BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Au pairing and domestic labour

 With her 1974 study The Sociology of Housework, Ann Oakley offered a comprehensive sociological study of women’s work in the home. Analysing interviews with urban housewives, she found that most women, regardless of class, were dissatisfied with housework. It was a finding that contrasted with prevailing perspectives, and a study that challenged the scholarly neglect of housework. Now that this landmark text has been reissued, Ann talks to Laurie Taylor about its significance and reflects on what has changed in the decades since it was published.

Also, Rosie Cox discusses her co-authored study of au pairing in the twenty first century, As an Equal? Drawing on detailed research, the book examines the lives of au pairs and the families who host them in contemporary Britain, arguing that au pairing has become increasingly indistinguishable from other forms of domestic labour. Revised repeat.

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Social Europe: The European minimum wage will come—but how?

The commission’s objective is to develop common European standards on all these points. In view of the great differences across Europe, however, the commission is explicitly not seeking to introduce a single European minimum wage, nor to harmonise existing minimum-wage regimes. [...]

Accordingly, a minimum wage is considered adequate when it is at least 60 per cent of the national median. By analogy with poverty research, a minimum wage of 60 per cent of the median wage is the wage that enables a single full-time worker to avoid a life in poverty, regardless of living and household circumstances, without relying on state transfers. [...]

The European standard for the adequacy of minimum wages would then become surpassing both thresholds—60 per cent of the median wage and 50 per cent of the average. Figure 2 shows by how much the minimum wage in various countries would have to rise to reach the respective floors. Application of the double, 60-50 threshold would lead to an increase—sometimes considerable—in the minimum wage in all EU countries with a statutory minimum, except Slovenia and France. In 12 countries the median threshold and in six the mean would have the greater impact; in four the outcome would be the same. The double 60-50 threshold would thus contribute to a general upward convergence of minimum wages across Europe.

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The Red Line: Somalia (Al Shabaab, Pirates and Nuclear Waste)

 Somalia is often referred to as a failed state, with the nation being fractured into 4 parts, piracy and Al Shabaab controlling large chunks of the country, but Somalia seems to be getting back on its feet now. What will this mean for the rest of East Africa, and who might be working to knock Somalia back down? We speak to our panel of experts about the regional ramifications. This weeks panel is Omar Mahmood (Crisis Group) Degan Ali (Adeso Africa) Alex De Waal (Tufts University) Follow the show on >> @theredlinepod or Michael on >> @MikeHilliardAus More info at www.theredlinepodcast.com

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UnHerd: Enoch Powell reconsidered

 “Throughout his political career,” Corthorn notes, “Powell grappled with what is arguably still the central issue in British foreign policy: the precise nature of the UK’s role in the world.” Yet, as a result of what Corthorn characterises as “a deeply polarized, and politicized, historiography”, Powell’s potential contribution to today’s debate has been minimised, a failing his excellent new book seeks to rectify, recentring Powell’s turbulent career as “part of a long-running and wide-ranging public debate over the ‘decline’ of the British nation”. [...]

The loss of India and Britain’s consequent diminished place in the world became the central pole of Powell’s worldview; the bloodshed of Partition fuelled his later fears both of mass immigration and of civil war in Northern Ireland, convincing him that “communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible”. His entire political career after 1947 would be devoted to defining, with an obsessive clarity not far from madness, the nature of British sovereignty in this new post-imperial world. [...]

Praising de Gaulle for pulling France out of NATO, Powell foreshadowed the French strongman’s modern heir Macron in eyeing Russia as the counterweight to preserve his own nation’s strategic autonomy, asserting that “historically the existence of Russia has been the ultimate guarantee of the survival of Britain as an independent nation… When in the last decades of the twentieth century necessity restores an understanding between Britain and Russia, the entente will not be cordiale; but entente it will still be…” As Corthorn notes laconically, at the height of the Cold War, “Powell’s argument for an alliance with the Soviet Union was a radical one to make. [...]

As for Brexit, Powell’s eventual, fierce opposition to the European Union would please many of the Conservative Party’s Brexiteers, yet his ridiculing of the Global Britain “delusions and deceits of a vanished Empire and Commonwealth” and his total and absolute hatred of the United States would have few takers in the modern Tory party. Perhaps it is here, as a foreign policy realist, that Powell’s uncompromising vision speaks most clearly to modern concerns.

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The Diplomat: China Doesn’t Understand Europe, and It Shows

 While his tour was designed to improve China’s post-pandemic image in Europe, some of Wang’s statements only made things worse for China. In Norway, while answering a question about the Nobel Peace Prize and Hong Kong, Wang said that China won’t allow the politicization of the Nobel Prize by interfering in China’s internal affairs — a response that many in the West read as a Chinese threat against awarding the Nobel Prize to Hong Kong protesters. Later, while in Germany, Wang criticized the Czech Senate President Milos Vystrcil’s visit to Taiwan and warned that it would incur a “heavy price” — another threat against a European country for doing something considered normal in a democratic state.[...]

China’s run of European mistakes started in 2012, when it decided to set up the 16+1 mechanism with the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, among them both EU members and non-members. Back then, China’s decision was watched with suspicion in Brussels and with every step China has taken in the CEE region the European Union’s fear of division has increased. While the EU seems to have gotten over the 2018 Visegrad (V4) moment, when China inaugurated a V4+China format for meetings with Hungary, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia, and Wang even praised the V4 as the EU’s “most dynamic force,” things changed a lot in 2019. Two crucial moments were Italy’s decision to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Greece’s addition to the 16+1. [...]

Moments like these have shown that China doesn’t understand the EU at all. While world powers no longer create agreements like the Treaty of Tordesillas, the idea of spheres of influence still exists in their minds. Sixteen formerly communist CEE countries teaming up with a communist great power set off alarm bells in Brussels. The EU doesn’t want any new “Berlin Walls” and it definitely doesn’t want to swap out Russian influence with Chinese in the CEE region, creating a new Iron Curtain. The European Union’s fear of division was mainly generated by China, which failed to understand how sensitive and important this subject is for Brussels. [...]

Sometimes, China doesn’t even seem to understand the basics of the European Union. The EU is a supranational entity, which receives its mandate from all 27 EU member-states, yet remains separate from the national institutions of each member state. The members of the European Parliament, although they come from each EU country, represent not their countries, but the EU. China’s failure to grasp the bloc’s basic structure became clear when it scolded the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs after an Estonian member of the European Parliament went to Taiwan.

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