Keir Starmer has made much of the diversity within his Shadow Cabinet. He previously pledged it would “balanced in terms of diversity”, and has since maintained an equitable gender balance amongst his top team. However, digging deeper into Labour’s top team reveals this may not extend beyond those in the limelight. Amongst Labour’s Political Advisers (PAds), there is a significant underrepresentation of women. The boys outnumber the girls almost 2:1. Just 35% of Labour’s top team of advisers are women, while 65% are men.

Despite his support for equal pay, David Lammy’s top team consists entirely of men. Lisa Nandy, Nick Thomas-Symonds and Ed Miliband also don’t employ a single woman. Nandy won’t be concerned, she just needs her team to switch their self-identification… 

Find the PAd List at order-order.com/pads or below. As always, updates, omissions or corrections should be sent to team@order-order.com.

After missing the extended deadline by a whole month, the Labour Party has finally published its gender pay gap report for 2020. It shows women now earn 98p for every £1 earned by men – a median gap of 1.84%, compared to -2.67% in 2019 when women earned 3p more per hour than their male colleagues. This might explain why the party was so reluctant to hand over the report…

The party also released an accompanying document that acknowledges the figures, and admits they must “ensure we consistently maintain pay equality across the Labour Party over the coming years.” The report is coy about explaining that whereas women were previously paid on average 4.68% more than men, they now have a mean pay gap of 0.33% less than men, a swing of 5.01% in relative pay in favour of men. They also claim – in big, bold text – that the Labour Party “is committed to transparency“. A brave move considering how long it took them to publish all this.

To be fair, women working at CCHQ also earn 2% less than the men, so they really shouldn’t have been so coy about it. At least the Tories submitted their homework on time… 

According to the BBC’s annual report, over a quarter of men (28%) believe that the BBC doesn’t effectively reflect “people like them”. A fifth of women (20%) believe the BBC does not reflect them either. Which means some 15 million adults are forced to pay for something that they do not believes reflects them. Guido suspects the appointment of left-wing Brammar as head of BBC News would only exacerbate this problem… 

Simultaneously, the report claims that 75% of men and 80% of women think that the BBC is “effective at providing content/ services that set a high standard for quality” and that almost 100% of UK based adults use the BBC every month. If that is the case the BBC should believe in itself, as well as the research it commissions, and embrace a subscription model…

The UN’s Economic and Social Council has elected Iran to a 4-year term leading the Commission on the Status of Women (CSR), a group which describes itself as “the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women”, and claims it is “instrumental in promoting women’s rights”. An inspired choice then, given Iran jails its own citizens for speaking out on the subject, and domestic violence is yet to be criminalised. 

Perhaps the most baffling thing about this is that, as human rights group UN Watch points out, at least four of the fifteen Western democracies on the Council would have voted for Iran. That’s a list that includes Australia, Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Latvia, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. Naturally, the ballots are kept secret…

The UN’s own Secretary-General even released a report last year investigating Iran’s record on human rights, writing:

“The overall situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran remains of serious concern, owing to persistent and gross human rights violations […]The application of the death penalty, including for child offenders, remains high […] OHCHR also received reports of torture and large-scale arbitrary detention, as well as persistent discrimination against women, girls and minorities.”

For a long time there has been talk of forming an alternative Union of Free Democracies from all corners of the world as a forum. The sooner the better…