Gair Rhydd

Working 9 to 5

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With the traditional working day becoming more and more rare, Caleb Woodbridge suggests that our work culture is in need of a massive image shift

Work: a word to strike terror in the heart of any student. (Particularly into that of a humanities student like myself, since I supposedly only have around half an hour of lectures a month.) But should we really have such an aversion to work?

We’re still reeling from all the changes from the Industrial Revolution, let alone the electronic revolution of recent years. Although the progress we have made over the last couple of centuries has brought massive benefits, we have adapted badly to the resulting changes in patterns of work.

The Goody, the Bad and the Ugly

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What the NUS should take away from Channel 4’s race rows, but won’t.

Channel 4’s Big Brother controversy may have attracted a record number of complaints, but the offence caused by broadcasting such contentious behaviour is irrelevant. They have, as Dermot O’Leary pointed out, started a conversation that politics hadn’t, particularly among the reality TV-watching demographic. And they’ve woken people up to the fact that racists still exist.

But Jade Goody isn’t one of them. She’s vicious, bullying and ignorant, for sure. But not racist. She disliked Shilpa Shetty first and foremost as a person, as an individual. The racial epithets only came later. Her inability to articulate her ill feeling led her to emphasise the obvious points of difference, rather than the abuse coming from genuine prejudice. She’s thick but she’s not a bigot.

Trouble in the pipeline

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Sarah Edmunds asks how seriously the government are taking the environment. Are the promises hot air or will we start seeing some real changes?

It’s all about climate change these days. It circles around political bills and proposals, and holds an urgent place within the media. Fly less. Trade fairly. Turn off the lights. Sound familiar?

Under the Kyoto agreement, Britain is committed to reducing carbon emissions and giving support to renewable and alternative methods of generating energy. Verbally, this is all very well, but in practice the moves look somewhat uncertain, even though popular protest and scientific opinion have asserted themselves with urgent pleas. Are the politicians’ supposedly attentive ears listening to all this? It is all very well that ministers have placed climate change and carbon damage on their bills. It would be encouraging to think that they are carrying these policies through and putting them into action. Let’s set the scene.

The race debate

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The Jade Goody debate could be the surface of a far more serious social issue. Ben Bryant suggests the importance of culture and difference

“I knew it! I knew it! Racist! Witch!” The echoes of McCarthyism were there for all to hear, reverberating in the media feeding frenzy that met Jade Goody’s departure from the Big Brother house. The uproar. The media hysteria. The naming of ‘The three witches of Endemol’ (in The Independent, no less). The burning of effigies. Even Gordon Brown decided to jump on the bandwagon, and pitch in a couple of soundbites about ‘fairness’ and ‘tolerance’, the little scamp. And all of this climaxing in Jade’s confused, tearful confession in The News of the World: “I was racist.” In the course of one week, with no small hint of irony, Jade Goody was destroyed by the very television programme that made her.

Good riddance, perhaps. Jade Goody bullied Shilpa Shetty. Jade, Jo and Danielle ganged up on Shilpa in an ugly, vicious display of backbiting and bitching. In Jade’s most direct comments, Shilpa Shetty became Shilpa ‘fuckawallah’, Shilpa ‘poppadom’, a girl who should ‘go back to the slums’. Her words were brutal and struck to the heart of Shilpa’s own cultural identity.

No more gay sheep?

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A recent scientific advancement could facilitate the genetic engineering of sexuality in sheep. Hollie Clemence examines the social implications surrounding the discovery

In a world where scientific discovery and technological advancement provides us with more information, more opportunities and more self-awareness, it would seem that no stone should be left unturned. But sometimes there arises a case where progress in these fields needs to be thwarted in favour of the people it professes to advance.

American scientists at Oregon State University and at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland are exploring a procedure to encourage homosexual rams to mate with ewes. By studying the rams’ brains they believe to have located a specific mechanism that influences the animals’ sexuality. Thus, by modifying the hormone balance in the brain, the scientists can effectively change the ram’s sexual preference.

Blair. Fair.

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I take it all back. All those criticisms of Tony Blair’s incompetence, all those jokes of electile dysfunction in New Labour’s reactionary and impotent policymaking – all of them, forgotten. At last the Government makes a law that will break down the barriers of discrimination. At last homosexuals will not be denied goods or services on grounds of sexual orientation. At last: homosexual couples will not be denied the right to adopt.

All right, so New Labour has still passed its fair share of awful legislation (ID cards, anyone?). But the Equality Act is a beacon of hope, forbidding schools, businesses and miscellaneous organisations from refusing services on the basis of age, race, religion, disability, gender or – if and when MPs approve the final third of the bill – sexual orientation. Only the Catholic Church’s hostility to gay couples adopting children stood in the way of progress – and now the Government has denied Catholic adoption agencies an exemption from these anti-discrimination laws. It is brilliant news.