Gay cures, welfare reform and Christianity: Mental illness isn’t just a pejorative term for things you don’t like

When the principles behind the Welfare Reform Bill are so openly based on Iain Duncan-Smith’s Christian sense of morality, how can we be confident that progress made on mental health sits in safe hands?

The recent controversy over ‘gay cure’ posters on London buses, and the placement of interns in Parliament from the organisation Care which promotes these so-called gay ‘cures’, are two of the latest examples of extreme religious groups trying to legitimise the opinion that homosexuality is a mental disorder. They are also excellent examples of how certain strands of the Christian faith dramatically misunderstand not just abstract concepts like love and morality, but also medicine, science, and mental illness.

When an obscure American Christian preacher was found to be handing out booklets informing pupils that homosexuality is a psychiatric disorder, Michael Gove refused to take action against him on the grounds that equality laws do not cover teachings which are not part of the curriculum, suggesting that this was an equalities issue; a matter of discrimination vs free speech, not one of medical misinformation.

It’s damaging enough to have these views handed out to children in schools, without being told that they’re not coming from an authoritative source. But while the government’s policies on issues like gay rights are obviously much less regressive than the Christian extremists, the line they take on illness and welfare is rather unnerving. Those Christian values driving Iain Duncan-Smith’s welfare reform plans have, in the past, led to catastrophic horrors for mental health sufferers.

Needless to say, many Christians and Christian charities have a brilliant record on all kinds of sickness, including mental health. But it’s pointless to pretend that the religion doesn’t have an awful lot to answer for, as well. Much of the ignorance and fear that exists even today about mental illness has roots in the old ‘Christian’ notion of mental illness as a sort of devilish possession, or a punishment from God. In societies like Victorian Britain, the mentally ill were, quite literally, demonised – and tortured as a “cure” for their illness. Suffering, it was thought, would heal these diabolical inflictions.

Most modern Brits are horrified when we read about, say, dunking a patient in water repeatedly to cure auditory hallucinations, or gagging and binding a person when they experience a traumatic flashback. We are extremely unlikely to go back to stocks and chains. And yet, when an extreme Christian teaches children that homosexuality is a psychiatric disorder, watch how politicians like Gove – himself a strong Christian – treat this as a moral issue, not a medical one. It may seem like a minor semantic distinction, but it is not. What does this tell us about their understanding of what actually constitutes a psychiatric disorder?

It may be news to some, but ‘mentally ill’ is not a pejorative term to be thrown around to denigrate things you don’t like. It doesn’t mean immoral, or sinful. And it doesn’t mean stupid, or dangerous. It means just what it says: illness.

There are over 300 psychiatric disorders in the DSM (Diagnostics and Statistics Manual) IV and every single one of them has a more-or-less agreed definition, with very specific combinations of symptoms resulting in a diagnosis.

Needless to say, the DSM is far from perfect. Being compiled by the American Psychiatric Association, for example, it’s fair to be wary of its tendency to be a little too drug-led and/or insurance-led, created with one eye on the profit-motive. And of course, sometimes the medical knowledge changes, or – as is the case currently with gender dysmorphia, for example – the diagnoses can be disputed by the patients themselves. But even so, they are based on expert medical study, not personal judgments about behaviour. Homosexuality has not been included on the DSM since 1974. In fact, ever since psychiatry established itself as credible a medical field, mental health professionals have disputed the classification of it as such, with some historians even arguing that doctors never wanted it to be classed as a psychiatric disorder in the first place. Pioneers like Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis declared it to be a natural state. Arguably, it was only ever included in the DSM at all because religious voices dominated all discussions about medicine, with particular control over the area of mental health, because it was, and still is, far too often, considered physical health’s poor relative.

This is all history of course, but it’s easy to forget how recent some of it was. After all, according to the BBC, organisations like Mercy Ministries still perform ‘exorcisms’ for illnesses like eating disorders, and churches like Towy Community Church in Wales seem perfectly comfortable declaring themselves ‘in partnership’ with Mercy Ministries. And as David Cameron recently declared at his Easter reception, Christian values are “what this country needs.” Christianity serves as a driving force behind much of government policy – and perhaps nowhere quite so poignantly as in the Welfare Reform Bill.

It’s difficult to draw comparisons without being hideously alarmist, but it’s an historical fact that the ideology which has preached extreme inhumane suffering as a cure for the mentally ill is ultimately the same ideology providing the mentality that says depression can now somehow be cured by the Protestant work ethic.

When the principles behind the Welfare Reform Bill are so openly based on Iain Duncan-Smith’s Christian interpretation of what morality means, how comfortable can we be that the slow but sure progress made on mental health in this country is in safe hands?

Just look at Paul Farmer from charity MIND, who resigned as charity representative on the DWP panel scrutinising the Atos Work Capability Assessments, because, according to Third Sector, “the assessments were damaging the people Mind helps and ministers had failed to address his concerns.”

And Paul Jenkins from Rethink stated in a letter to Chris Grayling that while their direct dealings with the minister left them confident that it wasn’t the government’s intention to force sick people to work, the charity was “concerned however that government communications about these reforms are already causing harm to these very people. On Newsnight last night, in an interview, you repeatedly stated that people on benefits would be expected to work.”

Perhaps most worryingly, Sonia Poulton reported in the Daily Mail – hardly a militantly pro-welfare paper of the biased left – that in an interview on Radio 5 Live, Grayling used anecdotes of individuals with a mental illness who had found being in work helped them as evidence that people with mental illnesses should be expected to work.

These concerns were voiced by Rethink Mental Illness themselves, in their analysis of the Welfare Reform Bill. The charity said there was a likelihood that time-limiting ESA for anyone in the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG) meant that people with long-term illnesses like schizophrenia could end up forced into utterly unsuitable work – and with the workfare schemes being extended to ESA recipients, they could, in theory, be not only forced to work, but forced to work for no wage.

The severity of an illness and the longevity of an illness are not the same. Sometimes there isn’t even a correlation. Just because someone is functional enough to be placed in the WRAG group by Atos – whose assessments are controversial at best in any case – it doesn’t mean they are going to be better within a year. The government’s aim, then, cannot be to support people until they are better; there would be no time-limit if this was the case. And the aim cannot be just to save money either; the £300m spent on a three-year contract for Atos to carry on performing these assessments, and the money being poured into seeing through the reforms, makes even pure, brutal cost-cutting insufficiently convincing as a motive for the reforms. It really does seem that the ultimate aim is to place people with poorly understood illnesses into work even when the patient and the doctor both say it won’t help. It really does seem as if Iain Duncan-Smith believes in the old-fashioned Christian fantasy that work itself, by its very nature, can cure people.

Not every Atos assessor is a medical expert, and Iain Duncan-Smith and Chris Grayling definitely aren’t. They are bad enough, judging by what disability activists like Kaliya Franklin say, at recognising and respecting physical conditions. What hope do those who struggle with mental illnesses, often invisible, often impossible to explain; illnesses afforded so little respect as medical conditions that people who’ve never so much as suffered a night of insomnia will comfortably pontificate at the tops of their voices on why people hear voices, or whether depression is a real illness or not. And when the main driver for the government’s policies is faith in the Protestant work ethic as a cure for all sin and sickness, keeping our eyes open to the slippery slope it could lead down may sound alarmist, but that’s because it really is alarming.

Blind faith, whether in God or the free market, can’t be used as criteria for a medical diagnosis, and neither can it be used as a cure. Mental illness is still shaky in its medical status; we must be quick to dispel any myths, arguments, or policies that risk worsening the understanding of it still further.

We hear a lot about the coalition’s policies sending women’s rights and workers’ rights back to the 1950s. It’s an equally terrifying prospect to imagine that the government’s approach to welfare could take sufferers of mental illness back, not just to the earlier part of this century, but, if we’re not careful, to sadomasochistic cruelty of the previous one.

Belittling depression: Barbara Ellen is the Jan Moir that Twitter doesn’t seem to notice (Guest blog by Mic Wright)

Barbara Ellen is the Jan Moir that Twitter doesn’t seem to notice

The media has a duty to act responsibly. Excuse me while I break off from writing this column to laugh so much that I rupture my spleen. Newspapers in particular, whatever their stripe, deep down feel only one responsibility: the responsibility to get attention at all costs.

While Twitter revs itself up into a foamy mess whenever The Daily Mail yanks the left wing’s tail with some ill-conceived splash of bile and spite, The Guardian and The Observer employ just as many troll columnists. What’s worse is that they come from a position of even greater self-righteousness. At King’s Place, there’s a general feeling of doing ‘God’s work’, only in place of God put the simpering face of Our Lord and Saviour Alan Rusbridger.

Barbara Ellen is a serial offender. Her Observer column is frequently the locus of illogical, bitter, hateful shit. It’s made worse because she can actually string together a really good sentence when she can see clearly out of the cloud of utter bullshit that she seems to walk around in, blissfully tanked up on a good mixture of misplaced righteousness and ragingly disproportionate self-esteem.

Why do I want to shoot Barbarella Ellen into deep space today? Because her latest column went even further than I have ever seen her go before. Depression is a tricky subject, one that requires nuance, empathy and understanding. Those are all things that Barbara “Bateman” Ellen struggles to manage being so convinced of her universal rightness.

I have a dog in this fight. Not because I am a depressed father (the subject of Ellen’s nasty little rant) but because I have suffered from depression and may do again. Last year, for about 6 months, I was crippled by it and unable to write. Most of the time, I was incapable of doing anything. It was not a choice. I did not want to be a burden on my family and my girlfriend. I wasn’t well. I got better. It was hard.

Now with that declaration of self-interest out of the way, let’s talk Barbara Ellen again. I’m sorry but it needs to be done. The crux of her column was the issue of “postnatal depression in fathers”. Like the worst kind of debate wanker, Ellen focuses not on the meat of the issue but on picking at the scab of language. The entire column is an exercise in semantic dickery by a woman who has made a career of being a total arse.

Witness: “One notices more talk of postnatal depression in fathers. I use the word ‘talk’ advisedly, scientific proof being in short supply.” Ellen has read two studies she disagreed with and needed something to fill her column, so, hey, why not belittle depression and write off a whole gender because, fuck, men are all bastards and shit, aren’t they?

“…the 21st-century vogue for PND in men is another steaming bucket of terry nappies.” Dr Barbara Ellen, PhD in Nasty Shite Studies, has spoken. Only I’m not sure there’s a “vogue”. If you stop getting hung up on whether PND is the right term – which I don’t think it is – and instead consider the number of young men who kill themselves without ever asking for help, the idea that there is in any way a fashion for depression is vile.

The paragraph which should have got this column spiked and which The Observer should issue an unreserved apology for is this one: “I would have been more concerned that the mothers in question were having to put up with such exhausting narcissists as partners – men incapable of hiding their sulky self-absorption, even while being watched for researchers for a period of, wait for it, three minutes. Even serial killer Ted Bundy managed to look ‘normal’ for longer than that.”

Babs picks Ted as an example because they have a certain affinity, what with them both being psychopaths with the empathy of a shark gnawing on a surfer’s leg. Depression is not a choice. It is crippling and debilitating. It’s not the affectation of a narcissist, like a pocket square added to a suit in the hope of looking a little bit more Don Draper. That “sulky self-absorption” is more like a pall of unstoppable gloom that threatens to consume you and faking a smile for even three minutes can feel as impossible as mastering flight or developing X-ray vision.

Barbara Ellen sees relationships as a battle between two enemies forced to fuck to continue humanity. Women and men are from different countries, meeting at a safe house to screw before returning to their encampments to rage. “One hesitates to use the term womb-envy…” says Babs. ‘One’ hesitates? ‘One’?! Who made Barbara Ellen queen of the entitled, horrific doucebag column wankers? Oh yes, Babs herself in a little ceremony in front of her mirror.

I am sad and angry that The Observer saw fit to publish this vile little outburst from a woman so incapable of making an empathetic leap. Sure her column made an impact but in a very real sense it helps contribute to the further stigmatisation of people with depression, regardless of gender. Depression is a killer and those who suffer from it must not and should not see their condition trivialised by people seeking to make cheap points in the desperate hope that they’ll sell newspapers/get them a telly deal.

Ellen concludes: “It was a long, hard road for womankind, getting postnatal depression recognised as a condition…it seems to me that saying men can also get it is just cheapening this achievement.” Oh, we are so sorry Barbara, would you like a fucking merit badge?

–
Mic Wright
Freelance journalist and writer

W: www.micwright.co.uk
B: brokenbottleboy.tumblr.com
T: twitter.com/brokenbottleboy

If racism becomes a forbidden word, the debate about it will never move into the 21st century (Guest blog by Janine Griffiths)

Racism has become almost like a dirty word in our society. But not for the right reasons.

Nowadays far too many accusations of racism invite angry responses of being too “politically correct” or “oversensitive”. Such responses can be expected even if such accusations are later proven false. The counter-accusation of “being too pc” or “pandering to minorities” have been levied against those who have fought against racism since the height of segregation in America and the apartheid era. And perhaps it is a mark of progress in our society when even the racists themselves go to great lengths to deny they are racists, or that their actions may have been influenced by racial discrimination. Take George Zimmerman for example, who over recent weeks became infamous over the shooting of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin after following him against police orders because he looked ‘suspicious’. It is one of the latest in a long line of racially charged cases that has so successfully split the public both over here and in the states right down the middle.

Some say George Zimmerman is innocent and acted in self-defence. Others say he is a racist gun nut who shot dead the black teenager in cold blood. The media has had its two pounds of flesh too. Some media outlets have condemned the killing and declared George Zimmerman guilty as charged. Others have instead opted to condemn Trayvon Martin after dragging up details of his alleged marijuana suspension from high school, and questioning the way he has purportedly presented himself on social media.

Then to top it all off extremists from both sides of the fence have joined in the feeding frenzy. The New Black Panther party – who have not only gained unpopularity with the majority of law-abiding American’s but have also been widely condemned by the surviving members of the original Black Panther Party – have offered up a $10,000 bounty to anyone who can catch Zimmerman dead or alive. Neo-Nazi groups in the US have also put in their two pence worth by patrolling the streets of Sanford, America in nice shiny black boots to “make sure” that the white residents of the area feel safe.

Conservative blogs and websites surrounding key figures like Glenn Beck and Dick Cheney began calling for the country to ‘wait for the facts’ on Twitter. But they did this by implying – without much evidence – that Martin was a criminal.

The hashtag #teamdueprocess was then forced into an embarrassing admission that a photo of a young black man sticking two fingers up to the camera and wearing his pants down was not in fact Trayvon Martin and therefore had no relevance to the case. But it was left up anyway to make a point.

And in a startling prophecy that would put mystic meg to shame, the Conservative Review has also branded the teen ‘a criminal thug on his way to a life in prison’. How they could possibly predict that is a mystery to me.

Beck’s website, The Blaze, had further tried to muddy the waters by speculating again without much evidence that Martin could have been suspended from school for possessing drugs, sexually harassing women or arson. As if any of that had an influence on the fact that he got shot after buying a dangerous bag of skittles and iced tea, which may have been used in terrorist activity.

At the end of last month a white supremacist hacktivist who has proudly named himself ‘Klanklannon’ took up the work of Cheney’s Caller and leaked private messages he claimed belonged to Martin. The hacker invited people to log into Martin’s gmail account and see for themselves, having kindly changed the password to ‘niggerniggernigger’.

Then, in the middle of it all you have those who simply say that the failure to arrest George Zimmerman and investigate it thoroughly to the satisfaction of all parties is the real story here. And I have to agree. Perhaps we don’t have the full story here. Maybe there is more to all of this than meets the eye. And of course, as the above examples have shown that the mainstream media, by and large has been neither helpful nor neutral. But when you hear whispers among supposedly well-meaning and impartial people, including the Attorney General in the US who claimed that there shouldn’t even have been an arrest or investigation into the case, then that old dirty word rears its head up again. When you have online bloggers and sofa warriors stating that George Zimmerman’s claims that he acted in self-defence should have just been taken at face value and the fact that somebody died as a result doesn’t count, well then it is easy to see why so many young black men are “paranoid”. The cause of Zimmerman’s paranoia however, has yet to be determined.

I would only add that the conflicting police reports at the time are a cause for concern. As is the fact that the decision not to arrest George Zimmerman at the time was taken after Zimmerman’s father “made a few calls” which resulted in the state prosecutor coming to the police station to persuade the lead detective not to arrest Zimmerman.
There are many who say that there needs to be a “conversation” about race in America. They claim that ethnic minorities have had it their own way for too long, and that it is about time they stopped stomping their feet and complaining about and dare I say it….racism. There are many in the UK who emulate such sentiments and call for similar “debates” about multiculturalism – another dirty word.

When a case comes up in the news which exposes institutional racism against minorities, as the Stephen Lawrence case in England did over the last decade, usually the “conversation” is diverted to an example or statistic of a crime involving a black person. The truth is we as a society have been having these one-sided conversations for a very long time. These conversations, which are often influenced by the media have lead to anger, bitterness, and horrific “revenge” and hate crimes perpetrated against both black and white people in the US and UK. It has also led to Guantanamo-style prisons, the loss of liberty and tin-pot dictatorships all over the world.

Whenever we come to accept the childish “us against them” “black-white” or “they started it” mantra opportunistically embraced by biased reporting, self-interest groups and political pundits then we must also accept the consequences. Perhaps those consequences inevitably involve the passive acceptance of laws and violence against our perceived enemies and then eventually against us. What a dangerous conversation indeed.

I say it is time to move the conversation to the 21st century. Rather than denying the existence of racism or other prejudices that continue to embarrass our civilisation, perhaps there should be a renewed focus on solutions that identify cause and effect. By solutions, I am not talking about ones which will benefit or blame the black race. Or the white race. Or the Latinos or [insert favourite racial group here.]

What I refer to is something that is not immediately ‘clear’ or simple or downright lazy such as “deport them” “take away guns” “kill them” “secure our borders” “bring out more laws…”.

Sure, let’s have that conversation about racism, but without the political shamans, ‘thinktanks’, skinheads, or panthers. But a conversation with proposed solutions that would be apparent even if the skin tone or racial identity of the people it affected were neither known nor suspected.

Perhaps if Zimmerman had initiated such a conversation Trayvon would still be alive today. And maybe he was acting in self-defence. Maybe Trayvon was. Nobody really knows what went on yet except the two young men involved. But the day we start saying that it’s ok to kill an unarmed person in “self-defence” without being arrested or questioned in any way is a very dark day indeed. And when we condemn or exonerate such a person based on the information filtered through a ridiculously partisan media, we ourselves open ourselves up to the possibility of living up to the ideals of that old dirty word – racism. This then leads on to other dirty words like violence, war, conflict or shooting somebody because they look different.

FEEDING THE TROLLS: The put-upon privileged who resist progress need to take responsibility for their actions

Rod Liddle, bless him, has somehow become a big-government, pro-statist left-winger. No, really. Here he is, in the Spectator, calling for regulations on businesses to protect employment rights for workers, even when the employee in question screws up so monumentally that your entire business’s credibility hangs by the skin of your gums.

You see, Rod Liddle thinks it was unfair of Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, to make a commercial decision about John Derbyshire’s future employment with him following his ‘controverisal’ (read: racist) article in a different, online publication. Derbyshire’s article The Talk includes titbits of wisdom like explaining to white kids that black people are usually less intelligent than white people, and that they should avoid, mistrust, and fear black people whenever they see them. You don’t need to spend much time joining the rather obvious dots to see how tragedies like the killing of Trayvon Martin, or, here in England, of Mark Duggan and Charles de Menezes, are the inevitable end result of having people walk around believing such racist nonsense. If it was published in England the article would quite likely be deemed an incitement to racial hatred.

America should be proud of the respect they give to their constitutional right to free speech. But the land of freedom is also famed for being the land of personal responsibility. If you’re seriously going to expect a black man wearing a hood to ‘take responsibility’ for the fact that some people see a hood as a threatening thing (rather than being, say, a good way to keep your ears warm), or a woman to ‘take responsibility’ for how she dresses or what she drinks in case she’s assaulted, you really have to also agree that racists should be expected to take responsibility for the consequences of their racism – or even to just use their common sense in understanding, as a grown up, that when they say racist things, some people will probably call them racist.

The National Review is a serious magazine, and, apart from anything else, it’s a well-run business. Lowry is perfectly entitled to decide whom he wants to employ and whom he wants to sack. Welcome to the free market.

Justice has been served by the free market itself (and it seemingly has because John Derbyshire has been sacked), so you might ask why I’m feeding the trolls with a blog post about the whining naysayers? Does it matter if people write silly things on the internet?

Well, for a start, the hateful Coffee House blog Rod Liddle wrote about the Stephen Lawrence case almost prejudiced the whole trial. It’s a horrible thing to make victims beg for justice in the first place; to risk dragging the quest for it out even further for the sake of your right to say silly things about a murder case with no consequences definitely does matter.

But this smug veneer of being lazily controversial at the expense of less privileged people than yourself is damaging to us all as a society in a much less immediately tangible way. It helps cultivate a culture of cynicism so pervasive that it serves to do exactly the opposite of what those who practice it pretend they want.

The Liddles, O’Neills, and Delingpoles are not the defenders of free speech. They are the very thing they say they detest: an oversensitive mob, shouting down dissent, and trying to ridicule people into silence.

They contribute to and facilitate a culture which is extremely saddening. It allows people to sit in their bedrooms nursing a convenient, uncharitable assumption that anyone who cares about any moral issue, ever, is only doing it because they’re following some trend, or else for some other selfish, hypocritical reason. It’s easy to miss how prevalent this world view is.

Real, serious work, such as that done by charities like Refuge, gets denigrated by Carol Sarler in the Daily Mail with no basis for the assumptions made whatsoever. Protesters get denounced because they drink coffee. In fact, activists, writers, and ordinary people taking any moral interest in anything are continually met with the most tenuous accusations of “hypocrisy” because, for example, they care about X, but not Y. And the criticisms usually come from people who feel no particular need to give a toss about X or Y. Or a A, B, C or D, for that matter.

Just look at the comments on the Guardian article by Ava Vidal about the Trayvon Martin case. Why don’t you do more about gang violence, demand page upon page of furious commentators? Why don’t you criticise black killers? Almost as if a black person’s opinion is only valid if they criticise some unrelated other black people first, which, come to think of it, is probably the inevitable logical conclusion you come to if you hold everyone of the same race responsible for each other’s actions (i.e. if you’re a racist).

And this fake concern for every other issue under the sun bar the one the person in question happens to be addressing at that particular point in time is more than just a mild irritation. It actually gives validation to whatever is being spoken out against. When Brendan O’Neill decided that the most pressing issue worthy of space on his blog was to criticise all the people who protested the execution of Troy Davis – protested it on the rather important grounds that he might have actually been innocent – he accused them of inverse racism. He may not have a racist bone in his own body, but the article spewed comments from a stream of people who had several, and who saw his sneering at anti-racism campaigners as a validation of their hate. When he criticised the language in the government’s gay marriage consultation by pretending to be offended that “us, the little people” are not welcome in the consultation process, he attracted pages of comments from people who “agree” with him that gender reassignment is nonsense, that people can’t ever truly change gender, and, weirdly, that the feminist movement should be honest and rename itself the militant lesbian movement.

It’s not just that these kinds of columns dismiss very real concerns from people who are often vulnerable and voiceless. By peacocking his own ignorance about gender reassignment and framing it as ordinary, O’Neill actually shifts the centre ground in terms of social progress. And, needless to say, he isn’t shifting it forwards. Keeping an issue like trans rights on the sidelines is the perfect way to provide yourself with endless column-fodder for years to come. While an issue is only defined a minority issue, it can be derided as irrelevant to ordinary people, and then, when awareness is successfully raised and people start to actually care about the issue in question, everyone taking an interest can just be mocked – then completely ignored – for being nothing more than fashion-following sheep.

To say nothing of the fact that declaring minority issues to be all bang on trend can be repulsively insulting to the people who know, with painful clarity, just who the most powerful “mob” really is.

Homophobes who sometimes have to – shock, horror – have their views challenged may think that being gay is “fashionable,” but a child bullied for being gay – whether they actually are gay or not – who is terrified to walk home after school, or go into the school toilets, for fear of being beaten up or worse, would probably disagree. Rod Liddle may be able to make money from writing in the Sun that disability is fashionable (before mocking and denigrating disabled people in the same article) but Fiona Pilkington and her daughter? They knew only too well that it wasn’t.

Yes, welcome to the smelly nub of the hypocrisy of these faux-libertarians. These people who side with the dominant groups in society, usually make money from doing so, and then pretend to be bravely rebelling against a fashionable trend. These people who say they agree that people are better at solving problems than governments are, but when people try to solve problems, they throw their toys out of the pram and call them names, because, as it turns out, they don’t like that very much either.

After all, when News of the World was closed down by the free market, because consumers and advertisers alike voiced their disgust in a great example of real free speech, against an organisation that actually was powerful, and had actually been engaged in illegal, harmful activities, Liddle, O’Neill and Dellingpole didn’t applaud that, or hold it up as an example of why government doesn’t need to regulate the press. No, they demonised the people speaking out about phone-hacking as biased, vindictive, and stupid.

There are some people who genuinely do value personal freedom, but we also value personal responsibility. There are others who use the very precious concept of liberty as an excuse to defend the indefensible. Make no mistake: that’s not about freedom of speech, or about freedom of anything else. It’s about resisting progress. Are these people to blame for every racist murder and every assaulted trans person? No. But every piggish snort they give out, every minute they spend finding reasons to mock the voices trying, however imperfectly, to drive social progress forwards for all of us, sets the whole fight back just a little bit further. And for that, they really should take some personal responsibility.

With a media that expects no less, no wonder our politicians are so comfortable lying to us

So it’s official: we are not actually expected to listen to the government. In fact, apparently, we set ourselves up to be mocked if we do.

Last week Francis Maude advised people to break the law. Dan Hodges, a Labour activist and blogger who constantly yaps at Ed Miliband’s heels for being out of touch with ordinary people, used the privilege of his space in the Daily Telegraph to declare: “If you filled up your car today because Francis Maude told you to, you’re an idiot.” He goes on: “Sorry to be so blunt about it, but you are. In fact, anyone who has taken any action over the past seven days on the advice of ministers in this Government needs their head examining.”

In fact, even when a woman suffered severe burns after she took Maude’s advice – albeit carrying it out in a somewhat less than practical way – the main emphasis was on her foolishness, with endless tweets even nominating her for a Darwin Award. (Although to get a Darwin Award, as the name indicates, you need to actually be dead. So perhaps some of the tweeters themselves aren’t as clever as they think.)

Francis Maude is not responsible for this horrible accident, but is this level of snide derision towards people for listening to their own government really something we’re comfortable with? Is this what we’re happy to become? Has the famous British love of sarcasm gone so far that our voices are just auto-tuned to ‘ironical sneer,’ one eyebrow permanently raised at everything, to the extent that when a government minister gives ridiculous advice our reaction is to make fun of the people who didn’t assume he was talking piffle? Surely it’s reasonable as a busy citizen of a civilised democracy to assume government ministers know, at the very least, what is legal behaviour, and what isn’t? The question of whether politicians should be mothering us and feeding us cough mixture when we sneeze in the first place with this kind of advice isn’t the point. Yes, such advice is only ever going to be geared towards their own special interests – as Francis Maude’s encouragement of panic buying undoubtedly was – but if they are going to go round giving everybody advice then we should have higher expectations of them than this. With a media that expects no less, no wonder our politicians are so comfortable lying to us.

And lie to us they do, about everything from fuel strikes to NHS reform; their true feelings on the Cornish pasty to mandatory work schemes. With the so-called ‘Snoopers’ Charter’ looming on the political horizon, the question of trust in our politicians needs to be raised – and higher standards need to be demanded. Fast.

We can’t afford to just sigh and raise an eyebrow every time a member of the political class show how little they care to gain and keep our trust. The charge that the coalition is out of touch with the public isn’t just about the chasm in personal wealth. It’s about politicians being removed from ordinary public dialogue. It’s not just the Tory party, either. Ed Miliband is one of the worst offenders for talking about the people he wants to govern – and supposedly represents – instead of talking to us. Or, God forbid, listening to us.

The out of touch charge should also not just be levied at the politicians themselves. The silly season recently came early for the media, with liveblogs, pie puns and hilarious tweets about the drolly-named ‘pastygate.’ Journalists really do seem to love nothing more than a good old laugh about how silly journalism is; about how funny it is that they’re all writing about something trivial, and then writing about how ridiculous it is that people are interested in the stuff they’ve written, as if they were all somehow forced to write about the whatever the topic was that they found so beneath them, by enormous public demand, because leading topics for the national papers are obviously all decided by a poll of everyone in the country, not by Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch, or their editors.

Yes, a hot food tax is not, in itself, a real political hot potato (sorry). So what? We get reams and reams of blogs and articles about the finer points of Britain’s electoral map broken down by region and personal demographics that could never possibly be of interest to anyone except, well, utter nerds. We get comment editorials coming out of our ears about every single poll bump or drop or flatline that ever gets printed or tweeted, only for them to fade to dust in days. We even get articles about key strategic questions like whether the Labour party should brand themselves as Red, Blue, (in the) Black, or Purple Labour. So yes, pasties might seem trivial in comparison, but the broader point – that a 20% rate of VAT is killing jobs, crushing the economy, and damaging both businesses big and small, and is now even spoiling people’s inoffensive pleasures like eating a bloody pie at the end of the evening – should not be.

For all the high-minded fuss about civil liberties and human rights, public versus private ownership, the relationship between religion and the state, pretty much every time there’s been a major revolution in history – not just here, but in America, France, and around the world – it has more or less, when it comes down to it, been instigated by a row over taxation. Unfair, unnecessary taxation that squeezes money upwards seems to make people madder than almost anything else, and it has done for centuries.

Polls have consistently shown that the most popular tax cuts the government could have made in their 2012 budget would have been to VAT and fuel. George Osborne either didn’t know this or didn’t care but either way he obviously couldn’t be bothered to listen to the majority of people in Britain on the one issue which is of most importance to us, and has instead, tailored the tax part of his budget to a very specific, small cluster of people. The only tax cuts he’s given out are to top rate earners, and corporations, and although in itself those tax cuts are not even bad ideas, they are unarguably for a minority, not the majority, of people.

No matter what type of food he eats, if George Osborne talked to the people who do eat at Greggs a little bit more, he’d have known that a lot more people are annoyed about fuel bills than we are about the 50p rate of tax. The Labour party, by the way, are also wrong to make a campaign centrepiece out of the 50p rate of tax. People care what happens in their own pocket much more than what happens in other people’s. The problem for Osborne isn’t the perception of top rate payers getting a net tax cut, it’s the perception of only top rate payers getting a net tax cut. And similarly, if Francis Maude spoke to people a bit more often, he might have known that if he told people to store fuel in their houses – when no strike had even been declared and Len McLuskey would have to give at least seven days notice if he wanted to declare one – some people might actually take him at his word, and might potentially injure themselves.

People are entitled to take advice given to them by a government minister without being mocked and called stupid by the political class just as people are entitled to care about a tax on Cornish pasties more than the colour of Labour’s new policy book if they want to. And the media can only go so far in labelling the government as out of touch if they then use their own booming voices simply to tell the electorate what they should be caring about. Cornish pasties themselves aren’t the issue; they never were. The ‘pastygate’ story in all its silly glory was not the voice of ordinary people so much as voice of the media and politicians guessing at what they think ordinary people care about. It’s nothing to do with pies per se. It’s to do with being taxed from here to next Tuesday by people who don’t have a sensible clue about how to spend our money, and don’t ask us. We are, after all, the people who actually live with the impact of whatever the government does and, from people on the very top rates of tax right through to people paying VAT on a pie or a packet of cigarettes, we bloody well pay for it all, too. That is why it matters when decisions are made by people who are so removed from us that they give us advice and are surprised when we actually take it. And until the media gives them something worse than a cool shrug of weary cynicism, we really have no reason to expect any better, either.

Amina Filali: Culture of shame a victim for honour

Guest blog by By Hanane Eve Spayne -Bensalah

It is time to lift the veil of secrecy that surrounds the systematic abuse of women’s rights in Morocco North Africa. The case of Amina Filali only highlights the failure of the law that instead of protecting a person’s human rights assists a dark aged wicked tradition in further violating any sense of justice. Amina Filia (16) committed suicide by consuming rat poison in a desperate act of protest against her marriage to man that raped her a year prior.

Being of Moroccan ethnicity I am no stranger to the penal code article 475 which empowers a “kidnapper” of a minor to marry his victim to escape prosecution. In order for the honour of the family to be preserved. I first heard about this law from my mother many years ago and stories of further abuses .What shocked me the most was that their seemed to be an approval of this law in the Moroccan community. How can this be?

Misogyny is so ingrained in Moroccan culture and traditions that there are few willing to speak out. To do so means that not only do you face extreme persecution you must face being ostracised form your community. With no support network many women have no choice but to suffer in silence. Rape is often blamed upon the woman even if it is an act of violence she is considered impure.

This concept of purity which is essential in marriage may seem backwards to any enlightened society but in Morocco few men would be willing to marry a woman that was not a virgin it would be considered shameful. Not only does the rapist get away with his crime he gains an unwilling bride. A woman so beaten down not only by what she has suffered but by family members that are so fixated by this idea of honour .That they are willing to sacrifice their child’s sense of justice and any shreds of happiness that she might be able to piece together for an uncertain future.

What can be done to stop this vile practice? Firstly I do admit the law has come a long way in Morocco with the amendment to the family code 2004,yet it is simply not far enough. It is the responsibility of us that live in free nations to put pressure upon the Moroccan government to make amendments to this barbaric law. Women are literally dying to be free it is our responsibility in the west with the freedom that we have gained to be agents of change and not fear treading upon cultural sensitivities.

Sorry but love is a right; jewellery isn’t

Comparing not having the right to wear a cross to not having the right to marry the person you love is actually almost as idiotic as comparing gay marriage to slavery.

Well, not really. Obviously, comparing gay marriage to slavery – yes, in any kind of context, drawing any kind of a parallel, before someone inevitably pipes up with “but he wasn’t saying it’s exactly the same as slavery!” – is about as sensible as comparing it to the union of a salt dish and pepper dish, or a pair of socks. We can all hopefully see this, and we’ve all had a good laugh about it. Yet, comparing same sex marriage to not being allowed to wear a cross, pray at work, or discriminate openly against gay people in your B&B, is being argued and debated as if it’s a lot more reasonable. These debates are, on the surface, about the conflict of different minority rights, and there is a debate to be had about which right trumps which. But even though it’s less emotive than the slavery parallel, these kinds of comparisons in rights are almost as much of a logical fallacy.

When a cross-party group of Christians examined whether the things LGB people ask for get more recognition in law than the things Christians ask for, they found Christians’ requests being discarded, and gay people’s requests being granted. So the report declared that “gay people have more rights than Christians.”

This is ridiculous for one glaring, huge reason: Christians – or straight ones, at least – already have the rights gay people are asking for. The right not to be discriminated against by the hospitality industry, for example, or to marry the person you love, or to adopt a child. And gay people – Christian or otherwise – do not have the right to do any of the rights Christians are asking for either.

This is one of the most important arguments in modern politics and it hardly ever gets said: everyone has the same human rights. Human rights are always talked about by those who oppose them in terms of “group A’s rights vs group B’s.” It’s a brilliant way of making everybody disown their own rights because they are only applicable to other people. We hear about the rights of the criminals or accused criminals versus the rights of the victims; the rights of religious people versus the rights of gays.

It’s a nonsense; a complete failure to understand the whole concept of rights, freedoms, and the law. The argument, ultimately, comes down to this: just because you’ve never had to call upon a particular human right in a court of law because you are automatically granted it every day without you having to even think about it, it does not mean that you don’t also have those exact same rights. Just because you’ve never had to call upon the right to a fair trial because you’ve never been accused of a crime, it does not mean someone else getting a fair trial has more rights than you do. Just because you’ve never had to take a B&B to court for kicking you out in the middle of the night because of your sexuality, it does not mean you don’t also have the right for that not to happen to you. And just because you’ve never had to fight tooth and nail for your right to marry the person you love, it doesn’t mean you are being discriminated against when other people get that same right, just because you personally don’t like them having it.

Gay people would have more rights than Christians if, say, on account of being LGB, you magically get the legal right to wear jewellery, headscarves, turbans, or veils to work or school, even if it violates a dress or safety code. But you don’t. Nor can LGB people pray during work hours, discriminate against guests at a B%B on the basis of sexuality, or preach hate and incite violence.

On the other hand, gay people don’t have the right to marry the person they love. But straight people do.

Discrimination means being treated differently from everyone else, not being treated the same as everyone else. Loss of privilege is not discrimination nor is it oppression. Freedom cannot possibly work if we’re not all equal under the law. And most people agree that while love, and the right to marry the person you love, is a sensible thing to consider as a human right, the right to wear a piece of jewellery because it’s symbolic of something you personally find special to work, is not. How many Christians would give up their right to marry in exchange for wearing a cross? Perhaps some. But probably not many. Yet they think the rights LGB people have are somehow better than the ones they have? Please.

The fact is, there really are no sensible arguments against allowing two consenting adults in love to marry. One of the funniest things is that so many of the anti-gay marriage voices like Janice Atkinson (UKIP) and Roger Helmer (a recent UKIP convert) try to paint themselves as being interested in “freedom” and the “role of the state.”

The “it’s not the role of the state!” argument is, of course, as silly as a banana pudding in a hat. Not the idea that the church shouldn’t be part of the state. But the idea that it isn’t already. The Church of England was set up by the state, for personal, political reasons. Christianity was only brought over to this island for political reasons in the first place. Religion and politics are completely intertwined up, and pretending otherwise is just factually incorrect.

If they really want more freedom to be applied to religious institutions though, I’m all for it. No more state support. No more special tax privileges. No more automatic seats in the House of Lords. No more Head of the Church and Head of State being one and the same. No more panic about preserving each and every religion; just like any other business, political party, charity, or pressure group, if enough people choose any given religion, it survives, and if they don’t, it doesn’t. Surely that’s freedom. What is freedom, I’m sure conservative “libertarians” like UKIP will agree, without the freedom to fail?

And of course, no more immediate megaphone being handed to them whenever they have an official view on something: their views can get coverage and agreement or dissent based entirely on their own merit, nothing else. How’s that for freedom of faith?

In fact, this is perhaps the most insidious thing about all this “religion under attack” nonsense being bawled out in Cardinal Keith’s favourite red crayon in the Sunday Telegraph, and in other news outlets like the Daily Mail. The only reason someone like Cardinal Keith is listened to at all is because of the reverential attitude we have to religious opinions, as opposed to secular ones, no matter how unsubstantiated they are, and because of the privileged place religion is given in our society. Without a religious basis for them, would any of these arguments from organisations like the Coalition for Marriage seriously even be put forward, purely on their own merit? Just for fun, let’s have a look. The first argument is this:

“Marriage is unique. Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman. Marriage reflects the complementary natures of men and women. Although death and divorce may prevent it, the evidence shows that children do best with a married mother and a father.”

Well, this one is quite easy, because no it isn’t, no it hasn’t been, no it doesn’t, and no it doesn’t.

So what’s the next argument?

“No need to redefine. Civil partnerships already provide all the legal benefits of marriage so there’s no need to redefine marriage. It’s not discriminatory to support traditional marriage. Same-sex couples may choose to have a civil partnership but no one has the right to redefine marriage for the rest of us.”

This is such a wonderful blob of logical jelly circles it’s actually rather impressive in a terrible, modern-art kind of way. The argument goes like this: marriage is so special, so unique, it cannot ever be changed. But, also, civil partnerships are exactly the same as marriage, they’re just called something else. And the only reason they have to be called something else is because they are between same sex couples, and marriage is not suitable for same sex couples because it’s tradition. And that isn’t discriminatory, even though by its very nature it discriminates, but it’s not discriminatory because it’s always been that way. And obviously, as we all know, anything which has been happening for a long time is automatically not discriminatory on account of how long it’s been going on. Yes, that’s absolutely the way it works. (Apart from anything, how long does something have to go on for it to qualify as a “tradition”? Five years? Ten years? A hundred years? Is Facebook a tradition yet? Because if so, someone had better tell Mark Zuckerberg as he keeps updating it.) And since when was “tradition” automatically more important than progress?

Okay, reason number three:

“Profound consequences. If marriage is redefined, those who believe in traditional marriage will be sidelined. People’s careers could be harmed, couples seeking to adopt or foster could be excluded, and schools would inevitably have to teach the new definition to children. If marriage is redefined once, what is to stop it being redefined to allow polygamy?”

The best one. Have they actually just given up by this point? Because you could apply this to any law that’s ever passed. They’re all potentially the thin end of some random scary wedge. Stating that one of the best reasons you can think of to be against same sex marriage is because of hypothetical things that could, in theory, happen at some unspecified point if we legalise same sex marriages is doing very little more than admitting how little there is actually wrong with same sex marriage itself. In other words, even the Coalition for Marriage couldn’t think of four whole reasons why same sex marriage itself is a bad thing.

The closing, rallying cry:

“Speak up. People should not feel pressurised to go along with same-sex marriage just because of political correctness. They should be free to express their views. The Government will be launching a public consultation on proposals to redefine marriage. This will provide an opportunity for members of the public to make their views known.”

Er, people are speaking up, and most of us either support gay marriage or don’t really give a toss. It’s only a minority – even within religious groups – who are having kittens about it. Why don’t the public share in the rage? Because, frankly, the chances are that if same sex marriage was legalised tomorrow but nobody reported it in the news, most of the people opposing it would hardly even know it had happened. That’s how little difference it will make to your life, Cardinal.

Minority opinions, which do not stand up to the faintest scrutiny, are given a megaphone in the media because they are founded in religion. Yet the anti-marriage campaigners – for that’s what they are; they are, after all, actively discouraging a huge number of couples from getting married – still think religion is being discriminated against. Why? Because they’re not always allowed to wear their favourite necklaces. Enough of dancing about in a fake pretence that these are equal issues of conflicting minority rights. It’s time to tell any Christian who sees this as “discrimination” or worse to be glad they have so little experience of discrimination and oppression to think that this is it. And then to stop whining and grow up.

When did I become the left?

It’s not just me who’s asking this question: a lot of centrists feel alienated, whiplashed, and winded by finding ourselves suddenly derided as “the militant left,” “Trots,” and “crusties” for what is, in fact, a simple lack of radicalism. 

Most of the Conservatives' policies would be good ones, if the things they believe were true. Closing Remploy factories would be a good way to foster integrated employment if their welfare to work programmes really were successful at getting more disabled people into secure employment. Cutting public sector jobs would be fine if the private sector really was picking up all the slack. Cutting housing benefit would be a good idea if rents really were only high because of subsidised rents, and if rents would definitely drop when benefits were cut. But none of this is happening, none of its true. Like a socialist believing in, say, ever-higher tax rates because it satisfies their sense of justice even if a high top rate of tax generates less revenue, so the coalition seem to believe in cutting, and privatising, the most random public services like the NHS and, now, it seems, the police, in face of all pragmatism, just because it appeals to theirs.  

Does realising that mean I’ve become more left-wing? It certainly feels like it. I end up on the “leftist” side of the debate almost every time I discuss politics these days, unless I’m talking to the hard left. But I don’t feel like my views have changed. So the other day I did something I haven’t done in years; I took the good old ‘Political Compass’ quiz. 

I am still exactly – exactly – where I have been (which is a centre-right fairly moderate libertarian, if you’re interested), ever since I dabbled in the Tory society at uni, and then went off to work in the private sector. Because I still believe free markets help keep people free. I believe the top rate of tax is too high – especially since the 50p rate was put in place. I believe strongly that private property rights, and private ownership, are important civil rights. I believe that the profit motive can have benefits for society. I believe in strong law and order, and I want taxes to be as low as possible – without sacrificing the basic things that make us civilised, of course. I believe state spending on luxuries like arts, humanities, and even some environmental projects, should be fairly minimal, especially at a time of cuts in public spending elsewhere.

But I also still believe that a legal minimum wage which is more or less in line with inflation, and which more or less covers people’s living costs, keeping them above the poverty line (which ours doesn’t) is a really important part of a successful economy, to say nothing of it being an important part of a civilised country. Businesses are nothing without customers; people need money in their pockets to buy things. Dirt-crunching wages shouldn’t be shrugged off as “part of the medicine.” Low wages and high unemployment are not part of the medicine; they are symptoms of the illness. I believe health, education, welfare, legal aid, and policing need to be kept away from the market, because they are, unfortunately, incompatible with the profit motive. I believe when you work you should get paid, and when you’re sick you should get support. These are not controversial viewpoints, not in this country. Or at least, they weren’t, last time I checked.  

And this brings me back to my original question: how did this happen, this dragging of the entire political narrative to the right? How did backing a state-subsidised “wage” of £1.60 an hour for doing a job that profits someone else become a moderate view? How did outsourcing police duties to private suppliers become the sensible centre? How did opening up the National Health Service to EU competition law and allowing 49% of hospital beds to be occupied by private patients* become the common sense option for public service reform? How on earth have the decent, hard-working people of Britain let this happen? And we have years left of this; how much more can happen before we get furious?

Why aren’t we furious? Is it me? Perhaps the political centre was never where I thought it was. Perhaps I’ve always been a “socialist,” and “socialism” actually just means not letting families become homeless because they’re poor to pay their rent. Is that what socialism is? Chris Grayling seems to think so.

But I think not. If it was, we’d have a lot more socialists, and “socialism” wouldn’t be used as a way to invalidate someone’s position. I think working for profit and being paid a wage that you spend within the economy to profit other businesses is a pretty important part of capitalism. I know a lot of socialists, and none of them think I am one.

Perhaps that’s the trouble with blind ideologues. They think everyone else is also a blind ideologue. When people polarise or simplify the arguments that oppose their policies or opinions, all they do is demonstrate how polarised and simplistic their own perception of the world is. It doesn’t matter when it’s Alexandra Swann writing in the Guardian, but it does matter when it’s the people running the country. They are supposed to be accountable to, not dismissive of, the public. 

Tony Blair calmly ignored the million protesters who marched through London in opposition to the war in Iraq but at least he never derided them as a bunch of “crusties” or “Trots.” He talked to them, listened to their arguments – with his eyebrows politely raised in that way he had mastered to make it look like he was taking something very seriously indeed – and then respectfully disagreed with them. He did not mock them for drinking at Starbucks, or for whether they sat, stood, or slept as means of protest – something David Cameron seemed to think was a valid criticism of the Occupy London protesters.

This is not unlike when, being corrected on a point of fact in the House of Commons, our PM told the MP in question to “calm down” and mocked her for, well, doing what she’s paid to do, which is hold the government to account when they get things wrong. 

It’s not just the Conservatives, of course. Career politicians in all parties are quick to mistake privilege for authority. If you’ve heard of “mansplaining”, you’ll know what I mean. (“Mansplaining” is basically just when a man assumes an automatic position of authority when talking to a woman about something she actually knows more about, usually without even realising he’s doing it, just because he’s a man and naturally sees himself as authoritative). The government seem to be guilty of, well, “affluent-splaining,” and “able-splaining,” and a whole load more besides.

So, for example, when sick or disabled people, who are regularly subjected to Atos tests which find them “fit for work” when they are plainly not, or find themselves losing access to benefits they badly need, in, you know, real life, and they tell this to government ministers, they get told it they’re wrong because isn’t happening and they’re being protected. When people say they are told by the Job Centre that workfare is mandatory, and show a letter which describes it as such, Chris Grayling irritably insists that they’re wrong because it’s definitely voluntary. When Bill Gates tells the government that we should back a “Robin Hood” tax, George Osborne explains that we can’t do this because the business world won’t wear it. That one is actually my favourite: George Osborme (a public sector worker with inherited wealth and a degree in Modern History), telling Bill Gates, about business! And, astonishingly, when an HIV-positive voter – a successful self-employed businessman called Andrew Scholfield – writes to all the Liberal Democrat MPs to express fears about the Health and Social Care Bill, Stephen Williams MP and Andrew Stunell MP (according to Unite) send him this: 

Andrew Stunell, MP for Hazel Grove, emailed Mr Schofield: “Consider just how counterproductive it is likely to be to send an unsolicited bar-room rant to a load of very busy people at the end of a long day.” And Stephen Williams, MP for Bristol West, told Mr Schofield, who lives in Salford: “You win the prize for my most nonsensical email of the day” and that he was writing “complete drivel”.

These career politicians think they can tell us what we, the public, think; what “normal people” (as Iain Duncan-Smith charmingly put it) think. They forget that we are normal people. We talk to each other. We tell each other what we think. And they seem to have forgotten that “normal people” – I give IDS the benefit of the doubt, and assume he meant most people – did not vote for the government.  

The last general election result is what really highlights the level of arrogance being displayed here: Labour catastrophically lost the last election, the Conservatives did not win it. Most of the public who didn’t vote Conservative gave their reasons as being that they “didn’t believe the Conservative party had really changed” and, more specifically, they “didn’t trust the Conservative party with the NHS.” Far from being a “prejudice” against the Conservative party, as David Cameron laughably described it in a Guardian article during the run-up to the election, these suspicions turned out to be rather well-founded. Actions speak louder than party political slogans, and the coalition’s actions have been very clear. I’m not judging them on anything but the detail of their own bills and policies. How can that be a “prejudice”?

The thing is, the Conservatives are playing a risky political game with this strategy. Every time they sneer that only socialists and “Trots” can believe in even the most moderate principles of a civilised social democracy, they are telling people like me not to bother voting for them, ever. They could not make it plainer that I am not welcome in their political discourse and they don’t want my vote. Not just mine: despite their constant insistence that conservatism is for everybody, it seems, from their policies and their attitude, that they don’t want the votes of an awful lot of people in the political centre. People with rent to pay, people with aspirations, working people who hope to send a kid to university one day or own a home; people who expect the rule of law to be enforced properly and there to be enough police around to protect them from crime. Anyone who wants to live in a sensible, civilised, meritocracy. If they don’t want our votes, that’s up to them. But they may find that, astonishingly, Iain Duncan-Smith’s grasp of what “normal people” think is even more distorted than mine is. 

*It should be noted that Shirley Williams has said that this is not what the bill will allow but almost everyone else seems to be in disagreement with her about that.

2 MINUTE RANT: Tax cuts and the work ethic

If a 50% rate of tax is enough to disincentivise work, what will low or non-existent wages do?

There seems to be an accepted consensus amongst business leaders and many senior politicians – at least, the right of centre ones – that the 50p rate of tax is harmful to economic growth. The 50p rate is serving as a disincentive for wealth creation, we are told. Top earners are creating fewer jobs, moving assets abroad, generating less wealth, and in general taking extra pains to avoid their taxes. In short, taxing incomes over £150,000 at 50% instead of 40% is enough to make people fail in their patriotic work ethic.

While this may well be true, and cutting the 50p tax rate may be a good idea for a whole myriad of reasons, not least because it is possible that it actually brings in a lot less revenue, although this is still up for debate, let’s not let the government get away with this open acknowledgement about the reality of the work ethic. If it is true that people earning, say, £160,000 a year (hard-working people by nature, surely, George Osborne would argue?) flounder in their work ethic when asked to pay an additional 10% tax on the top £10,000 of their income – because the first £149,000 is still, of course taxed at a lower rate; we are only talking about paying an extra 10% on any earnings over £150,000 – you must, surely, also believe that people on the lowest incomes in the country are going to struggle with this whole work ethic thing if they’re not actually being paid enough even to live on?

Yet the work ethic principle is, of course, applied differently to the poorest than it is to the richest. Undercutting the minimum wage with workfare schemes will make people work harder. Cutting housing benefit and time-limiting ESA will incentivise work. Letting the minimum wage tumble desperately below the basic costs of living, like housing and heating, will encourage aspiration. How can you simultaneously believe that this will work, yet also believe Stephen Hester needs a bonus written into his contract, guaranteed regardless of his bank’s share price performance, in order for him to work his hardest and perform well?

There is no real need to compete for the labour pool at the low end of the pay spectrum, especially these days, with around 3 million unemployed, so it’s obvious why we bother to make a job like running RBS attractive to a range of candidates, while stacking a shelf in Asda doesn’t need to be made to look all that attractive to potential shelf-stackers, as there are so many of them to choose from. But the point is, the difference is about economics, and who holds power, and what they can get away with in order to profit. It has nothing to do with aspiration, work ethics, personal responsibility, or morality.

But people are starting to genuinely believe that the harder you kick poor people in the teeth, the more aspirational they will somehow feel, whilst also believing that the more you reduce risks for businesses like Tesco by subsiding their employment costs, and the more you cut taxes for top earners and corporations, the harder they will work. The arguments put forward over the 50p rate of tax shows this double standard up clearly for what it is: a nonsensical attempt to intellectualise any moral justification that can be found for policies which basically amount to rewarding only the people who need help the least for being lucky enough not to need it.

We need to remember that the work ethic is not automatic. It goes both ways. You will have a work ethic if you respect your job and respect your employer, and your employer respects you. If you employer treats you abysmally, you probably won’t have much of one. Work can be good for if you’re doing something healthy and constructive, that you can take pride in. Work can help your self-esteem and mental wellbeing if you’re valued and have a regular sense of achievement, but if you’re undervalued, or overworked, or made to feel worthless, or your job is derided by society, it absolutely won’t. There are too many people criticising “job snobs” for daring to point out that cleaning a floor in Tesco is, in reality, not much fun, and as it profits Tesco, it should be paid, whilst simultaneously rewarding the people who have often never cleaned a floor in their lives with tax cuts, because they are “aspirational” – not like the floor cleaners, who deserve to be punished with a sub-standard minimum wage, if that. Too many people are criticising a flailing work ethic in British society without considering how they themselves behave towards shop staff, cleaners, waitresses and even higher paid professionals like teachers and social workers, and wondering whether the scorn they heap on these workers might be a factor in that supposed declining work ethic.

So cut the 50p tax rate, by all means. Go ahead and incentivise the wealth creators to create wealth and jobs. Just stop lecturing people on a fraction of that income about how hard they should be working in order to eat and have a place to live. Because the work ethic is not an innate moral quality that people either have or lack. And if it was, then a 50% tax rate wouldn’t be enough to demotivate people earning north of £150,000 for doing something they are good at, paid handsomely for, and have almost certainly chosen to do.

I don’t remember Tesco, Asda, or RBS being on the ballot in May 2010. But it turns out they might as well have been.

This is a little emotional, so I apologise for the less than great writing. But I am feeling pretty emotional. This is the email I have just sent to my MP Harriet Harman.

As a fairly new constituent of yours, let me begin by saying I’m proud to live in this area (which I didn’t think I would be). It has a wonderful sense of community, and some lovely local small businesses like Anderson & Co cafe, and Fenton Walsh – you should be very proud of these places. I think you’ve done a lot to regenerate the area, so before I begin the rest of my email I wanted to offer some words of strong praise; it is easy to disregard the good things Labour did in power until you live in an area like Peckham Rye, or Liverpool, where my family all comes from, and remember how it was under Thatcher and Major.

And now on to the reason for my email. After voting Lib Dem in 2010 (I used to live in Simon Hughes’s constituency and found him to be an excellent MP), I have felt increasingly betrayed by their partnership with the Tories, and failure to take responsibility for their own decisions in government, until their support for the Welfare Reform Bill and the Health and Social Care Bill (neither being part of the coalition deal, I don’t think!) became the two final straws for me, and I am resolved to, probably, vote for Ken Livingstone as London mayor. People, as I’m sure you will know, if you engage with any campaigners, are terrified following the cruel changes to the welfare system like time-limiting ESA for anyone in the WRAG group. Coupled with cuts in legal aid for welfare cases, and a sneaky privatisation of the NHS, I really didn’t think I could be any more disgusted by the coalition.

And then, having read about Tesco employing people without a salary this morning, this evening, I read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/16/disabled-unpaid-work-benefit-cuts

I want you to explain something to me, Ms Harman. I am one of these hard working taxpayers I keep hearing the government speak of with such respect. I earn just enough to pay a chunk of tax, but nowhere near enough for it not to matter to me. I am used as an excuse to cut housing benefits and turn people out of their homes. I am used as an excuse to replace DLA with PIP. I am used as an excuse to chuck rioters from their homes. I am used as an excuse to treat disabled people, mentally ill people, and sick people abysmally by subjecting them to ATOS tests, sometimes in buildings which don’t even have disability access. I am used as an excuse not to spend money on health and education. I am used as an excuse to deny “suspected” criminals their human rights.

And now? My taxes are being used to for corporate welfare!

This article from the Guardian above says that, for example, a cancer patient with more than six months to live could be forced on to such a scheme. My mum died of cancer. The idea that she would have had to spend her last months or years in this way makes me feel sick to my guts.

JSA for a week works out at about £1.50 an hour. We have a minimum wage for a reason. We should be putting this up to a living wage, not undercutting it. That is the way to get the benefits bill down; most benefits (housing for eg) for to people in work, on low incomes, to cover basic living costs. Undercutting wages will make my tax bill go up.

I am not even a “left winger” so to speak. I work in the private sector, and am fairly successful. I work hard. I believe in law and order, and personal responsibility. I pay my taxes, I pay my bills, I even (whisper it) grudgingly admire Tony Blair and at times Thatcher. I voted Lib Dem. I agree with chunks of the Orange Book. The reason I tell you this is to point out that the Labour party need to stop being terrified of looking left-of-the-government, as if that makes them ardent socialists. It doesn’t. The centre has not moved since the election, which the Tories lost because people did not believe they had “changed.” Gordon Brown was very unpopular, and Cameron could not even beat him. The Lib Dems have moved right, the Tories have moved right (or revealed their true policies which sadly surprise some), and common sense and decency is being desperately portrayed by the Tories and their allies in the press as radicalism, anti-business, and so on. But it’s not working. You have to stop being scared of looking left wing. This isn’t about left and right, or pro/anti business. It’s about using taxpayer’s money efficiently, creating jobs, and putting money into the economy instead of into the hoarding hands of corporate companies.

So what I’m saying is this. People like social democratic capitalism. They don’t want these policies.

The other day a woman came to me begging for money, help, anything, in the street, in Camberwell. She was desperate, starving and shaking. Her electricity has been turned off, her heating was stopped. She had a baby, she had a mental illness, she didn’t know where to go or how to get help. There are places, but services are being cut away for these people. People like this lady will never be profitable for a private, competitive, or “modernised” as they like to call it, health service. But some of them have already paid into the system, the system now being cut away when they need it in these difficult times.

Ed Miliband took the time to make a speech about chocolate oranges being sold in WH Smiths. People like chocolate oranges. People aren’t stupid, we’re capable of deciding how much chocolate to eat. What we can’t do is stop these policies that allow Tesco to get free Labour at my expense from becoming law. That’s what you’re there for. If Ed Miliband doesn’t stand up to this disgusting, regressive, corporate welfare that we are seeing then I honestly do not see how the Labour party can stand on any platform in the next election. What will be the point of you? Your record on civil liberties was grim and as for Iraq, I’m sure you know the public’s feelings on that. So Labour should not assume they will automatically get people’s votes, without earning them. The Greens already have one MP. You might want to consider how scared the Tories are of UKIP, who don’t have ANY MPs, and how much they pander.

You have a duty as Her Majesty’s elected opposition sitting in parliament to hold the government to account when they subvert the democratic will of their own people, and when they get it so plainly wrong on every level as this. It will crush jobs (why create a paid job if someone will do it for free?), it will undercut wages, it will inflate the benefits bill, it will keep money out of the economy so people don’t have money to spend in their local shops, we will see them collapse, and the only winner will be Tesco. I don’t remember Tesco, Asda, or RBS being on the ballot in May 2010. But it turns out they might as well have been.

I wish I could say I look forwards to hearing what action you, Mr Miliband, and the Labour party will be taking in parliament to oppose these disgusting work programs. But I don’t expect you to take any. I really hope I am proved wrong, though.