Instant Opinion: Working mums will decide this election

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Sarah Ronan in The Independent

on target demographics

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Working mums and their frustration at being ignored will decide this general election – disregard them at your peril

“You can always tell when campaigning shifts up a gear because the Conservatives begin to recall the existence of the north. This time it is the rugby league-loving men of Cumbria that have caught their eye – a dubious honour, if ever there was one. And while Workington Man will go down in the annals of election history alongside his cousins from Essex and Worcester, somewhere out there, lurking beneath the radar of many think tanks, is a woman making her way home from a job that pays her 17.3% less than it should, to collect her child from a nursery that she can scarcely afford. She scrolls through news stories of female MPs stepping down from office while male politicians have the whip restored to them, despite allegations of sexual harassment (with one MP having had a recent allegation against him dropped). Occasionally her frustration at the state of politics is interrupted by the worry that her child’s nursery is rumoured to be one of the 179 that will close this month. She’s Working Mum and you can find her at the intersection of feminism and economics.”

2. Paul Chadwick in The Guardian

on modern-day campaigning

Elections are changing, but broadcasting rules are stuck in the last century

“In social media during election campaigns, political players operate as individuals, as parties, through proxies (overt and covert), and as precision advertisers armed with unknown quantities of highly specific personal data about voters. The past always teaches something, but on the whole, broadcasting regulation as we have known it seems to have very little to contribute to a widely shared and pressing problem: how to create a framework that ensures that both free and fair elections and freedom of expression thrive in our strange new communications environment.”

3. Madeline Grant in The Daily Telegraph

on the politics of the environment

Halting fracking is a short-sighted political move

“Britain is a nation of eco-conscious citizens, localists who care deeply about their surrounding areas, sometimes to the point of unscientific Nimbyism. Clamping down on fracking will help the Conservatives signal their green credentials to disaffected centrist and Remainer Tories, while wooing residents in the scores of marginals.”

4. The Financial Times’ Editorial Board

on open justice

Donald Trump impeachment breaks into the open

“Until now, the inquiry into Mr Trump has played out mostly in private. It is about to break into the open. The intelligence committee of the House is to hold public hearings. Depositions taken in closed quarters could be published. There is the prospect of sustained and televised questioning of witnesses. As such, it will be harder for Republicans to slam the inquiry as an establishment plot. A ‘deep’ state that acts in public, as global audiences watch, cannot be all that deep. For their part, Democrats will also feel an onus to hone their lines of attack. There will be histrionics and grandstanding — this is Washington — but also opportunities for public scrutiny. Privacy has been essential until now to ensure the candour of witnesses. When the alleged abuse involves foreign policy, rather than a burglary or an affair, there are security implications, too. The trouble is that privacy is also fuel for conspiracy theorists. It gives the electorate only partial information.”

5. Todd Miller for Al Jazeera

on climate change

Why climate action needs to target the border industrial complex

“Western governments from Washington to Canberra view the climate crisis through the lens of national security. Even though they are the primary cause behind global warming, they are constantly looking for ways to separate themselves from its consequences. This is why the world's biggest polluters - including the US, which has emitted more metric tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution than any other country since the Industrial Revolution - are constructing unprecedented border regimes. These governments are seeing climate migrants not as people but "security threats" and heavily investing in private companies that are promising to eliminate this threat using walls, bullets, drones and cages. Thanks to the Western fear of migrants and unwillingness to come up with a sustainable and humane solution to the climate crisis, this border-industrial complex has grown strong enough to help shape national immigration policies and fuel militarisation and human rights abuses across the world.”