• Gender balance in the monarchy - equality of opportunity or outcome?

Lynne Featherstone has been making a big noise over the past few days about the lack of equality for women in the succession to the British monarchy.

First off, while I voted as a "don't care" whether we have a monarchy or not at this stage in the recent Lib Dem Voice poll - cleaning up and reducing the reach of politicians is a bigger aim for me - I can't help thinking "who cares" whether an institution that stands in absolute contrast to the notion of equality of opportunity (I'm never going to be king even if I wanted to, and more importanly nor is Tony Blair, or Lynne Fetaherstone for that matter) doesn't have gender equality in its succession policy.

But then I thought - what about "equality of outcome" as a measure. That way, and I know it's completely unscientific, but if we look at, say, the past two centuries - a period during which equality for other women in the realm has steadily been increased - we find that a woman has been on the throne for 60% of the past 200 years.

Seems like a pretty good record to me!