For reasons Guido can’t fathom Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper are hosting a ‘What Women Want’ meeting tomorrow at Labour Party conference. What they apparently don’t want is men at the meeting. However Mrs Dromey and Mrs Balls are giving Ed Miliband a sex change for the day and making him an honorary women so that he can address the meeting of the wimmin.

Charlotte Vere, founder of the more mainstream campaign Women On says she is

“astonished that men will be excluded from the meeting, not allowed in, left outside the door. … This is an outrage. Ed Miliband an “honorary woman”? Can you imagine a meeting to which only men are invited and Harriet Harman is an ‘honorary man’?” 

It strikes Guido as a throwback to Harriet’s more radical looney left days…

It was Erin Pizzey, the founder of the first refuge for battered women, who in the late eighties identified Labour’s then radicals Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt as dangerous feminist  ideological enemies of the family. Harman and Hewitt were in those days leading lights of the loony left’s radical feminist wing, arguing in pamphlet after pamphlet that “It cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion.” After decades of agitation, which influenced social policy as well as social workers, their attack on men and their role in modern life has reached its nadir in Tottenham. Local MP David Lammy put it bluntly last week: “We are seeing huge consequences of the lack of male role models in young men’s lives..” Harriet Harman is the ideological single-mother of those gangsta rioters.

Peter Oborne correctly identifies that behind the scenes New Labour’s party policy was captured by the likes of Harman and Hewitt who viewed the traditional two-parent family as an instrument of male, patriarchal oppression. The riots are the toxic legacy of such poisonous “progressive” attitudes.

In government Iain Duncan Smith has perhaps only until the next election to reverse decades of progressive social policies, he has to make work pay for people who have known only inter-generational worklessness and rebuild the traditional family as the prevailing societal norm. That task first starts in the think-tanks, moves onto the broadsheet editorial pages, before becoming a stated policy objective eventually leading to changes in the infrastructure of social policy. There is also a necessity for a reversal of the secular kulturkampf which progressives have waged to make non-judgemental, moral relativism the only acceptable official view. We are currently only at the think-tank and broadsheet editorial stage.

Harman’s 1990 IPPR  pamphlet “The Family Way” was described by Feminist Review as “An attempt to combat stultifying, traditionalist concepts of ‘the family’”. We have reached the end of that decades long struggle by Fabians and feminists to undermine the family; with 40%  of children born outside marriage and a minority of childhoods completed in the household of both biological parents. It is now apparent to all that few if any of Harriet Harman’s gangsta progeny come from those supposedly stultifying traditional families.

Give it a few minutes, but some popcorn worthy stuff from Newsnight last night:

There’s a rather warped transcript here.

Michael Gove told Harriet Harman on Newsnight…

“…if there is anyone responsible for how these children were brought up, it is the Labour party”.

As Ed Miliband goes to campaign in Oldham, Labour HQ must be having some trouble working out who to send to campaign in the local elections in Wolverhampton. Something tells Guido that Labour’s deputy leader won’t be going to stump for this candidate:

Better send Jack Dromey instead…

Remember how quiet Harriet Harman was on the Hoon/Hewitt attempted coup day?  Guido has been scanning the footage and column inches from that cold day in January and the only person who came to Gordon’s defence any later was brave David Miliband. Note her absence from the Guy News round up of that day. The rest of the cabinet hardly gave a ringing endorsement either though:

Harman hosted a New Years Eve goose roast with the other plotters at her country pile just six days before the attempted coup. Again this raises questions about why she didn’t run herself in May. It seems she was sensible enough not to wield the knife herself, but she clearly had her eye on the crown. Harman’s reputation as the mother of the party, uniting factions and holding things together has taken a massive hit with this news. Red Ed should watch his back – there have been stirrings while the leader has been away on paternity leave. Has Harriet been hosting any dinner parties this week?

Former union boss Jack Dromey tries hard to keep up his man of the people act, even now he is a Member of Parliament. Back in July he promised to take part in last Saturday’s Birmingham Half Marathon and press released the fact to his local rag. On Friday night attendees confirmed that he was as fit as a fiddle at a Compass event at which he spoke at in Birmingham. Yet on Sunday Dromey was a no-show at the marathon, citing a cold and the fact he was on antibiotics. However the drugs and Harriet gently mopping his brow must have had a wonderous effect since he had made a miraculous recovery in time for Sunday’s Politics Show.

After an audible gulp Jack’s office assured Guido that Jack hadn’t actually raised any money for the race, but that anything pledged will be rolled over to a fun run next year. Unless of course there is a chance to get on the telly…

With the London Fire Brigade Union set to walk out on Guido’s party night, the public and the government are up in arms, but strangely there hasn’t been a word from Labour. You would have thought that the Shadow Minister responsible for the fire services would have at least attempted to encourage a compromise. Strangely though, former union boss Jack Dromey hasn’t said a word. Guido can’t think why..

Yesterday morning the Labour Party was in favour of the war in Iraq because “it was the right thing to do”, yesterday afternoon it turned against the war in Iraq because Red Ed said “it was wrong”. Harriet Harman voted for and argued for the war. Hundreds of British soldiers gave their lives and limbs to liberate Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny. Harman illustrates the Orwellian readiness of professional politicians to say whatever suits them at the time, whatever the price in other’s blood and treasure. At least David Miliband had a principled position…

Despite becoming Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles still enjoys bashing Labour as much as he did when he was Tory party chairman.

Today he is highlighting “Harriet Harman’s Serene Green Tranquillity Room” built as part of a £2.4 million refit of the offices used by her Equalities Office. Described as “a 21st Century… space of quality, air and light, where we can work, relax and refuel in a natural ebb and flow”.

So bascially civil servants can loaf about doing nothing in comfort…