Should BBC Have Your Say administrators face execution?

Here are some things that have happened.

1. Ugandan MPs are debating whether being gay should be punishable by death.

2. The BBC World Service made a programme, aired today yesterday, in which they interviewed gay and lesbian Ugandans as well as religious leaders supporting the homophobic bill. So far, so nation speaking peace unto nation.

3. The BBC then asked their notorious Have Your Say contributors the question “Should homosexuals face execution?“. As if this is a topic for debate. As if this a controversial issue where people whose answer would be ‘yes’ might just as easily be as right as the people whose answer would be “No, hanging people because of who they love is wrong, and please shut the door while you’re fucking off.”

I know this is a clichéd thing to say, but I think it helps to get across just how utterly offensive this question is: what if they’d asked whether we should hang all black people? Or if we should deal with the aging population problem by giving everyone a lethal injection at 75? Or if we asked whether we should kill every member of any other completely innocent demographic who in no way deserves to die – like BBC HYS  administrators, to pick a demographic completely at random. (Feel free to Have Your Say below, but be warned I’m a little stricter with the moderation than they are over at the Beeb.)

To me, it seems at best astonishingly naive (anyone who has ever fought through the nausea of reading Have Your Say will know that there are British people on there, people who are allowed to vote, people you might sit next to on the bus, who think that homosexuality should be punishable by death and would not be at all shy about encouraging one another in this view), and – more likely – an example of the same ‘controversy for controversy’s sake’ ethos that saw a certain repulsive fascist given days of exposure on the BBC a few months back.

But enough of my opinion. My housemate Matthew put this better than I ever could: “Have sent a complaint to the BBC over their use of my license fee money to host a debate legitimizing calls for my murder.” You can do the same here, and I’d like it if you did.

ETA – just got an email from the BBC saying their response is here. Have a look for yourself, but I’m particularly interested in: their choice of title – ‘Controversial debate’ (‘controversial’, adjective, pertaining to a disputation concerning a matter of opinion); the phrase ‘We have sought to moderate [emails and texts] rigorously’ (seek harder) and also the phrase ‘varied and hugely diverse views about homosexuality’. Oh well, as long as it’s diverse, that’s all right then.

People ask how it feels to live the kind of life others dream about (I’d tell them if I knew)

I’ve been trying to pretend that I’m too cool to blog about this, but I’m not…

On Friday night I was invited to a reception at Downing Street – or, as Sarah Brown rechristened it for the evening, Downing Tweet. She’d invited an eclectic cross-section of her followers – I was part of a fairly large Labour contingent, but Kirstie ‘Biggest Tory on Question Time’ Allsopp was there as well, not to mention gazibillions of tweeting moms. Oh, and Beverley Knight. I’d sort of forgotten Beverley Knight existed. But standing among various minor celebrities, drinking wine and watching one of the Midlands’ finest divas hit high notes with impossible volume at a private performance in front of the Downing Street Christmas tree, might make a fan out of you.

Turns out Beverley Knight is one of those singers who likes to do the actions. Every time she sang ’shoulda woulda coulda means I’m out of time’ she looked at an imaginary watch. It coulda got a bit annoying. But there’s another line in that song which goes ‘People ask how it feels to live the kind of life others dream about…’ (hence the title of this blog. I don’t have the kind of life others dream about, unless they dream about Twitter and ‘phone canvassing and Greater Manchester public transport) and as she sang it she raised her arms and looked around the room like she couldn’t believe where she was. I liked that. I liked the idea that even if you’re a talented and famous person who probably gets to do this sort of thing all the time, you might not find it easy to get used to.

I don’t get to do that sort of thing all the time. I probably never will again. I was as uncool as you can possibly imagine. When Sarah Brown sent me a direct Twitter message, asking for my postal address so she could send my invitation, I accused her of having been twitter-hacked. When Rebecca Front arrived at the event I squealed “It’s Nicola Murray!…wait, she’s not a real politician.” When the Prime Minister asked me what the big issues on Twitter might be in the run-up to the general election, I couldn’t think of a single word in the English language. Not even 140 characters’ worth.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s amazing what happens because of Twitter. I – the least important person in the Labour Party; the kind of person people look around (or over) to see if there’s anyone more useful in the room – get to meet these amazing people. I learn about their activism, in the Labour Party and the women’s movement and the environmental movement. And we all get to talk about the things that are important to us and the causes we care about.

So on that note, since Sarah Brown was kind enough to invite me for an evening I shall always remember – even after I was unintentionally so rude to her! – allow me to plug the cause that means the most to her: Million Mums. Sign up at the website if you haven’t before (you don’t need to be a mom. Do it for your mom). I’ve blogged before about the appalling facts of maternal mortality, but let me remind you: worldwide, 1400 women die every day in pregnancy or childbirth. We wouldn’t let it happen here. Click above to donate or to organise an event – why not a tweet-up of your own? – and spread the word…and don’t forget to follow @SarahBrown10 and @WRAGlobal on Twitter.

On migrants and marriage

Have very belatedly added Left Foot Forward to my blogroll. It’s a very smart site by Will Straw and Shamik Das (met them both at Conference, scared ‘em silly) and I’ve only just got around to looking at it properly; there are a couple of pieces on there today which caught my eye, and both of them reminded me of people I’ve spoken to recently.

First of all, there’s this coverage of last year’s migration statistics, showing that migration from A8 states (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia) was down to just 9000 last year, from 78000 in 2007; also that emigration by A8 nationals more than doubled, from 25,000 to 69,000.

Not only is this as a slap of wet fish around the face to the right-wing press, UKIP, the BNP and similar organisations, but it backs up a trend I’d noticed among people I work with in Salford. I see A8 nationals every day – not only our clients, but also students and others who  contribute such a lot to the UK by volunteering with our service – and, as the stats show, the overwhelming majority are working…or trying to. One Polish client asked me plaintively “Why is it so difficult to get a job?” Although one answer in that case might be “Do you read the papers?”, it does explain the number of clients I see who are heading back to Eastern Europe. If you can’t get a job here either – and can’t claim benefits unless you’ve been working for long enough, incidentally – you can see why some people might prefer to go where everyone knows how to pronounce their name.

The other post full of win on today’s yesterday’s Left Foot assesses the Conservatives’ policy of tax incentives and its impact if implemented: namely, that the richest 10% of families would come out 13 times better off than the poorest 10% – another ‘rob the poor to pay the rich’  Tory idea, to add to the list under inheritance tax and scrapping the 50p tax rate.

Of course, these families would only get something like an extra £20 a week. So why bother? Well, says the policy report on which this policy is based (from Iain Duncan Smith’s Social Justice Policy Group, inevitably…why is IDS so obsessed with ‘family breakdown’? Does he have daddy issues?), ‘It would make it easier for a mother or father to remain at home to look after their children whilst the other spouse worked, or for one partner to do voluntary work within the community, look after elderly or disabled members or manage a home in a way that enables partners and families to have more undivided time together.’ In other words, tax incentives would be a tiny little cherry on the massive, rich cake that is just how much easier it already is to be a two-parent family than a single parent.

I got a call just as I was getting to work this morning. It wasn’t from a client, it was from someone I know personally, very stressed because she’s mired in solicitors over her divorce and contact issues for her young daughter.

This woman got married, back in 2003, like the Tories think we all should, and she had a little girl. And for a few months they played happy families; and then, for several years, her husband beat the shit out of her. He tried to strangle her in front of their then two-year-old daughter. He hit her older kids. He interrupted her teenage daughter’s birthday party by smashing up the house. And then, to the relief of everyone except my friend, who was in love with her husband, he left. He moved several hundred miles away; he ignored my friend’s pleas for him to maintain a relationship with his daughter; he paid no maintenance until the CSA tracked him down.

My friend was left to go through the grief of being abandoned; the humiliation of realising how long she’d spent with a man who would never have been worth a tenth of her; the absolute heartbreak of watching her little girl come to terms with the fact that her father wanted nothing to do with her. She is still living with the loneliness of single parenthood; with the relative poverty of a single income; with the logistical nightmare of finding friends and family willing to do school runs to allow her to work at all. And now she’s dealing – still largely on her own – with the stress of court proceedings as her daughter’s father reappears on the scene to reclaim the little girl who has just about manged to forget how badly he hurt her. It’s not easy. It’s not all easy to legislate for. Tax credits have helped enormously. Free childcare places and Domestic Violence Protection Orders – both announced as forthcoming by the Labour government – will come too late for my friend, but will help thousands like her.

But what if this had happened under a Tory government? What would they have done for her? I’ll tell you what: they would have rubbed her nose in her own misery. If my friend’s horrible, dysfunctional, worst-possible-environment-to-raise-a-child marriage had ‘broken down’ under the Tories, when her husband left he would have taken with him not only his income and his fists, but a precious twenty quid a week. As well as envying married couples their companionship, their choices over who gets to stay home and who gets to go out to work and their quality time with their kids, my friend would have been reminded that the government thought she was a failure for not being just like them.

There is nothing broken about my friend’s family. Her little girl is the brightest, most well-looked-after child I have ever met, and recognisably better off than she was with her destructive father present. It’s the kind of family the Conservatives will never reward, because it’s the kind they will never understand.

more than doubled from 25,000 to 69,000

Why don’t Tories get it about Thatcher?

At the weekend I reluctantly agreed to take part in a panel debate at the annual conference of student group People and Planet. I was a last-minute addition to the panel, opposite Green MEP Jean Lambert, Cllr Mark Ramsbottom for the Liberal Democrats and Stuart Penketh, Tory PPC for Ellesmore Port and Neston.

I’ve had a lot to do with People and Planet in the past and am sympathetic to many of their causes, as well as obviously having a handful of off-message views myself on some environmental, international and human rights issues; and was therefore somewhat worried that, on a panel of people who, unlike me, are elected and/or seeking election, I would be held up as ‘the Labour Party representative’, blamed for the Iraq war by the assembled group of lovely lefties in their dreadlocks and chunky Fairtrade knits, and pelted with vegan food. (I like vegan food. I hate to see it wasted. Or flung at me.) More to the point, I’d not had a lot of time to prepare, was winging it a little bit and didn’t feel I was able to give it my best.

Fortunately for me, to make me look better, I had Stuart Penketh. Stuart may not have got the memo about his audience. Possibly the highlight was when he said “you can vote for us, or if you don’t want to, you know where to go”, but personally I really started to enjoy it when, during his first five-minute speech, he talked about the regeneration of the Northwest. By Thatcher.

Now, when Stuart Penketh – Cllr Penketh, I should say – introduced himself to me, rather than giving me his name he simply said “I know Iain Lindley”. (Tories say this to me quite a lot, I’m not sure whether it’s meant to be reassuring or threatening.) One thing Iain Lindley would probably be able to tell him is: you don’t bring up Thatcher before anybody else does. Not unless you’re in a room full of people you know are all, or mostly, other Tories. Certainly not with an audience of polar-bear-loving, direct-action-organising lefties at a conference in the North.

I wasn’t sure whether the audience – many of whom wouldn’t have been born until after Thatcher left office – would react to this with the same animosity that I would have: but a definite chorus of disgust ran over the audience as soon as he said the ‘T’ word, and a young woman from one of the communities in the Northeast destroyed by Thatcher stood up to give Cllr Penketh the berating he had asked for. Unless you’re in a UKIP meeting, the Bullingdon Club or Buckingham, never assume that your audience don’t all still hate Thatcher.

And yet some Tories are still making this assumption. The Tory blogosphere has for the past couple of days been as breathless as a masturbating asthmatic in its manufactured outrage at a rather tasteless joke by Twitter’s undisputed master of tasteless jokes, Cllr Tim ’slobbering zealots’ Cheetham. The joke was about Thatcher falling down the stairs. It has attracted attention because, amongst other people, Ellie Gellard retweeted the joke, and, quite without meaning to, poor Ellie never fails to bring on Harry Cole’s breathlessness.

There’s so much wrong with Cole’s latest attempt to get Ellie’s attention, I hardly know where to start.

There are the comments from the equally outraged – “Ellie has crossed a line! She must go!” to which the only answer is…where? She’s already in France. What do they want her to do, unsend the email she sent to the Labour Party a week ago, the only ‘official’ Labour Party role Ellie has (so far) been given?

There’s the ludicrousness (is that a word?) of Tim’s joke being compared to the Tory inanities Cole himself has covered, beautifully illustrated by Julian Swainson’s Compendium of Tory Tastelessness:

Ann Winterton’s racist joke…Tory councillor’s refugee joke…CF member’s Maddie McCann joke…Alan Duncan’s Miss America joke (actually, I was sort of with him on that one)…Liam Fox’s racist, sexist Spice Girls joke…young Tories blacking up…Tory Association Chair’s sexism…another Tory councillor’s sexist, racist joke…Young Oxford Tory racist jokes…and it goes on like this.

The Tories find it difficult to understand how making a joke about “the woman responsible for years of British misery, tripping down the stairs” isn’t really as bad as a joke about “making all women walk around naked to make Muslims kill themselves”. I’m not really sure what logical knot this Tory is tying himself into, but it’s possible he thinks Baroness Thatcher is a race.

But that’s not even the most stupid bit. The really stupid bit is people like Harry Cole thinking that anyone outside their little circle of twats shares their outrage. The stupid bit is thinking that more than a handful of people in this country think of Baroness Thatcher as a frail, harmless old lady, and not the woman who said there was no such thing as society and did her best to make it true. As Tracey Cheetham has pointed out, it’s Thatcher who owes us an apology. Her being old doesn’t change any of that. A lot of people get old. Nick Griffin and George W. Bush and Simon Cowell may all live to be very old; it won’t change the evil things they did when they were younger. And none of it really compares to making a crack about a skateboard.

Call Me!

I want to do a post for the (currently under construction) Manchester Young Labour blog to encourage people to join our weekly ‘phone canvassing sessions. I know the sort of fascinating conversations you can have with voters when you call them, and I want to convince our young members that it’s worth a few hours of their evening.

To illustrate this, I thought it’d be fun to include a few ‘phone canvassing stories. I’ve amassed a few in more than five years of hitting the ‘phones, but I’d like to hear yours as well. What are the funniest, most inspiring or most enraging conversations you’ve had with a voter over the ‘phone for Labour? How do you find the experience of ‘phone canvassing? Do you use Virtual Phone Bank? Answers on a postcard, comment, tweet, DM, text…or just call me!

I believe the phrase is ‘Game On’?

Hello loyal readers (Mom), sorry I’ve been away so long. Since Conference I’ve been looking into getting the lovely Ben Furber to re-do my blog design so it looks less like I did it myself using Paint (which is exactly what I did), but while I’ve been waiting for him to redesign it so I can start blogging again, he’s been waiting for me to start blogging again so it’s worth doing the new design. Never mind. You can see a preview of the new look here. Also I have to admit other factors have been a) laziness and b) NaNoWriMo, an endeavour whereby writers from around the world attempt a 50000-word novel during November. I am failing horrendously at this – you can track my progress here if you really want to – but even the effort of failing has taken up a lot of my time.

But this week, the Labour Party that I love has really started to fight for the General Election victory the country needs: first with a Queen’s Speech that set out a stall of truly, defiantly Labour policies – protection for agency workers, support for high-speed rail, free home care for the 400,000 older people who need it most, enshrining the child poverty target in law, ditto fiscal responsibility – and then, to bring the message home, with an inspiring party political broadcast. If you’ve not watched it yet you should, and to make that easier for you I’m going to play it right now.

A version of this was originally shown at various points during Conference, but it’s been updated to bring in Labour’s policies for the future. I find it inspiring – let’s be honest, I’ve seen it ten or fifteen times now and still shed a little tear – but then I would, wouldn’t I. But I made very sure my Grandad…you all remember my lifelong-Labour, disillusioned-by-expenses Grandad…I made sure he watched it as well. And he thought it was brilliant. He didn’t promise me anything, I’m not counting his electoral chicken yet, but he called me up and said “This is what I’ve always said to people. Everything we’ve got has come from Labour. What are the Tories going to do for people like us? Nothing.” If the film reminds our core vote that however some politicians may have disappointed them, Labour is still the Party they need, then that’s definitely something.

Inspired by the reminder that it is the fighters and believers that change our world, this past weekend has been a ‘Fighters’ weekend – and haven’t we been fighting. On Saturday, Manchester Young Labour were out in Northenden, leafleting and door-knocking for Richard Cowell, while Andrew Gwynne MP in Denton rounded up his Twitter friends (me included) to join local Party activists for some canvassing; on Sunday, while LGBT Labour NW headed to Liverpool to campaign for Stephen Twigg before joining the March Against Homophobia, I met up with Rusholme’s local candidate Rabnawaz Akbar to arrange some canvassing that should keep me busy for a week or two.

To anyone out campaigning this past weekend the Party sent out these sexy little badges:

I was wearing mine in Manchester on Saturday when a complete stranger stopped me and said ‘Fighters and believers! I saw the broadcast the other night, that was brilliant.” Honestly. It’s a hit. I’m ordering t-shirts following massive demand for them on Twitter, email me if you want one in time for Christmas. By New Year’s Eve no-one will kiss you without one.

All of this is just a roundabout way of saying that I’ve been feeling a bit distant from the world of politics just lately, but now that we’ve got our collective arses in gear for the fight of our lives, the least I can do is get off mine and blog. Game ON, innit?

The Sun goes down on Cameron

I’ve temporarily misplaced the TV remote  for the flat where I’m staying this Conference, so can’t switch over from Sky News. And goodness me, what a load of self-promoting wank you get when one outpost of Murdoch’s empire reports ‘news’ created by another.

The theme I have seen coming up again and again at this Conference has been the changing relationship between politics, the media and the public. We all know how much more effective it is for voters to have direct and unfiltered access to their elected representatives through blogs and Twitter and Facebook.  We all know how rapidly the readership of every newspaper, including the Sun, has declined in recent years. We all know that newspapers cannot influence the voters’ choice in the same way now that they could when the Sun backed Blair.

If the Sun really believed in David Cameron’s Conservatives, they would have waited until their Conference, and written about the policies Cameron will announce and the atmosphere of the Conservative Party. But they didn’t.

If the Sun’s editors and owners genuinely believed it was possible for them to influence the outcome of a general election, they would have waited until the election was called, and urged their readers to support the Conservatives then. But they didn’t.

The media editor of the FT has suggested that the Sun’s timing indicates more about their desire to damage the Prime Minister than about any desire to encourage Sun readers to vote Conservative. He’s absolutely right. It’s a desperate attempt by a declining media empire to get some attention by trying to stir up controversy, and I don’t think anyone will be convinced.

What support really means

The Prime Minister’s speech today featured a barrage of new policy announcements. 10000 new green job placements; free childcare for a quarter of a million two-year-olds; scrapping compulsory ID cards; legislation on international aid in the budget; speedy diagnosis for cancer patients; free personal care for elderly people with the highest need; measures to allow constituencies to recall their MP where there is proven financial corruption; and a referendum on Alternative Vote.

However, there is another policy that has caused widespread concern, as this analysis by Tweetminster shows – and that’s why I’ve spent the last hour blogging on my feet in the exhibition centre internet cafe to offer a response.

Brown announced that ‘From now on all 16- and 17-year-old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes. These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads, but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly.’

I do understand why many are already expressing concern about it, from Rowenna Davis‘ criticism of Brown’s language, to Anne Perkins‘ accusations of Daily Mailism, to outright allegations of fascism on (where else) Twitter.

The language was indeed ambiguous, and that was unfortunate (although let us be very clear that Gordon Brown did not criticise single mothers in the slightest; any suggestion that he did may reflect more about the prejudices of some of those listening). When the Prime Minister spoke of a mother teenage being ‘given the keys to a council flat and…left on her own’ I do not believe he was accusing young parents of getting pregnant as a means to housing. As Anne Perkins pointed out, research has shown that this motivation is a myth. Instead, some young people try to create families in the hope of providing the love and comfort they never found with their own; and thus they may have children without the help and support of the wider family networks upon which so many parents rely.

This is what the Prime Minister wishes to address. He is not unhappy that teenage mothers are given the keys to a council flat. He is unhappy that they are not given any help once they are in it.

So what help is he proposing? The policy outline in the speech was, I agree, frustratingly vague, and I feel this has led to much of the opposition to it. But we did get some clues: he mentioned Dundee, where family intervention was used to great effect in the Dundee Families Project.

As the Prime Minister touched upon, the Dundee project helped vulnerable  families by housing them in shared blocks. While they were there, they could access ‘a range of services through individual and couple counselling, family support and group work…support 24-hours a day all year…after-school and young persons’ group activities…groups for adults have covered cookery, parenting skills, anger management and tenancy issues.’

It sounds all right, doesn’t it?

For too long the role of the state when it comes to the family has seemed either to be removing children from households, or doing nothing at all. Families across the country are crying out for a middle way – for the help that will allow them to stay together and that will enable parents to be the very best they can be.

If Labour is to fight back effectively we must be clear about our message; and every Labour supporter should be clear about what the Prime Minister announced today. It’s not the Tories’ marriage incentives. It’s not the ban on divorce proposed by a Tory PPC last night at a conference fringe. It’s not the mandatory knee-length skirts suggested by the fruitcakes of the BNP. It’s not paternalism, it’s not Victorian, it’s not the workhouse. It is real support to be offered to those who really need it. And I believe that as they did with the rest of his inspiring speech today, the Party, and the country, should be applauding it loudly.

Banning things that should never have been allowed and allowing things that should never have been banned

This evening the Prime Minister has released a statement of posthumous apology to Alan Turing.

Turing was the father of modern computer science. In 1999 Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century for his role in the creation of the modern computer, stating: “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.” He came up with the Turing Test for artificial intelligence, worked on the Manchester Mark 1, then emerging as one of the world’s earliest true computers, and worked as a codebreaker for British intelligence during World War 2.

Turing was a scientific icon, a Manchester legend and a war hero. He was also gay. In 1952, when he was outed, being gay was illegal. Turing was arrested, chemically castrated and banned from GCHQ. He never recovered, physically or psychologically, and two years later he killed himself with cyanide.

In 2006 Tony Blair summed up the achievements of this Labour government as ‘Banning things that should never have been allowed…allowing things that should never have been banned.’ Being gay should never have been banned. Alan Turing was never a criminal; those who persecuted him to his death were. It breaks my heart that this brilliant man was arrested in Manchester for being no different to the thousands of people who celebrated Pride in this same city last month.

Gordon Brown’s apology is symbolic; but behind the symbol is the solid foundation of this Labour government’s commitment to gay rights.

Civil partnerships, fertility treatment for lesbians available on the NHS, gay adoption rights and the scrapping of the Tories’ homophobic section 28 – this government has had to overturn not only centuries of inequality, but also a deliberately discriminatory policy brought in by the Conservatives as late as 1988.

The Conservatives have been doing their best to court the gay vote in recent months, and David Cameron made a high-profile apology for Section 28 (including having voted for it himself). But  the key difference between Cameron’s apology and the Prime Minister’s is that Gordon Brown is apologising for being the Prime Minister of a country that once had a homophobic government, because he wants to reassure the gay community that those days are behind us; whereas David Cameron had to apologise for having voted, personally, for a homophobic law, because he wants the gay community to believe that he and his party have changed.

I don’t believe him. The Tories are still obsessed with marriage incentives as a cure for all evil (their ‘Plan for Social Reform‘ doesn’t even mention civil partnerships); their MEPs deny that homophobia exists; and don’t even get me started on Nadine Dorries.

I was part of LGBT Labour’s entry in this year’s Manchester Pride parade and was taken aback at the huge number of spectators along the route who burst out clapping and cheering at the sight of our Labour banner: a demonstration that gay voters (perhaps particularly in Manchester) know that Labour is still the only true party of equality. I was so proud to be Labour that day, and I am again tonight.

Alan Turing: 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954

Things I wish I’d said first, pt 47

You all know I’m on Twitter, right?

A couple of weeks ago I changed my name on Twitter by adding a ‘Ms’ in front of it. This was because one of the volunteers at the CAB where I work on a Wednesday told me about a 70s song called ‘Ms Grace’, I looked it up on Spotify, it’s quite cheery and I liked it. If you’ve got Spotify you can listen to it here.

After I changed my Twitter username (and I really should have seen this coming) someone else picked up my old one, copied my avatar picture, started following all the same people I follow, and tweeted that I love Thatcher. So far, so pant-wetting.

However, my imitator got an imitator (are you following this?). I’m not that popular, I tend to ignore my critics rather than respond to them, and I am very easy to mock. So the Tory trolls found another target: Bevanite Ellie, a fellow Tweeter who will be familiar to regular readers. A fake Twitter account was set up in (very nearly) her name to make nasty, vicious and personal comments about her (and occasionally me, again).

Ellie puts up with a lot of crap from these people. I block Tories on Twitter as a rule because I don’t expect to get on with them personally, and don’t believe there is anything either side can gain from a political argument perpetuated by two people of intransigently opposed points of view in 140 characters at a time. (Also because I generally know what they’re going to say, but more on that later.) But Ellie perseveres, and engages, and debates, and for her pains she gets patronised, smeared and targeted for misogynist abuse.

This evening Ellie has hit back, and although I disagree with her contention that she’s an unworthy target (she’s a fiery and articulate commentator and a rising star of Labour’s online presence), I have to respect her decision that it’s time to take twats to task for being twats.

I imagine it would make a lot of people uncomfortable if I said that one of the reasons Ellie and I (and Kerry McCarthy, and, and, and…) come in for such a lot of stick is because we’re women. But the absolute effluent spouted by ‘the fake Ellie’ makes it hard to deny. Whoever set up that profile saw a picture of a happy young woman with long hair, and from that they judged that she is a silly, thoughtless, upper-class girl with a pony who doesn’t have any opinions of her own. It’s bollocks, it’s insulting, and it is sexist.

Make no mistake, a large part of the outrage directed at politically active women, from the me-and-Ellies on Twitter to the Harriets and Hillarys in the real world, is still grounded in the language of knowing our place. If we’re going to be women in politics, we should at least accept that men know better than us. We should at least pick men as our role models, when other women are so obviously laughable. We should at least stop banging on about sexism. We should at least accept that our looks are going to be compared to each other’s, and that we will be judged on that before we say a word. We should at least know when to shut up.

When it gets to me, it gets a bit more complicated. I’m not going to pretend that my bad press on the internet comes exclusively from being an outspoken left-wing feminist woman, because it doesn’t. Most of it comes from the fact that I did a very bad and stupid thing a couple of years ago. I paid the price for doing it, but I know it’s not going to go away, so since Harry Cole, Donal Blaney and others have already blogged on it, I thought it was about time I did too.

A couple of years ago I was the Academic & Welfare Officer of my Students’ Union. One night I stupidly got involved in an argument with a student I knew and – in the heat of the moment – in a state you could describe as ‘tired and emotional’ – I slapped him. He, and the rest of the campus right, then ran a campaign to force me out of my job.

I lost the confidence vote by eight. I’m ashamed of having been reduced to violence. But I paid the price, not least in losing a job I loved dearly and (I think) was pretty good at. But you move on and you learn lessons. I learned things about which friends you can really trust, about the media, about how to rebuild your life from the ground up, and other things I never thought I would need to know at the age of 22. I will never be proud of what I did, but I am proud that having lived through a local media shit-storm, one lesson I won’t ever learn is not to speak up for what I believe in. I know that most young women in politics will never make the same stupid mistake I did, but I hope they can learn from it anyway, and I hope no-one ever shuts them up either.