EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, ENGLAND

         

 

Mums net a victory

David Cameron may have tried to intervene to rein in the sexualisation of children, but the real answer lies with parents

The explicit tastelessness of a section of the pre-teens clothes market is enough to bring out the prig in the most broad-minded. The sexualisation of children should be a warning to the adult world. Its real significance is as an indicator of a deeper cultural shift. Yesterday, as we reported on Saturday, the government revealed a plan of campaign against the former. But that cannot disguise its powerlessness against the latter.

Not many parents would buy a pair of knickers for their daughter advertising her as a future porn star, and most of them probably flinched if they caught their under-16s watching Sunday night's MTV movie awards where the latest episode of the teenflick Twilight scooped the pool again, prompting some of its stars to respond with the awards' hallmark bad behaviour. The commodification of childhood, of which sexualisation is a part, is indeed a depressing development. And however determined parents are to fight it, it can seem impossible to confront the power of the high-street chains and the superstores, which spend millions persuading children to want what they sell. But that does not necessarily mean government intervention will tackle the core problem.

The coalition, which commissioned Reg Bailey of the Mothers' Union to investigate, was merely picking up where the last Labour government left off. There is real public anxiety here, as the influential parenting website Mumsnet "Let girls be girls" campaign showed. And with good reason. In April, the thinktank Demos, analysing education department figures, found that more than a fifth of teenage girls said they felt worthless, lacked confidence or had low self-esteem. The poorer their families, the more acute the problem. Turning children into consumers distorts values just at the moment they are most vulnerable. It is one more damaging aspect of our unequal society.

David Cameron promised to act. But restricting advertising near schools and making it easier for parents' concerns to be heard doesn't add up to a revolution. In truth, there is no government-led revolution to be had. For what is happening to children is a reflection of what is happening across society. We have been seduced by easy credit, cheap consumer goods and the rise of the celebrity into a sex-and-shopping culture that we have now passed on to our children. If all the little girls who want so desperately and inappropriately to wear the same clothes as Miley Cyrus didn't also have mothers anxiously sourcing the Duchess of Cambridge's new frock or Tulisa Contostavlos's X-factor outfits, maybe they would still wear jeans and a t-shirt from choice. The real answer to what is influencing our children is ourselves, and it is up to us to do something about it.

Trade unions: wage rage

The iron fist barely concealed in Dr Cable's velvet glove was a fresh attack on the right to strike

The words were warm, the tone was moderate and he even took the trouble to remind the brothers that he had once worked as an adviser within the Labour movement. But Vince Cable nonetheless ran into angry jeering at the GMB's conference yesterday. Anyone witnessing events without knowing the context might have concluded that the unions were recalcitrant dinosaurs with whom it had become impossible to reason.

Context, however, is everything. The iron fist barely concealed in Dr Cable's velvet glove was a fresh attack on the right to strike. Even while hailing that right as a "fundamental principle", he indicated that new laws to restrict it would become necessary if the workforce were to make more extensive use of it. The reasons that this is precisely the wrong time to be wielding this sort of a threat are legion. The most immediate of them were neatly summed up by the GMB general secretary, Paul Kenny. No "strike in our country could inflict the sort of economic damage which the banks and finance houses have".

Days lost to strikes are, as Dr Cable acknowledged, currently running at their lowest level since the Depression. Outside of London, with its peculiar dependence on rammed public transport, grumbling about stoppages is seldom heard. Covering half the share of the workforce that they once did, and already wrapped up in all sorts of laws, the unions are simply not in a condition to pose the sort of threat they may once have done, and the public well understands this. While very many people blame the banks for the cuts, concern about industrial strife barely registers. Ipsos Mori has been asking the same question about the most pressing problem facing the country since the 1970s, and whereas the unions were once named by 73%, that figure is less than 1% today. The country expects the state's workforce to take its share of the squeeze, but it is not in a mood to demand that dinner ladies and bin men should simply give up their pension rights without any fight.

The deeper worry is that the coalition imagines a pliant workforce is all that is required to walk Britain down the path to prosperity. Thus far the government's most substantial proposal for growth – as distinct from financial stability – involves taking a scalpel to protection, such as against unfair dismissal or in the event of company transfers. There are times when there is a kernel of truth in the old diatribe about a country that overpays and overprotects itself. But in the midst of the longest squeeze on pay since the 1920s, the disease afflicting our economy now is decidedly different. For all George Osborne's crowing about the IMF's soothing words on his cuts yesterday, the fund cut its forecast for the UK. It did so not because workers are too costly to hire, but because families are feeling too pinched to spend sufficiently.

Put to one side the horrendous dispersal of pay that the TUC revealed in a useful report yesterday, and a legitimate question about pay levels in general remains. Over 40 years now, the slice of the pie going to the workforce has been steadily squeezed, by about 5% of GDP. Some of that decline is the simple corollary of more pensioners and, counter to union claims, rising profits are a better predictor of recovery than rising pay. But running the ruler forward on the chart, using the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts – which show labour's share of the economy edging down by several more points by 2015 – suggests that if there is a developing imbalance in the economy it is an imbalance against the workforce.

The Resolution Foundation, a thinktank that speaks up for families of modest means, points to the precedent of the US, where the typical wage earner has enjoyed not a sniff of the vast growth seen since the mid-1970s. Obstinate as the unions can be, they are one of the few forces pushing back against this chilly Atlantic tide.

In Praise of … Gateshead

The reinvention of the Tyne's southern bank is a triumph for the smaller half of the famous Geordie partnership

The title of the Hippest Street in Britain sounds suspect in the media world of dodgy polls and tiny "public votes". But Gateshead's triumph in Google's Street View Awards is thoroughly deserved. The reinvention of the Tyne's southern bank as South Shore Road, the street that takes the crown, is a triumph for the smaller half of the famous Geordie partnership. Many talk of going to Newcastle to see the Angel of the North, the "winking bridge", the Baltic gallery or the Sage concert hall. They can indeed see all four from Newcastle, although the angel only on tiptoes, but all were commissioned by Gateshead. To say this is not to incite Geordie divisions, but to emphasise the regenerative reach of cultural projects right across the north-east. Far away in Venice, this year's biennale is a tribute to the flair of Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside; crowds are flocking to work contributed by Newcastle's Laing art gallery and Locus+ arts commissioning agency, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Sunderland's National Glass Centre. This is no flimsy successor to the engineering masterpieces associated with all three rivers: the history of pioneering art in northernmost England embraces the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Ashington painters, the engravings of Thomas Bewick and the wild, apocalyptic landscapes of John Martin. It is good to see Northumberland's little Alnwick in the Google awards, too, for Britain's best shopping street at Bondgate Within. After art, what better than a little retail therapy?