Clare Short, former Secretary of State for International Development, regards power in its political and historical context.

She suggests that it is a mistake to link the moral content of a movement like socialism to any one approach to social or economic organisation.

Quoting the former Russian President Gorbachev, she says: 'Peasants have always taken tomatoes to market' meaning markets are not all evil but distorted power and great inequality are.

Short favours a form of anarcho-syndicalism in which power is diffuse and widely held.

History teaches that the concentration of power into very few hands, regardless of gender, invariably leads to exploitation of the powerless.