Pride Rage

TW: sexual assault, rape, trans issues, transphobia, homophobia

So, JK Rowling, a woman who regularly pretends to be a man in her working life for financial gain, has been on the TERF wagon this week.

Some of you won't know what TERF means: it means trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Radical feminism rejects male supremacy, which is good. Trans-exclusionary radical feminism rejects male supremacy while also rejecting trans-women as women. The weird thing about TERFs is that all their arguments for excluding transwomen from radical feminism rely on traditional gender roles for women. TRANSWOMEN DON'T MENSTRUATE THEREFORE THEY DO NOT KNOW A WOMAN'S PAIN. Well, I hate to tell you ladies, but there are a lot of cis women who don't menstruate, through choice or not.
Some of you won't know what cis means. Some of you will think it's a bad word. It's not. It is just the opposite of trans: I am a ciswoman. It says nothing about sexuality, just about whether or not your sex (your bits) match your gender (your sense of you being male/female). Gender expression is much wider for women than men, which may be part of the reason there are more transwomen than transmen, but that's another discussion entirely.

So, JK Rowling is against changes to the Gender Recognition Act. A lot of people are, to be honest with you. The current Gender Recognition Act requires trans individuals to live as their preferred gender for two years, and then go to a panel and prove that they are living as the opposite gender in order to recieve a new birth certificate that says they are male or female. The panel bit is horribly invasive: you have to have a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, you have to have your spouse's permission if you are married, and you must prove you are living as trans. There are only about five thousand people who have changed their gender in this manner in the UK, of a trans population of up to 500,000. This means you have probably shared facilities with a trans person, without a GRC, and you had no idea.

The revision to the Gender Recognition Act proposes to do away with the panel, so if you want to change your gender legally, you can much faster and with much less fanfare.
That's it.

Anyway, JK Rowling and COUNTLESS OTHERS are against this change, and they're probably against it (if they're deeply honest with themselves) because they see being transgender as an aberration. Nevermind the fact that nobody knows what their sex chromosome makeup is unless there's a problem, nor their sex hormone levels; nevermind the fact that other people's genitals are absolutely none of your business, there is a sizeable chunk of people who think that being trans is just wrong. They cannot concieve of it. The same as people used to think being gay was just wrong. So much so, that they'd execute you for it.

But naturally, you can't just SAY you think it's wrong, that would be terrible for business. Especially when you're a beloved children's writer. So, a lot of concerns about the new Gender Recognition Act are dressed up as concern for the children. As it was ever so. Remember Section 28?

JK Rowling and friends are terribly concerned that men will simply say they are women in order to access sex segregated spaces. Changing rooms and toilets are the two most commonly cited examples. "Would you want your daughter in a changing room with a PENIS???" they ask. They don't say "Would you want your daughter in a changing room with a transwoman desperately trying to get changed without flashing anyone, terrified in case she does?" because that would actually humanise transwomen. No, A PENISSSSSS.

And it's ALWAYS transwomen getting demonised. Nevermind transmen, who will either be using the male changing rooms and risk being sexually assaulted by angry men (they do that, unfortunately) or using the female changing rooms while being coded as male and therefore also enraging the women. No, it's always the PERVERTED MASSIVE SCHLONGS IN SKIRTS that get pulled out for this particular argument.

Now. Let's consider what we know of rape and sexual assault against women in general. All stats are from Rape Crisis UK. About 20% of all adult women have experienced sexual violence in the UK. Most victims know their attacker (about 90%). Rapists overwhelmingly get away with it - about 5.7% of REPORTED rapes end in conviction; most rapes are unreported.

So, about 10% of rapes are committed by strangers. I can't find any statistics for what percentage are carried out by transwomen, which strongly suggests that it's such a rare crime that statistics do not exist. But stranger rapes still happen, largely committed by cismen.
Raped in the bathroom at McDonalds. Raped in the loo at Heathrow. Raped in the public toilets. Raped in the leisure centre changing room. Raped at school. Raped at the bus station. Raped in the pub. Raped in a shopping centre.

And these are just the ones that are reported.

Men do not need to pretend to be women to rape women.

Men just need to look like they're supposed to be there.

No rapist has ever walked up to a women's toilet, looked at the sign, sighed "foiled again", and walked away.

Because signs do not protect you from rapists.

If I am being really charitable, I suppose I can see this argument as a desperate hope that sex-segregated spaces ARE safe from rapists. That putting a sign on the door saying "women only" WILL protect them.

But it's Pride month, and I'm sick of this shit.

My little brother is trans. It is not a fucking ten minute thought experiment for him. It's a constant cycle of fear, self-doubt, coming out to new people, coping with being misgendered and deadnamed, arguing with the barber over whether or not he's allowed to have his fucking HAIR CUT, self-loathing, choosing the 'right' toilet, dysphoria, having to deal with other people's shitty whataboutery and "but the CHILDREN" all over his social media 24/7. He's been on the waiting list for the Gender Identity Clinic for more than a year, after having to argue with his psychiatrist to get a referral. He'll probably be waiting another year or more because of COVID, and the lack of clinics.

I am not here for people treating transgender people as a Problem To Be Solved rather than people trying to live true to themselves.
I am not here for people trying to make their lives harder when they are so hard already.
I am not here for people merrily demonising the entire trans community over a hypothetical situation.
And I am not here for these coded messages that trans people are sexual predators.
Statistically, you know rapists.
You're friends with rapists.
You have no idea they're rapists.

Do you know any trans people? Even one?

Are There No Workhouses?

Today, I read a thread on twitter likening workhouses to gulags. Quite aside from doing a grave disservice to the millions who died in actual gulags in Communist Russia, the person who wrote the thread seemed to have absolutely no idea how the workhouse system in England actually... worked. And then you have nobjockeys like that cartoon prick Rees-Mogg saying we should bring back workhouses, which is a terribly short sighted idea, which I will come back to in hot minute.

So, let me enlighten you, because the Victorian poor are, quite literally, my specialist subject.

The 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor was designed to echo Protestant culture of taking care of the less fortunate that spread across Europe in the 16th century. Essentially, the people who could afford it gave money to the church, who kept it in a giant chest in the church (the 'community chest', see also: Monopoly) and handed it out to the deserving poor. This meant the church got to decide who was deserving - vagrants (meaning anyone who wasn't normally resident in the parish) got short shrift. Most places also later built a workhouse to house people who needed it. They were usually quite small. To give a couple of local examples: Werrington workhouse was one of the thatched cottages near the village post office, and the one in Empingham was the house called The Wilderness. Cities had correspondingly larger workhouses. People could only claim relief from their home parish, under something called 'settlement'. You could acquire settlement by being born in a parish, marrying a man born in another parish and then moving there, or by working for more than a full year in the same parish before applying. This is part of the reason people didn't move around much in ye olden times - they risked losing their settlement, and thus any right to relief. 

By the 1800s, parish relief rates, a local tax payable by landowners and freemen, were getting out of hand. The data showed massive regional variation in how much people paid, to support a massively variable poor population. Something needed to be done, and the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced. This law was harsh, make no mistake. It was supposed to offer immediate incarceration in the workhouse to any able-bodied person approaching the parish for relief. It was meant to be a deterrent. New workhouses were built to consolidate all the small ones in the area: huge, prison-like edifices popped up in every registration district.  They usually included an infirmary, and separated inmates into men and women. The new workhouses were run by the Board of Guardians, which replaced the parish as the administrative unit. They usually comprised local government figures, a few doctors and perhaps some of the local clergy. The settlement rules remained in force, and the Board were quite happy to pay to send petitioners back to their home workhouse if they could not prove settlement. 

Theoretically, the Board were only supposed to offer the workhouse (or in-relief) to poor people, but they were never so rigid in practice. How could they have been? Following a poor harvest, entire agricultural communities would require workhouse beds. Even the largest workhouses couldn't accommodate everyone. So, they bent the rules and gave people out-relief, depending on need. This wasn't necessarily money - they could give out fuel, flour, potatoes. A great many old people remained in their homes until death thanks to out-relief. Should you engage in family history and discover someone living on 'parish relief', that is what it refers to. Sometimes, this relief was given in exchange for maintaining the roads. Widows were also commonly given out-relief, to prevent their children being taken into the workhouse. If a whole family sought help, it was not uncommon for the Guardians to admit the husband, and give the wife and children out-relief to keep them at home (and therefore, together). 

The humanity of the Guardians depended very much on the area and its needs, but I have found many more examples of benevolence than of cruelty. 

If you wanted relief, you had to go before the Guardians - the worst kind of job interview format you can think of. You had to demonstrate your right to settlement, your reasons for asking for help, and do so with enough humility to make them want to help you. 

If you ended up in the workhouse, it was dehumanising. You were issued with a uniform, separated from your spouse and children (if they came in with you), and expected to work. The idea was to make the workhouse so horrible that nobody would choose to go there, thus saving money. But the very SIZE of the new workhouses demonstrated that the government were under no illusions about how this was going to work. 

There were several food scandals in the early days of the workhouse, with people being fed starvation diets. These scandals were incredibly damaging to the reputation of the new Poor Law, mainly because the rich didn't want the blood of the poor on their hands. The Poor Law Board was implemented after the above scandal, to act as a sort of Care Quality Commission for workhouse safety. 

The Board of Guardians, and workhouses, also served several other functions that rarely get referenced in general discourse. They provided residential care for the disabled, saving them from life in an asylum. They provided maternity services for unmarried women and those too poor to afford even basic private maternity cover. They issued medical orders to allow the poor to get medicine for free from the dispensary, and hospital admissions. They took the fathers of illegitimate children to court for maintenance on behalf of the mothers. They designed and built the first children's homes, and developed formal foster care. Now, none of this was done for solely benevolent reasons (child maintenance, for example, stopped them having to fund illegitimate children) or to anything approaching a modern standard of good practice, but in an era before the welfare state, the Poor Law WAS the welfare state. 

In 1909, pensions were brought in for the first time for those who hadn't needed relief within the last five years. This was extended to universal provision in 1911, and marked the beginning of the slow end of workhouses. They still offered beds to tramps (read The Spike by George Orwell for a brilliant account of what being a tramp meant in those days), still offered maternity services for the unmarried (which was a source of immense shame in most areas), still offered inpatient care to disabled people, but essentially became hospitals. Peterborough workhouse morphed into Peterborough District Hospital over a number of years. Bourne workhouse became St Peter's Hospital, a residential home for disabled children and adults. The majority of remaining workhouses became Public Assistance Institutions in the 1930s, being subsumed into the NHS on inception, and most workhouse sites remain NHS-owned - one of Stamford's, for example, is an ambulance centre and residential service. Yes, affluent Stamford had two workhouses, housing 450 people, with a separate children's home. 

So why did they stop? Who decided workhouses were a bad idea, and why? For the same reason the government decide anything: cost. It is not cheap to maintain buildings designed to house hundreds of people. It is not cheap to hire the staff - all workhouses had a master, a matron (usually the master's wife) and various medical staff. Cleaning etc. was done by the inmates, but these inmates needed to be fed. After the workhouse scandals of the early Poor Law reform, they needed to be fed so they wouldn't die. It is much cheaper to keep people in their own shitty homes than to pay for them to be housed in government-run buildings, with accompanying government standards, however appalling those standards are from the modern perspective. 

And that remains the reason why reinstating workhouses would be a fucking terrible idea, morally, fiscally, practically. If you use  people who are currently in receipt of not-in-work benefits as your basic admission criteria, you have a minimum inmate population of eight hundred and ninety THOUSAND, not including spouses/children. So now you have to build workhouses to house those 890000 people, their partners and children, including adequate heating, electrics, food, water, medical care, ensuring the housing complies with individual access needs for the myriad disabled people. You have to pay for staff, and their training, and a Workhouse Quality Commission. Workhouses are not prisons - the inmates have done nothing wrong aside from not being in work - so you better have adequate facilities. The compensation market for wrongful practice would make an absolute fortune. 

Would that cost the government less than £70 per person per week? Would it fuck. Paying people their benefits directly absolves the government of responsibility if that person ends up in shit housing, with no electric, no medicine and no help. Put them in the workhouse, and the government better fucking deliver. 

Here endeth the lesson.

Further reading: 

The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948, Lynn Hollen Lees

The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution, Derek Fraser

The website www.workhouses.org offers a comprehensive catalogue of workhouses, children's homes and other institutions in England, often with pictures and maps.

In Which Jamie Oliver Needs to Take a Day Off

So, Jamie Oliver is back on his high horse. Not content with bringing in a sugar tax, driving up the price of popular beverages while doing precisely nothing to combat the diabolical amount of sugar in food, and wading in to tell us how BLOODY EASY breastfeeding is, he has now targeted Tony the fucking Tiger for promoting sugary breakfast cereals at children.

You see Jamie, who is clearly a man who struggles with not eating enough to feed the Five Armies, appeared in the Guardian this weekend claiming that the real issue with trying to get families to eat healthily is as old as the industrial revolution:

The Observer, 3rd June 2018, "Jamie Oliver: I like to laugh and that's all that matters at my age". Good job, really.

Let's...let's UNPICK THE STATEMENT SHALL WE?

The industrial revolution did not hit harder and earlier in Britain, it fucking STARTED here. Nor was it the first recorded time that families went out to work. There is this ridiculous idea that before the age of machines, the common folk of Britain were like Summerisle, all folk tales and flowers, dancing and singing, romping in fields. The picture of health, the picture of idyll. And then came machines, all steam and smoke and the RUIN OF MANY A POOR BOY. It's a lovely idea, and complete horseshit.

If you were in the lower ranks of British society at any point in the last thousand years, you worked. You got up with the sun, you put in a fifteen hour day, and then you went to bed, interspersed with an awful lot of bread. Men? Ploughing. All fucking day, dawn til dusk, ploughing. Women? Everything else. Making fabric, making and fixing clothes, feeding animals, making butter, making bread, making cheese. All this in addition to childcare, education (because how else would children learn all these life skills?), cooking and cleaning.

The difference wrought by the Industrial Revolution is that suddenly, women went out to work. Rather than working at home, or on lands they had some right to, women were employed in mills, in foundries, at coal faces. The idea that women gave up work on marriage to cook and clean and sew is a fallacy - in industrial centres, they kept on working. Pregnant? Working. Maternity rights? Lol, no. Maternity leave? Nope - you were expected to be back at work within days of delivery or you lost your job. After all, there were plenty of other women happy to take it.
Outside of major industrial towns, unmarried women worked in domestic service, and married women worked at or around the home: lace making, straw bonnet making, cleaning jobs, laundry work, nursing and maternity services. Some of these jobs (particularly lacework) earned them more money than their husbands, especially in rural places which mainly relied on agriculture, like Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. And these women would be churning out a child every eighteen months or so. The average family size in the 1840s was eleven children. It had gone down to seven by 1911.

So Jamie, in his infinite wisdom, thinks that these Original Hardworking Families used acquired or innate knowledge to feed their children well. At least, that's what I think his point is, with the follow up about 'fairly humble communities'. LOL. Nope.

A woman working in a factory who had a child had no hope of being able to sustain breastfeeding. If she was fortunate, she might be allowed to bring her baby into work for the first few weeks - I found a great, if terrifying, tale of a woman blacksmith working in the Black Country who rigged up a cradle attached to her smithing apparatus, so she could rock the baby without leaving work. But ultimately, it wasn't going to work, and these babies were fed on cows milk if they were lucky, and cornmeal mixed with water if they weren't. Cows milk was likely to pass on tuberculosis, if the unsterilised bottles didn't give the baby dysentery. Cornmeal and water is not exactly a beneficial diet without any supplementary milk. The baby would typically be left with a day nurse, often an infirm female relative or an older child, and often fed opiate based medication to keep it quiet - hungry babies cry a lot. This combination of mild neglect, overmedication and poor diet was the principle cause of the horrifying infant mortality that blighted the nineteenth century.
A woman working away from town had slightly more chance of keeping her baby with her and well fed, unless the poor thing happened to be born at a time when the women all went into the fields to work. A study of rural Kent (Microhistories by Barry Reay) showed a surge in infant deaths coincided with harvest time, most likely because of unsterilised bottles and improper childcare.

But they knew how to cook? Right? They could cook? Yeah? Pukka?
No.

A girl who was raised working in mills, from around six years old, would not learn to cook. She might see her mother cook, but it's as likely that she grew up in a house with no kitchen.
No kitchen!?!?, I hear Jamie cry, clearly having had visions of every house being like Bob Cratchit's at Christmas, copper aglow, turkey bought with careful savings. The problem is that Bob Cratchit was reasonably well off for a working class lad - born in approximately 1810, he could read and write well long before compulsory schooling was introduced, and had the connections to get him a job for a banker.
A kitchen was a waste of space for most poor factory workers, living in a few rooms of a shared house. They might have access to a kitchen, they might equally not. Their food would have been bought from day to day, and mostly consisted of bread, oatcakes, cheap fatty bacon offucts, and thin porridge. The occasional meat pie would bulk it up, once the man of the house had his share, and fuck knows what the meat pie seller had used to fill it with. These children's main meal might be part of their daily wages, and consist of little more than some oatcake eaten while working. Yum! Better that than some Frosties, eh Jamie?

A girl who went into service did so at around eleven years old. She might learn to cook from the housekeeper. She might teach herself to cook. She might already know how to cook if her mother had taught her. She could take these skills into a marriage. But if, as many did, she lived in rural areas, their food budget would depend on factors as fickle as the crops, the weather, and the whim of the landowner. Bad harvest? No money. Crop failure? No money. Too much labour? No work, no money. If you cannot afford fuel, what are you supposed to eat? A bit of corn stolen from the land, a few potatoes grown in the garden, it amounts to nothing without the heat to cook it.

And then, consider the motherless children, which considering the high mortality rate in childbirth were manifold. Those men who couldn't marry quickly sent their children to other family, or the workhouse. And if food was bad out of the workhouse, it was diabolical inside it.

There was no golden era where working women could fit in a fifteen hour working day, come home and cook a nutritious and cheap meal for their kids from scratch. It has never been a thing. I suspect what Jamie is thinking of is the early twentieth century, when women not having to work once they married was a badge of honour. And with the development of labour saving devices like economic ovens, twin tub washing machines, and the ilk, women had time to cook. The Book of Household Management was a ubiquitous wedding gift for the new brides of the 1920s and 1930s, full of useful recipes, among other slightly aspirational articles on how to get ready for new babies, how to diagnose a rash, and how to accept a wedding invitation. This was a luxury compared to their grandmothers' married lives.

We cannot compare our working lives today to those of 250 years ago. We don't go to work hungry and half expecting to die. Our children don't have to go to work to earn their keep at six years old. We have proper maternity protection and are unlikely to die in childbirth. We have PENICILLIN for god's sake. But we still don't always have the time to spend four hours in the kitchen after everything else, whether it's a full day at work, or whether it's a full day of juggling children. Or both.

Jamie Oliver needs to take a day off. Or better, Jamie Oliver needs to get up, make all his kids fucking granola or whatever he thinks they should be eating instead of Frosties, make their healthy lunch boxes, do a twelve hour hospital shift, go home, cook his kids a meal from scratch, do their homework with them, get them to bed without resorting to opiates but also in time enough to make sure they get enough sleep for school, and do this for seven days. I look forward to his findings.

The DWP's Valentine's Day Message

On Valentine's Day, the DWP charmingly sent this tweet out:

Claiming to be living alone is one of the most common types of benefit fraud – don’t ruin #ValentinesDay by failing to declare your true circumstances https://t.co/tZuNYZ5fer pic.twitter.com/ahutOO6NUy

— DWP Press Office (@dwppressoffice) February 13, 2018

And my friends, I took umbrage.

Long ago, in the distant mists of 2012, Tom moved down from Newcastle and in with his parents. He didn't move in with me straight away. We hadn't ever spent more than a week together in one go. We hadn't been together two years. He had just got a job but we didn't know it was going to work out at that early phase. It would have been foolishly optimistic to move straight in together. When you already have two very small children, you do not want the upheaval of a 'new daddy' moving in only to move out a few weeks later when you realise that actually, you can't fucking stand each other.

So, we lived apart. I assiduously tried to find out the cohabiting rules from the DWP, about what counted as living together and what didn't. This was ludicrously difficult information to obtain. You cannot just phone the DWP and ask them because this will arouse suspicion, and provoke scrutiny and you get enough scrutiny on income support as it is. You can find the current rules here. You may notice that they are OBSCURE AS HELL, and there is no more palatable version for the recipients of affected benefits. These rules can be used to define almost any sexual relationship as living together as a married couple, whether the sexual relationship persists, whether or not money is shared, whether abuse is present, whether the relationship is happy. I wouldn't let Tom sleep here more than three nights in seven, I wouldn't let him keep any of his stuff here, I wouldn't let him contribute to any of the household expenses. Even though he categorically was not resident here, I was still terrified that the DWP would decide he was and force that arrangement to become permanent before I was ready, or worse, prosecute me.

When Tom did move in, after a year of this anxious situation, I cancelled my income support the same day. It was the greatest relief.

Here's the thing. There is no room in the DWP's rules to allow you to have a trial run, to make a mistake in relationships and undo it quickly, unless you have considerable external financial and practical support - the sort where your boyfriend can live with his parents without issue, or where you can afford to run two households while you get to know each other. You either declare that you're living together immediately, or you break the law.

It is overwhelmingly single mothers who are prosecuted for breaking this law, as they are claiming the benefit in the first place. Those who are prosecuted are usually in abusive relationships. The partner is not prosecuted. The partner is blameless according to the law.

Single mothers are a great target for abusers. Income support doesn't really give you much money, and usually the shortfall is made up in tax credits when you begin to live together if your income remains low. However, income support automatically entitles you to maximum housing benefit for your house in your area, free school meals for older children, and maximum tax credits as applicable. It is a useful gateway benefit. And it can be held over you by a man who wants to live under your roof for free, abuse you, spend your money, and then threaten you with "If you try and leave, I will shop you to the DWP". This is not recognised or allowed for in DWP rules - they are very clear about an abusive cohabiting relationship still counting as living together as a married couple. Financial abuse is often one of the first signs of an abusive relationship developing, and being on benefits means you are additionally vulnerable to partners exploiting the anxiety and dependence inherent in that way of life.

Since the two child tax credit rule was brought in, there is an additional very real risk of declaring cohabitation too early in a relationship if you have more than two children and have been single since before April 2017. You WILL lose tax credits for any more than the older two. You will NOT get those tax credits back if the relationship fails.

There are some advantages to being on income support. There is reassurance in knowing that you get a certain amount of money at the same time every week or month. There is reassurance in that safety net, particularly when the rest of your life is a mess. You don't get much, and there is almost no financial room for anything to go wrong in this situation. You can't save up for a crisis. But it's more reliable than a zero hours contract, more reliable than hoping someone will swoop in and save you, particularly when someone you loved has let you down. It may be the first time you've ever had to manage your own money, the first time you've truly lived independently.

But in return, you surrender your freedom to run your romantic life as you choose. You surrender your freedom to decide when to make a casual living arrangement permanent. The state decides if you're living as married, according to a set of rules that could apply to almost every single relationship I know; serious or casual, with children or not.

It's a hell of a price to pay for being a single mother.

Charlie Gard

Charlie Gard is dying. He's been dying since the moment he was conceived. He has mitochondrial deletion syndrome. To put it very simply, the batteries in his cells don't work. There is no treatment for his condition: it's extremely rare and where diseases are rare, you have to improvise as you go along. He has been in Great Ormond Street Hospital for months, kept alive by machines, because keeping him alive is all they can do for him. My family has personal experience with GOSH's genetics team and you'll find no criticism of them here. Where there is hope, they will do whatever they can.

But it's hard, so hard to accept there's no hope, especially in a child so small. His parents have gone to every single court in this land and in Europe, begging for a chance to send Charlie to the US for experimental treatment: experimental treatment that even the doctor advocating it admits won't save him. They have blamed GOSH's workplace culture, saying GOSH refuse to admit they may be wrong about his chances, his prognosis. Their case has gone, to use a rather grim medical term, viral. Donald Trump has stuck his oar in. So has the Pope.
Today, the case goes back to court, to be tried on fresh evidence that Charlie is growing. The hospital say he is not growing. His parents say he is. The judge says he wants proof, and will base his judgement on that proof.

There are several contentious points here:

Medical Ethics
Is it ethical to send Charlie to the USA for treatment? In the UK, candidates for experimental treatment must be able to consent, they must be kept safe, there must be a fair chance of a good outcome. Charlie cannot consent. There is almost zero chance of a good outcome. The reason GOSH do not want him to take part in the trial is because it will make no difference. The reason the US doctor wants him in the trial is because people with mtDNA conditions this severe rarely survive - he's a useful little guinea pig. The key ethic in medicine is DO NO HARM - do nothing that will make the patient worse. Now, Charlie's ultimate outcome is death whichever way you look at it, but there is real suffering implicated in making a tiny baby travel nine hours across the Atlantic, in intensive care, for futile treatment which may kill him in the USA meaning his parents will have to repatriate his body, far away from their network of support. If he survives, he will come home and continue to require high dependency care for the rest of his life. It is traumatic enough to have a child in GOSH, which is often miles away from the family home. To have that child on a different continent is many times more traumatic.

The Rights of Charlie vs The Rights of his Parents
I have seen a lot (A LOT) of people insist that Charlie's parents have the right to decide whatever they want for their child. This is, fortunately, absolute bollocks in law and in practice, to prevent child abuse. As soon as a child is born, they have rights in law to be protected by the state in cases where a parent could do them harm. As described above, the move to send Charlie to the US can easily be considered causing harm to him. No parent is capable of making objective medical decisions about their child, which is why ethics panels exist, which is why doctors try to work with parents to do what is fair to the child. This is why Charlie has his own advocate in court. His parents are fighting for his life at all costs. GOSH are fighting to end that life. Charlie is neither old enough nor capable of having a voice. He gets no say in this.
But his parents, his poor parents. They have the most difficult time of all. Not only are they fighting to save their child, however fruitlessly, they are fighting the state on this matter. When you have a disabled child, however small the disability is, you have to fight and advocate and it feels like the entire system is set out to be as obstructive and difficult as possible. The NHS is an enormously potent and powerful institution. Of course his parents want to take Charlie to the US. Of course they want to exhaust every single possibility. How will they live with themselves if they give up? Every parent would do the same. There may be an unreality about their hopes and ambitions, but he's their baby and they're with him every day. What else can they do but fight?

The Interference of Donald Trump
Urgghh, this man. In case you know nothing of US healthcare, they don't have an NHS. All their healthcare runs on insurance, to a capitalist model that doesn't really work (as previously discussed, it's very difficult to run a capitalist health market when the ultimate outcome of the consumer is death - no profit). Obama brought in an Affordable Healthcare Act (known as Obamacare) to try and implement universal healthcare provision. Trump and the Republicans FUCKING HATE the ACA. Not only are they dismantling it, they are also attempting to bring in legislation to give insurers more power to refuse healthcare to people with preexisting conditions - preexisting conditions like having previously taken contraception, having been pregnant, having been raped. The Republicans do not believe that healthcare is a right.
So, it's somewhat ironic to have both Trump and his VP, Mike Pence, shout that Charlie should be allowed to go there for medical treatment. It is likely that they are going to use this as a stick to beat the NHS with, and since the NHS is one of the bargaining chips that Theresa May has admitted she is prepared to use to establish a trade deal with the US, WE SHOULD BE CONCERNED.

The Interference of the Pope
The Roman Catholic church believe in the inviolable right to life. No abortion. No euthanasia. You would think that the Pope would accept God's divine will in this sort of situation. Apparently not.

Money
BUT THEY HAVE RAISED OVER A MILLION POUNDS!?!! It's not about money. The NHS regularly invest millions in treatment for dying children to improve their quality of life - essentially throwing that money away since it's not curative. But it works both ways. You cannot throw money at illness and hope it goes away (although, money sure helps).

The shift in media's tone has moved away from SHOULD he be allowed to have this treatment to WHY WON'T ANYONE SAVE HIM? There seems to be a total disconnect of the reality of Charlie's condition. If the court rules he can go to the US, he has the treatment, the treatment somehow works a bit and he comes home, he will STILL be terribly ill and disabled for life.

Sometimes, medicine can't help, and that's the real problem here. It's not about citizenship, the perceived failings of the NHS, the monopoly of GOSH, the court system, money, or human rights. It's about the fact that medicine is unlikely to help this child and that is a blow to the heart of us all. Our culture has a faith in medicine, that one day it will destroy death itself, and this sort of case reminds us that medicine is fallible, some illness is written on the genes, and any of us could have a child like Charlie.

London's Burning

Imagine your house catches fire.

Imagine, worst case scenario, it burns down and the fire investigator declares it was because your electrical supply wasn't earthed, a dangerous, but preventable occurrence. Imagine, as you sift through the wreckage, how fucking furious you would be.

Now, imagine the above, but also imagine that you knew about this electrical fault. You'd known about it for years, and spent years trying to get the electrical company to come and fix it, only to be told it was fine and to stop making a fuss. Imagine your rage.

This is akin to what the people of Grenfell tower have suffered today. Because they knew their house wasn't fire proof. They knew there weren't enough fire exit routes. They knew the cladding the council had covered the building in was iffy. They knew what happened to similar tower blocks in the area. They knew. And they were absolutely powerless, as council tenants, to do anything other than try and get the word out.

Nobody knows what caused the fire. They've only just put it out; we won't know for months. But we do know that the tenants were formally advised to stay in their flats and put wet towels against the bottoms of the door in case of fire, because the fire wasn't supposed to be able to spread. The flats were supposed to be self-contained fireproof units. The tenants ignored this advice, and thank god they did, or they'd all be dead by now.

Some are dead. Many more are injured. And everyone who lived there has lost everything they owned. Perhaps that is the part that will resonate most strongly. We've all made the mental lists of what we would grab in case of fire, knowing deep down that we probably wouldn't grab anything in our haste to get out. There's nothing left of Grenfell Tower. It will never house anyone again.

I have seen many people say that this is a tragedy that shouldn't be politicised.
I did not see these people claim that terrorist prevention talk was politicising a tragedy after Westminster, Manchester and Borough Market. I did not see the people claim that dead Syrian refugee babies being washed up in the Mediterranean was politicising a tragedy. I did not see these people claim that talk of gun control after Sandy Hook was politicising a tragedy*.

Is a tragedy more or less political when it is directly caused by a lack of legislation?
Is a tragedy more or less political when it affects the poor rather than the unlucky?
Is a tragedy more or less political when it throws the unsavoury housing policy of the incumbent government into sharp relief?

More people have already died at Grenfell tower than died in the whole Great Fire of London.

When David Cameron began to gently dismantle public safeguards and services, he tried to package it as Building a Big Society, where everyone helped each other, so there was no need for governments to do it. Kensington has absolutely thrown itself into helping the people of Grenfell tower, with massive donations of money, goods and services. The badly cut fire and ambulance service has been out in force. But it should not have happened in the first place.

Ultimately, people should not have to face the possibility of losing all their possessions, their home, their loved ones and their lives just because they are in poorly tended social housing.

I hope this sparks reform, I really do.



*Well, I did, but mostly from gun-nut Americans and they are not my friends. 

Stewart Jackson: Redux

It's election time once more! Last time, despite my pleas, Peterborough foolishly elected Stewart Jackson as MP once more by a scant 1950 votes. And, as his leaflet dropped on our doormat the other day, let's take a look at the Life and Lies of Stewart Jackson.

So, the front page. Stewart Jackson stands with Theresa May, as you'd expect really, considering he's a Tory. He's hardly going to claim he hates the bitch and would make a much better PM. There's also a photo of him beaming in front of Peterborough guildhall and supporting a bee protection charity. That's ironic since he's consistently voted against climate change protection measures.

Within the leaflet, he marks out the work he's done for the area, like blocking the solar energy farm that was going to be built on Newborough fen; raising a petition about Werrington freight line  - he doesn't mention it submitted before GE2015, went unanswered, and the plans went to the secretary of state three months ago - and trying to improve the A47, which is underway, notably with the FUCKING AWFUL traffic lights at Wansford A1 junction. Such a trooper. In fairness to Stewart Jackson, he does write to the cabinet with questions pertaining to Peterborough (most of which already have answers available in the public domain), and voted in around 85% of all votes. He pushed for Brexit, which is no surprise, and he's even curbed his expenses a little. He's very proud of Peterborough's low unemployment rates. He also claims that the NHS is his top local priority, which is an absolute joke considering his voting history.

His voting record remains a catalogue of misery for anyone who isn't an older, healthy, white, heterosexual, salaried, homeowning British citizen.
He has consistently voted against gay rights, race laws, benefits being raised in line with inflation, and increasing jobs for young people. He has voted for the bedroom tax, for restricting disability benefit, for restricting disability benefit to those who have been disabled from birth/youth. He has voted against limiting letting fees for tenants. He has voted against people with cancer receiving extended ESA, He voted for the tuition fees raise, for the academy system, and for the various bills undermining the NHS. He has voted against ID cards, but for mass data retention (the Snooper's charter). He voted against a right to remain for EU citizens. He has voted against special provision for military families in the welfare system. He has voted against slowing the rise of rail fares. He has voted against nationalisation of public transport.
Of course he has, he's a Tory.


The rest of the leaflet is given over to the words of The Great Leader Theresa May. Theresa swears she has set out a clear approach to Brexit, which...has she? Really? She says she has a strong negotiating hand. The Tories have been openly mocked by the rest of the EU and Theresa May has demonstrated that she couldn't successfully negotiate a child's bedtime. We have nothing to negotiate with, except tax haven status,
And then, in a rehash of the last election, we are told our election choice is Strong and Stable Leadership in the National Interest OR A COALITION OF CHAOS with Jeremy Corbyn and Tim Farron. DO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME, CONSERVATIVES, THAT A COALITION GOVERNMENT WITH THE LIB DEMS IS A BAD IDEA???

The leaflet then tells us that Trump winning was a shock, even though Theresa May fell over herself to rush over there and hold his grubby, orange mitt. Brexit was a shock, even though the Tories definitely wanted it and it's gonna be amazing, honest guv. And Corbyn winning two leadership elections was a shock.

Maybe Britain is fed up of your lying bullshit about caring, Theresa. Maybe hardworking British families, who are also apparently irresponsible benefit scroungers, have had enough of your shit, of your punishing the economically weak for the faults of the strong, of being told if they would JUST WORK HARDER, they too could be RICH. Maybe normal British people fancy someone with a bit of integrity, someone who is decent, who inspires faith in the politically inactive. Someone who hasn't promised on national TV to NUKE THE WORLD, you fucking bloodthirsty maniac. Maybe the national debt going from five hundred billion pounds under Gordon Brown to a staggering ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY BILLION POUNDS in just SEVEN YEARS of Conservative government doesn't inspire a lot of confidence about your FUCKING ECONOMIC NOUS, which has always been the Tory selling point.

People are dying under this government, unnecessarily. The NHS is being stealthily dismantled, as is the social care contract. We go headlong into Brexit, fronted by a vindictive racist who couldn't lead herself out of a paper bag; who thinks you will vote Tory because you think they're a safe pair of hands. They aren't.


All voting information from They Work For You. Economic information from UK Public Spending. Leaflet published by Matthew Dalton on behalf of Stewart Jackson. Vitriol my own. 

Privilege

The thing that pisses me off most about Tories (and there are a lot of things that piss me off about the Conservative party, but I'm talking about Tory voters) is their fast belief that anyone, ANYONE, who works hard enough can succeed, and a lack of success is an individual's fault. In summary, poor people are poor because they have failed as a person, on some level. Rich people are rich because they are inherently better.

I mean, it's bollocks. You don't need a sociology degree to know it's bollocks, AND YET it forms the background of so many Tory policies. There is an a total lack of insight into how society works. When we are born, we are effectively a blank slate. What we are born into affects every aspect of our development and future.

If your parents are better off, they might be able to pay for your driving lessons, buy your first (and subsequent) car, pay your student living fees, house you while you save for a mortgage, lend or gift you money for your mortgage. And all these things are taken for granted by you, the privileged one, as enjoying the rights afforded to you by birth.

On the other hand, if your parents have little spare money, you might not learn to drive, or go to uni. This might severely restrict your ability to get a job, particularly in deprived areas. Your parents might be keen for you to move out because they can't afford to house you anymore. You might end up paying a rent that takes up most of your income, leaving you no spare cash to save for a mortgage. And this, according to the Conservative party, is your fault. You should have tried harder.

Even things like having parents available for free childcare can massively affect your career trajectory and income potential. And these are not conditions that most individuals choose, they are accidents of birth.

It was different when my parents were young, and you could get a 100% mortgage by just asking, and business loans were a thing, and university was free, and jobs didn't require you to have a degree and three years experience just to work in retail. It was different when their parents were young, in the immediate postwar era when the welfare state was born. But in the current economic climate, it is bloody difficult to get going into adulthood without some financial backing.
And so you get a cycle of poverty. Poor parents have poor children who become poor parents who have poor children. The Tories are trying to stop this by stopping the poor reproducing (and just for the record, THIS GOVERNMENT THINKS YOU ARE POOR IF YOU EARN LESS THAN £35k P.A SO WIPE THAT SMUG SMILE OFF YOUR FACE) but ultimately, you have to invest in people to make them thrive. You would think the Tories would know this - they know you have to invest in a business to make it succeed. But no.

But when Jeremy Corbyn starts talking about investing in normal people, in redirecting wealth, the Tories throw up their arms in despair, crying Marxism and trying to re-institute fox hunting. Fox hunting - a sport that occupies a few hundred people at a time, each paying a massive subscription, exclusive by definition - is far more important than dealing with any form of social inequality, because the Tories simply fail to acknowledge that it exists.

"We Didn't Have Autism In My Day"

If you browse articles on autism, or follow any social media discussion on it, someone will show up and tell you that autism is new. This someone will usually be a 50+ bloke, who thinks it's all a load of old codswallop; poor parenting, too many chemicals in foods, vaccinations, labelling every kid who's a bit odd. Autism is new. Autism is a new invention that doesn't really exist, except in the Rain Man savant stereotype.

Autism isn't new. Autistic behaviours have been described in individuals going back at least 500 years. Just as epileptics were considered possessed by the devil, autistic people were considered soulless demons. Until relatively recently, disability was widely categorised as deaf, blind, crippled or imbecile/insane/feeble minded. Autistic people were broadly defined as mentally subnormal, where it obviously disabled them, and weird or criminally insane where it was less disabling. It was formally discovered and named almost simultaneously by Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner separately in 1938 (hence the confusion between Aspergers syndrome and Autism - they are the same disorder, described slightly differently by two people on different continents at the same time). Autism was initially thought to be the result of distant parenting, and was classified as "infant schizophrenia" until the 1980s. This idea of autism being the fault of parents, or a psychiatric disorder, still resonates in public discourse. But autism is not a psychiatric disorder, although it is usually grouped as a mental health condition - it is a pervasive developmental delay, pervasive because the person cannot 'grow out' of it. One significant change in the last twenty years has been a fine-tuning of diagnostic methods, which has enabled more subtle cases to be differentiated, diagnosed and helped. I know several adults who have discovered, sometimes to their great dismay, that they score highly on autistic diagnostic tests - the stereotype of the mute, asocial autistic person is not really accurate now. 

I read a comment from a man on twitter who said that there was nobody autistic at his school, and he was 37. I am five years younger than him and I went to a large primary school, and a large secondary school. There was at least four autistic people in my primary school yeargroup and many more in secondary school. Once you have an autistic person in your life, you begin to recognise the signs in others, but when you don't know the signs, you just think they're weird. The autistic people in this man's school would be the ones who were bullied, the ones nobody hung around with because they were strange or said the wrong things, the ones who never went to birthday parties, the ones who were regularly out of class, the ones who turned up for two terms and then disappeared. Jimmy's classmates know and broadly accept that he's different, but they don't necessarily know he's autistic - autism isn't a common word in an 8 year old's vocabulary. Autistic children are supported more obviously in mainstream schooling now, and there is far more help available if you qualify for it. 

But formerly, the only real option for autistic children was residential institutions. 

For those of us born in the last forty-ish years, institutions are a distant spectre. Huge Victorian asylums still stand in most towns, often converted into flats or hospitals, the residents broadly unaware of their history. But for our ancestors, institutions were a normal, if feared, part of life. If you had an obviously disabled child, you were encouraged to send it to an asylum as quickly as possible. Autism isn't usually apparent until toddlerhood at the earliest, but children were still sent away to residential hospitals. Parents were not encouraged to visit - a relative of mine was put into an asylum in early childhood because she had Downs syndrome, and lived forty miles from her parents. Her mother visited once a week until her death aged 13, in 1952. This is recent history. In the 1980s, the people who had lived in institutions for most of their lives began to be released as part of the Care in the Community Act. Many ended up in sheltered housing, having never been taught the skills to live independently. The issue with living in an institution is that you become institutionalised. Ironically, this rather suits autistic people, although it has the potential for horrific abuse. 

If Jimmy, my beloved eldest boy, had been born in 1949 instead of 2009, he would have been institutionalised by now. He would be living on the site of the old District hospital, in the vast Victorian workhouse and asylum complex that has been completely redeveloped. He would be considered dangerous and insane. 

Autism is not a new disease, and the reason older people claim they didn't have it in their day is because it was hidden away, concealed behind huge walls and gates, in stigmatic buildings, buried under sedation and restraint. There should be no pride in claiming autism wasn't around in the good old days - it shows how invisible and suppressed disability was, and how uncomfortable it makes some people that it's now 'mainstream'. 

Tax Credits

So, I signed the petition to repeal the 'rape clause' that forms part of the tax credit policy now. And today, I received a government response which amounted to "you should have complained about this eighteen months ago, tough shit". But one paragraph absolutely INCENSED me:

LET US PARSE THIS STATEMENT

"Families supporting themselves solely through work" are either not claiming the tax credits they are entitled to, or earning more than the income threshold (£25000 for one child, £35000 for two). Look at those thresholds: they are Quite High particularly as the average annual income is £27000. The vast majority of working class families qualify for tax credits. Remember the 'hardworking families" trope? That's them.

"do not see their incomes rise automatically when they have more children". No, but by earning more than the income thresholds for tax credits, they already have a considerable scope for a much higher income. Two children on £35000 a year is very different to two children on £45000 a year. There are always people who fall into the cracks of being just over the threshold, but frankly if you struggle on £36k p.a. with two children (as one who has been doing so on much less for years) learn to budget better. A great deal of necessary public sector jobs have low and locked in salaries - an MAU staff nurse in Peterborough can expect a starting salary of between £22 and £24k; a newly qualified teacher's income is capped at £22k in their first year - which automatically classifies them as both poor and according to this government, an idiot with no idea how to control their fertility unless you threaten them financially.

"The policy encourages families who receive benefits or tax credits to make the same financial decisions about the number of children they can afford to support as those families who support themselves solely through work"

WHERE TO FUCKING BEGIN? The fucking PATRONISING language - "we ENCOURAGE the IDIOT POOR PEOPLE to STOP BREEDING". The whole idea that Only Rich People are sensible enough and rich enough to have more than two children. The idea that people have children for tax credits - yes, the difficult pregnancy, birth and eternity of care I invested in my third child is definitely worth the £50 extra a week. And separating those who claim tax credits - 4.43 million households out of approximately 18 million in the UK at the last ONS count - from those who don't need to as though that is a fair and just way of dividing the nation's fertility choice. Previously, those who were on income support or JSA were the Undeserving Poor of the nation. Now, apparently, it's to be extended to anyone on a low income regardless of how much they work or what classification of job they have.

"while protecting the vulnerable by retaining extra support for families with disabled children." DON'T MAKE ME FUCKING LAUGH. I have a disabled child, and believe me, I had to TAKE THE DEPARTMENT OF WORK AND PENSIONS TO COURT AND THEN THREATEN TO DO IT AGAIN to get them to pay the money rightfully owed to my disabled child. They don't give a single solitary fuck about disabled children.

None of this stops me or anyone else from having thirty two children if I want to, but the fact is that most low income households have included tax credits as part of their forecast income when deciding to have more children, and now they will have to stop doing that. There is an uncomfortable element of eugenics inherent in this policy that reminds me of the Victorian era when it was widely believed that poverty and poor moral behaviour were genetically linked. Stop the poor people having loads of kids and maybe there won't be any more poor people to worry about! Never mind fixing the causes of poverty and social inequality, just financially sterilise them!

But for a whole host of women, this family cap is going to be a real fucking issue. You see, it is applied to children born after 7th April 2017 and to "any new claims". So, if your circumstances change in the near future, and you suddenly find yourself applying for tax credits for the first time, little Imogen the Third Child won't be counted. If your partner moves in, or out, that counts as a new claim, so you may be absolutely fine now as a single parent of four, but if your boyfriend moves in, you will suddenly find two of your children are apparently not eating all your food, requiring clothes, using energy etc.

My situation six years ago was nothing uncommon - boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy impregnates girl, boy fucks off without a backward glance. I only had two children when I was dumped, but had it been another two years down the line, it could have been three. We could have easily afforded three children - indeed, we both now have three children - but I cannot stress enough how terrifying it was to suddenly lose 4/5s of my household income. My monthly wage didn't cover the mortgage, nevermind anything else. I relied on tax credits. Nobody should have children they cannot afford, but having children when you can afford them does not act as insurance against any financial or personal misfortune in the future. Women with more than two children in abusive relationships will have to think long and hard over whether they can afford to leave their partner.The Tories have also cut bereavement benefits, so if your husband or wife dies leaving you with more than two children, you are doubly fucked.

It will be women who suffer the most through this tax credit amendment. Two million lone parent households exist in the UK - that's just under half of all tax credit claims - and 91% of them are headed by women. Not only do women suffer the brunt of single parenting, they also have this fucking rape clause bullshit to overcome, where their third child only gets benefit if they are a product of rape. Never mind marital rape, never mind the ethics of being obliged to report your rape just to secure a little extra money, what sort of fucking government decides the only reason a poor woman might have more than two children is because she was raped?

It is a toxic, classist, eugenic and misogynist amendment and I loathe it and the party that instituted it with all my heart and soul.

WHAT? AGAIN?

So, there's to be a general election in less than two months. This is...unusual, but perhaps not unexpected.

The last general election was almost two years ago, and one of the myriad electoral promises made was that there would be a referendum on EU membership if the Conservatives won. This was a promise made partly to appeal to some Tory (and other party) MPs who were threatening to defect to UKIP, and to appeal more generally to UKIP voters. Despite a lot of hand-wringing about the possibility of a hung parliament and another coalition government, David Cameron won, Nick Clegg was told to sling his hook, and the possibility of a referendum loomed large.

David Cameron announced the EU referendum in February 2016, and it was held in May 2016. It was a dirty fucking scrum of a campaign, with the remain side not really bothering until it was too late, assuming that nobody would want to leave, and the leave side using racism, xenophobia and outright lies (often painted on the side of a bus), shrieking about democracy and sovereignty when challenged. We voted to leave, by 51.9% to 49.1%*.
Uproar. David Cameron resigned. The initial leadership of both the Conservative Party and Britain seemed to be Boris Johnson's for the taking, except he decided not to run (my theory: didn't want the shitty Brexit baton). His fellower Brexiteer Michael Gove ran, and came dead last. And so the race was left to Andrea Leadsom, who had little inter-party support and shot herself in the foot by suggesting women without children had no feelings, and we had a new PM with barely any fanfare. Theresa May. Former home secretary, supporter of the Remain campaign, first female PM since Thatcher. And Theresa May decided fuck it, she would go for a hard Brexit.

What is a hard Brexit? A soft Brexit? A buttery biscuit Brexit? Nobody seems to know, and considering that is what our country hopes to pursue in the next two years, it really is time someone came up with a fucking plan beyond "Brexit means Brexit". Instead, we have had Jeremy Corbyn enact a three line whip to make sure Labour agreed to trigger the Brexit process, the SNP announce another independence referendum for Scotland** and SHIT GOING DOWN in Northern Ireland, our only land border with the EU, which is worrying because we have a reasonably fraught relationship in general with Ireland and Irish independence. There have been eleven by-elections in sixteen months. Only the Lib Dems are offering any resistance to Brexit, so it's kind of a shame they only have nine parliamentary seats. UKIP have imploded, giving each other brain injuries and shouting about Douglas Carswell being a blood traitor, like they're fucking Dementors. It's been a trip.

Then there's the great fucking Wotsit over the sea trying to start a nuclear war with North Korea for shits and giggles.

The NHS continues to be underfunded, with staff at breaking point. Teachers are on the verge of striking again. Bereavement allowances are being slashed, because fuck knows the widowed need more hassle. Tax credits: don't even get me fucking started. Nobody can afford a house unless they're minted. Worker's rights are being gently eroded ready for the lifting of EU labour laws. It's a mess.

So, why call a general election now? Elections are expensive to run. They take a lot of administration. There's usually televised debates, which have normally been done by now. There was major election expenses fraud last time, which still hasn't been fully investigated. There's an act of parliament specifically to stop PMs calling a general election early. Why not just wait three more years and do it then, like everyone expects?

As it stands, the next general election should have been held in May 2020. The Article 50 protocol states that we should leave the EU by April 2019. Those two dates are quite close together, politically speaking. You, the voter, will remember quite clearly how fucking shit or amazing Brexit has made your life come 2020.

I expect that what Theresa May wants is a majority government without strong Brexit opposition to sail through the process, come out the other side and then bow out in 2022. I expect what Theresa May wants is for her government to stop bickering about the terms of Brexit, agree with whatever deal she can come up with, and crack on. I expect she wants to be elected by the people rather than just her party, so she can say she has been Chosen. I expect she doesn't want to have to fight an election the year after Brexit completes.

There was an awful lot of wailing immediately after the announcement that this will just make life easier for her. So don't. Vote. Vote for who you want to run your constituency. Brexit is happening unless the Lib Dems win by a landslide, so what we need is strong opposition to get us the best deal. Find out who your candidates are, and vote for the one who gives a shit: 90% of the time, it won't be a Conservative. There's a website here where you can see what your current MP votes for and against.

If you've recently turned 18 or will before June 9th, you need to register to vote. If you've recently moved house, you might need to register to vote. If you've recently graduated, you might need to register to vote. And since this election has been called with so little notice, you need to do that now: you can do it here. If you are a student, you are likely to be at home on June 9th - find out where you're registered to vote and apply for a postal vote if it's in your university constituency, and do it within the month. If you're going to be on holiday on June 9th, have a great time, but register for a postal vote first.

Young people, those aged 18-24, have the greatest stake in the future of the country, and they vote the least. So, boring as it can be, educate yourself and vote. Apathy changes nothing.



* Interestingly, this small victory has been quoted as a reason to pursue a 'hard' Brexit: when Erdogan won his own referendum by 51% to 49% in Turkey last week, this was described as "the smallest of margins" by the Torygraph no less. 

** When Brexiteers start complaining about this, I laugh and I laugh and I cry for their hypocrisy

Rape and Sweden

Oh Farage, leading trumpet of disinformation, has told the nation via LBC that Sweden has the highest rate of rape cases in Europe. He's said this because President Idiot told the world that Sweden had suffered a terrorist atrocity...and it hadn't. There hasn't been a terrorist attack in Sweden since 2010, unless you count the attack on school children by young, white, male Nazi in 2015. But OBVIOUSLY, that doesn't count. THAT was the work of a lone gunman...

Sweden takes in a staggering amount of refugees, because Sweden's social model is based on fairness and generosity. And, Nazi terrorist attacks and other hate crimes aside, it works out fairly well. And that RANKLES. You see, it suits the right to have a common enemy and that common enemy at the moment is refugees. From David Cameron calling them 'swarms', to Teresa May stopping unaccompanied children coming here, to Donald Trump closing his borders to some Islamic countries apparently chosen by sticking a pin in a map of Africa and the Middle East. The rise of the right across Europe is a chilling reminder that all this has happened before, and can easily happen again. But that's not why I'm RANTING AWAY TODAY.

So, Sweden hasn't had a terrorist attack. Trump looks like even more of an addled idiot. How then to make Sweden look bad? Especially as it's one of the few genuinely left-wing countries in the world? I can picture the scene, Farage on the Trump Hotline promising he will sort it out on his widely watched TV show, shown every night on the single British channel. And that very night, on LBC with its listenership of 1.7% of the market share, Farage hold forth. THEY'RE ALL RAPISTS. THAT'S THE PROBLEM.

Now, in a sane world, Farage would be ignored and us lefties would have less ulcers. But for some reason, the media hangs on to his every word, waiting to either praise him or deride him. Like a little Enoch Powell, but without the Parlimentary seat or gravitas, his words have been repeated all over Twitter, to the disgust of Sweden. He cites this graph as proof:

So, it tells us that Sweden has a very high rape record rate, or at least it did in 2012. Remember that date, it becomes important in a minute. Now, the important question is "what does Sweden count as rape?"
The definition of rape is never simple - in UK law, for example, it has to be penetration with a penis or it's *just* sexual assault. They have just about got around to agreeing that unconscious people cannot consent. In contrast, this is the Swedish definition:

A person who by assault or other violence or by threat of a criminal act forces another person to have sexual intercourse or to undertake or endure another sexual act that, in view of the seriousness of the violation, is comparable to sexual intercourse [...] This also applies if a person engages with another person in sexual intercourse or in a sexual act which under the first paragraph is comparable to sexual intercourse by improperly exploiting that the person, due to unconsciousness, sleep, serious fear, intoxication or other drug influence, illness, physical injury or mental disturbance, or otherwise in view of the circumstances, is in a particularly vulnerable situation

This is a far broader definition than most countries. In Jamaica, where the second most rapes are reported, rape law broadly corresponds to the British tradition, but they don't recognise male-on-male rape because all sodomy is illegal. So, how come Sweden has such a high rape rate?
In Britain, between 5% and 25% of all rapes are actually reported. The rest are concealed, out of fear, out of shame, out of conviction that you will not be believed. Unless you are raped at knifepoint by a stranger on CCTV, there will always be an element of his word against yours, and your past sexual activity will be used against you. It is not easy to report a rape, whether you are male or female. It is not easy to be examined immediately after such a physical trauma. It is not easy to give a statement, to go to court, to defend your honour as well as your word, when you have done nothing wrong. About 85000 women are raped each year in Britain, and about 12000 men, out of a population of 64 million. The majority are not reported. Of those that are, the conviction rate is around 5.7%. About 2500 men were convicted of rape in 2014 in Britain.
Let us compare to Sweden. About 6700 rapes (in a population of 9.5 million) were reported in 2014, with around 190 convictions. But it's not the broad definition that makes Sweden appear more rapey - it's the culture. The culture of equality, the culture of believing victims and the culture of victims believing they will be helped. This is what is lacking in British policing culture - for all the claims that the raped will be believed, the trial of Ched Evans, to name just one, has demonstrated quite the fucking opposite.


But this isn't really about the rape statistics at all, let's be honest. It is the barefaced bloody cheek of Nigel Farage and Donald "pussy grabber" Trump pretending they give one solitary fuck about raped men and women. That graph is from 2012, before Syrian refugees had begun to come to Europe in anything like the number they do now. If Sweden has a rape 'problem', it long predates the refugee crisis. Rape is a serious crime, that tears the heart of its victims for years. It's a crime of power, used by men to subjugate and humiliate, to make sure their victims know that all they are for is sexual gratification. It's a crime committed by all races, by all faiths. It is not a refugee problem now any more than it was a Jewish problem in the 1930s. The threat of rape by invading forces as propaganda is hardly a new one:

           

Polish propaganda warning about the Russian army, and Italian propaganda warning about the French. Notice how the soldiers are both black, despite coming from predominantly white countries? The first one warns you to defend your women and girls, the second about your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter. Coz fuck knows, men don't care about rape unless it's happening to someone they love. 

Rape has long been weaponised. It has long been used as an incentive to fight. But we are not at war, whatever Farage and Trump think. At least, not yet.

Two Child Rule

In the turmoil of Brexit, I had completely forgotten about the forthcoming changes to tax credits. From April 2017, only the first two children in a family will be supported by tax credits, and children born after April 2017 will not. I cannot find anything about what happens if you have more than two children and are already claiming tax credits for all of them. Perhaps the government haven't thought about that. Maybe I will have to choose a child to stop claiming for, a Sophie's Choice. Also, when my eldest ages out of payments, do I get to claim for the other two again? How is this going to work?

I mean, there are other rules that are frankly ridiculous like single parents now having to look for work when their youngest child turns three (from January 2017). It's ridiculous because you only get 15hrs free childcare per week and childcare costs literally cost all your wages - the reason I don't have a job at the moment is because I cannot get a job that would pay more than the FOUR HUNDRED AND FORTY POUNDS it would cost me for 40 hours childcare in an educational setting per week. There's a reason the old rules required parents to look for work after their youngest child was in primary school - the school-age children account for a mere £60 of that.

The pension age has also gone up, which means the scope for grandparents offering free childcare to the working is much reduced. And yet the government's broad family policy takes for granted that there is a reciprocity of care in family units. The idea that Mummy and Daddy have two children, Daddy goes to work, Mummy looks after the kids until they are a set age then finds a job for 'pin money', while Granny picks up the children for her and then, later, Mummy uses the first years of her retirement to look after Granny and Grandad and Granny and Grandad in law is still very much the typical scenario visualised. If informal care was taken out of the equation, the cost to social services would be astronomical.

Take, for example, my mum. Mum has been eligible for hospice care now since approximately 1st September (probably a little longer than that). Instead, my wonderful dad has taken a sabbatical from work and is looking after her himself. If we children were older and had less tiny children, we would be doing more to help. Inpatient hospice care costs £446 per day, on average. That's almost £20000 my parents have saved the government simply by coping. The hospice care provided at home costs approximately £20 a day, a very different price indeed.
When older people go to nursing homes, they now usually have to sell their homes to fund their care (approximately £2000 a month, depending on care home). Those who have never owned homes have their care entirely funded by the government. It is much cheaper for the government to rely on familial care, and people staying in their own homes: the population of older people in nursing homes is around 295000 out of a potential population of eleven million.

The tradition of intergenerational caring is as old as humanity, but is rapidly being outpaced by modern life. Since the 1970s, the average age of childbearing has increased as women pursue careers and, indeed, are expected to pursue careers. My mother had me at 23, which was about the average at the time. I had my eldest at 23, but I am a young mother among most of my peers. I cannot care for my dying mother because I am tied to very small children, a thing that would have been less of a concern if my mum had developed this illness in ten years time. My mother, still working until her bowel exploded, has never been able to offer free childcare because of her own career.

But back to my original point. I had forgotten about tax credit changes, but was reminded last night of it by this article in the Independent. Women who have their children as a result of rape will be exempt from the two-children rule. That is the right thing to do, but it very much frames the idea that poor people have children for benefits at the feet of...women. What of men? Take, for example, my middle son. Conceived within a marriage where both parents worked and barely qualified for tax credits (NEWSFLASH: the vast majority of families claiming tax credits are working), yet born into a single parent, workless family. It's not his fault that things changed so quickly. It's not my fault things changed so quickly. It certainly wasn't something I anticipated when I got pregnant with him, although he wasn't conceived in abuse. I don't know whether I should have aborted him, as to not to cost the taxpayer money. It is women who will continue to suffer the brunt of these cuts. The woman happily married with three children until her husband leaves, or dies, and suddenly only two of her children are acknowledged by the state as actually costing money to raise. The woman whose contraception fails her, but can't bear to have a termination. The woman who loses her job.

The proposal that women who have more than two children and claim tax credits ARE EVIL unless they are RAPED is so offensive to me. I don't understand why more people aren't talking about this.

Another Brick In The Wall

The stories in the news at the moment about selective education has made me ruminate on my Grammar school education.

I had the fortune to grow up in a town that had two secondary schools - a standard co-ed high school and a co-ed, no-fees grammar school. At the beginning of year 6 (I think) we all went and sat the 11+. I assume it was an optional exam, but it's not an option I can remember discussing. It was my first experience of a proper exam, all formally spaced tables in a large and alien hall on a Saturday morning. It terrified me. The stress of waiting to find out if I'd got in or not was ruinous to my mental health, as an already anxious 11 year old, but when I passed, I got one of the highest marks in the school. The following September, off I went in my expensive uniform clutching my expensive and heavy set textbooks that I never used.
Now, we didn't have a lot of money when I was little. We weren't on benefits because my dad earned a little too much, but that money was spread among a lot more people than is standard. We were very working class, and most of my friends' parents were horrified at this tall, sweary, untidy and hideous urchin befriending their special snowflake. Conversely, my mum absolutely HATED all the posh  friends I made. Until I was in year 9 or 10, I didn't have friends round very often, but neither did I make the friends that I kept for life until then, so no great loss.
School, for me, was something of a hideous nightmare. There was the bullying - daily do I give thanks that I never had to catch the bus to school. There was the bullying from staff, who occasionally joined in. There was the constant feeling of not being quite good enough. I have an old school report which says that I got 75% in a geography exam, and I was 22nd out of 25. This all got ramped up considerably running up to my GCSEs when all staff decided that the best way to get good results and finally beat Louth to the top of the county league tables was a campaign of demented terror. Every teacher became fucking Saruman, standing at the front of the hall, gravely intoning the awful fate that would befall those who could not be arsed. We might end up...poor.
I got 11 GCSEs. I went on to do five AS levels, but again was hobbled by a mixture of anxiety, discovering sex, and being taught in half my subjects by my nemesis. This teacher, in hindsight, was fairly innocuous and trying to get work out a woman who was far more interested in gigs and sexting and whose grandparents were dropping like flies. Alas that her main way of getting work out of me was to humiliate me in front of the class pretty much every week, in small ways like refusing to believe I had read a Nobel prize winning book in one evening, or just giving me the evil eye. I was never going to be a good student, but being taught by her meant I just didn't go to half my lessons all year. Then I got a B in her main subject, by essentially teaching it to myself.
But it was too late by then, I had given up, quit, and left after AS study leave. What I should have done was dropped a couple of subjects or switched to the other teaching group, but being teenage and grumpy and dramatic, I thought my only option was carrying on miserable or quitting. I had an idea I would go to college and become a nursery nurse, and even had a placement secured, but then my mum said I should stay at home and look after my sister instead. I agree, and also applied to do a nursing diploma at university, against some opposition from my boyfriend and family at the time. I was rejected, which fair broke my old heart. I ended up looking after my sister for over a year, and then moved away and got my first and only real job. The only reason they offered my shy, teenage self the job was because I'd been to Grammar school,

I'm still poor. I still ended up divorced. I still ended up on benefits. My kid's still disabled. I still live in a hovel. These are things that are supposed to be assuaged by a better class of education.

I mean, aside from getting a decent job by dint of being employed by a Grammar snob, I met my future husband at school. I learnt to write persuasively there, and I learnt to be intensely critical of everything, particularly myself. But my love of learning, of academia, of pushing myself did not come from school. That came later. I didn't go to university when my peers did, making me feel inferior, not to mention lonely. I remember going to a careers advice interview in year 12 and telling them I wanted to do a nursing diploma, and they stared at me aghast. Why not...go to med school? Why be a nurse when you can be a doctor? What sort of fucked up attitude is that? It is a blessed miracle I have a high-grade maths GCSE at all; there's no way in a thousand years I could get the grades for med school, even if I wanted to.

I now live in a city that doesn't have a Grammar, but does have a private school that takes a minimal amount of students on scholarships. It has twelve other mainstream secondary schools. There is fierce competition over which secondary school children go to, as there was in the area I previously lived in, where there were only three secondary schools and a private Grammar covering an enormous rural area. Our local secondary school is over the road, and I would no more willingly send my child to it than send him to a lion pit. That's my prejudice, my snobbery, but also based on its appalling GCSE grades. This is despite the fact that I KNOW that GCSEs grades do not necessarily equate to a good school experience. I was the most miserable girl on my throne of good grades.

The problem was succinctly put in a tweet I saw this morning from Professor David Andress of Portsmouth Uni: "What we see in the 'grammars' debate is an underlying certainty that it is impossible to educate everyone well, & a waste of time to try." It is so difficult to maintain any sort of standard in secondary education, whether because of appalling staff culture, the problems of academisation and having schools run as PR campaigns, or simply having too many students without motivation to try. Whichever area you live in, whether it be an area where having a two tier system is normal, or an area which is awash with average high schools, league tables are still used. Performance is still rated. Schools are compared by parents, who strive to get their children into the objectively best schools, hoping to give them a better start. Parents like the option of a Grammar school, not always because they are snobs or victims of class culture, but because they want to give their children a better education and they perceive that to be beyond the scope of standard high schools. Maybe instead of bollocking on about Grammar schools, the predominantly privately educated government needs to raise the profile and status of standard secondary education. Children do not deserve to be written off at the tender age of 11 because they went to the 'wrong' school, or failed to pass an entrance exam because they were stressed, or anxious, or upset about something else entirely.

Hospitals - Not For Tripadvisor

When you have to visit the same department of a hospital several times, you memorise the signs. I now know that domestic violence spikes during sports events, and what different nursing uniforms mean. I know that if you dare try and get NHS treatment fraudulently, Teresa May herself is coming round with the boys. I know that, despite brexit, we can still get EHIC cards. And I know whether or not I would recommend the department to my nearest and dearest.

Wait, what?

We have spent a lot of time in ambulatory care at Peterborough hospital of late. It's a strange, useful department, designed for people who are too poorly to be seen in outpatients but who don't require an inpatient bed. A lot of people in there are being followed up from A+E, or having transfusions. Almost everyone in there feels like shit and a lot of them look it too. It's not the sort of place you go for a picnic, or the stunning view of the car park and Macmillan unit next door. The water's cold, the outside benches were designed for people with waves for arses, and they really need more reading material, but I'm not about to go on Tripadvisor and leave an excoriating review of the amenities. It's not somewhere you go for a jolly - we are there because Mum has to be there.

And yet, would I recommend this department to my friends and relatives? What a bizarre thing to ask people in an acute care centre. A few years back, I had a brain injury and about two weeks later, someone rang me up and asked me how I would rate the A+E dept. I can barely remember being in A+E, so how I was expected to rate it, I do not know.

The NHS likes to bang on about choice, namely choice of provider. Sometimes this can be really useful - I was able to get my son re-referred to his old hospital for an operation despite being out of area - but mostly it is meaningless, particularly in terms of acute care. When dripping blood everywhere, who has time to ponder to which A+E they are going to drag their detaching limb? Who has that level of local choice outside big cities? Where I live, there is Peterborough, which is five minutes away, but the next nearest large hospital is Hinchingbrooke, which is half an hour in good traffic. In an emergency, there's no question of where I'm going to go. Offering choice in acute care is illusory. Being asked to rate it is meaningless.

Treating patients as customers within the NHS is a real bugbear of mine. A good patient experience is very difficult to quantify. For example, excellently executed palliative care still results in a dead patient. Conversely, a live mother and baby is considered the best outcome in maternity care (as well it should be) regardless of trauma suffered. Patients experience the same illness in very different ways, every clinician has a slightly different approach to treatment, illness progression and injury healing can be very difficult to predict. How high patients are likely to rate departments surely depends on their mood, their particular problems and their experience on that day.

To give an example, when my mum was in Scarborough hospital (rated as requiring improvement by the CQC), some of her care on the ward and in transit was substandard from a professional point of view, but we are all so grateful that they saved her life that we wouldn't consider complaint. If asked whether I would recommend their emergency care team, I would give them a very high rating despite seeing some negligent care later on, because of that gratitude. However, when we have been sitting in ACU at Peterborough for six hours, waiting for medication that seems to take days to dispense, while Mum cries and dozes on a bed, I am disinclined to rate them highly. It's not their fault, their care is always excellent, but my mood is never good there.

To rate patient experience requires more detail and nuance than a simple "How likely are you to recommend us to friends or relatives? 1-5" rating, like you get in bloody Argos. If my curtains take thirty minutes to come down the chute in Argos, perhaps I have cause for complaint. Perhaps my giving them a 2 rating is justified. But giving a hospital a low rating because I had bad news that day? Because a poorly toddler was screaming and it made my migraine worse? Because some drunk vomited all over the waiting room and it took a while to clean up? Because I was scared? Because I was in pain? No. That's not a fair way to rate a department.

When I worked in general practice, we had to do patient surveys. For a month a year, everyone on reception would sick of the sight of this stack of questionnaires, ignored upon the desk because nobody coming to an urgent GP appointments wants to rate the surgery - they want to get their medication and go home. So what ended up happening was that all the regular patients would fill them in, rating us generally highly because they absolutely loved the GP or rating all the reception staff poorly because everyone hates GP receptionists. It never felt like a particularly fair way to assess patient opinion, least of all with all the staff fearful of what they might write (I believe now the CCG sends questionnaires direct to patients).

The NHS is not a shop. It is not Argos. It's not even Amazon. It's a public service. Hospitals are not theme parks, or holiday homes, or somewhere you can reasonably expect to enjoy yourself (unless you're some sort of fetishist). Rating your care is so subjective as to be almost meaningless outside of detailed debriefs after the event. Complaining is one thing: I am a seasoned complainer, usually because of instances of negligence or misconduct rather than bitching about a receptionist's tone, and the NHS needs to be open to justified complaint, but giving a flash rating subject to emotion at the point of care is ridiculous. Make it stop.