The Obscure Death of Dorothy Woolmer

Dorothy Woolmer, an 88 year old widow, was found dead in her home in Waltheof Gardens, Tottenham, north London on the weekend of 3 – 4th August. She had been raped before she was killed. A spokesman for Scotland Yard said Reece Dempster, 22, from Haringey, north London, had been charged with murder, rape, sexual assault by penetration and burglary. Assault by penetration usually involves penetration by an object. One can only hope that Dorothy Woolmer died quickly.
Today’s news reports a man repeatedly stabbing a police officer who had stopped his van on a London street. The machete attack seems only to have stopped when the badly injured officer managed to fire his taser and immobilise the attacker. It was an appalling attack, but the officer’s condition is stable.

Unsurprisingly, national television news has covered the second story, but not the first. Equally predictably, Boris Johnson, our Prime Minister has spoken on television about the bravery of police officers and the need for more of them, but not the suffering of this unarmed and vulnerable woman. It seems the violation and killing of vulnerable, unarmed women continues to be of little interest to politicians and the media. Same old, same old.

News today suggests the number of women carrying knives is on the rise. The percentage increase looks alarming, but I suspect the numbers are small. In a way, it is hardly surprising that some young women, many subject to repeated humiliation, harassment and violence, carry knives. 

After all, the police officer on the street, who was armed with a taser, survived. The unarmed old woman in her home died.

Test

Test

Blue Plaques for the Suffragettes of Brighton

This article was published in Brighton & Hove Independent newspaper on Friday 22 June 2018 and the Argus of 23 June 2018.

In this Centenary year of the first UK women getting the Vote, there’s been increased focus on the suffrage movement in Brighton. Residents have realised that though our city has a rich suffrage history – at a civic level, little has yet been done to explore or celebrate it.

Now the Council is rising to the challenge. Amongst other things, it has agreed to partner a charity bid for the government’s Women’s Vote Centenary Grant and to set up a suffrage display in the Brighton Museum before the end of the centenary year, working with campaigners to achieve this.

The Council has also signalled approval for a ‘scheme’ or group of four blue plaques to honour suffrage campaigners. In the past, the Blue Plaque Panel has agreed a scheme of plaques for soldiers awarded the Victoria Cross. Now the Panel, chaired by redoubtable heritage specialist Roger Amerena, has approved a new scheme to honour heroines of the suffrage movement. Mr Amerena said “The decision of the Commemorative Plaque Panel was unanimous. The plaques will be a permanent reminder of these brave women who overcame considerable opposition to get the vote.”

Campaigners have responded with delight, aware that while Hove has one blue plaque for suffragette Victoria Lidiard, Brighton has none.

A plaque will be erected at the North Street Quadrant where the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) had its headquarters. Plaques will also be placed on the former Brighton homes of three women – Minnie Turner, Elizabeth Robins and Clementina Black.

Minnie Turner was born in 1866 in London, then moved to Brighton. A Liberal, she first became a member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), but then joined the more militant WSPU in 1908.

Minnie ran Seaview a boarding house at 13-14 Victoria Road in Brighton as both holiday destination and refuge for suffragettes recovering from imprisonment, hunger-strikes and forcible feeding. Her guests included WSPU leaders Emmeline Pankhurst, Annie Kenney, Flora Drummond, Emily Wilding Davison, Constance Lytton and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. Pankhurst’s sister, Mary Clarke lived at Seaview while working as Brighton’s WSPU organiser and in 1910 she and Minnie were both arrested outside the House of Commons. In 1911 Minnie was imprisoned for breaking a Home Office window. When hostile local men broke Seaview’swindows, she hoisted a sign saying “Male Logic”.

Minnie was a member of the Tax Resistance League (TRL), whose members refused to pay taxes when they could not vote. In 1912 her goods were seized and sold at auction in lieu of tax. She died in 1948.

Elizabeth Robins was born in the USA in 1862, but spent most of her life in England.

A renowned actress, she introduced Ibsen to the British stage and published many books. After she left the stage, she joined the NUWSS and later served on the WSPU Executive. Her suffrage play Votes for Women and her novel The Convertwere hugely successful. 

She met Octavia Wilberforce, who became one of Brighton’s pioneering woman doctors, in 1909. They remained close companions for 40 years, living first at Backsetttown, Elizabeth’s country home near Henfield, which became a retreat for suffragettes and later a convalescent  home – then at 24 Montpelier Crescent, a house acquired by Dr Wilberforce in 1923, which she used as a surgery.

Along with Octavia and others, Elizabeth helped develop and fund women’s health services, first the Lady Chichester Hospital and later – with Dr Louisa Martindale – the New Sussex Hospital for women. She was a close friend of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and Virginia and Leonard Woolf and was admired by Oscar Wilde, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw. She died in 1952. 

Clementina Black was a suffragist, writer and trade unionist. She was born in 1854 in Ship Street, daughter to David Black, the Town Clerk. Her first novel was a published in1877 and she continued writing throughout her life.  A friend of Eleanor Marx, she joined the Women’s Trade Union association and in 1888 attended the Trades Union Congress where she moved the first resolution calling for equal pay.  She was active in the boycott of Bryant and May matches, which led to the match-girls’ strike. 

In common with many suffrage campaigners, she was incensed by hypocritical male politicians who denied women the vote on the basis of physical ‘delicacy’, but had no scruple in ‘sweating’ women workers through hours of heavy labour in appalling conditions. 

In 1911 she became Vice President of the NUWSS, later editing the suffragist newspaper The Common Cause. Alongside her trade union work she continued to write  novels as well as books about low pay. Her novel “The Agitator” was based on her work for trade unions. She died in 1922.

Fundraising for the first plaque is complete, but £3,600 is needed for the other three.

Bring Anna Campbell Home

Anna Campbell from Lewes died in a Turkish air-strike on 15th March in Afrin in Syria. She was 26.

Anna had travelled to Syria to join the Kurdish fight against ISIS, because she was horrified by reports of their atrocities against the Syrian people and religious minorities. Appalled by ISIS’ assault on women’s rights and reports of mass rape and sexual slavery, she joined the YPJ, the all-female militia affiliated to the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Throughout the war, these male and female Kurdish ground forces – backed by US and Russian air strikes – have played the key role in repelling ISIS. Battle-hardened, highly disciplined and committed to democratic and women’s rights, they are accepted as allies by the UK, the USA  and the Russians. However, Turkey, fearful of an independent Kurdistan, views them as a terrorist force. 

Despite Turkey’s status as a NATO ally, there have been persistent complaints that its deeply conservative Sunni government has done little to assist the fight against either the jihadis of ISIS or the other Al Qaeda affiliates in the region – and that it has in fact covertly supported them, while impeding the Kurds’ efforts. 

On 20 January, with the West’s attention focussed on the Syrian and Russian bombardment of Ghouta, Turkey launched a ground and air offensive into Syria to oust Kurdish forces from Afrin.  Kurdish forces were redeployed to defend the town, though lacking air support from Russia or the USA, the odds were terrible. There were warnings that Turkey’s actions would allow ISIS to regroup and reassert control of Syrian territory ISIS had previously invaded, putting  vulnerable minorities like the Yazidis at risk of further atrocities. There were predictions of widespread civilian deaths and a refugee crisis. The situation could hardly have been more dangerous, yet Anna Campbell begged her commanders to let her go to defend Afrin. Eventually, reluctantly, they did. She died with two other female comrades at the hands of our NATO ally on 15th March.

When Anna’s death was  first reported I looked at her photograph and thought how near in age she was to my own daughter. Gazing at her fresh and open face, I thought how like she was to girls I had seen at my daughter’s old school. I almost thought I recognised her. It turned out that I did. When my daughter saw Anna’s photograph, she confirmed that in fact Anna had been at her old school, just one year ahead. 

I cannot imagine the pain of losing a beloved daughter and sister and to lose her violently and at the hands of a government that is supposedly our ally. Her family say they have been able to draw some comfort from the fact that Anna was fighting for what she believed. It may also give them some ease to realise that in the publicity surrounding her death, she has managed to highlight issues politicians and the media have preferred to ignore. Many people reading about Anna’s death, will have learned for the first time that the Kurds are our allies, the only effective ground force in a war against a brutal enemy that threatened and threatens both the middle east and Britain. And that against an enemy that despises women, the Kurdish forces have deployed thousands of women soldiers, many in senior leadership positions, who have played a key role repelling ISIS and promoting equal rights.

Shamefully, the Foreign Office has not condemned the Turkish attack on Syrian Kurds, nor Turkish threats to widen the assault to areas such as Sinjar, where Kurdish forces are protecting minorities such as the Yazidis. Instead, the Foreign Office has stated that “anyone” from Britain who goes abroad to fight risks arrest on their return – without any regard for whom they may be fighting. The BBC has ignored recent reports of Turkish atrocities in Afrin, while highlighting Turkey’s view that Kurdish troops are terrorists. 

Political cowardice and media dishonesty cannot alter the reality that, throughout this conflict, the Kurds have been our stalwart ally against a genocidal enemy. Or the shameful fact that this small,  stateless and beleaguered community took up arms against ISIS when Britain had not the courage or resolve to do it. 

Much as our political leaders may suggest it, there is no moral or political equivalence between British Salafists who have volunteered to fight alongside islamo-fascist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, and those British men and women who have taken up arms against them.  Unlike their opponents, the male and female Kurdish militias have defended human rights and have empowered and protected vulnerable communities.

Anna Campbell fought and died in defence of democracy and what the Kurds call a ‘women’s revolution’. She was a hero and a patriot. 

 

We should support her father’s call to bring her body home.

We Should Remember Them

In 1914, on the eve of world war, the Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst wrote in her autobiography, My Own Story :

“The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with blood, and for these deeds of horror and destruction men have been rewarded with monuments, with great songs and epics. The militancy of women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the battle of righteousness. Time alone will reveal what reward will be allotted to the women.”

Pankhurst lived long enough to see Parliament ‘reward’ a limited number of women with the vote. However, one hundred years on, women may have equal rights in law, but in practice there is little equality. As to the “monuments” these are few and far between.

I recently wrote an obituary for local pensioners’ activist Isla Robertson and in the process, confirmed what I had suspected – that only a tiny proportion of obituaries commemorate women. When I asked a journalist on a national newspaper the reason, she replied that “loads more” male obituaries are submitted.

Few obituaries and histories are written about women and it’s the same with other memorials, whether blue plaques or statues. There are historic reasons for the absence of memorials to early female lives, but that does not explain why prominent women of the twentieth century are so neglected. Nor does it explain why contemporary women are so tentative in commemorating them.

To mark the centenary of women achieving the vote, local feminists, led by the historian Elizabeth Dwiar, are crowdfunding to have a blue plaque near the Clock Tower to mark the place where the office of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was based. This is a worthy initiative and I fully support it. However, it is commemorates an organisation, rather than any of the leading suffragists who lived or worked in Brighton & Hove and whose names are all but forgotten. These women changed the world and should be commemorated as individuals.

Brighton and Hove may have a statue each of Queen Victoria, but there are none of other women. There has been no reluctance to recognise prominent men in this way. Over the past 35 years, the city has placed a statue of music hall star Max Miller in the Pavilion Gardens and another of athlete Steve Ovett on the seafront. Yet it has no statue nor any other permanent memorial to female reformers who changed history.

Probably the most obvious omission, is any kind of memorial to Dame Millicent Fawcett, who from 1897 led the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), by far the largest suffrage organisation. She lived, worked and lectured in Brighton from 1865 – 1874 alongside her husband Henry Fawcett, who was MP for Brighton.

There is no permanent memorial to the pioneering early women doctors, most of them suffragists, such as Dr Louise Martindale, who founded local clinics and hospitals. Nor for suffragist Margaret Bondfield, who worked here and later became Labour’s first women MP and the first female cabinet member and Privy Counsellor. Nor for Minnie Turner, of the WSPU, who ran a boarding house in Victoria Road, where suffragettes came to recuperate from force-feeding in prison.

There is none for American-born Elizabeth Robins, a renowned actor and writer, who introduced the works of Ibsen to a British audience and lived and died at Brighton’s 24 Montpelier Crescent. On the Executive of the WSPU, she wrote several influential suffrage-related plays and books, including The Convert in 1907.

The name of Sybil Haig, later Viscountess Rhondda, who was born in Norfolk Square and grew up in Adelaide Crescent, is largely forgotten. She, her sister Lottie who was born in Hove and daughter Margaret, were active members of the NUWSS and the WSPU. All three went to prison and though Sybil rejected violence, her daughter bombed a post box, then when imprisoned, went on hunger strike. Sybil’s niece Cecelia Haig was one of two suffragettes who died as result of police beatings on 18th November 1910, the day the suffragists called Black Friday.

Perhaps most shameful of all, there is no memorial for Mary Clarke, Emmeline Pankhurst’s sister, once the WSPU organiser for Brighton. She died in 2010, almost certainly as a result of harsh treatment and force-feeding in prison. Her death never received the publicity of Emily Wilding Davison’s violent end under the Kings’ horse on Derby Day 2013. Nonetheless, Mary Clarke’s obituary rightly called her the “first woman martyr who has gone to death for this cause.”

These and many others deserve the honour of a statue in our city – one that records the names of these heroic women. Commemoration is long overdue.

Isla Robertson 10 April 1933 – 20 December 2017 – A Friend of Age and Guide of Youth

There are some people who are forces of nature. Individuals whose charisma and willpower drives all before them. In this city, you tend to think they should have their name on a bus. One such was Isla Robertson, pensioners’ champion and activist, who died on 20th December at the Royal Sussex County Hospital. She was 84.

Isla would not have been sorry to miss Christmas. Like a lot of Scots, she didn’t think too much of it – but she would have been upset to miss Hogmanay and above all Burns Night on 25th January. She love Robert Burns’ poetry and the ‘wee dram’ of whisky that goes with it.

So it was fitting that the celebration of her life was arranged for Burn’s Night, the 25th January. Friends and family packed into the Purple Playhouse Theatre on Montefiore Road. There were elected councillors from London, who had served with Isla on Westminster City Council. There were people from Scotland, who had known her from childhood and others who had worked with her in London, after she trained as a teacher. Probably the largest contingent were those, like me, who had met her after she retired to Brighton and became an activist for older people’s rights. She was best known as Chair of the Brighton & Hove Pensioners Association, but she had many other roles, not least as a Trustee for Age UK. As one of her admirer’s said “It didn’t matter what you were there to do, Isla always got the conversation around to pensioners’ rights”.

Isla had had several falls, but after the last one, doctors discovered that the cancer she had conquered years earlier, had returned with a vengeance. She said “I’ve beaten it once. I can beat it again.” But this time even Isla was defeated.

Born in Scotland, Isla worked as a receptionist for some years, before training as a teacher. She was an inspirational teacher, determined to give the deprived children she taught the best education possible. She had no patience with educational fads, telling younger colleagues to concentrate on making sure children could read and write well. As a former ‘mature student’, she knew that excellent literacy skills provide the tools for second chances in adulthood.

A life-long Labour Party member, she served, between 1986 and 1990, as a Westminster City councillor for Little Venice ward.  While on the Council she became a planning specialist – and the scourge of Dame Shirley Porter, Conservative leader of the Council. Shirley Porter was later surcharged £27 million pounds for her part in the notorious ‘Homes for Votes’ scandal of the 1980s, where constituency boundaries were manipulated for political advantage and poor council tenants forced from their homes. As one former colleague said to cheers and applause “Shirley Porter absolutely hated Isla”.

However, I cannot imagine anyone hating Isla. She was forthright and honest and did not suffer fools gladly. When she asked you to do something, such as speak at a Pensioners meeting, you knew you had to do it. And what’s more, it would be fun. She loved laughter and sweets and whisky and the poetry of Robert Burns, which she would read in her wonderful deep Scottish accent. A friend described how Isla broke down in tears half way through reading him Burn’s great hymn to equality “A Man’s a Man for a That”. When he attempted to continue reading the Scottish dialect in his English accent, she burst out laughing, grabbed the book back and carried on herself.

A friend from Scotland paraphrased a Burn’s poem “Epitaph on my own Friend”. The words are apt.

“The friend of age, and guide of youth:
Few hearts like hers, with virtue warm’d,
Few heads with knowledge so inform’d:
If there’s another world, she lives in bliss;
If there is none, she made the best of this”.

A bus for Isla, please.

Throwing Women to the Wolves – Assurances about Violence against Women Count for Little

The last Friday of October was a grim day for news. National newspapers were dominated by reports of harassment and misogyny in Parliament, while that day’s Argus brought a report that a woman had been stabbed to death at her home. We now know she was 46 year old Jillian Howell, a Payroll Manager for Brighton University, who was also a volunteer for the Samaritans and a popular and devoted Albion fan. A man has been charged with her murder.

Superintendent Ed De La Rue of Sussex Police pointed out, as the police so often do when women are killed, that the “man and woman were known to each other” adding that it was “obviously very tragic and a very upsetting incident for the community ”. He reassured the public that the police “aren’t looking for anyone else” and reminded us “Brighton is a safe place”.“Unfortunately” he said, complacently, “these tragic incidents do, from time to time occur.”.

It was the sort of statement we’ve come to expect from police officers reporting on the deaths of women by known male assailants. The indication is that such events are to be expected and, though sad and regrettable, pose no risk to the general public. Except of course, that male violence does pose a particular risk to the half of the public who are female.

Supt De La Rue ignored the fact that of recent years there has been a huge increase in violence against women in the city. In 2015-16 in Brighton and Hove more than 4,500 incidents of domestic violence were reported to the Police, up almost 5 per cent on the previous year. In the same period, 667 sexual offences were recorded and 37 cases of stalking. A 2016 report to the city’s council revealed that in the 5 years from 2011-12 to 2015-16 there was a 107 per cent rise in the number of recorded offences of sexual violence, while domestic violence went up by 35 per cent. Bad as these figures were, the report reminded councillors that they were likely to be “an underestimate, since substantial numbers of people do not disclose such violence..”. Health services also recorded 23 patients who had suffered female genital mutilation.

No doubt police would say, as they always do, that the increase is due to ‘better recording’ and their own ‘improved response’. Except that they have been saying this for 3 decades and the real indicator of an improved response would be a reduction in incidents, levels of injury and crucially homicide. There are no signs of reduction. Moreover, Sussex Police have been severely criticised for their poor response to some female homicides, not least the tragic killing of Shana Grice following repeated reports of stalking by her ex-boyfriend.

The same day that reports of Jillian Howell’s death were published, another city newspaper printed an interview with ‘Lorraine’ from St Leonards. She described 10 years of terrifying stalking by Sherzad Salih, a total stranger. She had repeatedly reported incidents to Sussex Police, but action was only taken when she herself gathered evidence from a dash cam she had installed. Sherzad Salih has now been jailed for 4 years. However, even when he was on bail awaiting trial, she was not protected. He continued to stalk her, at one point even following her daughter. She believes he will stalk her again.

That Friday’s grim news ended with reports of the conviction of Dr Gautam Ray, a Sussex A & E specialist, for possession of ‘extreme pornography’. Headlines focussed on the fact he had viewed images of bestiality. Undoubtedly, these were deeply degrading to the women portrayed, but far worse were images of injured women, shown with whip marks and nails driven into their flesh, one with her breast nailed to a piece of wood and another tied to a table with bolt-cutters attached to her genitals. Ray, who used to work for Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, was given a 6 month suspended prison sentence and allowed to walk free from court. Depressingly, anonymous comments on the Argus website minimised the offence, treated the issue as a joke or suggested the women “enjoyed it”.

So Supt De La Rue, you’ll forgive me if I treat your reassurances with scepticism. I do not feel safe in the city. I have little confidence that the police will protect me or other women. I may be unduly cynical, but what I see is a police service that enthusiastically attends fashionable meetings and marches, talks up diversity and ostentatiously condemns hate crime against other groups – but turns its back on women and throws female victims to the wolves.

Warren Morgan – To Go or Stay?

Published in the Argus 27.10.2017.

The late Tony Benn M.P. divided people into weathervanes and signposts. Signposts are guides, showing the way, firm under pressure. Weathervanes shift direction in response to prevailing winds.

Brighton & Hove Labour Party members should remember this as they consider re-election and potential de-selection of councillors. Warren Morgan and some other politicians do seem at odds with the current direction of their Party.

However, if Corbyn’s people pursue de-selections, they need to be sure that the politicians they get, will be better than the politicians they had. An atmosphere of cult-like adoration currently surrounds Jeremy Corbyn, as it once did Tony Blair. With most of the mainstream, pro-remain media in full cry after Theresa May, Corbyn is getting a remarkably easy ride. To many, he looks a shoo-in for the next General Election. As a result, every careerist and attention seeker from Oxbridge to Wapping, and Sheffield to Kemptown now tacks Left, just as they or their kind once tacked Right. Once selected, and when the political climate changes, as it will, they’ll shift direction as it suits them.

In the 1990s, Blairite apparatchiks wore suits, carried pagers, defended global capitalism, courted “the filthy rich” insulted women and sneered at working class people. Nowadays, Corbynistas dress casually, argue for nationalisation and “the many not the few” while singing “Oh Jeremy Corbyn”. And still, it seems, insult women and sneer at working class people.

I do not agree with Warren Morgan, but he is, I suspect, a signpost rather than a weathervane. A political bruiser and front-stabber, at least people know where they are with him.

The Crisis in Social Care – Family Members Take up the Slack

The MP Philip Lee, a former GP, has accused families of being “too selfish” to care for elderly relatives. In response to reports of serious shortages of good quality residential homes, he told a fringe meeting of Age UK at the Conservative Conference that it is up to “families” to shoulder more of the burden, rather than taking up scarce places in care homes. He claimed we could learn from how the “Muslim and Hindu communities look after their elders”, echoing similar earlier statements from Jeremy Hunt the health secretary, and Jackie Doyle-Price, the Care Minister.

In reality, of course, it is not ‘families’ who bear the burden, it is individuals, usually women – many of whom have no choice. Traditional Muslim and Hindu families assume that the duty of care rests on daughters in law. In indigenous British families, it tends to be the daughter who takes responsibility. Whatever way you cut it, it is women who take the strain, they who are denied paid employment or forced to give it up so that children and then elderly parents can be protected and cared for.

Since the 2008 crash, women have born the burden of austerity. Their pay and benefits have been cut, while many traditional jobs have gone. Austerity has been especially hard on middle-aged women, the so-called WASPI women, born in the 1950s. They are losing thousands of pounds of state pension they were entitled to expect and also time they planned to spend with their families. All because Parliament, most of whose members have gold-plated pensions, decided to raise women’s state pension age quicker than it should and without warning.

This ‘sandwich generation’ of women, with no expectation of private pensions, typically work part-time for low wages, providing unpaid care for both grandchildren and older parents. Many such women abandoned earlier career opportunities to care for children and later gave up full time work to manage their parent’s care. In the face of a massive increase in Alzheimers-type disease, it is they who provide unpaid the bulk of what is estimated to be 11.6 billion pounds of unpaid dementia care each year. Small wonder that when the Conservative General Election Manifesto threatened to remove the ‘Triple Lock’ protecting levels of state pensions – something that would have disproportionately affected women – female voters abandoned Theresa May in droves and voted Labour. They had been pushed too far.

It is these people that Dr Lee had the gall to scold for “outsourcing” their parents’ care. A more sensitive man might have apologised for the failures of his own and previous governments. A more imaginative one might have proposed solutions. Instead, with breathtaking arrogance, Dr Lee told adult carers to accept that in future, care home places may not be available – and to consider providing care themselves. Given that most elderly people go into care homes only when they need high levels of personal care, that means shopping, cooking, feeding, lifting, bathing, administering medication, toileting or changing incontinence pads, not just occasionally, but regularly several times a day, every day.

The brutal truth is that elder-care is not something many men have to worry about. According to the Times journalist Alice Thomson men are “half as likely as women to care for elderly relatives.” There is no great societal expectation that they do so. Many care home staff tut disapprovingly at daughters who rush in to visit once or twice a week at the end of a working day, before dashing home to prepare supper – but look gently on a man who visits very occasionally at a weekend. He is accepted to be a loving son taking time out from legitimate employment. Daughters, on the other hand, already guilt-ridden and exhausted, are too often treated as if they have let their parent down.

At a personal level, few men have to worry about care in their own old age. The majority have – or expect to have – younger female partners to assume the burden of care while they live at home. Men without female partners have the advantage of higher social status than women, better pensions and greater disposable income. They are able to buy themselves protection in an ageist world – at least for a while. It is old women who tend to end up in care homes and – as every care home scandal reveals – where there is neglect, abuse or needless death in the care system, old women bear the brunt of it.

Each and every elderly person has a right to good quality housing, health and social care, whether or not he or she has a caring family. The public understand this and is prepared to pay for it.

It is the arrogance and indifference of politicians that is the problem.

Gender Neutral Uniform at Priory School

The headmaster of the Priory School reports that there has been negative public comment about schoolgirls’ short skirts – and an increase in students claiming to be ‘gender-fluid’. He plans to kill two birds with one stone by making all students wear trousers rather than skirts. Predictably, there has been complaint, because, as always, it is female dress being restricted.

There’s no doubt that shortened school skirts constrain free movement and expose girls to sexual comment, so change is needed. However, schools seem to get themselves into a needless twist over uniform, placating one interest group only to offend or hurt another. In the melee, children’s – and especially girls’ – real interests are often lost.

Some state schools have approved a uniform hijab for pre-pubescent girls.  A decision made to placate one group of ultra orthodox parents, has appalled others, who rightly say it sexualises very young girls.

The intention of uniform should surely be to ensure all children are neatly and comfortably dressed, their bodies neither sexualised nor exposed to insult, humiliation or embarrassment and free to play, exercise and excel at sport.

I would suggest local schools give all children a choice of knee-length culottes or ankle-length trousers, provided that neither are too tight and both allow free movement. Culottes look like skirts, but cannot ride up or easily be shortened. This would allow girls free movement, protecting them from harassment – and the public from embarrassment – while giving boys access to cooler clothing in the summer.

Whatever schools do, they need to keep their focus on all children’s equal right to education, not the lobbying of interest groups.