Mentally Processing 2020

My favourite analogy for what is going on just now is that humanity has been dumped.

You know when you're on the receiving end of a breakup and you don't see it coming, and it is with someone you have been seeing for long enough that you kind of have a life together at least half-assedly mapped out in your head.

Your spending plans are tied to them. Your social plans. Your happiness. Your sense of who you are. Your sense that you can trust how things will be from one day to the next, derived from how things have been between you and them each day until now.

That's what happened to us all last month.  We were breezing happily along, suddenly the virus hit us like an "it's over between us" to everyone in the land all at once.

For the first few days of working from adjusting and switching to working from home or travelling in a zombie apocalypse, it was like the moments and days after a relationship breakup. Blinking, unsure it's quite real, wondering if they might just change their mind and this whole thing will be a horrible moment of staring into the void but then won't be so bad after all.

And all those ways we measure and plan and know ourselves fell apart.

So it makes sense you can't focus on your work properly.  Where normally feeling like this you'd fall back on your friends to reassure you of things, you can't see them or go to a pub and grouch about what has happened.  All those good things to do like taking up a new hobby that involves getting out of the house and meeting new people, getting drunk in a bar and dancing near strangers, or going away someplace new for a change of scene - nope. 

And this time whoever you are, you aren't one of the lucky, pretty, confident things that outside of analogy-land bounce straight into a new relationship in next to no time. Damn their eyes.

Inside I wonder how many of us are even at the equivalent point to that day however many weeks or months after being dumped by a serious love where you have mostly stopped crying?

This month before us is the time when you want there to be your love next to you and there is no-one. You want to make plans to go away together in the summer, to move to a new place together, to have them there to talk to and to be company when you need to share how your day was or on a day out in the Easter Bank Holiday sunshine.

We can't make plans for our new life yet. We have to stay home and will naturally tend to focus on what we lost.

Because we are grieving the life we all thought we'd have this spring, like we'd grieve the life we thought we had with someone that they suddenly snatched away from us.

And we're crushed and we're cross and we just want to hit fast forward and be past all this.  Normally we all know someone who's feeling like that but instead every single one of us is going through it at the same damn time.

On top of which a growing number of us have the non-metaphorical grief of loss to deal with as people we love die at the hands of the plague that our former life left us for.

This is why I'm trying to be more kind to myself than normal, more willing to accept that I have days where I just feel like I failed, and to extend the same to others. We are all shambling round shellshocked from being dumped by a partner we didn't even know we had: the 2020 we thought we were going to be living with.

We can get through this. Let's not beat ourselves up along the way.

LGBT History Month is here!

In February 2005, the UK marked its first LGBT History Month.

I loved the notion: although looking back over old correspondence it seems that the organisers were perhaps collaborating on something to be marked in the more progressive schools around the country, the wider LGBT community heard about it and picked up the idea and ran with it.  So while there were no doubt a bunch of schools events (at thirtyish I wasn't really the demographic to hear about them!) there were a host of other things besides too around the country aimed at the LGBT community in general or anyone LGBT friendly in wider society.

But it was quite lesbian-and-gay despite the name.

Lots of bi and trans people felt left out and some of us decided to do things about it; but to be honest, it was much more something that got picked up within the trans community than the bi community.  So the next few years there were a host of trans events, and a slight downturn in the amount of gay and lesbian stuff - the second and third years of things often see a bit of a downturn as people who had one idea struggle to work out what to do the second time around - but there wasn't much for bis.

In Manchester we had a talk about interpretations of bisexuality in history over the past 3,000 years.  The odd person or group here and there did a talk that didn't really have much to do with history but was perhaps their latest bi research being presented, but it felt very much an LGbT History Month.
By 2013 I'd had an idea.  There has been lots of bisexual stuff that has gone on over the years, and a growing number of high profile openly bi people or depicitions of bis on TV and in film.

There have also been a lot of erased bisexual contributions to our LGBT history, When the story of the decriminalisation of sex between men in Wales and England is told, for instance, we all hear about Labour MP Leo Abse and Conservative MP Humphrey Berkeley, but there is far less mention of Tory peer Lord Montagu or Roy Jenkins (later leader of the SDP) and the role they played as bisexual men without whom the law would likely have taken many more years to change.  If we rely on the sources of the gay and lesbian press we'll never remember the stories of things like BiCon or the bi ban at London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard. 

And so I built bisexualhistory on twitter and its facebook twin bihistory - each sharing in so far as I can manage at least one thing every day about bi history.  "On this day in..." they go - they are all anniversaries or birthdays or the like.  Usually with a link to a news article or wikipedia page so you can read more on the thing in question.

As well as reminding (or teaching!) you of a little dollop of our bisexual history each day, they give an easy way to remind other people about your bisexuality - retweeting about famous bis or bi events is a subtle reminder but one no-one can accuse you of "ramming it down their throat" over, you're just retweeting a happy birthday message to Anna Paquin or Sara Ramirez or what have you. And for allies it's a really easy way of gently showing support through the year.

I'd love people to submit more dates for the calendar. Maybe you know a few or would like to help out by researching some.

And meanwhile the Month has grown like topsy the last few years with a host of events including the big "Hub" events around the UK - more than a dozen big LGBT history festivals at museums around the country and even with a couple overseas joining in.


So happy LGBT History Month. Even if it's not LGBTHM wherever in the world you are!

Mathematical Operators

A small thought.  The thing about "LGBT+" as a term is that it needs a counterpart.

Specifically "LGBT-", for where you say LGBT on the tin but you really mean a slightly smaller list.

(I want to carry on to other maths operators here but the next obvious one is multiplication, and the * has been appropriated for other purposes already, and the one after that is division and if you haven't already heard about divisions within LGBT you're never gonna learn and frankly it's our own private set of internal battles!)

Meanwhile in Spain

There are lots of media reports about the Spanish general election all over my newsfeeds today.  Which is great: we should know more about elections in other countries that are not the USA.

Here's how they all go:

• The Socialists are forming a government!
• The Conservatives lost half their seats!
• The Fascists are in parliament again!
• No-one got elected for the Stop Bullfighting party!

...what none of these stories mention is that the Citizens party jumped from 32 to 57 seats - also doubling its parliamentary representation and moving from fourth party to third party. Indeed they nearly took second place what with the outgoing government being reduced to 66 seats.

It's another reminder that our UKanian media are super eager to report neon-nazis and hate admitting there is anything or anyone pulling in the opposite direction.

Indeed if you ignore the small group of far-right MPs, which has upset the press by not being as great an incursion as they had been talking up, most of the Spanish election looks a lot like the UK's in 1997: Labour doubling its seats, the Tories halving theirs, and the Liberals doubling their representation - but the reportage being all about the reds and the blues.

2011 and all that

I got to thinking about the 2011 AV referendum. Post-2016, it would be "the referendum we've all forgotten" if that title weren't held by the 2011 Welsh referendum. No, really, there was one - look it up on google, it's seven pages in.

I knew and know people who voted either way on AV, though my social circle was definitely skewed against the national trend (not surprising, I hang out with more lefties than righties) with a majority of people I knew backing AV whether eagerly or on the "half a loaf is better than no bread" basis.

Since 2011 we've had two general elections.  Who's profited from the outcome back in 2011?

A little digging found some figures from a fairly reliable source.

In 2015 - the one where David Cameron got a majority government with help from interesting sources like Unite and Unison - it didn't make much of a difference it seems.

ERS reckoned back then:

Party	Seats under AV	Difference from 2015 election seats
Conservative	337	+6
Labour	227	-5
SNP	54	-2
Liberal Democrats	9	+1
Plaid Cymru	3	–
UKIP	1	–
Greens	1	–

Two years later the skew went the other way and with a bigger margin:

ERS say:

Party	Seats under AV	Difference from 2017 election seats
Conservative	304	-13
Labour	286	+24
SNP	27	-8
Liberal Democrats	11	-1
Plaid Cymru	2	-2
UKIP	0	–
Greens	1	–

First, you notice that in a country where it's now nearly fifteen years since anyone won a working majority, AV still delivers one smallish-majority government followed by one almost impossible hung parliament.  For people wanting "strong and stable" government, well, we were jiggered under first past the post, we would be jiggered under AV.  All those scary stories of how AV would make small parties overly powerful have come unstuck in the age of Blukip.

Second - how frustrating is it that both times these figures only look at the 332 seats outside Northern Ireland. After years and years of STV elections there it's surely the easiest place to guesstimate where the transfers would go? But we'll have to put that to one side.

So if you're a Tory, AV would have made things a bit better at first but in 2017 would have probably made government impossible outside of a 'grand coalition'. Despite Con-Lab being the easiest coalition fit ideologically, the longstanding pretence of difference means it is incredibly unlikely outside of wartime. The Conservatives would be the biggest party but with the DUP not able to get them across that 323 line it's hard to imagine them getting the extra votes anywhere else. Lots of howling in the press if the biggest party doesn't get to form the government, sure, but to little avail.

Meanwhile if you are Labour it was a mild escape in the pummelling of 2015, but come 2017 you have perhaps missed out of kicking the Tories out of office and being in power, albeit needing a working arrangement with the SNP and the Liberals or the SNP and the DUP. 

Ironically for Liberals, whose first taste of coalition compromise was "well, it's only AV, and there'll be a referendum on it, but we've the furthest we'll have got with bringing about electoral reform in decades" there really hasn't been enough in it to matter, while for the SNP the "no" vote is an increasingly lucky escape.

And all told, for people who hate our current PM and voted who voted "no" eight years ago: she's only there thanks to you!

Opting Out Of Oxbow Lakes

Many readers will have noticed the story in the media about "LGBT lessons" in a Birmingham school and how lots of people who have somehow been entrusted with the care of small children want them protected from being told about how two men can marry nowadays, because if the teacher doesn't mention it no-one will ever find out that Suzie has three mums cos it'll never come up in the playground, and if it does there won't be any bullying because groups of children never stigmatise something they don't understand.

You can't help think these are people who have not contemplated how a vengeful gay son choosing the quality of their care home thirty years hence might behave. 

It seems to vary depending which sources you read whether a these 'grown ups' have succeeded in ending these lessons, or whether the school is continuing them after the Easter break, but it has all got very heated as a clique of parents insist that children are property, not people. Following on from the leafleting we've seen recently equating trans people with paedophiles and rapists, Birmingham has started to have equivalent pamphlets circulating demanding that a section 28 style law is brought in so as to protect kids from not self-harming.  The neon-nazi playbook of targets follows a predictable path.

It is hideous, but it in this story it also leads to a peculiar demand.

Some of the parents are quoted as saying that the curriculum has been updated and it is unfair because they were not consulted.

Now first I have to note that teaching about the existence of something does not inherently make children want to do it. At school, I learned about the existence of things like hockey and rugby, and remained utterly uninterested. Other people might like that sort of thing and all jolly nice for them, but for me, we invented the indoors for a reason, and it's a bit of my cultural heritage I have a lot of time for. Similarly I was taught about oxbow lakes with such diligence that it is one of only two things I remember from five whole years of geography lessons. At no point did I decide I wanted to be one when I grew up. Didn't even have a lake-curious phase as a teen where I wondered about being fed from a river (and no, my regular and committed drinking of neat vodka between the ages of 18 and 21 doesn't count).

So what's interesting about this is that the dangers-to-their-own-kids parents at the heart of this story want control over RSE but don't expect to decide the rest of the curriculum.  How dare they.  If you are going to dictate what children should know about relationships from their schooling as if you had some sort of educational expertise, you should have to do the rest of the curriculum too.

So henceforth a bit of the typical Brummie school day can go like this:

Teacher: ...So that is how U-shaped and V-shaped valleys are formed and the difference between them.  Except for Mattie and Dave - so far as you are concerned, they just happen and, just you two, write this in your books, "no-one knows why, what do you mean they are shapes, and why are you asking me all this shit about valleys what are we Welsh my children don't need to know about that?" 
That's enough Geography for now 4C, so you can put your Geography notebooks away and take out your English Lesson books as we move on to Spelling And Grammer, a word which ends in an 'er' after a poll of your parents.  Today we are going to learn about the correct use of apostrophe'ses', and believe me this is going to be one of your goodest lesson's ever.  Oh wait, Mx Jenkins from class 2A is at the door, they must need to have a quick word with me about something - what's that?  No, Katie, I cannot tell you what the title Mx means nor how to spell it, not without half the class getting to go for morning break early. Nice try though."

A fine debate in the Lords

Bi Community News reports on the second reading of the Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths Bill in the House of Lords last week.

There were some excellent contributions all round, though Lib Dem peer Baroness Barker gave for my money the best contribution to the debate, with lots of depth in the subjects at hand as well as warm understanding of the rest of humanity. Also it reminded me of chatting over breakfast with the Baroness and comparing notes on our recent engagements:

“My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, for the way in which she introduced this Bill, which deals with matters of enormous importance and sensitivity to a very small number of people. I am delighted to speak today not least because my father married a lot of people. He was a nonconformist minister, and I must tell your Lordships that the day on which the Church of England took a more enlightened view towards the remarriage of divorced people was a cause of great sadness in our household.
“Turning to Clause 1, in 2016, I was absolutely delighted to get married in a beautiful chapel—it was medieval and deconsecrated, I have to say—but it was none the less a wonderful day. During the preparations, my wife and I had to see the registrar, and we all concluded that the fact that we had to tell the registrar who our fathers were but not our mothers was simply and utterly anachronistic.
“I am also indebted to my dad for reasons why we should accept the Bill today. Many years ago, my father was officiating at a wedding in Glasgow University Chapel. In fact, it was the wedding of some family friends. When he took the couple out to sign the register, they turned to the groom’s mother, who was in fact a professional registrar—and she had forgotten the certificate. So my father and mother had to disappear from the reception to go and get it so they could be married. Until today, few people knew that the pictures of the happy couple are in fact of them signing a bit of blotting paper for the purpose. So it is high time that we leap forward with tech and make the changes to the schedules outlined in Clause 1.
“Turning to Clause 2 and civil partnerships, there has been a huge debate about why, given that gay people are now allowed to be married and we have civil marriage, we need equal civil partnership. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, not least because my dad often married people in church and had to think carefully about whether that was the most appropriate thing to do. He had the right to refuse to marry people—it was a right that he exercised sparingly, but he did think about it. Back in those days, he thought that there were times when it was not appropriate for people have their ceremonies in church.
“On the question of civil partnership, I am greatly indebted to friends of mine. I am thinking in particular of one person who at a very young age was party to a violent and traumatic marriage. She managed to escape from that and subsequently spent more than 30 years with another man whom she loved deeply, but the idea of entering into something called marriage was absolutely not right. That is no reflection on the value of their relationship, and for her, a civil partnership would have been highly appropriate. I am indebted to her for getting in touch with me last night. When I told her that we were going to be discussing this, she said, “Look, there is a point in this. People who talk about marriage frequently talk about it being a union of two people. I do not disagree with that at all, but for me, the fact we are talking about a civil partnership—a partnership of two people who are interdependent rather than dependent on each other—is extremely important”. She, other friends of mine and others who are a part of the campaign for equal civil partnership have often talked about that point.
“I too want to talk about this in the context of the role of religions. I have spent a lifetime observing and wandering around the religious sensibilities of other people. Through all the arguments we had about civil partnership and same-sex marriage, time and again opponents were quick to throw at us the accusation that somehow this was undermining marriage as it is understood by the religious bodies in this country.
“No one ever recognised the fact that sometimes, a person falls in love with someone who is not of the faith into which they were born, and part of the process of managing their relationship with their family is that they do not get married. Until now, if those people are heterosexual, there has been no way to enter into a legal commitment with their partner while at the same time juggling sensitivities with their family. This is therefore an important step forward.
“Later, we will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, why we should extend civil partnerships to people who are from the same family, because of the issue of tenancies and property. It is not news to him that I oppose that. I believe it is wholly wrong to take a body of legislation designed to apply to adults who, of their own volition, come together to form a family unit and apply it to relationships which are consanguineous and cannot be broken. I agree with him that there is an anomaly in our fiscal law that needs to be sorted, but our fiscal law already makes allowances for children. Those who have children’s best interests at heart should go down that route and desist from this campaign, founded and funded by evangelical Christians, to have a go at civil partnerships and same-sex marriage. We are talking about two completely different things.”

 As a novel-thumping atheist it's easy for me to forget about the complexities of life that having gods can bring, and I particularly welcomed being reminded about intermarriage between people who were raised in or came to the worship of different gods than their partner.

The way ahead

So Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn's coalition of chaos has hit the buffer of a massive 432-202 defeat in the Commons.

What happens next?  Well, the EU needs to come up with an alternative we can support, parps Boris, Britain's highest-paid armchair general.

After two and a half years of bending over backwards to enable our whacky demands that replace the previous combination of opt-outs and special-cases they had allowed us since the 1970s perhaps the EU will have had enough and go for the only fix they can deliver:


By next Tuesday all 27 nations can have ratified a short bill renouncing EU membership and joining EU2, formally inheriting all the currency, political and social institutions of the EU bar "anything that refers to the United Kingdom".

"There you go" Tusk tells us. "It's your EU now, do what you bloody well want with it. No longer our problem so we can get on with reforming the union and protecting ourselves from the huge, systemically corrupt and heavily armed failed state to our East. Catch you later."

We then only have to negotiate with ourselves, which with the skill of the average Brexit secretary should mean we wind up only down about £59bn on the deal.

Except Ireland wouldn't be able to sign up because of the Good Friday Agreement. Bugger. Ah well, there is no solution to the puzzle. We'll have to stay.

2018 in Bisexual

Something I wrote for the BCN website wrapping up loads of bi news from the past twelve months...


So, 2018 has been and gone. Here are our bi-lights of the year past.

Seen On Screen

We had more bis on TV than ever including shows with bisexual leads The Bi Life, Sally4Ever and The Bisexual, as well as bis in shows like Riverdale, The Good Place, Jeremy Thorpe drama A Very English Scandal, bi poly life in the 1940s with Professor Marston & The Wonder Women, and the Freddie Mercury film Bohemian Rhapsody.

Research

Research showed bisexuals are far more closeted than gay and lesbian people – and more likely to experience violence and abuse. So much for the ‘best of both worlds’. The BiReCon (bisexuality research conference) events that have happened each even-numbered year since 2008 took a break but there was a day-long event in a similar vein in Manchester.

The government published the findings of the biggest LGBT survey ever conducted in the UK – and pulled out the bi findings where they were interesting, and often sadly reflected how bi people face additional challenges compared to gay and straight people. Among the resulting work programme they promised to ban ‘conversion therapy’ – the discredited practice of trying to persuade people into being straight or gay rather than gay or bi.

Politics

Political life in the UK is in a bit of turmoil, but in some parts of the union more than others. While the Conservative-DUP not-a-coalition struggles on in Westminster, and the Sinn Fein-DUP deadlock sees nothing happening in Stormont, there’s a working coalition in Cardiff Bay, and a minority government in Holyrood similarly getting on with its own agenda.

And so Scotland and Wales both announced improvements in sex and relationship education in schools – thanks in part to SNP education minister John Swinney and Lib Dem education minister Kirsty Williams but importantly thanks to long lobbying campaigns by individuals and campaign groups like TIE. Working for change takes time but the changes set for classrooms in Wales and Scotland will make all the toil of recent years feel worth it. England and Northern Ireland may be waiting a bit longer for equivalent improvements. We got our fifth equality minister at Westminster in the space of two years: I suppose they last longer than Brexit secretaries.

Referendums continued to be a poor way to decide human rights: while Ireland voted the right way on abortion, giving people rights over their own bodies rather than over one anothers, Taiwan rejected same-sex marriage, and Romania debated redefining the word ‘family’ to exclude same-sex couples.
Meanwhile in the US midterms the voters put Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate alongside other LGBT winners in other races while the Republicans’ most prominent out bisexual defected to the Democrats. The Danish minister for Education came out as bisexual, and Colombia got its first out-bi Senator.

Looking Back

Many events for LGBT History Month in 2017 had focused on 50 years since a bisexual MP (Home Secretary and later SDP leader Roy Jenkins) had enabled the partial decriminalisation of sex between men.  This year we had other key anniversaries with round numbers involved – 40 years since the Rainbow Flag, 30 years since Section 28, and 20 years of the bisexual flag.

Proud Allies

There were bi stalls at more LGBT Prides than ever (we reckon) with BiPrideUK’s campaign of publicity stalls reaching much of the smattering of prides that local groups like Bothways, BiPhoria and BiCymru don’t reach in an average year.

It was a summer where a small clique of transphobic people disrupted Pride in London and inspired many other Prides to show their rejection of transphobia.

Bi events

BiCon came to Salford for the first time – and went rather well. Next time it’s in Lancaster. Smaller BiFest events were successes in Birmingham, Swansea, London and Stirling.

Bi Visibility Day (and that does seem to be gaining ground as the name used for it worldwide now rather than just in the UK) was huge once again – with its children, BiWeek and BiMonth growing in usage as well.  Twitter joined in with a special BiWeek emoji. and BiVisibilityDay trended hard in the UK on September 23rd.

Big Bi Fun Day‘s future was left in doubt with no-one coming forward to run it in 2019.

Us

And there were of course six fabulous issues of BCN magazine. Subscribe to get the next six now.

The future

It turned out there will be a sexuality question in the census in 2021, along with a trans question – but they’ll be optional and people will still have a blunt “are you male or female” question, so there is still more work to do. Making it optional implies a degree of shame about the answer, if you ask us.



And so to 2019, whose anniversaries include 50 years since the Stonewall riot in the USA, 30 years since the UK’s LG(BT) lobbying group named after it was launched, and 25 years since BiPhoria formed – the UK’s oldest extant bi group.

We might even see progress on making Civil Partnerships more equal. And, of course, there’s Brexit…

Paddy Ashdown

My first proper Paddy Ashdown memory was in the 1992 election. Paxman was giving him a manifesto grilling about whether the voters of Yeovil were crying out for the abolition of section 28 and equalisation of the age of consent.

At a time when it was far from popular - the ink was still wet from Section 28 coming into law remember - Paddy put him back in his box as "we don't campaign for these things based on whether they are popular but because they are the right thing to do".

I already knew I was too left wing for Labour and the Tories, but it helped nail down which way to vote a couple of weeks later.

The 20th Bi Visibility Day is here!

...well, Bi Visibility Weekend then. I'm going to be rather busy the rest of the weekend so I thought I better get my blogpost in early: the Big Day is tomorrow.

It’s the 20th annual Bi Visibility Day this Sunday, September 23rd.

The date highlights bisexuality and the challenges posed by biphobia and bisexual erasure, as well as celebrating the work of a growing number of local, national and international organisations around the world which champion bisexual visibility and equality.

Last year there were around 130 events marking the date, from exhibitions, talks and film screenings to picnics and socials in bi-friendly bars. A host of public buildings around the world flew the pink, purple and blue bisexual flag. So far this year that tally has already hit 160.

Since 2001 I've been running BiVisibilityDay.com as a listings website, and I try to note everything happening to mark the date around the world. We usually get some 'late arriving' listings to add that we didn't get to hear about in advance so that 160 will most likely rise further.  They are spread across 31 countries, with some welcome new additions - I always love uploading a new flag to the website.

It's not just a numbers game though. I’ve been organising events marking Bi Visibility Day since the start in 1999 and the transformation in that time is huge. We are more talked about and more heard as bi people than ever before; yet also the challenges and particular needs of bisexuals have been thrown into sharper relief over that time.

Back then, bi was often seen as a kind of ‘gay lite’ with bis experiencing less impact from social homophobia, but research increasingly shows bi people have greater mental and physical health challenges than gay or straight people. We’re more likely to experience domestic violence from our partners, too. And just as there's a 'pay gap' between men and women, bi people on average earn less than their gay and straight friends.

So, far from the ‘best of both worlds’ cliche, the challenge of either persistently reasserting your bisexuality or having part of your life erased proves wearing for many bi people. Where lesbians and gay men have one closet to escape, many bi people find that leaving the one closet leads to being put in another.

Greater bisexual visibility is the best solution to that problem, so in the many many forms that this year's Bi Visibility Day events take I hope they will all be helping more bis find a space where they are neither in the ‘straight closet’ nor the gay one.

Reporting back on Cake

For anyone who was unable to attend the Liberal Democrat Friends of Cake Annual General Meeting last weekend, here are the notes the Underbaker circulated on Facebook a couple of days ago:


CONFERENCE POLICY IN FULL: at our AGM in Brighton, the following composited motion was passed reflecting the current values and direction of the party, including the proposed "friends of friends of someone who once met a Lib Dem at a train station and she seemed fairly nice" system of selecting party leader.

This AGM Notes:a) CAKE;
b) biscuits;
c) tarts;
d) pies and what have been termed "other sundry Liberal Carbohydrate groupings" by writers for the website Liberal Cakeocrat Voice;
e) that these now form the so-called "broad church" of Liberalism, despite many of them (and we mean the biscuits) coming from separate and fundamentally illiberal ideological traditions.

This AGM is Proud of our Record:
a) That the Old Age Pension was devised by the Liberal MP and part-time Prime Minister David Lloyd George after young Megan pressed him to ensure that our nation's elderly would be able to afford a nice bit of cake now and then.
b) That the NHS was invented by the Liberal MP William Beveridge to assist anyone who needed help in having their cake and eating it.

This AGM Believes:
a) In licking your finger and using it to pick the last crumbs up off the plate when no-one's looking, as first publicly proposed by John Stuart Mill to be the logical conclusion of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism.
b) But that it was most likely Harriet Taylor's idea as she was a very sensible woman.

This AGM Recognises:
a) The fine tradition of Moist Liberalism on which this Party was built.
b) Our traditional membership system, which consists of sending a cake not less than six inches in diameter to the Treasurer annually, who brings any leftovers to executive meetings for the rest of the team to polish off.

This AGM is Deeply Troubled by:
a) The entryist Biscuitty Tendency, who have sought to annex the Jaffa Cake and redefine Liberalism from its Moist roots, and the implications this has for what will be on the menu at Betty's Tea Rooms at York Spring Conference.
b) The status of Brussels And European Friends Of French Fancies And Danish Pastries in a post-Brexit world, and whether it will still be entitled to send voting representatives to Federal Conference.
c) The Party Leadership's suggestion of a "friends of neighbours of close personal acquaintances of Friends Of Cake" supporter scheme, under which eating a cake without first offering the Executive a slice would still count as showing somehow adequate commitment to the cause, which to us is frankly about as convincing as the adding up in a Labservative Party manifesto, I mean CRUMBS.

This AGM resolves:
a) To put the kettle on and have a worry about it all over a cuppa and a lovely bit of velvet cake at the first opportunity.

Changing Trains

Few coherent people entirely support the policies of just one political party and one of the Labour policies I warm to is the proposal to renationalise the railways.

Despite being old enough to remember how much worse they were before privatisation than they are now, the idea has deep emotional appeal.

Trains really don't make sense in a privatised-for-competition kind of a way: just like the water and sewage companies, it's all a bit peculiar.

Buses work out badly under competition but you can at least conceive that on the profitable routes at the busy time of day three or four operators can whisk a bus along a bit of road and compete on frequency, price or the like.

But trains can't so easily weave around one another. On the odd route where they can compete, the demand that you buy tickets before travel and while trying to crane your neck round to look at a departure board on the other side of the station from the ticket office to check whether you want this ticket or that ticket if you are to be able to board a timely train. But for most of us, rail competition is a work of fiction, as we have a monopolistic supplier for whatever commute or common trundle up the line to the big town we most often make.

But this is a bit of a heart versus head kind of a subject. And the more I think about it, the more I struggle with two things about renationalisation, even ignoring the potential impact on private pension provision and the like.

First - that I think most people cheering on the idea of rail nationalisation believe it will put an end to the ridiculous fares we pay in the UK.  "The rail companies make millions off of us!" goes the cry. 

The trouble is that's millions in profit from billions in turnover: take the profit out of the system and you free about 2% of the money involved.  With annual fare rises officially of the order of 3%-4% and actual fare rises* locally ranging between 10% and an outrageous 45% in recent years, 2% is not a lot to take out of the system. It's not even one year's worth of fare rises.

A fare freeze for a year and you've taken all the profit out of the system.  I think when the fare rises then go back to their usual painful pattern there would be a lot of public disappointment.

The second problem is taking rail investment into the hands of the government. There are two parties who mostly take turns having power in the UK - and to be blunt, one of them is about twice as effective at winning elections as the other.

Thinking about the agendas of recent Chancellors, do we want to go from the ongoing programme of new rolling stock being added to the network in the past twenty years to a situation where two years out of three there would be scant investment because public spending is "bad" and the rail unions bankroll the 'wrong' party?





* How do they keep getting away with this lie by the way? They claim 3% or the like in the headline figures but then every damn ticket gets rounded up by another 9p.

Change for the better?

The Beeb have announced changes to political programming on TV. I wonder if they will be for the better?

Certainly, UK television needs better political reporting. Like our newspapers, even the bits that like to think of themselves as responsible grown-up reporting are frustratingly lazy and present a narrative that has its flaws and its sparkle but is crucially devoid of attention span. 

On the left, think back to when Clegg became the leader of the Liberals in 2007 and he announced his aim was to double the number of seats the party had. Never mind what became of that for now: nowhere was there any analysis of what that would actually mean for the party and for politics. A simple grasp of maths tells you that Liberal force with a quarter of the seats in the Commons rather than an eighth would have meant a hung parliament or one of the Establishment parties being deposed from their cosy duopoly. Exploration of what that might mean prior to May 2010: nil.

Moving our lens to the right, at the start of this decade when Ed Miliband became Labour leader and sought to capitalise on the wave of unpopularity of the increase in student tuition fees from £3500 to £6000-9000, the BBC lacked even enough attention span to challenge this with the fact that a few months earlier he had stood on a manifesto that promised to raise them to £15,000 a year and beyond.

And continuing on our rightward trajectory, the BNP were cheerled to popularity by a media that thought they were exciting, newsy and edgy and was happy to help them to a brace of MEPs, and that for UKIP did the same in spades. Society paid and will continue to pay a price for those things, but not the people who enabled it.

I am perhaps kidding myself but the rose-tinted memories of Brian Walden's forensic interview approach on Weekend World in the 80s would surely have had the kind of background reading done thoroughly that seems to be missing now.

It's not just a problem at the BBC, as we saw last year when Channel 4's homophobic news anchor was left to run riot despite the station's pretensions to liberal values. And as for Sky Fox News...

The Beeb are determined to cut expenditure. That's going to happen through cutting broadcast hours. Surely better to save through getting rid of the deadwood presenters. The airtime is all there in the digitally multiplexed broadcast world, after all.

A press release from Auntie promising a shift to a more "conversational, unstuffy approach" that has less screen time and drops the party conference season from the roster doesn't sound like one that will lead to the kind of paying attention we need from our political reportage class.  If anything the reverse. Go on, Beeb, prove me wrong.

Rid of it

It's an emotionally resonant date to mark but I probably can't improve on my summary of the Section 28 affair from two years ago here. But as we mark 30 years since Section 28 came in, worth remembering that it is also 15 and 18 years since it was got rid of, depending where you live. Yet its shadow lingered on - and as the current government drags its heels on reform of sex and relationship education for England that shadow gets to linger a little longer. And we have this bold parallel taking place around us as voices just like those that warned of the danger of allowing children to know that bi and gay people existed then, now warning of the horrors that will be unleashed if children get to know about gender diversity. I might just live long enough to see what the next stupid scare story is in thirty more years.

It was heartwarming to see the news from Wales yesterday where the Lib Dem / Labour coalition is striking out in the opposite direction from Section 28, giving young people age-appropriate information to give them information and skills around gender, sexuality, consent and bodily autonomy. I grew up in Wales at the height of clause mania and it is nigh impossible to imagine such things. Yet here we are: hurrah.

For Scotland, the clause went three years before the rest of the UK, reflecting how the Lib Dem / Labour coalition government there had different priorities from the Labour majority government at Westminster. One of the frustrations of the 2010-2015 Lib Dem / Tory coalition was that it was almost always critiqued against what had been before, rather than what would have happened had the Brown government won another term. That's a misleading prism to look at things through - a logic that would wind up with asking why the 1974 Labour government did so little to roll out broadband internet access to rural areas - but with the SNP running Scotland and Labour running Wales there was no easy and direct comparison. But with tuition fees, the evil clause and a smattering of other things, from 1999 we got a clear reflection of exactly what difference the Liberals were making compared to having a single party administration.

For the rest of us it took another three years, and I'd forgotten that when it was at last brought to an end by an amendment tabled by Ed Davey - one of those Liberal MPs who lost their seat in the big lurch right of 2015 but who is now back in parliament. There's a neat symmetry that both sides of the border it was kicked out by Liberals, as the only party to have opposed it in those early days of 87/88.

Bi Erasure at the Beeb

Sadly little surprise that the BBC politics team is erasing bisexuality again.

It's over a decade since they were taken to task over reporting about another prominent left-wing bisexual MP, Simon Hughes, as John Pienaar declared that someone who had talked about having relationships with men and women was therefore gay. 

Expect a lot more of this as a retelling of the Thorpe saga is heading for TV screens (carefully timed, you note, for publicity just ahead of a round of elections).

There is a simple yet remarkable story that his career was ended by the demands of his ex, which spiralled out of control winding up with the bizarre dog shooting incident. Or there are the takes on it which reflect on how he was seen as a growing threat to the establishment in the UK and to the South African apartheid regime. Choose the level of conspiracy that suits your tastes.

Thorpe was - insofar as one can tell from much distance in time and social strata - a bisexual man whose life was shaped in an era where that had lots of social and legal implications. Like Nigel Farage, a great self-publicist, though with diametrically opposite views.

But as he seems to have had long happy relationships with women, erasing many years of marriage and other relationships away on a "just one man makes you completely gay" basis is below the standards of reporting we should expect from Auntie.

The "bi" part of the word bisexual gets falsely accused of meaning "2" from some quarters, but there are sadly still BBC journalists not capable of counting even that high.


(Not unique to the BBC, of course. Here in the Times for instance.)

At last, the 2010 show

So in today's news the Daily Express front page cries out "AT LAST! TAX CUTS ON WAY!"

We have had chunky tax cuts every year since 2010. It started thanks to the Lib Dems (arguably thanks to one Liberal parliamentary candidate, who from what I recall didn't even take first or second place in her seat) and after five years of being grudgingly allowed by the Tories as part of the left-right coalition deal it had proved so popular that Cameron and May carried on with it in their starring roles as Prime Minister With A Plan To Properly Sink The Economy and Prime Minister Who Will Never Take A Walking Holiday In Wales Again.

Top journalism. I look forward to their upcoming feature on who the entrants might be in the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest. As it's the Express they'll probably even let us know which song Princess Diana will be voting for.

#30

There'll be lots all over the internet today celebrating 30 years of the Lib Dems. I am struggling to use the computer just now so only a short blogpost to mark 30 years of the latest iteration of The Original Left Wing Party And Still The Best (copyright battle with Kelloggs' ongoing) to reflect on how I came to join.

Growing up where and when I did I got to see two things at once about politics growing up: the Tories are - collectively, with individual exception and all that - selfish venal people interested only in their own well-being and as a party with that of the people who bankroll them. Whereas Labour are - collectively, with individual exception and all that - selfish venal people interested only in their own well-being and as a party with that of the people who bankroll them.

The introduction of Section 28 - as supported by Labour and Tories alike and its repeal blocked repeatedly by both - made me move from "I am interested in politics" to "I will have to get involved then". Moving to England narrowed the choice down: having started to see the kneejerk transphobia in the Greens and with Plaid off the table both due to geography and my ongoing leftward drift, the Liberals were the only remaining option of note.

Then Paddy told Paxman to get the fuck out of here* on a Newsnight grilling about whether "lesbian and gay rights" was a popular cause ("we don't propose these things because they are popular, Jeremy, we do it because they are right") and - at last having just reached voting age - I was sold.

But it then took finding someone who gave me a bit of paper with how to join on for me to take that last vital step. It's much simpler these days, you just click here to get at the form.

I quit the party for a while in the mid 90s but had to come back in the end because - like in a cheap sci-fi alien invasion film with a wonky spaceship possessing an unreliable laser cannon and a steering column that wobbles all over the place at critical moments in the plot - for all of us at the bottom it's our last best hope against the relentless onslaught from above.


* he was a little more civil about it than that - though it would have made great telly...

False flags

In America the latest (that I've heard of at the time of typing) school shooting feels like it has picked up a little more momentum in the calls for action afterwards; not least because of the bisexual boss of the school's Gay/Straight Alliance group and how her extensive use of the term "BS" while explaining how the US' gun laws look from the perspective of some of the groups most likely to be killed as a result of the NRA's diligent purchasing of politicians was an ideal clip for going viral.

Naturally there's a pushback with someone - possibly someseveral, but you know how it is with server farms full of fake social media accounts and people paid to work full time on them - claiming that the whole thing is a 'false flag' operation with no children really dead and paid actors working for shadowy organisations faking the entire thing to acheive political ends.

Maybe that's true! It's not. Of course it bloody isn't. If you think it is, go wash your head in a bucket of water, come back and think it over some more. But suppose this weren't another case of the lying liars who lie about such things telling porkie pies to try and have the most contorted conspiracy theory out of their entire gang.

Well, it's like climate change and the related proposals that we move from unsustainable stinky polluting life-shortening energy production to clean renewables really isn't it?

What if it is all a lie. Maybe if we took a few million guns out of circulation in the USA it would all be in response to some staged pretend disaster. Maybe the sea levels will be just the same whether we use wind turbines or coal power to keep the lights on.

Imagine how awful it would be to be living in a nicer, cleaner, safer world, all for no particular reason.

Decades from now you'd be kicking yourself as you sat in your retirement home, years after you would have otherwise been dead. 

Terrible.

Strange Obsessions

The local paper reports a handful of danger-to-their-own-children type parents up in arms because Altrincham Grammar School for Girls has advised staff to call pupils "pupils", "students" or the like, rather than "girls".  The thinking being that it makes the place more accommodating for pupils who have been at the school for some time and then start to either question their gender identity or to come out as trans or enbee.

"But if they aren't girls, why do they want to go to a girls' school?" is the first silly question being knocked about. If you were starting out afresh as a prospective first year pupil and were male you'd be rather unlikely to apply, but if you are five years into your time at a school and about to sit your TGAUs, swapping schools and having to leave your friends and familiar spaces behind as well as dealing with your own gender vertigo may all be a bit much to cope with.

Persistent misgendering damages lives in many ways including those all-important-to-schools exam results, so it's in the school's enlightened self-interest to not have gender variant pupils under more stress than needs be the case.

It also has the fringe benefit of inculcating in the pupils a sense that they aren't "girls", the subtly belittling diminutive which gets used for women so much further into adult life than is the case for boys. So a bit of a boost for the cis kids too.

The other bloody stupid question being punted is: "but what shall they call the school?" This one carries on into extended drivel which boils down to:

"If it's now a school for girls and people who we thought were girls right up to the middle of their A levels and then found out we were wrong, and all of a sudden we've decided that people who are legally able to leave home and live independently, pay taxes, get married, have children or join the army and die in a war overseas are now also allowed to have an opinion as to what name they should be called, well, the sign on the front the school will have to be changed because PC Police."

I can't help but think that the schools I attended between 10 and 17 both had signs on the gates with "Saint" in them, and there was precious little in the way of saintly behaviour amongst the attendees be they staff or student. I suspect the students of AGSG will cope...