It probably wouldn’t work, he said. The audience for opera is in London. I told him I disagreed. We had both just witnessed first-hand a large and enthusiastic audience for opera in Greater Manchester, after all. Not only could the move work, but it would also be a great thing for the UK to have a leading company operating out of one of its most central and fast-growing cities. Allied with Opera North, whose production we had just watched and who tour the entire region from Leeds, it would make this part of the country a global opera powerhouse.

By the time I got off the bus, my companion was telling me how a Manchester ENO would allow talented musicians like him to stay in the North after graduating, rather than feeling forced to move to London, or overseas. “I’m just surprised that you are the only person making the argument,” he said.

The reason nobody has heard the case for a Manchester ENO is that the media coverage of this important arts story has been laughably, atrociously London-centric. “English National Opera fights ‘absurd’ plan to relocate to Manchester,” ran the headline of a story on the BBC. It quoted the ENO’s chief executive Stuart Murphy calling the move “insane” but didn’t counter his analysis with a single northern voice.

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Several newspaper reports accepted, apparently without fact-checking, Murphy’s comparison of London’s “9 million people” with “Manchester’s half a million”. It seems neither the reporters nor the editors on those papers could see the mistake the ENO chief was making, although it seems that Northern readers pointed out the problem to the Guardian. The paper has removed Murphy’s misleading quote and replaced it with “a more accurate comparison between the greater metropolitan populations of London and Manchester”. (The population of Greater Manchester is almost 3 million.)

The ignorance didn’t end there. The Observer’s classical music critic Fiona Maddocks said the ENO plans “certainly make no sense” because Manchester is already “well served” by Opera North — a company that is based in Leeds and usually only comes to Salford for one week every year. Maddocks, perhaps, was straying a little outside her area of expertise: the Observer’s classical desk, as one of my readers emailed me this week, “pretty much exclusively writes about things staged in London”. The reader went on to point out that whereas Opera North’s headquarters, at Leeds’ Howard Assembly Room, are an hour and a half’s drive from central Manchester, “the ENO is about six minutes’ walk away from the Royal Opera House, so who is best served?”

It’s understandable that the art world is shaken by the idea of the ENO moving. It is a loss for most of the people making and writing about opera, because they live in London. And it makes sense for an industry to fight against imminent job losses, and to complain that the decision has been made without proper planning or pitch-rolling in the North. What is unforgivable is that the media acted as a supportive chorus for London-based vested interests. I’ve yet to see a story in the national press that doesn’t frame the ENO funding decision as a disastrous folly or a betrayal of the arts. (Melvyn Bragg, also in the Observer, described the Arts Council decision as “stealing arts cash from London”, as though the capital is entitled to as much as it likes from the national coffers.) And it’s not just me who clocks this London-centricity in British journalism — and hates it.

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“It’s all been reported as ‘London is losing this thing’,” says a journalist from a national newspaper who I spoke to this week (who asked me not to use their name). “So they fucking should,” they went on. “Why should that be in London? If that’s taxpayer funded, if it’s the ‘National Opera’, why shouldn’t it be in Manchester? Why should Manchester residents have to travel to London?”

That journalist is one of the very small cohort of national newspaper correspondents not based in London, covering a patch that can only be described as “the rest of the country”. Of course, that’s impossible. “You’re not covering the country — you’re covering what Londoners want to read about the rest of the country,” this person told me, pointing out that the tabloids are better staffed out here in the wilds than the broadsheets are.

As the coverage of the ENO story makes clear, we don’t have a national press. We have lots of London newspapers whose claim to be national ranges from wafer thin — the Guardian has a staff of four in Manchester — to arguably fraudulent. Most of the national newspapers in England have fewer than five staff correspondents outside London. Some “nationals” don’t appear to have a single one.

“They call themselves national because they are sold in a shop in Cumbria, but they’re not national,” one northern editor told me this week. The papers that claim to speak for the whole country are, in the view of this seasoned reporter, clever variations on the London Evening Standard.

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That’s the paper where I spent the first five years of my career, by the way. I’m a southerner who values the capital’s diverse and noisy journalistic scene. What’s annoying isn’t that the London media exists and is strong and argues eloquently and passionately for the protection and extension of London’s privileges — it’s that it does those things while pretending to be the national media. It makes total sense that newspapers whose editors and reporters almost all live in a single city would reflect that city’s interests and blind spots. But it doesn’t make for very satisfying coverage for those of us living elsewhere.

When I asked my Twitter followers for their favourite examples of London-centric media coverage following the ENO debacle, the answers came thick and fast. One theme was the assumption that everyone lives in London. There was a piece in the Sunday Times property section about moving to York which listed one of the downsides as: “It’s so far away.” There was a column in the New Statesman in which a well-meaning political journalist wrote: “In my view, every journalist should make a New Year’s resolution to get out of London more.”

Lots of replies to my tweet mentioned weather coverage, from the trivial — snow coverage tends to kick in when it’s snowing in the South East — to the rather sad. “When the North East had awful weather early last year, some areas of Northumberland had to wait weeks for all utilities to be restored,” one person wrote, noting that the story and its impact on millions of people was sparsely covered in the national news.

What shocks me, as a relative newcomer to the North, is how bad the public transport is — and how little I’d been prepared for it by reading the national (sorry, London) newspapers. There is no way that the current state of the North’s railways — appalling; unbelievable — would be allowed to continue if it were happening in the South East. It’s often journalists personally experiencing things that lead them to prioritise a story, and very few of them are experiencing the 23 cancelled services every day from Manchester to Leeds.

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Imagine if this kind of disruption took place anywhere near London — actually, we don’t have to imagine: remember the Southern Rail strikes, reported as if it were a national emergency — the editors who frame our national debate would be firing off angry emails to their columnists and news editors from freezing platforms. The stink would be so great that ministers would be forced to drop everything and fix it within days. And yet up here, month after month, despite the attempts of local politicians to raise the issue, the crisis drags on, paralysing large swathes of the country.

After Brexit there seemed to be a moment of self-reflection in the British press, from certain columnists at least, regarding the abject failure to understand the brewing feelings and major demographic shifts that drove a seismic political event that few in London saw coming. But the reason for that short-sightedness was structural, not something a few fleeting trips to the high streets (never the more-important suburbs) of Northern towns is going to fix.

The structural problem is that if you have 95% of your workforce living in one world, you are going to miss a lot of important stories in all the other worlds that make up this country. “You have got an insane number of people sitting together in the same room with the same lives and talking about the same experiences,” as one Northern correspondent put it to me. “It’s utterly bizarre.”

I’m writing this article from The Mill’s office on Cross Street, over the road from where The Manchester Guardian used to be based. That building has long gone and is now a Boots, with a small plaque on the outside wall marking its former use. Within walking distance there used to be massive northern newspaper offices for the Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail — an ecosystem, referred to as “the other Fleet Street”, that lasted for half of the twentieth century.

Technological change put an end to those operations and drove a radical centralisation of our media in London. But the technology we have now means that any news organisation can quite easily have dozens of reporters spread across every region. Suddenly, we would see a different kind of journalism creeping into the papers — one that tells us less about meaningless jockeying between random 20-something political advisors in Westminster, and more about how government policy is impacting people’s lives; how people hundreds of miles from the centre of power are experiencing the British state. The benefits of de-Londonising the media will flow far beyond journalism into policymaking and the nation’s understanding of itself. The newspapers could decide tomorrow that they want to represent this country properly again. And if they want us to call them nationals, they should.

That same evening, less than five hours after the ceremony, someone levered the plaque off the wall with a crowbar and stole it. West Yorkshire Police immediately classed the incident a hate crime and opened an investigation. Hilary Benn, MP for Leeds Central, spoke for many when he declared: “It is not who we are as a city.”

In recent years, attempting to do justice to the memory of David Oluwale has been central to Leeds’s hopes of presenting itself as a more inclusive and tolerant city. Just weeks before the Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque was fixed in place last month, a bridge bearing Oluwale’s name was completed, spanning the river where he was found drowned in May 1969. More than half a century later, Leeds now finds itself contending with uncomfortable memories the city thought it had overcome.

When David Oluwale arrived in Britain as a stowaway on board a cargo ship carrying groundnuts from Lagos to Hull, he hoped to find a “New Jerusalem”. Within a few years, those hopes had been firmly dashed: in 1953, he was committed to a mental asylum following a violent altercation with Leeds police officers. Oluwale didn’t surface for another eight years. The effervescent dancer known to fellow Nigerians in Leeds as “Yankee” emerged a broken man. Now homeless, he picked up the kinds of criminal convictions born of living on the streets.

In the late Sixties, the climate across Britain was becoming more hostile for black people. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Leeds. In April 1968, the same month Enoch Powell delivered his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, Inspector Geoffrey Ellerker was assigned to Millgarth police station in Leeds city centre, teaming up with Sergeant Kenneth Kitching in a pairing that would make Oluwale’s grim life even more hellish. The two officers made it their mission to clear vagrants off their patch, but Oluwale came in for special attention. Calling him their “playmate”, they urinated on him while he slept, forced him to bang his head on the pavement as “penance”, and drove him to the city limits where they would dump him in the dead of night. When Oluwale was arrested for disorderly conduct, the police entered “WOG” as his nationality on his charge sheet.

On 4 May 1969, a group of boys found his body when they were out walking by the River Aire close to Knostrop sewerage works, a few miles downstream from the city centre. The only mourners at his pauper’s funeral were the undertakers. But 18 months later, after a police cadet reported rumours he’d heard about Ellerker and Kitching, Oluwale’s body was exhumed. A Scotland Yard investigation concluded that the officers had pushed or caused Oluwale to fall in the river in the early hours of 18 April 1969, and the two were eventually tried for manslaughter and several assaults.

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Yet the trial at Leeds Town Hall brought further attacks on Oluwale. “What right have we to call him a citizen?” Basil Wigoder QC, representing Ellerker, asked the jury in his opening speech. “His only claim to being a citizen was that every now and then he was lodged in the local prison.” Even the judge failed to hide his distaste, describing Oluwale as “a dirty, filthy, violent vagrant”. Though Ellerker and Kitching received prison sentences for a number of assaults, they were ultimately found not guilty of manslaughter on the direction of this judge: the witnesses who’d seen two uniformed men chasing someone by the river could not identify Ellerker or Kitching and could not even be sure of the colour of the man being pursued. Despite the two officers’ violent hounding of Oluwale over several months, the judge concluded that there was no evidence they had caused him to drown.

That didn’t stop football fans taunting the police from the terraces: They’re the boys from Millgarth and they don’t care, they threw Oluwale in the River Aire. But the unsettling story of Oluwale slipped slowly from the broader public mind.

In the Seventies and Eighties, no northern multicultural city was without its racial antagonism, and none could boast of healthy relations between its police forces and black communities. As the socio-economic climate worsened, those strains intensified. And Leeds entered a particularly dark period. During a riot in the Chapeltown area on Bonfire Night 1975, several West Yorkshire Police officers received serious injuries.

Days before the Bonfire Night riot, Wilma McCann — a woman from Chapeltown — became Peter Sutcliffe’s first known victim. The Yorkshire Ripper was known as the “Leeds Ripper” in the early days, as his first three murders were in the city. This was the Leeds that David Peace excavated in his blistering Red-Riding quartet: a grey concrete hell “abandoned to the crows and the Ripper”. All the ills of the Seventies — the misogyny, the civic corruption and police violence — were rampant in Peace’s city.

It was in this same period that Leeds became synonymous with racism, mostly down to the reputation of the followers of its football club. National Front publications such as Bulldog were sold outside Elland Road containing proud league tables of the “most racist fans”: Leeds United were usually near the top. Black visiting players were regularly pelted with bananas.

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Tony Harrison’s 1985 state-of-the-nation poem V. didn’t help Leeds’s reputation. It achieved notoriety with a film adaptation aired on Channel 4 in 1987, becoming the first time the word “cunt” was uttered on British television. V. was inspired by a visit to Holbeck cemetery during the Miners’ Strike, when Harrison saw tombstones, including that of his parents, desecrated with swastikas and NF slogans and the ground littered with Harp lager cans.

“What is it that this aggro act implies?” the poet asks in his clash with the vandal, an alienated skinhead who’d “been on t’dole all my life in fucking Leeds!”  The poet wants to suggest that the hooligans’ “mindless desecration” is something more than lager-fuelled frustration at Leeds United letting them down every week. He portrays it as springing from feelings of loss: of real jobs, a sense of place, dignity and security. Harrison’s V. was a moving cry for a more united country, a revival of post-war decencies and solidarity.

I was teaching in Leeds in 2004 when I came across the then-obscured story of David Oluwale. In those days, I was immersed in the novels of David Peace, though the contemporary city was confident and buoyant.

But there was another Leeds that stood outside this new prosperity. The British National Party’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim message resonated in poorer parts of the city, particularly after the suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005. Three of the bombers had been raised in the Beeston area of Leeds, coming from the close-knit terraced streets near to the cemetery that had inspired Harrison’s poem. A leaked membership list revealed that Morley, a few miles down the road from Beeston, had more BNP members than any other constituency in the country. Though the BNP had been picking up council seats in the region, it still came as a profound shock when, in June 2009, a BNP candidate was elected to the European Parliament for the Yorkshire and Humber area. The declaration of what was the party’s first major breakthrough into the political mainstream was made at Leeds Town Hall, the setting for Oluwale’s trial.

Lifting Oluwale’s story from the shadows of Leeds’s memory into the centre of its public history, and onto a plaque, had been a long, slow process. My own 2007 book was part of that effort. When it was adapted for the stage by Oladipo Agboluaje two years later, a large image of Oluwale’s face — a mugshot after one of his brutal arrests — was plastered onto the theatre wall, facing accusingly towards Millgarth police station.

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Back then, however, there was little appetite for a permanent memorial to Oluwale. Leeds Civic Trust acknowledged that his was a tragic case, but I was told this was not sufficient to merit a plaque. Such honour was bestowed on celebrated scientists and writers, the great brewers and tailors of Leeds, sporting heroes or social reformers. Marking a terrible event so that later generations might learn its lessons was not deemed good enough. It took the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the United States to change hearts and minds in Leeds.

Fast forward to last month, and the desecration of Oluwale’s memorial serves as a bracing reminder that Leeds is still doing battle with its historical demons. This was no random act of hooliganism; the perpetrator was no “HARPaholic yob”, as Harrison calls his Holbeck cemetery vandal. In an echo of the original offences against Oluwale, someone had set out to deny his citizenship and humanity.

The perpetrator might well turn out to be a solitary, embittered individual, but it comes in the context of a white English backlash against multiculturalism and against those calling, with growing confidence and assertiveness, for a different vision of Britishness. The recent Black Lives Matter assaults on monuments to white power and dominance seem to have provoked a kneejerk response: you tear down our history; I’ll tear down yours.

But the desecration of Oluwale’s memorial has also proved to be a spectacular own goal. The removal of the plaque was bigger news than its unveiling. Many more people, in Leeds and beyond, are now aware of the story of Oluwale. His name cannot be erased: a replacement plaque has already been crowdfunded and an image of the original one has been projected onto screens and billboards across the city. For all that Leeds is wrestling with its past, Tony Harrison’s dream of a more united society might not be a vain hope after all.

Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior research seminar. First, a visiting speaker from another University would spend an hour explaining the details of his new theory to an ostentatiously bored and listless audience. Grimacing through the faint applause, he would brace himself for what we all knew was to follow.

Previously slouched, comatose-looking figures in the audience would ominously stir into life. Hands would shoot up. The objections would start. Frank accusations of confusion, question-begging, inconsistency, and contradiction would be made, against which the stammering speaker would defend himself as best he could. Tenacious questioners would follow up on their original objections and follow up again, to be stopped only when the speaker eventually muttered the shaming words, equivalent to a “give-up” signal in judo: “I’ll have to think a bit more about that.”  Victory achieved, the questioner would fall back in his chair, visibly satisfied to an almost post-coital degree.

The speaker’s immediate ordeal over, he would be dragged to the pub and force-fed copious amounts of alcohol, then on to some probably awful restaurant, where colleagues who were particularly socially unaware — which, let’s face it, was most of them — would continue explaining to him precisely why he was completely and utterly wrong, with huge enthusiasm, late into the night.

When I was a Masters student at St Andrews, the stated aim of some faculty members was to humiliate visiting speakers, with a “win” for the “home” department declared afterwards. A distinguished Professor from Australia once told me that, years later, he still woke up in the night sweating, reliving how badly his paper at St Andrews had gone. At Leeds during my PhD, there were still a couple of Wittgenstein’s original acolytes knocking about. Apparently first learnt at the feet of the master, the habit had spread among staff of theatrically wrinkling and striking the forehead in an exaggeratedly contemptuous manner when they heard something they didn’t like, in full view of the visiting speaker. Sometimes they would wheel round, sneeringly turn their backs on the speaker, and hold their heads in their hands.

Frankly, these places scared the bejesus out of me. At St Andrews, I think I only ever spoke twice in class. The second time, I was scoffed at by the teacher so effectively that I didn’t speak in class again there, ever. In Leeds, I used to shake with anxiety walking down the endless departmental corridor. Towards the end of my time there, I finally dared to put up my hand to ask a question at a research seminar, and thought I must be having a heart attack, so loudly was my heart banging in my chest.

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Most places back then were like this. Academic philosophers were nearly all men, and many (most?) of them were eccentric, obsessive, grumpy men with minds like steel traps. Philosophy departments were places where derision, incredulity, and scorn were manifested on a daily basis without any attempt to hide it.

You probably expect me to say how terrible this all was. Actually, I wonder if it wasn’t the best of all possible worlds in comparison to what came next.

***

In 2011, a report came out that was circulated widely within UK philosophy departments. This was a joint initiative from the British Philosophical Association (BPA) and the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), entitled “Women in Philosophy in the UK”. Its aim was to present a new survey indicating women’s relatively low participation in higher echelons of the philosophy profession, despite large numbers of them at Undergraduate level. At the time, SWIP was an organisation I cared about partly for self-interested reasons, naturally assuming they represented me given my membership of the female sex. Later on, when more senior, I would get involved with their mentoring schemes for women in early career stages.

This report enthusiastically leaned into the fashionable theories and buzzwords of the time, hypothesising that the main causes of women’s diminishing engagement in Philosophy over time must be men’s “implicit bias” against women, and women’s experience of “stereotype threat”, rather than, say, the effects of early educational influences, economic or other structural influences ultimately to do with motherhood, or possible sex-based difference across populations. The salient point for us here, though, is that one of the report’s conclusions was that women were being deterred from postgraduate degrees and jobs in philosophy because of male aggression in arguments. For instance, the report noted:

“One piece of stereotypically male behaviour is an aggressive style of argument in the seminar room. This might include, for example, displaying hostility — by words, tone of voice or body language — towards a speaker or audience (or a class discussion) member whom one thinks has failed to grasp a point or adequately address an objection, or pursuing a point well past the stage where it is obvious that the speaker has no adequate response.”

Since stereotype threat and implicit bias were thought to be difficult to eradicate (and arguably are even more so now, since it’s turned out they probably don’t exist as robustly evidenced phenomena), by far the easiest-looking response to the report was to try to make philosophical discussions less intimidating. This project was taken seriously by many colleagues across the country, including my own. One by one, philosophy departments started to advertise on their websites that they abided by the BPA/SWIP’s new Good Practice Guide. By 2018, a study of the impact of this scheme was able to report that: “As a result of the seminar policies many universities reported that the atmosphere was more constructive and less aggressive.”

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Based on my own experience of both giving and attending talks around the country, I too can attest to a change in social norms in the philosophy seminar room during this period — fuelled partly by the influence of the report but also by the increasing numbers of North Americans getting jobs in UK Universities back then, and so bringing cultural norms of US academia with them. (Indeed, the two are arguably linked: one of the BPA/SWIP report’s main authors is American.)

The most obvious manifestation of this change was that younger British members of departments started talking like fake Yanks. An implausible degree of positivity in talks became the norm, even amongst the otherwise terminally morose. Upward inflection became commonplace, as did the intensifier “super”, an implied exclamation mark, and an unfeasibly perky demeanour. Ostentatious expressions of folksy informality became more common: some audience members started — shudder — bringing knitting along to talks. Meanwhile speakers, under a guise of flattening the hierarchies, could show off to others about their acquaintance with powerful figures in the profession by discussing their work on a casual first-name basis (“So here’s what Crispin thinks about higher order vagueness!”).

During question periods, there was also a noticeable shift. Elaborate rules would be announced by the chair at the beginning of every question period, the better to try to control unruly audience members. “Junior and minority scholars” would be prioritised over others to ask their questions first; “a hand” should be raised for a main question; “a finger” for a subsidiary follow-up; “hands” absolutely could not be smuggled in as “fingers”, and so on. A typical interaction between chair and questioner would go: (Chair:) “Is that really a finger, or is it a hand?” (Questioner:) “It’s definitely a finger!” (Reader, it was hardly ever a finger).

It also became much more common for audience members to start by thanking speakers fulsomely for their talk, then offer banal and unfocused lines of questioning such as: “I was really interested to hear you say X in your talk. Could you say a little more about that?” (Other audience members, inwardly: please God no!). Instead of trying to eviscerate the speaker with a devastating question, the new tendency was to try to be constructive and collaborative in one’s approach, identifying not what was wrong with the speaker’s argument, but what was right about it. Generally it seemed to me that, as ostentatious expressions of civility went up, standards of inquiry dropped — because as a questioner, you no longer had to have grasped the form of the argument to ask an acceptable question.

Unlike the authors of the BPA/SWIP report, I’m not convinced that the originally dominant argumentative style within philosophy departments was ever particularly testosterone-fuelled, though males were certainly its principal authors. They weren’t beating each other up, after all. In fact, outside the seminar room, I have found most male philosophers fairly passive and confrontation-averse, which presumably partly explains why so many have proved supine when it comes to rejecting fashionable gender metaphysics.

Whatever the truth about its origins, the demise of the old approach meant that aggression was still knocking around, but now it had to go somewhere else. As the numbers of PhDs being disgorged into the philosophy job market every year increased, and the number of jobs available decreased, competition amongst philosophers, always high anyway, became even more intense than usual. Where that aggression had formerly been expressed and so somewhat contained within the combative rituals of the seminar room, it now sought new outlets. And what it found was the internet.

***

Though more sensible academics tend to eschew social media altogether, Facebook is a favourite platform for many. Many spend lots of downtime scrolling and commenting throughout the working day. Even the most antisocial of philosophers is usually able to build up large numbers of Facebook “friends” on the basis of shared acquaintances in a close-knit profession, and this often includes lots of graduate students and post-docs.

Around the same time as the BPA/SWIP report was published, and as the popularity of Facebook as a platform was taking off, some senior philosophers realised it provided them with the means to build up secure little fiefdoms — not really private, given the large numbers of colleagues and students looking on, but not really public either. Within a few years, high on the fumes of the media attention being given to a few high profile sex scandals in the profession, these same people were furiously cementing a narrative that philosophy was a terribly dangerous and threatening place, not just for women but for other minorities too.

Now, whether or not academic philosophy was (or is) a truly terrible place for minorities is not my question here, but what was clear back then was that these people really, really wanted to believe it was. Particular stories about harassment and prejudice to individuals that emerged online would be seized upon as obviously indicative of what must be happening to a particular minority at scale in the profession, accompanied by heartfelt exhortations to “listen” to that minority, as if its members were functionally interchangeable. And because a narrative like this needs both heroes and villains and a clear storyline, there was also a lot of sneering about white males and other ideological enemies, and the emotional blackmailing of presumed weaklings into recanting public opinions the in-group didn’t like.

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As these figures virtue-signalled, gate-kept, and generally queen-bee’d around in virtual spaces, they consolidated their own power. An example was being set for younger onlookers, desperately hungry to get into the profession permanently, and standing relatively little chance given the paucity of jobs and the high number of competitors. It told them that self-aggrandising and bullying others was acceptable in the philosophy profession as long as it was in the name of social justice. And it told them that drawing attention to their own presumed victimhood was good for their careers, since it was likely to draw the approval of more powerful others.

One website for early career researchers, started around then, was called “The Philosopher’s Cocoon”, helpfully indicating the profession’s new favoured approach. Roughly speaking, this approach goes: tell junior researchers in some particular identity group that the world of academic philosophy will be particularly harsh for them, because of who they are; isolate them from evidence that might disconfirm this, or explain it differently; uplift any narrative that apparently supports it; and reward their ensuing expressions of anxiety with ostentatious cosseting, soothing, and patting. (And also — for the love of God and the continuing flow of student fees and cheap labour — don’t mention that for most philosophy postgrads, there will be no glorious butterfly stage after the cocoon, because there just aren’t enough academic jobs to go round.)

Soon enough, ambitious youngsters who were able to tolerate the obviously infantilising element got the hang of this new game. Via self-published blogposts, comments, and open letters pleading with the profession, they readily became the sort of public victim they sensed their elders would like to see.

Around this time, lots of Facebook groups and dedicated blogs sprang up to support particular identity groups in philosophy. The dynamics of these online spaces were sociologically fascinating to witness. I was a silent member of the group “Academic Mamas in Philosophy” for a while, as well as its parent group the gruesome behemoth “Academic Mamas”, and I still grin when I remember the implicit hierarchies, barely suppressed rivalries, moralised hyperbole, and passive-aggressive spats about exactly who was having to do the “emotional labour” of “educating” others about their linguistic transgressions. (Most of all, I remember the off-the-charts humblebragging: “Hey mamas, just wanted to get your views on whether an hour a week of screen time — supervised, of course — is excessive for a seven-year-old kiddo? And if so, can anyone hook me up to some cool educational websites?”. Ruefully, I would lift my gaze from my computer to wink at my own children, mainlining Penguin biscuits and watching Cars 2 on a loop for the 14th time that day).

But to get back to the main point: by 2017, when junior philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published her article in the journal Hypatia arguing that if transwomen are women, “trans-racial” people like Rachel Dolezal must be black, the groundwork for a debacle of carnivalesque proportions was already prepared. Though Tuvel was earnestly treating her argument as a modus ponens (i.e. since the premises about transwomen seemed true, the conclusion about trans-racialism and Dolezal must also be true), it was obvious to most readers that equally, her argument could work as a modus tollens (i.e. since the conclusion about trans-racialism and Dolezal seems obviously false, there must be something wrong with the premise about transwom… OH SHIT HELP LOOK OVER THERE!).

The resulting attempts to distract from this inconvenient implication involved mass denunciation on a hundred Facebook pages and blogs, widespread public huffing about “failure to engage with the scholarship of trans people and philosophers of colour”, and a comically pompous open letter alleging Tuvel’s incompetence as a researcher signed by big names in feminist philosophy and gender studies. A craven public apology from Hypatia’s own associate editors for having published the article in the first place followed.

The outcome of all of this, predictably, was fear. No-one wanted to be the next Tuvel, and especially not younger and more precarious members of the profession, but the more established ones didn’t much feel like it either. The traditional means of defending a position — using arguments — wasn’t fashionable in online spaces anymore. Instead, moves formerly condemned in first year logic classes were in the ascendancy: ad hominems, failures of charitable interpretation, begging the question, confusion of sufficient conditions with necessary ones, derivations of “is” from “ought”, and all the rest. Any white male over the age of 40 with a permanent job and a modicum of self-awareness took the temperature of the times and slid away to the edges of the online world, confining their robust discussion in public to impenetrable questions about panpsychism or metaphysical grounding.

In 2018, I wrote my own blogpost, having noticed that it could be quite an effective medium for getting philosophers’ attention. I wanted to suggest to them that there was a peculiar and undesirable silence in academic philosophy on the obvious problems around legal self-ID in relation to the Gender Recognition Act, which at that point was being discussed furiously elsewhere in the UK as part of a government consultation.

Reader, you probably already know the rest.

***

To date, to my knowledge, neither the British Philosophical Association nor the Society for Women in Philosophy have ever commented publicly on the circumstances of my resignation from my post at Sussex University. But in October 2021, at around the same time I was facing the prospect of men letting off flares at my campus workplace, angry with me for holding views about the importance of naming biological sex, they published another report on “Women in Philosophy”. This one followed up on their original one after ten years and summarised what they thought had changed. Utterly predictably, one of the things that had changed was that by now they weren’t talking about women anymore.

This new report, written by the original two authors, pretends not to notice that the old one was aimed at improving the lot of females in philosophy. It now says that the focus is “gender”, and talks of “woman” and “man” as “identities”, so making a nonsense of the idea that its aim is somehow continuous with that of the previous project. A “methodological note” describes a “newly included nonbinary gender category” in the associated survey of philosophers, but complains with regret that the number of non-binary people recorded in the survey is probably inaccurate, because departments have “inadequate reporting processes for students to change the gender on their records”.

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The report seamlessly adapts to the present cultural climate in other ways too. Though the notion of “implicit bias” is still hanging in there, “stereotype threat” — so heavily leaned on in 2011 — is out with barely a mention. And “intersectional oppression” is now in, a mere 33 years after Kimberlé Crenshaw first wrote about it.

Also predictably, the new report also declares that “philosophy is unwelcoming to trans philosophers”. By “philosophy”, they mean me, and a handful of others still hanging in there within the university system, argumentatively defending age-old, culturally ubiquitous, and still perfectly functional understandings of “woman” and “man” in terms of “adult human female” and “adult human male”. To try to demonstrate their lurid assertion about the environment for trans people, the authors link the reader to an article in the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly, in which non-binary author Robin Dembroff writes:

“The situation in philosophy is, to be blunt, a massive, complex, and thorny transgender trashfire. This trashfire manifests most explicitly in the context of social media, blogs, interpersonal interactions, and the occasional journal publication, and it has serious repercussions. (To name one, a number of high-profile court briefings opposing trans rights in both the United States and the United Kingdom cite blog posts by philosophers such as Kathleen Stock … as evidence that trans persons are dangerous and deluded.)”

Now as a matter of fact, none of this is true, and the footnote supplied by Dembroff to supposedly demonstrate the truth of the last parenthesis doesn’t even come close to doing so. But the energy drains out of me when I think about seriously trying to get the report’s authors, or Dembroff — or anyone at all working in feminist philosophy in a University these days — to correct the public record. For I know by now that in their line of business, stating the truth isn’t remotely the point.

This is adapted from a post originally published on Kathleen Stock’s Substack.

Una, the graphic novelist and artist, grew up in the same world I did. I spent my youth in a small, white town in the northeast during a deep economic recession;  the only work available was in a very gloomy factory, 20 miles away. Racism was creeping and insidious. The National Front would recruit by standing outside our sink school and handing out leaflets, with headlines about immigrants “taking the jobs” of white men.

Most of the young blokes in the neighbourhood became skinheads, the few Asian families who lived there constantly attacked. After they learned I was a lesbian, I was targeted by the skinheads too. Walking to the shops on our council estate was deeply unpleasant as I was fearful I might bump into groups of young men, looking for distraction from the boredom and poverty.

Even the boys who defended me against the thugs frightened me. I was reminded of all this when I read Eve, new graphic novel by author Una, which though ostensibly about the climate crisis, also considers Right-wing populism and Left-wing authoritarianism. In her book the anti-fascists deployed the same tactics as the racists — just as I remembered from my own experience, and just as we’re seeing today.

I picked Eve up because I had so loved Una’s previous book, Becoming Unbecoming, all about experiencing sexual exploitation at the same time that the Peter Sutcliffe’s psychological cosh was terrorising young women. That book spoke to me because I came of age in the same time and place that Sutcliffe mutilated and killed six of his 13 victims.

The new book is also set up North, in a town similar to Keighley. It has a beautiful landscape, a diverse population — and a lot of tension. But this time it is set in the future. It is, Una tells me, about her worries for her children and the next generation. “It’s hard to talk to my own kids because I don’t feel optimistic for them,” she says. And so she funnelled all those worries into the book.

It is all pretty abstract. But if there is a story, it is about how a young girl and her family cope as society slides into totalitarianism. Their world is in turmoil, something we can relate to in our current angry political moment; and the family fears feel familiar — like something we’re about to experience ourselves. Following some sort of life-changing catastrophe, Eve leaves her community and sets off alone to seek a new way to live.

One of the things Una was trying to work through in the story were her memories of that tension in the Seventies. Because she was something of an outcast, she was protected somewhat from the poisonous views: “I knew not to trust what people say when they are in that racist headspace.” The best that most people who might be a target for these attitudes can – and could — do in the Seventies is just get on with their lives and ignore it. Which is precisely what Eve’s family is doing. “Eve is a sort of ideal, artistic, bolshy, outdoorsy loner,” Una tells me. “She had the childhood I wished I’d had. I wrote her as a lesbian because I didn’t want the story to be about Adam and Eve, but Eve and Eve.”

In the novel Eve’s best friend, Si, is a mixed race boy who ends up fighting the fascists. He means well, but he soon becomes more enamoured with the fight than the cause.

As Eve’s mother says in the book: “These kids grow up with the constant soundtrack of spite, resentment, envy, despair… then they pick up this weekend, superiority-based victimhood…Bad things on the Internet. A few psychopaths. That’s all it takes.”

This is what’s happened in today’s world, with many on the Left using social media to bully and harangue women and some minority groups. They claim to be on the “right side of history”, but they are causing misery and distress. Eve refuses to be online and won’t even consider having a Nokia mobile. She describes the internet as being “like a virus, infecting people… and we all like to think we are immune.”

I couldn’t cope with the homophobic bullying when I was growing up; I decide to leave home to look for work. My mum wasn’t happy, it was the last thing she wanted, but she showed me nothing but support. She understood there was nothing there for me, and that my world was becoming a living hell. I needed to leave everyone I loved behind. Eve, in the book, does the same. She walks away from safety and security into the unknown.

When I moved to Leeds, it felt much better. There were lesbians, feminists and, although predominantly still white back in 1979, the city was home to a number of people from black British and immigrant communities.

But the racism remained fierce. The National Front chose Elland Road football ground to recruit from and would sell its newsletter every Saturday morning in the town centre. I lost count of the number of times the flat in which I lived with Rosie, who was mixed race, was vandalised and daubed with racist and anti-lesbian slogans. In the pubs, my girlfriend would be asked “Where are you from?”, and Rosie would answer “Hull”. I was seen by my family and those I’d left behind as someone in constant conflict with the world.

This was 40 years ago. And, yet, we can see the same flames being fanned today. There they are there in Batley and Spen, where race baiting is rife and is poisoning the polls. And the electorate is just getting angrier and angrier. I was the same back then, in constant conflict with the world. Every advert on TV, every comment from a man, every single thing made me angry. Si is angry about the world he inhabits but has nowhere to go other than into battle alongside the totalitarian Left. Si may think he is counteracting the right-wingers, but in fact is becoming almost as bad. Luckily, I found feminism before I could be swept into a hard-Left faction which would have allowed me to act upon my frustration with the ruling classes.

As far as Eve is concerned, she escapes into the beauty and serenity of nature and her writing, which is exactly what I did as a teenager in order to shut out the ugly reality of the despair and hatred all around me.

But Eve has little faith in her writing skills, despite her mum’s encouragement and praise. Reading Una’s novel uncovered a buried memory for me. As a child, I used to write poetry and, because my dad kept promising to decorate my bedroom and never getting round to it (he worked long shifts and he never had the time or energy), I would scrawl them on my bedroom wall. In these poems I raged against the poverty, violence and brutality towards women and girls, and looked to the day when I could leave that town and escape the pain.

Una channels all her anger through the book, which poses some uncomfortable questions about the kind of society we’re building. The imagery of a world heading into dystopia is powerful and scary, with Una uses the metaphors of racism and fierce nationalism. There is politics: the shadow of Brexit, the idea of northern deprivation, and the fall of the red wall.

But the novel does manage to invoke a feeling of both hope and impending disaster, as though one force is in constant battle with the other. Which, of course, it is.

Eve is a book about human relationships, and in particular mothers and daughters, as well as how we build and maintain community and friendship. Human weakness and conflict are juxtaposed with hopeful futures and painful pasts. It is speculative fiction that feels incredibly timely. The questions threaded through the narrative is, “where will it all lead”, and “what kind of society do we wish to leave behind”?

As Eve says towards the end of the book: “We’ve wasted decades, arguing about things that didn’t matter.”

In the war between fascists and anti-racists in the Batley and Spen campaign, accusations of homophobia and bigotry have been targeted towards young Asian men, and the white, openly lesbian Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, has been aggressively challenged on her position on the Middle East conflict.

Everyone is certain that the arguments about such issues are about the things that do matter, but are we wasting our energy by entering into conflict with those that will never listen? If we wish to avoid slipping further into the dystopia depicted in Eve, we need to wake up to what is staring us in the face.

Back in my hometown recently, I heard from third generation Asians and newly settled migrants from southeast Europe. All had previously voted UKIP. All were disillusioned with the Labour Party, telling me they believe it could deepen divisions between minority groups if they ever regain power. I felt sad remembering the hopes and dreams of my youth, and the boys from my estate who got sucked in by racists. As Una so clearly sets out in Eve, we have choices, and we are standing not by the crossroads, but on the precipice.

‘Eve’ is published by Virago

Set up by West Yorkshire Police (WYP) and Leeds City Council (LCC), the rules look simple: women can ply their trade within a certain area, between the hours of 8pm and 6am, without fear of arrest. Men can openly solicit sex from cars or on foot, so long as they stay within the boundaries of the zone. The area is policed, and a well-funded service provides condoms, tea and support for the dozens of women who are probably prostituting in order to buy drugs, whether for themselves or their partners.

Several security cameras cover the area, and a number of yellow bins are visible, in which the women and their punters are encouraged to drop used condoms. Every day, cleaners arrive to remove last night’s debris — which usually includes needles and other drug paraphernalia, empty booze bottles, vomit and items of women’s clothing.

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There is ample evidence from residents and other sources that prostitution has bled outside of the zone and into surrounding areas, and that a number of houses on the outskirts have become brothels. There are regular sightings of punters having sex with women in public, including in residential gardens, and women are often heard screaming while being attacked. I have spent time on the zone since 2014, and have spotted pimps, traffickers and drug dealers in and around the area. Many of the zone’s residents, including some of the women who work there, disagree with the recent report that the Managed Approach has been a success.

Campaigners against the zone believe that police and other agencies care little for the safety of the women, now they are supposedly “contained”. Speaking to residents, police, the women and the punters, I have developed a bleak impression of the situation. The punters, many of whom travel from outside of the city, are able to buy a woman with the same ease with which they might pick up a burger, often treating them like meat. “Because they can’t get arrested, they think they can do anything they liked,” says Angel*, a woman who sold sex on the zone during 2018. “I’ve been raped, and one man pissed all over me once and took a photo.”

Sammy*, who was pimped on her 17th birthday straight into the zone by her “boyfriend”, tells me that the police “don’t give a fuck about the women”. She says: “One night I was screaming my head off when a nasty punter got really rough with me, but these two coppers just walked past. All they want is to shove us away from the city centre so we don’t put off the tourists and those going out for meals.” Established local business owners in Holbeck have reported that trade is down because many potential customers avoid the area.

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This zone came into being because pressure was mounting on the police and local council to do something about street prostitution in the centre of Leeds. Residents and workers, sick of stepping over used condoms and fending off harassment from kerb crawlers looking for business, had filed enough complaints to make the problem a headache for the authorities. Arresting the women was counter-productive: all that happened was that the courts would fine them, which led to the “revolving door” situation of the women going straight back on to the streets in order to pay up, because they had no money.

But LCC and WYP had a choice: the money spent on containing the problem could have gone into exiting and drug rehabilitation services, for instance. Instead, the authorities have made it easier for pimps and punters to exploit the women, abandoning the prostitutes to a life of hell — and making residents feel unsafe.

There have been a number of rapes and sexual assaults within the zone, and in 2015, a few months after it became operational, Daria Pionko was murdered by a punter there. Pionko’s murder thrust Holbeck firmly into the national spotlight and saw serious questions being asked about the long-term viability of the experiment. And yet it continued. A few years later, in 2018, a Holbeck woman was raped on her way home from work by a group of men who assumed she was a prostitute.

My most recent visit to the Holbeck zone was in February. I arrived at its border around 10am and saw several women braving the cold and looking for business, despite it being hours past curfew time. Walking around, I saw carnage: dozens of used condoms and some blood-specked needles, as well as human faeces and empty bottles of spirits.

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One group of local feminists, including sex trade survivors, set up Campaign to End Leeds Sex Trade (CELST) in 2018. They roundly reject the conclusion of the recent report, saying it reads “like a fairy tale” to those living and working in the area. “Criminal gangs will be celebrating if this zone is maintained,” says CELST founder Fiona Broadfoot, who escaped prostitution in the 1990s:

“The vast majority of women on the zone don’t even speak English and could well be trafficked. Drug dealers peddle their goods openly with impunity. The punters use their privilege and entitlement to pay a pittance to the most vulnerable women in society.”

I spoke to Paul* who lives next door to three young Romanian women. He said: “Men come to the house all hours of the day and night. I have only seen one of them leave the house in months and she was accompanied by a man. I worry that they are being trafficked.”

The report failed to mention that the sex trade has expanded in Holbeck as a result of the zone. Meanwhile complaints of sexual assault have doubled, and rates of gonorrhoea, syphilis and chlamydia have risen significantly in Leeds.

Leeds Councillor Sarah Field is one of the most vocal critics of the zone within LCC. Field is furious that the authors of the report have recommended that the zone continue and, like me, believes that the only possible way to reduce the harm of the sex trade is to help the women exit and to deter the punters from buying sex by threatening arrest.

“Once again we see academics enthralled by what they call ‘sex work’ while they would never live in Holbeck, nor entertain the idea of their daughters or wives ‘working’ there. Adequately funded exit strategies remains the only way to stop vulnerable women being sold by men to other men on the streets of Leeds, with our council calling it success.”

The founders of the Holbeck zone should have seen the warning signs coming from countries such as the Netherlands. Having set up zones in a number of areas since legalisation, Dutch politicians have since admitted defeat and closed down every single one.

The first tipplezone (tolerance zone) opened in The Hague in 1983, with eight other cities following suit over the next three decades. As with the Leeds experiment, the aim of tipplezones was to deal with complaints of residents in the areas frequented by street prostitutes, and to ensure safety for the women. But the tipplezones did not deter violence from the punters, and trafficking, including of underage girls, increased, as did rates of HIV.

In 2004, Job Cohen — the then mayor of Amsterdam, which is known as “the vagina of Europe” for its highly visible sex trade — announced: “We’ve realised this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but those big crime organisations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings, and other criminal activities.”

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While those selling sex should be treated as victims, not criminals, decriminalising the pimps and punters is not the answer. A number of other states, including Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, France, Sweden and Israel have adopted the Nordic Model, in which the pimps and punters are criminalised, while those selling sex are decriminalised and offered support to leave the sex trade.

That might include drug and alcohol rehabilitation programmes, counselling, access to safe accommodation, and, where necessary, parenting skills. Training and re-education can give some women the confidence and ability to access gainful employment — and because prostitution is not criminalised, those who exit it aren’t automatically hindered by criminal records in seeking other work.

The Leeds zone has been thought up and maintained by those who see “the oldest profession” as an “inevitability”. But the women of Leeds deserve better than a strip of industrial wasteland and a few condoms. They deserve jobs and a future. The Managed Approach is an open invitation to the most disenfranchised women with the least choices in life, to enter a life of hell; there is no justification for leaving these women to die of drug overdoses, HIV or even murder.

The legitimisation of prostitution, often referred to by the women involved as “paid rape” is morally reprehensible. And as for the men that fuel this vile trade: it’s high time they were given a loud and clear message that women are not for sale.

*These names have been changed.

The last few years of politics have tested loyalties and fractured tribes; for many, it’s tempting to disengage altogether. We have asked contributors to remind us of why politics matters, by reflecting on their formative years. This series of political awakenings shows how family, feelings and unlikely accidents can shape a lifetime of politics…

One night in November 1980, I was followed on my way home from the pub. I was 18, newly arrived in Leeds and living in a YWCA hostel. At the time, the young women of northern England were living under a reign of terror; a serial killer operating in the region had already killed 12 women.

The man who followed me was of medium height with a dark, full beard, wiry hair and black, piercing eyes. I ran into another pub and managed to shake him off. Friends persuaded me to report it to the police and I completed a Photofit, but it was obvious that the officers weren’t taking me seriously.

The next day, the body of the serial killer’s final victim, Jacqueline Hill, was found less than half a mile from where I was followed. It was another two months before Peter Sutcliffe was arrested and confessed to her murder. When his photograph was published, it almost exactly matched my Photofit.

Sutcliffe, nicknamed ‘the Yorkshire Ripper’ by the tabloid press, turned out to be an ordinary, married man living in a suburb of Bradford. His crimes brought attitudes about women in general, and prostituted women in particular, out into the open — and it was in response to this shameful misogyny that I became a committed feminist.

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Sutcliffe’s first murder victim — 28-year-old sex worker Wilma McCann — had been discovered in 1975 and, right from the beginning, the West Yorkshire Police were guilty of dragging their feet and bungling the investigation. Complacent officers overlooked vital clues, and inadequate technology was used to collate interviews and intelligence reports. And all the while, Sutcliffe just kept killing — with hammers, screwdrivers and knives.

Partly to blame for their failure to track him down was their assumption that the Ripper was only interested in prostituted women — when, in fact, only a minority of his victims were involved in the sex trade. On 30 June, 1977, an open letter from the Yorkshire Evening Post to Sutcliffe said, “Your motive, it’s believed, is a dreadful hate for prostitutes — a hate that drives you to slash and bludgeon your victims,” Such women, in the eyes of many, were complicit in their own demise, or even deserved their fate — rape and murder being mere occupational hazards.

This mythology meant that police excluded a number of cases of women found murdered in England because they did not fit the profile. They failed, for instance, to listen to one of Sutcliffe’s surviving victims: Tracy Browne, 14 at the time, managed to get a good look at the man who chatted to her about the weather, before striking her about the head several times with a hammer. When she reported the attack, Tracy was shown the Photofits compiled by other survivors and told police she believed it to be the same man. But they dismissed her evidence because she was not engaged in prostitution.

As a result police were no closer to identifying Sutcliffe by the time they found his fifth murder victim — Jayne MacDonald, who also did not fit their profile — in June 1977. The killing was described by police and press as a “tragic mistake”: she was 16 and described as “respectable and innocent”. Victims were duly divided into deserving and undeserving women.

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When MacDonald was murdered, I was 15 and already thinking about feminism. I had been outed as a lesbian at school, where girls were judged either slags or lesbians by the boys who were the ones doing the naming and shaming. Sexism within popular culture was neither subtle nor occasional in the 1970s, and I learned that sexual violence was endemic in reality and widely viewed as entertainment.

In 1979, I moved from the North East of England to Leeds, where I met a group of radical feminists who were campaigning against male violence towards women and girls. At that time, their main focus of the group was challenging the appalling attitude of the police and journalists towards the victims and potential victims — and all women were potential victims — of the Yorkshire Ripper.

During Sutcliffe’s reign, ordinary men in the north of England loved to make jokes about him. “There’s only one Yorkshire Ripper”, football fans would chant; “Ripper 12, police nil”, was one particular jibe during Leeds United football matches where the police were penalising unruly fans; “Give us a kiss, love, I’m not the Ripper” was a regular crack heard in nightclubs around the country. A group of anarchists even named themselves The Peter Sutcliffe Fan Club because they saw him as the ultimate rebel.

Men would refer to Sutcliffe’s victims as sluts, slags and whores; they had it coming, blokes would say. I heard it from men on buses and on the streets. In the Post’s open letter of 1977, Sutcliffe was asked how he felt knowing that he had killed an innocent victim rather than a prostitute. Surely he felt remorse about his mistaken killing of the “respectable” Jayne McDonald?

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Sutcliffe’s killing spree and responses to it from the police, media and much of the general public opened my eyes to the toxic level of misogyny within our society. I learned that women’s lives are worthless in relation to men – especially when those women are, as the northern phrase goes, “No better than they ought to be”.

Misogyny is borne from boys who are raised to consider women as lesser beings — little more than a commodity to be used and abused. It is precisely because men are afforded power over women under patriarchy that sexual violence exists. Feminism, which is my core political belief, will ultimately liberate women from male supremacy.

Femicide — the slaying of women by men — is a pandemic worldwide. When feminism achieves its aims, there will be no more Sutcliffes, and no more raped and murdered women and girls stacked up in morgues. For this, and a million other reasons, every woman should be a feminist.