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.

Shut up, little girl, don't you know grown-ups are talking?

I apologise in advance, guys. I don't normally like to blog about the blogosphere, and I try to ignore what the blogosphere says about me, but this just takes the entire gluten-free cake.

Alright, so last week, I wrote an article about sectarianism in the liberal blogosphere for The Samosa. I was writing to brief, but it was a brief I thoroughly agreed with. In the piece I criticised, amongst other sites, anti-Islamist forum Harry's Place for slipping far too often into immature and unhelpful bullying, witch-huntery and ad hominem attacks.

Yesterday, Harry's place helpfully responded with a bullying ad hominem attack, on myself this time. Rather than actually addressing my points, the article and long comment thread consist almost wholly of a rant about how posh, rich, stupid, spoilt, young (and therefore ignorant) and female (and therefore silly and irrelevant) I am. It's worth reading in full, but if you can't be bothered, here are some choice exerpts:

From the article:

'People like Ms Penny - home counties raised and not long out of university - simply haven’t had that much time to reflect on matters beyond their own limited life experience and can’t therefore recognise political reaction if it comes with more melanin than she herself inherited'

'another member of the expensively-educated bien pensant community again...logically challenged and hopelessly muddled'

'since when did Socialism mean the rest of us had to be rearranged to suit the whims of a self-obsessed privately-educated, Oxbridge-cocooned twenty-three year old?'


From the comments:

'Silly cow'

'A stupid spoilt little girl'

'I feel sorry for her. She has no defences, no survival skills, nor any real moral framework that that would allow her to negotiate the world in an autonomous and secure way. She’s stuck in adolescence, is very weak and vulnerable.'

'a very silly, preening, posturing, vain, pretend revolutionary.

'I will criticise this spoilt little girl in any way I want'

And, most succinctly: 'Would she, please, just shut the fuck up?'

All this carries on for over 170 comments, Gosh, 170 comments, just for lil'ol me! I haven't been so thrilled since daddy bought me my third polo-pony :D

It includes a lot more invective, some speculation about my accent, and a few brave people jumping in to point out that responding to a piece about bullying and witch-huntery with a bullying witch-hunt might not be the smartest of ideas. As one commenter put it:

'The point of Laurie Penny’s article is - HP Sauce engages in smears and witch-hunts of anyone who dares dissent from its idea of what constitues ‘civilised debate’. So it responds by… smearing her, launching ad hominem personal attacks, and patronising her. The response has done her work for her. '

I'm flattered to note that a couple of knights in shining HTML have already ridden to my defence at Bleeding Heart Show and Pickled Politics. This is the point at which, for the good of my own mental health, I should probably just step away. But instead, I'd like to actually respond to the charges for once.

I'm pretty well used, by now, to being attacked on the basis of my age, my gender, my class, my background and my education, especially when people can't find much to criticise in my actual writing. It may come as a shock to some, but I’m aware that I write from a position of extreme privilege, despite having lived a lot more in my 23 years than some people at HP sauce give me credit for. I’m afraid that pointing that out isn’t going to shock me, or anyone who knows me, very terribly, although the news that I'm apparently both a Labour Party member and from the Home Counties did come as a surprise. (I was born in North London, grew up in Brighton, and have never been a party member in my life).

I’m quite open, on this blog and elsewhere, about the fact that I’m hugely lucky to have had the education and life chances I’ve been blessed with - my parents aren't peers of the realm, but we have always been reasonably comfortably off, and with my 80% scholarship they were able to afford to send me to a local independent school. I know I’m still very young and have lots to learn, but I see it as my duty to use those chances to contribute to a debate about meaningful social issues, and not just run off and make lots of money in PR or investment banking.

Tom Miller (who should know, because I've come begging to him for work more than once) pointed out on the thread that I'm actually not personally very wealthy, and am perpetually struggling to cover my rent and bills. Others have pointed out that I've had my fair share of tough life experiences, some of which I've discussed on here, some of which I haven't and shan't. These things are true enough - but they don't mean that I'm somehow exempt from class privilege. However hungry I get, I know that if I swallowed my pride, called my dad and told him I had nothing to eat, well...*sings* he would stop it all. And when I had my breakdown at 17 and was carted off to the loony bin for a year, I had my parents' private healthcare insurance making sure that I wouldn't be kicked out of hospital when the NHS cover ran out, as it did for many of the young people I shared the ward with. There's every chance that private health insurance saved my life.

It's not that I haven't fought, struggled and worked extremely fucking hard every day for the past five years just to survive. It's not that the struggle to stay well and stay productive and work for a secure future doesn't take everything I have, every day. It's that I'm privileged to have had the opportunity to work that hard at all. I know that. In fact, it's that knowledge that gets me out of bed on mornings like this one, when I'm convinced that I actually am the spoilt, selfish, weak, pathetic person that the haters like to tell me I am.

On the other points...yes, I'm young. Yes, I'm female. Yes, I am, in fact, 'little' -5 feet nothing in socks and a hefty 9 stone of ladyflesh. Tell me something I don't know. I've spent a long time being told that I'm too mouthy and opinionated for a girl, that however many books I read and measured debates I engage in, my gender and appearance mean I'm just a jumped-up, silly cow, no more. I've spent years being told to shut up and sit down and let the grown ups talk. I've spent 3 years of a neonate journalistic career being told that I'm simultaneously 'pretentious' (because I went to Oxbridge and know some long words) and 'stupid' (because...well...because I'm a girl, maybe?). And that's okay. I knew, when I decided to give journalism and writing a shot rather than go straight into teaching, that I was laying myself open to exactly the kind of bullying that nearly destroyed me when I was a weepy teenager. I'm stronger now. I know, and people who know me know, that I'm not some sort of spoilt, silly upper-middle-class princess who's never visited the real world, airlifted into a cushy media job by daddums. I've met those people, and I'm 100% convinced that I'm not one of them. If I were, I'm pretty sure I'd have a full-time paying job by now.

Criticise my writing, my ideas, my politics. Tell me I'm wrong, that I haven't read enough, that I need to educate myself more. Criticise my over-use of the semi-colon and inability to spell the word 'acheive'. Criticise my Marshall McLuhan fetish, my weakness for overblown feminist polemic, my frantic desire to find and create bridges between parts of a British left so divided that the effort itself may very well be useless. But don't call me a silly little girl. Don't tell me I'm unaware of my own privilege. If you do, don't expect me to run off crying. Don't expect me to sit down and shut up when the grown ups are talking. I am opinionated, articulate and unapologetic, and I am far fucking stronger than a lot of people would like to believe.

The only other thing I'd like to point out that I offered HP the chance to contribute to my article and put their point of view across - and they turned it down. Had they offered a retort, I'd have included it in the piece to make it more balanced. Instead, they refused to engage and devoted an entire article to a lazy ad-hominem attack. Not the first I've dealt with, nor the last. So it goes. Right, enough whinging from me, I've got work to do.

Mayday Socialist Feminist stomp!

A very merry M'aidez to you all. I was asked to give a speech, yesterday, at the Housmans Bookshop in London. This is an extract from what I said, and my thoughts have been formed by a detailed debate over at my personal blog.

********************

A sea-change is taking place in contemporary feminism, particularly in the cities. Feminism is moving out of the universities and back onto the streets, as women of all backgrounds realise that practical action, class agitation and the rights of ordinary, working women are, and always have been, the future of the movement.
Midway through writing this article on Monday, I had a pregnancy scare. My period was a couple of days late, I was spotting but not cramping, I was off my food… I panicked.
It didn’t take me long to decide that I would want to terminate the pregnancy, and that meant a litmus test for my socialism: should I spend my limited savings, money that could be going towards vital schooling, on a quick, safe, private abortion, or should I go through the stress and psycho-physical trauma of asking for an abortion on the NHS?Fortunately I got the familiar fisting cramps that night and was soon happily curled around a hot water bottle, but by that time I’d learned two things: one, that abortion and reproductive rights, like so many other feminist concerns, are primarily questions of class and economics. Two, that when you’ve had a pregnancy scare, ‘Alien 2′ is not the film to watch to calm yourself down.

Abortion is a class issue. My organisation, Feminist Fightback, is currently lobbying and demonstrating in protest at the abortion rights retractions currently on the Commons table as part of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which would cut the time-limit on later-term abortions.
This will not affect rich women, who have always been able to access abortions when they wanted them. It will affect vulnerable women who have no choice but to throw themselves on the mercies of the NHS postcode lottery and pray that they get a short waiting list and two pro-choice doctors.
Germaine Greer said, in her introduction to the Female Eunuch, that she could only speak about women of her own age, class and background. Very worthy, one might think, apart from the small fact that it was a blinkered, heinous and lazy approach that meant that one of the most influential political books of the decade only mentioned middle-class, educated, white women with prospects similar to Ms Greer’s.
Young feminists today are realising that in order to further our cause we must look beyond our own experiences. An extremely bright young working-class woman told me yesterday: “Rightly or wrongly, I regard feminism as it exists today as the territory of university-educated middle-class women with the privilege of spending some of their time debating privilege.”
While I would never dream of arguing that feminist theory, feminist blogging, etc is anything but worthwhile, to somebody whose concerns, through economic necessity, are more about finding and maintaining a job that will support them it cannot help but seem alien, or even irrelevant. The mainstream feminist collective appears not to care particularly about the realities of life as a working-class woman ‘
That, thanks to the oversights of Greer and her ilk, really is how feminism has come to be seen in many circles, despite the fact that it is fundamentally a socialist issue that transcends class. But that is changing, and I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s changing now.
Young women today, whatever their background, are finding themselves more socially and financially unstable than they have been for generations. As well as being more independent, we’re more likely to enter adulthood with massive amounts of debt, we face more pressure and competition to do well, our options and finances are more precarious, and we are more likely, whatever our level of education, to end up in hard graft, minimum wage jobs, as opposed to the glittering careers and model family lives so many of us were told to aim for.
This is part of what puts us in a position to empathise and share concerns with working women more than, perhaps, our mothers did. We are also aware, as 21st-century women, what it means to overwork for little reward within a patriarchal capitalist system that is fundamentally opposed to feminine needs.
After the social mobility of the mid-century, young women are finally coming to realise once more that the simple fact of being female puts our work, our capital value, on a different semiotic scale from that of our male classmates. For all of these reasons and more, feminism is turning again towards socialism as its natural counterpart, spearheaded by enterprising new groups like Feminist Fightback making links with workers organisations and trying to join forces with the dispossessed.
This isn’t about posh girls flirting with communism because they don’t want to pay their taxes.
We have no right to take control of someone else’s issue, no right to stomp into a territory we might not fully understand with our big mostly-white middle class feet. What it is about is people who’ve been lucky enough to have greater social opportunities and a platform using those opportunities and that platform to advance the cause of working women and to recognise that as women and as workers our goals are the same.
And then - crucially - it’s about making space on that platform and space in that debate for working-class women, women who may be bringing up kids alone, who may be working too many hours on minimum wage and may not have time or energy to blog or to organise direct action.
This is going to mean that middle-class feminists face the daunting task of working for change without the moral high ground, which is something that we are traditionally bad at. But we do not need the moral high ground to be agitators. Instead of ignoring our privilege, and by definition the concerns of the less privileged, we need to start using the advantages we’ve been given to form links, pursue local action and work for change, without necessarily expecting to be thanked and lavished with praise.
Like the men who helped push women’s suffrage through parliament 80 years ago, like the whites who marched with Luther King in the sixties, we have a duty to give help where we can, and then to step aside.