Putting aside the fact that they’re engines of class inequality, private boarding schools are just intensely fucked up places to send your children. It is just so intensely damaging.
I never met people who went to boarding school until uni, and it was honesty mad hearing what went on. All the things that made their parents mistrust the state system (bullying, violence, substance abuse) were not only endemic at these boarding schools, they were inescapable.
You’re sending your kid into that environment when they’re like 11, and putting them into the care of people who - no matter how well intentioned - don’t love them. What kind of message does that send to your child about how you feel about them?
For more than a few people I know, going through that system has been really psychologically scarring. And even for those who didn’t have acute mental health crises, there’s this strange detachment between them and their parents. It’s like they’re talking to work acquaintances!
And of course I’m not saying that bullying and violence don’t go on at state schools. They do! I got up to all sorts of things that I shouldn’t have during my adolescence, there were times where family life was very fraught, but knowing where home was made such a huge difference.
I just think it’s very fucked to get the message from your parents that they don’t want to parent you. When it’s poor people doing it, it’s time for social services to get involved, but when it’s rich people it’s proof they take education seriously.
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Keir Starmer is weak on tackling institutional racism, imo, because he’s scared to further alienate voters who felt Corbyn was weak on law and order. The gamble is that BAME voters don’t have anywhere else to go on Election Day.
The problem is, we can always stay home.
Starmer doesn’t have to stop being who he is to get better at this stuff.
All that “I’m a sir and a QC, I’m not scruffy, I’ve met the Queen” thing could actually make him a decent broker between two bits of the Labour coalition who have very different experiences of policing.
You can talk about policing both in terms of injustice and ineffectiveness when it comes to addressing the root causes of violent crime. You can talk about the recommended criminal justice reforms in the Lammy report. Talk about fairness and equality before the law.
Dunno if there’s a problem in Labour with race. All I know is that a staffer briefed a Sunday Times journo that I’d flounced out of HQ in disgust when the 2019 exit polls came out.
Small problem... I wasn’t even there. They’d just seen an entirely different brown woman.
The journalist in question took down the tweet as soon as they’d been made aware of the fact that, when I was meant to be storming around Southside I’d been doing a livestream at Novara HQ. Which is good! But I think that microevent speaks to a culture in the party bureaucracy.
And it’s one where disdain for the left overlaps with, and is amplified by, racism. Because the target of your ire is a factional opponent, little thought is given to your own blindspots or personal bigotries, and those things get even more entrenched.
Thread incoming, and heads up for those who need it, there's racist and sexually abusive language in the screenshots to follow.
But basically, yesterday's brush with the sticky floor of the internet got me thinking a lot about how porn shapes the language of online...
... and how we don't really have honest conversations about it.
My approach to this stuff is generally anti-censorship, pro-workers rights, and regulation should focus on consent, age, and workplace conditions.
And that's very much still the case. But from having to go through various uses of my image captioned and commented with degrading material, it was striking how much of the language (generally at the intersection of 'racist' and 'horny') overlapped with the register of Pornhub.
A little note on 'cancel culture', and why its origins aren't always what you'd think. A couple of weeks ago a radio producer got in touch to ask me about a particular podcast character by @DaftLimmy, from a series he did about 14/15 years ago.
The reason why the producer got in touch with me was because one of the characters voiced by Limmy was Vijay, the son of a cornershop owner who narrates his deliveries and the people he comes across.
While Limmy subtly augments his normal speech, it's not an 'Apu' kind of accent, but the kind of gentle emphasis on plosives which often characterises second generation South Asians in the UK (one of those 'you know it when you hear it' kind of things).
Most of those complaining about being cancelled are not only exceptionally wealthy, but well ensconced in national broadcast and print media.
It's not only that their freedom of expression isn't under attack - they have bigger and more powerful platforms than 99% of people.
Is all criticism from the left fair, in good faith, even-handed? No. But speaking as someone who recently got death threats from the right over a selfie with an ice lolly (and called an antisemite for asking about kosher salt), I don't think those traits are unique to the left.
I don't think 'cancel culture' is a particularly useful way to think about how social media has changed values-driven political conflict and/or accountability. It's imprecise, encompasses everything from calling for someone to be sacked to getting ratio'd.
Black people in this country are stopped & searched for drugs at 9x the rate of white people. Asian people are stopped & searched for drugs at 3x the rate of white people.
Makes sense, right? Communities of colour just use illicit substances more than others.
Eh, not really.
According to the Crime Survey England & Wales, white British people are far more likely to self-report having taken drugs in the last 12 months than Black and Asian people. The only group for whom that's not the case is 'Mixed', but when adjusted for age the rates are similar.
What's more, when it comes to stop & search, the 'find' rate for drugs amongst Black people is lower than it is for white people - suggesting that the grounds for searching Black people are weaker than they are for white people. Basically racial profiling isn't all that accurate.