Women face hard labour

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Women face hard labour

In 2005 I presented a documentary for Channel 4 titled The Truth About Childbirth, looking at the state of maternity services across the UK. I suggested the idea after my older son nearly died at birth, leaving me shattered and emotionally numb. The research I conducted became a voyage of discovery. I originally believed my body hadn’t worked very well and doctors saved my life. Afterwards, I realised it was far more complicated. There appeared scant reason to administer a drug – syntocinon, or artificial oxytocin – to speed up the birth (a fact later confirmed by a consultant midwife) and I had a terrible reaction to it, swiftly going into a near-permanent contraction that almost squeezed the life out of my baby. 

Part of the programme’s remit was to look at post-traumatic stress disorder after childbirth. I wasn’t that interested in the PTSD until we went into a birth suite to do some filming, where I started hyperventilating, then burst into tears – followed by birth-related nightmares. All classic symptoms of PTSD. The more I heard of women’s bad experiences, the more appalled I was. One common factor in everyone’s testimony was a shortage of experienced professionals, leading to poor decisions. I concluded the programme by saying if we didn’t overhaul maternity services, the UK would pay the cost in human lives (Channel 4’s male head of documentaries asked me to tone the scaremongering down). Then I went on Woman’s Hour to talk about the programme and bumped into psychotherapist Susie Orbach, who said, “I campaigned like this in the 1980s and it’s only become worse.” Another woman who’s long campaigned is our writer Milli Hill.

Fast-forward to May 2024. The findings of the UK’s first inquiry into birth trauma became public this week, leaving many shocked by the fact a third of new mums are left traumatised by poor practice. No wonder, since they are also left torn, ripped, shellshocked, abandoned by the system, and far too many lose babies. As I read the shattering testimonies, I thought of Orbach and realised I was now her, the 20-years-later sybil nodding her head and saying – yup – it’s been getting worse forever. There’s now been 40 years of women saying NHS maternity (and actually anything to do with our wombs) is a “Cinderella service”. Utterly neglected. We don’t just need action, we need a maternity revolution.   

Let sleeping mags lie

It’s rarely, in my jaundiced opinion, a great idea to revive an old magazine title. So I sighed when I read that Loaded – the ultimate 1990s lads’ title – had been resurrected online. Everything you need to know about this brave new dawn is contained in the strapline. Three decades ago it read “for men who should know better”, now it ditches “should” and says “for men who know better”, which manages to be both pompous and humourless. The whole appeal of the old Loaded was that it was delinquent, irreverent and (at first) very funny. I was working on fellow men’s mag GQ when Loaded launched in 1994 and recall everyone in the office staring at that first issue, with Gary Oldman on its front cover, fag in mouth. The top coverline read “Withnail, you terrible cult”, followed by “Air strikers, Sampdoria go to war”. The mood at GQ was undisguised envy; we were looking at gents’ suits and Rolex watches while Loaded was down the pub with Paul Weller and Eric Cantona. 

Loaded’s success led to the launch of fresh lads’ titles like Maxim and eventually the dire Nuts and Zoo, followed by a race to the bottom – and front bottom. Most men’s mags ended up looking like porn-lite. I particularly hated the shots of female celebs with one hand stuck down their bikini bottoms, implying to credible young men, “Yeah, I’m constantly fiddling with myself.”(I may sound hypocritical saying that, as the former editor of The Erotic Review, but my staff were almost all women and hyper-aware of the fine line between sexy and crass.) Inevitably, readers evaporated when they discovered free porn on the internet and most lads’ titles no longer exist. Far better that way than doing a Dr Frankenstein on an old title and then bypassing its original verve. I’ve had a gawp at the new Loaded website, so you don’t have to. There were two “life” features up: one about an age-gap couple on Only Fans and another interviewing a “family man” porn star. God help all who sail in that creaky, lairy old barge.And if you want a quick gander at what I regard to be manly virtues, here’s a piece I wrote for our “Whither men?” issue.

The shit show continues

Beatrix Potter was not known for being shy, so she wouldn’t just be turning in her grave but kicking the lid off at the news this week that millions of litres of sewage have been pumped into Lake Windermere. Windermere is the jewel of the Lake District, an area that remains remote and beautiful in a way that’s become rarer in Britain. Few landscapes have provided as much literary inspiration. It was here that William Wordsworth “wandered lonely as a cloud”, and here John Ruskin developed his ideas on architecture and art. Potter loved the Lakes so much she invested the money she’d made from her books into acquiring and preserving over 4,000 acres of it. When she died, she left most of it to the National Trust, ensuring its preservation for future generations.

Information obtained by the BBC shows that on 28 February raw sewage was pumped into the lake for over ten hours by the water company United Utilities, which has just reported a 17.5 per cent rise in its profits (to £517.8m) in the year to 31 March 2024. The company has claimed that the spill was an error caused by a “communications fault” between the sewage pumping station and the wastewater treatment centre. United has also drawn fire for not reporting the incident to the Environment Agency until thirteen hours after the spill, and the EA in turn for initially marking the spill down as “minor”.

If this were an isolated case it would be bad enough. But as we have been highlighting in Perspective since our interview last October with Feargal Sharkey, the punk rocker turned fly fisherman who has been the UK’s most high-profile campaigner on the issue, our waterways are now literally awash with shit. After decades of neglect (a word many would consider criminally mild) by the privatised water companies, individual discharges of raw sewage increased significantly in 2023 to 584,001. This has left 75 per cent of our rivers posing a serious risk to human health, and only fourteen per cent considered in good ecological health. Those figures come from the group Surfers against Sewage, one of a number of grassroots action groups now campaigning for urgent political action. And as Perspective’s own self-styled “water rat” Claudia Cockerell has reported, the health threats are all too real, with one study showing that regular swimmers in UK waters are three times more likely than average to have antibiotic-resistant E coli in their guts.

Campaigners are finding innovative ways to go after the water companies, with class-action cases being brought against several providers, including Severn Trent, United Utilities, Yorkshire, Thames, Northumbrian and Anglian, on behalf of millions of customers who claim they’re being overcharged as a result of the misreporting of pollution incidents by the companies to their regulators. While these are all encouraging, the wheels of justice move slowly. Meanwhile, for an average of ten hours each day, raw sewage is being pumped somewhere out there into our rivers and seas. A lot more needs to be done, more quickly, if we’re to get our shit together in time to save not only our waterways, but ourselves.

Read our special report on the state of the waterways:

Polarisation and political violence

World wars can start in the unlikeliest of places, with the spark sometimes just a single act of political violence. Back when history was compulsory at school, the Eurocentric version of it anyway, every kid learned that World War I kicked off in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo. No one quite remembers the logic, but the upshot was we needed to die in droves to save our continental cousins from the Hun. Of course, only geography pupils could confidently point to the Balkans on a map, and no (his)story is ever quite as simple as it seems. Just ask the Poles, for example, who saw the Great War differently, as a chance to stitch their country back together after it had been divvied up in 1795. But regardless of the peculiarities and complexities, it was hard to avoid thinking about poor Franz Ferdinand this week when the prime minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, was critically injured after being shot during a visit to the provinces.

The attempted assassination of Fico highlights the fact that isolated acts of political violence are not always cases of right-wing nutjobs attacking idealist lefties. Fico, who has modelled himself on the alt-right’s leading man, Viktor Orbán, is just one of a number of European politicians who have made the long, if rapid, journey from left-of-centre to populist right. A former communist, then moderate leftwinger who was an avid proponent of all things EU, Fico has more recently espoused strongly pro-Putin views, cleaving open further the deep fissures that have long characterised Slovakian politics. And before you jump to the conclusion that his 71-year-old would-be assassin – who describes himself as a “writer and a poet” (and is described by others as a “failed writer and lone wolf”) – is a bleeding-heart who just couldn’t bear any more intolerance, it seems he actually shared many of Fico’s anti-immigrant and populist views.

Since the end of the English Civil War, when we repented for our act of regicide by restoring the son of the decapitated king to the throne, British political violence outside of Northern Ireland has been relatively limited compared to that of Europe or America. Only one British prime minister has ever been assassinated, the otherwise long-forgotten Spencer Perceval, shot in the lobby of the House of Commons in 1812. And yet, that glosses over the fact that in the last eight years two MPs have been killed, Labour’s Jo Cox in 2016 and the Conservative’s David Amess in 2021. Both were killed by individuals in their own constituencies, as was Andrew Pennington, assistant to the MP Nigel (later Lord) Jones, who was killed defending his boss from a sword attack in 2000.

Slovakia’s tensions put our own in the shade, and Fico himself is no stranger to violence, having been forced to resign once before, in 2018, following the murder of a journalist who had been investigating government corruption. His latest administration has been characterised by increasingly desperate attempts to control the judiciary and the media, and to restrict civil liberties. And yet, it is worth recognising that we are not immune to political violence here, and nor have we learned our lessons. Jo Cox’s personality and politics could hardly have differed more from Fico’s, but the attack on her came just as Brexit was lifting the lid on our divides and the culture wars were becoming more strident. As in Slovakia now, her death briefly brought an outpouring of soul-searching about the effect of increasing polarisation on political discourse and social cohesion. Unfortunately, that ceasefire didn’t last long.

Book of the Week

My Family And Other Rockstars 
by Tiffany Murray
(400pp, Little, Brown, hb £22)
Reviewed by Louisa Young

Well, this is an absolute charmer of a memoir. Little Tiff lived with her Biba-wearing, cheroot-smoking mum Joan on the wet and wonderful Welsh borders. Joan is resident cordon bleu cook at Rockfield, the famous music studio near Monmouth, where Queen recorded Bohemian Rhapsody and an array of talent including Hawkwind, Black Sabbath, Dr Feelgood, Van Der Graaf Generator, Showaddywady, Nick Lowe, Rush, Iggy Pop, Echo and the Bunnymen and Squeeze traipsed through the mud and familiarised themselves with the motherboard, known as Doris. Mostly little Tiff is in love with dogs, but she takes time between serving the rock stars at table and helping wipe trifle off the speakers after food fights to almost faint from time to time at the beauty of the denim, the guitars, the smell of damp sheepskin and patchouli, the mystery of David Bowie’s eyes. And to acknowledge the harsh disappointments of real life: Showaddywaddy are just not the same when they’re not wearing their teddy-boy jackets. 

Murray uses her considerable novelistic skills (Diamond Star Halo; Sugar Hall) to present us with a clever, gorgeous kid in a wacky world full of affection and chaos, while never diminishing the precarity of the situation: her father isn’t around, a number of attractive (if unappealing to Joan’s prissy mother) boyfriends lurk, drug-toting roadies and festering slaughtered game festoon the local lanes, "money-wise" is a problem, dreams can be trampled, snotty school-mums bring to mind the Harper Valley PTA. The moment where somebody offers our eleven-year-old heroine a rolled-up fiver and a chopped white line is a beaut. She responds by racing off to her mother and asking permission. "Mummy can I take cocaine?"  The response? "You can if you’re really stupid."

Devices in memoir can be irritating, but the lists that Murray provides are fun. She gives us set lists of the songs that ring and wail through the narrative, sending the reader straight to YouTube, or the remnants of their vinyl collection. Lists of new words learnt echo their origins: penny whistle, jig, turlough, SAS, Arsecreeper, Grand Grand Grand, when Irish band Horslips came to record; Galileo, playback, pegboard, and Chablis when it was Queen. And she presents her mother’s memories and recipes in Joan’s own words, dripping with cream and deliciousness and humour and nostalgia. Moussaka, duck with gooseberries, whole poached salmon, sucking pig, glass of milk (for David Bowie). Boeuf bourguignon, she explains to the working-class teenage-lad rock stars is "steak and kidney pie without the kidney. Or the pie."

Like the best memoirs, My Family And Other Rockstars offers other lives alongside that of the protagonist. The recreation of a '70s Welsh childhood is poignant and detailed: cider, chickens living in your bed, Status Quo-dancing with your thumbs in your braces and your elbows flapping as you bend and lean. The anecdotes — Lemmy naked in the graveyard! Freddie’s white piano! Bunch of semi-feral kids stealing and crashing the trolley Hawkwind had brought to cart their gear around! – are second to none. 

But the fundamental force weaving through and holding it all together is a love story: that of an unorthodox little family. It tells how marvellous, impossible Joan, her out-of-his-depth yet rising-to-the-occasion boyfriend Fritz (Fryer, lead guitarist of the Four Pennies – remember Juliet from 1964?), the noble yet humble dogs Cleo, Boggle, Bess (among others), and Growing-Bigger-Every-Day Tiff managed to live together and love each other.  

It occurs to me that this book would be a really good present for people who are hard to find presents for. Just saying. Give it to everyone.