Mumsnet and Twitter – the two big buzzwords for the 2010 General Election. Both come from the same sentiment: that this year’s election contest will be dominated by the power of social media, its spreading of memes and messages and spider web ability to trap and feast on gaffes.

But the Mumsnet election is a myth. The media likes the idea of Mumsnet holding great power in the election. It’s an exciting and erratic element just like trade union conferences where nurses would boo and barrack politicians. Mumsnet q+a sessions with party leaders throw up the prospect of discovering that they don’t have a favourite biscuit or are baffled by Eastenders.

It’s said the political machines see Mumsnet as a bellweather for the state of the women’s vote and it’s fast become a vital stop on the modern party leader’s media merry-go-round. It’s up there with This Morning and the probing political inquisitions offered by Fern Britton.

Mumsnet’s founders, Justine Roberts and Carrie Longton, are incredibly smart media operators. They’re running a business and they understand that inflating the power of their site is good for it. Politicians and political commentators have touted Mumsnet’s relevance, why should its creators disagree.

But Mumsnet is not some super-representative bi-partisan collection of mothers. Look at the stats: 50% of Mumsnet members have an income of over £50,000, 75% are in full time or part time employment. 70% are degree educated. Crucially, nearly half of them live in London or the South East.

Most articles on Mumsnet say vaguely that it has “a million or so members”. Its monthly unique visitor numbers are around 1 million. As someone noted on Twitter the other day, there are specialist technology sites with similar numbers. Mumsnet’s reach is dwarfed by the Daily Mail and Guardian websites.

And while Mumsnet has hosted q+a sessions with all of the party leaders, it has also run Labour Party advertising and harnessed Sarah Brown, ferocious social networker, former PR woman and wife of the Prime Minister, as one of its most energetic cheerleaders.

Mumsnet is an effective community for some mothers to share their experiences, make a connection with others in similar situations to them and to debate and solve issues. But like any forum it has its bullies and its zealots. To boil it down to some homogenous political force is reductive – the idea that there is some universal woman’s vote is like lumping Margaret Thatcher and Germaine Greer into the same category.

There’s a vast swathe of women that Mumsnet doesn’t represent and plenty of Mumsnet users who don’t necessarily agree with the political outlook or positions of the majority or the site’s founders.

While the shock troop hardcore of Mumsnet descend on any article that dares criticise the site, they are surely just a subset of the wider membership. Women’s voices matter hugely in the next election but let’s not allow Mumsnet be the media’s proxy for a real conversation.

I’m looking to write a column. Like what you’ve read? Visit the About Me page for more information on my experience and how to hire me.

Samantha Cameron is about to wheeled out as the Conservatives secret weapon continuing the odd political hangover that says wives must be presented to the electorate. Dennis Thatcher was allowed to mooch around largely undisturbed but politicians’ wives must be perfectly primped and preened and plonked in the crowd to grin indulgently at the rhetoric of their overly ambitious other halves.

It’s clear why David Cameron has pushed the button on Project SamCam. He’s not convincing the public with his own public showing, giant posters and all, so it’s time to bring in Samantha Cameron to show just what a jolly good egg he is. In the Trevor Macdonald fronted documentary this weekend, we’ll doubtless get all the tales of Cameron up to his elbows in nappies and Marigolded up at the sink taking on the dishes.

Sarah Brown has been on the offensive for her husband too. She was seen frequently in cut away shots during the Piers Morgan party political broadcast. While Cameron needs Samantha front and centre to add sincerity to his man-of-the-people schtick, the Prime Minister needs Sarah Brown to help persuade the public that he’s capable of demonstrating human emotions at all. Her speech to the Labour Party conference declaring him her “hero” was mildly sick making.

We’re not voting Samantha Cameron or Sarah Brown. Both are patently impressive women who’ve built careers and handled the challenges of bringing up a family with men distracted by their political careers but they’re not the one’s we’re being asked to choose between.

It would be probably be better if we were seeing the pair of them slog it out for the Premiership. But the column inches that will be spent on decoding their dress sense and their body language during the Prime Ministerial debates will add up to one thing – a reduction of two formidable women to accessories for their ambitious husbands.

Ed Vaisey’s brogue-in-mouth moment, declaring that Samantha Cameron probably voted for Tony Blair got lots of attention. But so what if she did? Does she have to be some domestic droid in thrall to her husband’s political convictions? Surely we can imagine a couple agreeing on many things and disagreeing on policy.

David Cameron has said he expects Samantha will keep doing her job when he becomes Prime Minister. That’s unlikely to really be practical. The press will use any high profile political spouse as another way to batter their partner. Cherie Blair got involved and she suffered for it though many would claim she bought it on herself.

I don’t care how Gordon Brown proposed to Sarah. I don’t care if David Cameron doesn’t know how to load the dishwasher but has been Samantha’s “rock”. I want to know whether Cameron’s commitment to cuts will do further damage to the nation. I want to know how Gordon Brown can possibly believe he would make a credible leader for both his party and the nation for another term.

The soap opera is entertaining but much of the press is stumbling towards the trivia and away from substance. We don’t have a culture of the First Lady and we shouldn’t start now. If Samantha Cameron or Sarah Brown want to make a difference politically, they should get their names on the ballot.

Mephedrone has recently slid back into the headlines following the death of two teenage boys after taking the drug. But while the results of the toxicology reports have not been published yet, the media has already come to its conclusions and begun to bang the drum for a change in the law to ban Mephedrone.

I’m not advocating the use of Mephedrone. The side effects which can include a feeling of deep despair, violent nose bleeds and heart palpitations are hardly appealing. But the Mephedrone scare is just the latest episode in a confused and unhelpful debate about drugs policy.

After Professor David Nutt was removed from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs by Alan Johnson in October 2009, the drugs debate entered a heightened period of hysteria. Professor Nutt criticised the government for politicising the classification of drugs and was sacked for doing so.

Politicians bow to the pressure put on them by commentators in the media rather than listening to the advice of expert advisers like Professor Nutt. The Mephedrone debate is a classic example of that pressure, putting a substance in the spotlight following a high profile incident because the human interest angle heightens the story.

At school, we were told that using drugs was bad and given the example of the ecstasy related death of Leah Betts as a tale to discourage us from trying them. It was a shocking story but it just made us sorry for one family and left us most of us thinking, “Well, that was unfortunate but it wouldn’t happen to me.”

Don’t be fooled into thinking that the newspapers are really interested in debating the vexed questions of drugs policy. The media narrative is about scary new substances and their dangerous consequences.

Press interest is only sparked when there are deaths to peg a story on, no matter how few of them there are compared to the number of users. The press debates drugs with feelings not facts.

In a 2008 report, Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, detailed the consequences of threat-based drug prohibition: a large criminal black market, policy displacement from public health enforcement, geographical displacement and substance displacement.

Mephedrone can and probably will be banned but those issues of policy displacement and substance displacement will remain. The whack-a-mole attempts to outlaw substances are doomed to fail. Whenever one “legal high” is banned, another takes its place. Government ad campaigns are not stamping out drug use.

The tabloids will succeed in getting the government to ban Mephedrone. But that won’t stop young people from dabbling in new drugs or dealers from finding new substances to flog. Cocaine is illegal but there’s plenty of it taken by employees of the same papers that so frequently call for bans and reclassifications.

Scare tactics in advertising and scare campaigns in the newspapers do nothing to change the perspective of young people. In fact, they push them towards indifference. By conflating individual incidents into trends, we oversimplify the issues around drug use. It makes the entire exercise less serious – it turns it into a battle against bogey monsters rather than a reasoned discussion of a serious social issue.

There were 9,031 alcohol-related deaths in 2008. Drug related deaths numbered 1,952. We have a huge problem with alcohol. It is a legal high. It is a blight on our society. I enjoy it. The government taxes it. The Daily Mail has a wine writer. The Sun offers promotions to get cheaper booze. As Bill Hicks sensibly summed it up: “…it’s OK, if you drink your drug.”

People snorting mysterious powders with long term effects we cannot yet begin to fathom is categorically a bad thing. But young people have long searched for new ways to get high. We can continue to hunt down and ban these drugs but we’re not dealing with the reasons why people crave that release in the first place.

If we can’t stop people smoking by putting pictures of blackened lungs on their cigarette packets, why do we think David Mitchell playing a talking disemboweled drugs dog will do the job? Legal highs are here to stay and we need a better way of debating them than simply screaming “ban this sick filth”.

The Pope has released a letter apologising for the sexual abuse of children by priests, nuns and brothers in Ireland. But the Pope can’t apologise properly. The Pope cannot tell the truth – if the Vatican told the truth for one day its world would fall apart*. 

The church trades on what the news reports obsessively called “moral authority”, its whole existence is predicated on the idea that the Pope is some kind of earthed aerial for transmissions from god and the church and priests as satellites spreading those celestial messages.

The Catholic Church knew for years that there was widespread child abuse going on in Ireland. It covered it up. It is one of history’s great crimes. The Catholic Church was complicit in hiding paedophile priests, in shaming victims into silence. Previous Popes were complicit in that activity. Nothing in the Catholic Church is out of truly out of the sight of the Pope, it is a web of control whose vibrations reach back to Rome.

The Pope’s apology was mealy mouthed and isolated. It pushes the blame onto Ireland, trying to persuade the world that the cancer of corruption was restricted to one tumour enveloping Ireland.

Reports of sexual and other physical abuse by priests continue to pop up across the world. It was not a problem with the Catholic Church in Ireland but with the Catholic Church in general. Silence and repression is wound into the Catholic Church’s DNA. It put priests in a position of unquestioned authority. Its attitude to sex and sexuality is medieval.

As an archbishop in the 1980s, the Pope presided over the Munich archdiocese ignoring warnings about a paedophile priest. After the priest was finally convicted, he was allowed to resume work in the church and to have contact with children. He was suspended last week after information about his crimes came to light.

The Pope’s suggestion that renewal for the Catholic Church can come with fasting and contemplation is utterly offensive. His apology to those who suffered abuse at the hands of priests who were allowed to be moved in secret away from their accusers and to continue to work in the church is even more contemptible.

Nothing in the hundreds of words the Pope wrote admits the central fact – the Catholic Church allowed abuse to continue for years and conspired to conceal it.

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church has totally failed the most vulnerable members of its congregation. This Pope, the previous Pope, the Pope before him, have been figureheads for an organisation that tried desperately to protect its reputation above all else. It fostered a culture of silence and suffering. The Catholic Church would come tumbling down if it admitted that terrible truth, so it never will.

*Apologies to Richey Edwards

David Cameron told us a couple of weeks back that Samantha Cameron was going to play a major role in the Conservative election campaign. It’s very likely that he already knew that Samantha was pregnant.

Yesterday was a bad day for the Tories on Twitter with its #CashGordon site going into meltdown but an even worse day for Labour with Byers-and-the-other-liars-gate.

There was a lot of discussion about how to announce Cherie Blair was pregnant with Leo, the last tot to be delivered to a Downing Street mother.

Piers Morgan’s Mirror made an early grab for the exclusive on the Blair baby but wily old Rebecca Wade wheedled it out of Cherie first. Her pregnancy was a political issue (so much so that Tony Blair had to let Gordon Brown know about it early on) and Samantha Cameron’s will be too.

It hits lots of lovely big issues that play well in middle-England. David Cameron, the caring, sharing new man. David Cameron excited about another child. David Cameron – working man, loving father.

All the while Samantha Cameron will continue to be an accessory to her husband’s political ambitions, just as Gordon Brown has relied on Sarah Brown’s humanising, tweeting influence to seem human.

Samantha Cameron and her unborn child shouldn’t be tools for her husband’s political campaign but they will be. This is a skewed world where a politician’s private life is funneled through their party’s political machine.

Whether our leaders have children or not is largely irrelevant. Some of them will be good parents, some of them will be bad parents, few of them will let that affect their political philosophy all that much.

Labour slammed the idea of private schools and grammar schools in their policies but Labour ministers sent their children to them in droves. Conservative ministers will send their progeny to the same public schools that bred most of them.

Just as NHS hospitals are meant for the rest of us and not MPs, state schools are test sites for their educational theories and rarely the place they send their own children.

David Cameron knew when he announced Project SamCam that what we were really being prepared for was the Progeny Project. During Election 2010, we’ll be sold Gordon The Good Father  vs Dave The Doting Dad, the battle of Westminster’s yummiest mummies.

For most people, conceiving a child is as easy as too many drinks and not enough contraception, bringing a brood into the world is no guide to how good a PM you’ll be. And even the toughest Prime Minister’s have raised contemptible kids – Mark Thatcher anyone? 

I wrote about Project Sam Cam before in Samantha Cameron vs Sarah Brown: the battle of who could care less.

Early on the morning of May 2 1997, I woke up and switched on the tiny TV in my bedroom. I was 13 and watching the first Labour Prime Minister of my lifetime walk into Downing Street. Almost all the details of that historic moment have dissolved from my memory. All that remains is that Cheshire Cat grin and those insistent hand gestures.

I was an odd kid who listened to Radio 4 and was about as popular at school as condoms in a Vatican vending machine and I was sat there in bed supposedly watching Britain change. 

For my entire life up until that day, the Prime Minister had been a Tory.

Television news was stalked by the big beasts of the Conservative Party, themselves boiled down to cartoon characters in my adolescent mind – Norman Lamont as Billy Bunter gone off sandwiches in favour of sums, Kenneth Clarke chomping a cigar, Heseltine swinging past on a vine and John Major, the before picture in one of those Charles Atlas ads in the old comics I bought from the second hand bookshop.

I don’t remember a word that Tony Blair said as he stood in Downing Street that day. I just remember the sound of D:Ream assuring us all that Things Could Only Get Better and the new Prime Minister glad-handing the adoring crowd which I naively didn’t realised had been bussed in by party bosses. So I went back and looked at the speech Blair gave that day.

One paragraph stood out more than any other, three short lines that demonstrate the gulf between New Labour’s promise and what it delivered:

“It will be a government that seeks to restore trust in politics in this country. That cleans it up, that decentralises it, that gives people hope once again that politics is and always should be about the service of the public. 

And it shall be a government, too, that gives this country strength and confidence in leadership both at home and abroad…”

The Conservative Party is now whistling that tune. In the wake of the Lobbygate scandal, Stephen Byers offering himself up for hire like the least trustworthy minicab driver you’ve ever clapped eyes on, David Cameron has pulled on the rhetorical lycra to become, The Change:

“After the election we will have a once in a generation opportunity to bring about real change. To bring transparency and accountability to the system.…restoring trust and confidence in our politics. 
Above all, to show that a new generation of MPs, a new generation of Ministers understand the anger and disgust people feel with politics today, and are determined to put things right, and to show what public service really means.”

Change is like a Harry Potter spell for politicians. They peer across the Atlantic at President Obama and indulge in wishful thinking: “Maybe we can do what they did.” But the simple fact is David Cameron is another man in another suit. Gordon Brown is the man in the suit that we’ve got but don’t really want anymore. Nick Clegg is the man in the suit who says he’s not like the other men in suits.

As a precocious teenager with an over-developed interest in politics, I couldn’t quite believe Tony Blair when he spoke early on that May morning. As a 26-year-old man disappointed with the way things have panned out, I don’t really believe any of those men in suits with their pretty accessory wives and pretty similar policies. I want to but I can’t. Hope is a commodity they trade in, change is a word that looks nice on posters.

When I wake up early on the morning after the election and open up my laptop to see who’s won, I’m afraid that I’ll feel like the 13 year old me did, confused by all the cheering. For 13 years of my life we had Tories. For 13 years of my life we’ve had Labour. What could they possibly offer over the next few weeks that won’t leave us all thinking – same shit, different day?

I tweet about Question Time a lot. My insults fly like shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade, indiscriminate and directed at all sides besides the saintly Dimbledore. But every Thursday, I always get a smattering of @replies from party political folk asking: what side are you on? For some reason the position that they’re almost to a man/woman/reptillian-tossrag as bad as each other (with a few notable exceptions), confuses the hell out of them. 

Today’s story about the Lib Dems having planned to drop the Tuition Fee guarantee that Nick Clegg unblinkingly promised looking straight down a camera lens is making great running on the 24 hour news networks. “Isn’t this shocking?” they cry. But it’s not. Not in the slightest. The Lib Dems knew they might imminently be jostling for a spot at the top table by holding hands with one of their natural enemies, there would be compromises and that was certain to be one of them. 

That’s not to say the Lib Dems climbing into power on the back of student votes they’ve now effectively pissed all over isn’t an unpleasant sight, but this is politics not a tea dance. And for ex-Cabinet ministers from the Labour ranks to scurry on our TV screens to decry the Lib Dems making concessions for power is pretty rich. These are the people who took us into an illegal war and would have licked cream off Clegg’s nether-regions for the chance to tie up a coalition and keep their ministerial jags. Don’t be deceived by their Damascene conversion to having principles. 

I’d desperately like a fourth option, a party not of the traditional left or right but of common sense and common decency, made up of people committed to making a difference rather than feathering their own nests with perks and excellent pension provision. I might as well stick a unicorn on my Christmas list. 

Watching the student protests this week (which have now been swelled in the media imagination to some priapic cross between the LA riots and May 1968), I grew immediately tired of the return to crap 80s tropes. Ah, it’s Tory Scum time again as if the Labour Party is comprised of these mythical self-less socialists. Let me point you towards a sterling example of why that is a big rattling machine pumping out steaming bullshit – Hazel Blears. 

When Sally Hunt, UCU General Secretary, was leading the student protest rally in a cry of “You say Tories, I say scum,” I just saw the same petty squabbling and cheap name calling that goes on in the Parliamentary chamber every day enough MPs actually turn up to debate something. To stop the damaging cuts and the even more damaging schism along class and economic lines, we need to go beyond that simple insult slinging and realise: the whole political system is no fit for purpose. 

Until me do, I’ll be sat on my deckchair here in no man’s land, my tin hat firmly in place on my head, whistling Lily Marlene and smoking the tarriest fags I can cadge off the rest of the platoon. This class war isn’t going to play out well for any of us and whether you carry the standard of the Lib Dem letdowns, the Labour Liars or the Tory Scum, you’re on a hiding to nothing. Sorry about that. 

Image from LewisPR 360. 

A tweet by @buddhamagnet got me thinking yesterday. He said: “The Wikileaks situation is now firmly centred in personalities rather than issues like everything else in our inch-deep culture.” I know where he’s coming from but that tweet itself is indicative of a lazy, soundbite culture that’s encouraged by our amphetamine-brain Internet culture that’s desperately jonesing for a new bit of cool looking info to feast on.

ALL political stories are about personalities. That has nothing to do with our X-Factor obsession or the growth of other forms of insidious reality TV. The Cuban missille crisis and its solution was about personality (Kruschev vs Kennedy), the battle to introduce health care reform in the US is about personality (Obama vs those republicans who want to fiercely cast him as un-American and other).

Like those Electoral Commission adverts that forcefully made the point that almost every issue in life is political, I don’t think you can cut the personalities out of politics. To speak specifically to the Wikileaks issue, the Messiah complex exhibited by Julian Assange is a big element in the scandal and furore around the site’s disclosures. Assange perpetrated a knock-and-run on the US government like a naughty school boy. He stole their dirty knickers from the washing line.

If you follow politics and you bang on about wanting people to “focus on the issues” and not the personalities, you don’t understand politics. The personalities are the issue.

Before today when Andy Coulson found himself leading the news bulletins, most people didn’t know who he was. Despite the fact that he has been at the heart of a major media scandal and stood beside the Prime Minister, he wasn’t well-known at all. Of course in the liberal Twitter bubble and among media and political wonks the hacking story was huge but it doesn’t get much play outside of the capital. School kids used to pull the phone hacking trick when I was I was in high school.

In comparison with his famous predecessor Alastair Campbell, Coulson has been low key. He did a quiet and reportedly effective job as the PM’s press secretary and did not appear in news print much outside of pieces on the News Of The World and the hacking claims. By contrast, Alastair Campbell was linked to the exaggeration of the evidence for going to war, frequently appeared in press stories about his aggression and even rocked up to Channel 4 News to put in a particularly bug-eyed performance.

It’s been suggested that Andy Coulson knew about phone hacking at the News of The World. He claims he knew nothing which seems very unlikely. In my opinion, he did know. But the whole issue of phone hacking is being inflated. Phone hacking is illegal and unacceptable but it isn’t the worst crime I can think of and for that matter it’s an act that was perpetrated by journalists of all stripes and at papers for a long time.

Campell gets it right?!

Whatever other publications claim, they simply backed away from that activity before they got caught. The reason the Screws is in the firing line is that it got caught. Before 2001, the practice of hopping into people’s voice mail wasn’t illegal. It was widespread practice prior to that and it kept going after the law changed. Coulson knew. He had to know. Talking to old hacks from the 70s and 80s they speak about tabloid tricks that made phone hacking look like a playground game. Tabloids have always been run by morally dubious people – you don’t kick the hell out of celebrities in print or remorselessly reveal people’s private lives without being a laissez faire about the rules.

Surprisingly, Alastair Campbell made some very good points over here about the events of today and the following paragraph was particularly interesting:

“But what I found surprising about today’s announcement is that he hasn’t really been as big a focus of attention as he might have been. He talked about the time having come when the spokesman needed a spokesman, but I’m not sure it had really come to that. I did a public meeting recently at which someone asked why everyone seemed to know who Tony Blair’s comms director was, but nobody knew David Cameron’s.

I was taken aback and asked for a show of hands. About ten per cent knew it was Andy Coulson. I do sometimes wonder what the media would have been like if I had still been in charge, and had left a phone-hacking scandal behind me.”

The fact is that employing tabloid types to work in government is a bad move. Tony Blair was wrong to employ the dry drunk anger of Alastair Campbell as much as David Cameron was foolish to hope that Coulson could be integrated into government without the bad smell from the phone hacking case following him. But there is an element of hypocrisy in the shrill noises coming from The Guardian after claiming Coulson’s scalp.

Guardian of hypocrisy?

I have written for The Guardian on several occasions and think it is a very fine paper but its record is not spotless:

It failed to protect Sarah Tisdall when she turned whistleblower while working at the Foreign Office (telltale markings were left on documents revealed by the paper after a court order), it used fabricated documents to nail Jonathan Aitken (who utterly deserved taking down however) and has only briefly touched upon the relationship between Wikileaks and seemingly anti-semitic supporter and benefactor Israel Shamir (ironically, he’s a Jew who converted to ultra-orthodox Christianity).

I don’t mean to attack The Guardian. In my heart I’m clearly more of a Graun supporter than a News International fan (though, full disclosure, I have contributed to The Sun and written for The Sunday Times in the past) but I find it hard to take the sanctimony of a paper which itself does not have an entirely clean history.

Newspapers are a dirty business and none of them have a spotless record. However, few can match the Hitler fanboyism that lingers in The Daily Mail’s past.

The Coulson affair clearly matters a great deal in terms of the relationship between the government and the Metropolitan Police but when it comes to the magic question of David Cameron’s “judgement”, it won’t stay around for very long.

Ed Miliband has appointed Tom Baldwin (former Times chief reporter) as his directory of strategy and communications and Bob Roberts of The Daily Mirror as his director of news. I do wonder what those two (particularly Baldwin with his past at News International) might have in their own pasts.

Let’s hope for Ed “we must question David Cameron’s judgment” Miliband has vetted them carefully. We wouldn’t want to see more McBride-style controversy, would we?

Ireland has just had a two day budget. It was an inevitably dispiriting experience like watching the X Factor final but with the added horror of knowing that everybody loses. There wasn’t even an appearance by Louis Walsh comparing Enda Kenny to a young Rick Astley to lighten the mood. No one gets to enjoy the hail of sparks and cloud of dry ice that greets the crowning of an X Factor winner either. Instead, we all have to sit glumly in the corner and think about what we’ve done. 

One of the inconvenient facts of my current existence, aside from being so pale that I am practically translucent, is that in order to be with the woman I love (cue emotional string section), I need to live in Dublin. Back in the days of the Celtic Tiger when leprechauns danced about the place throwing gold at builders, that wouldn’t have been such a problem. But right now, Ireland feels about three days away from being purchased by a cartel of rich Texans and converted into Blarneyland, the world’s biggest begorrah-themed amusement park. 

Still, Ireland has many things going for it including: Tayto crisps, The Rubberbandits, the real-life Lovely Girls competition that is The Rose Of Tralee, the fact that people are, by and large, a lot nicer than in London and, of course, the craic. Unfortunately, in these straightened economic times, the good craic is quite hard to come by and many people are forced to settle for the value craic imported from the Ukraine by Lidl. 

In the absence of a permanent job offer, juicy freelance contract or a reply from the good folks at From Our Own Correspondent to my suggestion that they appoint me as their man in Dublin, it can be easy to forget that I’m even in Ireland at all.

Some days, following friends in England on Twitter and listening to 5Live, I can feel like a boy in a British bubble. But then I look out of the window, read Irish on the street signs and watch a couple of tracksuit clad lads pass by riding on a pony and trap. It’s a cliche but it’s a cliche I see at least twice a day.  

And after the regressive measures announced in the budget, steered through by the second most ludicrous coalition in Europe (Cameron and Clegg just edge it thanks to their homoerotic buddy movie antics), it feels like images that seem ripped from a bad movie about the suffering Irish might become depressingly common. Fingers-crossed there’ll be jobs for us as green-coated attendants in Blarneyland. I’ll man the Potatocoaster. 

My childhood visions of the future were elaborate and optimistic. The scenes were a cut and paste job of robots and megacities, space colonies and jet packs. I gobbled up comics, books and films to feed my future dreaming. Grown up (of sorts), the future feels as if it will be like today but worse somehow. 

In the Alka Seltzer fizz of the nineties, when the long hangover of nuclear confrontation seemed to be clearing, it was so much easier to dream of a shiny science fiction future. It was the big dumb future of the Lost In Space reboot – Daz white spacesuits, men with chiseled Joey Tribiani jaws and terrorists foolish enough to rely on Gary Oldman to get the job done. 

If you were lucky enough to live in a peaceful part of the placid west, the nineties were a kind of nothing decade. The ugly realities of the noughties future were squirming around just under the surface but they were easy to ignore, drunk on cheap credit and reheated pop culture pastiches. 

My nineties was a slow slide from toddler to bullied school boy to tolerated sixth former. At one point, choosing between Blur or Oasis seemed pivotal and whether or not your owned Kappa popper trousers was the difference between success and social Siberia. 

I was 17 when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 took place. They were at once horrifying and distant. They were something that had happened on TV and virtually everything about them was filtered to me through a speaker, from the Today programme or the 10 O’Clock News. Norfolk was not abuzz with talk of terrorists. 

While the planes were striking the towers, I was in a history class on the causes of the First World War. I heard the news from a disinterested bus driver who muttered something about Bin Laden. The radio burbled away with theories and static but I didn’t see that footage, the dust and carnage, until my bike ride home from my grandparents. I stopped outside an electrical shop and stared at the bug eye of big screens in the window. 

It didn’t hit me then – my 17-year-old brain was stuffed with thoughts of girls who didn’t know my name and books I wanted to buy – but that atrocity exhibition in the Radio Rentals window demolished the beautiful future dream. The sense that the universe can vaporise you as quickly as a sadistic kid slaughtering ants with a kettle became very real. 

The new century began in September 2001. While the history books we’d been clutching in that class on the afternoon of 11 September made sure to draw lines between war and postwar, there hadn’t been a day in the 20th century when an armed conflict hadn’t been clattering on the periphery. 

The 21st century has just made taking sides and placing bets even tougher. The Soviet Union was the big bad end-of-level boss. In the new century, the enemies were nimbler and harder to catch. Osama Bin Laden was practically mythical by the time the Navy Seals gunned down the flesh and blood vessel in Abbotabad ten years later. 

As the chatter about Iran gets louder, I can hear Things Can Only Get Better being piped into my brain stem, the deja vu flooding my system. We really don’t want a war, say the ministers, while their back-benchers mutter and splutter about how it might just be goddamn unavoidable and how a good scrap is golden for the polls. At the same time we eye Argentina like Jack Palance staring down the goat herder in that Bill Hicks routine: “Pick up the gun…” 

The Arab Spring sprang to life in 2011 but, by the end of the year, while Ghadaffi was dead in Libya, the army was back lording it up in Egypt. Ask the Burmese how easy it is to shift military rulers who’ve spent decades drunk on the idea of power. Depose one man with too much gold braid and a penchant for summary executions and often as not another one just hops up into his place. Democracy should come with a gift receipt.

The future could be stem cell miracles and lab-grown future food for all but I fear it’ll be war for water, blood for oil and the poor pushed out of the cities. The coalition government in the UK is already aching to make the poor, the disabled and anyone else it deems as undesirable get out of London. China picked off the destitute from Beijing’s streets in time for its Olympics, Boris and Dave are just dreaming of the same. 

The hover boards won’t be here for 2015 and space travel is long going to be a jolly for the super-rich with bank accounts so full there’s nothing earthly to spend it on. In Britain, an ageing population and a dwindling birthrate means politics will be as stuffed with the old faces as rock’n’roll has been for decades.

If you think you’re bored with still seeing Mick Jagger creak across the stage, imagine countless years of George Osborne and Harriet Harman until their heads are presenting policy documents from pickling jars. 

The Italians talk about the “caste” that control everything. Everyone in power is old and the young can’t get their feet on the first rung of the ladder. That’s only going to get worse. The rich get richer, the poor get bitter. The riots last summer will start to look like hijinks as the real unrest gets started. 

To my generation, nurtured in the bosom of a boom, the future can seem incredibly bleak. Distracted by reality TV, Twitter and Facebook, you can ignore the hard parts for a while. Then thirty looms up ahead of you and forty is just over the crest of the hill. You don’t own a house. You don’t have a child. You’re nominally free but as trapped as anyone else. 

In Ireland, the Celtic tiger cubs are still clutching their parents credit cards and making an escape to Australia and New Zealand. They realise that the birthright they were promised – cheap property, easy credit and jobs there for the picking – has evaporated in the heavy fog of politicians’ promises. 

The science fiction future of my childhood dreaming is trapped in Star Trek box sets and the idle wittering of techno-utopians. The iPads will get thinner. The computers will get smaller and faster.

The big problems still stretch out ahead of us. Little wins are followed by huge stumbles. On our TV screens, in parliaments, in trading rooms and on the battlefields, it’s the eighties reoccurring. Fukuyama knows he was wrong. History didn’t end, it just looped around on itself and picked up cooler props. 

I was so proud to go to Cambridge. Stupidly proud. I was the first in my family to go university at all. The place turned into a kind of bottle city for me, this sealed arcadia of knowledge and chaos.

I remade myself at Cambridge, slaked off the bullied boy of school days to become an endless motormouth self-promoting writer kid. I was on the student union, I organised parties, I fought unsuccessful election campaigns and got another union president elected despite his rampant Northernness and his opponent’s cloying poshness. 

I got stuck in at CUSU debates, grandstanding political opinions with the kind of skewed political oratory that students think passes for insight. I directed, wrote and starred in a late night comedy show called A Brief History Of Stupidity which was condemned by the Christian Union and loved by a 95-year-old lady who told me I should tell the CU to “piss off”. Cambridge University helped redefine who I am. And today, I am desperately disappointed with the university. Desperately. Desperately. Desperately. 

Yesterday, the University Court Of Discipline handed down a punitive punishment for legitimate political protest and made an example of one student. In what is being described as an “unprecedented decision” by observers of pettifogging university statutes, Owen Holland, a PhD student in the English Faculty, was suspended from the university for two-and-a-half years. His academic career is essentially ruined and potentially his life. What was his crime? 

He, as part of a large group, read a poem out during a visit by Universities Minister David Willetts in November 2011. The students chanted the ‘epistle’ and stopped Willetts from completing his speech, eventually forcing him from the lecture hall before he was able to deliver his speech. Do I think he should have been silenced? No. Do I think the university authorities should have stripped a student of his right to attend the university for two-and-a-half years as punishment? Absolutely not. It is a disgrace to the great traditions of a great university. 

Holland, quoted in The Independent, says: “I didn’t expect the sentence to be as harsh as has been handed down. The worst the university advocate, who was prosecuting, was pressing for was a single term, and she would have been happy with a fine.” After a six-hour hearing, Holland was found guilty of impeding the minister’s freedom of speech, in a ruling that has a crushing Orwellian kind of logic to it. 

After the university first decided to charge Holland, more than 60 dons and senior students wrote to the University in a “Spartacus” gesture asking to be charged with the same offence if Holland was to be put through the process. The letter denounced the charges as “arbitrary and wrong” and pointed out that the protest “was a collective act…we the undersigned were all involved in it – whether directly or indirectly, actively or in a supportive capacity.” The University ignored the calls. 

In a statement following the sentence, a Cambridge University spokesman said: “The University notes the decision of the Court of Discipline in its proceedings held today. By statute, the Court of Discipline is an independent body which is empowered to adjudicate when a student is charged by the University Advocate with an offence against the discipline of the University. The Court may impose a range of sentences as defined in the Statutes.” 

Holland can appeal within the next 28 days. I hope he does and I hope he wins. If the sentence stands, I will not donate any more money (meagre as it may be) to alumni campaigns or support any other initiatives undertaken by the university. This “it wasn’t us guv” statement from the authorities is almost as disgraceful as the Court of Discipline’s decision. 

I was appointed as a student representative to the Court of Discipline while I was at Cambridge but sadly was never called to assist a student case. I am utterly disgusted by the outcome of this case. I am ashamed of Cambridge and the example it has shown at a time when political protest is so vital in the United Kingdom. I was not the most political student when I was studying for my degree. Today, things would be very different.