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I don't know how to feel about the lack of women appointed to the Shadow Cabinet...
8/14 are men, and there are still 9 more to go. The big complaint is that the "top jobs" are largely filed by men.
McDonnel response to that claim was pretty entertaining:
Mr McDonnell said the health and education portfolios were more important than the traditional "great offices of state".
He said: "It is interesting, Jeremy said very, very clearly that we don't accept the hierarchical nature of what we have inherited by these supposed top jobs.
"They largely stem from the 19th century when you had an empire and all that.
"For most people the real top jobs are the ones that provide the services like health and education, those sorts of things. So he has broken with that tradition and I'm really pleased."
Make of that what you will, but the claims of gender imbalance yesterday and today seem to be exaggerations at most.
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@spiderpie
I don't know how to feel about the lack of women appointed to the Shadow Cabinet...
My gut feeling is that it's a bad thing not to have a healthy gender balance if only for representational purposes, which leads me to wondering whether or not it is necessary for a person to be like you in order to represent you. I guess the answer is no, but then that philosophy could easily lend itself to forgiving all manner of representative shortfalls.
It is an issue that I'd imagine Corbyn himself feels a little uneasy about, due to his insistence that his cabinet would be more representative of diverse Britain. It does ostensibly seem very white and male, but then one could argue that the ideas are more important than those expressing them. That would be my view but perhaps it's easy enough for me to say that, being that I'm white and male etc etc...
At the end of the day it's not really his fault that all the Red Tory women outed themselves and fucked off.