What a performance.

Come on, get down off it — whichever of this week’s righteous-fury ‘news’ stories we’re on. Anyone who’s a professor or an MP or anything else that gets you money, prestige or a platform — they’re there because they agreed to play the system.

And it’s hell for autistic people because, on the whole, they’re better actors than allistic people. As well as all the other pretence, they have to work out what the bad actors who pay them want them to think they’re thinking, and look like they’re thinking it.

That’s it. That’s all I wanted to say but, if you want some evidence on the uni front, click into a free, safeguarding or EDI multiple choice ‘test’ a uni does. If I do them, I automatically see what each of the answer options are ‘getting at’ and predict which one the uni has decided is ‘right’. I might get one question wrong perhaps, because it has options that are very broad, and overlap a bit, and I fail to second-guess their intentions. And I don’t think it’s only people with autistic traits who do that. The point is, it tastes bad, because we know we’re doing it, we’re not sure if we’re supposed to, but pretty sure we’re not supposed to say so.

How are autistic people supposed to work out which performances are expected, and which are going to be judged unacceptable?

Universities will not get out of the mire until a) they stop the massive, over-arching pretence that the research and courses that they run at the behest of corporate funders are valid and scrupulously independent,

and b) they stop pretending they believe that transwomenarewomentransmenaremenandnonbinaryidentitiesarevalid.

Because until the scrap those ideas, it continues to be illegal to do any honest thinking or observation in universities.

Politicians will not get out of the mire until they acknowledge that MPs and staff who are funded by Israel, private healthcare companies or the military-industrial complex are not going to do or say anything that shows up the vast (and very visible) harms that Israel, private healthcare and the military-industrial complex are doing to all of us.

Here in Hastings, our MP is absolutely lovely. You’ll find her front-and-centre of the photo-opportunity of every good thing that happens in Hastings. Here she is, genuinely, deeply concerned about the climate crisis at a special Public Emergency Briefing (at the start of which we were drilled: no politics!)

She’s really, really concerned about public safety, about cuts in the fire service, about the problems water companies are giving us… I guess she must have forgotten to sign the parliamentary call for the briefing.

There’s also a lovely photo of her at a special event Hastings Labour happened to put on, that gave Starmer a safe place in which to be cozy and popular on the day the Epstein/Mandelson story hit the fan, but I have a feeling the owner of the photo didn’t mean it for use by people like me, so you’ll have to imagine the cuddly, smiley photo of her and Starmer.

But here’s a fact: If the system ever throws her to the wolves to be rage-bait for someone’s hate-campaign, she’ll be far better protected than confused youngsters at universities are. She’ll have somewhere to run to where people will pretend to love her, just like Starmer always had.

She won’t end up like Jason Arday did.

I honestly wonder how many of our MPs and academics know they’re batting for the bad guys. Maybe they all feel vulnerable, and think they’re the only one that’s pretending.

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