BiCon 2015's bookings have just passed the 200 mark with 11 weeks to go. Rah rah them, etc.
But it does take me back to the first time I ran a BiCon, in 2000. When we hit the 200 mark, which in round numbers was about a month out, we had to drop the remaining publicity plans on account of having no additional capacity at the venue we could expand into. The final tally of 265 attendees was fab, but with the frustration of knowing it could have been more like 350 if the rest of the planning grid had worked out.
Sometimes you just get lucky with your venue and who else wants to be there that week :)
Monday, 25 May 2015
Monday, 11 May 2015
What We Have And Why
How the Unions handed the Tories power
In 2010, when the dust from the election settled, the Tories were fewer than 20 seats away from taking power. Labour, on the other hand, were around 70 seats away from the same goal - four times as far. 326 is the magic number in the Commons, and the Tories were on 307 while Labour were on 258.
At this point, the Trades Unions and Labour made a conscious decision that not only would they stay in opposition for the 2010-2015 parliament, but that they wanted to throw the next election - or even the next couple of elections.
To have the next government be Labour rather than Tory, whatever they did during the 2010 parliament had to shift power toward Labour four times as fast as it shifted it toward the Tories. Gain 20 seats for each of Red and Blue and the Tories would be in power with a slender majority. Gain no more than 17 for the Tories but 68 for Labour and you could, just, overtake them and get the keys to Number 10.
Yet they aimed their campaigns at demonising and demolishing the Liberals, and ousting Liberal MPs from Parliament. The trouble with this strategy being that of the 57 Liberal MPs around four out of five held seats that would otherwise go Tory. For each seat where the Liberals were punished for the coalition by losing to their local challenger, the Tories were moved toward power four times as fast as were Labour: the very opposite of what was needed to give Labour a chance at government.
Events exacerbated this with the rise of UKIP and the SNP taking ground from behind Labour while on their intended battlefront they were actively handing seats to the Tories, but that plot twist was yet to come.
This is not to say I don't understand why Labour and their wealthy owners in Unite, Unison et al did it. The coalition gave them three possible sets of targets to aim at. They could aim their fire at both Liberal and Conservative groups; or at either one.
Aiming at the Tories was their default position, but might allow the Liberals to underline the measures they were blocking thanks to the hung parliament. Labour, the Liberals and the Coalition all agreed on cuts of around £80bn; pointing out that the Tories on their own wanted to slash £96bn instead would highlight the positive impact voting Liberal had.
Aiming at the coalition as a whole would open Labour up to charges of hypocrisy, as most of the things the coalition was doing that were unpopular were Labour's own ideas. The extension of the Bedroom Tax, hiking up Tuition Fees, ending EMA, giving ATOS huge power over the lives of disabled people, curbing public spending by £80bn... these were all in the existing Labour plan - so whilst criticising them would be populist, it would also ring hollow if the media paid attention. Where the coalition differed from the Labour plan - levying higher taxes on the best paid, taking the poorest paid out of paying income tax - attacking that was not a message that would play well to Labour's core vote. Worse yet, the rate of privatisation of the NHS had fallen under the Coalition compared to what it had been under Gordon Brown.
So there was the third option, to blame the coalition on the Liberals and focus fire on them. A really emotionally tempting opportunity - after years of the Liberals attacking Labour from the left, pretend that everything the Coalition did was the will of the Liberals rather than the result of compromising between Liberal and Tory positions, five parts Tory to every one part Liberal. It gave a fine sense of revenge for the way the Liberals had taken Labour apart over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, creating massive youth unemployment since the early 00s, flogging off the NHS, blocking LGBT rights measures and so forth.
But the quid pro quo for that sense of vengeful satisfaction was consciously choosing to give the Tories absolute power. The gains Labour made would be outstripped four-to-one and the sixty seat advantage the Tories had would only increase. Of course, the SNP then made the maths even worse, stripping out a slew of seats Labour had taken for granted as safely their own.
So why do we have a Tory government? Five years ago the trades unions decided to give us one, and Labour collaborated in delivering it.
In 2010, when the dust from the election settled, the Tories were fewer than 20 seats away from taking power. Labour, on the other hand, were around 70 seats away from the same goal - four times as far. 326 is the magic number in the Commons, and the Tories were on 307 while Labour were on 258.
At this point, the Trades Unions and Labour made a conscious decision that not only would they stay in opposition for the 2010-2015 parliament, but that they wanted to throw the next election - or even the next couple of elections.
To have the next government be Labour rather than Tory, whatever they did during the 2010 parliament had to shift power toward Labour four times as fast as it shifted it toward the Tories. Gain 20 seats for each of Red and Blue and the Tories would be in power with a slender majority. Gain no more than 17 for the Tories but 68 for Labour and you could, just, overtake them and get the keys to Number 10.
Yet they aimed their campaigns at demonising and demolishing the Liberals, and ousting Liberal MPs from Parliament. The trouble with this strategy being that of the 57 Liberal MPs around four out of five held seats that would otherwise go Tory. For each seat where the Liberals were punished for the coalition by losing to their local challenger, the Tories were moved toward power four times as fast as were Labour: the very opposite of what was needed to give Labour a chance at government.
Events exacerbated this with the rise of UKIP and the SNP taking ground from behind Labour while on their intended battlefront they were actively handing seats to the Tories, but that plot twist was yet to come.
This is not to say I don't understand why Labour and their wealthy owners in Unite, Unison et al did it. The coalition gave them three possible sets of targets to aim at. They could aim their fire at both Liberal and Conservative groups; or at either one.
Aiming at the Tories was their default position, but might allow the Liberals to underline the measures they were blocking thanks to the hung parliament. Labour, the Liberals and the Coalition all agreed on cuts of around £80bn; pointing out that the Tories on their own wanted to slash £96bn instead would highlight the positive impact voting Liberal had.
Aiming at the coalition as a whole would open Labour up to charges of hypocrisy, as most of the things the coalition was doing that were unpopular were Labour's own ideas. The extension of the Bedroom Tax, hiking up Tuition Fees, ending EMA, giving ATOS huge power over the lives of disabled people, curbing public spending by £80bn... these were all in the existing Labour plan - so whilst criticising them would be populist, it would also ring hollow if the media paid attention. Where the coalition differed from the Labour plan - levying higher taxes on the best paid, taking the poorest paid out of paying income tax - attacking that was not a message that would play well to Labour's core vote. Worse yet, the rate of privatisation of the NHS had fallen under the Coalition compared to what it had been under Gordon Brown.
So there was the third option, to blame the coalition on the Liberals and focus fire on them. A really emotionally tempting opportunity - after years of the Liberals attacking Labour from the left, pretend that everything the Coalition did was the will of the Liberals rather than the result of compromising between Liberal and Tory positions, five parts Tory to every one part Liberal. It gave a fine sense of revenge for the way the Liberals had taken Labour apart over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, creating massive youth unemployment since the early 00s, flogging off the NHS, blocking LGBT rights measures and so forth.
But the quid pro quo for that sense of vengeful satisfaction was consciously choosing to give the Tories absolute power. The gains Labour made would be outstripped four-to-one and the sixty seat advantage the Tories had would only increase. Of course, the SNP then made the maths even worse, stripping out a slew of seats Labour had taken for granted as safely their own.
So why do we have a Tory government? Five years ago the trades unions decided to give us one, and Labour collaborated in delivering it.
Greens deliver for Labour
Going over the election results it's interesting - by which I mean "what anyone with any sense could see coming but went sadly unreported" - how the Greens' target seats programme has delivered for Labour.
The vaunted ten seat programme, had it panned out, would have leapfrogged the Liberals to fourth-party status. Instead it just resulted in a hold in Brighton, and the shifting of seats from left to right in Norwich, Bristol and the like. They took the opposition to Labour's ATOS assessment programme and Labour's bedroom tax and used it to enable... the election of more Labour MPs committed to those very social welfare slashing values.
Just as the BNP were an excellent front organisation for Labour over the years, it seems the Greens have become their puppet. It's a shame as the Greens' authoritarian plan for a poorer, greyer, monocultural Britain ought to be standing apart as one of the two serious approaches to the challenges of the 21st century: the Right to the Liberals' Left.
The vaunted ten seat programme, had it panned out, would have leapfrogged the Liberals to fourth-party status. Instead it just resulted in a hold in Brighton, and the shifting of seats from left to right in Norwich, Bristol and the like. They took the opposition to Labour's ATOS assessment programme and Labour's bedroom tax and used it to enable... the election of more Labour MPs committed to those very social welfare slashing values.
Just as the BNP were an excellent front organisation for Labour over the years, it seems the Greens have become their puppet. It's a shame as the Greens' authoritarian plan for a poorer, greyer, monocultural Britain ought to be standing apart as one of the two serious approaches to the challenges of the 21st century: the Right to the Liberals' Left.
Saturday, 9 May 2015
It'll be a blast
One of those riskier posts that may be proven right or wrong by the sands of time.
The story of the 2010 parliament was of how the Liberals saw a grenade ready to explode, threw themselves on it, and thus spent five years being attacked for lying on the floor by people who couldn't see the grenade.
Those people have now carefully removed the Liberals.
Here comes the explosion. It's a shame we're all going to have to live through it.
The story of the 2010 parliament was of how the Liberals saw a grenade ready to explode, threw themselves on it, and thus spent five years being attacked for lying on the floor by people who couldn't see the grenade.
Those people have now carefully removed the Liberals.
Here comes the explosion. It's a shame we're all going to have to live through it.
Friday, 8 May 2015
Majority Rule
So here's... fun... as we watch the formation of a single-party government for the first time since 1992. After the claims from vested interests that Clegg got nothing out of the Tories but a seat in a ministerial limo, let's see what difference the Liberals were making. My money's on "rather more than the junior partner in the previous coalition".
(More immediately, a terrible night for those of us on the left, with one of the two UK left parties wiped out and the other falling back badly, but that's going to be very well covered elsewhere - along with the fact that for the first time in my life the 'Blukip' parties won a majority of the overall vote, which will put the lie to any claims that Cameron lacks a mandate for a sweeping cuts agenda).
(More immediately, a terrible night for those of us on the left, with one of the two UK left parties wiped out and the other falling back badly, but that's going to be very well covered elsewhere - along with the fact that for the first time in my life the 'Blukip' parties won a majority of the overall vote, which will put the lie to any claims that Cameron lacks a mandate for a sweeping cuts agenda).
Saturday, 25 April 2015
More Out MPs in 2015?
The 2010 parliament had 27 out LGB members - 13 Conservative (4% of their parliamentary party), 9 Labour (3%), 4 Lib Dem (7%) and 1 Plaid Cymru (33%). Of these, two were bi men (one Lib Dem, one Tory) and two gay women (one Tory, one Labour): the remaining 22 gay men. In the interests of multi-party balance I should add that the DUP are probably most emphatic that none of the 26 are theirs.
27 is a significant slice of the 36 out bi or gay MPs we've ever had. If you were ever an out-LGB MP, the chances are you still are one. There haven't been any openly trans MPs in the UK yet, and though there are trans candidates for most of the mainland parties - indeed one of them currently being splashed over the papers as trans, queer and poly - alas none look likely to break through. Sorry Zoe.
For all that the polls suggest another hung parliament, they also suggest one with a swing to the right: we will have a different bunch of MPs running the show. It looks like fewer Lib Dem MPs and more SNP members, and a huge switcharound of Labour MPs as they lose a swathe of seats in Scotland and gain others in England. Probably quite some turnover of Tory MPs too.
All sides, pretty much, have out candidates. There are 38 for the Liberal Democrats, 35 Labour, 28 Tory, 22 Green, 5 UKIP, 3 Plaid Cymru, 1 SNP and 1 Alliance. The latter three parties only stand in 40, 59 and 18 seats respectively.
That said, in UK elections most candidates don't get elected. There's not many openly-LGBT potential new MPs in Tory-gain or SNP-gain type seats, but there are a few in Labour-gain seats. If the polls turn around for the Lib Dems, the seats they'd gain would add a little to the tally too. So we can look forward to fresh queer faces on the green benches after May 7th.
To keep bisexual geeks on their toes, both existing seats with bi MPs - and the one that might gain a new out bi MP - are seats that might change hands. The Conservative seat of Shrewsbury and Atcham has been in blue, gold and red columns in the last fifteen years, while the Liberal seat of Southwark and Old Bermondsey has been a Labour target at every election since 1983. Labour hope to gain Stockton South: on current polls they should do as it's a very Labour seat that flipped blue in 2010.
Friday, 24 April 2015
The Daily Record is confused
"having an attraction to the same sex in some eyes does not make you homosexual and it does not make you bisexual. Thus meaning you can be in a relationship with a female and be attracted to males but not necessarily be bisexual. The reason for this is because you could simply not envision yourself in a relationship with the same sex."Woah there. This is a special redefining of bisexual to mean "attracted to more than one gender and interested in relationships with everyone to whom you are attracted".
Let's consider that "not really the sexuality in question" clause applied for gay or straight people: if you were, say, going out clubbing, pulling people and having casual sex seven nights a week, and happy with this and not wanting anything "more" in your life right now... you're just kidding yourself about having a sexuality at all. Hmmm. No. Those people are definitely gay or straight. Once you stop having a double-standard for bi, Nicole's definition of non-bi-bis comes unstuck quickly.
Then she turns to the future, which will be...
"A time when sexuality won’t be pigeon holed. A time where gay, straight, male or female will not matter and we will just have sex with whomever we are attracted to regardless of their status."
Uh-oh. We've seen this one before, haven't we? It's the same future fairytale with which Peter Tatchell invents bisexuality every couple of years without ever using the B word. (I'm skipping over the lack in the original text of whether the other person is consenting. Subeditors can do terrible things to hone down a word count, after all).
I think it conflates two ideas, one which is useful, one which is not. Some day, yes, I hope whether you are bi, gay, straight or asexual won't matter: we won't need safe spaces as an escape from biphobia and so forth. That way that the first gay pubs I went to had blacked-out windows for the safety of patrons will be a long forgotten horror. If you find out someone fancies you, you'll only have to think: do I fancy them back? Are we both single or otherwise available? Great! Let's do something about it then!
The other idea, though, is the idea that when prejudice and queerbashing are behind us as a society, labels - bi, gay, straight - will no longer be needed. I think that's a duffer. Just because it's safe to be bi or gay won't make all the people who never experienced same-sex attraction suddenly realise how attractive the people they never fancied before are. We'll still be bi, gay, straight, asexual. We just won't be raised to beat ourselves up about it. And when someone turns you down because they just aren't into girls, they'll still need words that express that. Terms like bisexual may lose their loaded values, but they are still vital concepts about how humans and human sexuality work.
Then again, the Daily Record article begins by observing that "It’s hard to believe that only some 20 years ago it was a crime to be homosexual". It is indeed. Not least because it wasn't - even though Section 28 had sought to make talking about it a thought-crime, homosexuality was decriminalised in Scotland in 1980, thirtyfive years ago.
We should probably have stopped reading there.
Sunday, 19 April 2015
Whose fault is it anyway
Why did the economy tank? Whose fault is "the mess Labour left us"?
The soundbite from the Tories is "the Labour government did it"
The soundbite from the Greens is "the bankers did it"
The soundbite from the Labour party is "a big boy dun it and run away"
The soundbite from UKIP is "a big foreign boy dun it and run away"
The soundbite from the Lib Dems is "can we get a word in here... no? damn"
Well, Labour did it, and the bankers did it, and loads and loads of you lot did it. Cheap loans, stupid mortgages, house price super-inflation, the bankers couldn't do it on their own: they needed millions of complicity borrowers to make it happen. And while that happened on the edge of government control, Labour's tax and spend was based on the pretend money the bankers were creating for assets that were not really any greater than they had been before the hot air boom: when the balloon went pfffffft, we were left with the 'real' tax take but an expectation of what government could afford to spend based on all that imaginary cash being there too. Suddenly what had been passed off as foolish overspending was a humungous £400m a week more going out than was coming in. The 'mess Labour left' isn't the economy as such, it's the massive overestimate of how much the government could afford to spend given general economic activity and taxation levels.
But the politicians won't be heard saying that between now and polling day, as it has far too many home truths to be acceptable to the press and the voters alike.
So that's fun.
The soundbite from the Tories is "the Labour government did it"
The soundbite from the Greens is "the bankers did it"
The soundbite from the Labour party is "a big boy dun it and run away"
The soundbite from UKIP is "a big foreign boy dun it and run away"
The soundbite from the Lib Dems is "can we get a word in here... no? damn"
Well, Labour did it, and the bankers did it, and loads and loads of you lot did it. Cheap loans, stupid mortgages, house price super-inflation, the bankers couldn't do it on their own: they needed millions of complicity borrowers to make it happen. And while that happened on the edge of government control, Labour's tax and spend was based on the pretend money the bankers were creating for assets that were not really any greater than they had been before the hot air boom: when the balloon went pfffffft, we were left with the 'real' tax take but an expectation of what government could afford to spend based on all that imaginary cash being there too. Suddenly what had been passed off as foolish overspending was a humungous £400m a week more going out than was coming in. The 'mess Labour left' isn't the economy as such, it's the massive overestimate of how much the government could afford to spend given general economic activity and taxation levels.
But the politicians won't be heard saying that between now and polling day, as it has far too many home truths to be acceptable to the press and the voters alike.
So that's fun.
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