Star Trek (TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT). Battlestar Galactica (original and reimagined). Andromeda. Firefly. Space 1999. Blake’s 7. Babylon 5. Stargate SG-1. If you are still reading, there is a good chance that you, like me, have wasted some time indulging in the delights of space opera. Space opera is television that classifies itself as science fiction, but which belongs to a sub-genre so popular people forget that other kinds of science fiction are shown on TV too. Space opera, as the name suggests, tends to be set in space, or at least involves characters that pop to the next star like you might pop to the newsagent’s. In space opera we see the stories of the same group of people every week. Unlike soap opera, those stories are not confined to one planet, never mind a single street. The characters may visit different planets, but there is good old oxygen to breathe on every one. Which leads to my next point. As you know already, the cliches of space opera have been around for a long time. They were established not when Gil Gerard was Buck Rogering the 25th Century, but when Buster Crabbe was Buck Rogering pre-WWII America. Being so well established, I hardly need to tell you the best known cliches. Spaceships never fly upside down. Everyone speaks English, unless they speak Klingon, and even the Klingons speak English to each other when nobody else is around. You can hear sound in space. Rugged human males are considered surprisingly sexually attractive by females from alien races. The list of cliches is long, and you know plenty of them already. But probe within the exoskeleton of sci-fi cliche, and you will find even more cliches underneath. Here are a few of my favourites.

Deep Space, Deep Underground

Think of space opera and you tend to think of… space. That much is obvious. Or is it? No space opera series can afford to set every episode in space. Sets are expensive, and once you have done a few planets that look a bit foresty, a bit deserty, or a bit like a disused factory just outside Luton, you still need a couple more episodes that get the crew out of their spaceship. Whether it is caverns or corridors, no space opera writer can resist the temptation to set a few cheap stories underground. Best of all, claustrophobic plots also mean you can do with even fewer extras than usual.

Clothes Maketh the Alien

They have great clothes in the future, made with advanced sweat retardant fabrics. The clothes are so great, nobody ever needs to change. In the future, people wear the same outfit every single day. Heck knows what they wear on laundry day. You might imagine the ones with uniforms just have lots of tunics and pants that all look the same, but the ones who dress casual have no such excuse. The only people with two outfits are Captain Kirk, who has a regulation uniform yellow sweater, and an alternate green sweater, and hot alien females, who might have three or even four sexy outfits they can change into. How typical of women to waste so much money on fashion.

Seeing Eye to Eye

Tailors must struggle to find work in the future. Not only do most people own only one outfit, but everybody has roughly the same dimensions as humans, reducing the range that haberdashers need to stock. Two arms, two legs, a head on top of a neck, a face at the front of the head - very few aliens deviate from the norm. There is an upside to that. It means the standard interiors of spaceships (ceiling height, door width) always accommodate everyone.

Shocking Interior Design

They build spaceships to last. Torpedo them, phaser them, laser them, nuke them, crash them and bash them with asteroids, and they just keep going on and on like they were built by Ariston. But gently tap on the hull, and you will instantly cause any interior glass to smash and the work consoles to blow up in the face of the person using them. For some reason, whilst the outsides of spaceships are made for war, the insides are a veritable death trap for the occupants. With viewscreens and keyboards guaranteed to electrocute after the tiniest jolt, they should seriously consider changing the manufacturers. They should switch suppliers to the guys who make the one device that hardly ever malfunctions, no matter how bad a beating the ship gets…

[On the bridge, the captain holds on to his seat as the ship is buffeted by enemy fire. In the background, somebody struggles with a fire extinguisher, trying to dowse the flames from a science workstation. An ensign gets to his feet after being thrown to the floor. There is a gash across his forehead. He gets back to the helm and reports on the ship's status.]

Captain: Shield strength, ensign?

Ensign: Down to 17%, Captain. I don’t think they can withstand another attack.

Captain: What about warp power?

Ensign: Warp drives are off-line. Thrusters only.

Captain: Weapons?

Ensign: We’re out of torpedoes. Laser banks are down to 9%. Not enough to penetrate our enemy’s ablative armour.

Captain: And what about life support?

Ensign: Life support is on backup emergency power, sir. We’re also venting atmosphere on decks 3 and 9.

Captain: There must be something working on this ship?!?!

Ensign: Artificial gravity is fully functional and operating at maximum efficiency.

Starry Nights, Peaceful Nights

If you ever take a flight to the East, or West, you might have noticed a phenomenon called timezones. It has something to do with when the sun comes up. But in space, everybody keeps the same hours. Aliens might attack at any moment during the day, but they have the good grace not to attack when people are sleeping. And when you go to a new planet and call the locals to say you have arrived, you never need to say sorry for waking them up. In the future, the two things nobody needs is voicemail, or to bang on the wall and tell the neighbours to keep the noise down because it is late.

New Worlds of Opportunity?

All space institutions have an equal opportunities policy. Any alien, whether blue, green or purple, can be an ensign, bounty hunter or scientist. Scots and Irish can be engineers and doctors. Women are encouraged to lead the way in hand-to-hand combat (especially when using the favoured ‘double fists clasped together’ technique). Russians are trusted to fire the weapons. Blacks can not only steer the ship, they can give orders. But captains must always be American. Even Space 1999, which was a British production financed with European money, had to import American Martin Landau to be in charge (though they also kept the Italian backers happy with the part of Security Chief Tony Verdeschi). The exception that proves the rule is Patrick Stewart’s French captain of the Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard. Somehow the only French space captain in space opera history was portrayed as a demure and private man, who avoided liaisons with women, drank tea and spoke with an English accent. Incredibly, they wrote the character without feeling the need to explain his anglo-eccentricities as a transporter accident.

Technology is an amazing thing. It makes you think. I do not mean it makes you think about how things work, though it does that too. It makes you think about things you take for granted. It challenges your assumptions about what is in the world, how the world works, and what makes for a good life. Take abortion and care for babies born prematurely. Better technology to sustain young life begs the question of when life begins. Take cloning and human rights. Manufacturing life will challenge our perceptions as to the rights of the individual. Take fertility treatment and increasingly older mothers, or the potential for families where one or other biological parent was never intended to be part of the family unit. This erodes our assumptions about what the family is for. The example I want to talk about today, but is not being looked at clearly, even though it is perhaps the most common example of how technology has outstripped our intellectual and ethical worldviews. Millions of people, all over the world, share digital files that contain copyrighted content. Yet there is no grown-up debate about the fundamental questions about the extent to which this is a good thing, or a bad thing. I will avoid promising to give a definitive answer, but I will outline what the problem is.

Here is the nub of the philosophical problem that underpins filesharing. If I lend a book to a friend, I may be depriving the copyright holder of the potential to make money from selling that book. If I invite a friend to my house, so he can watch a football match on satellite TV, a match he could not watch at home, I may be depriving the owner of the content some potential to make money from selling the broadcast. Every day, for hundreds of years, people have done things that may, potentially, reduce the revenues earned by the owners of content rights. However, we have long considered these actions to be moral and virtuous. When the owners of great houses allowed the local community to use their private libraries, this was considered a civilized act of charity, not an attempt to deprive publishers of income.

We know that technology has changed the potential to share, most importantly because the content is now divorced from any physical medium. The analogy of stealing is false. Thieves do not break into your house and copy your jewellery, leaving the originals behind. They take something from you. Filesharers, on the other hand, do not take. They make a copy. The truth is that now people are prepared to share far more widely, with complete strangers, because it costs them nothing to do so. However, the act of sharing would be identical if it was sharing an entire music library with a complete stranger on the other side of the planet, or sharing a single e-book with a next-door neighbour. The technological and legal aspects are the same. All that differs is the range and scale of the impact. We can understand that we live in a society that thinks it is wrong to share a music library with a complete stranger on the other side of the planet, but believes it is good that we share a book with a neighbour. The polarized debate about right versus wrong simply ignores the fundamental issue: that legislators have proven incapable and unwilling to creative a framework that reconciles and accommodates both extremes. No government anywhere has been able to coherently adjust laws to allow for the act we generally consider virtuous whilst prohibiting those thought to be harmful. The result is a terrible fudge. All sharing is a violation of civil law, including sharing an ebook with a neighbour. However, some actions are ‘decriminalized’ not because of a choice of the state, but by a reliance on the copyright holder’s goodwill and lack of interest in pursuing damages. This leads to a new and intolerable conflict within our legal and ethical outlooks.

This is as a problem for all political parties around the world, because no party has been able to form and articulate a coherent position that explains why denying a copyright holder the potential to earn revenue is considered to be virtuous in some cases, evil in others. Technology has moved the debate forward, but our understanding of how to live in a civil society has not. With an issue like this, there is a natural tendency towards petty party political squabbling and points-scoring. There is a fear of dealing with this issue head-on with the hope of resolving it. Burying the topic in overly simplistic maxims about right versus wrong is much easier than risking the unpopularity that comes with thoughtful attempts to find workable compromises. I believe the popularity of the Pirate Party movement around the world stems from the failure to address the fundamental paradox that we consider sharing to be virtuous whilst denying others an income is wrong. The problem has been there for a long time, and articulating the problem has kindled the interest of many people who were already aware of it in one guise or other. There may never be a perfect solution, but a mature political party that tries to explore workable compromises will be doing everyone a favour, and earning themselves credit in the process.

The United States is sick.

I do not mean Americans are physically sick. They are physically sick, but every other nation knows that already. Sickness is a part of life. Barring accident, most of us expect to succumb to sickness sooner or later. Sickness in America is worse than in other rich nations, though the US is the richest of all. The US spends an extraordinary amount on healthcare, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of its GDP, yet still fails to deliver even modest levels of care for large swathes of the population. 47 million Americans have no insurance, and many more are underinsured. But I do not mean to emphasize America’s physical sickness. Yes, the US tends to rank lower than other rich countries, like the UK, on many measures of health. Comparing the US to the UK, the American life is shorter. The American infant is more likely to die. Americans are more likely to have HIV or AIDS. Americans are less likely to have a health professional present at a birth. Per capita, Americans have more dentists, slightly more doctors, but far fewer nurses. The meaning of the per capita measures is undermined, however, because the distribution of access is so different. Most Brits have very similar access to health professionals, whilst Americans enjoy, or dread, varying levels of access. In short, we all know that the US, on average, spends a lot on being well, but still manages to be, on average, sicker than the inhabitants of the UK and other rich European countries. But when I write that the USA is sick, I am not referring to the sickness, often untreated, that lies in American bodies. I refer to the sickness in the American soul.

Let me write one thing about freedom. Freedom is not worth dying for. Dead people are not free. Dead people have the least freedoms of all. However much we honour those who fight, and die, for our freedoms, most of us recognize that exchanging death for freedom is no kind of a bargain. To enjoy freedom, we must be alive to enjoy it. Moreover, illness and incapacity is the most debilitating kind of constraint on our liberty. Pain and infirmity leaves us imprisoned, trapped in a cage of our own bodies. Health, then, is a vital constituent of freedom.

Paradoxically, Americans want to die for their freedoms, or at least pay over the odds for it. The measures are straightforward. They know that inefficient healthcare is crippling their nation. Whether it is the unfathomable burden on unionized businesses, or the loss to the labour market of so many potential workers, or the astonishing waste on administration of insurance, or the wealth creamed off by ambulance-chasing lawyers, Americans know their healthcare is in a mess. But they cannot do anything about it. They cannot do anything about it, because they are worried about losing their freedoms.

In the US right now, there is a hate campaign about Britain’s National Health Service, nationalized provider of healthcare to all Brits. Britain’s NHS is being demonized. According to Conservatives for Patient’s Rights, a US pressure group, the UK suffers from lots of waiting lists. They also say that Britain suffers from rationing. Both are true. Both are natural by-products of efficiently providing universal healthcare. Waiting lists are a consequence of not spending money on having surplus resources, including healthcare professionals, lying around and doing nothing until somebody needs them. Waiting lists mean everybody waits a period of time, instead of having a system where some people can jump ahead whilst others wait longer, or a system where some go untreated to focus more resources on those who do qualify for treatment. As for rationing, even the free market rations scarce resources. A world without rationing is a world with infinite resources - in other words, a fantasy. People can say a human life is priceless, but that is only because they are not paying the bill. A simple thought experiment should clarify. Imagine somebody suffers from a disease, and the drug to cure it is very expensive. Imagine it is so expensive, it costs the entire combined GDP of all the nations on earth. What would happen? We would let the person die. Spending the entire world’s wealth on saving a single life would make no sense. Though difficult to measure these things on a scale, the benefit of a prolonged life for one person would be tiny compared to the loss of the rest of the world of sacrificing everything for the cure. So there are always decisions about who gets what treatment, and there will always be people who are denied treatment because of a limit on resources. The NHS is a system that rations healthcare based on the judgement of health professionals and a collective evaluation of the price to pay for health. America’s mess of insurance and private healthcare and hodgepodge of public provision and law also rations healthcare, but rations it based on a much less straightforward interplay between the wealth and economic value of the richer patient and the arbitrary rules and luck that befalls the poorer patient. Americans are only free of waiting lists because they pay the price in much more expensive care. Americans are not free of rationing, but because the rationing is a complicated jumble, and because it favours some over others, an alliance of the winners and the easily-confused now live in fear. They fear they will be less free if professionals are allowed to decide priorities.

Americans love to laugh at British smiles. Crooked old bad British teeth. Wonky smiles. Americans find British teeth to be an endless source of humour. There is also something else that Americans find odd about the British, though this attribute is less often on display. British men, ignoring those of a religious persuasion, have foreskin. I mention both dentistry and dicks because they both reflect a fundamental truth about the differences between American health values and British health values. Any idiot can judge a smile. Any idiot can see if a penis has been circumcised. Both are superficial. Both are to do with aesthetics. Braces do not make someone healthier, and there is no connection between circumcision and genital health. A nice smile and a cut cock can be judged by an ignoramus with no knowledge of medicine. In contrast, the knowledge of what makes for a good immune system, what reduces the risk of cancer, how to treat a disease and how to alleviate infirmity all belong in the domain of the expert. Americans idolize the Ben Franklins of the world: self-reliant generalists. But trusting an authority is more likely to deliver good health than trusting your own ignorance. Modern medical science is complicated and needs to be administered by people who are highly educated. Trust in authority is why British penises are not circumcised - because no money is wasted on an unnecessary procedure. Trust in authority is why British smiles are crooked - because resources have been applied to more important goals that prolong life and alleviate pain. That keeps the cost to the taxpayer down, whilst preserving the health of the people who keep the country running. In contrast, Americans trust their own judgement above all others. In the American deal, they can see how superior they are, thanks to the straighter smiles and aerated willies, but they must avert their eyes to fellow citizens who live life in pain or who die too soon. And to finance that deal, Americans spend double the amount that we spend in the UK.

The American evisceration of the NHS shows that the American people have souls in turmoil. For all the supposed flaws in Britain’s NHS, one truth keeps getting overlooked. The NHS is not a monopoly provider. The British state has not banned private medicine. Nobody is forced to pick state treatment. Nobody is denied the right to private treatment. The American obsession with freedom misses the essential truth that British healthcare is free. By the laws of demand and supply, nothing impedes private healthcare in Britain, other than the economics of inefficiency. Brits are free to get their healthcare supplied on a private basis. The NHS was deliberately designed to enable private care. Doctors were guaranteed the right to work privately, as well as the opportunity to work for the NHS. Many do both, guaranteeing that a free market is preserved within the provision of British healthcare. Put simply, Brits are at least as free as Americans. What Americans mistake for state oppression is nothing of the sort. The reason why the NHS often looks like a monopoly is not the product of state control, whether control of patients or doctors. The reason why the NHS looks like a monopoly is because most people chose to use it. Only 10% of Brits have private healthcare insurance. If more Brits wanted private healthcare, with more expensive doctors, in more exclusive hospitals, they could have it. They do not want it. They do not want it because, by and large, it is a poor deal. People would rather rely on the efficient provision of healthcare delivered by the NHS in preference to paying for private care.

There cannot be a better expression of freedom than Britain’s healthcare. Every Brit is free to survive. Every Brit is free to be treated. And every Brit is free to pay for a better supplier, if they choose. The vast majority chose not. In the American soul, the British system is something to fear. Fear is the American sickness. What Americans fear, more than anything, is the realization that they are already imprisoned, not by an authoritarian state, but by the labyrinth of ‘freedoms’ they constructed for themselves.

There is an irreducible problem with making decisions. Decisions will always be terrible when people have beliefs that are passionate, confident, certain but wrong. Some of the most terrible chapters of human history were framed with extraordinarily incorrect beliefs that were, nonetheless, widely held. For example, there was a belief that many women liked hanging out with Satan. Best practice was to burn these woman at the stake. Another example was that Jews were part of an international conspiracy to take over the world and subvert Aryans. Best practice was to deny them rights and/or exterminate them. A third example was that Cambodia would be mighty and its people joyous if they returned to the traditional agrarian values of the Khmer civilization. Best practice was to destroy all modern technology and kill anyone who had benefited from a good education. In all three cases it is easy to get fixated on the terrible injustice and suffering caused by these mistaken beliefs. But we should not forget that part of the reason for the cruelty was that all of these practices were based on ideas that would never have worked. The witchhunters were talking bollocks. The Nazis were morons. The Khmer Rouge were full of sh*t. None of their ridiculous plans would ever have delivered their respective goals, so escalating violence became their substitute for another terrible realization that they had to avoid at all cost: the realization that they were imbeciles with no idea how to achieve their goals. They hence substituted hurting others as an alternative to admitting they could not find a way to get what they wanted. Killing women for being witches will not rid the world of evil. Exterminating Jews is not a mechanism to liberate Aryans or any other pseudo-sect of people. Destroying tools and knowledge would not have made the Cambodians happier. But an eager willingness to hurt your ‘enemy’ is a great way to keep your friends on side. The problem with modern mass government is it still affords some people the opportunity to seriously propose, and even implement, disastrous, stupid and wrong-headed policies on a terrible scale, with much the same quid pro quo. The unreasonable and inequitable demands always start small enough to be taken seriously by reasonable people, but always have to get worse as it becomes more and more apparent that paradise, the thousand-year reich, or any other twisted utopian fantasy has not been realized through the ‘temporary’ manipulation of society and human freedoms. That is why this week’s post is dedicated to the person who is by far the most over-promoted individual in British politics today. I am writing about the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and general-purpose Cabinet dogsbody, Harriet Harman.

Before I dive into some detail, let me put Harriet Harman into perspective. She is Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. This is currently an important-ish post, because the Labour Party happens to be in government. She is popular in the Labour Party, sort of. She is popular with individual members of the Labour Party, and this popularity was vital for her narrow victory in the Deputy Leadership contest. Labour MPs and MEPs consistently favoured rival Alan Johnson, and the unions were fairly evenly split, so the backing of individual members gave Harman the decisive edge. Doubtless Gordon Brown was happy about that, because whatever Harman’s strengths, being a possible contender for leader was not one of them. In contrast the second and third-place men, Johnson and Jon Cruddas, might have been the kind of people who would have has a serious go at grabbing Brown’s crown. Cruddas is a serious lefty with solid union support, so might still place himself as a go-to man if the elastic snaps on the New Labour vision and it slides down to Brown’s ankles like the withered old pants they are. People also thought Johnson might be a leader, not least because so many of the parliamentary party would follow him, but he has now dimmed his chances by being all meek and mild during the recent attempts to dislodge Brown.

As Deputy Leaders go, Harman is a lightweight. As an MP, she started out as Harriet Likeable-but-Dim, but has matured as a politician. Now she is not so likeable. She entered Parliament after being picked for a safe seat. It is so safe that it is the modern-day equivalent of a rotten borough. If Labour selected Robert Mugabe for Harman’s seat, he would win by a landslide, and without the need for all that beastly violence and intimidation he uses in Zimbabwe. Labour should seriously think about making Mugabe an offer. Replacing Mugabe in Zimbabwe would be great for the people of that country, and the constituents of Peckham would probably prefer Mugabe’s common touch to Harman walking round the streets whilst wearing a stab-proof vest. Ignoring the redrawing of lines on electoral maps, Harman’s seat has been held continuously held by Labour since 1936. For a lot of the time that Labour have been in power, Harman has been given minor jobs, if any. She talks passionately about being a feminist, but even Harman must realize the Ministry for Women is not considered to be one of the top jobs (and subject to a rather less competitive pool of contenders). When briefly given the relatively big job of Social Security (lot of money to spend, new ideas not mandatory) she spent most of the time arguing with her underling, Frank Field. Tony Blair deserves a good slap for that pairing. Putting Harman in charge of the courageous and brilliant Field would be like asking Albert Einstein to report his findings to Oliver Hardy. Unlike her predecessors, Harman has never had one of the big Cabinet jobs. Healy was Chancellor before he was Deputy Leader. Beckett had a stint as Foreign Secretary. Even Prescott got trusted with the big budgets as Secretary for Environment+, before they realized he was not suited to a proper job and kicked him up to the honorary post of Deputy PM. Hattersley spent all his best years in opposition, but at least he shadowed big jobs that whole time. You have to go back to Michael Foot to find a deputy leader with a CV as meagre as Harman’s. The biggest job he ever got was Leader of the House of Commons, which happens to be the same Cabinet job that Harman has now. The historical analogy that Harman might like to draw is that Foot went on to be Leader of the Labour Party, and there are signs that Harman’s thinking runs along similar lines. The lesson from history she might prefer to forget is that Foot, more than any leader, led Labour into a ever deeper and darker oblivion, a course in devastating the party’s popularity that took seventeen years to reverse.

Harman’s the topic of this post, because she spent so much of last week trying to get attention, and hopefully appalling most people for the stupidity of her suggestions. With Brown ‘holidaying’ whilst ’still in touch for the big decisions’, his minions have had the chance to lap up the limelight with good publicity, and not just be forced to answer all those tough questions that Brown is trying to avoid. Harman has grabbed the opportunity with both ham fists. She suggested that Labour should have a gender quota system for its top two positions: at least one man, at least one woman. That prompted Prescott to respond with the superb line that she should “stop complaining, get campaigning”. She said that Lehman Brothers would still be around today if it had been Lehman Sisters. She reportedly has dug her heels in and insisted that the replacements for half of retiring Labour MPs must be selected from all-female shortlists. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail reported that Harman’s husband, trade union bigwig Jack Dromey, was being lined up for a safe seat. Presumably the seat is on the other half of the list - one where the local party can pick a man, or pick a woman, but must pick Harriet Harman’s husband.

Comparing Harman to witchhunters and Pol Pot may seem extreme, but anybody who decides that people generally cannot be trusted to do the right thing, and must be forced to do the right thing, is a dictator. That is what Harman is. She is a natural and instinctive dictator. The Labour Party selects John Prescott to be Deputy Leader… WRONG! should have picked a woman. Any woman would have been better than John Prescott (a plausible theory until you remember that his predecessor was Margaret Beckett and his successor is Harriet Harman). Lehman Brothers screws up… INEVITABLE! should have listened to more women. Women are much better at understanding financial markets because of natural selection predisposes them to understand the harmonic variances between stock indices and their monthly cycle, or if not that, then something as equally scientific and proven as that. Want a select a particular man to represent your constituency?… NO! a woman, any woman, would be better. Want Gordon Brown as your MP? NO! a woman would be better. Mandelson to return to the Commons? NO! a woman would be better. Bring back Blair? NO! you must be thinking of Blears, not Blair. Give a seat to Mr. Harman? you might have a point there, men have their uses after all.

The irony is that, despite being a natural dictator, Harman used to be the legal officer for the National Council of Civil Liberties, the old stage name of what is now known as Shami Chakrabarti’s Liberty and is soon to be rebranded as We Love Shami Chakrabarti (formerly known as Liberty). But as I pointed out in a previous post about Chakrabarti and Liberty, it is not unusual for cynical politicians to exploit NGOs to further their career. In fact, the less the interest in the actual goals of the NGO, the easier it is to use as a springboard. Hence why Harman has been so resolute in trying to using anti-terror laws as a way to attack our civil liberties, and why Harman proposed an alteration to the Freedom of Information Act to enable MPs to cover up their abuses of the expense system.

Of course the world is unfair to women. But simple equations and crude gerrymandering will not make the world a fairer place for anybody. Whilst Harman keeps bashing on about quotas every time women are under-represented, and sometimes talks about blacks being under-represented, she never follows through to the logical conclusion of using quotas to deliver fairness. If the world is unfair, and quotas are a solution, you could have quotas for every kind of unfairness, not just for gender or colour. You can use it for disabilities. Check. Stop ageism. Check. Promote gays, bis and lesbians. Check. Give people with a Brummie accent a better chance. Check. No discrimination for fatties. I suppose… Help redheads. Erm, let me think about that. Equal representation for short people. Yeah, but… Stop prejudice to ugly people. Hang on, we need to think this one through. Give poor children a fair chance. No, we do not support that - that would be unfair on our middle class voters, erm, I mean to the middle classes in general, erm, I mean the classless society we are trying to build, erm, I mean have built.

Whilst Harman rants in the absence of any data to support her nonsense, others in the Labour Party end up publishing reports that show kids from poor families have less chance of entering the professions than they did when the Labour got into power in 1997. Alan Milburn’s report on Fair Access to the Professions drew on a broad panel of experts. It refers to inequalities of sexes, and race, where apparent. But the damning conclusion is that people who come from wealthier and privileged backgrounds (people like Harriet Harman) use their influence, more than ever, to secure the best jobs for their children (in much the way Harman decided ordinary state schools were not good enough for her children). Whilst some professions have opened up to young women (for example, women make up 57% of both applicants to and acceptances by medical schools) they have not opened up to the children of the poor (on average, a doctor born in 1970 will have been raised in a family that is richer than five in six of all UK families). As the report also points out, professions like medicine and law remain heavily biased towards those born into wealth and who are educated at exclusive schools (just like Harriet Harman). Yet whilst Harman rails on and on about statistics like how few CEOs are women, and will abuse statistics to suit her purposes (Harman was warned about abusing statistics by the Head of the UK Statistics Authority) she make no mention of stats that show poor men and poor women being treated unequally to men and women from rich backgrounds. That seems remarkable when we talk about the goals of a Labour politician, but perhaps less remarkable when we remember this particular Labour politician has always benefited from prejudice of the right sort, and is only against prejudice of the wrong sort.

To get a feel for how messed up the current equality debate is, I thought I would pick a completely different example to the ones Harman likes to use, but would use it to generate the type of stats that Harman loves to quote. As noted above, Harman’s husband is a union bigwig. When talking about the private sector, Harman adores the phrase ‘glass ceiling’. So what better topic to analyse, than whether there is a glass ceiling for women wanting top jobs in trade unions?

I began my analysis by going to the Trades Union Congress website, the umbrella body for 58 British unions representing nearly seven million workers between them. I stripped the data they had on all the unions in the congress, and I analysed it for evidence of a disparity between the chances for men and women to get the top job at a union. The results were:

• Women comprise 44.6% of ordinary union members, but only 21.7% of union bosses.
• There were 14 unions where female members outnumbered male members, but where the union boss was a man.
• There were only 2 unions were male members outnumbered female members, whilst having a female boss. In one of these, the gender ratio of members was almost equal, with 50.3% men and 49.7% women.
• The four biggest unions all had male bosses. Seven of the eight biggest had male bosses.
• Some unions reported figures for male and female members that did not total to the figures reported for total membership. Either some unionists cannot count or they have identified an unspecified third gender.

Pretty damning. So why does Harman not campaign harder for more female union bosses, or for a law to create quotas for female union bosses? After all, these people are meant to be representing women in the workforce, the same place where Harman keeps insisting they get unfairly treated and unfairly paid compared to men. If the people who campaign for better worker’s pay and better worker’s treatment do not treat women fairly, is it realistic to expect the employers to do more?

It would be easy for Harman to do more for female representation in unions. She could turn over in bed, and talk to her husband, Jack Dromey. His union, Unite, was created by the union of two unions (yes, I know, but true). Unite is the biggest union in Britain. Dromey had been Deputy Secretary of the TGWU and continued as Deputy Secretary of Unite, though you might have thought the need for a deputy is excessive. The two unions solved the problem of a fight for the top job by having two joint General Secretaries (both men). Then again, I can see why unions might find it hard to cut excess staff. To be fair to Dromey, three quarters of Unite members are men, so you might expect more men at the top of the union. Unite’s top echelons include a fair share of women, so positive discrimination seems to be helping on that score. But if they could only persuade some of the male workers to stand aside, so women could take over their jobs… then you would see some real progress for women in the workplace…

I doubt there is much point arguing with Harman. She is in politics because she is convinced she is right. Listening to counter-arguments is best left to those with the minds agile enough to gain from the process. Harman is a bludgeon and will continue to be. She only ever changes her message if it might help her further her career, but even Harman can only double-back so often. She is the civil libertarian who wants to lock people up without trial. She is the advocate for equality that is silent on the growing inequality between children of poorer families and richer families. She is the voice of Labour that will not be silenced by critics, but says nothing about the decline in mobility suffered by those from poorer backgrounds. Aiding the mobility and aspirations of the poor is Labour’s raison d’être, so for a Labour Equalities Minister to ignore the topic is not just a disappointment, it is a betrayal.

Harman is a stubborn cynical ‘been there, done that’ sort of politician. When talking about political ‘big beasts’, Harman is the ox. She is slow and remorseless, supported by a safe seat which means no real need to compromise or reach out to a variety of voters. She presses forward in the direction she faces, with no real idea of where it will take her. Only an ox would see no contradiction in bemoaning the lack of top jobs for women in business, whilst ignoring the tendency for professional jobs to increasingly go to the wealthy at the exclusion of women - and men - from poorer backgrounds. That makes Harman that most terrible and terrifying combination: despot and dullard. At least Harman proves one thing about gender equality. Women can be overpromoted almost as much as men.