Penny Red
Here comes the future, you can't run from it - if you've got a blacklist, I wanna be on it.
Saturday, 10 September 2011
News from Nowhere
Monday, 5 September 2011
One sunny September day: the EDL march in London
A drunk woman in a bright yellow tabard that marks her a right-wing organiser is crying on the pavement, as a yelling man is cuffed by the police inside a closed betting shop on Minories Street. Her face is red, and she is shouting incoherently at the officers.
It's unclear why her friend broke into the bookies, but on a hot Saturday afternoon, any semblance of order or purpose is disintegrating under the September sun. Behind her, a thousand tanked-up fellow members of far-right protest group the English Defence League are shoving and screaming as they try to break through the lines of police driving them away from Aldgate, where a thousand anti-fascists and local Muslim youths are waiting for them.
As marches go -- and despite the controversial police ban, this looks very much like a diverted march -- this one sends mixed messages as the crowd wrestles its way down the side-streets. Some of the EDL members are half-naked skinheads, some are wearing football shirts, and one sports a Yarmulke; even as other members at the front of the march gave Hitler salutes, according to a journalist who was embedded with the crowd.
At least one marcher is black, and there are many women, wrapped in England flags and looking curiously at the few journalists who have dared to stay with the march after a press photographer was attacked with burning lighter fluid.
By this point, the English Defence League have been on the streets of London for several hours, are tired, hot and frustrated and have been drinking since breakfast.
Almost exactly 75 years since the British Blackshirts were prevented from marching through the East End at the battle of Cable Street, Oswald Moseley would not have approved of the bedraggled, sweaty rabble that bunches and yells as the police divert them towards the river: some of them aren't wearing any shirts at all.
They had congregated at Liverpool Street after the RMT union obstructed their arrival by closing underground stations, and were met by thousands of police and prevented from clashing with anti-fascists by mounted officers and several lines of riot police. To prevent the EDL from marching, the Home Secretary had declared a 30-day ban on all marches in the London area, neatly curtailing several other less proto-fascist demonstrations in the process, and setting a worrying precedent for the prevention of future protests.
Given that London is a tinder-box of social tension, with nights of violence and looting and clashes between rival gangs and the police fresh in everyone's memory, the immediate concern, as is so often the case in this new state of exception, was to prevent more riots. On both sides of the police lines this Saturday, I see angry, disenfranchised social groups spoiling for a fight with people they see, with varying degrees of accuracy, as alien intruders threatening their way of life.
Two or three young Asian lads appear in the alley my friend and I have just ducked into. They are far enough away to be safe while they goggle at the EDL. As soon as the march catches sight of them, they start to jeer and holler, stabbing their fingers in unison like pikes.
The EDL claim to be opposed only to the "threat" posed to society by the Islamic faith, but there is nothing at all to identify these teenagers as Muslim, nothing at all that differentiates them from some of the teenagers in the crowd, apart from the fact that they have brown skin.
"Scum, scum, scum, scum!" yell the EDL, as the boys hang back, afraid. The street is narrow, the air still, and you can feel the force of the chant on your face [read the rest at New Statesman online].
Friday, 19 August 2011
The Book of the blog, and why I'm not going on Big Brother.
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Panic on the streets of London.
I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?
In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge - declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was "utterly unacceptable." The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.
Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.
Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:
"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"
"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."
Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’
There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.
Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.
Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.
I’m stuck in the house, now, with rioting going on just down the road in Chalk Farm. Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed. Journalists are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot cops are in retreat where they have appeared at all. Police stations are being set alight all over the country. This morning, as the smoke begins to clear, those of us who can sleep will wake up to a country in chaos. We will wake up to fear, and to racism, and to condemnation on left and right, none of which will stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market clash teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is the time when we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide whether to descend into hate, or to put prejudice aside and work together. Now is the time when we decide what sort of country it is that we want to live in. Follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And take care of one another.
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
Of Pies and Circuses
Many people have been asking me whether or not I condemn the pie. I would invite those people to stand in front of the mirror and say 'I condemn the pie' without collapsing into giggles. Chucking a foam pie in Rupert Murdoch's face was undoubtedly a silly thing to do- I, too, would have preferred the polite comeuppance being delivered by Tom Watson and other honest MPs to continue undisturbed- but it's hardly Baader-Meinhof, is it? Jonnie Marbles is no more a violent terrorist than Harpo Marx. He threw a pie, not a grenade. It was a stunt. It was, let's face it, a funny stunt. On its own terms, it was a successful stunt- and the problem with successful stunts is that they make headlines.
In terms of distracting attention from his wheedling refusal to accept responsibility for what went on at NewsCorp, Murdoch could not have bought better publicity unless he had personally hired a lackey to shoot his son in the middle of the hearing - an oversight which, at one point in the proceedings, he looked like he was regretting. During the Murdochs' questioning, NewsCorp shares jumped by five per cent, in part because of the pie, briefly splattering the entire debate open in a welter of wet foam, but also because the Sun King played his own part with tooth-aching finesse.
That was the real circus. The man who owns and dictates the news on three continents played to the crowd as a doddering, out-of-touch gentleman executive who had absolutely no idea why he had had back-door access to Downing Street for decades, no idea why his journalists illegally hacked the phones of grieving relatives and a murdered teenager, no idea why his newspapers seem to have bought and paid for the Metropolitan police.
The terrifying thing is that a foam pie in the face is almost certainly the closest thing to actual disrespect Rupert Murdoch has experienced for thirty years. The stunt gives the remaining pro-Murdoch press an excuse to distract attention from the ugly details of the snowballing hacking scandal- but at the expense of showing their fallen prince covered in gunge and baffled, like Emperor Palpatine appearing in an episode of Get Your Own Back. The whole point of the thrown pie as a comedy trope is that it's designed to humiliate, not to hurt - the 'heinous assault on an eighty year old man' line is unlikely to wash for long. One would hope that the police officers currently holding Jonnie Marbles in custody will remember that, rather than treating him like some sort of wanton confectionary terrorist, but unfortunately the only way to find that out would be to hack their phones, and decent people don't do that.
Hackgate is too big and purposeful a beast to be by distracted by a juicy pie for more than a few hours. The status quo has been turned on its head and shaken until the dirty cash falls out. The power elites in Britain and, increasingly, in the US, have been rattled to their core. Journalists across the media spectrum are remembering that their job is to report the truth, not twist the agenda to suit their bosses. The moral panopticon of the Murdoch press, manufacturing consensus for thirty years of war and the pursuit of profit with pictures of tits and celebrity chitchat, has been exposed as a circus of lies and corruption, lubricating politicians into lazy complicity, putting government ministers on its payroll to do its bidding, turning the police force into a bunch of hired lackeys and the justice system into a mercenary sham, pilfering the still-warm bodies of slaughtered soldiers and strangled schoolgirls for a story, any story. Murdoch is eating humble pie (I wish I'd been the first to make that pun) with or without Jonnie Marbles. Can you tear your eyes away, even for a second? No, nor can I.
And that's just what the British government is counting on. Today, in the middle of the select committee hearing, it was discreetly announced that the NHS will be opened up for privatisation- the very thing that nobody voted for, the thing that almost noone wanted apart from private healthcare firms, the politicians whose election campaigns they financed, and -guess who?- the Murdoch press. Last week's Open Public Services white paper threatens to confiscate state-provided welfare, social housing, schools, nursing homes, libraries, hospitals, hospices. The hacking scandal has made it almost to the doors of Downing street, but in the meantime, on the quiet, the agenda of Murdoch's tame cabinet is being signed and delivered. It cannot be permitted. If we believe in a fairer, more honest world, we can't allow ourselves to be entirely distracted by the circus.
Monday, 16 May 2011
Books, etc.
Monday, 9 May 2011
From persuasion to coercion...
Asking for it?
Thank you Rumbold for this post.
Underflow at 9: I maintain that what I wrote about March 26 was the absolute truth. I was hit by a flying piece of fence that some protesters threw at the police AND by a police shield that day. It’s hardly uncontradictory, I was in the middle of a big fuckoff police battle and, as a reporter, I was unable to pick up anything to defend myself. You can choose not to believe it if you wish, but I am a journalist and I tell the truth. Sorry if that truth makes you uncomfortable.
As for the comment at 3 on asking why I don’t choose to respond to every single carping, bitching ad hominem directed against me – I simply can’t be bothered to engage with mindless personal attacks. I have no particular duty to do so. I have written (and you can find on my blog) all I wish to say about privilege, ‘romantic’ writing, the difference between narrative and fiction, etc, etc – questions that have been raised with me by readers whose respectful critiques I respect in turn.
I know, most of my readers know, and my friends know that I try to be a principled, honest and good-hearted professional with a deep understanding of the ways that class, gender and race intersect with my writing. I don’t have to respond to every crabby little troll to address those issues.
The posts you link to, far from being ‘accurate’, are snide, pissy, poorly-written personal attacks. They’re the blog equivalent of calling someone up, heavy-breathing at them down the phone for a while and then getting enraged when they don’t respond. If people want to see me as a cartoon punching-bag, then fine, but they can hardly get pissy at me for refusing to respond to their childish rants. I have far, far more important things to do.
To which I would add: it's BORING. Every five minutes I spend responding to some random dick-swinging troll on the internet is five minutes not spent researching the legitimacy of international adoption, or working on my book, or answering emails, or reading journals, or going to solidarity meetings, or snatching the occasional bit of downtime, or doing the washing up, or digging little bits of fluff out of my belly button, all of which are activities more deserving of my immediate attention than a small tribe of bitchy online hate-weasels.
I do not believe that, by being young, female and/or opinionated in public, anyone is ever 'asking' for the hateful, poisonous rape threats and death threats that I regularly receive, as do many other women and lefties who write online, especially if we have the temerity to be feminists. [[On the misogyny and rape-bombing question, Cath Elliott's post 'An Occupational Hazard' is a must-read.]] Even if I'd run out of things to say, even if I felt that ceasing to write were any more feasible an option for me than ceasing to breathe, I would probably carry on writing and reporting simply out of a wish to refuse to allow misogynist reactionaries shriek and scream the feminist left off the internet. As it happens, there is more to say. And a pile of important work to do, which I should get on with now.
Thanks to those who have written and blogged in support during the various rapebombing and hatestorms. It makes a huge, huge difference. hashtag-Solidarity.
Saturday, 23 April 2011
Riots and romance: thoughts on journalism, revolution and the anti-cuts movement.
I've been thinking about this more in the aftermath of the riot in Bristol this week. There was a vast disparity between MSM coverage of the riot and what thousands of us watched live online that night. I held back from writing a report until, reading the BBC and Guardian coverage the next morning, I realised that noone in the sparsely occupied Bank Holiday press rooms was feeling inclined to dig beyond the official police statement that day. In the age of Twitter, we should be able to do better than that- so I hurried out a piece based on eyewitness accounts and as much insider info as I could collate.
Following this piece, as with my reportage of March 26, I have been accused of bias, of glorifying and romanticising the protesters. I believe this charge, however tritely or maliciously put, deserves to be answered. More than that, I think I absolutely need to answer it if I want to get better at what I do.
On the charge of romance, I hold up my hands, with the caveat that the struggle of citizen versus state is essentially a romantic one. If one cares about accuracy and linguistic craftsmanship, it is very hard to describe these active clashes in a way that does not provoke passion on both sides. This is because the events themselves are moments of high emotion and challenge. Whatever their affiliations, a person's political passions are drawn with fierce accuracy when they are asked for their opinion on a given police ruckus- and every time it happens is another chance to take the political temperature of the nation.
Which brings me on to the question of condemning or condoning. I make no secret of the fact that, quite apart from my journalism, my political sympathies lie with the anti-cuts movement. But more than anything else, since I arrived at Millbank on the tenth of November just in time to see the windows kicked in, I have wanted to understand the nature of the political changes taking place in this country. This is why I have taken care to record and speak out about any instances of deliberate violence against police I happen to have seen. It's also the reason I've resisted the temptation to become member of any political party or anarchist group: it's easy to reel off propaganda (especially if one's style has a sliiiiight tendency to drift towards bombast) but far more difficult really to anatomise a movement and a generation and a nation in traumatic flux.
I believe that riots, and our response to them, teach people a lot about themselves. They have taught me one fundamentally important thing about myself - apart from the fact that I have a reckless attitude to my own personal safety, tossing all 5foot nothing of me repeatedly into violent situations where journalistic integrity forbids any active self-defence. What drags me to the scene of any riot, to any interesting protest currently ongoing, is not just politics, nor thrill-seeking: it's chasing a story that the mainstream press are still not telling properly yet, chasing a an important story, a story to which I currently have unique access as a young person within the movement.
Thursday, 3 February 2011
Notebook: responsibility and writing
So, I'm experiencing a bit of vertigo. Nine months ago I had just over a thousand Twitter followers; now it’s nearly thirteen thousand. Nine months ago it was a huge nerve-wracking fiasco for me to talk on a regional radio driveshow; last month I was a panellist on Any Questions. Nine months ago I was a blogger in the process of trying to improve my writing in the hopes of someday, maybe, being a ‘proper’ commentator’; I’m now a columnist for the country’s foremost leftwing magazine, earning a living as a full-time comment-and-features journo, and have written opinion pieces for the Guardian, the Evening Standard, the Independent and others. I got to talk at the Fabian Society conference! People from the BBC sometimes ring me up and ask what I think about things!
I’d be an idiot to pretend it's not all very exciting. Even when it’s terrifying and intimidating, which is most of the time, I remember that it makes my parents proud, and that’s always something to be glad about, because frankly my mum and dad have put up with quite enough crap from me over the years. I’m not trying to bitch and whine: manifestly, I’ve been handed a pair of golden slippers, and it would be ugly and ungrateful to complain that they pinch.
It does raise issues, though – because despite what some people inevitably believe, my writing is not a self-promotion exercise. Far from it. I care passionately about the politics and the movements I am engaged with, and I am having to learn very fast, by trial and error, how I can best behave in order to be useful to those movements. I’m having to anticipate what I might do or say that might damage or cause divisions within the causes with which I am associated. There is, bluntly, a lot more I can do now to fuck stuff up.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not under some delusion of being ever so terribly famous – it's not like I get recognised in the street. I have been recognised on two separate occasions at the same bus stop in Bethnal Green, but since I estimate that about half the people who read my blogs and articles probably live within shouting distance of E9 and have a tendency to wander down the Old Ford Road at midnight on a Thursday eating chips, that’s no huge surprise. I do, however, have a more powerful platform than I’d ever anticipated - at least not, in my nuttiest dreams, until I was in my mid thirties - and that’s daunting.
It’s daunting, because I’m in my early twenties and still learning the rules. The whole way I relate to my work and to my friends on the internet (and most of my friends are on the internet!) needs to change, now. This week I’ve finally knuckled under and accepted that.
It means accepting a certain level of responsibility. It means no longer posting quite so many profanities and details of my favourite bedroom activities in my Facebook profile. It means absolute integrity, being more mature and less impulsive. It means that the ripple effects of things I write and say are no longer small and friendly: if I call a fellow activist a cunt, it’s not just playful snark, it’s a big deal. If I tweet momentary disillusion with a protest movement, it might actively dishearten a few hundred people involved, and that matters. The way I choose to tell a story - romantic and human-centred, like this week's New Statesman cover story on the student movement, or theoretical and dispassionate, as some would have preferred? - matters to people. And I can no longer behave as though it doesn't.
All of this also means receiving a great deal more criticism – some of it good and constructive, and a whole lot of it frightening, horrible, threatening and nasty. I now receive rape threats and death threats on a daily basis; I am the subject of various spiteful right-wing hate campaigns and have my very own following of Tory and libertarian trolls. Haters gonna hate, and that's par for the course; but I can no longer respond to every criticism individually, as I used to make a point of doing. I have to block some of this petty shit out, or I’d go barmy.
I guess what all of this is leading up to is: please bear with me. This stuff is all new and vertiginous, but I’m not making the same mistakes twice. The biggest mistake, the one I regret the most actually, is neglecting my share of the housework with all the work and chores and running around I've been doing, with the result that it now probably seems, to my lovely and long-suffering housemates, like I suddenly think I'm too good for the washing up.
From now on, it's time to properly accept that what I write matters to people, time to step up to the responsibility I've been handed and do a lot more to earn it. It's time to behave like a proper commentator, not a terrified kid- even if in my head I’m still a weird schoolgirl who hides in the bin reading comics and has panic attacks when people speak to her without warning.
I anticipate that soon the fuss will die down, things will be less frazzled and I’ll have space to take stock. Probably not for another few months, though, cause I have a book coming out and another one on the way and I’m doing more things on the telly. Meanwhile, I’m gradually learning how to handle all the pressure without being a total dickhead.
That’s about it, really. Thanks for reading, if you’ve made it this far – I appreciate that your time is limited and that there are several revolutions on at the moment. If I ever lose perspective, or start praising George Osborne, or just turn into a massive wanker, I’m counting on the people whose opinions I’ve always valued to take me to task. I've relied on the advice and support of several very good friends and some wise strangers to get me through these past few months, and it's been invaluable. You know who you are. Thank you, I love you. Solidarity.
Monday, 17 January 2011
Filthy assistant required: please help!
Please do get back to me ASAP by leaving a comment here and/or emailing laurie.penny@gmail.com, telling me who you are, why you'd be a good person for the job, and what special arrangements if any you'd need. Deadline is the 25th of January 2011.
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
It's been a while...
As some of you will have noticed, I now blog and write a column for the New Statesman, and this would be the point to update your blog-reading aggregators or other such internet robots. I no longer work for the Morning Star; instead I'm a freelance journalist, which means I'm terribly poor but can stay up reading as late as I like. I'm nonetheless incredibly busy, but this blog will update periodically with cross-posts from New Statesman and any posts that are too long, too strange or too sweary for the national press .
This arrangement will continue until such time as I say something really truly awful and am inevitably and summarily fired, at which point it's all go on Penny Red again, so don't delete this blog just yet!
In other news, in case anyone's wondering: I found a place to live, not a hugely nice place, but a place nonetheless, with walls and a ceiling and bizzarre arty lesbian housemates and enough space to recover from the emotional maelstrom of the summer. This currently puts me in a far better position than most of London, given that the Tories have just imposed a Final Solution on the urban poor.
It feels a little hypocritical to be so incensed with rage about what's happening to this country, the ruthless neoliberal revenge agenda being enacted on the lives and bodies of the vulnerable and the socially invisible, when I've had such a lucky escape this summer. I could have become more unwell and lost my job and my income. I could have remained homeless. I could have had to fall back on a welfare system that's about to be snatched away almost entirely. None of that happened, and it happened to a large number of people I know. I will never get over just how lucky I am; sometimes I feel my privilege sitting on my chest like a Fuseli painting, but that's a fucking poor excuse for lying down and exempting oneself from the struggle.
So I'm going to keep writing and keep on trying to anatomise the reasons behind this assault on human decency. I'm going to link into more activist groups and more local and global campaigns and try to understand how strategies of resistance might be imagined, dreamed of and realised. Because it's the only way we're ever going to stop the right. I'm going to carry on writing; I hope some of you will carry on reading.
Love, solidarity and squalor bombs. xx
Saturday, 25 September 2010
Lessons from the Pope Protest
Now the Pope has gone home, the left needs to rediscover the courage of its convictions.
The atmosphere amongst the liberal left in the aftermath of the Pope's state visit to Britain calls to mind the uncomfortable eye-avoidance that takes place after someone suddenly turns the lights on at an orgy. Yes, we had a lot of fun, and we probably got rather carried away, but we're not overly keen to discuss it the next morning and we might well hesitate before leaping into any more messy entanglements with gay rights, feminism and anti-state activism.
The protest itself was a joyful chorus of self-congratulatory liberal paralysis. As bagfuls of naughty blown-up condoms floated up into an azure Piccadilly sky, central London thundered with the sound of twenty thousand broadly centre-left Britons failing to make up their minds about why they were there. Some of the printed-out slogans bemoaned the extra public expense of lugging the Popemobile around the country; some complained about homophobia, others about the oppression of women, but never too impolitely. There was, in fact, a horrific delicacy about this collective mumble, as if to make any real, overarching complaint about regressive state and religious indoctrination would be, well, a little tasteless.
'It's fantastic that there's a protest," said queer theorist James Butler, who I met in the crowd, "but it's telling that the only thing being chanted with any enthusiasm is 'Pope Go Home!' That sentiment seems less about creating real change than registering a formal objection while retaining the status quo."
Well, the Pope has now gone home, as he was always planning to. Hurrah. Well done us. Unfortunately, homophobia, misogyny, bigotry, intolerance and abuse have not gone home with the Pope.
The impulse towards egalitarianism and collective rationality that nominally brought twenty thousand liberals to Piccadilly last week should not now be permitted to disperse like incense in an empty church. It's vital that the left remembers that for many of us, there was more to this demonstration than the chance to stand around central London wearing pink paper mitres and making unhelpful jokes about men in dresses.
Even more dispiriting than the silly-hat brigade was the peevish fixation, by way of speeches, slogans and placards, on the cost of the Papal visit. Even Peter Tatchell and the Secular Society chose to focus attention on the twelve million pound bill to the state, in this new age of austerity, seemingly in order to rally the disparate strands of popular anti-papism into one miserly chorus of public annoyance.
This type of shoddy reasoning panders entirely to the clunky conservative line on the necessity of public sector cuts, and implies that, in this instance, liberal Britain would have been entirely happy to host the anointed head of an organisation which has covered up institutional child-rape, opposed women's rights and promoted homophobia across the globe if only it hadn't been so jolly expensive....[read the rest at New Statesman]
Sunday, 12 September 2010
Zionism, chauvinism and rape culture
Extracts from the unsealed testimony of the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, reveal that she initially alleged that Kushur had forced himself upon her, leaving her naked and bleeding in a doorway, but the charge was changed to one of rape by deception following a plea bargain after the woman's sexual history was revealed. The victim, it is claimed, had alleged rape on several other occasions after being subjected to a lifetime of violent sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her father. She had worked as a prostitute, had fled to a women's shelter, and was so traumatised and bewildered that the prosecution were worried about putting her on the stand to face-cross examination about her past.
This changes much about the story – but nothing about its racist ramifications. Even if the victim herself could be conclusively shown to have told the entire truth about her experiences, this would not for a second change the fact that the verdict given by the Jerusalem district court was scored with ugly cultural assertions about race, religion and fear of miscegenation.
The judge in the case declared that the sex was consensual, but that the woman never would have agreed to it had she known that Kushur wasn't Jewish. He added that the state of Israel had a duty to protect victims from "smooth-tongued criminals" who sought to defile "the sanctity of their bodies and souls". It speaks volumes about the relationship between racism, sexism and imperialism in Israel that a district court was quite prepared to convict on the basis that an Arab had defiled a Jewish woman's bodily 'sanctity' simply by putting his penis inside her, but unprepared to countenance the notion that a woman who had been abused by men throughout her life might have been telling the truth when she claimed to have been brutalised yet again.
...(read the rest at New Statesman)
Friday, 3 September 2010
William Hague's duty to the party.
"Well, if you're not gay, why haven't you got that nice girl pregnant yet?" It's the sort of question one expects only from atrocious, senile grandparents and the British press in silly season.
Beset by trollish gossip about his relationship with his former aide Christopher Myers, the Foreign Secretary has felt obliged to make an extremely intimate public announcement about the state of his wife's uterus to satisfy the snarling attack-dogs of the sweltering summer media hiatus. Poor William Hague. Poor Chris Myers. And poor Ffion Hague, whose multiple miscarriages have now been offered to the world as evidence of her husband's integrity and virility.
If there is one lesson we've learned in the past week, amid the breathless coverage of David and Samantha Cameron's new arrival, it's that the reproductive organs of Tory wives are extremely important and deeply indicative of their husbands' capacity to exercise power responsibly and well. After all, if a man doesn't know and control what's going on in his lady's pants, how can he be expected to run a government department?
The link between Mrs Hague's repeated, tragic loss of pregnancy and Mr Hague's heterosexuality is not necessarily straightforward, but it's the closest one can come in a public forum to "I've definitely been sleeping with my wife".
Hague seems to have accepted the rather Orwellian narrative that regular, productive heterosexual intercourse within the confines of marriage is a man's duty to the Tory party, and the press has goaded him into an explicit statement that he's been doing his duty. Will that be enough uncomfortable personal revelation to satisfy the ravenous media machine?
Unfortunately, it's probably exactly what we wanted. The British press seems to nurse an interminable fascination with what Conservatives do in bed together, and the party is clearly anxious to avoid another series of sex scandals like those that beset the Back to Basics years. Only by diverting the media's attention with a highly personal story which nevertheless emphasises that the New Tories are moral, married, faithful and fertile -- not the kinky Conservatives of John Major's premiership -- could Hague and his handlers have hoped to defuse this scandal.
Would it matter if William Hague was a closeted homosexual or bisexual? Yes, it would, simply because it would raise serious questions about the hypocrisy of his previous defence of Section 28. In the light of his extremely revealing statement, however, and in the light of the rumours having originated from that paragon of mature, well-researched online commentary, Guido "Terribly Dangerous" Fawkes, I'd venture to suggest that Hague's claim never to have had a relationship with another man is probably grounded. Yet all this juicy chatter misses the point entirely.
Even if Hague is straighter than a die, it doesn't make his ugly defence of homophobic policies and policymakers one jot more justified. Furthermore, whatever the Foreign Secretary's sexual proclivities, Ffion Hague's miscarriages have no bearing on his ability to do his job responsibly -- the Hagues could be as fertile and faithful as a pair of Catholic rabbits and William Hague would still be a grim prospect in the Foreign Office. And -- most importantly -- no woman's uterus is public property. Not even if they've had the poor taste to marry a Tory minister.
Saturday, 28 August 2010
Girls, exams and employment: a race to the bottom
Not so fast. Another equally well-evidenced trend over the past ten years has been the dizzying rise in mental health problems and low self-esteem amongst young women and girls. Women in the developed world are, it is estimated, over twice as likely to suffer depression and chronic anxiety as men; 80% of young self-harmers and 90% of teenagers with eating disorders are female. A recent study of Scottish 15-year-olds showed that whilst 19% of girls experienced common mental disorders in 1987, that incidence had increased to 44% by 2006, compared to just 21% for boys. These trends do not occur in isolation: they are linked.
It is not far fetched to surmise that it is precisely the alienation and distress that young women feel that make them ideal students and workers in today's ruthlessly profit-oriented economy, especially in the lower tiers of the labour market, where servility and identikit quiescence are paramount. In her book 'Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters,' Courtney E Martin describes this alienation:
"girls and young women across the world harbor black holes at the center of our beings. We have called this insatiable hunger by many names -- ambition, drive, pride -- but in truth it is a fundamental distrust that we deserve to be on this earth in the shape we are in."
Girls are trained from an early age to understand ourselves as social and physical commodities, as objects for others’ consumption who can adapt and should submit to whatever the current labour market wants from us. We expect to have to work hard for little or no reward, to be pleasant and self-effacing at all times. If we encounter failure - whether in the face of frantically standardised educational 'assessment objectives' or a job market so drained of opportunities that only the most abject and malleable wage-slaves need apply - women and girls tend to assume that it is we who are at fault, rather than the system itself.
Our response, as Will Hutton wrote in the Observer last month, is to "fearfully redouble [our] efforts, to avoid failure." Insecure and keen to please, young women will accept lower wages, longer hours and little to no job security. No wonder it is women who seem to represent the best business investment in this brave new post-crash world - the future of human labour in a labour market that hates humans. No wonder it is young women, not men, whom business owners and agencies are keen to employ. No wonder it is pretty young women who appear on the front covers of every paper in exam season, grinning and jumping on cue... (read the rest at New Statesman).
Monday, 23 August 2010
The West must not use women's rights to justify war
It seems curiously inconsistent, then, that, just a few weeks ago, the Home Office was quite prepared to deport another Iranian woman, Kiana Firouz, to certain execution in her native country for sexual unorthodoxy. Firouz made the film Cul-de-Sac to raise awareness of the oppression of lesbians in Iran, outing herself very publicly and embarrassing the state in the process: both crimes punishable by death in Iran. Nonetheless, it took a co-ordinated campaign by LGBT activists and solidarity networks in the UK to shame the Home Office into granting Firouz leave to remain.
Bita Ghaedi, another Iranian woman facing execution for breaking her marriage vows, also escaped to Britain -- where she was sent to a holding cell and repeatedly threatened with deportation. Ghaedi has been on several hunger strikes to protest at her treatment, but she still lives in fear of being sent back to Iran. Had the unfortunate Ms Ashtiani been smuggled to the UK, it is fair to assume that she, too, would currently be detained in Yarl's Wood, subjected to the indignity of pleading for her life to a government whose professed solidarity with Iranian women has not yet overcome its prejudice against immigrants to extend support to the hundreds of women who arrive on these shores fleeing violence every year -- all of whom, unlike Ms Ashtiani, we could actually do something materially to help.
State violence against women has long been used to justify military interventionism. The government of Iran is rather unusual in taking it upon itself to employ the executioners, but plenty of states with whom the US and UK have no military disputes currently allow men who feel their women have besmirched their family honour to carry out the killings themselves on the understanding that punishment will be minimal or non-existent.
Article 340 of the Penal Code of Jordan states: "He who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery and kills, wounds or injures one of them is exempted from any penalty." Similar laws were struck down only very recently in Syria, Morocco and Brazil; in Pakistan, incidences of women and girls being slain by their families for sexual transgressions (including having the gall to be raped) are routinely ignored by police and prosecutors.
Moreover, across the world, 68,000 women are effectively condemned to agonising death each year -- 5 per cent of them in developed countries -- for the crime of wanting sexual and reproductive self-determination in states with sanctions against abortion. There has, as yet, been no systemic global outcry at their plight. And in at least one European country, the defence of "provocation to murder" -- the so-called "cuckold's defence" -- was enshrined in law until just two years ago, allowing husbands to plead for a reduced sentence if the wife they had killed was unfaithful. The country in question was Great Britain. Were the US or UK to launch a systemic offensive against every country brutalising its female citizens because of their sex at the level of policy and culture, it'd be World War Three on Tuesday -- and we would have to start by bombing our own cities.
In this context, it could well be construed that there is another, more sinister agenda at play beyond concern for women's rights. Yesterday, Iran told the west to butt out of its right to murder Sakineh Ashtiani, making it clear that this case is now less about the well-being of one woman than about moral and militaristic positioning between hostile states. There is clear precedent for this callous, ideological long game.
This month, Time magazine published a cover photograph of a young woman, Aisha, whose nose and ears had been cut off by her father-in-law. The cover ran with the unambiguous title, "What happens if we leave Afghanistan". However, as the Afghan women's rights activist Malalai Joya told France24, Aisha was attacked under western occupation and such atrocities have arguably increased since the 2002 invasion.
"Eighteen-year-old Aisha is just an example -- cutting ears, noses and toes, torturing and even slaughtering is a norm in Afghanistan," said Joya. "Afghan women are squashed between three enemies: the Taliban, fundamentalist warlords and troops. Once again, it is moulding the oppression of women into a propaganda tool to gain support and staining their hands with ever-deepening treason against Afghan women."
In March, WikiLeaks published a CIA briefing that outlined a strategy to counter growing opposition in Europe to participation in the US-led occupation of Afghanistan. It recommended using a narrative about the oppression of women in the country that highlighted the Taliban's misogynist violence while ignoring that of the pro-occupation warlords and the occupation armies. A similar story is now being disseminated about the plight of women in Iran and poor Ms Ashtiani has become a tokenistic figure in that absolving narrative.
Instead of the solidarity they deserve -- solidarity that might first be extended by treating asylum seekers with something less than contempt -- Iranian women are being co-opted into a Nato narrative whose trajectory seems to point inexorably towards invasion. That the state of Iran hates and fears women is not up for debate and if even one person can be saved from fascistic, fundamentalist woman-haters, an international campaign is more than justified. However, if, as seems likely, Iran executes Sakineh Ashtiani anyway, it would be beyond distasteful for Nato governments to cannibalise her corpse as part of the moral groundwork for further bloodshed.
Monday, 16 August 2010
Peterloo: 191 years ago today
Brits: there's a reason why they stuck to Henry the Eighth and the Empire in school. They want us to be proud, but not about this sort of thing. We need to remember that there's another history of Britain, a history of poverty and disenfranchisement and the struggle for workers' rights and women's rights, the struggle against slavery at home and abroad.
Remember, remember the sixteenth of August.
Sunday, 8 August 2010
Undercover with the young conservatives...
*****
The teenager in the posh frock delivers her advice with the authority of weary experience. "Since this is your first Conservative Future event, I thought I ought to say -watch out for the men here," she whispers, as her friends disappear to the bar. "Most of them can't be trusted." We're at the Young Britons' Foundation summer party, incorporating the leadership hustings of Conservative Future, where I've come to observe the young right in full victory rut.
Descending three flights of stairs to the private function room at the Mahiki club in central London is a little like stepping into a sewer where the cultural overspill of the 1980s has been draining for twenty years. The room is stuffed with pasty young men in suits and ties drinking nasty orange cocktails and gossiping about Ken Clarke; the smattering of women present are wearing expensive polyester and listening prettily to what the boys have to say.
It's like a scene from one of those time-travelling detective shows, down to the droning muzak, the atmosphere of grim introspection, and the suspicion that everyone here is acting a role. The young people lounged around the bar seem to be rehearsing a set of social stereotypes that feel too clichéd to be real, mouthing empty lines of propaganda - "Thatcher did what needed to be done!" -with only a rudimentary understanding of their implications.
The Young Britons' Foundation is a finishing school for the centre-right which claims to be non-partisan and offers classes in dealing with the media, but the organisers have somehow allowed at least one journalist to infiltrate an evening they're hosting for the youth wing of the Conservative party. Eighty percent of the people here are men, and they have a lot to say about how the bloody Lib Dems are spoiling everything, and they say it over the heads of the women present.
"Yah, I really don't know what it is about Tory guys," continues Posh Frock. "They're worse than normal. I think it's because there are just so many men in the party, and it makes them...you know..." she fumbles in her bag, pulls out a pink gauze purse full of enough prescription medication to restock Boots, and pops some painkillers. "It just makes them arrogant, I suppose."
Is she some sort of feminist, then? "No! God, no!" she squeals. "No, definitely not, it's nothing like that. It's just - be careful. That's all I'm saying."
A hush falls; the hustings have begun. The three candidates for the Conservative Future leadership are all boisterous white men in their mid-twenties, all tall, all a little jowly, distinguishable by the colour of their shirts and the fact that one of them is wearing hipster spectacles. Their pitches are a unanimous declaration of strategic befuddlement.
"Now that we're in power, we've got to show the left that we can win the ideological arguments, because - because we're right!" declares Hipster Spectacles, but he doesn't sound convinced. His platitudes about "progressive politics" elicit disapproving tuts from the back row, who seem to be conducting a rehearsal for their future in the Commons. "Progressive, what does that mean?" mutters James from Kensington. "Everything seems to be progressive these days. It's the buzz-word."
"Yeah, like the Big Society," enjoins prematurely-balding Ollie, who works in the House of Lords and is slurping a Mai Tai from a tumbler shaped like a tribal woman's skull (my drink is in half a pineapple; it's all terribly ethnic). "Nobody knows what the Big Society means! It doesn't mean anything!"
"It means cutting about a hundred billion a year from public services," says his friend, adding hastily, "I mean, like, obviously that's a good thing."
"We need to make sure our party follows our principles and not those of the Liberal Democrats!" shouts another candidate. "It's the bloody Lib Dems who're the problem, they're getting in the way of everything!" During the bellow of assent that follows, one of my new friends brushes a hand surreptitiously and quite deliberately against my knee, like someone trying to be seductive in the seventeenth century. With a flash of awful clarity, I realise that these are precisely the young men my grandmother warned me about, that they are the heirs apparent to Britain's political system, and that not one of them has paused to consider if they deserve it. [read the second half at New Statesman...]
*
This piece was inspired by Dan Hancox's excellent report from the CF Christmas party in December.