Obviously, if every child wished for a pony, it’s not random chance that dictates which children will get one: it’s privilege. But do chidren (let’ stick to chidren for now) tend to wish for the same things, no matter who they are? Or are their dreams constrained by their circumstances? Will those for whom a sqare meal is a just-feasible luxury wish for that, while the well-fed wish for toys? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would seem to predict that, yes, aspiration is progressive rather than absolute. Until you are fed, you don’t feel the need for shelter so keenly. Until you are respected by others, you aren’t going to be motivated towards your full creativity.

But research published this week indicates otherwise. Poor 13-year-olds are just as likely as rich ones to aspire to go to university, despite that not being an aim they see others who share their experiences achieving, and despite their often not having other Maslowian pre-requisites for seeking self-actualisation*. What stops those aspiring graduates from poor families from achieving their dreams is lack of a “clear understanding of how to reach their goals”, leading more to fall away at each of the hurdles.

So there you go – when you wish upon a star, it does make a difference who you are. If your wish is for a cap and gown, the stars shine brighter on you if your parents have worn one, or if your parents can help you to get one debt-free.

It’s not poverty of aspiration. It’s poverty of example, expectation and education. As the summary to the research itself says, “policy to increase social mobility needs to go beyond assumptions about certain communities having low aspirations – it needs to tackle barriers to fulfilling them.”

Interestingly, the Joseph Rowntree research found that the likelihood of sharing high aspirations was greatest among teenagers in economically mixed environments, particularly schools. Comprehensive education really does have a measurable positive effect for poorer kids. So we need to defend comprehensive education, particularly comprehensives drawing from an economically mixed catchment. Then we need to resource and equip schools, families and communities to recognise academic and employment ambition and inform and educate young people about how to achieve it. Well, that’s straightforward. Isn’t it?

Obviously security, “morality”, family ties and intimacy are things that poor families can supply just as well as any other, but some of Maslow’s other base-of-pyramid needs are less evenly spread across layers of privilege.

So Abortion Rights, an organisation I’ve supported for years, tweeted a link to this article by Jessica Valenti, arguing that a hospital is wrong to stop providing free formula milk, calling it “brilliant”. When I and others questioned this, the twitter account owner responded that if we wre pro-choice, it was inconsistent not to see breastfeeding advocacy as “shaming” and formula feeding as a “free choice”.

This is a load of crap. “Choice” is the most abused word in feminism, to my mind. Choice is never absolute – choice can only be free when there are no constraints on it, and every choice takes place in a cultural, educational, personal context. So to say “choice” is the answer is to say that women don’t choose to be scientists, and they should just get over it and get to their books. Or, perhaps more pertinently in the context, it’s like saying that a total lack of sex education desn’t matter, as long as women can choose abortion if they have an unwanted pregnancy. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know the alternatives, the health consequences of unprotected sex, if they feel pressured into penis-in-vagina sex in the first place, because we have framed the question over-simplistically, and we have answered the question with “choice”.

Fuck choice. I want liberation. I want my breasts not to be sexualised commodities to be sold back to me, but rather a part of my body which offer pleasure, function, decorativeness, health-giving properties… I want motherhood to be a valuable and valued contribution in the context of my family, community and society. I want breastmilk to be recognised for its health, bonding, economic and empowering properties. THEN you can ask me to choose.

It’s about “nice”, and how it’s the most overrated quality I know of. Oh, other than profitability. And “just being honest” when you actually mean “being rude for no reason”. Sorry, hyperbole isn’t nice.

I’m not nice. And my Greenness is not nice. I try to be kind, and I try to be responsible, but “nice” is the marshmallow of virtues, and I’m more of an acid drops type. Nice wrings its hands when things go wrong, and I’m about analysing, spotting what’s likely to go wrong, working to stop it happening, and busting a gut to minimise the effects if it does. Nice is non-judgemental when someone pickets the funeral of a young man murdered in a hate crime. Nice pretends not to see bullying. Nice is nice to everyone, which always means screwing someone over.

Nice is a bystander; nice is passive; nice doesn’t really care what happens as long as everyone keeps smiling. You don’t get social justice with niceness, though kindness is a big help. You don’t get sustanability if you just care that nobody’s upset – getting into the middle of debates about the Beuly-Denny power line is necessary and might upset some genuinely lovely people. And mean working with some whom I personally kinda hate. No, I’m not giving you links on that.

So, no, I don’t think that being an arsehole is a virtue. And I don’t think you should ever be unkind or ungentle or disresepectful unless there’s a damn good reason. But I do think there are a lot of damn good reasons.

So I’m not nice. I aim to be kind, and to have an overall positive impact on the world. I hope mine will be a good funeral, but if that’s because some folk are dancing on my grave, so be it.

My biological children, both born years later, will never have to have that joke made to ease the insult to their lives. I’m profoundly grateful to Wendy Alexander and Donald Dewar and all the people who I campaigned alongside, for the moral courage that made that true. And I am still angry with Brian Souter for his lying, conniving campaign, for his use of the vast fortune he made exploiting his workers and a formerly public transport system, for being the face and the voice of hatred and humiliation for us for that year. If ever anyone deserved less to be “honoured” by his country – well, no, there are others who’ve caused hurt and death and division, too. But he’s among them.

But I am not going to sign the petition against his knighthood. I can’t say that his should be removed but, ultimately, other people should remain “Knights of the British Empire”. The whole system is a sick reminder of how we reward capitalistic excess and kowtowing to the system with the trappings of aristocracy. The whole system is rotten, and saying we should only give these tainted gongs to the “right” people is missing the point. Let’s refuse the notion of honour in “honours”. Let’s make it as irrelevant as it should be.

To this end, I propose that we each, on our birthdays, confer honours on people who we think deserve them. Let’s each claim the right to bestow titles, on the basis that great judgement of human quailities isn’t confined to Elizabeth Windsor and “her government”. You can call these “pretended honours” if you like, but I don’t accept that any more than when the government called my family “pretend”. We need to change, and that change needs to accept the human dignity of each of us. It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks, so keep your eyes peeled.

And now we’ll have a referendum on independence. Like most Greens and the party as a whole, I support Scottish independence, though it’s got to be sustainable and supported by our renewable resources. And yes, I was born and brought up in England. I am, in some of the senses that matter, English. That’s a big part of why I support independence.

I got into a wee chat with @WilliamCB on Twitter when I asked “What does England want Scotland for?” He said, “What do you want the rest of your family for?”

Well, I know and love my family – all my extended family live in England, by the way – and they know and love me. Growing up near Cambridge, I neither knew nor loved Scotland. I sort of knew it was there, and vaguely thought it was probably pretty much the same as where I was. Then I moved here, and, to my surprise, I discovered that the unknown cousin was a wild, fun, beautiful and distinctive place, confident and vibrant, and obsessed, for some reason I still can’t quite get, with Irn Bru. And Tunnock’s Tea Cakes. Seriously, nothing said “I don’t know you” during this campaign than Ed Milliband mocking Annabel Goldie for launching the Scottish Tory manifesto from the Tunnock’s factory.

And, to stretch the metaphor, if a family member has an addiction, and just can’t stop, well, voting Tory, and destroying themselves in the process? And they bring the destructiveness of their Tory-voting lifestyle into your home and fuck it up? And at some point you have to say: it doesn’t matter how I feel about you, I have to say you can’t bring the Tory-ness in here any more? Well, that’s all I can say right now. Scotland demonstrates over and over again that we don’t want the neo-liberal shock-and-awe Tories (or the old patrician kind either). We can’t do any more for England than we already have. And England doesn’t even notice, just keeps voting for the idiots.

Time to cut them loose.

Much as I try not to be Twitter incrowdy (my excuse for never blogging), this did arise from a Twitter “event”. One idiot was promoting “managed anorexia” because he felt only thin was valuable, and a lot of great people responded by trying to get #curvesaresexy trending. Then some less great people started labelling thin bodies as unsexy, and some other people objected and…

This is how it goes, though. Bodies – pretty much invarably women’s bodies – are where the discussion is at. Whether we value curves, bones, or all kinds of bodies, women’s bodies are a site for discussion in a way that men’s are not. And I don’t think that changing the object is as helpful as changing the subject. Laurie Penny put it beautifully in her moving piece on recovering from anorexia:

[T]he real breakthrough came when I stopped defining myself merely by my dress size. Once I started to believe that my worth as a person had nothing to do with how my body looked to other people, I began to give myself permission to take up the space I needed.

Put it like this: if offered the chance to never be treated as a body-object again, on the condition that neither would anyone ever find me sexy again, I’d take it. That is, of course, from the vantage point of being a mother, and therefore devoid of public sexuality in most environments anyway. (Seriously – for a start, it takes about 12 times the effort to communicate that I am, in fact, a lesbian, once people know that I’m a mother.) And I’m in my mid-30s, so moving past the realm of mainstream sexy, anyway. But not moving past the point where my body is a defining factor in how I am perceived, how I perceive myself, and where who I am is positioned in culture. Worthy of notice or not worthy of notice, that judgement in itself requires that my body be noticed. Unsexy, mumsy, frumpy, dykey, MILF, invisible because physically unremarkable, all of those require an evaluation of my body.

And I would just rather not. I don’t want to be a mainstream or a countercultural or a fetishistic sex object. I want to be a subject, and my subject, largely, is not my own body, or even my own sexuality. I want my daughter to stop thinking it’s important to call me “pretty”. I want her to stop thinking it’s important when people call her that. I want to remove the instinct I have right now to tell you that, of course, she is beautiful. Can I tell you she’s valuable? That you are? That I am? Can we leave it at that?

I spoke up (no, really, try and pretend to be surprised) for the motion, because I think that, fundamentally, going into a coalition, particularly as a junior partner which, realistically, is the most likely for us Greens right now, means breaking election pledges, and that is something that needs serious consideration from people who aren’t steeped in the discussions with other parties, hopped up on the heady air of the political bubble.

Councillor Martin Ford, however, takes the other view, and takes it forcefully. I hope I’m paraphrasing him reasonably* when I say that his point was that voters vote for candidates expecting them to seize and use power to the maximum, and that turning down an offer of coalition was a betrayal of what voters want when they vote for us.

And it made me think: really? When people vote for Greens, particularly in Scotland where we have small (at the moment!) numbers on councils and in the Scottish Parliament, what do they think is going to happen to their vote?

I think it’s safe to say that, while Green voters may well dream of a Green majority government, it’s not in the sole hope of that happening that they entrust their votes to us. Something other than (short of?) government is clearly an aspiration worth voting for, too. Must that be to be as close to the centres of power as possible? What’s it worth laying aside to have a finger in that pie?

To me, the other option is more persuasive. We don’t have all-or-nothing presidential government. A vote that is unlikely to contribute to electing the First Minister is not a wasted vote in a Parliamentary (or council) system. MSPs from a non-governing party can develop and introduce legislation, affect policy, lead rebellions. And, of course, do the consituency/ case work that is the less public side of being a representative.

Formal arrangements short of coalition, such as “confidence and supply” are another way to influence Government without, quite, being part of it. But this isn’t so much about what’s possible as what people want when they cast their vote.

The elephant in the room is, of course, the ConDem coalition. Did most of the people who voted LibDem in May this year think that their vote would lead to the implementation of most Tory election pledges? I think probably not. Do most of those people think those Tory policies are a price worth paying for the concessions made to the LibDems? I will not even try to get inside the mind of a LibDem voter, but I think it’s certainly not a definite “yes”.

So, people who vote Green, or, I suppose, for other parties unlikely to form a majority government, what do you think you’re voting for? Good people whom you trust, as close to the heart of power as they can get? For the manifesto policies to be implemented? How? For meaningful opposition to other parties you disagree with? For good local representation?

What’s in a vote? I think if we asked everyone to write on their ballot papers what hopes, dreams and dreads they were putting into that simple cross or row of numbers, we’d get as many answers as papers. But I also think it’s a question we need to ask, as we face a future where we will probably have chances to influence government in any number of ways.

*James thinks I have overstated MF’s views, by the way, and not mentioned that he’d rule out a lot of coalitions.

However, what I’m sure of is that this is an attack on women, and on the way the welfare state can seek to support their empowerment.

It was a big deal when it was decided that CB would, by default, be paid to the child’s mother. It was, probably, the biggest single act of redistribution of income within households that the welfare state has ever achieved. Now, CB will be withdrawn based on household income, and not paid to women who, as non-employed mothers, have no other income in their own name. That is a regression, a typically Tory acceptance of the traditional macro-economic view that everyone in a household has equal access to the household’s money. That is not true. There are many men who control their female partners by controlling their access to money, and non-employed mothers are among the most vulnerable. (And there are people in all other gender combinations of relationships in the same position, but typically it’s the former.)

So the Tories have decided that child benefit does not belong to the mother by default, but to the household. A backward step for mothers. We need to watch this government like a hawk: they do not understand gender, and they do not care to improve their understanding.

This is just a quickie post – also have a look at Caroline Crampton in the New Statesman on the implications for the National Insurance gap for stay-at-home parents

So, last week I went to Firstborn’s school for a “consultation evening” on homework. I’m not a big fan of homework. Firstborn is five, just starting her second year at primary school, and can’t reliably put her shoes on the right feet. She needs to work on eating without becoming the centre of a Saturnian ring of debris; she needs to spend time processing the complex emotional transactions of friendship; she needs to build stuff with Lego. And I need to chat with her, cuddle, cook, sing, argue, read, bounce, tidy, garden, build dens, prod worms, and rattle sticks along railings.

This is really what I wanted to say to her headteacher. But when all the other parents laughed at the idea that “some parents think there should be no homework at all,” I realised that it wasn’t going to be the place or time. Instead, it was the place to discuss what parents can doat home to “support” what their children were doing in school. We can let them handle the money while out shopping, to support numeracy work in school. And here I was thinking they did numeracy work in school so they could operate in the outside world (among other things).

But who could possibly argue against reading with your child in the evening? Who could say it’s bad to make musical instruments out of plastic bottles? Well, me. Because, for a start, I find it pretty difficult to comply with Firstborn’s homework regime all the time. We can’t read every night with her – sometimes she’s throwing a tantrum, sometimes she’s too tired, sometimes we’re in the middle of an awesome book that doesn’t feature bloody Biff, Chip and Kipper, and we’d rather get on with that. And sometimes I’m exhausted or busy or dealing with her small brother. Sometimes I’m handling both of them creating drama and Partner is out; sometimes we’re having a great evening singing together (scatting is their most favourite thing at the moment). Sometimes I’ve dumped them in front of the TV and gone to my bedroom to read so I don’t thump them. And we are a pretty well-functioning household: two parents, both literate and healthy; two children, both without particular additional difficulties. So what happens to homework when things aren’t so straightforward?

But the point is that this is life and school is part of it. And I am their mother. I’m not an adjunct to their teacher. Yes, I could get their teacher to use her clout to make Firstborn comply with her homework better,as someone suggested at the consultation. But I don’t actually want to. I don’t want her to be compliant with the orders from her workplace even when she’s at home. I want her to know that life is about a million different things. And, maybe in the school-centric, achievement-focussed world all those other parents inhabit, I’m selfish, but I also want to be just simply her mother, not her teacher’s enforcer.

Besides, I’m raising rebels. They shouldn’t assume I’m on their side without question and reservation.

In the end, I wrote on one of the bits of paper with the carefully-framed questions: “sometimes it’s just parenting, you know?” and felt like I was on the wrong planet.

This post started as a comment to Stephen Glenn on this post, entitled “Is Job Sharing MPs Idea Sexist?”. Green Party of England and Wales leader Caroline Lucas has proposed that MPs be able to jobshare. Stephen argues that it’s retrograde to suggest that “offering women part-time jobs” is the best way to retain/ get talented women into Parliament(s). So here’s what started as a comment to that.

What a load of nonsense. Other people with caseloads job-share all the time – doctors, nurses, therapists, teachers. And MPs already have constituency workers who form part of the team on constituency cases; ministers likewise have civil servants in their teams (some of whom might be job-sharing). If it would be completely impossible for someone else to take over your job if you fell under a bus, you’re doing your job wrong.

As for “demeaning to women”, what’s demeaning to women is saying that, because we have the Equal Pay Act, we should just pull ourselves together and participate in the all-hours, all-consuming job world, when the reality is that it is still women who do most of the household and childcare work. It might be nice if this were not the case (though in my two-female-adults household, I’m not sure what the other options are, apart from maybehiring a houseboy), but I don’t see why we should be willing to wait for utopia before women can have tolerable lives as parliamentarians. And what is demeaning to both men and women who want a life alongside work is to suggest that this doesn’t have the potential to make them people with richer experience, and hence better representatives of their constituents.

Two problems: parliaments demand unreasonable things from their members; and women are, on average, dispropotioantely unable to meet those unreasonable demands.

Personally, I think that even if job-sharing were only a part-time stop-gap to get women able to meet the demands of an M(S)P job until we reach that glorious utopia where everything is equal, it would be worth doing. Saying “but there shouldn’t be sexism, so we won’t do anything to address its real effects here and now” is just nonsense.

But more importantly, I think, why should it be the business of women and others who are unwilling to give up their lives to this all-consuming job to “get over it” and do so? Isn’t there a problem with Parliament(s) if standing for them is something ordinary folks with family commitments and hobbies cannot consider? Doesn’t it lead to a Parliament full of weirdos and anoraks? Now, I’m both a weirdo and an anorak myself at times, but even if I could get and afford someone else to mind my kids all day every day, evenings and weekends as well, I would actually not want to do that. But I think I’d be a pretty good representative, both in Parliament and as a caseworker and in all those other things M(S)Ps do. You might disagree (and indeed, the people of Edinburgh North and Leith did disagree this May, placing me a (fairly respectable) 5th. Love y’all anyway.) but surely you can think of someone who would?

Let’s release the Parliamentary potential of a much wider part of society – disproportionately but not exclusively women. Support Caroline Lucas’s proposals.