The ego of Peter Tatchell

My most persisting memory of Peter Tatchell is from a counter-demonstration against the EDL, who at the height of their strength were trying to march past the East London Mosque. Tatchell's helpful contribution to this was to turn up with a placard denouncing 'far right Islamists'. I thought he was a twat.

Now, 'Islamist' is a worse than useless political description, but I no doubt agree with Tatchell that the people who I presume are his targets - fundamentalist, patriarchal, homophobes - need to be stopped. Politics, however, isn't simply about having the right ideas and saying the right thing. It's about doing this in a concrete political situations with due attention to context. In other words, it's about doing this as recognising that your fellow participants are human beings rather than robots. The importance of this is easy to forget if you are, say, a white man with ready access to the media.

If you're a member of a besieged community under immediate attack from fascists, on the other hand, you might wonder why on earth Tatchell felt the need to do something that might look like qualifying or nuancing his support for you. Perhaps you yourself have some ideas, on homosexuality say, that would fall within the remit of Tatchell's condemnation - plenty of people do (or all faiths and none). Or perhaps you have some sympathy for Islamist politics; given the slipperiness of the term it's easy enough. What might move you more towards Tatchell's type of politics would be a display of unconditional solidarity against the immediate threat, leading to conversations based on the relationship of trust this kind of solidarity can create. The intervention picture above would, if anything, push you in the other direction.

Fast forward to today. Jeremy Corbyn was giving a speech on violence against women. And then this happened:

Now, I think the left needs to be able to criticise Corbyn, and I think the cult of personality that some have for him actually undermines his leadership. I also think Corbyn has been naive on Syria - calling for 'diplomatic' responses, for instance (as though either Assad or Daesh would engage in meaningful diplomacy), and being insufficiently strong in his condemnation of Russian attacks in the region. This is the legacy of the dual influence of pacifism and Stalinism on the Labour left, and needs addressing. But once again, it's not simply a question of what one says, there remains the matters of how and where one one says it.

Questions might reasonably be asked about attacking Corbyn at such a vulnerable time, with his leadership under renewed attack in the wake of the Sleaford by-election result. Admittedly Green supporter Tatchell might not care too much about this: one way the heckling could have been reported is 'Politician heckled by member of rival party'. But above all else, whatever you have to say, is heckling a speech against violence against women the way to do it?

One thing the Corbyn leadership has undoubtedly been good at is giving prominence to issues that are forgotten by mainstream politics. Mental health is one example. Women's liberation is another. I don't know what he was saying about violence against women, since it hasn't been reported, nor whether I agree with it (or whether, for instance, his approach was carceral). But at least he was talking about the issue. Here was a politician for once talking about an issue that affects millions of lives worldwide. And it is being ignored because of Peter Tatchell.

A working hypothesis: what Peter Tatchell cares about is getting Peter Tatchell in the newspapers. And being a contrarian is a good way to do that. Hey, I'm even writing a blog about him.

Excellent radio programme on Grunwick

'Grunwick Changed Me' - on Radio 4, here.

Judith's point is very valid...

I have just spent an exhilarating day with comrades in Thanet campaigning against Nigel Farage and for his Labour opponent. When one has been exposed to real politics, to racism and its interaction with other issues in the lives of real women and men, it is always a little dispiriting to return to the bosom of that most self-hating of beasts, the British left. But despise it though I sometimes do, it is home, and so I dutifully logged in to my computer this evening to find - would you believe it? - said left fighting itself.

The issue is that Socialist Resistance, a fourth internationalist outfit, has hosted a debate between feminists who take differing views on transgenderism. In response a petition has been set up, signed by some quite prominent leftists, and not a few men (there's, as you might imagine, an overlap between these two groups) criticising SR for hosting 'transphobes'.

As will rapidly become clear I do not think my views on this issue matter very much. Questions around transphobia are current on the left. For what its worth, I get the impression that people talk past each other quite a lot on this subject (for example, around the question of who qualifies as a woman, differing positions on which seem often to turn on differing prior definitions of the word) - this is exactly the kind of situation I would expect to be helped by open debate. There does also seem to me to be an almost perverse desire taken by some on the left, and I'm thinking here of cis-gendered straight people, to take delight in 'calling out' people as transphobes. I'm not talking here about Julie Bindel and her odious ilk, no - it seems quite easy to be a transphobe. Believing, for instance, that people suffer oppression on the grounds of sex, as distinguished from gender, seems sufficient. There's an uncomfortable whiff of thoughtcrime here, as well as hints towards more general issues on the left: an individualistic moralism and a hyper-identification with victims that seems to me to say more about those doing the identifying than it does about oppression.

I might, however, be wrong about all of this. It's not an area I've thought a great deal about. But even if I had the surprising certainty other male leftists seem to have about matters close to the heart of others' identity (this, if anywhere, is surely somewhere we should tread gently, for we step on dreams, and much else besides) I would not sign the petition. Nor would I sign a counter-petition. And the clue here is in the adjective 'male'.

I am a man in a patriarchal society. Let's, to reappropriate a phrase from John Major, get back to basics. Men, as a group and as individuals, benefit from women's oppression. Yes, it ultimately impoverishes us, much as the wage-relation ultimately alienates the bourgeoisie. But we, like them, do well in penultimate terms. We get more chances in life, we tend to get privileges in relationships - because patriarchy runs deep; like original sin, it inscribes itself into our very being, a being much of which is hidden from us at any given time. We cannot take ourselves out of this situation by a sheer act of will; one no more becomes a 'new man' by a virtue of a momentary decision than the flirtatious born again Christian is miraculously delivered from libido. I think that we have all, pretty much certainly, not only benefited from, but contributed to, women's oppression at some time or other, even whilst declaring ourselves feminists. This stuff is structural; that is not to say there is nothing we can do as individuals. It is to say that the fight against patriarchy must be a political affair.

And as a political affair, it ought to be guided by a principle that - one might naively have hoped - is part of the (non-Stalinist) socialist's ABC. The liberation of oppressed people must be the act of the oppressed themselves.

Which is to say, amongst other things, that men could usefully shut the fuck up about a debate within feminism, all sides of which are already well-represented among women. There is, to my mind, something particularly distasteful about men appearing to want to silence, or at least deny, a platform to a woman (with whom, it should be noted, another woman taking an opposing view was happy to debate). Just stop it.

Sort out the way we as individuals relate to women, in our relationships, in our workplaces - there is plenty of work to be done here. Offer support and solidarity where appropriate - of course. But acting as referees or censors to feminism? That is not our task.

The rise of the political wife

The woman the media are calling "Justine Miliband", married to Ed, is not standing for election in May. She just happens to be the spouse of somebody who is. Why, you might then wonder, is she being subjected to pre-election interviews?

The political wife, and it is always a wife, has been a feature of the American political landscape for years. She exists to stand beside her husband, to express concern for him and stick up for him-  "I think over the next couple of months it's going to get really vicious, really personal, but I'm totally up for this fight," Justine told the BBC's James Landale. Above all she reassures us of the persistence that most feminine of spheres, the domestic, which lurks behind the front doors of even the most powerful. In possibly the most banal caption ever published on a reputable news website, the BBC tell us that "The Milibands share the family chores, such as loading their dishwasher". Look here, they are:

Notice that in order to make the, apparently weakly feminist point, that Ed does some housework, his wife is required. For the domestic is her sphere.

Now this is all so much sexist claptrap. It is no doubt a by-product, along with those wretched leaders debates we're hearing a lot about, of the presidentialisation of British politics during the Blair era. It is encouraged by a collective flight to the maternal and homely, of proportions large enough to keep Freudians in PhD theses for a generation, in response to the anxieties of the age. There may be recessions, Ebola, and the growth of ISIS, but at least we have cupcakes and the option to watch people decorating their dream homes on TV (even if we can't actually afford homes of our own).

Anyhow, the indignity of Justine Thornton, as she in fact calls herself, a barrister, having to talk to journalists about household chores is by no means the worst effect of the rise of the political wife. When Sally Bercow, married to the Speaker, did a photo-shoot for the Evening Standard, her husband is reported to have "read the Riot Act" at her. Certainly the none-too-subtle subtext of right-wing sniping about Bercow's Twitter activity and appearance on Big Brother is that the Speaker can't control his wife.

Welcome to Britain in the 21st century.