on Kanye, and Louis CK, and that guy who ruined the student left
Behold! I have had a thought.
Hello!
Hi! First of all I would like to thank everyone who read my New York piece last week and said nice things about it. I was really pleased with it and it was lovely to see that other people also enjoyed it. Second of all I would like to thank everyone who is a paying subscriber to this newsletter, both because it enables me to keep writing it - something I find very fulfilling! - but also because it allows me to, at least for now, look at the increasingly dire state of freelance journalism and know that I’ve got at least some stability.
I think it’s a very kind thing for you to do, and it also reminded me of the fact that I’ve not run a sale on this newsletter for a while, so I’m going to run one right now! If you subscribe over the next few days, you’ll get 25% off, both for monthly and yearly subscriptions. Why not take the plunge and keep this bozo’s second-hand-books-and-charity-shops addiction going? In my opinion that would be dandy.
In any case, I reckon you would enjoy this Guardian long read on Britain’s lorry robberies crisis. I mean the headline alone mentions “35,000 pints of stolen Guinness and 950 wheels of pilfered cheese” - what more could you possibly want?
Elsewhere, I also liked this piece on the “mall cemeteries” of North Carolina. It, huh, does what it says on the tin, and explains why North Carolina has so many cemeteries in malls, mostly round the parking lot. Truly, what a country.
Finally - and this is a niche one, I’ll give you that - if you’re a Londoner and in need of a free eye test, and irked that Polette has shut down their showroom and Specsavers has stopped being so slutty with its vouchers, then I bring you some good news! The quite badly named BlooBloom has a bunch of stores around and they all do free eye tests no questions asked as long as you book in advance. This is not in any way sponsored. I just resent spending money on my eyes and assume you do too.
Bye!
A column
A note: this was written before the Home Office decided to ban Kanye West from Britain. It is very annoying to me that they decided to ban him hours after I finished writing this, but days before I published it. Shabana Mahmood must you always be like this.
Anyway: I decided not to rewrite the piece because I think the points in it still stand and that decision doesn’t really change my overall argument. Thank you.
Somehow we became known as “the star chamber” afterwards. It made us laugh, a bit, but mostly it felt insulting and wrong. We’d just tried to do something at a time when the situation felt on the verge of becoming unbearable for everyone concerned. Why were we being attacked by people we liked and loved?
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It was early 2012. The student protests of November and December 2010 had, to the naked eye, all but died down, but some of us had found it hard to let go. There’d been occupation and marches and from those, friendships had been born. We called it the “anti-cuts movement”, and I guess it technically was our purpose, but mostly I think we’d all got used to hanging out together nearly every day, and didn’t want to let go of our weird, intense lives.
Bonds formed through activism are unhealthily strong, as you believe there’s something greater than all of you keeping the whole thing together. Having a common goal also means you just won’t really drift out of each other’s lives; there’s always more to be done.
Though the press had loved us, back at the height of the student fees chaos, they mostly left us alone after that. Still, we kept all those tight-knight social groups, and were busy dreaming about our socialist utopia. What would our brave new world entail?
Often, some cracks could be found in the walls. In one social centre we ran, the girls decided to launch a “safer spaces” initiative, and the boys felt that they were nannied by it, and they hated it. I oversimplify a bit here, but not much. A slightly different subgroup then tried to make the space sober, and even I had to join the men at that point: enough was enough. If I couldn’t drink Sainsbury’s Basics white wine - “for the table, not the cellar!”, as the bottle cheerily reminded us - then it definitely wasn’t my revolution.
We had these fights practically every week, about everything and nothing, both because we felt we were working towards something much bigger than ourselves, and because we’d somehow created some sort of pocket universe for us to inhabit, and we just had too much time on our hands as we were, for the most part, still undergraduate students.
Then the rumours began. In the early months of 2012, word reached us that a man many of us had been friends with for some time had assaulted a woman, in a city outside London. What exactly had happened? Everyone had got a version of their own story, and was ready to share it with others. Somehow, by early spring, this man had touched a woman’s arse without her consent but also he’d raped someone at knife point in an alleyway, and he’d sexually assaulted her at a house party in front of everyone. Was none of it true? All of it? Some of it?
A group of us found the situation increasingly uncomfortable, and decided to act. We spoke to the woman in question and got her version of events, then we put it to paper. We wrote an email, all five of us, and set out to send it to everyone we could think of who may socialise with this man. Here, we said, was a more definitive version of the story that had been doing the rounds. As readers would soon be able to tell, the man’s behaviour had been unacceptable, and he had sexually assaulted a woman. As such, we felt we should both let people know what he’d done, so other women in our circles could keep themselves and each other safe around him, but also wanted to open up discussions as to what we ought to be doing next. Perhaps there could be some form of accountability process we could follow but that would be up to the group.
This is when we gained our nickname. Within days, an email had appeared in all of our inboxes, sent by a group of ten anonymous people among the student left. Its precise wording has now been lost to time - as with our original email - but the substance of it was: how dare they? Who died and appointed this narrow group of people as moral arbiters of an entire social group? And so on, and so forth.
A meeting was held in the following weeks so we could decide what to do and, following a tense, tightly moderated debate that lasted for over five hours, nothing happened. We just couldn’t agree. Our side, to call it that, argued that the man should be banished from our social circles entirely, especially as several women had, since then, come forward with stories of times when he’d made them feel uncomfortable. None of them had really crossed the line, but they established a pattern which, we believed, made sense in context of the assault. This wasn’t merely a man who had committed one solitary act, but instead someone who didn’t care for people’s boundaries in general.
We weren’t against the idea of redemption but felt that he should have to prove to us that he had understood what he had done wrong and genuinely changed his ways and, until then, he should be kept out of the movement.
The other side…well, to be frank, I can’t remember precisely what the other side argued. I think it would be intellectually dishonest of me to put words in their mouths at this stage, but I suppose what they said was something along the lines of: heh. I vaguely recall them mentioning that there wasn’t a police report for the incident, but mostly I can still picture them turning their guns towards us, and asking, again, who we thought we were. Obviously, the problem was that they sort of had a point. Who’d died and put us in charge of all this?
It’s a question I’ve asked myself several times over the years. After a few more tense meetings, some endless email chains and quite a lot of tears, the man mostly stopped coming to our marches and parties. Well, he also managed to cleave our social group in half. That’s mostly what ended up working. If you want to know what happened to the student left after the fees protests of 2010, then this is it: some guy sexually assaulted a woman, and then the whole thing blew up.
