This is what male privilege looks like - and this is why it matters….

This week, UN Special Rapporteur, Philip Alston, in his stinging commentary on poverty in the UK, said that the government's austerity politics has indeed had a seriously disproportionate effect on women and families. It is, he said, women who are bearing the brunt of the public service cuts, and it is, once again, unpaid, undervalued ‘women’s work’ that is expected to hold a fractured society together. He went further: “if you put a group of misogynists in a room and asked them to create policy that makes it worse for women, it would not be much different than the policies in place”. 

At the same time, in a juxtaposition worthy of a Ken Loach film, a short film clip from The Times did the rounds on the internet, showing a “Brexiteer hedge fund tycoon” unable to contain his glee at the enormous profit he is making (￡220m overnight on the referendum vote), as sterling falls further because of political uncertainty in the UK.

 Reading that report should be shaming for us, the fifth biggest economy in the world; but the government chose instead to rebut and reject it. Amber Rudd, the new DWP Secretary called it “too political”.

So where are the senior political journalists who should have been immediately headlining this, and challenging those in power to respond?

Instead, this last week, we’ve had a vivid vignette of male privilege in action. First, there was Andrew Neil’s early hours tweet (since taken down) calling award-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr “Karol Kodswallop… the mad cat woman.”  Carole has provided an elegant and clear response here, but most telling is this. Andrew Neil chose to use the insults that Arron Banks - a proven liar and under police investigation – uses, to try to undermine Carole’s investigations about him. When it comes to choosing a side, Neil looks like he’s choosing the other wannabe alpha male. When the BBC, his employer, was challenged to sort it out, their response was limp and defensive. This, BBC, is what institutional sexism looks like – not just your gender pay gap.  In a further demonstration of how Neil behaves towards women, he’s trending on Twitter again, this time accusing Grace Blakeney, the economist, of being ‘patronising’ to him, when most observers of that interview are more likely to apply that epithet to him.

Then there was Andrew Marr’s treatment of Shami Chakrabarti on his Sunday programme. Shami is a barrister, former leader of Amnesty International, member of the House of Lords and Shadow Attorney General. She is also a black woman. Go back and watch it - here - and see what you think. What I see is this; Marr spoke to Chakrabarti in tones that he simply does not use with fellow ‘establishment’ white men. And if you want proof, compare his treatment of Dominic Raab elsewhere in that programme. Whatever your views on Brexit, there was much, frankly, on which to challenge Raab that day. His poor command of his brief (“I didn’t understand the importance of the Dover- Calais route,”) his resignation at a critical time for the country; positioning the UK as the victim or ‘abused partner in a divorce’, when - to follow the logic of that analogy - he was the one who left and then tried to gaslight his partner into giving him the house…. But no - Raab got the gentlest, respectful treatment from Marr.  It is also telling that, just the previous week, Arron Banks chose Marr’s programme, for a public appearance in an attempt to rebut the charges against him – a prime-time privilege not often afforded to those undergoing police investigation.

This, then, is what male privilege looks like - and why it matters.  Men like Marr and Raab, Neil and Banks ultimately look out for each other. In the Establishment Club, they see ‘one of us.’  Shami, Carole, Grace - and others who question the way things are, who seek to draw attention to the ways in which our public sphere is not working in the public interest or for public value - can never be ‘one of them’. In those moments of truth - when they have the right to expect respect for their hard-won standing, their ‘otherness’ is what counts.

This phenomenon was described by researchers after the Enron disaster, and then again, in the post mortems following the 2008 crash. How, researchers asked, could apparently intelligent, experienced board members of these major corporations allow such devastating decisions to go unchallenged? It is because, they found, that for the man who needs to be an alpha male, ‘belonging’ to the ‘alpha male club’ - socially and psychologically - is more important than just about anything else. And that includes calling out those actions and behaviours that can have devastating global implications. 

As the UN General secretary Antonio Guterres points out. “People are rightly questioning a world where a handful of people (mostly men) hold the same wealth as half of humanity.” We should also be questioning those journalists who decline to hold them to account, instead focusing their ire on the women (and men) who choose to illuminate the inequality – indeed corruption – that props up this state of affairs.

Andrews Marr and Neil – and all the others in similar privileged positions: it’s time to step up or sit down.