Penny Red

Laurie Penny

Description

In the space of a year, Laurie Penny has become one of the most prominent voices of the new left. This book brings together her diverse writings, showing what it is to be young, angry and progressive in the face of an increasingly violent and oppressive UK government.



Penny Red: Notes from the New Age of Dissent collects Penny's writings on youth politics, resistance, feminism and culture. Her journalism is a unique blend of persuasive analysis, captivating interviews and first-hand accounts of political direct action. She was involved in all the key protests of 2010/2011, including the anti-fees demos in 2010 and the anti-cuts protests of spring 2011, often tweeting live from the scene of kettles and baton charges. An introduction and extensive footnotes allow Penny to connect all the strands of her work, showing the links between political activism and wider social and cultural issues.



This book is essential for understanding what motivates the new generation of activists, writers and thinkers that bring creativity, energy and urgency to the fight against capitalism and exploitation.
Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I. This is Actually Happening

Inside the Millbank Tower Riots; Talking About a Revolution; Inside the Whitehall Kettle; Protesting the Turner Prize; Inside the Parliament Square Kettle; A Right Royal Poke; No Sex, No Drugs and No Leaders; What Really Happened in Trafalgar Square; Lies in London

2. Girl Trouble

The Gulag of Desire; In Defence of Cunt; What Sun Readers Swallow With Their Cornflakes; The Sexy Way to Die; Vajazzled and Bemused; Burlesque Laid Bare; Me, the Patriarchy and my Big Red Pen; Galliano’s Fashionable Beliefs; The Princess Craze is no Fairy Tale; Skinny Porn; Violence Against Women in Tahrir Square; Zionism, Chauvinism and the Nature of Rape; A Modesty Slip for Misogyny; Charlie Sheen’s Problem with Women; The Shame is all Theirs

3. Kingdom of Rains

Undercover With the Young Conservatives; Buns, Bunting and Retro-Imperialism; This is England; Poppy Day is the Opium of the People; Michael Gove and the Imperialists; The Power of the Intern; Strictly Come Scrounging?; Poverty Pimps: Selling Out the Disabled; A Tale of Three Parties; Simon Hughes and the Cartel of British Politics; The Social Mobility Scam

4. Cultural Capital

Facebook, Capitalism and Geek Entitlement; Girls, Tattoos and Men who Hate Women; Pickling Dissent; Julie Burchill’s Imperialist Rant over Israel; Baby Boomers; Bah, Humbug; Interview with China Miéville; I Shall Wear Midnight; It’s all Over for Sex-and-Shopping Feminism; Beyond Noughtie Girls

5. Their Hallucinations, Our Desires

Insurrection on Oxford Street; This is no Conspiracy; The Revolution Will Be Civilised; Revolts Don’t Have to be Tweeted; Is that a Truncheon in Your Pocket?; One Man and His Tent; How the Disabled were Dehumanised; Hey, Dave: Our Society’s Bigger Than Yours; In Defence of Squatting; Inside the Gaddafi House

Details of Original Publication

Sujets

• Political Advocacy
• Political Process
• Political Science
• Advocacy group

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 07 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849646048
• Langue: English

Extrait

Penny Red

First published 2011 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © Laurie Penny 2011
The right of Laurie Penny to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3208 6 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 84964 605 5 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 84964 603 1 eBook PDF
ISBN 978 1 84964 604 8 ePub

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Warren Ellis
Introduction
I: This is Actually Happening
Inside the Millbank Tower Riots; Talking About a Revolution; Inside the Whitehall Kettle; Protesting the Turner Prize; Inside the Parliament Square Kettle; A Right Royal Poke; No Sex, No Drugs and No Leaders; What Really Happened in Trafalgar Square; Lies in London

II: Girl Trouble
The Gulag of Desire; In Defence of Cunt; What Sun Readers Swallow with their Corn Flakes; The Sexy Way to Die; Vajazzled and Bemused; Burlesque Laid Bare; Me, the Patriarchy and my Big Red Pen; Galliano’s Fashionable Beliefs; The Princess Craze is no Fairy Tale; Skinny Porn; Violence Against Women in Tahrir Square; Zionism, Chauvinism and the Nature of Rape; A Modesty Slip for Misogyny; Charlie Sheen’s Problem with Women; The Shame is all Theirs

III: Kingdom of Rains
Undercover With the Young Conservatives; Buns, Bunting and Retro-Imperialism; This is England; Poppy Day is the Opium of the People; Michael Gove and the Imperialists; The Power of the Intern; Strictly Come Scrounging?; Poverty Pimps: Selling Out the Disabled; A Tale of Three Parties; Simon Hughes and the Cartel of British Politics; The Social Mobility Scam

IV: Cultural Capital
Facebook, Capitalism and Geek Entitlement; Girls, Tattoos and Men who Hate Women; Pickling Dissent; Julie Burchill’s Imperialist Rant over Israel; Baby Boomers; Bah, Humbug; Interview with China Miéville; I Shall Wear Midnight; It’s all Over for Sex-and-Shopping Feminism; Beyond Noughtie Girls

V: Their Hallucinations, Our Desires: The Grassroots
Insurrection on Oxford Street; This is no Conspiracy; The Revolution Will Be Civilised; Revolts Don’t Have to be Tweeted; Is that a Truncheon in Your Pocket?; One Man and His Tent; How the Disabled were Dehumanised; Hey, Dave: Our Society’s Bigger Than Yours; In Defence of Squatting; Inside the Gaddafi House

Details of Original Publication
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone at the New Statesman magazine for having faith in this body of work giving me a platform to write. Most of the articles that follow were published in the New Statesman , either online or in the reactionary hard-copy remix that a few subscribers seem to favour. Thanks are also due to David, Alec and everyone at Pluto Press; to the enchanting and inhumanly patient Juliet Pickering at A P Watt; to my friends and mentors, Paul Mason, Warren Ellis, China Miéville, Roz Kaveney, Tanya Gold, David Randall, Cath Howdle, Adrian Bott, Zoe Stavri and Jed Weightman.
Most of all, though, thanks and respect are due to the activists, anarchists, feminists, students, school pupils and pissed-off citizens around the world who have been part of what I’ve called ‘the new age of dissent’. I have been privileged to meet some of them, and many more have contacted me, encouraging me to keep writing. Those letters and emails have made all the difference. As I write, many young activists and student protesters are serving lengthy jail sentences in Britain for taking part in peaceful demonstrations and for defending themselves against police violence. It is an outrage that they should have to be so brave. This book is dedicated to them, in solidarity, and to my father.
Foreword
Warren Ellis
One of the worst things in the world, for me, is switching on Twitter and seeing that Laurie Penny is loose on the streets of London. Because it inevitably means that there’s some kind of protest action going on, and, equally inevitably, that Laurie’s out in the middle of it. An element of the inward wince I experience is certainly down to the immediate and quite vivid recollection of having to put people back together after the Poll Tax riots in the 1990s. A bigger element is that, frankly, Laurie has all the self-preservation instinct of a lemming dipped in vodka and balanced on top of a stepladder. And so I worry. It’s not, I hope, some paternal chauvinism. It’s more that, having somehow survived to the age of 43, I remember both feeling immortal at 24 and how many people I’ve buried since then.
And it’s not like times have changed. Sure, the SPG (Special Patrol Group) aren’t operating any more. But now it turns out the Met are okay with beating the wheelchair-bound and killing passers-by live on video. And I’m damned sure the stark idiocy of kettling is going to get a copper killed one day soon, and that makes me sad and angry too. So, yeah, when I see her running around out there, it drives me a little nuts. I mean, I know she needs to do it. And I have a little guilt because one of her formative influences was a book I wrote, so when she does finally get the piss beaten out of her it’s going to be a little bit my fault.
But this is what Laurie does. She drives you a little bit nuts. She makes you angry. Sometimes it’s about something you’re angry about too, and she shares it with you, and finds new ways to see it with you. Sometimes she makes you angry in that way that makes you want to hold her head down the toilet until her leg stops twitching. There are things in this collection that, honestly, give me a sudden compulsion to press a nerve in Laurie’s neck, and I’ve been her friend for years. Everybody will find something in this book to argue with. And that’s good. Laurie Penny makes you shout, but she also makes you think. Laurie Penny makes you engage , which is vital in a society that in the last 20 years had wandered a fair way towards turning passive acceptance into an artform.
Someone once said that if you want objective journalism, get yourself a CCTV camera. Subjective journalism isn’t a crime. It’s a joy and a necessity. Reportage needs to be a living thing. And I love Laurie, and I love this book, because it illustrates that, yes, there is going to be a new generation of reporters capable of getting up on their hind legs and shouting when things go wrong.
This book is, I think, as vivid and electric a snapshot of this moment as you’ll find. I hope you enjoy it – and shout at it, and with it – as much as I did.
Warren Ellis
Southend-on-Sea
June 2011
Warren Ellis is the author of the graphic novels Transmetropolitan, Fell and Red (amongst 50 others), and of the novel Crooked Little Vein. He is the recipient of the NUIG Lit & Deb Society’s President’s Medal for his contributions to freedom of speech.
Introduction
‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.’
Hunter S. Thompson

‘The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.’
Terry Pratchett, The Hogfather
Politics, like alcohol, makes me feel horrible and sexy. So, with a ready deadline and in the absence of gin, let me share a moment with you.
Roaring down the Holloway Road one night not so long ago, hanging from the shoulders of a bemuscled friend and hollering misplaced intentions into the traffic, in what addicts call a moment of clarity, I realised how much we have left to do.
This generation has inherited, whether or not it deserves it, a world whose old order is broken, and parents who have no idea how to build a new one. We were raised to believe that if we worked hard and passed all the exams, everything would be all right. We were lied to. Everything is most certainly bloody not all right. However many times we’re informed that we’ve been given the whole world on a cocktail stick, it is terribly hard to shake the creeping feeling that we’re being worked over, every day, by idiots. This is because we are being worked over, every day, by idiots.
We are worked over by our gender, by our sexuality, by our class, our age, our race and nationality, by our money or lack of money, by the fact that we’re young and poor and stupid, by whatever metal or plastic gods we’ve chosen to chase. If you’ve ever felt like control of your life is slipping through the cracks in your fists, this means you. If you’ve wanted something you could not name, this means you. This means us. Old and young, we are being worked over every day.
We do not have to take this.
This is a story about the new young left, dispersed and disenfranchised though we may be, and the resources we have available to us. It’s about politics, feminism, alternative culture. Politics because without it we are armourless, powerless children. Feminism because it breaks in wherever the lines have been drawn between the weak and the strong. And alternative culture because we need to destroy their hallucinations with our desires. Because – just sometimes – if we want to win, we have to become the people our parents always warned us about.
Fortunately, this is eminently doable.
* * *
Four years have passed since I wrote those words as part of the first post o