Hope(less)

Back in 2008, like many (many) people I was totally absorbed by the US Presidential election. 

The Democratic candidate spoke about change like it was a thing that could really happen, and seeing stadiums full of people totally absorbed in this idea that there was real hope for the future.

Some years later, I'm sat with an International Relations & Politics degree in an office of local councillors because it seemed like the way that I could help make a really positive change on people's lives.

Despite three years of learning about an awful lot of grim politics and international events, I stuck by the idea that fundamentally, people are inherently good. That we can work together we can tackle issues that are far too complex for one person to deal with alone. That the ideologies that drive us apart can be defeated.

Yet over the past few weeks my faith in people being generally good has been tested.

When the current Republican candidate for president, who once insisted that the current president must actually be African because he's black, wants to keep people of different races (Mexicans)  & religions (Muslims) out of the US. 

And these ideas are not met with condemnation, but stadiums full of cheering people who are filled with hate towards people they barely know.

When a London Mayoral campaign is run on the idea that all Muslims must vaguely know some kind of extremist.

When a Mayor of a capital city claims that the President is anti-Brexit because he has natural 'anti-English sentiment' due to his Kenyan heritage.

When a former Mayor claims that Hitler was a Zionist. 

When a man can shoot dead 49 people because of who they love & despite this loss of life there are politicians in the US who refuse to see the logic in tightening gun laws.

When a campaign can literally borrow from Nazi propaganda in order to win an election.

When Jox Cox MP can be shot in the street for doing her job.

It's really hard to keep believing that there is any light in any of this. I'm tired of politics and I'm tired of a referendum that has done nothing but bring out the complete worst in people. 

I hope that if anything comes from the senseless murder of a politician who seemed to genuinely care about her constituents, the wider community and vulnerable people across the world is that it gives us time to consider where we're headed. And what happens when we allow hate & fear to dominate our discourse, rather than hope & change.

Far more eloquent people:

A Day of Infamy, Alex Massie

The Mood is Ugly & An MP is Dead, Polly Toynbee

Jo Cox was brave. So are most MPs. Let's show them more respect, Michael Deacon

A day was always improved if you bumped into Jo Cox, Laura Kuenssberg 

Amy
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Why You Should Vote in the Local Elections

If you’ve picked up a paper or watched the news or just spent some time on social media you’ll be very aware that this year is an election year. 

Whilst much of the coverage has focused on either the US Primaries, the London mayoral election or the EU referendum; May 5^th is the day of local elections across the country. Here’s a few reasons why voting on the 5^th is a good idea:

Councils are more than bins & potholes
I promise! Councils look after a lot more than you might expect; this includes care services for the elderly, services that people struggling with addiction, sexual health services, how where you live approaches environmental issues, libraries…the list goes on. If you have any opinions about any of those things, you should vote on May 5^th

Councils are going to get more power
The government is really keen on devolution, or giving local areas the chance to design their own solutions to problems. This means it’s super important that you get your voice heard so that your local council looks the way you want it to.

Local elections are used to measure how well the government is doing
Local elections are generally used as a yard stick to see how well people think the government and opposition parties are doing in terms of selling their policies to the general public. Therefore if you have a message that you want to send the main political parties, this is a great way to do it.

Councillors are a lot more hands-on than MPs
Generally speaking, local councillors have a lot more contact with their constituents than MPs as they don’t have to spend lots of time in London. This means it’s a lot easier to raise issues with them, and your answers will be tailored to your local area, as opposed to national policies.

Voting is just important 
Every election cycle there is normally some high-profile person that feels the need to bang the drum about how the entire political system is flawed and that people just shouldn’t vote (looking at you Russell Brand). But by not voting you send a signal to your politicians that you don’t care and therefore they shouldn’t attempt to design policy with you in mind. By turning up to vote, even if you spoil your ballot, you're showing that you are here and care and want your voice to be heard.

I was totally supposed to publish this post before the registration deadline (#deadlaptopproblems) so hopefully you're all registered, if not you can still register for the EU referendum here. You can check your local council's website to find out about local councillors in your area. 

Amy
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Choosing Hope

Birmingham is my much-loved adopted home.

When I first walked onto the University of Birmingham's campus I remember getting this buzzy feeling in my stomach and just felt like I totally belonged there.

In my second year I started working at two of the city's wonderful concert halls and loved working in the heart of it all.

After graduating, I headed back to Lincolnshire and mourned the loss of a city where so much stuff was happening; where I could get a train and a bus wherever.

Getting a job back in Birmingham last year was a complete dream, and living and working in the city centre has made me very happy. I love being in a city where people actually smile at you and are approachable and generally have pride in a place which still gets a bizarrely bad rap despite the fact that it has changed remarkably over the past 30 years.

One of the things that makes me proudest to live in Birmingham is the fact that it is a massively multicultural city. A place where people of all faiths and races live and work alongside each other.

However, sadly there are some people out there who are seemingly scared by the idea of people living harmoniously. That for whatever reason, people who do not look like them or practice the same religion as them are not worthy of a place in our country.

Pegida are a group that were originally founded two years ago in Germany, and are essentially neo-Nazis. Tommy Robinson, a co-founder of the English Defence League, has decided to bring this hate group over to the UK. On the 6th February, Pegida are planning to march through Birmingham to protest the presence of Islam, their first march on UK soil.

It would be fantastic if you could sign the Hope Not Hate pledge against them here. Groups like Pegida and their hateful messages have no place in the Birmingham that I know, or a country that I would be happy to live in.

Amy

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Look for the Helpers

(Andrew Meares, via Sydney Morning Herald)

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realising that there are still so many helpers-so many caring people in this world"
-Fred Rogers

In the aftermath of any tragedy or inconceivable event, in this age of social media there follows an outpouring of noise; as people try to understand what is happening by hurling views and opinions out into the ether. 

I feel like there have been numerous academics who discussed the problems of IS more eloquently than I can (I'd recommend the most recent New Statesman podcast and my former uni's Political Worldview podcast to get an idea); and besides, anything that I might say about blowback and how frustrated I remain by the international community's refusal to act in Syria when Assad began killing his own people, isn't going to be much consolation to the families and friends of the 132 people who have died so far. Nor will shouting about the hypocrisy in the Western media's lack of coverage of the Beirut attack bring back the 41 people killed there. These issues are massively complex and can't be boiled down to click-bait blog posts or opinion pieces. The only thing I can really say, is that we are incredibly lucky to only have to feel this fear and anxiety about the future when attacks as rare as this happen. That we do not live somewhere where either our own government or fanatics with guns pose a daily threat to our lives; to the point that we would risk everything to travel to a continent that offers hope; only to discover that the things we are running from are there as well.

However, amongst the noise and the bigots who use attacks like this to further promote division, there are always people doing great things, and I'd really like to focus on them.

• The #PorteOuverte hashtag which was used by Parisians to offer safety to others
• The security guard who prevented a suicide bomber entering the Stade de France
• The hundreds of people who turned out to donate blood to those wounded
• The vigils and Tricolore lighting around the world
• The Refugees Welcome march that took place in Colchester 
• Paris incredibly beautiful, experts confirm (because sometimes humour is what you need)

Amy
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Thoughts On: Suffragette

I decided to take myself to see Suffragette as a Halloween treat and I am so glad that I did. The film (written by Abi Morgan & directed by Sarah Gavron) follows the story of a group of working class women that become involved in the suffragette movement. It centres on Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) who works in punishing conditions in an industrial laundrette where working conditions are bleak and sexual harassment is rife. When she becomes acquainted with Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff), Maud becomes drawn into the movement, with heartbreaking consequences. 

The film does take a while to get started, although this does mean that you get well-immersed into the working class world that Maud lives in, with her husband (my boyfriend Ben Whishaw) and son (an adorable Adam Michael Dodd). Plus, when it gets going, it really gets going. The suffragettes are regularly taught in school, and so most people are aware of force-feeding tactics, police brutality and the death of Emily Wilding Davison. However, it's something completely different to see those events depicted on screen; the final event is the films climax and is just brilliantly done (and I spent that entire sequence somehow wishing that history was different). It's also wonderfully acted; Mulligan is always a good screen presence, Anne-Marie Duff is great and performances by Helena Bonham-Carter as a female chemist and Romola Garai as a middle-class recruiter are also really wonderful (Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst pops up for all of five minutes). When it ended, I definitely just felt incredibly grateful that these women did so much and risked so much in order that women today can vote, and women like me can study & work in politics.

But what really stuck with me is the moment in the film when the lead police inspector (Brendan Gleeson) says to Maud that people would never listen to people like her, because what she has to say just doesn't matter. The idea that the suffragettes were just somehow above their station, and just needed to shut up, is something that permeates the film...and still feels painfully familiar today.

This issue seems to have come to a head in the past week, when in the wake of the Tampon Tax debate, Philip Davies (an MP whose previous achievements include claiming that gay marriage is discriminatory to straight people) stated that he wanted an International Men's Day debate in the Commons to look at the issues that affect men. Jess Phillips dismissed this idea, stating that until women have equity in parliament there's really no need to have a specific debate on men. Regardless of the fact that it seems that important issues such as a male suicide and male domestic violence are only ever bought to the fore when women try and talk about anything to do with them-the response to Phillips suggesting that such a debate is unnecessary has been pretty grim.

(a fun sample)

The suffragettes were incredible women who help enfranchise millions to vote, yet for many the fight for women's rights seems to have begun and ended with them. Whenever any woman suggests that things could be in any way better, the response is usually that they should be grateful for what they have in comparison to women living elsewhere and, as suggested above, if they're not happy to be quiet they should be violently made to be. It's a shame that whilst we have come so far from the events in the film; in terms of women having the vote and being able to have a say in how their children are raised, and yet some people's attitudes are still very 19th century.

Amy
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Thoughts On: Strivers vs. Scroungers

This post was supposed to be written in response to the announcement of Britain's Hardest Grafter, which sounds like some kind of W1A satire-but real. The title just sat in my drafts only to come back to me after I endured watching Benefits Britain, a documentary which aims at exploring life for people on welfare-but is obviously filmed in a way to make everyone involved look as bad as possible or, in the words of the tabloid press, like skiving scroungers.

The last election saw politicians fall over themselves to prove that they were part of the group that really represented hard working people or those who are 'aspirational'. The main way that they did this was to reassure them that those scroungers who spent all day watching daytime TV and who are sleeping in with the blinds down while the ordinary working Briton is commuting would be punished. Clearly, if people are less well-off when they're working than when they're on benefits something needs to be done; but perhaps it would make more sense to legislate for a living wage rather than allow working people to continue to struggle to live in our major cities and simply cut welfare payments, claiming to be working towards a fairer society.

This shirkers and scroungers narrative is a problem across the political spectrum; in the current Labour leadership contest there is a lot of talk about wanting to represent 'aspiration'. The inference being that under Miliband's leadership they were considered to be too soft on welfare reform, and that obviously no one who is signing on could possibly have any form of ambition. However, the them and us narrative is most loudly preached by the right. 

The Coalition government began to reduce welfare spending, largely blaming Labour for creating a budget imbalance, and the new Conservative  have already announced that they are going to be making £12bn worth of cuts to the welfare budget. Although they haven't quite worked out where, or how they'll be doing this. Whilst introducing a cap on benefits neatly feeds into the 'punishing the lazy unemployed' narrative, it's likely that the main area that will face cuts is tax credits. Far from supporting the work-shy's big television fund, tax credits support those on low incomes in order for them to make ends meet. Whilst Cameron does appear to pay lip service to the idea of higher wages, it seems unlikely that when he talks about 'drivers of opportunity' he's referring to raising wages for shop workers. It's more likely that he's suggesting that lower corporate taxes will enable business to pay their workers more; or in improving Britain's STEM industry standing-none of which will particularly help Osborne's striving shift workers.

This lack of understanding, wilful or otherwise, of issues surrounding those who aren't employed is something that is a defining feature of our current government and its supporters. 'Human errors' which end in people with serious illnesses being asked to attend a job centre meeting. There's been an alarming trend in suicides and deaths among vulnerable people who have their benefits removed. And there's been a general denial from politicians and right-wing journalists that there is any correlation between people's benefits being removed or decreased and the use of food banks; or that this is even a bad thing, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. 

It would be untrue to say that no one on benefits plays the system, but this represents just 1% of welfare payments. When I think about Benefits Britain, there was only person on the show that I would say seemed a little sketchy. The others were a young couple wanting a ~benefits baby~ but they shopped in charity shops and the man wanted to get a job to support his future child. A foster mum who is framed as hoarding her teenage children's benefits for rent (how dare she) who ultimately gets a part-time job, and who is an excellent reminder of the anxiety faced by the unemployed when it comes to making the grade and getting fired. There was also a single ex-carer who is facing losing her home that she's lived in for over a decade thanks to the bedroom tax. I'm pretty sure Channel 5 and the government would want me to be filled with rage that my money is funding these people's lifestyles; but it kind of just made me feel sad.

This rhetoric of them and us has always been present in politics and is becoming increasingly so over the past few years, whether about immigrants or the poor (the headlines at the beginning of this piece are from 2012). However, its lazy politics and I, for one, am definitely bored of it.

Amy

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(I wrote this last week, but George Monbiot wrote an excellent piece on the same topic which is far more eloquent than mine, you can read that here)

Thoughts On: #GE2015

So, after weeks of everyone assuming the UK would have another five years of Coalition government, the Conservative Party managed to gain enough seats to form a majority government. Whilst polling companies everywhere are probably scratching their heads about how they managed to get their predictions quite so wrong, I feel that what the entire internet needs is yet another article on the election's fall out...right?

1. The number of women in parliament has increased

(via BBC)

This is my favourite thing about the election, as this has been a real area of interest for me for years; to the point that I wrote my dissertation on it. The number of women has risen to 29%, just shy of the magic 30% that some academics claim is the 'tipping point' for real solid recognition of gender issues. Plus, as they are across all the parties (including the youngest MP for generations, 20-year-old Mhairi Black) they haven't been given any patronising moniker (i.e. Blair's Babes or Cameron's Cuties). Yet. 

2. The Red Wedding for the Left?

Once it became clear that the Lib Dems had been largely wiped out, and that Labour would most definitely not be a contender for government; the news featured back-to-back resignation speeches from Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband. Additionally, numerous political heavy-weights from these two parties have found themselves unemployed. This has in turn been followed by an awful lot of hand-wringing about what these parties should do next. 

Criticism levelled at the Labour Party seems to be focused on the fact they have become too left-wing; which considering they were committed to continuing to make 'savings' (read: cuts) and manufactured mugs cheering on immigration controls seems a little rich. Personally, I feel that their issue was one of communication-their policies never really seemed overly clear (even when engraved in stone); they never really successfully countered the 'financially irresponsible' narrative and nor did they attempt to challenge the idea that a Labour/SNP coalition would be an unmitigated disaster. When it comes to the Liberal Democrats, I was surprised by how much they were apparently punished for being part of the Coalition, especially as many of their seats went to the Conservatives. I guess what is clearly key for much of the electorate is trust, the Lib Dems reversed on tuition fees and despite the fact that they probably prevented some of the less centrist legislation passing, it seems that that decision dogged them to the end.  

3. Our parliament isn't that representative 
Aside from the fact that the majority of MPs are white men, when it comes to the logistics of voting, our government doesn't really represent what voters really wanted. The Lib Dems received more of the popular vote than the SNP, but were reduced to just 8 seats whereas the other party holds more than 50. Similarly, Ukip polled third overall, but hold just one seat. Regardless, of whether you agree with party policies, it is little wonder that many feel alienated from Westminster when their voices are unheard. Despite some vocal demands for electoral reform on social media, this is unlikely to take place under a government for whom the current system works, but it's definitely something to bear in mind for future manifestos. 

4. So what happens now?

Five years of Tory slim majority rule, basically. Cameron has had a reshuffle, but most of the key players remain in their former posts. This article neatly summarises the key policies that are likely to happen, especially without the presence of the Lib Dems. The current key issues that are creeping out are plans for the EU referendum, scrapping the Human Rights Act (the appointment of Michael Gove to Justice Secretary all but confirming this) to be replaced by the British Bill of Rights as apparently we have different rights to the rest of Europe and re-legalising fox hunting. Cameron is likely to have issues, not only surrounding Europe, but also on facing Scotland's rather tangled relationship with Westminster and dealing with rebellious backbenchers. And we all get to experience this all over again in 2020. 

Amy

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Thoughts On: The Politics of Fear

I'm sure you may have heard that in the UK we are just days away from the General Election, where (hopefully) millions of people will 'go to the polls' and have their say about who the want to run the country for the next five years. The past few weeks have seen the political parties filling the airwaves with their respective soundbites. But the real thing that has stuck out to me is the amount of scaremongering, and fear that has dominated the election rhetoric.

A lot of this has centered around the rise of the UK Independence Party and their pretty single-minded anti-migrant sentiments. As far as UKIP are concerned migrants can be blamed for everything from lack of jobs and lack of housing, to a rise in congestion on our motorways (seriously). This would be laughable, had it not been a sentiment reflected by some areas of the media and thus also by the more 'mainstream' political parties. This means that a lot of this election has been focused on emphasising the importance of British jobs/homes/healthcare/education/roads for British people as opposed to for those scary evil migrants.

However, it's not just issues around immigration that have seen unabashed scaremongering, but also certain parts of the electorate. Namely, anyone considering voting for a smaller party or Scottish people. The sheer amount of hatred that has come from areas of the press towards the Scottish National Party, and indeed the mere idea that Scottish people should be represented in Westminster is pretty frightening. To the point that the Conservative Party are encouraging people to vote for them simply to stop the SNP gaining influence in government so Putin doesn't go nuclear on us all (again, seriously).

And there's the problem. Scaremongering by our politicians and our media does not lead to an informed electorate making decisions based on what they really want. Scaremongering instead leads people to have incredibly skewed perceptions of what the country actually looks like. For instance, an Ipsos Mori survey showed that people believed that recent migrants made up 31% of the population as opposed to just 13%. The same is true of benefit claimants (another group of people that continually come under fire from all sides of the political spectrum for not 'doing the right thing'), thanks to both the press and television programmes such as Benefits Street, people believe that benefit fraud represents about 25% of social security spending. The actual figure is less than 1%. The creation of this non-reality that many people believe they are living in can be blamed squarely on the media and politicians, for allowing easy scapegoating to take the place of acting to achieve real change.

Because for politicians, it is change that is scary. So long as people are busy worrying about there being too many people speaking different languages in their supermarkets; they are not thinking about the constant yo-yoying of education policy; they are not thinking about the long-term implications of changing our relationship with the European Union; and they are certainly not thinking about the weirdly close relationship between our government and a great many of the businesses whose corporate tax payments have been pretty pathetic.

In my mind, politicians should be scared. They should prove to us why they are worthy of gaining positions of power, not through just attacking their candidates, but by showing us what they will do to make the UK a better place to live for all its citizens. Not just those who can pass them a hefty cheque.

You can find out more about party policies without the hyperbole here and here.

Whilst I know this has been a bit of a negative nancy post, I still believe it is vital that you vote on Thursday if you're eligible. The only way any of this is going to change is through making our voices heard.

Amy

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