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.

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.

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

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.

It’s been an evening of confusion in the grey area between old and new media – Mark Hanson has summed up pretty well what happened when the Guardian let slip something LabourList was supposed to tell us first. It’s almost as though Labour needs someone to coordinate our new media presence…oh, wait, what do you know – we now have that someone!

Kerry McCarthy has been appointed Labour’s official new media campaign spokesperson. She’s the obvious choice for the role (since Prezza’s a bit tied up with Go Fourth) and you can read about her plans for sharing best practice amongst MPs and PPCs, and generally helping us new media types to help Labour, here.

I’ve had quite a long day in Walsall (it involved more guinea pigs than one would expect) so I’m not going to add much more to what Kerry has said, except:

1. She’s absolutely right that it’s Labour whose politicians have made a real effort to use blogs and social media to communicate with the voters, while the Tories have been relying more on prolific angry blogging minions (like right-wing, much more high-profile versions of me, I suppose)

2. I’m very pleased and grateful that she named this blog in her interview, along with my other favourites Bevanite Ellie* and Blackburn Labour, and a local Labour hero of new media, Labour’s PPC for Withington Lucy Powell

3. I’m looking forward immensely to the McCarthyite era of new media! That is all

* btw, I’ve only just read Ellie’s post on ‘welovetheNHS’ (I’m using an unfamiliar keyboard and it doesn’t seem to have a hash key! Argh!) and it’s excellent, have a look.

Seems to be a slow day for Swinton South Lib Dems, who’ve been reduced to trying to think up a campaign song for the Tory PPC for Worsley & Eccles South.

Regular visitors to this blog will know said PPC as my token Tory friend, so don’t expect any sniping from me.

However, while thinking about songs I did think of one that, in my view, perfectly encapsulates the attitude of ordinary voters to 1. every MP who took the piss with our money, 2. particular MPs who then went on to whinge that being an MP is shit, 3. 26-year-olds who run for Parliament from their mother’s back room before they’ve ever had a full-time job…was that sniping? Whoops

[WARNING: parental advisory lyrics.]

Lots of noise yesterday about George Osbourne’s claim that the Tories are carrying the ‘torch of progressive politics‘.

I’ve actually never been a big fan of the word ‘progressive’. I think it tends to be used in the Labour Party by people who don’t want to use the word ’socialist’. But what does it mean to the Tories?

One man who should know is Phillip Blond, director of the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos and ‘the man who sets Cameron’s mood music’ – who gave an interview at the weekend suggesting abortion should only be available in ‘extreme cases’ and has also been known to argue that society should discourage adoption of children by gay couples.

Very progressive. Just like Iain Duncan Smith’s obsession with ‘family breakdown’, which led to the ‘tax breaks for married couples’ policy.

I could go on, but I think Peter Mandelson nailed pretty well why this talk of progressive Tories is cobblers:

“…why are the Tories so coy about their policies on education, healthcare, minority rights, workplace rights and Britain’s place in – or out of – Europe? How progressive is a policy on inheritance tax that would favour the very wealthy with a substantial tax cut?”

But still, you can’t blame Osbourne for some pretty ballsy spin. It’s just too bad no-one told the rest of his party.

First Tory MEP Dan Hannan went on his slag-off-the-NHS tour of the States.

Then another Tory MEP, Roger Helmer, announced that there’s no such thing as homophobia. It is, he said, ‘merely a propaganda device designed to denigrate and stigmatise those holding conventional opinions’. As Stonewall’s Ben Summerskill and others have pointed out, he can tell that to the parents of Jody Dobrowski and Michael Causer.

My token Tory friend is very cross with us irreponsible Labour bloggers for drawing attention to the things MEPs say. While Labour’s MEPs, like Arlene McCarthy, are at the forefront of genuinely progressive politics, apparently the Tories’ elected representatives are an irrelevance and we should ignore them. To be fair, the LGBTory group has come out of their usual invisibility to call for Helmer to be reprimanded; but, as John Prescott has pointed out, Cameron has never distanced himself from Hannan’s denigration of the NHS.

So thank goodness – for the Tory press office – that the Shadow Cabinet are a bit more in touch with real people, eh? Oh dear. Alan Duncan. As if it wasn’t bad enough that he tried to claim £3194 for his garden. As if it wasn’t bad enough that he went on Have I Got News For You to be smug about it:

Now, he’s been caught on video bitching about how he couldn’t make the taxpayer fork out for his entire gardening costs; and describing his £64000 (before expenses) MP’s salary as ‘rations’.

Of course, you can see why what would seem like unimaginable wealth to the people I meet every day in Salford seems like peanuts to millionaire Alan Duncan. The question – aside from ‘How stupid do you have to be to get caught out by ANOTHER Don’t Panic video?’, and possibly ‘Was that the least convincing apology of the summer?’ - is: would this party of homophobes, frighteningly ideological right-wing stars of Fox News, and whinging rich bastards, recognise a progressive party if it dug a hole in their lawn?

Inspired by the lies Dan Hannan has been telling the US media about our wonderful health service (and don’t forget that Cameron has still not condemned Hannan’s comments), the American right has started laying into it even more.

The Brits aren’t standing for it. Comedy writer Graham Linehan started a backlash on Twitter with a #welovetheNHS hashtag campaign, and it’s been at or near the top of the trending topics ever since. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about…you’re just going to have to find out, aren’t you, there’s only so long I can explain the 21st century to you.) Here are some of the highlights:

‘my Mum recently got a new knee, so now I can call her the bionic woman. She’s always had great care from dedicated individuals’

‘Three out of four of my young family have been carted off by the same helpful fast responding paramedic’

‘In Wales the prescriptions are free!’

‘because my mum needed intensive care for 6 weeks at Christmas and we wouldn’t have been able to afford it in the USA’

‘If it wasn’t for them I’d be missing 1 finger, 1 eye, 1 child, and 1 wife.’

‘cos they dont make you wait, as a 9 year old is screaming in pain, for the credit card to clear before treating you. Unlike some.’

‘But for the NHS I would be a single parent of 3 and would have spent every penny we had on cancer treatments.’

‘Because through all the terror,the chemo,the not knowing there was never ‘are we covered’ or ‘can we afford it’.’

Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I was so proud to be British. The people running Twitter accounts for government departments and the NHS itself have been bowled over by the level of support. This isn’t something that was started by the government or John Prescott or LabourList – and although most of the people I follow on Twitter are Labour members, Labour supporters or at least broadly left-wing, there is no way Labour members alone could have driven a Twitter trending topic. (Believe me, I know - I’ve tried to do it before.) This was something that ordinary British people did – coming together to share our experiences of a system we know isn’t perfect, but that we know we couldn’t do without.

I hope Americans on Twitter will have taken note of the support we have for our health service and that it goes some way to counter the lies the American media (and British Tories) have been telling. More than that, I hope it demonstrates to Hannan that our NHS is politically untouchable. This electoral bloc is much, much bigger than 1.4 million.

If you’re reading this, you probably read last night’s post on Dan Hannan’s contempt for the NHS. But it wasn’t just me: some of the finest minds on the internet were having a crack at Hannan and his Tory cronies too. Here’s a selected round-up:

First off, a few facts and figures about the system the Washington Times described as the best in the world; but which the World Health Organisation ranked in 2000 as 37th in overall performance…my friend Andy points out:

“The annual premium for an employer health plan covering a family of four: $12,700. Median American household income: $50,233. Wanna pay a quarter of your pre-tax income on health insurance? Vote Dan Hannan…”

Meanwhile, a Twitter friend with diabetes provides some context:

“Say what you want about the NHS, but there’s no one giving themselves stitches because they have to choose between eating and treatment. Cost of my prescriptions in the USA: $758.31 per month. Cost of my prescriptions in the UK on the NHS: 0 (oh, and that’s using figures from cheap canadian Internet pharmacies in part).”

Back in the blogosphere, the Political Scrapbook wonders if Hannan will be as popular with the Tories as he is with the American media. More worryingly, as Hopi Sen points out,

‘Hannan’s no fruit loop. He’s a player in Tory politics. Hannan replaced Osborne as William Hague’s speechwriter back in 2001 and is still a leader writer for the Telegraph. Here’s the question. As Hannan makes clear to his American audiences, he regards the NHS as sadly politically untouchable, believing we’re trapped with this Marxist system because it’s so uh, popular. So is he saying what certain top tories really think, or is he positioning himself for some future Cameroonian crisis?’

HS also has a good related post about the hilarious claim in Investors Business Daily that Stephen Hawking would be left to die under the NHS, whereas he…well…hasn’t. Hawking, of course, responded:

“I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.” Good man. What’s really funny, though, is this anti-NHS comment on the AJC blog-post:

“…Hawking, by virtue of his extreme personal wealth, has access to healthcare far beyond that of most with the same physical infirmities.”

They’re just never going to get it, are they?

If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed me whinging and whining and complaining more than usual lately. I do apologise. It’s my job. I love it but it does, essentially, consist of people telling me about the things that stop their lives being bearable (more on this later).

Last week, someone called me to ask for the number of ‘The Euthanasia Society’ (Dignity In Dying, I assumed), which he’d promised to get for his neighbour who was elderly and ill and had ‘given up’.

That’s a thought to depress anyone’s week (and I made him promise to call Age Concern first) but of course I believe that everyone has the right to die when they want to. Which is why I was interested in an email newsletter from ‘OOFFOO‘, an ‘all things ethical’ organisation I’ve recently discovered (their name comes from 00FF00, the html code for the colour green, don’t you see): in between recycling tips and recipes for chocolate courgette cake, they have a debate on whether ‘Right To Die’ facilities should be made publicly available, with contributions from both Dignity In Dying and Care Not Killing. Worth a read.