Are you a mother or a lover?

In a poll assessing 'what takes priority in your life?', the Daily Mail offers its female readers only two priorities: their husband or their children.

One would have thought they'd at least have included 'self loathing' as a third option for those of us who have the temerity to be unmarried, childless, gay, focused on our careers, or simply uninterested in dedicating the greater part of our lives to caring for others.

Fascinatingly, the poll runs next to two articles that investigate precisely how much time single, childless women over thirty-eight should devote to guilt, plastic surgery and questioning every professional decision they've ever made. Clearly, women with neither husband nor children are of little interest to the Mail unless they're prepared to be effusively upset about it. The prefered pose is one of elegant self-loathing, of well-preserved women in expensive dresses admitting that despite all the good things life and liberation may have brought them, their lives are empty and pitiable.

Unsubtle though its message may be, this poll represents rather succinctly what life is really like for many women today. We are discouraged from imagining futures that do not involve servicing the needs of others. We are offered an illusion of choice, formatted in garish baby-pink, between a small range of options that actually serve to exclude any possibility of another kind of life. And this, dears, is why feminism is still important.

Youth politics and revolution

I gave this speech yesterday at the youth panel at the Compass conference, 'A New Hope'. After writing this in a fit of pique at the notion of youth politics being co-opted into the conference-going, sandwich-eating mode of adult politics, I got very nervous about actually saying the words out loud, and was sitting next to John Harris of the Guardian as chair, whose columns I adore, which didn't help. Thank you to those who attended and tweeted nice things whilst the event was going on!

***

Not every generation gets the politics it deserves. When baby boomer journalists and politicians talk about engaging with youth politics, what they generally mean is engaging with a caucus of energetic, compliant under-25s who are willing to give their time for free to causes led by grown ups.

Now more than ever, the young people of Britain need to believe ourselves more than acolytes to the staid, boring liberalism of previous generations. We need to begin to formulate an agenda of our own.

There can be no question that the conditions are right for a youth movement. The young people of Britain are suffering brutal, insulting socio-economic oppression. There are over a million young people of working age not in education, employment or training, which is a polite way of saying "up shit creek without a giro".

Politicians jostle for the most punishing position on welfare reform as millions of us languish on state benefits incomparably less generous than those our parents were able to claim in their summer holidays. Where the baby boomers enjoyed unparalleled social mobility, many of us are finding that the opposite is the case, as we are shut out of the housing market and required to scrabble, sweat and indebt ourselves for a dwindling number of degrees barely worth the paper they're written on, with the grim promise of spending the rest of our lives paying for an economic crisis not of our making in a world that's increasingly on fire.

Just weeks ago, as news came in that the top 10 per cent of earners were getting richer, 21-year-old jobseeker Vicki Harrison took her own life after receiving her 200th rejection slip. Whether a youth movement is appropriate is no longer the question. The question is, why we are not already filling the streets in protest? Where is our anger? Where is our sense of outrage?

There are protest movements, of course. It would be surprising if anyone reading this blog had not been involved, at some point over the past six months, in a demonstration, an online petition or a donation drive. We do not lack energy, or the desire for change, and if there's one thing that's true of my generation it is our willingness to work extremely hard even when the possibility of reward is abstract and abstruse.

What we are missing is a sense of political totality. From environmental activism to the recent protests over the closure of Middlesex University's philosophy department, our protest movements are atomised and fragmented, and too often we focus on fighting for or against individual reforms.

We need to have the courage to see all of our personal battlegrounds - for jobs, housing, education, welfare, digital rights, the environment - as part of a sustained and coherent movement, not just for reform, but for revolution.

For people my age, growing up after the end of the cold war, we have no coherent sense of the possibility of alternatives to neoliberal politics. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek observed that for young people today, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

For us, revolution is a retro concept whose proper use is to sell albums, t-shirts and tickets to hipster discos, rather than a serious political argument.

Many of us openly or privately believe that change can only happen gradually, incrementally, that we can only respond to neoliberal reforms as and when they occur. Youth politics in Britain today is tragically atomised and lacks ideological direction. We urgently need to entertain the notion that another politics is possible, a type of politics that organises collectively to demand the systemic change we crave.

Revolutionary politics involve risk. Revolutionary politics do not involve waiting patiently for adults to make the changes. They do not come from interning at a think tank or opening letters for an MP, and I say this as someone who has done both. Revolutionary politics are different from work experience, and they are unlikely to look good on our CVs.

The young British left has already waited too long and too politely for politicians, political parties and business owners from previous generations to give space to our agenda. We have canvassed for them, distributed their leaflets, worked on their websites, updated their twitter feeds, hashtagged their leadership campaigns, done their photocopying and made their tea, pining all the while for political transcendence. No more; I say no more.

A radical youth movement requires direct action, it will require risk taking, and it will require central, independent organisation. It will not require us to join the communist party or wear a silly hat, but it will require us to risk upsetting, in no particular order, our parents, our future employers, the party machine, and quite possibly the police.

The lost generation has wasted too much time waiting to be found. Through no fault of our own, our generation carries a huge burden of social and financial debt, but we have already wasted too much time counting up what we owe. It's time to start asking instead what the baby boomer generation owes us, and how we can take it back.

No more asking nicely. It's time to get organised, and it's time to get angry.

Why I hate the world cup.

Much as I hate to disagree with Gary Younge, I can't get on board with his utopian vision of the upcoming FIFA world cup evoking a "collective sense of latent English identity...infused with positive energy." I despise the world cup. I will not be supporting England, nor any other team. I refuse to get excited about some wealthy misogynist jocks tossing a ball around in the name of patriotism and product endorsement.
Mistrust of team sport as a fulcrum of social organisation comes naturally to me. I'm a proud, card-carrying member of the sensitive, wheezy, malcoordinated phalanx of the population for whom the word 'football' still evokes painful memories of organised sadism and unspecified locker-room peril. I'm a humourless, paranoid liberal feminist pansy who would prefer to spend the summer sitting in dark rooms, contemplating the future of the British left and smoking myself into an early grave.
The fact remains, however, that there are more pressing things to worry about over the soccer season than the state of Frank Lampard's admittedly shapely calves. This country is in crisis. Young people are in crisis, poor people are in crisis, unemployment stands at 2.5 million, the Labour movement is still leaderless and directionless, and there's a brutal train of Tory public service cuts coming over the hill. In short, the left has more important things to do than draw up worthy charts determining which FIFA team is worth supporting on the basis of global development indicators.
The British left has an uneasy relationship with international sport. Liberal alarm bells can't help but be set ringing when a bunch of overpaid PE teachers get together to orchestrate a month of corporate-sponsored quasi-xenophobia; however, as soon as world cup fever rolls around, members of the otherwise uninterested bourgeois left feel obliged to muster at least a sniffle of enthusiasm, sensing that not to do so is somehow elitist.
This is a misplaced notion: football is no longer the people’s sport. Just look at the brutal contempt that the police reserve for fans, or count the number of working-class Britons who can afford to attend home matches, much less the festivities in South Africa.
Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that the world cup is only and always about men. Younge is right to celebrate the fact that race is no longer an impediment to his young niece and nephew’s vision of football as a world ‘in which that they have a reasonable chance of succeeding’ – but unfirtunately, his niece can forget about it. [read the rest at New Statesman]

There's nothing edgy about violence against women.

Popular culture fosters the delusion that violence against women is edgy art rather than daily reality. This week, as the bodies of murder victims in Bradford and Brighton are picked over by the courts, cinemas, magazines and catwalks are teeming with glossy images of the rape, battery and dismemberment of pretty young ladies who appear artfully complicit in their abuse.

Michael Winterbottom's new two-hour murder-porn epic, The Killer Inside Me, hits cinemas next week, and advance reviews have already carried gushing descriptions of its graphic denoument, in which Casey Affleck's sheriff Lou Ford (pictured above) beats his lover to death with his bare fists, whispering how sorry he is over the sound of crunching facial bones. How terribly edgy.

Apologists for this type of thoughtless sexualised violence have described The Killer Inside Me as iconoclastic and challenging.

The photographer Tyler Shields responded with similar righteous indignation to criticisms of his latest series of stills, which feature a bestockinged Lindsay Lohan covered in blood and flashing bedroom eyes at the muzzle of a gun. Shields and Lohan defended the shots as art, but they look suspiciously like bland, mass-market, coffee-table misogyny of the type you can buy at Urban Outfitters for a fiver.

Art can shock in all sorts of valuable ways, sometimes by reflecting real life and sometimes by conjuring uncomfortable fantasy. But art that tries to get a reaction by dressing everyday misogynist brutality in a lacy thong and sexy lighting has lost its utility as social commentary.

The whole discourse is a lazy fallback, a stand-in for authentic subversion when creatives can't be bothered to do anything new.

After even the screechy million-dollar engineered catfight America's Next Top Model has featured a high-profile fashion shoot of young girls posing as murder victims, representations of violence against women can no longer be considered iconoclastic. They are consummately mainstream.

The relentlessness of these images normalises sexual violence, fashioning kinky little set pieces out of the abuse of women on an industrial scale.

Also in cinemas this week is Robert Cavanah's Pimp, a juddering fairground ride of beatings and buggery whose sharp-suited, snarling hero deals out disciplinary rapes and executions with a flick of a prop-box cane. The protagonist is played without a shred of irony by Danny Dyer, in whose name a column appeared in last month's Zoo blithely advising a reader to cut his ex-girlfriend's face "so no one will want her".

Meanwhile, yesterday's Telegraph carried the following headlines: "Woman and son murdered in Derbyshire village"; "Remains of second prostitute found"; "Spanish imam's 'prostitute jihad' ". The paper couldn't even find space to mention the ongoing trial of the man accused of killing Andrea Waddell, who was found strangled and burned in her Brighton flat last year. [read the rest at New Statesman]

Michael Gove and the Imperialists

The Tories want our children to be proud of Britain's imperial past. When right-wing colonial historian Niall Ferguson told the Hay Festival last weekend that he would like to revise the school history curriculum to include "the rise of western domination of the world" as the "big story" of the last 500 years, Education Secretary Michael Gove leapt to his feet to praise Ferguson's "exciting" ideas - and offer him the job.

Ferguson is a poster-boy for big stories about big empire, his books and broadcasting weaving Boys' Own-style tales about the British charging into the jungle and jolly well sorting out the natives. The Independent's Johann Hari, in his capacity as young bloodhound of the liberal left, sniffed out Ferguson's suspicious narrative of European cultural supremacy in a series of articles in 2006, calling him "a court historian for the imperial American hard right," as Harvard-based Ferguson believes that the success of the British Empire should be considered a model for US foreign policy.

This is exactly the sort of history that British conservatives think their children should be learning. "I am a great fan of Ferguson, and he is absolutely right," Michael Gove told the Guardian. The new Education Secretary has declared his intention to set out a 'traditionalist' curriculum 'celebrating' Britain's achievements. Andrew Roberts, another historian set to advise on the new curriculum, has dined with South African white supremacists, defended the Amritsar massacre and suggested that the Boers murdered in British concentration camps were killed by their own stupidity. It looks like this 'celebratory' curriculum might turn out to be a bunting-and-bigotry party, heavy on the jelly and propaganda.

What should shock about these appointments is not just the suspect opinions of Roberts and Ferguson, but the fact that the Tories have fundamentally misunderstood the entire purpose of history. History, properly taught, should lead young people to question and challenge their cultural inheritance rather than simply 'celebrating' it. "Studying the empire is important, because it is an international story, but we have to look at it from the perspective of those who were colonised as well as from the British perspective," said historian and political biographer Dr Anthony Seldon, who is also Master of Wellington College. "We live in an interconnected word, and to one has to balance learning about british history with learning about other cultures."

The ways in which schools and governments structure and promote stories about a country's past, the crimes they conceal and the truths they twist, have a lasting effect on young minds. It is not for nothing that the most fearsome dictators of the twentieth century, from Hitler to Chairman Mao, altered their school history curricula as a matter of national urgency. Even now, the school board of the state of Texas is re-writing the history syllabus to sanitise slavery and sideline major figures such as Thomas Jefferson, who called for separation of Church and State. That the Tories, too, wish to return us to a 'traditionalist' model of history teaching should thoroughly disabuse the Left of the notion that the Conservative party has no ideological agenda.[read the rest at New Statesman]

A modesty slip for misogyny.

Slip away the modesty cloth of faux-feminist posturing over the veil and you'll find an ugly skin of nationalism, male intolerance and misogyny.

In his article Thinly Veiled Threat, Mehdi Hasan impressively fails to assume that the debate over the niqab and burqa - recently outlawed in Belgium, with similar laws tabled across Europe - is all about him. This sets him apart from nearly every man writing, legislating and proclaiming about this most symbolically loaded piece of clothing.

Hasan's piece is learned and thorough, but it misses perhaps the most fundamental question about the veil debate. The question is not to what extent the veil can be considered oppressive, but whether it is ever justifiable for men to mandate how women should look, dress and behave in the name of cultural preservation.

Male culture has always chosen to define itself by how it permits its women to dress and behave. Footage recorded in 2008 shows a young member of the British National Party expounding upon the right of the average working man in Leeds to "look at women wearing low-cut tops in the street". The speaker declares the practice is "part of British history - and more important than human rights", and laments that "they" - variously, Muslims, foreigners and feminists - want to "take it away from us".

Never mind the right of the women in question to wear what they want or, for that matter, to walk down that Leeds street without fear of the entitled harassment made extremely explicit in this speech. This is not about women. This is about men, and how men define themselves against other men. [read the rest at New Statesman]

New blog for New Statesman

So you guys: I've been wheedled away to write a blog for New Statesman with the promise of enough cash to keep me in gin and ribbons for a while. It's all been a bit touch and go, so I didn't want to announce until it was certain, but for the next few months Penny Red will largely be moving to New Statesman online - here. The site isn't finished yet, hence at time of writing my lovely new blogroll mysteriously contains Alastair Campbell.

I will be writing about - well, the same sort of things I write about already, feminism, youth politics, socialism, pop culture. It will all be cross-posted to here under a cut, so the discussion can continue here and at the Staggers. I'll have to run everything by the editors until such time as they're confident that I'm not going to get drunk and post pictures of my bum, so if there's ever anything that needs an immediate response - or anything a bit too heartfelt for the Staggers - that'll be appearing on here too. So, this is by no means goodbye, just a sabbatical. They want me to post 3-4 times a week, too, which is very exciting and also a little bit scary, so expect the content here to go up rather suddenly.

So there's no need to update yr feeds, but I'd rather you did, and I'd love it if people could occasionally link to or comment at the NS blog, simply because if all goes well and there's lots of traffic then I might be assured a more permanent source of income. Blackmail is such an ugly word.

This is, of course, absolutely the worst time for this nice thing to have happened, being that I'm still living out of a suitcase, recovering from a battered heart and attempting to settle into a new job at Morning Star. But I've come to understand that this is always the way of things, that hard work happens when it happens and all you can do is step up to it. I am going to be relying on those who know me in real life to remind me that cigarettes replace neither meals nor sleep. I suspect there shan't be time for many frisbee competitions this summer, but really, does this face look like the sort that enjoys the sunkissed look?

My first column is about Sex and the City and the death of shoes-and-shopping feminism. Enjoy.

A sad day for British democracy.

(image via scepticisle)


I'm actually in tears. Boris Johnson, the Tories in Westminster Council and the centre-right coalition have managed to do what nine years of new Labour anti-civil-liberties wrangling didn't have the guts to do. They've sent in the police and they've taken away Brian Haw.

Brian Haw's anti-war protest - a tent, some placards and a whole lot of brazen peacenik courage - has been pitched directly outside the houses of parliament for almost nine years. Embarrassing the executive. Reminding them of their complicity in an illegal war. Reminding the people of the possibility of resistance. Labour tried everything they could think of to get rid of him, dragging him through the courts, even setting up a whole new law to ban protest in parliament square without prior approval specifically designed to oust him. They never could. Under the new centre-right regime, however, there's no such faffing about with legal precedent and squabbling over human rights. Today, the Mayor ordered the stormtroopers in to handcuff Brian Haw and drag him away, and now, after nine years, he's gone.

That's what the right does, in government. No lengthy, drawn-out hypocrytical bollocks about decorum and protest, no legislating you out of existence bit by heartbreaking bit. Just this. You are a nasty protestor. We do not like you, or your messy ideas about justice and freedom. You are spoiling our nice clean lawn. We are sending large men to remove you.

I am twenty-three, and have been politically active for about as long as Brian Haw's protest has been standing. Nearly all of my significant political memories involve Haw, from rainy pickets over the HFE bill in 2008 to cheering as the crowd of nearly two million marched past his tents on the big anti-war demo in 2003, back when I was sixteen and had only just begun to realise how terribly wrong the world was, and the power of personal resistance.

Years later, as a parliamentary intern, I passed Haw's protest every morning and evening as I crossed the street into the Houses of Parliament. And every time, I felt glad to see it, sometimes a lonely one-tent display facing down the glowering edifice of Big Ben and the commons, sometimes a larger gathering, as thousands of well-wishers and supporters travelled from all over the world to meet Brian and join his demonstration. It made me feel proud, every day, to know that whatever faff was going down in parliament, I still lived in a country where citizens had some right to protest, some right to face down the entitlement and warmongering of the state without fear of their lives and livelihoods, even if it was just one little tent and some placards against centuries of privilege and pride. It made me feel proud, every day. Johnson is using the excuse that Haw's protest detracted from the majesty of Parliament Square, but I considered Brian Haw as much a symbol of the political inheritance of my generation as the Commons. And now he's gone.

Some of us on the left were always convinced that the Tories would be worse than Labour on civil liberties. We did say. But today 'I told you so' tastes of nothing but bile. This is a tragedy, a travesty, and nothing more. Mr Haw, we salute you. The state may want to forget your protest and the grassroots resistance it symbolised. We never will.

Shiny happy rape culture

So the new government has somehow found time in its recession-busting schedule to propose a law that will grant anonymity to men accused of rape, who are of course the most pitiable and urgently unnoticed victims of woman-promoting-marriage-destroying-single-mum-supporting-violence-preventing Broken Britain. It's not as if the tabloids already paint women who allege rape as lying, heartless bitches out to destroy men and their god-given right to put their penis inside anything that gives the slightest hint of consent - by getting into their taxi, for example. Popular wisdom has it that vast numbers of rape allegations are false, when in fact false accusation is believed to account for only a tiny percentage of reported rapes - no higher than false reports for other crimes.

The Daily Fail have somehow produced both the most table-bitingly offensive assessment of the situation so far - from treacherous misogynist Melanie Phillips, who claims that "after Labour's reign of extreme man-hating feminism, common sense is reasserting itself" - and the most reasonable discussion of the issues for women, from Susanne Moore. "Do we have a Government intent on setting back women’s rights?" asks Moore. Sorry to disappoint you, Susanne, but we seem to.

Moore points out that adults who are falsely accused of child abuse run just as much, if not more risk of having their lives and reputations ruined as do men who are accused of rape - but the question of anonymity for them is not on the table. This is not a policy proposal with any real, consistent concern for the human rights of those accused of crimes. It is a rapists' charter, pure and simple, designed to protect men from lying women who, by not being properly shamed for speaking to the police when men rape, beat, assault and invade their bodies, have clearly had it all their own way for far too long.

Misogynists talk as though speaking about rape and consent is something that's easy to do, something that doesn't come with a social penalty for women, within or outside the legal system. This is not the case - particularly as most rapists prey on women who are personally known to them. When I eventually decided to speak about my experience of non-consensual sex on this blog, I was hounded by accusations of having made it all up. It was a big decision for me to come forward. At first I regretted it profoundly. Not because I was lying, but because as well as having experienced non consensual sex, during which I picked up a painful infection, I am now understood to be a manipulative lying bitch by people whose respect used to matter to me. I stayed in the house for days, not talking to anyone. And then I started getting the emails.

In the weeks after making that post I recieved no less than five emails from women who had recently experienced rape, saying that they felt happier talking to an anonymous person on the internet than going to their friends or the police. Saying that they were worried about telling people because they quite liked the guy, or their friends quite liked him, or because they thought they wouldn't be believed, or because they'd heard awful stories about how women who bring rape cases to court were publically accused of being sluts. Saying that they felt dirty and ashamed and scared and hurt and they didn't know who to contact about their internal bleeding. One of the women who emailed me was just fourteen years old.

Nobody is seriously suggesting that the number of women who remain silent about experiences of rape does not far exceed the small number of men who are falsely accused of rape - but it's clear where the government's priorities lie. It has been proven that naming rapists encourages women to come forward to report rape, just as it has been proven that a culture where women do not speak about rape and non-consensual sex allows rape to continue as an accepted part of our sexual dialectic - which is why anonymity for those accused of rape was waived in the first place. Just last year, when serial rapist John Worboys was eventually put on trial for nineteen counts of rape, no less than eighty-five women came forward claiming to have been sexually assaulted by him. Eighty five. Eighty five women who didn't know that they were part of a far broader picture. Eighty five women who didn't come forward until seeing their rapist's face in the paper convinced them that maybe it wasn't all their fault. Are eighty-five men falsely imprisoned for rape every year? Somehow I doubt it.

In this society, to accuse someone of rape is seen as a crime equal to raping someone. Men accused of rape are always given the benefit of the doubt. Women who get up the courage to speak about rape are invariably accused of lying. And now even our government is calling us liars. Rape ruins lives too - but the new regime seems to be interested only in silencing victims.

Orwell, Abbott and abortion rights

So after the Orwell awards last night -I didn't win of course, but there was an AWFUL lot of wine and a fun time was had by all, including sitting next to a Tory MP who told me how awful his constituents were in graphic detail - I arrived home at witching time to turn around some emergency copy on abortion, moral imagery and the shame matrix. I'm pleased with the response to the piece, which went live on CiF just in time for a few rabid forced-birthers to spray bits of bile and sandwich at the internet in their lunchbreaks.

Am consolidating a coherent socialist-feminist paradigm with staunch pro-choice ideology at its heart, about which there will be more waffling on here when I've lined up the theory so it all matches up and there are no little stringy bits to trim off the sides. But in a week which has been about tackling a housing crisis, centering my pro-choice feminism AND despairing over the future of the parliamentary left, I was absolutely bloody overjoyed to see that Diane Abbott will be standing for leadership of the Labour Party.

Diane Abbott is a pro-choice heroine, who attempted to force her party into granting Northern Irish women the right to even a measure of reproductive self-determination in 2008, who opposed Trident replacement, ID cards, Labour's anti-terrorism laws and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is anti-war, pro-woman, pro-equality and a socialist, and she's also very funny on the telly, and the London electorate knows all too well how much that helps. I will be joining the Labour Party in order to vote for Abbott, and I will probably be volunteering for her campaign. You should too. Diane for King.

{ETA January 2011: I didn't join the Labour Party. I couldn't bring myself to. I'll never be a member, not till they change their welfare policy.}

An 'I'm Blogging This' moment.

So there I am at the gates of Downing Street, at around 3pm this afternoon, with a moderately raucous throng of people in purple demanding 'Fair Votes Now.' We're here to hand in a petition as thick as a man's thigh, demanding a referendum on proportional representation.

And it's all got a bit noisy and spontaneous, in a shufflingly British sort of way, and I've managed to end up at the front of the line, just behind all the people with the huge cameras, who are always there at protests in London but don't really count. This is the closest I've ever been to Number Ten and aha, here come the vans.

Three riot vans screech up and police in yellow jackets pour out of the hatches like predatory lymphocytes to sterilise the dissent. They stream into formation and edge us back from the gates, politely for now, but extremely firmly. One young policeperson's face is really close to mine as he shuffles us unseeingly back, and suddenly hey, I bloody know you, officer.

Last time I saw Officer X, he was wearing my underwear and a red velvet corset.

This was about three years ago, at a photoshoot for Genet studio show we were both involved in, in which I played a cross-dressing lesbian hooker in 18th-century Paris and he played, funnily enough, a career sadist. We were all set up in an empty wine bar to do the shoot for the publicity posters, and we decided it'd look great and also be kinda hot if we swapped clothes.

So we did, and then we did the play, and then we left university and went our separate ways in the way that young people do, me to urban squalor, activism and writing, him to be a state t-cell. I recognised him instantly, because he was doing the same flinty, murderous, slightly suggestive gaze into the middle distance that made his character so effective. He's clearly not going to be on the beat for long.

So I say, hey. And he says nothing. And I say, hey, name. And he says, oh- er, hi!

His flak jacket is still all up in my face. We exchange awkward pleasantries. Because he's a copper now, he asks me if there really are another thousand of us coming. Because I'm an activist, I deny any knowledge of anything.

The crowd shifts, surges forward behind me, a shifting sea of quiet human rage. We're losing each other in the swell. The moment of connection is gone, and time rushes back with the noise of the chanting and more vans turning up.

We promise to contact each other on Facebook, and I disappear into the crowd.

A Tory wet dream of women in politics: for Morning Star

Column out today! For the Morning Star! Which is a great paper that everyone should read!

***

It's hard to decide what aspect of Britain's new centre-right government is more insulting to women. Is it the dramatic drop in the number of people with female bodies holding positions of power? Is it the Conservatives' notion that one can best support "families" by encouraging women to marry and leave the workplace? Or is it the sudden arrival of Theresa May MP as the most powerful woman in the country?

The appointment of the former Conservative chairwoman as Home Secretary was an 11th-hour decision taken by the men brokering the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, who this week promised the country a "new politics" - but there's nothing new about a Cabinet stuffed with rich, right-wing public schoolboys.

Media outlets have already been keen to stress that "shoe fan" May "is better known for wearing distinctive shoes than any pronouncements about crime," as the Telegraph put it on Wednesday.

The British press has long nursed a perverse fascination with the feet of Conservative women, with May's leopard-print kitten heels making headlines at the 2002 Tory conference and, this year, many column inches devoted to the perfect toes of Samantha Cameron. If this is how powerful women are supposed to look and behave it's rather galling that the £150 bribe offered by the Conservatives to "reward marriage" will barely be enough to keep any self-respecting Tory housewife in shoes for a month.

The focus on fashion rather than policy shores up an antiquated vision of a woman's place in politics.

"It's a shame that the Telegraph felt the need to comment on Theresa May's fondness for designer shoes," said feminist activist Laura M. "I suppose they felt they had to remind everyone that she was a woman.

"Female politicians' bodies and clothes are subject to pervasive scrutiny that men, who only have to decide what colour tie to wear, can barely imagine," she explained.

"Drawing attention to stereotypically 'female' personal interests - which May is perfectly entitled to pursue - works to make readers subconsciously associate her with shallowness and frivolity."

Tory MP Nadine Dorries, the expenses cheat and tub-thumping anti-choice activist of the Christian right, has made public statements about how much she loves her stilettos, dubbing herself the "Bridget Jones of Westminster." Unfortunately, Dorries - like May - is anything but an airhead. Both pursue a punishingly pro-market programme, both have actively supported motions to reduce the time limit on legal abortion and neither is a friend to the majority of women in Britain, however many lovely shoes they own.

May's new role as Minister for Women and Equality will no longer be a full-time job as it has been under Labour. This may be just as well, as May has voted against equality legislation 18 times since 1998, is an opponent of a woman's right to choose and has already been condemned by leading LGBT organisations for her shameful record on gay rights.

David Henry of OutRage! told Pink News that May was "the wrong person for the job," saying that "she's opposed almost every gay rights measure."

While May voted with the Conservative whip on civil partnerships, she absented herself for the votes that led to the Gender Recognition Act and has a worse record on votes protecting women and LGBT people from abuse than Chris Grayling, who was turned down for the post of Home Secretary after being perceived as "too homophobic."

This, then, is the underlying assumption of the Conservative approach to equality and women's rights, that tokenism will suffice, that the equalities agenda can be comprehensively shelved by handing it to a woman, any woman, no matter how bigoted, thuggish and illiberal. The mere fact of May's femaleness as relentlessly proven by her indulgence in a certain species of consumer femininity is seen to cover all bases.

This is why the role of women in politics will never be just a numbers game, shocking though it is that the Conservative party in parliament and the coalition Cabinet are both over four-fifths male. Merely putting female bodies and gorgeous shoes in places of liminal power will never automatically equate to empowering women and minorities within or beyond Westminster.

May is a tokenist Tory wet dream of women in politics, and not just because there's only one of her at the top table. Posh, spiky-heeled and stern with a staggeringly intolerant agenda, she bespeaks a type of kinky discipline that just longs to kick naughty little boys and girls into shape and make us behave. Media focus on the bad Thatcher drag and high-heel evangelism of the few women promoted by the new regime conceals a brutally intolerant moral agenda.

Hey, geeks: NO.

Can I just say, for the record, entirely untargeted at anyone I know and with deep love for the concept and praxis of slash fiction in all its forms:

I find the sudden internet squeefulness over Clegg/Cameron slash- and related fic at best banal, and at worst wilfully and dangerously resistant to the actual political analysis that's needed here.

The mainstream press has been going at it too, of course. Yesterday's Evening Standard headline, 'A Very Civil Partnership,' did not make anything about what has just happened to this country at all better, although it did make me giggle on the tube. It's as if the return of the centre-right and all their mad Tory friends to power was just a bit naughty, just a cheeky intra-elitist 'Eton fag' romance, a little bit saucy in a PG Woodhouse sort of way - rather than, say, terrifying and depressing.

I really, really hesitate to say this. But there are some times, some very rare, very sad times when constructing juicy stories about real or imagined homosexual angst between two powerful and/or fictional men IS NOT THE ANSWER. Now is one of those times. Because actually, it's the people, not each other, that these men are quite possibly about to screw.

I also suspect that the implication - at least where it concerns the popular press - is that a coalition is in someway not masculine enough, not Daddy enough for the proper thrustingly heterowonderful British way of doing things. Coalitions are unmanly, and unmanly = OMG gay.

Here's what you can do, Dave

You can ignore the howling of a country that hates you and doesn't want you in power. You can dig yourself into Westminster like a toad under a stone for four years whilst this country bleeds from a thousand cuts. But you can't run from progress, and you can't roll back the changes that thirteen years of progressive government have put in place. Labour did many terrible things, but they also helped open a pandora's box of visceral social change. You can't undo that, not ever.

You did not win, and you cannot rule absolutely. The Liberals may have turned traitor, but they're going to shackle you. They're going to neutralise the rabid dogs on your backbench and pare down the most illiberal of your schemes to shit magnificently on the poor and the disposessed, on welfare claimants and women.

You can't 'rebuild the family'. The nuclear heterosexual family, that fragile unit of industrial capitalist economy, has been broken for a generation as people realise that they don't have to chain themselves to each other in order to survive. You can't cram that back in its box, no matter how many women you try to persuade that they'll be better off wedded to their sinks, no matter how many children you shame for having divorced parents, no matter how coldly you judge or how hard you slice at people's earnings. Times are hard already. They won't stand for it.

You can't put gay liberation back in its box, either. You can't replace the official prejudices of the Thatcher years, section 28, that's not ever coming back.

You can't stop people wanting more than this. You can't erase people's resentment at privilege and pride, especially in difficult times. People won't be patronised or wheedled into behaving. The public are not going to behave. We won't allow it. You may be prime minister today, but the country is not behind you.

You can't stop the cities. You can't stop the internet fracturing everything that was solid and safe about the priggish culture that made you. You can't stop the riot that's brewing as people in Britain realise that they have been cheated, time and time again, by a system stuffed with people who hate them and want to put them into boxes and make them do what they're told.

And you can't, as a new Tory MP just told the BBC newscaster, 'put Britain back.' You can't ever put Britain back. You can't disappear inside Number Ten and slam the door on the future; if you do, the future will go on without you. And we all know what happens then.

If you try to push back at the raw edge of modernity, it's going to cut you.

And gods, I'm scared right now, I'm scared as hell of what's going to happen to this country and city I love, but I'm going to enjoy watching you bleed.

...

Oh, god.

For reference, mr BBC: that wasn't cheering outside Number 10. That was howling. They were screaming 'Tory Scum'. I wasn't imagining it and neither were you.

Oh, bloody hell. Stop the country, I want to get off.

The kindness of strangers.

Thank you to the anonymous person who sent me the very much needed surprise donation last night. I have done as you asked and not looked you up, but I hope you'll accept public anonymous thanks in return. When things are better and if I'm ever rich, I shall be sure to pass it on to the next young punk in trouble.

In-betweenery.

The personal is not *always* political, and try as I may there's no way I can take the abrupt demise of my long-term relationship with my partner and best friend, the fact that all my remaining close friends are leaving London this week and my related and impending imminent fucking homelessness and twist them around and turn them into a gritty urban fable that seems to say something profound, in a post-adolescent sort of way, about modern politics. It's a bugger, is what, and that's all.

I could make some sort of comment here about how my heart feels a little like the rest of the country at the moment: mightily bewildered and exhausted and facing a number of confusing new options all of which seem to offer their own special flavour of grim and crawling horror, peppered with a few small delights and the hope that, in a year or two, everything might be alright again, all overlaying a sort of hard and horrible yearning for change, any sort of change, gods.

But that would be trite, and over-simplistic. It's just a bugger.

So this is by way of an apology for what may be scatty posting here over the next few weeks, whilst I get my stuff together and attempt not to have a total meltdown. My headspace is worse at this point than it has been for years, and I really need to sort my shit out without being a bitch to anyone or making some godawful internet gaffe like, I dunno, getting piss drunk and posting naked pictures of myself weeping artsily in a bath.

I'll be fine, I always am, and with any luck by the time I'm properly back the damn country will have sorted itself out too. I'm quietly hopeful.

Demonstration tomorrow

For a more representative democracy, and in protest against whatever flavour of shambles this country wakes up with. Parliament square, sane o'clock. Details here. I can't be there, because I have a family commitment. Shout extra loud for me, but not at a police horse: bad things happen.

The people have mumbled!

Nothing can take the shiteating grin off my face today.

There will be no Tory majority government. Labour kicked back. The Lib Dems held the line, although they didn't make the gains they hoped. The worst-case scenario here is a hobbled Tory minority dragging its bloated, stinking carcase around the Commons until progressives throw enough rocks at it to make it squeal out another election. Yes, they can and probably will do some damage. No, it won't be as bad as it might have been.

Other bloody brilliant things: Greens get their first MP in Brighton, with party Leader Caroline Lucas taking the seat. UKIP and BNP vote surge isn't as high as predicted, and Griffin suffers a punishing defeat in Barking. Homophobic Tory hate preacher Philippa Stroud lost to the Lib Dems, as did nepotite toerag Anuzziata Rees-Mogg (although her little brother Jacob, the one with the nanny, won his Somerset seat). UKIP and the BNP turned in almost no votes in Wales and Scotland. The one tragic loss in all of this is that heroic pro-choice, pro-science, rationalist MP Dr Evan Harris lost his seat in Oxford after a boundary change. He'll be back, though. As will the left.

The people have mumbled; faced with the prospect of Torygeddon, the people have stammered. This is not how enfranchisement looks, but it's enough to have made David Cameron very, very angry and, you know, that's fine by me.

The Tory day of glory is soured, and there will be no 1997 moment for the Conservative party whilst I'm young, although this is enough of a gotcha moment to help the left get its goddamn boots on and remember what it's for. We've got a long, hard fight ahead of us. But we knew that anyway. And the beast coming over the hill just started to look a lot sillier. Let's stay a bit cheerful.

For fuck's sake, vote.

The sky over London is pathetically empathic, brooding and low and just about to break into a weird little squall. I've been woking 14-hour days for the past six, and I'm bleeding and I'm tired and pissed off, and Torygeddon seems to be coming, and there's nothing I can do or say to make that better. No matter how much I scream and stamp I can do nothing to stop what's coming over the hill, not on my own.

Apart from vote, of course.

Which is the only thing we can possibly do tomorrow that matters.

So here's how it goes: you. Vote. Yes, you, with your quietly freakish views and your weird opinions that no mainstream party will ever quite understand. Vote.

Yes, you, with your sulkishly correct intimation of having been betrayed time after depressing time, in small ways, with politicians taking away your faith and your fervor piece by piece. Vote. I know you think it doesn't matter, not where you are. It matters.

I don't care how much you hate them, every single one, how much you want to tear it all up and sit in your living room and throw guilty glares at the TV and not be implicated in this whole fucking mess. You are implicated already. Now go out there and take some sodding responsibility.

Not that you should vote for just anyone, of course. You should vote for whoever is going to beat the Tories in your area. Not just because they're evil, or because they're incompetent, or because (with the exceptions of a few notable people who I know read this blog) they hate you and everything you stand for. Vote for progressives because Tories are scummish and dull and boring. They are boring. Look at that sky. Taste the clammy May air, how grey and hopeless it is, spring sap run to rot. Remember when it tasted like this? That was the early 90s. Do you remember the early 90s? Vote.

Because if you don't get out there and tick whatever box you need to tick, right now if you're at home, or as soon as you can get out of work, I shall consider whatever happens tomorrow your fault. And you should too, because it will be. Turn in your internet license, you've got no more business ranting at empty cyberspace if you can't put your shoes on and engage with hard copy the one time it matters.

Which is right now.

Get your shoes on, get out of the house and vote. Put the internet away. This is it. Game on.

Go.