Dispatches from the Same Old + Staggers on generational angst

I'm not very around at the moment, as I'm dealing with a new job and juggling work and book deadlines whilst trying my hardest not to be evicted from my house. But: recent weeks have seen an avalanche of books come out about 'generational' things and how it's all gone wrong for Generation Y, woe and angst and blame the immigrants not the banks. After the predictable panic about argh-I've-got-nothing-relevant-left-to-write-for-this-book, I wrote this article for New Statesman about the epistemology of the trend. David Willetts is the peculiar sort of smiling, avuncular fascist who begins by making you feel cosy and understood and then explains, gently, why it's all because of the women and the blacks. All the links are worth a click: Radical Future and It's All Their Fault are particularly important and, predictably, as they're the ones actually written by people who are vaguely young, they're available to download for free in black, white and pixellated neo-Soviet slogans. Yeah, screw you, Peter Mandelson!

***

Do your parents love you?” asks Neil Boorman. “Of course they do – but it hasn't stopped them from robbing you blind." Boorman's new book, gleefully titled It's All Their Fault, is part of a clutch of works that have emerged in recent weeks analysing the socio-economic crisis facing today’s young people. Books like David Willetts’ The Pinch and Compass and Soundings’ Radical Future are easing into motion the rusty gears of generational conflict – and none too soon.

After the crash of 2008, Generation Y realised with a rush of horror that no matter how good we were or how relentlessly we hammered our minds and bodies into the grooves laid out for us by our parents, our teachers and a culture of mandatory capitalist self-fashioning, everything was definitely not going to be fine. Instead, we are going to spend our lives paying for the excesses of our parents, who have bequeathed us a broken economy, a stagnant job market and a planet that’s increasingly on fire. This sudden understanding of just how blithely our future has been mortgaged has been festering for a full 18 months, and now a rash of books has broken out, angry and sore, across the body politic.

Most concentrate on pointing fingers at the Baby Boomer generation, currently in their 50s and 60s, who enjoyed free higher education, supportive welfare, good jobs and great music and grew up to own a vastly disproportionate share of the wealth of the nation. David Willetts' The Pinch, subtitled How the Baby Boomers Took their Children's Future - and How they can Give it Back, makes no bones about who is responsible for the plight of the young. However, rather than analysing the effect of the contraction of social mobility on the prospects and potential of Generation Y, Willetts, who hopes to be a key member of the Conservative cabinet in a fortnight's time, advocates a return to traditional gender norms, particularly marriage. Willetts prefers to blame the evils of “feminism” for the crisis, offering a decidedly atavistic assessment of Where It All Went Wrong that, one suspects, was written with middle-aged voters in swing seats in mind.

Unlike Willetts, Tony Judt at least deigns to address young people in Ill Fares The Land, which takes a far broader view of the political psychology of the young, analysing not just consumerism and stagnation of social mobility but the loss of socialism and classic liberalism as implicit alternatives to neoliberal orthodoxy. Judt reminds us that “Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization, the growing disparities of rich and poor.”

Judt, like Willetts, is himself a Baby Boomer. Both men are extremely personally wealthy and successful, at least by the standards of a cohort of young people for whom home ownership and meaningful work are Sisyphean dreams. As such, even Judt’s pertinent, readable survey occasionally lapses into half-hearted apologism, of the sort that has become a hallmark of privileged Baby Boomer commentary on the so-called ‘Lost Generation,’ who are largely denied space or opportunity to answer back.

Radical Future, edited by Ben Little, attempts to create that space, with young people from a range of backgrounds contributing chapters on their authentic experiences of growing up under New Labour. Nineteen-year-old Clare Coatman’s assessment of her ‘Blairite education’ and Noel Hatch’s analysis of youth unemployment stand out in particular. However, the chapters - including my own on mental health - are limited by a sort of desperate worthiness that retreats from real radicalism. Only Boorman's book truly captures frustration of Generation Y at discovering that we have not only been taken for a ride, but are now expected to get out and push.

Boorman identifies the upcoming election as a generational last stand, despite the fact that no mainstream party is addressing young voters and the young themselves see only the opportunity to change the face of the grinning dad-a-like who will be mortgaging our prospects. “We have one chance to create change, and this is it,” declares Boorman – but such panicked generational doom-mongering is desperately unhelpful to those young people on the ground, at the sharp edge of the global recession, who are wondering where their future went.

It can only be good news for young people that commentators are beginning to notice the socio-economic time bomb we’ve been handed, but these books fail to offer Generation Y the one thing we need more than anything else – a long-view. Rather than addressing young people with any coherent manifesto for our social and political inheritance, contemporary analysis is lapsing into helpless rage or blithe apologism. Members of Generation Y already know that this is a terrible time to be young. What we need is the tools to imagine a better world.

The young people of Generation Y don’t need your pity, and we haven’t got time for a collective tantrum. We need to reclaim our social, political and economic inheritance, and we need to do it now. Raging into the void may be cathartic, but only a coherent radical framework will help us get what we want – which is our future back.

Men and feminism: comment is fraught.

Write about female objectification in the comment pages of any major paper and you're in for a pasting. No matter how reasonably you put your arguments variously for or against ladies' tits in public places, you will be instantly, brutally and often personally attacked in the comments, on other websites and in the living rooms of the right-thinking. Oh, unless you're David Mitchell, in which case you get a 500-comment thread all about how fantastic you are, and a storm of gushy agreement on Twitter and in the feminist blogosphere.

It's more than a little annoying that when a man decides to write something positive about feminism - for once - he is rewarded with attention and praised for originality of thought, when lady feminists have been saying exactly the same things for years and have been lampooned for it. Mitchell's article about Cambridge university's pole-dancing classes for Comment Is Free is absolutely fantastic, but it doesn't cover any new territory. On the same site in October, Rowenna Davis wrote a brilliant, witty piece about institutional sexism at Cambridge - and was called a silly little woman in the comments. Any lady feminist on Comment Is Free gets the same treatment, no matter how funny they try to be - look at what happens to Bidisha. Or Bea Campbell. Or, for that matter, to me.

It's bloody enervating. No, it's infuriating. And yes, it says a lot about the barriers of mistrust and prejudice that women face - from men and from other women - when they attempt to say something meaningful in public. But I can't help it. The article -'Actually, you won't find female empowerment halfway up a pole' - still fills me with joy, and makes me want to whisk David Mitchell away to my secret socialist-feminist volcano lair and seduce him (I'm anticipating a dazzling swordfight when Robert Webb comes to his rescue).

Men like Mitchell have a role to play in feminist dialectic. Quite specifically, they have a role to play in educating other men about what feminism means and why it's important. Because feminism must address men, as well as attacking patriarchy. We are long past the point where we can make our arguments only to one another.

And when you're addressing men, it's nice to have a man on side. Because like it or not, men are much more willing to listen to other men than to scary scary women. Like it or not- and I don't - what sounds like a bitchy attack coming out of the mouth of a female feminist often sounds like brotherly advice when it comes from a bloke.

On every liberation front - and make no mistake, feminism is still very much a liberation front - defectors from the other side have a vital role to play. When what you want is to actually share a society with the oppressors in the long-term, when your options for liberation do not reasonably include the total annihilation of all ball-swingin' manpersons, then you have to get men onside sooner or later. And it helps if they can crack a joke.

David Mitchell is one of a growing trend for male comedians who understand that they don't need to fall back on misogynist jokes as part of their repertoire, that lazy misogyny actually dates their work and alienates half of their audiences. Bill Bailey and Charlie Brooker would be other examples of public funnymen who realise that sexism is stupid - so stupid, in fact, that a lot of material can be mined from pointing out the various ways in which patriarchal capitalism is bloody ridiculous. The Daily Mail's feature spread on the toes of the party leaders' wives, for example.

Too often, it's only the men with ugly views who comment on feminist articles. Sexist commentators are a self-selecting bunch, because unlike the silent majority of blokes who don't sit in their pants hating women on the internet all afternoon, they just don't care who they hurt. In fact, the silent majority of blokes are usually quite anxious not to hurt or offend the women in their lives, and their silence doesn't denote absence - it denotes a trepidation about getting involved in feminist discussions, for fear of making a mistake and being lumped in with the greasy-keyboard misogynists.

The trouble is that this process is self-selecting: feminists are so used to being attacked that it's sometimes hard to listen to what a man might have to say without assuming he's going to make horrific, bullying, unhelpful comments. When you're far too used to hearing tiresome internet and debate-room whiners squealing 'what about the meeeenz?', it's sometimes hard to pick up on men who are genuinely interested in women. It's hard to spot those blokes who aren't just out to score cheap points or question your right to speak, because really, there are so few of them. And only more male feminist allies will break this stalemate.

Feminism needs to enlist more men brave enough to admit to having feminist ideas. Like Mitchell, it might be a struggle to get them to actually use the word 'feminist', but 'empowerment' is a good temporary substitute for those still too delicate to handle the f-word. The silent majority of men, particularly younger men, are sympathetic to feminist aims. We need them to be brave enough to speak.

Urgent abortion support appeal: help a teenage girl in Northern Ireland

I don't normally do this, but I'm posting this verbatim from Mara, the convenor of the UK's Abortion Support Network, which provides assistance to women travelling to England from Northern Ireland to access safe, legal abortion. This is a very important appeal - please help by donating and/or cross-posting and tweeting this wherever you can. Solidarity, L.xx

Whether it’s a shortage of mange tout at the supermarket or a friend stranded abroad, we’ve all been affected by the cloud of ash from Iceland. But imagine if you had only a few weeks to navigate your way to England for a safe and legal abortion.

This week, we’ve heard from a number of women who were due to have travel to the UK this week for terminations, including a very young teen who is extremely close to the 24 week time limit for abortions in the UK. She had to miss her appointment earlier this week and is now coming next week by ferry and train – a roundtrip journey of more than 24 hours. Her mother solely supports her and her siblings with a part time job and now has to cover costs of £2,300 (procedure + money lost on cancelled flights + last minute ferry and train tickets).

Due to these extraordinary and extremely difficult circumstances, ASN has made a pledge to fund this young woman £500, much more than we usually commit to a single case. This is less than half of the costs she is facing. We would like to help more. If you would like to help cover more costs for her and women like her, please pledge to make a donation today.

You can do this by donating via PayPal (http://www.abortionsupport.org.uk/donate/), writing a cheque (email info@abortionsupport.org.uk for our postal address), or by making an online transfer (HSBC/Abortion Support Network/Sort Code: 40-11-18/Account Number: 64409302).

Please mark the donation “Iceland”.

Thank you in advance for any amount you can give – your donation will make a real difference to this family or to one of the other women who have had to re-purchase tickets to travel to England.

Full interview with Ken MacLeod

"Science fiction is a laboratory of thought experiments," says Ken MacLeod, sipping his coffee. The 55-year-old Scottish novelist is adamant that "you can do a great deal with science fiction that you can only do in a very strained, constrained way in more mainstream journalism and literary fiction."

I meet MacLeod at EasterCon 2010, Britain's biggest annual convention for science-fiction writers, readers and fans.

With two hours to go before the opening ceremony, the Radisson hotel in Heathrow is packed with oddly dressed people giddy with sugar and anticipation, clutching laptops and novelty stuffed toys and chattering excitedly.

This sense of childish excitement about the future is utterly absent from more bourgeois literary events - you wouldn't find attendees at the Booker prize, for example, dashing through conference rooms and giggling about gay robots while one of the nation's foremost novelists attempts to explain the effect of the evolutionary long-view on socialist thought.

"Science fiction is about prophetic vision - from the most crude and pulpy to the most sophisticated," says MacLeod, who lives in Edinburgh with his wife Carol.

"It's about combining social awareness with elements of scientific truth and speculation."

British writers like MacLeod are universally recognised as working at the cutting edge of science and speculative fiction, a phenomenon MacLeod attributes to the grandfather of British sci-fi - HG Wells.

"The thing about Wells's work that had such an effect on British sci-fi writers is that he was socially conscious," says MacLeod.

"Wells studied biology under Thomas Huxley and assimilated an understanding of human evolution with social speculation, a sense of the transience of human societies within millions and billions of years of deep time."

MacLeod explains that Wells's sense of "deep time" has inspired generations of socially conscious sci-fi writers in Britain, from Arthur C Clarke to Alastair Reynolds, Iain M Banks - and himself.

"If you have a sense of deep time, you can't possibly think the modes of production we have now are necessarily eternal, or even very long-lasting, on a cosmic scale."

It is this aspect of socio-political prophetic vision that places British sci-fi writers at the coalface of literary innovation.

MacLeod's 15 books may feature robots and Glasgow gangsters in space, but they offer prescient and engaging analyses of anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism and contemporary counter-terrorism.

"Science fiction is necessarily political because it depends on what assumptions you have about the nature of society," he says.

"If you believe that all societies are based on natural hierarchy then you will write one kind of story. And if you think that the market is the fundamental principle that societies tend towards, then you will write another.

"Particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, science fiction tended to envision the triumph of the American or Soviet side of the cold war, projected into space, forever. But after the changes of the 1960s, new experiments began to happen in what the future might look like.

"When I started writing my Fall Revolution series, it was against a background of the real fall of the revolution in the late '80s and early '90s.

"I began with a very simple situation - a scientist in the laboratory and a guy with the gun - but I was also thinking about how to create the world they lived in.

"The whole process was informed by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the sense of fragmentation and disintegration.

"Sometime in the backstory of the novels there has been a big swing to the left in the West, which was defeated.

"I no longer define myself as a socialist, but it stuns me that there's a whole generation of growing up - a generation who are younger than my own children - who lack the idea of socialism as an implicit alternative.

"What might a future without any socialism look like? It's not necessarily an attractive prospect."

MacLeod, the son of a Presbytarian minister, was born in Stornoway and worked as a computer programmer before becoming a full-time writer.

As a student at Brunel in the 1970s, he became involved with Trotskyist politics.

"I was a regular reader of the Morning Star back then," admits MacLeod, who fictionalises a future version of this paper in some of his novels.

"For me, in the '80s, the Morning Star was a voice of sanity in a mad world, even if it was sometimes a rather dull voice.

"The second cold war which happened the 1980s was rather frightening and it did look as if the West and the Soviet Union were on a collision course.

"One thing that had a very strong effect on me at the time was the way in which the cold war was actually being fought out in terms of Western-backed counter-revolutions.

"That period hasn't been properly assimilated historically. It was a completely unprecedented, worldwide terrorist campaign by the United States and the United Kingdom against radical regimes."

MacLeod's near-future novels The Execution Channel and The Night Sessions deal directly with what he calls the "blowback" from Western-organised terrorism.

"I've never romanticised terrorism as a strategy, but sometimes it's easy to feel like you have to keep your mouth shut about what you really think - and science fiction can offer a safe space for those discussions," he says.

MacLeod's analysis of far-left movements is far from uncritical. He points out that left-wing movements have been slow to embrace new technologies, in part because the internet "challenges a set of Leninist assumptions that a lot of far-left groups had about how discussions must and should be conducted.

"A lot of the formal rules of the left are still based on 19th-century communications technology - the idea that revolutionary politics are built around a top-level party line set down by a newspaper, which everyone has to agree with. The internet negates that process," he says, adding hastily that "the Star has a head start, in that it allows in voices from outside the party."

MacLeod reserves special disdain for elements of anti-humanist thought in the green movement, which he satirises in several of his novels.

"I think siding with nature against humanity is despicable. The fundamental thing as far as I'm concerned is that you have to judge everything in terms of human interest.

"There is an element in green thinking which rejects this totally and says that the interests of other organisms, and rocks and so forth, need to be taken into account.

"This is not my view at all. I'm quite strongly in favour of humanity developing and improving, and suspicious of the Malthusian logic preached by people like George Monbiot."

So does some green thinking tend towards the fascistic? "It's much worse than that - at least fascism believed in some human beings!"

MacLeod stresses that he does not wish to minimise the seriousness of global warming - merely to critique the anti-human ideology of some green thinkers.

"Global warming is real, it's happening and it's serious, but it's certainly no reason to believe there's more than an outlying possibility of the world coming to an end in this century."

For MacLeod, a central purpose of science fiction is to imagine a future for the human race.

"In science fiction, as in politics, imagining armageddon has the nice effect that you don't have to do anything about it because it's all inevitable and fated anyway.

"We don't know what the future will look like - that's one of the reasons writing science fiction is so rewarding. But there's every reason to believe that human civilisation will continue into deep time."

Printed in Morning Star on 21/10/2010. Ken MacLeod's next book, The Restoration Game, is published by Orbit on 1 July.

Geeking the left: Ken Macleod on radical politics and the internet

Like any science fiction writer, lots of Ken MacLeod's prophetic visions have failed to come true. However, one thing he did foresee, as a socialist computer programmer in the 1980s, was that left-wing movements would be slowest to embrace new communications technologies, in part because the internet “challenges a set of Leninist assumptions that a lot of far-left groups had about how discussions must and should be conducted."

"The organised left has taken a very long time to be aware of the internet and start using it properly," commented MacLeod when I met him at EasterCon 2010. "A lot of the formal rules of the left are still based on 19th century communications technology, which meant newspapers. As with Pravda and the Bolshevik revolution, who decides what goes in the newspaper was absolutely crucial, as was everyone pretending to agree was what was in the newspaper.

"The top level instruction was, and for some organisations remains, that you follow the party line set down by the paper -although I should stress that the organisation that produces the Morning Star is not necessarily one of those. It has the great advantage that it allows in other voices from across the left spectrum!

"The idea that revolutionary politics are built around a top-level party line set down by a newspaper, which everyone has to comply with, is antithetical to the digital age."

-This is my favourite bit of the Big Squeeful Ken MacLeod Interview. You can read the whole thing tomorrow in the Morning Star and online.

There's just no pleasing some people.

... here's the bit where I'm impolite.

So last night, two hundred well-dressed members of the British literary and political eschelons gathered in the Thomson Reuters building in Canary Wharf to watch three nice white chaps in identical suits jostle for the most recalcitrant position on immigration. The great and good who were assembled for the announcement of the Orwell shortlist got to watch the leaders' debate on huge screens over drinks and nibbles. Television history was made over the clink of champagne flutes, in what I couldn't help feel was a dazzling dramatisation of the alienation of 'mainstream' politics from the reality of people's lives.

Don't get me wrong. It's wonderful to be nominated for this prize, and I'm very grateful to the Orwell Trust and the judges, and it means a very great deal to me. But the featured debate, 'Have the political classes been fatally weakened?' made me so angry I could hardly speak, even though for the first time in three years of attending London debates, most of the speakers were women *and* the topic was something other than women's rights. Because I don't see myself as part of the political classes, and I don't care if they've been fatally weakened. What's more, I don't think George Orwell would care much either. Meg Russell from the UCL constitution unit declared that voters were being 'hysterical' in their vocal impression of having been politically betrayed, and MPs who fiddled their expenses were 'just normal human beings'. A basic salary of sixty thousand pounds plus a free house, travelcard and dinner expense account does not a normal human being make.

The whole point of books like The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London - indeed, the point of most of Orwell's work - was to create a fluent political discourse which talks about most of the people, most of the time, rather than gleefully acquiescing to political privilege. When one speaker explained to the audience that 'of course, all of your children will go to university,' I wanted to stand up and yell, 'I won't be able to afford children until I'm eighty-five!'

I had spent the early part of that morning bidding farewell to my housemates, who had finally been forced out of their Tottenham bedsit after years of frantic joblessness and graduate debt in which all of us were repeatedly denied welfare benefits and adequate health care because we had the temerity to be young, poor and disenfranchised. It has taken two years for us to lose hope in our collective future. Suddenly, I'm having opportunities flung at me - of course I am, I was always the posh one - but my peers are suffering setbacks at every turn.

Over two years of economic catastrophe and personal disaster, during which young people like me have watched our future being progressively mortgaged by middle-aged politicians who enjoyed all the benefits of free higher education and parliamentary expense accounts, I started writing this blog about the rage and frustration of the new lost generation, our generation, and feminism, and bigotry, and all the other things that make me impossibly angry. I started writing this blog because I was unemployed, angry and needed an outlet for my energies, and now I have a prize and my friends have had to leave the city. It is wonderful to have a prize. But any amount of prizes, any amount of expensive canapes and any amount of televised right-wing pageantry will not make up for the manner in which the British political class has betrayed its poorest constituents and broken the hearts of its children.

On giant screens in the glittering Reuters foyer, Messrs Clegg, Cameron and Brown fought to score cheap laughs off each other's poster campaigns while appearing to be men of the people. ITV had to resort to a clunky gameshow formula to distinguish the speakers, with swooping close-ups and colour-coded ties - Gordon Brown chose a fetching metallic fuschia, presumably in order to deflect the impression that he had any sort of red flag around his neck. The whole thing resembled an apocalyptic late-1990s cookery show, with 9.9 million viewers clustered to watch the yellow, blue and pink teams compete to make the best stew out of the economy. Will the swan-faced bloke in the blue tie stave off the unemployment timebomb with a magical cake made of marriage? Or will everything burst into flames?

At my shoulder an Italian delegate nibbled expensive potato wedges. "I think I'd pick the yellow tie," she said, indicating the Lib Dem leader. "But I don't know - the blue one is really the same, isn't he?"

Nick Clegg is roundly considered to have won the debate, a conclusion that may have had less to do with the Lib Dem leader's barnstorming summation and obvious rhetorical flair than with our understanding of the way television works. Pitted against two Establishment villains with broad smiles and murderous eyes the young underdog with the strange hair always wins. In fact it was only Clegg's progressive stance on nuclear disarmament that distinguished him in ideological terms - the remaining 86 minutes of airtime were a pageant of empty rhetoric, with all three leaders struggling to give least offence to centre-right swing voters in "Middle England."

Meanwhile the few young people watching in Canary Wharf drank ourselves into a frenzy in the front row, occasionally throwing peanuts at the screen. None of the leaders' placations were directed at us. Cameron's promises of tax cuts for married couples will make no difference to the thousands of young couples who don't earn enough to pay tax, let alone get married. I'm certainly not going to be able to afford to rent a house with my partner for the forseeable future, and I've got posh parents. Brown's growly avowal of support for our troops meant nothing to the millions of young people whose first political memories are of marching and demonstrating against the war in 2003 and not being heard. And Clegg's repeated imprecation that politicians must not "let the young offenders of today become the hardened criminals of tomorrow" rang terrifyingly hollow for a generation who have had to downsize their dreams and want nothing more than the chance to hold down a job in a world that isn't entirely on fire.

Stepping out into the sparkling Docklands night, it felt like I had just attended the party at the end of the world. The magnitude of the crisis facing my generation is already frighteningly misunderstood, both by the tie-wearing men on the television and the well-meaning chicken-goujon-eating progressives at the Orwell debate.

Nobody is addressing us. And why would they? We aren't influential, or important. We don't own any property or assets, and we aren't likely to. We have neither high-powered jobs nor the organising traditions that would allow us to hold our bosses to account in any meaningful way. We will continue to sweat and toil for longer hours and fewer rewards than our parents could possibly envision, and some of us will win prizes, and most of us will be turned away time after terrible, heartbreaking time from any chance of economic stability and personal dignity, especially if we are working class, or non-white, or unwell, or women. Nobody is addressing us, and because nobody is addressing us, the energy of our frustration is being dangerously underestimated.

Jubilations: Penny Red makes the Orwell Prize shortlist! [and finds more gainful employment]

Penny Red has made the shortlist for the Orwell Prize for blogs, along with Jack of Kent, Hopi Sen, Winston Smith, Tim Marshall and the brilliant Madam Miaow. MM has a full report of the event, along with a photo of herself and moiself looking fierce.

I've only just sat down to process this happening, as the past two days have involved two last-minute freelance copy deadlines, nine hours of sleep in total, and the first days of my new job as Features Assistant at Morning Star. I am, of course, incredibly flattered that the judges (Jack Knight and Oona King) like my work, and I'm glad that people like my blog, and I'm delighted that the blogosphere is getting the recognition it deserves as, in Orwell Prize director MC Jean Seaton's words, "representing reporting from places that aren't getting reported."

I blogged some polite and hopeful thoughts about political theatre and the leaders' debate at New Statesman today. I'm about to post up some more coherent thoughts about why, despite very exciting and pleasing things happening for a full, exhausting 48 hours now, I'm storming around in a rage. Part of it is just anxiety, I'm sure: I felt incredibly out of place at the shortlist debate, with all the nice wine and posh canapes and ubiquitous Peter Hitchens, and the leaders' debate, as well as being structurally exhilarating, made me more angry than I can actually justify, given that I've just won a big shiny prize.

But before I grump off into a sleep-deprived grump, I thought I ought to put up something saying: jubilations and celebrations! And thank you to everyone who flatters me with their attention on this blog. I love you all. Even Vanilla Rose.

Digitally betrayed: blog for New Statesman

Positive engagement with the digital generation interests the political classes only when they want something from us. - read the whole thing at the Staggers.

Vote for choice.

David Cameron has this week expressed the intention to slash the time limit on legal termination of pregnancy from 24 to '22 or 20' weeks should he be elected Prime Minister. We were all expecting this. In fact, Cameron and tubthumping anti-choice MP Nadine Dorries - the self-styled 'Bridget Jones of Westminster' - all but adopted mysterious Austrian robot accents when they swore to be back with the issue under a Tory government, which is just one more reason for us all to refer to Ms Dorries as The Terminator from henceforth.

The anti-choice ideological assaults of 2008 might seem like a long time ago, but for those who weren't around during the big cross-party feminist victory over the forces of bad science, bigotry and state control, here's a precis: many Tories, including the Terminator herself, filed anti-choice amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, their first aim being to reduce the time limit on legal abortion to 20 weeks. The Terminator also launched a propaganda campaign in the Daily Mail, which was contested by this blog in conjunction with many other progressive activists and campaign groups. Pro-choice MPs, with support and encouragement from reproductive freedom campaigners and scientific focus groups who had the hard data on why reducing the time limit is arrant bollocks, responded with their own pro-choice amendments, including one on the extention of abortion rights to Northern Ireland. In the end, a free vote was held, amidst a huge demonstrations in Westminster and beyond. The 24-week time limit was upheld by 304 votes to 233 in the first vote on the issue in parliament for 18 years.

Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg voted to uphold the 24-week time limit; anti-choice apologist David Cameron voted to lower the limit to 22 weeks, in a clear statement that he prioritises moral posturing and misogyny over treating his female constituents like human beings who can make their own choices. A large proportion of the 233 votes for reducing the time limit were Tory votes. And now Cameron has had the gall to ask us to elect him on a platform of forced birth and bigotry. If one has any feminist compass at all, one should not be voting Conservative. Period.

However, on this issue as with so many others, it's not a simple case of Red good, Blue bad. In 2008, The amendment to extend abortion rights to Northern Ireland was quashed after some government filibustering, in which the DUP's nine votes on the 42 day detention-without-trial period for suspected terrorists were traded directly for a guarantee that Northern Irish women would continue to be denied basic medical care and be forced to carry pregnancies to term or travel to England to access pregnancy termination services. And yes, setting that statement down in black and white still makes me feel nauseous. When the DUP walked through the Commons to cast their votes for 42 days, MPs who supported human rights screamed 'what were you paid?'. This is what they were paid. The bodily autonomy of Northern Irish women sold over their heads for a statement vote trading our essential freedoms for an airy notion of national security.

I suspect that New Labour expects us to forget about things like this. I won't be forgetting. Not ever. Not about the welfare reform fiasco, not about 42 days, not about the surveillance state, not about the Iraq war, not about the Digital Economy Bill, and not about the cold way in which Brown sold out Northern Irish women. I'm not under the illusion that any of this would have been anything but crashingly worse under the Tories, but I can't blithely give my vote to Labour after this litany of betrayal and disappointment.

In short: on this, as on so many other issues, there is no obvious choice between parties. The only thing that feminists, scientists and anyone who objects to the idea of forcing women to give birth against their will can do is be sure to vote for the heroes of the pro-choice movement, those MPs of all parties who can be relied upon to defend women against the brutal forced-birth agenda that's coming around the corner.

Pro-choice heroes:

-Diane Abbott in Hackney (Labour, sitting)
-Evan Harris in Oxford and Abingdon (Lib Dem, sitting)
-Emily Thornberry in Islington (Labour, sitting)
-Stella Creasy in Waltham Forest (Labour, PPC)
-Lynne Featherstone in Haringey (Lib Dem, sitting)

You can find out how your MP voted on the issue here, at Liberal Conspiracy (via Public Whip).

And now for something completely different.

Where the hell are we gonna live...
where the hell are we supposed to live?
The Levellers

The battle buses are rolling, the Tory jets are fuelling up and the march of the nice shirts and sinister wives has begun. I'm technically on holiday, which technically means that I'm technically supposed to sit around reading nice books and writing a dreadful one and not technically blog about the election. So, for those of you who, like me, are already sick of seeing their terrible faces, here is a blog that is not, technically, about the election.

The government has just rushed through a bill called the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 2010. No, it hasn't made the headlines, and probably wouldn't have done so even if it weren't Election Announcement Week, because it's a very, very boring bill. I know, because I've just read it. In between interminable sub-clauses concerning what types of building may or may not be used to store maggot-infested meat* is a slippery little snippet of legislation creating a new dwelling category, 'Houses with Multiple Occupants' - meaning that any three or more unrelated adults living together now constitute a legally separate form of household, requiring separate planning permission and separate housing administration. Sounds like an everyday piece of wearisome local-government wrangling, but let's be paranoid for a second and ask ourselves: who is this set to target?

The practical effect of the legislation will be this: if you're a student, on a low income, a lodger in a landlord's home, a migrant worker, or if you simply want to share a flat with more than one friend who you don't happen to be fucking, any landlord offering to rent you a property will have to go to the expensive beauraucratic nightmare of obtaining planning permission. Even if you can find a landlord willing to take on the hassle, the local council will be able to decide whether allowing house shares will fit in with their "development plan" for your local area - a scheme that has already been test-driven in Loughborough. The number of properties available for people wishing to flatshare will inevitably decrease, rents will rise, overcrowding will worsen, and many of us will simply be unable to afford to live in large towns and cities.

Is this a targeted attack on young people? Let's have a little look at the Manchester City Council briefing on the new legislation:

"Problems caused by high concentrations of Houses in Multiple Occupantion (HMOs) have become an issue in a number of towns and cities across the country. High concentrations can have a detrimental effect on the local environment as well as impacts on social cohesion and services within an area. Manchester, along with other local authorities, has lobbied the government for greater planning powers to be able to tackle these problems."

Manchester and other councils evidently consider people living in houseshares - students, migrants and young adults - to 'have a detrimental effect on the local environment'. They don't like our sort, you see. Not only are we feckless enough to want somewhere to live, we have the temerity to use actual services. The bloody cheek of it.

Let's not forget, either, that those of use who are under-25 and are sick, on low incomes or receiving jobseekers' allowance will still only be allowed to claim housing benefit based on the average "shared occupancy" rent in the local area. Young people are expected to live in houseshares, and local governments will only pay for us to live in houseshares - but they'd rather those houseshares were kept to an absolute minimum. Where in gods'name young adults, students and migrant workers are actually supposed to live is, apparently, not their problem. Starve, move in with mum or leave the cities, they don't care, just don't have the audacity to be young, poor and energetic on our doorstep, thanks.

Where do Generation Y live? Together, mostly. Sometimes because we want to, and usually because we have to. Soaring house prices driven by the neoliberal property fetish and a failure, across the country, to build anything like enough new homes for the past, oh, twenty years now mean that for nearly everyone under thirty, the idea of being able to afford even to rent one's own place is an impossible dream - never mind having a mortgage. No, it's not ideal. I've lived in communal housing for three years, and yes, it's very different from Friends. But there's no alternative; and the makeshift communes of the 21st-century have produced, rather charmingly, some of the most radical ideas and creative projects that Europe and America have seen in decades. I suspected that I was a socialist before I started living communally with other young, poor somethings trying to build lives. Now, I know for sure. My housing arrangements are a significant part of my wanky online bio for the simple reason that they have a sincere effect on my politics.

Right now, I pay half my meagre salary to live in a room the size of a normal person's toilet (we suspect it used to be a toilet before a dodgy landlord modded the place) in an overcrowded houseshare in inner London, the fourth such houseshare I've lived in since moving here in 2007. Nobody does enough washing up, everyone gets on each other's nerves, and we all have to pretend not to hear each other's shagging sounds through the paper-thin walls. We are also family. We play music together, cook together, discuss politics, write together, share smokes and paperbacks and ideas. We may not be related, but we're enough of a family to have agreed to put up a sign in the window endorsing the Liberal Democrats, and we are voters too.

There are millions of us, young, frustrated, eking out a living in warren-like flatshares in every city in the land, and we all have votes, and it's policies like these, put in place by local authorities and blithely given the nod by central government, which engender a strong suspicion that politics has nothing to offer us, that they're all the same, and that the man might, in fact, be out to get us. And sometimes, that's the correct assessment. It doesn't mean one shouldn't get one's wriggly young arse down to the polling station like a responsible person, but sometimes the assessment is correct.

As far as me and my housemates are concerned, we're sitting here waiting for an election, when what we need is a revolution. Not the revolution, the rapture for socialists and dreamers, the big change that's always coming over the hill, the revolution, the kind there's only ever one of. I'm talking about the sort of quiet, radical upheaval that follows in the wake of social agitation and gets things done. The sort of unravelling that prevents the authorities from lashing out at the poor, the young and the disposessed. I'm talking about everyday revolution, revolution I can grab with my hands and show to my friends. I want it so much I can almost taste it.

Looking at these three grinning hairdos, it's painfully obvious that none of them will bring that revolution, even though all three are so frantic to repeat the word 'change' that I keep expecting one of them to voice his desire for the Queen to appoint him Britain's first African-American Prime Minister. Two days into the big push, and I can't persuade myself to feel anything but irritated over this election. Can we have some revolution now, please?

[Muchos Gracias to JH-M for the tip-off]

*Unfortunately for our prospective overseers, the Houses of Parliament are excluded.

ETA: Oh, and the Digital Economy Bill passed. Ugh. Not in my name.

Hang on, is it just me -

Or is this more likely to make wavering Tories vote Labour than the other way around?

I actually tremble before the strategic brilliance of our possible future administrators.

Adventures in hipsterland

A few nights ago, I attended the Hauntology debate at Cafe Oto in Dalston. It was packed with twenty-somethings wearing brogues, drinking organic cider and discussing the traumatic nature of technology. I wasn't even allowed to instantly hate everyone, because some of my friends were there, and I may have cadged some of their pomegranate seeds interesting japanese sweets and nice cigarettes.

The debate itself was excellent, for a definition of excellent that does not exclude two hours of shuffling and quiff-scratching whilst four chirpy white guys in nice shirts discussed their favourite bits of salvaged culture. Dance tracks that sample the laughter of long-dead studio audiences. The crackle and hiss of vinyl superimposed onto digitally produced music. An exhibition based on rotting photographs found in a skip. The death of futurism and the end of history. Found objects, found art, old fads and crazes resurrected and shambling in the strip-lit malls of our imaginations, looking for brains to feed on. A paranoid ontology, haunted by revenants from a past it won't shuck. Hauntology.

Adam Harper, who was persistently referred to as 'a member of a certain generation' (he's 23, like me, and you should all read his blog because it's clever and important) had the most interesting things to say. He believes that this sort of cultural reclamation can be progressive, and it can be utopian. He dared to express some genuine excitement, and was hissed at to mention the word 'hipster'. One word that stuck in the craw of the panellists and the audience, however, was 'retro'; hauntology, the reasoning goes, is not just a special strain of retro, but something else entirely - a nostalgia fostered deep in the psyches of the generation born after the end of history, a terror at the prospect of creating our own culture even as we are surrounded by an abundance of technologies with which to effect that creation.

Hauntology is a pitch-perfect orthodoxy for a new generation of smart, suspicious hipsters. Douglas Haddow said it best in 'Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilisation':

"Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it..The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks.The dancers are too self-aware to let themselves feel any form of liberation; they shuffle along, shrugging themselves into oblivion"

What Haddow and others spotted in the mid-noughties was the sharp end of a cultural phenomenon that has now diffused into the mainstream, substituting a timid irony for authenticity in political as well as creative arenas. It is this sort of thinking that allows young people with nice haircuts to remain convinced of their own alienation from the overculture whilst voting for the Conservative party.

Let's not forget that Boris Johnson rode into City Hall in 2008 on a wave of irony. LOL, Boris! Isn't he a leg-ernd? What a dude! Look at his hair! He's even on Have I got News For You! 'Lolboris' political recalcitrance goes hand in hand with contemporary British hipster culture, as does deliberate political apathy, refusing to vote as a silent, solipsistic protest at the futility of, well, everything, sort of. Most of the young people I spoke to on Thursday night were not intending to vote at all, although there were a couple of Tories in fake-fur boleros and oversized spectacles. The overwhelming impression is one of horrified intransigence, like a party held on the central reservation of a major motorway. Everything is moving so brutally fast in both directions that any movement more decisive than a small ironic shrug might knock us into the oncoming traffic.

Without courage, our generation is doomed to another decade of political disenfranchisement and shit music. But courage is - crucially - not something that we are incapable of demonstrating. Our boldness and our innovation break through in the most curious of ways. The most important contribution of the evening came from Jesse Darling, a young artist in the audience* (as transcribed it in my best scrawly shorthand):

"I don't think we're all scared of the future. In fact, I think Generation Y is constantly looking for ways to cite itself. You talk about crackly soundtracks and mold-growing photographs, but a digital track doesn't crackle; a JPEG doesn't decay. It doesn't have the decency. Your technostalgia is nothing to do with me."


*Who was, for some reason,clutching a five-foot foam-rubber crucifix in one hand and a pregnant friend in the other, like some manic re-imagined Spirit of Easter come to eat all your branded chocolate and shout at you.

A small wobble

As those with the dubious good fortune of knowing me in the meatspace will be aware: I'm writing a book. Specifically, I've signed a contract to write a short book for Zero [the fine people who produced Militant Modernism and One Dimensional Woman] which I need to hand in by June. It's going to be called Generation Square, and it's about all the people who were mean to me at school hipsters the deliberate cultural and social impoverishment of Generation Y. About the way in which our futures have been bartered, what the first stages of that bartering have done to us as a generation, and the way in which that process differs from the way every cohort of powerful adults sells out its children.

If I disappear off the radar for a few weeks in April, this will be why. Currently I'm totally paralysed and spending a great deal of time sitting in front of the ricomputer going fucksticks and arsebiscuits I'm in no way knowledgeable or mature enough to write a book. I'm a little bit panicky, too, because this book is Not Specifically About Gender. I'm not an academic, I'm still pretty young, and I routinely overuse the tricolon as a rhetorical device. But, in the slim chance that it does get published and doesn't suck, I'd very much like to count on the support of people who read this blog -for editing help, thrashing out ideas and maybe, eventually, buying a copy so that I can afford to keep my boyfriend in gin and ribbons.

There, I've now put it on the blog, so it's real and I have to write it. In other news, the Lib Dems are finally being sensible about the Digital Economy Farce. Between this, the Real Women campaign and the fact that our local Labour candidate is a tubthumping Eurosceptic, they'll probably have my vote.

The Sex Work Shibboleth

For feminists, arguments about sex work have become an ugly, obstructive shibboleth. The debate about whether feminism can ever tolerate the sale of sex has raged for over five decades, and in recent years the question has opened old wounds in the fabric of feminist unity, leading to such embarrassing flashpoints as the verbal abuse and police intimidation of sex workers and their allies at the Reclaim the Night march in 2009.

Many feminists, like Finn MacKay of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution, feel that the purchase of sex from women is always and only misogyny: “Equality for women is a farce in a society where it is considered normal for men to buy our bodies.

“We can't be free while so many of us are literally for sale. As long as I believe prostitution is a form of violence against women, then how can I work alongside anyone who promotes it as a job like any other?”

A Moral Quarrel

Furious debate about sex work and pornography dominated the discussion at the recent Women’s Question Time event in London, organised by the charity Eaves, where feminists were invited to put questions to prospective Women's ministers in the run-up to the General Election.

Pandora Blake, a feminist sex worker, attended the event. “I hadn't realised quite how aggressively hostile most of my sisters are to my ideals,” she said. “It’s worrying that so many of the best female politicians seem unable to see nuance when it comes to the sex industry".

At this event, like so many others, issues such as abortion rights and the pay gap were elbowed out in favour of monolithic tub-thumping about sex work that played out a worrying tendency on the part of contemporary feminists to moralise rather than strategise.

On the other side of the debate, many pro-sex work feminists believe that the protection of sex workers should be the only consideration.

“Criminalisation of kerb-crawling, to take one example, is harmful to sex workers because ultimately they are the ones who suffer,” said Nine, a former support worker for Edinburgh prostitutes. “Sex workers who still need to make their money are faced with doing business with clients they would ordinarily have rejected. It concerns me greatly that the mainstream feminist movement refuses to look at the harmful effect of laws like these, which they support simply in the name of sending a message to men.”

Giving space to abusers

Unfortunately, tolerant attitudes such as Nine’s are too often manipulated by patriarchal apologists concerned with maintaining a status quo that constrains and commodifies female sexuality. Easy examples of such apologism can be found on the popular networking site for johns, Punternet, which rates and reviews prostitutes as ‘pieces of meat’. Worryingly, the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) recently recruited on the site, encouraging punters to write to their MPs to safeguard their favourite hobby.

If the exclusionary tactics of abolitionist feminists are unsound, the unscrupulous attitudes of organisations like the IUSW are hardly more laudable. The attitude that abusive punters are an inevitability, and the related reasoning that one cannot fight the misogynist meat market, hardly offers an answer to people like Rebecca Mott, a former prostitute and abolitionist activist:

“The torment of being prostituted has never left me. On the first night, when I was fourteen, I was gang-raped for many hours. That was the test to see if I was suitable material for prostitution. You learn that your body is there to be damaged. That you have no right to say no. That your purpose is to service men in any and every way they can think of. It is so much easier to speak only of women who appear in charge of their own working environment, rather than the reality.”

Too often, the pro-prostitution lobby is guilty of silencing the voices of women like Mott – just as the abolitionist lobby refuses to acknowledge sex workers whose experiences differ. The sex work debate is a sea of unheard voices, private tragedy and misinformation in which moral squabbling obscures the real-life concerns of many vulnerable women.

A legal no man’s land

The net result of all this wrangling is that the legal status of sex work remains an unworkable, precarious Jenga tower of muddled laws and moral equivocation. Recent changes to the law in Britain have altered that situation very little. Welcome efforts to focus police attention on those who buy the sexual services of abused women, such as Clause 14, which makes it a criminal offence to buy sex from ‘a woman controlled for gain’, has been balanced by more regressive and punitive sanctions against soliciting.

In Britain, as in many other developed countries, women who work as prostitutes are stranded in a socio-economic no man’s land, their work just about legal enough to offer a seedy but acceptable outlet for restrained bourgeois sexual mores and an economic option for women in desperate financial circumstances, and just about illegal enough that the market for commercial sex remains illicit and underground, depriving sex workers of public dignity and of the full protection of the justice system, and satisfying the prudish public drive to punish those who sell sex.

Amongst all of this moralising, misogynist apologism and equivocation, it is stupendously difficult to have a productive conversation about sex work. “There are very few spaces in which feminists with different perspectives on this issue get together and talk about it and find points to agree on,” said Nine. “There frequently isn't even room for debate at all, just point-scoring and shouting over people.”

The stagnation of the sex work debate around a brutal moral binary can be seen as the greatest extant danger to the future of feminism, particularly if one believes, as I do, that if we all stopped shouting at each other for a while we could hold the revolution tomorrow.

Belle De Jour: a misleading cipher

The keenest example of this unimaginative binary thinking is the Belle de Jour problem. Dr Brooke Magnanti of Bristol was recently forced to out herself as the former PhD student and prostitute behind the blog which turned into the book which turned into the lucrative, trashily unchallenging ITV adaptation, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, in which Billie Piper wears a variety of rump-revealing latex dresses and does a lot of heavy breathing.

The show, now in its third series, has become the dominant vehicle for the Belle De Jour meme, stripping out everything that was realistic and challenging about Dr Magnanti's blog and leaving a deodorised husk of middle-class male fantasy in which a massively undercast Piper perkily advises the audience to “'work out what the client wants, and give it to him as quickly as possible”.'

Feminists have justly denounced the show as duplicitous, portraying sex work as entirely safe, glamorous and lucrative for all those prepared to devote themselves entirely to the sexual service of rich men. However, commentators from Kira Cochrane to India Knight have failed to notice that Secret Diary of a Call Girl is ITV's convenient fiction, and not Dr Magnanti's reality.

Dr Magnanti herself was working in the elite eschelons of the sex trade, with no pimp or drug habit to worry about, but even so, critics have failed to notice that the show bears about as much resemblance to the blog as Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves might bear to the life of a medieval peasant.

Poor Dr Magnanti. All she wanted was to develop her writing and discuss her experiences. Instead, she has been distorted, idolised, victimised and vilified by anyone and everyone with a barrel to beat about prostitution. From glamorous courtesan to tragic victim, it’s not just Belle's body that can be bent into any position you fancy.

The one thing that almost no-one has asked is why a PhD student might find herself selling sexual intercourse to fund her studies in the first place. Commentators are slow to connect Belle with a bankrupt higher education system in which indebted students routinely live well below the poverty line to afford the degrees their future employers increasingly demand. Just last week, a report by Kingston University suggested that since the abolition of the student grant, the number of students funding their degrees by working as prostitutes and strippers has increased fivefold. Basic socio-economic analysis of this kind is what is missing from both sides of the contemporary conversation about prostitution.

There is a trench of faff and fighting at the core of the sex work debate where a rigorous analysis of work and capital should be. Sex work is an economic question, not a moral one: in a world where shame and sexual violence are still hard currency, the normalisation of the sex industry is a symptom not of social degeneration, but of the economic exploitation of women on an unprecedented scale, in a feminised labour market where all working women are expected to commodify their sexuality to some extent.

Nothing obscures this crucial approach so much as the dogmatic insistence, on both sides of the debate, on the primacy of a faux-feminist notion of ‘choice’.

With sex work, as with many other feminist flashpoints, the notion of ‘a woman’s free choice’ is fetishised and taken out of context in order to obscure useful analysis. The word ‘choice’ has been manipulated by the neoliberal consensus in order to erase the influence of brutal capitalist paradigms on the deeds and decisions of poor people, and of poor women in particular.

Liberated sex workers insist that their work is ‘a free choice’, whilst abolitionists and many exited sex workers claim that prostitutes suffer such abuses that the very notion of ‘choice’ is anathema. The term has already been devalued by wider society to the extent that any sexual choice made by a woman is assumed to be an empowering act of autonomous agency – especially when the net result of that choice is financial exchange.

Abolitionist feminists unwittingly play into this misleading rhetoric of ‘choice’ with their insistence that women in the sex industry have none, that, as Finn Mackay puts it, ‘prostitution is non-consensual sex’ - as if choice and consent are ever enough to justify industrial abuse. As if choice were something made in a vacuum, unconstrained by socio-economic conditions.

The underlying assumption of this analytical cul-de-sac - that any woman’s sexual choice, however restricted, is positive and empowering - could only have currency in a world where female sexual agency is still seen as abnormal.

Decriminalisation: a way forward?

The supreme irony of this sociological stalemate is that, on many counts, the ultimate goals of pro-protection and abolitionist feminists are one and the same. Both camps, for example, believe that women and men who sell sex should not face legal sanctions, and both factions understand that the persecution of prostitutes by law enforcement officers is a form of state violence against women that needs to be eradicated as a matter of urgency.

But achievable aims like these are sidelined by partisan squabbling. So intense was the debate around Clause 14 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill that practically no opposition was brooked against other, more directly damaging clauses of the Bill, such as those that gave police greater powers to raid brothels and confiscate any earnings found on the premises. “Women are being turfed out onto the street in their scanties,” observed feminist academic Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon. “Does anyone have an answer to this?”

Even in this bitter debate, however, occasions for hope do occur. A recent collaboration on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog between Thierry Schaffauser of the IUSW and Cath Elliott concluded that feminists should work together on decriminalisation:

“While we've all been busy arguing over other things, those most in need of our help continue to suffer violence. We believe the criminalisation of sex workers/prostitutes helps to legitimise those who attack them. Criminalisation of soliciting is a sexist law.”

Ultimately, all feminists believe that vulnerable women need to be protected from abuse, violence and stigma, and all true liberals oppose cultures that brutally shame and commodify female sexuality. If our goals are to be realised, the sex work shibboleth must be broken. Feminists need to put aside ideological differences and work towards a radical restructuring of neoliberal attitudes to sex, to work and to sex work.

It is not enough to seek to criminalise prostitution at the expense of vulnerable women, and neither is it enough to cede responsibility to misogynist market forces and offer protection within an imperfect, abusive sex industry as the only realistic alternative.

If we want a world where women’s bodies are more than just commodities, feminists need to get radical, we need to get smart, and we need to be prepared to lay down our weapons and take the fight to the real enemies. If we stop fighting each other and turn our energies on the pimps, the abusers and the superstructure of misogynist free-market capitalism, there are exhilarating victories to be won.

This article was published at The Samosa on the 25th of March, 2010.

'What I have most wanted to do… is to make political writing into an art.'

In thumpingly exciting news, this blog has been nominated for The Orwell Prize 2010. Gosh.

I don't know quite what else to say. It's a massive, massive honour to be on the Longlist. I've been muddlesomely practicing making political writing into an art with this blog, but it's quite to shock to discover that I may have been objectively getting it right, at my age. I don't expect to be shortlisted, this is more than enough of an accolade.

Also nominated are Hopi Sen (who deserves to win), Iain Dale, Dave's Part, Jack of Kent, Mary Beard, Political Betting, some Proper Journalists (Tim Marshall, Gideon Rachman, David Smith) some Anonymous Real People (PC Bloggs, 'Ray' and Winston Smith) and the awesome Madam Miaow, upon whom I harbour a lingering crush.

Well, that's cheered me right up. It's been a long time since I've had a prize for anything. I'd forgotten how nice it is, having a little prize, which does make me feel like a bad grumpy socialist. But if anything, there's too much imposed scarcity around this sort of acknowledgment, making people compete when they should be celebrating each other.

If I ran the country, everyone would be entitled to at least one prize a year. They could fill in what they deserved it for most. You could have a prize for getting over a bad break-up without getting trashed and making a scene, or a prize for living in a grotty part of London, or a prize for looking after your mum when she was ill. But then I want to run away to a world of Smart Happy Socialism, where the state's main role is to reward people for getting through their lives. Anyone want to join me?

Ada Lovelace and the Digital Economy Bill.

I wrote an article for New Statesman online, all about the Digital Economy Bill and creativity. I'm pleased with it. Customers who enjoyed Penny Red on cultural capital also selected Simon Indelicate at Indieoma.

There's lots more to say, but I'm heading off to the demo now and have to answer emails and pack a protest bag (chocolate bar, phone, fags, declaration of my rights in the event of police resistance, wet wipes). If you're not able to come along too, please write to your MP, via the excellent 38 degrees, and ask them not to rush the recalcitrant Digital Economy Bill through parliament.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, the day when bloggers celebrate the technological and scientific achievements of women. So today, I am going to the protest in honour of all the amazing female bloggers I have met over the past three years, and in celebration of the 21st-century feminist revival that has been driven by the internet. As a woman and a feminist, I am appalled that laws are being tabled that threaten many of these women with disconnection from the source of energy and inspiration that has given me, along with so many millions of others, a renewed political awareness and a visceral sense of sisterhood and solidarity. I have no doubt that if Ada Lovelace were living today, she would be appalled, too.

Because of the internet, I know that I am not alone. Because I have the privilege to use the internet and exploit the technology that defines my generation, I know that I am not the only one who's angry, that there are thousands of women out there who want to rip up the rulebook of violent patriarchal capitalism and start all over again. This Bill threatens the new feminism, just as it threatens the resurgence of the left across the world. And I will resist attempts to control the netroots until my last breath. See you on the demo. x

A state-sponsored book-burning parade.

For months, my head has been jammed with anger and ideas about the Digital Economy Bill that's in the last stages of being rushed through parliament. I keep meaning to discuss it on this blog, and I haven't. Not because I don't care - actually, this piece of legislation offends me personally and politically more than anything Labour have done since they took us into Iraq - but because I care so profoundly that I don't think anything I can say can really do it justice. Pathetically, I'm also a bit intimidated by the volume of clever stuff that's been already been said about corporate copyright protection, and I'm scared that if I try to express how I feel I'll reveal myself as a Stupid Shouty Girl who Doesn't Understand. But I've got to at least acknowledge that this matters to me. It matters because the Digital Economy Bill is one of the most significant assaults on human rights that Labour has managed to execute in its twelve-year trigger-happy showdown with British civil liberties.

Today's open letter from a group of MPs, bloggers, musicians and members of the Featured Artists association [including Anthony Barnett of Open Democracy, Billy Bragg and The Indelicates] is a reserved shot of the sheer indignance that many internet users are feeling this week:

Many of us believe that the Digital Economy Bill threatens to severely infringe fundamental human rights, by allowing the disconnection of internet accounts for alleged copyright infringement, and also by new 'website blocking' laws that could result in new ways to suppress free speech and legitimate activity...Last week, Harriet Harman MP failed to give the commons any reassurances that this important, complex and controversial Bill will be properly scrutinised by our elected MPs. Democracy and accountability will be sidestepped if this bill is rushed through and amended without debate during the so-called 'wash-up' process.

The best blog analysis on the Bill that I've read recently has been helen's post at Police State UK, 'The Chilling Effect', explaining the recent amendments and why the actual sanctions proposed against people sharing files for free online are only part of the problem. Suppression of free speech isn't just about direct censorship - it's about creating a climate of cultural orthodoxy in which certain ways of behaving and sharing information are suspect, and then putting power in the hands of intermediary regulating authorities [ISPs, for example] to enforce that suspicion.

The Digital Economy Bill is altogether a larger and more dangerous assault on liberty than its individual clauses would suggest. What really frightens me about the government's corporate copyright protection movement is the casual, sneering manipulation of neoliberal dialectic: talking about 'safeguarding businesses', when clamping down on personal internet freedoms will endanger small entrepreneurial partnerships and cottage creative industries. Talking about 'protecting creative industries', when it's clear, as Bragg told Panorama last night, that "the music industry is thriving. It's the record industry that's in trouble."

This is a vile, vituperative piece of legislation, driven by corporate lobbyists and blithely ignoring public interest. It's a Faustian pact between a dying government and antique, anti-innovatory music and publishing industries who are as terrified now as manufacturers of illuminated manuscripts were in 1455 when they got their hands on the Gutenberg Bible and saw the page turning on a world of easily-exchanged ideas that they could not monetise or control. And just like today, the backlash was vicious, because of easy deal-brokering between communications merchants keen to control how people spent their money and state authorities keen to control people's access to ideas and information.

It's not just the fact that the Digital Economy Bill will criminalise young people, that this law has been written by people who mistrust and misunderstand the internet in order to punish those whose economic and cultural world has been formed by it. It's not just about the collision between information that wants to be free and information that others want to be expensive. It's about a cold and calculated assault on the forming paradigms of my generation, a final statement by a crippled and expiring Labour government that big business being free to make money at the expense of everyone else is the only thing that matters - more than the lives and livelihoods of individuals, more than artistic expression, more than the long-term socio-economic future of this or any other nation.

Because much as the Digital Economy Bill is Mandelson's terrible lovechild, collusion by frontbench Tories and Lib Dem Peers gives the lie to the idea that this is simply a Wicked Labour Scheme. It's not even a trend that's unique to Britain. Across the West, governments are moving to restrict the access of their citizens to unpaid content on the web, creating blacklists and gifting themselves with the power to cut people off from the syncretic world of high-speed information exchange at the slightest provocation. Future generations will look at campaigns like these in the same way that we think about fascist book-burning parades.

On Wednesday, there's going to be a demo in Westminster. Hope to see some of you London-centric folks there.

How a protest should be.

The anti-objectification protest outside the Miss University London beauty pageant finals on Tuesday was the sort of event you really only see in arthouse films set to a soaring indie soundtrack. A samba band joined us, and the whole thing turned into a glorious street party, with people from the area coming in to dance and stamp and join in. With chants that sounded like we'd practiced with the musicians for hours. The police were called in to disperse us, and the frigid-looking princes and princesses waiting for entry to the club were terribly peeved, which was fantastic, because winding up boring hipsters is amongst the more wholesome of my private passions.

The full report is here, on Counterfire, with videos of us all dancing and screaming and acting like the sort of idiots who don't understand that the market loves misogyny and there's nothing you can do about it. The idiot you can hear shouting in the first video is me, and the words I'm yelling are: That's not what empowerment looks like - This is what empowerment looks like!

When the Miss World pageant came to London in 1970, second-wave feminists were there, trying to resist the deliberate commercial alienation of women from our own bodies. Forty years later, feminists are still here, we're still organising, and we're still angry that brilliant young women with everything ahead of them are routinely duped by corporate whorebags into letting themselves be weighed like pieces of meat and judged in their swimsuits in the name of perky fun and money for the middle-man. The placards are new, but the injustice is the same. The difference is that this year, we had men standing alongside us, refusing to have their sexuality poached and sold back to them, resisting this antique symbol of the objectification industries' assault on their sisters' self-esteem.

My favourite part was when a couple of the attending hipsters stood behind us and loudly enumerated which of us they would and wouldn't consider putting their dicks into, and called us all 'ugly'. Funnily enough, I always get called ugly when I misbehave. Some things never change.

This is very interesting.

I can absolutely understand why many people around my age don't want to vote in the upcoming elections, as long as they can understand why they deserve a smack and a dose of Susan B Anthony: suffrage is the pivotal right. If you opt out of the one effort that makes you a relevant civic entity, you have forfeited your right to complain about anything the government does, and you have betrayed all the other young people who do want the right to be heard. Generations of suffragettes, civil rights protesters and trades unionists did not fight and die so that you could sit on the sofa thinking about how the government never listens to you.

But if you're stil parrotting the line that voting doesn't make a difference and politicians are all the same - implying that you've never actually looked too hard at John Redwood- there is now an alternative. You can give your vote to someone who does care, someone in another country affected by Britain's policies on trade sanctions, climate change and military interventionism, someone who doesn't have a voice in these elections, but who just might deserve one. No, really.

The Give Your Vote campaign is one of the maddest, most mind-boggling, most potentially revolutionary ideas to come out of the internet age in Britain so far. The concept is simple: if you don't see the point of using your vote yourself, as is the case for many Disaffected Yoofs, then you can sign up to recieve notification of how one real person in Ghana, Bangladesh or Afghanistan would vote in your place, if they could. And then you get off your arse and you cast that vote. Due to launch on Monday, this drive to combat voter apathy and build international solidarity has already gained several hundred Facebook followers, many of whom appear to be more than caps-happy flamewar faff-merchants, and several of whom have already pledged to donate their unused votes to people in developing countries whose livelihoods, homes and families have been imperilled by the decisions of British governments.

The scheme seems to be surprisingly thought through, with manifestos and focus groups in each of the target countries and an open-source system based on the efforts of volunteers to co-ordinate the proxy votes on election day. I spoke to the Give Your Vote campaigns organiser, May Abdalla, who is evangelical about creating a climate of global democratic involvement in an age where politics is disconnected from the reality of young people's lives:

"The internet means we can conceptualise communities that aren't just geographical, and start imagining democracy that isn't just limited to within borders," she said. "Young people understand that our 'neighborhood' is now global, but the campaign is aimed at everyone who feels passionately that people should be allowed to be part of the decisions that affect them. And we're not the first to have this idea. During the US election, people started questioning the breadth of US influence; when we see so many so-called international organisations dominated by a few countries, whilst at the same time 'democracy' is held up as something so valuable that our country will fight for another nation to get it, we have to question how there can be real responsibilty in their actions if those they affect can't hold them to account."

"Give Your Vote is the mobilising of a transnational civil society through new media," Abdalla explained. "People in Ghana and Bangladesh have respnded so well to the idea that they can represent themselves, rather than acting through an NGO that has its own objectives or requirements. The internet has a capacity to be used as a democratising force - because we can allow that diversity of opinions without the need for gatekeepers and be active in that process."

All very sweet and utopian. But aren't they worried about being slung in jail for electoral fraud? "It's entirely legal, because we are not forcing anyone to vote in a particular way - jut encouraging them to allow others to use their vote as a platform," explained Abdalla. "Anyway, David Cameron tells us who to vote for all the time."

Most media outlets I've spoken to have dismissed Give Your Vote as a deranged student movement, and that, more than anything, is what excites me about the scheme. As a rule, any idea that makes nice people from both sides of the bourgeois political spectrum immediately and furiously dismiss you as a mental person generally has currency, because it almost always threatens unexamined orthodoxies. Orthodoxies like geography as the sole organising force for solidarity and fellow feeling. Orthodoxies like the inalienable right of the West to operate for its own profit or pride in the third world without being held to account by citizens of developing countries. Orthodoxies like East and West - them and us - rich and poor.

I will not be taking part directly, because I'm already planning to use my own vote to assist one of the liberal PPCs in Leyton and Wanstead. But if you're not planning to vote yourself, I absolutely encourage you to sign up to the Give Your Vote scheme. If you can't be arsed to tick one box once every five years to hold your government to account, you now no longer have the option of whinging that it won't make any difference, because if even a few hundred votes can be cast by proxy in this election by people in countries affected by British policymaking, that will send an important message about international solidarity. I say this as a British patriot - yes, I'm on the left, and I'm a patriot and I'm proud, a patriot who believes in no borders. I love the British, and I also love my planet, and I believe that global thinking and global policymaking are the only paradigms that will count in a world that is increasingly connected, facing more and more problems that cross international borders, and approaching the singularity threshold. I believe in an international struggle for the liberation of workers, of women, of the disposessed. And lots of other young people believe in it, too.

The Give Your Vote scheme is exciting because it's a whole new way of thinking about politics and online democracy, and that's frightening for the old people who are currently sitting on all the power and all the money in this country. It's frightening enough that this time round, Give Your Vote's impact will remain small, and they will doubtless be dismissed by everyone as a bunch of idealistic, utopian, lunatic do-gooders, which is precisely what they are. But so were the first suffragettes; so were the early civil rights activists; so were the Diggers, the Levellers, and all the weirdos and fringe gangs in this country and elsewhere who dared to dream of a freer, fairer world.

Most of the people reading this blog only have rights today because someone, tens or hundreds of years ago, had the crazy idea that we deserved them, and was prepared to be dismissed as crazy and hounded as a dangerous freak because of that powerful, paradigm-bended idea. Someone always has to do it first. And maybe, just maybe, this is another one of those first times.