Well, well. My raising of the issue of how women get bumped for men when it comes to succession to our throne has caused a bit of a fuss!
And my old sparring partner at the GLA, Tory Brian Coleman, does in particular seem to have got really quite excited! (He also distorts our monarchy’s actual history. He says we shouldn’t touch something that has been in place for hundreds of years, but in fact the monarchy has been repeatedly reinventing itself and much of what we now think of as traditional was actually started in the twentieth century. Why should attitudes towards women from several hundred years ago be one area left untouched and preserved?)
For me the basic point is quite simple: the monarchy is meant to be a symbol for our country, so what does it say that we enshrine sexism right at its heart – in the rules for who gets to be monarch? Banishing sexism from the monarchy would be a powerful symbol for the rest of society – where there is still so much to do.
Anyway – the New Statesman has now published a further piece from me on the topic, and there was also coverage in the Evening Standard. Fingers crossed for Women’s Hour next week too, unless some other story comes along to bump it off the schedule.
UPDATE: Also hit The Observer too.
Lynne Featherstone 
Bloody good start to your new job – good symbolic issue – imaginative idea – more press coverage – and annoying smug Tories – well done Lynne!!
Surely much of the objection is from people who believe that a good wife does what her husband tells her (thereby giving the throne to a male consort rather than a queen) — harder to counter than a simple “boys and girls should inherit equally”.
Pingback: Ian Shires » Blog Archive » Huge public support for removing sex discrimination in royal inheritance
Well well, fancy us being taken back to the days when Lynne was pretending to be an opponent of the Tories rather than actually being one.
Needless to say her argument then was pseudo Tory in any event- not shall we address the issue of the monarchy- but rather there is sexism in the law of succession blah blah.
How about we go a logical stage further and recognise that we are a mature democracy that does not need a monarchy- constitutional or otherwise- and all the associated inherited hierarchical claptrap that goes with it?
Pingback: Huge public support for removing sex discrimination in royal inheritance | Mark Pack