National 5 Reading



National 5 Reading

For each of these articles, complete the following:

1. Summarise the main points of the article in your own words. (5-6 bullet points or sentences)

2. State the purpose of the article. Note that many articles may have multiple purposes (e.g. to entertain and persuade). Identify what you consider to be the main purpose, explaining your reasons in part d) if necessary.

• To entertain

• To inform

• To persuade

• To examine/explore an issue

• To describe/report

• To instruct

3. Explain your choice of purpose by quoting word(s) or phrase(s) from the article to support your answer to part 2.

4. State the target audience of the article. Try to be specific – consider age, gender, lifestyle, background, interests, etc.

5. Explain your choice of target audience by quoting word(s) or phrase(s) from the article to support your answer.

6. Identify the tone of the article.

[Note that many articles will contain a variety of tones. You should identify one significant tone, or the tone which seems to pervade the article.]

7. Justify your choice of tone with evidence from the text.

Quote words or phrases from the article and analyse how they create the tone you identified in part 4.

8. Identify 3 techniques which have been employed by the writer.

Analyse each technique and explain its purpose or effect.

[Basic techniques to comment on include: word-choice, imagery and sentence structure.]

9. Quote 3 words from the article that are unfamiliar to you.

Look up and provide their definitions from a dictionary or .

Many words have several definitions. Be certain to only provide the definition appropriate to the context in which the word is used in the passage.

[If you cannot find 3 words that are unknown to you, choose 3 words which you think are particularly complex, sophisticated or interesting, and look up their dictionary definitions.]

10. Think about the ideas, opinions or issues involved in the article you have read and write a short, personal response to the article where you evaluate its content – what is your opinion or reaction to the topic/issue? What questions does it make you ask? Do you agree or disagree with the article’s stance? What did you find interesting, puzzling or informative about the article?

Pop needs to get political again

Why have socially conscious songs become a thing of the past? British musicians must rally the public and become the voice of political opposition once more

Cian Ciarán, The Guardian

Monday 9 March 2015 08.45 GMT

A few months ago, Ukip – the millionaire’s ego trip masquerading as a political movement – came out complaining about leftwing comedians not giving it a chance. It was a welcome reminder that comedians such as Mark Steel, Stewart Lee or Mark Thomas are still able make bigots squirm in their seats. Bill Hicks, a hero of mine, was a master of it. But I couldn’t help notice that Nigel Farage and his kind didn’t moan in similar tones about Britain’s musicians. Well, why would he? Either they aren’t a threat, or their voices aren’t being heard.

Take Paloma Faith, one of the stars of the recent Brit awards. She is from Hackney, which in the same week was named as the local authority with the highest level of deprivation in England. Faith is now taking writer Owen Jones on the road with her in an effort to convince potential Ukip voters to change their mind. We need to start hear more of these voices of political opposition in popular music itself. Young people especially need some good to believe in.

In times gone by, there were few things cooler than rallying against the establishment, from Marvin Gaye during the civil rights movement to John Lennon with his anti-war message. Some of the most prominent names in punk and new wave took part in the Rock Against Racism concerts of the late 70s and early 80s, as Elvis Costello and The Clash waged war on the National Front. The Red Wedge Tours of the mid-80s gathered pace with help from acts such as Style Council and The Smiths. I’ve still to ask Noel Gallagher how he ended up endorsing Labour’s campaign, but even he now speaks of being disenfranchised.

Subversion is a creative gift so not all political action needs to be overt. The most engaging of issue-based songs, such as Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit or Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come, are a far cry from the traditional image of the ranting protest singer hammering away on their acoustic guitar. Sometimes anger alone can be an unhelpful emotion in music.

I am from north Wales, where we have for decades felt the sustained disdain of the British establishment for the regions, from our valleys being flooded to provide drinking water to English cities, to the building of nuclear power stations in areas of incredible natural beauty, as far away from the Tory-voting heartlands as possible. With my band, Super Furry Animals, we knew how to have fun, but occasionally anger and frustration spilled out. We weren’t what you would call a political band, but at the same time we didn’t shy away from talking about it.

Writing songs in Welsh was a natural thing for us as native Welsh speakers to do, but there was undoubtedly an element of defending and promoting our culture against those who would see it eroded. We bought a tank as a promotional tool, but it also made a stand against the civil liberties limiting the Criminal Justice Act, by making the driver/DJ immune to arrest. We joined the campaign for a nuclear-free Wales, and I still take an active interest in the campaign to see nuclear power, and its twin Trident, become things of the past.

I’m in awe of young wordsmiths such as Hollie McNish and Stephen Morrison-Burke, who come out and say what needs to be said without a guitar or keyboard in front of them as a crutch or distraction. You need real conviction to be able to say as much as they do, as loud as they do, without any band members around them to share the responsibility. I’m proud to be working with them and others, including Steve Mason – a rare political, musical beast – on a protest album that tries to react to the populist media bombarding us with anti-Islam, anti-immigration, anti-poor people sentiments, seeming to blame anyone but those who hold real power. All the while the public are made to subsidise expensive, long-term energy contracts, transferring public money to the French state, and £100bn is easily found for the folly of a nuclear military “deterrent” while the NHS is sold off in pieces.

I wish Britain’s biggest selling artists, such as Ed Sheeran, George Ezra and Sam Smith would join us. As long as British musicians lack political motivation, surely we will get the governments we deserve.

Tim Stanley, The Telegraph, Last updated: August 24th, 2014

Doctor Who might be tired and self-important, but Capaldi's Doctor is intriguing

 

I can just imagine the angry letters flooding into the BBC next week: “Will Doctor Who please stop pushing inter-species lesbianism down our throats? It’s the thin end of the wedge!”

It was certainly a large part of the first Capaldi episode of the new series of a very old show – an episode that dragged out for what felt like two thousand years. The theme was “identity” and the metaphors came thick and slow. A robot who wants to be human so he can go to Heaven, a Doctor who can’t remember who he is and a lizard woman forced to hide her face behind a veil and pretend that her wife is actually her maid because Victorian London is, like, so backward (BTW, she’s always welcome to move to Paris). Of course, there’s nothing wrong with subtext and we’ve been promised scripts that are more thoughtful than action-based. But the problem is that TV nowadays is all about energy and vim. This episode spent too much time considering its own navel and, as such, became plodding. Its politics were also about ten years out of date. Britain in 2014 is totally cool with homosexuality. We get it, we don’t mind it – we’re over it. And it says a lot about how far we’ve come that when Doctor Who devotes twenty minutes to a reptile banging on about her love for her cockney side kick it was just … tedious.

Ironically, a show about time travel has become lodged in its own past. It struggles to break free from the template it created for itself when it regenerated on to our screens a decade ago. This episode contained some moments that felt different, daring and adult: the scene in a restaurant that harvested humans was nail-biting and Clara’s use of adolescent tactics to confuse the android into coughing up information was inspired. But then we’d get yanked back to the bad old days of the Matt Smith era. Gags about Sontarans not being able to tell humans apart. Jolly violins while the Doctor steals a horse. A dinosaur clomping around London that – you guessed it – can feel pain, man. Mawkish, unconvincing sentiment. Same old, same old.

Which is a tragedy because it distracted from a couple of signs of future progress. Capaldi’s performance will divide critics. Kids will hate it – he’s eccentric but not charming, and sometimes scary in his unpredictability. In one scene you feared he might assault a beggar. In another, he walked away from Clara and it felt like he might actually have abandoned her (a pity because she’s one of the most likeable of the recent companions, if only for not being a squawking nag who insists that her entire family squats in the Tardis). I’m worried that he lacks sufficient authority for the character, a flaw that often occurs when a Doctor is introduced as vulnerable (think Davison or early McCoy). But I want to see what he’s going to do next. I’m intrigued.

I’m was also intrigued by what turned out to be the best bit of the episode – the last three minutes. The robot-who-would-be-human (a cliché-borg, if you will) woke up to find that he was in Heaven, in the company of a delightfully psychotic looking woman who spun around a garden with an umbrella. She looks like a lot of fun. Between her and Capaldi, the show might just transform itself into something different and worth rediscovering. A pity, then, that the reveal for next week’s episode shows them running into the Daleks. Wheeling them back on suggests the producers aren’t nearly as confident of success as the publicity machine suggests.

Look, I know that I’m the voice of bitter old fans who think New Who was rubbish from conception, but I’ve stuck with the show and I want it to succeed. I also want it to be daring in more than just a visual or political way. I want it to be sophisticated, fun science fiction that opens kids’ minds to intellectual possibility. Maybe this new series will move in that direction, maybe not. But I will still be watching it. If only to find out what that crazy lady with the umbrella is up to.

HOWARD JACOBSON

The Independent, Friday 22 August 2014

Why do women opt for cosmetic surgery when there is such beauty in age?

Women are trading their dignity and grace for the furious flower of plastic evil

It was a night made for eating out. The sun still hot but the glare from the Mediterranean no longer angry, the Promenade des Anglais given over to people perambulating rather than exercising, remembering that their bodies are primarily sites of pleasure, not denial. No more early-morning joggers ruining the golden hour before breakfast with their strenuous example. Now, all was well with the world again, and my only thought a bottle of Bandol. Then I saw her.

I didn’t have to stare. I could have looked away. I had a companion to converse fondly with, a menu to study, and a bread roll of the sort that only the French can bake to pull apart, a bread roll that creaks and whimpers the way mandrakes are said to do when you rip them from the ground.

But there was something so magnificently heroic about the insouciant carefulness with which she negotiated the steps into the garden, on heels that would have doubled my height had I been wearing them; something so alarming about the upward curl of her lips, as though she’d ordered the surgeon to give her a mouth with which she could blow kisses at her own eyeballs – eyeballs too far apart for her to see in any direction but sideways, like an alligator; something so heartbreaking about the way she tossed her hair, a girl again, prior to sitting herself down on buttocks from which the flesh had been so sedulously suctioned, sliced or dieted away that even over the creaking of the bread you could hear her little bones crunch, that I had no option but to lean over and say something to her.

“Excusez-moi, madame, but in the name of God, why?”

Naturally, I didn’t say anything of the sort. She was none of my business and a woman has a right to look the way she wants to look. But was it really she who wanted to look like that, or was it the man she’d joined, the man I took to be her husband? It’s hard to believe that so many years after The Female Eunuch there remain women willing to mutilate themselves to stay in favour with their men. And in truth there was no knowing, on this occasion, for whose behoof this valiant woman had subjected herself to such a drastic assault.

But if it was to interest the man, then it had failed. He had been sitting in a sort of rich man’s slouch, his feet outstretched in pale pink loafers – no socks – a lazily replete expression on his face, as though he knew life had no new thing to offer him, only more dying sun and flat champagne and, I am afraid to say – all that remodelling notwithstanding – her. He didn’t raise his eyes to her when she arrived. Perhaps he knew she wouldn’t be able to see him with her repositioned vision anyway. Or perhaps he knew an embrace was out of the question for fear her face would deliquesce in the heat of the propinquity.

She didn’t please him, anyway. Reader, she couldn’t have pleased him less. If it had been her intention to fool him into thinking she was 21 instead of – and I’m guessing conservatively – 71, she had wasted her money and her time. Not impossibly she had wasted her natural beauty too. For if there’s madness in a young woman’s paying to be disfigured, there is tragedy in an older woman’s doing it. We all age differently, I grant you. But it is a cruel fallacy to suppose that the beauty of a girl must surpass the beauty of a woman, that the blankness of expectancy is to be preferred to the marks of knowledge.

This, too, I wanted to lean across and tell my neighbour: a face that bears the history of affection can be a lovely thing; the lines of mirth and sorrow that experience etches are more engrossing – and that can mean more sensually as well intellectually and spiritually engrossing – than no lines at all; extravagant beauty is not the lot of everyone, at any age, but there is an exquisiteness that even the plainest face can possess by virtue of kindness given and received, by virtue of what the eyes – if you would only leave them alone – have registered, and by virtue of what the lips – if you would let them be themselves – have uttered.

And yet this you have chosen to sacrifice to an illusion of youthful naturalness which resembles youth in not a single aspect and is to nature what Disney’s Dumbo is to a living elephant.

Would you not have thought, reader, that sufficient women have traded their dignity and grace for this furious flower of plastic evil that surgeons call a mouth for others to know now what to expect?

And don’t tell me that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that where I see a woman deformed the woman herself sees confidence and allure, for you have only to watch her sit entrapped in her friable cosmetic cage to see that she is mortally unhappy – unable to know how to behave, for she is not a child, whatever her desperation to look like one, and never again to know whether she will be loved for herself or for what’s been practised on her.

As for him – the man for whom, perhaps, she’s done it – then let him show how well he thinks it works by having his paunch and double chin removed to suggest vigour, and his dead unillusioned eyes widened to suggest the sweet ingenuousness of a shepherd boy, ideal companion to his new young Sylvan wife.

I accept it’s none of my business. And, for all I know, the silent couple might be wondering why I am so careless of how I look as to be glugging Bandol as though it’s the last bottle on the planet and ripping at French bread as though I love making it cry. I grant them their right. But grant me mine. It saddens me, that’s all. As the poet said, “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.”

Yet to be, not been. 

Justin Bieber: Teen pop idols never die. They're gradually unfollowed

After a bumpy start to the year, the rapidly ageing teenywink singing sensation stands at a crossroads in his career

Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, Sunday 27 January 2013 19.59 GMT

Because I'm no longer 13 years old, I haven't really paid much attention to teenywink Canadian singing sensation Justin Bieber since he was first hammered into the collective unconscious like a nail of frozen p*** into a cabbage, but I've just seen a photo of him and God, he's grown. He's now 36 years old and is played by a gangling miscast Jim Carrey action figure. And none of his costumes fit any more, which means he has to take to the stage wearing trousers that only come down to his knees and a child-size baseball cap optimistically Pritt-sticked to his hairdo.

Naturally it's left him too depressed to sing. His performances now consist of him quietly begging the audience to leave so he can have some time to himself. But they can't hear his pleas because they're too busy screaming, and they can't see his tears because they're watching his performance while filming it on their Samsungs and he's too far away for the weeping to be visible onscreen. Caught in a trap of his own making, he is the loneliest man in the world. One day he'll learn to express this in his music. And then you will love him.

The photo of Bieber accompanied an article about his mother, Pattie Mallette, who's courting controversy with a short anti-abortion film called Crescendo. She's hoping a series of screenings will raise $10m in aid of "pregnancy crisis centres". This seems unlikely, since most short films lose money, and unlike Crescendo, those aren't ideologically driven tales of abortion set in 18th-century Europe. Expecting an abortiony period drama (or, more accurately, missed-period drama) to generate millions of dollars is an act of optimism on a par with trying to pole vault over the sun. Personally, I'd downplay the gloomier aspects on the poster, change the title to something like Yipes a Doodle Doo! and maybe add a bit where a monkey drives a car.

This whole pro-life movie escapade hasn't gone down well with some. It's the latest in a series of setbacks for Bieber, who, I was horrified to learn in the past five minutes from the devastatingly trustworthy Perez Hilton website, had a bumpy start to the year. First a paparazzi died while pursuing his car. Then he was accused of smoking marijuana. Then he split from his girlfriend. Then he got his bum out on Twitter and deleted the photo moments later. Then he was accused of firing a Nerf gun at a security guard. Now his mum's made a controversial film. On top of that, he's ageing at an alarming rate. Since you started this article, he's put his crayons away and taken out a subscription to Decanter magazine.

He stands at a crossroads. But unlike teen idols of the yesterpast, he doesn't stand alone. In years gone by, teen idols would quietly fade from view, remembered only by a few hardcore devotees. The fallen star would pop up years later in an arch documentary to mutter something bitter about their former manager before stepping onstage at the Bumford Pavillion as part of a nostalgia line-up alongside Partners in Kryme and George the Hofmeister bear. But because Justin Bieber has over 30 million followers on Twitter, it's impossible for him to vanish gracefully. His fans can't gently forget him over time. They have to actively delete him. If things go badly for him, a huge percentage of the Beliebers will presumably tap "unfollow" – not all at once, but over time.

Picture the fan. It's 2021, she's at work, she's stressed, she's got a cardboard cup of coffee searing her palm, and she's trying to read a text from her boyfriend, when up pops an update from 49-year-old Bieber, griping about the waiting time at a Hertz customer service desk #aintgotalldaydudes.

It's the last straw. She forgets about the hours spent singing along to his music. Forgets the desktop wallpaper she had when she was 13. Forgets everything he once meant to her. And with a swipe of her thumb she finally, firmly, "unfollows" Zzzzwip. Thousands of miles away, killing time in the Hertz queue, Justin Bieber notices his follower count drop by one. It's been heading downwards since that incident with the Nerf gun back in Black January. Now he's down to a mere 6 million fans. It's hard on the ego, being gradually unfollowed by 24 million people over the course of several years. And so he does something bad.

He looks up the username of the woman who unfollowed him. Tweets something unpleasant about her avatar photo and says good riddance. She calls him a dickwad. He calls her a bitch. By the time he reaches the front of the queue, showbiz sites are running catty stories calling him "Justin Bitter" and mocking him for turning on fans. As a result, the man at the desk refuses to serve him. Yelling obscenities, Bieber is kicked out of the building. He tumbles down the steps, trips up and somehow, improbably, ends up accidentally sticking his entire index finger up the anus of a passing dog as he tries to break his fall. A passer-by films the whole thing on their mobile and shares it with the world. JUSTIN BEAGLER, they call him. He is disgraced. His follower count drops below zero, which ought to be impossible, but reality makes an exception. Later that night, alone, at home, he sings a song so heartbreaking you would (as pointed out earlier) love him if you heard it. But no one hears it. No one wants to know.

That's one potential future. The other is this: he reinvents himself as Justin Timberlake 2.0, ages gracefully, makes billions more dollars, and gains another 70 million followers. He designs uniforms for them and teaches them anthems. Gradually they seize control of the towns and cities. Six of them kick you to death in your own home before ransacking the contents and setting the building ablaze. Identical scenarios play out around the globe. The world is plunged into a 1,000 year reign of darkness. I'm sorry. But those are the only two possible outcomes.

Russell Brand

The Guardian, Tuesday 12 August 2014 17.12 BST

Russell Brand: Robin Williams’ divine madness will no longer disrupt the sadness of the world

The manic energy of Williams could turn to destruction as easily as creativity. Is it melancholy to think that a world that he can’t live in must be broken? 

I’d been thinking about Robin Williams a bit recently. His manager Larry Bresner told me that when Robin was asked by a German journalist on a press junket why the Germans had a reputation for humourlessness that Williams replied, “Because you killed all the funny people.”

Robin Williams was exciting to me because he seemed to be sat upon a geyser of comedy. Like he didn’t manufacture it laboriously within but had only to open a valve and it would come bursting through in effervescent jets. He was plugged into the mains of comedy.

I was aware too that this burbling and manic man-child that I watched on the box on my Nan’s front room floor with a Mork action figure (I wish I still had that, he came in a plastic egg) struggled with mental illness and addiction. The chaotic clarity that lashed like an electric cable, that razzed and sparked with amoral, puckish wonder was in fact harvested madness. A refinement of an energy that could turn as easily to destruction as creativity.

He spoke candidly about his mental illness and addiction, how he felt often on a precipice of self-destruction, whether through substance misuse or some act of more certain finality. I thought that this articulate acknowledgement amounted to a kind of vaccine against the return of such diseased thinking, which has proven to be hopelessly naive.

When someone gets to 63 I imagined, hoped, I suppose, that maturity would grant an immunity to adolescent notions of suicide but today I read that suicide isn’t exclusively a young man’s game. Robin Williams at 63 still hadn’t come to terms with being Robin Williams.

Now I am incapable of looking back at my fleeting meeting with him with any kind of objectivity, I am bound to apply, with hindsight, some special significance to his fragility, meekness and humility. Hidden behind his beard and kindness and compliments was a kind of awkwardness, like he was in the wrong context or element, a fallen bird on a hard floor.

It seems that Robin Williams could not find a context. Is that what drug use is? An attempt to anaesthetise against a reality that constantly knocks against your nerves, like tinfoil on an old school filling, the pang an urgent message to a dormant, truer you.

Is it melancholy to think that a world that Robin Williams can’t live in must be broken? To tie this sad event to the overarching misery of our times? No academic would co-sign a theory in which the tumult of our fractured and unhappy planet is causing the inherently hilarious to end their lives, though I did read that suicide among the middle-aged increased inexplicably in 1999 and has been rising ever since. Is it a condition of our era?

Poor Robin Williams, briefly enduring that lonely moment of morbid certainty where it didn’t matter how funny he was or who loved him or how many lachrymose obituaries would be written. I feel bad now that I was unduly and unbefittingly snooty about that handful of his films that were adjudged unsophisticated and sentimental. He obviously dealt with a pain that was impossible to render and ultimately insurmountable, the sentimentality perhaps an accompaniment to his childlike brilliance.

We sort of accept that the price for that free-flowing, fast-paced, inexplicable comic genius is a counterweight of solitary misery. That there is an invisible inner economy that demands a high price for breathtaking talent. For me genius is defined by that irrationality; how can he talk like that? Play like that? Kick a ball like that? A talent that was not sculpted and schooled, educated and polished but bursts through the portal, raw and vulgar. Always mischievous, always on the brink of going wrong, dangerous and fun, like drugs.

Robin Williams could have tapped anyone in the western world on the shoulder and told them he felt down and they would have told him not to worry, that he was great, that they loved him. He must have known that. He must have known his wife and kids loved him, that his mates all thought he was great, that millions of strangers the world over held him in their hearts, a hilarious stranger that we could rely on to anarchically interrupt, the all-encompassing sadness of the world. Today Robin Williams is part of the sad narrative that we used to turn to him to disrupt.

What platitudes then can we fling along with the listless, insufficient wreaths at the stillness that was once so animated and wired, the silence where the laughter was? That fame and accolades are no defence against mental illness and addiction? That we live in a world that has become so negligent of human values that our brightest lights are extinguishing themselves? That we must be more vigilant, more aware, more grateful, more mindful? That we can’t tarnish this tiny slice of awareness that we share on this sphere amidst the infinite blackness with conflict and hate?

That we must reach inward and outward to the light that is inside all of us? That all around us people are suffering behind masks less interesting than the one Robin Williams wore? Do you have time to tune in to Fox News, to cement your angry views to calcify the certain misery?

What I might do is watch Mrs Doubtfire. Or Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting and I might be nice to people, mindful today how fragile we all are, how delicate we are, even when fizzing with divine madness that seems like it will never expire.

45 years after the Equal Pay Act, there’s still a long way to go

Loopholes have meant that the original legislation hasn’t lived up to its promise to improve women’s pay. Now it’s due for a major overhaul

Emily Thornberry, The Guardian, Sunday 8 March 2015

I was 10 when the Equal Pay Act was passed. It was pretty inspiring stuff. So much so that when, as a member of the girls’ choir at St Mary’s church in Guildford, I heard that the boys in another local church were getting at least twice as much as us, my friends Bryony, Lesley and I wrote to the rector and complained. He didn’t take it well. In his next school assembly he condemned us in an address about “greed and avarice”.

If only we young girls had known that, 45 years later, this inspiring piece of legislation would have got so bogged down that women would still be paid almost 10% less than men on average if we work full time and over 19% for all employment, full time and part time combined. The time has come for a new Equal Pay Act. Frankly, women have been waiting long enough!

The principle behind the Equal Pay Act is that if an individual woman finds a man doing similar work and being paid more she can take her employer to a tribunal and get paid equally and compensated. Sounds simple enough. But in reality this law has been hamstrung by a series of stupid loopholes that have developed over the years.

Did you know that if a man takes your job and is paid more than you, you can’t rely on that as evidence of discrimination? Did you know that if the man you find who is paid more than you for similar work for the same boss, works in another building, there can be a serious argument that he is not “a fair comparator”? Clearly, we need to sweep these away for a start.

But even if the current law worked as intended, there is something actually wrong with the system. Our current law relies on individual victims of discrimination bringing change by enforcing a form of contract on a piecemeal basis. If they win a case they only win it for themselves and sometimes there is a settlement where the woman is bought in exchange for a gagging clause. There is no power to read across to all women treated in the same way by the organisation, or to look at the company to see if discrimination is systemic. What we really need is profound culture change and radical legislation.

We should not have to rely on individual women chipping away. First, it should be accepted that it is all our responsibility to drive this change. We should treat women taking complaints as whistleblowers and a valid complaint should trigger a requirement on organisations to audit how they pay people, look again at the skills required to do the jobs and do proper evaluation studies. This should be done externally by people properly accredited to do the task and their work and plan for change should be overseen by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Tribunals should be able to order these reviews as part of their findings at the end of the hearing or even at the start as part of the pre-litigation negotiation.

We should encourage organisations to change themselves through proper skills audits, but the other important driver is to encourage negotiation. However, there has been a spate of cases recently where trade unions have come to an equal pay settlement with the employer, only to find themselves sued by disgruntled women. Any new Equal Pay Act should have a code of conduct that will inspire confidence in collective agreements and there should be additional guidance from ACAS where necessary.

Tribunals should have their procedures streamlined. Cases frequently take years and the more complex ones can take five years just to deal with a preliminary point. Complex cases should attract senior judges to ensure that they move quickly through the system.

A new Equal Pay Act is also urgently needed as the old one never envisaged an employment market as we have today, with its fractured employment practices and insecure working. We need a fresh act to restore and strengthen guarantees on terms and conditions for public sector workers transferred to the private sector, close loopholes in agency worker regulations and create statutory rules against sham self-employment.

Radical though a new act along these lines would be, we have to be honest and accept it won’t deal with two of the major causes of inequality: in my opinion, we still have not done anything like enough to allow people to work flexibly to balance their work and home lives; nor have we dealt with one of the most entrenched causes of the pay gap between men and women, which is the type of jobs that women do. Nearly two-thirds of women are employed in 12 occupational groups, most of which relate to their traditional family role (caring, catering, cleaning, teaching, nursing, clerical work, etc.). To misquote Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin: “We’re coming out of the kitchen, but we just haven’t got very far as yet.”

But that should not hold us back from making the changes we need. In fact, we should kickstart the move towards a new system by having a set of rules that will last five years – time-limited provisions to accelerate progress. We should waive fees for those taking equal pay claims; they are our whistleblowers and should be encouraged. Companies that do a full skills audit and act on it should have a defence to any claim during those five years. And for this five-year period, compensation for failure to pay equally should be limited to two years back pay, as stated in the original act.

This deep-seated problem needs focus, political will and an acceptance that this is a problem we all have responsibility to tackle. This choirgirl is now middle aged – and is impatient to see the problem resolved before she hits retirement.

Stop sneering at working-class youth at play in Magaluf and Ibiza

Yes, there are excesses, but somehow there’s one law for these young people and another for their middle-class peers

Barbara Ellen, The Guardian, Sunday 8 March 2015

It’s interesting to see that the Guardia Civil in the Balearics have invited British police to help patrol notorious districts in Ibiza and Magaluf. The proposal is partly about the UK police helping to enforce new laws, specifically regarding the drunken sexual and violent behaviour of British holidaymakers.

It’s to the credit of the localities that they’ve committed to these changes, risking lucrative revenue. Also, that they’ve targeted companies, many UK-based, who specialise in the kind of pub crawls that led to the infamous “mamading” incident in Magaluf last year, when an inebriated 18-year-old female was tricked into fellating 24 strangers for a “holiday” (a drink). However, I’ve long felt that curbing of tourist behaviour is only half the story – what also needs to change is the vindictive attitude of those who make sneering at a particular breed of British holidaymaker an annual national sport. I’m talking about the pungent whiff of snobbery directed towards the young British working class on holiday.

As a card-carrying old bat, mother of two, I’m not pretending that I’ve any interest in wild alcohol-fuelled holidays, or that I look upon scenes of youths lying unconscious in foreign streets with anything other than prissy pearl-clutching anxiety (“Hope someone is looking after them!”). However, what I refuse to feel is judgment.

Just as fit people have what they’d term “muscle memory”, I appear to have “hedonism memory”. I might not use my ghost muscles like I used to, but they still spring into action when, say, I feel I’m being encouraged to sneer at drunk holidaying Brits, not just by reporting in the media, but also by the sort of people who gloat over it.

When this happens, I have an image of middle-class folk salivating with Victorian glee at working-class “yoof” losing it. Convinced that these marauders are different to their own delightful progeny – not realising (naive, clueless fools) that many of their children are behaving similarly, albeit in different settings. Another non-realisation: that these “difficult times to be young” they’re always wailing about, on behalf of their own offspring, are also being experienced by those young people they’re smugly gawping at as they vomit on Mediterranean pavements.

I’ve noticed this time and again. While young people from the middle classes at least receive sympathy for their tougher reality, there is no such compassion or leeway afforded to their working-class counterparts. Why not? They’re under just as much pressure, probably more. Where these holidays are concerned, they’ve probably worked dead-end jobs, saving hard for their good time – if they want to get blotto, who could blame them?

As with the grotesque mamading incident, the true responsibility lies with the host districts and, specifically, those companies who cynically exploit the gullibility of young people, who’ve not yet learned how to handle intoxicants.

While some might raise issues of “free will” and “self-responsibility”, how much do these concepts register when you’re young, green and trashed? Certainly, the majority of these holidaymakers look young enough that it makes sense for companies to behave responsibly on their behalf.

It’s good, then, that this is now happening in places such as Magaluf – that, there at least, large groups of our young people will no longer be actively encouraged to make idiots of themselves and worse.

Even if some behave recklessly, it doesn’t mean that they should be mocked and dehumanised by censorious rubbernecking fellow Britons. They’re just young people making mistakes; same as it ever was. Before changes such as those made in Magaluf, this behaviour was facilitated by host districts and holiday companies who provided the drinking culture because they wanted their money.

So join the annual “sneer-a-thon”, if you must, but remember – those vomiting, scapegoated young tourists aren’t causing the problems alone.

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