The ableism of the gender-critical movement

 I'm back. Having written more in the last month than I think I ever have done since I started this blog, I got ill and decided to focus on my recovery more than argue about politics!

It's actually an experience I had when I was ill that is the inspiration for today's blog. My Facebook news feed is, for some reason, absolutely filled with Harry Potter-related items (perhaps the algorithms haven't yet caught on to the fact that I no longer like to discuss Harry Potter in public, in protest against the harm its author has caused the transgender community). Although I was ill and wasn't really in the right frame of mind, I did leave one comment (perhaps ill-advisedly); and as usual, what I got back was a lot of people challenging what I was saying.

Normally I'm all right to politely reply to people in these kinds of circumstances (I wrote this blog a few weeks back about how to have a political discussion online). But on this occasion, I wasn't really feeling up to it, so I asked someone who had agreed with me if they could deal with these questions. I then had a lot of responses back from that essentially saying that I had no business making any kind of political statement in the first place if I wasn't prepared to back it up. I responded to one person in particular saying that I would when I felt better, and even eventually relented and said, 'Okay, if you sum up your questions, I'll write you a diplomatic reply, but just to you.' But this person continued to speak to me in an aggressive and hostile way, with very little acknowledgement for the fact that I was feeling ill, and in the end I stopped replying because I felt disrespected.

I think what I've experienced here is a comparatively minor form of quite an interesting phenomenon that I think it's important to address, which is that transphobia and ableism often go together, and people who express one are often not that far from expressing another. In my case, I wasn't that ill and I could probably have mustered the energy to write a decent reply if I'd really tried - but the people I was talking to had so little regard for my wellbeing that I really didn't feel inclined to at that point. Given that they don't know me and I didn't go into detail about how I was ill, I did think to myself, what if I'd been far more ill than I was? What if I was in chronic pain, bed bound or severely disabled? What if it had taken all the energy I had to even write my first initial comment? Thankfully, I was nowhere near as seriously ill as this, but these people didn't know that, and it did hit home to me how they might treat someone who was.

To be clear, I do think it's important, if you're going to express political views on the Internet, to be able to back them up with facts. I have been called ableist in the past for expressing that view, so perhaps this makes me a hypocrite. However, it being important to be able to back up your points doesn't mean you have to do so straight away someone asks, or be willing to engage if the other person is clearly not in good faith. If you're to take the 'don't express views unless you can back them up' to an extreme, this would mean that no one whose energy or emotional capacity is limited in any way should ever express any kind of opinion that someone might disagree with. This is an ableist view.

This made me think more about other ways the gender-critical movement has proven itself quite ableist as well. The recent Cass Report talks a bit about neurodivergent people, suggesting that they are more likely to question their gender identity and want to transition, and that the rules should be particularly strict for them. I have no idea if there's any correlation between being neurodivergent and being transgender, but what I do know is that this is extremely threatening to the idea of anyone with a disability or a learning difficulty having independence. The insinuation is that if someone has one of these conditions, that they're less likely to be able to fully understand the consequences of their decisions and that this is a barrier to being able to consent to their own medical treatment. This logic, if applied, would surely not just apply to decisions relating to gender transitions, but to medical and cosmetic treatment generally. I've written quite a lot about mine and my partner's work campaigning for disability rights, and a major part of this work has been based around making it easier for people with disabilities to live independently, making their own life decisions and not having to rely on family members and carers to make them by proxy. To the best of my knowledge, none of the people we work with are transgender (although of course, any of them could be and have not told us, or perhaps not realised themselves); but regardless, I find the Cass Report to be a grave concern to the future of what we do, and I have addressed this issue with fellow campaigners, who have agreed with me.

One final example is that the gender-critical movement, when talking about their feelings on things, tend to be predominantly making assumptions that the cisgender people they claim to be protecting are able-bodied. The best example of this is the constant (and tedious) obsession with gendered toilets. I was discussing this matter recently with a trans-woman who also has Cerebral Palsy, and she pointed out that this has rarely been a problem for her, because she uses disabled toilets which aren't usually gendered. I must admit that this had never occurred to me. My solution to the matter of toilets would be to make all toilets unisex and single-occupancy, and the fact that disabled toilets usually already are is quite a good indicator of the fact that this would be a very easy and non-controversial solution. But I have never heard any gender-critical person express concern for anyone specifically with a disability when discussing these matters.

Ultimately, I think the reason that so many people with transphobia problems also express views that are quite ableist are because transphobia and ableism ultimately come from the same place - the place that there are specific, and desirable, ways of being a human being. Being cisgender and able-bodied are seen as 'normal' - if someone is trans, or someone is disabled, this is seen as a deviation from the norm, and therefore not legitimate. Having viewed someone like this, the most sympathetic way you can treat them is by patronising them. What is needed is a completely different outlook on what it means to be a human being - one that recognises that we are all legitimate and all equally worthy of respect.

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Deconstructing 'We have to vote Labour to get the Tories out'

 'We have to vote Labour to get the Tories out.'

This is something I've heard over and over again. Truthfully, I'm sick of hearing it. Not only is it a really rigid line that leaves no room for discussion or dialogue, but it's something that Keir Starmer and the Labour Party are relying on. In fact, it's the only thing they're relying on; as a Government-in-waiting, they are offering nothing but the fact that people want the Tories out as their appeal.

As I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I'm involved with OCISA, a group that aims to create a socialist alliance through the election of independent socialists in the 2024 General Election. Most prominently, OCISA is supporting the South African socialist Andrew Feinstein to attempt to unseat Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party. This is also happening in various other constituencies around the country, and my partner Owen is crowdfunding to stand against David TC Davies in the new constituency of Monmouthshire. Personally I think this is a really exciting turn of events, something that if loads of people get behind could really quite radically improve political discourse in our society.

But unfortunately, it seems that this idea that 'We have to vote Labour to get the Tories out' is a really dominant feature within our political understanding, so I thought I should give some reasons to explain why that isn't the case.

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The Tories and Labour are currently almost identical

There is nothing the current incarnation of Labour is offering that is discernibly different from what the Tory Government is doing. I will repeat that: nothing. The Tory Government is opposed to climate justice, and so is Labour. The Tory Government is opposed to viewing trans rights as human rights, and so is Labour. The Tory Government supports continuing to arm Israel in its genocide against the Palestinian people, and so does Labour.

To be fair, the actual manifestos haven't been released yet, so it could be that Labour will offer a few things that the Tories aren't doing - perhaps a few that have some appeal to them. But even if they do, do you trust them to actually honour these pledges? I don't. Pretty much all of Keir Starmer's ten pledges that he made during his 2020 leadership campaign, from social justice to climate justice to strengthening trade unions, have been scrapped. If Labour can do brazenly ignore its own pledges before it even gets elected to power, how on earth can it be relied upon to be telling the truth about anything it's promising in its manifesto?

The slightly optimistic view I've heard from some people is that maybe Labour is just pretending to be right-wing to get the mainstream media on side, and then they'll be proper socialists once they get elected. I very much doubt that this is true - I am not aware of any Government ever that has turned out to be more a party for the people upon being elected than it appeared to be before. But even in the hypothetical scenario that it did turn out to be true, I still wouldn't approve of this as an electoral strategy. It damages one's own credibility, and significantly harms innocent people in the meantime. Even if that were their plan, they do not deserve to win.

There is one, and only one, thing that the Labour Party has done to make it look like more of a suitable Government than the Tories, and that is make its leader Keir Starmer have a professional shine to him and look like a grown-up. However, this one thing would only appeal if Boris Johnson had still been the leader - I think Labour was hoping for a showdown between Johnson and Starmer. But Johnson is long gone, we've had two Prime Ministers since him and I don't believe that will work anymore.

What will be the excuse in 2029?

We don't even know yet when the 2024 election will be, and already I'm thinking ahead to the following one.

If you don't like Labour but plan to vote for them just to get rid of the Tories, what do you think will happen next time? If they're in Government under Keir Starmer for five years, continue to preside over the most harmful policies that the Tories did, presumably at the next election you'll 'just want to get rid of Labour' in the same way you just want to get rid of the Tories now? So who will you vote for then? The Tories?

I actually believe that Labour winning the next election with a majority would be more harmful than the Tories getting back in. As a socialist I can't actually believe I'm saying that, but there is method to my madness, I promise. If the Tories get back in, they'll surely continue being awful, but at least Labour will have to accept that its current strategy simply isn't working. It will force Labour to do something to improve. But if Labour gets in with a big majority, all that will do is re-affirm that nonsensical neoliberal right-wing posturing is what wins elections, irrespective of what harm it causes elsewhere. The Tories, meanwhile, will have the opportunity to take five years without being held accountable for anything that goes wrong, regroup and get back in one or two elections down the line.

Labour already acts as if the only election results that count were its losses in 1983 and 2019, and its win in 1997. It cherry-picks these three elections specifically because they back up the political point it's trying to make, and completely ignores the fact that since the 1980s there have been seven other elections whose outcomes undermine that point. Labour is trying to create the circumstances in the next election to back up this point even more. It's not true, and has never been true.

The first-past-the-post system

I've heard quite a lot of people say that the problem is with the first-past-the-post system, meaning that it's virtually impossible for anyone other than the major parties to win seats.

I agree with this. It's a crappy system that is designed for there to only be two options. You know who isn't going to change the system? Rishi Sunak. You know who else isn't going to change it? Keir Starmer. There has never been a Labour or Conservative leader who has backed a more democratic voting system (not even Jeremy Corbyn, one of the few things I disagreed with him on). That's because the system benefits these parties. It benefits the Tories most, because they're usually in power, and it benefits Labour on the odd occasion when the Tories are even more unpalatable than normal. If you don't like the first-past-the-post system, and most of us don't, voting Labour or Conservative is an absolute own goal.

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I don't have a particular opinion on what I want to happen nationwide at the next election. Neither of the two main parties deserve to win. I suppose the best we can hope for is that both parties lose significant numbers of seats, and that whoever has slightly more needs to rely on the support of more sensible people to get anything through Parliament.

However, I think we can hope for better results in individual constituencies, and that's why I'm so inspired by OCISA's work. Remember, you can't vote for who the Prime Minister is. That isn't how our system works in the UK. You can vote for your local MP, and you may have opportunities to get someone in who will hold whichever party ends up in Government to account. Even if you live in a so-called 'safe seat', remember that safe seats generally mean safe from either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party. They don't mean safe from concerted campaigns from citizens who aren't interested in the politics of either of the main parties.

I will just finish by saying that I really am not as convinced as everyone else is that Labour will shoot to victory in the next election. I'm not going to go out on a limb and say they won't, because they could do, but I don't think that's guaranteed by any means. I don't think the Tories being awful automatically means that Labour will do well. I recall a Labour win being predicted in 2015, but it didn't happen because Labour were so unappealing - and they're even less appealing now than they were then! Sure, the Tories have got worse as well - but do people normally win elections just because the alternative is dreadful? I don't think so. I think nearly everyone who has ever won an election, in this country at least, has appealed to hope on some level.

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The Cass Report ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT vindicate TERFs

 This week, paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass released an almost 400-page report that she'd been working on since 2020 into transgender healthcare in the NHS. The report has been widely reported on over the last couple of days, and has been quite controversial because it suggests that there isn't sufficient evidence that the benefits of treatments such as puberty blockers outweigh the drawbacks.

I originally wasn't going to write about this, because I feel that I don't have sufficient evidence myself to fully be able to analyse it. I've heard some complaints from some fellow Trans Rights Activists that the report isn't especially comprehensive and gives away the author's own bias quite a bit... but I'm hardly an expert in transgender healthcare and what do I know? However, from venturing onto my Twitter account and seeing the hashtag 'TERFsWereRight' trending, I knew that I had to say something. Because this report does not say that. It's completely untrue, and if that's how it's being taken then that's a very dangerous narrative that needs to be called out straight away.

Let me be very clear about something. Even if the Cass Report contained irrefutable proof that every single person throughout history who has ever questioned their gender was doing it because of pressure from external sources (which it doesn't) that still would not mean that TERFs were right. The reason it would not mean that is that if the evidence were to show that, that would ultimately still mean that transgender people were some of the most vulnerable people in the world, some of the most at risk of being abused both physically and psychologically. As it happens, transgender people are some of the most vulnerable people and most at risk of these things, just for different reasons. But the morality of that would remain the same.

If all TERFs were doing was questioning the safety of people who say they want to transition, even if I disagreed with exactly which aspect of their safety they were concerned about, I would at least be able to recognise that the concern itself comes from a kind place. But this is not what TERFs do. TERFs pretend that the inclusion of trans people (particularly trans women) is a threat to the safety of cis people. TERFs ignore the fact that trans people are over four times more likely than cis people to be victims of violent crime, to imply that it's actually trans people who are likely to be committing the violent crimes (very often, they don't explicitly say this, but it tends to be implied). TERFs talk about things that have existed for years as though they're very modern - for example, trans women have competed against cis women in sporting events for two decades, there hasn't been an influx of trans champions (which would have happened if they had advantages significant enough to be noteworthy) and nothing has happened recently to suddenly make it a relevant topic right now.

TERFs are not the slightest bit concerned about anyone's safety, as very often they have been prepared to sacrifice the safety of cis people as well in order to justify their suspicion of trans people. As an example of this, the debate about transgender women accessing women's toilets regularly comes up - but how is anyone meant to know whether someone in a women's toilet is a trans woman or not? Are we proposing security guards at the door, with no entry to anyone who doesn't produce a birth certificate saying that they were assigned female at birth? There have been instances of cis women who appear slightly manly being harassed in women's toilets out of suspicion of being trans women - this is essentially a witch hunt. Never mind the fact that if trans women were forced to use men's toilets, this would also mean that trans men would have to use women's toilets, however far through the transition process they were (and also cis men would be able to claim to be trans men to use them as well, so it results in the same thing). TERFs know this, and know that the obvious solution is to make all public toilets gender neutral (if they're single-occupancy, there's no possibility of anyone of any gender being abused, which would protect cis people just as much as it would trans people). But, they aren't interested in actual solutions. They're only interested in creating a moral panic around transgender people, most particularly trans women.

There are 67 million people in the UK. Less than 300,000 of them are transgender. Between 2014 and 2019, news stories about transgender people increased by 414%. I don't know why this was, apart from the fact that it was their turn to be the subject of the moral panic which was gifted to gay men in the 1980s and 1990s, benefit claimants in the 2000s and immigrants (particularly Muslims) in the early 2010s. There's always a scapegoat for social injustice, it's usually some kind of minority person and at the moment it's transgender people. As to why it's transgender people right now, I have a couple of theories - but they're just guesses, so there's no guarantee I'm right. The first is that same-sex marriage was legalised in the UK in 2013, with the first same-sex marriage ceremonies taking place in 2014. This to many felt like a major victory for the gay rights movement - it felt like a concession from the far-right, and meant that there wasn't a political mood to scapegoat gay people anymore, so a different but related group was targeted instead. My other theory is that developments in technology caused people who had transitioned to find it easier to live in their gender identity, without it being visibly obvious that they were trans, than they had done before. I think sometimes, people were okay with trans people existing as long as they were obvious on the street and therefore could be seen as freaks and subject to harassment. The idea that you could talk to, get to know and become friends with someone who'd transitioned before you knew them, without knowing that fact about them, came disturbingly close to having to treat trans people with basic dignity and respect, which is absolutely terrifying to certain sections of society.

Whether I'm right in any of my theories, I don't know and I'll probably never know. But for whatever reason, transgender people are facing far more discrimination nowadays than they did in the past. This article from PinkNews talks about the transgender character who was in the soap Coronation Street in the 1990s, and how much more she was accepted by society than trans characters who have appeared in things more recently. It is TERFs who are perpetuating this. It is these people who are deliberately creating a false narrative about trans people which causes them to be viewed with increased suspicion, and in some cases, like that of poor 16-year-old Brianna Ghey, has led to their murders. The verdict reached in that case was that transphobia was a factor in Brianna's murder - it probably wasn't the only factor, but it was a factor, and anyone who has participated in the moral panic around transgender people helped to create the sociopolitical circumstances which led to this horrific attack, and countless others.

Are there problems in the NHS' treatment of gender dysphoria in children and adolescents? Most likely - there are problems in all areas of the NHS, and I see no reason why this would be the special exception. Can the recommendations of the Cass Report help to solve them? I don't know. I think probably not, because from what I've seen it's a highly biased report that is more likely to leave people who are worried about gender-related issues out in the cold, but that's a matter for people who are far more informed about the quality of these services than I am. But if you think for a moment that it vindicates TERFs, ask yourself: is there any other instance where you would think that someone deserves to be bullied, harassed, ignored, mocked by everyone from comedians to politicians in the House of Commons, sexually assaulted and possibly murdered, because a mistake might have been made with the prescription of their medication? No. It's a preposterous question. But this is what we're being asked to accept when we're told that the Cass Report proves TERFs right.

I will just finish by saying that there is one thing that Dr Hilary Cass has said in interviews about her report that I do agree with her on, although I suspect not for the same reasons she says it. She says that children are being let down by the toxic debate on this issue. I agree - they are. If a child or an adolescent is worried about their gender identity and how to express it, they need to be given some quiet time with their family and friends to work this stuff out. Statistically, most of the time they'll come to the conclusion that they're cisgender anyway. And in the cases where they don't, they can be treated in a way that is dignified, respectful and gets them the help they need. What they do not need is to be the topic of the day for politicians who want votes, news websites that want clicks and faded writers of children's books who want attention. The angry, suspicious, hateful rhetoric that currently surrounds trans issues did not come from children. It came from adults, who have seen what has happened to Muslims, to the disabled, to gay people, to benefit claimants, when they were targeted in this way, and should have known better. And if you're an adult who knows a child or adolescent who is worried about these issues, you should show some basic human compassion and be an example to them.

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Don't let this be our last tango in Halifax

 On Tuesday 9th April, myself, my partner Owen and a few of our friends went with homemade placards to stand outside Halifax bank on Abergavenny's high street. The protest was against the planned closure of the bank, following the closure of other banks recently and the proposed closures of more.

In March of this year, Abergavenny was named by the Sunday Times as 'the best place to live in Wales'. As someone who only moved there from Bristol six months ago, I can definitely attest to this. It's an absolutely beautiful place, with some lovely shops and cafes, absolutely incredible and beautiful green spaces and a really nice community of people who have welcomed me with open arms. Abergavenny feels like a home to me, in a way that I haven't had in quite a long time. In the short time I've been there, I've found my mental health to be markedly improving, and I'm happy in a way that I haven't been since I was quite a young child.

I've been thinking a lot recently about communities and how important they are (I wrote about this back in January). Since I wrote that blog, I've become aware that they are even more important than I realised then, and that most of the mental health issues that I've had since I was around nine years old have all stemmed from the feeling of not being part of a community. Human beings are an exceptionally social species, and we have an inherent need to talk to one another and communicate. The constant push to move things like banking online is a hindrance to this.

Let's talk about the Internet. The Internet is undoubtedly the most important invention of our time - nearly every aspect of how we live our lives is now dominated by the Internet. I actually don't think this is necessarily a bad thing (although I know a lot of people do). For me, a lot of positive things have come from my having a very active online presence. But I think to fully appreciate the importance of the Internet, we have to understand what it is that it's so good for. Because the Internet can both enhance communication, and suppress it. A big part of why I like social media, and why I'll always defend social media, is because a lot of my closest friendships and relationships have been nurtured primarily through it. There are some people I've met for the first time online before I ever met them face-to-face, and some people who I knew in person but only as casual acquaintances, people I would never have stayed in touch with were it not for being able to spend time talking to them online and finding out more about them. On the Internet, we can find people with similar interests to us. We can share information about things that are going on in the world with friends, without having to be fed it from above. All the best bits about the Internet, and why it's here to stay, come from the fact that the Internet is amazing for humanity's greatest necessity - communication. This is why the Internet is enjoyable.

But there are other things the Internet can be used for that suppress communication - such as ordering things online, without any need to go and speak to someone and search for it yourself. These things are not enjoyable. These things have been thrust upon us from above. This does not mean that no one benefits from them - it is quite nice to be able to buy things more easily without having to make so much effort to go into town and find a shop selling what you want - but these benefits are somewhat fickle and temporary. On the whole, it makes the experience less fun, less of an adventure - it's harder to discover something special by accident, or become friends with someone because they happen to be looking for something in the same aisle as you, or discover a new shop you like. All of these things are community-based things that we are in danger of losing, and I believe they do need to be protected.

Banking falls into this category. I refuse to use online banking every time I'm asked, to the point that the staff at my bank don't even bother to suggest it anymore because I'm notorious for my dislike of it. We're told, over and over again, that online banking makes financial transactions quicker and easier. Well, I don't think financial transactions should be quick and easy. I think they should be slow and steady, like the moral of The Hare and the Tortoise. If I'm making a big transaction to someone, I would like to be afforded the time to actually think about what I'm doing. Refusing to use online banking means that very often there isn't chance to make a transaction until the next day, next week or whenever you next happen to be in the vicinity of your bank. This is not a bad thing. On the contrary, it's a very, very good thing. It makes it far harder to be taken in by scammers (and there was a time, a few years ago, that my partner and I came very close to being scammed, and would have been had we been using online banking - the time it took between the time we were asked to pay for something and the time we were actually able to made us think about it and realise it was a scam).

Of course, scammers can be very convincing, and sometimes no amount of time will make you realise. But bank staff might, the people whose job it is to process these things and be aware of them. This is the other reason why it's important to do this in person. I don't know how it is at all banks, but at my bank the staff really have a personal approach, taking the time to talk you through exactly what you're doing, check it's all above board and that you aren't being scammed. Once, whilst waiting in the queue, I overheard the staff realise that the elderly man in front of me was being taken advantage of by his cleaner, who was charging him far more than she was entitled to be paid. I will never forget how kind and understanding the bank staff were to that person, and it hit home to me quite how important these people's roles are.

Not everyone has access to the Internet, especially the elderly. Even if the elderly do have access to the Internet, they are more susceptible to being conned, as are people with learning difficulties. My partner and I do a lot of work with adults with learning difficulties, helping them to get independence, and these people are far more likely to be able to gain control over their own finances if there are going to be dedicated bank staff helping them. Irrespective of one's susceptibility, loneliness and isolation are serious problems in our society. It is vital that people are able to keep up regular face-to-face correspondences with people, and even if it's just a member of staff at the bank, that can make a difference to a day being worthwhile.

So yes... banks are vital, and it is essential that physical branches stay open. I was delighted that so many people signed our petitions - I've petitioned for lots of things over the years, and it's been very rare that I've had to say so little to persuade people why they should sign for something. This seems such an uncontroversial issue - loads of local people in Abergavenny were keen and enthusiastic to sign, and one lady even volunteered to take some petitions and go and get signatures elsewhere. The only common objection was that someone didn't live in the local area, which we always said isn't a problem - this is about more than just this one branch of Halifax. This is about banks all over the country closing their doors. It's got to stop.

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Our relationship with Roald Dahl could not be more biffsquiggling

 It was reported this week that new stories are to be published featuring characters created by Roald Dahl. The BFG, Matilda, Fantastic Mr Fox and the Twits will return in new stories by new writers. This comes off the back of his books still selling many copies, various theme park rides inspired by his works and successful musical editions of his works Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

As the partner of an author who has written some books that are (in my own highly biased opinion) pretty fantastic, I have some issues with repeatedly rehashing new versions of old stories. I feel that there are a lot of great new works released who don't get anything like as much shelf space as authors that have been around forever, and it would be great to give a few of these a go. Having said that, it doesn't have to be an either/or, and I wouldn't say that there's no longer a place for Roald Dahl. He was undoubtedly one of the most talented children's authors there has ever been, with great imagination and an exceptional skill for making up words. I grew up on Roald Dahl, and even though I'm a completely different kind of writer to what he was, I definitely think that this had a positive impact on my enthusiasm for making up stories.

But it's been obvious, over the last few years, that certain people have had something to say about Roald Dahl. First is the fact that he was extremely anti-Semitic. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he was - he held absolutely disgusting views about Jewish people, and even heavily implied that they deserved what happened to them in the Holocaust. I don't believe in the view that someone was 'a person of their time'; making sweeping derogatory statements about entire ethnic groups is quite an original sin in my book, something that deserves utter condemnation no matter when it was done. There is no excuse I can make for Roald Dahl expressing a view like this apart from the fact that he's dead - if he were alive and profiting from sales, I might seriously consider boycotting his works and materials relating to them in the same way that I do with JK Rowling and her positions on transgender rights.  Having said that, I do find it quite troublesome to selectively choose statements that have been expressed by someone who's dead, and use them to form a concrete opinion of that person's character when they are no longer alive to respond. I believe that if we don't know someone personally, we can't form opinions on who they are or were, only on what they do or did. And there are other things that Roald Dahl did that I very much do approve of - for example, he was vocally opposed to corporal punishment in schools, something that we now consider to be child abuse, when this was still a common practice. It seems wrong to me that we've decided to single out the very worst of Roald Dahl's views and completely ignore things that show him as a more sympathetic character. (In the interests of being fair and balanced, I would also hold the same opinion if it were the other way around - if Roald Dahl was consistently held up as a pioneer of pain-free education, I would make an effort to remind people that he was also very anti-Semitic).

But aside from Roald Dahl's personal views, there has also been a lot that has been said about the content of his actual books. Early last year, it was announced that hundreds of edits to the text of his books would be made. From reading through the exact edits, I think that almost every descriptive word, no matter what it's of, has been removed, just in case it might cause offence. I can acknowledge that there are some things (like depictions of the Oompa-Loompas) could be seen as quite racially insensitive. But there are other things that have been edited that really don't make any sense - for instance, the BFG's cloak has been changed from 'black' to 'dark', and I highly doubt that anyone thought the previous word was insensitive. Likewise, a comment in George's Marvellous Medicine where the main character's grandmother encourages him to eat caterpillars and he refers to how his mother washes them down the sink, this has been changed to 'Mummy and Daddy wash them down the sink', presumably to suggest that cleaning and hygiene aren't just for women. I can understand the logic, but I think most rational people will think this is a bit of an extreme reaction, and I think if I wrote a line about a female character cleaning something no one would bat an eyelid.

Actually, the full list of edits feels like it was done by AI - words are changed with very little regard for the actual context that they were intended. And I'd be against this in any situation, but it feels particularly egregious to do it with Roald Dahl, an author who was so incredibly imaginative and creative with his use of language. I don't believe that if I was a child, reading the current editions of the books would inspire or excite me at all. Actually, they don't feel like they're aimed at children now at all. I also think that as a member of the generation who grew up to be woke lefty snowflakes (I'm generalising, but who cares?) it's quite evident that in spite of some of the slightly risqué humour in the kind of books we read, this hasn't made us insensitive and slightly racist human beings. If anything, I think it's that creative streak that most causes us to think critically (this is also why a lot of JK Rowling's most ardent critics were huge Harry Potter fans back in the day, myself included).

I'm conscious that a lot of what I've said sounds a little like I'm making excuses for someone who was actually really dodgy, so I want to summarise a couple of things. Firstly, books are different to statues. I do not subscribe at all to the idea that statues commemorate history. Statues celebrate history. I come from very near where the statue of Edward Colston was pulled down, I grew up seeing how hated that statue was and I was delighted when it was taken down. If a community wanted to pull down a statue of Roald Dahl for similar reasons, I say go ahead - I'll come and cheer you on. But that's not the same as censoring books. I don't know if Edward Colston wrote any books, but if he did, I think what he said would be worth reading. I don't believe that books are a celebration of the author in the same way that statues are. I'm currently reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and I certainly don't share her views - but it's still interesting to learn what she believed in her own words, because then we can have an intelligent conversation about it. We can't have conversations about things that have been censored.

Secondly, I'm aware that I am quite possibly looking at Roald Dahl with too much nostalgia. If someone thinks I am, you're welcome to tell me and I'll have the humility to accept that. But if I'm wrong in what I've said, and actually Roald Dahl has left behind a legacy that is so harmful that his work deserves to be censored, then actually it shouldn't still be published at all. That isn't the option that I would personally choose, but it would be more appropriate that releasing work under his name that is not what he wrote. There are many modern-day authors who could be given his shelf space instead - authors who are still alive, who could benefit from a bit more promotion. But this is not what we're doing. We're continuing to promote him like mad. I challenge any reader to walk into any bookshop in the country and not find Roald Dahl in pride of place in the children's section. We make films, plays, musicals and theme park rides inspired by his works. We repeat the old adaptations of things on the telly. We re-record new audiobook editions read by modern actors. We continue, in short, to have a thoroughly inconsistent relationship with this man - we constantly attack him for his views with one hand, whilst with the other continue to try to make profits from his work.

Why is any of this important? Well, it's important because it demonstrates the fact that capitalism has made it impossible for us to sit down and have a serious and fair conversation about anything. Capitalism is capable of taking completely contradictory positions on things - trying to appeal to progressively-minded proponents of equality, AND still make money out of people who had views that were the complete opposite. And if it can do it with something fairly innocuous like a children's book, it demonstrates that it can do it with pretty much anything. A politician might fall from grace and lose their job, and then make a huge amount of money from a book deal telling their side of the story. Which is it? Do we detest them and want to distance ourselves from them, or respect them enough to want to hear their side of the story?

I think that right now in society, we have some important opportunities to really learn from the mistakes of the past and have these conversations, particularly with the people who have most been silenced. But in doing that, we need to be aware of this fallacy, because the two sides are like Eurasia and Eastasia - capitalism will back both of them at once, and they'll take turns at winning depending on which one is more profitable at any one time. We can, and should, do better than this.

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How to have a political debate with someone on the Internet

 Brexit - Leave or Remain? Jeremy Corbyn - an inspiring man who inspired a generation to get involved in  politics, or an anti-Semitic Russian spy from the IRA? Trans rights - do they contravene feminism, or do they not? Israel - do they have a right to murder innocent children, or don't they?

The way I've phrased particularly the last one probably gives away my own opinion on it (I never pretended to be impartial!) but let's face it, we've all come up against people on the Internet who we absolutely dread talking to, haven't we? People who have expressed opinions to us that we've thought, 'How on earth can I deal with that?'

It's extremely tempting, in these conversations, to just ignore these people and gravitate towards people who agree with you. I do this as much as anyone, and it's impossible not to at times, but I also worry that the more we branch off into echo chambers the less social progress we make, so I try to reply to people as much as I possibly can. I also think that in terms of my own personal emotional development, I've become better able to express my own feelings about things as a result of having practised.

So, if you'd like to get better at this, here are some useful tips:

1) Know when it's worth it, and when it's not

I'll make clear from the beginning that there are some people that are just not worth the time or energy. We've all come across people like that, and sometimes it's hard to distinguish them from people who would listen if you took the time with them. The way that I usually tell them apart is that I refuse to respond to someone who uses the 'laugh' emoji on something I've said. I find the laugh emoji on social media very unpleasant - it's not even a nice image, it reminds you of a primary school bully, and it's really not nice to laugh react to someone who is saying something that means something to them, no matter how wrong you think they are.

So my rule is that as long as they don't use the laugh emoji on me, I'll do my best to politely reply, no matter what they say. If they use it though, they're letting it descend into outright unpleasantness, and then I won't bother (unless of course I've said something that was meant to be funny, but it's usually obvious when that is).

2) Make sure you know your own viewpoint inside out

It seems like an obvious one, but it's worth reiterating. Make sure you know what you're talking about. If you're just repeating the same point over and over again, people are unlikely to take any more notice the sixth time than they did the first time.

Be able to back up your points with evidence beyond just your own personal opinion. Have links to hand that you can immediately send people (this is also quite useful in the sense that you may not have time to write a detailed response, but you can still send someone a link that backs up your points).

3) Make it personal

Having said the previous one, I also find it so helpful to be able to use my own personal experiences! If you've got a human touch to you, you seem less robotic and therefore more easy to engage with.

4) Take your time

One of the worst things about debating online is the fact that sometimes it's tempting to respond too quickly. I've had so many times that I've written back to people without really thinking about it for long enough, and then thought, 'Oh hell, why didn't I say that? That would have won me the argument!'

There's no shame in taking a couple of hours to think over what the person said. Hell, it doesn't matter that much if you reply the next day, or even the next week. I always think it's far nicer to know that someone's taken the time to think what to say than been hurried with me.

5) Remember that the other person might be right in some aspects as well

I don't believe that debating is always about proving the other person wrong. I've had debates where I've come to realise that I was wrong, and that's worth taking into account. So when you read something the other person has said, don't read it and just immediately think how you can prove it wrong. Think to yourself, 'Is there anything here that they may have a point about?'

There are quite a lot of times when you realise that you're actually quite similar to one another, and can bond over something.

6) There's always the next time

If it doesn't go well, and you come away thinking, 'I didn't explain that very well', it's not the end of the world! Just take some notes on how you'll handle it the next time you're in that situation.

And don't ever let someone disrespect you or say anything personally nasty about you. No one has the right to do that (you also don't have the right to do it to anyone else, even if they're already doing it to you. Two wrongs don't make a right.)

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Both the left and the right are wrong about cancel culture

 It is almost impossible to have any kind of sociopolitical conversation on the Internet without the topic of cancel culture being raised at some point.

Cancel culture is referred to on Wikipedia as 'a cultural phenomenon in which some who are deemed to have acted or spoken in an unacceptable manner are ostracized (sic), boycotted, or shunned. This shunning may extend to social or professional circles—whether on social media or in person—with most high-profile incidents involving celebrities. Those subject to this ostracism are said to have been "canceled" (sic).

I listen to a lot of opinions on this and I often find myself in the quite strange position of not actually agreeing with anyone, so I want to summarise exactly what my position is on this. The first thing is that I have to say what the three most common opinions on this actually are, which is as follows:

1. The view that no one, no matter how toxic their opinion is, should ever have an invitation to speak rescinded because of their unpopularity (This is normally expressed by the right, and originated in relation to certain speakers being de-platformed by student unions, but I've heard it extended to everything, even unfollows on social media);

2. The view that rescinding invitations to people who have expressed harmful viewpoints is generally a good thing, or even better not inviting them to speak in the first place (this is normally expressed by the left);

3. The viewpoint that cancel culture is a complete myth and doesn't happen, because the people involved normally have platforms that are too big to effectively cancel (this is a more neutral one, but I've seen it more from the left than from the right).

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Of these three viewpoints, the one that is the closest to my opinion is the third one. I used to be that person arguing that cancel culture doesn't exist, because the likes of Katie Hopkins and Nigel Farage are so connected and have such big platforms to reach people that rescinding an invitation to speak somewhere won't cancel them at all. I still believe this - however, this does not mean that cancel culture does not exist. It definitely exists - moreover, it exists in a way which is not what people normally mean when they use the phrase 'cancel culture', and in a way which is intensely damaging. Saying that it doesn't exist doesn't help to acknowledge this.

I remember the exact moment that I realised what cancel culture really is, and that it's such a serious matter. I was watching this interview between the journalist Louis Theroux and the comedian Katherine Ryan. He asks her about cancel culture about fifteen minutes into it, and if you can really be cancelled. Ryan responds, 'You can if you accuse too many men of sexual assault', and discusses an interaction she'd had on a panel show with a well-known person, in which she implied information she was aware of of this person's concerning activities. Her comments had been cut from the broadcast. She doesn't name the person in the interview, but it's now widely believed that she was referring to Russell Brand.

Accusing people of sexual assault is not something that is commonly understood to be the kind of thing that gets you cancelled - if anything, it's understood that being accused of sexual assault without having been found guilty is what gets you cancelled, along with anything viewed as being 'not woke enough'. But Katherine Ryan's experience, and also my own experiences of the entertainment industry and understanding of the world more generally, have taught me that cancel culture is not something that is done by students or members of the public. It's done by media owners and PR people, in boardrooms, when someone is too much of a challenge to the establishment status quo.

The nature of cancel culture is such that although we can know it exists, we can't know for certain of any actual instances of it - the whole purpose is that it's done so quietly that it's not particularly noticeable. Usually, not even the person who's been cancelled knows about it - they just quietly find that they're finding it harder to express themselves to large groups of people than they used to be. So I have to make clear that any examples I could give on this blog would only be speculation; I'm not certain, and if the person I'm going to refer to believes themselves not to be a victim of cancel culture, they are welcome to contact me and correct the record and I'll give them a full and public apology. But the person I suspect has been a victim of cancel culture is the Irish author Sally Rooney. A few years ago, she was hailed as the voice of a generation, although she herself rejected this; her first two novels were adapted for screen to huge success, and her quirky and gently probing prose was considered indicative of the sociopolitical views of people in their teens and twenties. I used to see her work all over the place, both in the media and in bookshops. But shortly following the release of her third book, the amount of media exposure she was getting abruptly reduced. I'd barely see her in the media anymore and her books would stop appearing on the tables in bookshops. And I wonder if this is connected to the fact that she very publicly refused to allow her third book to be taken on by an Israeli publisher, in support of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement. It really wouldn't surprise me if this was too radical for the establishment status quo, and that they starved her of attention from this point onwards. As I said before, I do not know this for certain. It's entirely possible that Sally Rooney decided for herself to reduce the amount of media she was publicly engaging in, and if that's the case I apologise to her. However, if she isn't an instance of it, there'll be someone else in similar circumstances who has been.

Harvey Weinstein, Jimmy Savile and other people who behaved extremely inappropriately because of their power were not always successful in intimidating their victims into staying quiet. There were people who spoke out about it at the time, and their voices were suppressed. This was cancel culture. There were brave journalists who tried to report these things, and their publications refused to print it. Nowadays, this comes in the form of social media shadow banning (not banned in any official sense, but merely the algorithm preventing someone's posts from showing up in feeds so you have to actually look for them). Someone in the group I'm part of, OCISA, suggested earlier this week that OCISA may have been shadow banned as they've stopped seeing their posts - the admin was unsure, as you don't get told. All of my most recent blogs have been taken down by Facebook in the interests of 'cyber security' - this makes no sense to me. If they argued that I was spamming, or self-promoting too hard, I'd think that a reasonable complaint even if it was annoying, but I don't think anyone who has actually read my blogs could argue that there are any security issues with them. My reports to Facebook have not been heeded at all. You could argue that this is me being cancelled.

In terms of unfollowing people on social media you don't like, or rescinding invitations to speak, I really don't have an opinion on this. I don't generally think it's a good idea to only listen to opinions from people you agree with, I'd always encourage open conversation and sometimes that includes quite difficult conversations. But I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't have a limit in who or what they're prepared to listen to, and the line is a very individual and personal thing. In each particular case, I tend to think that it's got absolutely nothing to do with me and is a matter for the individuals involved. And, it remains the truth that they've very rarely been cancelled. If an invitation has been rescinded because someone is so unpopular with the general public, they're probably someone with a very big platform that can't be cancelled. I'm hearing a lot at the moment about JK Rowling being cancelled because of her views on trans rights, and I always say, 'No, she hasn't been. JK Rowling is too rich and famous to cancel, she'll always be known and be capable of reaching an audience.' But most people are possible to cancel, and throughout our lifetime, many of us will be if we annoy someone powerful. And guess what? We won't even know it's happening.

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Difficult decisions and morally right ones

 It is very common, when politicians announce things they've done, are doing or are planning to do in the future, to hear them talk about the fact that these decisions have been very difficult for them. This takes place on both a local and a national level, and has become so frequent that a politician's general effectiveness tends to be measured against how difficult their job is seen to be. We often hear of Prime Ministerial candidates, 'Are they prepared to make the tough decisions?' But what exactly is a difficult decision, what about it makes it difficult and how does that square with decisions that are morally right?

In 2018, following two failed attempts, I decided to go vegan. I'd been vegetarian for just under ten years at that point, and for a long time I thought being vegetarian was enough; but once I learned how much animal cruelty is involved in the production of eggs and dairy products, I came to the conclusion that I could not morally support it. I'm very happy being vegan and I expect I will be for the rest of my life, but it wouldn't be true to say that becoming vegan hasn't at times been a source of some inconvenience for me - having to read the ingredients on every product I pick up at the supermarket, asking questions in restaurants about the food, and trying to think what I could cook that non-vegan friends might like. Becoming vegan was a difficult decision.

Last summer, the new cast members for the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child were announced, and when I was looking through them I was taken aback to discover that the part of Albus would be played by a good friend of mine. My immediate reaction was to congratulate him on getting such a high-profile West End role and assure him that I'd come to see it - but in truth, I haven't done, and I very much doubt I will in the remaining time that he's playing it. The reason for this is that the creator of the Harry Potter franchise, JK Rowling, has and continues to behave in a way that is extremely harmful to transgender people, in her increasingly hostile tweets, her refusal to listen to any dissenting opinion and, perhaps worst of all, her smug reiterations that she'll continue to donate her vast fortune to hate mongering transphobic groups. As much as I want to support my friend on a personal level, I feel that as someone who's campaigned for trans rights I cannot support this production. That was another difficult decision.

These decisions were both difficult and morally right. Let's look at what constitutes a difficult decision and a morally right one. A morally right decision is, very simply, a decision that helps someone, as opposed to a morally wrong decision which hurts someone. It can be a bit less black-and-white than that, as there are lots of decisions that help one person and hurt someone else, and at those times you have to work out whose need is greater and if there's any kind of compromise that can be made, but that's the basic formula.

A difficult decision is one that causes you some kind of inconvenience as an inevitable part of enacting it, as opposed to an easy one which causes you no inconvenience (or perhaps even alleviates some of the inconvenience you were already facing before that point). This inconvenience can be practical (as in, the time and energy it takes me to check that I'm morally okay with the food I'm eating) or emotional (as in, the disappointment I feel at not being able to support my friend who's received his big break). And if a difficult decision causes you this much inconvenience, the only real reason for making it is because it's the morally right one, the one that you'll be able to feel pride in taking rather than guilt. This is why difficult decisions and morally right ones very often go hand-in-hand.

But when politicians talk about making difficult decisions, I don't think they usually mean these kinds of things. Nick Clegg said that axing child benefit was a difficult decision. I've heard firsthand the various members of Monmouthshire County Council scramble to talk about what a difficult decision it was to close Tudor Street Day Centre, a resource which countless members of Monmouthshire's disabled community and their families relied on. Today, I saw Labour MP Darren Jones justifying Labour's colossal drop in members (they've lost a staggering 23,000 people in just the last two months) by saying it's because Labour are making 'difficult decisions' to prepare to govern. Jones doesn't elaborate in the article exactly which difficult decisions he's referring to, but he's obviously meaning things that are deeply unpopular with ordinary people if it's causing so many to leave the party.

I don't think that any of those decisions were difficult, because I don't see that they have caused the slightest iota of inconvenience to the people making them. Let me be clear on some political decisions which have fitted that category. It was difficult for Jeremy Corbyn to consistently promote socialist policies, knowing that the media and the establishment right would absolutely crucify him for it, causing irrevocable damage to his reputation and his career. I have a friend who dug under a road to a fossil fuel terminal to stop oil tankers - this was a difficult decision, both because it's extremely dangerous and because the legal consequences are severe (that friend is being sentenced next month, and expecting a custodial sentence). It was a difficult decision for Jacob Flickinger to leave his wife and baby son and go with his colleagues at World Central Kitchen to deliver food and aid to Palestinians, knowing that Israel was quite likely to attack them (tragically, they were all killed). It was a difficult decision for former US serviceman Aaron Bushnell to fatally set himself on fire as a statement about what Israel is doing to Palestine. All of these things caused a lot of inconvenience to the people who did them, and in some cases cost them their lives.

It is not a difficult decision for a politician to do the thing that they're under pressure to do from the capitalist establishment. That is, at best, just allowing themselves to be bullied and intimidated, and at worst a cynical action from someone who never went into politics to help anyone anyway. The only reason that these people say they were difficult decisions is because they know it will be unpopular, and they want to give the impression of having spent a lot of time thinking about it and weighed up all the pros and cons - essentially, to have behaved in a way that is considered rather than impulsive. I have no idea how long they spend thinking about these things before they decide to do them, and I don't especially care, but let's not pretend that a decision that causes great inconvenience to someone else and very little to you is in any way difficult. The person it's difficult for is the person who is on the receiving end of the consequences, who usually played no part in the decision.

Just as a final point, I'll add that life is all about decisions, and no one can be expected to make the right decision all the time. It's unreasonable to expect them to, and it's unreasonable to expect someone to never just resort to doing the thing that's easy. I don't think someone is evil if they eat meat, or if they buy Harry Potter stuff - it's very hard to stand up to things that are so in your face and require so much energy not to do, and I'm sure many of them are doing some hard and morally right things that I myself am not, so I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. And yes, this does include politicians - there are politicians that have bowed to pressure and voted in ways that have disappointed me that I still generally think are not too bad. But if you are doing that, and you're doing what you deep down know is the wrong thing, please do not insult me by making out that that decision caused you any difficulty. On the contrary - it's the easiest thing you can possibly do, and that's why there's so much cruelty and unfairness in the world.

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It gets worse before it gets better

 The sheer amount of horror coming out of Palestine is now so great that I find I'm pretty much unable to consume it all. The videos of the destruction of Al-Shifa hospital are so sickening that there aren't even words to describe it. I cannot physically get my head around how any human being is capable of this level of cruelty.

This isn't the first time horrors as great as these have occurred in the world - however, I think it is probably the first time that they've occurred on such a public scale. I've seen this situation described as 'the world's first live-streamed genocide', and I think that's pretty accurate. Astonishingly, the Israeli forces aren't even pretending to be following international law (or maybe they are, and there are things happening that are even worse than what we know about, but if that's the case it makes me wonder how bad it's actually possible for things to be). The reasons they're so brazen about it I'm not entirely clear on - they're either so strongly preconditioned that they truly believe that what they're doing is right and they aren't ashamed of it, or they've become so accustomed to the world's tendency to let them off the hook that they simply can't even be bothered to keep up any semblance of respectability.

I find myself in quite a difficult moral position over all of this. Here in the UK, I've been really heartened to see so many people prepared to stand up to Israel - I've been involved in Free Palestine campaigns for ten years, and I haven't seen widespread anger on this scale in the past. For the first time, it feels as though we're getting somewhere - at any rate, our Government and opposition have had no choice but to row back on their reluctance to call for a ceasefire, even though they still aren't even close to doing what is needed. I am optimistic that in the near future, Israel will be held account for its appalling and disgusting actions. However, I know that this is only the case because of how bad it is, and how much it's becoming public knowledge. Further activism will occur only when it gets worse. And if things start to improve, I'm concerned that public action will dip back down again, when it needs to be consistent and sustained.

This is something I've been wondering about in a more general sense recently. I've just finished Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which is set in what is arguably a dystopia (although some may present it as a utopia); where people are kept so content by being given superficial things that they never have the motivation to create any kind of social progress. Our own world is far closer to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - everything is in a terrible state, everyone knows that and many people are quite rightly deeply unhappy and cynical. Personally I think this is a preferable state of affairs because dissatisfaction is part of the key to having a movement; but the downside to that is the amount of suffering that takes place in the meantime. Is any amount of suffering worth it if it makes people prepared to stand up for what is right?

The answer isn't yes and it isn't no. I do believe we're moving in the right direction with Israel and Palestine, but I could easily be wrong about that - we may be moving in no positive direction at all, and even if we are it shouldn't be like this in the first place. There is nothing positive whatsoever about great suffering, not even if good things are created out of it - but that does not mean that we should shy away from creating good things out of suffering.

The same is true the other way around. I was reading an article the other day (I can't remember where it was) where someone lamented the fact that climate activism in the United States is nowhere near as strong and powerful as it was a couple of years ago. The reason for this, the person argued, is that Joe Biden has been stronger on climate policy than Donald Trump was, meaning that there's a perception that the war is being won and therefore that the pressure can be reduced a little. This is intensely dangerous, because although Joe Biden is a bit better than Donald Trump, that really isn't saying very much and withdrawing upon making a few minor victories could result in a worse state of affairs in the long run. The person who wrote that article was arguing that eventually, taking into account the amount of political activism each set of circumstances are likely to entail, climate policy might end up being better if Donald Trump ends up winning the Presidency again later this year than if Joe Biden gets a second term. As an activist, this creates an absolutely impossible situation. It means there's nothing you can reliably campaign for.

I can't give a creditable solution to this dilemma - all I can say is that there is a balance to be struck somewhere, and the worse things are the more likely it is that people are going to be motivated to change them. But the opposite is also true. I believe that hope and momentum are also essential for good activism. I think everyone has experienced the feeling of wanting to change something but feeling so dejected by the state of things that they don't see the point. I know I've felt like that myself - every progressively-minded person has. But I hope it creates some kind of optimism to remember that everyone in history who has ever achieved something had their days when they thought, 'Is this really worth it?' I'm not a religious person, but I do think that a big part of the appeal of religious texts is that it's reassuring to remember that people thousands of years ago felt the same emotions, hopes and fears as we do. They're a universal part of the human experience, and they aren't going to change.

So get out there, and change the world. Clean up rivers and beaches. Write articles bemoaning our descent into fascism. Donate to charities campaigning for a ceasefire in Palestine. Look into who your local parliamentary candidates are, and support the ones who don't just go along with their party status quo. And if things just feel like they're turning to shit, remember - the worse things get, the more likely it will be that there are loads of other people who feel the same way you do. I don't think there's ever been a period of time since I've been born that has quite as much of a window of opportunity as we have right now - a time when people are unhappy enough to want things to change, but we're still having enough success to have momentum. That moment will not last forever, but we have it right now. Let's utilise it.

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The importance of having activism in stories

 This blog comes with a shameless plug for a major project I've just launched, but let's take a moment before we get to it.

'Helly Johnston is miserable. Her mother is thinking of marrying again, but Helly doesn’t want a stepfather, certainly not this one. She sobs her way out of the classroom all the way down to the cloakroom and the depths of despondency. There, forceful Kitty Killin comes to the rescue.

Kitty’s not known for sensitivity or tact, but she’s been through it all herself - her mother married the silver-haired, chocolate-bearing, goggle-eyed Gerald. Kitty begins to unfold her tale of how her mother seems so changed by Gerald’s presence, of how her little sister takes to him at once, and how Old Goggle-Eyes remains a perpetual thorn in Kitty’s side.'

That is the blurb on a novel I listened to on cassette when I was about seven or eight, the first of many 'parent gets new partner that child can't stand' stories that dominate children's and YA fiction. The story is called Goggle-Eyes, it's by former Children's Laureate Anne Fine, and it won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

Now, you might be thinking, 'This is meant to be an activism blog, why is George recommending a children's book?' Well, because I re-read it in my twenties, and I realised that the main plot line of the sisters, their mother and their obnoxious stepfather is just a smokescreen. In spite of the title, the blurb and the promotion, this is actually a book about nuclear war, weapons and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The story is set in Scotland in the 1980s when the CND movement was particularly strong in Scotland, and if you read the book as an adult you can see that there's a political undercurrent running right the way through the narrative. The girls' mother, a nurse in a hospital, is an important member of the local CND branch, and regularly participates in calls to action against nuclear weapons. Her daughters, main character Kitty and younger sister Jude, have been brought up in and around this movement and have got to know their mother's activist friends, and Kitty herself is clearly becoming increasingly aware of the importance of the movement. And the reason why Kitty takes such an immediate dislike to her mother's new partner, the crux of the plot, is because he's actively opposed to this movement. His presence is a threat to everything Kitty is growing up to stand for, and she cannot understand why her mother, who feels as strongly about these issues as she does, wants to spend her time with him.

The current edition of the book has an afterword by the author Anne Fine, where she talks about her own history of activism and her thought process behind the book. As I expected, her need to tackle the issue of nuclear weapons and activism against them came first. It was after attending Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in 1981 that Fine had the idea to write this into one of her books. However, she stresses the importance of not just lecturing readers, so she had to turn it into a personal story about real characters as well. She invented the sisters, their mother and their new stepfather, turned them into a thriving family and set it with the backdrop of a world living under fear of nuclear war.

When I was a child, I wasn't exactly consciously aware of the political backdrop of this story - I was more just entertained by the characters' day-to-day lives in the same way I would be in any other story. However, I think something of this must have gone in subconsciously. When I re-read this book as an adult I got shivers down my spine, because so much of it resembles the kind of work that I've grown up to do. Like Anne Fine, I like to write stories that are about original characters, who have lives and interests and personalities that you can get into, but that are all influenced by the sociopolitical zeitgeist of the time.  More importantly, I think it's really important to tell stories about the lives of activists. Activists in stories are often depicted as what tvtropes.org calls a 'Soapbox Sadie' - defined as 'A character, often a child or teenager and almost Always Female, who cares deeply about all worthy causes. She wants to protect the environment from polluters, prove that women aren't inferior to men, and Free the Frogs. If she's the main character of the show, she spends a lot of time struggling with her idealism and whether it is too unrealistic. Soap Box Sadie is usually a post-hippie, the type of girl who would have been a hippie had she not been born in the wrong decade. Sometimes she's updated to the more recent counter-cultures of the time like emos, goths, hipsters, etc.' Examples of this kind of character include Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter stories when she goes off on one about the house-elves, and Lisa Simpson about various causes at various points in the show's history. And even that's assuming that they're depicted positively at all - in many stories, they're just depicted as slightly unhinged extremists.

Rarely do you have characters in stories who have their own lives and identities, are going on their own personal journey, but also are aware of the injustices of the world and aren't afraid to speak out about them. This is something that my partner and I have tried to do in our TV drama Square. We define Square as 'a TV drama series about the world today, the lives of many people living in Bristol and the bewilderment of spending your life trying to achieve something'. The main characters have lives, relationships, affairs, job interviews and lots of other personal stories, but they're all linked by wanting to do good in this world, and much of the story is set within the backdrop of Bristol's anti-war activism scene. We created this format in 2018 and then spent several years trying to develop it and turn it into something. In 2021 we created a pilot off the back of a crowdfunding campaign, which I will embed below. Since then, we've continued to try to turn it into a full series, but unfortunately the entertainment world has proven absolutely impossible to break into. It's bad enough at the best of times, but when your format rocks the boat as much as ours does, it sometimes feels like you'd have more luck buying a lottery ticket.

Happily, we aren't giving up. Particularly taking into account how terrible things are in the Gaza Strip and how important it is at the moment to have really good stories about anti-war activism, we've decided to try to fund the series ourselves. We are doing this by putting our pilot episode online and then taking pre-orders for the full series. This is not a crowdfunder, it's a pre-order - when we've made the full six-episode series, we'll sell it at £10 per episode or £50 for the whole series in one go (this is the equivalent of getting one episode free). So at the moment, we're taking payments until we've raised enough money to make the whole thing, and the people who have already paid will obviously get immediate access.

Although doing it this way is going to be incredibly hard, I'm also really excited about it because there's something beautifully meta about this. Our story is about grassroots people trying to achieve something off their own backs, and that's also what we're doing with our means of creation. If we pull this off, it will change the way the industry works - much of the time, people in the industry behave in a really arrogant, bullying way because they believe that you need them and that you'll take it. I really hope that much like the #metoo movement made great strides at reducing sexual harassment within the entertainment world, this will have a similar outcome and create a world in which people who want to create something special are treated with more respect.

Here is our pilot episode - it's 50 minutes long.

If you'd like to support us to make a full series, the pre-order form is here - there's a lot of information on there as well about how we came to be doing this work and what we hope to achieve with it.

It would mean so much to us if you'd help us out - I do truly believe that telling stories is the best way of changing the world for the better. Storytelling exists in every culture in the world, it unlocks the imagination and it makes people dream of something better. And having dreamed it, they start to demand it. Let's do this together.

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A lot of the time, basic human decency is enough

 I was very upset this week to read this story about a primary school in Scotland where parents have been offered versions of their children's class photos without the pictures of certain children, including children with cerebral palsy or additional complex needs. From reading into it, it seems that even the parents of the specific children concerned have been quick to stress that this wasn't the school's fault, but entirely the fault of the external photography company, Tempest Photography.

It's obviously extremely disturbing that in 2024, a photography company still believed that this was acceptable behaviour, and I'm immensely glad that the school, its pupils, the pupils' parents and the media are holding it to account. As bad as this instance was, it would seem to be a one-off, and the fact that it's caused such outrage is, I think, a sign that we're making great strides forward in recognising disabled children and wanting to treat them equally (I think in the past, such an attitude would have been shrugged off, and perhaps children with disabilities would have been barred from taking part in the photography session in the first place).

There is nowadays a lot of talk about positive representation of people with disabilities in the media. I agree with this, although I do believe that this often doesn't translate into creating actual decent services that include them (I've written about this on previous blogs such as this one). Although I have witnessed services for the disabled crumble to pieces under successive neoliberal administrations, I am at least satisfied that regular folk on the ground are keen for their disabled friends and family members to be recognised and treated with respect and dignity. However, I also feel that there is a consistent misunderstanding as to what this means, and I'd like to spend a few moments discussing these misconceptions.

When I was at University, a friend of mine with a severe learning difficulty invited me along to a group that they went to. I went to it, and on the wall was a poster with tips on how to treat people with learning difficulties. The tips included 'Don't bully them', 'Include them' and 'Try to be nice to them'. I can't remember all of them, but I remember finding that poster immensely patronising. I remember talking to one of the people who was running the session about this, and pointing out that there was not one single item on the list that I didn't think was just basic human decency that should be afforded to everyone. She was interested in what I had to say, and I felt she was taking this on board.

It was this instance that made me think that a lot of the ways in which we discuss people with learning difficulties is based in the idea that they should be some kind of exception to the ruthlessness of the world. To be told to 'try to be nice' to a particular person because they're particularly vulnerable suggests that we aren't going to try to be nice to them just because they're a human being. This whole model of disability rights is based around the idea that the world is horrible, as are most of the people in it, so the most we can hope for is that some of the people who are struggling won't have to experience how horrible it is because we'll take a moment to smile at them and pretend that everything is okay. This is not only extremely condescending to anyone who has one of these conditions, but also ignores the fact that lots of disabilities are invisible, everyone can suffer, and everyone deserves a bit of compassion in their life.

As I've written about previously, my partner set up a community group in Abergavenny called The Gathering, which aims to restore some of the services for adults with learning difficulties, disabilities and mental health problems that have been cut in recent years. The group still has a long way to go before it can be truly inclusive to the members of the community who have the most severe needs, but as a new project is absolutely thriving - every time I pop by one of the sessions, there's an enormous group of people there smiling and having a good time. One of the most important things about it is that no one has to qualify for anything to attend. As long as they aren't behaving in an abusive way or anything, anyone is allowed to drop in, by themselves, or with a friend or family member or a carer - they don't have to explain why they're there, or be assessed and judged to be vulnerable in any way. This is a big part of the model of needs that I'd like to see adopted more widely - that of people striving to be there for one another and help one another, without necessarily knowing or understanding why that person needs help. You don't need to be an expert on someone's condition to be able to help them.

In fact, I sometimes think that being an expert on someone's condition can be actively harmful, because that may cause them to be seen as a condition rather than as a person. My partner has also written a novel called Vulnerable Voices, which is inspired by his time working in care (although it is fictitious). The main character in it is a boy in his late teens called Ellis, who finds himself volunteering with the disabled after finishing school mainly because he's not sure what else to do and falls into it by accident. Within the story, Ellis proves far and away the most adept character at understanding what the service-users need and helping them to sort out their lives. It's told in the first person from Ellis' perspective and he himself doesn't particularly realise how exceptional he is at this work - but it's him not realising that makes him so exceptional. Because with his unassuming nature, his lack of self-consciousness and his enjoyment of cheesy pop culture, Ellis is just there, talking to people exactly as he'd talk to anyone else and not thinking twice about it. For the service-users, who perhaps are more used to being othered and talked down to even by those who mean well, this could be a rare moment of normality in their lives. I think this is something that we could all do with remembering - you don't have to know details about someone's life or think that they're a radically different kind of person to you, because they probably aren't, and sometimes a kind word or a thoughtful gesture is enough.

One more thing... we may talk about 'learning difficulties', but it's important to remember that we can't access other people's brains and we don't know their level of understanding. There's a young man whose family is involved in our disability rights campaigns whose family often brings him to the council meetings - he's a wheelchair-user, is unable to talk and has extremely complex needs, and to look at him I think a lot of people's natural assumptions would be that he probably doesn't really understand. And perhaps he doesn't - I don't know him well, and I wouldn't know. But I remember watching him at a meeting once, and thinking, 'What if he does actually understand everything? What if he's able to follow it all, and is frustrated by the fact that he can't communicate this to us?' This is a moment that I've never forgotten, and ever since I've always tried to talk to everyone, no matter who they are, with the expectation that they have just as high a level of understanding as I do, even if they can't show it. Because for all I know they might do, and it's disrespectful to their dignity and intelligence to suggest anything less. Someone once told me that it's ableist to assume that someone else has the same capacity that you yourself do... but I think the opposite is true. I actually believe it's ableist to assume that they don't.

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My love-hate relationship with the Green Party

I'm from Bristol, which has a very prominent Green Party presence, and I'm the son of quite a prominent Green Party activist, so I grew up in and around the party and have been introduced to quite a few of their most high-profile politicians, such as their first and only MP Caroline Lucas. Their current co-leader, Carla Denyer, is someone who I used to stand with on picket lines before she was a politician - back in 2011 we got barred from Costa Coffee together when we protested against them forcing their way in on Gloucester Road (I was going to link to my blog at the time about that, but having given it a re-read I'm embarrassed to! It's in the archives if you want to find it - I apologise in advance for how incredibly cringe it is!)

Suffice to say, I have an awful lot of respect for the Green Party. I've campaigned for them, I've signed their petitions and I've voted for them at the vast majority of elections and democratic exercises since I've been old enough to vote. I also suffer from great anxiety and fears connected to climate change, so the Green Party's priorities are usually my priorities. But having a lot of respect for someone does not make them immune from criticism, and there have been quite a few times that I've also had quite a bit of scepticism about Green Party activity.

2019 was the year that I started getting a bit frustrated by the Green Party, having previously really appreciated their take-no-prisoners attitude towards the right-wing establishment. But when we had a really strong left-wing movement led by Jeremy Corbyn, I felt that this was often undermined by the Green Party. Corbyn was making all the same socialist arguments that Caroline Lucas had been making in Parliament for years, I felt that this was a really opportune moment to build strong alliances with Labour, but I felt the Green Party did not take them. If anything I felt that the Green Party allowed the Tories to dictate the terms of the conversation, continually taking the bait over Leave vs Remain and avoided focussing on the issues that actually mattered. This culminated in Caroline Lucas proposing a completely nonsensical cross-party consensus of all-female anti-Brexit MPs. I was very confused by exactly how this had come about - to this day, I'm still not clear if this was actual Green Party policy that had been voted on at conference, or Lucas' own vanity project. I wasn't clear why this matter had been turned into a gender issue - a lot of the MPs who Lucas approached about this consensus seemed to have been chosen purely because they were female and anti-Brexit, even if their voting records had been profoundly anti-socialist and anti-environment. Also, if Lucas wanted to make this about identity politics, it backfired when it was pointed out to her that all of her handpicked female anti-Brexit MPs were white. I say this as someone who's met Caroline Lucas and has generally been very impressed by her in the House of Commons, and to be fair to her she did later hold up her hands and admit that she'd messed this one up. I found that very refreshing, because most of the time we just hear them bluster around things and pretend their present positions are what they've always held - it's so incredibly rare to hear a politician say, 'I got this wrong and I'm sorry', and it showed an extraordinary level of honesty and integrity on the part of Caroline Lucas. Nevertheless, I still don't know what she was thinking. I feel the time she spent on that project could have been spent forming alliances with politicians who were actual socialists, rather than prioritising being anti-Brexit and being female. I think if she and the Green Party had been a bit more strategic here, it could perhaps have done a better job of overcoming the likes of Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

Come the 2019 election, I felt the Green Party continued to be more focussed on being anti-Brexit than on anything else, which resulted in them seeming more chummy with Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats than with Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. I found this an exceptionally harmful and damaging decision, for a few reasons. Firstly, although I voted Remain in 2016, I can respect the fact that the UK voted to leave the EU, and that continually campaigning against a democratic vote is not a good look (I'll also acknowledge on this that I said the opposite for quite a while after the Brexit vote, and campaigned to reverse the outcome. I'm not a hypocrite, but I'm capable of changing my mind and in hindsight I can see that I was wrong - our focus should have been on making sure that all our rights and opportunities were protected after Brexit, and if we'd done that maybe we wouldn't have had such a destructive Brexit as we eventually got). Secondly, I'm of the generation that supported the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg in 2010, and we were let down when he took the Lib Dems into coalition with the Tories. The protests over tuition fees at that time were the start of my becoming so politically active in the first place, and Jo Swinson was a part of that Government. She expressly ruled out ever supporting the socialist principles of Labour at that time, but she did not make such a rock-solid commitment to not working with the Tories. I didn't trust the Liberal Democrats then, I still do not trust them now, and the fact that the Green Party tried to make alliances with them was the main reason why, for the first time ever in 2019, I did not vote Green. I voted Labour, for my local incumbent Thangam Debbonaire, in spite of the fact that my friend Carla (the now co-leader) was the Green Party's candidate and in spite of the fact that I hadn't been very impressed by Debbonaire in the past.

On reflection, I believe I was wrong to vote Labour, and I've discussed this before. Thangam Debbonaire has proven a big disappointment, and until I moved out of the constituency last year I regularly wrote to her with various frustrations I had with her actions. I believe that I should have swallowed my pride and voted Green, in particular because the issues I had with the Green Party in 2019 were not Carla Denyer's fault (I don't know if she even approved of them). I've been delighted to see Carla become co-leader of the party - truthfully, I can think of no one better.

Having said that, I'm still not desperately impressed by the Green Party's tactics for election. It was recently announced that at the next election, for the first time, they plan to stand a candidate in every constituency seat in the country. I'm very glad to see them standing in more seats, and given how poorly both Labour and the Conservatives are performing at the moment, I genuinely hope to see them win more than their sole seat in Brighton Pavilion (which Caroline Lucas is standing down from anyway). However, standing in every seat in the country is in my opinion a complete own goal, and fails to take into account the circumstances of each seat. As I've written about previously, I believe that party politics is dead, and I'm a big supporter of OCISA, a campaign group that seeks to stand really good socialist independent candidates against establishment politicians - most particularly in Holborn St Pancras, where Andrew Feinstein intends to stand against Keir Starmer. If the Green Party would get behind campaigns like Andrew's, it would go some way towards making up for the fact that in 2019 they failed to support what was at the time a valid socialist alternative. If the Green Party seeks to split the anti-establishment vote in constituencies like these, I believe this could become a major obstacle towards their goal of climate justice.

Actually, my problem with the Green Party is the polar opposite of my problem with the Labour Party. My issue with Labour (its present incarnation anyway) is that it is run as an absolute top-down endeavour, where no one is allowed to express any opinion other than those which have been sanctioned by the leadership. The Green Party has the opposite problem - the politicians who represent it vary hugely in quality. As long as someone believes in taking immediate action on climate change, their views on other things can be wildly different from one another. Through our campaigns to improve services for the disabled in the Monmouthshire area, my partner and I have interacted quite a lot with Green Party councillor Ian Chandler, and I've written in the past about the difficulties I've had with Councillor Chandler's attitude, which has often felt quite dismissive of the needs of the most vulnerable (to be fair, they do now seem to be a lot more supportive of my partner's work than they have been in the past, so I'm really hoping something has improved there). But it's indicative of my point that although action on climate change and environmental matters generally is quite rightly the Green Party's core aim, that is not enough. It's possible to be in favour of these things, and still have views that harm the most vulnerable. In particular, there are some kinds of environmentalist whose views can slip into what is called 'eco-fascism' - the belief that the world is overpopulated, and that in the interests of dealing with climate change it would be good if large swathes of humanity died out (which is incredibly unfair, as the people who stand to lose the most from environmental degradation are those who have done the least to cause it).

Am I in support of the Green Party as a political organisation? Yes. Will I vote for them again in the future? Probably. Do I think it stands to improve a great deal under its current leadership? Absolutely I do - I have great respect for Carla Denyer, both from knowing her personally as a human being and from her political work, which includes causing Bristol to become the first city in the UK to declare a climate emergency. I don't know as much about Adrian Ramsay as I do about Carla Denyer, but I have faith that he's a very good person as well. However, that does not mean that the Green Party is always run especially well - in fact at times, I think it's been run abysmally. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well, and the Green Party's work is more worth doing than that of any other political party in the UK.

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