There’s one thing you need to know about the Chancellor’s big moment today. It’s not really a big moment.
Don’t blame Rishi Sunak for that. He’s been working flat out for weeks with his officials as they battle to stop unemployment soaring and the economy crashing. He’s pouring in billions. He’s planted stories — a green deal here, a stamp duty cut there — and saved surprises for the day. Helping young people get work is right (which is why he isn’t the first chancellor to try to do it). Insulating homes keeps people busy and cuts emissions (which is why a Green Investment Bank was once meant to make it happen).
But in a month’s time even MPs will struggle to remember half of what he has just announced.
The big things from the Government are already happening: furlough schemes and getting loans into businesses to keep their cashflow going.
Now we need confidence in the real economy.
People will buy new houses if they think that next year they can still pay for them, and if they will go up in value. They will set up businesses and employ people if they have confidence they won’t have to fire them next year.
Mr Sunak is an impressive Chancellor and he’s done a lot by his presence to reassure people.
But it’s the things which he can’t control — maybe a second wave of coronavirus in Britain, worsening US-China relations, an EU trade deal or the rapid success of a vaccine — which will do most shape what happens next.
It’s right to have a Plan for Jobs but Mr Sunak knows it will take more than that.
Women heard at last
There is a long history of women being dismissed as hysterical, emotional, hormonal... (husbands once had the power to institutionalise their wives on their male evidence alone).
Even today, there remains a strong bias in society that our ability to have children — and thereby keep humanity revolving — weakens us. Unable to control our moods once a month — how many times has a man asked a woman when she has shown any aggression in the home or workplace? (“is it your time of the month, love?”); claims that the debilitating effects of menopause render us unable to truly lead (that horrible phrase “that time of life”), and prone to being psychologically unstable.
And now, more damning proof with a government inquiry showing that this deep-rooted prejudice can cause serious harm.
Dangerous and debilitating medical conditions were routinely dismissed as “women’s problems”, which led to a series of healthcare scandals that ran over decades.
The review into vaginal mesh chaired by Julia Cumberlege and rightly ordered by Jeremy Hunt in 2018 — which also addresses hormonal pregnancy tests, and an epilepsy medicine that harmed unborn babies — is highly incriminating, and Cumberlege’s words are clear: “Anything and everything women suffer was perceived as a natural precursor to, or part of, or a post-symptomatic phase of the menopause ... as women we know when things are not right with our bodies. We are the first to know.”
It is why women must continue to rise up the ranks to equally lead all institutions, the medical establishment included, and especially government, so that our voices continue to be heard and listened to.
