By Casey Burgess

It’s the most wonderful time of year again. While Christmas Trees are being decorated, there is a very serious debate raging.

The centre of this debate is the song “Fairy-tale of New York” by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, released in 1988, which still holds its ground at the top of people’s favourite all time Christmas songs.

What could possibly be controversial about a Fairy-tale in New York? One of the lines, often the most famous (or infamous, depending on your view) is “you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap, lousy faggot.”

Now, this is where the centre of our debate lies. Faggot is a reclaimed word by the LGBTQ+ community, with it being an incredibly vicious slur often hurled at queer people. Does the fact that it appears in a somewhat outdated song mean it’s OK for heterosexual people to say it?

The answer? No. The reasoning behind this is not the “snowflake” generation taking offence to every little thing that they don’t like. The reasoning is based in power dynamics, gender politics, sexuality and hateful murder.

There is absolutely no circumstance in which a person who does not identify as LGBTQ+ needs ever to utter the word. There is also no circumstance in which people are referring to “lazy Irish people” or “a bundle of sticks”.

The word did mean a bundle of sticks, but that meaning is obsolete. When it did mean that, however, the “faggots” would be placed under a suspected homosexual and set alight.

Bringing the point back to the song, the debate centres round two tenants. Whether it is OK to censor the word in the song and whether it is OK for straight people to sing that particular word.

The Pogues frontman and writer of the song, Shane McGowan, has said that it is OK to censor the word if it does make people uncomfortable. He adds that it was not intended in a homophobic way, but instead used to portray the character that Kirsty MacColl played as a deplorable person.

The reactionary right-wing media, and even some moderates and liberals, would have you believe that the censoring of this word is snowflake political correctness gone mad. It is anything but this. What this is, is compassion.

Queer people often have a tough time around Christmas due to family issues around their sexuality or gender identity, and the entire family gathered round with cans in hand singing a queer slur is hardly going to make it comfortable for them.

Similarly, the word faggot has been shouted at many queer men and trans women when being violently assaulted, raped and even murdered. Do their tragic stories, lost lives and broken bones mean nothing to heterosexual people?

This word is reclaimed. It is reclaimed by those who felt powerless, embracing a label to make sure it was defined on our terms and used in our community.

There are three hundred and one words in the song “Fairy-tale of New York.” Three hundred and one. Is it too much to ask, given queer blood has been spilled with that word being the last thing they ever hear, that you miss out one word? One. Single. Word.

That is one thing that the queer community asks you for this Christmas. Be a good ally. Don’t make excuses. Skip the slur.

The UK’s railways are quite frankly not fit for purpose. Passengers regularly face delays, cancellations, and overcrowding on an outdated rail network. This makes for even worse reading, when rail fares are set to rise by 3.1% to next year, which will accumulate to a whopping 37% increase in fares in the past decade.

It is current Labour party policy that if elected, they would renationalise the railways, but would bringing the railways back into public ownership bring lower prices and better service?

The case for renationalisation

There is good reason to support the case for nationalisation. Privatisation has put an onus on business performance over service. For example, the infamous Southern rail fully or partly cancelled more than 58,000 of its services in 2016, in that same year collecting profits of £100 million. The bottom line is that profit comes first for train franchises, and the customer comes second.

Bowman (2015) makes a thought-provoking point, suggesting that the UK railways are in no meaningful sense privatised. Bowman argues that extensive subsidies are being channelled through network rail, and have enabled backers of the current system to maintain their narratives about the successes of privatisation. If you consider that most of the railway is already nationalised: “three-quarters of the industry – the track, signalling and big stations – are already under public control“, then are train franchises simply profiteering off of the work of the state?

Could renationalisation  empower the people? Public ownership would enable the public to regain the power to hold the government to account for the quality of service provided. Earlier this year, a BMG poll found that 64% of people supported renationalising the railways.

The case against renationalisation

For all the possibilities, there is always the chance that the grass isn’t always greener. Putting the railways fully under public control will once again put the railways in competition with other services for funding; that means a battle with the NHS, education, and other vital infrastructure such as roads, houses etc.

Privatisation has seen passengers double, and a host of new trains put into service. The Rail delivery Group said on the 30th November that we can expect “7,000 new carriages, supporting 6,400 extra services a week by 2021″. Would this sort of investment be feasible, when it would be in competition with other key areas for finite public resources?

Renationalisation also potentially harms large-scale projects that are attempting to address the growing number of commuters. For all its critics, and there are many, HS2 is going ahead, with work starting in only the past couple of months.  The £55 billion high-speed rail network will “add almost 15,000 seats an hour on trains between London and the cities of Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds – treble the current capacity“.

Admittedly, the the fruits of this project won’t be felt until the end of 2026 at the earliest, but renationalisation could throw HS2 into doubt, and the reality would be that despite its faults, Britain’s railways would once again be left in limbo.

Where does this leave us?

As Brexit continues to overwhelmingly saturate the news sphere, it will be difficult to gain traction for the renationalisation argument in the near future. This is unless Labour won a general election next year, which due to Brexit is by no means a complete impossibility. In sum, renationalisation is probably too great a change to incur in the near future, given the instability the UK currently faces.

Then again, critics would argue there is never a good time for such a major overhaul. The faults of the railway’s past doesn’t forebode its future if the UK decided to go down this route. There is no one solution that can guarantee improvement, but as the voices of public discontent rise in opposition to the current situation, support for public ownership of the UK’s railways will continue to grow. Something will have to give sooner or later.

Chris Lomas

It was in 2014 that then Prime Minister David Cameron said ‘spending cuts had done little damage’. This sanguine assessment of government spending since 2010 has been starkly contrasted by the blaze at Grenfell Tower. The disaster not only the crystallised seven years of austerity but the result of a culture of deregulation. A culture of seeing red tape as undesirable.

Some commentators tried to depoliticise the event by arguing that the fire may have been a human error. This view neglects decades worth of government failure with regards to Grenfell, council housing and to a great extent, housing policy. That may be the use of flammable cladding, the absence of fire sprinkler systems across tower blocks in the country or the dearth of affordable social housing. The latter was an issue born from the industrial-scale selling off of council housing under the ‘right to buy scheme’; all are problems that are inherent failures of central and local governance.

Housing policy intertwines organically with views of social class. ‘Poverty porn’, perpetuated by politicians and mass media across the UK alike, stems from a central thesis of shirkers. Continuing on, this is the idea of an apathetic, inattentive underclass of people that do not work or strive. As well as tensions between Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, this view helps to explain the consistent neglect of Grenfell Action Group’s pleas regarding the safety of the tower. Coupled with this was the rejection of COBRA meetings by Theresa May and her continued contempt in not meeting victims families in the immediate aftermath, ending in scathing criticism from residents.

Views of those who live on tower blocks and social housing are also at the mercy of government agenda. Continually, since the Thatcher years of privatisation, rampant deregulation regarding housing has removed vital safety provisions. New regulations have also ensured watering down and vagueness of safety provision, with them now being open to the manipulation and contusion of the political climate. This precarious push towards lowering costs at the expense of regulation is referenced by Jose Terero, a fire safety expert who spoke to the Grenfell Inquiry in phase one of its proceedings. He stated that there is a need to shift from a culture that inappropriately trivialises ‘compliance’ to a culture that recognises complexity in ‘compliance’ and therefore values ‘competency, performance and quality’.

Theresa May has since been praised in bringing about the potential to produce ‘a new age of building for homes.’ Action including the Social Housing Green Paper, attempting to rid the stigma of social housing and tower blocks is admirable, but when events take place that undermines this such as the effigy burning of a Grenfell recreation, it is clear to see much work is to be done. Nonetheless, there have been useful steps taken in unshackling local government by allowing them to borrow against the Housing Revenue Accounts. There has also been a £2bn spending pot earmarked for affordable housing. Swiftly after the policy was made, however, local council leaders from Lincolnshire (currently building less than 20 homes a year) to Nottinghamshire (a relative success story building around 200 homes a year currently) stated that it was not enough money for supply to meet demand. More radical ideas, such as councils’ renting unused property, known as ‘sweating’ have been rejected fervently by the government.

It was in 1990 that former Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan noted that, ‘There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics’. Whether this and the problems the Conservative minority government are facing during Brexit signal a shift in the emphasis of policies created remains to be seen. I for one, am sceptical.

Lukas Winterburn