My kinky vote

Thursday is election day. I thought it worth spending a little time deciding which, if any, of the three major parties might benefit my BDSM lifestyle, and that of those kinksters around me. A handy springboard for this is the rather lovely mygayvote.co.uk which lists percentages of party members voting on certain issues of concern to the gay community. There's clearly some overlap with kink lifestyle here - particularly age of consent, adoption rights and civil partnerships, but with a rather major difference. Same sex is not illegal. Certain elements of BDSM are. Whilst being kinky is beginning to be recognised as a sexuality in its own right rather than some sort of very extended foreplay or, worse, mental illness it is still only partly understood by society (celebrity scandals such as Max Mosely spearheading both positive and negative interest), rarely publicly and openly accepted and certainly the kinkster has very limited protection in law. It's important not to forget, that the marks we like to look at in the morning are technically illegal, more to the point, I am not considered to have the wherewithal to consent to receiving them. Although, of course, I can have a tattoo.

Needless to say, none of the major parties have taken an obvious stance on BDSM within their literature. Which means I am reading between the lines a little, and dealing with more than a bit of popular prejudice and inference - a friend mentioned that the Tories would be the obvious party for CP. Where they do talk about sexuality, the focus is on the gay community and where they talk about equality the focus is on race and "women" (we have our own special section in each manifesto which always references childcare and makes me feel all warm inside, like a burning, angry fire). Rather than trawl through the manifestos point by point, which will take up rather a lot of space and involve a lot of irrelevance, I'm going to highlight a few areas of specific concern to me, which mostly focus on legislation around personal freedoms as well as the type of lifestyle and living patterns encouraged or discouraged by the various parties.

Taking the party in power first. Labour have been criticised in the press for eroding civil liberties, which is not a very good start, however they have been generally positive in terms of increasing the number of officially recognised relationships from just marriage to include civil partnerships implying at least in theory that other types might yet emerge. The main bugbear here are the sections of the Criminal Law and Immigration Act 2008 which pertain to sex acts and pornography however it is fair to say that this legislation was supported by other parties. I think realistically we can expect more of the same - no better and no worse.

On to the Tories. Not the natural party for change or liberal thinking (they are conservative after all). I'm a little nervous about the focus on the family, particularly the use of tax breaks to support those who have chosen to marry or engage in civil partnerships because I think that smacks of social engineering and whilst kinksters may certainly marry, there are reasons where the lifestyle might make it difficult or they are simply happy just living together without a piece of paper. The fact that there is a section on "Family" is a little worrying, because it makes me think about the sort of family that they are talking about. On the plus side, they do want to invest lots of money in giving Britain "the fastest high speed broadband network in Europe" But given their support for the Digital Economy Bill and the Extreme Porn Act we won't be able to download anything worthwhile.

Finally, the Liberal Democrats. They want "fairness", which is nice (although I would vote for "consensual unfairness" but that doesn't appear to be an option). Attitudinally, one would assume that they were the natural kinky vote, but they are a bit hard to get a read on in any concrete sense - I wonder if we perhaps know what it means to be Labour or Tory and end up viewing the Lib Dems as a none of the above. The one nugget of their manifesto that struck me was one on their plans to introduce The Freedom Bill which whilst not immediately and obviously pertaining to kink does focus on increasing the ability to be actively political.

So, from those meagre scraps I've managed to pull together, well, not a lot for the kinky voter I'm afraid. Fuck it. They are are fielding Anna Span. I'm voting Lib Dem.