Undercover with the young conservatives...

Yup, I haven't even managed to cross-post this week, because I became homeless *again* and had to scrabble for a place to live whilst finishing deadlines, and a dog ate my homework. But you should all read this, because I suffered for this one, godsdamnit. I had to pretend I was a racist for an evening. It was terrifying. Enjoy, with trepidation.

*****

The teenager in the posh frock delivers her advice with the authority of weary experience. "Since this is your first Conservative Future event, I thought I ought to say -watch out for the men here," she whispers, as her friends disappear to the bar. "Most of them can't be trusted." We're at the Young Britons' Foundation summer party, incorporating the leadership hustings of Conservative Future, where I've come to observe the young right in full victory rut.

Descending three flights of stairs to the private function room at the Mahiki club in central London is a little like stepping into a sewer where the cultural overspill of the 1980s has been draining for twenty years. The room is stuffed with pasty young men in suits and ties drinking nasty orange cocktails and gossiping about Ken Clarke; the smattering of women present are wearing expensive polyester and listening prettily to what the boys have to say.

It's like a scene from one of those time-travelling detective shows, down to the droning muzak, the atmosphere of grim introspection, and the suspicion that everyone here is acting a role. The young people lounged around the bar seem to be rehearsing a set of social stereotypes that feel too clichéd to be real, mouthing empty lines of propaganda - "Thatcher did what needed to be done!" -with only a rudimentary understanding of their implications.

The Young Britons' Foundation is a finishing school for the centre-right which claims to be non-partisan and offers classes in dealing with the media, but the organisers have somehow allowed at least one journalist to infiltrate an evening they're hosting for the youth wing of the Conservative party. Eighty percent of the people here are men, and they have a lot to say about how the bloody Lib Dems are spoiling everything, and they say it over the heads of the women present.

"Yah, I really don't know what it is about Tory guys," continues Posh Frock. "They're worse than normal. I think it's because there are just so many men in the party, and it makes them...you know..." she fumbles in her bag, pulls out a pink gauze purse full of enough prescription medication to restock Boots, and pops some painkillers. "It just makes them arrogant, I suppose."

Is she some sort of feminist, then? "No! God, no!" she squeals. "No, definitely not, it's nothing like that. It's just - be careful. That's all I'm saying."
A hush falls; the hustings have begun. The three candidates for the Conservative Future leadership are all boisterous white men in their mid-twenties, all tall, all a little jowly, distinguishable by the colour of their shirts and the fact that one of them is wearing hipster spectacles. Their pitches are a unanimous declaration of strategic befuddlement.

"Now that we're in power, we've got to show the left that we can win the ideological arguments, because - because we're right!" declares Hipster Spectacles, but he doesn't sound convinced. His platitudes about "progressive politics" elicit disapproving tuts from the back row, who seem to be conducting a rehearsal for their future in the Commons. "Progressive, what does that mean?" mutters James from Kensington. "Everything seems to be progressive these days. It's the buzz-word."

"Yeah, like the Big Society," enjoins prematurely-balding Ollie, who works in the House of Lords and is slurping a Mai Tai from a tumbler shaped like a tribal woman's skull (my drink is in half a pineapple; it's all terribly ethnic). "Nobody knows what the Big Society means! It doesn't mean anything!"

"It means cutting about a hundred billion a year from public services," says his friend, adding hastily, "I mean, like, obviously that's a good thing."
"We need to make sure our party follows our principles and not those of the Liberal Democrats!" shouts another candidate. "It's the bloody Lib Dems who're the problem, they're getting in the way of everything!" During the bellow of assent that follows, one of my new friends brushes a hand surreptitiously and quite deliberately against my knee, like someone trying to be seductive in the seventeenth century. With a flash of awful clarity, I realise that these are precisely the young men my grandmother warned me about, that they are the heirs apparent to Britain's political system, and that not one of them has paused to consider if they deserve it. [read the second half at New Statesman...]

*

This piece was inspired by Dan Hancox's excellent report from the CF Christmas party in December.

The Tories' war on independent women.

If the Conservative party is looking for a theme song that really sums up its message for the next election, it could do worse than Beyonce Knowles' pop smash 'Single Ladies: Put a Ring On It.’ The Tories have already made it clear that a return to marriage as the fundamental framework of socio-economic control is the aspirational core of the party’s ideology, and Tuesday’s emergency budget sent an uncompromising message to women who have the temerity to divorce or to remain unmarried: single ladies will pay heavy penalties, especially if they have children.

As well as excising the health in pregnancy grant and other rare, precious tokens of state support for mothers, the new budget expressly delineates welfare penalties and work sanctions for single parents, nine out of ten of whom are women. Single mothers will now be required to find a job in today’s shrivelled labour market as soon as their children are of school age, but as employers are under no obligation to pay a living wage that incorporates enough money to cover childcare, work itself will be no guarantee of a decent standard of living.

The changes to housing benefit - justified with solemn anecdotes about chav families living in castles that sounded a little like the chancellor had muddled his notes with a copy of the Daily Mail - will also imperil lone parent families, who are three times as likely to live in rented accommodation as families with two resident parents. The charity Shelter has warned that the cuts will "push many households over the edge, triggering a spiral of debt, eviction and homelessness."

The Tories may have sidelined their plans to recognise marriage in the tax system, but the cuts announced in the new budget are far more disastrous for women’s rights than the crass symbolism of tax breaks for married couples, making it significantly more difficult for women to contemplate raising children without a man, any man, to offer the support that the new government takes moral exception at providing.

Lisa Ansell, a single mother from London , explained that the new budget may destroy her chances of building a stable home for herself and her three-year-old daughter. “I have worked all my life, and done everything right, but the VAT hike and housing benefit cuts man I'm sitting here with a calculator wondering how I'm supposed to survive,” she said.

“This attack on single mothers is directly in line with Conservative rhetoric about encouraging marriage. If the only way for a poor woman to get out of poverty is a man, that has serious consequences for people like me and my daughter.”

Like many lone parents , Ansell was relying on a job in the public sector to support her family but after a freeze on recruitment in preparation for the cuts announced last week, the work she had lined up has disappeared. “I am an intelligent woman and a good mother, but on budget day, I woke up to find that I am society's garbage, ” she said. “If the new government feels that any woman who has a child with a man should be left in poverty if she separates from him, with a new sexual relationship her only route out, then it should just say so.”

David Willetts MP, who is to sit on a new taskforce for children and families, articulates the Conservative attitude to women and the state with icy clarity in his recent book The Pinch. Lamenting the rise in divorce and praising marriage as a solution to poverty, Willetts complains that "a welfare system that was originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is being slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men.” A Green Paper on “the Family” released in January by Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice suggested that lone parenthood is responsible for “fracturing British society,” and that governments should send a clear signal that “families matter”.

Unfortunately for millions of parents, partners and children in Britain, only certain families truly matter to the Conservative party. The entire premise of the Tory marital fetish is that ‘families’ are not just any old riff-raff who love one other and are committed to each other’s wellbeing: the proper form of the family in Conservative Britain is a rigid economic arrangement involving two married, cohabiting parents, preferably owning property and drawing as little state support as possible. Only 37% of the population enjoy this sort of ‘traditional’ arrangement, but Tory social policy has rarely taken the reality of working people’s lives into account when imposing its dictats.

One does not need to be a socialist feminist to understand that the history of women’s liberation has always been about economics. Indeed, after suffrage was achieved, the key victories of the women’s movement in the 1970s involved the fight to allow women and children to be financially independent of men should the need arise.

The hypocrisy of the Tory family fetish, which rewards married, middle-class women for staying at home with their children whilst demonising poor, single women for doing the same, should remind the British left that even the most fundamental of progressive reforms can be reversed unless progressives remain vigilant. Contemporary Conservative policy on ‘The Family’ encodes a cold, reactionary moral agenda in the rhetoric of “allowing people real choice over their lives”, but this budget threatens women's hard-won freedom to make important choices for themselves and their families: the choice to leave an unsuitable or violent partner without facing financial ruin; the choice to remain unmarried; the choice to live a dignified life independent of men, whether or not we have children. These choices are fundamental to women's rights. They are not optional extras that can be trimmed from the budget whenever the nation feels the piece; they are core provisions for female security in an unjust patriarchal world, and they are priceless.

This budget is not merely a repulsive moral assault on single mothers: it is a direct threat to all women who believe that our futures should not depend on the ability to catch and keep a man. The Coalition has claimed that the cuts annonced on Tuesday are 'unavoidable', but the new budget looks anything but reactive: it looks, amongst other things, like a concerted attack on women's hard-won freedoms, an attack based, in Harriet Harman's words, on ideology rather than economics.

Labour's fingerprints are all over this budget.

Panto season came early this year. Watching Gideon George Osborne take the floor on Tuesday to announce the execution of the welfare state was a bit like being in the audience at a raucous Christmas show, with booing and howling on cue from the Labour benches as the Chancellor tore successive chunks out of sickness benefit, housing benefit, lone parent support and the dole before setting out plans for a wildly regressive VAT hike, a freeze on public sector pay and a hefty tax break for businesses.
The sheer brazenness of it all felt farcical, almost unreal. You half expected Osborne to burst into a musical number about how fun it is to be the baddie, announce the closure of all orphanages and vanish from the Commons in a puff of green smoke. The response from Labour and the liberal press has been equally pantomimic. After all, when a new cabinet of whose members 80% are personally millionaires pulverises welfare and housing with a fistful of broken sums before declaring that 'we're all in this together', what can you really say except 'oh no, we're not’?
By far the most astute summary came from activist and comedian Mark Thomas, who tweeted: "that wasn't so much a budget as class war committed with a calculator." The controlled ferocity of the emergency budget was almost kinky, presuming you have a fetish for being kicked repeatedly in the soul by a man with a stack of papers and a glass of mineral water. Labour and the liberal press have condemned the proposals – but the fiery indignation of Harriet Harman and Alistair Darling rings hollow when one considers that the groundwork for many of the proposed welfare cuts was already in place before Labour lost the election.
Uncomfortable as it may be for the left to recall, some of the most regressive changes in this budget - from forcing lone parents with school-age children into work, to sanctions for the mentally ill and long-term jobless, to elimination tests for sickness benefits - were Labour policies just a few short months ago. As the liberal press laments the proposed rationing of disability living allowance, it seems to have forgotten that Labour has already cleaned up on every other benefit offered to the infirm.
In 2009, the Labour Representation Committee accused the government of ripping off Tory welfare reform proposals wholesale. They were right: Labour’s green paper on benefit reform and the then shadow cabinet’s proposals to downsize and privatise the welfare state were functionally identical. In January, John Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford explained in an essay for New Statesman how Labour had ‘lost its way’ on welfare, abandoning the long-term jobless and undermining state support for the most vulnerable, with tragic consequences.
Earlier this year, the BBC exposed the brutality of the new Employment and Support Allowance tests, which are designed to deny sick people benefit by any means necessary and which have required patients dying of cancer to prove their incapacity by walking until they fall over. Despite the absurdity of imposing punitive ‘incentives to work’ in a climate where there is simply no work to be had, outliers like John McDonnell who have spoken out against welfare reform were condemned as cranks, and during the general election campaign not one Labour member made the strong case for social justice and a protective welfare state that so many of us ached to hear.
Osborne’s emergency budget is class war and nothing else, unashamedly shoring up the private sector whilst stripping vital support from those who already have nothing. The bitter truth, however, is that Osborne would not have been able to get away with this had New Labour not already laid the ideological foundation for the destruction of welfare in Britain.
For those of us who have lived at the sharp edge of Labour’s welfare reforms, for those of us who lost homes, friends and partners to poverty and unemployment, for those of us who have organised, campaigned and fought to push stories about the savagery of benefit sanctions into the press, the centre-left’s sudden attack of conscience is colossally insulting. For the young, the sick and the poor, the energy of Labour’s outrage over welfare reform has come far too late.
The Guardian’s Jackie Ashley commented that these cuts represent “the absolute triumph” of the Tories’ “softening-up process” - but that process occurred under Labour. At some point over the past decade, it became acceptable to stereotype families and communities as ‘scroungers', to scapegoat lone parents and the long-term jobless, and to imply that the long-term sick are merely malingering. Somehow, it became admissible to speak of poverty and hopelessness as ‘incentives to work’. Somehow, it became conscionable for the left to refer to welfare provision as ‘a drain on the state’ rather than a central, vital function of the state.
For the millions of us who have relied on meagre welfare support to survive the first dip of this recession, it was New Labour who held us down whilst we waited for the inevitable punches from the right. And in one way, news of the Coalition's outright assault on the life chances and dignity of the poor hurts a little less, because we saw it coming. Being smacked in the face is less painful than being stabbed in the back.
In the weeks and months to come, Labour might just begin remember that it is not the party of business, the party of corporate Britain, but the party of Nye Bevan, Clement Atlee and Barbara Castle, the party of working people and the poor, the party of the NHS, of university grants, of chartists and levellers and diggers and dreamers, of trade unions and of the welfare state. Over the coming years of pain, Labour will serve the ordinary people of Britain best if it remembers its core values. For some of us, however, it may already be too late.

Michael Gove and the Imperialists

The Tories want our children to be proud of Britain's imperial past. When right-wing colonial historian Niall Ferguson told the Hay Festival last weekend that he would like to revise the school history curriculum to include "the rise of western domination of the world" as the "big story" of the last 500 years, Education Secretary Michael Gove leapt to his feet to praise Ferguson's "exciting" ideas - and offer him the job.

Ferguson is a poster-boy for big stories about big empire, his books and broadcasting weaving Boys' Own-style tales about the British charging into the jungle and jolly well sorting out the natives. The Independent's Johann Hari, in his capacity as young bloodhound of the liberal left, sniffed out Ferguson's suspicious narrative of European cultural supremacy in a series of articles in 2006, calling him "a court historian for the imperial American hard right," as Harvard-based Ferguson believes that the success of the British Empire should be considered a model for US foreign policy.

This is exactly the sort of history that British conservatives think their children should be learning. "I am a great fan of Ferguson, and he is absolutely right," Michael Gove told the Guardian. The new Education Secretary has declared his intention to set out a 'traditionalist' curriculum 'celebrating' Britain's achievements. Andrew Roberts, another historian set to advise on the new curriculum, has dined with South African white supremacists, defended the Amritsar massacre and suggested that the Boers murdered in British concentration camps were killed by their own stupidity. It looks like this 'celebratory' curriculum might turn out to be a bunting-and-bigotry party, heavy on the jelly and propaganda.

What should shock about these appointments is not just the suspect opinions of Roberts and Ferguson, but the fact that the Tories have fundamentally misunderstood the entire purpose of history. History, properly taught, should lead young people to question and challenge their cultural inheritance rather than simply 'celebrating' it. "Studying the empire is important, because it is an international story, but we have to look at it from the perspective of those who were colonised as well as from the British perspective," said historian and political biographer Dr Anthony Seldon, who is also Master of Wellington College. "We live in an interconnected word, and to one has to balance learning about british history with learning about other cultures."

The ways in which schools and governments structure and promote stories about a country's past, the crimes they conceal and the truths they twist, have a lasting effect on young minds. It is not for nothing that the most fearsome dictators of the twentieth century, from Hitler to Chairman Mao, altered their school history curricula as a matter of national urgency. Even now, the school board of the state of Texas is re-writing the history syllabus to sanitise slavery and sideline major figures such as Thomas Jefferson, who called for separation of Church and State. That the Tories, too, wish to return us to a 'traditionalist' model of history teaching should thoroughly disabuse the Left of the notion that the Conservative party has no ideological agenda.[read the rest at New Statesman]

A sad day for British democracy.

(image via scepticisle)


I'm actually in tears. Boris Johnson, the Tories in Westminster Council and the centre-right coalition have managed to do what nine years of new Labour anti-civil-liberties wrangling didn't have the guts to do. They've sent in the police and they've taken away Brian Haw.

Brian Haw's anti-war protest - a tent, some placards and a whole lot of brazen peacenik courage - has been pitched directly outside the houses of parliament for almost nine years. Embarrassing the executive. Reminding them of their complicity in an illegal war. Reminding the people of the possibility of resistance. Labour tried everything they could think of to get rid of him, dragging him through the courts, even setting up a whole new law to ban protest in parliament square without prior approval specifically designed to oust him. They never could. Under the new centre-right regime, however, there's no such faffing about with legal precedent and squabbling over human rights. Today, the Mayor ordered the stormtroopers in to handcuff Brian Haw and drag him away, and now, after nine years, he's gone.

That's what the right does, in government. No lengthy, drawn-out hypocrytical bollocks about decorum and protest, no legislating you out of existence bit by heartbreaking bit. Just this. You are a nasty protestor. We do not like you, or your messy ideas about justice and freedom. You are spoiling our nice clean lawn. We are sending large men to remove you.

I am twenty-three, and have been politically active for about as long as Brian Haw's protest has been standing. Nearly all of my significant political memories involve Haw, from rainy pickets over the HFE bill in 2008 to cheering as the crowd of nearly two million marched past his tents on the big anti-war demo in 2003, back when I was sixteen and had only just begun to realise how terribly wrong the world was, and the power of personal resistance.

Years later, as a parliamentary intern, I passed Haw's protest every morning and evening as I crossed the street into the Houses of Parliament. And every time, I felt glad to see it, sometimes a lonely one-tent display facing down the glowering edifice of Big Ben and the commons, sometimes a larger gathering, as thousands of well-wishers and supporters travelled from all over the world to meet Brian and join his demonstration. It made me feel proud, every day, to know that whatever faff was going down in parliament, I still lived in a country where citizens had some right to protest, some right to face down the entitlement and warmongering of the state without fear of their lives and livelihoods, even if it was just one little tent and some placards against centuries of privilege and pride. It made me feel proud, every day. Johnson is using the excuse that Haw's protest detracted from the majesty of Parliament Square, but I considered Brian Haw as much a symbol of the political inheritance of my generation as the Commons. And now he's gone.

Some of us on the left were always convinced that the Tories would be worse than Labour on civil liberties. We did say. But today 'I told you so' tastes of nothing but bile. This is a tragedy, a travesty, and nothing more. Mr Haw, we salute you. The state may want to forget your protest and the grassroots resistance it symbolised. We never will.

A Tory wet dream of women in politics: for Morning Star

Column out today! For the Morning Star! Which is a great paper that everyone should read!

***

It's hard to decide what aspect of Britain's new centre-right government is more insulting to women. Is it the dramatic drop in the number of people with female bodies holding positions of power? Is it the Conservatives' notion that one can best support "families" by encouraging women to marry and leave the workplace? Or is it the sudden arrival of Theresa May MP as the most powerful woman in the country?

The appointment of the former Conservative chairwoman as Home Secretary was an 11th-hour decision taken by the men brokering the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, who this week promised the country a "new politics" - but there's nothing new about a Cabinet stuffed with rich, right-wing public schoolboys.

Media outlets have already been keen to stress that "shoe fan" May "is better known for wearing distinctive shoes than any pronouncements about crime," as the Telegraph put it on Wednesday.

The British press has long nursed a perverse fascination with the feet of Conservative women, with May's leopard-print kitten heels making headlines at the 2002 Tory conference and, this year, many column inches devoted to the perfect toes of Samantha Cameron. If this is how powerful women are supposed to look and behave it's rather galling that the £150 bribe offered by the Conservatives to "reward marriage" will barely be enough to keep any self-respecting Tory housewife in shoes for a month.

The focus on fashion rather than policy shores up an antiquated vision of a woman's place in politics.

"It's a shame that the Telegraph felt the need to comment on Theresa May's fondness for designer shoes," said feminist activist Laura M. "I suppose they felt they had to remind everyone that she was a woman.

"Female politicians' bodies and clothes are subject to pervasive scrutiny that men, who only have to decide what colour tie to wear, can barely imagine," she explained.

"Drawing attention to stereotypically 'female' personal interests - which May is perfectly entitled to pursue - works to make readers subconsciously associate her with shallowness and frivolity."

Tory MP Nadine Dorries, the expenses cheat and tub-thumping anti-choice activist of the Christian right, has made public statements about how much she loves her stilettos, dubbing herself the "Bridget Jones of Westminster." Unfortunately, Dorries - like May - is anything but an airhead. Both pursue a punishingly pro-market programme, both have actively supported motions to reduce the time limit on legal abortion and neither is a friend to the majority of women in Britain, however many lovely shoes they own.

May's new role as Minister for Women and Equality will no longer be a full-time job as it has been under Labour. This may be just as well, as May has voted against equality legislation 18 times since 1998, is an opponent of a woman's right to choose and has already been condemned by leading LGBT organisations for her shameful record on gay rights.

David Henry of OutRage! told Pink News that May was "the wrong person for the job," saying that "she's opposed almost every gay rights measure."

While May voted with the Conservative whip on civil partnerships, she absented herself for the votes that led to the Gender Recognition Act and has a worse record on votes protecting women and LGBT people from abuse than Chris Grayling, who was turned down for the post of Home Secretary after being perceived as "too homophobic."

This, then, is the underlying assumption of the Conservative approach to equality and women's rights, that tokenism will suffice, that the equalities agenda can be comprehensively shelved by handing it to a woman, any woman, no matter how bigoted, thuggish and illiberal. The mere fact of May's femaleness as relentlessly proven by her indulgence in a certain species of consumer femininity is seen to cover all bases.

This is why the role of women in politics will never be just a numbers game, shocking though it is that the Conservative party in parliament and the coalition Cabinet are both over four-fifths male. Merely putting female bodies and gorgeous shoes in places of liminal power will never automatically equate to empowering women and minorities within or beyond Westminster.

May is a tokenist Tory wet dream of women in politics, and not just because there's only one of her at the top table. Posh, spiky-heeled and stern with a staggeringly intolerant agenda, she bespeaks a type of kinky discipline that just longs to kick naughty little boys and girls into shape and make us behave. Media focus on the bad Thatcher drag and high-heel evangelism of the few women promoted by the new regime conceals a brutally intolerant moral agenda.

Hey, geeks: NO.

Can I just say, for the record, entirely untargeted at anyone I know and with deep love for the concept and praxis of slash fiction in all its forms:

I find the sudden internet squeefulness over Clegg/Cameron slash- and related fic at best banal, and at worst wilfully and dangerously resistant to the actual political analysis that's needed here.

The mainstream press has been going at it too, of course. Yesterday's Evening Standard headline, 'A Very Civil Partnership,' did not make anything about what has just happened to this country at all better, although it did make me giggle on the tube. It's as if the return of the centre-right and all their mad Tory friends to power was just a bit naughty, just a cheeky intra-elitist 'Eton fag' romance, a little bit saucy in a PG Woodhouse sort of way - rather than, say, terrifying and depressing.

I really, really hesitate to say this. But there are some times, some very rare, very sad times when constructing juicy stories about real or imagined homosexual angst between two powerful and/or fictional men IS NOT THE ANSWER. Now is one of those times. Because actually, it's the people, not each other, that these men are quite possibly about to screw.

I also suspect that the implication - at least where it concerns the popular press - is that a coalition is in someway not masculine enough, not Daddy enough for the proper thrustingly heterowonderful British way of doing things. Coalitions are unmanly, and unmanly = OMG gay.

Here's what you can do, Dave

You can ignore the howling of a country that hates you and doesn't want you in power. You can dig yourself into Westminster like a toad under a stone for four years whilst this country bleeds from a thousand cuts. But you can't run from progress, and you can't roll back the changes that thirteen years of progressive government have put in place. Labour did many terrible things, but they also helped open a pandora's box of visceral social change. You can't undo that, not ever.

You did not win, and you cannot rule absolutely. The Liberals may have turned traitor, but they're going to shackle you. They're going to neutralise the rabid dogs on your backbench and pare down the most illiberal of your schemes to shit magnificently on the poor and the disposessed, on welfare claimants and women.

You can't 'rebuild the family'. The nuclear heterosexual family, that fragile unit of industrial capitalist economy, has been broken for a generation as people realise that they don't have to chain themselves to each other in order to survive. You can't cram that back in its box, no matter how many women you try to persuade that they'll be better off wedded to their sinks, no matter how many children you shame for having divorced parents, no matter how coldly you judge or how hard you slice at people's earnings. Times are hard already. They won't stand for it.

You can't put gay liberation back in its box, either. You can't replace the official prejudices of the Thatcher years, section 28, that's not ever coming back.

You can't stop people wanting more than this. You can't erase people's resentment at privilege and pride, especially in difficult times. People won't be patronised or wheedled into behaving. The public are not going to behave. We won't allow it. You may be prime minister today, but the country is not behind you.

You can't stop the cities. You can't stop the internet fracturing everything that was solid and safe about the priggish culture that made you. You can't stop the riot that's brewing as people in Britain realise that they have been cheated, time and time again, by a system stuffed with people who hate them and want to put them into boxes and make them do what they're told.

And you can't, as a new Tory MP just told the BBC newscaster, 'put Britain back.' You can't ever put Britain back. You can't disappear inside Number Ten and slam the door on the future; if you do, the future will go on without you. And we all know what happens then.

If you try to push back at the raw edge of modernity, it's going to cut you.

And gods, I'm scared right now, I'm scared as hell of what's going to happen to this country and city I love, but I'm going to enjoy watching you bleed.

...

Oh, god.

For reference, mr BBC: that wasn't cheering outside Number 10. That was howling. They were screaming 'Tory Scum'. I wasn't imagining it and neither were you.

Oh, bloody hell. Stop the country, I want to get off.

It's not Torygeddon yet.

Hanging around outside the Houses of Parliament last week, angry in the way that only a British smoker can be when it's the middle of winter and they've caught the runny nose that's going around, I met two American tourists who were genuinely convinced that David Cameron was the prime minister of Britain. It was almost impossible persuade these people that Cameron hadn't been in power for at least a year, swooping in to fill the power vacuum left by the universally beloved Tony Blair.

All of this would have been pleasantly diverting if the entirety of the British left didn't seem to be labouring under the same delusion. On the eve of what's supposed to be a huge symposium of liberal thought and policy, can we please - just for one weekend - stop behaving as if the Conservatives were already the party in power?

Because the Conservatives aren't in power yet. If Torygeddon does occur, if it occurs, it won't be till after the election in May. After the election, not before. And yet both Labour and the liberal press are behaving like the ballots are already in. This week on Labour List alone, we've had Alastair Campbell's analysis of Cameron's 'grab a gay' policy [ouch] and Ed Miliband's mortifyingly concessionary open letter to Cameron on the environment.

The Guardian is the worst offender in the mainstream press, with Alan Rusbridger positively salivating over David Cameron's tantalisingly unreportable remarks at the Davos conference today. But the blogosphere is by no means exempt. How much energy have we spent over the past six months offering responses to draft Tory policy plans? How much time have we wasted taking the debate to staid conservative social re-engineering projects like the Centre for Social Justice, rather than laying out our own plans for truth, justice and the revival of the job market?

The Conservative party's ideas - sorry, their slogans - are nonsensical, but at least they have some. Broken Britain! Tax breaks for married couples! Character-building! We can't go on like this! It's service-station paperback political narrative, but it hangs together, and it's reasonably compelling. Labour, on the other hand, after six months of lukewarm, weak-willed, quasi-theoretical equivocation, have just about decided that it's okay to use the word "class". The government has come up with precisely zero policy platforms or post-election goals, almost as if it were hoping that twelve years of overseas conflict, widening inequality and educational meltdown would speak for themselves. It's a very special blend of arrogant defeatism, and it's not pleasant to watch.

It's not as if the people of this country are out of progressive political ideas. The work being done by Power2010 and 38 degrees clearly shows that there's a hunger not just for reform, but for liberal reform. Voting is open for the ideas canvassed at the public Power 2010 conference, which include an elected second house, votes at sixteen and capping political donations. In the absence of any liberal narrative at all within the party system, young people of the left have had to invent a whole new kind of politics in an attempt to force attention towards the real nature of the public's thirst for change. Meanwhile, the only strident politics coming from nominally liberal Whitehall parties over the past six months have been direct responses to Cameron's trashy, pulpy politics. As if Labour and the Lib Dems were already in opposition. As if the left had nothing more to say.

It's not pretty to observe the Sun and other such skin-flakes of the lumbering Murdoch empire drooling temporarily over the Cameroons, but it is expected. By contrast, it's bloody embarrassing to watch the left obsessively picking over what ideas Cameron might or might not have about gay rights, the economy, the environment, the poor, the welfare state, whilst at the same time brazenly declaring that Cameron has no ideas. We're discussing his PR machine, his policy platform and his hairstyle with precisely the same sullen illicit exactness with which you might spend a lonely evening examining the vital statistics and profile pictures of your recent ex's new squeeze on facebook, downing shots of cornershop vodka and wondering what she's got that you don't.

That sort of thing is perfectly acceptable behaviour for a week or two, but really, guys, it's been months. It's time for whatever part of the British liberal conference represents the Sensible Friend to turn up, take the booze and recriminations away, and force us into a long hot shower of self-analysis so we can move on and start laying out some coherent, practical ideas of our own.

This is going to hurt.

With politics, as with relationships, there are certain times when you wish they'd just lie to you a little harder.

This week, for instance, with the election months away and the Tory campaign bursting onto billboards across the country in all its terrible definitely-unairbrushed glory, it'd be nice if someone in government was making some sort of noise to persuade the people of Britain that they really do have a choice in their political leadership. Amidst all the filibustering, the clumsy cloak-and-dagger backstairs plotting over a last-minute replacement for Gordon Brown, if it's too much to ask that we actually be granted a degree of democratic self-determination, then I'd like them to pretend. I'd like them to at least pretend they have anything other than contempt for ordinary voters. Unfortunately, this week's abortive coup against Gordon Brown's leadership of the Labour Party demonstrates that contempt perfectly.

It is impossible to truly know what Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon thought to accomplish with their secret ballot. Perhaps they genuinely wished to give the people of Britain the leader they deserved, the leader we have waited for for so long: someone worthy of the respect of his or her country and executive, someone who has earned the confidence of the people and the party, someone who would not, for example, demonstrate their utter scorn for the electorate and for parliament in a cheesy daytime television interview.

But whatever their intentions, they demonstrated, as so many sitting members of both the Labour and Conservative parties have in the past, the sincere conviction that it is the job of parliament to decide who should lead the people, rather than it being the right of the people to decide who should run the government.

David Cameron's new poster campaign is disgusting and fascinating, like a teenager's sock drawer, or tertiary syphilis. Once you manage to tear your eyes from the spooky, ten-foot-high head-and-shoulder-shot of the Tory hopeful that dominates the frame, an image that absolutely hasn't had its jawline articifially strengthened, its pores smoothed, its nose diminished, its hair filled in or its skintone adjusted to remove that pesky Eton flush that was so in evidence at the 2009 party conference, you start to notice the little things. Like the fact that the words 'Conservative Party' are not prominently featured anywhere in the design. Like the fact that, despite their utter ideological disinclination to factor the lives of ordinary people into their policymaking, the Tories have recognised that the people of Britain want to elect a leader, not a party.

The Tories understand that whilst the brand of their party remains tarnished, their prospective candidate for leadership is by far the strongest part of their case to make the next government - not because of who he is, but because of what he represents. He represents someone who wants the trust and respect of the people, and is prepared to put his touched-up face on a giant poster saying so.

Every opponent of the 'presidential' attitude adopted by Blair and now aped by Cameron bases their arguments on the fact that, technically speaking, no British leader has ever been elected by the British people: it's understood that the leader of the political party which gains the most votes will be invited to form a government by the queen. Unfortunately, apologism for our anti-republican state mechanisms doesn't quite cut it anymore in terms of the popular mood.

As Paul Sagar observed at Bad Conscience this week, what the British people appear to want is not just a change of leader, but a change in the type of political leadership Britain has become used to: "not any-old-leader emerging through ...back-stabbing, pole-climbing patronage structures, but a man (or perhaps woman) with charisma in whom they can believe and who is tested through the conflict of a national plebiscite."

Put simply, Shiny Dave has had himself definitely-not-airbrushed all to fuck, but at least he seems to care.

This is why we're going to start to see more dangerous smiling bastards like Boris Johnson and David Cameron getting elected to high office. In a climate in which the machinations of politics are so thoroughly debased, in a country in which the mechanisms of government are occluded and arcane, in a culture where we are no longer invested in the narrowing ideological difference between two ancient, stale political parties, charisma can count for a great deal. Charisma can replace concrete policies. Charisma can look very much like the change we so desperately need.

David Cameron is not the change that his poster promises. David Cameron is a smiling bastard in a nice shirt, which is why I will be voting against him and campaigning against his leadership bid over the coming months. But until the Labour party sit up and notice which way the political wind is blowing, until they stop filibustering and start to show the electorate something other than utter contempt, until they put strategies on the table that engage the public in at least the illusion of choice, we can point out the pixel-smears on Cameron's jawline as much as we like: the bastards are still going to win hearts and minds.

Happy New Year to you too, Boris

On Monday, millions of commuters will return to work in the capital to find that their public transport fares - already the most expensive in the world - have been hit with yet another price rise. Mayor Boris Johnson has increased fares by 6-11% last year, and has committed to further above-inflation price increases this year. Most significantly, bus fares are to rise by 12.7% from the 4th of January - a move that will disproportionately and unashamedly penalise London's poorest.

Don't believe me? The average bus-riding commuter will be paying about 70p extra per day. Presuming you don't leave the house at weekends, that's an extra £3.50 per week. That's an extra £182 per year. For someone on a city worker's salary that won't make a blind bit of difference, but for someone earning barely enough to feed themselves, it will make all the difference. But then, city workers don't often take the bus.

Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy has the story, pointing out that Boris is once again extorting money from his poorest and neediest constituents, whilst continuing to oppose tax increases for the capital's wealthier residents. "Theoretically, increasing fares should decrease income for London Transport as people are put off from travelling, and yet fares keep rising despite the recession...but when taxes are raised on the rich, [Boris argues] against them on the basis they will not raise any extra income. In other words, if a policy hits London’s poor: implement it. If it hits the richest, argue against it."

And a very merry and prosperous 2010 to you too, Boris - I'm sure you're looking forward to one. For the rest of us, this is what happens when we allow ourselves to get dazzled by cartoon politics: we elect dangerous smiling bastards who don't give a damn about poverty and inequality and who are quite willing to make life exponentially harder for the low-paid majority at the expense of a privileged few.

Like Boris, I live in the greatest city on earth. Unlike Boris, I believe that making it harder for the poor to live and thrive in London diminishes my city's greatness. And that's the key difference between the Tories and everyone else: at the core of Conservative ideology is the conviction that the few and the privileged are the only people whose lives and contributions really matter.

Is Brown playing the class card under the table?

Brown was right to play the class card, but he must play it with integrity - on Labour List today.

Gordon Brown has faced near-universal disapprobation this week for daring to mention that the personal wealth and privilege of members of the shadow cabinet might have the tiniest bit of bearing on their inheritance tax plans. The phrase "dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton" was particularly unsporting, something that Mr Brown would doubtless have been able to grasp had he attended Eton himself.

That's the problem with talking about class in Westminster. It’s just not classy, is it? It's not the done thing, not since Mrs Thatcher swept it all neatly out of sight for us. As Shadow minister Eric Pickles put it after Brown’s salvo last week: “frankly we aren't that type of country anymore."

More pressingly, bringing up class makes everyone look bad: commentators have been quick to point out that, whilst no Labour MP has yet billed for moat-maintenance, the party in government has always boasted its fair share of wealthy hand-wringers – blogger Dizzy Thinks rightly pointed out that seven current cabinet ministers went to fee-paying private schools.

However, amidst all this pouting about cheap shots, reverse class prejudice and the fact that, apparently, nobody cares anymore about the inevitable inheritance of power by the rich and privileged, not much has been made of the fact that Brown actually has a point.

It may not be fashionable or comfortable to talk about wealth and privilege, but wealth and privilege matter. It matters that, sixty years after the advent of the welfare state, one’s chances in life are still largely predicated by one’s birth and background. It matters that, nearly a decade into the twenty-first century, it is possible to accurately predict from several months before birth the likelihood of a particular jellied ball of cells and pre-natal fluid growing up to be a business-leader or a benefit-scrounger, as demonstrated in Louise Bamfield’s brilliant Fabian pamphlet, Born Unequal. It matters that some of those more felicitous balls of cells, several decades down the line, are now expatiating on fantastically illiberal policy proposals that aim to shaft the poor in order to protect the interests of the property-owning rich; proposals that would, if someone made Hansard into a Hollywood blockbuster, inevitably be played by Alan Rickman.

Schoolyard obloquy aside, it’s hardly the Prime Minister’s fault if the mere mention of Eton playing-fields happens to make some 5.5% of Tory parliamentarians personally squirm like snotty schoolboys caught with their hands in Matron’s biscuit tin. Unfortunately, Brown’s ideological attack on Conservative policy has since been overwhelmed by faltering personal follow-up shots, such as John Prescott’s unfortunate ribbing of Eric Pickles on last week’s Today programme. The asinine practice of attacking Tory candidates as airy ‘toffs’ has not won Labour any by-election victories to date.

This type of strategy demeans what remains of the principles of the Labour Party. Attacking people on the basis of their class alone looks like a petty, desperate strategy for the simple reason that it is a petty, desperate strategy. More to the point, the last fifty years have amply proven that a minister’s class can have little or no bearing on their loyalties or their policy decisions: the inherited titles of many members of Attlee’s cabinet did not prevent them from masterminding the NHS, whilst three decades later Margaret Thatcher, a butcher’s daughter with a grammar-school education, set about breaking the power of the unions and draining the efficacy of the welfare state. But neither this, nor the fact that George Osborne and Harriet Harman went to the same private school means, as Ken Clarke argued in the Daily Mail, that "the class war is over". The class war is merely over in the hallowed halls of Westminster, chiefly because it was never begun.

In truth, any sitting parliamentarian, whatever his or her loyalties, is practically and financially divorced from the breadline. The real question here is about how political power is wielded: whether privileged politicians are committed to ensuring that they and those whose interests they represent retain a stranglehold on the wealth and enterprise of this country, or whether they feel, as Aneurin Bevan himself put it, that "the purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away".

For politicians more than anyone else, "the price of privilege is absolute integrity". Labour is right to raise the class card, and to question policy decisions reeking with an ideology of privilege and social stagnation that remains the philosophical foundation of the Conservative Party. But the choice to push the class issue will fail as long as it is propelled by petty spin-shystering: if unearned wealth and privilege are to become election issues for the first time in over twelve years, that change in direction must run like a course of antibiotics through the sickening heartsblood of Labour thinking. If Labour wants to play the class card again, it must play it with integrity, starting with a good, hard look at its own policy history.

Sadly, Brown, Duncan and Prescott could be entirely forgiven for lashing out at the hordes of chuntering poshos waiting in the wings had they themselves been slightly more successful, over the past 12 years of government, at increasing social mobility. A Labour government which has presided over an increase in the gap between rich and poor needs to do some serious self-scrutiny before it rightly and tardily takes on the issue of unearned privilege.

Brown’s attack on Tory tax policies that rob the poor to feed the rich was both morally sound and in keeping with the interests of Labour’s core voters: let’s hope that it represents a Damascene conversion.

No going back.

A better day today. Whatever you think about the New Labour project, there are certain ways in which it has changed the country forever, and for the better. In partnership with gay rights groups, Labour has set the bar for tolerance and diversity. No, things aren't perfect, not by a long chalk. But for a sense of how Britain has changed, you only need to listen to the 1993 version of Tom Robinson's fantastic, angry dialectic, Sing If You're Glad To Be Gay - a cross between a cheesy popsong and the best stone-cold protest rant ever - and count how many of the complaints aren't relevant anymore:

Don't try to kid us that if you're discreet
You're perfectly safe as you walk down the street...
Make sure your boyfriend's at least 21
And if you're a lesbian, don't be a mum.
Gay Lib's ridiculous, join in their laughter
'The buggers are legal now, what more are they after?'

You know someone's rolled up the map when one of the most prominent right-wing voices in the nation is out of the closet, proudly civilly partnered to another man and, today, challenging the Daily Mail over its nasty, patronisingly homophobic comments about his campaign for election in Bracknell in today's edition of the paper. I never thought I'd say this, but Iain Dale's principled stance is actually pretty damn impressive:

"I really thought that we had got away from this sort of thing and it's very sad that we haven't...If by standing up to the Daily Mail, and drawing attention to this issue, it hijacks me in Bracknell, then that will be a bitter blow to have to take, but if I sat back and just accepted this sort of thing, what sort of person would that make me? And worst of all, if I did say nothing, it would just encourage them to do it again to someone else in the future. I simply cannot do that...PCC here I come."

Even more heartening are the hundreds of comments from Tory sympathisers expressing support for Dale's brave stance. There have always been gay Tories, but time was they were expected to shut the hell up about it. They certainly couldn't run for candidacy whilst going to the Press Complaints Commission about homophobic attacks on their lifestyle. The Tories were the party of the closet, the party of don't-ask-don't-tell, the party of Section 28, the party that stood against civil partnership laws and lowering the age of consent, the party of hate and self-hate. That old guard is still bumbling evilly around Whitehall (o hai, Ian Duncan Smith), but for the moment they no longer hold the majority consensus. In fact, at the Tory conference this week, the first ever Conservative Pride rally will take place. Maggie must be spinning in her wheelchair.

I'm not saying that there are no bigots in the Tory party. I'm not saying that they have anything but an appalling record on LGBTQ rights, feminism, anti-racism or any other aspect of equality-driven policymaking. But it might, just might be the case that twelve years of a Labour administration has changed the terms of the debate forever. The world has changed. There can be no going back to the days when queer-bashers escaped prosecution and gay men and women were called perverts on the front pages of every tabloid. And if the mood continues in this way, with millions of LGBTQ people and their allies of every political tribe standing up to defend equal rights, then there will be no going back - not even under a right-wing government.

Tea and sympathy.

Right now, along with most British liberals, I feel like I'm sprinting up a down escalator. There's to much to do and too much to oppose and too much to say; I'm overworked and exhausted and running on empty, to the extent that I've had a mental health crash and had to call in sick to drink strong tea, contemplate the future of the Left and watch True Blood, simultaneously the worst and most compelling show ever made. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

I mention all this partly to explain why all the posts I've been wanting to write, about gender at the Labour conference, about fucking Roman Polanski child rape apologists, about teenage mums and the notion of social justice and winning the argument on mental health and employment rights, are all boiling away in the charging ether of my hindbrain, and they're likely to stay there, because this weekend I need to chill the fuck out even more than I need to put the world to rights.

Because there's so much going on that I almost don't know where to start. It's been a bad week to be a lefty, a bad week to be a feminist, a bad week to care. Here's just some of what's made me angry this week:

Kate Harding reminds Salon readers that Polanski raped a child.

Melissa McEwan and Jill at Feministe give us the Roman Polanski defend-a-thon (trigger warning).

Anne Perkins sums up the gender agenda at the Labour conference fairly well (I was in that Tim Montgomerie event and almost threw a sausage roll at him).

...and Liberal Conspiracy uncovers Tory links to a European party with a right-wing, homophobic agenda. Hail our future lords and masters!

I've just got back from the Labour Party Conference, which was one of the most depressing events I've ever attended. Brighton was doing its tarty, gaudy best to lighten the mood, all brilliant sunshine, sparkling beaches crisply stinking of chips and sugar and the grand old seafront buildings lit up like the biggest wedding cake on the planet; but it was all to no avail. At the fringe meetings, the equality agenda was on the back foot, the feminist lobby was almost non-existent, and the loudest voices for social justice were those of the hordes of young Socialist Party members protesting outside the Conference zone on Sunday (Dave Osler has a great analysis of this over at Liberal Conspiracy).

The parties were the worst, hordes of apparatchiks drinking themselves into oblivion, staving off the terrible tory hangover we're all going to wake up with come 2010. One former MEP, hearing that I was a feminist blogger, told me that the only difference between the Tories and the Labour old guard is that the latter are 'only unofficially misogynist'.

At some point during the melee, I turned 23. And it occurred to me, not for the first time, that I'll probably be in my thirties before a nominally left-of-centre government hold the reins of my country again. From now on, being on the left is going to be a real fight. And whilst I've cut my blogging and journalistic teeth in the last days of Labour, it's all going to be a lot harder from now on, with more ideological territory at stake. John Cruddas MP summed it all up perfectly in the Fabians' Next Labour debate on Sunday, when he declared:

"There is a train coming down the track.It's brutal and it's extremely right wing. It is incumbent upon us to step up and face it."

Right now, today, that train coming down the track feels almost unstoppable. On Tuesday I walked along the seafront with Hilary Wainwright and John McDonnell whilst those two seasoned old campaigners- veterans of 1968, feminists and formerly die-hard Labour activists - mused that the future of the left lay in direct action. The left is not beaten yet, but we're flagging, caught between two parties scrabbling madly for the centre-right, with only the Lib Dems pursuing any sort of liberal platform at their conference. I feel tired before it's even begun: not because I'm ever, ever going to lie down and let them roll over me and mine and our agenda of tolerance and decency and justice. I'm tired because I know I never will, and it's going to get a lot harder from now on. Normal service will resume shortly, but right now I'm going to drink tea and collapse. I hereby give every other lefty reading this permission to do the same: we need all our faculties for the fight to come.

***

A small ray of sunshine: The Samosa, a new liberal-leaning, multicultural British comment site, launches today. I'm writing a column for them. You should check it out :)

Shiny Dave and the Lightweight's Cant.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Shiny Dave has made his bid for the big job. And I'm not so young nor so caught up in my own factional worldview that I didn't make the time to really listen to what he had to say. I tell you what, Mr Greasy has some decent speechwriters on board. He can say almost nothing and make it sound really quite exciting.

Almost nothing, but not quite nothing. Limiting parliamentary terms to four years and introducing open primaries for candidate selection: good ideas. Not new ideas, and not Tory ideas, as many Labour and Lib Dem bloggers have been quick to point out – but then, real opportunities for constitutional reform are like bloody buses. You wait for them for god knows how long until eventually the whole notion of a bus seems like a stupid idea anyway and you start wondering if it might have been quicker to walk. The stop is getting crowded. People are muttering that the whole notion of buses is idealistic and unworkable. You consider ordering a taxi for just you and your mates and putting it on expenses. But then the bus arrives, and it comes without warning, and all that matters is that you're at the front of the queue with your ticket ready.

Shiny Dave has his ticket ready.

He's not considering real, widespread reform, however. He won't touch the Lords; he won't introduce proportional representation; most worrying of all, I distinctly heard him mention reducing the number of MPs, which redistributes power to glossy nobody and which gives whichever party happens to be in government, ahem, the power to totally redraw the poitical map of Britain according to their tastes.

I have listened to Shiny Dave, and I don't trust him to run a hotdog stand, let alone my country. In fact, screw it, I don't trust him with that puppy. He's a middle manager in sales, is what he is. Just look at his hair. He should be running a regional branch of a stationary company in the Midlands. He's a hand-shaker. A lightweight. A smiler, and not even a clever smiler. But today I have accepted that this man is probably going to be Prime Minister, and there's nothing I can do about it.

The last time I got this feeling, during the 2008 mayoral elections, a strange thing happened. I'm a recovered anorexic, and I haven't skipped a meal since 2006. Think of it like a teetotaler sipping lemonade in the pub and you're in the right ballpark. But when I walked out of my lecture that day and saw that Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson was going to be running my city, I got the most terrific urge to run to the nearest loo and throw up my lunch. The world was spinning beyond my control; I was powerless; I wanted to exert my self-determination in the first and best way I learned how.

I didn't, of course. I took myself home and made tea, a sandwich and a cigarette and made myself eat, drink, smoke and chill the hell out in that order. I allowed myself one evening in which to be pissed off, scream at the television and get munted with my hippy friends whilst planning radical comic strips.

And then I got up the next day and decided to get on with things. Since then I've attended assembly meetings and protests, helped plan occupations of public buildings, been involved in organising women's networks and had the London Underground symbol of the tube station nearest my birthplace - Angel - tattoed into the nape of my neck. I love this city and I will not see it turned over to the right, or for that matter to apathetic media squallbabies with the BNP breathing down their necks.

There's hope. I look at the game unfolding in Westminster and I see the left being outmaneuvred at every turn. Liberal energies are mounting, have been mounting before and since the Convention on Modern Liberty – but we are disparate, bickering among ourselves, in retreat. I firmly believe that the last thing the British left needs at this point is a Labour victory.

I've spent all day interviewing very sick people who've been screwed out of the measly amount of benefits they were living on by Wee Jimmy Purnell, he of the twice-as-much-as-annual-incapacity-benefit-spent-on-TAXIS-ALONE-in 2008. I won't say that I can't imagine things being any worse under a Tory government, because I don't trust them and because I've got a great imagination, I used to win prizes in school and everything. But I just don't think the current Labour party is fit for purpose any more - it's serving neither the principles of its members nor the people of this country. We have been screwed in both directions, and it's time to slink off and lick our wounds.

I want to see a decent egalitarian socialist like John Cruddas in charge of the Labour party in opposition, I want to see them reconnecting with their roots whilst the Tories make the pig's ear of bringing us out of the recession that they're going to. And they're going to: Shiny Dave can be as right-on has he likes about 'the man and woman in the street' (whilst doing dodgy deals on abortion rights behind closed doors), but the fact is that those people are in the street because they've lost their homes, and winter's coming on. Whilst we're ladling up the soup ,I want people of the left and every Blairite in Whitehall to remember what the point of a Labour party used to be: to empower ordinary women and men to live decent, free and honourable lives.

The Labour party in government is not the British left; it never was, and this is not the end for liberal values and egalitarian ideals in this country. We'll take a little while to work off some justified disappointment, we'll have some catfights and drink some (much cheaper) booze, and then we'll pick up again and carry on as we have been since it all went down the porcelain man in 2003: challenging, holding them to account, organising underneath their shiny brogues and dreaming up big ideas for the just society we want to live in. With one difference. Now we won't have to waste our time apologising for the behaviour of ministers who do not represent our interests. Now we can get back not to first principles - those are by definition yesterday's politics - but to new principles. I believe that a Labour defeat can signal a new beginning for the British left, and one thing's for sure: we definitely won't run out of work to do anytime soon.

Biscuits and bigotry: our glorious leaders.

****Please note: none of the following links is safe for work, or for those with delicate constitutions.****

Like most quiet, bookish middle-class girls with secretly filthy minds, I had always thought that the Soggy Biscuit Game was an urban legend/ a teatime accident/ something that Stephen Fry made up. According to the internet, this is not the case. According to the internet, it really happens.

For those across the pond/ around the world/ living in a cardboard box on the M6, the Soggy Biscuit game is, well. It's a game that posh public schoolboys are supposed to play. It involves wanking, and public humiliation, and a biscuit. Oh, bloody hell, just check the Wiki.

This is another thing that makes me inestimably glad that I was not spawned amongst the upper eschelons of society. I'm not trying to suggest that toffs are any more degenerate than the rest of us, but bog-standard, everyday sexual deviancy and experimentation is ...well, it's supposed to be fun, isn't it? That's the point, isn't it? I mean, if I were going to get my knob out in front of my peers, I'd want either mood music or money, and preferably both. I'd want a little less of the gag-inducing public shamefest. But apparently, at Eton, you get what you pay for, and that means culture, class and extremely speedy ejaculation onto small pieces of confectionery.

Hat-tip to Spiritof1976 for pointing out that this means that this man has almost certainly played Soggy Biscuit.

White, 'well'-bred public schoolboys are frequently cultish, is what I'm trying to communicate here. They are a strange and self-referential race, trained from boyhood to administrate tenancies, shoot defenceless woodland creatures and come on cookies. Some of them are doubtless able to defy the expectations of their upbringing; but surely not every single one of the disproportionate hordes of the creatures currently running the banks, the civil service, the regions and most of the government, and if the Tories maintain their 20-point poll lead, soon to be running even more of the country? Does anyone else make this calculation and find themselves questioning the natural order of wealth and heredity, if it means that the men who still have almost all of the money and power are overwhelmingly the bizzare, fetishistic, feckless, greasy-haired oiks whose parents have paid hundreds of thousands for them to take part in Soggy Biscuit?

Interviewed by Decca Aitkenhead today, equalities commissioner Trevor Philips said:The task today is not to shout for black people or women, but to break the grip of white men who went to public school. And that's why I'm here.'

The photo above is a picture of the Bullingdon Club, Oxford University's most exclusive drinking society, open to all members of the swaggering upper classes who like to get drunk and smash things. These young gentlemen, already displaying early signs of Tory jowlage in 1987, include several prominent barristers and businessmen, one bank director, Our Beloved Shadow Prime Minister (top row, second from left) and Our Beloved Mayor (bottom right).

Oh, Boris. Oh, you've eaten the biscuit, I'm sure of it.

Look, we're not asking for much. We're not asking for rows of potatoes to be planted on the lawns of Balmoral, or for Buckingham Palace to be turned into the country's largest publicly-owned hostel for those made homeless by the credit crunch. Not yet, anyway. But can we have some semblance of sense? Can we have someone in charge who's not a developmentally damaged, cultishly co-opted, biscuit-eating over-privileged princeling? Someone who understands what poverty, what hopelessness, what bad luck might mean in a recession? Someone who spent their university career being involved in student activism, or - god forbid - doing their work, rather than joining elitist drinking clubs and throwing bread rolls at waiters? Look at those lads. Look at their little white wing collars. Look at the nonchalant smirks on their terrible pasty faces. They don't care what they do with power as long as it's them who get to have it. And by the time we remember how very dangerous that can be, it may well be too late.

Is the Future Conservative?

You can't say 'Compassionate Conservatism' without baring your teeth, but I wanted so badly to believe - so I went to the Comment is Free/Soundings debate on Monday with an open mind. It was titled 'Is the Future Conservative?', and my mind was as open as a field, as open as the sky. As open as my jacket pocket, from which I lost £2.55 and my student bus pass on the way home, which just shows what you get for trusting people.

Tories in queer hypocrisy shocker!

So now the Tories are courting the pink vote. Big surprise. But the notion, promoted even by the BBC, that gays might have a 'duty' to vote Conservative is baffling.

They've wheeled out Margot James, PPC for Stourbridge and noted deep-blue dyke, to tell us all why we need to vote Tory. This is the same Margot James who did not stand as a gay candidate at the last election, and who has been heard saying that she hoped her partner's name, Jay, would be mistaken for that of a man by reporters. Ms James' parroting of the party-line at the Stonewall event yesterday goes something like this:

"Gay people are net contributors to public services through their taxes, because very few of them have children.

"I think gay people have got more angst on this issue than anybody else because gay people are paying in, through their taxes and actually using far less of the NHS because they tend not to have families, less of the education system for the same reason and all the more reason to be angry with this government for the waste of their taxes."

Translation: "Everyone knows you faggots hate kids! So vote for us - we hate kids, too!'

The suggestion that homosexuals do not have 'families' is both degrading and manifestly false. I happen to live in a massive multi-sexual household of six. None of us are related by blood, but we consider ourselves family. All of us, furthermore, have mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and all of us feel that - despite our sexuality - we are just as invested in other humans as anybody else. Me and my big queer family are appalled by this throwaway rhetoric, at a Stonewall event, no less.

The logic of the tory tax argument also falls down when the ageing society is brought into play. Sure, homosexuals may, on average, raise fewer sproglets than their het friends, but this makes it all the more important for us that we live in a society that invests properly in healthcare, elderly care and the pensions system. Without the dubious surity of grown-up kids to wipe our octogenarian posteriors, we are going to need a government that invests in our care - a government that values the contribution we make as members of society enough to make public spending a priority.

The main tory line, however, remains that you and I should vote Conservative because, well, there are quite a lot of gay conservatives. Newsflash: there have always been gay tories; there have been gay tories before the word was even invented. What there have never been are tories promoting a gay agenda. In recent years, tory MPs have, for the most part, had an appalling voting record on queer issues in parliament - vital issues like civil partnerships and the age of consent. The tories are quite happy for us to carry on shuffling in the dark. If they're gay, too, they certainly haven't traditionally wanted the world to know about it. The tory closet door remains firmly shut. And no wonder, this being the party that introduced and tried desperately to save Section 28 of the Local Government Act, 1988.

Just a reminder: the amendment stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". Ian Duncan Smith and a great deal of the tory party faithful spent 2003 trying to save this disgustingly homophobic piece of legislation. Nobody has apologised for that, and the silence of top conservatives over their shocking record at the Stonewall event stunk of hypocrisy.

I am not suggesting that just because you like a bit of same-sex action you absolutely must be a political radical. Not at all. Not one jot. In fact, I'm grudgingly of the opinion that one thing the 1990s were good for was freeing gay men and women of the grinding obligation not to also be bigoted fuckwits if they so chose. But bigotry and a forward-thinking queer agenda have never gone hand in hand, and if one is queer - not just gay, which is a statement of fact, but politically queer - you do have a duty to vote for anyone else apart from the tory party and far right.

Queer politics involve more than a private penchant for cock and a public rhetoric of tax breaks for straight, married couples. Queer politics are politics which make it easier for the millions of men and women who choose to live and love outside of the heteronormative box to do so without cultural, practical or financial discrimination. Queer politics are inherently radical, and not everyone working towards them is gay, and not everyone gay has queer politics. Let's not mistake gay - which is what the Conservative party has always secretly been - for queer, which it never will be.

Comic 5!

Script by PR, art by Withiel, lettering by Twitch. Apologies for tardiness - there was no way to upload this whilst I was at Conference! x