The people have mumbled!

Nothing can take the shiteating grin off my face today.

There will be no Tory majority government. Labour kicked back. The Lib Dems held the line, although they didn't make the gains they hoped. The worst-case scenario here is a hobbled Tory minority dragging its bloated, stinking carcase around the Commons until progressives throw enough rocks at it to make it squeal out another election. Yes, they can and probably will do some damage. No, it won't be as bad as it might have been.

Other bloody brilliant things: Greens get their first MP in Brighton, with party Leader Caroline Lucas taking the seat. UKIP and BNP vote surge isn't as high as predicted, and Griffin suffers a punishing defeat in Barking. Homophobic Tory hate preacher Philippa Stroud lost to the Lib Dems, as did nepotite toerag Anuzziata Rees-Mogg (although her little brother Jacob, the one with the nanny, won his Somerset seat). UKIP and the BNP turned in almost no votes in Wales and Scotland. The one tragic loss in all of this is that heroic pro-choice, pro-science, rationalist MP Dr Evan Harris lost his seat in Oxford after a boundary change. He'll be back, though. As will the left.

The people have mumbled; faced with the prospect of Torygeddon, the people have stammered. This is not how enfranchisement looks, but it's enough to have made David Cameron very, very angry and, you know, that's fine by me.

The Tory day of glory is soured, and there will be no 1997 moment for the Conservative party whilst I'm young, although this is enough of a gotcha moment to help the left get its goddamn boots on and remember what it's for. We've got a long, hard fight ahead of us. But we knew that anyway. And the beast coming over the hill just started to look a lot sillier. Let's stay a bit cheerful.

Day of the Dead

[written on the tube home from the Trafalgar Square vigil. Photos from BLTPicons are here - let me know if you'd like me to link to your photos of the event!]

Tonight was the second vigil I have attended in six months for a man murdered on the streets of London. The first, Ian Tomlinson, was a victim of police brutality at the G20 protests - an innocent bystander and family man who did nothing to provoke the violence he met at the hands and batons of those who were meant to protect and serve him. The second, Ian Baynham, 62, died in hospital on October the 13th after homophobes attacked him in Trafalgar square. Ordinary citizens, out walking in the heart of their own city, minding their own business; blameless men brutalised by a thuggish state and a society simmering with repressed rage and unthinking prejudice against anyone a little different.

Tonight, thousands of us have gathered in Trafalgar square, the site of the attack, for a candlelit vigil against hate crime. When I arrive, the square is packed, humming, glowing with little lights; St Martin in the Field Church has donated hundreds of candles, and organisers with great hair and horrible hi-vis tshirts are handing them out. The atmosphere is somewhere between a riot and a state funeral, an undercurrent of anger punctuating the speakers' every sentence with low howls of protest. This should not still be happening.

"We're here to stop violent hate-crime," says one teenager, his arm around his girlfriend. "I've been bullied in the street, and so have my friends," cuts in a lady with an orange crew-cut and fiery eyes. "It seems to be getting worse". She is right: in the past few years, homophobic hate-crime in the UK has risen by almost 20%.

Suddenly, a hush gathers in the flickering half-light. A list of names is read out: all the victims of homophobic hate crime in the past ten years, predominantly in London. On the steps a choir begins to sing, something soaring low and beautiful with a deep beat that might be drums, or clapping hands, or centuries of frustration and forgiveness. Looking around me I see people with their eyes closed, soaking in the music and the sense of sacredness, people embracing; a man with his arm around his wife, the light from their candles deepening the lines in their faces. Two middle-aged women are kissing softly; a boy of about twenty holds hands with another boy, quiet, listening. A teenage couple dangle their feet in the fountain, holding each other.

The year is turning. Today is Samhain; Hallowe'en parties are going on across the capital. For countless centuries, people in Britain have gathered at this time of year to burn offerings for dead friends and relatives. Tonight we're lighting candles of protest for those who were taken from us because of ignorance, violence and prejudice. Tonight we are here to make a reckoning; to celebrate our solidarity and diversity and stand together in the face of fear.

Outside the square, police cars drone away across London, but the choir's song rises above the idiot howling of the sirens. Noone can quite make out the words, but it's something about love.

Nelson's column burns like a pagan pyre with three thousand little lights of protest. London mourns its dead.

A bit of good news.

Alan Turing has been posthumously vindicated by the British Government, in response to a petition on the Number 10 website which received thousands of signatures. Turing was a brilliant mathematician and code-breaker who played a significant part in the Allied victory in World War Two. In 1952, he was tried for 'gross indecency' under the homophobic laws of the time, and sentenced to chemical castration. He took his own life two years later.

Gordon Brown's statement was actually pretty damn moving -

On behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

A queer friend pointed out to me today that thanks to this little act on the part of the government, far too late for poor Turing himself, millions of people who had never heard his story now know exactly who he was, why he was a hero, and why his death was so tragically unjust. And that means as much as any personal victory for supporters of the man himself.

In other breaking news, it's eight years since the World Trade Centre collapsed, and Caster Semenya is biologically intersexed. Now be about your business.

Purnell's welfare plan 'close to collapse'!

Haha!

Sucks to be you, Jimmy boy!

'Responding to warnings that his reforms will not work without major changes, James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, has abandoned plans to announce the preferred bidders for the multi-million-pound contracts this week. This follows demands from the firms involved for hundreds of millions more in "up-front" cash. A crisis meeting between top department officials and the bidding companies was cancelled on Friday after Whitehall announced a "short pause" in the tendering process.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said it had been called off "because of the snow", but one company manager involved remarked: "The most telling thing is that no new date was set."'

No, this doesn't mean we can relax. No, I'm not going to get off this man's back or stop pressing for liberal reforms in any small way that I can, not until I see a radical new deal on the table for the sick, disabled and long-term unemployed coupled with a requirement that work pay a living wage. Yes! Yes, alright, I'm a goddamn socialist! What are you looking at? *twitches*

After months of trying to feed six people on two minimum-wage salaries, after months hunting for jobs that don't exist in a market that mistrusts the physically and mentally impaired, my household has decided to beg the government for our dinners again. I've spent the last two hours filling in online benefits claims forms for my severely disabled partner, and no, the support isn't adequate and no, no I'm not happy about that. But I'm going to sleep a little bit sounder tonight knowing that there's less chance that my lamb of a lover is going to have to hobble on his poor leg to stack shelves in ASDA for less than half the minimum wage.

Thanks to everyone who commented on the welfare posts; keep on propagating, guys. It's too early to let our guard down just yet.

Barely Legal...

A victory this week for the Safety First Coalition, as legislation attempting to further criminalise prostitutes was thrown out, once more, by the House of Lords. The legislation, which would have involved forced rehabilitation or prison for repeat offenders and greater powers given to the police to arrest and incarcerate hookers, has been officially axed from the extremely dubious Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. (Keep your eye on this one).

Call me sally-state-the-obvious, but when a person is in the sort of situation where prostitution starts looking like a viable career option, the fact that it might be illegal is probably going to be the least of their worries. Right, I'm going to take a job which is widely seen as degrading, unstable, hugely dangerous, exposes me daily to disease and isolates me from my friends and family - no, but wait! I might get a criminal record!

The functional illegality of prostitution in the UK serves only one purpose: to better allow the police and others to bully and pick on the most vulnerable members of society - mostly young, mostly women, almost exclusively poor and desperate, often chemically addicted and forcibly on the wrong side of a sexually conformist-heteronormative privilege divide.

Angela Millen, a London barrister, told me yesterday about Shani*, from London, who has 379 convictions for soliciting, and who has been served with an ASBO preventing her from entering the London Borough of Lambeth - where her whole family, including an ailing mother, reside. As a result the 37-year old, who is now familiar to the police and an easy target, spends half of her time in Holloway women's prison, and the rest of the time working the streets illegally in order to feed herself outside of custody. There is no conceivable way in which current government legislation is helping women like her.

Let me make one thing absolutely and incontrovertibly clear: we are not talking about Belle de Jour. Belle de Jour, if she exists (and I'm a believer), is a sexually self-possessed and self-determining woman with a lot of support in the career she has chosen. She has a financial, emotional, commercial and personal buffer which makes it both safe and profitable for her to continue with prostitution (and prostitution blogging) as a career. She happens, however, to be the exception to the rule that the patriarchal fantasy of the happy hooker is fallacious (a phallacy...oh, they're rolling in the aisles).

I have written before on the media circus around Belle De Jour. She and those who support her most vociferously are absolutely right in stating that prostitution is a career choice, and, in some rare circumstances, only that. The fact that Belle has built an extremely successful writing career around prostitution no doubt affects how much she enjoys her work, but the fact stands that prostitution - when it does not involve personal, social, financial and physical subordination on every level, as it normally does- is not in itself a degrading career choice. For the vast majority of young men and women entering the profession, however, that level of choice is simply not on the cards.

Is the job degrading for most prostitutes? Yes, but not for the reasons you might think. We live in a society simultaneously in denial about our massive commodification of sex and obsessed with women's sexuality as a moral code. The selling of sex is degrading because it is taboo and quasi-criminalised, and it is taboo and quasi-criminalised because women actively selling sex rubs our faces in one of the salient facts of patriarchal capitalist societies: that sexuality, particularly of women and vulnerable men, is on display for the highest bidder.

The whore is not culpable for her (usually) reduced social and financial circumstances: society is, and the whore is criminalised to allay our own self-disgust . It is not the hooker who is reprehensible, but her clients, which is why each time a noted politician - such as New York governor and celebrated anti-sleaze campaigner, Eliot Spitzer - is discovered paying substantial sums for the services of prostitutes, it continues to cause a scandal. It is the hypocrisy that disgusts us: however much we don't want prostitution on our doorsteps, we are even loather to imagine leading patriarchal and authoritarian figures engaging intimately with an industry whose gross lack of regulation has turned it into a cipher for the violent mosogyny at the heart of capitalist patriarchy. I can only wish the aspiring musician who provided Spitzer with her personal services the best of all possible luck in her future career.

So what's the state of play now for Britain's sex workers? Well, the most the IUSW and Safety First knew they could hope for at this stage was maintainance of the status quo, which they've worked tirelessly for and duly achieved. So, although forced rehabilitation and measures leading to the jailing of more than the current 3,500 prostitutes a year are being thrown out, soliciting and brothel-keeping are still very much illegal, as is kerb-crawling, making advertising sex for sale even more dangerous. 'Living on the earnings of prostitution', however, has not been illegal since 1956, meaning that prostitution is legal as long as you don't do it safely or in public.

Semi-criminalisation of this kind has become the default response of the British authorities to distastefully longstanding social problems. Making an activity such as prostitution effectively illegal - but just illegal enough that it remains unregulated, uncontrolled, unprotected and, most importantly, unofficial - means the authorities can be seen not to endorse social injustice without actually having to deal with an endemic social tragedy in any meaningful way.

Exactly the same logic applies to underage drinking and to marijuana legislation (weed is a class C drug, so, again, functionally legal but unregulated, meaning that the under-16 market is flooded with free skunk). Britain does not want to think of itself as a nation whose under-40 yr old population relies on downer drugs like hash and skunk to help it cope with day-to-day living - but it is. Britain does not want to see itself as a nation whose children are blasted and wayward because it's some of the most damn fun they can have - but it is. Britain does not want to think of itself as a nation where hundreds of thousands of vulnerable woman are exploited and abused every day, where the bottom line of women's value is still their sexuality - but it is.

I say Britain because semi-criminalisation is a particularly British political phenomenon. Where countries like the USA simply cart off whores, stoners and teenage drinkers for lengthy jail sentences, we stamp a 'could do better' sticker on the problem and leave the police and media snootiness to bully it into invisibility. We sneer at the hyperconservatism of some US states whilst committing a gross sin of ommission: neglect by studiedly ignoring - or, worse, accepting - the problem.

If the British Government really wanted to do something about prostitution, there's one blindingly obvious step that they could take and aren't: ensure that poor and desperate women have other viable choices. Provide a genuine living minimum wage which
allows the poorest members of society a decent, legally-obtainable standard of living. This is the bottom line for anti-prostitution campaigners both within and outside Westminster. John McDonnel MP supported this pro-worker sentiment, declaring to the Safety First Coalition last week, "I welcome the government's announcement and hope that it signals a future approach towards prostitution underlined by welfare measures rather than criminalisation, putting the needs and safety of sex workers above the desire for moral condemnation."

All of this talk has made me terrifically moopy, so I'm off to spend the remainder of the money I made at my last terrible retail job on crack and jelly babies. Expect more updates on less legitimate prostitution legislation as the situation progresses.