Lynne Featherstone

This is the comment piece  published inside the Telegraph today.

It’s an interesting question and a pressing one in the debate around equal civil marriage. It is owned by neither the state nor the church, as the former Archbishop Lord Carey rightly said. So it is owned by the people.

The fierce debate over the past few weeks has shown people feel very strongly about marriage. Some believe the government has no right to change it at all; they want to leave tradition alone. I want to challenge that view – it is the government’s fundamental job to reflect society and to shape the future, not stay silent where it has the power to act and change things for the better.

I believe that if a couple love each other and want to commit to a life together, they should have the option of a civil marriage, irrespective of whether they are gay or straight.

We are not prioritising gay rights, or trampling over tradition; we are allowing a space for the two to exist side by side.

I want to set the record straight once and for all: we are not changing religious marriage. We respect and value the vital role religion has to play in our society. We understand how strongly some religious groups feel about the issue, which is why we are listening and we want to work with them. But there are a range of other views we need to listen to as well.

I want to urge people not to polarise this debate. This is not a battle between gay rights and religious beliefs. This is about the underlying principles of family, society, and personal freedoms.

Marriage is a right of passage for couples who want to show they are in a committed relationship, for people who want to show they have found love and wish to remain together until death do them part. Why should we deny it to people who happen to be gay or lesbian who wish to show that commitment and share it with their family, friends and everybody else? We should be proud of couples who love each other and a society that recognises their love as equal.

That is why you will not find us watering down this commitment.

Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone

I was recently interviewed by My Muswell about local issues as the local MP. Given Muswell Hill was where I started my political journey it was a walk down memory lane. You can read the interview here.

The RFL (Rugby Football League) was one of the first sporting bodies to sign up to the Coalition’s Sports Charter – which is about tackling homophobia and transphobia in sport.

Signing up is the first step – but it’s about more than signing a charter as the RFL have already shown. Not only were the Sheffield Eagles the first team to wear Tackle It shirts – but now the RFL have produced a ‘Tackle It video. You can watch it here.

Fantastic!

All Walks – the amazing team of Debra Bourne, Caryn Franklin and Erin O’Connor – who work to educate the fashion world away from singularity of image to diversity – screened an American Documentary in Parliament ‘Missrepresentation’ the other day.

I was on the panel who took questions afterwards – chaired by Jo Swinson MP, my Liberal Democrat colleague (and co-founder with myself of the Body Confidence campaign). Jo now chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image and I have taken Body Confidence into the government’s work on public health and mental health and well-being.

First we watched the film Missrepresentation. I can only recommend that you see the film itself. All Walks have made a short commentary on the film from some of those who came to see the screening. You can watch it here.

Help crown the winner of our competition to find a logo for the Sports Charter – to kick homophobia and transphobia out of sport.

Last November I launched a competition to find a logo for sports clubs, fans and players across the country to mark their support for the Charter for Action to tackle homophobia and transphobia in sport. The first stage of the competition closed on 18 January and we were delighted to have received nearly 70 entries, most of them from young people.

Our judge Rugby Union star Ben Cohen has now shortlisted the top six entries and now it is over to you to help us crown the winner by voting for your favourite design. It is really easy to vote. All you have to do is:

Like’ your favourite logo on our Facebook page, or;
If you do not have a Facebook account you can vote via Ben Cohen’s website

There isn’t much time. Voting closes on Monday 20 February at noon so please get voting now!

Once the competition closes, votes will then be added together, and the logo with the highest number of votes will win the competition. The winning logo will then go to a professional design team and the final design will be unveiled in March. For more information, please visit the Home Office website

Please also help spread the word and forward this message to your contacts and post it on your website and Facebook page.

Mike Tuffrey always did have a way of telling it like it is. In my day on the London Assembly it was Ken on the receiving end. Nice to see that he is still on it – and holding the current Mayor to account – pointing out to people in London just how measly and insignificant Boris Johnson’s ‘tax cut’ is.

Commenting on the Mayor’s budget proposals for the year 2012 – 2013 Mike said:

“A few weeks ago the Mayor was resisting our (Liberal Democrats’) proposal for a cut in the council tax bill. Now as the election approaches at the eleventh hour he has come forward with a mouse of a cut.

“The Mayor has failed to share with Londoners the fruits of the central government grant and he has failed to make real savings in the huge budgets he controls.

“By tackling waste and extravagant expenditure our proposals enable key services to be protected whilst giving Londoners a tax cut four times larger.

“When most Londoners are struggling with zero pay rises and increased household costs it is wrong that the Mayor has failed to help them in these tough economic times.”

Go Mike!

I recently visited FoodCycle’s Station House Community Café . They also had celeb Thom from Channel 4’s ‘Three Hungry Boys’ . We were invited there to show our support for FoodCycle and help to reach their £5,000 target on crowdsourcing website PeopleFund.it.

The café is based at MIND in Haringey on Stapleton Hall Road. It uses surplus food and dedicated volunteers to create healthy meals for the community every Friday lunchtime, running a ‘pay what you can’ scheme so anyone can come along.

To help keep the Café running, they’re offering rewards in return for pledges on www.peoplefund.it/foodcycle including a VIP dinner for two, signed cookbooks and FoodCycle aprons and T-shirts. The Café needs £3,000 to reach the target which will help it to run for another year.

If you are interested in supporting this local good cause please visit: www.peoplefund.it/foodcycle

The campaign to push back against the relentless pressure to be a singular perfect shape and size continues. Here is my recent piece on the Government Body Confidence campaign for the Huffington Post.

This is my most recent column published in the Ham & High:

Our Parliament has come a long way in recent years. In fact, watching ‘The Iron Lady’ with Margaret Thatcher sticking out like a blue female sore thumb amongst the total male greyness of the then chamber – it reminded me of how recently in history this establishment was nearly all male.

However, despite real progress, it is still nowhere near reflecting the percentage of women in the country – and that is without even starting to talk about other aspects of diversity such as ethnicity, class or disability…

It is in everyone’s interests to have a Parliament that is made up of the best people for the job, and that includes a range of people who can best represent the diversity that exists in our communities – and who bring the benefits of a diverse set of experiences.

We do not just elect individuals, we elect people to be members of a team (their party, government/opposition, Parliament overall) – and, just as in sport, good teams have the right mix to be more than simply the sum of their parts. Good teams need variety and diversity.

We all suffer if that is missing because we end up with worse decision-making if Parliament is made up of a monochrome slice of uniformity.

There have been tremendous strides made in recent years. Whatever your views on how best to get there – Labour’s all women shortlists made a massive change in the culture of both the Labour party and parliament. The Conservatives, using a very different mechanism, have also made great strides in terms of their diversity. And we (Liberal Democrats) had worked incredibly hard on mentoring and monitoring and had succeeded in getting women in winnable seats in 2010 – but sadly we didn’t win them.

In our case we now have the Leadership Academy which will support a small, but ambitious and able cohort of under-represented groups as key candidates for the future. Winnable seats will have to have two of the graduate candidates from the Leadership Academy on their shortlists. Members will still have the final choice of course – but we will not just be sitting on our hands thinking that nothing needs doing.

I responded for the Government in the recent debate on representation in Parliament last week. The Speaker’s Conference a couple of years back made a number of recommendations – for Government, for the House and for political parties in terms of improving the diversity of their elected representatives.

Some of the recommendations have been introduced to date – including the holding of this debate s. It is legal until 2030 to employ all women shortlists if a political party wishes so to do. The Equality Act now allows us to balance our shortlists with people from under-represented groups if we wish. There is an ‘access to elected office’ plan and fund to support those with disabilities in being candidates about to be announced in detail and a raft of other measures.

What was clear from the debate – and very heart warming – was that everyone across the political divide is working hard to improve our representative quality.

Each party has its own traditions and beliefs, so each party has to find its own solutions for the shared problem we have of how unrepresentative Parliament. The political system needs to give parties the options to pick their own solutions – which it now does.

But as ever in politics – as it should be in a democracy – what matters is not only what the system permits or what politicians want, but what the public demands.

You do not have to wait until an election though. If you know someone talented, why not encourage them to get stuck into politics and stand themselves? The readers of these columns are a wonderfully diverse group – and I’m sure that the people you know and could encourage would be more diverse than the current make-up of Parliament!

Well – it’s nice to get good news to start off the year.

A poll by Liberal Democrat Voice amongst its member only forum rates how ministers have done: which four ministers have most improved their standing, who is minister of the year and who has done worst.