[This is a question which rolls around from time to time and, loathe though I am to contribute to the decades of speculation on the issue, I hope a blog outlining my thoughts may excuse me from having to do so as frequently in future.]

First and foremost, I regard the question as one of semantics. No one is sensibly arguing that men cannot challenge sexism, attempt to understand feminist gender politics and so forth; indeed, it’s rather expected that they should. The question is how we refer to men who do so.

The reason that the word ‘feminist’ may be inappropriate is that, according to some, a feminist understanding of the world must be informed by explicitely female experience. A man, because his experience of patriarchal society is necessarily different from that of women, is incapable of reaching such an understanding. Various alternate phrases, like ‘supportive of feminism’ and ‘feminist ally’ exist to fill the gap (which I personally think sound uncommitted and somewhat patronising, though your mileage may vary).

It is arguably true that only those who have been on the receiving end of misogynist oppression can fully understand it, but is the ability to understand misogyny in this way the only definition of feminism? Is feminism not simply a body of ideas and schools of thought like any other, and ‘feminist’ simply a name for its adherents?

Considered another way: Feminist arguments made by women are often dismissed as being subjective (according to the prejudices proscribed by patriarchy; generally because the woman is emotional, hormonal, irrational or stupid). Of course, good feminist arguments stand objectively, regardless of who is making them, and (though they may be reached through uniquely female experience) can be comprehended, accepted and put forward by anyone. Yes, a man’s capacity to contribute to feminist discourse will at times be necessarily different to that of women (and often of less usefulness), and yes men should not crowd women out of feminist discourse, but an awareness of and attempts to challenge one’s own privilege is surely something we should expect from any feminist, regardless of gender.

The degree of commonality in female experience is itself debatable, especially when sexist oppression intersects with other forms (racial, homophobic, transphobic, ablist and class being the most obvious). It seems flippant and evasive to respond to any issue of gender politics by disputing the inherent essentialism, but it is never the less worth considering that any attitude which relies on a ubiquitous female experience is likely to fall foul of other, more nuanced, feminist thought. Our gender should not define our intellectual or political identity.

A significant contributing problem, which demands more consideration than I’m going to give it here, is a habit of reducing all things to uncomplicated labels which we can then chose to apply to ourselves or not. Therefore, several centuries of probing, ever developing, frequently contradictory critical thought are reduced to a binary of political identity: one is or is not a feminist. Similarly, concern over whether or not one is a Marxist, an anarchist, a post structuralist etc are often unhelpful. These are schools of thought from which one may take what is useful and consider it without redefining one’s own political identity. These ideologies, rather than describing who we are, enable us to describe what we are thinking.

I argue, often, from a feminist perspective. Feminist ideas inform my interpretation of my experiences, which informs my thinking, and that thinking informs my actions. I consider myself a feminist.

This relates to the 2011 Christmas day episode and the debates about sexism that it sparked, but so many common arguments came up that it provides a pretty good template for discussing prejudice in entertainment in general. Bear with me while I tackle the specifics of the episode:

In (very) brief: Some alien trees want to migrate to a new planet but they need a living vessel capable of transporting them. The Doctor, and some children, are too ‘weak’ for this purpose, but the children’s mother is ‘strong’ and able. What people have primarily taken issue with is the essentialist view of gender in the episode and the way in which the woman becomes powerful by conforming to her prescribed role, as per the patriarchy, of mother. Much of this is expressed by the Doctor when he works out why (according to the migratory trees) ‘She is strong’ while he is weak:

’Weak and ‘strong’; it’s a translation! Translated from the base code of nature itself. You and I, Cyril, we’re weak but she’s female! More than female, she’s Mum! How else does life ever travel than mothership?!

This pun lies at the heart of the conceit of the episode, but the Doctor’s epiphany is a little flawed. Life travels in all sorts of ways that are totally irrelevant to motherhood. Cells divide, plants are pollinated (in a program in which two characters are sentient trees, this isn’t a facetious comment!) –  of course, Doctor Who is not written for bacteria or trees, or for seahorses (the males give birth) or for any of the alien species in Doctor Whowhich transfer life without a concept of motherhood, so we can forgive its anthropocentrism.

Even among humans likely to be watching the program, though, these statements (which are presented not as opinions but as a factual explanation for the action) are grossly reductive and genuinely insulting. Firstly, let’s accept that men can get pregnant and give birth. Gender is not a simple binary of male and female, and people identify (if at all) in a multitude of ways based on many criteria. To define gender exclusively by reproductive capacity is to reduce people to a biological function, rather than a personal identity.

Now, the attitude to women. The Doctor declares that to be a mother is to be ‘more than female’. Whilst it may be true that (good) parenthood requires many skills and strengths of character, to suggest that women who are not parents are somehow lesser beings is patently ridiculous. The idea that women are somehow incomplete without children, as well as being degrading and damaging on its own, is part of a broader patriarchal idea of social roles; parenthood is the job of women. My knowledge of Doctor Who is fairly sparse, but I’m pretty sure he’s a father; why couldn’t he be the vessel for the trees? Why is the female ‘stronger’ (translate, ‘better equipped’) for this? Why not ask ‘Where else do we feel at home than fatherland?’ It’s because there is an idea in our society that women are somehow inherently nurturing, caring and protective (in a way that men aren’t). This serves both to push women into lifestyles and employment based on these attributes (nurses, teachers etc) and stops them being taken seriously in other fields. Though we may pride ourselves on not being overtly sexist, this essentialism means that our prejudices about gender still define most social relations.

To some, this does not look like sexism. After all, a woman saves the day when the Doctor is incapable. Things are, naturally, more complex. Sexism is not always about men being good and women being bad; it is a set of prejudices about men and women which dictate certain appropriate attributes and roles for them. Women are, ultimately, to bear and rear children. Having a woman become heroic is good, but to have her be heroic by conforming to her patriarchal role of motherhood (literally, as she protects her children, and metaphorically, as she becomes a semi-willing vessel, a ‘mothership’, to carry life) is not progressive. Again, I stress that the issue is not just that characters think these things; it’s that reality in the show is constructed to make them true. This is a form of that most insidious prejudice, ‘benevolent sexism’. Sincere attempts to portray women as strong and powerful (which this episode probably was) can end up reinforcing prejudices which are ultimately damaging if they lack a critical awareness of those prejudices (which this program certainly did).

When I made these points during the program, I was met with a series of arguments which may be familiar to anyone who has criticised a well loved work. It was unfair to call the show sexist because, I was assured, there are strong female characters in other episodes, or because there were positive examples of fatherhood in other episodes, or because there were bad mothers in other episodes. This stemmed from an assumption that, if I identified sexism in one episode of Doctor Who, I must be condemning the whole program as sexist: specific criticism met with general defence. There was even talk of ‘forgiving’ the show, as if it could only be judged as a single entity, its constituent parts indivisible.

We do not need to view things in terms of condemnation or praise; we need to acknowledge something has problems and watch it maturely. This is well addressed in the blog How To Be a Fan of Problematic Things, though of course it extends far beyond geek fandom. The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play, but that doesn’t invalidate its value as a work of art. Triumph of the Will is a masterpiece of cinema, despite being Nazi propaganda. We all enjoy things which have bad politics, but that doesn’t make our politics bad, unless we fail to be critically thoughtful. The danger comes when people attempt to defend every aspect of a work because they are somehow invested in it. To say that an episode of Doctor Who had a sexist plot line is not to say that Doctor Who fans are sexist (unthinking loyalty to a television program regardless of the concerns of people offended by it, on the other hand, does reveal a bad set of priorities… )

So, then, the final concern when criticising and critiquing popular entertainment; is it appropriate or necessary?

If millions of people watch a program, many of them children, and if few of them are critical of its political values, then that would suggest that it is necessary to vocalise criticism when it occurs to us. As for appropriate, it’s easy to be accused, when considering light entertainment, of ‘over-analysing’, ‘reading too deeply’ or ‘thinking too much’. There is a misconception that just because a work was not written in terms of conscious political awareness that it cannot be read in those terms. To follow this line of denying critical views is a form of obtuse anti-intellectualism, and those who choose to excuse themselves from thoughtful discourse should have not further bearing on it. Much more serious, though, is that to dismiss articulated critique of popular entertainment is to shut down discourse on privilege and oppression for the sake of a television program, which is unforgivable.

It was suggested to me that ‘if you look hard enough you can find sexism in anything’ (which to be honest I don’t doubt, at least in terms of artwork since everything is the product of a pervasively sexist society), the implication being that people, presumably humourless, man-hating straw feminists, comb over everything they can find looking for things to be offended about. Of course, this isn’t the case; no one chooses what offends them, or what their reaction to a TV show is. When sitting down to watch Doctor Who, it wasn’t that I chose to see the sexism in it, it’s that I couldn’t chose not to, and yet still there was a suggestion that I and everyone else who viewed it as I did should try to ‘just watch it’, to ‘just enjoy it’, and even the notion that we might be souring the mood for those who would otherwise watch quite unproblematically.

Now, I am not an ideological purist, a dogmatic crusader or a moron; I understand that a constant sense of struggling against entrenched injustice is not good for one’s mental health. What if you’re tired? What if you see sexism every day? What if you fight misogyny every time you leave the house, what if the entire direction of your life is based, beyond your control, on your gender and what if when you sit down on Christmas day to watch some light entertainment with your family you don’t want to think about feminism and oppression and offence? Isn’t it ok to ‘switch off’? Isn’t it ok to seek escapism from time to time without feeling compelled to confront injustice and prejudice?

My only answer is of course it’s ok to seek escapism, to watch things for pleasure without composing a political response. But that’s why we need to force improvements of our popular entertainment, so that it’s possible to watch them without having to confront the tiresome and horrific inequalities that define our daily lives. Art can only ever be so far ahead of the society that produced it, and is likely to be a fair way behind, and as such will always be riddled with problems which, in our ignorance and privilege, we may only be dimly aware of. If we attempt to deny ourselves and each other, explicitly or implicitly, the act of critical analysis of the art that we consume, be it by claiming that the work doesn’t warrant so sophisticated a reading or by declaring that offence taken is somehow not valid, we leave ourselves disenfranchised. If we value our ability to watch a television program unchallenged as higher than someone else’s ability to watch it uninsulted then we have probably picked the wrong side in a long established relationship of privilege and degradation. We may choose to sit quietly through the objectionable bits of a work of art, from time to time, even when it offends us, but we can’t expect other people to do so with us (even on Christmas day) and we must be prepared to acknowledge it when the things we like problematically contain things we have to hate.

“And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”

This significant unveiling in America coincides with Black History Month in the UK (October), and the Metro recently carried a double page spread of the ‘50 top black heroes’, who are apparently ‘battling it out to be named the most inspirational black man or woman’. The paper boasts that “readers can help crown this year’s winner in a contest organised by Metro and City Hall to mark Black History Month.” Not being a Metro reader, I am spared the difficulties of deciding whether last year’s winner, Leona Lewis, is more or less deserving than the man who invented Reggae Reggae sauce of this lofty accolade. There’s also a guy from Eastenders and Naomi “blood diamond” Campbell. Dianne Abbott is on this list. Dianne Abbott is a contender for the most inspiring black person of all time. Of all time.

Naturally, I don’t expect the Metro to produce a historically coherent article about anything, but it is more than incompetence that accounts for this patchy list. Perhaps the most glaring omission from this list is Malcolm X (or any of the Black Panthers or other militant black rights campaigners in 20th century America). While Martin Luther King’s photograph is prominently displayed at the top of the page, the man who historical convention has come to regard as his more radical counterpart is conspicuously absent. Again, I am not naive enough to expect the Metro or City Hall to celebrate a militant organiser, an advocate of the armed struggle, a man from whose lips emanated the immortal words “by any means necessary”, but we see the inherent problem of celebrating representatives of oppressed groups. Black people in America, and in this country, and all over the world, were oppressed both by the state and by dominant prejudice. Any black activist who was committed to improving their lot and had the courage of their convictions was necessarily opposed to the state’s authority, because the state was (and is) racist. Similarly, any honest list of female heroes will throw up a handful of Suffragettes who were prepared to break the law (and windows, and bones), transgressing against the state because the state was (and is) sexist.

This presents a problem for any modern group, be they government or free “newspaper”, which doesn’t support insurrectionary dissidence but does want to celebrate the history of an oppressed group by championing individuals. The result, in this article, in the exhibition it advertises, and (one can predict) in most of Black History Month, is the same revisionism which pervades so much of the discourse relating to the struggle of black people in our society; City Hall and the Metro inherently have far more in common with the oppressors of the past than they do with the heroes.

Martin Luther King is celebrated above other significant figures because he firmly advocated non-violence. This is a source of great inspiration to many, and his legacy is rooted in a broad respect for his stance, but we cannot discount the state’s role in influencing in the way such ideas are spread. The tactical and moral superiority of non-violent protest is a received opinion, quietly endorsed by these continual celebrations. The state has delegitimised all but the most inoffensive challenges to its authority, just as one would expect it to, negating, revising, distorting the voices of those who said that it was the violence of the state, not of the individual, that was intolerable.

When we allow the salient facts of the past to be defined and articulated by the vested interests of power, we create not history but propaganda, and we must be wary.

In Margolis’ eyes, Petrie’s set was a series of “painfully earnest protest songs”. I’ve seen Grace Petrie play live; it’s a stunning, moving, inspiring and thought provoking experience. This is perhaps because she writes songs like ‘Emily Davidson Blues’ and ‘Tonne of Bricks’ which tackle the difficult politics of protest vandalism, violence and sentencing. The demonisation of politically conscious students, our problematic cultural values and the hypocrisy of the legal systemare subjects I’ve written on before, but never with the talent to set to music. These are difficult ideas, and they are important for activists. Margolis, I would tactfully suggest, might not fully relate to the student protest experience articulated in these lyrics in quite the same way I do. Grace Petrie’s music is unashamed in its idealism, determination and ideology. Margolis writes as the kind of achingly self-deprecating lefty journalist who must describe a festival as a “small, boutique-y gathering of beardy Guardian readers” in order to excuse herself from being there. While I find Petrie’s performances gripping and honest, Margolis considered it “so sickeningly worthy that I nearly choked on my falafel burger”. Perhaps because she was trying to eat it ironically.

Margolis’ assertion that “the whole performance seemed to cling for its life to another era” is where we get to the real point, though I think she has missed it. The problem that we have with the question “where have all the protest songs gone” is a problem that pervades attitudes to protest and the culture of protest both within and without the activist community, which is expecting modern activity to fall into the patterns of the past. Grace Petrie herself articulated the hypocrisy at the heart of this in a tweet to me:

@MediocreDave The 2 criticisms I hear: a) we need protest music for TODAY and b) People writing protest songs belong in another era

Angry young people alone on stage with acoustic guitars are certainly a symbol of protest from a previous era, and, while still of great value and validity, are unlikely to define the current one.

The crucial truth to grasp is that not only will protest music look different today, but the cultural role it played in the past may not be filled by music at all. While singers in the 1960s were offering an anti-establishment critique of the dominant mainstream messages, that baton (at least in this country) was passed to a revolutionary wave of alternative comedians in the 1980-90s (while stars like Carlin and Hicks were vocalising dissent in America). This is only my impression of our cultural history, though; I wasn’t there in the ‘60s or the ‘80s. I am here, however, in the 21st century, and it seems obvious that with the internet facilitating he most significant cultural shift in centuries, bloggers and online journalists are set to be whatever protest singers were in the past. Like Bob Dylan himself, Laurie Penny has had the mantle ‘voice of a generation’ foisted upon her against her will because, like Bob Dylan, she managed to articulate a dissenting viewpoint at a time that people were really keen to hear it. The truth is, though, that this generation will have many voices. Conditions have changed, and we no longer need to defer to figureheads and spokespeople and heroes; we can all contribute. Writing The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll today, Dylan would have been just one of many commenters attempting to make sense of the incident.

For its visceral and emotional qualities, too, songwriting has been matched in its ability to encapsulate modern protest mentality by new technologies. Not only with the army of journalists and photographers than follow major protests but with each of the protesters themselves likely to be carrying a camera, by their very presence on the streets or in shops, costumed in eye-catching fancy dress or masks and hoods, protesters are with every outing creating the very images of their propaganda. How is a protest songwriter attempting to create an anthem of rebellion and disobedience able to compete with photographs coming out of Greece of a big bin full of burning debris pushed towards police lines, the words “NO CONTROL” sprayed in red across the front? How does a lyricist express pure rage at the banking industry in a way that footage of people putting bricks through bank windows doesn’t surpass? Just as much as singers at the moment, the artists creating materials to really get the blood pumping are those editing down hundreds of hours of riot footage to play the most potent and powerful combination over an angry beat, and putting the lot anonymously on You Tube.

So where does that leave protest singers? Free. They are able to communicate and test ideas at the very edge of mainstream acceptability, to be voices outside the establishment looking in. Petrie plays her part in this, for sure, but in her hunt for the next Leonard Cohen or Bruce Springsteen, Margolis has overlooked Lowkey, Akala, even Scroobius Pip, or any of the other hip hop artists articulating the anger and intelligence of protest. Yes, acts like Verbal Terroristsare unlikely to top the charts, but that’s not because of a lack of protest spirit. Stop looking within the establishment for anti-establishment music; the times they have a-changed.

There has been so much tiresome debate under the tedious heading “Where have all the protest songs gone?” that it seems a shame to add to it at all, but indulge me one last point. I remember, in the Winter, being part of a student protest movement that was facetiously called “the Dubstep Revolution”; every major action used to have a soundtrack, leading us through the streets like fifes and drums, and though it might not filter up to the music industry, the cultural critics, the armchair supporters and the social historians of tomorrow, protest music is exactly as alive and present as we need it to be. Go to a protest. Find an anarchist with a car battery wired up to a speaker on the back of their bike. Listen to what they’re playing. That’s protest music.

In the debate between those who support abortion rights and those who do not, a certain familiar cliche will often tend to rear its head. One side or the other will offer up the hypothetical situation of a woman seeking an abortion after being impregnated by rape. It seems almost an inevitability, like a particularly grim analogue of Godwin’s Law, and there are many who are opposed to abortion except in cases where the woman has been raped. It seems simple, obvious even, that people might make this exception, but it’s worth considering the motivation behind it.

I broached this on Twitter, and @Rattlecans suggested that the kind of people who debate abortion from an anti-choice perspective don’t think of it as something that will ever affect them personally; for whatever reason, they and the women they know are not the kind of people who suffer unwanted pregnancies. Rape is the only way, they believe, that this kind of crisis might actually occur within their lives, and so they frame their discussion of the right to an abortion around that issue. This is probably a bit simplistic to be taken as a universal maxim but it’s a thought worth bearing in mind when these arguments come up.

My understanding of it is different, though. I think there’s an inherent subtext to that line of moral debate, which runs something like this: ‘Imagine a woman. She is pure and innocent, virginous, even, until a corrupting sexual force is imposed on her. She has absolutely no control over the circumstances of her pregnancy. She is blameless. Unlike other women, she should be allowed an abortion to restore her and nullify the rape.’

The problem here is that it reinforces some particularly damaging and illiberal attitudes to female sexual behaviour. It suggests that women who consent to sex (and maybe even enjoy it) have forfeited their right to sympathy and support in the event of unwanted pregnancy. It suggests that any woman who becomes pregnant without having been raped has no right to complain about their pregnancy.

The second major problem with rape exceptions is that they cast women entirely as victims, denying them the autonomous agency to engage responsibly in the sexual world. The abortion is a way of cleansing the sullied body, protecting the victim from the ravages of sex, rather than a way for a woman to take responsibility for her own medical state. Ultimately, framing one’s position with hypotheticals like this only allows for women to conform to one of two narrow roles: the victim, who is entirely passive and needs to be looked after, or the whore, who brings whatever befalls her upon herself and gets what she deserves.

Since this blog largely preaches to the converted, I’m directing this appeal to pro-choice readers. I understand that if you are trying to reason with someone who says that abortion is unacceptable under any circumstances, asking their feelings on cases involving rape can be an effective way to draw them away from moral certainty and make them accept that there are complex issues at play. However, not only is it a bit crass and exploitative to use hypothetical rapes to manipulate the course of a debate, but as far as I can see it’s a dead end which reinforces too many anti-choice prejudices. Abortion to avoid delivering a rapist’s child can be justified as a necessary evil, but to do so accepts that abortion in general is evil. Furthermore, it posits a kind of moral hierarchy of women seeking abortion, with some (rape survivors) as more deserving than others. Another cliche in these discussions is the woman who ‘treats abortion like emergency contraception’. This woman, because she is reckless and irresponsible, because her reason for wanting an abortion is something as unimpressive as simply not wanting to have children, is undeserving; her choice to have an abortion is far less forgivable than the rape survivor’s. It is essential to resist this kind of prejudice and not to build arguments based on the idea that some women are more or less deserving than others. As far as I can see, the only argument which pro-choice people (especially men) need to justify supporting abortion rights is this: neither I nor anyone else has the right nor the moral authority to dictate to another person the choices they make about their body. And that’s that.

EDIT: As a perfect illustration of the paternalistic misogyny that lies at the heart of this exceptionalism, @Boudledidge has sent me a link to the comments of Senator William Napoli.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO [Journalist]: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

I’ve never understood it, personally. I can see how a fine or community service may be seen to fit this accepted rhetoric, with the convicted person making some formal contribution to the broader community, but a prison sentence seems to strive for an oddly karmic sense of equilibrium. A criminal has (presumably) inflicted some suffering by their crime, and in so doing has incurred a societal debt. By being caused to suffer themselves they are able to pay it off. They have been punished. I believe that’s how the logic goes, and yet unlike direct restorative justice, which sees perpetrators and victims brought together in communication to find a way to make amends, prison is not in the interests of either the victims or the wider community to any greater degree than that ‘justice’ can be seen to be done – prison costs the tax payer money. Yet, in spite of all of this, my friend was told that he had to repay his debt to society.

What I find most egregious about this phrase, and the ideology it represents, is the hypocrisy. It is the idea that we suffer and heal and forgive collectively. This is, in itself, a beautiful notion, but it is inconsistent with the nature of our judicial system. The idea of a ‘debt to society’, of a common interest, of all our fates being interwoven and our prospects interdependent is the philosophy of solidarity and comradeship, it is the philosophy of the hard left; the ideology underpinning the concept of a ‘debt to society’ can best be summarised with the phrase “an injury to one is an injury to all” – the language of the organised labour movement. And yet the idea of a ‘debt to society’ is invoked by the establishment, it is the mantra of the right, of Law and Order loving conservatives, of the children of Thatcher, who told us there was no such thing as society, of those who promote individualism and self sufficiency, and it is a hypocrisy. If we truly believed that we each have a duty to society, and that failure to act in the interests of others is a crime, we wouldn’t waste prison space with petty offenders; the cells would be filled with the the self-serving individualists; the politicians, journalists and business tycoons who place their own advancement over that of those around them. If there is such a thing as society, and if by victimising individuals within it one deserves the condemnation of the whole and incurs a debt, then we must act like it at all times, not just when it comes to sentencing criminals. If not, then we should be honest about what the justice system stands for; not to protect the shared interests of us all, but to preserve the power of the establishment and maintain the status quo.

Charlie Gilmour has just been sent down for 16 months for violent disorder during student fees riots. He notoriously swung from a union flag hanging from the Cenotaph before later harassing some royal cars, smashing up Topshop, concealing a mannequin’s leg and angrily refusing to eat cake. As the Mail puts it, ‘although Gilmour was not sentenced for his behaviour at the Cenotaph, he was told his actions were ‘reprehensible’.’

The Judge in this case, Nicholas Price QC, was quite clear, though, that Gilmour’s actions at the “empty tomb”, despite not being the crime he was prosecuted for, had certainly been reflected in the sentence. He was explicit in highlighting that Gilmour’s reckless behaviour was made significantly worse by the cultural significance of the space he did it in.

“For a young man of your intelligence and education and background to profess to not know what the Cenotaph represents defies belief,” he said.
“You have shown disrespect to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, to those who fell defending this country.”
But Gilmour was given some credit for apologising for his actions.
“You expressed yourself in a fitting way when you said how deeply ashamed you are for what is, as you acknowledge, the terrible insult to those who gave their lives,” the judge said.

BBC

For Price, it is inconceivable that an intelligent person could fail to understand the importance of the memorial. Everyone knows what it represents, and in failing to give it the reverence it is seen to deserve, Gilmour has disrespected our war dead with an insult which penetrates right to the heart of our national values.

The soldiers died, Gilmour was told, to protect his freedom and the freedom of all in this country. It is because they gave their life that Gilmour has the right to peaceful protest, and so not only did he disrespect their memory by using the flag as a rope swing, but also by failing to live within the limits of the freedom they apparently won. And this is where I start to lose my footing with established wisdom on the subject. Firstly, because of the obvious obliviousness on the part of the Judge to the irony both of lecturing a man about the privileges of freedom while simultaneously condemning his behaviour and curtailing his liberty and of chastising him for his failure to remain peaceful in the same breath as recalling the example set by soldiers in a war. Secondly, and more unsettlingly, because when one looks at the situation afresh, nothing seems more disrespectful to the thousands of dead than, decades later, to appropriate their suffering as a tool with which to admonish a foolish man for his drunken idiocy. The reverence that Price expected, the reverence we are instructed to feel about those killed in combat is a function of the gross hypocrisy surrounding the issue. At the heart of this hypocrisy is the problem of statues, monuments and artifacts of commemoration.

Today, the Queen, our head of state, unveiled a new statue to honour the work done by the men and women of Bletchley Park during the second world war. These were the nation’s best cryptographers, logicians and mathematicians and, by creating what is sometimes regarded as the world’s first computer, they were able to crack the Enigma machine’s code, which was a decisive moment in the course of the war. Little mention today was made of the fate of Alan Turing, one of the most significant thinkers of Bletchley Park. Turing was gay, and because homosexuality was a crime he was given the choice between prison or ‘treatment’ in the form of female hormones which amounted to chemical castration, which he accepted. Eventually he was found dead from cyanide poisoning, in what is presumed to be suicide. Neither Gordon Brown’s 2009 apology on behalf of the British government nor today’s statue can undo the suffering that was inflicted on Turing by a state whose ill-conceived values he was unable to live by. What we instead witness is an effort to disguise the sordid ideology on which we have built so much of our society behind a whitewash of reverence, ‘respect’ and patriotism. By honouring the work of the Bletchley Park team, the establishment is merely exploiting their legacy to celebrate itself. Turing is best known today for lending his name to the Turing Test, a means of identifying artificial intelligence. Turing enables us to differentiate between genuine humanity and its mere cynical imitation.

The Cenotaph, as our primary war monument, is possibly the most focused example of the self-serving and dishonest logic of commemoration. The inherently false values are perhaps best expressed in three words engraved on one side: “THE GLORIOUS DEAD”. Why, we must ask ourselves, is there not a monument to our glorious living? There is a legend that when the Cenotaph was unveiled soldiers who had returned from the war impoverished, wounded and hungry remarked ‘we asked for bread and you gave us stone’. Consider those words for a moment, and you begin to understand the truly chilling nature of war memorials. When sleeping rough in Westminster is criminalised in September, a proportion of the homeless people the Police will be moving along will be ex-soldiers who we will claim to honour in November. They can’t sleep in the Cenotaph. The state’s failure to adequately provide for veterans reveals its appreciation for soldiers’ sacrifices to be little more than a pose. The glorious living are an inconvenience, the glorious dead are a tool. They are to be celebrated, because their memory is a short hand for the values which keep us in line. Today, their deaths were used to criticise a twit because he had played on the cold stone with which we celebrate their suffering, and their memory was appropriated in the courts to add generations of emotional weight to the establishment’s artificial distinction between ‘proper protest’ and that which deviates from what is acceptable by providing a genuinely confrontational challenge to the state’s authority. Is this what those men died for? I suspect it probably is.

Every major war shapes our attitudes to war itself. In the days of empire, war was glorious and masculine. In the 20th century WWI and WWII were honourable, noble, righteous, necessary. As we watched Vietnam the tide began to turn, as we started to weigh up the moral authority with which the Western powers engaged overseas, the demographic of the men who died and the atrocities that were committed against indigenous people. For many of us raised on Iraq, war is an expensive, misguided, illegitimate affair, as much an assault on the decency and character of a people by their government as on one nation by another. Is it any wonder that those who engineer war are so keen to remind us of The Great War? Is it any wonder that we still talk in outdated terms of ‘trenches’, ‘the front’ and ‘no man’s land’? Is it any wonder that the symbol of our remembrance is the poppy of 1918, not the deserts or the oil fields of 2011?

Jon Snow sparked a modicum of controversy in November for declining to wear a poppy on television in the weeks leading to the 11th, as he found the gesture lost its meaning if it became just another unthinking habit. TV studios have baskets of poppies on stand by so that everyone who is to appear on camera can be fitted with one, ensuring that a consistent and unconfrontational set of values are presented at all times. Wearing a poppy to ‘remember’ the dead has become a default for the public figures who appear within the mainstream media, a cultural trend to which one conforms. The ubiquitous prevalence of poppies is, to any student of symbols and their political potency, disquieting. They hang, pinned to the lapels of every apolitical figure, as an uncritical invocation of horrific bloodshed nestled harmlessly into everyday life, or plastered all over crosses in what could almost be taken as a deliberately cold and humourless pun on religion as the ‘opiate of the masses’. They are a totem, a prop, a signifier which tells onlookers that the wearer is compassionate and caring about soldiers’ deaths but they fail to do anything to prompt deeper thought. There are those who seek to counter this without appearing unfeeling by sporting a white poppy for peace, rejecting the militaristic jingoism and the glorification of war that is suggested by the red poppy and instead embodying the only fitting sentiment that could adorn a sincere war memorial; ‘this must never happen again’.

War memorials are dishonest. They are a way to satisfy our guilt and our concerns whilst allowing us to excuse ourselves from addressing the real tragedy. Stone is an imperfect material with which to express genuine sorrow or gratitude. War memorials are a cultural shorthand for a sentiment that we no longer bother to feel. They are a two minutes silence, when what is required is a scream. They are an exploitation of tragedy. They are a celebration of death. We should not celebrate the casualties of war. We, who have the luxury of not being soldiers, should not take a second’s pleasure, satisfaction or pride in their suffering.

This morning I was prompted to remember the provocative and flippant intellectualism of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys:

“All the mourning’s veiled the truth; it’s not ‘lest we forget’ it’s ‘lest we remember’. See, that’s what all this is about; the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two-minutes silence, because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.”

It would break up the strange bedfellows who are only in the same party by historical coincidence. Why should those socialists on the left who want to support the trade unions have to share a party with New Labour? Why should socially progressive libertarians have to share a party with the bigotry and intolerance of old Tories? Why should any Lib Dem have to share a party with Nick Clegg? If people didn’t feel it necessary to opt for the main three (ultimately, the main two) parties to avoid wasting their vote, they might be able to vote more honestly. Allowing splits and factions to flourish into distinct parties gives voters a greater degree of choice in line with their outlook. For example, rather than just choosing the right wing party, you could have a choice of several different right wing parties and select the one you most identify with or have the most confidence in. It might no longer be an inescapable function of political campaigns that all the parties fight over a thin sliver of centrist middle ground.

Some of these parties, understanding their limited scope, would set up more like taskforces to respond to specific political conditions. For example, if we were experiencing a time of considerable economic turbulence and a man like Vince Cable really did feel that the best way to improve things was for him to put aside other differences and join forces with George Osborne for the good of the nation, that could happen. They could form the Deficit Reduction Party and see what the electorate felt about that.

There are two obvious objections: Firstly, that people who want to keep voting for the same party year on year would not be able to; and secondly that as parties disband and reform there would be core groups of people who stick together. Essentially, the two answer each other. There would be small cabals of politicians who, once their party had been disbanded, would remain together to form the next one, and people who were genuinely happy with their performance would vote for that new party. What the process of constant change would achieve, though, would be to shake off from the periferies of these clans all the people (politicians and supporters) who no longer shared their view, who weren’t happy, who could then go to form their own party and have it appear on a level footing with whatever new party their former colleagues had formed.

New parties entering the arena would be placed on a level playing field. Even parties made up of familiar faces would be unknown and untested to some degree. The idea of a ‘life-long Labour voter’ or a ‘life-long Conservative voter’ is ludicrous and can only exist in a world where parties to do not progress and voters’ views are not adequately represented. If we did away with the old giants, removing the default voting option, then in order to have a clue who to vote for, people would actually have to read manifestos and engage with policies.

Traditionalism, loyalty and branding produce nothing but stagnation in politics. Constant change keeps us on our toes. Constant change brings us progress.