Blurred Party Lines: The dodgy attitude towards consent from the Labour Party

Content warning: This post discusses rape culture and has a dream sequence involving Robin Thicke in which consent is ignored

All I wanted to do was peek at the Labour manifesto, to see if it was awful. I’d thought the Labour website would be the best place to find it. Maybe it is there, or maybe it isn’t. I don’t know, because before I was allowed to view the site, I was presented with this choice:

Eagle-eyed readers will spot an option that is missing on this poll: the ability to say “no”. By polling standards, this is therefore a pretty crummy poll. By the standards of basic human decency, this is merely reflective of how consent is usually constructed.

Labour’s framing of the question would not sound out of place if Robin Thicke were canvassing, a red rosette fixed jauntily to his sunglasses. As you try to close the door, his slimy foot slithers in in that classic salesman tactic. Robin Thicke proffers you leaflets, red and yellow. More and more of them, and he begins to stuff them down your throat, incessantly yelling “I KNOW YOU WANT THIS”. You gag, you choke. You cannot breathe. With your fading strength, you nod assent. You tell him you will vote Labour just so he’ll go away.

Nightmares aside, this little snap survey from Labour does betray rather a problematic, yet sadly commonplace attitude towards consent. There is no such thing as a no, only a “maybe” that can be turned into a “yes”. Rape culture is everywhere, and so the idea that “no” is not an option is equally ubiquitous.

It is in the interests of maintaining rape culture to keep the ability to say no off the table. What might seem like an innocent bit of bad polling has the seedy undercurrent of rape culture allowing it to happen in the first place. Perhaps instead of a pink bus, Labour could have demonstrated an understanding of the concept of consent to attract women voters.

Disclaimer: I suspect the content of this blog will appeal to people with political affiliations which isn’t Labour, so allow me to say that as well as Labour being dripping anuses, so are the Green Party, the Tories, the Lib Dems, UKIP, TUSC and all the other tiddly trot parties, the nationalist parties of NI, Scotland and Wales, as well as Mebyon Kernow (who always get forgotten), and also the loyalist parties, and basically, if you’re in a political party, your party’s shit. So there.