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. 

Accessing The Future and That Movie Where The White Straight Cis Non-disabled Guy Saves The Day Despite Everything.

I wanted to join in the blog hop to raise awareness (and hopefully money) for Future Fire's latest project Accessing The Future,which they describe as an "SF anthology exploring disability & the intersectionality of race, class, gender & sexuality."

If you enjoy science fiction or have any interest in promoting diversity in fiction, please support this project. Also check out (and join in) their blog hop - here are Jo's and David's intriguing contributions, as well as this post by A C Buchanan on disability in speculative fiction.

I have not managed to do anything new and am soon to be invaded by small children. However, I unearthed this monster from my Drafts folder as the subject matter is not irrelevant to diversity (or the lack thereof) throughout fiction:

That movie where the white straight cis non-disabled guy saves the day despite everything. 

This is jam-packed full of spoilers – can’t work round that.

Most of the greatest films ever made feature a hero from a very narrow demographic; straight cis non-disabled white men make up around a quarter of the British population and even less of the US (where most English language movies are made). And yet this minority are often treated as a massive majority in movies; these are the faces we see most often on screen and indeed, these are the faces of some fantastic characters: James Bond, Philip Marlowe, Indiana Jones, the Man with No Name and up to a point, John McClane. 

The fact that in 2014, film-makers treat a character's whiteness, masculinity, straightness etc. as necessary criteria for a protagonist, particularly in action, science-fiction and fantasy, is disappointing. But something worse is happening. In recent years, I've seen a whole raft of movies where heroes with these qualities have very little else. They don't save the day because they behave heroically; they save the day just because they are that guy. 


This hero is not heroic.

In many cases, he is outright incompetent.

In Non-Stop, Liam Neeson's character is an alcoholic who was thrown off the police force for his drinking and then, miraculously, employed as a Air Marshal.  White House Down begins with Channing Tatum's character being turned down for a job at the White House because he’s unqualified and has terrible references. In Star Trek, Into Darkness, Kirk is the least talented person on the Enterprise, an incorrigible lech with a reputation for getting into brawls, a man of thirty-something they talk of sending back to the academy.

These are not men who are underestimated and come to prove themselves; in Non-Stop, our hero fannies about, upsets everyone and eventually follows protocol after the bad guys have messed up their own plans. The most pivotal action Kirk takes in the entire movie is to fix a machine by repeatedly kicking it in frustration. The hero of White House Down is good at shooting people, but he isn't crafty or cunning. He's just sufficiently violent.

I assume there must be an idea, somewhere, that movie audiences want heroes they can relate to - ordinary people who aren't particular good at anything and don't make good choices. Only, most of us are good at stuff and we do make good choices. Flawed heroes are great - we want to consume fiction featuring human beings (even if they are pixies, rabbits, crockery or whatever). But where's the entertainment in watching someone just get lucky?


He was a far greater man in the original film or book. 

It's also remarkable how this treatment has been applied to established characters. William Shatner's Captain Kirk had tremendous charisma and often made smart choices, even though his wisdom was a little inconsistent. You understood why everyone wanted to follow him into battle and/ or eat his face. Chris Pine's Captain Kirk, on the other hand, has a surprising large forehead.

Given the immense amount of time and effort they put into making The Hobbit into three - three! - movies, you'd think they would have considered the character of the eponymous hobbit, Bilbo Baggins; a small man who uses wit, cunning and the help of his friends to overcome enormous foes. In the movies so far, Bilbo is a small man who happens to be aggressive and fast. 

In the book, when the dwarves have been captured by spiders, Bilbo makes himself invisible and sings to them, freaking them out before driving them off by throwing stones. In the film, he fights them, stabbing them and waking up the dwarves so they can pull the spider's legs off. In the book, they gradually win the trust of Beorn (apparently a recluse since leaving Abba) by introducing themselves and telling stories. In the movie, the gang run away from Beorn's bear self, occupy his house and wait for him to turn human. 

If you're determined to suck the dynamism out of your heroes, you need to bring in a lot of outside help to make sure they save the day. This is done in two ways:

It is his destiny.

There's an awful lot of destiny involved in these movies; these are legends, not fairytales. The idea of an ordinary boy or man who discovers he is something significant doesn't make for a bad story - that's Harry Potter, among others. However, Harry Potter found out he was a wizard and then worked hard at being the best wizard he could be, overcoming obstacles, forming alliances, facing down his enemies.

In these movies, destiny is pretty much enough, although unlike Harry Potter, these are privileged boys and men, living very comfortable lives. In Ender's Game, Ender apparently has some skills but he is repeatedly tricked and manipulated by the people who believe it is his destiny. The same people manipulate his colleagues to like or dislike him and to follow him as a leader. He is then finally tricked into saving the world. 

Comic book superhero movies are not generally That Movie; superheroes belong to the metatext and are thus pretty reasonably-constructed characters. But the sheer number of these films and the fact that these heroes triumph because they are heroes (or in the case of Thor, because he is a god) are part of this general pattern.

In Kick Ass, good prevailed because of considerably cunning, courage and acquired skill. In Kick Ass 2, good prevails against far greater odds because... well, it just does somehow.



The other way you overcome the great gap where the hero's heroism should be is to make him adored by everyone around him.

Everybody loves this guy. Nobody knows why. 

Oz, The Great and Powerful came out of the questionable idea that there are no fairytales with strong male protagonists. So what kind of hero did they go for? Well, the first, second and third thing we learn about Oz is that he exploits women for both money and sex, he also exploits his male colleague, he continues to behave with abject cynicism even after he finds himself in a mysterious magical land. Yet everyone he meets adores him and thus he is reformed through the entirely irrational love and faith of others.  

In Non-Stop, two smart women - played by the excellent Michelle Dockery and Julianne Moore - never waver in their faith in our unreformed alcoholic Air Marshal, despite their short acquaintance, knowledge of his drunkenness and the fact he manhandles and accuses them.

In Oblivion, the Scavs risk life and limb to communicate with Jack Harper, a man who has been killing them all, just because he's started to frown and gaze into the middle distance. They already have a perfectly good plan for defeating their enemy without him - a plan that would have worked out if they hadn't brought Harper there to tell him about it. For no good reason.

The hero always gets the girl.

We've apparently moved on from having a final scene where the leading man takes the leading (often only) woman into his arms for a snog, even if they've only exchanged a few lines about nuclear fusion early in the second act. Getting the girl is now more often implied; the final scene features a moment of flirtation or a mutual look of longing. But that guy still gets the girl. Beautiful women are no longer prizes for heroic acts, they are the prize for being the protagonist in the movie, even an incompetent protagonist whose path was largely dictated by fate.

Bilbo Baggins is the one exception - he does not get the girl (although I've only slept through seen the first two movies so far), although the film-makers have invented a love story which begins when the dwarves are captured by the elves. Addressing a lady-elf, the best-looking dwarf says, "Aren't you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers!" 

At this point, Tolkein's ghost entered the room and smashed in our telly with a copy of The Anglo Saxon Chronicle. 

There are action, adventure and science fiction movies with black protagonists and women protagonists and those aren't all great movies. They do, however, make their heroes and heroines demonstrate some reason for us to root for them and some means by which they might have a chance at fulfilling their quests or defeating their enemies. In fact, action movies with women protagonists work hard to establish, within the first scenes, this is not just any woman; this is a special woman, with special skills. Or occasionally, this is a very ordinary woman who is about to befall a terrible fate which will force her to learn to be special.

In fact, an irony about these movies is that they are not short of competent women and people of colour. The women on the Starship Enterprise are massively qualified and brave and Sulu takes the helm with great success (let's skip past the casting of Khan). White House Down staffs the Secret Service with smart women and has Jamie Foxx as president (as he deserves to be). Most of the women in Oz, The Great and Powerful are tremendously strong and powerful, despite Oz's baffling sexual allure being enough to turn a good witch bad.

So, as well as these character's failure to engage the viewer, there's a dreadful message of entitlement here. It used to be that a white straight cis non-disabled guy could go to the movies and come away with the message that people like himself were capable of great things. Now he can come away with the message that someone like him will achieve greatness however little he actually does.

Meanwhile, the rest of us? We've got to knuckle down and rally around our hero; the whole world is at stake and he doesn't look like he can save it without us. 

Some Reading Matter

It's ages since I've made a post of links, but I seem to have seen several I really want to share.

Wheelchair Dancer has been writing about a revamp of Ironside, the (originally 70s, I guess) American TV series with a wheelchair-using detective. WD's posts on this have been phenomenal and she's promised a fourth. So far we have:

• Ironside I: The Non-disabled Role/ Roll again about the justifications used to cast a non-disabled actor as the leading disabled character, descriptions of the actor trying to master acting disabled etc..
• Ironside II: The Rough Rider Condom Chair about the intersection of straight masculinity and disability in the character of Ironside and his impractical wheelchair.
• Ironside III: Criminal Minds, Luther about the casting of a black man as Ironside and the intersection of race and disability.

Read them all.  Read the fourth one when its published. Okay? Good.

Also:

Biphobia is not (only) an LBGT issue, on how straight folk can't blame queer folk for biphobia.

Disability in Kidlit: A new blog providing "reviews, guest posts and discussions about the portrayal of disabilities in MG/ YA fiction".  I know YA is Young Adult. Apparently MG, in this context, is Middle-Grade.

This is really old, but I first saw it this summer: Why Film Schools Teach Screenwriters Not To Pass The Bechdel Test - infuriating and insightful.
.
I read this after I posted this blog, but it needs to be here: A geek against Gok
- Zoe Burgess on the manipulation and humiliation of a TV show and the triumph of a geek over adversity.

Some powerful personal posts:

One Classroom, Two Genders - The experiences of a trans woman when identified as a man, then as a woman, by her students.

Peeling Back The Layers of Shame: Talking About My Mother - Rachel describes the shame she has felt for not loving her mother, and how that continues to effect her years after her mother's death.

My Mother-in-law and Me - Lucy tells the story of a mother-in-law, who has always disapproved of Lucy because of her impairments.

This is What You're Missing: An American Love Story - A deeply moving story of sisterly love and grief.

On Being An Auntie (again). NTE watches her new nephew come into the world.


I'm sure there were other things, but usefully, my reader has just been closed for maintenance.

Since I'm here, I'm guest-blogging at the F-Word this month.  So far, I've written about women abusers and sex tips.

First, Believe Them

If you do just one thing in the promotion of equality and social justice, it should be this:

When someone gives an account of their own experience, believe them. 

If at some point along the way, something jars, something doesn't feel right and you begin to doubt what's being said, then by all means, doubt away. But always start off from the default position of faith in your fellow man.

One of the defining experiences of belonging to a marginalised group is to be mistrusted at every turn. You go to the doctor, they won't take your symptoms seriously. You go to the police about a crime committed against you, and justice is a pipe dream. You're treated as suspect because of who you are. You wish to marry and you're told your love isn't what it feels like. Every time you try to make your own life better - or simply more bearable - you are up against gatekeepers who don't trust your motives, who don't believe your account of things. You assert your faith or lack thereof and are told you are deluded. Then when people, whether this week's comedian or fashionable activist, say disgusting and insulting things about people like you, any argument you make will be dismissed as if you are the one throwing the shit, spoiling the fun and turning positive movements in on themselves.

I've often suspected that there's something about me which makes me particularly credible. But in common with anyone (especially a woman) who has seen enough doctors, I have been told on occasion that my perceptions of what is happening to my body (particularly gynaecological events) are wrong. Not the cause of my experience - I'm not a doctor - but the very symptoms I am experiencing.  As a bisexual person, I've been told that whatever I say about deep-seated emotional experiences, I am in fact straight.  Not that I have misunderstood what bisexuality is, but that it is impossible that I should feel what I say I feel.

Nobody has directly questioned my experiences of various forms of violence and abuse, but this is largely because I have not given them the opportunity; I certainly live in a culture which treats these experiences with scepticism and I read and hear opinions which question experiences just like mine. I read and hear questions about;

• Whether these things really happen.
• Whether these things are really all that big a deal.
• Whether in fact, both parties are equally to blame. 
• Whether victims may be motivated by the prospect of compensation, a favourable divorce settlement, a legal advantage in custody battles, malice, the need for attention or a wish to cover up their own misbehaviour.

It isn't that nobody ever lies.  People do lie and some people will tell lies in just about any context you can think of.  But most people don't lie, most of the time.  And when someone is vulnerable and needs support, medical treatment or police help, when someone comes out to you, or expresses a fear, tells you a secret or recounts the hurt they have felt, they have a particularly strong motivation to be telling the truth.  Nobody does any of these things for no reason. They have a huge cost when they go wrong - some have a huge cost whatever happens - a cost that a casual fibber is unlikely to risk.  

Meanwhile, the only way to get to the truth is by listening to all the information. The only way to do that is to start from a position of faith in what you are being told. Automatic scepticism shuts down this opportunity; you will never know whether you were being told the whole truth, a half-truth, a complicated truth or an outright lie. 

This isn't all about power, but it is power that ties all these strings together. Whilst many of us have faced this mistrust, all of us have the power to mistrust others. And folks do. In newspapers and around dinner tables, we regularly see this kind of scepticism applied to those with less power than us.

Take fat as an uncomplicated and sadly socially acceptable example. Roughly every week or so, there's a news story about the Obesity Epidemic with angst about how fat everyone is. And do you know one of the big reasons it's still acceptable to talk about fat people in derogatory and judgemental terms? Because, many believe, they tell so many pork pies. I'm afraid my family are weird and anxious about food, weight and health, so regularly have discussions where I hear that fat people;

• lie to themselves and the world about how much food they eat and how much exercise they get.
• lie to themselves about how heavy they are, and pretend they don't have a problem.
• lie to themselves about what they look like.
• lie to the world about any medical conditions, medications or other life circumstances that make weight much harder to control. 
• lie to the world if they have mobility problems; a fat person who can't walk, can't walk because they're fat.  Fat people are immune to ill health unrelated to their weight.
• lie to the world if they say that they're fit and healthy. 
• lie to the world if they say that they're happy the way they are.

(Incidently, these discussions frequently involve one or two people who would fit medical criteria for morbid obesity, but of course, aren't fat fat and anyway, in their case, it's glandular. Meanwhile, there are invariably people there who smoke or eat no fruit and vegatables or indulge in similar behaviour in breech of universal guidelines for healthy living. But exposing the lies of those others, these absent fatties who are not there to defend themselves, gives folk at the table such power.)

Less often, in my presence, these conversations are about disabled people - not me, you understand, or anyone else we know, but those others, most so-called disabled people in fact, who are just exaggerating things, or making them up entirely, and just looking for attention and money - so much money to be made by affecting a limp! I try to tell them how much - I can provide figures and stats - but they don't believe me.


I was thinking about all this in a week where the police report into Jimmy Savile's prolific abuse of women and children was published, and folk come up with all manner of explanations for how he got away with it. One big reason - not the only one, but a whopper - is that we treat young people, especially girls and young women, especially poor youngsters, especially those identified as troubled on account of their mental health or family background, as if they cannot be believed. We treat almost anybody who complains of sexual assault as someone who is probably lying, even when any reason we can dream up for such a lie is far less likely than an actual sexual assault taking place.

Also this week, following the reporting of malpractice allegations against a particular gender reassignment doctor, there's been the #Transdocfail hashtag, which has flooded my Twitterstream with tales of mistreatment, dismissal, neglect, misdiagnosis, personal insults and sexual harrassment endured by trans people seeking medical treatment. There was then an almighty row over the language used by femininist Suzanne Moore (in this piece, the non-apology, but particulary on Twitter). Moore left twitter and several prominent powerful journalists and writers spoke of her having been hounded off by a politically correct mob - folk like Paris Lees, who wrote this beautiful letter to her. There then followed the single most vile piece of hate speech I think I've ever read in a national newspaper, by Julie Burchill, which has been taken down for now and I can only conclude was a cynical move on the part of the Observer to get more website hits when everyone flipped out over it.

So trans folk are certainly a group who are not believed about their life experiences. People seem to doubt;

• Whether they are transgender in the first place (and whether that status exists). 
• That a trans person can have medical and mental health problems unrelated to gender.
• That a trans woman is a woman, like other women, who experiences sexism and other gender nonsense (let alone additional gender nonsense). 
• Ditto trans men. 
• That when a trans person says they feel hurt or upset, it is because they feel hurt or upset.  

We could add to this list that trans people are not a powerful and aggressive political lobby, braying to lynch anyone who uses out of date terminology. But I suspect people only pretend to think this when called out on their own abusive behaviour. See, as with all things, there is a time for doubt.

Trans is an area where I had a long way to travel. I used to think that, whilst magnanamously believing that the happiness of people alive now was paramount, one day we would achieve complete sexual equality and everybody would be happy in whatever bodies they'd been born into. I believed this, partly because of nonsense I had been fed (my feminism being forged in Greer) and sheer ignorance, but partly because I had gone through something of a struggle to come to terms with being a girl.  What's more, as a younger woman, I really did believe that being a decent sort, believing in equality in principle,  meant that I couldn't go far wrong.

I didn't analyse it then - the ignorant aren't all that introspective - but it must have made me feel superior. There were these people, making themselves utterly miserable, undergoing a humiliating process of psychiatric assessment, hormonal treatment and sometimes multiple surgeries in order to feel okay in their own skin and here was I, having worked it all out, feeling absolutely fine in mine.  I always had great sympathy for trans people, probably the single most discriminated group of people and one manifestly less fortunate than myself (more likely to be abused at home, more likely to be harassed and attacked in the street, more likely to be murdered, more likely to live in poverty etc.), but for some years, I went round believing that they simply hadn't figured things out as well as I had.

I'm not going to swear at my younger self and I'd rather you didn't - she's no longer here to defend herself.  She met people, she read a lot and acquired a great deal more compassion.  But it wasn't all about what she didn't know, it had to be a bit about power. After all, it is an incredible leap of faith to believe that you understand someone's profound experiences better than they do. It's not impossible - there are circumstances, with close kith and kin where we perhaps do understand a situation better than the person in the middle of it all. But these are very complex experiences effecting thousands of people.

It's not nearly such a leap of faith to take someone's account of their own life at face value. It just requires us to bite the bullet of not knowing better. I have struggled with this more than once. Other people - including people who are, as it was put the other day, "on the right side" - seem to share this difficulty.

(By the way, if someone is offended by something you've said or done, that isn't an automatic reason to stop doing it. Lots of things offend lots of people. But it is impossible to work out how best to proceed, to behave decently, if you do not believe that someone has been offended. Listen!)

I guess scepticism makes us feel clever, the opposite of gullable.  It is a bit like when you read a murder mystery and you've got your eye on the friendly tea-sipping parson for the murder, as opposed to the ill-mannered thug of a scarf salesman who was found with the body. Only, in the last book, you fancied him for the village fete poisonings when he had a rock solid alibi, and in the book before, you had him down as chief suspect for the bank robbery when he wasn't even in the country. Sooner or later, you've got to admit you've got it in for that parson or else, at the very least, you're behaving as if you do.

Mary Seacole vs. Admiral Lord Nelson

When I was at school, we didn't hear about Mary Seacole.  In fairness, we missed her period, but British history, despite being a history of migration, immigration and colonisation involving, at peak, around a fifth of the world's population, was the history of white straight men.  When we came across a woman, any woman at all, I paid attention. For example, Rosa Luxemburg is a footnote to the story of post First World War Germany, where various extremist factions are squabbling over a devastated young country. But she's a woman and a Jew with one leg shorter than the other. She tried to make the world a better place, died for her trouble and had a really cool name.

Michael Gove is a strange fish, who's latest brainwave is to replace various characters in school history syllabubs with the traditional British heroes that he learnt about when he was at school in the 1900s. It's really tricky to find what he actually said at source and you'd hope that history is never taught as a series of biographies in any case, but the idea of wiping Mary Seacole from school curricula has invited particular comment. In one paper, it said they were going to swap William Wilberforce, Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole for traditional British heroes such as Lord Nelson, Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill.

I could say a lot about all those figures, but I wanted to focus on Nelson and Seacole.  They are both interesting characters - I'd invite either round for dinner - they both lived through and played a role in events that were much bigger than themselves and they were both true celebrities who captured the public imagination of the day.

It seems to me, we study history for five reasons:

1. To understand the evolution of ideas in technology, science, religion, social justice, politics, fashion design etc..
2. To understand what people can do for each other if they are good, strong and brave.
3. To understand what people can do to each other if they are bad, weak and cowardly.
4. To understand the nature of history itself, how is it is recorded, revised and understood (as well as hidden, twisted and misunderstood). 
5. To understand the series of events which lead to the state of the world in the present day.

Arguably, both Seacole and Nelson's stories touch on all these things.

Of course, different areas of history appeal to different people.  Personally, I like pretty much all of it.  I haven't yet given in to my Mum's recommendation that I visit the local Drainage Museum, but I do know that if I went there and learnt about the history of drainage, I wouldn't be bored.  Not the first time I went, anyway. 

But history is about asking questions.  Questions such as, how come a huge swathe of unfarmable, barely habitable marshland in East Anglia was drained to make up part of the bread basket of England; who did it, how did they do it and why?  I trust all these questions and more can be answered at the Drainage Museum.  And, through what little knowledge I have of the Fens, I do know that this stuff touches on important and current issues, such as immigration (it was mostly Dutch labourers - experts in drainage - who did this work for us), the environment and environmental technology. 

I didn't study Nelson at school, but I know an awful lot about him through cultural osmosis.  He's the bloke at the top of the big tall column in the most famous thoroughfare in our capital city.  How could I not know about Nelson?

Nelson became a hero in his lifetime because he was very good at his job and he was involved in crucial military campaigns - events which held back the spread of French imperialism and have influenced British political life and culture to this day. Anti-French humour still refers to the Napoleonic wars. These wars are the inescapable backdrop to all of Jane Austen's novels, as well as being used as a setting for popular literature - both adventurous and romantic - to this day (notably the Sharpe, Hornblower and Master and Commander novel series). When Harrogate were first allowed to elect a mayor, they voted in a man in a monkey suit to commemorate the poor innocent monkey that was once hanged there as a French spy. 

But Nelson's life story is not all that remarkable.  He did not rise from humble or disadvantaged origins. He was on the right side only sometimes (Trafalgar was about fending off an invasion, but that wasn't the only thing the British Navy got up to at this time).  He was good at his job at a crucial point in history, was a massive celebrity in his lifetime and died a hero's death, defending his country.  

Some Other Facts I Know About Admiral Lord Nelson.

1. About five miles up the road from where I sit, there is a sign that announces "Welcome to Norfolk: Nelson's County". Before Stephen Fry, Nelson was the only famous person ever to come from Norfolk.  Actually, no, I'd forgotten about Delia Smith! 
2. Nelson had a famous extra-marital affair with Emma Hamilton who, in terms of truly remarkable life stories which tell us much about the age they lived in, trumps Nelson's any day. The story of their love affair and its notoriety, which at one point had them living very publicly as lovers in the same house as Hamilton's husband, is remarkable and comes at a turning point in British social history. Had they lived in England at any time in the following hundred and fifty years, their romantic lives would have been a dirty little secret at best, and potentially, the end to Nelson's career. 
3. Nelson is a very famous disabled hero, with only one eye and one arm. He is quoted as saying various stoical things on the loss of his arm and almost undoubtedly returned to work within half an hour. It was, of course, extremely commonplace for sailors to be disabled at this time, whilst still being able (and expected) to continue sailing and fighting. This is an age where disability is conceived in a completely different way to the 21st century and in some respects (not all, but some) the position of disabled people was better then it would be for most of the next two centuries. But I don't think Michael Gove imagines a focus on Nelson from this point of view.
4. Similarly, the fact that his final words were a request for a kiss from his male friend.  The fact that people still argue whether he said, "Kiss me, Hardy" or "Kismet, Hardy" is both an amusing and important point about our cultural investment in history. Nelson was dying, he probably wanted comfort or else to say goodbye to his friend, at a time when there were very different social rules about physical affection between men.  According to my very brief and inadequate research, the first use of the word kismet written down in English comes forty-four years after Nelson's death.  I'd be more inclined to think his last words were, "Ouch, urgh, bugger."  
5. Nelson had a godson who married a woman of colour. Her name was Mary Seacole. 

Now, I know all this through bits and pieces I've picked up in books, TV and radio programmes, none of which were specifically about Nelson.  And some of these points raise questions about our past and present.  But when it comes to Seacole, pretty much all I have is questions.

Some Questions I Have (and Have Heard Asked) About Mary Seacole

I know much less about Seacole than Nelson.  I'm not that interested in her time and place, so I haven't read up on her, but I have heard some questions asked about her, and have others of my own. 

1.  Was Mary Seacole black?  What does that even mean?  These days, you and I would regard her as black because blackness is a political status, but the exact pigment of her skin seems to have been and remains a cause for a great deal of analysis and speculation.  Even she wrote about herself as "only a little brown."  Why would anyone care so much?  It's very like the way we talk about sexuality and disability today, struggling all the time with the non-binary nature of identity.
2. What was it about Mary Seacole's life which made it possible for her, as a fat single middle-aged woman of colour, to do all kinds of things that were unthinkable for the vast majority of women within British and Jamaican culture at that time? She traveled, she ran her own businesses and whilst not coming from quite the bottom rung of society, she rose to fame and respect which had her massaging the Prince of Wales' gammy leg. Was this something in Seacole's character? Did her marginalised identities mean that she had nobody in her life trying to control her?  
3. What on Earth is a woman from Jamaica doing risking her life to nurse wounded British soldiers in the Crimean War?  What was the Crimean War even about?  (It may be just me, but I've never grasped what any of us were doing there, apart from being killed and horribly wounded.) 
4. How could someone be so famous in their lifetime and then disappear from the history books, when the activities and events they were involved in (the nursing revolution that took place in the Crimean War) continued to be read and studied?  What is it about Florence Nightingale - a figure not without her own controversies - that means that every one of us knew who she was before we left primary school and I only heard of Mary Seacole about ten years ago?
5. Is some of Seacole's history completely made up? Apparently, she wrote an autobiography - the very first by a black woman in the UK - which some consider to be something of a fiction.  Florence Nightingale said she had an illegitimate daughter and was running a brothel on the front-line of the Crimea War.  Is Seacole overrated because we are desperate for a heroic black woman in this part of our history? Is she a politically correct construct, as the Daily Mail would have you think? 

You can never look at two characters in history and say that one is more important.  As I said, history shouldn't be all about biography anyway.  Oliver Cromwell is a terrifically important figure - probably the closest we have had to a Stalin or Hitler - but you couldn't possibly study him outside the full context of everything that was going on at the time (pretty much the most important period of our political history - everything we are comes from what happened during and directly after his lifetime). 

However, there are lives which raise more questions about our past and our lives today.  I suspect that Mary Seacole is more useful to study than Nelson - and kids will learn about Nelson anyway.  And yes, it does matter that she is a black woman.  Race and gender matter both in the context of her story and the way we tell it - or try to dismiss it - today.