election

The rise of the bad guy

Trigger warning: first two paragraphs mention paedophiles, middle section is about racism and sexism, later content is political

The first time I met a paedophile I had no idea. He didn’t wear white towelling socks that showed below his slightly-too-short trousers, he didn’t wear a dirty trench coat, and he wasn’t a socially awkward man with greasy hair, unflattering glasses and a slight squint. Quite the contrary. He was a well-groomed, educated, articulate, middle-class man. He attended appointments to express concern about his grandchildren, and appeared supportive to his children in trying to sort out their problems. He was polite to professionals, and always thanked us for our time and expertise. I later found out that he had sexually and physically abused several members of the family. Looking back, our only clue (beyond the fact the children referred to us were evidently troubled and failing to thrive) was that the receptionist in one clinic said that she didn’t like the way he spoke to his wife in the waiting room, saying “I wouldn’t talk to a dog that way”. But we didn’t know how you could appropriately record that in the notes, given only the children were open to the service. So we didn’t record it.

The next time I met a paedophile he didn’t fit my stereotype of a creep or bad guy either. In fact, he tried to be my friend and find areas of common ground. If I hadn’t met him in my professional capacity and known of his conviction in advance, but instead had met him socially under different circumstances, I suspect we would have found some. Perhaps we would have had a pleasant conversation about politics, video games or running internet forums, and I’d have left thinking he seemed like a nice person. He was young, outgoing and wore a colourful T-shirt referencing a slightly crude meme. He was charismatic, informal and irreverent, and he flirted with the admin staff. However, I might have picked up on something when I found out his partner’s IQ was more than 60 points lower than his, that she had a serious trauma history, and they had met on a dating app for single parents where his profile bragged of how much he loved children. But I doubt his attraction to vulnerable single mothers is something apparent to most people that meet him, at least until they know him well.

The opposite face of this coin, where people assume they can judge a person’s character accurately from superficial appearances, almost certainly contributes to a lot of prejudice and discrimination. So many people from specific population groups are assumed to be aggressive, untrustworthy, or unacceptably different because of their culture or religion – but whether people experience these prejudices or not doesn’t reflect their behaviour or beliefs (or even whether they actually belong to the assumed demographic). Think of the prejudice about gypsies and travellers, or Muslims, or young black men, for example. Likewise the stereotypes about gender, or age. As I mentioned in another blog post, women in the public eye get judged for how well they conform to societal expectations of women – to look decorative at all times, to not be perceived as “aggressive” and to look after others. Any emotional expression is seen as a weakness compared to the perceived standard of cold logic that is perceived as more masculine and therefore preferable. There is a whole lexicon of words used to put women down when they step up to the plate.

Again, most of us are blind to our prejudices and we are also blind to our privilege. We assume an equal playing field when we congratulate ourselves for our achievements, and we don’t see the constant attrition that marks facing prejudice that contextualises individual incidents. This forum conversation (from post by mr0860 near the bottom of page 2 onwards), this twitter thread and this twitter thread show exactly what happens when the recipient flags sexism or racism, but those in the audience who have not experienced it do not pick up the same cues. You end up with a split between those who think it is legitimate behaviour/debate and those who are fed up with it (the recipients of the behaviour). The former group are disproportionately white men who have never been on the receiving end of the issue they cast doubt on. In fact they often haven’t even witnessed the issue first hand, giving them the false impression that it is rare, due to the false belief we all hold to some extent that our own experience is universal. The latter group are then branded as over-sensitive snowflakes stifling debate (though ironically it is those bandying those terms about who cry the loudest if they feel they are being criticised or their voice isn’t being given enough credit, see Stephen Yaxley Lennon or Milo Yiannopoulos).

Meghan Markle has been a particular victim of this pattern, as a mixed race woman that has used her platform to speak up for feminism and against racism and inequality, so it is no surprise that the vested interests of the British tabloid press dislike her and want to put her in her place. Yet there are still those who claim it isn’t racism, or that she brought the problems on herself in some way. In this brilliant clip Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu calls it out perfectly. The emotional labour of explaining or performing inequality is exhausting, and falls disproportionately on those who are subject to the prejudice in the first place, who already have additional burdens to carry.

My point is that we all make assumptions about other people, and often we aren’t as good as we think we are at picking out people’s true character from their appearance or what we get to see of them before we know them well. In fact sometimes we can know people very well and still miss huge facets of them, as is often evident in the terrible guilt and grief post-mortem when someone dies by suicide. The same thing might also contribute to why people enter relationships with partners who later become abusive toward them. Yet we are often blind to what we don’t know – I had someone on twitter recently claim to be certain that nobody in her extended network of over 100 friends and family members has ever experienced mental health problems. Statistically that’s as probable as a lottery win on a day you get struck by lightning, unless her family deviates very far from the rest of the world population in some way.

That isn’t to say there aren’t horrible people who are outwardly and obviously bad. There are. And I’ve met plenty of them, both personally and professionally. But I don’t think we can always pick them out from a line-up. And even when we can, it doesn’t seem to always hold them back. After all, we’ve had some very popular and powerful men come to light after many years of sexually abusing people on a massive scale (eg Weinstein, Epstein, Savile). There are also more than a few repugnant men in prominent political positions at the moment. Somehow being a division-stoking, lying, philanderer who will take whatever political position is expedient to him or his far-right paymasters, or a hate-mongering, tax-dodging, cheating, sex-pest who has asked foreign powers to interfere in his country’s elections hasn’t blocked two rich, overweight, blond men from some of the most powerful offices of power in the world. Far from it. Instead of their moral character being a barrier to office it is a selling point. Rather than denying or attempting to mask their true nature, they have started to double down in the knowledge that it isn’t reducing their popularity. Perhaps their carefully constructed persona of being harmlessly dim keeps them filed under ‘amusing oaf’ rather than ‘dangerous autocrat’. It is clear that their simplistic slogans have appealed to populations fed up of being ignored or talked down to, and made them seem more down to earth, whilst their decisions (no matter how hypocritical or founded on lies) make them seem like men of action.

I can’t be the only person that finds this incredibly frustrating. Surely we need to value truth and honour and block bad people from power? We need to stop it being amusing or acceptable to lie, express prejudice, exploit others, or to foment hatred of vulnerable people, and that means challenging the way that this is reported. Critical in this is the regulation of social media, and the support of journalism that is ethical and independent, rather than being reliant on social media, misleading narratives from biased sources and badly checked hearsay that spreads more rapidly and widely than the corrections that follow. I’m with Carole Cadwalladr that this is key to helping the public understand the truth about key issues and allowing democracy to function. If everyone who wanted progressive values to stand a chance in the world boycotted Facebook and lobbied for better regulation, their advertising revenue would fall and their business model would have to change. The million dollar question is whether we want things to change enough to take action, even if this means we have to find alternate ways to journal and share our lives with our networks*. Otherwise the bad people might tighten their hold on power and lead us in increasingly worrying directions.

 

*If that feels too much of a step, then I’d recommend you take three simple areas:
  1. Increase your privacy. On Facebook change your name and set your privacy settings higher so little or no information is public. Be wary of services with poor privacy and data protection.
  2. Be more data savvy. Watch The Big Hack. Be aware of what data you are giving way. Be mindful of what data your mobile phone and/or internet browser is collecting and what “personalisation” of advertising you are allowing, read what you are consenting to in the user agreement for apps and software
  3. Install apps that block advertising and show who is funding the adverts you do see. I use FB Purity and Who Targets Me?

Trauma and the return of hope

I wanted to write something about the recent traumatic events including the Manchester arena bomb, the London Bridge incident, the Grenfell Tower fire. These are very painful and raw events that have been quite distressing to learn about, and I am aware that we still don’t have the full picture. I also wanted to touch on the reaction to these tragedies including the One Love concert, and to give my reaction to the election results. I hope it doesn’t seem disrespectful to connect the two, but to me they represent both the fear and sadness of recent events, and the compassion and hope that have followed them. I should warn you now that the second half of this blog is less psychological and more political than usual. That probably isn’t surprising when I am writing about the election, but I know that type of content is not for everyone so I’ve marked where you might want to skip to the end.

Barring 9/11 I can’t remember a month in my lifetime with more traumatic events. The Manchester bomb killed predominantly young people and parents, and felt very close to home for me. The idea that innocent young people and families going to a concert could be the target for terrorists was unbelievably horrific, and the ages of the victims made the story identify with people of all life stages around the country who could imagine it being their child, grandchild, sibling, friend or parent who was affected. This wasn’t some far away event in another country, where people speak another language or have different culture or appearance that can let us abstract the horror away from ourselves.

The impact of the explosion was felt in ripples that spread far wider than just those who tragically died or were injured in the blast, to those who lost friends, relatives and loved ones, and wider again to those at the concert who witnessed the horrific scenes and felt scared by the situation, the emergency services and NHS staff who responded to it, and those who were peripherally involved in the aftermath of helping people find ways home or places to stay, or in looking for people who were missing. As well as the terrible loss of life, and lasting physical injuries, psychologically these events will have changed the course of people’s lives in various ways and to various degrees.

The same was true of those involved in the events on London Bridge and Borough Market. These were ordinary Londoners and tourists going about their daily life. On another day, or with another roll of the dice this could be any one of us or people that we know. Again, the ripples spread far and wide.

And now we have another unspeakably awful tragedy, where the Grenfell Tower fire has killed and injured large numbers of people representing the full spectrum of age and cultural diversity. What they had in common was living in a tower block built by the council in the 1970s. Preliminary commentary suggests that the decorative and insulating cladding used in a refurbishment of the block was highly flammable and caused the fire to spread rapidly and the compartmentalisation system to fail. If that is true, and it was cost-cutting and a delay in updating the fire regulations that was to blame, then that is unforgivable and needs to lead to legal consequences for those responsible, as well as learning that prevents similar tragedies occurring in the future. I can understand the level of anger that is being expressed by the local residents whose concerns were ignored, and by those who feel that the balance of power in the current political situation means that the lives of people with below average income are given little value compared to the profits of the rich.

Here too the psychological consequences will ripple out widely beyond the horrendous loss of life and physical injuries to those who were bereaved, traumatised by what they witnessed, those who tried to raise the alarm but couldn’t reach everybody, the emergency services who responded so admirably against insurmountable adversity and those more peripherally involved. There will be complex feelings for those who survived when others perished, and I can’t begin to imagine how it must feel for the person whose flat the fire started in. If it is true that a faulty washing machine started the blaze, they must be wondering whether there were any choices they could have made differently that would have prevented or reduced the terrible outcomes that followed. Likewise those on lower floors or adjacent buildings who escaped early on and had to watch others jumping from windows, throwing out children, or being trapped too high to do either. I can’t begin to imagine how that will impact upon them over time, as it was overwhelming to even watch on the limited TV coverage.

Yet, everywhere there is tragedy, we see good people come out to try to help. From the emergency services and NHS staff, to those running charities and organisations to help those affected to those doing practical things on the ground because they happened to be there and felt compelled to do something. The One Love Manchester concert had the highest viewing figures of the year and the fundraising for Manchester victims and charities has topped £11 million. Likewise the fundraising for victims and organisations that can provide support in relation to the London incidents and the Grenfell fire have been astronomical (last figures I read suggested there had been donations of over £1.5 million in 24 hours to causes related to the fire). Overall, following these tragedies we have seen an outpouring of love and kindness on an unprecedented scale.

So perhaps in that context it is not quite as surprising as the political commentators think that the election results suggest the tide is turning against austerity. Public sector workers with frozen pay are those who have been responding to these crises, killing and arresting the terrorists and identifying their networks, fighting the fires and patching up the injured. That means that the public have remembered what heroes they are, and look in a different light at the cuts to the public sector that are preventing them from doing an effective job and mean we are not rewarding them adequately for the essential work that they do. We have also been roused into action to prevent further victims. We can no longer ignore the fact that the NHS and fire service are warning of their inability to provide sufficient cover to meet the need with budgets cut to the bone. Hospitals are struggling to sustain staffing, let alone recruit, without nursing bursaries and international staff. Children are being harmed and dying because of insufficient social care services, and people with disabilities and health problems are suffering and dying because of cuts to their benefits and support packages.

In short, as events have awakened our empathy it has become clear that the government’s policies are without compassion, and are all about protecting big business and the super-wealthy. They are making the rich richer and the poor poorer, and the vulnerable are dying as a result. Tough talk about immigrants and scroungers has been used to justify a lack of public spending coupled with policies that harm the most vulnerable in society – yet the sudden change away from austerity when their electoral majority was lost confirms that these were idealogical rather than economic choices. The negative focus on blaming disadvantaged groups in society has turned the spotlight away from much bigger abuses of the system by international corporations who manage to pay little or no UK tax, and who exploit staff on zero hours contracts, or even force them to work for their benefits through work fare schemes. The wealthiest in society are able to pay accountants and lawyers to help them avoid tax the most, and to hide income in off-shore schemes for tax avoidance purposes.

So at a time when compassion is so needed, and so evident in response to terrible events, there has been a political shift. It hasn’t happened in isolation – we have seen increasing unpredictability in public voting over the last year. I can only make sense of this in terms of a desire for radical change. Young people and those who have felt disempowered and disenfranchised by a political system that seemed to occupy only the middle-right and work only to sustain the vested interests of those who are already wealthy and powerful have been voting for the option that they think will upset the establishment. Sadly, the only options for rebellion available last year were to vote for Brexit and for Trump, or to not vote at all. But this year, as the government has moved the Overton window further right since the Brexit vote, clear blue water has emerged between the parties. And to the surprise of many, the Labour Party has moved left from their centrist policies and candidates of the last decade. Somehow a genuine socialist candidate has been voted into leadership in the form of Jeremy Corbyn, and despite all the efforts of the press and his own party, he has stuck in there stubbornly, growing support from the ground up, and now he seems to have popular support and the potential to be a future Prime Minister.

[If you aren’t a fan of politics, feel free to skip to the last paragraph now, because the second half of this blog is about the election results and what they might mean].

Corbyn might be an unlikely leader following past templates, as he does not use glib press-friendly soundbites. But he is a man who has stuck to his principles throughout his political career, and has been a voice of reason and negotiation when others have been shouting. From day one he has been an authentic voice in a world of spin. Although he was damned for it at the time, he acknowledged the complexity of the issues and did not ally himself fully with either of the polarised sides of the Brexit debate (though he said on balance he would prefer to remain). He has subsequently been able to make a positive campaign in a time in which the fashion is to blame and ridicule. In the words of Michelle Obama that I like so much “when they go low, we go high“. It doesn’t mean not being outraged or angry. It means choosing to focus on how we can solve problems, rather than on denigrating opponents. Corbyn was not only an underdog that would upset the establishment but an opportunity to say enough to austerity. That message has connected with people whilst Theresa May was curiously defensive and robotic, repeating the same soundbites over and over again and refusing to engage in the debate.

Corbyn’s politics roused a new generation of political campaigners (Momentum) who fought a savvy campaign on social media, where it is said a budget of just £2000 reached more voters than over a million pounds spent by the Conservative party. Over 12 million voters saw a facebook post started by a Momentum member in the week before the election. Partly as a result of this, 622,000 people registered to vote for the first time. This image of Facebook reactions to a live stream of the Prime Minister made me smile:

It is obvious to anyone that knows me or anyone who reads what I write that I identify as being on the left of the political spectrum. I was alienated by Labour’s move to the centre, and have become a lifetime member of the Green Party, despite being pragmatic enough to recognise that whilst we have a first past the post voting system the UK will be a two party political system. So I have been quite interested in the rise of the left within the Labour Party, and a fan of Corbyn as an individual politician for some time (I wrote about Corbyn on this blog a year ago).

So, unsurprisingly, I saw the election outcome as a great result. I was afraid that the Tories would get a landslide victory and use it to push through ever more austerity, and channelling of wealth to the super rich. So to see them lose their majority was a brilliant outcome. I’m delighted, and the more I have thought about it the more I think a hung parliament is about the best possible result.

First off the Tories have lost the mandate for their hard right, hard Brexit plans. And young people have been engaged in politics. Hopefully we can prevent repugnant policies like the dementia tax and fox hunting and cuts to education because the majority is so slender and these policies haven’t played well with the public. But I like that brexit will be a Tory problem to resolve, because when it gets messy they will have nobody else to blame. There is a stronger position to oppose boundary changes and to press for electoral reform. Maybe we can improve the terrible cuts to benefits and the regime of sanctions whilst their focus is on damage limitation and Brexit. And the next election might be one in which change is possible.

I don’t think it is a panacea. After so many cycles of hope and disappointment in recent politics, I’m cynical about whether this is the beginning of a sea change, and worried there is still a lot of conservative thinking about the economy and UKIP influenced blaming of foreigners around. I’d like to believe that things will get better from here, but I don’t think we should expect too much too soon. Some of the optimistic predictions of having a Corbyn government by the end of the year, and reaching a point at which the populace don’t want to go through with Brexit by the two year deadline seem just too good to be true. However, I am optimistic about the long game, because of what the analysis about voting patterns shows. Corbyn’s support is younger and more educated than that of his opponents. That is supported by this chart from the Financial Times:

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You can see that over 65s were 35 points more conservative than the UK average, whilst under 45 year olds are more prone to voting progressively. That split by age is a relatively new thing and it has been much more marked over the last two elections. Then I think about what the five year interval between elections means to the population. With half a million older people dying every year, and half a million younger ones becoming eligible to vote, surely over time that will tip things in a positive direction. The only question is whether the tendency of people to swing right as they get older will continue as the current population ages and/or whether the Tories can start to market successfully to these new voters.

I’ve been trying to understand the reason for these demographic shifts, to judge whether the current middle aged moderates are the retired conservatives of the future. From what I have read I’m not sure that the fade from red to blue is inevitable. I think a lot of us who will be entering the top half of that graph soon age-wise grew up under Thatcher and have much more reticence for those kind of policies than the current over 65s who grew up during and soon after the war. We are also more educated (and education is associated with more progressive values) as well as growing up in a more socially liberal world, with greater exposure to diversity. As this article puts it “When my parents first voted in the 1960s, homosexuality was illegal, abortion was largely illegal, the death penalty was still in force and openly racist attitudes were widely acceptable. Now, the death penalty is a distant memory, abortion rights are firmly entrenched, gay marriage is legal” and (perhaps with the exception of the Brexit effect and islamophobia) racism isn’t socially acceptable. Environmental issues are really embedded in the values of young people, and the scientific consensus for climate change and the need to preserve our limited resources has become overwhelming over the last decade or two. Every school has recycling bins and anti bullying policies, every home has energy efficient light-bulbs and lots of products market their green credentials. There is an increased focus on making healthy choices for ourselves and our planet. Anyone under 40 is also growing up immersed in social media, and with the perspectives of the whole world available to them immediately, rather than just the opinion of the local community and the newspapers. The media barons have less influence, and the circulation of the tabloids is decreasing (and there is increased coverage of celebrity “news” within them, and less coverage of the more serious topics).

So I’m optimistic. Despite all of the things in the world that are upsetting people and setting them against each other, I think the march of time takes us towards an increasing prevalence of progressive values. I hope by the time my children are voters the world will be a nicer place, and the Overton window will have moved back to the left.

 

A promise to my daughters

As well as being on the progressive left politically, I’ve increasingly identified as an active feminist over the last decade. I’m sure that this has been apparent from my blog, which has at times posted about this topic explicitly. So this has been a depressing few months for me. After the inauguration of a racist, misogynist sex pest as the POTUS, and in the context of the thoroughly depressing situation in the UK with the toxic politics of austerity and Brexit, I have been thinking about the kind of world I want for my daughters. I have also been thinking about what I can do to to instil in them the values that I think are important and will help them have the kind of future I would want for them.

The massive turnout across the USA and around the world for the Women’s March has been a heartening message in a hard time. It is empowering to think that women all around the world and for several generations, as well as their allies, are working towards the same goals of equality and to further progressive causes (such as caring for the environment, LGBTQ and BME rights, and the value of science/evidence over propaganda and opinion). That sense of community and caring for each other and the future is also a refreshing change from all the aggressive posturing, selfishness and commercialism that seem to saturate the narrative at the moment.

The placards and quotes from the Women’s March have been particularly inspiring. I particularly like those shown on the MightyGirl blog. They illustrate how women all over the world are bringing up the next generation of girls to approach the world on their own terms and have whatever aspirations they want, without the boundaries of sexism and prejudice holding them back. There is one placard that says “I am only 4 years old, but I know everyone is equal” and that is the simple truth – until children are skewed by the prejudices they see around them, they understand the fundamental truth that whatever differences there are between people in how they look or how they live their lives, we are all equal in importance and all deserve to be treated with kindness and respect.

My children have often surprised me with their insight into international conflicts and world events. I remember driving them home from the supermarket when they were four years old, and them asking why the rich people of the world couldn’t give jobs to all poor people so that they could afford the things they need like food, clothes and places to live. I couldn’t really answer that, because I don’t think there is any justification for levels of inequality that mean that the richest eight men in the world have more money than the poorest half of the world population. Yet we have stopped seeing how odd and obscene that is, because we are implicitly given the message that we live in a meritocracy, and wealth is earned through hard work (when the reality is that many people inherit wealth, and few would argue that even the self-made plutocrats work harder than anyone else in the wealth spectrum). A year later, after explaining why poppy badges were being sold I remember having a conversation about whether there were still wars in the world. I said that there were, and most of them were to do with people having different religions. We talked about how wars don’t only affect soldiers, and how a recent bombing campaign had destroyed schools and hospitals. My daughters suggested that “we need to send people in that country postcards to remind them that schools are really important”, as “that is where children will learn that people are equal even if they are different, and you need to be kind to everyone”. I’ve never felt prouder.

I’d like to think I’m good role model of a woman facing the world on my own terms, setting up my own business and being “the boss” at work, as my kids see it, and being an equal partner in my relationship, which does not conform to traditional gender roles. We’ve worked hard to expose our daughters to a range of interests, and given them a variety of experiences. I’d hope that they can make choices about what they enjoy or how they want to present themselves unencumbered by narrow gender expectations or unhealthy/unrealistic body norms. Our bedtime stories have characters of both genders who solve their own problems, rather than princesses passively waiting to be rescued by a prince to live happily ever after. I’d like to think we’ve also modelled the way that we interact with each other, and with a wide variety of people with respect. We have taught them to appreciate diversity and to admire those who defy convention or achieve something despite adversity.

But I’m not sure I’ve done enough to show that we can take action to address issues we see happening in the world around us. I should have taken them to the march on the weekend. I think it would have been a great experience for them, but frustratingly I’m still too unwell to travel. So I need to think of other ways to involve them in activism. And I need to do more myself than donate to charities, sign petitions and write messages on the internet. At a time in which the news is dominated by a super-callous-fragile-racist-sexist-nazi-potus I want my daughters to know that I’ve done everything I can to give them the maximum range of choices for their future lives, and the best chance of being judged by their actions rather than their appearance. So I will finish with the words from a placard that resonated with me: I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change, I am changing the things I cannot accept.

If the bigger picture is too depressing, look at the little picture

Today we learned that we will have a Conservative government for another five years, and I woke up feeling very pessimistic about the world. Clearly there are a lot of people who were swayed by the propaganda churned out by the billionaire owned newspapers, and the scaremongering about whether Scotland would steal English money. This is a sad day for the NHS, which will continue to be fragmented and put out to tender. It is a sad day for anyone dependent on benefits or health and social care services, who will continue to be blamed, stigmatised and treated like second class citizens. It is another five years in which wealth will be leached from the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society and given to the wealthiest and least deserving. So I could have stayed in bed and despaired for the state of the world. But I didn’t.

Today I made a difference person by person through my work. I also gave blood, and hopefully helped a stranger in their time of need. I was friendly to my neighbours and colleagues so that they could be a little happier as they went about their day. I donated to the DEC appeal for Nepal to help a displaced family have clean water. I gave advice to a person I don’t know on the internet to help them get their landlord to repair the hot water in their home. I spent time explaining things to my children and helped them to understand that the decisions that benefit us personally the most are not always the right ones to make when weighed up against the greater good. In other words, I made several small positive ripples go outwards into the world.

I’ve learnt that when problems on a global or political scale seem beyond my reach to influence I have two choices, to let despair immobilise me or to take it as an incentive to action. Today I was able to take the latter path, and I hope that many of you can too.