Cynical or not, mansion tax is a coup for Labour

Labour's hijack of the mansion tax is a victory for the party, whatever the result of today's vote

Ed Miliband looking unusually triumphant

Labour’s sudden conversion to the mansion tax cause could be that rumoured beast: a One Nation Labour policy. A real, One Nation-values espousing policy. The sort of concrete, saleable idea eagerly anticipated by party activists, who can now rejoice in the hope of more where that came from. By stealing a Liberal Democrat flagship policy to partially fund the return of the 10p tax rate, Labour may have just pulled off a political coup. Read full article at Total Politics magazine. 

What it's like to be a news intern at The Jewish Chronicle

Judith Butler, combining topical Jewishness with general excellence

Hello! I've been interning at the Jewish Chronicle for the last fortnight, writing news and consuming my own body weight in cake. As anyone within earshot of me at any point knows, I have a dream that one day I will be paid to do journalism. Until that point, however, I'm learning valuable life lessons - like not assuming it's ok to use someone's surname (complaint number 1), not accidentally misquoting someone (complaint number 2) and not calling someone a lesbian unless they say you can (complaint number 3).

The JC, as it is affectionately known, is a highly pleasant place to work. On morning one they put me at a desk and told me to get on with it. It's exactly the kind of working environment I like. I've been able to engage in quintessentially journalistic pursuits like finding my own stories, doggedly tracking down people to talk to and calling up Russia for a chat.

Here are some of the stories I've written. Also, look out for forthcoming exciting reports on how a flaming meteorite hit Siberia and what to expect at this year's Jewish Book Week (hint: it includes Judith Butler).

First off, a guy called Rodrigo Rosenberg set up an elaborate plot to bring down the Guatemalan government:

'Perfectionist' lawyer arranged own murder


There was an exciting case of Holocaust 'fraud':

'Reich's youngest Nazi' investigated over Holocaust 'lies'


I continued my foray into LGBTQ oriented news, this time with a Jewish slant:

Gay marriage: shuls ready

Gay Jewish parents slam Catholic MP's anti-family allegations


There was a spate of (two) antisemitic attacks in France:

Antisemitic attack in Marseille

Knife-wielding woman threatens boy at Toulouse Jewish school


And most important of all, in light entertainment news:

Sacha Baron Cohen is best-paid British actor in the United States

Jewish burial hope has film star Drew Barrymore seeking tattoo removal

Galliano shocks in Chasidic garb

The rise of Golden Dawn and Venezuela 'spying' on its Jews

Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn members looking like the cast of Les Miserables, except fascist.

As part of the long, hard, unpaid road into journalism, I am currently interning at The Jewish Chronicle. It's super exciting and I get to write serious stories about fascism and the Jewish community and Venezuela and the Jewish community, so far.

I've also written a forthcoming piece in which I interview civilly partnered Jews about their relationships and thoughts on nearly-legal equal marriage. I spoke to a Conservative politician about this at 7.45 this morning, which to me smacks of utter dedication in all respects.

There has been some discussion of 'The Only Way Is Essex' in the office, but luckily the finger of light entertainment writing doom has not been pointed at me.

Here are some news pieces I have written so far. The first is kind of a big deal:

Biggest Golden Dawn rally in Athens since election.

The second is also massive. Chavez's secret services have allegedly been spying on Venezuelan Jews. For anybody with fluent Castilian, there is a cache of secret intelligence documents floating around on the internet:

Venezuela 'spying' on Jewish community:

Gay marriage, Pussy Riot and that guy from the Big Bang Theory

Pussy Riot masks. Maria Alyokhina has received death threats in jail in Russia. And the colour coding here is super cute.

For the widespread delectation of all, here is a final round-up of stories from my time at Gay Star News.

'Celebrating' the publication of The Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill last Friday (25 January), I wrote a feature laying out the the differences between gay marriage and civil partnership. There are actually a surprising number of distinctions. Seven, to be precise.

More importantly, a Pussy Riot member incarcerated in a Russian jail is receiving death threats for her activism there.

Back on the never-ending train of stories about equal marriage: The Tory Defence Secretary Philip Hammond says UK gay marriage will threaten religious groups. He's probably right. But as comedian Wanda Sykes once pithily said, 'if you don't believe in same-sex marriage, then don't marry somebody of the same sex'.



Oh, then there's another story about gay marriage. Go on, you can stomach one more. This one has the low-down on a wildly attractive, mysterious businessman named Ivan Massow: Gay millionare to run as Tory MP in area split by gay marriage row.

Broadcaster and performance artist Amy Lame being awesome.

In other news:

Amy Lamé takes revenge on 'lezzer' white van man (this one is actually pretty cool)

Gay Big Bang Theory star Jim Parsons develops child prodigy TV show

And finally, if you don't read this last one your life won't be complete:
Mayor apologises for banning gay signs from family fun day 

Five top tips for getting a job

You've finally graduated, with a good combined degree in Humanities and Other Useless Studies. You spent your university years relatively well. You played sport for a team, you joined an orchestra. You had a social life. You're reasonably well rounded, and entirely sure that you can a: answer the telephone, b: send an "email" and c: talk to people without accidentally saying "cunt". Ready to take on the adult world of employment.

But the glorious, hopeful summer has now turned to October, and you're sitting in your parents' kitchen in yesterday's pants with a mysterious crust on your face (this bears no relation to my own life, I'm totally fine. Having a great time, actually). You're on your fifth cup of instant coffee and its only ten in the morning. You're flicking through the same unpromising job ads that you've seen every day this week. Most of them tell you neither what the job is nor who it would be for, but they do use plenty of fun, meaningless phrases like "self starter".

The fortnightly trips to the job centre take on a nightmarish air. The night before sign-on day you wake up in your sleep, soaked in sweat. Will you be able to convince the sceptical woman behind the desk that you are worthy of this week's £56.25? Difficult to say, when passing the test to keep your benefits depends on you accepting individual blame for the failings of the political system.

Of course, there's always an opening in recruitment consulting, bribing other people into becoming recruitment consultants. If you don't think about it hard enough, maybe you won't notice that its an empty, self-perpetuating job cycle created to give desperate graduates something to do. Sometimes these consultants even call you up, deliberately ignoring whatever sector it is you marked as desirable on your CV:

Consultant: "Would you like a mind-numbingly boring job that you have absolutely no interest in?"

You: "No, thank you kindly"

Consultant: "You are clearly a benefits scrounging loser. I read about your kind in the Telegraph."


I've never had a conversation like that, but it's only a matter of time.


In any case, from one work-shy feckless job-seeker to another, here are my five top tips for getting a job. They have served me admirably well in the past:


1. Start your cover letter thus:

"Dear Company,

I have no idea who you are or what you do, but frankly the position advertised is an insult to someone of my abilities. Obviously I am capable of filing, answering the telephone, and making tea. During my degree I had to write essays about dialectical materialism, for fuck's sake. Please, please, please give me this job, I really need the money."


2. Apply for unpaid internships. When they offer them to you ask if they'll pay you. If not, turn them down in an outraged email railing against slave labour, linking them to the wikipedia page for the principle of "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work". Repeat.


3. Turn down any job offers you receive. If they're offering you a job, it can't be that great a job. What's wrong with them? (See: Groucho Marx)


4. Write intimidating speculative applications to companies who don't have job openings. Threaten to leave the country if they don't create a job for you. Why should multi-billion pound businesses receive favorable treatment?


5. Whenever friends, parents, partners or bloggers try to give you well-meant job advice, laugh long and loudly. You have no need of their advice! Have you not sent five thousand applications this very week! Do you not have as much chance as anyone else of landing the BBC Director-General job (as and when George Entwistle vacates it)? Shout all these things aggressively, then cry and run out of the room.


Good luck! You'll need it! 

The twilight of anti-coalition opposition

Insert "to the left to the left" related caption

My New Statesman piece on how the left has become quiet, resigned and accepting: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/twilight-anti-coalition-opposition

Contraception is no stroll in the park and men should share the stress

On a side note, all the stock pictures of women and implants are of white women

I have a new piece up on Comment is free. Its about a recent scandal in which contraceptive implants have become lost in women's bodies, and problems with the contraceptive market more generally. And the global pharmaceutical industry. And gender: Contraception is no stroll in the park and men should share the stress

"Justice" for Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Don't make me laugh.

Oh hey! Do you like knowing you're right? Me too! What about justice? Hooray for justice! How about demonstrations of blindingly ignorant privilege coated in the faux-language of 'objectivity' or 'reason'? Wait, what..?

Privilege Denying Dude: he's always right

I didn't study gender at school. My school syllabus was based on the theories white English guys made up about the world for the past thousand years. At school, some things were up for nuanced interpretation, like English literature (a girls' subject). Sometimes, at most, we were asked to consider 'the role of women in...' But hard, manly subjects like science and maths, defined as fact, could not be disputed.

Apparently there's a major branch of theoretical thought called 'feminist epistemology', or something. Most people don't know about it, because we only learn white-guy-theories at school. One of the great things it does is to challenge the idea that what a culture thinks of as "knowledge" is objective, or neutral. Here's a quote that summarises the central point nicely:

"One cannot survey the human race from a great and learned distance, proclaiming loudly that one has found the truth for the good of all the nameless faceless abstractions that one has never bothered to take seriously." (Elshtain, 1981)

And here's another:

"Reflection on how social phenomena get defined as problems in need of explanation in the first place quickly reveals that there is no such thing as a problem without a person (or groups of them) who have this problem: a problem is always a problem for someone or other." (Harding, 1987)

In other words, feminist epistemology focuses on the roles of real people in abstract theorizing. When we're talking about knowledge, it matters who is doing the knowledge acquisition, and who the knowledge is being acquired about. The people involved - their positions as members of oppressed or privileged groups - affect what facts get churned out, and who gets to decide what counts as fact.

What falls out of feminist epistemology is the extent to which "knowledge" generally reflects the perspectives, not to mention the will to power, of the people in charge. How do societies come to believe that we are most threatened by those who are worst off: the Jews, the immigrants, the blacks, the gays, the benefits scroungers? As a direct result of the taken-for-granted "knowledges" made up by those with more power, that's how. And we believe it. We read the newspapers, we absorb the prejudices handed to us.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, despite facing (or rather, evading) repeated allegations of rape and sexual assault, gets to speak at the Cambridge Union debating society because of these power imbalances in the process of knowing. Facts about "the law", "justice", "innocent until proven guilty" are taught to us year in and year out. These are the representative tenets of our great liberal democratic society. They are the mighty principles of the fair society, we must uphold them, free of nuance, free of interpretation, lest we become a Stalinist Soviet Union! Innocent until proven guilty! That's an objective fact! You don't get to decide the law, the law does, and the law is defined as not-wrong!

But there are other facts here that don't get heard, or taught, or learned. These are the facts about the crimes of those with more power against those with less power, and the proportion of the time that the law fails to uphold justice when the victim is a woman, or a person of colour, or someone defined as 'vulnerable'. Could a black chamber maid ever prove a rape case against the white male leader of a political body? I doubt it, whatever the evidence was.

Do I need to quote, again, the attrition rate for rape cases in the UK? It's less than 6% Do I need to mention that 1 in 7 women experience sexual or physical violence whilst students, that about 1 in 4 women are sexually assaulted as adults? Is it worth pointing out, again, how many cases there are, how few of them reach the police? What about the figure for the number of cases reported that are simply dropped due to what dominant knowledges say about false allegations?

I'm so bored of talking about these facts, but no one from the "innocent until proven guilty" camp considers this to be valid knowledge, worth using to interrogate Dominique Strauss-Kahn's free pass to propound his views. Instead, we hear "innocent until proven guilty" repeated over, and over, and over, like a cult mantra. That's the only knowledge that counts, the justice that protects the rights of the guys in charge.

What about the "innocent until proven guilty" that should have been upheld for Nafissatou Diallo and Tristane Banon? Instead we had the "guilty, just guilty" treatment meted out to Diallo, and the "you have a case, but the law is designed to stop us from pursuing it" reaction to Banon. Given that the law did nothing for them, I reckon Cambridge should give them the benefit of the doubt. I'd suggest that we should believe that they aren't just vindictive, pathological liars - but of course that's not the kind of justice that we're used to.

For what it's worth, I agree with "innocent until proven guilty". It just doesn't apply here. We don't have a fair process for finding people guilty. Dominique Strauss-Kahn isn't going to court on these charges - he got let off. 

The case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is damning: Diallo and Banon are just the women who have come forward. Their heinous treatment at the hands of the law, in the name of "justice", suggests to me that Dominique Strauss-Kahn will go on to rape and to assault with impunity. And all the while student debating societies will invite him to chat about economics. After all, it's a much more important subject, rooted in facts and objectivity. That's the stuff that really counts.

To sign the Disinvite Dominique Strauss-Kahn petition, click here: http://www.womens.cusu.cam.ac.uk/campaigns/strausskahn/

Why the gender pay gap matters

The real castration complex? 

I have a new post at openDemocracy. It's about the gender pay gap, but is also sexy and exciting: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ray-filar/why-gender-pay-gap-matters

A well regulated press would also be a freer press, if it could do anything to end media sexism

Not another picture of Pippa Middleton's ass

The Leveson inquiry drags on, akin to the 1000 pages in the middle of The Lord of The Rings where the hobbits do nothing but walk across a cliff. We're still only on the first half - the bit of the inquiry in which press culture, ethics and practices are vigorously talked about. In fellowship terms, we're barely out of the shire.

Lord Justice Leveson is now indicating that he is unlikely to consider any government regulation. That may not be so disappointing, given the government's seeming view on regulation, otherwise expressed as 'we hate regulation'. But this does leave us to speculate on exactly what actions Leveson may be intending. In a manner quite dissimilar to that of Tolkien's oeuvre, the inquiry does not seem to be leading to any massive inexorable conclusions. 

At the end of last year coalition of mainstream feminist groups (the End Violence Against Women coalition (EVAW), Eaves, OBJECT and Equality Now) submitted to the Leveson inquiry that it should address press sexism as part of a full investigation into the relationship between media and society.* How unbelievably heinous; it takes a country-wide media culture overhaul to enable official challenge to media myths of the alien species, 'women', who do nothing but lie about rape, wear clothes, or not wear clothes.

In this video, a Sky News commentator speculates - ever so insightfully - that the inquiry's outcome may be a 'tougher, beefed up, testosterone fuelled regulator.' Sexist language aside (and the identification 'good=masculine' could be one of the first things to go, if you ask me) a proper independent press complaints commission would seem to be one highly logical outcome of the inquiry. We already have one, after all, giving it teeth would be relatively easy. 

The problem is that enabling it to take action against sexism would take greater ovaries than Leveson could ever countenance. The culture is too longstanding, and it runs too deep in the national psyche. The suggestion of any anti-sexist regulation stronger than 'um, guys, can you please play nicely?' is invariably met with the outraged cry: 'FEMINIST CENSORSHIP!!!!' or 'A FREE PRESS IS THE SOLE HALLMARK OF A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY!!!' or, as with Clare Short's campaign to end Page 3, you are clearly just 'fat and ugly' and 'jealous of beautiful young women'. 

Here is what will (probably) happen instead. Between now and the announcement of a new PCC, the bit of the inquiry that was about countering media misogyny will get lost. Or looked over. Or watered down so much that it will become irrelevant. Some concession may be made to not displaying 'inappropriate' materials pre-watershed, 'where children can see'. But the banal onslaught of everything that is idiotic in our culture, the four hundred pictures of Pippa Middleton's bum, the appraisal of women politicians on the basis of their clothing choice - all this will continue.

Those who get on the high horse about the inalienable right to free expression forget that in practice this has meant the unabated reproduction of unsubstantiated ideologies about less powerful groups who, non-coincidentally, have less press control. The people who read rape reports focusing mainly on 'false' accusations, skirts, and alcohol consumption, are the same people who comprise juries who sit in on rape cases from which rapists repeatedly walk free. That's the very definition of a vicious circle.

To mandate that women should be represented as people who partake in the public sphere in roles which are not primarily aesthetic is simply to mandate representations closer to the truth. An end to the barrage of boobs and bimbos would make life a lot freer for the women who would like to be assessed on the basis of their actions rather than for the shape of their behinds. I hope Lord Leveson is brave enough to say so.


*Disclaimer: I don't agree with everything that was put forward by all of these organisations, but implementation of anything vaguely anti-misogynist would be better than what we have now. 

Familes are not factories

I'm guest blogging at The F Word this December! This is the first post, published last week: http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2011/12/post_6

Good question. Tangentially relevant to this post.

My parents have been married for thirty years. I grew up in a semi-detached house in a suburb, one of three kids. The only surprise in the set-up is that we don’t have a picket fence. It was a Tory government’s wet dream of an upbringing. 

Somewhere along the line, though, something went wrong. The conveyer-belt churning out endless, identical replications of this ideal kinship model hit a snag, shuddered and stopped. It turned out one of the slightly-more-than-2.4 kids was queer and at least one of the others didn’t really give a damn about marriage. Our predicted stable, nuclear futures wobbled as reality, in all its glorious diversity, failed to conform to ideology.  

Thank god, then, for the government, who have announced the return, albeit in diluted form, of Thatcher’s Clause 28. Children in free schools or academies will in future be receiving heterosexist brainwashing instead of Sex and Relationships Education. Perhaps they can halt the cultural decline in straight people buying into holy matrimony by literally legislating for its ideological imposition? 

How obnoxiously weird that a practice designed to institutionalise the exchange of women-as-commodities should, in 2011, be being brought back as if it’s the only excellent kinship model. Over one third of marriages end in divorce, we know that only about 50% of people get married anyway - why do conservatives insist on touting the myth that marriage provides a stability that other forms of relationship don’t? Could they actually believe it, or is this a Dorries-esque way of grooming the next generation’s prejudices against the rights of those who threateningly queer the picture? 

Against all the evidence suggesting that other relationship models are also great, we are hugely invested in the ideal of marriage, in particular, in the importance of marriage to women. Popular, mildly-misogynist TV shows Don’t Tell the Bride and Four Weddings (both guilty pleasures, I admit) speak to this, camping up the ‘greatest-day-of-her-life’ aesthetic until it is too absurd to take seriously. Unless you’re Michael Gove, who presumably resolved to bring back Clause 28 during the Don’t Tell the Bride adverts. 

Given how much pro-marriage marketing we receive, perhaps it is not surprising that our common cultural conception is that it is vaguely ‘best for children’ if they grow up with married hetero-parents. The viciousness of anti-single-mother rhetoric, returning time again to narratives of blame and failure, only compounds this problem. The government spectacularly fails to consider the possible impact of such negative socialisation on children growing up in single-parent households. 

No matter. It is best for children to be brought up by married heterosexual couples , apparently, because two parents provide more stability than one. If an extra parent is so great, why wouldn’t it be better to have more than two? Why not four? Or ten? Why don’t we bring children up in communes, as envisaged by our feminist foremothers? 

I want to know why a marriage certificate makes a difference, if it is not just to get couples bogged down in financial commitments to each other so that they can’t separate. I’d like to know, moreover, how it could be better for children to grow up the company of two parents who would really rather have gone their separate ways, and why it is thought to be right that parents abnegate those - potentially eighteen - years of their lives ‘for the sake of the children’. I’d like to know why gender is presumed to make a difference to that equation, why God is genuinely believed to have given a shit about anybody’s chromosomes. 

Clause 28 is a case of cart-before-horse. There is nothing inherently better about nuclear families except the belief that they are better (coupled with tax breaks). If the children of hetero-marriages turn out to be better adjusted, whatever the hell that means, than those from other families, we need to look at the ways in which the former set of children are systematically culturally privileged and change the system accordingly. To conclude that therefore marriage is best and should be preached to kids is question-beggingly circular. It perpetuates the cycle, excluding those who can’t or won’t fit. 

I have seen at first hand that a heterosexual marriage can provide a stable upbringing in which children can grow. But I would contend that if there is anything about my orientation which would prevent me from bringing up kids in just as good a manner, it is the attitude of Gove and co, who, through Clause 28, will attempt to make sure that the society my children will grow up in will be even more full of hate than the society we have now. Thanks Gove, you utter wanker. 

Mad Women on the March

Alicia would probably be a better Prime Minister

Write up of Fawcett Society's 'Don't Turn Back Time March' - published at openDemocracy: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/ray-filar/mad-women-on-march