Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

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Quotes in the Guardian and Telegraph

12 April 2013 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been quoted in newspapers twice this week.
Yesterday, the Libel Reform Campaign learnt that Sir Edward Garnier MP was seeking to remove essential provisions from the Defamation Bill. The Guardian asked me to comment:

Robert Sharp, head of campaigns and communications for English PEN, said both subclauses were essential “to stop the inequality of arms that corporations use. They use the libel law for PR.”
Sharp pointed out that Garnier does not have the full support of his party, with Tory peer Lord Mawhinney having given his support to the companies’ clause saying the fact they could sue anyone without any prima facie proof of financial damage was “a form of bullying”.

The quote from Lord Mawhinney was during a House of Lords debate on the Defamation Bill, which I attended.
I was also quoted in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend, in a piece by Andrew Gilligan about the Royal Charter and Hacked Off. I am less pleased about that one, though – it is a story about process, not policy.

I assumed the word 'Prime Minister' meant a woman

8 April 2013 / / 1 Comment

Margaret Thatcher has died aged 87.

There will be many analyses of her legacy in the next few days.  My sense is that not only the inequalities, but how we deal with the inequalities, is down to the actions of her Government.
Here’s an immediate thought, not related to her policies:  I grew up assuming that the word ‘Prime Minister’ necessarily meant a woman.  Just as maleness is a ‘necessary characteristic’ of James Bond, for me, femaleness was a necessary characteristic of a Prime Minister.
There’s some dialogue near the start of Mary Poppins, where Mrs Banks (the suffragette) says that they planned to picket the Prime Minister, and refers to him. As a kid, watching that film a lot, I always found that weird.  Likewise, when John Major took over in 1991, and the news reporters called the Prime Minister ‘he’, I experienced real cognitive dissonance.

Update

According to the data published by the Guardian, the gender pay gap actually increased during Thatcher’s premiership.  However, woman’s full time pay, as a percentage of men’s, did increase.

Tap Essays: Native Internet Art

8 April 2013 / / 0 Comments

I enjoyed this short essay promoting Lauren Leto’s book. It’s honest and (I assume) true to the book it seeks to promote.
It’s also presented in an interesting manner, native to the digital world. I wonder if would be as engaging if it were on a couple of pages (either printed or HTML). Probably not.
This type of presentation is not new. Last year Robin Sloane created a ‘tap essay’ called Fish that was published as an iPhone app. Like Leto’s essay, there is no back button, which (according to this Wired review by David Dobbs) provokes the reader to read more closely.
I would say this is another type of native Internet art… although the tap essay format is analogous to picture books that have few words to a page, or stylised essays like Marshall Mcluhan’s The Medium is the Massage. Continue reading

James Bond is just a code name

6 April 2013 / / 1 Comment

Although I support the message behind this James Bond Supports International Women’s Day video, I’m not really a fan of the video itself.  I don’t really see how having Daniel Craig as James Bond just stand there for a bit, and then return in drag, adequately conveys the inequality between the way men and women are treated in society.  Surely having a woman (say, Naomie Harris) perform Bond’s lines, while Daniel Craig delivers the Miss Moneypenny lines, would better convey how men and women are treated differently in all walks of life?
Could there ever be a female James Bond?  This may seem like a silly question:  That James Bond is a man (a womanising man, no less) seems to be a ‘defining feature’. Continue reading

Please stop calling George Osborne 'Gideon'

5 April 2013 / / 4 Comments

The Chancellor’s terrible parking gives me a chance to say something I’ve been meaning to get off my chest for a while.
I get so irritated with those on the Left who insist on calling George Osborne by his middle name, ‘Gideon’. 
In doing so, they seek to emphasise his upper-class background, which they believe will discredit him.
This is both a dog-whistle and an ad hominem and a piss-poor political tactic.
In the USA, Barack Obama is regularly called ‘Hussein’ (his middle-name) by his opponents.  This is a similarly immature attempt to discredit him.  The Left condemns that practice… and I don’t see how deploying the ‘Gideon’ moniker is any different.
Worse: the class card can be used in reverse. If the Left legitimises ad hominem attacks on the upper-class, it gives people like down-to-earth, working class Eric Pickles a sheen of credibility as they propose awful policies that hurt the poor.
Margaret “Grocer’s Daughter” Thatcher, and John “Son of a Music Hall performer” Major derived similar political cover from their backgrounds – a piece of political armour gifted to them by the class warriors of the left.
George Osborne’s callous and growth throttling policies would be no more or less harmful if his middle name was Robert, not Gideon. A moratorium on this pettiness, please.

Gideon

Gideon, Class Warrior

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