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.

Jodie Marsh was not on Newsnight, of course. She was on Channel 5. And if it’s controversial to call a Tory a feminist (which it shouldn’t be, really, seeing as how Emmeline Pankhurst joined the Conservative party in the end, but never mind), then, let’s face it, a glamour model, mainly famous for reality television shows, and sleeping with one of Jordan’s boyfriends (so I’m told), has to be pretty far down the list of people that get named as top feminists. The uncomfortable truth is, Jodie Marsh is the sort of woman that a lot of feminists like me – geeky, Newsnight-watching ones – usually talk about. We don’t watch her programs. (I don’t even know if she has other programs.) I mean, it’s not that we’re not interested. We have theories about the Jodie Marshes. Is she exploiting the patriarchy? Is the controlled by it? Just an inevitable product of it? Is she actually a feminist; a liberated sexual woman just doing what men have done for centuries? Is she a dangerous role model for young girls? Can feminists help her, or should we ignore her? We analyse Jodie Marsh. Or rather, let’s be honest, we judge her. Then switch back to Newsnight for intelligent discussion. Or at least, I usually do.

But last night, as it turns out, millions of people did watch her, all over the world. While a handful of people were tweeting bland, predictable comments about Louise Mensch and Laurie Penny, #JodieAgainstBullying was trending worldwide on Twitter. Friends of mine – also from around the world – started posting on Facebook that they were in tears. So tonight, I got home from work, and for what I think is the first time ever, went to the channel 5 website, then watched it.

And Jodie Marsh, as it turns out, is pretty interesting. She was a straight A-student at school, and wanted to be a vet. She was smart enough, hard-working enough, certainly ambitious enough. Then she went to secondary school. And was bullied. For being “ugly.” 

“I know if I hadn’t been bullied, I’d be a vet,” she says, to the camera. “And I’d be a really good vet. I let the bullies change my whole career path.”

While Newsnight is showing the now infamous clips of Louise Mensch posing in a £485 Dolce & Gabbana leather skirt (which, just to clarify, she doesn’t actually own), ‘Jodie Marsh Bullied: My Secret Past’ is showing pictures of a sweet, pretty young girl which gradually change into pictures of a young girl with her shirt tied up around her breasts, pictures of a girl posing and pouting. And we watch as the ambitions to have a successful career as a vet were slowly, painfully, turned into ambitions to be attractive. Not attractive to women, but desired by men. Because that makes us all worth something, don’t you know. 

Fed up of seeing her bright, ambitious daughter miserable and tormented – on the verge of suicide, says Marsh, in tears on the This Morning interview she did ahead of the program – Jodie Marsh’s mother bought her a nose job. 

Her mother breaks down into tears on camera at this point, and says she’s sorry “for putting you through it,” and Marsh tells us how she was then bullied for having had surgery. But Jodie cheerfully tells us, “The bullying didn’t stop. But at least I wasn’t ugly.”

And it’s not just Jodie. Zoe, another woman interviewed on the program (by Marsh herself, who it turns out, incidentally, is also a good interviewer, with a real sensitive ability to get people to speak, to know when to shut up and let them, and a genuine interest in what they’re saying to her) says she was bullied for being too clever and into her studies. Kids put hair removal crème on her hair, she says, making it fall out. They threw urine on her.

And now we come to the point, because here’s the bit of the program that made me cry: Zoe says quietly to Marsh that she “feels embarrassment” telling us what they did to her. She feels embarrassment. She does. 

This isn’t just a random channel 5 program anymore. Suddenly, this is feminism and misogyny in microcosym.  

Less than 800 people could be bothered watching Louise Mensch and Laurie Penny argue about the role of the state and the speed of the government’s cuts (important issues as they are), but all around the world, women and men were watching ‘Jodie Marsh Bullied: My Secret Life’, and learning something terrifying: that as children, girls like Zoe are taught never to be clever, and then, later in life, women are blamed and mocked for acting dumb. Women like Jodie Marsh are taught they are ugly and deserve abuse for it, and then, later in life, get taught that they deserve abuse for being too into their looks or for having plastic surgery. It goes on and on. Girls get taught to be permanently sexually available in order to be respected or loved – then, later in life, we get told we don’t deserve respect or love because we are sluts and whores.

Perhaps it’s just me, but this is the stuff that’s important. Politics should be about power, and its uses and abuses. How did it become about political activists having circle jerks over Sunny Hundal making a typo on Twitter?

That’s not to say that we should forget the discussions about Tory feminism versus left-wing feminism, or discussions about whether the state has replaced the patriarchal powers of the husband and father, because of course we shouldn’t. And this is me: I’m interested in that stuff. It’s just that I’m also already a feminist.

The paradox I suppose of feminism is this: it’s not about us, it’s about all women. Feminism is useless if it’s only interesting to the women who are on Newsnight, or watching and tweeting about it. Feminism is, ultimately, about girls like Jodie Marsh. It’s about the girl wants to be a vet but learns that she will get more respect by taking her top off. It’s about the girl who drops out of school at seventeen because she’s pregnant. It’s about the girl who thinks she doesn’t deserve love because she enjoys casual sex. It’s about the girl who thinks she doesn’t deserve good consensual sex because she’s in love. It’s about the girl who says there’s nothing wrong with giving her boyfriend sex when she’s in pain, because boys and girls think differently about sex anyway, and she’s in a relationship with him. And it’s about the boy who gets beaten up for acting gay and leaves school at seventeen because he doesn’t feel safe. Feminism is no use if it’s just about the girls and women reading the Guardian. Who’s going to listen to the girls who grow up reading the Sun?

Louise Mensch wants to bring feminism “out of the ghetto.” I wish, sometimes, that it would get out the… well, whatever the of whatever the opposite of a ghetto is. Because the best trick of everyone who wants liberals to all calm down and shut up is to pretend that liberalism is all a load of complicated, middle-class, waffling rubbish, that real, ordinary people don’t have time for. Feminism isn’t complicated. It is about treating individuals with respect. That’s it. Mensch tweeted this morning that feminism starts with Emmeline Pankhurst, but doesn’t end there. Well historically, maybe so, but in the here and now? Perhaps should start with things like not calling the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition Mr Potatohead for a cheap laugh, from a position of privilege, in a national newspaper.

NB – since writing this, Louise Mensch has tweeted at me that she didn’t intend to call Ed Miliband Mr Potato Head. Lots of people did interpret that to be her meaning but I take her word for it! Sorry Louise

Jodie Marsh was not on Newsnight, of course. She was on Channel 5. And if it’s controversial to call a Tory a feminist (which it shouldn’t be, really, seeing as how Emmeline Pankhurst joined the Conservative party in the end, but never mind), then, let’s face it, a glamour model, mainly famous for reality television shows, and sleeping with one of Jordan’s boyfriends (so I’m told), has to be pretty far down the list of people that get named as top feminists. The uncomfortable truth is, Jodie Marsh is the sort of woman that a lot of feminists like me – geeky, Newsnight-watching ones – usually talk about. We don’t watch her programs. (I don’t even know if she has other programs.) I mean, it’s not that we’re not interested. We have theories about the Jodie Marshes of the world. Is she exploiting the patriarchy? Is the controlled by it? Just an inevitable product of it? Is she actually a feminist; a liberated sexual woman just doing what men have done for centuries? Is she a dangerous role model for young girls? Can feminists help her, or should we ignore her? We analyse Jodie Marsh. Or rather, let’s be honest, we judge her. Then switch back to Newsnight for intelligent discussion. Or at least, I usually do.

But last night, as it turns out, millions of people did watch her, all over the world. While a handful of people were tweeting bland, predictable comments about Louise Mensch and Laurie Penny, #JodieAgainstBullying was trending worldwide on Twitter. Friends of mine – also from around the world – started posting on Facebook that they were in tears. So tonight, I got home from work, and for what I think is the first time ever, went to the channel 5 website, then watched it.

And Jodie Marsh, as it turns out, is pretty amazing. She was a straight A-student at school, and wanted to be a vet. She was smart enough, hard-working enough, certainly ambitious enough. Then she went to secondary school. And was bullied. For being “ugly.” 

“I know if I hadn’t been bullied, I’d be a vet,” she says, to the camera. “And I’d be a really good vet. I let the bullies change my whole career path.”

While Newsnight is showing the now infamous clips of Louise Mensch posing in a £485 Dolce & Gabbana leather skirt (which, just to clarify, she doesn’t actually own), ‘Jodie Marsh Bullied: My Secret Past’ is showing pictures of a sweet, pretty young girl which gradually change into pictures of a young girl with her shirt tied up around her breasts, pictures of a girl posing and pouting. And we watch as the ambitions to have a successful career as a vet were slowly, painfully, turned into ambitions to be attractive. Not attractive to women, but desired by men. Because that’s what makes us all worth something, don’t you know. 

Fed up of seeing her bright, ambitious daughter miserable and tormented – on the verge of suicide, according to Marsh herself, in tears on the This Morning interview she did ahead of the program – Jodie Marsh’s mother bought her a nose job. 

Her mother breaks down into tears on camera at this point, and says she’s sorry “for putting you through it,” and Marsh tells us how she was then bullied for having had surgery. But Jodie cheerfully tells us, “The bullying didn’t stop. But at least I wasn’t ugly.”

And it’s not just Jodie. Zoe, another woman interviewed on the program (by Marsh herself, who it turns out, incidentally, is also a good interviewer, with a real sensitive ability to get people to speak, to know when to shut up and listen, and a genuine interest in what they’re saying to her) says she was bullied for being too clever and into her studies. Kids put hair removal crème on her hair, she says, making it fall out. They threw urine on her.

And now we come to the point, because here’s the bit of the program that made me cry: Zoe says quietly to Marsh that she “feels embarrassment” telling us what they did to her. She feels embarrassment. She does. 

This isn’t just a random channel 5 program anymore. Suddenly, this is feminism and misogyny in microcosym.  

Less than 800 people could be bothered watching Louise Mensch and Laurie Penny argue about the role of the state and the speed of the government’s cuts (important issues though they are), but all around the world, women and men were watching ‘Jodie Marsh Bullied: My Secret Life’, and learning something terrifying: that as children, girls like Zoe are taught never to be clever, and then, later in life, women are blamed and mocked for acting dumb. Women like Jodie Marsh are taught they are ugly and deserve abuse for it, and then, later in life, get taught that they deserve abuse for being too into their looks or for having plastic surgery. It goes on and on. Girls get taught to be permanently sexually available in order to be respected or loved – then, later in life, we get told we don’t deserve respect or love because we are sluts and whores.

Perhaps it’s just me, but this is the stuff that’s actually important. Politics should be about power, and its uses and abuses. How did it become about political activists having circle jerks over Sunny Hundal making a typo on Twitter?

That’s not to say that we should forget the discussions about Tory feminism versus left-wing feminism, or discussions about whether the state has replaced the patriarchal powers of the husband and father, because of course we shouldn’t. And after all, this is me. I’m interested in that stuff. It’s just that I’m also already a feminist.

The paradox of feminism is that it’s not just about feminists: it’s not about us, it’s about all women. Feminism is useless if it’s only interesting to the women who are on Newsnight, or watching and tweeting about it. It’s useless if it’s only about people who know they deserve to be treated with respect, and to feel safe. Feminism is, ultimately, about girls like Jodie Marsh. It’s about the girl wants to be a vet but learns that she will get more respect by taking her top off. It’s about the girl who drops out of school at seventeen because she’s pregnant. It’s about the girl who thinks she doesn’t deserve love because she enjoys casual sex. It’s about the girl who thinks she doesn’t deserve good consensual sex because she’s in love. It’s about the girl who says there’s nothing wrong with giving her boyfriend sex when she’s in pain, because boys and girls think differently about sex anyway, and she’s in a relationship with him, and that’s what girlfriends do. It’s about the boy who gets beaten up for acting gay and leaves school at seventeen because he doesn’t feel safe there. Feminism is no use if it’s just about the girls and women reading the Guardian. Who’s going to listen to the girls who grow up reading the Sun?

Louise Mensch wants to bring feminism “out of the ghetto.” I wish, sometimes, that it would get out the… well, whatever the of whatever the opposite of a ghetto is. Because the best trick of everyone who wants liberals to all calm down and shut up is to pretend that liberalism is all a load of complicated, middle-class, waffling rubbish, that real, ordinary people don’t have time for. Feminism isn’t complicated. It is about treating individuals with respect. That’s it. Mensch tweeted this morning that feminism starts with Emmeline Pankhurst, but doesn’t end there. Well historically, maybe so, but in the here and now? Perhaps should start with things like not calling the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition Mr Potatohead for a cheap laugh, from a position of privilege, in a national newspaper.

In the same way as we so often confuse liberty with greed these days, so we have also somehow come to confuse “aspiration” with looking down on others. Worse, we have come to confuse “aspiration” with simply keeping others down.

Tell me if any of these arguments sound familiar. Public sector workers should not defend their pensions – even the lowest paid, and the part-time public sector workers – because in the private sector there are many people who have no pension at all. Civil liberties are a luxury because in Saudi Arabia they behead people. Electoral reform is a waste of money because in North Korea they execute people for speaking out against the government. Child poverty shooting up isn’t worth much attention because in Sierra Leone children are made to fight wars. Tuition fees aren’t outrageous because some people don’t even get a chance to go to university. Benefit claimants suffering from changes to their benefits should shut up and be grateful because once upon a time we used to let people starve in the streets in the first place.

Yet time and time again, these arguments come from people who consider themselves to be proudly on the side of “aspiration.” Well, aspiration surely involves looking up, not looking down?

Real aspiration is important. It just goes far beyond economics. One of the saddest and most dangerous examples of a race to the bottom masquerading as “aspiration” comes in the form of our actual quality of life itself.

How many times have you heard someone say “But we all get depressed! I get depressed, I just carry on?”

Now, often this will, of course, just be someone lucky enough to believe “getting depressed” just means “having a rubbish day.”

But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it is an expression of something deeper. An expression of the same resentment that prompts people to say “But I don’t have a pension!” or “But I would be sacked if I went on strike!” or “But I struggle to pay my heating bills on my salary, and I work! Why do people who can’t work get so much help?” or “Well I have people discriminating against me and being nasty to me all the time, why do black people get special treatment?”

In other words, the words of someone so powerless in the face of injustice they face and cannot tackle, they look down, instead of looking up, because it is less painful, and misdirect their hurt towards people who speak up instead of people really to blame for their position.

In other words, the very opposite of aspiration.

A few years ago, a particular friend of mine, who I’m not going to name, attempted suicide. He was, it only occurs to me now, one of the first to shout angrily that he “gets depressed too but just gets on with it!” with a degree of venom towards people getting any measure of support, whether professional or friendly, for their depression, that always seemed disproportionately bitter.

Perhaps if someone had said “Well, why don’t you?” and explained that he was perfectly entitled to get help for his depression, he mightn’t have come to his crisis point in such a painful way.

The point is this: the race to the bottom is not just economic: it is cultural. It isn’t just about leveling down pensions and wages: it is about allowing ourselves to be emotionally, intellectually, and morally less than we are capable of. It is about thinking we do not deserve happiness. It is extremely dangerous.

And, let’s all be absolutely bloody clear, it is the stark staring opposite of “aspiration.”

It’s hard to know where to start, but let’s begin with the simple matter of consistency. If we’re going to lecture bullied kids on their behaviour, perhaps we could at least decide what we’re going to tell them to change about themselves, then stick to it? It’s extremely confusing for young people to see Kidscape running “courses” for bullied victims with well-meaning tips on how to increase their confidence, stick up for themselves, and not internalise the messages given them by the bullies, whilst teachers are telling them they should internalise the messages they hear, listen to the bullies, be aware of what people think of them, be more like everybody else, and essentially allow the people who act the nastiest to dictate what terms of behaviour are and aren’t acceptable. So let’s get that straight among ourselves as adults first, shall we: are we telling bullied kids it’s their fault because they’re too sensitive, or because they’re not sensitive enough?

Assuming we decide how best to try and change bullied children, it’s still a bit of an odd solution. If changing people was easy, we’d surely be trying to change the actual bullies? But we’re not, so presumably, we accept that we can’t reasonably expect to change those people. There will always be bullies, and it’s part of life. Right? So what the hell are we doing trying to change the behaviour of ordinary kids who are simply going about their day, minding their own business? Kids don’t just learn by what you teach, they learn by example. If you single out the easiest people to scapegoat, instead of the people actually at fault, you’re setting them a pretty clear example. And it’s not an anti-bullying one.

Anyway, aside from whether you can or should change a child, it would be nice to see some evidence that it will actually do some good. Does it make the bully learn that their behaviour is destructive, for example? Or do they just go off to pick on somebody else? Does it not sometimes makes things worse? Won’t the bullies see they are getting a reaction and carry on? It’s a rather exhilarating demonstration of your power over someone, if that’s what floats your boat, watching them change their behaviour entirely to suit you. It’s not clear why this would stop a bully.

And most importantly of all, even if it does stop the bullying, it still doesn’t do much to mitigate any psychological damage the victim is suffering. Everyone who has experienced it knows bullying isn’t just punching and kicking; hurled rocks and laughter; being tripped over and spat on. It feels like a lesson in your place in the world; a lesson in your worth as a person; and, most heartbreakingly, a lesson in what kind of treatment, behaviour, and loyalty you can expect from others in life. What a bullied child needs to hear to protect themselves from the damage happening on their insides is that the bullying isn’t a measure of their worth as a person, and – crucially – they need to hear, feel, and believe that the rest of the world is not necessarily going to be like this. If you feel that who you are provokes hate in people the issue isn’t the literal manifestations of that hate, but the psychological guilt, shame, and fear that who you are could provoke hate in people at any time, throughout the rest of your life – in work, in relationships, with your family, in any children you might want to have, and so on.

But none of this is the main problem with this kind of advice, either. When you tell a child they should change for the bullies, have a good serious think about what it is, in practice, that you’re actually asking that child to do. Do you really think school policy should be to encourage whatever is dictated by the school’s least socially cooperative pupils?

What advice would be given to Holly Stuckey, who, at 12, killed herself after being labelled a “lesbian” by her classmates, because she wasn’t as outspoken and confident about sex as they were? How many of us would encourage 12 year olds to be more mouthy about sex, to pretend they have more experience than they do? Yet “acting gay” to her bullies meant behaving in a way that most adults would probably consider normal, positive, and – if anything – praiseworthy. Kids get bullied for not taking drugs, for studying hard, and for standing up for other bullied kids. I’ve seen kids get bullied for being Christians, for spending time with their grandparents, for being affectionate to their parents. I’ve seen kids get bullied for having intellectual hobbies, and for doing volunteer work. Most of us would admire these things – and most of us would definitely admire, respect, and love these children. Bullies make their victims feel like nobody will ever admire, respect, or love them ever again. The bullies are in the minority. You know why? Because they are the ones with the problem. And changing the behaviour of the people’s they choose to victimise will not address that problem, not even a little bit.

It’s easy for parents and teachers to slip into victim-blaming mode without realising it; to fall for the lie that, somehow, the majority can’t be wrong, even when the question of who is in the majority and who is in the minority is completely contextual. It’s easy to forget that it is actually quite hard to stop thirty people doing anything when there’s only one of you, no matter whether you’re shy, confident, articulate, tough, emotional, friendly, bright, stupid, brave or, well, basically whoever you are. (Although you’d think teachers, of all people, would be sympathetic. Presumably if they didn’t realise how hard this is, they’d be able to control the bullies themselves in the first place.)

The advice handed out by these teachers in Essex is likely to be dismissed as rogue and unrepresentative. Most people don’t feel this way, we will be told. Or, we will be reminded that schools always declare a ‘zero tolerance’ policy on bullying. Because everyone agrees that bullying is wrong, and everyone states with dull eyes and a sad face that it is never the victim’s fault, and every adult you speak to is horrified by the stories you tell them about what happened to you, yet strangely, almost every kid you happened to know at the time was not. Meanwhile, 70% of children have been bullied, and on average at least 16 children a year kill themselves over it.

And the reason organisations like BullyingUK responded so quickly and passionately to the news report is that people experience this victim-blaming mentality all the time. There’s nothing even surprising about it; it is often the way the world is run. And that’s why people kill themselves.

For all my pontificating on this blog about everything from Europe to welfare to human rights to religion, there isn’t much I even claim to speak about with any real authority. But I do know about this. Bullied children don’t usually commit suicide because it’s upsetting when someone makes fun of their hairstyle five days a week. It’s because of the bigger picture. Because it often looks like the world celebrates and rewards bullies, while it blames, mocks, and patronises victims. Because it looks like there are more of them than there are of us, and always will be. And because it looks like no-one is really on our side against them. When you tell a fourteen year old that the best way to stop themselves being bullied is to change things about themselves that they feel they couldn’t change even if they wanted to; things that form a fundamental part of who they are, you should be aware that you’re potentially telling a suicidal person that their reasons for wanting to kill themselves are valid, correct, and shared, officially, by the world.

And then there’s the question of the message we’re sending to the bullies. These children are often victims of bullying or abuse of some sort themselves, after all, and by teaching them (by implication) that abuse, assault, or harassment is pretty much a natural response to finding another person disturbing, threatening, weird, or annoying, you’re hurting these children as well. In fact, you’re hurting them twice over; firstly, by making it easier for them to avoid actually getting help for their own problems – which may be a lot more serious than being a bully, by the way, as it’s usually a symptom of something – and then, secondly, by making them feel even more to blame for their own victimisation, however serious or trivial, in whichever area or areas of their life it may be occurring. When a bully feels worse about themselves, they – being a bully – tend to pass that negativity on to others, and even aside from that, it will very likely be pretty distressing for them, too.

So we all need to ask not just the teachers giving out this advice, but anyone expressing their support or sympathy for it: is this really how we want to raise our children? Perhaps you think this advice is nothing more than an honest reflection of the way it is “in the real world” (as people are fond of saying these days). Well yes. If you think that, you’re right. It is a reflection of the way things are in the world. And that doesn’t trouble you?

It doesn’t alarm you that a victim-blaming tyranny of the majority, which far transcends classroom politics, leaves us all with a rather ugly world to live in? Doesn’t it sadden you that we teach children to make themselves into less than they are, because it’s too difficult for us to protect them?

We have more than enough people in the world already who side with the bullies. Anyone with any sense of perspective, compassion, and responsibility should surely want to help the next generation of young people to understand that the world really, really doesn’t have to be like this. Because if we don’t, we will, in the end, get the world we deserve.

You know the issue: the one that the politicians care about, but voters, especially apolitical, undecided voters, would, well, let’s just say they would probably very rarely chat about these issues in the pub over a pint.

The polling can be misleading on these kinds of issues, too. When asked outright, especially in a push poll, a lot of people say yes, they think that we should pull out of – or at least seriously re-negotiate our membership of – the European Union. But if you ask people whether they want their prime minster to cut his own sandwiches at lunch time they’d probably say yes, too.

When asked outright what we’re worried about, angry about, or what we want politicians to get more worried and angry about, very, very few Brits raise EU membership as a priority unless they are prompted.

In fact, independent polling company Mass1* named the UK’s top concerns thus:

1.Money worries
2 Cuts to council services and NHS services
3. Rising cost of living
4. Stress
5. Education
6. Housing
7 Job security
8. Coalition government
9. Defence
10. Immigration

Yet just as the Liberal Democrats reserve their moments of defiance against David Cameron for issues like electoral reform and the Human Rights Act, so the Conservatives reserve their moments of rebellion against him for a parliamentary debate about holding an EU membership referendum. Neither issue makes the list above, nor do they come up on many other such polls, although you could, of course, argue that immigration is intrinsically linked to EU membership. Yet politicians take a tougher stance than they do over the NHS, tax avoidance, job cuts, defence spending, or taxation.

But all this aside, the question remains: should we have a referendum on the EU? Well, if only so as not to make our democracy look rather silly, and to avoid the crowing of the likes of Nigel Farage and John Redwood, the party leaders should allow a free vote on whether to have a referendum or not. And is there really such a risk that such a vote would be won by the pro-referendum lobby, even if not whipped? Perhaps Conservative MPs are quietly relieved at being able to blame a three-line-whip for voting with their experience and understanding rather than voting as their constituents might wish them to.

Annoyingly, this risky debacle probably could have been averted had the promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty been kept by Labour in 2007. In fact, the British electorate have always been told that whenever there is a significant devolution of further powers to Brussels, we will be given a referendum. So first things first: did the Lisbon Treaty actually devolve further powers to Brussels?

Well, the creation of a High Representative for the Union of Foreign Affairs certainly looked like a further devolution of power. So did the policy of making the Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding. Not to mention the Labour party’s manifesto promise for a referendum, and the Conservative party’s manifesto promise to do the same. The Lib Dems, at the time, called for a referendum on the UK’s EU membership itself instead; it’s unclear whether they’ve all changed their minds about that now or not.

You don’t have to be much of a hardened cynic to suspect that the Lib Dem call for a referendum on full membership was because they felt this debate was winnable. Yet how times have changed; everyone is looking incredibly nervous about a referendum, which they surely wouldn’t do if they believed it was a sure win. In fact, Tory MP Louise Mensch admitted in a tweet she didn’t back a referendum because “I don’t believe in unwinnable referendums. I’m not a Lib Dem.” This hilarious tweet might remind us of David Cameron’s famous warning that “too many tweets may make a twat”: the kind of forty character smack down that sounds like a clever one liner until you read it back ten minutes later and you realise what you’ve actually just said: you don’t want to give the public a vote on something they might change if you don’t agree with them – unlike those pesky Lib Dems with their democracy and whatnot.

So we all the know the anti-EU sentiment, whilst not a electoral game-changing issue, is getting stronger, and this trend won’t reverse itself without action from Westminster. Unless people’s criticisms of the European Union are properly listened to and, where appropriate, responded to, the reluctance to let the British electorate express their views about who actually governs them will play right into the UKIP narrative. The Tories can’t afford for that to happen, electorally, any more than they can afford to risk being the party that yanked Britain out of the European Union.

In other words, the pro-European voices need to get their boxers on the right way around and suit up because the debate is too important to leave it up to people with their own negative, sometimes potentially dangerous, anti-EU agenda.

There is an honest discussion to be had about Europe, and we – by which I mean keen Europeans, who believe that whether perfect or not, being part of the union is in Britain’s best interests – should start by not calling every single person pointing out the flaws in the EU’s sometimes laughably corrupt and undemocratic institutions xenophobic little Englanders, or even Eurosceptics. You don’t have to be a Eurosceptic (in its commonly understood sense) to notice the elephant-sized problems with the EU. Lots of bright, informed, sensible people are extremely suspicious of an organisation that makes so many of our laws yet is near enough impossible for us to exercise any real influence over. That’s not Eurosceptism, a hatred of brie, a fear of siestas, or a nostalgic harking back to the days of the Empire. It’s just a passionate regard for representative democracy.

Tim Montgomerie has posted up a (by no means extensive) list of key concerns about the EU on ConservativeHome. The issues Montgomerie lists affect all sorts of people from low income workers, to small and big business owners, to farmers. But the fact is, none of these issues would matter quite so much if not for the enormous democratic cavern between Brussels and each citizen of each member state. It’s number eight on the list (lack of democratic accountability for decisions made in Brussels), but it might as well occupy every other spot as well.

It’s this feeling of powerlessness; of smallness, that makes people resent the EU so much. After all, many, if not all, of the other things on Montgomerie’s list apply to Westminster and local councils too, but because voters feel we can hold these people to account they become tolerated grievances, not real sore points of anger.

The yawning democratic deficit is there for a number reasons, but one reason is that well over half the eligible population don’t bother to vote at all in the first place in European parliament elections. And even when you do vote, it seems undeniably pointless in such a big constituency. You elect an MEP who is going to represent you and hundreds of others, in a parliament with over 730 other MEPs from other countries, and it must be a simple fact that the sheer size of the parliament will immediately drown out your own MEP’s voice, let alone yours. And that’s just the EU parliament; the Council of Ministers feels even less democratic, the European Commission, all but entirely so.

So the pro-Europeans need to get serious about not just the UK’s relationship with the EU; not even necessarily the repatriation of more powers back to the UK, but just about some basic reforms, together with our other European allies, of the EU’s democratic institutions.

This is a wonderful opportunity for the Liberal Democrats. Whether they have scrappy enough fists for it remains to be seen. Many critics of the EU believe one reason the union will never be scrapped is because ministers here in London love being able to blame a higher, foreign, hated power for unpopular decisions, and to declare occasional empty victories for stopping things that were never going to happen in the first place. Brussels also doubles up to function as a safe place to dump MPs if they’re disgraced or sacked but you don’t want them either on the back benches or on Andrew Marr’s breakfast show every weekend. But if the Lib Dems are genuinely committed to the European Union because it’s good for our country, they should start work now to stop making the union such an easy target for attack. Ideally before Monday’s vote.

Because the fact is, all things considered, Britain is almost certainly better off in the EU than out of it. For a start, we’ve had peace in Europe for well over half a century now. How much that can be attributed to nuclear weapons and how much it can be attributed to the successful diplomacy of the EU is probably the kind of intellectual tug of war between the pro-European left and the Eurosceptic right which can be, and probably will be, argued about indefinitely. It’s probably at the very least a little of both. Either way, the role the EU has played in maintaining that peace should not be casually disregarded, especially not by a generation of politicians and voters who haven’t lived and fought through world wars on their doorstep, or on their soil.

And even if we decide we do want to pull out of the EU, we aren’t ready to do it any time soon, anyway. We don’t have strong enough trade relationships with non-EU nations, for example, and we would need to bolster these considerably before giving up the special arrangements with have in the European Union. Even downgrading to a business and economic only partnership with Europe could considerably impact upon our trade and with growth still flat-lining hopelessly, we can’t afford to take that kind of a risk with people’s jobs.

Perhaps most importantly of all, none of this would extrapolate us from the Human Rights Act or the ECHR anyway, and as the bad press both of these get is almost certainly the basis for much of the anti-EU sentiment expressed in Britain, it’s difficult to see how pulling out of the EU would actually address the electorate’s main concern with Europe anyway, which is, according to the polls, immigration.

So should we have not just a free vote on the referendum, but also have a referendum on the EU? Perhaps, democratically speaking, we are owed one. It’s an enormous risk to take, but if the British public do choose to vote us out of the union, the politicians in Westminster have themselves to blame: they have done us all a disservice, pro-Europe and anti-Europe alike, by never giving us a referendum over the Lisbon Treaty after promising one; by dragging their heels so much on reforming the union’s institutions you’d think they had shackles around their ankles; and by ultimately leaving the debate in the hands of the likes of UKIP, John Redwood, and Roger Helmer, who are irreversibly convinced we should leave, no matter what evidence, argument or research shows the union to be in the nation’s best interests.

So now here it is: we’re at a crunch, the Eurozone has imploded, people are fed up and we’re facing a debate on an in-or-out referendum. The Conservative party could risk flooding the UKIP membership office overnight by whipping Tory MPs on an issue which for many of them is the reason they went into politics and why they joined the party they did (not to mention being an issue they know their constituents may have seen as a vote decider; if fiercely anti-EU Tories are forced to vote against this referendum, it could be, democratically speaking, a tuition fees pledge moment for the Conservative party).

Or they could allow a free vote, and trust the very political system they expect us to trust every day with our jobs, our economy, our lives. With only a minority of the seats held by the Tories, with most Labour MPs and all the Lib Dems extremely likely to vote in favour, and with the vote not legally binding anyway, we surely won’t see a referendum on EU membership any time soon, no matter what happens on Monday? The least they could do is make a pretence at asking us what we want.

If not for our faith in the European brand of democracy, then for our faith in our own. Because when our own government has no faith very same democratic system that puts them into power to deliver the answers we know to be best for the nation, you really, really have to wonder why on earth they so continually expect us to trust it – or them – at all.

*Conducted for UnitetheUnion

So say the anti-protester protests, all assembled on Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, the news, and sometimes even the protest itself (yes, some of them actually claim to have gone all the way down there, especially) to whine about people they think are whining; to waste energy on people who they think are wasting their energy; to blog, tweet, gossip, complain and scribble with an impressive amount of stamina about people who they feel have too much time on their hands, and in general protest against the protesters.

I suspect there’s a bit of a mish-mash of different ideas, different grievances, different hopes, and different suggested solutions at Occupy London Stock Exchange today. Is it an anti-capitalist protest? Yes, in so far as the protest is quite clearly intended to highlight the gaping flaws in the way we currently practice capitalism, of course it is. That doesn’t make anyone who thinks they have a point into a communist. Maybe if we could critique and amend and improve capitalism like grown ups without being burnt as a communist witch or laughed at as a naive mad lefty, perhaps we’d have cracked on to a few of the problems a little bit sooner, the whole system wouldn’t have exploded in such a ridiculously predictable way, and capitalism wouldn’t be looking quite so foolish as it does to its enemies right now.

Just to repeat: I’m not at the protest myself. There are plenty of sensible criticisms of the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest. But what bothers me a lot more than a protest which may or may not be misguided is something all too common: the snide, derisive, superior attitudes from people who don’t want to try and make the world a little bit fairer, directed towards anyone who does. It’s not just this protest; there’s a strange derision, a fear of vulnerability or ‘softness,’ perhaps, which burbles out like farts when these people are confronted with any sort of compassion or decency.

Brendan O Neill, for instance, finds it ridiculous and worthy of derision that people could get so upset about the phone-hacking scandal (obviously a prejudice against Rupert Murdoch, not a belief in upholding the rule of law or compassion for the Dowler family), and the execution of Troy Davis (obviously hypocrites who only cared because he was black, not about his potential innocence or even the death penalty itself). How sad does your view of the world have to be before you interpret concern for a dead child’s family or a potentially innocent man facing execution as worthy of mockery?

It’s not about where someone sits on the political spectrum, or about difference of opinion. You can want the world to be as free and unequal as you like, you can believe inequality is unavoidable and there’s no point addressing it, you can believe inequality is necessary to preserve freedom, you can believe every single rich person in the world is clever and hard-working, and every single poor person in the world is a failure, you can believe corporations are above the law, you can believe anything you like. What makes you hypocritical, unpleasant, and rather moronic is when you actually think you are better than people who don’t believe those things.

Every time someone infantilises the left by saying they need to “grow up” or “live in the real world” I want to scream and throw a shoe at them, before pointing out that I shared a lot more of their conservative views when I was younger, and then I actually did “grow up.” It was only when I experienced the “real world” that I learnt not every single person who gets rich is someone who works hard or has talent, just as not every single person who works hard and has talent automatically gets rich. Especially not these days, what with obscene educational costs, staggering unemployment, and the rest, with bells on. These days, you’re lucky if hard work and talent keeps your head above water, frankly.

It might surprise some of the armchair anti-protest protesters, but actually, rather a lot of hard-working taxpayers they think they speak for are sick to the roots of our teeth of being told we aren’t considered “hard-working” or successful enough, or even at all, because we’re not in the top 1% of the national income. I mean, unless we change the laws of mathematics, by definition, the majority of us will never be in the top 1%. The majority of us will never meet Dave Harnett and arrange our tax affairs in person; the majority of us will get visits from bailiffs or go to prison if we decide we don’t feel like paying our taxes. The majority of us don’t get bailed out if we fail in our jobs, we have to pick the pieces up and start again. The majority of us understand that sometimes you fail in the market, whether you deserve it or not, because that’s how the market works. That is the real world. That is what “growing up” leads most of us to recognise.

And guess what? Some of the people who are protesting, some of the people who are the angriest about the world being run in the interests of a tiny minority instead of the majority, some of those people want more of what the right say they want: less regulation, less government handouts, less subsiding failure, stronger law enforcement. That’s why Occupy Wall Street in America got support not just from the political left, but from Tea Party Republican Ron Paul and a lot of his Tea Party supporters, many of whom joined the protest.

This surprised some people but it shouldn’t: if you’re pro-meritocracy, pro-market, anti-subsidy, pro-work ethic, pro-liberty, pro-individualism, pro-wealth creation, pro-job creation, pro-business, and anti-state, you should not, logically, think it’s okay for the rest of the world to be economically manhandled by 1% of its population, regardless of whether that 1% fails, succeeds, abides by the law or demands special privileges. If you think capitalism isn’t synonymous with corruption and immorality, then for goodness sake, the assumption that anyone who criticises corruption and immorality wants to scrap capitalism must surely be even more maddening to you than it is to a socialist?

I’m used to arguing with left-wingers about what it means to be right-wing. What constantly eludes me is how many right-wingers argue that being right-wing means being stupider and nastier than it actually does, by yelping “lefty! lefty!” at the smallest reference to the rather gapingly obvious problems in modern society.

There are lots of people at Occupy London Stock Exchange today with whom I disagree enormously.

But I can’t mock these people. I don’t think they’re stupid, or lazy, or naive, or jealous, or even wrong. They’re right to be furious to see Goldman Sachs and Vodafone getting special tax privileges from the treasury. Even Conservative MP Jesse Norman is calling for Dave Harnett’s resignation over the Goldman Sachs deal. They’re right to find it obscene that millionaires can howl about corporation tax only being cut by 2% when ordinary hard-working taxpayers are expected to put up with “obesity” tax hikes, removal of tax credits which amount to a 41% tax increase, and VAT rates of 20%. They’re right to be annoyed that we reward failure instead of success in the form of bank bailouts. They’re right to be annoyed when laws aren’t being upheld, in the form of the phone-hacking scandal. They’re right to be annoyed at the patronising lie that this is all in their best interests, and that the interests of the 1% always, always, always match up with the interests of the other 99%.

So disagree with the protesters or not, but cut out the sanctimonious whining. The anti-protest protesters, who are more bothered about a protest they don’t agree with than they are about actual wrongdoing, are the ones with the rose-tinted goggles, the ones who aren’t basing their views in reality, the ones who need to grow up.

Or at least, if they can’t control their manners, perhaps they could just shut up while the grown-ups are talking?

Everyone picked out their favourite – or least favourite – bits from their advanced text and before most of us had even had our first morning coffee the Daily Mail and the Sun were announcing he would declare war on capitalism, the Daily Telegraph was having a nice big panicked special cuddle with themselves about potential new levies for businesses, and the Daily Mirror was insisting that his speech marked the end of the “pig” society, complete with not only a picture of David Cameron wearing a fake pig snout, but – even more ridiculous – a picture of Ed Miliband with his jaw in the air looking tough.

Miliband was never going to give all those people what they wanted to hear. He wasn’t going to declare war on capitalism – although if ‘capitalism’ really is intrinsically inseparable from ‘asset stripping’ and ‘tax avoiding’ then perhaps he should. But of course it isn’t. Unless you actually are a socialist, of course, which the Daily Mail, unless they’ve had some kind of amusing divine conversion, isn’t.

The business loudmouths – not the real business community of Britain, but those who treat the market as a religion and any criticism of any profiteer as some kind of horrible blasphemy – are, quite frankly, embarrassing themselves by denouncing Ed Miliband as “anti-business” and having a tantrum about it. The “business” world – the loudmouth bit of it, that is – has been having its nappies changed by the rest of us for far too long.

The silliest thing is that corporations and businesses really are people, this isn’t some daft pro-capitalism propaganda truism, but they just cannot handle being treated like people. The fact is that the government makes distinctions between people every time they announce a policy, with no qualms whatsoever.

When the Conservatives speak of “good immigration” and “bad immigration,” or Muslims who live by “our” values, and Muslims who don’t, or “genuinely disabled” benefit claimants, and people who fake illness, or when they support tax breaks for married people, or support tax credits for people who “save and do the right thing,” or support tax breaks for people who make charitable donations in their wills, or say that housing benefit should be allocated depending on whether you’re in work or taken away if you join in with the riots, or any number of other policies (some of which, by the way, are also perfectly sensible ideas), do they mean this as an attack on everybody? Perhaps we should assume from their reaction to Miliband’s speech that they do.

It’s hardly left-wing to advocate incentives for successful businesses and better lending for SMEs. That isn’t “playing to a union gallery”, as Sir Digby Jones put it: far from it.

His notion of incentivising – incentivising! Not regulating! Incentivising! – good business practice with tax cuts is actually extraordinarily pro-business; much more so than the 20% VAT, plastic bag regulations, and stalling zero growth that the Tories are offering, in the same way that Working Family Tax Credits, Child Care Tax Credits, and even (whisper it) a raise in the minimum wage are pro-work ethic, much more so than just hacking people’s benefits away. A wide-open goal for Labour is surely that the coalition swears they want to “make work pay” and lower the tax burden whilst scrapping all these tax credits which essentially amounts to a 41% tax hike for Britain’s lowest paid workers.

My complaint with Ed Miliband’s speech, then, isn’t that it’s anti-business, or even that it’s left or right or Labour or Tory or Red or Blue or Purple or any other academic irrelevant labels we’ve all managed to come up with to box everybody’s ideas into lines so we can easily know what we think about them and what that says about us.

My complaint with his speech is that he’s selling himself short. Why adopt a damaging Conservative policy – letting people in full time work leap frog the housing benefit queue for example (finding secure housing is the first step on the road to employment for so many people: prioritising people in employment is a bit like letting people who managed to treat part of their illness themselves with over the counter medication jump the NHS waiting list) – when what you actually believe in is 100% balanced, sensible, ethical and correct?

There’s plenty wrong with Miliband’s speech, not least the total and utter lack of actual policy substance, his Thunderbird-puppet style delivery, and his alienating habit of speaking like an academic theoretician rather than a human being who gives a damn about other human beings. Andy Burnham’s education speech may have also been thicker on rhetoric than detailed ideas but at least his eyes lit up and his voice changed pitch occasionally.

There’s a great episode of the West Wing where Jed Bartlet wins a debate because at the eleventh hour his communications team realise that because the public are so irreversibly convinced Bartlet is arrogant, he can be. There are not many parallels between Ed Miliband and Josiah Bartlet but he needs to face facts: the public are irreversibly convinced that he is a red-rose-carrying trade-unionist-loving pro-tax left-winger. Every time he takes a shot at the unions or the unemployed, he loses on every front. Even people that support this kind of blueish stance won’t respect a “leader” who simply repeats what his advisors tell him. And you can bet your boots that the actual left, even a lot of cautiously-Labour centrist voters, will cringe at his random mentions of things like “irresponsible strikes” – an empty phrase, surely, if ever there was one – and constant refusals to address the gaping, horrific holes in the Welfare Reform Bill, or the complete unreliability of Atos’ Work Capability Assessments.

It’s not even a matter of policy so much as it’s a matter of leadership. If he just does whatever his speechwriters – who clearly don’t have a bloody clue, frankly – tell him at this stage, what on earth kind of Prime Minister would he be?

He is being denounced as a red-blooded hardline socialist for suggesting that businesses and corporations are people, and he is being denounced as a closet Tory for suggesting that low paid working people feel that they’re not rewarded properly for their efforts. He is being denounced as “weird” and then denounced for caring if people think he’s weird and not caring if people think he’s weird in equal measure. This whole discussion demonstrates the deepest flaws of British politics.

He should be denounced for talking like someone who has eaten an A-level politics textbook and is choking it up awkwardly in place of a real speech. The tragedy is that underneath it all, his approach to governing Britain is probably just what we need. But if his advisors don’t believe it, if his colleagues don’t believe it, and if he doesn’t even believe it himself, how on earth are we supposed to?

50% of your money is, to me, an unacceptable invasion into personal liberty. Yes, even only 50% of any capital over £150,000.

A big difference between the Taxpayers’ Alliance and me, of course, is that the TPA argues that tax avoidance is an inevitable consequence of high tax rates. I take the view that if tax avoidance was handled more sensibly in the first place, we wouldn’t need such cloyingly high tax rates. And that goes for everyone, not just the top 1%.

We have a terminology problem regarding tax avoidance. The term covers a whole range of practices, some of which are predominantly if not exclusively used by people on low to average incomes.

Some tax avoidance is not just technically legal, but is actually entirely reasonable; even a moral positive. Self-employed freelance workers and other individuals account for £13bn of the £25bn a year estimated to be lost through tax avoidance, and we should be careful about demanding that ordinary people pay more tax than they are actually obligated to, just because they happen to employ others instead of working for somebody else.

But it’s not all individuals and it’s not all small businesses who are avoiding tax. £12bn a year is lost by tax avoidance from the largest corporations in the country. And for many of them, it’s not a matter of getting an accountant to check your paperwork. It becomes a matter of actually negotiating your own tax bills. Many would not call that tax avoidance at all, but corruption.

Take Vodafone. Today it was reported that Dave Harnett, the HMRC’s Head of Tax, “did not follow correct procedure” in his dealings with Vodafone. A “settlement” was reached with the company, which – to take just one aspect of the alleged agreement which has caused anger – may not have even compelled Vodafone to pay interest on their overdue tax, something which to anybody else would quite unambiguously be an offence.

How can it be right that people on some of the lowest incomes in the country get threatened with court appearances, bailiffs, and even prison, for not paying their council tax on time, but a company which “slumped” to £46bn in revenue even in the middle of a recession get to pick and choose how much tax they fancy paying?

If this kind of so-called tax avoidance, as well as tax evasion – and tax evasion costs us a further £30billion a year, incidentally – could be stopped, and people were made to actually respect the laws of the country they choose to do business in, we could drop the top rate of tax along with the middle and lowest rates dramatically. Some figures even suggest the top rate could fall as low as 39%.

Taxes should always be as low as possible. All taxation is a necessary undesirable invasion into personal liberty – like stop and search or CCTV – that we need to collectively consent to, democratically, as a society. We need to make our economy more democratic but taxing the richest 1% in the country doesn’t do this. It just puts a plaster on the wound.

Am I cynical for wondering if Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling guessed the 50p rate of tax wouldn’t actually raise any cash, and guessed that the Conservatives would be under pressure both economically and politically to drop it back again? That it is not so much an economic policy as a political trap to make the Conservatives look like they’re cutting taxes for the rich while everyone else is facing belt-tightening of the harshest kind?

I hope this isn’t true. The economy is serious; much too important for political games. Taxes are to pay for the things we need, not to make us feel better about the inequalities we create and excuse.

Dropping the 50p rate of tax isn’t a top priority of mine, and I’m suspicious of anyone who makes it one of theirs – especially if they do so without having a plan to address the problem of lost tax money. But if independent studies continue to show that it doesn’t actually raise money – worse, that it actually costs Britain money – then the government has no justification, economic or moral, for keeping it in place for any long-term period. They shouldn’t feel nervous about scrapping it.

Just why is Nadine Dorries so despised?

For a start, it isn’t because she’s pro-life, and it isn’t because she’s religious, although there are an awful lot of people who seem to think otherwise. The fact is, there are plenty of pro-life people, and plenty of religious people, some of whom are in far more senior positions of power than the MP for Bedfordshire, I might add, who don’t come in for anything like the derisive ribbing and angry criticism Nadine Dorries gets. Like Tim Montgomerie, the editor of ConservativeHome, for instance. And Liam Fox MP, the Defence Secretary. And Labour MP Frank Field, whose name is also on the controversial Health and Social Care Bill amendment.

Nadine Dorries has been having way too much fun playing the victim card, interpreting every criticism of her policies as a personal attack. It’s been easy for her to do it, too, because her opponents are falling into the baited trap of talking with immense dislike about Dorries herself: her affair with a married man, her public revelations/claims about his ex-wife (because after you still steal someone’s husband, the natural thing to do is humiliate them in the papers, obviously), her often quoted “70%-of-my-blog-is-fiction” statement, her online slander of her own constituent Humphrey Cushion. But we mustn’t do it. Because none of this, ridiculous though it may be, is the point.

What matters is policy, not personality; what actually becomes law, and how it affects people.

Dorries’ amendment, first of all, seems to be based on a failure to understand what it means to actually be pro-choice. It isn’t the opposite of being pro-life. It isn’t anything to do with when you personally think life begins, or whether you personally would ever choose to have an abortion. It just means that you accept that you – much less the state – can’t make that decision for anyone else. The absence of an ideological position, or rather, the absence of a desire to enforce an ideological position on others, simply does not equate to a devout, self-interested pursuit of an agenda opposite to the one you refuse to enforce.

And here is another point of apparent confusion. Expertise is not the same as bias. Who knows as much about abortion as an abortion charity? Certainly not the only real “competitors,” Care Confidential and Life, who’ve been investigated by Education for Choice and found to be providing misleading, even completely false, information.

Disrespect for expertise in one’s profession seems to be a point of consistency for the coalition. After all, if they want GPs to manage finances, IT companies to diagnose illness, and parents, journalists, celebrities, and even soldiers to set up schools and teach, then why not have religious groups with seemingly no – or at least extremely poor – medical expertise to provide counselling on abortion? You might as well, really, by that point.

But it goes far beyond disregarding expertise, training and knowledge. Nadine Dorries is making assertions – allegations, in fact – about bpas and Marie Stopes. She has not backed these allegations up yet she and her supporters keep repeating them as fact. The only “evidence” I can see for the claims that Marie Stopes and bpas are somehow giving biased advice on abortion for financial gain is that “only” 1 in 10 women who receive the counselling don’t have an abortion in the end. That is not unlike saying that only 1 in 10 people who visit a church convert away from Christianity in the end, and churches pass around a collection plate, therefore churches are obviously forcing people to worship there in the first place for financial gain, and should lose their tax exempt status because they are clearly manipulating people for profit.

In any case, if you make an assertion, especially if you’re in a position of authority, it really is down to you to back it up with evidence, yourself. Why should these reputable charities spend energy, time, money, and other much-needed resources on defending themselves against half-baked accusations which the accuser herself cannot even be bothered to properly substantiate?

But even this isn’t getting to the crux of why so many people find Nadine Dorries so very objectionable. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that we don’t accept the above argument entirely, and that we decide to place the burden of proof on the accused, not the accuser, for whatever reason. Let’s give Nadine Dorries the benefit of the doubt, and imagine she is right, and that bpas and Marie Stopes are somehow motivated in their work by profit. It still strikes rather a lot of people as curious that the Conservative party are all of a sudden suspicious of the profit motive. If an unproven, hypothetical suspicion of the profit motive possibly lurking within the motives of an organisation providing health care upsets them this much, they really ought to read the rest of their own Health and Social Care Bill. In particular, the parts where Andrew Lansley opens up the NHS to European competition law, giving new Clinical Commissioning Groups extra procurement powers including the power to outsource practically everything to – yes, you guessed it – private companies. Where is Nadine Dorries’ moral panic about the conflict of interest in other areas of health care? The deteriorating affect this could (and almost certainly will) have on everybody else’s counselling services? In fact, if you find yourself depressed for any other reason than guilt about a pending abortion, it’s unclear how the government intends to improve the service you receive, or even protect it. At all.

Anyone who cares about preserving life this much should surely care with an equal passion about the quality of life? How can anyone who is pro-life and doesn’t trust the profit motive think the profit motive is right for schools, hospitals, food, central heating, housing, arms manufacturing, political party funding, journalism, media ownership, child care, and military strategy, but just not for terminating a pregnancy? Which begs the question: does Nadine Dorries really not trust the profit motive? Or does she actually just not care very much about any of the above?

It is perhaps rather ironic that while the pro-life agenda in Westminister focuses on making abortions harder because they believe abortion causes mental illness, while making cuts to mental health services around the country, the Scottish NHS is running Suicide Prevention Week, from September 4 to September 11. It’s a fair position to love brand new human life before it is even given birth to – in fact it’s a much-mocked yet arguably rather beautiful, admirable position to hold – but only if you carry on loving those babies and caring passionately about their lives once they’ve actually been born. If you fail to make foster families and adoptive families exempt from the welfare cuts, for example, or fail to properly fund SEN specialists for children growing up with attachment problems, or send them halfway around the world to kill other people in a war for that same profit motive that once was such a great big worry, then frankly, you are less pro-life than some of the most ardent pro-choice people on the planet. Telling someone not to abort a foetus is the easy bit. The hard bit is fighting suicide, famine, war, and AIDs. When Nadine Dorries starts calling David Cameron “gutless” for not addressing those problems, she might get more respect from the public. And that includes pro-lifers.

For a lot of people, it is this hypocrisy – this blatant, insultingly obvious dishonesty about intent and motive – which is so bloody galling. The antipathy towards Dorries isn’t because she’s religious and pro-life. It isn’t because her critics are all mad feminists or even particularly left-wing. It isn’t even the fact that Nadine Dorries is trying to push her pro-life religious agenda into law without any credible mandate or evidence.

No, the main reason she riles up even the most moderate of commentators is that she is going about pursuing her agenda in such an extremely disingenuous way. She isn’t doing it by having an open debate about abortion, which many of us members of the public could and would actually respect. Instead, she’s insisting that she’s “pro-choice,” and “pro-women,” (as opposed to what? She is a woman! And no-one doubts that she’s pro-Nadine Dorries…) and talking of “independence,” whilst slandering two completely reputable charities that have both done nothing but try to help people. And then feigning astonishment and assuming victim status when people who have worked with and for these charities, people who have relied upon their services without complaint, and even undecided, impartial people who simply look for evidence before they believe something, when all of those people ask her to back up her claims with the occasional provable fact.

An awful lot of us in the general public dislike Nadine Dorries’s approach to doing business more than we dislike her politics. We don’t take kindly to being manipulated. Nor are we keen on hypocrisy. Most of all, we don’t like ideologically-driven accusations directed towards people and organisations that we know, trust and respect. And actually, that applies whether we agree with the ideology behind it, or not.