Getting The Rounds In With Galloway

First things first: thanks to The New Statesman for watching this poison, so I didn’t have to.

Even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true, 100 per cent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don’t constitute rape. At least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it. And somebody has to say this.

Let’s take woman A. Woman A met Julian Assange, invited him back to her flat, gave him dinner, went to bed with him, had consensual sex with him. Claims that she woke up to him having sex with her again. This is something which can happen, you know.

I mean not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion. Some people believe that when you go to bed with somebody, take off your clothes, and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you’re already in the sex game with them.

It might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and said, “do you mind if I do it again?”. It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning. . .

I don’t believe either of those women, I don’t believe either of these stories.

Now… let me tell you about the time I went to the pub with George Galloway.

Once upon a time, I met George Galloway in a boozer for a few pints, as you do. “Would you like some lager?” I asked him. “Oh yes,” he replied. The z-list celeb circuit can be hard, and I felt good to be doing someone a good turn who may otherwise have been reduced to a second stint in the Big Brother House, a fate surely worse than death.

I walked up to the bar. “I would like 38 pints of lager,” I said to the esteemed barkeep.

“Nigh on twoscore of my finest carbonated fermentations?” he spluttered.

“Quite,” I replied. “My friend George Galloway and I are fair parched.” I slapped my debit card down on the bar.

“One for me, and 37 for you, George,” I said. How generous I am sometimes. He didn’t look as happy as someone about to get some free booze should have.

“You’d better drink them all up, too. I’ll make sure you do. After all, you did say you wanted lager, didn’t you George? I didn’t ask how many you wanted and now I expect you to drink as many as I choose to force you to drink. That’s how these things work.”

Even taken at its worst, and even if the allegations made subsequently were 100% true, and even though the pub CCTV caught the action in wonderful grainy black and white, what I did doesn’t constitute drowning. At least not drowning as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it. And somebody has to say this.

George met me, accompanied me to the pub, agreed to have some lager. Claimed he didn’t consent to being force-fed 37 pints of the stuff, but how was I to know that until he was being given the kiss of life by the pub chef? This is something which can happen, you know.

I mean, not everybody needs to be asked prior to each drink. Some people believe that when you go to the pub with somebody, agree to a pint or forty, you’re already in the drinking game with them.

It might have been really bad manners not to have paused between each pint I forcibly poured down his throat and said, “Do you mind if I do it again?” It might be really sordid and bad pub etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not drowning or you bankrupt the term drowning of all meaning…

The Question

The question is not, “Is Thatcher dead?”
The question is, “Why isn’t Thatcherism dead?”

 

The answer isn’t ‘The Falklands’ – that’s too simplistic.

 

Answers on a postcard, please.

The Problem With Military Academies

Odds are you know, by now, that Labour has announced its big policy to counter the coalition’s free schools project. It’s received plenty of attention, much of it negative, so much so that ResPublica founder Phillip Blond has had to defend the research in the Guardian this afternoon.

The policy is dangerous and misguided.

The ResPublica report (found here) isn’t that long, and I read it this afternoon. I’ll try to break it down as much as possible.

The foreword contains the following quote:

This proposal seeks to address the failure of this great nation’s Social Contract between those who have and those who have not, it seeks to make small gains against the overwhelming tide of indifference and it seeks to reinforces [sic] that which works… This proposal is about continued public service, an approach not alien to the Armed Forces and attends to a clear and present social danger which if left will challenge the very fabric of civil society.

The purpose of the report is clear. These military academies are for poor kids – the introduction suggests:

The schools should be set up in each of the ten RFCA regions in England and Wales and located in those regions in areas with the greatest concentration of young people who are NEET (not in employment, education or training) or at risk of becoming NEET.

The justification for this focus is the riots that occurred in England in 2011. Again, quoting from the introduction:

Our proposal for a new model of schooling offers one policy solution to the social ills that became manifest at the time of the riots. Looking at the educational background of the young people who took part in the riots, two-thirds were classed as having some form of special educational need (compared to 21% for the national average); more than a third had been excluded from school during 2009-10.

Those people who took part in the riots, in other words, were not served well under the current education system. I recently went through that same system, and it is one that rewards rote-learning, discourages creative thinking and is, for the most part, dictatorial rather than interactive. One of my secondary school teachers asked our class (rhetorically, of course), “Look, do you want to learn about the subject, or do you want to pass the exam?” as though it was a simple binary choice. Introducing more discipline and longer school days with “obligatory extra-curricular hours [for] sporting and community activities” will not help kids already struggling.  I don’t agree with everything in this RSA lecture from Sir Ken Robinson, but it raises very interesting points. The ResPublica green paper does home in on a very real problem, namely that “tens of thousands of our young people are becoming hopelessly trapped by the lack of opportunity” – the problem for the educational establishment is that teenagers know this. Sir Ken notes,

When we [his generation] went to school, we were kept there with a story, which was that if you worked hard and did well… you would have a job.”

This is no longer the case. With youth unemployment in the UK above 20% this March (and worse in other parts of Europe, particularly the PIIGS countries), young people have realised that their future is bleak whether they try hard in school or not. One word crops up throughout the report – “aspiration.” It makes 8 appearances in the short 15 page document, but seems to restrict the aspirations of working class kids to joining the army, or at least subscribing to some vaguely defined “military ethos.”

The pivotal logical basis of the report is found across pages 7 and 8.

We believe that the riots were an expression of an economic, educational and cultural failure: the failure of an excessively unequal society, riddled with asset poverty and debt serfdom, welfare dependency and growing youth unemployment… In many ways, the riots were a ‘pay-off’ of a rentier state that has concentrated wealth and stripped millions of ordinary Britons of their capital, denying them a path to assets, ownership and trade. The share of liquid wealth for the bottom 50% of the population had fallen to 1% in 2003, eroding the path to prosperity for those at the bottom. Not surprisingly given these shocking figures, an O.E.C.D. survey in 2010 found that Britain has the highest correlation between parental income and outcomes for children, and therefore the lowest rate of social mobility in the developed world.

Anyone who’s ever played Monopoly can tell you that this is what happens when you allow rentiers to accumulate wealth unchecked. The problem, then, is Capitalism. Or, to use another term, it’s greed. Challenging this will see a change – not producing teenagers with “high levels of respect for authority” or “heightened aspirations”, whatever those may be.

General Lord Dannatt, former head of the army, asked recently, “given that the military has the unique opportunity to educate its own into the importance of a proper moral understanding – then perhaps the military community may have a wider contribution that it can make to the Nation?” – What proper moral understanding is this? What particular morals dictate the conduct of soldiers? None are suggested in the paper. The word “ethos” also appears 8 times in the report, but no concrete claims are made about this mythical ethos of the armed forces which can somehow benefit wider society.

What do the reforms boil down to? Well, basically, they say what teenagers need is discipline (not choice or actual meaningful prospects), a “military ethos” (which could mean quite literally anything you want it to) and that joining the armed forces is something poor kids should “aspire” to – they should look forward to being sent to die grisly deaths in the desert for rich people back home to make fistfuls of dollars.

This isn’t a vision for the future, it’s a fascist nightmare, and a policy Labour should never have touched with a bargepole.

Gaspar Tamas on the Failure of Liberal Democracy

Hungarian philosopher Gaspar Tamas gave a talk at the Munk Institute last September entitled, ‘The Failure of Liberal Democracy’. Thankfully, this was one of the rare occasions when the content of the talk lived up to its attention-grabbing title. In the context of the Welfare Reform Bill, the Spartacus Report and widespread austerity, as well as new anti-immigration rhetoric straight from Ministers’ own mouths, what he has to say struck me as extremely relevant.

Keynesianism has been killed dead by international bond markets, and raising overall taxation is way off the coalition’s radar, so, at least in the short-term, we are faced with a public purse that is shrinking, and will continue to shrink. This is the ideological context of the Welfare Reform Bill, and plenty of other legislation.

At the 25-minute mark on the linked video, he says this:

Governments have to decide (and [this] is the great moral problem of the age) a very simple and very basic thing – who do contemporary governments take responsibility for? In other words, who will live and who will die? Social existence is on its way out. Governments will decide who to help (and in contemporary terms, the number of these people has to be small, because governments don’t have enough resources in this crisis… they don’t have the will either). Therefore people in power have to decide, ‘Shall we continue, in this difficult position, when people who are working and their real wages are sinking, and when all the institutions we need, from hospitals to schools, are in a difficult situation; Do we finance immigrants? Do we finance the unemployable? Do we finance all the unpopular minorities? The ill? The lame? The old?

If you are reading this and are horrified, good. The problem is, these questions ARE being asked, at the highest levels of government, across the Western world. The great god Austerity demands a sacrifice, and who ends up on the altar is the question, not whether anyone does.

At a time when we are seeing disabled people stripped of their benefits and benefits caps being put in place, supposedly to alter the “lifestyle choices” people make, these decisions are being made by the coalition. It is clear that they don’t believe that in a time of restricted resources, one is morally obliged to provide for the sick and dying. Tamas understands that the welfare state as we know it is not a byproduct of capitalism but a deliberate construction of society in the face of capitalism, and one that it is crumbling fast.

“In a usual [or orthodox] capitalist society, there are two genuine and legitimate sources of income – Labour and Capital. All the rest has always been… threatened, but it didn’t have the importance it has today, when the majority is relegated to… one kind of assistance or another. [This] splits society in a… biopolitical way, [between] the people who are still working or still have capital… people who can help themselves in one way or one another (and even that involves skills and getting money out of the state), [and those who cannot help themselves in this sense].

This is already the case in the UK. Top-up benefits and payments such as child benefit are what keeps low-paid workers above the poverty line. State assistance, in other words, even for working people. And the number of state-subsidised working people is growing. To make work pay, and with inflation on the rise, increasing numbers of working people are relying on the state to help with their living costs, and with jobs moving abroad and advances in technology, the situation is unlikely to improve in the future.

In this environment of scarce resources (in which the resources are both jobs and state support in the absence of a job, or in the case of low pay), is it any surprise to find hatred towards those seen as not contributing or pulling their weight? It is the ugly side of the “hard-working taxpayer” rhetoric, when those seen as a drain on the system are vilified and attacked. A study for Scope by ComRes in May 2011 found that “more than half (56%) of disabled people say they have experienced hostility, aggression or violence from a stranger because of their condition or impairment” and that “more than a third (37%) said people’s attitudes towards them have got worse over the past year” (ie the first year of coalition government).

There is also a fundamental public misunderstanding of benefits such as DLA, which are assessed independently of whether the claimant is working or not. DLA is supposed to help people cope with the increased costs of getting around so that they lead active and fulfilling lives, and many “hard-working taxpayers” also claim DLA.

Add to this the damning select committee report which called Atos Healthcare’s Work Capability Assessment used to assess Employment and Support Allowance “flawed” with a “high proportion of inaccurate assessments”, and notes that “people are suspicious that the Government’s only objective is to save money.”

From the Welfare Reform Bill itself, I give you this passage regarding ESA:

“Many of us feel that a time limit on ESA needs to be justified on the basis that most people can expect to be back in work before it expires. The Minister has suggested that he would favour the shortest period he can get away with.”

This, we now know, has been set at 12 months. If you haven’t found a job by then, tough. Apparently, you only deserved that support on the understanding that it would help you find a job, and if you fail to do so, that’s it for you. This is the age we live in, when you don’t automatically qualify for government support because you’re a person who needs that help.

Tamas’ closing statements are chilling, and a reminder that this new norm which is developing in the corridors of power and in society at large is one which threatens fundamental liberal ideas of equality and basic human rights.

We are in a situation of passive revolution… Capitalism itself is operating the breakup that shows to us all that the old foundations are broken… Society is being broken up racially; according to health; according to age (and these are very fundamental, basic determinations in people’s lives). If people who are not producing are considered to be second rate citizens for whatever reason, well then we are in a very bad way, and there’s no reason to believe [in the morality of the state/society], and so whoever would like to go against this must address, with the greatest intellectual determination, the question whether he or she still believes in the fundamental equality and the common substance of humankind.”

(Sort of) In Defence of Diane Abbott (I Suppose)

I am no great fan of Diane Abbott. I think the way she reneged on her agreement with John McDonnell during the Labour leadership contest was despicable, and she rarely says much I agree with or get inspired by.

That said, I’ve decided to “storify” a few tweets on the subject of the row that’s erupted over her “racism”. This isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis, just a way of saving my two penn’orth for posterity.

1. Weird that Glasman can get away with blaming immigration for every problem ever, but Diane is hauled over the coals for a throwaway comment.

2. I mean, I find “It’s all the fucking foreigners’ fault. Fuck them. Fuck them all with a big stick. Close the borders!” an extreme position.

3. …Certainly a more extreme position than, “Cor, white history is plagued with injustice and exploitation, innit?”

4. Because, you know, one is pretty much true and one is pretty much the BNP manifesto.

5. Seriously… I mean, Glasman thinks ‘Faith, Family, Flag’ is an acceptable electoral slogan in this century.

So, uhm, yeah. There you have it.

Who’s Holding the Country to Ransom?

David Cameron, and the Tory party in general, often mention that they are opposed to striking (ie workers withdrawing their labour for a set time) on a fundamental level.

However, I’d argue that highly-paid and wealthy people hold the country to ransom not just a few days a year, but every single minute of every single day.

Take a look at this report from September, in which economists argue that rich people will move abroad rather than pay a few pence more tax in the pound. Last week the CEBR reported that the 50p tax rate is being avoided to the tune of £1bn in lost tax revenue.

This ultimate withdrawal of labour (ie leaving the country and refusing to pay tax altogether) is far more damaging, and far more immoral, than a 24-hour strike in a desperate attempt to save pensions – pensions that people have counted on, some having  planned their retirements for decades based on calculations that are about to be flushed down the toilet.

On a related note, we are told that high remuneration at taxpayer-owned banks such as HBOS and RBS is necessary to “keep talent” in those businesses. If workers at those banks refuse to accept relatively modest pay in return for the taxpayer bailing out their otherwise-doomed institutions, then in doing so they are holding the nation to ransom by being unimaginably greedy and selfish. Just taking the case of RBS in point, workers there were paid £950m of bonuses, despite the bank making losses of £1.1bn.

It is the rich holding Britain to ransom, not low-paid public sector workers struggling to make ends meet, who have already endured a 4-year pay freeze, and are now being told to pay larger contributions for less valuable pensions.

Blaming the Cuts is Myopic

There’s been much made of the social reasons riots kicked off across England, including perceived police racism, joblessness and a more general sense of disaffection in the areas trouble was found. There have been a queue of politicians and media types asking whether the cuts are to blame. The answer is both yes and no, but blaming cuts is simplistic and myopic.

The youth of areas such as Tottenham, Salford and West Bromwich do feel let down by the Coalition’s decisions to drastically reduce EMA, and also to get rid of the Future Jobs Fund, and communities with already high unemployment are struggling to cope as the economy staggers onwards, with high inflation impacting those on fixed incomes. These things have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, along with local government and charity cuts just filtering through.

But that isn’t the whole story. Labour has its part to answer, too. Misuse of stop-and-search laws has alienated black and Asian communities. Black men are “over nine times more likely” to be searched than their white counterparts, and unemployment remained stubbornly high in these places even during the boom years under Labour. These are people largely abandoned by all major parties, even if the Tories have taken it a step further.

The police have complained loudly that concerns about human rights were impeding their ability to stop the riots. Given that the initial disturbance was triggered by police shooting dead a young man, I’m surprised they didn’t just use the force of sheer irony to blast the assembled crowds away. For the Met, its credibility dragged through the mud of late over phonehacking and bribery allegations, this has been a godsend. A facebook page in support of the Met now has almost a million likes, in a spillover of the ‘Our Brave Boys’ mentality, as far as I can see.

Finally, in the interest of taking looking back further in search of the disaffected youth’s root cause, allow me to close with this quote from fifth-century BC philosopher Socrates:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households.

Whither the Left?

I know, I know. ‘Whither the left?’ you’re thinking, ‘What an arse.’ Bear with me please. The title is a little fancy-schmancy, but that is my question. I could just as easily have indulged my sweary side and called this post, ‘Where the Fuck, Lefties?’ but it has less of a ring to it. I’m also aware that this issue has been covered a billion times before. I hope to do more than rehash tired arguments, though.

I’d like to open by stating, definitively, that the financial crisis of 2008 has killed liberalism, and might have killed European social democracy as we know it into the bargain. Liberalism (in its classic form) is the contention that the state’s function is to protect the individual and his/her rights from forces they would be otherwise unable to resist. I don’t think this is a particularly wacky or left-field interpretation. In this respect, it has failed utterly and miserably. As the people of Greece (and the rest of the Southern European periphery) are sacrificed to transnational capital, it is clear that liberal national governments cannot protect their electorate from the veracity of Capital (given rights equal to, and beyond, actual people by corporate legislation). Our own Liberal Democrats have shown in coalition that making liberal demands of capital is next to pointless. Ask what they will, austerity is king, the spectres of rating agencies, bond markets and capital flight casting a long shadow over our political discourse.

I am reminded of Žižek’s fairly well-known joke about dusty balls (yes, it’s crude) here. We have allowed the Mongol (ie global Capital) to do awful things to that which we love, even to those whom we love, and in many cases have only plotted to dirty his balls, even more rarely going through with the act. For too long now, we have seen the battlefield as the individual, when we should have been thinking bigger. How do we build community, build belief in an alternative and spread our manifesto? Not on our own, that’s for sure. We need a new collectivism, one that functions without hierarchy or exalted individual heroes, and without the self-loathing and deprecation that Maoism seems anchored in.

The Left needs to become prescriptive, not descriptive – it’s all well and good to read Guardian column after column condemning the coalition and its policies, but agitation must have its place – agitation for a radical alternative that looks to deal with the root causes of problems, not mitigate their symptoms. Again, this is pretty middle-of-the-road, but too often on the left we focus on describing problems, and bemoaning battles already lost, instead of asserting our own narratives and coming up with workable solutions. The right wing press is reactionary, but at least that implies some kind of agency and forcefulness – the bastions of the Left often don’t react strongly enough in terms of proposing solutions.

There is nothing ultimately subversive about condemning selfish capitalism if the alternative is merely a less selfish version. Furthermore, such thinking underestimates the all-consuming nature of modern consumer capitalism, which seems to easily either eradicate or incorporate dissenting thought as it expands.

I said earlier that European social democracy as we know it might be dead, because across the continent we have seen the centre-left dissolve. It’s easy to blame infighting, but the lack of a forward-looking narrative is the piece of the puzzle that’s missing. Part of the reason the Greens are growing in the UK is the vision of a brighter future they paint. What does New/Blue/Next Labour have to offer besides tired rhetoric about social mobility? (bear in mind I say this as a member of the Labour Party) The welfare state should never have been an end in itself, in my opinion, but a stepping-stone towards a truly compassionate and collectivist society. Unfortunately, that has failed to materialise.

I am not denigrating gradual change or hard-won victories over Capital, such as minimum wage regulations, progressive taxation and so on, but if these are the sum of our aims, it’s no wonder people are left uninspired. We’ve conceded the Big Society narrative to the Right, which is a huge mistake. It is a rightly-derided attempt to cut public services and pass the burdens onto society at large, but at its heart is a good concept, if backed up with something radical such as a universal basic income which allows people to volunteer without making huge personal sacrifices in terms of money and/or time.

One of the most poignant passages of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, for me, was his assertion that “the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism… failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy” (p79). This is a U-turn from received wisdom on the left that a big state is inherently good in and of itself. I am no small statist, but the value of public institutions is in the services they provide, not the employment they provide. That, at least, should be clear, but often seems to be lost in debates. The reason we love the NHS so much is the stellar work its staff do for ordinary people, day in and day out, but the same praise is due to many other public institutions held in less esteem by the wider public.

I’m not 100% sure what I’m driving at here, but generally, I wish the left, broad church that it is, would embrace radical narratives instead of the softly-softly approach favoured by the stereotypical Graun-reading, flat white-sipping liberal. The vote on AV was a prime example of a “miserable little compromise” failing to inspire anyone. I voted yes, but was hardly moved or excited by the prospect of being able to list candidates in order on election day. I suppose my final message is not the usual one, that the Left must stand together around a lowest-common-denominator piddling compromise, which is usually where this kind of blog post ends up, but the opposite – that we need more radical ideas, more attacks on what has been taken for granted and more dialogue that isn’t cheap points-scoring or conciliatory bullshit, but genuine exploration of the boundaries of what is politically possible and innovative solutions to genuine problems.

On Cameron and Pensions

Here’s David Cameron in the London Evening Standard, insisting that the new public sector pension proposals in Lord Hutton’s review are “fair”, and a “good deal”. He’s wrong.

Mr Cameron, addressing the annual conference of the Local Government Group in Birmingham, said reform was “essential”, warning that the pension system was in danger of “going broke” unless action was taken because people were living much longer.

If the public pension system is funded by the government (which it is), then the only way it can “go broke” is if the government refuses to fund it properly. It’s entirely in their hands. If Cameron was quoted in the Times tomorrow saying we were in danger of declaring war on Guinea Bissau, it would be no more ridiculous. It’s like someone telling their children their pocket money fund is in danger of going broke and they’d better do more chores or it will become unviable to pay them at all.

At least he admitted that gold-plated public pensions are a tiny exception to the norm. Almost half of all public service pensions are worth less than £6k a year, the article notes.

The balance between what public sector employees paid into their pensions and what the taxpayer contributed was getting “massively out of kilter”, said the Prime Minister.

Civil servants contribute around 1.5% and 3.5% towards their pension, compared with 19% from taxpayers, while taxpayers paid the equivalent of £1,000 per household towards maintaining public sector pensions, which Mr Cameron said was not fair.

This is the part that’s got me really annoyed. Mainly because it overlooks the fact that PUBLIC SECTOR EMPLOYEES PAY TAX. Quite a bit, actually. So to draw a line between public employees and taxpayers is stupid. It’s like pointing out that all car owners are subsidising drivers of yellow cars, when those drivers (whose only crime is questionable taste) pay road tax, etc. too. It’s an utterly false dichotomy, but one that seems to be increasingly popular.

I was talking to my father (who is a public employee) last night, and he pointed out that public sector workers have always earned less than their counterparts in equivalent jobs in the private sector, with the understanding that their pensions would be better and more secure. “I look forward to getting that as back-pay,” he quipped.

The argument that private sector pensions are terrible is no defence either. Standards of public pension provision should be the benchmark, not another contender in the race to the bottom, born of companies’ unwillingness to pay money to anyone not still contributing to their bottom line.

Ultimately, the decision not to fund the existing pension scheme is a choice, just as it was a choice to spend what is already a cool £300 million on intervention in Libya while cutting funding elsewhere, and to slash corporation tax while raising VAT.

There Is No Alternative?

Don’t You Believe It.

Ken Clarke, and the Nuances of Rape Law

Ken Clarke made some comments today about rape, which are proving contentious. Particularly worrisome was his allusion that “serious rape” or “classic rape”, ie someone you don’t know using violence to force you to have sex with them, is somehow more serious than, for example, familial rape or date rape.

I’ve seen people defending Clarke try to say he was alluding to sex between 17 and 15 year-olds, but that charge is not prosecuted as rape. It seems people don’t really understand how rape is charged, and what actually constitutes rape in the first place, especially in the grey area 13-15 year olds fall into. I should also add that I’m discussing the law as it aplies to England and Wales, under the Sexual Offences Act (2003), and draw legal guidance from the CPS website.

What is rape?

In a nutshell, rape is the insertion of a penis into the vagina, anus or mouth without consent, or reasonable belief of consent. Furthermore, if the offence is committed against a child under the age of 13, any questions regarding consent are irrelevant.

What about 13-15 year olds?

If an adult has sex, or engages in some other sexual activity, with someone who is under 16, and who they do not reasonably believe to be over 16, they are guilty of the offence of sexual activity with a child, not rape as defined above. Offences under the relevant sections of the Act (9-10) carry maximum sentences of 14 years.

However, if the offender is a minor, the advice for prosecutors contains this quote from Lord Falconer:

Our overriding concern is to protect children, not to punish them unnecessarily. Where sexual relationships between minors are not abusive, prosecuting either or both children is highly unlikely to be in the public interest. Nor would it be in the best interests of the child…

Charging advice also instructs prosecutors to take into account “the relevant ages of the parties”, “parity between the parties in regard to sexual, physical, emotional and educational development”, “the relationship between the parties, its nature and duration” and “whether there is any element of exploitation, coercion, threat, deception, grooming or manipulation in the relationship”. This quote is also important:

In addition, it is not in the public interest to prosecute children who are of the same or similar age and understanding that engage in sexual activity, where the activity is truly consensual for both parties and there are no aggravating features, such as coercion or corruption. In such cases, protection will normally be best achieved by providing education for the children and young people and providing them and their families with access to advisory and counselling services. This is the intention of Parliament.

It’s obvious that when he was talking about rape, Ken Clarke wasn’t referring to those kinds of relationships. Either that, or he has no knowledge of the Sexual Offences Act, 2003.

What was he talking about, then?

His remarks bear a worrying resemblance to a recent Republican move in the US to impose a distinction between “forcible” and “non-forcible” rape. This idea that there is a “serious” kind of rape, which involves overt violence, and a softer, gentler kind, which is less overtly violent and so somehow less damaging or severe. It’s not new, and it’s wrong, but it seems popular, especially when linked to three factors, namely:

a) having a penis

b) being older

c) being privileged/rich

Possession of one or more of these traits seems to make you more likely to subscribe to this “levels of seriousness” argument, and it’s cousin, victim-blaming. Dear Kenneth probably won’t lose his job over this, but his comments are deeply worrying.

Amendment: I also recommend you read David Allen Green’s piece over at the NS website, which talks about sentencing.