This is a long read, and it’s all about those times when the political gets really, really personal. I hope it’s useful, and hope it reads okay!

Rocking and reeling and finding the way home

Yesterday was one of those slough of despond days. I’d been on the edge since a sobering experience at a feminist meeting a couple of weeks back.

Then partner and I watched Shadow World.

Then I got up yesterday morning, read about Israel’s latest attempt to start World War Three, and went through the day in that twilight, dissociated state that feels like the end of the world – no, it’s worse than that. It feels as though you wouldn’t mind much, if the world ended.

Ironically (the despondent are good at spotting irony) I kept trying, and failing, to think of an answer to a message from a friend who’d got despondent.

And then this happened…

… if you’re not a lefty, or not a feminist, you’ll have to believe me about the severity of those blows, about how we ‘lefties’ and, as my kind get called, ‘gender critical feminists’ have been taking blows like that for years now, but if you are one of us, you probably want more details of my low day, and want to know why I haven’t faded away and died of heartbreak.

Fact is, in a way I did.

I don’t like the phrase ‘task avoidance behaviour’. I consider Ursula Le Guin’s advice ‘when you don’t know what to do, do the next thing’ much more useful. That’s why a lot of housework, office work and a book delivery got done yesterday.

 So for those who want the gory details and those who want to know how it all turned out, here’s how Friday went:

Armageddon in slow mo

In the first weeks of the carnage, the images of Israel’s pitiless destruction of Gaza kept reminding me of Grenfell Tower – the enormity of waking in the morning to contemplate an inferno that killed – well, actually more people than we’ll ever know, and of discovering as the story unfolded, that this was caused by a deliberate and self-interested neglect.

It was horrible, even for those of us with no direct contact with those in pain and loss – but at least it didn’t go on happening, day after day after day after day, like the Gaza carnage does. And at least we were together then, ‘the left’, and we thought we were going to fight our way out of it and despite everything, that we’d do it as members of the still growing Corbyn movement in the Labour Party.

We were still obediently not saying upsetting words like ‘Zionist’, ‘Blairite’ or ‘female’, still aiming for Corbyn’s ‘better, kinder politics’, and watching our comrades being picked off one by one by Starmer’s end of the party, but we were still together. More on that later. First…

Yesterday morning, I woke up to news of Israel’s direct attack on Iran. They appeared to have tried to bomb ‘a nuclear facility’. That is how much damage they were aiming to do. Iran managed to prevent that, but it still left us with the distinct possibility that World War Three was going to start.

Well I grew up in the 1970s. I was literally brought up to live in the knowledge of the likely imminent destruction of absolutely everything but yesterday morning – a grey morning it was too, I read that the US and the UK were still finding the audacity to urge Iran to ‘show restraint’ and standing by to defend Israel if necessary.

I had a book delivery to do, so on this grey day, I took a grey train to a grey, flat industrial estate and wove my way through grey security gates to deliver a parcel to a grey-box of a distributor warehouse. Quiet, dissociated, contemplating my knowledge that, after six months of hell in Gaza, it’s very clear that the weapons companies that run the world do know that all-out nuclear war is not good for business. They will keep stringing out their eternal, ‘restrained’ wars and keep ‘managing’ the ‘conflicts’ that grieve all of us, wreck the environment, and kill whoever it is whose home is currently the site of ‘wars’.

It would be wise, I thought, to remember that when they talk about ‘sustainable’ developments and industries, the weapons industry is a part of their portfolio, that they want ‘sustained’.

Under their plan, we and our world will die slowly.

Parcel delivered, I went back through the grey day in the grey industrial estate to the the grey station, sat down and waited for the train home. The place is flat and grey, but there were sparrows cheep-cheeping in the trees opposite, and bluebells on the platform verge. It was lovely enough to be wistfully, peacefully sad.

The tyranny of silence

I was still coping, although I’d been on a downward path since a feminist meeting a week or two back. Here comes some old people / disability stuff – I’m used to this – if you’re a hearing-aid user, if you have poor eye-sight, if you’re on the borders of those ‘neurodiversity issues’, you aren’t going to cope easily with noisy meetings in dark, crowded pub rooms. This feminist meeting was one of those but I wasn’t too worried as it wasn’t my town, so I was there as a supportive observer (I thought). I didn’t expect to be able to contribute, but (I thought) I wouldn’t need to.

But the gathering had a disturbing feel. Very white, middle class, middle-aged-and-older – that can happen sometimes but I had confidence in the organization running that meeting. They could and they do find other people. Meantime, I was sat at a table with my back to the wall, the better to see/hear/cope, and the rest of the table didn’t much want to talk to me, so I was just sat, when a woman came storming across from the bar and cried shame on one of the other women at the table.

It was met with stony silence. The angry woman then stormed out. The organizers leaped into action, two rushing to catch up with the out-stormer, one to check up on the shouted-at. Fair enough as first aid. The convener started her speech by saying ‘that’s not the way. We need proper debate.’ That too, was fair enough as far as it went. The woman at my table apparently writes for the Guardian and the angry woman was (obviously) desperately grieving for Gaza, so no mystery there.

So yes, the organizers had checked in with everyone and said a proper debate was needed. But then, after the speechifying, the room was asked for ideas about matters of concern to local women. Not a single woman mentioned Gaza or Palestine, or racism, or the weapons industry, or apartheid.

Not one.

I was right back where we were when the self-ID issue first came up in Labour. Everyone knew there was a dispute there somewhere but no-one had found their feet enough to speak out except for a very few fearless feminists (for women’s rights) and a flurry of stupid people who didn’t see the problem and lectured ‘be kind’.

We had no idea how deep and mind-bending that silence would get, or how long it would last. Do we really have to go through that all over again in feminism, before we get to the inevitable shouting about Israel / Palestine?

I left, thinking of all those videos of women shouting at Ruskin back in the ‘70s, when feminism wasn’t scared of a battle.  Or that’s how I read it, but leaders of feminist groups now are anxious, and trying to ‘manage’ the situation because they see all those rows back then as what broke second wave feminism. Me, I’m scared of dying of silence.

Shadow World

Actually, there’s not much in Shadow World that I didn’t know but watching it is still sobering. If you haven’t watched it, I hope you will. If you’re still not sure what broke the Corbyn movement, or even why it mattered so much to us, you should definitely watch it.

It is, as they say, ‘depressing’ but a useful reminder of the nature of the load on the back of your mind every day, all the time. Focus helps, sometimes. We watched it because we’d just been to a talk by Andrew Feinstein, a politician who strikes me as one who has the education and the intelligence to see through most of the crap that’s out there…

Stupid people

…unlike Jeremy Corbyn who, after all we’ve been through, can still plunge me into misery. Yes, he’s very special. Yes, he has a huge following and can help lead us out of the dark but his notion of a ‘better, kinder politics’ led him to run the Labour Party as though it really were a ‘broad church’, tolerating a range of ideas, trusting everyone, obediently suspending anyone who ‘upset’ MPs by saying ‘Zionist’ or ‘Blairite’, trying to play by the rules, while the suits in the party systematically kicked out all those who would have defended him, who would have supported us, his officers — and accepting Keir Starmer of all people as his right-hand man to deal with the leaving-the-EU thing, when the last thing on Starmer’s mind was helping to heal the split over Brexit and finding a way through that honoured the referendum result without shafting British workers.

It wasn’t the lost election in 2017 that led me as deep as I’ve ever been into the slough of despond. It was 2019. The election results that night, and the spectacle of Jeremy Corbyn resigning at the end of the night, just as the establishment’s rules require, just as if the last two General Elections had been in any way honest and fair, that was what left me exhausted and hopeless on the sofa, doubting I’d ever get up and find anything to be hopeful for again.

The thing is, you don’t sink that badly because of other people being stupid. The most psychologically disastrous thing you can suffer is you being stupid. The reason the 2019 election results floored me was that, had I been honest with myself, I would have known weeks before that we were going to lose. All the signs were there but we just couldn’t afford to stop trying, so we painted smiles on, stupefied ourselves and kept going. That was why I was sunk so helplessly deep the day after that election, after the smile finally fell off.

People make mistakes

Jeremy Corbyn has faults. Humans do. A common fault of political activists is to invest too much in promising ‘leaders’. A common fault of men of the left have is the inability to listen to women, especially feminists, even more so older feminists, the ones who’ve lived long enough to see the full range of obstacles the world throws at women. That’s why, after all this time, a piece of shit like this can appear in Corbyn’s social media, and why it’s still so distressing to see it..

There is no LGB without the T.

My speech at the Council of Europe. pic.twitter.com/LKckcbPgXT

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) April 18, 2024

Yep, there it was, last night on TwitX. Jeremy Corbyn passionately supporting a line that would force lesbians to accept males in their political, social and support groups, and gays to accept females. It calls for an end to the rights of same-sex attracted people currently enshrined in the Equality Act. “No LGB without the T” is coercion, it is forced teaming and, unless you’re in Scotland where they’ve fallen even harder for gender-ideology, it’s illegal.

What’s worse is that he supports his argument for destroying lesbian and gay rights by going on about the original battle for lesbian and gay rights. Five years ago, I’d say ‘oh, he just doesn’t get it. He thinks he’s being kind.’ Or, ‘I expect some over-enthusiastic youngster does his social media posts for him.’

But now, all these years on, I know just how many feminists have spoken to him about the perniciousness of the ‘trans rights’ campaign, a campaign which has endangered vulnerable children, done nothing for actual trans people, but has been characterized by a hugely damaging and relentless tirade of of sexism, ageism and misogyny.

This is what’s been explained to him, time after time after time…

Here’s my favourite explanation: when you can see the picture on the left below as being all about women and the picture on the right as being all about men, you will understand how real feminists see the world, and why they don’t see ‘transitioning’ — drugs and surgery and paperwork changes and dictating pronouns — as the way to save the sexually oppressed.

But despite all of that, men like Corbyn have absolutely no idea that his determination to “be kind” is heaping troubles on the heads of lesbian and gay people, and doing a profound disservice to gender-non-conforming youngsters; he has no awareness that ranting away about the “tide of transphobia” at this time is terrifying youngsters, blinding people to reality and isolating the women who are trying to put things right.

Kindness is merely a variety of politeness. Anyone can do it and it is as likely to serve oppression as it is socialism.

What true friends and comrades should be doing is seeking out truth, and being honest.

A few examples of the “trans rights campaign” in action:

Grey night

So – from walking lonely away from a meeting of the feminist groups I’ve depended on through the years of that campaign, through Shadow World and World War Three to a stupid betrayal of women and girls by Mr Kindness, all that having been heaped on my head, I ended the day in a grey stupor of dread but I remembered Ursula Le Guin’s advice, and did the next thing – ie, lock up, get ready for bed, then pick an innocent, undemanding book and read until the day disappeared in sleep.

This is what that night sounded like. (Don’t worry too much about the images – it’s the song that counts…)

Morning light

That grey day wasn’t nearly as bad as that depression back in 2019, because I don’t kid myself any more. It wasn’t as bad as the sloughs of despond of youth and past heartbreaks, because they happened, and I’m still here and, when I woke in the morning, I was thinking about where we went wrong with Jeremy Corbyn.

Yes, he was the man of the moment. Yes, he did hold the door open as long as he could. He didn’t get everything right, but no-one does. He did all one man could do, and we just didn’t manage to walk through that door.

One of the things “second wave” (aka real) feminism teaches is that stars and celebrities are a trap. Heroes, Kings and Queens really do have to be (to quote another song) just for one day. The strength lies in the movement – in the movement’s ability to grow, absorb and learn from mistakes, and to keep rolling on, however many individuals come and go. There are plenty of those kinds of feminists still out there, and they’re busy, and sometimes, they get listened to. An example…

Sometimes, things work out right. Other times, there’s still work to be done. I look back at yesterday now, and I don’t see troubles heaped on my head. I see a handy list of the issues we need to address. And that is the story of 24 hours in the slough of despond which, when it came down to it, wasn’t too painful at all.

The way forward

Sure, Jeremy Corbyn isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer and J K Rowling’s most definitely not a socialist, but heroes all the same, each in their way. Remember that Andrew Feinstein talk I mentioned? We lefties are all very interested in him just now because he’s stepped up to run against Keir Starmer at the next election. As a former colleague of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, pitting himself now against the horrors of the weapons industry, he has all the makings of a hero. Many attendees that night wanted to hear about his plans in UK politics, and some looked a bit disconcerted when, rather than grandstanding his personal manifesto, he said he was going to hold a whole heap of consultations, and if elected, would be doing his best to model “MP as spokesman for the people”.

Independents and solidarity

They are many and varied, the independents standing, or planning to stand, in this year’s local and national elections. There is still much thrashing about on the left and the right, trying to organize “their” independents into a new party of this or that but don’t let that worry you. The strength of the independents will be in their number and their variety, not in any one candidate’s ‘star quality’. That makes them a much safer bet as a solution. They can’t all be bought off by the arms industry or the Israel lobby. They can’t all fall for “sell the NHS to save it”, or “transwomen are women, real women are bigots”. They can’t all fall into the same traps so, despite their differences. Just get those independents and new party people elected. We can come together as a people and stand solidly in support of independent voices in council and government – that is the way we can bring back democracy. New parties and new directions can come after that, when we’ve sorted out the heap of corruption and electoral malpractice that is our current government.

I suppose the message is don’t expect to feel good all the time. Don’t despair, but don’t dodge despair. Don’t expect anyone to rescue you – just “do the next thing” until the light returns, and it will come with a new perspective, a new direction and a new mood. It may not work for everyone but it works for me, and so just might help someone else. That feels like a good enough reason to write about it.

********************

Dear Reader,

Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.

Click here to donate

Cheers,

Kay

********************