Single Red Female

Hello everybody!

Bit of an eventful few months so I’m really sorry for the lack of blogging. Fingers crossed I’m back now. Got loads of stuff to cover, don’t you worry your pretty heads.

I went to the Liberal Conspiracy conference today on “Where does the Left go from here” and whilst I found it illuminating, I couldn’t help but be disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm for serious engaging with the public. Yes, we all blog, and we’re all members of the public, but we also know each other’s internet presence, and have political in-jokes, abbreviations, and preconceptions about the nature of those we might disagree with.

We were divided up into tables of about 10-15 people, covering a range of topics, and asking round my table why the Daily Mail is the most popular newspaper in the UK, no one could provide me with a suitable answer. Is it because it’s cheap? Does it really reinforce the opinions of the majority of the UK? Is it because it’s written to accomodate those with a reading age of less than perhaps the Telegraph or Guardian?

At Westminster Skeptics, there are people from many different backgrounds and, shock shock horror, right wing Tories. Some of them are really nice if I’m honest, you’d never know what lurks beneath the surface. Rather than campaign on party-led issues, they come out to support issues that affect everyone, the most recent being the Libel Reform campaign for Sense About Science, and the Science and Technology Committees Evidence Check, regarding evidence based medicine.

There’s been a fair amount of political naysaying from the left recently. We’ve had people denounce the Lib Dems for joining the Tories, the Blairites and Brownites for pushing otherwise Labour voters away from Labour, the mainstream media for giving the Tories an easy ride, but not many people on the left have been calling for Labour to take stock of its mistakes and failings over the last 13 years in order to repair the relationship they have with voters.

What do the left want to achieve? I don’t want people to agree with me because I’m better at arguing, I want people to agree with me because they’ve looked at how policy has affected their lives versus those who make the decisions and can see for themselves what I’m saying. The right wing media make it easy for people to agree with them: Newspaper columns have a fairly straightforward agenda and the content appeals to us on a personal level. Stories about foxes attacking sleeping babies is a good example of this. It doesn’t matter that this sort of event is excruciatingly rare (and dependent on several factors, like the kids being left unattended with the back door open??), it frames a potential discussion about foxes being a nuisance, so perhaps we should reconsider the hunting ban. Cynical, yes, but it really wouldn’t surprise me if we start seeing pro-hunting articles in the news over the next few months.

Why don’t we do this on the left? Where are our anecdotes and our interviews with low-income families struggling to pay the mortgage now that the new budget has been announced? Where’s our gossip stories about the lifestyles of the fatcat bankers, profiting from the bailout WE GAVE THEM. Anyone would think the banking crisis was ancient history, the way people have forgotten their recklessness.

Why are people so happy to swallow the idea that we need public sector cuts to get us through a recession? By all means cut Trident, ID cards, the Royal budget (pffft! as if), but getting rid of teachers, doctors, nurses, firemen, policemen to fill the gaps the bankers made? Come off it. You’re reading this leftie luvvie blog, so perhaps you know it, they almost certainly know it. Why isn’t this widely known apart from the odd Guardian or Independent article.

We have some excellent writers highlighting these issues on a daily basis, but we’re reaching out to those who already agree with us, much like my own blog really. My big grand suggestion is to cast our nets much wider, and actively recruit those we have tried to distance ourselves from. Sometimes, engaging with the public means engaging with those we think lesser of. I reckon that not only will we be surprised by the outcome, but we may just reach an all-round better conclusion in UK policy for a range of issues.

Life is Hard

Hi everyone,

Yet again, I find myself apologising for the distinct lack of blogging and Twitter activity. I don’t even know where to begin. The main reason is that I just don’t have the time. The second reason is that I don’t know what to say, and the third reason is that I’m really bloody miserable.

The reasons for my lack of time mainly centre on my working life. I work 9 hours a day, 8.30am to 5.30pm without a lunch break, Monday to Friday. Sometimes, I can blog around this. It might take me 5 or 6 hours* to write a single blog post on my outlook, copying and pasting links from my iPhone to my work email address, to email back to my iPhone so I can email it to my WordPress account. All this is due to the company I work for blocking our internet access to increase productivity. The irony is not lost on me.

When I get home from work, I’m usually so exhausted that I usually make a quick dinner for myself and head to bed reasonably early. The thought of staring at another screen to write a blog post is incredibly daunting when you’ve been sat staring at a screen for 9 hours that day already. Sadly, I’m not one of those people that can just sit at a computer all day and all night. It’s funny how that was never a problem before.

So much stuff has happened since the last time I blogged about anything serious – the Gaza flotilla debacle, the ongoing Labour leadership contest, Paul Chambers’ appeal, and so many have commented better than I could. What on earth could I possibly add to the debate other than my blogging companions at Liberal Conspiracy, Jack of Kent, Madam Miaow, Johann Hari, and Anton Vowl (to name a few)? I feel like the more I say, the more I open myself up to being “found out”. I’m no more intelligent or interesting than anyone else. My opinions are founded on things that happen to me or things that I read and agree with, which is no different to anyone else. I’m not educated, or particularly privileged or under-privileged, I’m somewhere in the middle. What qualifies me to throw my judgment on the actions of others? And unless I act on my opinions, how am I any better than Richard Littlejohn or Liz Jones?

As for being miserable, money is perhaps the one thing I’ve managed to stay in control of over the last couple of years but now, for the first time in a long time, I’m struggling on a pathetically low budget, and unless something drastic happens (like getting a new job or my rent magically decreasing) I’m living on £10 a week for the foreseeable future, dipping further and further into my overdraft as the weeks roll on. For my birthday in April, I splurged out £12 on a pair of shoes for myself and was gutted to discover that they give me blisters. In lighter times, I’d have found this amusing – a week’s money that I could have spent on food is now giving me blisters! Perhaps I deserve it, perhaps I should have spent that money on something worthwhile rather than a cheap birthday present for myself.

Having said all that, I’m extremely lucky to have a great network of supportive friends (please follow @MedTek – http://twitter.com/medtek – and @dawnhfoster – http://twitter.com/dawnhfoster on Twitter, they’re great) and a wonderful boyfriend who have all been helping me with my CV, writing covering letters, and generally cheering me up, but even with such fantastic people by my side, the other stuff in my life just feels infinitely hopeless.

With little self confidence and no money, and apparently no immediate escape from drudgery, I find that I’m clinging on for dear life until I can make a viable change somewhere. Until then, I’m afraid, I won’t be blogging as much as I would like to.

*Incredibly this only took me 2 ½ hours to write!

PS When David Cameron talks about cutbacks and austerity, it really pisses me off. Not just mild anger in a “What would he know” kind of way, this is a genuinely furious “I have no money to eat, who the FUCK do you think you are?” sort of anger. David Cameron’s face is one of the reasons I joined the Labour Party, and also the main reason for my first action after getting a new job: taking up kickboxing.

Cx