Get a phone call. Good news. I knew I had been nominated in the Dods Woman of the Year Award (Woman MP category) – and today they rang to say I had been shortlisted.
I know. I know. You can’t take to much notice of these things – but it’s better to be mentioned than not be mentioned!
Did the Politics Show on gun crime in London today. It is the big story at the moment, courtesy of a spate of killings and the shocking ages involved – but gang culture and guns have been running for years.
So – yes it’s right to look at lowering the age at which the mandatory sentence for being in possession of an illegal gun can be prosecuted from the current 21 to 17 or 18. But don’t just put them in prison – where youngsters can simply learn in crime’s best university how to be on the wrong side of everything for the rest of their lives. Use that period also to invest in trying to give them real rehabilitation and pathways to a better life.
The one bit of the proposals from Blair that I thought was spot on was the need to introduce protection for witnesses that come forward to give evidence against members of a gang. But neither legislation nor police powers will change the real malaise. These gang members need such a range of support – from somewhere to go, alternative adults to care about them if their parents or parent don’t, life chances and real commitment for long periods from others. There was a guy on the Politics Show from Boyhood to Manhood, who work in South London. We need to ensure that more of that work is going on to support and sustain the individuals and the communities. It’s no good just appointing blame. This has to be about bringing support to lone parents and creating means for fathers to be with their children even if the partnership is long gone – or indeed never was. And this gang and gun culture (and I had a bit of bother saying that on TV – it came out gung!) is specific to this particular criminal culture. It is not endemic across all communities. But we all have to help resolve and resource this long term – not just now the spotlight is on it. One idea I would like to see tried more widely here is an American one – where they started something called something like ‘dads and doughnuts’. These are evenings organised by schools to bring in fathers with their children – not the mothers. Particularly useful where the parents has split up and aren’t getting on as this way – rather than only the mother attending parents’ evenings and the like – the fathers are more involved and engaged with the school and the progress of their child there.
Combined with the UNICEF report that puts our children at the bottom of the rich nation heap – it has been an eye-opening week. We are doing badly. I don’t think you can conflate the two – the gun and drug criminal culture is way beyond the norm. However, we do have a ‘behaviour crisis’ in terms of the more general findings of the UNICEF report – and I hope it is a wake-up call.
I have some sympathy with the Government in as much as so much of the damage was done under the Tories – and the Labour Government has at least made tackling child poverty one of its priorities. The child tax credits, for example, were not a bad idea – just badly executed.
However, it is clear from the report that we, all of us adults, had better have a look at ourselves and our behaviour – because we are letting our children down.
Recorded recently in Wood Green:
Of course, if you are an iTunes user and have signed up to my iTunes feed (see panel on the right) you’ll already have had this film delivered to automatically!
I 
only ask, because that seems to be the logic behind many of the fingerpriting systems in use in schools around the country. As I say in my latest newspaper article:
The technology being used on British children is similar to the identification systems used in US prisons and for the German military. This system is now being used in thousands of UK primary schools up and down the land – sometimes in conjunction with digitised photographs – to replace library cards and – so it is argued – to increase efficiency of library management.
But, in my view, treating children like criminals is unlikely to be the best way to imbue the sort of values we should be instilling in the next generation. Fingerprinting and digitised photographs for protecting the Crown Jewels – fair enough – but fingerprinting and digitised photographs for a children’s book about them?
The full article is here.
I’m due to be on the Politics Show this Sunday.
Topics to talk about will be the Unicef report saying the UK is failing our children and also gun and knife crime in London.
Having received no Valentines (yet!) today, was cheered to receive one from Adam Boulton in the form of his 2007 10 Most Fanciable MPs. Now, when I was a just a young lass and burning my bra – a wolf-whistle from a workman was to be reviled, put down and spat back – let alone appearing in a ‘top totty’ poll. However, age has mellowed me. Now – I am just grateful!
That’s the topic of my latest newspaper column (Asian Voice on this occasion):
Hanging together in the face of adversity – and often in the face of having a community flung into different parts scattered around the world – is an admirable trait. But it can lead to some customs, traditions and religious practices that cross a line of what can be accepted in a civilised society – and so where the state does have (in my view) a duty to intervene and prohibit.
You can read it in full on my website.
Back 
from the Westminster Hour! Tonight was – is Ming too old (Lord Owen’s comments in the week)? No – say I – just a grumpy old man (Lord Owen not Ming).
Then it was on to Ming and his profile on Facebook – which already has over 200 friends. I’ve just got one too – follow my leader! – but with only 23 friends (so far!).
Then David Cameron – does he have a right to a private life? Yes!
Then – should the Government take note of the online petition on the Number 10 website signed by around one million people about road charging? Yes – of course. Clearly folk are not happy and whilst the overall intention of the policy might be right – there ought to be a lot of work going on to find out how to mitigate the problems people see with the proposal. Also – it cannot be about revenue raising, only about sorting out our traffic and transport.
And then it was on to the Tories approaching our Lib Dem David Laws to change sides. Go away – he said. But I am not surprised that the Tories are trying to seduce our brightest and our best! They need a bit of talent on their benches – but b****r off – you can’t have ours!
On arriving home find a listener who has taken pity on me having heard my friend count and become my friend. Thank you Anna!
Very, very sad today. Went to David Rebak’s funeral. David died aged 82. David is one of those unsung heroes that you get in all parties. A man who is totally and utterly committed and passionate to the values of the party and spend their life in the party structures – organising, supporting, galvanising and encouraging others to continue the good fight.
Such an interesting man with a history of serving in the British Army, and then the Israeli Army before coming back here in 1960 to a lifetime of activism in the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats.
He did serve as a councillor and he did stand for Parliament – but his real gift to our party was this lifetime of working to keep the flames of liberalism alight and advancing. He was deeply involved in Simon Hughes’s original campaign to get elected in Southwark and was loyal to him through the years in his leadership and Mayoral bids.
Loyalty was his strong suit – to his family first and foremost (and they are the sort of family you envy – warm and loving and close); loyalty to the way he believed you should conduct yourself and live your life (i.e. have principles and live by them) and loyalty to the tenets of liberalism – freedom, fairness, internationalism and equality.
Being next door to me almost in Enfield, over the years we had quite a lot of contact and overlap. He was overjoyed when I got elected. I suppose the idea that a Lib Dem might storm Labour Haringey was so remote over the years – must have seemed like an impossible dream. But hey – nothing’s impossible.
I remember David sitting in my lounge and asking me how I would manage standing for Parliament (this was before my first outing in ’97) given I was a single parent with two children. Never politically correct (you just don’t ask that of potential candidates) he was quite determined to make sure that family considerations were taken into my equation.
It is impossible to imagine seeing his wife Maurine (also a lifetime Lib Dem activist) at party conferences without him. For so many years wherever you saw David you saw Maurine. But I am sure she will go on fighting for this party comforted and supported by her two sons and daughter Marianne. There closeness as a family made me almost envious. We are losing the matriarchs and patriarchs of that era – an era where the family was all.
Marianne, who is a teacher (and Deputy Head) in a local primary school in my constituency, read out a letter from ‘Uri’ who had met David when he (Uri) was fifteen. David didn’t just teach Uri, but he left such an impression that clearly this relationship had been so strong and so important to him. And that had stayed with him all these years to be written down in a letter of condolence to his family.
As I said – a very sad passing of a man of principle.
Very cross with Iain Dale for not defending my virtue (again). When Andrew Marr opined this morning that there were virtually no Lib Dem or Labour blogs compared with numerous Tory ones – Iain failed to leap to my defence! (And once before he forgot about me too – when talking about how no Lib Dem female MPs blog. Tsk tsk Iain!).
However, he can be forgiven – just about! – as he was, at the time, dealing with Yasmin Alibi Brown who was making a pig’s ear of objecting to blogs. She was trying to make the case that we bloggers are not gifts to the communications industry (possibly true in my case – but never in Iain’s). Green-eyed monster I think! Iain – she’s just jealous of you!
Lynne Featherstone 