We love the NHS! Sort of.

This article has also been published at The Huffington Post, with thanks to my boyfriend, Andy, for letting me pillage his life story for cheap points. I love you, baby.

My partner suffers from a bone disorder which requires regular operations, paid for by the British NHS. His most recent procedure was performed without anaesthetic by a drunken surgeon wielding a rusty hacksaw. As I forced a mouldy rag between his teeth to stifle his screams, an official wearing Nazi insignia burst in and informed us that limbs were not considered an NHS spending priority, so dirty chisels were employed to remove both his legs and one of his arms for good measure. My partner is now a triple amputee, and I am forced to prostitute myself for heroin to numb the pain of living in an Orwellian super-state. God save the queen.

This decidedly made-up story is hardly more ridiculous than the lies that Republicans have been peddling about the NHS all week. To set a few spluttering records straight: patients over 59 are not denied heart surgery; Professor Sir Stephen Hawking has personally come forward to say that he would not be alive without the NHS; and Republican hysteria over ‘death panels’ reflects more accurately the situation in the United States than in Britain. On both sides of the Atlantic, lofty officials get to choose how best to allocate a finite amount of healthcare funding – the difference is that the NHS bases decisions on its analysis of how best to deliver equitable healthcare for all, rather than basing decisions on the interests of its shareholders.

Brits all over the world have been stepping forward to defend the NHS, with ‘welovethenhs’ becoming a trending topic on Twitter this week, surely the ultimate signifier of public passion. The British are proud of our healthcare system, and even members of the Conservative party have pledged to defend it, knowing that without promising to uphold socialised healthcare their chances of election success would vanish.

What Obama is proposing is not a simple transposition of the NHS, although it will make for a fairer system if it passes Congress. He is right not to base his plan on the British setup: the NHS has its flaws. It’s not a simple case of NHS good, medicare bad.The reality, as ever, is much more complex, and is being obscured by half-truths, frothing right-wing paranoia and outright lies.

My partner’s illness, however, is real – so let me tell you what really happens.

Whenever he needs an operation, my partner receives top-quality care from our local hospital – eventually. Because his debilitating, agonising condition is not life-threatening, he normally has to wait many months for the free operations, and the process of consultation and aftercare varies on a sliding scale from risible to non-existent.

On the other hand, his disability makes him unfit for most work, and were we US citizens my meagre half-salary would doubtless put us amongst the 43 million Americans with no healthcare cover at all. We can and do complain about the NHS – being British, it’s one of our favourite hobbies – but the specialist painkillers he needs to get through his worst days are free, and they will remain free for the rest of his life.

It isn’t easy for my partner, being 25 years old and facing a lifetime of pain and limited mobility. He worries about his future; I worry, among other things, that any children we decide to have will inherit his condition. But one thing we never have to worry about is being able to afford those vital operations, or the medication that keeps him stable.

Moreover, if I were to fall pregnant tomorrow, even on my low-income I would be treated to regular check-ups, help to quit smoking with free NHS classes, ante-and-post natal care, and food vouchers so that I could afford to drink milk, eat vegetables and take supplements to safeguard my health and the health of the fetus. By contrast, staggering inequalities in the US healthcare system mean that the United States has the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world.

I’m proud to live in a country with ‘socialised’ healthcare. For all its faults, its shoddy waiting lists and its dreadful dental care, the NHS system erases health inequalities and relieves millions of people, rich and poor, from the burden of constant anxiety about medical bills and sudden sickness. Even more importantly, it creates the progressive impression that the physical and mental health of the nation is the collective responsibility of all its citizens. In the process, without making a fuss about it, the British NHS truly upholds the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. If that’s socialism, then sign me up.

Turn Left

There are only so many ways round you can ask 'what does it mean to be of the Left in Britain today?' before you start to sound like Yoda in the small hours of a party conference booze-up. Nonetheless, yesterday's launch of Demos' new Open Left project, spearheaded by James Purnell, threw up some very interesting points.

Purnell believes that left ideology necessitates 'choice in public services', which is a tad rich coming from the man who single-handedly purged the welfare state of its last remaining shreds of compassion earlier this year with his intricate schemes for lie detector tests, workfare-style sickpay deals and a punitive scheme for addicts and alcoholics. Will Hutton, fashionably late as always, talked a great deal about the language of fairness and 'just deserts'. The tone of the debate was consistently philosophical, which is absolutely fine when debate is also inclusive - but the elephant in the room was its narrow field of vision.

Purnell opened his talk by declaring that he had been refreshed, since leaving the cabinet, by the expansive vision and energy in the wide, wide political world of....thinktanks! I listened for the sniggers, but there weren't any. And looking around I saw why: in a roomful of 100 people meant to be talking about the future of the left, there were precisely no activists and nobody who looked like they'd ever spent time on state benefits. There were, however, plenty of Guardian journalists, a lot of folks from Demos and the Fabian Society and five - five! - people I personally knew from Oxford university. So where were the have-nots in the debate? Surely it was their conversation to have as much as anyone else?

I stood up to explain that I was living in a household of young people with the bad luck to be unemployed and suffering from chronic health problems, and that whilst the panel was equivocating over the real meaning of fairness most of us were lucky if we could afford one meal a day. I asked the room why we were not talking with and about the people suffering most in society today. I asked the room how many people there present had been unemployed for long periods, or had ever worked for the minimum wage, or had not been to a top university. By this point I was so angry that I properly started shaking. People came up to me afterwards to congratulate me rather patronisingly on my 'passion'. Why? Had they spent so long in think-tank land that they'd forgotten what an actual angry person looks like?

This, surely, is at the heart of the dilemma. Labour was established in 1900 as a party to represent the interests of the working class, but the urban and industrial working class as it was between 1790 and 1980 no longer exists. The large swathe of people working low-paid jobs in industry who gave the Labour party its name and its purpose no longer exist as a block with a unified purpose of reasserting control of the means and rewards of production. But there are still many millions of people in Britain who are poor, disadvantaged and subject to what Purnell called "arbitrary authority". If Labour isn't the party for those people, then what on earth is it?

John Cruddas pointed out that the Labour Party "has lost because we've embraced a neoliberalism which is brutal and individualist". The notion of collective good has been lost. Collective good is at the heart of what it means to be of the Left, and central to its instigation is, in Cruddas' words, "a notion of socialism, which is important to retain, whereby we preserve and nurture forms of interdependence and solidarity." In layman's terms: being of the Left is more even than the utopianism, the statism and the egalitarianism that Purnell lays out in his LabourList article today. Being of the left is about materially supporting, practically helping and politically including those less advantaged than ourselves, because we share a common humanity.

The labouring classes of today don't work in mines anymore. They work in callcentres, care homes, shops and hospitals; they are women as well as men, black and asian as well as white; they are single parents, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed, scrambling for a living in hard times; and they need a party that represents their interests just as badly as the factory workers and miners of the 1900s did. If it wants to survive at all, Labour needs to step outside the think tank bubble and ask not how the disadvantaged fit its agenda, but how it can best serve them.

Because if someone doesn't start coming up with answers soon, as Cruddas, Will Hutton and neophyte Lewis Imu pointed out, then extremist groups like the BNP will step in to fill that gap. In the last elections 900,000 people voted for the BNP, most of them from poor and disadvantaged communities, because no other party in Britain today is even bothering to consider what people on low incomes or no incomes, people living in the teeth of the downturn, really care about. Unless Labour can relearn that language, then the party is finished. And if the Left doesn't rediscover its social conscience double sharpish, we may as well all go home.

***

GEEK POINTS: The first person who can tell me why the picture above has been chosen to illustrate this post wins a hundred shiny geek points and a fabulous prize that I will invent later.

The 'Evil Poor'.

Over the past few days, I've been watching in horror as prejudice against benefits recipients and the unemployed stacks up in the press and on the internet; as people decry even a small hike in taxation of the super-rich whilst advocating leaving the poor to stew in their own juices; as a slew of right-wing commentators have articulated their hatred of the welfare system on this blog. Like Dave Osler, I find it logically inconsistent that so many people seem 'to demand cuts in invalidity benefit and public sector pensions as a response to the financial crisis, yet explode in splenetic rage at the idea that the richest of the rich should pay tax at a rate slightly more in line with the bulk of the population.'

Dave has addressed the question of the class-war-that-isn't; what we need to talk about urgently is why, precisely, it is not okay to make even the slightest hint of a suggestion of putting the merest policyette into place that might slightly disadvantage the rich - sorry, 'wealth creators' - but it's fine to pour scorn, mistrust and hatred onto benefits recipients and the underpaid? When did it become alright to treat people on low incomes as if they were an entirely different, morally deficient species of person? When did it become alright to call the poor 'evil'?

No, really. Let's not forget that this week the Orwell prize for blogs was awarded to NightJack, a blogger who claims to be a white, middle-aged police officer posting about his experiences in the force, passing over, amongst others, the esteemed Alix Mortimer whose hyper-boots I am unfit to lick. One of his winning entries is entitled 'The Evil Poor'. Initially I assumed that the title was ironic. It isn't.

'This phenomenon of the evil poor has spread so that not a town in England does not have it’s unfair share of Kappa clad, drugged up, workshy, wasters swaggering through the town centre streets with a can of lager in the one hand and a bull mastiff on a string in the other. They aren’t out looking for a job or a chance in life let alone a wash.....They just want to get high, shag your 14 year old daughter until she is pregnant and nick your stuff. Sorry if that’s a bit bleak but it’s a lot true.'

I understand why we need to at least entertain the barely-literate frothings of the paranoid authorities, but must we give them a special prize too? Or shall we just all form a line to do a massive poo on Orwell's grave?

As John Scalzi eloquently explains, being poor is not a moral judgement. Poverty is something that the rich can choose to ignore, relying instead on lazy stereotypes churned out by a press that hates the disadvantaged. Poverty is not an identity. Poverty destroys identity, stripping you down to a struggle for life's essentials, consuming you with anxiety. Poverty is not an exclusive, alien community: poverty divides communities and fosters social alienation, aided by a government propaganda machine which encourages people of all classes to mistrust and spy on their fellow citizens. Have you seen those DWP 'we're closing in' adverts? Those ones with the voiceover by the actual Mysterons? You'd have to laugh if they weren't so deadly serious about stamping down on the 1% of benefits claimants estimated to be genuinely fraudulent - despite the fact that legal tax evasion by the top 1% of earners costs the country seventeen times as much as benefit fraud.

And poverty is the ultimate hallmark of inequality, the signpost which the struggles of all other minority groups use to rightly attest to their own marginalisation. Poverty is not restricted to minority groups; poverty can happen to anyone, without warning, especially during a recession.

I'm it all seems so very, very obvious, so fundamental to any notion of decency or political justice, that I'm forced to wind myself back to a point where I can see how some people might ever even think that leaving people who can't work, are out of work or are low-paid to be destitute and to starve is something that we can justify to ourselves, as citizens of one of the richest nations in the world in the 21st century. I can't understand how decent people could countenance such a notion. I'm trying to understand.

Poverty in this country exists. To claim otherwise is crassly ignorant and stinks of privilege. Absolute poverty exists. Nearly four million British children are growing up below the breadline, and some of them go hungry, or their parents go hungry so that they don't have to, on a very regular basis indeed. In winter, grandparents surviving on the state pension have to decide between food and heating. There are also 400,000 homeless households in this country. Four. Hundred. Thousand. That includes plenty of kids. These homeless people are either sleeping rough, leaving themselves at real daily risk of death by exposure or violence, or precariously housed in hostels and shelters, usually with little or no money for food, clothing and basic necessities. But relative poverty exists, too, and relative poverty has been shown to be equally damaging in terms of destroying social cohesion, damaging mental health and holding back progress. The real hurt of being poor goes beyond mere cold and hunger, although both are never far away in modern Britain. Stein Ringen says, in What Democracy is For (2007): 'It is about dignity, the ability to make choices and live one's own life, the risk to children, the feeling of exclusion.'

If you're wondering what a spoilt little rich kid like me is doing sounding off about what poverty is and isn't, you're right to do so. It's not done to talk about money in this country, for some reason, especially if we have it. There's an obscene fashion for whinging about how skint we are whilst conspicuously consuming. Well, I think that's crap. I think that until we can admit our own privilege, we have no business even *talking* about social justice. So I'll start with myself.

At the moment, I regularly find that I have a good deal of month left over at the end of the money, and I do not yet earn enough to pay tax. I am a twenty-something trying to make it in the big, bad world of journalism, I'm supporting a disabled partner and housemates on benefits; things I can't afford include meat to stop me getting anaemic, bedsheets without holes, a place to keep my clothes that isn't the floor, and any sort of holiday. In the years when I was really messed up, I was briefly homeless, and living on £10 a week after bus fares. I've slept in warehouses and on coaches. I've lived on porridge for weeks. However, I come from money. My parents became wealthy towards the end of my teenage years, and although I'm on a tight budget, if I ever got in real trouble I wouldn't, for example, have to sign right kidney away to a loan shark. I could call my dad, and, yknow, he would stop it all. That's privilege. I live in a nice warm houseshare with only a few mice. That's privilege.

Being rich isn't all about disposable income, either. As you will know if you follow this blog regularly, I am currently in recovery from a serious and life-threatening illness, anorexia nervosa. Because I was lucky enough to have parents who could pay for private healthcare insurance, when my illness led to physical collapse in 2004 I was able to be treated in a really decent mental institution, and that probably saved my life. If you're dying of anorexia and you have to go to the NHS, it's a very different story. All of the famous lady writers who did their time in loony bins - from Susanna Kaysen to Elizabeth Wurtzel to Sylvia Plath - they all went to private institutions, too. You don't hear back from the state-mental-healthcare graduates quite so often. In my recovery, too, money means a lot. In times when I really have been poor, not being able to afford proper food really took my mental health back down to zero. I couldn't afford to eat anything 'safe', so I just didn't eat. Now, although it might mean that I can't afford a drink in a bar or that new pair of shoes, I am able to ensure that I have enough food that I'm comfortable eating in the house. I firmly believe that if I was from a less wealthy family, and if I had been less fortunate in my choices after university, I would be much iller than I am now, presuming that I'd survived to my twenties at all. That's significant privilege. Having the chance at a second chance is privilege. My capacity to be shocked by how much privilege I enjoy is also a privilege.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sitting here every day beating myself daintily up over how terribly privileged I am. That sort of thing is self-indulgent, doesn't solve anything and is a very bad habit to get into. An even worse habit, though, is ignoring the fact altogether, and that's something that quite a lot of my middle-class friends, even the bleeding-heart liberals, have occasionally been guilty of. Refusing to believe in poverty, inequality and social injustice doesn't make it go away. Inventing some plausible reason why everyone poorer than you deserves to be poorer than you will not make it go away. Persuading yourself and anyone who cares to listen that even some poor people are 'evil' is disgusting, disingenuous and frankly cowardly, and it sickens me.

Single parents, socialist feminism and the right to equal work

‘There will be no true liberation of women until we get rid of the assumption that it will always be women who do housework and look after children’ - Ellen Malos

It’s official: single parents are scroungers, and their time has come. Don’t listen to me, listen to the DWP, which plans to start compelling single parents (by which they mean, in 9 out of 10 cases, single mothers) back to work by the time their children are one year old. Our favourite DWP spokesmonkey declared before the Welfare Reform Bill’s first reading that ‘when the national effort is about a global downturn, we cannot afford to waste taxpayers' money on those who play the system’, repeating the patchwork fantasy that ‘work is the best way out of poverty’. Ahem. Not where I live, it’s not.

A report published only this week by The Joseph Rowntree Foundation attests to the spectacular hypocrisy of New Labour’s plan to ‘make work pay’ for the poorest and neediest whilst failing to take a stand over tax fraud committed by the super-rich. However much Purnell may claim that this is all for their own good, however much he may spit out the mantra that‘work is the best way out of poverty’ for single mothers and their families, he is belied by the fact that that the majority of children in poverty have at least one parent who works.

So there it is, in shiny think-tank black and white: without a decent living wage system, getting single mothers back into paid work will not increase quality of life for the poorest families, nor will it do anything for the nation’s children other than ensuring that they receive less primary care. Even those mothers who are lucky enough to find work - in a downturn where women are being made redundant at twice the rate of men - may find, like the distressed young woman who I met at Saturday’s Gender, Race and Class conference, that the only work available to them does not even cover the cost of childcare.

Let’s make one thing spectacularly, sparklingly clear: being the primary carer of a small child is work – hard work, unending work, work that can last an entire lifetime, work that defines the term ‘labour of love’. It’s work whether a man or a woman does it, although it continues to fall into the historic category of work that women contribute to the economy for free, ‘women’s work’, work undeserving of pay or professional respect. The fact that childcare isn’t recognised as work doesn’t make it any less valid as labour. But, not content with giving single parents with no other means of support a minimum of basic care rather than a liveable salary, the Welfare Reform Bill seeks to force single parents into extra, paid work, work that will not even raise their standard of living above the poverty threshold. That’s extra, paid work that isn’t actually available at the moment, in case you’d forgotten.

This system has already been tested out in the United States. ‘Workfare’ was implemented across the pond in the boomtimes – and even in conditions of high employment, as speakers at Saturday’s conference confirmed, it has contributed to a staggering increase in child poverty and in general poverty, creating what history will doubtless term the new American underclass. But that won’t stop wee Jimmy from trying to shoehorn a similar scheme into policy over here, not even when – as reported on this blog last week – many of the friends he was planning to give Workfare contracts to are already muttering their dissent.

There are, in fact, plenty of jobs available in the UK right now– it’s just that a great deal of them don’t earn any money, for no reason other than the fact that they never have before. The wisdom that we’ve all received is that if a job isn’t paid it must not contribute to the economy – but hold on a second. Since when did the raising of children not contribute to the economy? In Capital, Marx himself comments on the attitude of capitalism to the unpaid work of sustainance and reproduction done mostly by women:

‘The maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and propagation. All the capitalist cares for is to reduce the labourer’s individual consumption as far as possible to what is necessary.’

A hundred and fifty years after those words were written, the British government is setting out to reduce the individual consumption of domestic labourers to almost nothing, by withdrawing automatic benefits entitlement after their children are one year old. Domestic labour, since it does not turn over an immediately bankable profit, and since it is done overwhelmingly by mothers, is not considered real work – domestic labourers must therefore take on a second job to support themselves. If they refuse to do so for any reason, they are ‘playing the system’ and must be punished.

This state affairs was commonplace two hundred years ago, when single, unsupported mothers also faced destitution if they did not or could not take on extra work. The difference now is the level of public hatred reserved for single mothers on benefits. Stories of young mothers 'playing the system' in order to be housed in mysteriously palatial council accommodation have been stock red-top fodder for years, but the bile directed at single parents who receive state support has never been more vocal than it is now - just look at the hatred directed at Karen Matthews, not for the real crime of false imprisonment, but for the social transgression of daring to live in poverty as a single mother with no paid employment. This manufactured public hatred directly serves the interest of a capitalist society predicated on women's unpaid work, and yes, these are socialist knickers I have on today, what of it?

The domestic labourers (and I shall personally stamp on the shrivelled gonads of the next person who even whispers the hateful word 'housewife', which Greer rightly equates with the term ‘yard-nigger’) who will be affected by this new law, of course, will only be the poorest. Women who do not work outside the home, but who do not need government support because they are independently rich or because they have a partner who works, are not considered to be ‘playing the system’, not by the DWP and certainly not by the Evening Standard group– even though the only difference between these women and single mothers on benefits is the good fortune to be born with money or to marry it. If the world were a late-night tube carriage, the social hypocrisy of the British state would be fumblingly revealing itself in the corner.

In this hyper-capitalist world, power and respect are afforded to those who earn wages – are distributed, in fact, in the form of wages. By paying a decent, liveable salary to those women and men who have primary responsibility for a child – a wage which they can spend on maintaining themselves out of paid work, or on decent childcare whilst they perform alternative work - we might well fix not only the nation’s soaring unemployment crisis, but go some way towards erasing the breathtaking poverty and hypocrisy of our socially bankrupt self-organisation. Hey, I’m 22, so I’m bloody well allowed to dream about social justice in vivid technicolour. But if the idea of radical reform sticks in your throat, there are other solutions. As columnist Deborah Orr noted in The Independent today:

The Rowntree Foundation does not make radical demands in its report…although it does warn that in the long-term only improved job quality and sustainability will solve the problem. It merely suggests that a larger sum than the Government has already ear-marked must be made available if the catastrophe of yet another generation born and raised in poverty is to be avoided. That sum is £4.2bn a year in benefits and tax credits above its present plans, and is needless to say a fraction of the money that has been spent so far on bailing out the banks.

Call me Captain State The Obvious, but we live in a society which prioritises the interests of the rich over the general good of the labouring classes, a system which, not incidentally, relies on the unpaid labour of women to sustain itself. Because we’ve grown up with it, it seems normal, even justified – and for this reason, a government which feels justified in requiring single parents to work twice as hard as anybody else merely to qualify for the minimum level of benefits merits only sustained criticism rather than rioting in the streets - although watch this space for news on that front. To get you started, Gingerbread, the lone parents' forum, have organised an online write-to-your-MP skiffle, and you don't even need to be a member of the SWP to join. Because, fundamentally, this isn't just about socialism. It isn't even about feminism. It's about human decency, and it's about justice.

Mental illness: the last great taboo?

For days, now, I’ve been trying to put down in words what I feel about the Christine Laird case, the civil case currently about to create a legal precedent for suing one’s employees if they dare not to reveal that they have a history of mental ill health. I work in mental health, and what I’ve been hearing everywhere is – well, this is a complicated case. Well, if it becomes legally plausible to demand that people declare their mental health history on job applications, hopefully that’ll encourage more people to come out of the closet rather than persuading more of us to lie. Well, maybe she wasn’t doing a very good job anyway.

And I am here to say: I have absolutely no interest in what sort of job Christine Laird was doing. She’s not being sued for doing her job badly, she’s being sued for being a closeted mentalist, something that, in this culture, she had every reason to be. The simple fact is that, faced with a very real prejudice against people with past or present mental health difficulty in the workplace – faced with a situation in which only 40% of employers will even consider employing someone with a mental health difficulty, and only 24% of people with chronic mental health conditions are in work – most of us lie.

I’ve lied. I’ve lied on most of the couple of hundred job and internship applications I’ve filled out in the past year, and I’ve not been invited to interview with any of those where I’ve been honest, not even when I was working in another capacity for the company at the time. If Christine Laird had been hiding the fact that she had a heart condition in order to get a job she was qualified for, would she be being sued now? Doubtful. Current disability laws do not protect workers like Christine Laird who choose to hide mental health conditions for fear of facing prejudice. This means, in my not-so-humble-this-evening, that current disability laws are a steaming crock.

Do I think that being a mentalist is something to be proud of? Of itself, no; I’m no more proud to have mental health problems than I am proud to be short, or that I have straight hair, or a high IQ, or that I’m white. These are inalienable things about me, borne of nature and of nurture. In the same way, in any sane society, being gay shouldn’t have to be something to be ‘proud of’ – but the fact is that living life honestly and successfully as a person of non-heterosexual orientation in this 21st-century world is still a challenge, and one that every queer person who is honest about their sexuality should justly respect themselves for. In just the same way, people struggling with the daily challenges of mental health difficulty should be able to feel proud of themselves for doing so, rather than think of themselves as the state and their families too often characterise them – as dangerous criminals.

The threat of further legal sanctions against the mentally ill frightens and angers me. Ten times I’ve started this post, my fingers hovering above the keys over the phrase ‘I’m not proud to have mental health difficulties’. And I can’t do it.

Because I am proud.

I’m sorry, mum. I’m sorry, dad. I know that in begging me to hide my condition you only want what’s best for me. I know that the way I was born has caused you a great deal of grief, and for that I’m sad and I’m sorry, but I’m not ashamed. In fact, I’m proud as anything to be sitting here today, alive and thriving and dealing both with my mental health problems and the stigma that they have won me, as I ever was when I got my degree, or when I was awarded the top mark in GCSE English in the UK. It’s been a long, hard road, and I’m sad and I’m sorry, but I’m not ashamed.

And if I could ever be honest in a job interview, here’s what I’d tell them. I’m the best candidate you’ll see today, not just because of my creativity or my academic record, but because the challenges I face daily have made me a stronger, better person. I learned more about the world and how to live in it over the 9 months I spent as a psychiatric inpatient than I did in the three years of university that followed. I know about waiting, and frustration, and I know what it’s like to have your dreams ripped away from you and to have to build them again and build them better. In order to make full use of my talents, you may well have to adjust your prejudices as well as your working practices. You may have to allow me time to deal with my condition; you may have to trust me to work to the best of my ability without the marker of 9-5 attendance or constant insufferable smiliness, but you’ll know that every bit of work you’ll get out of it will be my best, because I have something to prove.

I look at the amazing young people I’ve befriended over the last few years, and I see how powerful and beautiful they are, how they constantly support and buoy one another up, despite the fact that in many cases their families and employers don’t or won’t understand what their lives are really like. I look at these young men and women, and I remember the ones we lost too young, and I want more for us than this – more for us than a life begging for treatment that isn’t provided and understanding that isn’t forthcoming and quarter that isn’t given. I look at these beautiful young people, and I worry for their futures. I know that people just like us, people with mental health problems, are today’s disenfranchised, making up 72% of the prison population and a large percentage of the homeless and unemployed. I know that we are barred from holding parliamentary office, shunned by employers and stereotyped by the media. If I have a child, the chances are that with my genetics that child will grow up facing some of the same difficulties that I face. I want my children to have the same opportunities and life chances as anyone else.

No, I will not just buck up. I won’t ‘just buck up’, because I can’t. I’m not a crook, or a scrounger, or lazy; in fact, the nature of my disorder means that I’m far more likely to push myself too hard and work myself into a crash. But I’m sick of being told to just get on with things and be a normal person, because I know that that’s not an option for me and mine, not within definitions of ‘normal’ as they currently stand. I won't buck up, and I won't shut up, because it’s those definitions that need to change, not me – I’m proud to say that I make changes every day to secure my own mental health and continue as a functioning person, and pretending that it’s otherwise is unhelpful, it’s massively unhelpful to me and it’s unhelpful to society. I want to live a long, successful life, and when I’m in my fifties and sixties I want to be saying to the young men and women entering my industry: I did this with a mental health problem, and because of that, for you, it’ll be a little bit easier.

Our laws, our employment structure and our attitudes to mental ill health need to change, and they need to change now. We can no longer afford to keep the millions of citizens with mental health difficulties largely disenfranchised, disaffected, poorly treated and out of useful work adapted to their needs. We can’t afford it morally, and these days we certainly can’t afford it financially. I’m not satisfied with the welfare reform bill being quietly swept under the table; I’m not satisfied with Employment and Support Allowance, with Personal Care Budgets. I will not be satisfied until people with mental health difficulties have the same rights to live and love and work and receive care as people whose needs are different.

Purnell's welfare plan 'close to collapse'!

Haha!

Sucks to be you, Jimmy boy!

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

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

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

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

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

Redistribute this: Fabian NYC report *1

I've just got back from stewarding at the Fabian Society Conference, 'Fairness doesn't happen by chance', tickets fairly priced at £30, which is why I was stewarding. As soon as I saw the title of Secretary James Purnell's keynote debate - 'SOLIDARITY LOST? Reviving the will to re-distribute' - I got an intense and heady craving for a sausage roll. A cigarette. A hard slap in the face. Anything, actually, to reassure me that the life I'm living has some connection to reality. The Welfare Reform Bill may be a hundred and nine pages' worth of suspicious gibberish and the debate that followed was vaguer and more dubious still, but you always know where you are with a sausage roll.

After some initial platitudes - 'What is solidarity? Well, I'd say it's kindness transformed into political reality...' - the Work and Pensions Secretary got down to the meat and bone of what he has in mind for the nation's poor. Apparently, 'passive redistribution' - the worn, outdated notion of actually transferring money from one group of people to another - simply isn't 'modern' any more. 'We need to move from the concept of passive redistribution to one of active redistribution-increasing aspiration, education and opportunities'. Not thirty seconds before, Purnell himself had noted that aspiration, education and opportunities are accurately predicted by parental and personal income - but apparently financial redistribution is still just a bit too last century, not to mention expensive.

Onto welfare reform. Purnell's new Welfare Reform Bill contains nothing whatsoever about actually spreading wealth around (I've read it. Twice) and a great deal of sops to an imagined Daily Mail readership - and this is cheerily deliberate. 'I think politicians need to respond to public opinion,' Purnell said. And yes, that's commendable, and that would be fine if there were real research into public opinion behind this Bill, but trouble is that the Mail does not, in fact, reflect public opinion so much as create it - which begs the question of why it's this particular piece of 'public opinion' to which the Brown administration has decided to buck a ten-year trend and pay some attention, a question which was left dissolutely dangling.

The rest of the debate meandered over issues of what the left really mean, what they really mean by the concept of fairness, and was ultimately hijacked by a worthy but somewhat off-topic immigration conversation between Trevor Philips of the ECHRC and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, much to Purnell's beaming relief. Brown was right, but the extent and detail of her rightness conveniently allowed the entire discussion to abandon all hope of actually addressing actual redistribution actually at all, which nobody had seemed very keen to do in the first place anyway.

So I put up my little ink-blotted hand and flapped ineffectually at the air for twenty minutes, until I realised that no, the chair was not going to take my question, because he'd met me. And after realising this, I waited for a pause in the proceedings, and stood up and said it.

''So, Mr Purnell, is there actually going to be any increase in financial redistribution, or not?''

Purnell flustered for a split second, and then he asked the chair, ''do I have to answer that question?'' The chair (not his fault) shook his head. ''I'm not going to answer that question,'' declared the Secretary.

So when the legitimate questions had finished, I stood in front of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and said,

''Mr Purnell. In this Welfare Reform Bill, a copy of which I have here *brandish*, you have this week suggested that you're going to impel long-term benefits claimants to work for large companies, which you're going to sub-contract at public expense, and you're going to pay those workers under half the minimum wage, and pay the difference to the companies, companies that include the US mega-firm Wal-Mart. Is that correct? And is it just?''

''Well, Ms Penny, *grin wearing thin*, I think the question we need to ask is, 'does it work?, isn't it?''

No, James. No, that's not the question at all.

A lot of things work, and a lot more things work for a little while. Fascist regimes, for example. Or cleaning your teeth with bleach. Or crash-dieting. The question is, is it fair? Is it right? And is it going to create a stabler and more functional society, as opposed to a dazzlingly unequal corporate archipelago? Unless the answer to all of these questions is 'yes', does it work doesn't come into it - not before you know precisely what it is you're trying to acheive.

''A lot of people would be happy to stack shelves for Wal-Mart, if they were given the opportunity to do it for a living wage. What do you say to that?''

''Well - yes, but we couldn't do that for everyone who was unemployed for even a day, could we?''

Purnell glared at me, and put on his long, black, expensive-looking coat in a looming-looking way. I, however, am under five feet tall. I'm used to looming. I was not impressed. I remain unimpressed. And as the Bill proceeds through the House in the teeth of a recession, we can only hope that a few stalwart Westminster souls still believe in redistribution - because the Labour's figureheads certainly don't.

If you're feeling a little chilly inside right now, you might want to take a look at this reassuring picture of a very tasty and wholly predictable sausage roll, and possibly go and eat one. I know I shall. There, don't say I never have any practical solutions.

The writing's on the wall.

You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them - George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

I am seriously considering whether the best use of my time would be to torch myself on the steps of Parliament in protest - Withiel Black Esq., this morning.

I am angry, today.

But Ms Red, I hear you cry, you are quite often angry. Well, yes, that's so, but today I'm bloody angry, angry for a reason. I am sitting in a house from which my current family and I may soon be evicted, because we have failed to make our rent. We have failed to make our rent because we have failed to gain employment, we are paying off debts, and the pissingly tiny amount of benefits to which we are entitled have failed to arrive. We are spending our time watching ripped downloads off the interwebs and living on fried potatoes and tea and cigarettes re-rolled from the butt-ends of what we'd imagined our futures would be.

We're in our early twenties; the whole world is ahead of us, but a recession-bitten employment market and an increasingly punitive welfare system are making the immediate world look grim. It's going to be worse, still, for those friends of ours who are due to leave school or university this year and take their first faltering steps into a world that won't let them work and can't afford to keep them. This is not romantic. Poverty and hopelessness are not romantic. They're a fucking pain, is what they are.

When I met James Purnell in September he was half-cut, coming out of a party and manifestly didn't want to be talking to the small insistent girl reporter in black, but he took the time to explain to me why he thought his welfare reforms were going to help the poor and incapacitated. He genuinely impressed me. He knew his stuff. Three months on, with the recession steaming in and all my friends and loved ones poor and depressed and rejected by a nominally caring Labour welfare state, I'm beginning to think we've been had. I have a visceral fondness for energetic, hobbit-looking men, but not when they instruct the poor and needy to bend over and spread for a rogering, telling them in breathless pants that it's for their own good. Let's take a look at that party line:

Myth: 'work is the best way out of poverty.'

Fact: work is the best way out of poverty provided that there is work available, and provided that that work does not pay a poverty wage. Most of the journalists and politicians smugly licking Purnell's shiny arse on this one are lucky enough to have well-paid, fulfilling careers. But have you ever worked as a fast-food waitress? Have you ever worked in a call centre? You spend nine solid hours in a cramped, light-sputtering cage being bullied by your bosses and harassed by people who didn't ask you to call and harangue them. The work is soul-eatingly dull and draining and when you come home, blinking, dried-out, feeling ancient and depressed, you have to do it all again tomorrow, and you are still poor. You are still poor because you are being paid way below what might constitute a living wage, and you have no career prospects to keep you motivated. You get to choose between this and staying on benefits, being ever so slightly more crushingly poor but more physically and mentally well. What will you choose? (NB: call centre work is the only work many school leavers and graduates in the cities are currently able to find).

Myth: There is work there for people, and we believe they should do it. We can't afford to waste taxpayers' money on people who are playing the system. [Purnell]

This recession is not the fault of the poor. It is the fault of well-off wankers who live in large houses and go on holidays to Majorca, and now that the proverbial has hit the proverbial, nobody wants to take responsibility. Treating people like criminals for failing to find jobs that aren’t there is kicking us while we’re down. And that is what ‘"a system where virtually everyone has to do something in return for their benefits” means. Yes, it’s right that people take responsibility for their own lives – but what creates poverty, worklessness and drug and alcohol abuse is not moral decline, it's social and economic decline, and that's the fault of governments and the fault of a financial and business sector which sees no reason to look after its workforce in any way whatsoever.

The alleged lack of virtue of the working classes is now being exploited in order to offload the blame for what this Labour government has done – over 2 million unemployed, a toppling economy, another million so mentally and emotionally incapacitated that they cannot work. The idea that people without jobs are lazy, exploitative, ungrateful and engage in piffling class-defined vices places the blame for ‘Broken Britain’ on a group of people who have less to do with it than anyone else. The political and financial classes refuse to take responsibility for where they have landed us, and are now telling us that it’s our fault, because we are just not trying hard enough.

Don't for a moment imagine that the Tories are planning anything better. In fact, as David Cameron's latest editorial in the Hate shows, Tory contempt for the poor is if anything more shameless and ingrained than frantic Labour scapegoating could ever be: Cameron and his gang believe that the poor are lazy, and should be punished lest they all turn out like 'evil' Karen Matthews. As Matthew Norman puts it in the Indy, it takes a rich man to pour such scorn on the poor.

But I've had enough. I've had enough with trying so very, very hard to be a Labour apologist out of fear of the Tories. The Labour DWP's strategy is not just not good enough: it's actively immoral, scapegoating the neediest and making it more difficult for us to work and live just at the time when we should be carrying our wounded.

Fuck you in the fucking eyes, Purnell. It just saddens me that by the time that you see the wrong end of a dole queue in 2010, it'll be way too late for you to help even yourself.

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.

Is the Future Conservative?

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

Welfare reform: what's the deal now?

Ooh, James Purnell. Those kindly eyes, that roguish smile, that cheeky little pro-war voting record. He can call me any time, but meanwhile, guys and gals, let's satisfy our post-adolescent political lust by calling the Secretary on welfare reform.

The national drive towards reform of the benefits system has been gathering momentum over the past 18 months, with the pace stepping up from January when the Conservative party released 'Work for Welfare', a short proposal for some pretty draconian reforms to the current welfare state where all 'able bodied' men and women would be expected to work (the fact that one in four claimants of incapacity benefit are severely mentally ill clearly does not register with tory stiff-upper-lippers). Hot on the heels of this report came Purnell's green paper, the rather more progressively titled 'No One Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility.' Cue a tiresome little inter-party squabble with a lot of bitchy back-handing to the BBC over just whose idea it was to bring the British welfare system into the 21st century.

On first reading, both reports advocate a greater emphasis on individuals taking responsibility for and 'earning' their own benefits; both want to encourage more people into work and provide better checks to do so; both want a clearer distinction between the genuinely needy and those relatively able to work, those whom a medieval government might have called 'sturdy beggars'. The net effect of the reforms is that in October 2008 a new Employment and Support Allowance will be introduced for new claimants of Incapacity Benefit and other benefits before being rolled out to all recipients.

There, the similarity between the proposals ends. It must be made absolutely clear that Purnell's green paper treads an extremely fine line between positive reforms that empower people to work and victimisation and further isolation of already poor and vulnerable sections of society. For now, in the months pre-instigation, the proposals come through relatively successfully, with welcome additions such as a long-overdue simplification of the benefits claiming system, making it easier for genuinely needy claimants to access vital support. Until you've sat up with a severely physically and emotionally disable friend and watched them crying in frustration as they try to fill out the forms, you may not understand quite how vital this particular change is. The old system was designed to be complex in order to discourage fraudsters from bothering; the new system will build in more proactive checks. And about bloody time too.

The tory proposals, on the other hand, are replete with the rhetoric of disdain for the poor and needy. In the conservative worldview, people need to be stopped at all costs from 'playing the system'; the government has a 'moral right' to 'protect families', the practical upshot of which is tax benefits for married couples, as if a silver ring ever solved anything. Quite apart from the fact that Labour's report is massively longer and more in-depth, quite apart from the fact that it answers the conservative challenge with the diligence of a progressive government purposefully handling the difficulties of practical power, we cannot - simply cannot - have tory hardliners like Chris Grayling in charge of this delicate transitional period in the benefits system.

This welfare reform package is one that can only be successfully implemented by a socially aware, self-policing socialist party of the type that, at its best, Labour tries to be. Conservatives such as Grayling have claimed that Purnell's proposals are a 'straight lift' from tory plans; they are not. If anything, the latest proposals represent a visionary re-working of a policy which, under the Tories, would further criminalise the working classes and drive hundreds of thousands into poverty, debt, addiction and despair.

Because the tories have far less idea even than the incumbent government of what real poverty really means. You can't say 'credit crunch' with out baring your teeth into a snarl, and it's going for the throat of benefit recipients trying to live on £40 per week. MPs demonstrating 'belt-tightening' by not demanding increases on their sixty grand salaries live in an entirely different world from people on JSA and Incapacity Benefit. The welfare state was never designed, as the tories claim, to allow 'a young man to grow up' knowing that 'the state will support him' whatever choices he makes: if you live on benefits, you are poor. Very poor, and you'll stay poor unless your circumstances change. A life lived on benefits is a life on the breadline, a life replete with stress and starved of reward and acheivement, a life in many respects half-lived. The vast majority of people on state benefits are keen to return to work - the problem, is that many face tremendous obstacles in obtaining and retaining employment.

The conservatives' mantra of small government, of decreasing state support in every arena in favour of 'the family,' will be massively detrimental to the real good that has been done in moving millions of people off benefits and over the poverty line in the past decade. David Cameron believes that:

'The primary institution in our lives is the family. It looks after the sick, cares for children and the elderly, supports working people and the unemployed' -

Woah there. Reading between the lines, doesn't that mean that families should be doing the work of the state, just like they did in the pre-industrial era? Well, presumably they're planning to reward domestic work financially, then, aren't they, and take massive social steps to encourage social cohesiveness within all family structures, and provide equal benefits for civilly-partnered homosexual couples and married straight couples alike? No? Or, just for instance here, could it be another strategy to shove vital care structures such as 'caring for children and the elderly, supporting working people and the unemployed' out into the streets in order to save money? We've heard this one before. It was called 'Care in the Community.'

Oh, yes. And tucked away in the pages of 'Work for Welfare' are some really juicy howlers, such as:

'Equal pay audits will apply only to those firms which lose pay discrimination cases'.

Which is a logical and VITAL part of making the welfare state work for everyone, clearly. Only a progressive socialist government has the tenacity and social responsibility to make welfare reform work: we must work now to avoid handing a fledgling system based on 'rights and responsibilities' over to the tories, who will never understand in our lifetimes what it really means to be poor, sick and desperate.

Kill Patriarchy 3: Cleaners' strike

Whilst the Tories squeal and bicker over one working woman's pay-packet, let's talk about some practical feminism happening in London right now.

The cleaners of the London underground work through the night to keep the city's vascular system pumping and sanitary. Most of them are women with families. Many of them face abuse and sexual harassment every day from loutish travellers as a part of their work. On top of wiping up our vomit and newspapers and taking crap from our scum, they have to struggle with shockingly low pay, on-the-spot third party sackings, little to no sick pay and a measly 12 days' annual leave. And they've had enough.

RMT, the tube workers' union, will be striking on the 26th-27th July, and again on the 1st-2nd July 2008.
'The tube cleaners are an inspiring example of women fighting for their rights,' said Laura Schwartz, a representative of Feminist Fightback. 'London Transport must stop under-valuing so-called women's work such as cleaning and recognise that it is crucial to the smooth running of the Underground.'

These people are us. These are the people who clean up our muck. They have feelings, and they have families, and they have a level of baseline leverage that the Old Firm trembles to contemplate, and they're sick of being fucked with. This is feminism.

Let's make one thing crystal clear right now: we're not talking about the caring face of service privatisation here. Much of the abuse faced by these workers, most of whom are migrant women, does not just come from commuters. Clara Osagiede, a representative of the tube workers' union RMT, told me that it is extremely common for women to come to her complaining about serious sexual harasment from their male bosses- agency supervisors- but too afraid to make formal complaints. Male bosses take advantage of immigrant workers by threatening to expose them if they don't keep their mouths shut. This is the type of insidious patriarchal fist squeezing the breath out of the vulnerable women of this country every day.

Because, for the benefit of the uninitiated, London isn't all fashion and finance, Kate Moss and cocaine. There are millions of people here living on the poverty line, doing hard, thankless jobs that they hate just to keep themselves and their families together. Most of those people are women. Feminism happens on the ground, it's not traded in bitumen between snarling academics, and it's a central and inextricable part of anti-capitalism.

Eat the rich. Demand decent pay and support those working to do so. We are entering a new strike economy and you, too, are likely to be inconvenienced in your daily habits at some point over the next few months. But not half as inconvenienced as we'll all be if we allow the Old Firm to kick workers' rights and women's rights to the bottom of the agenda.

Barely Legal...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humbuggery and radical rantings.

Woman is born free, and is everywhere in chain-stores.

This holiday season, the drop in national festive spending has been worse than predicted; even the last-minute pre-christmas dash hasn't been enough to recoup losses on the high street. This is causing panic over dried-out mince pies in boardrooms up and down the country. Women wield a level of consumer power that is truly terrifying to those who recognise it, and in the face of spiralling food and clothing costs, we're starting to dig in our heels just a little.

Let's not forget that in the macro-capitalist playground in which we live, our power as women doesn't reside in our looks, nor in our sexuality: it's in our wallets. Seventy-five percent of global retail revenue is generated by women. That means that, every time an ordinary consumer makes a purchase anywhere in the world, three times in every four it's a woman handing over the cash or the credit card. We have a huge and terrifying amount of purchasing power - enough to bring world economies to their knees simply by changing our spending habits. Which we might be starting to do, ever so slightly, at this most financially loaded time of the year.

My Christmas wish? That every stressed and overworked home-maker, every dutiful daughter, sister and friend, every woman breaking herself and her bank balance in order to make christmas that little bit more special for those around her, will realise the true nature of the power that she wields. An economy that is geared towards making women consume and expend effort in an established manner can only be maintained if those women continue to do so in those same, very precise ways. And at this time of the year, the effort required, the money involved and the social and financial juggling expected of us in fulfilling those social requirements pinches particularly hard. But, sweating over the mince pies or collapsing under a sea of discarded giftwrap, we are not as disempowered as we might think.

*********

In the spirit of a Socialist Christmas, have a truly amazing short story, written by China Mieville for the Socialist review three years ago. Never say I'm not good to you. And that's it from me, I'm now going to go and gorge myself on booze and chocolate in the best British fashion. Merry non-denominational festivities to all, and bollocks to all that.

I like the leather, I like the whips and chains...

Some people think
Little girls should be seen and not heard
But I think -
Oh, bondage! Up yours!
Ah-one-two-three-four!
X-Ray Specs.

This weekend, London goes fetish-mad. Following the opening of Club Antichrist (link NSFW) tonight, it's the 10th annual Erotica show, a huge retail extravaganza with tie-in events headlined by none other than Dita Von Teese. Being a kinky little fuck doctor of journalism, I of course have my best shiny pvc mini-dress and party bondage gear ready for action.

Fetish. Erotica. What does it mean? Any sex-act is subversive, reminding us as it does of an essential humanity that can't be charged to a credit card; any sex-act that deviates substantially from standard heterosexual, heteronormative social models of normal shagging is that much more subversive. The UK fetish scene plays into all of these deviances, so it attracts - and influences - many who find themselves outside the 'hetero-normal' bracket, whether gay, straight, bi, trans, gender-queer, teenage or middle-aged. It's a subculture that's intensely, gorgeously performative, with many clubs and events blurring the boundaries between sex and theatre. Fetish is fun.


Playing with power.

It's also a subculture that's intensely respectful - almost definitively so, since power-play and BDSM are amongst the main thrusts (sic.) of the scene. The feminism - or feminisms - of BDSM are a minefield of fascinating cultural specificity, since by their very nature power-play fetishes operate beyond the sphere of existing power agendas, and are worked out for themselves, between consenting adults both of whom are gaining from the power transaction. That's not to say that some people - both male and female fetishists - take other, personal socio-political agendas into the bedroom, but it's very far from the norm. You'll find men who are sociopathically domineering at home or at work begging to be straight-jacketed, chained and flogged by tiny women in ridiculous shoes; you'll find women who love to be laced into corsets and spanked until they scream on the boards of companies or on the frontlines of feminist rallies. In fact, the mere act of playing with power in the bedroom can change one's response to the imposition of power in other, more clothed arenas of life.


Cash for Kinks.

The only problem I have with the scene - and it's a big problem - is the high cost of entry. Sexual subversion is a powerful force for social change; one of the only ways to defuse it is to twist its emphasis into line with the dominant status quo. In Western domestic society, capitalist participation and acquisition- shopping - is the dominant status quo, so it's hardly surprising that one of the main activities of the fetish crowd seems to be buying stuff. That shopping is a central part of the fetish experience is less surprising still in the light of the intense performativity of the scene - in which both voyeurism and exhibitionism are major parts of the participatory experience. The scene is partly about showing off; showing off one's eccentricities, kinks and physical assets, however, becomes less playfully shallow when it necessarily also involves a display of one's disposable income. The lifestyle is expensive, from bondage gear, toys, equipment and outfits to tie-in objects d'art, all of which need to be specially and carefully made, and all of which are costly. Unfortunately, although members of the scene are generally co-operative types, the nature of many of the toys means that sharing isn't an option. What all of this means is that vulnerable members of society - the young, those on lower incomes or without the disposable cash required - find themselves excluded from the very sexual underworld that could do most to expand the horizons of the naive and under-privileged. In a very Marxist sense, the fetishism of the scene extends to the commodity as well as to the sex-act.

That said, though, at one point, whilst living with a Domme and her sub, I made them a present of a washed length of black inner-tubing from a car engine that had been abandoned in the road near my college. Bondage games, and sex-fetish play in its broader sense, need not be prohibitively expensive.Moreover, the fetish subculture is one of the closest things to an anarchic, self-perpetuating mini-economy that the UK, along with other states, can boast: most fetish products are made by small, independent businesses and craftspeople for a dedicated market. Few people become multi-millionaires through fetish business, and those who participate do so for love of the craft and love of the scene, since profit margins for bespoke items and products made from, for example, rubber and worked leather, are so low - 'an average of 5% across the industry', according to one insider. Finally, most of those involved in selling to the scene are scene members themselves; there's a certain, elegant simplicity in the economic lives of a group who make a living selling chic couture sex-play gear only to finance the purchase of more of the stuff for their own play.

The key difference with the sexual-fiscal economy of the fetish subculture is this: the sex is the point. The sex is the point and the shopping is subsidiary to it, whereas in mainstream, heteronormative advertising culture, the shopping is the point, and sex just a means of upping sales.

So, tonight I'm putting a leash on an obliging boy, packing some whips and bondage tape and heading to a club for some investigative journalism. The fetish culture negotiates a minefield of capitalist moral quicksand and power-games; I want to know if it's retained its subversive soul. Goshdamn, but I hope so. ;)

And today, on Brown-o-vision: Gordon Goes for Gold!

The Queen's speech really does get on my tits. Not least because, this year, some of the most interesting policy-proposal in the past few months was dribbled out to a televised audience of ermine-clad, elderly peers in silent ranks - only half of whom have been elected since the Lords reform bills of the past decade - looking disturbingly like something from an Ursula LeGuin novel. Lords expert Meg Russell is damn right to point out that this 'anachronistic hoopla' does nothing to strengthen popular faith in politics. I sat through the whole thing half-expecting an exchange along the lines of: 'we're reviewing the 28-day terrorism suspect pre-trial bill'! 'Oh, no, you're not!' (They're not.)

This, however, is the right move. Or, at least, it looks like the right move. Rights to flexible hours for more working parents? Great. Great, because it brings working womens' issues back into the spotlight. Great, because it might help persuade the voting public that Cameron isn't the sole Great White Hope of working families. Great - as long as it's backed up by legislation ensuring that those who then seek flexible hours don't a)face a drastic salary-cut or b)lose their jobs.

One thing, though. The right is only available to any employee with 12 months' service. Correct me if I'm wrong, but 12 months, for, say, a woman with a young child attempting to return to work after maternity leave, is a very long time indeed. A proven year-long service record will be no problem for many of the more affluent, middle-aged, middle-class citizens, but it WILL be a problem for the most vulnerable working citizens: contract workers, those in low-paid service industries where jobs are less permanent, immigrants, recent graduates, women returning to work, and the young. Furthermore, this sub-clause will mean the new legislation has no effect on the corporate bullying of the 1 in 16 British workers who are classed as 'agency workers' - this includes, for example, a substantial proportion of UK nurses and care workers.

Moreover, it seems that employers will have the right to refuse flexible working hours 'on the grounds of excessive cost.' Brilliant: so we'll have no actual right to flexible hours - but nevermind, at least we'll have the right to ask for them!

Distinctly below-average, there, Gordon. Must Try Harder.