Notebook: responsibility and writing

Hello, the blog. It’s been a very strange few months. Things have been moving fast and, due to an auspicious combination of luck, class privilege, working twelve-hour days and being in the right place when things were happening, I’m now a journalist who people have heard of and stuff. I’ve had a big think about the consequences of that this week, and this is my post about it, which will probably come across as massively wanky and self-indulgent, particularly when so many really important things are happening in the world. I’m mostly writing this so I can get it all out and get it down and concentrate on those more important things. If it helps, you’ll get the basic sense of this post from just skipping to the penultimate paragraph now.

So, I'm experiencing a bit of vertigo. Nine months ago I had just over a thousand Twitter followers; now it’s nearly thirteen thousand. Nine months ago it was a huge nerve-wracking fiasco for me to talk on a regional radio driveshow; last month I was a panellist on Any Questions. Nine months ago I was a blogger in the process of trying to improve my writing in the hopes of someday, maybe, being a ‘proper’ commentator’; I’m now a columnist for the country’s foremost leftwing magazine, earning a living as a full-time comment-and-features journo, and have written opinion pieces for the Guardian, the Evening Standard, the Independent and others. I got to talk at the Fabian Society conference! People from the BBC sometimes ring me up and ask what I think about things!

I’d be an idiot to pretend it's not all very exciting. Even when it’s terrifying and intimidating, which is most of the time, I remember that it makes my parents proud, and that’s always something to be glad about, because frankly my mum and dad have put up with quite enough crap from me over the years. I’m not trying to bitch and whine: manifestly, I’ve been handed a pair of golden slippers, and it would be ugly and ungrateful to complain that they pinch.

It does raise issues, though – because despite what some people inevitably believe, my writing is not a self-promotion exercise. Far from it. I care passionately about the politics and the movements I am engaged with, and I am having to learn very fast, by trial and error, how I can best behave in order to be useful to those movements. I’m having to anticipate what I might do or say that might damage or cause divisions within the causes with which I am associated. There is, bluntly, a lot more I can do now to fuck stuff up.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not under some delusion of being ever so terribly famous – it's not like I get recognised in the street. I have been recognised on two separate occasions at the same bus stop in Bethnal Green, but since I estimate that about half the people who read my blogs and articles probably live within shouting distance of E9 and have a tendency to wander down the Old Ford Road at midnight on a Thursday eating chips, that’s no huge surprise. I do, however, have a more powerful platform than I’d ever anticipated - at least not, in my nuttiest dreams, until I was in my mid thirties - and that’s daunting.

It’s daunting, because I’m in my early twenties and still learning the rules. The whole way I relate to my work and to my friends on the internet (and most of my friends are on the internet!) needs to change, now. This week I’ve finally knuckled under and accepted that.

It means accepting a certain level of responsibility. It means no longer posting quite so many profanities and details of my favourite bedroom activities in my Facebook profile. It means absolute integrity, being more mature and less impulsive. It means that the ripple effects of things I write and say are no longer small and friendly: if I call a fellow activist a cunt, it’s not just playful snark, it’s a big deal. If I tweet momentary disillusion with a protest movement, it might actively dishearten a few hundred people involved, and that matters. The way I choose to tell a story - romantic and human-centred, like this week's New Statesman cover story on the student movement, or theoretical and dispassionate, as some would have preferred? - matters to people. And I can no longer behave as though it doesn't.

All of this also means receiving a great deal more criticism – some of it good and constructive, and a whole lot of it frightening, horrible, threatening and nasty. I now receive rape threats and death threats on a daily basis; I am the subject of various spiteful right-wing hate campaigns and have my very own following of Tory and libertarian trolls. Haters gonna hate, and that's par for the course; but I can no longer respond to every criticism individually, as I used to make a point of doing. I have to block some of this petty shit out, or I’d go barmy.

I guess what all of this is leading up to is: please bear with me. This stuff is all new and vertiginous, but I’m not making the same mistakes twice. The biggest mistake, the one I regret the most actually, is neglecting my share of the housework with all the work and chores and running around I've been doing, with the result that it now probably seems, to my lovely and long-suffering housemates, like I suddenly think I'm too good for the washing up.

From now on, it's time to properly accept that what I write matters to people, time to step up to the responsibility I've been handed and do a lot more to earn it. It's time to behave like a proper commentator, not a terrified kid- even if in my head I’m still a weird schoolgirl who hides in the bin reading comics and has panic attacks when people speak to her without warning.

I anticipate that soon the fuss will die down, things will be less frazzled and I’ll have space to take stock. Probably not for another few months, though, cause I have a book coming out and another one on the way and I’m doing more things on the telly. Meanwhile, I’m gradually learning how to handle all the pressure without being a total dickhead.

That’s about it, really. Thanks for reading, if you’ve made it this far – I appreciate that your time is limited and that there are several revolutions on at the moment. If I ever lose perspective, or start praising George Osborne, or just turn into a massive wanker, I’m counting on the people whose opinions I’ve always valued to take me to task. I've relied on the advice and support of several very good friends and some wise strangers to get me through these past few months, and it's been invaluable. You know who you are. Thank you, I love you. Solidarity.

Is Brown playing the class card under the table?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A 'Straight, White Men's' officer for SOAS?

I was kindly invited to speak at a very interesting SOAS debate today. I can't make it, because I have a Secret Family Engagement; but here's my remote contribution :)

White, straight men are on the back foot on campus. London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was established in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies, with the specific remit of training future colonial administrators in the language and culture of the people they were destined to rule.

Nearly a century later, at this institution founded on racist, patriarchal principles, straight white males account for less than 20 percent of the SOAS student body – a fact that has prompted calls for them to be recognised as a minority group by the students’ union, and granted their own exclusive welfare strategy. Today, as part of their Diversity Week, SOAS will debate whether or not to appoint a ‘Straight White Men's Officer’.

University life often comes as a shock to the privileged sons of this country. Higher education is the time in their lives when young men are most likely to experience minority status: white men may dominate in the world of work, in top-level management, in politics, in administration, in the arts, in culture, in the military and in the media, but as undergraduates they make up only 36% percent of the student population. White males are also have less chance ofless likely to graduateing with a first or upper second class degree and of finding immediate employment than their female classmates, where by contrast, less than thirty years ago, white males appeared to dominate every mixed-gender campus. At university, unlike in other environments, straight, white young men cannot pretend that they represent the standard for normal humanity – instead, they are required to confront their roles as members of a privileged minority interest-group on the world stage. Nowhere is this sea-change more evident than at SOAS.

Many have opposed the motion to appoint a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer,’ pointing out that white, straight males do not face discrimination on the grounds of race, sex sexuality or gender – and that to suggest that they do marginalises the experiences of oppressed groups.

SOAS students’ union women’s officer Elly Badcock comments saidthat: “Women have a women's officer because we're fundamentally disadvantaged in society, and liberation campaigns exist for those who have been systematically and structurally discriminated against, specifically because of their sexuality, gender or race.

“ Straight white men have never been discriminated against on these fronts, so claiming that they are an opressed group smacks of whingeing.”

Indeed, whilst white, straight males are now in the minority at SOAS, no evidence has yet come to light of such students facing racist, sexist or heterophobic discrimination on campus. James, 25, who studied Arabic at SOAS, told me that "as a white male in an aggressively diverse environment, I never felt anything other than welcome, really."

Like other white, male students, however, James sees saw the need for a white men's officer to address issues other than discrimination: "Iit'd be useful, if only so that so that we can identify as a minority group alongside other minority groups, and if and when we need slapping down, it can be done by one of our own.

“ That, and they could organise Bruce Springsteen appreciation nights."

At SOAS, straight, white young men are confronted with the truth of their status as a minority group, albeit a privileged one, in every classroom and hallway. That white, straight males are finally recognising themselves as the minority group they have always been is a positive development, and the appointment of officers to oversee this difficult process of recognition could well help the white, straight young men of today identify and position themselves in solidarity with women, queer people and other minorities.

The needs of straight, white males are different to the needs of other minority groups, and should be treated as such. But being born a privileged son does not mean that one deserves to be denied support in the process of finding and exploring one's identity, especially as growing up as a white, straight and male in Britain today is so often a confusing and painful experience.

Today’s white, straight men too often mistake the work that equality activists do to oppose the worst consequences of white, male, heteronormative privilege as active discrimination against themselves as individuals. Attacks on unearned privilege are not the same as discrimination, nor are they something with which any ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’ should waste his time opposing. Instead, such an officer would best serve his community by helping students explore positive ways of expressing a straight, white, masculine identity in a society thoroughly sick of being dominated by straight, white males.

Gay, female and non-white people, at SOAS and elsewhere, have every reason to be wary about allowing straight, white males any more exclusive identity clubs: historically, there are have been few models for such spaces that dido not define themselves violently against everyone who is 'different'. Having fought to create spaces in which our own identities as women, homosexual people and/or BME people are celebrated rather than attacked, it seems disingenuous to suggest that white, straight men might make positive use of such safe spaces.

But in a diverse community like SOAS, where white, straight men are already compelled to recognise and adapt to their minority status, a 'Straight White Maen's Officer' with an agenda to support students in avoiding the pitfalls of prejudice and negotiating their own identities might well be a positive appointment.

The gradual movement of today's young, white, straight men towards a positive identity model deserves all the support it can garner. This Last week, Courtney Martin reported in The American Prospect on a recent conference, led by men, on the fight to build a new 'feminist masculinity': " There are legions of progressive men ... who are struggling to redefine masculinity and live that redefinition every day. They have the opportunity to shed their socialized skin and all the anxiety that comes with trying to be a ‘"tough guy’" and make a happy life defined, not by their paycheck or their size, but by their humanity. Fighting against the world that we don't want is a critical first step, but fighting for the world that we do want is where liberation truly begins."

SOAS was established a century ago to train young white, straight young men in the arts of domination and subjection. With a little imagination, it could well end up training the next generation of white, straight young men - struggling to find their place in a world that orders them to dominate and then blames them for doing so - in the arts of listening, sharing and solidarity.

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

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

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

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

From the article:

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

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

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


From the comments:

'Silly cow'

'A stupid spoilt little girl'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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