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. 

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 Cupcake Fascism & Class War

The only cupcakes I've ever eaten were stolen. They were stolen, they were sticky and they were sweet. That's the first thing Tom Whyman gets wrong in What is Cupcake Fascism?; cupcakes are all style and little substance, but over half that substance is buttercream. They are neither dry, nor wholesome, no lacking in goo, but rich, sickly sweet and impossible to consume without getting one's fingers sticky. Unless you can open your mouth really, really wide. This is both metaphor and truth.

Meanwhile, in another piece on class, The Working Classes Don't Want To Be Hard-Working Families, Selina Todd writes,

"Sit my extended family around a table and you'd have white- and blue-collar workers, the sick, the old, people in council housing, and families with two cars and a nice house but large debts to pay for them. This is replicated all over Britain. There is no static "underclass" and neither is there a robust middle class: instead, there are a lot of people who have to work for a living and, because of that fact, choose to identify as working class."

This a world I recognise. It's hard for left-wing commentators to admit this, because it's much harder to get to grips with than a binary world of gin-swilling middle classes versus the pasty-munching working people, but we're pretty much mixed in. The one massive flaw in Grayson Perry's truly excellent 2012 series on social class and aesthetic taste (do watch it if you didn't) is the tremendous leap between the working and supposedly middle class folk he spoke to - a gap which could be represented by years of education, multiples of annual income, several degrees latitude and in fact, most of the UK's population.

And you know the thing that makes this stuff even harder? We're mixed in but not at all blended. Class still exists and it still matters. There is rising wealth inequality. The possibility of home-ownership is more or less hereditary now. We're being governed by toffs who were born into wealth and use their positions as public servants to generate more for themselves and their friends.

That's why Tom Whyman wants to call middle class culture fascist and takes aim at the unmissable target of nostalgic twee. I get class hatred. I was part of the Assisted Places Scheme. Being a precocious child who asked such questions, my mother informed me we were, "Lower-middle-class, fallen on hard times."

The mothers at school intimidated mine, so I observed their vulgarities. In those days, posh women wore Alice bands ("Grown women, wearing Alice bands!" my teenage self would sneer). They had handbags with thick gold-coloured chain instead of a strap. They often wore necklaces, generally pearls, outside their blouse collars or polo-necks - jewellery outside their clothing, for crying out loud! They wore a lot of make-up, some of them had had cosmetic surgery and they drove the first family-friendly 4x4s, the ridicule of which was clear to me, years before anyone called them Chelsea Tractors. These women seemed like characterless china dolls next to my wild-haired Mum, who dressed sensibly and practically and cycled everywhere.

Whyman isn't moving far beyond my teenage self as he sneers at modern middle-class hipster aesthetics. I don't entirely object to the sneering (although I do play ukulele). The tea parties, Liberty prints and shelfies of middle-class culture are routinely privileged as clever and tasteful, while the clubs, leopard prints and magazine racks of working people are not. The Guardian publishes dazzlingly sycophantic pieces like this about a very wealthy young woman using her wealth to get wealthier like that's somehow a worthy and interesting creative exercise.

I really enjoy The Great British Sewing Bee, The Great British Bake Off and BBC Three's Hair, which was barely spoken about but applied exactly the same format to amateur hairdressing (three challenges over two days each episode, the second day dedicated to something fancy). I like this format - I like to see ordinary folk showing off what they can do. I'd like to see a woodwork version next, please.

Despite the identical format, Hair was punctuated with random pop music and presented by Steve Jones, a sort of Welsh Father Dougal who asked what a quiff was, despite having a rather impressive example directly above his frowning forehead. Hair was not the subject of newspaper review, speculation about who deserved to win or any declaration that hair-dressing was the new black. Sewing and baking are fairly classless activities (although wealthier folk often have more time to muck about with more expensive materials, without needing a practical purpose or special occasion), but apparently, hairdressing - at least as skillful, creative and useful as baking or sewing - just can't be packaged as gentle and genteel.

Thus, as I say, I don't entirely object to the sneering. Sewing Bee played Doris Day to introduce an anorak.

But this sneering is always aimed at feminine aesthetics. It is the mob baying for Marie Antoinette; demands to strangle the thirty-five year old in bobby-socks and fairy-wings with her own designer bunting. Another crack in Whyman's argument is that, of course, feminine fashions (which is what cupcakes are) are very often infantile. At once point it was impossible to buy an adult woman's jersey nightdress without a big teddy on the front and a slogan about snuggle-time or feeling sleepy-woo. In the 1970s, a lot of women seemed to dress like Little Bo Peep.

And then Whyman gets it completely wrong about the 2011 London Riots. Yes, they were kicked off by the police killing of Mark Duggan, along with austerity measures that place the overwhelming burden on the poor and the young - it wasn't a random occurrence. But the riots were a nightmare for many ordinary people in London, especially poor, vulnerable, disabled and older people. Attempting to clear up and make things better was not about passive-aggressively asserting middle class values, but trying to put things right, tidying up one's own backyard after the storm, taking care of one's neighbours. People who want peace on the streets are not automatic supporters of the regime.

Meanwhile, what those rioters did? The young poor (and a fair number who weren't so poor and weren't so young) were exploiting a situation of over-stretched resources to their material advantage. Rather like, you know, our senior politicians. Except, of course, the kids got punished.

A busty 18th century lady with a ship on her head,
admiring a rather large cupcake.

Marie Antoinette once had her hair done up with a silly great ship in it (a look, incidentally recreated on BBC Three's Hair). She never did tell anyone to eat cake, but she lost her head for looking like a ridiculous hedonist at a time of national hardship and frustration. She never had an significant power. Nautical hairstyles were not the reasons for poverty and oppression in pre-revolutionary France.

There are political attitudes in our country, many class-based, which are causing us big problems; the belief that a person's value is measured by their wealth, and that wealth-creation is the highest possible virtue. The very middle-class belief that charity, rather than welfare, is a sensible way of providing for people in financial difficulty (it feels so good to help out). The belief that poor people are lazy, feckless and dangerous. Whatever belief you'd like to attribute to the fact that youngsters received custodial sentences for petty theft during the 2011 Riots, while Maria Miller stole £5800 and didn't even get the sack.

The cupcakes I had, even with the elicit thrill of having stolen them, weren't that special. My Granny, baker and cake-decorator extraordinaire was scandalised when my cousin had cupcakes instead of wedding cake ("They're mostly just buttercream!"). So we're agreed, I feel, that people should eat more substantial and flavoursome baked goods.

But twee is background; stage dressing. It is an aesthetic, not divorced from our social and political problems, certainly not immune from critique, but not to targeted in place of the widening wealth gap, increasing poverty, deteriorating working conditions and political disenchantment.

Plus it's hard to believe someone who uses the phrase Cupcake Fascism can really mean it when they conclude, "you are just not thinking about the matter dialetically enough."

Also, how can you possibly illustrate an article with the phrase Cupcake Fascism with anything but a cupcake with a swastika on it?  I found some on a site promoting the swastika as a positive symbol we should reclaim from Nazism. But someone could have at least drawn one.

Oh and if you're interested/ bored enough to get down this far, you might like Is 'cupcake feminism' all empty calories? from 2012, which discusses some of these topics from a different angle.

On Poverty & Reading Books

Book shelves with books on.

I'm wanting to get back to more personal blogging, but here's a thing about books and poverty.

England divided into 'readers and watchers', BBC News:

England is suffering from a "worrying cultural divide" with poor adults much less likely to read books than their richer neighbours, a report says. The country is divided into two nations, those who read weekly or daily, and those who prefer TV and DVDs, it says. It finds key links between an individual's social background and how likely they are to read.

There are a lot of statistics in the article, few of which are very shocking. For example, rich people own more books than poor people. Who'd have thought it? Another strange phenomenon I have observed is that although richer people have only slightly more feet on average, they own considerably more shoes...

More than one in four (27%) of adults from the poorest socio-economic backgrounds said they never read books themselves, compared with just 13% of those from the richest socio-economic backgrounds.

Around 16% of the population of England is "functionally illiterate". The chances are that almost all of these people occupy the poorest socio-economic background, for obvious reasons of both cause and effect. That entirely accounts for the difference - in fact, if the sample were big enough, it might even suggest that a slightly greater proportion of rich people who can read choose not to.

And more than six in 10 (62%) of those from the richest backgrounds said they read daily or weekly, compared with four in 10 (42%) of those from the poorest.

Okay, so on these figures, the ones that indicate the worrying cultural divide, we're talking 60:40. To be perfectly honest, I'm pleasantly surprised that the difference is so small, given the massive disparities in educational opportunities, the fact that poorer people generally have less time, less access to books, live in environments less conducive to reading in peace and are more likely to have intellectual, cognitive or sensory impairments that prevent them from reading.

That's if we assume that everyone is being honest. We know that when you ask men and women how many sexual partners they've had, you end up with a statistical difference which simply cannot be true; men feel under pressure to raise the figure, women feel under pressure to lower it. I suspect something similar here.

Among the wealthier middle classes, there is a much stronger hierarchy of the arts; middle class people frequently boast that they never watch the television that takes pride of place in their living room. Meanwhile, although to a lesser extent, working class people (especially men) sometimes feel that the world of books doesn't belong to them. They may even feel that the books they read don't count as proper books.

I suspect that some poorer respondents may have downplayed their reading and I'm absolutely certain that some richer respondents will have exaggerated theirs.

And 83% of adults from the richest group feel that reading improves their lives, compared with 72% of those from the poorest group.

Hmm, yes, well. The difference here is very slight, but here's the thing:

As well as middle class snobbery and mythos surrounding the arts (Art can save the world!), richer people have much easier lives. Thus, when they think about things that can improve their lives, they are likely to think about books, art and esoteric things rather than, you know, decent affordable housing, a living wage, having enough food to eat and everything else they take for granted but others cannot.

I believe wholeheartedly that books do improve our lives, and perhaps make the most difference to the most difficult lives, but I understand there may be a difference in the way this question is understood by richer and poorer readers.

The article concludes:

Viv Bird, chief executive of Booktrust, said: "This research indicates that frequent readers are more likely to be satisfied with life, happier and more successful in their professional lives. 

"But there is a worrying cultural divide linked to deprivation. There will never be a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to social mobility, but reading plays an important role - more action is needed to support families."

 Yet there are no suggestions about what this support entails. So here are mine:

1. Keep libraries open and promote what they do to the wider community, including the increasing stock of ebooks and audiobooks you can borrow on-line.
2. Promote ebook, braille and audiobook formats, to broaden the spectrum of people who can access literature. Audiobooks also raise the possibility of reading as a group activity, which makes it more appealing for people low on time and energy to spend with their loved ones. (Historically, people read out loud much more, but audiobooks are the low-energy option).
3. Relieve poverty with a living wage and decent affordable housing. However one feels about the inevitability of material inequality, we should aim towards a world where everyone at least has a chance to have a little culture in their lives. People can read in all kinds of places and situations, but having space, peace, time and the absence of immense pressure, is sure going to help.

Also, you know, sort out education so that people grow up enjoying reading, rather than seeing a book as a job of work or a task to be completed for some reward other than its own sake. 

The Cult of Self-Improvement

It's that time of year; adverts for new diet regimes, articles about makeovers (houses, wardrobes, faces, lives) and on-line dating (I did enjoy the BBC's two offerings on what not to put in a profile). This year, the Guardian is offering an entire weekend supplement every month to help enable its readers to live more intensely. I panicked - this directly clashes with my personal ambition, which is to live a little less intensely; to lay back and consider the lilies rather than wake up and smell the coffee.

But I can keep breathing, because the Guardian's campaign to intensify your life includes instructions for knitting a scarf. The Do Something Manifesto explains the urgency in their woolly-minded project:

"As a society, we've long championed sober diligence over the quest for thrills. But the tide of research is turning. Recent years have established that a liking for novelty, neophilia, is a reliable predictor of wellbeing, provided you've got a certain capacity for perseverance, too. Couples bond more, it's been shown, when they pursue unfamiliar activities together, rather than the comforts of movies and meals out ("Marriage," as Balzac wrote, "must fight constantly against a monster that devours everything: routine.")"

Knitwear has a place in marriage: We model
our Smitten & Mittens, a wedding present
 knitted by idlevic.
(A white man and woman huddle together,
there hands held in a red heart-shaped
double woolen mitten in front of them.)

Of course, we only got married last year and I reckon we need to tire of that thing with the hedgehog costume before we bring knitting needles into the bedroom (there's a movie about that). The Guardian also suggest starting a Supper Club which strikes me as a great idea - I know so few people who call their evening meal supper, they should definitely get together and re-enact scenes from P G Woodhouse.

However, in line with all our culture's self-improvement narratives, the Do Something supplement is about doing more work and spending money in order to improve one's social status; to gain more whimsical anecdotes ("I was once a gorilla keeper for a day"), add upholstery skills to your CV, to make more of the right kind of friends, invite them round for tea and charge them £15 for the privilege.

This is the capitalist model of self-improvement. You buy an experience; an upgrade on yourself and your life. Even if there's no monetary transaction involved (although there almost always is), it's still about labour and acquisition; regardless of whether you enjoy knitting or want a scarf, we're told that knitting a scarf

"even makes watching telly feel productive". 

The pressure to reinvent ourselves is a very profitable one. As well as the spend required to coax them into being, the new you will require new trappings of identity - a new look, new surroundings, new accessories. After a short while, you are likely to see similarities between the new you and the old you, tempting you to seek out yet another newer shinier you. Self-help is like pornography; if it truly fulfilled rather than exciting then frustrating, the consumer would not keep coming back for new variations on the theme.

I've always been attracted to people who see themselves as works in progress. As I've grown older, I have become wise to those who have found the answer, usually unexpected (vigorous wishful thinking, doga), which is going to change everything.

Diane doesn't know it, but she is one of the wisest people I know when it comes to personal change:

"It’s taken me over a decade (I am not good at life) to realise that feeling turned upside down and like you’re about to hyperventilate is just… how it feels. Even when you’re moving towards something positive, change does not feel good. It’s so much easier to resist, to give in to the magnetic pull of I can’t do this. But it turns out that resistance and all those crappy feelings are part of the process. When you don’t recognise your life and nothing feels safe, it probably means you’re moving forward. 

"The other messed up, un-movie-montage-like thing I’ve learned is that change can be slow. Sometimes it’s so slow that it doesn’t seem like change at all."

I don't believe Diane is not good at life. Many people get through their whole lives without making any dynamic changes at all - many are lucky enough not to need to, others don't bother to try. Outright panic may not be inevitable, but meaningful change is always hard and often slow. It almost always involves either removing oneself from a warm, familiar and often comfortable source of misery (a place, relationship, job, personal habit) or else embarking on a terrifying adventure that should lead to somewhere good. If significant change was ever easy, we'd never find ourselves in positions when it needed to be thought about in any depth..

Meanwhile, when I first saw the phrase Do Something on the Guardian website, I had a naive expectation. I thought, since the Guardian is into hand-wringing about the injustices of the world (and they sometimes publish genuinely good social justice writing), a Do Something Manifesto might be about, you know, doing something to making the world a better place; helping out in one's community, supporting one's friends and family, giving time and energy to causes that make a difference. Especially as the tide of research would suggest that this, far more than neophilia (with all due respect to Keanu), is what makes people feel good.

How Marriage Became More Meaningful

The Modern Man: Stephen fields calls from his investors whilst
ironing out deconstructed neckties for my wedding dress.

Equal marriage means so much to me.  Given that I'm a woman about to be married to a man, I don't think anyone realises just how much it matters.  It's so I can get married and not feel like a fraud.  It means I can have a wedding which doesn't make me feel closeted, because people like me can only marry if they happen to have partners of a certain gender. Not just yet, but soon enough, I will be able to marry whoever I like.

There's a certain type of social conservative who enthuses about marriage, but worries that it isn't what it used to be, weakened by decades of social change and legal reform.  To me, this is counter to everything I feel and observe about marriage. As an institution, I believe that marriage is getting stronger and stronger.

Things that have made marriage stronger and more meaningful include:


1. The ease of divorce means that folks are less likely to stay together in unhappy, loveless or abusive marriages because they can't get out of it.  Divorce is not easy. In court fees alone, with no legal advice, the least complicated divorce costs a little under £400 and will take about six months - marriage costs a little over £100 and can be carried out within 16 days. Divorce law is complicated, so if you're not on excellent terms, if there's money, property or children involved, the whole thing gets extremely difficult and costly. But it's doable and it's (largely) socially acceptable.

Marriage had to be far less meaningful when it was more commonplace for people who were unhappy together to be married. Where divorce was inaccessible, it wasn't uncommon for people to move on and start new relationships, have new lives and families whilst still being legally married to someone else because of the shame, cost and complication of divorce - the legalisation of divorce in the UK was brought about by a moral panic about people living in sin because they had separated from spouses, started again with new partners, but had no option to remarry.

Marriage could be made stronger by... no fault divorces.  In England and Wales, a couple may divorce on the grounds of separation after two years apart, but to get divorced any quicker, it has to be somebody's fault. I have known amicably splitting couples lie about adultery in order to speed things up. The only bar to no fault divorces is the idea that two adults, in the absence of adultery or ill treatment, might not know their own minds about the end of a relationship.

2. The social acceptability of cohabitation. The option of cohabitation means that most people know what they're getting into before they make a permanent commitment, folks can freely experiment with living arrangements and fewer people rush into marriage just because they're madly in love and need a social licence to spend all their time together for however long the passion is burning - even if it fizzles out within a few months. Meanwhile, couples who feel that marriage is not for them for whatever reason are no longer obliged to choose between biting the bullet of social convention or else meeting with stigma and discrimination.

My mother often described the anti-climax of the first months of my parents' marriage.  During those first few months - a particularly cold winter - they had to discover what it was to live independently from parents and what it was to live with one another, all of which would have been cool except that they'd had to promise forever before they got to experiment, negotiate and learn about themselves and how to get along. So they felt under tremendous pressure.

I reckon the acceptability of cohabitation has made things better even for people who don't cohabit before marriage, usually for religious reasons, because they seem to have learnt so much from the rest of us. In my parents' day, few people lived together before marriage, but there was no discussion about it either, you got married and worked it all out as you went along. These days, folks who want to jump into the deep end on their wedding day are encouraged to have thorough discussions about how they're going to organise themselves in everything from finances to sex.  And that's a good thing.

Marriage could be made stronger by... allowing some legal contract, other than marriage for people to become one another's next of kin.  This would benefit lots of people who are not married, whether they are living with a romantic partner, a friend, a sibling or if they are estranged from their official family (or don't have one) and want to nominate someone else to make decisions for them in an emergency, automatically inherit from them and so forth.


3. The (gradual) demise of the nuclear family as the ideal living arrangement.  So much focus of the resistance to marriage reform comes from the idea that the nuclear family is a great ideal. It's not. It was a short-lived middle class notion; working class people, who have nothing much to pass on and can't necessarily afford to move out of parental home or pay outsiders for childcare and other help, have always had a far more flexible attitude towards family. It's partly to do with blood, but also geography, history, circumstance, as well as love. Your uncles and aunts are not necessarily your parents' siblings. Step families prosper with less emphasis on biological relationships. Of course, poor people have poorer outcomes in education, health, employment and pretty much everything else. But they have tended to have a pragmatic attitude towards family; family are simply the people around you.

The nuclear family places the sole responsibility for children on two parents. It shuffles the rest of the family completely out of the way. If people don't marry or don't have children, they are not part of the club, a club which is isolating for those both within and without it.  It depends on everyone having enough money to live such an isolated life, which of course, fewer and fewer folk do.

I'm not about to celebrate the economic downturn or in particular, an economic shift which falls disproportionately on younger adults, who simply won't have the same opportunities as their parents. But it has forced us to be more flexible. Multi-generational households are suddenly much more common. People live in houseshares which become familial (not all are like that, but some are). Middle class people now speak of their "chosen family", which is what a lot of working class people would simply describe as "family".

All this makes marriage stronger, because it makes marriage supported and supportive to others. Couples do not need to sail out alone in the world and hope to sustain each other. When someone joins a family (formally or not), they become important to several people, not merely a partner for one individual.

I'm not sure I've explained this at all well, but never mind.

Marriage could be made stronger by... a cultural shift away from the idea that happy people come in units of two and single people are fundamentally alone in life. We drastically undervalue other relationships, friendship most of all. Romantic love is a truly wonderful thing, but it isn't radically distinct from other kinds of love, and love is what really matters. Happy people are people who have love in their lives, and that can come in many different forms.


4. Increasing Sexual Equality.

People have argued a lot about the origins of marriage in human society and what marriage is naturally about.  Clearly, nature is not a part of this; marriage is something people invented.  Fundamentally they invented it to organise and celebrate pair bonding and I'm sure in many cases, especially among ruling classes, property or children (principally, which woman bore which man's children) were a priority. But most people in the history of the world didn't have a lot of individual property and childcare tended to get shared out in the most convenient way within a community. Marriage exists because people have always partnered off - not everyone, and it's not our only sexual strategy but it is something humans do.  And since this is a fairly big deal in people's lives - like being born, becoming an adult or losing a loved one - people have tended to celebrate it and use the language of permanent change.

There are some folks who think that marriage is about men and women, because man is one kind of animal and woman is quite another and somehow, despite massive differences in comprehension, ability and desire, they somehow work well together (if they buy the right self-help books and listen to the right kind of religious leaders or relationship gurus - otherwise, the whole thing is hopeless).

But the truth is that private relationships between men and women can be condemned by a society where such expectations exist, where men and women don't have the same freedoms and opportunities. This isn't to say that there's an ideal feminist marriage in which both partners play exactly the same roles in every context which, if only we all subscribed to, we'd be sorted. But the more freedom - legal, financial and social - that both parties have, the more likely they are to negotiate and discover an arrangement that suits them. The less likely they are to believe that they can't really talk to each other about their needs, because people of their partner's gender are incapable of understanding. The less likely there is to be violence or abuse on either side.

Marriage could be made stronger by.... a cultural shift away from the idea of marriage or relationships as a goal and overarching source of fulfillment for women.  As it is, this places tremendous pressure on women to find a partner, exact commitment from them and then, single-handedly, manage the inevitably two-person job of a happy and healthy relationship. Women can stay in miserable relationships because they hold themselves responsible and fear being alone. Women can feel miserable about good relationships because their lives are unsatisfactory and they believed that marriage was supposed to fulfill them. Having a partner in life is not the same as a partner being a life.

Basically, marriage would be so much more meaningful in an egalitarian universe.  On which subject...

5. A growing acceptance of romantic and sexual diversity, Civil Partnerships and soon, coming to a wedding venue near you, Equal Marriage. 

There was time, not all that long ago, perhaps up until the mid-eighties, when it was extremely common for exclusively gay men and women to marry straight people.  Some of those marriages were mutually convenient arrangements between close friends but others, I'm sure, were absolute hell. Straight marriage got a lot more meaningful when being gay no longer necessitated complete secrecy. It got yet more meaningful when gay people began to have some options for becoming parents. These days, it is only those from extremely zealous religious backgrounds who feel the need to use straight marriage as a closet.

Equal marriage will mean that marriage is no longer even slightly about being straight. A marriage certificate will no longer be a certificate to say that your relationship is valid and superior to other relationships between people with the same strength of feeling and commitment towards one another.

If your a woman who finds a man you want to spend the rest of your life with, you climb up to the top of the nearest office block, church spire or silo and cry out "We're in love!". You don't cry, "We're so straight!" or as some Tory MPs seemed to think you might, "It would be typical for two people of our respective genders to have baby-making potential for at least the earlier portion of our adult lives, regardless of whether we're still young enough, each have the necessary equipment and chemical capacity or indeed, the slightest desire to have children! Hooray!" (People on the ground could never comprehend such a long sentence). 

Marriage could be made stronger by... ditching the gender binary in legal language around marriage (Why? Why on Earth is it still there now?) and trans folk who had their marriages dissolved as part of the gender recognition process, getting to have their marriages back (here's the tabled amendment).


My marriage will mean so much more to me because I could marry anyone.  It removes the element of straight privilege that only belongs to me by a double coincidence. It makes me part of something which is now so much more inclusive.  This is not the be all and end all of queer rights (not nearly) and marriage is by no means a perfect institution.  But in the last few weeks, the world has become a slightly better place. 

On Naming Children & Fictional Characters

Sophie and I were both worried about the baby with no name.
(An unhappy looking white woman and baby niece.)

My sister was telling me about a very indecisive couple she knows.  They had a baby and announced its birth, explaining that they hadn't come up with a name yet.  In the UK, you're legally obliged to register a birth within four weeks.  At three weeks and six days, they finally made their minds up. Or at least, kind of - the child now has two forenames, the father refers to her by her first name and the mother by her second.

I can completely understand this.

Names fascinate me. I've always been interested in the origin of names and the way that names evolve, concealing, preserving or celebrating cultural identities. I like the sound of names and the way those sounds conjure up ideas about a person's nature; softness, sharpness, hardness, roundness, grandour, strength, wisdom and frailty. Our arbitrary rules about what makes a feminine or masculine name (which don't apply elsewhere in the world, Peaches). I like the way that people move through different names, diminutives, pet names, formal names, married names, pen and stage names and our ability to change our identity through tweaking or completely changing our names. I like the capacity for the sound of our names to give comfort, arousal, irritation or terror ("They're coming to get you, Barbara..."). In the news, I'm always spotting evidence of nominative determinism; an anatomist called Dr Bone, a bird expect called Prof. Crowe and so forth (I'm sad to report that when I googled the best study I knew into this, I found that it had been debunked - but that only makes it interesting in another way).

So yes, I'm like names.

So if I ever had to name a human being.... well, fictional characters are hard enough.  I spend more time on this than you could ever imagine.  I was relieved when I saw an interview with Graham Linehan who spoke about how the writing of The IT Crowd was delayed because he couldn't quite decide on what Roy's name should be.  And that's the guy who dreamed up Father Ted Crilly.

A fictional character's name, like that of a child, must

1. Be distinct from the names of other characters (or in the case of babies, nearby children) 
2. Be memorable enough in its own right
3. Not have any strong unintentional association with a famous person or fictional character.
4. Fit in naturally with the context of their life (not really applicable to babies) and 
5. Just feel right.

1. Coming up with a distinct name sounds simple, but it is much easier when dealing with fictional characters than people. Just within my own family, there are three Michaels, plus pairs of Stephens, Jeans, Christophers and even Rosemarys - none of whom were first born children taking a parent's name. At high school, there were three Elizabeths, three Emmas and two Georginas in a class of just twenty-five girls. Although we cringe (or admire the massive power of fiction*) when we see that Harry and Bella are now among the most popular baby names, the things that influence name choices are usually quite subtle. You may well find the very special name you've chosen for your child is commonplace among her peers, with no clue why so many people chose Pandora this year. (There was a Pandora at school. Everyone got nervous when she opened her packed lunch...)

Yet if you're writing a family or a class of children, you'd be much more careful about repetition. It's probably as hard to write characters with the same name as it is to read about them and keep track. Emily Bronte gets away with it because she kills the original Cathy giving birth to the next Cathy.

It's not just to do with straight repetition - it's terrifically easy to muddle some names, like Mary, Marie and Maria.  Personally I still have to look up which evil wizard is Saruman and which is Sauron and it's a good job Arathorn only featured historically, given that his son is Aragorn. At least, his first born - the family don't like to talk about his wayward vegetarian younger brother Araquorn. 

I soon cheered up but Sophie had needed to think about it.
(A happier woman with uncertain baby niece.)

When my sister and brother in law were thinking of names for their children, they pretty much ruled out the names of anyone they knew well. They even ruled out my favourite, Phillipa, because they know a man called Philip. Some excuse...

2. Memorability should be easier, in theory, if you're writing fantasy or sci-fi or making up a child's name from scratch. But memorability isn't just about being unique. It also helps

• If a name can be easily spelled. 
• If a name is easily pronounced.  It really matters.  Sometimes it's not possible, if you're writing in English about a non-English culture.  But it is much harder to hold a name in your head if you can't imagine what it sounds like.

War and Peace is the only book where I actually took notes on the characters because I was losing track. Obviously, reading in translation, I can't complain, but I had big problems with diminutives. So for example Pytor or Peter was Petra to his family and Pierre in some contexts. Which would have been manageable if there weren't five thousand other characters I was trying to hold in my head.

I don't know whether to applaud or condemn Dickens for his capacity to come up with memorable names.  The trouble is that characters in the Dickens parody Bleak Expectations wouldn't exactly seem out of place if they came up in one of his novels; Pip Bin, Harry Biscuit, Skinflint Parsimonious, Gently Benevolent and so forth. Certainly Dickens displays a love of language in his ability to come up with names that give you information about a character; Mrs Todger, Edward Murdstone, Mr Bumble, Betsy Trotwood, Orlick and perhaps most the explicit, Uriah Heep.  But it often feels too much. Mervin Peake and Terry Pratchett do the same kind of thing, but then they're writing in fantastical worlds, with no attempt to persuade the reader that these are people you might meet on the streets of a real city.

Anyway, really simple names, well chosen, can be just as memorable as complex ones; Harry Potter, James Bond or Jim Hawkins, for example. Douglas Adams was great with very simple but memorable names, as well as the sci-fi Zaphod Beetlebrox; Arthur Dent, Dirk Gently, Richard MacDuff and the genius of Ford Prefect, given that Ford Prefect sounds like it ought to be perfectly sensible and ordinary name.

I've also decided there's something about first names with three syllables that benefit a great deal from a monosyllabic last name such as Atticus Finch, Artemis Fowl and Sebastian Flight - such good names!

I'm really struggling to think of female characters in literature who have really fantastic names. Any suggestions?

3. The absence of strong confusing associations should be a no-brainer.  Marilyn was not named after Marilyn Monroe, but having grown up in the 50s and 60s, she still imagines that Monroe is the first thing that comes to a person's mind when they hear her name. Any Kylies or Adeles growing up now may come to consider themselves cursed by their famous namesakes.

One of the strangest criticisms of Fifty Shades of Grey is that it is a book all about a woman who doesn't eat unless she is told to, called Ana, and the only female character she likes is called Mia. Ana and Mia (here's the Google results, which come with a serious health warning) are slang terms used by people with anorexia and bulimia, particularly those who support one another's disordered behaviour through on-line community. It seems to me extremely unlikely that the author did this intentionally, but it is jarring and, when intention is suspected, rather sinister. 

4. Whilst there is virtue in not making life especially hard for a child, I think it would be fairly unhealthy for parents to consider the social context when coming up with a name. Hopefully, your child will go out into the world and mix with a great number of different people.  Name them accordingly.

After a while, we were both feeling better.
(Same happy woman and equally happy baby).

Everything about social context is fluid and riddled with exceptions. My parents say that if I had been a boy, I would have been called Desmond, after my grandfather. I have never known another Desmond and all the famous Desmonds I can think of are much older than me and black.  However, I could have been called Desmond, got along just fine and I'm not sure anyone would have considered it that remarkable.

As it is, I can count on one hand the Deborahs I've had personal contact with (I've met dozens in fiction) and nobody's commented that it is a strange name. I am however, aware that before the early twentieth century, it would be a very unusual name for a British gentile. Same with Ruth, Issac and a few other Old Testament names. (I don't think anyone's been called Nebuchadnezzar since Nebuchadnezzar - apart from the second King Nebuchadnezzar, I suppose, and the name was enough to give him nightmares!) 

Here are further considerations:

• Socio-Economic Class.  Names that don't sit with the class origins of a character jar a lot with me, because they suggest ignorance - for example, when a upper middle class writer has got a Tarquin selling drugs from the council flat he grew up in.  He probably carries them around in a Waitrose carrier bag. However, these trends change very quickly. When I was a kid, Milo was a posh name, then there was a character Milo on kids TV and there are now many young boys called Milo from many different backgrounds. Similarly, I should imagine there are far more British working class Gileses, Cordelias and Xanders around now whose parents enjoyed Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There was a girl at my school called Bali, who would loudly proclaim that this was Bali with an L I (not to be confused with Barley) because that was where she was conceived. I imagine her folks had to be fairly wealthy, whereas these days far more people can afford to travel and use their children's names to commemorate the sex they have had in exotic locations. 
• Age. There is a slightly ridiculous article on the BBC website about baby names which were unlikely to be rehabilitated called In search of a baby called Derek (which of course resulted in such a response from Dereks and their parents that they had to publish a whole page of them) which, although being a little wide of the mark, does make the point about naming, fashion and the course of time. Although, few names completely disappear (except possibly Adolf), there were very few Dillons about before The Magic Roundabout and (contrary to a terrible film I saw last week), you didn't get many Gavins in ancient Rome. 
• Religion.  Most British Catholic families I know, even now, stick to Saints names (there's an awful lot of them). Many Muslims and Jews, regardless of where they or their families come from, choose Arabic and Hebrew names respectively. Although this doesn't apply to everyone, by any means, it is a factor to bear in mind. 
• Cultural Heritage and Naturalisation. One is as important as the other - some immigrant groups will take British names - sometimes even changing existing first and surnames - while others will hold onto tradition. Then, generations down the line, some will revert to traditional names and others will choose British names instead. Which is partly to say that there are no hard and fast rules, but these are things which would be very useful to know about your characters and their background.  Also, if you're writing a story based on a spaceship in the year 3012, with a predominantly white crew with names like Cobalt and Squee, you need to think about why your token Asian guy might be called Rajendra. Also, the white thing.
• Sexuality. This is entirely in the negative - believe it or not, a person's sexuality does not influence what their parents name them at birth. Some girl's names are butch and some boy's names are rather camp, for whatever reason (Round The Horn did for Julian and Sandy forever), but gay people are no more likely possess them than anyone else. Radclyffe Hall (originally Margaret) had the heroine of Well of Loneliness christened Stephen because her parents wanted their child to be a boy. I mean, I know it was a different time and Hall had never listened to Lady Gaga's Born This Way, but you'd think she'd have realised from personal experience that Stephen would have been into girls even if she'd been called Stephanie.

Sophie was very pleased once we'd sorted this business of
naming people out. (a very smiley white baby)

5. It's got to feel right. My sister and brother-in-law had firm ideas for names for their children, but didn't tell anyone before they were born, just in case the babies came out looking like someone else entirely. Sophie looks like a Sophie, but she might have come out looking like a Wendoline or even a Rover.

Part of this issue is around diminutives. I've known parents who name their child Michael or Catherine, but then cringe whenever people address them (or worse, they call themselves) Mike, Mick, Cath or Kate.  And of course, different people attract, prefer, tolerate or loathe the diminutives to their name. Parents need to anticipate this and not mind, but writers need to understand how this is going to work for their characters.

There must be a reason that nearly no-one ever calls me Debbie, whereas Rosemary is known as Rosie to everyone who first met her as an adult.  I don't know what it is, but if we were fictional characters, our author would need to know. Perhaps we are, and they do! If so, someone needs to work harder on the dialogue - way too many ums and urghs.

People call Gerald Gerry, but at some point he decided that he could no longer tolerate it.  He then made the mistake of correcting his son-in-law's innocent mistake (nobody knew Gerry was a problem), with the now infamous words, "That's Gerald, dear boy."  Years later, he is still frequently addressed as Gerald Dear Boy by various family members.  This little story tells you an awful lot about this character and his family.

When writing fiction, some names come to my head and stick so fast that it would be a terrific wrench to change it.  Others take a lot of thought and I can change them several times as I'm going along.  Even the names of minor characters can require a great deal of contemplation - with some books, you can read the writer's contempt for their minor characters, being all Johns and Janes, Smiths and Joneses.

But to name an actual human being, who would take that name and wear it for eighty or ninety years? I'd need a lot more than nine months to work that one out.




Of course, some people get to choose their own name, sometimes when they transition, sometimes when they want or urgently need a fresh start for other reasons. In a strange way, I imagine that's easier, but I'd really love to know how it's done. When one close friend told me the secret of their original name, I exclaimed with horror, "But I'm sure you were never a [insert the most unsuitable name imaginable]!"

* I recently met a six year old Merlin. It was difficult not to ask how he felt about his name.