‘Slow but sure decline’ has certainly been the trend under New Labour, with membership falling to an all-time low. However, in the week following the election, 12,000 people joined the party, as if they sensed the danger faced by the left at the end of the New Labour era.

Over the following weekend, a slew of post-election conferences from the Fabian Society to the Labour Representation Committee discussed Labour’s future with an atmosphere of optimism – bordering on outright relief – that might seem curious for a party that has just lost 90 seats and been ousted from power.

Old hands and young bloods alike are keen to break from the New Labour tradition. Former cabinet minister Jon Trickett emphasised that a revitalised movement must ‘openly say that Iraq was a mistake, and never will such a thing happen again’, advising party members to admit that Labour also ‘operated with completely the wrong economic paradigm’. Labour’s new MPs have arrived at Westminster with deeply critical perspectives on Blair and Brown’s positions on Iraq, privatisation and immigration. At the Progressive London conference, Lisa Nandy, newly elected to represent Wigan, described her relief at being able speak freely on such matters.

Nandy’s successful campaign was part of a new strand of Labour thinking that ‘keeps in touch with left-wing people who may not be Labour born and bred’. Many Wigan voters were ‘motivated by the memory of what the Tories did to the north west in the eighties and nineties, and came to work with us. They were also motivated by equality issues and the Tories’ homophobia,’ said Nandy. While David and Ed Miliband’s campaign speeches have sounded rather like bids to be chief executive of an ailing company, there is also a broader, more plural view of a labour movement opening up among the young and at the grassroots – a view that doesn’t require a party card and that is based on joint action.

‘After the election I had a socialist awakening, and I realised that the Liberals don’t have the type of grass-roots socialist politics that interest me – so I joined the Labour party,’ said Adam, 19, at the Fabian conference. ‘But the party needs a leader who can unite the left without being tainted by the New Labour brand. I’m hoping that Ed Miliband can offer that kind of leadership, but I’m not sure.’

Billy Hayes, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, stresses the need for the left to focus on the practical issues facing working people. ‘Building resistance to the cuts has to be the priority,’ he says. ‘People don’t realise how hard they are going to hit. The leadership will come from those at the front line, but I expect the Labour Party, along with the new leader, to offer support.’

The veteran Labour left-winger and leadership candidate John McDonnell agrees that Labour needs to relearn its ambition to improve the lives of ordinary people. ‘The last general election seemed to be fought in a fantasy world,’ he says. ‘None of the main three parties have any clear analysis of globalisation, and all have been co-conspirators in creating a global economic crisis and then expecting working people to pay for that crisis. There are alternatives to this, and the alternatives strike at the heart of the system itself – so it means systemic change, on an economic level, on a parliamentary level and on a party level, and a return to socialist awareness.’

After tramping around the post-election conferences, we went to Westminster to the Take Back Parliament rally for fair votes. Swathes of protesters decked in purple ribbons marched on Downing Street to turn in their petition for proportional referendum. Their desire is for a political system that is less centrist, less timid, and fairer in principle and practice to the unheard millions who have waited too long for politicians to take a stand. No mainstream party in its present state offers the radical change that this constitutional reform movement wishes to see – not even the Liberal Democrats.

If Labour could make the links between economic democracy, political democracy, workers’ rights and civil liberties, then it might regain the distinct purpose that Miliband senior insisted was a condition of reversing its decline.

Books such as Redfern and Kristin Aune’s recent Reclaiming The F Word chart the welcome upsurge of feminist rage that has followed the perky corporate passivity of 1990s ‘girl power’. However, while Redfern is right to argue that feminism is large enough to encompass women of all ages and backgrounds and with a broad range of views, today’s revived movement is suffering an identity crisis.

Issues such as the role of prostitutes and the status of trans women within the movement are fragmenting the new wave of feminist activism into small campaigns and factions which, while worthy in themselves, have failed to start moving in the same direction. Finn Mackay of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution, a major figure in the new movement, states the sex work shibboleth in broad binary terms, asking, ‘As long as I believe prostitution is a form of violence against women, then how can I work alongside anyone who promotes it as a job?’

Feminists have never agreed with one another on everything, nor should they be expected to – but today more than ever, what the feminist cause needs is a broad coalition of activists, with a clear direction and long-term goals.

Redfern notes that in recent decades the notion of feminism has been somewhat ‘re-branded’, as ‘fluffy and unthreatening… more about claiming an “empowering” identity than collective action or concrete changes’. It is this focus on the broader structures of gender, politics and economics rather than the niceties of personal and community identity that remains fatally absent from the modern movement.

Feminism is about economics before it is about identity, and only a movement that understands this can effect positive change and defend women’s progress on a national and international level.

Feminism at a crossroads

The truth is that feminism stands at a crossroads. In 2010, women face a choice between completing the social revolution that our foremothers began in the last century or bowing to the demands of the conservative right. While worthy in themselves, groups that campaign solely to ban lapdancing clubs do not address the basis of women’s oppression today – the encoding of ancient patriarchal assumptions into the economic and social structure of imperial capitalism.

Capitalism is built on the docile bodies of women – as unpaid carers and low-status labourers performing 66 per cent of the world’s work; as consumers, making over 75 per cent of spending decisions while controlling only a small proportion of global wealth; as victims of sexual violence and aggression at individual, local and international levels; and as reproductive labourers whose physical and sexual autonomy is relentlessly policed.

Since feminism demanded that women be freed from the economic obligation to marry, be paid equally for all of their labour, be protected from individual and state abuse and be in control of the means of reproduction, patriarchal resistance to feminist revolution has been riveted into the mechanisms of late capitalism.

The ‘backlash’ that Susan Faludi identified in her 1991 book of the same name is ongoing, and while it may be couched in vengeful moral terms, its basis is wholly economic. Recent years have seen a strikeback from the markets-and-morals brigade on both sides of the Atlantic, cracking down on the most fundamental victories won by second-wave feminists.

Women’s reclamation of the means of reproduction is under particular threat. In 2008, Christian and Conservative lobby groups in Britain attempted to outlaw termination of pregnancy at 20 to 24 weeks, and in the US, state governments compete to think up ever more cruel and unusual ways to punish women for sexual self-determination. Utah recently ratifed a law whereby a woman who behaves ‘recklessly’ while a foetus is gestating inside her can be charged with homicide.

The British Conservative Party has made it clear that it believes traditionally repressive gender roles are best for society. In his recent book The Pinch, the Tory ideologue David Willetts makes a sweeping case for how feminism – by encouraging women to enter the workplace and divorce their husbands – has upset the balance of a society based on private property and small, atomised economic family units.

Feminists have taken all the jobs and destroyed social security, says Willetts, declaring that ‘a welfare system that was originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men.’ Willletts advocates a return to marriage, like the rest of his party, which plans to reward married women for staying at home.

The point of feminism

In one respect, Willetts and his ilk are right – the partial emancipation of women really has broken society. That was the point. That was what it was designed to do.

Feminism was not supposed to be about the occasional drive to get prostitutes off the streets combined with as much chocolate, shopping and low-paid public-sector work as we could stomach. Feminism was meant to be about a total overhaul of society’s rules about work, family, sex, money and power.

That’s what ten generations of women marched, sacrificed, protested, eulogised, fought and died for. It wasn’t because they’d heard there was a really excellent shoe sale on. They wanted to break society, and that’s what they set out to do.

Somewhere in the last 25 years, that revolutionary energy was compromised. We forgot that gender equality was never supposed to mean the right to be oppressed on equal terms, and the old feminist demands of equal work at home, equal pay at work, dignity in the streets, reproductive freedom and protection from abuse began to be hedged as early as the 1980s.

Faced with overwhelming resistance, the fight for the emancipation of women of all races and classes was downgraded to a polite request for middle-class, white women to be allowed to enter the workplace – as long as we continue to smile, look pretty and accept lower pay; to have sex outside marriage – as long as we bow to ruthless corporate objectification; and to divorce our husbands – as long as we continue to do all the gruntwork of domestic cleaning and caring for children and the elderly, entirely for free.

Even in the west, women’s liberation is an incomplete revolution. As today’s feminist activists argue over whose ideology and identity is the purest, the global right stands poised to roll back the advances women have made. Conservatives speak of ‘fixing society’ when what they are really anxious to shore up is the bruised superstructure of patriarchal capitalist control. Feminists must unite to stop the right rolling back the clock on women’s rights and to continue the revolution begun nearly a century ago.

Eighty years after women won suffrage in Britain, young women are waking up to the continuing realities of sexism, misogyny and institutional gender oppression. We have truly begun to ‘reclaim the F word’ – but reclamation is only the beginning. 21st-century feminists have no time for a collective identity crisis. We have a huge fight on our hands.

Laurie Penny is a journalist whose blog, http://pennyred.blogspot.com was shortlisted for the 2010 Orwell Prize for political blogging

Every year, around 7,000 women from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland travel to England to have abortions. Despite the efforts of feminist campaigners, abortion remains effectively illegal in both states, and women with unwanted pregnancies are still obliged to find the money to travel overseas or risk their safety buying illegal abortion pills on the black market. Over the course of 40 years, 180,000 women have arrived in London, often alone and at late stages of pregnancy by the time they have gathered the necessary funds and information, usually vulnerable and frightened and desperately in need of the support that their governments refuse to provide. In the 1980s, a brave group of Irish women came together in sisterhood to offer that support – whatever it took.

The story of the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group (IWASG) – and its sister organisation, the Spanish Women’s Abortion Support Group (SWASG) – is movingly retold in Ann Rossiter’s recently-released book Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora. For more than 20 years, this London-Irish underground provided accommodation, information, money and transport to women arriving in the capital for abortions.

Rossiter, a founding member of IWASG, has drawn the book together from hundreds of hours of painstaking research and interviews with the women involved. They stretch from the group’s inception in 1980 through to the pro-choice revival of 2008, when women from all over the world came together to fight for Northern Irish women to be granted the same basic rights to control over their own bodies that have been enjoyed by their sisters in the rest of the UK since 1967.

Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora launched in London and Dublin in April, and the timing could not have been better. Feminists across the country are now carrying copies of Rossiter’s book, which functions for today’s campaigners as part inspirational history lesson, part handbook for practical feminist action wherever need is most pressing. And with scores of women still travelling from Ireland for abortions every week, need is certainly pressing. Nearly 30 years after the formation of IWASG, feminist groups are mobilising once more to offer sanctuary to ‘abortion tourists’ – and taking the story of the IWASG collective as a starting point.

Collective action

For Ann Rossiter, it is important for today’s activists to remember that ‘IWASG and SWASG were collectives, and members took their responsibility towards abortion seekers very seriously. The group may have been entirely voluntary and run on no money at all, but members had a lot of commitment – and you can’t buy that, although today a more professional organisation will work just as well. The times are different now. We were dealing with an underground, illegal situation at the Irish end. Anyone involved with abortion was being picketed and doorstepped by a very vocal opposition. Now that the war seems to be over in the North, things should begin to look up. But the Family Planning Association is still picketed all day, every day, in Belfast and Derry.’

Blanca Fernandez, who was involved in abortion support work in London from 1987, agrees that ‘both IWASG and SWASG women were grassroots activists in the real sense of the word. They would turn their hand to anything, taking women to the clinic, producing stickers, banners and posters, addressing meetings and conferences highlighting the plight of abortion seekers and raising money for them. This was real sisterhood and they didn’t get – or expect – any glory or medals for it.’

With laws in place in the 1980s to outlaw even the dissemination of information about abortion in Ireland, much of the function of the abortion underground was to fill that gap, signposting desperate women to clinics and providing basic medical information. ‘Something I do remember vividly while answering the phone is women whispering,’ says Isabel Ros Lopez. ‘You’d have to ask them to speak up, but of course they wouldn’t; they were afraid of being overheard.’

Fed up of being afraid

Across Britain and Ireland, women are fed up of being afraid to be overheard, although a tenacious taboo against seeking or fighting for access to abortion remains firmly in place. Over the past 12 months, threats to abortion rights in the UK have energised a new generation of British women to stand up in defence of their reproductive freedoms. Many of these recruits are women who might not have called themselves feminists in the past. Attacks by pro-life lobbyists and anti-choice MPs such as Nadine Dorries and Conservative leader David Cameron, along with the real threat of restrictive amendments to the human fertilisation and embryology (HFE) bill in 2008, provided a flashpoint.

Women of all ages and backgrounds came together in October 2008 to protect their rights to safe, legal pregnancy termination up to 24 weeks and to demand pro-choice amendments to extend abortion rights to Northern Ireland. In Parliament Square, hundreds of women and men gathered to protest against anti-choice amendments and to support the Irish abortion amendments put forward by Diane Abbott MP.

Gwyneth Lonegran, of the young socialist-feminist network Feminist Fightback, explains: ‘There is much greater concern over abortion rights recently, because of the HFE bill and the attempts to ban abortion or severely restrict it. It’s clear that we live in a society where women’s autonomy is still not valued.’ With rumours circulating in Westminster that prospective Conservative cabinet ministers are already in talks about how to launch their next attack on abortion rights, it seems that this new energy for pro-choice activism may be all too prescient.

From New York to London

In 2001, in New York City, a service operating along much the same lines as IWASG was formed when Cat Megill, a hotline director for the National Abortion Federation, was asked to host a young woman in desperate need of abortion, with nowhere else to stay. ‘After that,’ says Megill, ‘I was hooked.’

Megill founded the Haven Coalition, a service hosting and supporting the hundreds of women who travel to New York every year in search of the reasonable abortion access denied to them in many parts of the United States. (Some 86 per cent of US counties lack even a single abortion provider, and many existing providers will not end late-term pregnancies.) In 2008, Mara Clarke, a former director of the Haven Coalition, moved to London with the express intention of setting up a similar service to help Irish women travelling to London – and found a broad base of feminist support waiting to be tapped.

At a meeting on 29 April, activist groups including Feminist Fightback pledged their support and that of other feminist organisations to Clarke’s as-yet-unnamed group, which is to begin operating in the summer of 2009, with help and advice from former IWASG members. ‘We wanted to call it Haven UK, but in Britain that’s a domestic violence shelter,’ explains Clarke. It is, perhaps, telling that nearly every English synonym for ‘place of safety’ is already in use by an organisation providing women with support in addition to the scant government services available.

Dilemmas of practical feminism

This type of practical feminism, which Ann Rossiter calls ‘welfare feminism’, is not without its contradictions. Ann Hayes, a former IWASG member, says that: ‘At the back of your head you have the impression that you are bolstering a service that should be funded by the taxpayer … We are engaged in a version of philanthropy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, something that really belongs to the 19th century and earlier. This is all wrong, you think to yourself.’

Today’s feminist activists struggle with this dilemma. Mara Clarke puts it most succinctly: ‘Ask any abortion rights activist what she wishes most, and she’ll probably tell you, “I wish I didn’t have a job.”‘

But in a world where women’s bodies are still battlegrounds for the moral, conservative and sectarian claims of the states in which they live, welfare feminism has a vital part to play. Practical feminist organisation helps to fill the gap in services and raises awareness of the continuing struggles that women face in accessing basic self-determination. Although these struggles can often seem dauntless and unending, although the brave and committed activists of the 1980s are now in their fifties and sixties and, as Ann Rossiter says, ‘tired’ of fighting for rights that remain denied to Irish women and countless others, there is, at least, a new generation of feminists to whom the women of IWASG can ‘pass the torch’.

The new London abortion support network is looking for volunteers. If you might be able to offer a sofa and supper to an Irish woman seeking abortion, or you can donate your time, money or expertise to the group (or you think of a catchy name!) please get in touch. You can contact Mara Clarke by phone on 07913 353530, email mara@maraclarke.com, www.abortionsupport.org.uk

Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora is published by the Irish Abortion Solidarity Campaign. Email iascpub@yahoo.com

Our contributors lay out the context for building on this public surveillance, starting with Clare Coatman’s article on ‘sousveillance’ (below) explaining how we can watch the watchers. At the same time, we must keep abreast of what we’re up against: Tariq Mehmood’s account of his arrest in Manchester (page 22), showing how just about anyone can get caught up under the increased police powers of today, is accompanied by Dave Mery’s lowdown on Section 44 stop and searches (page 23).

The events at the G20 protests were not – of course – without precedent. Some commentators have rightly made the challenge that the sense of shock demonstrated by the middle classes on this occasion is evidence of a widespread lack of understanding of the police’s longstanding targeting of trade unionists, minority groups and others. Steve Powell from the Football Supporters’ Federation (page 21) explains what the misuse of police powers has meant for sports fans. And historian Rhian Jones sets the history of police violence in its proper context (page 20).

Being of the left is not just about being against things. It’s about questioning received wisdom, as does Rowenna Davis in one of our further features as the policing theme continues online at the Red Pepper website, www.redpepper.org.uk

The police should be there to serve and protect us. Here, we offer a contribution to the debate on how our modern police force has deviated so profoundly from that ideal, and on what we can do as voters and as citizens to hold the forces of law and order to account.

One thing is clear: throwing bricks is futile. It’s time for us to start throwing ideas. And we plan to throw more in future issues of Red Pepper.

This section was commissioned and put together by Laurie Penny, blogger (Penny Red) and freelance journalist.

‘In the early days, we just wanted to sing,’ explains the artist with the girl group whose honey-coated voices made history with records like ‘Baby Love’, ‘Love Child’ (a scandal in its day for dealing with the subject of illegitimacy) and ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’. ‘It wasn’t until later that we started to think about all the rest.’

‘All the rest’, however, was what made the Supremes such a phenomenon – their unique sound, the power of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s songwriting and the high glamour of the Motown diva machine providing a group of young, talented black women with a visibility and popularity unprecedented in pop history.

The longest-standing member of Motown’s super group was in Britain at the end of 2008 to promote The Story of the Supremes from the Mary Wilson Collection, an exhibition of the Supremes’ outfits currently touring the country in conjunction with the Victoria and Albert Museum. The gowns trace the group’s rise from their roots in the Detroit housing projects in the 1950s, when school friends Wilson, Florence Ballard and Diana Ross formed the Primettes in discount-store dresses, to the elaborate one-off Hollywood creations from the height of their fame in the 1960s.

All of this – the glitz, and the fuss, and the memory of a hyperbolic glamour that resonates across five decades of social change – does it feel a little false, when the music was what started it all? After all, it wasn’t long before civil rights activists started declaring that Wilson, Ross, Ballard and other Motown artists were sell-outs, controlled by Barry Gordy and other music bosses who were making them cave in to white norms of dress, taste and femininity.

Wilson goes quiet for a moment. ‘No, we weren’t selling out,’ she says. ‘Definitely not, although I know there will always be people who are going to dislike it. Firstly, it was very creative – yes, we were young, but we weren’t controlled completely, we had our own styles and got to choose our own dresses. And then, you have to understand that when we first started out, what we were trying to achieve was so far-fetched. We had all dreamed of that sort of success but never imagined it would actually happen. For us, as young artists, as young women, as black women and as black human beings, it was something not expected of us.

‘When we started, playing in segregated clubs to black audiences, we didn’t know that in a few years’ time we would be playing to huge mixed audiences of white Americans and African Americans. Once the laws broke down and segregation broke down, the music brought people together. And, when it happened’ – she pauses, collecting her thoughts – ‘well, it’s important that, as human beings, we all do what we can. Nowadays you don’t see so many people marching for their rights, but back then it was so important, for blacks and for women, too, because people don’t like change. And I was there, too – we were all there,’ she says, recalling the thrilling energy of the civil rights protests of the 1960s. ‘But you can’t achieve everything by marching and demonstrating. Sometimes you have to play the game.’

Famously, Motown’s ‘Artist Development’ division gave its young black artists training in etiquette and personal grooming in order to maintain control over the sleek, polished Motown image. Wilson insists that, far from selling out to a white image of pop-stardom, ‘Artist Development was preparation for the kind of work we were doing. The personal grooming, the work ethic, all of that was just as important as the music, in some ways.’

She believes that education remains ‘the most important issue’ facing black America today, from a class perspective as well as a racial one. ‘Providing young people with the training they need for the work they choose to do, whatever it is – that was what Artist Development did for us, and it is still so important.’

So what does she think about the progression of the black music scene after Motown? Some have condemned elements of rap and hip-hop for glorifying violence and misogyny and reinforcing the negative stereotypes that Motown worked so hard to dispel – but not Wilson.

‘I think music, in general, always grows up,’ she says. ‘For us, the times were different. We sang about love and happiness back then because that was what the world wanted and was all about. Gangsta rap represents a different reality. I’m sure that the young people who were making such music were just that: young. Now they’re growing up and the message will change. When you’re young, you’re a little wilder and carefree – I know I was!’

‘Music has evolved and Motown was one of the models, one of the templates for that evolution,’ Wilson continues. ‘Rap and hip-hop are new sounds, but they are inspired by the sounds of the sixties, too. I think it’s true that the Motown sound and Supremes music did have an effect on not only black society, but on America and the world at large. I wouldn’t say I’m all that surprised that the music has lasted all these years and continuously inspired people, because we knew at the time we were on to something special, and looking back 50 years, what we felt then is still true now!’

Mary Wilson will be participating in the ‘Once in a Lifetime – Motown Legends Live Tour’ in June 2009, tickets now available online. The Story of The Supremes from the Mary Wilson Collection is at the Grundy art gallery, Blackpool, until 1 February, then the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, from 21 February to 7 June and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol from July to August 2009

Instead of meekly accepting the government’s corporatisation of her children’s mealtimes, Tulloch, now 62, decided to act. She joined her local parent-teachers’ association and started organising marches down Merton High Street to demand better standards of care for the borough’s young people.

So began half a lifetime of dedicated education activism. Tulloch, who originally worked as a researcher in microbiology, quickly became involved with CASE, the Campaign for State Education, serving as their spokesperson for 16 years until 2004. She is now a trustee of RISE (Research and Information on State Education), chair of the Advisory Centre for Education and secretary of Comprehensive Future, which campaigns for fair admissions, an end to selection in schools and a higher standard of quality state education for all.

Tulloch is a tireless protester against the social exclusion that results from school selection. ‘The focus of Comprehensive Future is to attempt to persuade the government to end selection at 11. We try not to talk about abolishing schools – we need all the schools we have – but instead about abolishing selection,’ she says. ‘All we want is a system where children don’t have to face tests that tell the majority of them that they’ve failed at a very early stage of their lives.’

Tulloch is doubtful that Labour has delivered on its education promises, and is particularly critical of initiatives such as allowing selection in specialist schools, foundation schools and academies.

‘The dying stages of the last Tory government allowed some schools to select on “aptitude”, but Labour has extended that,’ she says. ‘It’s shocking that we have a situation where we have more, not fewer children facing selection at 11 after ten years of a Labour government.’

She is disappointed that the legacy of the selective grammar school system continues, with the old 11-plus exam still casting its shadow over schoolchildren up and down the country: ‘A significant minority – a minimum of 15 per cent – of young children still face that barrier at the age of 11. In areas like Kent and Buckinghamshire there are families where three generations have failed the 11-plus, entrenching social stagnation.’

She is also no fan of academies. ‘Why is it necessary to take schools out of the maintained system in order to improve things for young people?’ Tulloch asks. ‘I’m horrified that this has happened under a Labour government. It’s a bit of a return to the 19th century when the great and the good were in charge of education. It’s entirely possible to improve standards without returning schools to the semi-secret world of selective, semi-private, corporate education.’

She acknowledges, however, that: ‘To be kind to this government, there was a strong lobby for early education in the 1980s with which CASE was involved, and the current Labour government has improved that immeasurably with programmes like Sure Start, although the impact will take a long time to be known.’ And she concedes that ‘we did a lot of campaigning about class sizes, and the incoming Labour government really listened to us over that’ when it imposed a limit of 30 pupils on primary school classes.

‘I don’t ever claim individual responsibility for achievements, but in terms of the campaigns that I was involved in through CASE over those years, I do think that we made a difference in terms of the involvement of parents in school organisation,’ she says. ‘When I first became involved in CASE, the idea that schools should help parents to help their children learn was virtually unknown. That concept has become much more accepted as the norm, and in terms of what the government considers important.’

‘The idea that people who are not teachers have a role in the accountability of schools has meant that education is more valued, and it’s more difficult for politicians to spend less on education,’ she continues.

‘No political party can now put education at the bottom of the pile. It used to be the case that when the education debate was called at the party conferences everyone would go and have a cup of tea – well, not any more!’

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) recently honoured Margaret Tulloch with the Fred and Ann Jarvis award for education campaigning by non-NUT members. She believes that activism is an essential tool for involving local communities in politics, and for changing the tide of political thought: ‘Its importance has to do with helping to create a climate of expecting things to be different, and pointing to areas where they should be.’

‘One of the first actions of the Thatcher government was to remove the nutritional guidelines for school dinners. Now we have a Labour government finally introducing them again. Clearly on the school meals front, change has finally come, although I do wish it had done more than come full circle. I wonder sometimes why I keep having to find these brick walls to bang my head against,’ says Tulloch. ‘Who knows – maybe I am a natural born rebel after all!’

Under New Labour, government rhetoric has shifted dramatically from a focus on providing ordinary people with a decent living, to the belief that people and their skills are quantifiable as ‘products and services’. A recent government report concluded that the current crisis in higher education can be reduced to the fact that: ‘The market won’t buy products and services that don’t suit its purposes. The current culture does not, in general, engender confidence in the markets in higher education’s ability to deliver effectively courses and services that bring clear, direct benefit to the employer and employee’ (Higher Education for the Workforce, DIUS, 2008).

Graduates, it seems, are now simply an industrial input whose value decreases or increases depending on their particular skill set. The government believes it has a socio-economic duty to provide ‘the market’ with the raw materials it requires, in the form of employees. It is hardly surprising that the concept of dignity in work has all but disappeared from contemporary British parlance, especially for young people entering the workplace.

A degree is not enough

The popular careers website prospects.ac.uk sets future graduates straight about exactly what three or four years of hard struggle and financial strain have won them: ‘A degree is not a guarantee of a good job. In selecting employees, employers will look at what else graduates have to offer, including their skills, work experience (providing desirable commercial awareness) and overall potential. Quite simply, a degree is not enough on its own.’

Final-year students are caught in a bind: their degrees are not yet fitting them out for appropriate employment in Britain’s emerging tertiary sector economy, leaving them to make up the deficit in training and knowledge by themselves – but they still need a degree to progress beyond junior level in most professions.

The current university skills crisis is plain to our political leaders. According to skills minister David Lammy: ‘Britain’s future is as a knowledge economy, creating high-value products and offering innovative services. Low and unskilled work won’t disappear, of course, but our competitiveness depends on a sophisticated workforce who are world-leaders in finance and IT, in engineering and the creative industries. The skills dimension to this new reality requires us to raise our game, and to operate differently … to ensure sustainable economic growth.’

Since higher education is no longer entirely state-funded, most students graduate with a great deal of debt – but the scale of that debt and the impact it makes on their future lives varies hugely with social class. While local education authority (LEA)-sponsored student loans are still low-interest and need only be repaid when the student is earning a decent wage, many students without subsidies from wealthy parents find themselves with overdrafts and ‘career development loans’ to pay off as well. This drives many students from poorer backgrounds into immediate low-level employment in an effort to assuage their creditors. These students, whatever their talents and drive, cannot afford to devote the extra funding and hours of free work (‘work experience’) needed to develop a graduate career, to enhance the skills their degree has given them, or to pursue postgraduate study.

Rhian Jones, 26, grew up in the former mining community of Tredegar, in south-east Wales. ‘Academic research is always what I’ve been best at,’ he says. ‘This led me to get a first from London, and I then went on to do two postgraduate degrees at Oxford, where I focused on popular protest in 19th-century Wales. In order to enable myself to go to Oxford, because I had no means of support or income other than working part-time, I took out a professional studies loan of £25,000. The loan covered my tuition and college fees over three years and in order to pay my rent and bills I worked six part-time jobs over that time.

‘If I hadn’t had to do that work,’ he continues, ‘I would have been able to spend far more time and energy on my research, which would have allowed me to gain the funding I so desperately needed. As it was, having failed to gain sufficient funding to complete a doctorate, I had to cut my degree short and immediately take up work to pay back the loan. Because my part-time employment had lacked a cohesive focus, the only jobs I could get were relatively low-paid.’

A premium on testicles

Hardworking female graduates could be forgiven for feeling themselves particularly worked over by an employment culture whose pretensions to educational meritocracy remain as hypocritical as they ever were. A survey found that the gender gap in earnings for recent graduates starts at 11 per cent and rises to 20 per cent by the time they are in their third jobs (Recent Changes in Intergenerational Mobility at Work, Sutton Trust, 2007). Women had lower average earnings than men in similar jobs and with similar qualifications, and were far less likely to use their academic qualifications to their fullest potential; only 30 per cent of female science and business graduates went on to gain jobs in the field using their degrees, compared to more than 90 per cent of men. The market buys those raw materials it considers of most economic value – and in the modern workplace a disturbing premium is still placed on the possession of testicles.

For a time, rapid economic growth did a little to kick the sand over the inequality of opportunity that was reasserting itself in higher education. More and more graduates were churned out across the country as higher education expanded to meet New Labour’s target of 50 per cent in university by 2010, but most of these graduates were able to find lowly jobs to cover the bills, even if these jobs were traditionally ‘non-graduate’. Economic expansion and heavy public sector borrowing meant that firms across the tertiary sector could afford to take on and train graduates, and new jobs were relatively easily had in metropolitan areas, to which school and college leavers accordingly flocked.

The ‘credit crunch’ (a concept it’s impossible to pronounce without baring the teeth) has put a stop to that. For the classes of 2007, 2008 and 2009, the glaring inequalities and inefficiencies of the graduate employment world in which 43 per cent of our young people are now involved are becoming all too clear.

Corporate agenda

The function of a degree has perceptibly shifted from a rigorous course of academic and intellectual training to a necessary ticket into a certain class of ‘graduate’ professions – many of which would not have required a degree even ten years ago. As this shift has occurred, colleges, departments and university careers services have aggressively pursued a corporate agenda.

In 1989, Matthew Salusbury observed in Thatcherism Goes to College that ‘Bristol University’s history department was proud of the number of bankers and financial service personnel they had produced, using the fact to justify their continued existence. They would not have recognised the argument that a life in the stock market was as much a waste of a history degree as a lifetime’s unemployment.’ Two decades on, it is the received wisdom that, with a history degree from Bristol, you should have your sights set on the City. How the course makes one more qualified for a career in finance than three years working as a trainee bookkeeper in your hometown, is a question rarely asked. A degree is now a mandatory entrance ticket for higher-paying jobs in most employment sectors, with graduates being expected to find and finance their own targeted training outside study hours.

The onus on graduates to use their own initiative to train themselves through work experience, part-time jobs and postgraduate and vocational courses would be far more acceptable were it not for the regressive nature of student debt. The student loans system and the removal of universal grants have created what is in effect a graduate tax that hits the poor and aspirational far harder than the sons and daughters of the rich.

Simple privilege

Let’s look at this picture from the other side. I’m no slacker. I was raised in the sure knowledge that if you believe in your dreams, trust your heart and follow your star, you will still get beaten every time by the kids who worked harder than you. I was lucky enough to win a place at, and eventually a degree from, an ‘elite’ university. But what has made a difference to my career since is not talent, nor motivation, nor even my degree: it is simple privilege.

At 18, I inherited a sum of money from my grandmother, and that money has meant that I’ve been able to put in hours working for free, holding down only part-time paid work and concentrating on gaining extra qualifications and work experience, while many of my more talented and deserving classmates still find themselves paying off debts in jobs way below their personal and educational capabilities. As the possession of a degree becomes less and less of a social leveller, the privileges and opportunities conferred by wealth continue to differentiate graduates entering the job market, entrenching the very social inequalities that Labour’s notion of higher education for all was meant to erase.

The dialectics of progress are changing in the UK today, and our education system has not yet adapted itself for the transition to an economy based on tertiary-sector employment. Our higher education machine does not deliver the skills and training needed for the 43 per cent of young people who now graduate from university to enter the workforce with ease. However, the aggressive expansion of higher education under late Thatcherism and New Labour has meant that a majority of employers looking for ‘skills’ still require a degree as an entrance ticket to ‘knowledge-based’ careers – leaving graduates with no choice but to find some way of making up the deficit themselves.

The apparatus of post-Thatcherite market ‘meritocracy’ has destroyed the vestiges of social democracy that allowed a minority of our parents’ generation to overstep the economic barriers of their class. It is now harder than ever for new graduates to escape the dictates of their socio-economic background, as a degree loses what value it had as a social leveller.

‘What’s apparent now is that Boris only believes that people like Boris should run the earth. There’s no political position he’s not prepared to surrender in order to stay powerful. And that makes him very dangerous. In a situation where the far right, for example, could deliver him power, he’d have no hesitation in pandering to them.’

I meet Ken Livingstone in his new office – a window table in a Hampstead branch of Costa Coffee – and he is more than keen to chat. And not just about Boris. We talk about economics, about China and India and the organisation of gender roles before metalworking developed, about his plans for a roaring comeback and the future of the left. Ken talks and talks and his kind blue eyes twinkle and I feel faintly like I’m about to be invited to attend wizard school, albeit one with a little more pork-barrel canniness than anything invented by J K Rowling.

‘When the prime minister asked me to run as Labour’s mayoral candidate in 2004, I’d have been crazy to have said no. If I had, it would have been held against me, and against London, forever – but after I said yes, they had a duty to stand by me and my decisions. After 2004, the money flowed.

‘Since then we’ve managed to invest £39 billion in London. I’ve left Boris the money for 50,000 new houses, which he might even build. And even if the mayor has only crude mechanisms to redistribute, doing small things to make working people’s lives easier – cutting bus fares for people on income support, for example – that’s what was most important to me about the job.’ Ken knows better than anyone how crucial small but strategic changes can be – like Boris’s first policy axe, the Venezuelan oil deal that provided cheap fares for London’s poorest and environmental support for Venezuela’s cities.

Practical revolutionary

Ken Livingstone is a practical revolutionary, and he loves London with a deep and energising reverence. It’s this love for the city rather than the City that breaks through when he speaks of the necessity of bank regulation. ‘I’m a socialist, but it’s not a question of socialism, it’s a question of common sense,’ he explains. ‘Roosevelt did it in 1945, and then Reagan and Thatcher came along and ended 50 years of economic stability. It’s taken a generation to take effect, but that’s when this crisis started. And don’t forget, the very same Tories who are clamouring against New Labour now were there when it started. They might have been in short trousers at the time, but they were totally committed to deregulation.

‘It’s important to remember about Cameron that, although he was only an oiky little nerd at the time, he was Lamont’s adviser on Black Wednesday. Now Osborne and Cameron are once again talking of commitment to reducing the state – just as the world needs large state systems more than ever.

‘For example, all European finance ministers have agreed that finance centres aren’t casinos, except Britain. But if you operated responsibly, if you had even a one per cent tax on financial transactions, that would generate enough money to end poverty.’

It’s about this point that Ken starts talking, very quietly, about a new project for the left – one that encompasses, however reluctantly, a world where workers’ revolutions are a vanishing prospect.

‘Every left activist has to understand that globalisation is inevitable: there are no national solutions any more. What’s important is linking up the struggles in different countries. Debating voters’ rights in the US and the UK; defending Venezuela and Cuba from US imperialism. Looking towards Europe, and towards China.

‘I have a great deal of hope for China. It offers an alternative to the US’s destructive form of capitalism. It’s about to become the leading country in combating climate change. And we must remember that politics isn’t about a choice between pure good and pure evil. It’s about choosing the shade of grey that’s the least grey.’

Infectious energy

Listening to Ken talk about China is almost painful. It calls to mind a certain Olympic closing ceremony where this country was lately humiliated by a clown with an entitlement complex and his jacket flapping open. Ken knows all about China because he was supposed to be there. But whatever the papers say, any snippiness the conversation draws out is almost instantly overwhelmed by an infectious energy: energy for politics, energy for the next project, energy that turns bitterness into black humour. Retirement, for Ken Livingstone, doesn’t mean golfing and easy domesticity. Like a true liberal politics junkie, everything comes back to the state we’re in today.

‘I’m writing my autobiography at present, and I’ve just got to the part where I’m about 17. It’s horrendous stuff. I remember always being the weedy kid at school, always coming in on the mile run second last, just in front of the fat one. My sports teachers all seemed to be rehabilitated Nazi war criminals who believed that humiliation was a good way to make us improve. It wasn’t.’ Which brings us onto crime and the skills crisis.

‘However much I hated them, the way school playing fields have been sold off over the past 20 years means that kids who aren’t academic successes now have less to go to school for. And that causes problems, particularly for young men.

‘In the last 50 years, physical strength has become less and less relevant. If you can’t work in an office, you’re screwed. So not only have boys lost the idea that they can grow up to have a traditional father’s role, head of the household, they’ve also lost the notion that they can sell their physical strength. No wonder they get self-respect out of beating and knifing each other. Nobody’s talking them through the process, nobody’s trying to explain. That’s why I lobbied the government, as we need to continue lobbying the government, for more focused skills training.’

Suddenly, I find a pile of papers thrust into my hands.

‘Now, you can keep a copy of these,’ says Ken. ‘This is the latest from my economic adviser – I get a printout sent to me every day. It explains everything I’ve just been saying about the credit crunch.’ As he starts to scribble down email addresses, I hear myself saying, ‘This doesn’t look like retirement to me.’

Ken gives me a sly little grin. ‘Oh, it isn’t, not really. I’ll be back. I’ll be back in three years. Well – nobody can say for sure, of course, but if Boris dropped dead tomorrow I’d run. I’m only 43 inside!’

Ken has no magic wand, and the British left has no supernatural backing. What we have is everything to play for, in a world waking up after a generation of deregulated markets with a shocking hangover, and what we need is the energy to forge links and create something a tiny bit better. At 63, Ken Livingstone’s energy is catching. Let’s hope it spreads again.

On reading her columns, you might expect Commie Girl to be an effusive, larger-than-life lady with Hunter S Thompson’s grin and Rosa Luxemburg’s haircut. But Rebecca Schoenkopf is neat, petite and fragile-looking, her heart-shaped face traced with the lines of a life lived well and a bodhisattva smile playing on a mouth as foul as a Soho alley after midnight. An obvious assumption is that she is looking askance into the very fabric of your socialist soul; but she has a glass eye, having lost her left in a childhood accident.

‘One of my brothers was throwing a stone at another one of my brothers – and I lost the eye. I was ten. In high school, I just wore an eyepatch, and boys in bars would come over and lift up my patch. Just like that. I mean, how is that acceptable?’

It’s endless questions about the basic assumptions of capitalism, patriarchy and republicanism that have made her columns, with their gleefully despairing leftist humour and little political intimacies, such a phenomenon in the US and across the world. A collection of her journalism, self-titled with her cheek-biting moniker Commie Girl in the OC, has just been published in the UK by Verso.

Schoenkopf is hesitant to discuss the self-branding nature of her work – but Commie Girl in the OC is a brand; a feminist brand with its roots in Gonzo and Riot Grrl and self-assertive socialism, and a clever one at that. The book is a manifesto in the style of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, without any of the gratuitous post-adolescent drug binges. Well, not too many.

‘My book is very modest, really. It’s a compilation of my columns divided into five rough topics – god, love, sex, drugs and rock’n'roll, what’s wrong with the way we live, and politics.’ Simple themes guide the reader around a complex personal philosophy that interrogates salient facts about American life and world politics.

So, is there an overriding theme to her journalism? ‘Eat the rich,’ she says, ‘although I do enjoy going to their parties.’

‘I do a lot of fancy things, you see, and that’s good – it means I can make fun of those fancy things later.’ The Commie Girl brand allows Schoenkopf a measure of cross-political acceptability in the tediously Republican state of California, which she enjoys immensely. ‘I’ll turn up to an event and everyone will be like, “Oh, it’s just Commie Girl!”‘

It has to be asked, given the distinct lack of faux-Stalinist badges and the packet of pre-rolled cigarettes: why ‘Commie’? ‘By communist, I really mean a form of socialism,’ she says, ‘the name’s a little self-mocking. By British standards, I’m a socialist, and a middle-of-the-road one at that, but in the USA, it’s not possible to get very much more publicly left wing. That’s starting to change, though.’

The slow and inexorable revival of American liberalism fascinates and energises Schoenkopf. ‘It’s more and more acceptable to call yourself a liberal these days,’ she says excitedly. ‘The tide is really turning. When Barack Obama is president, we’ll see those changes move faster.’

Despite not being the first American left-winger to desperately evangelise the Obama campaign as a forgone conclusion, she does so with a quiet energy that is infectious. ‘It’ll happen,’ she says. ‘When I think of America today, I think of those four little black girls, burned to death in that church in Alabama in the sixties. And now, pretty soon, we’re going to have two beautiful little black girls of about the same age in the fucking White House. Now, that’s really something.’

Schoenkopf is philosophical about the business of liberal journalism. Her own career started rather inauspiciously with a semi-reluctant stint as an intern on a family friend’s paper. She explained how, stuck for an opening for her first story, she opened the newspaper, ‘and I saw a headline that read: “Jesse heard voices”. And that made me catch myself because my brother, Jesse, was a schizophrenic.’ Jesse committed suicide at 21, when Rebecca was 17. ‘So I sat down and wrote about my brother. It was the first piece of real journalism I ever wrote. When it was published, they ran an ad at the bottom of the page. It had a golden retriever wearing glasses, and it said: “Why is Jesse smiling?”… and there it was. I was meant to be a journalist.’

It’s not been an easy journey. Schoenkopf has fought her way up through the American weekly industry to become a well respected writer while raising a son, Jimmy, who she adopted when she was 22. But every career progression has been made in the face of an industry riddled with prejudice.

‘Male editors – like all high-achieving men – can afford to be lax. They can afford to not be at their best and to take days off, because there will always be a brilliant, keen and enthusiastic woman in a junior role only too delighted to take on the extra work. As a woman working in media, politics, anything, you have to be that extra bit better, try that extra bit harder.’

‘One time I dreamed I was getting finger-fucked by Hillary Clinton’

‘I was in Seattle and I’d just come back from yet another interview for a job I didn’t get, when yet again I’d been told I was a strong candidate, that I was qualified, brilliant at what I do – I am brilliant at what I do – and told I’d been runner-up. Not one of those people I was beaten by was a person of colour, and not one of them was female. That night I dreamed that I was in a hotel room and in walked Hillary Clinton.

‘Don’t the Jungians say that you’re meant to represent every person who appears in your dream? In walked Hillary Clinton, and she was a maid, like Jennifer Lopez in that movie – Maid in Manhattan. And I forced her to finger-fuck me, and she wasn’t enjoying it – hell, I was practically raping her, like …’

At this point, Commie Girl makes a hand gesture I can’t quite bring myself to describe.

‘And I woke and thought, this is it. I’m always going to be getting fucked, I’ll never be in charge, and I’ll always be worked over and raped.’

Book deal or no book deal, Rebecca Schoenkopf has retained the indefatigable energy of dissatisfaction that makes her political writing so compelling. The Commie Girl brand is an essential model for 21st-century feminism of dissidence: darkly defiant, and still sticking it to the squares.

Commie Girl in the OC is published by Verso