8 reasons decent people might mistakenly vote Conservative

There are some arguments worth having. We're about to have a general election in the UK and while it is likely that the Conservative Party will remain in place, it is worth arguing for every vote against them. Politicians and political parties are at their most dangerous when they feel safe and unopposed.

This argument is worth having because many people have not made up their minds yet and others may be thinking one way but could be talked around. In recent weeks, I've been frustrated with those who share my approximate politics but seem to have lived their entire lives in communities where everyone votes in the same way, allowing them to imagine and then declare that people who vote Conservative are universally wealthy, self-interested and prejudiced in all variety of ways. If this were the case, political arguments would be pointless. As it is not the case, such rhetoric risks pushing folk off the fence in the wrong direction.

Some political arguments are not worth having. Some people have such extreme and hateful opinions that talking to them about politics is not only pointless, but can only feed their thirst for attention and power over others. If such a group of people were about to take power on June 8th, our strategy would need to be very different. 

As it is, there's a possibility we can still win this one, or at least minimise the damage. So I thought of everyone I've ever known who admitted to considering a vote for the Conservatives and (having eliminated the ones who fancied John Major or wanted revenge on their socialist father) I compiled the following reasons a decent person might mistakenly vote Conservative. 

1. Some folk have always identified as Conservative-voters:

I've known builders and hair-dressers who have always voted Conservative because of this idea that a Conservative government will work in the interest of the self-employed. I've known Christians (who have not all been middle class and white) who have always voted Conservative because of this idea that a Conservative government will support roughly “Christian” values (I've put this in inverted commas because most Christians I know care very much more about child poverty or the plight of displaced people than they do about tax breaks for married people. However, they still might vote Conservative depending on how they understand such issues.).

Where I live in rural East Anglia, voting Conservative used to be a mandatory condition of employment; once working men got the vote, any suspicion or rumour that you were going to use your vote otherwise would lose your job with the lord or landowner. Most local people worked for the lord or landowner. Left-wing city-dwellers sometimes imagine that safely blue rural seats like mine are populated by tweed-addled gentry or commuting investment bankers – that we don't have a housing crisis, foodbanks and the rest – but the reality is that generations had no choice about who to vote for (it is still perfectly legal to fire someone for their political affiliations on the UK mainland) and our local identity as Conservative-voters kind of stuck. 

Even today, the most prominent political campaigning I see are the big Conservative billboards erected in fields by the road. People who own fields still hold a lot of political power in rural areas. Conservative Governments tend to look out for people who own fields – green, brown and otherwise.  

2. Theresa May is not Donald Trump

(or Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders etc.)

Since 2010, the Conservative government have stirred up and exploited fears about immigration, writing new laws which split families apart and more recently, hare holding EU migrants, upon which our communities, public services and economy depend, to ransom. Oh and now there's Empire 2.0. This government's treatment of disabled people has been so appalling that the UK has been condemned by the UN. The demonisation, interference and deprivation some of us have experienced has been fascistic in nature, but even so, we are not living under a fascist regime. 

There's a huge difference in a government which does this stuff under the guise of "security" or "austerity" and a government whose leader makes explicitly racist remarks, hangs out with unashamed white supremacists or mocks disabled people to the cheers of their supporters (if prominent Tories have done any of those things, even I am unaware of it). If I was a US American, I would struggle with the knowledge that any friend, family member or neighbour of mine had voted for someone who repeatedly spoke of people like me with utter contempt and promised to remove the free medical care upon which my life depends. When I meet folks who admit they voted Conservative, I assume (usually correctly) that they don't know the first thing about Welfare Reform and haven't heard of Yarl's Wood. 

People who vote Conservative don't have to be racist and they don't have to hate disabled or poor people. If everyone was equally and thoroughly informed about politics, it would be a different matter - what's happening is wrong, lives are at stake and everyone who knows about it has a duty to do the bare minimum by voting against it. 

But not everyone knows about it or understand things the same way. 

3. Some folk are much more comfortable with the idea that people are rewarded for wrong-doing than the idea that innocent people are punished.

In conversations with non-disabled people (and even the odd disabled person) about the damage caused by benefit and  social care cuts and the rhetoric surrounding them, I have never heard that disabled people deserve to be demonised. Instead, I hear that disability fraud is endemic and while of course “genuine” disabled people – people like me – deserve much better treatment, the blame lies firmly at the door of people who have been exploiting the system. The governments own stats put this fraud at around 0.7%.

Of course some people do genuinely hate disabled people. But far more common is the hatred of an imagined mass of non-disabled people who are exploiting a system designed to support disabled people. People believe in that and of course, fraudsters – though rare - do exist and are often frustratingly conspicuous.

In the same vein, some people believe we should halt all immigration, but more common is the belief in significant numbers of benefit tourists or criminal gangs trying to get here because we're a “soft touch”. We're sitting on our hands during the greatest refugee crisis of a generation, but "genuine" cases (that word again) would be welcome if it wasn't for so many villains knocking on the door.

There is a bit of a chasm between people who tend to get involved in social justice and those that don't. Those of us actively involved (however modestly) in trying to make the world a fairer place know how extremely unfair it is already. And that hurts – usually, it has hurt us personally and deeply. However, it is very difficult to effectively communicate these ideas with people who are not yet prepared to accept that many of life's misfortunes are not pure bad luck, but the work of prejudiced, power-hungry, uncaring or malicious people.

It's not that those of us who see this are looking at a bleak world, but merely a world which requires work and self-awareness. Hordes of limping fraudsters and Romanian ATM-robbers may be easier to stomach.

4. The big problems in the country are invisible to many people.

There are currently 75,000 families (consisting of at least one parent and at least one child) living in temporary accommodation in the UK – that's B&Bs, and not the sort like that nice cottagey place in the Cotswolds with too many doilies. 75,000 families is a lot of people. It's a scandal. But there are 65 million people in the UK, so there's no guarantee that you know any of them (or that they would let you know how they were living if you did).

There are more empty houses than homeless families. There is planning permission for thousands of more houses and developers who have promised to build them. However, there is an awful lot of private money to be made out of house prices and rents that most people can barely afford and some can't afford at all. It costs the state a fortune to keep a family in even the crappiest guest house, but this particular government favours the interests of the very rich (on account of them being very rich people themselves).

I use this example, because it was something I only learned about a few months ago. I knew quite a lot about other aspects of the housing crisis, but had no idea so many families were homeless just now because I don't think I know any of those families.

I would guess that most people don't know the difference between ESA, PIP or universal credit (several politicians are muddled on the subject). I have heard people speak with absolute bewilderment as to how anyone might need a foodbank because they've been poor or unemployed and they never did. Folk just don't know the scale of what has been happening in the country because it is extremely bad on a relatively small scale. We don't have very visible problems such as high unemployment. However, to be unemployed right now is to live far more precariously than it was ten, twenty or thirty years ago.

5. The media is biased (but it is not a conspiracy).

The media is made of a diverse group of people, mostly employed by wealthy individuals motivated primarily (though not exclusively) by money. Money is made by selling newspapers, attracting clicks or viewers and so forth. The people who own large media corporations tend to (not always or exclusively) prefer right-wing governments because they (a) look after rich people (b) tend to (not always or exclusively) create economic and social instability, which in turn creates dramatic headlines, which in turn sells copy. This is not a conspiracy – this is capitalism.

I installed a Chrome extension which replaced pictures of
Nigel Farage with kittens at a point his unelectable face
was everywhere. It's an improvement, isn't it?

Even organisations like the BBC, who are very heavily obliged to be politically impartial can never present a truly balanced view of events as they unfold. The need to present “balance” occasionally winds up with a guest campaigning against drink-driving contrasted with another guest who thinks he's a better driver after he's had a few. And of course, they too need clicks and ratings, which conflict and controversy drive along (thus, for example, the endless appearance of Nigel Farage, who was repeatedly rejected as an MP and whose party's parliamentary power peaked at a single seat, now lost).

Not only do we mere mortals forget all this, but we simply don't have the time or energy to consider the way every story we hear or read is being told. I am extremely interested in this stuff – I love both statistics and story-telling, and am both fascinated and appalled by the way these are combined to present the most sensational possible news. However, even I get tricked about subjects I'm not especially invested in.

6. Misinformation happens easily and quickly even without manipulation and “fake news”.

One day, a few years back, a stranger came to the door raising money for the local Air Ambulance. They explained that the Air Ambulance received no state funding as our government preferred to spend our taxes on putting Indians in space. This was one of those remarks where you're not sure quite what's going on in a conversation, but it feels like you probably want out. I can't stand up for long anyway, so I said as much and promised to look the charity up on-line.

A few days later, I mentioned this strange exchange to a friend and they said, “Oh yeah, it wasn't that the UK was putting Indians in space, but rather some of our foreign aid had been used by the Indian government towards their space programme.”

I didn't disbelieve my friend, but I turned to Google anyway. The story was from three or four years earlier, when the government froze levels of foreign aid to India. However, there was an argument made at the time (by Philip Davies MP, incidentally) that we shouldn't give any aid money to a country which is rich enough to have its own space programme. This BBC article explains some of the complexities within foreign aid.

Absolutely no UK money has ever been used in the (modest) Indian space programme.

Most people don't buy newspapers. There's some evidence that even when people link to a story on Twitter or Facebook, they often don't actually read the story. In any case, most of us consume most of our news in small snippets – in headlines, in tweets, in the first few minutes of TV news, in the on-the-hour bulletins on radio and in disjointed conversations. It's not people's fault when they end up with the wrong end of the stick, especially when it confirms pre-existing prejudices.

This is why it is always important to talk to folk about what's going on in the world. Human beings are extremely social, and we wield an awful lot of power over one another. Arguing directly “You're wrong about this!” is often hopeless, but telling stories, telling our own stories and experiences or discussing subjects we know well can help prise open folks' eyes.

7. Lots of people vote local at General Elections.

If you're not especially interested in national politics (and goodness me, I'm not interested – it just effects me and those I care about too profoundly to ignore it), but your sitting MP helped out your uncle with a boundary issue or put in a good word for your friend when they lost their benefit (because some Conservative MPs seem to really care about their constituents in crisis, even if their own voting choices have caused the trouble), then you're going to vote for that guy rather than a stranger you know nothing about.

8. It's could be worse.

Remember after David Cameron resigned last summer? I wanted Theresa May to be prime minister. I remembered this was the lady who confused a man'spartner and his pet cat with the words “You can't make it up!” (she just did). But remember our other prospects? Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Andrea Leadsom. Theresa May was by far the best of a very bad bunch. Of course, it's not impossible the Conservatives stay in Government but May loses her seat... best not think about that.

Things do not feel very stable just now, and even though May and her colleagues are demonstrably part of that instability, the entire general election campaign is based on the idea that the Conservatives under May somehow are “strong and stable” in comparison with other options. If people's quality of life has not deteriorated (and it hasn't for many people, even while it has plummeted for some) but they feel nervous for the future, they're likely inclined to vote for the status quo. Even though of course, we're about to leave the EU – the status quo is completely and utterly off the table.

Image descriptions & attribution:

The first image is a photograph of two dogs outside a polling station. The most prominent dog is a small terrier who is wearing a blue rosette. Behind them sits a black dog whose type I couldn't identify. This image was found on Flickr, belongs to Ashley Coates and is used under a Creative Common's License.

The second image is a photograph of a scarecrow in a field. The scarecrow wears a hardhat and long grass or cereal comes up to its waste. This image was found on Flickr, belongs to Peter Pearson and is used under a Creative Common's License.

The third image is a photograph of a van on the side of which it reads "In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest" and there follows details or who to contact. This image was found on Flickr, belongs to Ian Burt and is used under a Creative Common's License.

The forth image is a photograph of a terrace of houses where the windows and doors have been boarded up and the front gardens left to become overgrown. This image was found on geograph, belongs to Carl Baker and is used under a Creative Common's License.

The fifth image is a photograph of a tabby kitten rolling on its back while gazing at the camera. This image was found on Pixebay, is by EugenieM and is in the public domain. 

Blogging Against Disablism Day 2017 will be Monday, 1st May 2017

As with last year, I've given BADD2017 its own page, so please click here to read all about Blogging Against Disablism Day 2017.

The myth of prejudice, fear and ignorance.

Audio for this blog post is here:

I grew up with the idea that at the origin of all prejudice was ignorance and the fear of difference. Something like,

Those people look different, they act different, I don't understand them and so I am afraid!

It is natural to fear strangers, people would say, but as civilised educated people who know we have nothing to fear, we overcome it. People who fail at this and hate people who don't look, dress or behave like themselves are simply ignorant and more easily afraid.

I had some doubts about this even as a child because as a British white non-disabled child, I was not in the slightest bit afraid of people of colour, people with foreign accents or disabled people. I met people at school – a family of Bangladeshi sisters with albinism, a teacher with cerebral palsy - who looked, dressed, walked and/ or talked very differently from anyone I had ever seen before, even on television or in books. I didn't feel afraid of them in any way. Nobody did.

Meanwhile, the children I saw picking on their black, Asian, fat, skinny or bespectacled classmates did not seem to be afraid, they did not lack information about the children they bullied, nor had they missed out on any of the lessons about tolerance than I had received.

And yet the idea that prejudice was a natural impulse we must learn to overcome held a rather romantic message; for example, as a white person who felt no animosity towards non-white people, I must be a particularly good person. I watched movies where characters who looked a bit like me – although admittedly usually men – were able to rescue groups of black, Asian, Native American or Jewish people from their white or gentile oppressors, occasionally even from one another. In such stories, the villains usually looked a little like me, but the heroes looked and thought like me. These days, there are even versions of this movie, such as Avatar, John Carter and Game of Thrones, where a white hero saves an entirely fictional, fantastic non-white people because this is the way it works.

The idea of a world divided into the good guys, the bad guys, and the helplessly haplessly oppressed in need of my rescue appealed to my childish mind. It was an idea that gave me power.

Every now and again, a disabled friend will be shouted at in the street. Very often (although not always) the assailant is drunk in the middle of the day. Usually, the words shouted are about benefits, accusing the disabled person of being a scrounger, lazy, faking or some variation on this theme.

The victim will post about this experience on Twitter or Facebook. Folks are entirely sympathetic, but there are almost always comments along these lines:

“People just don't understand.”

“People believe everything they read in the papers.”

“People need to be educated about invisible disabilities.”
"People are afraid of what they don't understand."

“People need to spend a day in a wheelchair and see what it feels like.”

“People fear us because disability reminds them of their own mortality.” (Really.)

Street harassment of disabled people has risen steeply in the UK since the Welfare Reform Act of 2011. Political rhetoric sought to justify removing benefits from thousands of people with the idea that a whole load of people were either pretending to be disabled or at least exaggerating their conditions for cash. Hate crime and political rhetoric are undeniably connected.

But this is not because a bully on the street has come to the conclusion that the next person he sees in a wheelchair almost certainly doesn't need it. Nor does a bully look at a passing wheelchair user and feel a cool chill of existential angst as he realises that one day his own beleaguered body will fail and die.

A bully sees a disabled person and he sees a mark. He sees someone who appears physically vulnerable and socially isolated (folk rarely have these experiences in company). All that crap in the papers about scroungers doesn't give this guy a motive to abuse us; it gives him permission. People who shout at us in the street almost certainly have a lot of fear in their lives. But they don't need to be shown stats about benefit fraud. Their fear has nothing to do with us.

In the aftermath of the EU referendum, there was a massive increase in racist and homophobic hate crime in the UK. Nobody became more ignorant and these crimes were not being carried out by people - like EU migrants resident in the UK - who suddenly had something to fear. As a Brit, one of the most painful aspects of the unfortunate US election result was knowing that the same and worse was about to happen over there. Not that the election result made people more racist or homophobic (and the rest), but it made them believe that prejudiced sentiments were more socially acceptable to express in public. This perception literally shifted over night.

This is because prejudice is primarily about power.

We have a limited capacity to know and understand all those who are different from us but such knowledge and understanding are not necessary for respect and compassion. We know that all other people are as human as we are, that they have their strengths and weakness, loves and hates, fears and their desires and that members of any given group – even one brought together by a shared political belief – are not all the same. We know this but applying this at all times is a challenge.

Complaints about “people who...” do annoying, hypocritical or awkward things are common conversational currency – folk unite against a common outsider, however superficially they are defined. I enjoy the BBC TV show Room 101 where celebrity guests talk about their pet hates (rather reduced from Orwell's original), which are very often “people who...”. It's fun and funny because it is playing with this power; part of the joke is to ridicule a certain kind of person but the other part of the joke is the righteous indignation of the celebrity guest about a rather petty subject. It is a safe way for someone to say to a crowd, “Let's wipe people who eat noisily in the cinema from the face of the Earth!” and for that crowd to cheer their assent, united in their faux-loathing. And anyone present who knows that they eat noisily in the cinema can laugh along (or rustle their toffee-wrappers) and has absolutely nothing to fear.

Only usually, we're not joking. Sometimes we're half-joking, but other times we enjoy our righteous indignation with a totally straight face. Sometimes we complain about people who have done or do something wrong - rude, hurtful or harmful - but very often not.

When I first heard discussions about people wearing pyjamas at the supermarket, even I had a taste of smugness about the whole thing. Most days I struggle to get dressed, but only a medical emergency would draw me out of my home in my pyjamas. And thus I had a moment where I enjoyed a warm glow of superiority over people who shop in their sleepwear. Am I offended by this behaviour? Not one iota, but it made me feel good to think that I have risen above those uncouth wastrels by rarely ever leaving the house.

Now that's an ugly confession. We're not supposed to show our pleasure in feeling superior to other people – we're not supposed to admit to a world-view where some people are better than others. So instead we pretend to ourselves and others that we have other motives. It's a scandal! It's very disrespectful! And then we can build on this using our rich arsenal of cultural prejudices.

Okay, so many of the discussions about pyjamas in supermarkets had some humour mixed in, but not nearly enough. Very quickly you could see and hear folk reaching for sexism (this is about women shopping in their pyjamas, women breaking the rules!), fatphobia (these are probably fat and lazy women!), sexism against mothers in particular (these women set a dreadful example to their children!) and social class (these fat crap mothers are undoubtedly chav scum!).

When this January, one Tesco shopper published a picture of two women wearing sleepwear in a store on the Tesco Facebook page, the subjects of that photograph later said they felt they had been targeted as travellers. That's very likely the case; prejudice against travellers is rife and it would have provided yet another reason for some twerp to feel superior to them.

None of this is about the question of whether wearing sleepwear in a supermarket is disrespectful to the people who work there – a question worth asking, but hardly worthy of national debate. This is about taking pleasure in passing judgement on folk who are seen to have transgressed.

So let's imagine if Philip Hammond, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, was seen shopping in the supermarket in his pyjamas. We could criticise his arrogance, but we'd struggle to find much to say besides that. Being very powerful and a millionaire doesn't mean (I hope) that you or I could not consider ourselves Hammond's moral superior, we just don't have the language to back that up. We don't have the language to bring a rich straight cisgender gentile non-disabled white man down without casting aspersions on one of those identities. This is why even someone who is as morally repugnant and personally tragic as Donald Trump is mocked as having small hands or a small penis (not manly), drawn kissing Putin (not straight) or described as mentally ill (not non-disabled).

The pyjamas thing may seem like a trivial example, but when the aforementioned Tesco shopper posted that picture of two traveller women wearing sleepwear in a store on the Tesco Facebook page, he asked the supermarket to stop serving “such people”, adding that, “It's bloody disgusting!”

By which he meant, “I feel so superior to these people that I think I might single-handedly stop them being able to use a supermarket at all. It's bloody amazing!”

But that doesn't mean he wasn't genuinely angry about it. The anger that accompanies righteous indignation is absolutely real. I'm sure this chap felt that he was trying to correct some great wrong in the world and that his actions were public-spirited. He's probably a perfectly nice bloke the rest of the time and may well regret a deed which took just a few moments of excitement.

This is a big problem. We would like people to be on one side of this or the other; good guys and bad guys. Not just because it's simple, but because you and I can be on the right side. As I say, it's a romantic idea, and I believe it is more romantic the more detached you are from the realities of prejudice (which, as a young non-disabled girl who imagined she could grow up to be Indiana Jones, I once was).

We are very social animals and we are constantly concerned with our place around other people. We all have access to a variety of strategies for interacting successfully with other human beings, including very nice things - like sharing our resources, making ourselves useful, making others feel good – then mutual self-interest and the exertion of power; deceiving folk, threatening folk, undermining folk etc.. There are also strategies we employ not as individuals, but as groups. Groups of people bond over common causes and goals, shared experiences, shared jokes, but also belittling, hating and fearing outsiders. Human beings are so very social that we far surpass all other animals in our capacity for destruction and cruelty - but only when our friends are looking on.

Like other primates and many other mammals, we have access to all these strategies, and – when successful, however fleetingly – all of these things feel good. Obviously not all of us use all of them. We make choices based not only on what we've got (if you're very small, physical intimidation may not be your thing), but also on what makes us feel comfortable and good about ourselves.

But just as almost everybody will have felt a violent impulse from time to time, almost all of us have it in us to wish to exert power over others. And when we do so – especially when we're angry or insecure (because fear does play a role in this), it is easy to slip into the patterns our culture has dictated. On the rare occasion I feel a real loathing for someone, I find myself thinking of really insulting and often amusing ways to describe their physical appearance. This despite the fact about half of everything I've ever written might be vaguely summarised as “Don't judge people by their appearance.”

Debbie Cameron wrote recently about the tendency for egalitarian folk to pull apart the grammar and spelling of bigots. I understand and share this impulse; it's funny and satisfying, but it reinforces some of the very cultural hierarchies we are attempting to dismantle. There's a lot of this sort of thing within egalitarian politics, where folks who wish to end prejudice of all kinds nevertheless employ prejudicial language (most often disablist slurs) to insult their political enemies.

This is a point we keep missing again and again. I think folk are afraid of this truth partly because it is unflattering to almost all of us. But mainly, I think, because it makes bigoted behaviour even scarier when you understand that folk take pleasure in placing others as inferior; people and groups enjoy feeling powerful. People and groups enjoy exerting power.

There are other things I want to write about power and prejudice, but I will conclude this post with a very positive example of how this stuff can get better.

Among straight people in my social circle, the short ten years between Civil Partnership and same sex marriage revolutionised attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people (even though trans* people cannot be said to have full marriage equality even now). A wedding is an occasion of collective joy, usually involving many more people that just the brides and grooms. It is a really big deal to refuse a wedding invitation, whether it is for your only son, an old college friend or your great-niece twice removed – people notice, people know about it, people wonder how anyone can be so pig-headed. It is a really big deal to put a dampener on a wedding – not just for the couple but for any member of a wedding party – by making foul jokes about it or insisting it shouldn't be allowed. Even if you are so far removed from things that it's just your colleague that's the mother-of-a-bride, you are socially obliged to smile and coo at her new hat, and afterwards look at the photos and agree that the couple look incredibly beautiful and happy. Anything else is a potential bridge-burner.

Marriage was not a priority for all LGBTQ+ people – some folk object to the whole institution - but it caused the ground to shift. Straight people got to truly celebrate same-sex relationships, to take them seriously (no more of this “Johnny's special friend” to mean Johnny's spouse), to associate these relationships with the formation of family and the consumption of cake, while homophobes increasingly looked like killjoys and bigots. This did not happen overnight and it was not magic – we've not nearly begun to see the end of homophobia, transphobia and the rest. But I've had conversations with folk since 2014 which would have been inconceivable in 2004 and vice versa, because queer people started getting married. 

This happened not merely because people's minds were changed by reasonable argument (although that's part of this), but because of both positive and negative social pressure; it's nice to be participate in other people's good news, fewer people were going to laugh at those jokes or nod sagely at those bigoted remarks and more people were prepared to object. All this can work, not just to silence increasingly unpopular views, but to change people's minds, to knock the wind out of the sails of their prejudice and bring them around.

People will hold onto prejudice when it gives them power. Remove that power, all of it, and folks do let go. 

On Loss & Chronic Illness - Anger

Content warning for brief references to self-harm, domestic abuse and all variety of disablist nonsense.

I decided to provide audio for this in order to avoid the irony of post which is so long it might be inaccessible to some people who might benefit from it:


The perfect management of a fluctuating chronic illness is impossible. So long as the precise nuances of your body and brain remain unseen, you will overdo it. You may sometimes be over-cautious and do less than you could. And you won't really know what you've done until it hurts a lot more.

Beyond this, you sometimes do too much because there's something you want to do, or get done, or because you're frustrated, angry or anxious and you can't stand to stay still with that feeling.

When I first began to realise this – that things would not improve just by pushing and pushing – I was filled me with rage towards myself. I would swear at and curse myself out loud. I was disgusted with a body which refused to co-operate. I injured myself and made half-hearted attempts on my life. It wasn't that I was sad or disappointed in myself; I was livid.

At this time, I began talking to the man who would become my first husband. This person carried a hell of lot of red flags, but having tricked myself into ridiculous hope, I no longer trusted my instincts. One of these red flags was the fact that this man in his mid-thirties was angry all the time at pretty much everything, even with a teenager he was talking to on-line. However, I felt crap about myself, and this anger made more sense than the kindness and support of my true friends; I figured they must be deceived about me, while he was not.



Our culture isn't great when it comes to extreme negative emotions like sadness or anxiety, but it's pretty atrocious when it comes to anger. For one thing, there is a profound social hierarchy in who is allowed to express anger. Rich white powerful men are allowed to shout at and mock their colleagues in public and yet remain in charge of us all. Another can physically assault his subordinate and maintain much of his public favour.

Women are taken much less seriously than men if they show anger and while many stereotypes about women of colour are about being submissive and demure, the first sign of anger can flip this on its head; the eager-to-please East Asian becomes the Dragon Lady, the submissive Muslim stereotype becomes a terrorist and so on. Our culture is particularly wary of angry black people, particularly black men. This makes sense in terms of our imperialist history; it's a good idea to be afraid of anger in people you're trying to control or crush.

Disabled people are another category who are not supposed to be angry except in very specific contexts: a young white man who has been physically injured during heroic activity (war, fire-fighting, police work etc.) is allowed to express anger if he channels it into successful rehabilitation. Almost anything else and you're heading into disabled villain territory.

This is one reason that I've struggled to write about anger and loss. Anger is a natural stage of grief and recovery from any kind of loss and trauma – it's okay for anyone to feel angry about their experiences and the injustice in the world. In fact, to be angry about the hurt one has experienced is often a first step in valuing oneself and one's safety.

For people with chronic illness the problems are fourfold:

1. You're not supposed to be angry. When people admire a sick person, they say, “They're really suffering, but they never complain!” Meanwhile, you're supposed to respond to those around you with gratitude that you're being looked after (even when they're not looking after you) – you're certainly not supposed to get angry with them. If you get angry, you might be left entirely on your own when you literally can't survive without help.
   
   There are some situations where showing the slightest frustration with someone who has power over your life – a medical professional, an employer you're negotiating access with, someone from the benefits agencies – can have you pigeon-holed as a trouble-maker. This is especially the case for people with mental ill health, who can even acquire new diagnostic labels for arguing with their doctors.


2. Competing with fear, anger might be the most exhausting emotional state to be in. Your body prepares for physical conflict, your heart races, your breathing becomes shallow, your muscles tense and blood is diverted from normally essential things like digesting food. Anger can make a healthy person feel pretty sick. For sick people, the physical tension of anger can cause a lasting increase in pain. It can cause gastrointestinal symptoms that go on for days. And while sadness drains energy like a hole in a bucket, anger pumps it out of you.


3. In chronic illness, anger often has no place to go. Sometimes, you're literally stuck in a room either with its source or completely alone, with no way of addressing or venting it. Sometimes it's impossible to even talk about it or write it down. Gobble gobble gobble.


4. As well as the anger associated with the multiple losses involved in chronic illness, we have plenty else to be angry about. Disablism, discrimination, poor access, crap from benefits agencies. Unhelpful, sometimes cruel remarks and behaviour from family and friends. Plus misdiagnosis, medical bureaucracy, abuse and negligence are immensely common – not because doctors are a bad bunch, but because having a chronic condition means we see dozens of them over the years and are bound to encounter the occasionally horror. Trouble is that horrific doctors can cause lasting damage. 

A particular trouble with disablism is that often we experience injustice which simultaneously insults us personally and denies our loss. When the DWP decides we can do things we can't, when folks express envy that we don't have to go to work and when politicians talk about encouraging us to do the right thing, they're not only implying dishonesty, laziness or other character flaws on our part, but they are denying the limitations we have and the things we've lost. For people with conditions that involve suffering, they are denying this suffering. This is one reason why, unhappily, a lot of disability politics has gone Tragedy Model over the last six years, with folks arguing for their basic rights, not on the grounds of the intrinsic equality of all people, but on the grounds of compassion.

A cousin was telling me about a colleague who had a condition a bit like mine, although much less severe – this lady was still in full time work, although it was an increasing struggle. My cousin had explained to his colleague about me and my medical history. He said, “I told her, it must have been so much easier for you. She's in her forties with a job, a couple of children and a mortgage, whereas you were only fifteen and didn't really have anything to lose.”

Thus I find my entire identity reduced to that of sick person – all I ever was or am or will be. This happens quite a lot. In hospitals and doctor's offices, I am a collection of symptoms. I've currently got my ESA form-filling file open (not for fun - I have a form to do); 6000 words about the intimate details of my daily life. And it has nothing about me in it, no whisper of who I am, what I care about or what I'm good at. 

In the media and the mouths of politicians, folk like me (especially those of us who have few formal qualifications and have never had a full-time job) are talked about as if we are blank people without interests, skills or experiences - either to be filed neatly out of the way (those who need the most help) or to be pressed, moulded and trained up into real coloured-in people (ordinary hard-working families).

The temptation is to respond to this stuff with protests of what might have been – the dominant Tragedy Model narrative; the way we are taught to tell our stories. My cousin's colleague wasn't going to lose her children and was unlikely to lose her job – things I had lost before I even had a punt at them. I might have had a glittering career, made a profound contribution to the world with whatever path I took, earned a fortune and been someone my cousin boasted about as opposed to someone whose story can be shared as an example of a non-life.

But that's a game I'm bound to lose. For one thing, it's nonsense;  I would have had a very ordinary life, working jobs I liked and jobs I didn't, with spells of unemployment in between. I know healthy people who travel through life clutching onto a narrative of what could have been if only they'd been in the right place at the right time, and it's both sad and deeply unbecoming – there's always the implication that such people are somehow better than the average-wage life they actually have, thus somehow better than their colleagues, their friends and neighbours and most certainly people like me.

It's also a story of disabled life which focuses on the contrast with the non-disabled life which never happened. And although I'm writing about loss, I am not prepared to escape the identity of sick useless person who would never have amounted to anything by signing up to be a non-disabled person trapped inside the life of a disabled person. 

I often see people with chronic illness on social media declare that illness destroyed or ruined their life, stole their youth or future - sometimes in the first person plural; our lives, our youths, our futures. I'm very lucky this didn't happen to me. Illness helped shape a life which was different to the one I had expected. This life features a degree of ongoing loss and frustration because I am a sick person living in a disablist world. 

When I was fifteen, I had a hell of a lot to lose and I lost a very great deal. But I'm far more upset now by what I'm losing as a thirty-five year old. I have friends and family I hardly see - right now my 92 year old Granny is in a bad way and I'm not well enough to visit. Weeks pass when I can't leave the house and there are all kinds of social and cultural events I can't join in with. I'd like to have a dog.

I have acquired talents, expertise and experience which I am only able to put to limited use. Right now, I don't fantasise about having more money, but I deeply envy people who have jobs that fulfil them and make them feel useful. I know full well – because I work hard myself – that no activity is universally pleasurable and fulfilling. But I envy the opportunity to spend more than a few hours, randomly distributed across the week, doing what I do well.

And this is okay. I can and do live with this in much the same way as I live with the loss of loved ones I long to talk to again. It's a recurring pang, not a bleeding wound. It doesn't ruin my life.

However, I struggle when this loss is denied.  

In social justice circles, I often see arguments in favour of anger. The thinking goes like this: women and minority groups are discouraged from showing anger by the very same culture which gives us all kinds of reasons to be very angry indeed. David has written about it just this weekend. Learning that it is okay to feel angry can be a first vital step of our resistance.

This is sometimes extended into a command to get angry and stay angry, to express anger. Which is all very well if you're lucky enough to be able to channel your anger into something useful and productive without harming yourself or others. It's pretty hopeless if you're lying in bed, unable to do anything yet unable to sleep or rest properly because you're seething with rage.

So I have a different philosophy. It is okay to feel anger. Anger is a natural and important response to loss, trauma or injustice - if you try not to feel it, you're likely to run into trouble.

But having felt that anger, it really would be wise to seek out a way to open that clenched fist and let it go.

Another problem with anger – and its sister, guilt - is that it demands legitimacy. We might feel sad about lots of things, and sometimes feel foolish for feeling sad, but with anger, we can repress it because we think we're wrong to be angry, or get lost in it because we have a right be angry; someone or something deserves our anger, and us being angry is just.

But other people don't live in our hearts; nobody is punished by our anger or comforted by our guilt.

Meanwhile, the behaviours we adopt to cope with anger can be habit-forming and eventually dangerous. Various forms of explosive behaviour can cause an addictive release of endorphins, including things we do to ourselves like self-harm, starvation or over-exercise, as well as things we might do to other people and objects. Ranting on the internet at nobody in particular can be a fairly benign way of releasing all this unhelpful adrenaline, but it can do the same thing.

All angry behaviours are likely to escalate. You know that thing about how swearing is a great painkiller? Well, that's true, but only if you don't usually swear and you're not often in pain. If you're always stubbing your toe and responding with elaborate blasphemy and curses, they won't be working too well – you have to swear harder, louder and more disgustingly, in order to have any effect.

Behaviours don't actually have to feel good in order to become habits; they just have to provide relief.  

This is why Twitter is as it is - of course, Twitter is awash with love and kindness, but there are folk about, of all stripes, at all points on every political spectrum, who are permanently pissed off. Many of those people have something very real and horrible to be angry about, but without a break from it, it's only going to get worse.

When I used to belong to illness-specific support groups, I saw the same; some folk were angry and supported one another in anger to the extent that they believed that their illness was by far the most stigmatised, that people without their diagnosis couldn't understand them, that some people with their diagnosis were giving the others a bad name by having different kinds of symptoms and limitations. Some wholeheartedly believed that other people's willful neglect was keeping them ill; that if only enough attention was paid to their condition, a cure would have been found years ago. None of these people had had an easy time or been treated with the full respect and care they deserved and for a few, the actions of others had undoubtedly damaged their health. However, the belief that other people have ruined your life (because such people did see their lives as ruined) is pretty much impossible to resolve.

It's going to be recurring theme in these posts about loss, but the disability rights movement helped me stop being angry with myself. Understanding the socially-constructed nature of disability doesn't stop me wishing I had less pain and more energy, but my body is off the hook in some major respects: I would love to be able to walk about, but the mere fact of having to move around on wheels should not mean I'm profoundly limited on where I can go and what I can do. Meanwhile, to operate with any sense of blame and innocence when it comes to ill health is to play into hierarchies which oppress us all.

It helped a lot when I stopped being around angry people. To avoid other people's anger altogether would be to avoid anyone in pain or having a crap time and I don't mean that at all. But for a long time, I was attracted to misanthropes. I didn't hope for love (or trust it, because it was always there somewhere) so I sought toleration; I was attracted to people who hated everyone but begrudgingly tolerated me. It felt like the safest kind of special status. Thus I lived with domestic violence for over ten years, with someone who was even angrier with me than I was.

However one great lesson I learned from the aftermath and recovery from that is about trauma. Trauma victims and survivors frequently blame themselves for what they've experienced because the psyche abhors helplessness; it is far easier, psychologically, to take on responsibility for things that were far beyond your control than to admit to yourself that you had no real choice. This is evolution; organisms that maintain undying faith in their power to avoid or escape perilous situations are more likely to survive.

Of course, in adult abusive relationships, there are choices, but greatly diminished ones. In illness - also a traumatic business - there are choices, but again, these are diminished. You can't see what's ahead. You can't stop the world. You can never avoid risk. Your health is complicated and sometimes one aspect must take a hit on behalf of another. Some things matter more than health.

But most of all, again from listening to others on disability rights, I learned that my health is a morally neutral fact. If I am less well, it matters only as much as it matters to me.  I can only let anyone down if I make a promise and choose the day before my presence is needed to experiment with the unicycle. This is not something I often do.

Managing anger with things outside myself is all about identity. We talk about identity a lot, not because it makes us feel special or interesting, because these are things others reduce us to and we wish to resist this reduction. Disengaging from these identities, (insisting, "I don't consider myself disabled!"), just doesn't work for most of us. However, because we find ourselves reduced to a disabled person, a wheelchair user, a benefit claimant, a psychological services user and/ or a person with chronic illness, it's important to hold onto everything else we happen to be.

So, there are three things I try to remember about all the crap we receive as people with chronic illness:

1. I'm not alone in this experience, even if I'm alone at that moment in time. Someone else has been through this. Some experiences (like having trouble with benefits agencies) are almost universal. Some experiences come down to tremendous bad luck. Some people are victimised because of a combination of attributes which our culture struggles with, e.g. having a mental illness and a physical impairment, and being working class, a person of colour, LGBT, fat etc.. 


2. This crap is all about other people, fear and power, and the systems they create. Discrimination is very rarely motivated by conscientious belief. The nonsense disabled people have from benefits agencies is not about genuine mistrust (although that's how it manifests) – they simply wish to maximise the number of people who, overwhelmed or disheartened, will give up before they get the correct award. Politicians create narratives about hard working tax-payers' and benefit scroungers in order to distract from the origins of our economic problems. Right wing politicians are sometimes very good at advocating for their constituents with benefit problems – people can and often do believe two things at once.
   
   Street harassment, the bullying remarks of colleagues, family and other acquaintances are mostly about power and fear. These people are bullies (whether they do it all the time or once in a blue moon) and the issue is about them, their insecurities and anxieties. They say stupid things relating to our health because they can - because we live in a culture which treats disabled people as charity cases, demanding proof of our deservingness, legitimising speculation about whether our impairments are exaggerated, badly managed or taken advantage of. 


3. This stuff is never about who we are. None of us will never be everyone's cup of tea, but people who know and like us will, of course, be largely disinterested in our health, how we manage it, if and how much we work. They will be interested in us, what we're interested in, what we're good at, what we're passionate about. And when I do my own thing, exercise my skills, listen to the music I love etc., I am not anything like the person those bastards want me to be.

None of this is to minimise the scale of injustice – all these things applied to the disabled people entering the first gas chambers, along with everyone else who ever ended up being abused, tortured or killed for some aspect of their identity. The fact that prejudice is rarely authentic – that is, it is rarely arrived at through any kind of conscientious rational thought process – doesn't make it any less dangerous. This is in no way a sticks and stones argument. Sometimes we have no choice but to fight this crap. Other times we have to get away from it as soon as possible.

However, the more we keep hold of ourselves - our best complicated selves with our passions and talents and foibles and that birthmark that looks like one half of Jedward (but which, you wonder, but which?) - the better equipped we are to escape being utterly consumed by the rage.

On Loss & Chronic Illness - Denial

Content warning for brief references to self-harm, discussion of bereavement and psychological abuse.

I decided to provide audio for this in order to avoid the irony of post which is so long it might be inaccessible to some people who might benefit from it:


For the first two years I was sick, I wasn't in denial so much as ignorant then optimistic. My health was up and down, so I assumed that very soon, things would pick up, and up and up and up. All the strategies I was given were about resisting my illness. Do as much as you can. Keep going. Have a go, even when it hurts. Stay positive.

By the third year, it had gone on too long. The idea that I would not be going to university at the same time as my peers was unthinkable. It wasn't that my academic career had ever been central to my identity before then, but all my other identities had dropped away. My greatest passion - acting - was now impossible. My role in all friendships and within the family had greatly diminished. I couldn't sing more than a few lines. I couldn't make art. I couldn't write stories. I was struggling even to read.

All I had left – and what my parents were most worried about, the one thing, apart from my health, that others asked me about – were my studies. I didn't have anyone breathing down my neck on this, but I felt an immense pressure. If I stayed sick, I was going to let everyone down.

Here are some ridiculous things I did in that third year:

• I went from studying a single GCSE to trying to cram two A-Levels into one year. If you're not familiar with the English and Welsh education system, that's increasing my workload by about five times, without any improvement in health.

• I began to write the story of how I got better. In the past tense. When writing anything was a tremendous effort. Which is why I only used up the first few pages of the lovely new notebook I'd chosen to write in. Such a waste!

• Most ridiculously, I asked my parents for a new bicycle for my eighteenth birthday. Before I was ill, I used to cycle all over the place. I'd had a few bikes before, but never a new one and I had absolutely never bought or asked for anything which I didn't then use. Thus I reasoned, my capacity to balance on a bicycle seat and peddle with my malfunctioning legs would just have to improve accordingly.

All this may sound daft, but I want you to imagine this in a bad movie. A sick girl who has significant trouble walking buys a bicycle because she's determined she'll recover to a point where she can cycle again. She begins to write the story of how it's going to happen. She takes on all the work she needs to get her into university (Cambridge said they'd consider me with just two A-Levels, given the circumstances).

She has to get better. She deserves to! She has hope in the face of dwindling odds. This girl isn't a fool – she's a hero. The final scene of the movie has her either peddling off into the sunset or with a shot of the pristine unused bicycle, propped up against her gravestone.

I didn't die, though my health got much worse and I entered a darker, uglier level of self-doubt. Maybe I was kidding myself about trying so hard, when really I wasn't? Maybe on some unconscious level I wanted to be ill? Maybe I didn't want to be ill but a part of me was making myself ill just to spite myself and cause distress to everyone around me? By this point, I was cutting myself and stockpiling meds. Soon after, I got together with my first husband, who hurt me even more.

.......

On the 26^th August this year, I will have been ill for twenty years. I'm not upset about that, but I've been thinking about it and want to write something about loss and chronic illness. I want to use the Kubler-Ross model of coming to terms with loss which, though imperfect, covers all the bases; the process of denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and acceptance.

Denial is a psychological defense against very difficult facts, but it's almost impossible to sustain on your own. Usually, when a loved one dies, it can take a few weeks at least to fully comprehend the fact - it's healthy the pain doesn't come at once. But sometimes, someone is informed of a death and simply refuses to believe it. This usually lasts moments, or minutes and occasionally a few hours. Then it shifts, because however gently they are treated, everyone around them is contradicting their belief. Abuse victims can remain in denial about the nature of their relationships for years, because there's either no opposition – other people smile and nod when they say everything is fine – or that opposition is discredited by the abuser.

Meanwhile – and this will be a recurring theme as I write about loss – with chronic illness, you can't just come to terms with these facts in one dose, even it is spread out over months. There will be other losses, relapses and complications, - even remissions that stabilise far below the point you hoped for. There may be points where you realise you have to drop some work you're doing, studies or hobbies, a point you realise you can't have the family you'd like or can't play your preferred role within your family. You'll miss events - weddings, parties, Christenings etc. - which will never happen again. You may lose friends, when your  illness gets boring. There are all kinds of ways which you won't get to be the person you wanted to be - not because you chose to be someone else, but because of illness.

Of course, everyone experiences loss, but the loss associated with illness complicates regular loss - if only I wasn't ill, things would be different, maybe this might not have happened, maybe this would be easier. I wasn't devastated by the death of my maternal grandmother last year, but the fact I was too sick to attend her funeral sent me into a couple of months of emotional disorientation.

Fortunately, you don't have to mourn for the whole thing at every set-back, but loss is dark pool which settles for a while, only to be disturbed again; sometimes a mere ripple, sometimes a splash.

After that terrible third year, I never again counted so completely on my health improving, but there would be other times I overestimated my (usually deterioating) health and stamina when I really should have known better, times when I worked on the basis that my good days would be my normal days from now on This would always coincide with desperation, self-doubt and external pressure.

.........

As soon as I started to think about writing about chronic illness and the Kubler-Ross model, I noticed how our culture discourages people with chronic illness from getting to that final phase of acceptance. Our culture actively encourages denial (as well as anger, sadness and bargaining especially). As I say, it's almost impossible to maintain denial on your own.

I generally enjoy my life very much. I'm writing about loss, but loss is part of life and doesn't stop it being mostly great. However, sometimes I'll have this conversation when someone implores me to keep positive. Not that they think I'm not making the most of life, but because I'm not highly invested in the prospect of getting better. I'll hear that I shouldn't “give up” - I should keep hoping for a cure, pestering my doctors for tests and experimental treatments, trying alternative therapies, restrictive diets and so on. I hear this both from other sick people who have got themselves a bit stuck, and from healthy people who really have no concept of how incredibly short life is and how very much shorter life is if you have to rest more than half the day.

However, I have many advantages when I roll my eyes at this. Meeting the disability rights movement made such a difference; it made my illness personal and private, separated out the things I can attempt to address (physical access, social attitudes etc.) and released me from the sense of obligation to fit our culture's model of a deserving sick person.

Some people are much less lucky and get stuck on denial, even after years of illness. A few times, I've come across people who are convinced that they have found the answer and – understandably, altruistically – wish to share the good news with other people. In the worse case, I was put in touch with a friend of a friend, a man in this thirties whose parents were spending twelve thousand pounds a year on a single nutritional therapy regime. Twelve thousand pounds – it crossed my mind that even if this worked and I regained full health, I could probably never earn enough to pay for it. But of course, it didn't work.

He'd been on this regime for a year or so when the therapist used some kind of mystical scanner and declared that the illness had left his body. Completely cured, his body and immune system remained weak and just needed building up again (with this ongoing course of expensive therapy, funnily enough). But as our conversation progressed, I realised that he hadn't really seen much improvement at all; this weakness was basically all the symptoms he'd had before, only with a different explanation.

Someone who has never encountered this might think such a person would have to be terribly gullible, foolish and perhaps a little unhinged. He wasn't. He was a pleasant, sensible father of three who had worked as a teacher before he was ill. He just couldn't see a life where he didn't get well. Given their financial investment, his family obviously had the same imaginative block. It wasn't that he was pretending to be well - he still wasn't able to work or walk significant distances  – but having been told that he was well, he chose to believe it.

I describe this as the worst case because, well, twelve thousand pounds a year. But there have been others and it's always tragic. You generally lose touch with these people, not because of arguments (you don't argue with this) but because it becomes impossible for them. How can you face people around whom you evangelised about a cure, when two or three years later, you are still demonstrably unwell?

But of course, in terms of stories, our culture loves this stuff.  Illness is something to be fought - Beechams will help you fight a cold, David Bowie just lost his battle with cancer. This is all denial; There is no cure for the common cold - if you have anything but a mild cold, you will feel rotten and infect people around you. Whatever courageous attitude Bowie adopted towards his illness, he died because of a great collection of circumstances which amount to bad luck - had he survived, he wouldn't have fought it off, but merely been luckier.

Hope is a great thing and looking after one's health is entirely sensible. Placing faith in the impossible (or even the rather unlikely) is a waste of life.

.......

There's one more point to be made about denial, which makes it unique among the phases of grief: other people will try to get in on the act for sinister purposes. 

Naturally, some folk do go into denial about the deteriorating health of a loved one. They desperately want there to be a simple solution, and for things to go back to normal, so they pretend that's going to happen. This can cause a lot of stress, but it's unlikely to last long. 

However, the very first thing a person does if they wish to bully, undermine or control any disabled person, but especially one who is sick with subjective unseeable symptoms, is to cast doubt on their impairment, speculate that they could try a bit harder, that their account of things is inconsistent, that maybe there's a part of them that is seeking attention. 

And these two things – someone profoundly distressed about another's state of health, and someone exploiting the opportunity to exert power over them – can be easily confused, with disastrous consequences. When friends, family, quack therapists and occasionally even medical professionals get up to that crap, a sick person can be easily dragged into that very dark and ugly place I described earlier (Is it me? Am I doing this to myself?).

Again, this cruelty is in our culture. This is what the benefits agencies do – they endlessly question perception and imply dishonesty in rock solid cases. This is what newspapers do when they complain about scroungers. People who do this to their own family and friends aren't in the least bit original, but their message must not be mistaken for love or concern. This is all about power. 

My top survival tip – not just when it comes to chronic illness, but life in general – is to trust yourself, your feelings and your experiences. This doesn't mean experiences mean what you think they mean (honestly, it was just a satellite – if you look at the sky for long enough, you'll see dozens), or that you should act on all your whims. The mind can play tricks on you, and you may have irrational thoughts, but you almost certainly do know roughly what's going on with you.

On some level, I knew I wasn't going to ride a bicycle again any time soon. But I was trying to defy my own reality. When others attempt to defy your reality on any matter - not to merely disagree with you, but suggest that what you feel is not what you feel -  you need to give them a very wide berth. 

Freedom from criticism is quite the opposite to freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech has never been the freedom to speak without consequence. Freedom of speech means freedom from interference, harassment, intimidation, imprisonment or violence. But speech, like anything we do, has real life consequences. There is no freedom of speech if people are allowed to talk and others are not allowed to object to what they've said. 

This weekend, famous philosopher, author and university professor Roger Scruton was relegated to the obscurity of the BBC News website (link to text) and BBC Radio 4 (link to audio) to talk about freedom of speech. He seems about to explore the potential ills of criminalising hate speech before meandering in an entirely different direction, concluding. 

“Of course, we have moved on a bit from the Middle Ages. It is not the man who is assassinated now, but only his character. But the effect is the same. Free discussion is being everywhere shut down, so that we will never know who is right - the heretics, or those who try to silence them.”

I was obliged to study Roger Scuton's work as a young philosophy student, so I feel qualified to translate:

“Of course, we have moved on a bit from the Middle Ages. Outspoken men I personally relate to don't get assassinated, but instead the views of other kinds of people are heard alongside ours, which can make us look ridiculous. Free discussion is everywhere, and views like mine face powerful and articulate opposition.”

Freedom of speech means that Roger Scruton should be free to express his views without harassment, intimidation, violence and so forth. He has arguably earned the right to have far greater access to public platforms - television appearances, newspaper articles and so on – than someone like me. I might disagree with pretty much everything he stands for but that's not a problem – here he is, right now, helping me explain an idea to you. Thanks Rodge! .

What Roger Scruton is absolutely not entitled to is to express his views without criticism. For example, he describes how homophobia was invented (as most words were at some point) and is used to ruthlessly attack, um, homophobia: 

“The orthodox liberal view is that homosexuality is innate and guiltless. Like the Islamists, the advocates of this view have invented a phobia with which to denounce their opponents. Deviate in the smallest matter from the orthodoxy, and you will be accused of homophobia and, although this is not yet a crime, it is accompanied, especially for those with any kind of public office, by real social costs. “

And yet, here is Roger Scruton, on the BBC News website, implying opinions that are already in the public record; to his credit, he overcame much of his earlier prejudice, but he still objects to same-sex marriage or adoption. And yet this weekend, he was still being published on the BBC News website in a piece to be broadcast on the radio. When Scruton speaks of “real social costs”, I can only assume his lesbian friend didn't invite him to her wedding.

(Incidentally, Scruton is the co-author of the article Same-sex marriage is homophobic. So he's right about at least some people abusing the word homophobia for the sake of their own particular arguments.)

This is how history works. When I was a kid, homophobic views were widespread and freely expressed. In 1989, Scruton himself wrote that society was correct in instilling a revulsion of homosexuality in children - some of his contemporaries said and wrote far worse. Section 28, which effectively prohibited the discussion of homosexuality in schools, was not repealed until four years after I had left school. When I was growing up, someone who supported same-sex marriage had the right to say so – they certainly wouldn't have been arrested for it - but they would have struggled to get any kind of platform outside LGBT magazines. Gay and bisexual teachers, let alone people in positions of more significant power and status were still frequently closeted. That's real social costs.

But our society had an argument and the argument was won. Not that we have achieved consensus, but most people either support or are indifferent towards same sex marriage. Conscientious people like Scruton have found at least some of their prejudice to be intellectually unsustainable. This is because gender doesn't make any moral difference to sex, romantic partnership or the creation of families. Homophobia – including, violent homophobia – still exists within our culture, although it is much more often subtle and implicit. Scruton's views are in the minority. He still has a very loud voice. He just can't expect such a great applause whenever he uses it.

To say so isn't silencing him. To bombard him with abusive messages would be silencing. To threaten his peace or his person would be silencing. To hack the BBC News website and take down his article would be silencing. He's not being silenced. 

Scruton may well have been harassed about his views, but he doesn't describe this. He doesn't describe any specific negative effect of speaking out until he arrives at Nobel-prize winning biochemist Tim Hunt. Like the rest of us, Hunt was not entitled to say whatever he liked without his words having consequences. His character was not assassinated – he made a fool of himself, just as surely as if he had turned up to work drunk in his underpants. Nobody accused him of a crime or of any underhand activity other than undermining the status of women in science with sexist jokes said in public.

"A lifetime of distinguished creative work has ended in ruin." is a wild exaggeration; the chap resigned at the tender age of 72, he may well work again and few history books will record anything but his contribution to science. We're still talking about it now because it happened this year and stirred up a lot of existing frustration about the treatment of women in science. To my knowledge, Hunt was not harassed or threatened, but merely laughed at. A lot. He had claimed female colleagues kept falling in love with him. It's no hanging offence, but no-one can say that and not look like a prong.

It's funny Scruton's piece should be published in a week that a very different heretic (and one who has done far more to earn that title) Germaine Greer made a stand for the voiceless by appearing on fringe news outlet, BBC Newsnight, complaining about a petition to stop her talking at Cardiff University, because of her widely published transphobic views. This was a petition – people exercising their own freedom of speech - asking that she should be no-platformed. Student Unions are not obliged to provide platforms and audiences for anyone who feels they have something to say.

Cardiff University said they did not endorsed Greer's views but would not stop her speaking. Greer decided not to go. She would have been met by a far smaller audience than that of Newsnight or the many other news outlets who have published both her complaints about Free Speech, as well as her hateful remarks about transgender women in the last few days (including the front page of the BBC News website, up and left a bit from Scruton).

Greer has the right to say what she likes, but not wherever she likes. Nobody has, but Greer has far more opportunities to air her views to huge numbers of people than I ever will. What Greer has experienced is, ironically, exactly the same minimal harm she claims to be committing against transgender people when she denies their very existence; hurt feelings. 

The fact that people with as diverse views as Greer and Scruton could be making these complaints and so loudly, when nobody who objects to their views is being heard (Show me a prominent article about the ills of homophobia this weekend. Where is the interview with Rachel Melhuish who set up the petition against Greer's talk?), suggests something about the way freedom of speech currently works in our culture.

So let's talk about actual silencing. I write quite a lot about discriminatory language and the media and much of this comes down to people shouldn't say that. Language is tremendously important. The way women, men and minorities are spoken about and represented is tremendously important.

When I say, “People shouldn't say that.” I absolutely mean it. This isn't the same as saying "People shouldn't be allowed to say that." let alone "People should be arrested for saying that." 

However, people should be criticised for saying foolish things - this is part of freedom of speech. Sometimes, public figures should lose their jobs over the things they say – the rest of us run exactly the same risk and are likely to meet with far less tolerance. However, fundamentally, I want to win these arguments. I want to help persuade folk to treat others as they would like to be treated.

This has limits and those limits should be obvious. I didn't think very hard when I became the Goldfish with my painting of a goldfish as an avatar, but over the years I've become acutely aware of the way that I escape the abuse that other women with feminine handles and photos of themselves routinely experience when they talk about any political issue. Young women, women of colour, women pictured wearing headscarves and trans women are targeted with particular bile and there's reason to believe they have less recourse to justice.

Harassment and abuse are always unacceptable and should be far more vigorously prosecuted. These things force victims to change their behaviour and create a genuine obstacle to speaking out. For some minorities – particularly trans people and Muslim women – the high probability of receiving abuse any time they draw attention to themselves may be enough to keep them quiet.

Criticism - even unreasonable, lazy or incoherent criticism - doesn't have this effect. Nobody wants to be called a bigot, and Scruton has personally demonstrated that not everyone uses words like homophobia (or racism, sexism etc.) in a consistent and coherent way, but being told one's speech is prejudiced cannot be compared to threats of violence, personal and sexualised insults and so on.

Meanwhile, this last week, while Scruton and Greer were speaking without opposition in the national press, it was announced that there will be a new register, like the Sex Offenders Register, which would prevent anyone with a conviction or civil order for "extremism" from working with children or young people. Nobody is clear quite what "extremism" is. We already have disasters like the Prevent Strategy which basically monitors young Muslims for signs of alienation or radicalisation, including what they say in public. And earlier this month, not at all famous Bahar Mustafa was charged for offenses apparently relating to her use of the hashtag #killallwhitemen on Twitter*, while the very famous Katie Hopkins, who wrote of refugees as "cockroaches" who should be gunned down or drowned before they reached Europe, faces no criminal action. 

Obviously, I don't mean to suggest that we should only care about certain kinds of silencing, or extreme cases where people are menaced into silence. Nor do I believe that one has no right to complain of ill treatment if someone else is experiencing worse (someone always is). However, I do think it is worth observing that there are patterns in the people and opinions which do get sidelined, shouted down or even draw the attention of the criminal justice system.

Freedom of speech is a vital aspect of a free society and something we may always have to fight for. To reduce it to the freedom for powerful people to express their prejudices without meeting the disapproval and criticism of others only distracts from and undermines the real battle taking place. 

* The nature of this kind of case is that the press cannot report exactly what Bahar Mustafa said that was so offensive, given that it is being described as "grossly offensive" in the charges. It may be that she did say something absolutely outrageous (#killallwhitemen is very difficult to take seriously).