News from Nowhere

I've left London, and I am sailing to a new island that has appeared out of the ice in the Arctic circle. No, this is not a prank. I've been invited along with an eclectic collection of academics, artists, lawyers, activists, sixth-formers and scientists to sail to this small pitch of land, which has been named NowhereIsland, as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Right now, I'm in Oslo, and tomorrow we travel to Svalbard, where we will board a ship, the Noorderlicht, which will take us to the island, where those of us who went to fee-paying schools will be devoured by bears.

Along the way, we're supposed to debate and discuss how to build a conceptual new nation, a model society in the wreck of late capitalism. There is a chance, given how many Guardian readers we seem to have on this trip, that we may just all turn pirate and start raiding the coastal towns of Norway and Finland and looting all the humous and complicated jam. Presuming we make it, however, we will have weeks stuck on a boat to debate utopianism, anarchism, feminism and environmental activism and try to avoid one another's eyes in the communal showers.

Anyone can become a citizen of Nowhere Island, just by signing up here. In fact, NowhereIsland already has more citizens than Vatican City* and we may soon outnumber Monaco, although you can't reroute your tax through Nowhere Island, because in this new nation the common wealth of humanity will be held above the pursuit of profit. Also, there isn't a bank.

I signed up for this journey because I was thoroughly enamoured with the possibility of going to the Polar circle, and by the human experiment of being crammed on a tiny ship with twenty strangers and no internet access for two weeks, a sort of Big Brother as imagined by Ian McEwan. As I've become more involved in the project, however, I've come to realise what a mad, brilliant idea it really is, and so, I need your help. I'd like you to write, in the comments here or in an email to me, and share your idea of Utopia - Nowhere, in Greek - of an ideal society, whatever that means to you. I don't care if your vision of Utopia is a zero-carbon society, a neo-libertarian dystopia, a world without gender, or a fantasy theocracy where everyone worships the Flying Spaghetti Monster and matters of state are decided by competitive playoffs of Dance Dance Revolution . It can be as detailed as you like, or just a few lines. I'll be keeping a travel diary of this mad, weird fortnight and will post as and when I have web access, which will depend entirely on the satellite service. And the bears.

*and not ALL of them are Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. :S

Of Pies and Circuses

In Greece, they raise their hands. In Iraq, they throw their shoes. In Britain, we throw pies. This probably says a lot about us as a nation. Like everyone else, when I saw young comedian Jonnie Marbles lobbing a foam pie in Rupert Murdoch's face, as the elderly oligarch attempted to distance himself from years of criminal newsgathering, police corruption and government complicity, I felt like I was dreaming. One of the weirder dreams, where you have to ride a horse made of biscuits, or watch someone you know throwing a plate of gunk down the shirt of the most powerful man in the world. That shit doesn't happen in real life.

Many people have been asking me whether or not I condemn the pie. I would invite those people to stand in front of the mirror and say 'I condemn the pie' without collapsing into giggles. Chucking a foam pie in Rupert Murdoch's face was undoubtedly a silly thing to do- I, too, would have preferred the polite comeuppance being delivered by Tom Watson and other honest MPs to continue undisturbed- but it's hardly Baader-Meinhof, is it? Jonnie Marbles is no more a violent terrorist than Harpo Marx. He threw a pie, not a grenade. It was a stunt. It was, let's face it, a funny stunt. On its own terms, it was a successful stunt- and the problem with successful stunts is that they make headlines.

In terms of distracting attention from his wheedling refusal to accept responsibility for what went on at NewsCorp, Murdoch could not have bought better publicity unless he had personally hired a lackey to shoot his son in the middle of the hearing - an oversight which, at one point in the proceedings, he looked like he was regretting. During the Murdochs' questioning, NewsCorp shares jumped by five per cent, in part because of the pie, briefly splattering the entire debate open in a welter of wet foam, but also because the Sun King played his own part with tooth-aching finesse.

That was the real circus. The man who owns and dictates the news on three continents played to the crowd as a doddering, out-of-touch gentleman executive who had absolutely no idea why he had had back-door access to Downing Street for decades, no idea why his journalists illegally hacked the phones of grieving relatives and a murdered teenager, no idea why his newspapers seem to have bought and paid for the Metropolitan police.

The terrifying thing is that a foam pie in the face is almost certainly the closest thing to actual disrespect Rupert Murdoch has experienced for thirty years. The stunt gives the remaining pro-Murdoch press an excuse to distract attention from the ugly details of the snowballing hacking scandal- but at the expense of showing their fallen prince covered in gunge and baffled, like Emperor Palpatine appearing in an episode of Get Your Own Back. The whole point of the thrown pie as a comedy trope is that it's designed to humiliate, not to hurt - the 'heinous assault on an eighty year old man' line is unlikely to wash for long. One would hope that the police officers currently holding Jonnie Marbles in custody will remember that, rather than treating him like some sort of wanton confectionary terrorist, but unfortunately the only way to find that out would be to hack their phones, and decent people don't do that.

Hackgate is too big and purposeful a beast to be by distracted by a juicy pie for more than a few hours. The status quo has been turned on its head and shaken until the dirty cash falls out. The power elites in Britain and, increasingly, in the US, have been rattled to their core. Journalists across the media spectrum are remembering that their job is to report the truth, not twist the agenda to suit their bosses. The moral panopticon of the Murdoch press, manufacturing consensus for thirty years of war and the pursuit of profit with pictures of tits and celebrity chitchat, has been exposed as a circus of lies and corruption, lubricating politicians into lazy complicity, putting government ministers on its payroll to do its bidding, turning the police force into a bunch of hired lackeys and the justice system into a mercenary sham, pilfering the still-warm bodies of slaughtered soldiers and strangled schoolgirls for a story, any story. Murdoch is eating humble pie (I wish I'd been the first to make that pun) with or without Jonnie Marbles. Can you tear your eyes away, even for a second? No, nor can I.

And that's just what the British government is counting on. Today, in the middle of the select committee hearing, it was discreetly announced that the NHS will be opened up for privatisation- the very thing that nobody voted for, the thing that almost noone wanted apart from private healthcare firms, the politicians whose election campaigns they financed, and -guess who?- the Murdoch press. Last week's Open Public Services white paper threatens to confiscate state-provided welfare, social housing, schools, nursing homes, libraries, hospitals, hospices. The hacking scandal has made it almost to the doors of Downing street, but in the meantime, on the quiet, the agenda of Murdoch's tame cabinet is being signed and delivered. It cannot be permitted. If we believe in a fairer, more honest world, we can't allow ourselves to be entirely distracted by the circus.

Resignations, rivalry and the future of the left.

Radical politics, like romance, inevitably disappoints. It has become a cliché that liberal infighting gets in the way of liberal action, but this week has been a flashpoint for the British left, struggling to organise itself in the face of an upcoming election which may well bring greater gains for its enemies on the right and the far-right than the country has seen for a generation.

Fifty core members of provocative far-left group The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) resigned their membership yesterday in a dramatic public walkout that has sent shockwaves through the British left. The catalyst for the walkout was the resignation of party stalwart and recent Mayoral candidate Lindsey German after members attempted to block her appearance at a local Stop The War meeting, amid ferocious internal debates. "Such sectarian behaviour does enormous damage to the standing of the party in the movement, [and] fits into what is now a well-established pattern," conceded the fifty former SWP members in their joint resignation statement.

They are right: sectarianism has crippled progress on the left since the formation of Respect in 2004, and has prevented any genuine electoral alternative to the three central parties from forming. The SWP has been at the forefront of every attempt to scupper cohesion on the left over the past decade, gaining themselves a reputation for petty squabbling that, for many, overshadows their valuable work in opposing the Iraq war and propelling the anti-capitalist mobilisations of the start of the decade. It’s almost enough, in the words of singer-songwriter Frank Turner, to make one hang up one’s banner in disgust and head for the door.

The inertia that inevitably results from destructive leftist squabbles is heartbreaking for anyone who believes in progress, but there is something to be said for infighting - within reason. The nature of the left is multifarious. We are progressive not in spite of our differences, but because of them: we are progressive because we have the imagination to think beyond the good old days or the status quo, and sometimes that thinking will take us in different directions. However, radical politics, like romance, isn’t a thought or a feeling – it’s something that you do. The usefulness of the British Left will not be judged by the purity of our ideals, but by our actions, and by what we manage to achieve together for the benefit of ordinary people.

Lenin's maxim of "freedom of discussion but unity in action" is the founding principle of Democratic Centralism, the nominal organising principle of most liberal and left-wing parties, as well as several others. Unfortunately, sectarian groups like the SWP have historically been so scuppered by internal squabbles and personality politics that they haven't even managed to nail the first part. And that's no way to build a flat-pack cabinet, much less a coherent platform for the future of British progressive politics.

Factional splitting is hardly unheard of on the left, but yesterday's walkout offers genuine cause for hope. Most significantly, the mutineers acknowledged the need to prioritise agitation over irritation, saying that “the most glaring mistake has been the SWP’s refusal to engage with others in shaping a broad left response to the recession, clearly the most pressing task facing the left.

“Even valuable recent initiatives, like the Right to Work campaign, have minimised the involvement of Labour MPs, union leaders and others who have the capability to mobilise beyond the traditional left,” said the mutineers, who recognised the achievements of the SWP in their statement. Their call for unity in action could hardly be more urgent.

Were we living in a period of peace, stability and economic ease, without the pressing necessity of a response to climate change, the left could be forgiven for allowing itself the luxury of protracted ideological self-scrutiny – a pastime that has never overly troubled the British right. But we are cowering on the tracks of a cultural crisis, and there is a train bearing down upon us, and it is brutal, and relentless, and recalcitrant, and intolerant, and if we don’t hold it up it’s going to roll right over us. If we want to halt the approach of a grim Tory future riddled with fascist pressure groups, the left needs to prioritise action over solipsistic squabbling – because if we don’t, the far right will.

[adapted from a talk I gave at Mutiny last week and cross-posted at The Samosa]

Can't Stop the Blog

This article was published on the Huffington Post on Tuesday; I wanted to leave a few days before cross-posting to keep the previous post at the top of this blog. Hope you enjoy it!

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The people of Britain understand the political potential of the internet like nobody else in the West. We have a ferocious craving for democratic involvement, in part because we have been denied it for so long within our democracy, and electronic engagement offers us a voice where our own government does not.

The unique circumstances in which the United States was created has led to the overwhelming impression that the North American government, whatever its flaws, is of the people and by the people. In Britain, by contrast, government is still an arm of the elite, operating by mandate of the crown. Last week, 'The Unspoken Constitution', a document drawn up by Westminster insiders and journalists to expose our country's painful lack of a just and concrete political settlement, was published and disseminated online - just like nearly every dissenting element of British political thought. It is because we do not feel that we own a stake in our own democracy that the internet holds an unique fascination for the British as a nation.

This week, the power of the internet over the British political imagination spread its infectious energy to the world. First, there was Trafigura. When the London law firm Carter-Ruck obtained an order to ban the Guardian newspaper from reporting on Trafigura's dumping of toxic waste , millions of internet users fought to keep the information public - and won.*Trafigura and *Carterruck became trending topics on the social networking site Twitter, bloggers across the world published their own research into the cover-up, and Carter-Ruck found itself unable to contain the spread of information. The firm has withdrawn the gagging order, and international attention has been drawn to social and environmental abuses which might otherwise have slipped under the radar.

Then on Thursday Jan Moir, a columnist for ultra right-wing newspaper The Daily Mail, published an hatefully homophobic article claiming that popstar Stephen Gateley's sudden death from a congenital heart condition could not have been "natural", despite the coroner's ruling - because Gateley was civilly partnered to another man. The tweetosphere and blogosphere mobilised in disgust at Moir's column, again forcing a reaction from both the media elite and the international community, with retailers such as Nestle and Marks and Spencer withdrawing their advertising from the newspaper to distance themselves from Moir's intolerance. The Press Complaints Commission received 21,000 complaints about the article in a single weekend - more than it usually receives in five years. As blogger Iain Dale tweeted on Thursday: "Jan Moir's career has died of perfectly natural causes."

The latest instalment of the Welsh-American webcomic 'bunny', entitled 'Can't Stop the Blog', sums up the situation perfectly, with two suited figures under attack by giant blue birds that resemble the Twitter logo. For British users of the incongruously named site, the sudden sense of power in a progressive online consensus is thrilling.

Despite or, perhaps, because of our lust for freedom of collective expression, Britain boasts some of the strictest libel laws in the world. Trafigura was not the first international company to attempt to exploit this fact to its advantage, nor will it be the last. The state has good reason to tremble at the possibility of its populace being allowed to share opinions at speed. When the last earth-shattering communications revolution, the printing press, finally achieved widespread uptake in the 17th century, the explosion of handbills, newsheets, satire and subversive literature helped to catalyse a decade of bloody civil war. In a very real sense, moveable type set in motion the dire and righteous machinery whose trajectory ended, on a cold January morning in 1649, with the killing of a king.

The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips once said that '“What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind.” The internet has had the equivalent impact of the advent of atomic warfare on the world of ideas, making individual thinkers part of a chain reaction whose power can be immediate and devastating. Marshall McLuhan observed in ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy that "societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication". The British are desperate to see our creakily ancient institutions – newspapers and political parties dominated by wealthy Oxbridge graduates and a parliamentary system where official communication between the two houses is still overseen by the hereditary figure of Black Rod – reshaped by the internet.

Slowly, that reshaping is beginning to happen. Last year, Britain watched in awe as Barack Obama’s presidential campaign demonstrated the power of the internet to effect change, and activists of all stripes have determined to learn from the campaign: advisers on internet strategy for Obama/Biden ’08 are still swamped by requests to speak at seminars and conferences in the UK. Moreover, the boldness of online commentators and independent auditors this year has inspired British media institutions, particularly the Guardian group and the Daily Telegraph, to embrace for the first time in decades the duty of keeping the government and law enforcement honest.

The process is achingly slow. Twitter user Leon Green commented that “When Twitter campaigns lead to people voting 1 way or another then I'll be excited. It's just off starting blocks till then.” But a groundswell of online grumblers is gradually changing the shape of British politics.

We have always been a nation of grumblers, gossipers and whiners. Thirty centuries of being invaded by nearly everyone, ruled over by bloodthirsty fops in stupid tights and incessantly rained on will do that to you. Now that Britain has the highest percentage of internet users in the world, with 79.8% of the country's population connected, we finally have a chance to turn our national pastime of whinging into a focused endeavour. October 2009 may well go down in history as the month when Whitehall and the world learned not to underestimate the power of several million Brits grumbling as one.

Stop hounding the Prime Mentalist!

So. Rumour has it [well, Guido has it] that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is taking a course of mood-stabilising anti-depressants. Several major blogs and broadsheet columnists of all stripes have gone public with the allegation that Gordon Brown is taking “heavy duty antidepressants known as MAOIs (Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors)”. This rumour, along with what Guido reminds us are "the stories of rages, flying Nokias, smashed laser printers, tables kicked over and crying Downing Street secretaries subjected to foul-mouthed tirades", have led many in the national press to suggest or imply that Brown's leadership is inherently undermined by his alleged mental health difficulties, as well as by the medication he supposedly takes for those difficulties.

We have no way of substantiating this rumor, but let's for a moment run with the assumption that Brown is taking anti-depressants. My response? Good. Great. If the Prime Minister of Britain is suffering from depression or some other mental health condition, which given the stresses of his current position seems highly likely, then I'm glad he's getting treatment for it. I'm glad he's man enough to admit that he might need help. Anti-depressants are used by millions of people in this country, although the stigma attached means that many of us don't talk about it, and in almost all cases barring those of people detained against their will in institutions, the process is both voluntary and helpful. It takes courage to go to the doctor and say that you have a problem, even if you're not a leading political figure who's constantly in the public eye. I only wish more politicians would follow his example - after all, it's not as if mental health difficulties in government are unheard of.

Some of the greatest leaders the Western world has ever seen had serious mental health difficulties. Winston Churchill was plagued by crippling depression, which he referred to as 'black dog' and treated with that much less effective anti-depressant, booze. Lincoln was also chronically depressed and anxious. The Time To Change campaign has hilighted these examples, along with other famous figures who had mental health difficulties, such as Florence Nightingale and Charles Darwin. Last year, a Mind investigation found that large numbers of politicians and staff were forced to hide mental health problems, with 19% of MPs, 17% of Peers and 45% of staff reporting personal experience of mental health difficulties. And in 2001, the Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik outed himself as a person with depression, and was subsequently elected for a second term.

So is the 'Prime Mentalist', as he has become known, a person who has mental health problems? It certainly seems likely . Would that fact, by definition, make him unfit to lead the country? Absolutely not. Not only have plenty of great statesmen and women had mental health problems, the experience of overcoming those problems and playing to one's strengths may even be an advantage in politics - as it is for many people who, like myself, battle mental ill health.

You need to be a bit mental to play the politics game, and if you aren't to begin with, you might be before long - 86% of MPs say that their jobs are stressful, and at a recent Depression Alliance event Laura Moffat MP bravely told guests that her own experience of depression was a direct result of her valuable and ongoing work in poltics. A symptom such as paranoia, believing everyone hates you and is talking about you behind your back, may well be a perfectly rational response to, say, being Gordon Brown. I'd wager that few politicians are entirely sane, especially not the successful ones - just take a glance at Tony Blair or David Cameron if you want to see what an obviously broken personality looks like. On the other hand, just for example, it's perfectly possible that Enoch Powell and his dimwitted BNP descendants are entirely sound of mind - stupid, prejudiced and evil, but sane.

One's mental health does not affect one's morals or one's ability to lead. To say that Gordon Brown is a mentalist may well be accurate, but it's also entirely beside the point. Gordon Brown is not a weak leader because of his mental health. If he is a weak leader, it is because he lacks the courage of his convictions, because he no longer has a convincing political narrative, because he is out of steam and out of ideas.

So let's challenge Brown for being a worn-out, uninspiring leader who we're all a bit sick of. Let's bring charges of cronyism, aggression, lack of charisma and lack of ideals. But don't let's for a moment suggest that his mental health - good or bad, medicated or unmedicated - has anything to do with it.

Push the button, save the world: Torchwood and the British state

In response to a few requests, I'm continuing the review theme here. Partly because there's a lot of stressful stuff going on down in the trenches and I've been ingesting a metric buggerload of fantasy/sci fi/drama to get through it, and partly because, well. I've just this second finished watching Torchwood: Children of Earth, and it had me squeeing, and then shouting at the telly, and now it's got me thinking.

This is when Torchwood finally grew up, and I've come away with about ten times more respect for Russel T Davies than I had before. He's kept the cheek-wobbling ham acting, but ensured that the sex is far less important than the politics in the series, which is how it always should have been. The gay agenda is still there, of course, but there's simply too much going on for it to get much attention - which, in an ideal world, is how everyone should respond to the sexuality of strangers. And yes, they killed one half of the main gay couple, but in an incredibly bloody moving way that validated and contextualised homosexuality within the plot, a way that was definitively non-gratuitous. It was a GOOD death, it was shiny-dead-lover narrative logic turned effortlessly queer, and that's not something I've seen on TV before, and TV is what changes the way people think. That's why I love this show. It's shiny, it's clunky and it's all about ideas.


Bastards in suits sell us out: The Panto

This series didn't even try to make anything look particularly convincing, and instead pulled out all the old lo-budget sci-fi tropes, with the horrible robotic screaming children, wiggly green oscilloscopes down in the basement of Thames House, anti-poison boiler suits, and aliens so scary that no existing TV wizardry could possibly do them justice who spent the whole show growling in a tank of fog. And like all the best sci-fi, it was political satire thinly disguised as whimsy.

Turns out that we didn't need to see the monster in the tank at all, because the real monsters were the ones who were on screen most of the time: the ones behind the desks in Thames House. It all started to look suspicious when, soon after the horrible standing-still-kids started screaming 'We Are Coming', John Frobisher - Home Office Permanent Secretary, played brilliantly by Peter Capaldi - and various frazzled people in ill-fitting suits started blundering about trying to cover up something awful we'd done in 1965, which three episodes later is revealed to have been giving some aliens twelve parentless Scottish kids to torture until they released gummy chemicals that the aliens just loved to get high off. Dodgier still, the whole world was now looking at us, with every child in the world pointing at London and speaking flawless BBC English. When the same aliens, calling themselves The 456, finally did show up on our doorstep, it wasn't long before the PM and various ministers were around a table with an assortment of serious-looking world leaders being given a talking-to by the United States, looking like a 10-year-old caught shoplifting. Which was so painfully spot-on that it hurt a little bit to watch.

The first question on everyone's lips in the show was the most important, the one that the fine tradition of British sci-fi always forgets to ask: why us? Why do all the aliens and apocalypses happen to tiny, moist little Britain? Why were the kids even speaking English when, as Torchwood was at pains to point out, English is not even the world's most common first language (that would be Mandarin). The 456's response made me cackle: we came here because you have no significance. You are middle men.

Because that's what we are, isn't it. A nation of middle men. Of go-betweens and diplomats and middle managers, frantic to cover up anything that might put a stain on our reputation: just look at the next Prime Minister. Look at the government response to the policing of the G20 protests, where we were so very ashamed of how our rowdy populace would seem to world leaders that we were prepared to send the troops in on innocent bystanders. RTD's biting backhander worked because it was true. Of course, the real reason the 456 chose to crash on British soil was darker still: we'd given them kids in the past. They knew that we'd do it again. They knew that when threatened with any sort of inconvenience, the British government will take the coward's road. Even if it causes bloodshed and suffering, we'll play the big kids' game, hoping they won't hurt us: whether that's the USA or some bloody monster from the sky making vague threats to wipe out humanity. In Torchwood: Children of Earth, the 456 don't even bother to explain how they're going to kill us all: the merest threat of danger is all that's needed for the cabinet to give the order to start loading kids onto vans, and then, as it turns out, blame it all on the USA ,who were technically in charge at the time.

Of course, they had to to work out which kids to sacrifice. And my mouth fell open as the ministers round the table calmly ensured that their own children wouldn't be at risk. They start out by siphoning off the kids noone will miss - the failed asylum seekers - before agreeing to send 'the lowest-achieving ten percent' off to the slaughter. How were they going to determine which kids were the lowest-achieving? Simple: the school league tables.

Which is also exactly what would have been done today, for a definition of 'today' involving slime-spewing aliens. Torchwood made no attempt to disguise the government's cold class logic, with a government agent telling middle-class Alice Carter and her son: 'don't worry. The nice kids are safe. They're getting rid of the ten percent they don't want - the kids on street corners'. Meanwhile, the chavs on the Cardiff estate were the only people showing the humanity to fight back and protect their own kids as the soldiers dragged them screaming out of their houses.


Can't stop the signal

New Who is all about ideas, and one of RTD's most enduring obsessions has been with citizen journalism, with ordinary people taking control and 'turning the signal back on them'. In fact, that's precisely how RTD's protagonists defeat the bad guys in three out of four Dr Who finales to date, as well as countless other episodes. And yes, it's cheesy and it's obvious, but I think it's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And in this series the concept really came into its own, with heroic amateur reporters saving the day from the sidelines, and the Torchwood team holding the entire government hostage by threatening to release details of the dodgy dealings to the public. We'll release the tapes to the public is, in fact, the number-one absolute and final worst thing you can say to a politician, in Torchwood and in real life - has been since Watergate. The only thing we can do, whether we want to defeat aliens or our more earthly overlords, is to take control of the signal - and the way that simple agenda is handled in the miniseries is elegant and moving.

Because a British state ready to abandon its own people to pain, loss and hardship is not science fiction. It's happening right now, today. In the 20th century alone, the government sacrificed not 335,000 but millions and millions of its own citizens, mostly boys, some barely more than children, when faced with an enemy armed only with machine guns and lots of mud. Right now, our government is offering subsidies to wealthy bankers whilst kicking a significant proportion of the poorest and neediest in the nethers. Right now, our government is placing us all in terrible danger by maintaining an arsenal of country-killing weaponry simply in order to make themselves feel better about our dwindling importance on the world stage. Right now, saving face and staying powerful is more important than saving the world, and there isn't even a magic button we can push to make it stop.

In You Can Panic Now's far more erudite post, the writer concludes that the bleakness of Torchwood: Children of Earth prevents it from being truly excellent television - we're deprived of that glimpse of human heroism, that glimmer of hope at the end of a harrowing show:

The everyday heroism of human life is what is truly missing from this series, and it is deliberately excluded in favour of a political message: our leaders care only for politics, and in their pursuit of political power lose touch with real life, and we the people are too apathetic and powerless to stop them. Ultimately, the storyteller is responsible for the message that his story sends. And I think that Children of Earth failed, on Day Five, to deliver a message that was useful, morally coherent and worthy. Shocking and frightening us with the potential of our own brutality was step one, but it was not followed by a step two.

I'm inclined to agree, which is why I'd make a terrible TV pundit: I like unremitting bleakness. I find it energising not to be offered easy solutions. RTD has always been a nihilist, an atheist with an eye for showing us our own most terrible potential in disarmingly silly ways. The real genius of Torchwood: Children of Earth, as well as those shit-scary screaming kids, was its effortless grasp of what is truly to be feared in this world. The series didn't need super-CGI, brilliant acting or massive fight sequences. It didn't even need to take the monster out of the fog: the actual aliens were barely on screen at all. Turns out that the monster was on the other side of the glass the whole time, in Westminster, ready to sell us all out for the promise of a quiet life. We were looking at the monster all along: we're still looking at the monster, and ultimately we are offered no easy redemption. That right there is the sort of sci-fi that scares the bejeezus out of me. Bloody brilliant stuff.

More on those stupid white men.

Dear white, straight guys: it’s not about you.

No, really, listen up. I have been stunned this week by the cybersquall that has erupted over Rowenna Davis’ Guardian article, entitled – although not by her – ‘Stupid White Heterosexual Male’. The article was well written, reasonable, and managed to make points about equality without getting personal, which is unsurprising, as Rowenna Davis is at the tender age of 24 one of the finest and most ethical journalists I’ve ever had the privilege to meet. But the piece got almost as many negative comments as Charlie Brooker’s denouncement of the BNP in the same paper got supportive ones – all because Davis had the temerity to suggest that perhaps white, heterosexual males might not actually need their own anti-discrimination officer at Oxford University of all places (45% private school students, almost entirely white and with a tenacious male bias in finals marks), especially not when Andrew Lowe’s policies included ‘to replace St Anne's college crèche with a finishing school, ban women from the library and save money by getting female students to serve food in halls instead of kitchen staff.’

So, does the suggestion that white, heterosexual males might still be enjoying unfair advantages in today’s society gives you the strange sensation that a tight knot of anger is squeezing your normally normal-sized brain into a smaller, gassier space? Does the idea that white males might be a minority panic you, and the notion that they might still be an advantaged minority panic you even more? Do you worry that you’ll be the victim of ‘reverse discrimination’ at work, at school or in any other arena of power?

Then I have a message for you: your privilege is showing.

Take it from a lilywhite daughter of the Sussex middle classes: it is a great horror to discover that you yourself are part of the overclass and yet to feel that you are not enjoying any special privileges because of it. The nature of privilege, of course, is that it is taken for granted: whoever you are, whatever race, class, gender, you, like me, do not notice your own privilege 99% of the time you spend enjoying it. But actually yes, it does hurt. It hurts, in this culture, to feel powerless, and with the current cornucopia of crises most of us are feeling pretty powerless right now; it hurts even more to be powerless and at the same time be told that you are lucky, yes, LUCKY, to have the privilege of being white, male, straight, able-bodied and/or middle class. What’s felt but too often unsaid is: how can you call white males be privileged when we don’t feel very privileged?

To which the only decent answer is: did you expect to?

There is a difference between being privileged and being powerful. That, in fact, is why we have two different words for the concepts. Not everyone who is privileged is powerful, and certainly not everyone who is powerful is in every way privileged - look at the most powerful family in the world, who can’t even take their dog for a walk in the garden without an op-ed in the New York Times. Just because privilege is often a precursor to power does not mean that ALL privilege engenders power. This is where the politics of white male resentment begin: with white men complaining that they feel underprivileged, like a marginalised group, when what they actually mean is that they feel powerless.

Well, guess what. So do I. So does your Asian-British neighbor. Most of us feel pretty damn powerless. Things are bad. There’s a recession, kids are killing each other in the streets, nobody’s certain of having enough money to put food on the table tomorrow. It may surprise you to know that the rest of us aren’t sitting here imagining that white heterosexual males are living in some kind of utopia. We know you aren’t. We’ve met you. It may also surprise you to know that we don’t want to strip this mythical dominion from you and leave you naked: we just want to be where you are, with the same opportunities, the same freedom from fear, the same right to be judged as a person and not a demographic, however limited those freedoms, opportunities and rights currently are. Make sense?

You may feel powerless, but equality agitators aren’t the reason for your lack of power. We aren’t the problem here. We took nothing from you – well, actually, we took one thing, and one thing only, and we're still in the process of taking it: the right of people who are white, or male, or rich, or straight, in any combination, to gain preferment over and to expect to enjoy a better and safer life than people who are not. And yes, the fact that we stepped up and demanded that right back slightly decreases the average white man's chance at a top job, decreases the average white man’s automatic right to status and power and respect, if suddenly he is competing against not only his own race, class and gender but all the others as well in a capitalist world where status and respect are finite. In short, we’ve taken nothing you actually needed.

Now, you may think that you NEEDED those things, those free passes to the top, that unspoken advantage over women and minorities, to get the good things in life. But trust me, you didn’t. I have met a great deal of white men and loved some of them very deeply: white men have the same potential as everyone else to prove themselves without the advantage of unfair selection which currently – still! – is weighted in their favour in almost every sector of work and citizenship. Trust me. You don’t NEED your privilege. Not half as much as we all need a fairer world.

Reducing unfair advantage is not the same as prejudice. Just because something inconveniences you doesn't mean it's about you. Look at the tube strike. For those not in London, most people who are were extremely put out this week by the fact that the underground trains weren’t running, because a significant number of train drivers were striking for better working conditions and to defend the jobs of their fellow workers. But, and this is crucial, the tube strikers this week did not strike because they hate commuters, because they personally and collectively really hate all those jammy non-car-owning bastards who travel on the tube and think it's high time they got their comeuppance. They went on strike to protect the jobs and working conditions of themselves and their fellow workers -and why shouldn't they? (cuntsarestillrunningtheworld has a fantastic in-depth analysis which you should all read). Yes, it's an inconvenience to the rest of us, but it’s temporary, and anything but personal – in fact, in the long run, more drivers on our tubes actually means a faster, safer journey to work for all of us.

And that’s the problem, really. We are so desperate, so very, very desperate to be noticed, to contextualise ourselves at the centre of any story. Actually, what's most frustrating about the tube strike is that it was totally out of our control, manifestly messed things up just a little bit for everyone, and was – to add insult to injury! – almost certainly also the right thing to do.

It hurts. I know, I know it hurts, it hurts to realise that you have privilege and you never even realised it; it hurts to know that you are privileged and to still feel powerless; it hurts even more to realise that there’s no easy minority to turn and blame for all your problems. How do you think it feels, as a lady and a lifelong feminist, to realise that actually the individual blokes in the street and in my kitchen are NOT the source of all my problems, that if they went away I’d still be earning too little to pay my rent? I get it. Really, I get it. But getting it doesn’t mean I can excuse it in myself or in others. Because it’s not enough not to be stupid. Unless we actively and at every turn avoid turning on each other, avoid condemning the struggles of minority groups for equal rights to work and citizenship and quality of life, unless we stop whining that it’s not fair and then actively join that struggle as allies – unless we do that, we become part of the problem.

No, really. You might not think that you personally, sitting behind your computer, reading this rant and getting pissy, are part of the problem -but you are. The people who attacked Rowenna Davis’ on-the-money article with such bile and vitriol are part of the problem, even though many of those are the very same hands-up-harries who were the first to condemn the BNP.

Because there is a heartbeat’s space between the blind stupid rage of otherwise sensible people who felt hard done by reading that article and the creeping influence of right-wing policymakers in parliament. There is a heartbeat’s space between the growing tide of otherwise non-idiotic white male resentment in this country and the breathtakingly idiotic racist, homophobic and misogynistic logic with which we have just sent two far-right representatives to the European Parliament. And if you are not prepared to step up, own your privilege and be part of the solution, then, my darlings, you are going to become part of the problem.

Please may Penny be excused from the blogosphere today?

...I've got a terrible case of pissiness, and just looking at all the flak that's gone down over the McBride/Draper scandal makes me want to vomit up my own pancreas in disgust. In case you've spent the whole day in a chocolate coma, it being the day on which we commemorate the baby jesus detonating into confectionary godhood, here's a useful rundown of the bitching, sniping and apologism. Together with yesterday's thoroughly rubbish performance by the black-mask protest gang, I have been taking a day solidly out from leftist writing, determinedly not getting involved in the squabbles, and instead reading comics and eating croissants in my grottiest underwear.

For the record, yes, I do write for Labour List, and I've had a lot of fun doing so: the stuff I do is quite far left for the site's audience and it's been gleeful and instructive to have an audience of crusty old recalcitrant quasi-libertarian dad-a-likes to smack down. The site has been a worthwhile project in that it brings together some real radicals in conversation with government policymakers, but it's been woefully on-message so far. This, in fact, was most of my reason for getting involved, and it'll be my reason for staying involved if the site manages to struggle through this fiasco.

I am appalled at the smear campaign plans, mainly because, as Sunder Katwala so rightly pointed out, the 'Red Rag' site was designed to be a *cough* leftist alternative to Guido Fawkes. Guido Fawkes (Paul Staines), in case you hadn't noticed, is a frothing right-wing anti-political arserag, a misogynist, a suspicious white stain on the face of the blogosphere. The last thing the left needs is to emulate him. Despite this, to most of us wanting to get involved in real ideas, Guido is irrelevant. So it's thoroughly shameful that Draper and co. have developed such a schoolboy obsession with his thoroughly mediocre work.

The political blogosphere is, in fact, more than a sleazy sideshow of arrogant white middle-aged men wanking angrily at each other. We are better than this.

Sunny has the best commentary I've seen on the whole shambles, over at Liberal Conspiracy:

If you’re pissed off by this whole episode - and everyone involved - then it’s obvious what the task ahead is. There’s no point complaining about it. If we want the left to succeed and not be killed off by the libertarians, conservatives or New Labour, then we have to do it ourselves. Otherwise the likes of Derek Draper and Guido Fawkes will end up dominating the conversations.

I'm sick and tired of having to listen to these guys, the shouty white male bullies on the internet and the shouty white male bullies at the back of the protest, just because they happen to shout the loudest. They're as bad as each other. Sniping and in-fighting is the worst quality of British politics, and when we allow ourselves to succumb to it we reduce ourselves to the lowest possible level of debate. We become bitter.

Today, I am ashamed of the British left, on and off the web. But I believe we can do better than this. I believe that - as long as certain almost universally male comrades learn to share the platform, drop their pointless schoolboy obsessions, understand that smears and violence acheive nothing, and grow the hell up sharpish - we can be better than this. Who's with me?

Rip it up and start again.

It's not often that my faith in the British press soars quite as much as it did yesterday, when I offered up silent thanks to the nameless journalist who did the digging on Tony McNulty MP's claming of £60,000 as 'expenses' on a second home in Harrow, where his parents currently live. Yes, that Tony McNulty, Purnell's lapdog. The same Tony McNulty who believes that crushing poverty is an important incentive to persuade benefits claimants into jobs that aren't there. The same Tony McNulty who believes that the Welfare Reform Bill - voted in last Wednesday, albeit with some important amendments - is an appropriate strategy to bully the workless back into below-minimum-wage jobs. He claimed as much as £14,000 per year on the home, on top of his considerable MP's salary and additional expense claims.

It has been pointed out numerous times, not least by McNulty himself, that the money he claimed - equivalent to the entire salary of many of his constituents - wasn't against the rules. I'm sure it wasn't. I don't however, give one solitary iced damn if the Queen gave him the cash in a gold-plated envelope scented with the royal perfume, it's still entirely and indefensibly wrong.

Because, well. How dare he, really. How dare he dictate to the poor and needy how they should live their lives, how dare he imply that people are 'playing the system' when he himself has been playing the system for at least five times the annual rate of jobseekers' allowance every year. How dare he tell Britain's poorest and most disadvantaged young people that they do not deserve the paltry £48 of jobseekers' allowance they receive every week, when he himself has been claiming at least £270 per week in additional expenses on top of his salary. The sheer pig-headed hypocrisy of it all makes my ovaries itch.

It has further been reported that Mr McNulty claims to have made "considerable" use of the property, but said that he had stopped claiming the allowance in January - get this- 'because the fall in interest rates meant he could afford to pay the mortgage from his MP's salary'. As Mr Eugenides puts it, 'you have to marvel at the sheer ingenuity of people who only stop stealing from us when they've driven the economy far enough into the ground that it becomes temporarily cost-effective to act honestly.'

I mean, what is it with these guys? Have they completely lost all sense of narrative subtlety? Do they actually wander the corridors of Whitehall stroking overfed white cats, cackling to themselves and rubbing their hands with glee when brownbeaten assistants scurry up to tell them that the local orphanage has been demolished just as they ordered? What has happened to this government, when the Conservatives - the Conservatives! - have to suggest to McNulty that 'questions need to be answered'?

If you hadn't guessed, I'm incandescently angry about this.

They have no idea how the other half live, these people; they have no compassion, they have no compunction, and they lie. I refuse to believe that Labour MPs are stupid as well as hypocritical, mainly because I've met some. They know. They know full well just what £270 per week would mean to some of Britain's poorest families, in terms of staving off daily hunger and protecting parents from loan sharks. They know. They just don't care. They're content to claim it for themselves instead, all the while refusing to instigate policy changes that might help the 1.3 million unemployed young people in this country being thrown on the scrap-heap for good, all the while refusing to help Britain's 2million workless citizens and many more benefit claimants raise themselves above the poverty line.

The potential to create jobs in this economy is staggering - and yet the government is sitting on its hands. No FDR-esque New Deal for us, the country with one of the most meagre provisions of social security in the developed world - just more expensive and fruitless chivvying of the jobless into jobs that aren't there, with a workless to vacancy rate of 30:1 in many parts of the country. For some of the millions of school and college leavers out there, it is already too late. For many of Britain's long-term unemployed, grinding poverty and hopelessness have already done their damage. For the rest, time is rapidly wasting. As Saint Polly puts it:


The social cost of leaving a generation to rot will be far greater than the small financial cost of creating jobs and training now. Crime, welfare dependency, children's problems, mental and physical illness and all the social ills that shame Britain from previous eras of gross social neglect are huge debts weighing on the nation's future as surely as IMF sums. A job creation programme can be afforded, in the same way that war, anti-terror measures or an outbreak of avian flu have to be afforded. The social destruction wrought by long-term unemployment is a national emergency.

They could afford to bail out the banks at fifty times the cost of these damaging new welfare reforms; they can afford to save us from desitutition if they choose, but instead, the cabinet ministers we elected to serve us sit on their bottoms paying themselves vast salaries under the table, in a state of near-perfect inertia.

Bugger this. I want a better world.

Days like this make me want to forget any notion of Trotskyan Transitionalism and take it all in my tiny hands and smash it to brittle bits. Instead, I'm going to be taking my frustration out on the streets of London this Saturday, at the Put People First march and rally in Hyde Park. Hope to see some of you there. I'll be the short one.

The Queen is Dead. The Queen of England is Dead.

Genitals, ladymen, rabid fans, frothing trolls, music-lovers everywhere: glory at the wonder that is Withiel finally getting his attractive posterior in gear to put his fabulous music (self-produced in our living-room, so if you listen really closely you can probably hear me cackling in the background) on the interwebs.

I said, glory at it!

And make sure you listen to the Smiths cover first. Although Ashtray is my most favourite song of this year. Right, I'm going to cough up my own pancreas. Be seeing you.

Sold out: an end to whataboutery.

The Policing and Crime Bill 2008 is, as Fiona McTaggart MP admitted to me on Wednesday, 'a rag-tag bill.' Everyone has come to the table determined to force their own agenda through, and spurious amendments have been twatted onto every clause of the final document. There are some extremely dodgy new rules on kerbcrawling in there (similar, in fact, to those introduced in Ipswich in 2006, just before the tragic murders of six women who sold sex on the street) and some even dodgier ones giving the police powers to close brothels, and to take a cut of any takings found on the premises. Taken together, these two new rules make even less sense. You're still allowed to sell sex - just not indoors. And by the way, it's now more dangerous for you to do it outdoors. Speaking on behalf of the IUSW, Stephen Paterson pointed out that 'Lewis Carrol could have written these laws. They come from political cowardice and a herd instinct to assume the safety of the moral high ground.'

Somehow, though, the main bit of the new prostitution legislation has been pushed and pulled and wrangled into a shape that makes no one entirely happy but that somehow - maybe - just might bring us closer to social justice than any of the hard-liners would advocate.

The new law will make it a criminal offence - punishable by a fine of up to £1,000 and a criminal record - to pay to have sex with someone who is "controlled for another person's gain". This would target the market for abuse within prostutution - making it an offence to buy sex with a trafficked person or with a person who is forced into prostutition by pimps, drug-dealers or violent gang leaders.

Paying to sleep with a single mum who happens to have moved into prostitution because there's no other way for her to see her kids and pay for her prescriptions at the same time would not be illegal under the terms of this law, if it works the way I've been told. Paying to sleep with a young girl coerced into drug-taking by her pusher pimp who forces her to sell herself for her next fix would be illegal - and I've been twisting this round in my head, talking to the MPs making the laws and the sex workers affected by it, and whichever angle I look at it from, I can't see anything too terribly wrong there.

Do I think that all prostitution is rape? No. Do I think any prostitution might be rape? Well, let's think about that one. Let's think about the hundreds of young women being prostituted right now on the streets of our cities who don't want to have sex tonight but are being forced to service strangers by their pimps, drug-dealers, traffickers or violent partners, who have sex not for personal pleasure, gain or fulfilment but out of fear - fear of violence, of withdrawal, of exposure or even murder. Is paying for sex with these women rape? Yes, I think so. Yes, I'd say it's rape.

The abolitionist MPs backing these clauses prefer the Swedish Model, which draws no distinctions between paying for sex with a sex slave and paying for sex full stop. The compromise that has been reached, provided it stays in the bill in its current form, is a far more sensible solution. Not only does the 'controlled for gain' compromise set out to target abuse within the industry, rather than the industry itself - not only does it make it no less legal to have sex with a woman who is selling her body of her own free will - but this is the first piece of legislation ever, in over two hundred years of criminal legislation against hookers, which puts the blame for the 'social ill' of prostitution anywhere other than squarely between the legs of those who sell themselves.

McTaggart told me that part of the point of this law was to 'make a statement'. Is that important? Yes it is, vitally so, although I'd argue whether a new criminal law is the best, first place to be making that statement. But someone, somewhere, finally, needs to stand up and put the blame for abuse within prostitution where it's due: on the men who buy sex without a thought for the consequences. On the men who consume others' bodies for their own pleasure, who don't care where it comes from as long as they come. By making sex with women forced into prostitution a strict liability offence - one where it doesn't matter if you thought or hoped she wasn't a sex slave - this law might make prostitution what it so desperately needs to be: a seller's market.

Because currently, all the power within the sex industry lies with those who spend the money - overwhelmingly men. One in ten men in this country, in fact - mostly single men under forty. The balance of power and money is still in the hands of a patriarchy that treats abused women in the way that people who wear Nike trainers treat foreign sweatshop workers - as an unfortunate side-effect that we can make go away if we're very careful not ever to think about it, unless of course we happen to like the idea. And I think that's so wrong.

The English Collective of Prostitutes says it sees no reason why consenting sex between adults should be criminalised just because one party pays. They are entirely right - but 'consenting' is the most important word there.

Now, I'm not, as a rule, in favour of any new law that doesn't do away with the laws it's trying to update - and miraculously, at least in part, this looks like it's going to happen, too. To whit, they're going to take away the right of magistrates to impose fines for sex work. Let me repeat that. No more slapping a fifty quid fine on any poor streetwalker the fuzz happen to pick up. All they can now make orders for are 'meetings' - and according to McTaggart, this will include sessions with drugs counsellors.

This is fantastic. In anyone's book, this is fantastic. Questioning McTaggart over why the government isn't being braver and taking the logical, sane next step - making the selling of sex entirely legal - she replied that she and many of her colleagues in government would support such a move, but that it was being blocked from within. Blocked by whom, she wouldn't say, but I'm guessing that at least one of the blockifiers is very unhappy with women being allowed to sell sex and get away with it - unhappy with any suggestion that it might be the tricks and the pimps who bear responsibility for any abuse that happens, rather than the women's fault for opening their legs in the first place.

Is this bill, with all of its amendments, entirely sound? Absolutely not. Does this new piece of legislation go far enough in making life easier for prostitutes who choose their profession and harder for pimps and tricks who rape and abuse? No, it doesn't. But it's a step, a tiny step, in the right direction. If it were me, I'd make the selling of sex entirely legal to boot, and insitute a programme of advertising and a sex education curriculum where boys can learn from an early age what life is like for women in the sex industry. But hey, it's a start. To help you sort out your thoughts on this one, I've compiled a handy checklisty type of wotsit, inspired by Liberal Conspiracy's recent Gaza mythbusting efforts. Enjoy.

Prostitution - an end to whataboutery.

• If you think that all women who work in the sex industry do so of their own free will, in full knowledge of the consequences and not coerced by anyone, you are wrong.
• If you think that no women who work in the sex industry do so of their own free will, you are also wrong.
• If you think that sexual slavery doesn't exist - or if you think that it doesn't matter - you're an idiot.
• If you think that no woman involved in the sex industry has any agency or autonomy - you're fooling yourself.
• If you think that your human right to a cheap, consequence-free fuck trumps a coerced woman's right to decide what happens to her own body, you're an arsehole.
• If you think that the fact that IUSW union members might lose a bit of business or have to change their working practices trumps a coerced woman's right to decide what happens to her own body, you may need a knife and fork - you're going to choke on that party line.
• If you think that making prostitution more illegal or totally illegal is going to stop it happening, you're a fool.
• If you're worried that you might sleep with a sex slave by accident - you may want to look again at how and where and why you buy sex.
• If you think that no significant part of the sex industry is currently a)unsafe or b) underground, you're either lying, ignorant or extremely lucky.
• If you think that the ultimate culpability for abuse within prostitution lies with the women who turn to vice and let themselves be abused, you're a wanker.
• If you want to be able to buy sex legally, but would be apalled if your own daughter/sister/friend sold it - you're a hypocrite.
• If you think that prostitution is universally easy, fun and profitable and that all the girls doing it have a great time, you're so wrong.
• If you think that all prostitution is rape, you're also wrong.
• If you think that prostutition prevents rape - that the more whores we have, the fewer sad lonely fuckers will attack and rape women - you've entirely missed the point.
• If you think that prostitution should be a buyer's market like any other - you're a libertarian.
• If you think that prostitutes should be locked up and that we're living in a world of sexual slavery and should learn to like it - you're the wanker I met in the pub last week, you still owe me a pound fifty, and rest assured, I know where you live.

Police State economy claims its first casualty

You remember how just before Christmas, they put into force that scary fucking law that gave baliffs the power to use 'reasonable force' against debtors?

You know, the law whereby it's okay to break down old ladies' doors if they have unpaid parking fines but not okay to use similar force on billionaire tax-dodgers on the Isle of Man?

Well, that law has just claimed its first life.

Andy Miller, 78, a retired pub landlord and father who had recently returned from hospital after a stroke, collapsed and died from a heart attack whilst being forced to a cashpoint by baliffs 'under duress'.

The father-of-five collapsed last week on his way to a cash machine in Accrington, while the bailiff parked and waited for the money.

The death is not being treated as suspicious.

Well, actually, I think it's pretty damn suspicious when baliffs are allowed to pursue frail old men to the point of physical collapse, whilst billions of pounds of unclaimed tax is ignored as long as it's the wealthy committing fraud on a massive scale. I think it's suspicious, when the poor and sick are hounded quite literally to death whilst Brown tries to persuade us that the economic crisis is a 'test of character', that we need to need to show 'wartime spirit'. There's a war going on here, that's clear enough now, but I'm not sure who the bad guys are meant to be anymore. I'm furious, and I'm frightened. This isn't the freer and fairer world I was promised in 1997, when my mum told me that everything was going to be alright now that Labour were in power. This is an economic crisis forced on us by the rich, and now the poor are paying the ultimate price.

Is it me, or did it just get colder in here?

Youth power and the progressive future

I have had it up to here - higher than I can reach at my towering 4'11 - with standing by whilst my generation, one of the most enlightened, good-hearted, engaged, interesting bunches of young people ever to grace these undeserving continents, is slagged off as the root of all society's ills.

The last in the Guardian’s 2008 series of debates, fluffily titled Who Owns The Progressive Future?, was put down by its own keynote speaker last week as Caroline Lucas of the Green Party wryly declared that she’d rather share it. Lucas, Bea Campbell, Ken Livingstone and Aditya Chakrabortty made for an engaging panel, but the mood of the debate was distinctly glum. Who owns the progressive future? Not us, was the conclusion, where us was a gathered mass of Guardian readers, most of whom had voted for Blair in 1997. I was going to be good. I was going to sit there and eat my sandwich and be quiet and be grateful for my free ticket. But when the debate turned to blaming the moral failures of today’s youth for progressive political apathy, my fingers started to itch.

A man from the audience deplored the fact that he’d caught his teenage son stealing, and declared that the ‘post-Thatcherite’ generation were ‘politically vapid’ and lacked a ‘moral compass’, at which point I found myself yelling‘absolute rubbish’ across the hall.

Slander. Lazy, unthinking neo-liberal slander that tars a generation already unfairly dismissed as drunken, amoral, apathetic, selfish and useless, the 21st Century’s Gin Lane. I have no time for it.

First of all, if your kid’s a thief, you should bloody well teach him not to steal and stop blaming society for your failures as a parent. And secondly, at no point in my political memory has this generation been apolitical. What we haven’t been is party political, and that’s a very different matter.

I'm sorry to go on about this. But when two million of us marched through London in 2003, demanding that our government refrain from following the United States into what we knew would be our generation's Vietnam, and when we were utterly ignored, many of us ceased to believe in the power of government to change the world. For a lot of us, that was our first experience of direct political involvement - and it wasn't a happy one.

No wonder, then, that we have reacted by abandoning the parties in unprecedented numbers. As the Stop The War generation has grown up, become voteable, fuckable, marrigeable, big enough and ugly enough to make our own decisions, we have inherited a distinct political cynicism combined with an energy to effect positive change in any way we can. As the youth vote has dwindled and membership of mainstream British political parties trickled into the low hundred thousands in every age group, membership of voluntary organisations continues to soar. It is estimated that a third - a third - of 16-25 year olds is directly involved in voluntary work. There are 20 million volunteers in this country, a figure that dwarfs party membership by several degrees.

Just take a look at Redwatch, the spotters' site where fascists can go and wank half-heartedly over mugshots of wooly-hatted crusty lefties on demos (I like to think that this is BNP members' version of the Man In Uniform sexual paradigm). Well, firstly, the leaked membership list now makes Redwatch worse than useless (come on, what are you going to do? Photoshop us? Go through our rubbish? Really? We know where you live now, you terrible useless scum, so come and have a bloody go if you're going to. Are you going to write a letter to the Mail? Are you, really? Bring that storm down!). And secondly, there’s a surprising amount of fit young commies on there: Redwatch is becoming young, taut and hot as under-30s flood the anti-capitalist, green, anti-globalisation, feminist and pro-equality movements.

More of us than ever are on the streets, and fewer and fewer are choosing to engage directly with the political process. In my many soul-destroying hours interning with think-tanks and in dealings with the leached-out little New Labour finishing school that is the NUS, most of the young people I’ve met who would call themselves ‘stakeholders’ in the Tory, Labour or LibDem parties are some of the most spineless, career-oriented, name-dropping, politically vapid slimy Whitehall dishrags I’ve ever come across. They’re probably going to be in power in ten years, worse luck, and these will be the young people that MPs and political decision-makers spend most of their time with. But they do not represent the sum total of political energy amongst my generation.

Who owns the progressive future? Not Labour, not any more. They lost the young British Left unequivocally in 2003, and they might even have lost us anyway, finally sick of being screwed over HE fees, excruciating debt and an employment market that has failed to adapt to new workforce demands, leaving millions unemployed or afraid for their jobs at the start of a breathtaking recession and angry that the best Labour can offer us is ‘Not The Tories’. But despite watching our politicians fail us time after heartwrenching time, Generation Y has still not given up on the idea of saving the world: more of us than ever are socially and politically active; we are connected; we care. We just don’t care about the political process very much, and that's their fault - not ours.

*****

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: A new activist and social community has been set up to encourage and facilitate self-organisation amongst transpeople and their allies in the wake of last month's Stonewall demonstration. T-CAN, the Trans Community Activist Network, is live at http://www.t-can.org.uk/.

Say you want a revolution

'Revolutions are the locomotives of history.' Marx, Class Struggle In France

'I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.” Brave New World

For three days I've been racking my brains for a witty and incisive new angle on current affairs to post on this blog that I love so much. Three days huddling on top of a tiny merciful space heater, drinking endless sugary tea in a cold North-London commune ringing with the hacking petrarchan coughs of smokers with chest infections: it's winter, we can't afford 5-a-day or red meat, we're precariously employed or unemployed, we're battling winter depression, viz: we are all sick. Here is the arena of the unwell: we have reached it. Nothing to do but scramble for dog-ends in the bottom of beercans, eat plain pasta and play thrash guitar late into the night whilst hallucinating Grant Morrison in between frantically applying for every job we can find. Dicking around with each other's hearts and groins because there's nothing else to do in the baby-killing socialist utopia of Haringey.

We didn't think it would be this hard.

The reason I can't quite summon a sparkly opinion about the US president-elect, or the various ways in which George Osborne is a disgrace to right-wing social economists everywhere, or what the car-crash spectacle of I'm A Celeb 2008 really signifies, is a lingering sense of betrayal. We're good kids. We did everything we were told to do: we went to the schools our parents picked for us and then to university because that's what everyone does these days, because everyone knows you need a degree or two to get yourself employed even if it lands you in crushing debt. Somehow, we made it through three years of higher education only to find that our parents' generation finally broke the economy for us and no degree in the world is going to make us any more employable, or fit us out with the training we need to make decent lives for ourselves. They told us that if we worked hard and did as we were told and stayed off the crack and didn't get pregnant, then the shiny new neo-liberal free-market world would be our playpen. They told us that if we behaved, we'd all get jobs in advertising and end up partying at Bungalow 8 with Peaches Geldof and Jaime Winstone. They lied.

And you know what? I'm sick of being lied to. I'm sick of accepting a shitty deal for myself and my loved ones because I'm told that it can't be any different. I'm sick of swallowing nonsense from a nominally liberal government that refuses to tax the wealthy to fund decent healthcare and welfare for people on the ground and yet comes up with untold billions when a real banking crisis hits. I'm sick of being told that nothing can change. I just don't believe it any more.

What the neo-liberal consensus has been achingly effective at doing is persuading the generation that has grown up knowing nothing else that there can be nothing else. We hear of different political paradigms like fairy stories, with international communism as the wicked old witch who gets cooked in her own oven at the end of chapter three. But in real life, the story goes on. The kids grow up, and the honey walls of the gingerbread cottage begin to crack and crumble.

And now the sheen has worn away, we can see with older eyes that although we are living in one of the richest countries in the world, with more than enough credit to its name for every citizen to live a comfortable and free life, millions of us still live in poverty, misery and personal and economic servitude. The amount that our government has spent on trident, the Iraq war and the maintenance of a massive standing army over the past three years could have eradicated child poverty in Britain. There is a choice here, and it's a choice that our elected leaders are making for us every single day.

The way the right and left wing corps in the press have used the tiny body of Baby 'P' as a bargaining chip is vile. But the point stands that there remains a vanguard of British citizens who continue to believe that, in a pinch, the state is there to protect their children. The state is there to enact justice and social decency. Our expectations of the state are justly high, and if the state fails in its duty, it deserves to be raked over the coals. There remains a social democratic consensus beating just below the surface of the British psyche, and the nation's response to the horrific case of Baby P bears that consensus out.

There is a hunger in this country for social democracy, for socialist ideals if not for socialism itself, and that hunger will only rumble the louder as this recession bites. Change needs to happen, and fast. As Saint Toynbee pointed out in a recent Guardian article, the last recession created a lost generation of young people entering the workforce unable to find jobs. I fear that the slow creak of social stagnation has already begun for my peer group, and that this time our leaders' failure to adapt to the transition between the information age and the industrial age will take a cruel chunk out of our futures. Whilst ministers squabble about how and whether and when to fund skills training, a generation of 16-to-27- year olds slides slowly into unemployment. We are not asking for the earth. We are asking for the chance to earn our keep.

When I say I want a revolution, I don't mean blood in the streets. Since 1688, this country has had a proud tradition of sweeping social change effected without the death of millions. When I say I'd like to see revolution in my lifetime, what I mean is that I'd like a government with the balls to give us what we need. Welfare that is positive, not punitive. A commitment to on-the-job training, along with more pressure on businesses to fill the gap in skills training that the state cannot fill on its own. A commitment to instituting a living wage, so that anyone can support themselves in a job of work and so that a life on benefits isn't truly the easiest option. A commitment to flexible working and to European working-time directives, making it easier for women and those unable to work full-time to really contribute to the economy and to their own lives. A commitment to taxing high-end financial transactions and to increasing the income tax payable by the wealthiest 10%. A commitment to chasing state money held in offshore accounts and channelling it back into the larders and school lunchboxes of the needy. Would I like to see David Miliband dressed in green and challenging the Sheriff of Nottingham to an archery contest? It'd be good for a giggle, but give me the rest and I'll go home happy.

Ask most of our generation if they think we'll ever see a socialist revolution in this country and they'll laugh at you. The Poppy Project laughed at me when I told them the sort of systemic change I believed was needed to end prostitution - but when I suggested that campaigning for a living wage would do a great deal to reduce the numbers of poor women choosing prostitution, they nodded in agreement, before suggesting that we get 'back to the real world'. But this IS the real world. Exploitation, suffering, class, race and gender discrimination happen, and part of the reason that they happen is that my generation has accepted the neoliberal paradigm that allows them to happen.

Today, Jacqui Smith's prostitution proposals have been made public: another moralising legal solution to a problem that can only be solved by a commitment to systemic social change. How we get there isn't the immediate problem: first, we need to say that this is not good enough. We need to say we want a revolution. Even quietly, in empty rooms, in the privacy of our heads, we need to reject the lie that this is the best of all possible worlds. Say you want a revolution, because - sometimes - even just wanting it is enough.

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.

'If Boris dropped dead tomorrow, I'd run.'

'Has Johnson any politics? No. We thought he did, and that was based on a collection of crazed neocon rubbish he wrote for the Telegraph.' The truth, according to Ken Livingstone, is far worse.

'What's apparent now is that Boris only believes that people like Boris should run the earth. There's no political position he's not prepared to surrender in order to stay powerful. And that makes him very dangerous. In a situation where the far right, for example, could deliver him power, he'd have no hesitation in pandering to them.'

I meet Ken Livingstone in his new office - a window table in a Hampstead branch of Costa Coffee - and he is more than keen to chat. And not just about Boris. We talk about economics, about China and India and the organisation of gender-roles before metalworking developed. Ken talks and talks and his kind blue eyes twinkle and I feel faintly like I'm about to be invited to attend wizard school. And speaking of school -

'I'm writing my autobiography at present, and I've just got to the part where I'm about seventeen. It's horrendous stuff. I remember always being the weedy kid at school, always coming in on the mile run second last, just in front of the fat one. My sports teachers all seemed to be rehabilitated Nazi war criminals who believed that humiliation was a good way to make us improve. It wasn't.'

Ken may be writing his memoirs, but the constant calls from his PA and pile of complex charts balanced on the tiny table doesn't look very much like retirement to me. For more on Livingstone's comeback plans and projects for the activist left, read the full interview in Red Pepper very shortly.


******

As I write, stock markets are falling all over themselves like City boys outside Spearmint Rhinos at 3 am, and the USA seems to have fucked us all over quite royally by a 23-vote margin. Let me express my sincerest hope that you and I still have jobs in the morning.