An open letter to the UK's climate political prisoners

The following is a joint email I wrote to all of the UK's current political prisoners who have been jailed due to their climate activism. You can do the same at emailallprisoners@gmail.com. Or, if you'd prefer to email individual prisoners directly, a complete list of their contact details can be found here.

Dear Amy, Noah, Ella, Margaret, Indigo, Daniel K, Paul, George, Gale, Theresa, Paul, Phoebe, Cressie, Roger, Lou, Daniel S, Lucia, Rosa, Rory, Adam, Luke W and Luke E,

My name is George Harold Millman, and I'm a political campaigner and blogger based in South Wales. My blog, which I've been writing since I was seventeen, is called The Rebel Without A Clause, and I try to use it to whip up support for progressive politics, social justice and to empower ordinary people to make a stand against the establishment.

I am writing to you mainly to thank you for all your hard work. I cannot imagine how intimidating it must be (though I'm sure not as intimidating as the climate catastrophe) to stand in front of a judge and stay true to your principles in the way you have done. The courage and tenacity you have displayed is an inspiration to all of us. Nearly everything we have today, from the right to vote for women to the abolition of slavery, was fought for by brave activists, some of whom were jailed or even killed for their work. I believe that you are the modern-day equivalent. You are on the right side of history, I hope you know that.

I am not a climate scientist, but I do read a lot of the commentary from scientists, and I would also like to say that I believe that we will win this fight and avert the worst of the climate emergency. Perhaps this is naive of me. However, I think this win is already happening. There's a quote, commonly attributed to Gandhi (although I don't believe in reality he ever actually said it: 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.' I actually think the entire reason world Governments and powers are being so heavy-handed just at the minute is that we are winning - if not from a scientific level then from a social one. More people are aware of climate change than ever before, and are willing to take the action that needs to be taken in order to deal with the problem. The fact that we haven't solved it yet is entirely on world leaders, and world leaders are both replaceable and persuadable. I will continue to write and campaign to get you released. I have written to my MP about the case of those of you who have become known as the Whole Truth Five specifically, and the fact that you were not able to properly state your case in court. Unfortunately, my MP has not as of yet responded, but I will not let this matter go, and I will continue to talk about it with as many people as I can.

I have a suggestion as well. Recently, the subject of prison overcrowding has been quite a hot topic, particularly with the new Government. There have been people who have been convicted of far lesser offences than yours who have only received suspended sentences, with prison overcrowding cited as one of the reasons. Have you considered having a sit-in and refusing en masse to leave prison when it comes to the end of your sentence? Or, if you're physically removed, sit outside as close to the prison gates as you can? Perhaps this action would a) send the message that prison is not a deterrent to climate action and that you aren't afraid and b) make an important point about political prisoners being detained when the prisons are overcrowded in the first place. Maybe I'm wrong and that it wouldn't work, but I thought I'd suggest it in case it hasn't been thought of.

At any rate, I hope that my email has given you each of you one less dark night, and has reminded you that there are still people out here fighting both for your release, and for an end to the environmentally destructive neocapitalist system which has enslaved us for too long and is destroying the only home we've ever known. You are not forgotten, will not be forgotten, and we will win this.

Best wishes,

George Harold Millman

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The perpetual helplessness of politicians

'If I spend my life on the losing side, you can lay me down knowing that I tried' Grace Petrie

 The Prime Minister Keir Starmer will announce that 'things will get worse before they get better' in his first keystone speech as Prime Minister this week. It's a stark contrast to the slogan 'Things can only get better' that Tony Blair was elected on in 1997, and whose campaign Keir Starmer and the current incarnation of the Labour Party seems to be most inspired by. (And, to be fair to Blair, a fair few things did get better for ordinary people in the pre-Iraq days, and I say that as someone who is no fan of Blairism).

The Government and the Prime Minister at the moment seem very keen to manage expectations. They say that things are far worse than they anticipated before the election, that the Tories have caused so much harm that it's going to take time to clear up. Personally, I'm quite sceptical about this. During the election campaign, the Institute for Fiscal Studies criticised both Labour and the Tories for what they called a 'conspiracy of silence' - essentially, that they'd been shady and unclear about exactly how they'd deal with the country's economic woes. This was then dismissed by Keir Starmer as 'defeatism'. I don't think the party can reasonably claim that it's only recently learned of information that has caused them to have to backtrack on things. I doubt they're telling the truth, but even if they are, it's not a very good look for a new Government to have not made themselves aware of these matters beforehand.

I want to talk about something else though, and that is the way that upon being elected to Government in coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, the Conservative Party led by David Cameron portrayed a very similar narrative. We were repeatedly told of this note that had supposedly been left for them by the outgoing Labour Government that said, 'Good luck, there's no money left!' Whenever the Government was doing anything that was unpopular with the public, it was never done on moral principle. It was always because the previous Government did such an awful job that we simply have to save money, and there is no alternative. We were fed economic gibberish like 'Labour maxed out this country's credit card' to justify the necessity of policies that harmed the most vulnerable people in our society.

In reality, there's quite a lot wrong with this kind of message. To start with, there isn't a national credit card, so it can't be maxed out. The budget for a country is quite significantly different than a budget for a household, because the money you spend on a country will be replenished when people have more disposable income. It's a line that was invented to take advantage of the fact that most people haven't been taught how economics actually works. Secondly, it's untrue that any incoming Government doesn't know how bad (or otherwise) things are. Their entire job in opposition was to scrutinise the previous Government, establish what they were doing and what they themselves would do differently. Thirdly, there is no discernible difference between the modus operandi of either of the two main parties. Whichever one is in power at any one time always says that the previous Government did things badly - but the things they did that were bad are just being continued ad nauseam.

Think about that for a moment. In 2010, the Tory-Lib Dem coalition Government criticised Labour under Blair and Gordon Brown for mismanaging the country's finances, and announced that there'd have to be cuts to public services to make up for it. Now, the new Labour Government is criticising the previous Tory Government and their five Prime Ministers for exactly the same thing, and announcing there'll have to be cuts to things like winter fuel payments to make up for it. And if the Tories ever get back in, no doubt they'll accuse Labour of the same thing. And how will it need to be made up for? Almost certainly, by continuing to harm the most vulnerable, whilst the super-rich get progressively wealthier. This is always the solution, no matter who's in power - and the public finances never improve for the ordinary, because the system just does not work.

There's a reason why the actions of successive Governments always have this justification. The reason is that if politicians told the truth - that they are ideologically opposed to social progress and equality for all - there is no way that ordinary people would put up with it. The only way to justify the unjustifiable is to say, 'We had to do it! The other guys left us with no choice!' And note that it's very rare that the exact logic here is explained - precisely how the previous Government got it wrong, and precisely how the course of action being taken now is going to deal with that problem. Politicians are generally pretty vague when challenged on that, and they take advantage of the fact that political education in the UK is sorely lacking to get away with it. Still, it doesn't work forever. Eventually the people get fed up with hearing excuse after excuse, and are ready to vote them out. And when that happens, the other party is always there to present itself as a sensible option who's ready to resolve all the problems (well, almost ready. They will be ready after a few years, when they've made a few more cuts that the other guys forced them to do) and the whole ghastly cycle starts over again. There's never a point when the crisis is over and we can get on with our lives. The crisis is permanent. That's how the system operates.

The thing that I'm the most sick of in politics, especially politics that pretends to be progressive, is the constant helplessness. Everything about politicians is utterly helpless. Ask a politician for anything, anything at all, that would benefit your life, and 99% of the time the response you will get is something along the lines of, 'We'd love to be able to do this, we hope to be able to do this in the future, we're going to work towards doing this, but we can't do it right now because of xyz.' I've written multiple times on this blog about mine and my partner Owen's work towards re-opening Tudor Street Day Centre in Abergavenny, a former hub for vulnerable adults which was closed down during the 2020 lockdown. It was in late 2022 that it was announced that the building would be demolished, and we've been campaigning to reverse this decision and re-open it ever since. The campaign has become extremely well-known and popular in the local area, and Owen stood as a Parliamentary candidate for Monmouthshire on this platform at the 2024 General Election. Recently, we received the very welcome news that the campaign has been successful, and that Tudor Street Day Centre will re-open its doors later this year.

Make no mistake, the reasons why the building is re-opening are as follows:

1) Because the campaign became very well-known and popular locally

2) Because my partner's decision to stand for Parliament made this an election issue, raised at every hustings

3) Because the local community group The Gathering, which is run by volunteers, created a convincing pitch on exactly how the service could be run going into the future

You might notice that none of these things have very much to do with politicians' imagination or creativity. This is because they don't. For the last few years, we've been given excuse after excuse from politicians, of all parties, for not re-opening this building. We've been told everything - the money doesn't exist, they need that space to house the homeless, none of the vulnerable adults who used the building want it anymore, the building has fallen into disrepair and will need far too much maintenance for it to be worth the energy - and none of it was true. All of this came from the inclination almost all politicians have to make excuses for not doing things rather than finding ways in which they can, and the only reason it's changed now is because ordinary people have made it too embarrassing for them to carry on pretending. We only found out a few weeks ago that the campaign has been successful, and we're hoping the building will be re-opened within the next month. So in reality, it hasn't taken very long to organise. It really hits home what could have been done years ago, had the politicians involved not wasted time with ineffectual excuses.

In our society, we've become so accustomed to this kind of political helplessness that you even see non-politicians engaging in it. This was incredibly evident as the partner of an independent election candidate - Owen and I had even close friends say to me, 'You won't win' upon learning what we were doing, and I really didn't think that was the most helpful comment, and I still don't. I saw quite an interesting forum discussion recently about Shockat Adam, the independent candidate who unseated Labour's Jon Ashworth in the constituency of Leicester South on a pro-Palestine stance. I was quite taken aback by the number of people who were quite scathing about this new independent MP and the fact that his constituents chose him over an experienced Labour Party candidate. The suggestion from a lot of people was, 'Well, what will he do about Palestine? We have very little control over the Israelis.' And whether that's true or not really depends on how you look at it, and in what respect we're talking about 'we' (as an entire Government, I think we could do something about Israel if we actually decided to, but admittedly an independent MP may struggle). But I think a question of more importance is, if the situation in Gaza is the most important thing to you, why shouldn't you vote out a representative of a party that isn't taking a strong stand against Israel? Why should you give the benefit of the doubt to someone like that? If we've got at least the pretence of a democracy, doesn't that mean your vote should actually be trying to achieve something?

I cannot exaggerate enough how capable human beings are when they put their minds to something. It's quite common to look at humans for their flaws rather than their strengths, and given how much we've damaged the planet it's understandable to do that, but I think we're capable of pretty great things as well. We're an exceptionally creative and social species. We've invented astonishing amounts of technology. We've learned insanely sophisticated things about human psychology and philosophy. We've even put people on the fucking moon. We've achieved so much in the few thousand years we've been on this planet of ours, and none of it was done by making excuses. The resources exist to do absolutely anything we set our minds to, if we allow ourselves. But if we're going to do that, we have to let go of this tendency we have to just be utterly helpless, act as if history is over and that because of the actions of other people, the current status quo is the only way things are ever going to be from now on.

It doesn't have to be like this. We can come together and change systems in a single day if we decide to. We do not exist to find reasons not to do things, and politicians are certainly not elected for that.

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The Imane Khelif case shows how prejudice harms everyone

 For the last few weeks, the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has been in the news frequently. Her success at the 2024 Olympics, winning a gold medal in the women's welterweight, has led to much speculation on social media that she might actually be a man. A similar situation has occurred with the Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, although to less public scrutiny.

To make clear to anyone who isn't sure, Imane Khelif is not a trans woman. In her native Algeria, trans people are not accepted, and there is no way she would be allowed to compete as a woman had she not been assigned female at birth. She isn't, to the best of anyone's understanding, even intersex. There was an occasion last year when she and Lin were disqualified from the International Boxing Association 's Women's World Boxing Champions, allegedly for failing eligibility tests. However, the International Boxing Association is not considered by the International Olympic Committee to be a reliable body. Later last year, it was formally stripped of its international federation status, having previously been suspended due to governance, finance and corruption issues. The exact testing methodology that Khelif and Lin apparently failed has never been revealed. There is no evidence that their chromosomes had any relevance to this decision. Given that the body that made this decision is discredited, its opinion on this matter, and on all matters, should be treated with scepticism anyway.

In all the discourse around Imane Khelif, I've seen quite a few people on the left say, 'But what if she had been a trans woman? Would you defend her then?' And that's a fair question. To be clear, I do not believe it would matter if Imane Khelif had been a trans woman. I do not believe it would matter if she had been intersex. I'm a firm believer in trans athletes being able to compete as a member of their considered gender in sports, and truthfully I think that most sportspeople are as well. If we're going to start policing the differences in people's bodies to that degree, it creates an absolutely impossible precedent to enforce, because every successful sportsperson in history has had some kind of biological advantage over their peers. As an example, the reason Michael Phelps was able to hold his breath underwater for such a long time is because his body had a quirk which meant he produced half the lactic acid that most people's do. In the twenty years trans sportspeople have been able to compete in the category of their preferred gender in the UK, there hasn't been an influx of trans champions (i.e. more than the law of averages would expect). I think most people would struggle to name three trans sportspeople.

But the fact that this has caused a cis woman so much harm emphasises a point that I've been trying to make for a long time, which is that transphobia harms cis people. We hear quite often people arguing that women's toilets, changing rooms, refuges and so on should not include trans women 'for safety measures'. It's a bullshit argument anyway because trans women are some of the most unsafe people in the world, but to keep this logic going, how exactly would this be enforced? Are we intending to have genital inspections for everyone who wants to enter? Is this the way you intend to keep women safe? There is never an answer, because as I've said in the past, this conversation has never been about finding a solution. All it's about is stoking up hate and suspicion between each other. Not to mention the fact that even if those kind of extreme measures were enforced, Imane Khelif would still pass that test. She's a cis woman, she has female genitalia, she was assigned female at birth. Although it's such a serious case of cruelty and aggression towards an innocent person, it is also quite laughable that a group of bigots who have spent years insisting that the only thing that makes you a man or a woman is what genitals you have suddenly backtracking and saying that it's about something else as well. These people will move the goalposts whenever they like to back up whichever toxic point they're trying to make at the time, because there is no consistent logic behind the argument. The argument is motivated purely by spite.

I know that some people will question why, as an advocate for social justice, I've focussed my blog about how prejudice harms privileged majorities rather than marginalised minorities. The reason is that I think we already know about small vulnerable communities and how much they are harmed by prejudice, and I don't think my voice would add very much to that argument. I think prejudice is an awful, terrible thing, and it's something I've experienced myself. But a valid question to ask whenever someone doesn't like something is, 'Is anyone better off as a result of this thing?' And the answer, in this case at least, is no. No one is better off as a result of prejudice. If they were, I still wouldn't like it but I'd have a little more patience with it, because at least I'd know that someone's quality of life had improved because of it even if not everyone's had. But it doesn't work like that.

A few years ago I read an article by Dr Jessica Taylor (which has since been taken down, and unfortunately the author turned out to be a bit transphobic herself but she was right about this) entitled 'Why I Don't Want Women To Become Equal To Men'. Admittedly I read it because I can never resist a controversial title, but I was really intrigued by her points. Her argument was that in saying that women should be equal to men, we're presenting the current male experience as something that women should aspire towards having, and that this would actually not be at all desirable. If women were equal to men, it wouldn't just be things like being paid more or being respected more. It would also mean that women would commit violent crime at the same rates as men do, be unable to express their emotions in ways other than anger, would have increased cancer mortality rates because of shame preventing them from seeking treatment the first time they find a lump. The fact that men experience these things is because the patriarchy harms them as well as harming women, and if the aim of feminism is to dismantle the patriarchy, this is something that men would experience a net benefit from.

Men do not benefit from the patriarchy. Cis people do not benefit from transphobia. White people do not benefit from racism. Straight people do not benefit from homophobia. If you're unfortunate enough to live in a patriarchal, transphobic, racist, homophobic society (and we are all unfortunate enough to live there) the best you can hope for is to have a marginally less hard time of it than someone else. Not everyone suffers from prejudice to the same extent, but if it exists we all suffer from it somewhat. This is the reason why the far-right is so successful in perpetuating these forms of prejudice; because ultimately everyone knows that they're suffering, and when they're constantly being told how privileged they are and they really don't feel very privileged it can be very easy to be persuaded to fear the 'other'. And then the whole ghastly thing continues to spiral, and nothing ever improves.

There should be no opposition, even from the world's most selfish person, to break down our systems and rebuild them with equality in mind. If we did that, every single one of us would be happier. This ought to be the least controversial proposal in the world, and I believe that if we stopped pitting us all against one another we would be capable of doing so.

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The mental gymnastics at the heart of the Zionist movement

 Earlier this year, at a screening of the film Israelism hosted by my local Palestine society, I asked the question, 'Is it possible to say something about Israel that is derogatory and incorrect, but isn't an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory?'

The response I got was that even negative statements about Israel that are correct are considered to be anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. I think everyone who tries to secure freedom for Palestinians has experienced this at times, but for the sake of this argument I wanted to focus on things that were incorrect. No one is right 100% of the time. Everyone goes through life at some point being led to believe something about someone else that turns out not to be true, often things that are unflattering. Upon learning something is untrue, sometimes your opinion about that person or that body changes. At other times it doesn't change, because your general opinion of them was built on other things that were true rather than just the one that isn't (for example, I don't believe that Keir Starmer was the reason that Jimmy Savile wasn't convicted in his lifetime, from what I've seen I think this claim is unfair, but my giving Starmer the benefit of the doubt on that one thing doesn't change my negative opinion of the hordes of other things he's done of which I disapprove).

Every state in the world will occasionally have people make claims about it that turn out not to be true. Sometimes these claims might be made on purpose to spread disinformation, and sometimes someone may have just made a mistake. Israel is not exempt from this. But I have never heard an inaccurate statement on Israel being corrected without the person concerned being accused of spreading an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Naturally, some inaccurate claims might be; if a claim relied on offensive tropes about the Jewish community (such as the idea that Jews have great money and power, for example) I can understand why that would be anti-Semitic. But if something was just inaccurate, in the same way a claim about China or Russia might be, the anti-Semitism complaint doesn't quite seem to make sense.

A prominent example of this is when the then Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey was sacked from her role as Shadow Education Secretary after she shared an article from the Independent on Twitter by the actress Maxine Peake. The article, which was about police brutality and had only mentioned Israel in passing, had claimed that the technique used to kill George Floyd in the USA (kneeling on his neck) had been taught by the Israeli secret services. This, of course, is not provable. Even if that technique is used by Israeli law enforcement (something I have no idea on) it cannot be proved that that this was where the officer who killed George Floyd learned of it. Peake herself acknowledged that making this claim had been a mistake, and apologised. But Rebecca Long-Bailey's decision to share the article (which was published in the Independent, considered to be a reputable news source) caused her to be accused of spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Is suffocating people by kneeling on their necks something that's typically associated with Jews? If so, I have never heard of it. I think Maxine Peake shouldn't have made that claim and it's right that she apologised for doing so, but I think she was just wrong rather than acting with racist intent.

Of course, as I said at the very start, accusations of anti-Semitism fly around constantly even when people say accurate things about the actions of the state of Israel, let alone inaccurate ones. The ongoing genocidal war in Gaza has had countless instances where people have been accused of anti-Semitism merely for calling it a genocide, even when the highest courts in the world have argued a plausible case for this. It's important to make clear that there is very little consistency here in terms of what words or actions constitute anti-Semitism. The only consistency in it comes from not what the person has said, but from what politics they support. Most of UK politics subscribes to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, not all of which I agree with, but there are a fair few points that I do support as well. For instance, I agree strongly with the IHRA's assertion that Jewish people should not be held collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel. Judaism is a peaceful religion, and I have met so many Jews, many of them through Palestine campaigns, who are appalled by the actions of the state of Israel and are indignant to be used as a justification for them. But this rule is applied very inconsistently. The rules about not equating Zionism inherently with Jewishness only apply to people who oppose Zionism. People who support Zionism equate the two things all the time without any criticism or consequences. And anti-Semitic tropes are used frequently in other ways as well. A few years ago, Labour MP Lisa Nandy appeared on BBC Radio 4 to talk about kicking anti-Semitism out of the Labour Party, during which she described anti-Semitism as 'a very specific form of racism that punches up rather than punching down'. To the best of my knowledge, Nandy has never qualified what she meant by this, but it seems to me that her logic did rely on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. The concepts of punching up or punching down mean the morality difference between attacking someone of higher or lower social standing to you (for instance, a stand-up comedian making fun of the Prime Minister is in a very morally different place to someone who makes fun of a disabled child). For anti-Semitism to primarily involve punching up, you have to take it as read that Jews are likely to be people of high social standing - those with power, money and influence. This is one of the most common anti-Semitic tropes and if a politician on the left had made that comment they'd surely get into trouble for it (and I would support them getting into trouble for it as well). But because of the general political standpoint that Lisa Nandy had, she apparently didn't face any consequences for this and is still a senior frontbencher within the Labour Party.

With what's been happening in Gaza over the last year, the way that anti-Semitic discourse has increased in public life far outshines the days when you could argue about punching up or punching down though. Within the last week, Labour MP Clive Lewis has faced calls to have the whip withdrawn after writing this tweet:

Lewis' tweet does not mention Jews at all. In fact, aside from in the screenshot which is from the Guardian, it doesn't even mention Israel. It only mentions the daily inhumanity being meted out to Palestinians, which is inarguable, and the link between that and rising Islamophobia in the UK. There is only one way of interpreting this comment as being anti-Semitic, and it involves using logic which considers support for the murder of children and Islamophobia as inextricable parts of being Jewish. I think almost any Jewish person would strongly object to this characterisation of Judaism. If I heard any of my comrades opposing the genocide in Gaza characterising Jews in this way, I would say to them in no uncertain terms that they are absolutely not my comrade. But again, if you're in support of the state of Israel, you can say this kind of thing. The rules apply only to people with certain kinds of politics.

I don't believe Clive Lewis will be suspended from the party for this tweet, mainly because I think it would have happened by now if it was going to. But more broadly, if we're to achieve any kind of peace, either domestically or internationally, we need to be abundantly clear what the rules are about what you can and can't say, and be safe in the knowledge that they apply equally to everyone. If they're applied inconsistently, we all suffer - but Jews are some of the ones who suffer most. The actress Miriam Margolyes, who is Jewish, has been quoted as saying that the way in which the Zionist movement has caused the peaceful Jewish community to look on the international stage almost feels as if Hitler has won. I was very moved to hear this, and I know a lot of Jewish people who feel similarly. The mental gymnastics that are used just to shut up political opponents on this will in the long run benefit no one.

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Do all lives still matter?

 The phrase 'All Lives Matter' was used frequently in the latter part of the 2010s decade in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, which opposed violence towards black communities particularly by the police. The phrase seems to have largely fallen out of usage now, it's been a little while since I've heard it, but the suggestion behind it was that in saying 'Black Lives Matter' that people were saying that only black lives matter. This was one of the most cynical misinterpretations of a political slogan I have ever seen, because that was not what was meant by the slogan and nor did anyone associated with it ever insinuate that this was what was meant by it. Black lives were (and, unfortunately, still are) treated as though they did not matter, and therefore stressing that black lives do matter was necessary in calling out institutional racism. Saying that one thing matters does not mean that something else does not.

Truthfully I think most of the people saying 'All Lives Matter' weren't really especially concerned about racism and were doing it just to undermine legitimate protest. Nevertheless, I can see why someone who hasn't put much thought into it or wasn't aware of the scale of institutional racism in society might think that 'All Lives Matter' is a better phrase. After all, it sounds inclusive, right? But in 2024, it's quite laughable to see the UK's reaction to a brutal murder of three children by someone who happens to be of Rwandan heritage, and think that the right-wing of society ever, ever, ever believed that all lives matter.

This is the first time I've written about the Southport murders and the racism riots which have followed it. Truthfully, the reason I haven't written about it before now is because I've struggled to think of anything original to say about it. There have been so many articles published, many of which have great insight into the mindset of the rioters and the sociopolitical circumstances that led here (I particularly recommend Inferiority and an absence of genuine politics behind UK race riots, by Steve Hall, James Treadwell and Simon Winslow in Transforming Society) but I've struggled to think what I can say myself that will add to this. I've been horrified by the level of animosity people have towards their fellow human beings, and I'd like politicians of all colours to take some accountability for this. But I think what I can say is where my own personal experience takes me on this.

I was born in Bristol in the early 1990s. Bristol is a city that became wealthy off the back of the slave trade. It's a very multi-ethnic city, and many of the residents are descended from slaves. I lived very near where the statue of Edward Colston was pulled down a couple of years ago, and I found it really curious to suddenly hear people who weren't from Bristol and didn't understand the local culture talking about this as though it was at all controversial. That statue had been very deeply unpopular. There had been frequent campaigns to remove it legally since before I was even born. You'll find very few Bristolians who miss it at all. Everyone in Bristol has heard of Edward Colston because there are huge numbers of things that are named after him (including three different schools). Since the removal of the statue, they've pretty much all changed their names. It's a matter of great shame that they waited until then to do so, but regardless, I think it says something about the strength of feeling about the matter that they all acquiesced following the statue's removal.

So this culture, that was uniquely aware of its history in the slave trade and wanted to make amends for that, is one that I grew up in. (Having said that, I'm sure it could still be better - Bristol is quite gentrified, I don't want it to sound like a beacon of anti-racism in all aspects.) But more than this, I spend pretty much my entire childhood living with foreign nationals. At any given point, there were usually two lodgers in my home, usually students and most often from overseas. Predominantly I lived with people from European countries, but there was a fairly high number of Chinese people, and at different times this included people from Malaysia, Palestine, South Korea and India, to name a few. I grew up becoming close to these people and treating them like family. Often, they stayed in touch when they moved out. Whenever I've been on foreign holidays, it's most often been to visit people I once lived with. And of course, from going to friends' houses I quickly understood that most people didn't live like this, but it's only been fairly recently that I've come to realise how much of a different viewpoint on life it's given me.

My earliest understanding of any immigration issues were when I was living with people who were trying to extend their visas for whatever reason. I remember being very confused about this when I was a child, not understanding why it would matter to anyone else whether they were in the UK for a bit longer or not. I didn't have to prove my right to live somewhere or access public services, so why should someone else? As an adult, truthfully I still don't quite see how immigration concerns benefit anyone. All it strikes me as is a lot of unnecessary paperwork just to have more control over people's lives. But I understand more now why it looks different to other people to how it does to me. It's because to most people, particularly if they live in an area where there aren't many immigrants, it's easy to avoid seeing the human side of this. If you're struggling with money and opportunities, it's straightforward logic to think, 'There's only a certain amount to go around, and someone else has come and taken what's rightfully mine.'  But for someone like me, having actually lived with these people, I can see how it's not like that. When these people were in my home, their presence in my life and in my home was benefitting me - I enjoyed their company, they became family members and it was educational to learn about their lives and their cultures. I believe that this is actually true of everyone - the more immigrants we have, the more we can learn from them and the more we grow as human beings. I think there are very few things more beneficial, both for yourself as an individual and for society at large, than going to live in a different country, sharing your values with the people there and learning new values from them. I'd like to actively increase immigration, not just in the UK but all over the world.

Some people say that we can't take new immigrants because 'we're full'. This is not true. There is no evidence whatsoever that the UK cannot take more people. If there were, we'd have to do something about UK nationals having babies as well. And I suppose you could say that isn't it at least theoretically possible that there might not be enough space at some point if we keep letting in more people? Well, yes. But that doesn't take into account the number of UK nationals who decide to go and live in other countries. If there was serious evidence that there just wasn't the space anymore, we could have that conversation, but that clearly isn't true (the number of empty houses is a testament to that) and the conversation is motivated more by a tendency to justify a pre-determined conclusion than anything else.

This thing about being 'full' also doesn't take into account the fallacy of the 'perpetual foreigner'. The 'perpetual foreigner' fallacy is based around the notion that if someone is an immigrant, their children and grandchildren and further descendants will continue to be perceived as being foreign, even if they've been born here and grown up in this culture. A couple of years ago, Lady Susan Hussey got into quite a lot of trouble by repeatedly asking Ngozi Fulani, a charity executive and the daughter of Windrush immigrants from the Caribbean, where she was 'really from', the suggestion being that because of her dark skin she couldn't be originally from the UK. The perpetual foreigner fallacy is crucial in the current discussion about the race riots. The 17-year-old who murdered three children is British. He was born in Wales, grew up in the UK and there is no suggestion that his Rwandan heritage had any bearing on his decision to commit the acts that he did. If he was white, these riots would not be happening, just as they didn't happen when Ian Huntley killed Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, or when Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering babies on the Special Care Baby Unit where she worked as a nurse. It's inevitable that in a society composed of people with all kinds of different heritage, that sometimes a murderer will happen to be dark-skinned. It is not a result of having immigration. And yet, when it happens, dark-skinned people who have also been here throughout their lives feel compelled to justify their presence.

Although I'll admit that this is often how I think of them, it's important to me not to just decry the people doing the rioting as 'racist thugs'. These things don't just happen in a vacuum. It's very easy to get swept up by strong emotion, and particularly if you haven't had good access to education or been taught to think critically, it's easy to assign the blame for your own circumstances in the wrong place. It's very interesting to me that we had riots in 2011 shortly after the Tories came to power, and now we're getting them again shortly after Labour has come to power. This to me says that it's a reflection of the inherent problems in society - the fact that we're pretty much all getting poorer, with no prospects and no immediately accessible way of improving our circumstances. However, the one major difference between these riots and the ones in 2011 is that I really don't believe the 2011 ones were motivated particularly by racism (on the contrary, a major provocation for them was the murder by the police of Mark Duggan). The change in attitude from then to now is, I believe, a reflection of the constant anti-immigration sentiment which has been drip-fed over and over again by mainstream politicians, commentators and newspapers. They created a collective enemy in Schrodinger's immigrant, and there is almost no one who I do not believe needs to take some degree of accountability for this. It was only a few weeks ago that the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced big immigration raids of small businesses searching for people from countries like Bangladesh. If you say that kind of thing, you cannot be surprised when people from Bangladesh are targeted in circumstances like these.

I am an optimist, and I'm hopeful that this will make us all realise just how toxic our 'legitimate concerns' around immigration have become, to the extent that a lot of it has turned into plain racism quite a lot of the time. I've also been really heartened by how many people have come out to defend our streets, our public services and the most vulnerable people in our communities, particularly in my home city of Bristol. I also think this has started to cause some of the most virulent far-right commentators to start turning on one another and tying themselves in knots, and I really hope we can rise to the occasion and use it to become a more accepting and peaceful society. Otherwise it's just going to continue to be like Lord of the Flies, and no one wants that. If a few years ago you were telling us that you think all lives matter, it's time to put that into action.

NOTE: This blog was edited on 13th August to make a correction. It previously stated that the man who killed the girls in Southport had been born in England, whereas in fact he was born in Wales.

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The Huw Edwards debacle only serves to expose more serious problems with celebrity culture

This blog was inspired by a headline I saw today regarding the 2006 Doctor Who episode 'Fear Her' being pulled from iPlayer. The headline didn't give any indication why, and I clicked on it out of curiosity, struggling to recall what that episode did that might have offended someone. Then when I read a little more about it, I thought, 'Ah, Huw Edwards. Of course.'

As most people in the UK will have heard by now, the former news presenter Huw Edwards has pleaded guilty to possessing indecent images of children. Edwards had been an extremely familiar face on news and current affairs programmes, and appeared in the offending Doctor Who episode as a presenter on the 2012 Olympics, which at the time of broadcast were six years in the future. I daresay the episode will be back at some point with his presence in the episode having been digitally removed - but according to news sources, it's presented the BBC with the awkward situation of what to do with the hundreds of hours of footage of Huw Edwards they possess in archives, and whether they should ever re-broadcast them.

The situation reminded me of something that happened a few years ago, when a close friend of mine confided to me that they'd been sexually assaulted by a regular contributor to a well-known BBC panel show. I was naturally shocked to hear of this person's behaviour, as prior to this conversation I'd enjoyed that programme and appreciated this celebrity's contribution to it. In the aftermath of their encounter, my friend contacted both the police and the media. In the case of the police report, the allegation didn't go anywhere as there wasn't sufficient evidence to charge the celebrity. However, shortly afterwards the allegation of this person being a sexual predator was widely reported in the UK press.

The BBC's response to these allegations was one of the most peculiar things I've ever seen. The person was removed from the television programme they were a regular on. However, the BBC insisted that this person's removal had nothing at all to do with the allegations against them of sexual misconduct and that they were just refreshing the show's line-up. I do not believe this claim was true, for a few reasons. The first is that none of the other regular people on the programme lost their jobs. The second is that the offending person's episodes were completely pulled from repeat broadcasts afterwards, which had never happened with anyone who had left the show previously. It is evident to me that the BBC's reaction was motivated primarily by embarrassment and wanting to distance itself from the allegations. And I think this was the worst decision it could possibly have made. Ideally I'd have liked them to be decisive about the person's removal from the show in order to make a statement that this kind of behaviour will not be tolerated, but I can appreciate that the person in question was never actually charged with a crime, so if they'd decided to keep the person on and remind everyone that we are all innocent until proven guilty I think there's something to be said for that as well (obviously I know the person is guilty because I'm friends with the victim, but I can appreciate that that's beside the point). But finding an excuse to take the person off air and pretending it had nothing to do with what had happened didn't make any kind of statement. It didn't protect either the accused person or the accuser. All it protected was the BBC's reputation. And this is unfortunately indicative of the BBC's attitude to allegations of serious misconduct.

I believe, and have done for quite a while, that the culture of celebrity is utterly toxic. I was in conversation about this recently with a friend of mine who said that they felt that it was problematic how much people glorify celebrities in our culture. I said, 'People who glorify celebrities generally don't actually know any celebrities.' And it's true. Working in entertainment, I have occasionally crossed paths with well-known people, some of whom I've liked, some of whom I've strongly disliked, but all of whom have reaffirmed to me how damaging the whole nature of celebrity is. Celebrities are often incredibly toxic people - but even if they aren't toxic, even if they're lovely and I've got on really well with them, I've been able to see that being in this world and absorbing the kind of attitudes within it has actually made them quite vulnerable. It's fairly common on the left to strongly dislike the Royal Family and the fact that they fundamentally represent an unequal society - but I feel the left hasn't quite caught up yet with the fact that this is also true of famous people in general. The existence of celebrities perpetuates a privilege divide within society that is consented to by the public in a way that other privilege divides are not. With any other social inequality (racism, sexism, homophobia and so on) those who are oppressed have means of standing up to their oppressors and demanding their rights - but for some reason, when it's celebrities, we very rarely do.

I think I know the reason why celebrities get a free pass here. It's because the nature of celebrity is something you aren't born with. It is, at least in theory, possible for any of us to become a celebrity (this is ignoring the very high numbers of celebrities who are from upper-class backgrounds, but it's also the truth that some people slip through the net). When you've got a monarchy, you know that it's something you're either born into or you're not, so it's relatively easy to persuade people to stand against such an unequal system. But when it's a celebrity, particularly someone who's famous for their work entertaining us, they represent something that we all aspire towards. They're perceived as people who worked hard and were really talented, and quite rightly earned respect for what they did. They represent the meritocratic values that we've been brought up to believe in. They represent the idea that if we also work really hard, we could become as respected as them. To be clear, I'm not saying that these people haven't worked hard. I'm sure many of them have. But there will always be plenty of other people who have worked just as hard and are just as talented (if not more so) who do not receive this level of recognition. The celebrities exist to perpetuate this idea that 'if you work really hard, you just might make it!' in order to make people who are struggling feel that it must be because they aren't working hard enough, rather than because there are flaws in the system.

As damaging as this is for regular people, I think it is also deeply damaging for the celebrities themselves. I believe it is profoundly unhealthy to exist in a culture where people are constantly being sycophantic towards you, or believing that they know you when they don't. I've recognised this in people I've met from time to time, but mostly I've seen it in how these people behave if you observe their lives from afar. Particularly because celebrity relationships and marriages are often very brief. It's become quite a regular joke how rare it is when you see a celebrity couple that's been together more than a certain amount of time. There's a reason for this, and the reason is that if you live that kind of life it is hard to form meaningful relationships with other people. It's probably hard even to feel confident in your own identity, because it's all so tied up with how you're perceived by people you don't even know. I've written before about JK Rowling's very extreme online behaviour in recent years and how much she seems to want to harm the transgender community - and to be clear I think there is absolutely no excuse for this behaviour, but I also think that these are not the actions of someone who is mentally healthy. I think the almost godlike cultural status JK Rowling had for two decades has most likely caused significant damage to her mental health and what we're seeing is a very public and humiliating breakdown. Truthfully I feel sorry for her, although not nearly as sorry as I feel for the transgender people who are suffering greatly as a result of the amount of money and resources she has behind her breakdown.

Huw Edwards is one of a very high number of celebrities in recent years who have been accused or even convicted of inappropriate behaviour towards vulnerable people. Of course, there are plenty of people who behave like this who aren't celebrities as well, so you can't say with any specific individual that 'this wouldn't have happened if they weren't famous'. But it isn't a coincidence that it happens so much more often with very high-profile people working in the media or in entertainment than it seems to with people working in any other field or at any other level. It happens because it's a consequence of someone firstly being intensely powerful, secondly having a public image which isn't conducive to having good mental health, and thirdly inhabiting a culture within your work which is incredibly dog-eat-dog. Being quite emotionally isolated whilst also having the money and resources to do whatever you want and feeling like you're invincible is a cocktail for abusive behaviour, and everyone who glorifies celebrities helps to continue that trend.

And the worst part is that a culture which puts these people on pedestals will inevitably contain cover-ups. The most disturbing thing about the predatory behaviour of Jimmy Savile when it was revealed wasn't even his obscene behaviour (which was obscene, but only as much as plenty of other predators' behaviour) but the fact that everyone at the BBC knew about it and allowed it to happen. I remember an interview with a child who Savile abused in his dressing room on Jim'll Fix It who recalled that at one point the door opened as someone else started to come in, and then quickly went out again and shut the door upon realising that Savile was molesting a child. Not everyone went along with the cover-ups. When these predators are revealed, they usually have had people who did try to speak up against them, and those brave individuals normally suffered for it (you can read about this in my blog on cancel culture). But on the whole, the message is sent that if you value your career, you don't stand against someone powerful no matter what you know about them. And unfortunately, I have seen no evidence that bodies like the BBC have changed at all since the days of Jimmy Savile. My friend's attacker had been a regular panelist on that programme for many years, and I sincerely doubt that there had never been any other victims prior to my friend, or that people at the BBC didn't know about it. The same was true of Russell Brand, the same will almost certainly be true of Huw Edwards, and I'm certain that there are other people working for the BBC and other entertainment bodies who are known to be predators. And one day their names will come out, and as usual their colleagues will wring their hands and talk about how awful it all is, without doing anything to change the actual system.

Now we have the matter of how the BBC should handle the archive footage about something like this. I think it's absolutely pathetic to put so much energy into editing out Huw Edwards' tiny cameo in the Doctor Who episode 'Fear Her' when during that era of Doctor Who, there were three companions whose actors have all faced allegations of sexual misconduct. (The actors in question are Noel Clarke, John Barrowman and Bruno Langley - of the three, Langley's instance was the most severe, Barrowman's the least, but sexual misconduct is never acceptable and I think it's an absolute stain on the history of what is generally a good television programme that all these men were associated with the programme around the same time). I do of course realise that these actors' roles cannot be edited out of the episodes they contributed to without ruining the story, and I do not wish them to be. I don't think it's right for Huw Edwards' role to be cut either. I don't think references to Jimmy Savile should be removed from old television shows, or that his appearances in episodes of things like Desert Island Discs shouldn't be on the BBC website. I didn't think that the episode of The Simpsons featuring Michael Jackson should have been pulled (this was a weird one as it happened twenty years after the allegations of his inappropriate behaviour with children had come out, long after he was dead and everyone had calmed down). As in the case where the celebrity who attacked my friend was removed from a BBC panel show, these decisions have not been made to protect anyone's victims. They've been made to whitewash history - for the corporations behind these productions to hide the evidence that they enabled these people's crimes.

If you're going to recognise how wrong the behaviour of a famous person was, and commit to doing better in the future, you have to acknowledge your own role in that. I think everyone should be able to see how often these people appeared on television, how much money they made, how much power they had, how much access to victims they were allowed. Then, and only then, can we start to build a society that recognises everyone as equally worthy of respect, and equally culpable if they do something wrong.

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