All men are bastards

Poor old Gordon Brown is probably twisting himself inside out at the moment, trying to figure out precisely why the great British public has fallen so comprehensively out of love with him and his party. While he moulders in Southwold, his army of 12 year old policy planners are casting the runes and trying to solve the same puzzle.
They obsess over his appearance, his clumsiness and his apparent inability to dress down, even when he's beside the sea in Southwold.
Somehow, it never seems to occur to them that people are worried not by Brown's lack of presentation skills or even his sartorial gaucheness. What really gets the collective goat of the electorate is his total disconnection from the realities of their lives. They want positive action to stop foreign-owned energy companies using them as some sort of national piggy bank. They want to be able to fill up their cars without first consulting a Finacial Adviser. Above all, they want to know that the value of their house won't go down the toilet along with what remains of their pensions and personal savings.
What they definitely don't want is yet another set of laws or regulations produced at the behest of yet another single-issue pressure group.
But, thanks to Harriet Harman - a one-woman, pressure group in her own right - that is precisely what has been served up for our consumption.
Mad Hattie's latest wheeze is to make the murder of an abusive partner not a murder at all, even if the perpetrator has spent years planning the deed. The only proviso, of course, being that the person so murdered is a man and the murderer is a woman. The same allowance will not, apparently, be made for male victims of spousal abuse on the wholly reasonable grounds that all men are bastards.
Now, our Hattie like many of her cabinet colleagues, is a lawyer. As I have pointed out before, however, that is no guarantee of any particular ability as a legal draughtsperson; or even of an acceptable level of common sense. In fact, her latest proposal appears to have been drafted by a refugee from a Care in the Community order.
Because what Mad Hattie is forgetting in her myopia is that militant feminism is not the only single-issue game in town. Just, for a moment, try to imagine what is going through the minds of the Human Rights Lawyers' Union even as you are reading this. Consider the narrow definition of the term wife contained in Harman's proposal. For a start, it assumes that the wife will always be a woman and the spouse a man. Bloody hell. That should set the cat among the pigeons of the Gay Power movements, Lesbian Action groups and assorted odd couples who have committed to each other in various forms of same sex marriage and Civil Partnership. How long will it be before they are agitating for the right to be regarded as abused spouses and to be able to seek redress against an abusive "husband" or partner by topping him - or even her, if the partnership is an all-woman affair?
The only upside that I can see is that all of those unemployed lawyers created once Labour lose the next election should have plenty to keep them busy in the future.