Ellee Seymour

Type the word “failure” into Google and whose name comes up first? I don’t want to give the game away, just try it for yourself. The idea came from reading Robert Scoble’s post on Googlebombing.

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The reason I couldn’t attend yesterday’s Olympic logo launch was because as a trustee of Headway Cambridgeshire I had been asked to look after Andrew Lansley during his visit in the afternoon to mark National Volunteer Week.

Not that he needed any looking after, he was a really good sport and joined in a drama workshop on showing emotions. We saw him happy, sad, frightened and angry.

Andrew is patron of this excellent charity, which provides rehabilitative care for adults with an acquired brain injury. It relies very much on its volunteers, and the 37 who help out at the Cambridge centre spend 170 hours there a week on different tasks and are much valued.

I hope you are all doing your bit to mark Volunteers’ Week, however small. A survey has shown that those in the South West are the most community spririted. I believe we should all do some voluntary and community work if we can, that it is important to give something back to society, and not just take.

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A guest post by Boni Sones

Boni is one of life’s characters, we used to work together at the Cambridge Evening News and she has always been a great enthusiast. We met up again recently and I offered her a guest post to write about the Women’s Parliamentary Radio station she is heavily involved with, I must admit I did not know it existed. She describes the need for more women MPs to “civilise” Westminster.

Thanks for asking me why I set up www.wpradio.co.uk a web based radio for women politicians across party and across nations. As you know I co-authored a book: “Women in Parliament:the New Suffragettes” which looked at the contribution women politicians across party have made to Westminster and public policy since the 1997 election.

The march into Westminster of the “101 Blair’s Babes,” was highly significant and women politicians across party are changing how  politics is conducted. All change is incremental, male politicians of the past, and present will tell you that too, but to suggest that the women have had no impact at all is wrong.

The women politicians I know work incredibly hard and are subject to  the most vicious personal attacks of any politicians, and those personal attacks often embrace their family members too.

It is incredible to think that a gender balanced parliament may be  hundreds of years away. A sobering thought is that however much women themselves may not want to support positive methods of discrimination,  such as twinning, positive discrimination is needed as it is the only measure which is shown to work.
 
Regime change elsewhere in the World often results in gender balanced Parliaments. When you start from scratch you can devise methods to ensure people are represented equally by men and women. Meanwhile the slow old world of “suited and booted” politics in Westminster grinds on, and it could be a long, long time before we have a truly representative number of women MPs in Parliament. No wonder Nadine Dorries needs to blog about her weird life there.

Perhaps hearing the voices of women parliamentarians through wpradio.co.uk might help young women to engage with the political process in the future. They may decide that they’ll shoulder the ridicule – “oh their shrill voices!” – “oh their messy hair” – “and did you see what colour dress they were wearing?” so that Westminster is half men and half women before my great-great-great grandchildren are born.
 
Yours ever hopeful…and still marching on…..

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Yeremi Vargas, aged seven, vanished while playing outside his home on the holiday island of Gran Canaria three  months ago. He was last seen playing with two of  his cousins just a stone’s throw away from his family on 9 March.

Extensive enquiries and searches by hundreds of volunteers have failed to find him, 10,000 posters have been put up around Spain, Yeremi’s picture has been posted on YouTube and more than 4,000 people attended a rally in support of his family. He is described as “very shyâ€?.

The family’s ordeal was made worse following a sick hoax caller demanding money for his safe return. But Yeremi’s disappearance has also touched many people, including a pensioner who reportedly put her small monthly payment up as a reward for his return.

Yeremi’s mother , who is 24, was traumatised and had to be sedated following his disappearance.

“They have taken my son and are doing something awful to him.�

His family has been offering support to Madeline McCann’s parents. Tragically, Yeremi’s disappearance is the second child abduction case to rock the island in less than a year.

Last July, a 14-year-old girl named Sara Morales vanished from Las Palmas, the main city on Gran Canaria, while on her way to a shopping centre. As with Yeremi, the island community joined together to search for the teenager and put up thousands of “missing” posters.

The two disappearances have shaken the local community and raised fears among islanders that the cases are linked and that a paedophile is at large.

In memory of those who are still missing.

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