Feminising foreign policy, remembering Grenfell, and unionising the young

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It’s June. Or as we optimistically call it in Britain: the start of summer. And things are definitely heating up political economy-wise. Southern Europe has decided stable governments with parliamentary majorities are so 2017 – as Spain gets jealous of Italy hogging the headlines. Not that we can talk. The only thing changing faster than European governments is trade policy, as Donald Trump decides there’s nothing better than a good old fashioned trade war. What a guy.

To make sure this weekend reading material is as useful on Sunday as it is on Friday night we’re steering clear of these fast changing topics and sticking to some that can change, but tend to do so depressingly slowly – like the onward march of gender equality or the state of our NHS.

Equal Swedes. The last year has seen something of a step change in the fight for gender equality – with much needed debates rising to public attention. To add to that debate the Swedish government’s new Gender Equality Agency has hosted an international conference on, wait for it: MEN – and, specifically, what public policy can do to help redefine masculinity without some of the more unhelpful aspects. The Swedes have always been on the more confident side when it comes to the power of the state – but if you’re inspired take a look at their strategy page ‘A Feminist Government’ for a wide range of articles and inspiration on what can be done when a government takes gender equality to heart. There’s everything from new sexual offences legislation to a feminist foreign policy.

Grenfell. Ahead of the 1-year anniversary of the Grenfell disaster, the London Review of Books this week devotes its entire issue to a deeply poignant but controversial essay by Andrew O’Hagan on the stories of the tower’s residents – which are no less heartrending a year on. It covers the details of the night of 14 June movingly but the controversy relates to its more sympathetic approach to the local council’s response and to questions over where responsibility lies for the mistakes that led to the fire. Those are issues we need to continue debating – and are why we have the Grenfell inquiry not just magazine articles.

That NY Times piece. No, not the one about the fake Russian socialite but this essay, looking at the impacts of austerity on Britain. It’s an unrelentingly melancholy piece, arguing that the programme of budget cuts “has refashioned British society, making it less like the rest of Western Europe, with its generous social safety nets and egalitarian ethos, and more like the United States, where millions lack health care and job loss can set off a precipitous plunge in fortunes”. But is it all accurate? The Spectator says not, but the squeeze on public spending has been unprecedented in recent British history and councils have borne the brunt of it. The comparison with the US is badly made given both the existence of the NHS and fact that we have seen record employment levels rather than the far too widespread worklessness that scars parts of America. It also misses the fact that spending cuts have only gone on so long because of some very large and very expensive tax cuts (think corporation tax or the ever-rising personal allowance). That balance between tax and spend is where the real political battle of the 2020s will come – not least when it comes to…

…the state of the NHS. For a sense of the facts lying behind the political knockabout on the state of the NHS it’s worth a read of a presentation released this week by NHS Improvement. It covers recent clinical and financial performance of the NHS trusts that run much of our health service and paints a picture of them struggling with acute financial (a 17/18 deficit of £960m) and clinical pressures (the worst winter for flu this decade and the reality that over the last 3 years A&E departments haven’t hit their target of 95% of patients being seen within 4 hours in a single month). These challenges are likely to be with us for some time – the report notes NHS trusts now have more vacancies than there are available people qualified to fill them. We have political choices to make…

Future of work #5859762. Another report on automation and the future of work, this time from McKinsey Global Institute, focuses on the likely impacts of future automation on the distribution of skills within workplaces. It picks out some useful nuances in what can be a simplistic debate, forecasting that demand for basic cognitive skills and physical and manual skills will decline, but not in all sectors: healthcare is expected to see a greater demand for physical skills while in many countries in 2030 employees will still spend more time using physical skills than any others.

Chart of the week… comes from new ONS data on trade union membership, released yesterday, which showed there were 20,000 more employees in trade union membership in 2017 than 2016, and 3,000 more people in union membership overall (including the fall in self-employed union members). The big picture is still of long-term decline in union membership – by over 800,000 since the mid-1990s – but there’s a ray of hope in the 16-25 age group, who are no less likely to be union members today than they were at the start of the decade.