Owen Jones Watch: Dear Me

Owen frowning and looking concerned, pictured recently.

How tempting for the left to turn inwards, to suddenly feel like strangers in a foreign and hostile land, populated by shy Tories and rampant Ukippery. You can see how the already inward-looking left could become ever more insular, with leftwing meetings serving as group therapy rather than a means to win over the unconvinced or the unreached, and activists retreating into online “safe spaces” free of those who think differently. Our language often seems intended to exclude, full of rhetoric and terminology that only those who have associated with leftwing milieus could ever hope to digest. Social media abounds with activists attacking others on the left for failing to abide by the strict rules of communication.

Not speaking or writing in the correct way can be seen as suspicious at best, treacherous at worst. For millions of people who are not au fait with the latest queer theories, that means being written off. Being “leftwing” could become a cultural label, like being a hipster or an emo-kid, a way of standing out from the crowd and asserting difference in a Ukip-ised England.

How ironic that the right preaches rampant individualism but often displays great solidarity, while the left professes collectivism, but often operates in the most rampantly individualistic way. Voices on the left who achieve any prominence whatsoever are castigated for careerism or other ulterior motives, or for failing to use their platform to promote the correct form of politics. Rather than seeing different strategies as complementary, an advocate of a different approach risks being accused of not acting in good faith.

For those of us who want to transform society, rather than just noisily critique the way things are, we have to completely rethink our approach. This is not me castigating the failures of others, arrogantly assuming I have it all worked out. I don’t, and this is about my failure as much as anyone else’s...

Owen Jones, The Guardian.

Our Owen castigates those on the Left who are 'talking among themselves' by writing about himself.

All a bit rich for someone who holds the Twitter record for BLOCKING! anyone who says he may be wrong.

Poor lamb.

Stop it OJ!

PS Owen Jones is quite bonkers.

Tweet Of The Day: Panti Bliss

Yesterday, two days after the result, I saw so many LGBT couples holding hands in Dublin. All changed, changed utterly. Long may it continue

— Panti Bliss (@PantiBliss) May 26, 2015

It seemed like this in Brighton, too, interestingly...

PS Let's not be beastly to the Christians, urges the Telegraph.

Update: GCN cover.

George Osborne: No Tongues

GEORGE OSBORNE was so convinced that the Tories would not win an outright victory in the general election that he offered to give Lynton Crosby a French kiss if they got a majority.

The chancellor made the bizarre pledge to the Conservative campaign chief on election day as senior Tories tried to predict whether David Cameron would be returning to Downing Street.

When Cameron stormed to an unlikely win, Osborne was forced to “consummate” his promise but withdrew his pledge, as one senior Tory put it, to give the architect of the campaign “a proper snog”.

The chancellor planted a kiss on Crosby’s cheek in front of Cameron and fellow strategist Jim Messina when they met in No 10 on the morning after their triumph.

Crosby said: “It’s true. His aftershave still haunts me. Fortunately tongues remained withdrawn. The pledge was on election day. The consummation was the day after at No 10.” ...

The Sunday Times.

I guess if you went to a posh school you find this sort of thing 'bloody hilarious'.

Peter Mandelson: Still Creepy After All These Years

'First of all, I'd like to pay tribute to Ed Miliband, useless sack of socialist shite he may have been. You know something Andrew, we could have won this election if only everyone had listened to me. Remember New Labour, they were great, and that was me. I blame the trade unions for picking Ed over his more Blairite and, let's be honest, much better looking brother, David. As for his successor, we don't want a beauty contest, but that young Chuka Umunna chap you had on the show today, when I was watching him I almost lost my deposit!'

Thank you Lord Peter of Mandy, anything else?

'Aspiration, aspiration, aspiration!'

The look of love...

Gay Star News: Where Politicans' Sexuality Trumps Their Ideology

Gay Star News.

Is this a cause for celebration when almost half are Tory shitbags?

And as for the likes of Labour's Ben Bradshaw and Stephen Twigg...

PS Good to see the back of the Lib Dem's leading crypto-Tory gay crook, David Laws, though. :)

General Election 2015: A Small Red/Green Dot

Freedom for the St James's Street bit of Kemptown!

Update: Come join the People's Republic Of Brighton & Hove.

General Election 2015: The Morning After

By 'all', I don't mean the 75% of people who didn't vote for a right-wing cunt, obvs.

General Election 2015: It's Here!

Like many people, Fagburn only found out yesterday that there was a ban on taking selfies inside a polling station.

Which prompted the obvious question; what kind of a wanker would take a selfie at a polling station?

Well, today we have an answer!

Small print: This wasn't tweeted 6 hours from the time on this blogpost, I've just posted it closer to the time when he did. 

General Election 2015: Never Mind The Ballots...

THIS is clearly the most important thing happening in the UK right now!

Nigel Farage: It's The Way He Tells 'Em

Naughty Nigel enjoying a nice fag.

Nigel Farage was last night accused of homophobia after footage emerged of him making a joke about ‘fags’ in a best man speech.

The Ukip leader’s final hours of election campaigning were overshadowed by the release of the video of his brother’s wedding.

The singer Rod Stewart, who was a guest at the July 2001 wedding, appeared visibly uncomfortable after Mr Farage used the word ‘fags’ as part of a joke about the death of a man at Michael Barrymore’s house, which happened months earlier.

Mr Farage yesterday pulled out of a planned visit to a bingo hall shortly after he was contacted by the Mail about the film.

He claimed that he had intended ‘no malice’ with the joke, but did not apologise...

Mr Farage, who appears much younger in the video with a full head of black hair, says that he would like to start the speech with some ‘housekeeping’.

He said: ‘As far as smokers here are concerned there’s good news and bad news for you. The bad news was we were not allowed to smoke until the coffee was served.

‘But the good news for us who are smokers is that we are far better off here than if we had been at Michael Barrymore’s house.

‘Because there they removed all the ashtrays on the basis that now they chuck all the fags in the pool.’

Daily Mail.

Now this is funny.

Not Nigel Farage's joke about the death of a gay man, obvs.

How long have the Mail been sitting on this video?

And was it released now as a final pre-election bombshell?

And did they think this would turn their readers off Farage, rather than warm to him even more?

And finally, you may want to read this Observer interview with Barrymore from 2002, where he attacks his 'trial by tabloid'.

PS Did this play a part in NF pulling out of answering questions from Pink News readers?

General Erection 2015: Geddit???

We have been watching Ipsos MORI and YouGov all campaign long – they're not giving us any clues.

One minute the Conservatives are surging ahead, the next Labour look as though they might have a real shot.

So I thought I would conduct my own poll exclusive to Daily Star Online to find out who's really going to be our next Prime Minister.

Using blow-up sex dolls.

That's right – there are now blow-up dolls shaped like our very own prospective PMs Ed Miliband and David Cameron. Milifans and Cameronettes eat your heart out.

So what did people think?

I took our many-holed but decently-dressed friends to the streets of the political heart of our country – Westminster...

Daily Star.

I'd've loved to have been at the editorial meeting that thought this was a real humdinger.

PS And this classy headline is even beneath me...

General Election 2015: Those Celebrity Gay Backers In Full

Conservatives: Christopher Biggins.

Only patron of LGBTory who's not an MP!

Though they can also count on Ivan Massow and David Starkey*, too!

What a right bunch of right-wing gay cunts, eh?

Lib Dems: Patrick Smugtwit?

Probably.

He is Britain's most boring wet liberal poove.

And it's a family affair!

Green: Peter Tatchell.

And who better to dispel the myth that the Greens are all a bit nutty, than the publicity shy campaigning celeb?

Pete's probably said somewhere that he founded the Green Party, if not Planet Earth itself.

Bless.

Labour: Owen Jones.

No, really, he is. Trust me on this one.

SNP: Alan Cumming.

Was often wheeled out during the 'Yes!' campaign.

But like their most famous celeb supporter, Sean Connery, Mr Cumming is an ex-pat. Oops!

'England for the English...' etc etc.

Ukip: Morrissey.

"I nearly voted for Ukip. I like Nigel Farage a great deal," he told Loaded in 2013.

"His views are quite logical – especially where Europe is concerned."

And La Mozza's views are highly logical, too.

She loves England so much she's spent much of the last 20 years living abroad in tax exile, cos it's been flooded with foreigners, innit?

Silly old queen.

* Dr Starkey threatened to do a big queeny flounce and leave the country if Cameron didn't win the 2010 General Election. Paul O'Grady - a man Fagburn much admires - has said he'll leave if the Tories win again this time. It's usually the most unbearable right-wing shits who do this - I am unaware if anyone has actually carried it out.

PS If you decide how to vote because of something a famous person has said, may I implore you not to vote tomorrow?

Update: Undecided/Undeclared - Will Young. Former politics student Will Nice-But-Dim offered his astute analysis to Digital Spy; 'I don't know, it'll be a hung parliament and it all just feels like a wet fart.'

General Election 2015: Carry On Campaigning

While we’re on the subject of locker-room horseplay, though, could there please – in the name of all that is decent – be a moratorium on politicians making jokes about sexy time? In Hendon, Cameron was reiterating that to vote for Ukip is to “go to bed with Nigel Farage and wake up with Ed Miliband. I don’t know about you,” he twinkled suggestively to the audience, “but no part of that works for me”. Last week it was Ed Miliband referring to the idea of having to go into a “darkened room” with Nick Clegg, telling the Question Time audience: “I don’t like the sound of that,” he oo-erred, “for a whole range of reasons”.

Guys, guys … Please. We get it. YOU’RE ALL STRAIGHT. You’re not mining some comic seam here – you’re doing the equivalent of going into the gents’ and writing “NIJEL FARRARGE DONE IT WITH NICK CLEG!!!!!” on the wall...

Marina Hyde, The Guardian's election diary.

General Election 2015: Pink Turning Red

I saw something very Brighton on Bank Holiday Monday. A woman putting bottles into a bottle bank noticed that one of them had a drop of wine left in it. She unscrewed the cap, downed it, and then dropped it in the bank. To combine recycling with alcoholism is about as Brighton as it gets...

Kemptown, in the east, has also seen a massive influx of Labour campaigners – and the dominance is shown in the number of Labour signs in windows. I spoke to a gay couple basking in the sun outside a café. One said: "Yeah, we’ll probably go with Labour… Ed’s not very impressive is he? But anything rather than Cameron.”

“Ed looks weird,” added his partner. “That mouth.”

I asked if the Tory embrace of gay marriage had made any difference to their voting intentions, and they said that it hadn’t. “I mean, we’ve not got married have we?” observed one with a raised eyebrow – suggesting that I’d opened a can of worms. “But Labour would’ve backed gay marriage anyway, so it doesn’t make any difference.” 

This is a view that might not be true, given national polling evidence that the Tories are now doing much better among gay voters * – although, not well enough to hold on to a constituency that could be described as the San Francisco of England. Then again, Kemptown has always been a very working-class kind of gay scene. There are a lot of middle-aged couples sporting tattoos that probably hail from the days of Margaret Thatcher...

Tim Stanley, Daily Telegraph.

Fagburn is proud to announce he is voting Nancy on Thursday - I think this may well swing the election.

PS Radio 4's Today attends a gay hustings in Vauxhall to find out 'Where is the pink vote?'

* Fagburn on why the Pink News' readers poll is unrepresentative of gay voters. Today also cited it without question.

Mind you, this one could be the most unscientific gay election survey of all time; Most Grindr Readers Back The SNP!

Will Self: Oscar Wilde, Champagne Socialism And Why I'm Voting Labour

Wilde seeks to define the individual type of the coming socialist age: “With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” It might be argued that in rejecting the institutions of marriage and family, while taking himself – a quasi-closeted gay artist in hypocritical late-Victorian England – as the representative type of the coming age, Wilde was genuinely prophetic. After all, whatever else we may say about contemporary Britain, there’s little doubt that many people perceive it as a society in which they can be themselves sexually, individually and creatively; that this self-realisation is fully articulated within capitalist metrics would presumably be shocking even to Wilde. Soothsayer or not, he never imagined the pink pound would become legal tender...

Wilde writes: “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” Yet for him, in his essay, the two are conflated, because for all utopians, no matter how anarchistic they may think themselves to be, the premise underlying their brave new worlds is that everyone cravenly become exactly like them – and while I myself am perfectly happy to emulate Wilde, I’m not sure being a flamboyant literary figure is likely to fulfil everyone’s needs, nor lie within everyone’s ability. No, I’m no longer a socialist if to be one is to believe that a socialist utopia is attainable by some collective feat of will – but I remain a socialist, if by “socialism” is understood an antipathy to vested interests and privileges neither deserved nor earned, and a strong desire for a genuinely egalitarian society. And that is why, for the first time since 1997, I will be voting Labour in a general election.

Will Self, The Guardian Review.

And here is The Soul Of Man Under Socialism of which Will writes.

General Election 2015: Oops!

We apologise if yesterday's sharing graphic caused any confusion and have taken it down following your feedback: https://t.co/Dpg9pL4kbE

— Stonewall (@stonewalluk) April 28, 2015

Here's the first version, that made LGBTory, Lib Dem, SNP members have kittens, saying it was misleading.

Compare and contrast to Stonewall's breakdown of the major parties LGBT manifesto pledges.

Stonewall have often been accused of cosying up to Labour - most notably when Angela Mason backed Frank Dobson, a Labour MP not noted for his support of LGBT equality, in the Mayor Of London election in 2000, over Ken Livingstone, who had been a pioneer and public champion for some 20 years.

After leaving Stonewall in 2002, Mason was made head of the Women And Equality Unit quango by the Labour government, doubling her salary to £80,000. In 2007 she was made Dame Angela Mason.

General Election 2015: Vote For Adam Clifford!

Adam Clifford was on The Daily Politics today - you can watch it here (50 min in).

Our Adam will be outside Buckingham Palace at 12 noon tomorrow to launch the Class War manifesto.

PS 'Promoted by Murray Healy'! Who he??? etc etc.

General Election 2015: Vote For Susan-Anne White (Independent).

Via Alex.Kane on Twitter.

Election 2015: Analysis By Nicky Haslam

What did Ed Miliband’s kitchen say to him, I wonder? “Oh, kitchens are so common, aren’t they? And people who bang on about kitchens are common,” he says dismissively. Bathrooms are much more revealing, he thinks. “Dickie Avedon [the American photographer] once said to me, if you want to decorate for someone properly, you should go to the bathroom and find out what pills they take, if they’re on uppers or downers or what.”

Haslam may be unenthusiastic about Miliband’s kitchen but he loves the man himself. “He looks like a Velázquez. An extraordinary face. He’s really rather beautiful. I met him the other day and I said, ‘You may have read, Mr Miliband, that I think you’re wonderful-looking.’ And he said, ‘Have you met my wife?’” He chuckles throatily. “I thought that was quite funny.” What about David Cameron? “Great fat lump!” he declares. “I’m very fond of David but he looks like anybody really, doesn’t he?”

Interior designer and socialite, Nicky Haslam, The Times.

Lucky readers also learn Nicky keeps his weight down by watching his diet. 

“Avocados only,” he says. “I’m sure that was the food of Eden.”

Ian McKellen: The Director's Cut

Labour luvvie Sir Ian McKellen is the highest-profile celebrity so far to come out for Ed Miliband.

The Oscar-nominated actor yesterday said he was impressed by the party's manifesto for lesbian, gay and transgender people.

I wonder what he makes of Miliband's pledge to eradicate tax avoidance?

McKellen, like many artistes, is sole director of his own company, Kirikiri, through which he channels his earnings.

Last year, the company had assets of £8.3 million, boosted by income from reprising his role as the wizard Gandalf the Grey in the Hobbit film trilogy.

Companies are tax efficient as they are subject to corporation tax of 20 per cent, rather than a top rate of income tax of 45 per cent on annual incomes of more than £150,000. Expenses incurred in the line of duty can be offset against profits.

Last year, McKellen — perfectly legally — took out a loan from his own company of £1.7 million.

One tax expert says: 'In the case of a loan to a director — provided a certain minimum rate of interest specified by HMRC is charged — the borrowing is not liable for tax. Such a measure is perfectly legal, but it allows those who take advantage of the mechanism to delay when they pay tax on income earned through their company — potentially indefinitely.' ...

Your actual gay Uncle Tom - and gay Tory, obvs - Andrew Pierce in his rubbish daily election diary for the Mail.

And here is Labour's LGBT Manifesto.

PS Pink News take on Gandalf's endorsement of Labour's LGBT manifesto attracted some comment on Twitter...

Is Sir Ian McKellen maybe just a tad overdressed for a #GE2015 press conference tho? @pinknews pic.twitter.com/wQEjH6ci8X
— David Wright (@BitGay) April 22, 2015