Consent Class

In the same year as the Iraq War, the people who brought it to you also brought you Harriet Harman's criminalisation of all male heterosexual activity per se, with tiny circumstances under which a prosecution might not be brought in practice.

The judgement on that was of course placed in the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service, which is part of Thatcherism's most abiding legacy, the wholesale transfer of economic, social, cultural and political power from working-class, often privately employed men, to middle-class women who were directly, or not very indirectly, employed at public expense.

I admit to sharing the middle-class resentment at the amount that footballers are paid.

If nothing else, it gives the lie to the argument that the route to affluence is academic education. (Why should it be? But of that, another time.)

Many footballers can barely read. I sincerely believe that some of them cannot read at all.

Yet the only people who do as well or better, financially speaking, are the old aristocracy and the Royal Family, who again are rarely noted for their intellectual accomplishments.

But there was a rich intellectual culture in the old working class, and its destruction has followed inexorably from that of its economic base.

Working-class men used, as a matter of course, to be on good money. The problem is that that has been, not lost as if by accident, but actively destroyed.

Only football, the incomprehensibility of which to me will be known to longterm readers, has survived, and has indeed taken off into the stratosphere.

Therefore, Alison Saunders, like a thing possessed, has hysterically pursued the oafish Ched Evans.

Goaded on by media that have become as feminised as they have become gentrified, as part of a single process from the 1980s onwards.

Even now, the BBC is insisting on the word "teenager", and on giving only Evans's current age, when describing an encounter between a 19-year-old and a 22-year-old.

The aim seems to have been to destroy football itself, for reasons rooted in old school class analysis, which increasingly captures the imaginations of the young, rather than in anything to do with 1970s identity politics, which increasingly does not.

But even Harman's Law, and even that Law as applied by Saunders, could not secure the conviction of Evans once his financial resources, his public profile, and his base of popular support, had forced the matter to a trial rather than to a show trial.

Again, the class analysis, if of a slightly different and a cruder kind, is obvious. What of those without his base of popular support? Or, more to the point, without his public profile? Or, very much to the point, without his financial resources?

In a previous role, Saunders, of course, dismissed calls for a second inquest into Hillsborough. Such lives were worthless to her, as the lives of the boys who were sent to die in Afghanistan and Iraq were worthless to Harman.

But the real Left is back now.

The offences of rape, serious sexual assault, and sexual assault, ought to be replaced with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, enabling the sentences to be doubled.

The sex of either party would be immaterial.

There must be no anonymity either for adult defendants or for adult complainants. Either we have an open system of justice, or we do not.

In this or any other area, there must be no suggestion of any reversal of the burden of proof.

That reversal has largely been brought to you already, I say again, by the people who in the same year brought you the Iraq War.

The Parliament that was supine before Tony Blair was also supine before Harriet Harman.

Adults who made false allegations ought to be prosecuted automatically. As in this case.

Moreover, how can anyone be convicted of non-consensual sex, who could not lawfully have engaged in consensual sex?

If there is an age of consent, which ought in any case to be raised to 18, then anyone below it can be an assailant. But a sexual assailant? How?

Similarly, if driving while intoxicated is a criminal offence, then how can intoxication, in itself, be a bar to sexual consent?

The law needs to specify that it was, only to such an extent as would constitute a bar to driving.

American-style provisions for internally administered "balance of probabilities" or "preponderance of evidence" tests to sexual assault allegations at universities or elsewhere must be banned by Statute.

It is incompatible with the Rule of Law to punish someone for a criminal offence of which she has not been convicted.

It must be made impossible for anyone to be extradited to face charges that fell short of these standards, or for such convictions to have any legal standing in this country.

The case of Julian Assange yet again ties in these concerns with the struggle against the neoconservative war machine, and not least with that machine's war on civil liberties.

That machine is also very literally at war with young men.

Convictions under laws predating these changes ought to be annulled by Act of Parliament along with those of men whose homosexual acts would not be criminal offences today.

Labour should vote against that unless it also annulled, not only all convictions in the above categories, but also all convictions and other adverse court decisions arising out of Clay Cross, Shrewsbury, Wapping, and the three Miners' Strikes since 1970.

This would set the pattern for all future feminist and LGBT legislation. Without a working-class quid pro quo, then Labour would vote against any such legislation.

Alongside the DUP, the Conservative Right, or whoever. It is not Blair's Labour Party now.

As an aside, I am still banned from several major political websites because I have been pointing out for nearly 20 years that Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt had ties to the Paedophile Information Exchange, something that the entire media have always known.

Do you not think that there ought to be someone like that in Parliament? We can make it happen. Not least, see the PayPal button on this site.