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. 

The EU Referendum, Hope & Despair

When they announced that there was finally going to be a referendum on the UK's membership of the EU, I thought, "Well, that's it then. We're out."

The European Union is a truly excellent idea, imperfectly - and sometimes badly - put into practice. I felt sure we would vote to leave because it has long provided a political scapegoat for domestic politicians of all stripes - it is rather like an absent wife, who a husband might moan about and use as an excuse for his own inaction and inadequacy. All his mates think he would be so much better off without her, but then one day they actually meet her and wonder how such a woman puts up with a twat like that. Not that she's an angel, mind you. But he is a complete twat.

Whatever happens, the EU will still exist tomorrow and honestly, that is a wonderful thing. My parents have got into their sixties without seeing any outright conflict between the countries of Western Europe - possibly the first generation to do so since people started organising themselves into approximate nations. I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War, but a further conflict between us and one of our close European neighbours has been and still is completely inconceivable, because of an idea borne out of discussions that started at the end of a war which killed around 3% of the world's population. This is an incredible achievement.

But of course the EU is a collection of countries with different political cultures and mostly muddles through, sometimes failing to act on urgent matters, sometimes acting badly. Fairness is an extremely messy question when you're talking about such a diverse group of countries with equally diverse needs and resources. The EU is one of the best political ideas that anyone ever had, but you know, it's not brilliant. It is merely better that we should be part of the effort.

The European Convention of Human Rights has been by far the most successful application of the tenets first written down in the Univeral Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In principle - although again, far less often in practice - people in the EU have these rights. Our governments can't kill us unless we pose an immediate threat to others. Our governments can't torture us or imprison us indefinitely without trial. They can't interfere with our family life, our religious practices or our private lives in general. I can characterise the government of my country as a twat - I can say pretty much whatever rude things I like about them without fear of interference.

This is amazing. We think it's normal, but it's not normal. It is justice, it is right, but most people in the world do not have nearly this degree of freedom. And it is freedom. Human Rights are often framed as protections - which they are - and of course, most people feel comfortable and comfortable people don't feel they need any protection. But the reason we feel so comfortable is because we are free! And those of us who care most about Human Rights are usually those who are less comfortable or who know that, elsewhere or not so long ago, our lives would be dramatically blighted by governments who would wish to control, silence or eliminate people like us.

And of course, in reality, Human Rights are still abused in Europe, including the UK. There are outright violations like police brutality and abuse, and there are still actual laws on our books which fall short of those sacred tenets. 

And this is relatively young legislation, so there have been some fabulous newspaper headlines about ridiculous cases being brought under Human Rights legislation, with no follow up article when such a case is thrown out of court. But after a bloody long battle, our Human Rights Act remains the most fantastic delicious and brilliant piece of legislation ever enacted in our country.

Whatever happens tomorrow, this is still the case. The EU remains intact, whether we're in it or not and you and I and the rest of the planet will still be better off for that fact. The EU gave us Human Rights and we'll still have them tomorrow. We'll always have to fight our government for them - this one has threatened to scrap ours - because people in power always want more power. The EU has also given us a (metric) tonne of equality and workers rights legislation. It has made us a safer, healthier, freer and more just country. That can't be undone overnight.

Like I said, when they announced the referendum, I thought it would be straight-forward. I have been both gratified and disappointed at how wrong I was. Gratified because an awful lot of people - far more than I imagined - feel as I do or have come round to my way of thinking. Disappointed because the argument has become so ugly. I had imagined any argument would have been about bureaucracy, about future expansion of the EU's powers and about money - how much money goes into the EU and how much comes out. I'm appalled at the racism and hatred I have seen in the last few months. Appalled and frightened.  

Whatever happens, our country needs to do a lot of healing from all this.

We all need to be careful about our bubbles. I've seen a lot of racism (often with a sizeable pinch of homophobia, disablism and misogyny mixed in) because I've seen it on Twitter and because it has been highlighted by anti-racist friends and allies. And I won't say "but clearly, 50% of the country aren't racist" because we live in a racist society and such a statement would wrongly exonerate the other 50% as well. However, many Leave voters will simply not have witnessed this behaviour from their fellow voters. Some will only have seen the debate as reported in a particular newspaper, in the local campaign literature or as portrayed by friends, family and colleagues. Some will not have seen much of the debate at all, but will be voting according to their own values or priorities which have absolutely nothing to do with being scared of or feeling superior to people from other countries and cultures.

So if we vote to Leave, we ought not to despair of our fellow countrymen, women and others. We're in a mess - as I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, there was greater and greater acknowledgement that racism was a problem which decent people tried to combat in themselves and others. In recent years, increasing Islamophobia has twisted that trajectory and in the last few months, I feel that public discourse has taken a firm step backwards. However, whatever happens now, we need to start sorting this out and that won't work too well if we start from the perspective that half of everyone around us is a raging Nazi.

Some people are afraid we're about to swing even further to the right but I think that's the one good thing about this referendum; it answers a question which has been used to stir up anger for the last few decades. That momentum is about to drop away. If we vote Leave, the economy is about to take a dip - even if things work out well long term, this is pretty much inevitable. If we vote Leave, our Prime Minister may resign and there may even be a general election in a few months, but the EU will no long be a factor in that election - why vote for someone offering independence and almost nothing else when that's already been achieved?

That's not to say this whole debacle has not been immensely damaging. It has been by far the most divisive set of political events in my lifetime. It has brought out the very worst in some of us, including some very powerful people who hold significant influence over our lives. The devil is now a regular feature on our TV screens, even though he doesn't yet control their content. 

We will need to deal with all this, whatever. But the EU will still exist, we will still have Human Rights and it would be a great mistake to fall into despair at any outcome of this referendum, given how much work now needs to be done.

Of course we'd blame cancer for plane crash deaths

Discusses suicide and stigma of illness.

Alistair Campbell wrote an article condemning media speculation about the mental health of Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings co-pilot who, it would seem, deliberately crashed a plane into a mountain, killing 150 people on board. Campbell's article is entitled

Would we be 'blaming' cancer for the deaths of those people who perished in the Alps?

It has been widely shared in my circles, but I keep thinking, "Yeah, we would."

If the guy had cancer, there would have quickly developed a narrative in which, raging against his fate and embittered against the world, the chap decided to end it all and take everyone else with him. This is the basis for almost every disabled super-villain in comics and movies. When they're not warming our hearts, we expect people with physical illness to be angry, bitter and to love life and other people a whole lot less.

The media treatment of depression is significantly worse because it treats this diagnosis - a very commonplace, highly variable condition - as if that explains everything. The guy was (probably) depressed. What more do we need to know?

With cancer, the speculators would have had to expand on that - "He obviously thought the cancer was coming back" or "He was angry that he would die in his twenties while other people would experience all kinds of things he would never get to".

There wouldn't have been headlines which implied that people with cancer should never be allowed in the cockpit of an aeroplane (or presumably, in any of the many positions of great responsibility people with various illnesses regularly occupy). But narratives in which we use physical illness and impairment to explain violence and self-destruction are not uncommon.

Way too often, in describing some oppression, a minority is identified who would never receive such ill-treatment. There were a lot of articles about cripping-up - non-disabled actors playing disabled characters, usually to overblown critical acclaim - following Eddie Redmaine's Oscar win for his role as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Many of these articles stated that blackface is a thing of the dim and distant past; you'd never see a white actor play a black character, so why are disabled people so oppressed?  Of course, the corpse of blackface continues to twitch, while white or mixed race actors are routinely cast in historical or fictional roles whose time and geography would suggest black or Asian characters. Meanwhile other groups - like transgender people - get to see themselves represented by their own people even less often.

The mental illness vs. physical illness nonsense is especially disparaging because it demonstrates what an extremely low bar mental health campaigns tend to reach for. They want mental illness to be treated just like physical illness. Being more ambitious, I'd like mental illness to be treated as a morally neutral personal experience, not a symbol or a story, a quirk or a weakness. Many people are able to see it as just that. Culturally, we have a way to go.

Sometimes, people are too sick to work. All kinds of illness, all kinds of work. This doesn't always mean such people don't come into work. They may do so because:

• We live in a culture which treats paid employment as the minimum criteria for a decent and valuable human being. 
• We live in a culture which treats all illness, but especially mental illness, as personal weakness.
• Folk are afraid to disclose illness to employers, especially mental illness.
• Employers often don't take illness seriously, especially mental illness.
• Employers are often freaked out by illness, especially mental illness.
• People don't always know how sick they are.
• Other people, including doctors, don't always know how sick a person is.

In other words, even those who are convinced that a diagnosis of depression poses a significant risk need to care about the further stigmatization of mental illness.  And all other illness, because our culture encourages folk to push themselves and take risks where physical or mental collapse could lead to disaster.

However, depression is entirely inadequate as an explanation for Andreas Lubnitz's actions. Even in the most severe suicidal depression, there's a huge difference between being careless of other people's safety (e.g. stepping in front of a train, driving into traffic) and purposely harming others (e.g. crashing the plane you're piloting).

And why shouldn't Idris Elba play James Bond?

Here are some facts about the fictional character of James Bond as represented in the books and films:

• James Bond's age shifts randomly along a range between 30 and 57 years old. In the most recent movie, fifty years after the first book, he was 44. 
• Bond's height varies between 5'10" and more than 6'2". 
• He has a range of upper middle-class English accents, with the exception of one Sean-Connery-trying-to-sound-English accent.
• His eyes are blue-grey, blue and brown. His hair is blond, brown and black. He has either smooth complexion or a significant facial scar.
• His parents are probably Scottish but possibly Swiss. 
• Sometimes, he gets attached to a woman and is very upset if anything happens to her. Other times, he shrugs off the death of a lover like a broken nail.
• His entire personality shifts about in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. 

Different creative people, different writers, actors and directors treat their subject differently. But here are some ways in which James Bond has always been the same:

• He is a British secret agent with MI5, code name 007, etc.. 
• He's really into stuff. He likes expensive clothes, watches, weapons and cars.
• He likes a dry martini, shaken but not stirred. 
• He enjoys having sex with women that either he or his enemies have power over. 
• He is suave, cool and charismatic. He suits tailoring. 
• He is serious but not especially earnest. 
• He is quick-witted, with a dry sense of humour.
• He is a bit of a git. Sometimes a lot of a git, but always a bit.
• He is physically imposing, fit, fast and strong.
• He is taller than the average British man.
• He is white.

Together with height, whiteness is the most superficial trait that all versions of Bond have had in common. Whiteness is not part of the essential character of James Bond. Whiteness is part of the origin of Bond, along with the Cold War and all manner of 1950s period detail, long since discarded by film-makers. Whiteness is not anachronistic, but whiteness as an essential quality, important to Bond's character, context or any of the adventures he gets up to, is.

A selection of outraged comments about the suggestion of Idris Elba as the new James Bond from the Daily Mail website, was making the rounds on Twitter (I found them so unlikely, I had to verify them. At Christmas time!). Among other nonsense, there are various demands that white actors be allowed to play fictional characters who had previously been cast as black.

These fictional characters included:

Shaft
Idi Amin
Martin Luther King
Nelson Mandela

So, in other words, just Shaft; a character who can boast only a handful of films, only one of which everyone saw. A character who has only ever been played by one actor (remember, Samuel L. Jackson played Shaft's nephew). A character who lives in the Harlem of the 1970s, whose friends, contacts and context are largely black. A character whose experiences are informed by the racism of his country at the time. Shaft is a big black private dick, who's a sex machine to all the chicks.

Shaft is black as Hornblower is white. Hornblower is a British naval commander in the 1800s. There were British black folk about during the Napoleonic Wars, but racism would make it impossible for a black man to have such social privilege and education, let alone become a naval officer. Hornblower is a great white naval nob, who never thinks of petticoat when he's on the job.

Other characters have far greater flexibility. There are examples of characters, previously played by white actors, played by people of colour without a hitch; the new Annie is black, the recent Ironside is black (though played by a non-disabled actor). Both Guinevere and Elyan in the TV series Merlin (although there are people of colour in the Arthur legend) are black and Lucy Lui plays Watson in the US version of Sherlock. The only production of Julius Caesar I've seen had an all black cast and was fantastic. Yeah, Julius Caesar probably had paler skin, but he also spoke Latin and he probably died saying, "Aaaarrrrggghhh!"rather than "Et tu brute? Then fall Caesar!"

Far far more often, literary characters are made white, or much paler, on our screens (just in the last year, see Noah*, Exodus: Gods & Kings and Half of a Yellow Sun). In the same way, disabled characters are either made non-disabled or played by non-disabled actors. The excuses are that there are too few actors of colour with box office draw and no famous disabled actors at all (maybe you have to get cast to get well-known).

However, the fact that the same industry routinely straightens out lesbian, gay and bisexual literary characters suggests another motive. There's a widespread belief that white straight non-disabled men can only tolerate movies and television shows where people like themselves predominate. This despite the fact that movies with strong female characters do very well indeed.

(Not that long ago, all significant characters were played by white folk. The most recognisable Othello on film remains a blacked-up Lawrence Olivier. Of course, in the earliest productions, even Desdemona was played by a white man. Times change. People change them.)

I'm not suggesting that we attempt to counter this erasure with a black Bond. I'm suggesting that if we can fiddle about with characters in order to appease the variously bigoted elements of the film and television industries, then there can be no argument about preserving the whiteness of a fictional character if there's an excellent non-white candidate.

Idris Elba would make an excellent Bond. Not all talented and charismatic actors can do it as there's a certain kind of charisma required. Even the omnipresent Cumberbatch has his limits. Elba is not the only candidate right now - Tom Hardy could do it, maybe Damien Lewis - but I can't think of anyone who would do it better.

Meanwhile, there are good reasons, in addition to pure merit, for casting a black guy as Bond or any lead role. Folk - especially young people - need to see themselves represented in a diversity of roles. Folk - especially young people - need to see one another represented in a diversity of roles. James Bond isn't exactly renowned for this, but hey.

Wednesday's New Yorker featured the following cartoon:

[A domestic scene where an older white lady clings to the arm of a tall black man in a santa outfit while an older white man with a long white beard looks on. The caption reads, "You've been Santa for a thousand years. Let Idris Elba have a chance!"]

It acknowledges that Idris Elba is a man of colour with an immense draw. But, well, who says Santa has been the same white man for a thousand years? Sometimes the Santa in a store grotto is black, as he is in Run DMC's Christmas in the Hollis video; he's just never black on Christmas cards or in movies. But he does change. He puts on and loses weight. He frequently restyles his hair and beard. He can be aged anywhere between about 35 and 80. He changes, possibly even regenerates. Is there any essential quality to Santa's character, context or behaviour that suggests whiteness?

And yes, on regeneration, the Doctor of Doctor Who could be a person of colour (though not Idris Elba - he too has his limits). The Doctor could also be a woman or non-binary, have a physical impairment or whatever else. Not should, just for the sake of it, but if an actor is right for the part.

We're talking fiction. Things still have to fit together; characters must be consistent, plots must hold. But the possibilities are as expansive as the silence that follows the question, "Why not?"



* The Bible makes no reference to Noah's race or his geographic location (unlike the story of Exodus, which is quite specifically not a time or place with a lot of Northern Europeans running the show). However, if you're going to recount a world-famous origin myth and you the resources of a major production, you have really four options:

1. Cast people of African descent because that's where all our early ancestors were.
2. Cast a great mix of ethnicity, to represent the diversity of humanity on Earth. 
3. Cast people who look like the people who created and eventually wrote down the myth, 
4. Cast only white people, because only white people matter.

These things do not apply if you're making a student film, a school play or a theatrical production with a small company. But in a big budget movie depicting a myth that belongs to a huge proportion of the world's population, the decision to employ an all-white cast supports a very particular world-view. 

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. 

This is what the Devil looks like.

We never take enough time to consider why tyrants are popular. Some of them, including Northern Europe's own mustachioed bogeyman, were elected by the people. Elsewhere in the world in recent years, people have voted for Putin, Morsi, Mugabe, al-Assad, even if the count is often rigged. But we’re not baffled, not really; these people who believed that the Devil was their best option either lived in the past, or they live in the developing world, which is as good as living in the past. They are vulnerable, gullible, much less sophisticated than us. The Devil walks in, horns polished to a shine, fork-tail swishing in the cloud of sulphurous gas that surrounds him and they have no idea at all.

Only this is what the Devil looks like. The Devil looks just fine. He can talk okay, is arguably charismatic, but his magnetism is not supernatural. He comes across as a decent sort of chap. He makes a few extreme statements - so sometimes he goes a little too far - but at least the man is honest, horns unpolished, refreshing in his candor. And he's funny. Charming rather than seductive. His blunders only prove that he is human.

He is nothing special, this Devil. I don't mean merely that he doesn't look that special, but if we’re honest (and we rarely are about this), evil is quite commonplace. The Devil has many guises; tyrannical regimes come in many bitter flavours. Yet there are three things all tyrants have in common:

• They happen to have massive, massive power.
• They use fear-mongering and scapegoating to maintain their power.
• They are in love with their own reflection, with an anxious need to protect and manipulate their image, as they imagine it to be, in the eyes of the world.

The massive power is what makes all the difference. It's an external factor; something that other people, circumstances, history or brute force makes happen. Look around for a leader who merely meets the second and third criteria and you have three out of our last five Prime Ministers. We only point and say, "Look, it's the Devil!" when they've been completely let off their reigns. When hundreds or thousands of their own people are imprisoned or violently killed.

So this is what the Devil looks like; like so many other politicians with a suit and a sound bite. And that’s part of our trouble when discussing his rise. People called Thatcher a fascist. People have described Blair as a murderer and Cameron as a man with no conscience. We’re not talking about people you’d leave your pet goldfish with – not if you didn't want it be sold off, drowned or abandoned with nothing to eat.

Only none of them made a bid for power on a platform of socially-retrograde authoritarian nationalism (or, you know, Fascism), suggesting we be afraid of our neighbours, with fellow candidates advocating the execution of minorities and political opponents. Other sinister political figures of my lifetime had a far nicer image to preserve. That's part of the reigns I mentioned.

A lot of people can smell the sulphur just now.

There’s a now much-quoted blog post by poet Michael Rosen which includes the passage:

"Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you..."

On Twitter, Steve Graby objected: “Worth remembering fascism comes as your friend IF you are white, straight/cis and non-disabled. Otherwise it's pretty blatantly your enemy from the start.”

That would surely be the case if everyone knew what the Devil stands for. But it is not a civil duty to keep track of all the political goings on, to read the full manifesto rather than the single-page pamphlet. It is not morally irresponsible to zone out while the politicians bicker on the breakfast news. And many ordinary fallible people do. Most people who vote for the Devil care about one or two issues and see that guy as the guy who’s going to fix them.  A lot of people vote for the Devil just because they don’t like their other options. Evil is commonplace, but naivety is pandemic. It's part of our charm.

This is what the Devil looks like. The horns and the fork-tail? All that's in the small print. There’s good and bad news about all this:

The bad news is that ordinary and fallible people can be taken in by the Devil. They don't have to be very bad or stupid, just misguided. Worse news is that you are as ordinary and fallible as the next person. He would have to wear very different clothes to fool you, of course. And maybe you do read the small print, and maybe you’d never place your vote on anyone less than a saint (abstention again, is it?), but at some point, in some context, you may well shake the Devil’s hand.

The good news is that people who support the Devil, vote for the Devil, are not evil or beyond reason. There’s as little reason to despair of your neighbours as to fear them. Better news is that a population of ordinary, fallible people in a country not yet overwhelmed with despair due to famine, mass poverty, internal divisions and war are more than capable of keeping the Devil in his place.

Despair is always the danger. Right now, politicians are so despairing of their own people that they grit their teeth and flare their nostrils, trying not to gag on the sulphur and give away the fact they can smell it. Meanwhile, some of them are, themselves, a little bit evil and the presence of the Devil beside them can only improve their own precious image. But politicians aren't very important.

Last week, I was rolling round my village, looking at potential places to live. And the thought crossed my mind,

"What if people put party political posters in their front windows? What if we find somewhere perfect but we know, without meeting them, that the neighbours are a bunch of bastards who hate people like us, our friends and families?"

And I knew I was wrong at the time (and I saw just one poster, in the house of someone who always parks their sports car on the pavement so that my wheelchair is in danger of scraping the paintwork as I pass). Then this weekend, I hear that I should prefer not to live next door to Romanians and I felt even more guilty. It would be reasonable to assume that people with those posters in their windows are ordinary, fallible, just not paying so much attention, maybe with a little less to lose.

This is what the Devil looks like. His potential power lies in our despair at each other.