Julie Bindel

In the past few weeks my poor dog Maisie has been screamed at, threatened, vilified and monstered, just as she is every summer. Why? Because as soon as the weather promises to be nice a significant number of idiots dust down their Tupperware and schlep a picnic to a public park. Why is it, then, that dogs who make a dash for the chicken drumsticks laid out within sniffing distance and on their own turf are accused of theft and bad behaviour? In what way can we possibly blame scavenging animals from taking food from the ground? And this is in a world where women who go out late at night/take a taxi when drunk/wear a short skirt/indulge in flirtatious behaviour are told that if they are raped they have brought it on themselves!

I hadn’t seen a Ken Loach film in years because I got sick of his schmaltzy sexism but yesterday decided to give him another try and popped along to see his latest, Jimmy’s Hall. Set in 1930s Ireland, it tells the true-life story of self-educated, community-serving James Gralton, who enraged the Catholic church and the local land owners by setting up a community centre that served as a meeting place for ideas and, God forbid, dancing. Perhaps he's returned to form, I thought on my way to the cinema, and produced something gutsy like Cathy Come Home or Kes. These story lines usually warm my cynical old heart, so I approached Jimmy’s Hall with a hopeful spring in my step.

There is so much to hate about massively successful TV series Masterchef that I have been glued to it for ten years. But then I always watch Nigel Farage when he pops up on TV, and even sit through that advert for Sheilas' Wheels. But let me explain why I think Masterchef is so bloody annoying to me, a food-lover and enthusiastic cook. First there are the hosts, John Torode and 'Mr Spanky' Greg Wallace, and their parroting of puerile comments. You know what I mean: 'Saltiness coming from the...', 'Sweetness running through...', 'Flavours of the sea', 'Tang of the...', 'ABSOLUTELY beautiful'. Then there is the question of John Torode’s upper lip: where is it?

The news is dominated by tales of ‘sexual misconduct’ by men in positions of power, and nowhere is the smell of sleaze as strong as in Westminster. Our politicians work in a building formally known as a ‘palace’ where they are often treated like kings — and, occasionally, behave like them. Even more occasionally, the rest of the world catches a glimpse of what is going on. There has always been a certain tolerance of sexual misbehaviour, which is more often the subject of jokes than outrage. One Tory minister is teased by his colleagues for blowing his parliamentary staff budget on hiring a beautiful researcher, only to find her turn up for work having acquired a large engagement ring.

Do you remember the rather brilliant comedy sketch featuring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse in which they played laid-back police officers in Amsterdam, bragging that they no longer have to deal with the crime of murder in the Netherlands since the Dutch legalised it? Don’t laugh too hard. In 2000 the Dutch government decided to make it even easier for pimps, traffickers and punters by legalising the already massive and highly visible brothel trade. Their logic was as simple as it was deceptive: to make things safer for everyone. Make it a job like any other. Once the women were liberated from the underworld, the crooks, drug dealers and people traffickers would drift away. Twelve years on, and we can now see the results of this experiment.

In the good old days of the gay liberation movement, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the excitement of challenging the orthodoxy attracted even the shy and apolitical to its cause. To those of us around at the time, it felt like a cultural insurgency: a rejection of compulsory heterosexuality and the lifestyle that accompanied it. But now battle, such as it is, has changed utterly. It seems to involve people like David Cameron inviting gay people to conform to what he rightly calls the profoundly conservative institution of -marriage. These new, well-spoken and self-appointed leaders of the gay rights movement want to rebel by conforming. To them, homosexuality is not really something to be proud of.