There was a very good article in yesterday's The Sunday Times that worried about the absence of business people in politics. It also noted that few modern day politicians had experience of the military or of life outside of politics. It worried that there were too many career politicians and suggested that the expense of running for office was excluding people who had engaged in sacrifical service in the voluntary and social enterprise sectors. The article asked if these representative failures were connected with the incompetence of modern government.
Actually that article didn't appear in The Sunday Times or in any newspaper. Instead we had a super-long feature in The Sunday Times about the feminisation of politics across Europe:
- Zapatero's Spanish cabinet has more women than men (pictured).
- Seven of Sarkozy's fifteen Cabinet ministers are women.
- Berlusconi has promised to put four women in his top team.
- Five members of Germany's Cabinet are women in addition to Chancellor Merkel herself.
- Ten of Norway's 19 top ministers are women and most Scandinavian nations now have 'zipper systems' that require one woman to be appointed for every man appointed to a political position.
David Cameron intends to discriminate in favour of women here, too. More than half of his A list were women, women got higher rankings in MEP selection even if they received fewer votes than men and now he aspires to appoint women to a third of all ministerial jobs.
ConservativeHome recently asked Tory members: "Do you agree with David Cameron's aspiration for a third of all ministers to be women in the next Conservative Government?"
30% of the more than 1,500 who responded said 'yes', 60% said 'no'.
The aspiration to remove unfairnesses to women (and ethnic minorities) is right but where is the discussion and concern about the business people, soldiers and social entrepreneurs missing from today's politics? There is something terribly lopsided about the debate.