You’ve got to hand it to the white, middle class, straight blokes out there who still think the world is set against them. Here we have Ian Swales, a Lib Dem MP for Redcar.
Announcing that he would be standing down from the role ahead of the next election, he griped to The Telegraph: ‘I don’t have a future here. I’m the wrong gender, the wrong sexuality, the wrong colour, the wrong age. That’s a joke. It’s just a comment about the political correctness, really. You can see by some of these Cabinet appointments. Women still talk about glass ceilings – it’s clearly the opposite.’
What’s the opposite, Ian? A glass floor? Because as far as we can see, at the very least, politics-wise (because we haven’t got all day), there are five women in the cabinet to 17 men. There are seven female MPs in the Lib Dems, to 49 men. As for LGBT MPs, there are David Laws, Simon Hughes and Stephen Williams (take into account four Lib Dem MPs voted against gequal marriage). As for people of colour? The Lib Dems’ MP roster is 56 shades of white/ruddy/flushed. Age? The average age of an MP is 50. Swales is 61, which isn’t really too far off that, is it?
Anyway, he’s since tried to clarify his comments, telling i100.co.uk: ‘It needs to be put in the context about the various imbalances that there are in parliament about other aspects of what we need such as scientists and so on.’
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He then pointed out that he mentors two female parliamentary candidates. Cool story, bro. Shame that he got in the way of his grander point, which was that career politicians with no more qualification to serve than two university degrees are filling up the Commons.
Swales’s comments remind us of another story today, that of this American guy Paul Elam, who’s basically made a career out of saying, in his daughter’s words, that ‘women are awful’ via his website A Voice For Men. In a profile in Buzzfeed, it was shown that he won’t explain where donations to his website get spent, and he doesn’t actually campaign or advocate or advise on men’s rights.
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The men’s rights activist, who once said that some women get raped because ‘they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk [through] life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads,’ also seems to have spent a lot of his life financially supported by women.
And he said his daughter was the child of an affair, so he could get out of paying child support for her!
Stay classy, guys.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.