Webcomic for Election Night

ETA: FUCKING YES.

After New Labour: report on Guardian/Soundings event last night

So, last night I found my tiny self at a debate organised by Soundings and Comment Is Free, provocatively titled 'After New Labour'. I was starving, having been writing all day when I should have been eating lunch, and had just about enough time to pick up the world's largest blueberry muffin on my way to King's Place. As I was due to write a piece for the Graun (Pennyred articles commissioned and turned down by Guardian currently stand at 6), I was ushered into a little room containing The Rt Hon Harriet Harman Rt Hon, Madeleine Bunting and someone else who knew them both so was obviously famous, and - me, and my muffin. Dilemma! I have an annoying tendency to shake and fall over when I haven't eaten. But Harriet Harman was right there! I couldn't just scoff down a muffin in front of her without even introducing myself - could I? Or could I? In the end I made my excuses and sprinted outside for sugar, cigarettes and other vices, before heading back in to ask cheeky questions and generally have a great deal of fun. A report/thinkpiece follows. Enjoy.


*


After New Labour, we have been delivered a shrill and remote language of progressive politics. Every speaker at last night’s Soundings/Comment Is Free debate agreed on the urgency of abandoning old rhetoric and working towards what John Cruddas called ‘a new sense of economic and social solidarity’, but such high-mindedness will be scuppered if Labour continues to define itself against the Conservative party.

My generation does not remember an ideology of Old Labour. Some young people who were born after the fall of the Berlin wall have already cast their first votes. Our parents may have voted for Blair in 1997, and we may even remember the excitement and pounding pop anthems that signalled the fall of the Major government, but we do not relate to that excitement. We do not play well with big, simple political ideas for one very good reason: big, simple ideas no longer seem relevant.

The global credit crunch has delivered the final blow: we have come to the end of ideology as a significant rallying factor in party politics. The New Labour generation, raised with the syncretic paradigms of internet technology, is bright and informed enough to understand that answers that look too easy usually are too easy. Radical socialism no longer quite suits; neither does the sacred cow of free market capitalism, currently flailing its hooves in bovine panic.

In the midst of this crisis, the same Labour party which not ten years ago declared an end to ideology is now casting about like a teenager anxiously trying to define itself. The party needs to move on from its adolescent wavering and realise, like every growing kid, that nobody cares how it defines itself anymore: it will be judged on its actions. At last night’s event, Harriet Harman lauded New Labour as ‘a delivery mechanism for Labour values’ – but the 18-26 year old cohort no longer has a clear idea of what those values are.


The party is still, as Harman noted, ‘driven by our experience of what it was like to live under a Tory government whose values we abhorred,’ but with what Chuka Umunna identified as Labour’s failure to ‘deal a blow to the Thatcherite consensus’, my generation can only point to New Labour when the cruelties of neo-liberalism begin to bite.

What will win votes is not ‘a return to Labour values’, but principles and practical planning, two noted absences from the current Conservative platform. If we are not offered practical principles, my generation will vote for personality, as we already have in London this year (not that anyone's grateful).

Umunna, by far the most engaging speaker of the evening, was the only one explicitly to agree that Labour must offer something more than a platform of ‘not the Tories’. He noted that the notion that the individual prospers in the context of a strong and active state has always been at the heart of Labour’s mission – ‘it’s not that hard to say, so why don’t we say it?’,

Labour must stop defining itself by what it is not, and instead step forward with real principles to win back the 4.3 million voters who have abandoned the party since 1997. One of these core principles must be the potential of the state as an engine of wealth redistribution. The collapse of the derivatives market provides a perfect opportunity for this government to raise the pitifully low tax thresholds for the wealthiest 10 percent, who own 71 percent of this country's wealth - so long sticking place for a British progressive consensus attempting to reconcile itself with New Labour values.

In the wake of this financial crisis, Brown's government will enjoy a unique window in which to tax the wealthy, in response to a real public hunger for tax justice. My generation is crying out for socio-economic fairness, and the forcible lowering of petrol prices at the pumps this month is a baby step towards the platform of real social solidarity which Cruddas and Umunna echoed the call for last night. ‘After New Labour’, the Labour party’s first question must not be what it now stands for, nor what its values are, but what precisely it plans to accomplish with another term in power.

***

ELECTION NIGHT ON PENNYRED: THE DOOMED YOUTH OF TODAY ARE HOLDING AN END OF THE WORLD PARTY AT MY MEATSPACE RESIDENCE, WITH GIN, CHEMICALS, BBC-ONLINE AND MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF DORITOS AND BLIND HOPE. THERE WILL BE A SMALL AMOUNT OF LIVEBLOGGING, DEPENDING ON WHETHER OR NOT I'M SOBER ENOUGH TO HOLD THE KEYBOARD STRAIGHT. STAY TUNED TO THIS SITE AND TO LIBERAL CONSPIRACY.

Neo-nazis say: vote Obama

Esquire magazine, admittedly not always the most reliable of sources, has interviewed several prominent US career fascists, and amongst the drooling, gum munching racist filth it was today revealed that significant members are planning to vote for Barack Obama rather than his white, Republican opponent.

Rocky Suhayda, the Chairman of the American Nazi Party, said: 'White people are faced with either a negro, or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro.'

And there's more!

Tom Metzger, the Director of White Aryan Resistance, said:'The corporations are running things now, so it’s not going to make much difference who's in there, but McCain would be much worse. He’s a warmonger. He’s a scary, scary person--more dangerous than Bush...I hate the transnational corporations far more than any black person.'

Please understand the difference between endorsing white supremacists' rhetoric, which I'm not doing, and giggling helplessly as the last rats leave the sinking McCain schooner and American politics goes through the looking glass. Combine this with possibly the worst assassination plot ever (two young men plan to buy/steal some guns, wear white tuxedos and drive in the general direction of Obama, somewhere, whilst shooting things and shouting, before getting shot by police. That was their plan. That was their whole plan.) and I think liberal American kiddies can sleep safe in their beds.

When we're done cackling, we should probably remind ourselves that on this side of the pond we're rather short on Charlie Chaplin fascists - instead we've got a highly organised neo-fascist faction, the BNP, with a stunning PR team and the guile to get out there knocking on doors and trying to win parliamentary influence, having already gained a seat on the London assembly. Just, yknow, saying.

Pantomime dames (Oh yes, we are!)

Queer campaigners and feminists alike are outraged over Stonewall’s decision to nominate Julie Bindel for its ‘Journalist of the Year’ award. Bindel is a notoriously outspoken transphobe (her insulting and upsetting remarks about transpeople in national newspapers can be found here, here and here) and protestors say that the decision to promote her as a pioneer of gay rights is an insulting piece of hypocrisy. ‘This is not just an insult to transgendered people, but hypocrisy in the extreme -Stonewall claims to represent a minority group which suffers from discrimination, but they are prepared to honour someone who is instrumental in repression of transgendered people with her bigoted transphobic journalism,’ said organisers of the protest against the controversial nomination.

Regular readers of this blog will know how I feel about Julie Bindel and her terrible views, which are - upsettingly enough - shared by grand dames of the movement including Germaine Greer. I think it’s important not only to challenge them, but to offer a response. So here’s a contemporary feminist take on femininity, feminism and transgenderism, from the point of view of a largely cis-gendered feminist activist (yes, many of my best friends are transgdendered and wondering where all their makeup has gone). For a transsexual feminist's viewpoint and a much more in-depth and articulate study, look no further than the excellent Whipping Girl by the ravishing and razor-sharp Julia Serano.

I've actually met very few transpeople who shout about it in the street. Most, after years of bravely facing down abuse, dealing with the reactions of friends and family, struggling to access treatment and, often, battling the psychological fallout of feeling themselves born in the wrong body, simply want to be left in peace. Nonetheless, transsexualism's existence and tentative acceptance within mainstream society is immensely radical.

Transsexualism is not merely a valid part of the queer- and gender-liberation movements: it's a vital one. The notion that one's biological sex does not have to dictate anything about one's behaviour, appearance or even the eventual layout of one's genitals and secondary sex organs, now that we live in a glittering future where such things are possible, is a radical one.

Furthermore, not all transsexuals present, as Bindel would have it, as 'men in dresses'. Transsexualism, transgenderism, transvestism and intersexuality present in a myriad different ways. Some bio-men choose to live as women and to take hormones, but do not elect to have any surgery. Some bio-women present as males half the time by binding their breasts, stuffing their pants and going to nightclubs in tanktops and baseball caps, the liberated 'bois' of the spreading San-Francisco scene. Some people are born with hormone imbalances, or born entirely outside of the two-gender sphere altogether: in fact, one in 2,000 babies is born without an XX or XY genotype. Trans issues go way beyond 'men in dresses', although drag queens tend to remain the postergirls for the same reason that Kylie Minogue is now the face of breast cancer: they look good doing it.

Femininity is not a sacred cow. Femininity is a social construct, and Bindel is right to identify it as such, but utterly wrong to claim that transsexuals re-enforce these stereotypes. The problem is not with transsexuals, but with our entire fucked-up construction of what is 'male' and what 'female', what 'masculine' and what 'feminine'. Bindel's bio-'boys' in 'fuck-me-boots and birds-nest hair' are no different from today's bewildered 12, 13 and 14-year old girls struggling to make the transition from deeply felt, little-understood womanhood to socially dictated artificial 'femininity'. Like teenage girls stuffing their bras with loo-roll and smearing on inappropriate lipstick, the m-t-f transsexuals for whom Bindel, Greer and their ilk reserve special hatred are simply craving what all growing girls crave: social acceptance.

Yes, they are performing femininity. But so are all women, every day. Yes, some of them might sometimes present as 'pantomime dames' in Greer's ever-tactful phraseology. But after a long night out on the tiles, too much slap, tarty heels, padded bra, bling and rapidly deflating hairdo, I fail to see in what way I'm less of a pantomime dame than, say, the fabulous Jodie Harsh (a lady who does it much, much, much better than almost everyone else).

Jodie Harsh is a pantomime dame. So is Victoria Beckham. Lily Savage is a pantomime dame. So is Vivienne Westwood. So was Margaret Thatcher. So is the Queen of England. We are all pantomime dames, performing femininity because that's how we gain social acceptance. Those who have least to gain by performing femininity – bio-males who, in doing so, voluntarily and utterly abandon male privilege – are perhaps the bravest and canniest of all of us.

It is those who have found themselves outside the two-sex system who have done the most to challenge toxic gender binaries throughout history. From the Hirjas of India to the holy hermaphrodites of ancient Greece, from the Molly-boys of 18^th century London to the f-t-m artists of bohemian paris, transsexual, transgender, transvestite and intersexed individuals have been revered and reviled, studied and sought out, as if they held the keys to the mysteries of the gender system that binds us. Perhaps they do.

Victorian philanthropy and government hypocrisy.

The work of government-funded anti-prostitution group The Poppy Project is ‘incoherent’ and ‘dangerous’, according to British experts.

The release of a damning report by academic specialists in the politics of sex work comes in the wake of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s plans for a massive crackdown on the ‘blight’ of prostitution in the UK. The Home Secretary’s proposals, based largely on the dubious work of The Poppy Project, will outlaw street prostitution and criminalise some buyers of sex – moves which have also been denounced by women’s rights groups.

‘We are appalled that the government has used this sloppy research while ignoring a large body of reputable research,’ said Dr Helen Ward, one of the authors of the document. ‘Jacqui Smith’s proposals are deeply flawed and will put sex workers at even more risk of violence and exploitation. They also contain yet another major assault on civil liberties – this time on the liberties of adults having consenting sex.’

‘Just two years ago in Ipswich we all witnessed the tragic consequences of zero tolerance policies on sex work,’ said Kate Hardy, a researcher in sex work and member of activist group Feminist Fightback. ‘Women are forced to take more risks, with less time to decide whether or not to get into cars, having to work alone rather than in pairs or small groups and working in darker more isolated areas.’ Police in Ipswich implemented just such a policy before the tragic murders of a number of sex workers in the city in 2006 (pictured).

‘It is not the place of the criminal law to be policing people’s personal morality,’ said Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon of the University of London, adding that ‘If they really cared about people’s safety or about public nuisance, the government would allow these women to work off the street.’

The Poppy Project, which last year received over £2.4 million of public money, offers highly conditional help to the 0.2% of prostitutes who are victims of sex trafficking. Feminists and sex workers alike have been appalled at the insistence by members of the Project that prostitutes agree to give up sex work forever and to turn in their traffickers – sometimes a very dangerous step for them to take – before they receive any help whatsoever. ‘It’s like the worst sort of Victorian philanthropy,’ said Dr Brooks-Gordon.

As well as making life more dangerous for street prostitutes, the Home Secretary’s proposals will give the police greater powers to raid brothels and flats where sex workers operate. This move is particularly astounding, given the fact that the police are currently allowed to keep a quarter of the money used in such raids – even if that money represents a woman’s life savings. The risk of diverting police attention to pursuing the most profitable rather than the most exploitative sex work establishments has not been lost on the Home Secretary, who simply declared: ‘we will take their bling away from them.’

‘There have been scenes of police arriving at 5am in full riot gear and dragging women out into the street in their underwear,’ said Dr Brooks-Gordon. ‘As a feminist, I find it very hard to see how that promotes women’s rights.’

The aim of the changes, according to a Home Office memo, is ‘to send a clear message that the Government will protect the vulnerable.’ However, many groups, including coalitions of sex workers, have raised concerns that the implementation of such legislation will actually increase the dangers for trafficked women and migrant workers in the sex trade, whose lack of papers will leave them even more vulnerable to abuses within underground prostitution rings.

The Safety First Coalition denounced the moves towards criminalising the purchase of sex being promoted by UK ministers ‘despite evidence from academics and sex workers in Sweden that the law has forced prostitution further underground, undermining women’s safety, driving women into the hands of pimps and making it harder for the police to prosecute violent men and traffickers.’

Isabella Lund, of the Sexworkers and Allies Network in Sweden, commented on the failures of the Swedish Model in Sweden itself, saying that ‘street prostitutes today are more exposed to robbery, assault and rape than before.’

If Jacqui Smith and her cronies really care about protecting society's most vulnerable workers, they wouldn't be focusing on 'taking their bling away' but on putting schemes in place to help prostitutes clean up and clear out, or to make their work safer, if that's what's needed. The work of The Poppy Project smacks of the worst sort of moralising Victorian philanthropy, and is utterly inappropriate for dealing with the social problems caused by prostitution in the 21st century.

Now, let me try to explain this in song....

A brief interlude for a grey October evening: Withiel, Pennyred's multitalented comics artist, presents That One, a techno tribute to our favourite candidate. Featuring Barack H. Obama and the adoring masses.

Click the link and sing along.

Abortion, rape and hypocrisy

On October the 22nd, pro-choice amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill will hit the table again. Dr Evan Harris MP, who has been instrumental in forcing these amendments onto the bill, said on Monday that this is 'a once in a generation opportunity to modernise the law.' With it, it's time to modernise our attitudes.

A significant proportion of the UK believes that abortion is far more permissible if the pregnancy is the result of rape. In October 2007 a CBS News poll showed that 34% of the residents of the United states - the highest proportion of the sample- believed that abortion should only be permitted 'to save a woman's life, or in cases of rape or incest.' And in a survey of British students, over two-thirds of those who identified as 'pro-life' believed that abortion should be permitted in cases of rape. This single fact tears a savage hole in 'pro-life' reasoning.

Believe it or not, there's one area where the twisted logic of Governor Sarah Palin actually makes some sense: either abortion is murder, or it isn't. I happen to believe that it isn't, but let's suspend disbelief for a second and suppose, as some people do, that a foetus is an entire and sentient person from the moment of conception. Murder’s still murder, even if you do it with virgin, unsullied hands. The prominence of the viewpoint that abortion is okay as long as the woman has been raped tells us what the real issue is here.

The real issue is women daring to have sex at all. What people really mind isn’t women evacuating the poor little embryos, it’s women daring to exercise sexual self-determination and getting away with it. In other words – in fact, in the words of several pro-choice websites – women deserve to ‘suffer the consequences of sin’. Of course, if a woman’s been raped then it wasn’t her fault she had sexual intercourse, so she's excused.

It's easy to see why the pro-choice movement takes such pains to parrot this wildly hypocrytical piece of rhetoric, appealing, like at the parliamentary rally this week, on behalf of women who might be 'forced to have their rapist's baby.' But unless you subscribe to the misandrist Dworkinite premise that all penetrative sex is rape, there has to be more to it than that. A woman shouldn’t have to justify her decision to have an abortion in terms of her sexual purity.
If you truly believe that it’s alright for a woman to terminate a pregnancy when she has a good excuse for being pregnant -one that doesn’t involve the crime of consenting to sex - then you concede that it’s okay for some pregnancies to be terminated. In the pro-choice movement, we are convinced that nobody else should get to decide whether or not a woman ‘deserves’ an abortion. We believe that it should be her decision alone, not someone else’s blind sentimental call, and certainly not a question of sexual virtue. Let’s put aside this archaic reasoning and modernise abortion law to reflect 21st-century values.

****

Use Abortion Rights' online lobbying tool to lobby your MP ahead of the crucial vote on Tuesday, or come to the protest on Monday the 21st at 5.30pm outside parliament, Westminster tube.

The day the music died.

And we all know the real song
but we won't sing along
'cause our boyfriends and girlfriends
and parents will say
Don't be a square, grow your hair and be happy
It's not god that made you this way -

So lift up your top
Lift up your top
Lift up your top, got to use what you've got
Try not to see anything but the fee
It's all tongue in cheek anyway!

'Our Daughters Will Never Be Free,' The Indelicates, 2008

We have a very short window in which to start asking some crucial questions about wealth and gender. We have a short window, whilst the FTSE and the Dow and the Nikkei buckle and collapse, to commit blasphemy. To say that the very nature of financial markets, of patriarchal capitalism itself, engenders ideological violence against women - and by association, men - everywhere.

Fact: markets will seek to maximise profits. Fact: sexism sells. The image of the cackling city boy stuffing his bonus into a hooker's disembodied garter - just the leg showing, never the face - has become one of the icons of hypercapitalist success. However you wrangle the incentives, an economic model spawned and nurtured in an atmosphere of male privilege will seek to make money by selling women's bodies back to them, by selling them to other men, by exploiting women's work and by hijacking femininity as a saleable commodity and nothing more.

I remember the first time I met Ginger Spice. It was four years ago, and I was standing at the reception desk in the acute anorexia wing of a London mental hospital. I was there because there was nobody but my receptionist to watch me and make sure I took my meds and kept my meal supplements down, wearing a floppy hat and a tracksuit that flapped on the bent coat hanger of my body, drawing slogans to keep me occupied. And Geri Halliwell walked by.

She was there to see the girl in the next room from mine, a friend and a fan. And my first thought was how very, very tiny she was – barely five feet three in massive heels, dwarfed by shopping bags and a bunch of violent pink crepe-wrapped roses. Tiny and fragile-looking, all desperate smile and thin hair bleached back to its natural pale strawberry-blonde, Geri Halliwell had been in the press all year, and still is, thanks to a much-touted recovery! from anorexia, bulima and other lapses in celeb inscrutability. Through the haze of numb, sour fear that dogged those hospital days I remember thinking: that’s Ginger Spice. That pale, frantic creature is the same girl whose posters I had on my walls, whose feisty, pumped-up pop smashes were the first singles I ever bought with my pocket money. That’s Girl Power, right there. There it goes.

How sad, and how empty it all seems now. In 1996, we were told that anything was possible. Girls were powerful! Girls were sexy! Girls were marketable! You could be anything you wannabeed! Fast forward twelve years and the record is scratched and broken, the Spice Girls themselves bleached by years of pap-dashes into wasted, desperate husks of the energetic, ballsy girls we once thought we knew. We made ourselves into products again the instant empowerment was wrenched away from the feminist movement and assaulted with price-tags, we were consumed; we consumed ourselves. Femininity was for sale, and too much of it made us sick. Sick of ourselves, sick of our lives, sick of looking forward to another twenty years of hard sell until we could no longer pretend that we were young and available and found ourselves consigned to the scrap-heap with the computer shells, splitting bin-bags and acid-leaking fridges.

The year I started eating again - really eating, not just subsisting on crackers and tea - the sub-prime mortgages broke and the markets began to deflate like a balloon at the end of a long party. Right now, a loaf of bread costs more as a percentage of the average wage than it ever has. Groceries are getting harder for everyone to afford. We can no longer stuff ourselves with impunity, but right now, right this second, I feel something I spent my whole life missing. I feel something girlishly blasphemous and slightly obscene. I feel full.
Shopping, preening, starving, serving, fucking. Five key activities for my generation of young women under capitalism. We were born in the shadow of Thatcher and taught to prepare ourselves not for productivity, but for producthood. We do not remember living through anything but boomtimes, but for us, money is still something we will not win without the trappings of servility; we came to learn that nothing sells better, or faster, than our bodies, and the better and faster we could cash in, the happier and worthier our lives would be -

There's no better example of the pitfalls of unregulated capitalism than the strange case of the 22-year-old woman, known by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan, who is selling her virginity in hopes of financing her college education. She wants to be a marriage and family therapist. This transaction is "capitalism at its best," according to the manager of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch in Nevada, which is brokering the deal. He made the point on a TV show last week on which we both appeared as guests. I argued this is capitalism at its worst. You've got a desperate woman (she was allegedly defrauded out of a hunk of cash by her no-good dad); virtually no safety net if you're poor; gargantuan college fees, thanks to little government assistance or regulation; and the perfect storm of circumstances that makes a young woman think it's OK to sell her body. Scary? Yeah. Does it have to be this way? No. It's about the morality of the market. - Marian Meed-Ward, Kingston Whig-Standard, Ontario 25.09.2008

Maybe I'm a little biased, being accustomed to a student lifestyle and still having no job to lose- but I say let it all come down. Let the markets crash, and let the ugly arrogance of a society rent by the gashes of commodified gender come tumbling with them. So what if the glittering future that was promised to us as long as we behaved ourselves like good little girls has vanished? We may have been trained as hyper-consumers, but we don't have to live that way.

Let it all come down. Let's see the arrogance of the testosterone-stinking trading floors thwarted and the altars of deregulated markets toppled: we don't need the old gods and their archaic laws any more. Now that governments have intervened with basic financial packages to has save us from utter disaster, we can breathe a little easier - but the ideology of Western capitalism will never be the same again, and its discourses of gender are open to decimation. Bring it all down.

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.

Stand up for women in Northern Ireland!

For months, Northern Irish MPS have been holding the government to ransom over abortion rights, using the bodies of their female constituents as bargaining chips over the 42 days legislation and claiming that if moves are made to extend abortion rights to Northern Ireland, the peace process will be threatened. 'It's time to call their bluff,' said Diane Abbott MP at a rally in Parliament last night.

Diane Abbott has tabled an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, due for its third reading on the 22nd of October, calling for an extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. This is precisely the same amendment that Emily Thornberry MP was forced to withdraw back in May, when Gordon Brown assured her that the move would be seen as a slap in the face by the nine DUP members who swung the 42 days vote in the Prime Minister's favour. Today at noon, forty women from Northern Ireland will hand into Number Ten a letter signed by the leaders of civil society in NI supporting abortion rights for women in the region.

The women want to meet as many MPs as possible whilst they are in London, in order to counter some of the anti-abortion propaganda which is doing the rounds in Westminster. MPs are, for instance, being told by the government that they should not adopt an ‘imperialist’ or ‘colonialist’ attitude to NI and impose something on the region.

'But there is no question of Westminster ‘imposing’ abortion on NI; it is already a reality of life here,' said Alliance for Choice spokesperson Goretti Horgan. 'Each year thousands of Northern Irish women travel to Britain and Europe and pay for private abortions. For women living on low incomes, getting the money together on time is impossible. An unwanted pregnancy can leave some women in a desperate situation – which is why we now find some women turning to the internet to buy the abortion pill.' Women who have taken black-market abortion pills often present at hospitals in Northern Ireland with terrible bleeding - and if the reason for their symptoms is discovered, some could face a life sentence once they recover, last night's audience was told.

'The poverty of some women in NI also impacts on the numbers of late abortions in Britain,' said Ms Horgan. 'The time it takes some women to find enough money to have an abortion means that women from here are three times more likely than British women to have abortions after 20 weeks. However, thousands of others are forced to continue pregnancies they find intolerable. This includes women pregnant as a result of rape and sexual abuse', says the Alliance for Choice spokesperson.

'If you're afraid of falling into some colonialist mindset by overriding Stormont, please, forget it - we need our human rights,' said Dr Audrey Simpson of the Northern Irish Family Planning Association, reminding those present that when the Bill was last on the table in May, Northern Irish MPs had 'no qualms' in voting to cut the time limit from 24 to 12 weeks for English, Welsh and Scottish women.

Whilst a majority of Stormont MPs are vehemently anti-choice, they do not represent the needs and opinions of their constituents on this matter. Northern Irish MPs are elected along sectarian lines, with a simple choice between orange and green candidates. Since 1967 over 80,000 women have travelled to England to have abortions, but there's one big reason why more pro-choice women, doctors and lawyers aren't speaking out, according to Annie Campbell of the Alliance for Choice: 'they are afraid'.

Ms Campbell explained how women suspected of seeking abortions in Northern Ireland have been the victims of appalling abuse, adding that anyone vocally supporting the pro-choice cause in Northern Ireland can expect significant harrassment. 'This is a global war and, as usual, women's bodies are on the frontline,' she said. She urged all the women and men present at the meeting to lobby their MPs, asking them to speak out for Northern Irish women 'because at the moment, we can't speak for ourselves. There's no use in us lobbying our MPs for the right to legal abortion - for all we know we'll just be put on a hit-list,' she said.

Dr Evan Harris MP, who has been instrumental in furthering the pro-choice cause in parliament, repeated the call for pro-choice citizens to lobby their MPs and urge them to vote for the positive amendments on the bill, reminding those present that 'this is a once in a generation opportunity to modernise the law'.

It's also the last chance Northern Irish women will have to fight for their rights to legal abortion for a very long time: soon, criminal law will be devolved to Stormont, after which 'we won't see positive change for generations,' said Annie Campbell.

If you agree that it is unacceptable that a group of women in the UK are still treated as second-class citizens and denied reproductive self-determination, here's how you can get involved -



WHAT YOU CAN DO:

1)Write to your MP, asking him or her to vote in support of the amendment extending abortion rights to Northern Ireland, and encourage your friends and family to do the same. 'We get so much hate-mail from pro-life groups that every supportive letter we receive makes a genuine difference', said Katy Clark MP last night.

2) Sign the online FPA petition in support of extending rights to Northern Ireland, here.

3)Come along to the protest organised by Abortion Rights UK ahead of the crucial vote - details will be posted here as soon as they appear and will also be available at Abortion Rights.

4)Add your voice to the Pro-Choice Majority website, containing testimonials of delays and obstruction to the process of medical abortion by representatives of the 80% of the UK who support a woman's right to choose.

Webcomic 6!

Art by Withiel, script by Penny Red, lettering by Twitch. x

Tories in queer hypocrisy shocker!

So now the Tories are courting the pink vote. Big surprise. But the notion, promoted even by the BBC, that gays might have a 'duty' to vote Conservative is baffling.

They've wheeled out Margot James, PPC for Stourbridge and noted deep-blue dyke, to tell us all why we need to vote Tory. This is the same Margot James who did not stand as a gay candidate at the last election, and who has been heard saying that she hoped her partner's name, Jay, would be mistaken for that of a man by reporters. Ms James' parroting of the party-line at the Stonewall event yesterday goes something like this:

"Gay people are net contributors to public services through their taxes, because very few of them have children.

"I think gay people have got more angst on this issue than anybody else because gay people are paying in, through their taxes and actually using far less of the NHS because they tend not to have families, less of the education system for the same reason and all the more reason to be angry with this government for the waste of their taxes."

Translation: "Everyone knows you faggots hate kids! So vote for us - we hate kids, too!'

The suggestion that homosexuals do not have 'families' is both degrading and manifestly false. I happen to live in a massive multi-sexual household of six. None of us are related by blood, but we consider ourselves family. All of us, furthermore, have mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and all of us feel that - despite our sexuality - we are just as invested in other humans as anybody else. Me and my big queer family are appalled by this throwaway rhetoric, at a Stonewall event, no less.

The logic of the tory tax argument also falls down when the ageing society is brought into play. Sure, homosexuals may, on average, raise fewer sproglets than their het friends, but this makes it all the more important for us that we live in a society that invests properly in healthcare, elderly care and the pensions system. Without the dubious surity of grown-up kids to wipe our octogenarian posteriors, we are going to need a government that invests in our care - a government that values the contribution we make as members of society enough to make public spending a priority.

The main tory line, however, remains that you and I should vote Conservative because, well, there are quite a lot of gay conservatives. Newsflash: there have always been gay tories; there have been gay tories before the word was even invented. What there have never been are tories promoting a gay agenda. In recent years, tory MPs have, for the most part, had an appalling voting record on queer issues in parliament - vital issues like civil partnerships and the age of consent. The tories are quite happy for us to carry on shuffling in the dark. If they're gay, too, they certainly haven't traditionally wanted the world to know about it. The tory closet door remains firmly shut. And no wonder, this being the party that introduced and tried desperately to save Section 28 of the Local Government Act, 1988.

Just a reminder: the amendment stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". Ian Duncan Smith and a great deal of the tory party faithful spent 2003 trying to save this disgustingly homophobic piece of legislation. Nobody has apologised for that, and the silence of top conservatives over their shocking record at the Stonewall event stunk of hypocrisy.

I am not suggesting that just because you like a bit of same-sex action you absolutely must be a political radical. Not at all. Not one jot. In fact, I'm grudgingly of the opinion that one thing the 1990s were good for was freeing gay men and women of the grinding obligation not to also be bigoted fuckwits if they so chose. But bigotry and a forward-thinking queer agenda have never gone hand in hand, and if one is queer - not just gay, which is a statement of fact, but politically queer - you do have a duty to vote for anyone else apart from the tory party and far right.

Queer politics involve more than a private penchant for cock and a public rhetoric of tax breaks for straight, married couples. Queer politics are politics which make it easier for the millions of men and women who choose to live and love outside of the heteronormative box to do so without cultural, practical or financial discrimination. Queer politics are inherently radical, and not everyone working towards them is gay, and not everyone gay has queer politics. Let's not mistake gay - which is what the Conservative party has always secretly been - for queer, which it never will be.

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

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

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

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

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

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


******

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

Comic 5!

Script by PR, art by Withiel, lettering by Twitch. Apologies for tardiness - there was no way to upload this whilst I was at Conference! x

The people's flag is palest pink...

Genitals, Ladymen, comrades, compatriots and fraternizers:

I've been at the Labour Party Conference for two days and my back and brain are aching. The sweet scent of power and privilege overwhelms the subtle breeze of socialism blowing through the hallways. Everybody knows that the party needs a new direction, and some people are even starting to say it out loud: what Hazel Blears MP yesterday called 'the unsayable'. The fact that Labour is 'not about altruism, or philanthropy, but about personal advancement and gain for working people' - for those poorer social groups who are now leaving the party in droves for the Tories and the BNP. Labour is not about the good-hearted rich giving out sweeties - it's about the people making a better deal for themselves. And now the party has retreated to Westminster, the cost of abandoning its communities is racking up. One councillor from Stoke, a new BNP heartland where skills are amongst the lowest in the country and where the Labour presence dropped from 60 to 16 seats at the last election, noted at a debate yesterday: 'we can have all the policies we like, but if we're not out there knocking on doors, then the BNP will be.'

The Comrade Did Not Mention Socialism!

...is what John Denham MP wanted someone to yell out from the audience, but nobody did. I'm tempted to do it myself this afternoon when Millie gets up to talk about foreign policy, but I'm on the mikes for that event and I like my job.

Last night I went to a party, drank four glasses of free champagne and compared dresses with important political ladies for a set period of time before going outside to smoke with the other interns and attempt to throw up my own lungs in a paroxysm of horror. What on earth happened to the Labour party? What happened?

(I spent the rest of the evening shouting about the RMT to Boris' transport minister and attempting to get people to stand on chairs with me and sing 'the red flag'. I'm not sure I'll be invited back.)

At every event they're edging closer to coming out and admitting that Labour has abandoned the grassroots. Peering out from their glittering Westminster bubble, even the chummy delegates and media flunkies here in Manchester are starting to get a little bit worried. If they don't mobilise, if they don't involve the communities and do more to address the needs of the people who vote for them and buy their newspapers, the number of expensive dinners on their horizon looks to significantly dwindle.

All this gets forgotten, of course, as soon as Club Miliband arrives at any given venue. The thrill of celebrity is thick on the air from the moment the security detail arrives, and even the bomb-squad sniffer dogs have been scampering up and down the halls with excitement (either it's excitement or there's something they're just not telling us). Everywhere he speaks, crowds of hopeful delegates and camera crews follow in his godly wake, waiting, just waiting for him to say something new. Anything new. Something hopeful, something fitting from the son of the man who wrote 'The State in Capitalist Society'. But no, there was nothing. Just a Blairite turn of phrase and Millie was away, avoiding the awkward questions with the flair of a schoolboy trained for power. He's shaved off the stupid little moustache, but he's still no Barack Obama.

We used to be more than this, and I'm coming to realise that it's this very thing - the glitter and privilege of power - that's been thrown in our eyes, divorcing us from our principles and our roots. In the week that big business was sent to the naughty step, in the week that the Telegraph - the Telegraph! - wondered if maybe Marx was right all along, let's remember where socialist politics began and what they were for. Let's remember that before it's far too late.

Stripping the Tories

Luckily enough for the Tory party, quite a few international markets went boom on the day that this story broke. Strip club vouchers offering discounts for Tory delegates, in with the brochure for the upcoming Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham.

Let’s not wallow around in anyone's gloopy moral residue. Sex work isn't nice work, but it isn't immoral, and a visit to a strip club is simply a statement that you are happy to cash in on the privileges of your wealth and gender in the most sickly self-indulgent of ways, and that you are comfortable enough in that privilege that you don't mind buying other people's bodies for your personal sexual gratification in a room full of your colleagues. Hey, there's a big market for that sort of thing, and markets, as we've all been reminded this week, are amoral, not necessarily immoral. Markets merely allow the flow of wealth and power to seep a little more smoothly towards the top. And hey, since it's the annual Tory piss-up and we're all very pleased with ourselves, why not flaunt that philosophy, especially if, in the words of Ian Taylor of Marketing Birmingham, the vouchers were 'produced to help maximise the economic impact for local businesses'.

What angers me about this sordid little story isn't the fact that Tory MPs might enjoy visiting strip clubs. Statistics suggest that well-paid, powerful white men will number most patrons of these newly-licensed 'entertainment establishments' (A legal loophole means that since the introduction of the Licensing Act 2003 lap dancing clubs currently only require a Premises Licence for the sale of alcohol to operate, despite being part of the commercial sex industry. The number of lap dancing clubs across the UK is estimated to have doubled since 2004). There is always, always going to be a market for the more culturally and fiscally powerful to buy sex. What adds insult to time-worn injury, however, is the fact that it's a buyer's market. This was not an advertisement, but a voucher: a voucher offering conservative delegates a 66% reduction in entry price to Birmingham's Rocket Club.

Now, these are bloody hard-working girls. The women who staff strip-clubs and brothels don't do it for kicks, whatever the makers of Secret Diary of A Call Girl may say. They do it for the money, and they earn every penny of that money by laying the most intimate parts of their personhood on the line and risking their physical and mental health every day within a profession that earns them ostracization from friends and family. These women deserve better than to be offered up as discounted goods. These women deserve to be treated with respect.

In the vast majority of cases, women don't become sex workers - prostitutes, lap-dancers, streetwalkers, strippers or porn stars - for the kicks. No, they do it for the money. They do it because there is simply no other way to earn that scale of living wage as a woman under 30 in the current UK job-market. In the Guardian today, most commenters seemed to miss the point of a heart-rending article by a prostitute and single mother. Her point was that she became a prostitute because her former job as an office PA was not paying her enough to support herself and her two children and was, at the same time, taking up so much time and energy that she barely got to see them. Her decision to go into full-time sex work was, as it is for many women in her situation, entirely an economic one.

We need to start respecting women’s work, whether or not they have made the difficult decision to enter the gloomy world of sex-work. If Tory MPs such as Anne Widdecombe really feel that the inclusion of the voucher in the brochure represents the party ‘throwing every value out of the window,’ if they don’t want to face the escalating realities of sex work for women of every class and background in the economic real world of contemporary Britain, then maybe they should start to analyse why women make these choices.

Eighty three per-cent of sex workers, according to recent studies by Object and Fawcett, want to leave the profession; but thousands of women every year make that career choice, and they make it because the country in which we live is currently fostering a gruelling long-hours culture in which women make up the bulk of lower-paid, exploited workers. Women are still paid 17% less than men in full time work and 33% less in part-time work, and when they get home they are still expected to perform the bulk of domestic chores, especially if they are single parents, as many sex workers are.

But the Tory delegates who have been so warmly invited to enjoy the bodies of the low-paid women of Birmingham at a discount price do not think this is a priority. In fact, a key part of current Tory policy proposes an end to equal pay audits, insisting that ‘only those firms which lose sex discrimination cases will be subject’ to them ('Welfare to Work', 2008). Until the Tories get serious about offering low-paid workers decent living wages, then any paltry statement blaming the City of Birmingham for putting entirely appropriate adverts in the back of their brochures will be crass hypocrisy. Until that day, they may as well schedule complementary sessions with hookers into the official programme and stuff a few fivers into Lady Thatcher’s pearly g-string whilst they're at it. Any less is pure hypocrisy.

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

And with that, I'm off to the Labour Party Conference for a week. I'll be checking in regularly but comments may take a few hours to appear!

Friday webcomic: Brittania 12/09/2008

Art by Withiel. Design and concept by Penny Red.

Those post-9/11 blues...

In the words of one of the great philosophers of our age, 'fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself'. (c. Albus Dumbledore, 1997).

An entirely legitimate response to atrocity is to look at the semantics. Today is a significant anniversary: seven years ago, members of minority terrorist sects hijacked some planes and flew them into the World Trade Centre, New York, and into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C, killing themselves and 2,975 innocent civilians in the process, and altering the course of human history forever. Because this atrocity occurred on American soil, it is implicity weighted with more significance and solemnity than any of the many, many atrocities that have occurred since. When we say '9/11' rather than 'the world trade centre attacks in 2001', we collude in affording the event and its victims disproportionate significance, significance that starts to justify the atrocities committed in its name. When we say 'Terror' rather than simply 'terrorism', we acknowledge that the word has silently expanded to encompass anything, anything at all, that the West, led by the USA, happens to be frightened of. And that's quite a lot. The struggle of different nations against terrorism -something that the British are more than resigned to, having had the IRA on our doorstep for the past hundred years - is now being treated as something entirely new, in no small part due to the semantic trickery in which the rhetoric of 'post-9/11' is enmeshed..

The plain fact is that nobody - US citizen, British citizen, Iraqi citizen, French, Japanese or Afghani - has any right to feel safe at all times. This world isn't safe, it will never be safe, not while there are buses on our streets and armed police in our capitals. We have no right to safety, none. We merely have a right to take care of ourselves and our neigbours as best we can, and waging war is generally accepted as a poor method of acheiving said objective. In most countries that aren't the USA, people understand this. But some isolated, cosseted individuals are still of the opinion that suddenly not feeling entirely safe and superior any more gives them the right to have a seven-year temper-tantrum costing millions of lives and billions of dollars.

I can already hear the trolls rumbling under my bridge about tastelessness, so I may as well pick a final nit: the use of the American date convention, '9/11/2001' (rather than 11/09/2001, as it would have been reported in the UK and many other nations) increases the tendency of the event to be historicised from a position which entirely privileges the North American reading of its fallout. And the North American reading is the slow finger-tracing of a frightened toddler. But if we're still going to run cackling with the month/date obfuscation, let's at least have some alternatives. May I suggest:

10/12: on the 12th of October, 2001, the USA and its allies invaded Afghanistan, ostensibly to cature You Know Who. Total Bin Ladens captured: none. Total innocent civilian deaths: at least 3,700 and probably closer to 5,000.

3/20: on the 20th of March, 2003, the USA launched 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' along with its allies in the UK and Australia and help and support from a 'coalition of the willing', consisting of over forty other nations. Total weapons of mass destruction discovered: a few really big rocks. Official body counts estimate that since 3/20, there have been 80,419 to 87,834 civilian deaths (that's 9/11 x 30!), although the true number and names of the innocent dead will never be known.

12/ 7 - on the 12th of July, 2006, Israel attacked Lebanon with US-supplied weapons . In 33 days of war, the Associated Press's body count gives us 1,064 civilian deaths.

Today is September the 11th, 2008. Seven years ago today, the towers went down and your world changed forever. Happy anniversary. Everybody do the post-9/11 dance.

They have no compunction.

This week, according to the tabloids, there has been an ‘all party call for a cap on migration’. Bollocks there has. In fact, what has happened is that Frank Field and Nicholas Soames -two of the most foul and bigoted MPs ever to lumber through Whitehall -have ganged up to produce a proposal, Balanced Migration, calling for a cap on the numbers of immigrants entering the country. The disingenuous reporting of the proposal has been nothing short of shite.

Firstly, Balanced Migration is emphatically not an ‘all-party call’ for a cap on migration. One bigoted Tory colossus and his favourite Labour defector does not an all-party call make (Field was raised a Tory before jumping ship in the sixties.) There are, in fact, more than two political parties in this country, and one of the alternatives has commanded around 20% of the popular vote at the last two general elections. This is, in fact, a bipartisan proposal, limited in scope and not officially condoned by either represented political party. Good job this is a basic mistake that only the right-wing tabloids are making, then. Oh, wait.

In fact, both of these MPs have faced massive opposition within their own parties, not least on account of what has appeared to many as scantly-concealed racism. Far be it from me to suggest that Nicholas Soames is a racist. But barely a year ago there were calls from within his own party for him to resign after he quoted figures seemingly lifted from a BNP pamphlet as part of an anti-immigration speech to parliament. And far be it from me to suggest that Frank Field is a racist, but not two months ago the BBC had him all but endorsing Enoch Powell, saying in response to the racist rabble-rouser’s predictions that white people are fleeing the country because of the influx of ethnic minorities: ‘There is apprehension and people are leaving if they can – they don’t like what’s happening to this country.’
Now, I happen to have gotten my grubby little paws on a copy of the proposal, and I’ve read it through, after which I found myself chain-smoking and shaking with rage in the back garden. It’s a vile piece of xenophobic drivel. After the first few pages it doesn’t even try to be polite to ethnic minorities, openly lamenting the fact that fewer and fewer economic migrants are coming from ‘the EU and the Old Commonwealth – Australia, Canada’ and more and more coming from ‘Africa, India and ‘other foreign.’’ Pretty soon after this, its unsupported statistics start unashamedly talking about ‘white’ versus ‘black, asian and other non-white’ as opposed to ‘british-born’ versus ‘foreign-born’. Oh, and on about page three the nation ‘Britain’ apparently becomes interchangeable with a place called ‘England’, entirely omitting to mention that we have at least three other countries with their own devolved governments and proud ancient cultures within this nation state. But that doesn’t bother Field and Soames, neither of whom have, it seems, any particular inclination to even think about Glasgow – where, incidentally, the rate of immigrant cultural integration is commendably high.

In the ‘chapters’ (read: ten lines of ranting and a graph) on social cohesion and community integration, the Bradford riots are cited without detailing any causal relationship between immigration and social unrest. We're merely invited to assume that there is one, and that a cap on migration is the best way to deal with it rather than, say, involving young people in community cohesion schemes and encouraging greater social dialogue. We're also invited to assume that the increasing number of schools where English might not be spoken in the homes of the majority of pupils is intrinsically a bad thing. Actually, English was forbidden in some of the first schools ever established in this country, being the language of the servant classes: pupils at Rugby, Westminster and other ancient British establishment sausage factories were ordered to speak Latin or go back to the provinces. And again, 'balanced migration' - rather than extra language lessons for immigrant pupils and their families - is apparently the answer. The proposal is a racist striptease, tearing away veils of decency paragraph by paragraph to reveal the real sickness behind its slippery statistics: Field and Soames simply don't like ethnic minorities, and they don't want any more of them in their country.

As well as these staggering assumptions-by-omission, there are glaring, basic factual errors throughout the document. One of these is its much-touted claim that, by adding 7 million people to the population of the UK by 2030, immigrants would contribute an equivalent of ‘7 cities the size of Birmingham.’ Have Messrs Field and Soames ever, in fact, been to Birmingham? The West Midlands conurbation of Birmingham had a population of 2,284,093 according to the 2001 census, the largest metropolitan area in the EU. This is either some admirable feat of particular Tory perspective or these MPs and their flunkies simply haven’t done the social research which is, ostensibly, the point of the proposal.

All of this makes me spit. I’m proud to be British, and part of the reason I’m proud is that when my grandparents were driven out of Lithuania in the pogroms, they made a long, torturous journey across war-torn Europe to the UK, hoping for sanctuary, hoping for something better, and they found it. A country where they were allowed to work and worship as they pleased, where they established themselves in business and became leaders in their local synagogues, where their race and religion and country of birth didn’t prevent them and their children from becoming British citizens, and bloody useful ones too. I’m proud to be British, because in 1942 my grandmother was awarded the George Cross along with the rest of her nation in order to "bear witness to the heroism and devotion of its people" after the battering Malta took from and on behalf of the British in WW2. The medal is in her drawer, some little semblance of recompense for the years of starvation and nightly bombing offensives. When this government decides to make a similar gesture to the people of Iraq, maybe I’ll reclaim that frisson of wonder I remember from when I was a little girl peering into Nanna’s jewellery box - until then, never.

My family came to England in a time before Field and Powell, in a time when skilled and unskilled workers were welcomed into the country from the commonwealth and elsewhere, and they flourished. Now the second generation is entering its fifties (happy birthday, mum) you wouldn’t know us from Adam. We're Slavic, European, Celtic - in other words, we're more or less white, and according to Soames and Field, we're a part of the problem, but not the real problem. But if we’d arrived today, we’d still be told by crusty racist MPs and little-England bigots that we were a race apart, instead of representing what this nation is about at its best. We’d most likely have spent years struggling for work permits or languishing in detainment centres. We’d be reduced to numbers on a BNP chart, taking jobs away from good, honest, native-born Britons. It makes me fucking sick.

Because, actually, we are all immigrants, even British-born natives who can trace their families back centuries untold. Immigration is what Britain is all about: since records began it’s been the waves of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Romans, Normans, Spaniards, Celts, Hibernians, Hugenots, German Protestants, Jews, French, Italians, Chinese, South-East Asians, Indians, Pakistanis, Africans, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Eastern Europeans and Americans that have kept us vibrant, kept us whole and humble and constantly changing as a nation. It's racists and recalcitrants in power who are the real scum muddying up the waters of change and vitality roaring around these islands, keeping the poor poor and the rich ignorant, holding us back. If the Home Office has any sense at all, it'll drop this sickening tract in the shredder.



ETA: I've given the proposal to my nearest degenerate drug-fiends, and it's being roached as we speak.

It's a jungle out there!

Blogging about the blogosphere is a little like having a wank in the garden. It feels gritty and inappropriate, there's always the vague apprehension that somebody's watching and judging, and you're likely to come away with unpleasant things stuck to you. Be that as it may, I can't not comment on - well, the comments on the recent post, 'Palin, abortion and the gender agenda', where I dared to suggest that a feminist stance is contingent upon a pro-choice outlook.

The post, as many of you will be aware, weaselled its way onto Liberal Conspiracy and went nova, exploding into far and away the site's most commented piece within 24 hours. It turned into a quasi-socratic mud-flinging match between various mostly-male commentators who wanted to take the discussion away from feminism and into clunky semantics, worrying the mostly-female-and-Sunny commentators who were actually trying to make points about female physical sovereignty in best British bulldog style. Reducing arguments about real women and real issues to a 'thought experiment', completely oblivious to the fact that only men have the luxury of doing so. Some commentators took wilful refusal to listen to the point of actual aggression, the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and singing ‘laa-laa-laa, I can’t hear you!’

Now, I was shite at debating in school, which wasn't all that long ago. Oh, I could come up with shiny speeches on the fly, but I was always being told that I wasn't dispassionate enough, that I got too emotionally involved with my arguments, I took things too personally. And funnily enough, that's the accusation that's flung in the direction of feminist writers and commentators online when they try to engage in debate with men and with misogynist trolls.

Feminism isn't something you can approach dispassionately, nor should you try. We are emotionally involved, all of us, because we're women or we're close to women. The idea that empathy has no place in contempotary politics or in contemporary political debate is nonsensical, dangerous and typically masculine in a way that most great male thinkers I know find tiresome. Cold, dispassionate debate can be sometimes massively unhelpful when you're talking about something that's so emotional, so personal, something that's about, for example, your own uterus and your own future and whether you have any right to control it if the technology is there. To take a completely random example, insisting again and again and again that everyone’s feminism is valid, even if they are willing to shout 'women are filthy whores who should suffer the consequences of having naughty sex - but I'm a feminist, too! I say so! Look!' – isn’t constructive debate.

Some of the commentators (again, all male) doggedly insisted and re-insisted that, although they themselves were of course pro-choice, feminism should open its doctrinal heart to so-called ‘feminists for life’. Because feminism is a matter of theosophical consensus, and not a practical, pro-woman political position at all. And because us girls should all just learn to get along.

I spent this morning on a crumbling sofa in a tiny bookshop in SoHo, reading books I couldn’t afford. One of these was Kate Fillion’s excellent ‘Lip Service’. Sub-titling her argument ‘the myth of female virtue in love, sex and friendship,’ Fillion makes the long-overdue case that in-fighting within the movement is slowing us down, that ‘sisterhood’ was and remains an over-prescriptive, quasi-eroticised fantasy of ephemeral cross-gender solidarity, and that us gals don’t, actually, have to all get along for feminism to work.

No. I won’t accept that every man and woman who says he or she is a feminist is one. It’s not, as some Liberal Conspiracy hacks would have us believe, a case of absolutely everyone’s feminism being equally valid. That’s a cop out, a dangerous and much-misused loophole that has allowed misogynists, peddlers of regressive porn and Sarah Palin to wave tokenistic feminist flags over the most anti-woman policies imaginable.

It doesn’t work like that. Actually, there are several ground assumptions of feminism. The idea that women aren’t inherently evil, or weak, or crazy, or saintly demons, or degenerate, is one of them. The notion of every woman’s right to bodily and reproductive autonomy is another.

Nor is a position automatically feminist because a woman holds it. I’m heart-sick of people quipping, in response to anti-patriarchal ranting (me? never!) – but XX says it! So it must be okay! Actually, some women – women whose life experiences and morals are equally valid – do not participate in the sisterhood, or in feminist thought and action, whatsoever. I know, crazy, isn’t it. With the way the world looks today, with the wimminz taking men’s jobs and filling men’s universities, you’d think us bra-burning harpy feminazis were everywhere. But we’re not. That’s why those of us who are out there have to shout so loud.

I’ve known plenty of women who thing that women are naturally, biologically and intellectually inferior to men. I’ve known women who believe that a woman’s role is to have babies and please her man. And I’ve known women who firmly believe that any given clutch of jellied pre-human cells is far more valuable than the life, life choices and personal sovereignty of any woman, anywhere, and who would legislate on that basis given the chance. That doesn’t make it a feminist viewpoint, that doesn’t mean that the speaker believes in women’s equal biological rights, and it doesn’t make it okay.

It’s not okay to call yourself a feminist if you believe that women aren’t fit to make their own decisions, including over whether or not their child is carried to term. It’s not okay to call yourself a feminist if you would deny women the right to make those choices, deny them basic personal sovereignty and physical autonomy.

It’s terribly convenient for commentators like Lee Griffin to ignore or dismiss the very salient fact of internalised sexism. It’s terribly convenient to think that one can still say that one is feminist whilst prioritising one’s religious dogma, cultural prejudices and personal sexism, racism and classism over anti-misogyny and genuine gender equality. But it does not work like that.

As Fillion points out, sometimes feminism means facing down misogyny wherever it comes from. Feminism doesn’t mean insisting that all women are right, always. I’m willing to allow other women the privilege of being wrong. In fact, in the course of this debate I’ve told women who I greatly respect that I find their pro-choice, pro-criminalisation-of-abortion position deeply anti-feminst at root level. I like and respect these women, but I still believe that a pro-choice stance is essential to contemporary feminism, and I’ll take on anyone, male, female, enemy or friend, who says so.

The temptation is so strong and the cultural script so deeply written to subvert one’s own political position for the sake of solidarity, partly because there are still so few of us. It’s a lonely business being a feminist writer and activist. As a young feminist, I feel keenly the lack of a coherent older generation to set the standard and show us the way. Instead, most of what we’ve got is Julie Bindel, a rampant bigot who hates all men and most women, giving the rest of us a bad name in the process. The young activist contingent is gradually increasing its numbers and its energy, but its favourite pastime is still in-fighting (more on this later), and we’re feeling our way in the dark. We’re casting our anchors into a deep and hostile see and hoping like hell to strike land. But what else can we do?

Whatever male commentators might like to believe, feminism isn’t a happy, fluffy land of hand-holding and tea parties where everyone gets along. It’s a lonely and exhausting place, populated by bitches like me who won’t lie down and shut up. And with that proviso, we keep our integrity.