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Dear George,
I just read your article regarding the Bones episode which covered the
Kennedy assassination. I am surprised that you have written the episode is
badly written and biased towards the Warren Commission, especially
your comment, “Who the bones belong to is never explained nor why this
exercise is done is never made fully clear.” (more…)
Dear Ms. May,
I am writing to you with great concern regarding the pending deportation of Brenda Namigadde this week. Brenda came here in 2003 fleeing persecution as a lesbian. Even setting aside the horrors of a system that has left her in legal limbo for no less than eight years, it seems hard to believe that very system has also apparently deemed her not a lesbian. Given that Brenda fled to the UK in the first place as she faced threats on her life because she was living with her female partner, Janet Hoffman, I can only wonder by what criteria the immigration service deemed someone gay at all.
However, regardless of these questions, which go well beyond the specifics of an individual case, the fact remains that of Brenda Namigadde is deported to Uganda, she will be arrested, tortured, and killed. Whether she is in fact lesbian or not, though all evidence before everyone but the judge suggest that she is indeed gay, is absolutely irrelevant to this case: the Ugandan government clearly believe that she is a lesbian, and will duly persecute her as they persecute all homosexuals. David Bahati, a Ugandan MP, has already called for her to “repent or reform”, saying that “Brenda is welcome in Uganda if she will abandon or repent her behaviour. Here in Uganda, homosexuality is not a human right. It is behaviour that is learned and it can be unlearned. We wouldn’t want Brenda to be painting a wrong picture of Uganda, that we are harassing homosexuals.” Mr. Bahati is also responsible for trying to introduce a law that would sentence people found guilty of gay sex with life imprisonment. Only international pressure has commuted his original attempt to introduce the death penalty.
With this background then, it seems unfathomable that as a nation we can be knowingly sending a woman back to her certain death because of ideological views on immigration. Economic migration is a matter of fair debate, but when the Daily Mail holds sway over our policy-making over asylum seekers, we are playing with people’s lives for political expediency. As an LGBT person myself, I am horrified that the rights which I have the luxury of taking for granted, like the right to life, the right not to be tortured, the right to be out and proud, are to be denied to another simply because of the country she was born in.
As Home Secretary. you have the power to stop this from happening. I beg you to re-examine Brenda’s case and intervene so that she can have the right to life she is entitled to and we do not have blood on our hands.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah McCulloch
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In October, I was contacted by an individual through my contact form who identified themselves as sexually interested in children, wanting to know what my views were on paedophilia. It has taken several months to strike a balance between my belief in freedom of the individual and the need to protect young people from harm. The below is my reply. Even just reading through it now, I anticipate probably having to write a follow-up post to clarify a few things, so please leave a comment if you wish to get a response.
Before I receive any enquiries, I have reported people to CEOPS with full name, address and chat logs in the past to no effect. This person used an encrypted email address and did not leave a name. I do not know their location, gender, nationality, or anything at all identifiable about them other than that they are in their twenties and are fluent in English – that narrows it down to about 85% of all internet users.
Due to the nature of this post, I have decided against any “appropriate” images, and have gone with pictures of Netherland Dwarf rabbits instead. I apologise in advance to any confused Google searchers.
Hello,
I did receive your email but given its nature I decided to wait until I could sit down and write you a proper reply.
As I am sure you can gather from my blog, I have a very open-minded attitude to considering “issues”. I do believe, very firmly, in taking an evidence-based approach to everything which is currently clouded by moral judgments and media hysteria. You categorised those opinions as extreme [the sender referred specifically to drug policy and prostitution], but I don’t think there is anything extreme about suggesting that the past thirty years of spending hundreds of billions of pounds a year to encourage people (who are harming no-one but themselves) towards substances which could harm more than they would want or intend, or to lock up, punish, and in some case execute dealers who are supplying a demand in the same way as any other business that sells products that are unhealthy, to almost no effect in terms of suppressing the industry, might be worth a rethink. Similarly, suggesting that trying to prevent people from selling sex, as if sex was somehow any different from any other service involving their own labour that people may want to offer, and that people need to be protected from “being exploited” in a profession many freely choose (but that those who are forced into it should be handed criminal records, as if this will solve any of their problems), seems to me to be the height of sensiblility. And likewise, to prosecute those engaging in consensual incest behind closed doors can only be described as a hangover from another era, as far as I am concerned.
A Netherland dwarf rabbit called Magda.
So when you write to me and ask me about my views on paedophilia, yes, I have an open-minded view on the subject. But if you are looking for encouragement regarding your sexual interest in children, you will not find it here. It is absolutely true that a lot of the public discourse around paedophilia is prompted by hysteria and a lack of evidence. One friend of mine demanded that all paedophiles should be locked up forever. I calculated that that would cost approximately £93 billion a year in the UK alone, which is hardly practical, not to mention cruel. It’s not, after all, the fault of anyone to be sexually interested in children; indeed that reason that figure is so high is because something like 5% of the adult male population has sexual thoughts about children from time to time.[1] But there is of course a difference between having a sexual thought about a child and seeking to have a sexual encounter with them.
A beige Netherland dwarf rabbit.
The argument that “these feelings are ok, as long as you don’t act on them”, is obviously something that I am aware was, and is, also used on people who have same-sex attractions. I acknowledge that people that say that stuff do think of people who are gay and people who are paedophiles to be in the exact same category. But, as I’m sure you will have guessed, the issue for me is one of consent. We know that most adults can consent to sex. But I am not convinced by any evidence that children have the capacity to make an informed decision about sex. You said in your email to me that “nobody has evidence that sex causes harm” – every rape case in history would immediately disprove that, though I know that’s not what you meant. But sex with children isn’t the gesture of love that NAMBLA makes out to be. I wouldn’t want my kids to take drugs, I don’t want them to be going off and having sex. That’s not because I view either activity as inherently despicable, but because children are developing human beings, and both drugs and sex have the capacity to warp them in ways that would not happen to (most) adults.
A Netherland dwarf rabbit sitting on a brick.
Though that do I mean when I say “kids”? I think the age of consent is entirely meaningless as a concept. It was introduced in the Victorian era in Britain in order to protect child prostitutes (it was originally set at 13) and has since evolved to mean that a consenting fifteen year old, of whom I have known many, is supposed to abstain at risk of having their partner prosecuted for statutory rape. That’s ridiculous. All laws based on arbitrary cut-off ages are ridiculous. But the question then becomes, how does one legislate to protect the fifteen year old, the fourteen year old, the twelve year old, even, who knows exactly what, or whom, they are getting into and welcome it, and the thirteen year old who feels pressured into sex against their own judgement, but doesn’t have the maturity or the power to say no?
A black Netherland dwarf rabbit sitting on a window sill.
My preferred legal system is one where sex between consenting parties is legal but unequal power sexual relationships are not allowed. There are 12 year olds that can consent to sex, and there are many that can’t. A 12 year old who has a fumble with a 13 year old in the wendy house is an entirely different matter to an altar boy being coerced into sex by a priest. A 13 year old having consensual sex with her 20 year old sister seems to me to be no matter of state; a relationship between a father and his daughter seems abusive. We create laws that are fixed and rigid in an attempt to deal with such a grey issue as sexuality and consent, but when such laws become more harmful than helpful, they must be changed. How you can legislate for this, I really don’t know, but I recognise and acknowledge with you that the current system is inadequate.
A Netherland dwarf rabbit called Butterscotch.
However, I find your reference to the term “child-lover” rather worrying. In my experience people who use such terms intend them as a euphemism for things which cannot be described as loving. When I read about the man who spanked his daughter on request of another paedophile he met on the internet, in return for footage of that man’s son being abused, I cannot help but think that sometimes abstract intellectual musings are irrelevant in the face of such violence and exploitation. While I stand by all that I have written above, I must conclude that my position rather changes once someone shifts from fetishising children to seeking to hurt them, whether they believe they are “loving” them or not.
I have spent considerable time writing this reply, and I hope that it gives you the level of intellectual engagement that you were seeking; If you would like to email me back, I shall respond accordingly.
Yours faithfully,
Sarah McCulloch
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A Netherland dwarf rabbit called Chibi.
I regularly get messages through the contact form on my website in reference to my blog posts. This morning, I got an email from someone who had read this article and decided that I was spending too much time drinking and not enough time studying on the basis that I had spent much of the 9th December demo coordinating Manchester activists from the Lord Moon at the Mall instead of being kettled. The below is my reply.
Dear whoever you are,
Thank you for your message. In response to your email suggesting that I would be better off studying than drinking or demonstrating; I do not drink. I was in that pub on the 9th December that I mentioned because it was the nearest place that had wireless internet access – I am employed part-time by the University of Manchester Students’ Union to help co-ordinate our cuts campaign and I figured before everything kicked off that it would be easier to try to make sure our students were safe from a warm building that served food that to be standing in the middle of a riot: which turned out to be true.
I find your cut-off point at 18 for free education quite interesting. Why does no-one deserve an education past 18, and not 16? Or 14? Or 11? Why do you consider universal free education compulsory at 9 but something that crippling debt must be incurred for at 19? If the purpose of education is to produce productive, useful citizens, why would we not want that to continue up to the acquisition of a useful skill? In my mind, we should be offering every school-leaver a free tertiary education qualification, be that a degree, an NVQ, a HND, or an apprenticeship. Given George Osborne magicked up £6 billion to give to Ireland, enough to give every student currently at university free education for two years, I do not consider this out of the realm of the impossible. Indeed, it would be of great benefit to society, economically and socially, to have such a well-educated workforce.
I assume you went to uni when you were only paying maintenence loans, because even working 16 hours a week during uni I would not be able to pay off the debts that I have built up in my time at uni at £6000 a year in fees and loans. I wonder, would you have been so happy to accept a marketised education if you were still paying off a debt of £36,000 for a reduced quality of education, with fewer classes, larger classes, fewer books and more university charges?
I’d go to more lectures, but due to the cuts in my education that were pushed through despite claims of further investment, I had about nine contact hours a week in my second year. I have a friend in third year who has four hours of lectures and tutorials a week. What do you propose we do in the meantime? Go to the library? But universities across the country are reducing the number of books they buy. Time to speak to lecturers is restricted, if you even have a lecturer and not a post-grad student – 20% of my entire degree has been taught by fellow students. Would you pay £9000 for me to teach you?
Maybe you got a decent education at a reasonable price and you spent your university days happily ensconced in a corner of your library learning. We aren’t getting that. The student movement isn’t just complaining for no reason, we’re objecting to the cuts in our education, the 80% funding cut in the teaching budget and the tripling of tuition fees for *the same* – the students who have to pay tuition fees and put themselves in debt for twenty years or more aren’t going to receive diamond pens or gold star feedback, they will be getting the same stressed lecturers under pressure to do research than teach, the same poor feedback systems (which have been reduced to a number in a box instead of any meaningful criticism for many of us), the same apparent expectation that we should just know how to write a good quality essay on the basis of a single practice assignment a module.
Perhaps you think that that is an acceptable price to pay for a piece of paper that says “degree” on it, but that isn’t why I am at university. I do not expect to get a good job with an arts degree, I love my subject with the same enthusiasm with which you enjoy berating people who were not as lucky as you to get a good education for free. I want to learn, all of us out on those streets want to learn – that’s why we are demonstrating! Nothing has ever changed in history because we put our heads down and hoped it would all be okay in the end. “I will try harder” (look, I’ve read a book!), gets no-one anywhere.
I’m not going to get free education, but I can stop the closure of my university departments (I have at least two friends whose entire departments were closed a year after starting their degree), I can stop the closure of my building’s study rooms, I can stop my support staff being fired. I can demonstrate on behalf of the tens of thousands of students who won’t be making it through sixth form, let alone to university, because of the removal of their Education Maintenance Allowance which pays for their bus to school. I think that is worth fighting for. I personally don’t like violence, but I think that everyone who dislikes violence should recognise just how far peaceful protest has gotten us so far and why people feel disenfranchised from the entire system.
If you managed to get through university with a resolve to just accept what you are handed by a government whose interests do not coincide with yours, I can only say that I see why you think free education is a waste of time: it was clearly wasted on you.
Yours faithfully,
Sarah McCulloch
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We like our tax bills to be paid, yes we do.
As you may remember, the Vodafone protest on the 30th October went well except for the security guard who was incredibly rude and unprofessional to myself and a colleague. When we emailed the Arndale centre, the General Manager gave us a prompt reply saying he would investigate the matter. Four weeks, one reminder email and one vaguely threatening one, we have received a reply:
“Dear Sarah
Thank you for your reminder note last evening. I apologise for taking a while to return to you but as this related to the conduct of an employee you will understand that we wished to undertake a full and proper detailed investigation into this matter.
The protest were, as you will appreciate, a very unusual occurrence for us and there are certainly aspects of how we managed it that we could have done better. These are being addressed and we will communicate lessons learned to all our members of staff. I appreciate the feedback which you have given in this regard.
We have spoken to the member of staff concerned and now consider the matter closed. However, I note from your further comments re a proposed blog entry, particularly the reference to a photo. She is ordinarily a hard-working and conscientious persons and I am sure you would not want her to be distressed by publication this way. I hope that you will reconsider your proposal.
Finally, may I thank you for making me aware of your democratic protest this weekend.
Yours sincerely
Glen Barkworth
General Manager”
This is obviously not much of a reply, but as over 300 people have now read about this incident since it was published, I think the point has been made.
The demonstration originally happened to protest against the disparity between cutting public services at the same time as allowing international corporations to evade their tax responsibilities to the tune of billions. It was very successful, and there is now a follow-up day of action if you would like to attend.
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Originally sent to Student Direct.
Dear Student Direct,
we broke a record for the number of policies passed last week at General Meeting, and some say we should be proud. However, the endless procedural motions to block debate and pass policy without any debate or scrutiny should cause us to consider our first General Meeting in 18 months as a matter for shame as well.
Several procedural motions to go straight to a vote were spoken against by speakers saying “Look, I have an opposition speech here, please hear me out”, so this is not a matter of passing “uncontentious motions”, as has been claimed.
Students don’t come to university to learn facts, they come to be challenged. If General Meetings are simply events where anyone can get their motions through without scrutiny or debate because they aren’t about Palestine, then we may as well get rid of them completely (and we will never reach quorum online if people want to get stuff through sheer apathy). There was a speaker who wanted to speak in favour of cuts – that’s amazing! What did he think? What was his response to our arguments? How would this make me consider how I know what I know? I don’t know, because General Meeting cut him off because it wasn’t “contentious”. And our right to listen, to be challenged, to think through what we believe and why we believe it, was denied.
Several exec members are justifying the way General Meeting was handled by rightly claiming that all procedures were constitutional. But last week was a travesty of democracy, and the fact that it was constitutional doesn’t in any way change the fact that it was wrong.
Yours faithfully,
Sarah McCulloch
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We like our tax bills to be paid, yes we do.
Sent to the Head of Security at the Arndale Centre.
“Dear Sir/Madam,
We are writing to you with regard to the conduct of one of your security staff members at the Vodafone demonstration on Saturday the 20th October. As she was not wearing a name badge, we cannot say what her name was, but we have attached a photograph [redacted - details as to where she is in the attached photo].
As we are sure you are aware, several people took the decision to demonstrate at a Vodafone store because of the £6 billion tax bill that Vodafone was let off by the government, in the same week as the Chancellor announced a £7 billion cut to the welfare budget. This is hugely unfair and will render thousands of people destitute, including many of those in work, and hundreds of thousands of people may lose their homes. We therefore felt it was important to hold a peaceful protest in order to express our outrage at this. We had an extremely positive response from the shoppers who passed by the demonstration, and many thanked us for drawing the issue to their attention. Indeed, some spontaneously joined us!
Early on during the demonstration, as security staff were still arriving, the staff member in question was overheard telling another member of staff who had just arrived that the demonstrators had been “shoving at the doors” of the shop and that security had had to hold people back. An impartial legal observer was present at the time and reported that he had not witnessed shoving from any of the parties involved. Contemporaneous notes are available to support this.
We concluded our demonstration at approximately 4pm. One of us (Sarah) then turned to the security member in question and politely asked if she had a Vodafone contract, as we had asked many people that day. This apparently provided her with the opening she’d wanted to rant about what a disgrace we were for depriving someone’s freedom of speech; it seemed someone who objected to the protest had been heckled by a different group who had attended. She claimed that this group had shoved the objector away from a microphone which was being used to address passers-by. At this point, Josie joined the conversation to object to the accusations of shoving, as there had been no physical contact involved (this will be confirmed by CCTV). The member of staff denied having accused anyone of shoving, despite the fact that we had both heard her say it moments before. She continued to say that our demonstration was “pathetic” and “sad” and that we didn’t have the right to protest because “half of you don’t pay taxes or have a job anyway”.
Josie asked what evidence she had that we were unemployed and how that had anything to do with our protest. The staff member then once more denied that she had said any such thing but continued on the same theme and said that our protest was “pathetic” again, because one protestor had received a fine for fly-posting earlier on in the day, and had no way of paying. We tried to ask whether she didn’t find it odd to be denouncing one of our protestors for being fined £50 he couldn’t pay and defending Vodafone getting away with an unpaid tax bill of £6 billion, but she merely continued to call us sad over and over again.
We pointed out that she was as likely to end up unemployed as anyone else, because with the cuts that have just been announced and the subsequent effect they are going to have on the economy and business, nobody’s job is safe; she informed us that “I don’t care, I’ve got a job for life”, because “there are some things which are certain in life, death, taxes, food and securing a building. This mall isn’t going anywhere, they can’t get rid of me.” She then began to ask us why we were still here, and began to make shooing gestures, saying, “go on, you’ve had your little protest, now just go away, go on, just go away”.
We are sure we needn’t point out how discourteous and unprofessional the behaviour of this security staff member was. While some of us may well have an extremely low income, the two of us have personally spent hundreds of pounds each in Arndale shops, as have most of our fellow protestors. Being treated like this by someone who emphasised repeatedly that she was one of your employees has discouraged us from wanting to visit particularly often in the future.
This letter of complaint has been published on SarahMcCulloch.com (8000 hits a month) and via various social networks including Sarah’s Twitter page which has 6700 followers. We would be most appreciative to receive a response detailing what steps you will take to deal with this most unfortunate smear on the reputation of the Arndale Centre; we would be happy to publish your response to the same audience.
We look forward to your reply.
Sarah McCulloch
Josie Czechowicz”
UPDATE – We have received a letter of acknowledgement:
“Dear Sarah,
We acknowledge receipt of your letter dated 1st November 2010 concerning an incident which took place on 20th October 2010.
We view this very seriously and will be undertaking a comprehensive investigation of all the facts concerned in this matter and will respond to you early next week.
Yours sincerely,
Glen Barkworth
General Manager”
Vodafone, we pay taxes, why don’t you?
Check out the campaign: http://ukuncut.wordpress.com
See also: Pay your taxes! Vodafone shop shut down in Manchester town centre
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Sent to the DELGA (the LGBT Liberal Democrat group) mailing list in response to an appalling email from a current member of the Executive following the principled resignation of a colleague. I will make no claim that this is well-written or well-referenced.
Dear all,
I was waiting it out with regard to the Comprehensive Spending Review, but after reading Dave’s disgusting, partisan, and utterly unacceptable jibe at Ollie, I am hereby resigning immediately from DELGA and the Liberal Democrat Party. The fact that [redacted] is Ollie’s partner is no way enhances or detracts from the fact that our university teaching budgets were just cut by 80%, our cornerstone pledge that every student should receive a free education was ripped up with glee, 100,000 people are about to be forced to move out of London because they cannot pay the rents, legal aid has been REMOVED for housing and family cases, Disabled Living Allowance is being denied to many people with mental health problems, social care for the elderly has been cut by 30% – do you think that people too frail to leave their beds will just learn to care for themselves?
I joined this party because I believe that we should “build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.” I still believe in that and that is why I must quit. We have betrayed those values, we have betrayed those who voted for us, and we have betrayed our own membership by disregarding their horror at what is unfolding due to our connivance with a cuts programme which rivals Thatcher by deriding it as some sort of lovers’ tiff. Shame on you, Dave, and shame on every one of you who has shrugged their shoulders at the CSR and the hundreds of thousands of desperately poor people are who are now facing oblivion.
The Liberal Democrat Party are in the process of making our country more unsafe, more racist, more unfair, and more hypocritical. Access to health, education, housing and justice has been curtailed and people will die as a result. I hope you can live with that, because I certainly can’t. Goodbye.
Yours faithfully,
Sarah McCulloch
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My apologies to those readers who checked my blog on Monday for my latest post. I have a 1600 word feature on mephedrone and legal highs raring to go that I wrote for Student Direct; I was hoping to post an extract and link to their website and have waited to see if they are going to upload it, but unfortunately it hasn’t been updated for some time. The article will go out on this blog next Monday instead, so please check back then. Sorry for the delay. Sarah.
Dear Student Direct,
you have received many a letter from me in the past keeping your illustrious and distinguished readers aware of the beard vs. non-beard ratio on our Union Executive. Sadly in recent years the bearded masses have lost ground and this year, only Miles is keeping up the hirsute tradition, and even then he only has a little moutee thing. The full follicled days of Dan Lee and Gabriel Hassan are gone, it would seem!
How can we say that we represent students when the more flocculent among us are so obviously unrepresented at the highest levels of our union? This inequality must end. I call on the exec to take heed of this issue and immediately require at least one or two of their number to sport some fuzz. Given her manifesto commitment to prioritising student concerns, I am sure Sarah Wakefield would look lovely with a beard.
Yours faithfully,
Sarah McCulloch
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Published in the Guardian today here.
Sir,
I must take exception to your recent reference to autism as a “distressing illness” (Andrew Wakefield case highlights the importance of ethics in science, 24th May). I am autistic, and I am not ill, sick, or retarded – I merely think differently to other people, and subsequently find it harder to understand how other people think. All autistic spectrum disorders may be summed up thus to a greater or lesser extent. If others find that distressing, that is their problem, not mine. But I am not ill.
Yours faithfully,
Sarah McCulloch
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