The RFL (Rugby Football League) was one of the first sporting bodies to sign up to the Coalition’s Sports Charter – which is about tackling homophobia and transphobia in sport.

Signing up is the first step – but it’s about more than signing a charter as the RFL have already shown. Not only were the Sheffield Eagles the first team to wear Tackle It shirts – but now the RFL have produced a ‘Tackle It video. You can watch it here.

Fantastic!

All Walks – the amazing team of Debra Bourne, Caryn Franklin and Erin O’Connor – who work to educate the fashion world away from singularity of image to diversity – screened an American Documentary in Parliament ‘Missrepresentation’ the other day.

I was on the panel who took questions afterwards – chaired by Jo Swinson MP, my Liberal Democrat colleague (and co-founder with myself of the Body Confidence campaign). Jo now chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image and I have taken Body Confidence into the government’s work on public health and mental health and well-being.

First we watched the film Missrepresentation. I can only recommend that you see the film itself. All Walks have made a short commentary on the film from some of those who came to see the screening. You can watch it here.

Help crown the winner of our competition to find a logo for the Sports Charter – to kick homophobia and transphobia out of sport.

Last November I launched a competition to find a logo for sports clubs, fans and players across the country to mark their support for the Charter for Action to tackle homophobia and transphobia in sport. The first stage of the competition closed on 18 January and we were delighted to have received nearly 70 entries, most of them from young people.

Our judge Rugby Union star Ben Cohen has now shortlisted the top six entries and now it is over to you to help us crown the winner by voting for your favourite design. It is really easy to vote. All you have to do is:

Like’ your favourite logo on our Facebook page, or;
If you do not have a Facebook account you can vote via Ben Cohen’s website

There isn’t much time. Voting closes on Monday 20 February at noon so please get voting now!

Once the competition closes, votes will then be added together, and the logo with the highest number of votes will win the competition. The winning logo will then go to a professional design team and the final design will be unveiled in March. For more information, please visit the Home Office website

Please also help spread the word and forward this message to your contacts and post it on your website and Facebook page.

Mike Tuffrey always did have a way of telling it like it is. In my day on the London Assembly it was Ken on the receiving end. Nice to see that he is still on it – and holding the current Mayor to account – pointing out to people in London just how measly and insignificant Boris Johnson’s ‘tax cut’ is.

Commenting on the Mayor’s budget proposals for the year 2012 – 2013 Mike said:

“A few weeks ago the Mayor was resisting our (Liberal Democrats’) proposal for a cut in the council tax bill. Now as the election approaches at the eleventh hour he has come forward with a mouse of a cut.

“The Mayor has failed to share with Londoners the fruits of the central government grant and he has failed to make real savings in the huge budgets he controls.

“By tackling waste and extravagant expenditure our proposals enable key services to be protected whilst giving Londoners a tax cut four times larger.

“When most Londoners are struggling with zero pay rises and increased household costs it is wrong that the Mayor has failed to help them in these tough economic times.”

Go Mike!

I recently visited FoodCycle’s Station House Community Café . They also had celeb Thom from Channel 4’s ‘Three Hungry Boys’ . We were invited there to show our support for FoodCycle and help to reach their £5,000 target on crowdsourcing website PeopleFund.it.

The café is based at MIND in Haringey on Stapleton Hall Road. It uses surplus food and dedicated volunteers to create healthy meals for the community every Friday lunchtime, running a ‘pay what you can’ scheme so anyone can come along.

To help keep the Café running, they’re offering rewards in return for pledges on http://www.peoplefund.it/foodcycle including a VIP dinner for two, signed cookbooks and FoodCycle aprons and T-shirts. The Café needs £3,000 to reach the target which will help it to run for another year.

If you are interested in supporting this local good cause please visit: http://www.peoplefund.it/foodcycle

The campaign to push back against the relentless pressure to be a singular perfect shape and size continues. Here is my recent piece on the Government Body Confidence campaign for the Huffington Post.

This is my most recent column published in the Ham & High:

Our Parliament has come a long way in recent years. In fact, watching ‘The Iron Lady’ with Margaret Thatcher sticking out like a blue female sore thumb amongst the total male greyness of the then chamber – it reminded me of how recently in history this establishment was nearly all male.

However, despite real progress, it is still nowhere near reflecting the percentage of women in the country – and that is without even starting to talk about other aspects of diversity such as ethnicity, class or disability…

It is in everyone’s interests to have a Parliament that is made up of the best people for the job, and that includes a range of people who can best represent the diversity that exists in our communities – and who bring the benefits of a diverse set of experiences.

We do not just elect individuals, we elect people to be members of a team (their party, government/opposition, Parliament overall) – and, just as in sport, good teams have the right mix to be more than simply the sum of their parts. Good teams need variety and diversity.

We all suffer if that is missing because we end up with worse decision-making if Parliament is made up of a monochrome slice of uniformity.

There have been tremendous strides made in recent years. Whatever your views on how best to get there – Labour’s all women shortlists made a massive change in the culture of both the Labour party and parliament. The Conservatives, using a very different mechanism, have also made great strides in terms of their diversity. And we (Liberal Democrats) had worked incredibly hard on mentoring and monitoring and had succeeded in getting women in winnable seats in 2010 – but sadly we didn’t win them.

In our case we now have the Leadership Academy which will support a small, but ambitious and able cohort of under-represented groups as key candidates for the future. Winnable seats will have to have two of the graduate candidates from the Leadership Academy on their shortlists. Members will still have the final choice of course – but we will not just be sitting on our hands thinking that nothing needs doing.

I responded for the Government in the recent debate on representation in Parliament last week. The Speaker’s Conference a couple of years back made a number of recommendations – for Government, for the House and for political parties in terms of improving the diversity of their elected representatives.

Some of the recommendations have been introduced to date – including the holding of this debate s. It is legal until 2030 to employ all women shortlists if a political party wishes so to do. The Equality Act now allows us to balance our shortlists with people from under-represented groups if we wish. There is an ‘access to elected office’ plan and fund to support those with disabilities in being candidates about to be announced in detail and a raft of other measures.

What was clear from the debate – and very heart warming – was that everyone across the political divide is working hard to improve our representative quality.

Each party has its own traditions and beliefs, so each party has to find its own solutions for the shared problem we have of how unrepresentative Parliament. The political system needs to give parties the options to pick their own solutions – which it now does.

But as ever in politics – as it should be in a democracy – what matters is not only what the system permits or what politicians want, but what the public demands.

You do not have to wait until an election though. If you know someone talented, why not encourage them to get stuck into politics and stand themselves? The readers of these columns are a wonderfully diverse group – and I’m sure that the people you know and could encourage would be more diverse than the current make-up of Parliament!

Well – it’s nice to get good news to start off the year.

A poll by Liberal Democrat Voice amongst its member only forum rates how ministers have done: which four ministers have most improved their standing, who is minister of the year and who has done worst.

My column published in the Ham & High this last week:

It’s been quite a year – both in government and in the constituency. And there is no real separation between those two. The constituency is where legislation and the economy hit the street. The people who come to my advice surgery and the letters, emails and phone calls that come in from local residents at the rate of between two and four hundred per day are my reliable barometer of local peoples’ lives.

Sadly, the stand out of the local year has to be the riots, which kicked off in Tottenham and then spread – not only to Wood Green in my constituency – but across the country. The images of peoples’ lives in flames and wanton looting seared into the nations psyche. I have written about the riots, cause and effect before, but in terms of my own actions at the time – I was duty Minister at the Home Office on the Sunday. With Boris, the PM, the DPM and the Home Sec out of the country – it was down to me to go out on the airwaves to speak to the nation. And of course – locally – going to visit the traders in Wood Green who had been left for hours the night the riot kicked off without police coming to their frantic calls and then visiting Tottenham High Road with Nick Clegg on the Monday to see the devastation for ourselves, meet some of those who had suffered the consequences of the riots and all of the local partners who needed to put things in place for recovery and help and support.

More generally, as a Liberal Democrat in a coalition government, it has meant making terribly hard decisions in order to do the right thing for the nation. I would have loved to come into government like Labour did in 1997 with a flourishing economy. But the economy not only is not flourishing – but takes all we can do not to go under. So I totally support and believe that the stringent measures we have taken as a government are what is protecting us from the hideous interest rates that we see hit other countries like Italy, Greece and Ireland. If we had those interest rates – the job losses and loss of homes would be massive compared to what we are suffering now.

The economy has dominated all – and will do for some time to come. So without rehearsing a full list of Liberal Democrat achievements in government I will mention a couple of key policies delivered – both which go to the heartbeat of Liberal Democrats – fairness.

Thanks to Liberal Democrats, the coalition has taken over a million of the lowest paid out of tax altogether and put £200 back in the pockets of 23 million low and middle income earners.

Our ‘pupil premium’ (which is money that the follows the child and is awarded on the basis of deprivation), has meant that even during these tough times in Haringey we received £5.3 million extra for our schools the first year of the pupil premium. This year it has gone up to £8.8 million and this will go on rising year on year of this government. Education is the key transformative for so many children.

More personally in my government portfolio (which is Equalities and Criminal Information) I have been very fortunate to be able to commence the Equality Act (nine tenths enacted); see civil partnerships in religious premises become law; announce that the government will consult on same sex marriage next March; produced action plans on: violence against women, equalities and transgender; introduce consultations: on stalking; on widening the definition of domestic violence; on the disclosure of information about previous convictions men have of harm to women (Clare’s Law); get rid of identity cards; reduce vetting and barring back to common sense levels; ban wheel clamping on private land; set up a Body Confidence campaign group (fighting the impossible pressure of the perfect image); find some funding for male domestic violence groups; play a part in the change of the laws of accession; ensure that government messages on women’s rights (a moment in history with the Arab Spring and Afghanistan), violence against women and LGB&T rights are taken across the world by travelling ministers; play a part in the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan post 2014; tackle Homophobia and Transphobia in sport with the Sports Charter; support and pursue more women on boards, equal pay; women entrepreneurs – and a lot more – which there just isn’t room to cover in this column.

But as ever – home is where the heart is – and here in Hornsey & Wood Green there have been many,  many campaigns. Perhaps the biggest of which is fighting against plans which are supported by Labour Haringey for a massive waste plant at Pinkham Way . We have stopped them at the moment (thanks to lots of local people, Liberal Democrat Cllr Juliet Solomon and the Pinkham Way Alliance and the three local MPs) – but vigilance is key. As to Labour’s plans to make rubbish collections once every two weeks – judging from our survey – not wanted!

I have also – as always – been delighted to visit countless local people, schools, projects and events and you can always see what I am up to if you go to my website and look at the news section which covers what I do locally.

As ever, it has been an absolute honour and privilege to serve as your MP and I thank you all for your contribution in answering my emails and my surveys and for being the best constituents an MP could ever want.

Please just get in touch if ever I can be of help.

Wishing you all a very Happy 2012.

I was very proud today to launch the Government’s Advancing transgender equality: a plan for action – the first ever Government action plan to advance transgender equality.

It lays out the Government’s vision and commitment to improve transgender people’s lives. To view the action plan and our e-bulletin, please click here.

The action plan was formulated with the trans community and I would like to thank everyone who took time to speak to us, attend our events and respond to our e-surveys. All of the input, challenge and continued hard work by the community themselves have made the action plan possible.

PS  Support our campaign to tackle homophobia and transphobia in sport. Sign the Charter for Action by ‘liking’ our facebook page