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On the ballot paper in my region there are no less than five extremist Right-wing parties.  Six if you include the Conservatives.  Apart from that there are two centrist neoliberal parties: Labour and the Liberal Democrats.  I know a fair few very nice, likeable and principled Lib Dems (online and in real life), but as a national political force the party is part of a coalition with the Tories and, as such, constitutes a de facto Right-wing party.  So that's seven Right-wing parties of various shades running from crypto-fascist to poujadist to centre-Right - none of which has any serious quarrel with the neoliberal consensus - and one centrist neoliberal party, Labour... which is now so degraded and debased that it seperates itself from the Tories and Lib Dems by a few whiskers.  Centrism has itself been shifted so far to the right that the modern Labour party is to the Right of the pre-Thatcher Tories on many issues.

That's democracy for you.  That's apparently the best we can do.  That's the freedom I'm supposed to relish and celebrate.  What a barren wasteland of horror.  What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise.  This is politics, supposedly.  This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice.  This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.

But, I'm going to vote.  Not because I want to.  Not because I like any of the 'options'.  I don't want to.  I don't like any of the 'options'.  I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me.  I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper.  I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill.  But it has to be done.

I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine.  I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc.  I don't expect my vote against them will change anything.  Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda.  Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements.  Roll on the day.  But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.

I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency.  It is a moral obligation - I feel - to vote against the Tories and the Yellow Tories. 

If there were no Green Party candidates in my wretched, squalid, parochial, bigoted little rural shitpit of a region, then I would have to hold my nose, gird my loins, keep a grip on my stomach in the hope of not puking up my soul, and vote Labour.  My hand might wither and drop off.  Luckily, however, there are Greens to vote for.  So I'll do that. 

If I felt for a moment that abstaining from voting would achieve anything worthwhile, I would do so.  But it won't.  I don't believe that 'the vote' is a meaningful way to change society within the smothering death grip of the rotting zombie of capitalist democracy... but my disbelief in the power of the vote is also why I disbelieve in the power of the non-vote, the withheld vote.  Piffle like that is for the likes of privileged simpletons like Russell Brand.

I'm not telling anyone else what to do.  I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.

Glug Glug Glug

Read this.  Please.

Want a taster?  Here are some sentences from the article:

Almost as soon as it took office, this government appointed a task force to investigate farming rules. Its chairman was the former director general of the National Farmers' Union.
...

Thanks to a wholesale change in the way the land is cultivated, at 38% of the sites the researchers investigated, the water – instead of percolating into the ground – is now pouring off the fields.
...

The crop which causes most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.
...

We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.

I propose a new fly-on-the-wall docudrama: 'Benefit Farm', detailing how the feckless, greedy, welfare-guzzling farmers are to blame for "Sunken Britain".

31

John offers the Doctor some sugar for his tea.  John is a black man with a Caribbean accent.

"Ah," says the Doctor ruminatively, regarding his sugarless tea, "A decision. Would it make any difference?"

"It would make your tea sweet," says John, humouring this strange customer.

"Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?"

"Not really."

"But..."

John is suddenly strangely interested.  "Yeah?" he prompts, wanting to hear more.  (I used to think of John as a manifestation of the 'magical negro' stereotype... but actually he's just an ordinary Londoner who meets a magical Scotsman.  As such he's one of the better examples of the Cartmel era representing black people.  Sadly, those years often saw black men cast simply because the character was a rapper or a blues musician.)

"What if I could control people's tastebuds?" suggests the Doctor, "What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That'd make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those who cut the cane."

One person making a little decision doesn't change much.  Lots and lots of people making lots and lots of little decisions, however...

"My father, he was a cane cutter," says John.

"Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn't have been a cane cutter, would he?"

"If this sugar thing had never started," says John, "my great-grandfather wouldn't have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I'd be a African."

In British Jamaica, as in Brazil and French San Domingue, slavery was at its most brutal.  Slaves were literally worked to death.  The horrors of Caribbean slavery - virtually unrepresented by the mainstream capitalist culture industries - equal anything seen in the Nazi camps (which are endlessly dramatized and documented in popular culture as a warning against ideological extremism and a foil for the moral courage of the British and the Americans).  The connection between these horrors - that both were caused by capitalist empires grabbing land and profiting from racialised slavery - is still less often made.

John is lucky to exist at all.  For a long period, death rates for slaves in Jamaica were considerably higher than birth rates.

Slavery is not only one of the foundations of capitalism, funding and propping it up in the lands of the free, but it is also the origin of modern racism.  'Race' is a fundamentally unreal concept when it comes to humans; a social construct... and a relatively recent one in its current form.  'Races' were made socially.  It was, for instance, far from clear to the dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' culture in 18th-19th Century America that the Irish or the Poles were 'white'.  The idea that 'negroes' were an inferior 'race' arose with the need for millions of people who could be used as farm machinery in the plantations of the 'New World'.  It was a get-out clause against the universalising promises of the bourgeois revolutions.  The American Declaration of Independence stated "all men are created equal".  There needed to be footnotes to that so that the gentelmen who wrote and signed it could keep their wealth and privilege.  But it was only with the rise of a new society that such footnotes become necessary.  The Tsars never had to justify why some were serfs and some were not: that was just the way of the world.  Skin-colour was a handy marker for the modern, bourgeois Tsars; the Tsars of Liberty.  It was a justification.  It divided some workers from others.  It was an unremovable mark.  Pigment became a serial number.  The toxic effects of this still deform the world.

It's quite rare to see any connection made in popular culture between racism (which is what this story - with its racially warring Daleks and its 'No Coloureds' signs and its little group of British fascists - is about) and slavery.  Still more rare to see slavery and racism talked about - even obliquely - as direct results of market forces.  In this scene, slavery is something you consume.  Do you want some slavery in your tea?  Of course, there is also the question of where the tea comes from.

John doubtless gets stick from some white Londoners for being an immigrant, but he's descended from people who were given no choice but to be 'immigrants' to Jamaica.  He probably came here to fill one of those situations vacant that Britain had after the war.  As before, there was work that Whitey needed doing.

This scene is happening in November 1963.  The previous year, the Conservative government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, restricting the right of Commonwealth people to move to Britain.  Leader of the Opposition High Gaitskill called this "cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation".  The following year, amidst a Labour General Election victory, the Tories ran a successful campaign in Smethwick for Peter Griffiths featuring the slogan (if you'll pardon my repeating it): "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour".  Harold Wilson called for Griffiths to be treated as an untouchable in Parliament.  Of course, by 1968, Wilson's Labour government was introducing (with Tory support) a new Act which further restricted the right of Commonwealth citizens to move to Britain.  That's just what Labour does: talk the talk of moral outrage when in opposition, then out-racist the racists once in power.

Boulders.  Lakes.  Ripples.

Love & People

This paving slab thing really seems to bother some people. 

Some of it seems to be just good, old-fashioned prudery.  Personally, I don't have a problem with kids hearing an oblique fellatio joke.  Think about the dreadful things we're happy for them to watch (they were still watching Hannah Montana when 'Love & Monsters' aired, for example).  By contrast, a mild joke about consensual sex between people who love each other seems quite nice.  Besides, we turn off the TV in disgust because there's a joke about sex and then the kids go to school and spend all day giggling about bottoms and willies.  I know I did.

If she really is stuck in the slab (and we can't be sure of this, given that Elton is an unreliable narrator and we never see Ursula's slab-embedded face from the POV of his video camera), there's no reason to suppose that the Doctor didn't ask her if it was what she wanted.  Why assume that he'd force it on her?

There is something potentially disturbing about a woman being so utterly in a man's power... but Elton doesn't read like an abuser.  Of course, the problem is that he can abuse her if he wants because of her extreme physical vulnerability.  This seems at least as pertinent as the gender issues in this episode.

There is, of course, no reason why a 'disabled' person can't have a happy, fulfilling life.  They can and do... at least when they're not reliant on ATOS for access to basic human dignity. 

I'm making the link between Slab-Ursula and 'disability' despite the fact that she connects with this complex social phenomenon in very broad, Fantasy terms.  Aside from the origins of her 'disability', she represents near total immobility, which is not unheard-of in the real world but which is unrepresentative of the huge matrix of different 'disabilities'.  She could, if read too closely as 'disabled', be considered offensive as a representation because of her extreme helplessness.  Taken that way, she could tie in with the perception of 'disabled' people as like objects lacking agency.  Pity dehumanizes the pitied; that's why common humanity and solidarity are infinitely preferable.

I think a major bit of the unease over this scene - and the joke in particular - is actually submerged anxiety about sex between 'disabled' and 'able-bodied' people.  The conscious worry is perhaps over abuse... but abuse is not peculiar to relationships involving the 'disabled'.  Of course, there is a horribly high level of abuse of the disabled, but abuse is, by definition, not about consensual sex between loving partners.  The idea that Elton and Slab-Ursula's relations might be inherently abusive probably stems from that very perception of the 'disabled' as weak and helpless, semi-people, in need of protection.  The object without agency, as above.  Like kids.  (Children in our society are too often seen as passive receptacles.)  For an adult, there can be no such thing as consensual sex with a child (which is true).  Ergo, for an 'able-bodied' person, there can be no such thing as consensual sex with a 'disabled' person (which is not true).  Of course, the analogy rests on the correct perception of a common power imbalance (the essence of abuse)... this is why the extreme nature of Ursula's 'disability' becomes a potential problem when she is related to real-world 'disability'.  Real 'disabled' people are not always so utterly dependent... and focusing on the power differential as a physical thing fails to grasp how socially-constructed it is, how dependent upon social structures of privilege.  'Disability' is relative to how the social world is culturally and materially constructed.

I'm not saying, by the way, that anybody who doesn't like 'Love & Monsters', or that scene, hates 'disabled' people, consciously or unconsciously.  Society in general needs to do better in our perceptions of these issues.

What the 'disabled' actually need (besides Iain Duncan Smith consigned to a slave labour camp where he spends all his time making stretch limousines customised for wheelchair access) is to be treated like people, just like everyone else.  (I feel able to pronounce on what 'they' need in this instance, because all I'm saying is that they need to be accorded the baseline status that I get automatically.  For anything beyond that, my job is to shut up and listen.)

The episode makes it plain that, if she is really stuck in the slab, she's also in a non-abusive relationship, whatever the potential problems.  If we get caught up on those potential problems, we run the risk of discrimination, i.e. of over-emphasizing the potential problems in 'disabled' relationships while forgetting about the huge amount of abuse that takes place in 'able-bodied' ones, thus embracing the hubris of privilege.

Having "a bit of a sex life", or at least being accorded the ability to have non-abusive sex if you choose, is surely part and parcel of being treated like a normal human being (which is how 'disabled' people should be treated because its what they are).  The kind of ruthless, inhuman, results-driven neoliberal world that Kennedy/Absorbaloff represents (a call-centre-verse where all human enthusiasms and capacities are slaved to a maniacally ravenous, pinstriped monster of consumption) is the kind of world that produces monsters like ATOS and IDS.  Children can see them on the TV and nobody turns a hair... and they're far more offensive than a joke about a 'disabled' person giving the man she loves a blowjob now and then.


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(Note: I put the term 'disabled' in scare-quotes because, while it seems to be the best term, I like to treat it cautiously.)

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EDIT (26/10/13): Clunky clarification added in brackets at end of the first sentence of the last paragraph.  Just in case anybody decided to deliberately misinterpret my meaning.