Here is my selection of articles to inform, inspire and infuriate from this week’s Sunday newspapers.

First of all, the Observer reports on a Mumsnet survey which finds that most women who responded think that Parliament is sexist, out of date and masculine. 97% think the political culture is sexist. The site’s founder, Justine Roberts,  said:

People are so fed up. We know that the reason there is a lack of female representation in parliament isn’t just down to sexism at the point of selection; there just aren’t enough women prepared to put themselves forward. This is confirmation of how they feel and how strongly they feel. Things like the long hours and being ‘on show’ is rolled into the idea that it’s all a bit male and shouty, but even male MPs have complained about the hours. The hours seem to revolve more around 50-year-old men who want to socialise than even among thirtysomething men who are dads and might like to have a family life.

On a similar theme, Hillary Clinton tells the Observer about the rubbish women standing for office have to put up with:

Despite those historic successes, Clinton recalls running for the presidency as “very combative, even brutal”. She says she faced a great deal of sexism on the campaign trail, whether from her political enemies or from the media, which devoted considerable air time and column inches to the way she looked, her facial expressions, “likeability”, relationship with Bill Clinton and even her cleavage. “Many women around the world who have been in politics and tried to become prime minister or president have had to face the same.”

The Independent has the story of a Florida attorney’s attempt to gain a last minute stay of execution for a client on Death Row.

In recent months, all around the country, there were teams of defence lawyers just like Harrison, protesting intellectual disability standards, protesting the use of certain lethal injection drugs, protesting compounding pharmacies that supplied drug cocktails, protesting the lethal injection method itself, which had been originally been introduced as a more humane alternative to the electric chair or the gas chamber. Now people were wondering whether it really was humane. Now the latest Gallup poll had national support for the death penalty at 60 per cent, compared with its 1994 high of 80 per cent. Now one state, Wyoming, was considering going back to executing people by firing squad.

Andrew Rawnsley turns his attention to Labour’s Ed Miliband problem, suggesting that the public are being very unfair to the Leader of the Opposition who is even more unpopular than Nick Clegg. The phrase “damned with faint praise” seems to be apt:

The public can be unfair and in this case they are being harsh on the Labour leader. A variety of personalities have been tenants at Number 10 since the first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. He was spectacularly corrupt. Those who followed him have included drunks, charlatans, procrastinators, paranoids and bullies. More than a few idiots have occupied the highest office in the land and so have some characters who were unhinged. Mr Miliband is better equipped to be prime minister than quite a lot of those who have been prime minister. Compared with previous occupants of the office, he would be above average for intelligence and temperament.

Rawnsley goes on to argue that Miliband’s big problem is that he isn’t very good at selling Labour’s policies and has little interest in improving.

The Sunday Times (£) finds disunity in the Cabinet over how to deal with the Iraq situation. It’s mainly amongst the Tories, though. The only Liberal Democrat who gets a mention is Nick Clegg:

Senior sources said Hammond’s call to back the Americans led to “push back” from both Cameron and Nick Clegg.
A senior Whitehall source added: “The prime minister’s view is that while we should be supportive of our transatlantic allies, we should be absolutely clear about what that involves. He thinks we should be very cautious about being seen to take sides in that region.”
The Lib Dem leader demanded answers from NSC officials on “where this starts and where this ends”.

Scotland on Sunday’s headline screams that there’s a Republican plot to get rid of the Queen after a Yes vote for independence. This is based on an article written by well known republican and leader of the Scottish Socialists Colin Fox, whose party currently has no representation. The story fails to live up to the headline with even Green leader Patrick Harvie acknowledging that a post independence Parliament would probably keep the Queen as Head of State.

Some Liberal Democrats will be worried about this article in the Observer which suggests that beards may no longer be cool.

In the Observer, Nick Cohen tells the story of a group of university cleaners who took on the system and won fair pay – with no thanks to Unison.

We’ve told you all sorts of things in recent months about the egregious abuse of stop and search by Police Scotland, something that the Justice Secretary said was both an operational matter for the Police and successful because of all the weapons that were found. Well, the Sunday Herald finds that those figures were grossly inflated by up to 40%.

And, finally, a heartbreaking story from the Observer, of a mother’s campaign to legalise drugs following her daughter’s death. Her life could have been saved if she’d known exactly what she was taking, argues Anne-Marie Cockburn

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social