Here’s a quintet of things I’ve read this week to entertain you and make you think this weekend:

Gender Budgeting in active travel

Engender’s Feminist Five pointed me in the direction of this article by Tiffany Lam, the Strategy Lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Sustrans, the custodians of the National Cycle Network.

She writes about the need for gender budgeting to consider the needs of women if we are going to increase the numbers of women cycling.  Currently, twice as many men as women cycle. Is that because men are less likely to be doing the weekly shop and looking after children? What other factors are at play and how can we make cycling more accessible for women?  She explains how gender budgeting has helped them make 9 recommendations to improve women’s participation. Are they asking the right questions?

Do we just need fewer landlords to solve the housing crisis?

Last year, Lib Dem Conference defied the leadership to call for a national housing target to build the houses we need. This included 150,000 homes for social rent annually which was already in the motion and is supported by the party.

Over on Liberal England, Jonathan Calder suggests that the problem may be the proliferation of private landlords pushing up housing costs for Generation Rent, citing this article in the Guardian by Nick Bano.  While I definitely think that we need more houses for social rent and that leaving housing to the market to sort out is a disaster for many tenants,  there are not enough suitable houses for everyone who needs them and we need much more sensible planning to provide, for example, more lower cost housing for older people and younger families.  Anyway, some of the commenters want to see that argument played out here. What do you think?

A musical about the miners’ strike

It’s hard to believe that it is 40 years since the Miners’ strike. I remember the daily scenes of angry confrontation and worse on the picket lines. As a 16 year old, my instinctive reaction is that there had to be a better way of resolving these conflicts. Scargill’s NUM and the Government just seemed to have an agenda of destroying each other with no regard for the people and communities caught up in it. .

My husband worked in the coal industry at the time. He was a safety engineer at Polkemmet Colliery not far away from where we live now and he has stories to tell about that period. When we first met he told me about how there was a funeral of an old man in the area which nobody attended because he had worked in the General Strike of 1926.

I enjoyed this review in the Guardian of a musical comedy about that time and I would love to see the show:

Churchgoing Olive (Victoria Brazier) and livewire Mary (Stacey Sampson) are both miners’ wives; 18-year-old Isabel (Claire O’Connor) is dating a police cadet. Their stories are an amalgamation of fiction and of people’s memories, shared with Red Ladder theatre company. Early on in the strike, Olive sits alone beside a brazier (represented by an upturned lampshade, repurposed from the opening scene, a deft, agitprop metaphor). “What are you doing?” asks Mary. “Minding the picket line,” replies Olive. “Where are the men?” “Off holding a meeting to discuss whether to allow women on the picket!”

First nation development in Vancouver sparks controversy