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Left again…
The young Eleanor Marx persuaded her whole family to join her in attending the huge and enthusiastic demo in London in support of the Fenians. ‘Disobedience to tyrants is a duty to God’ said one of the placards. The Marx family sang the Marseillaise. They all ‘danced with joy’ when they heard of the election […]
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Terrible Fish
My blog ‘About’ Page descriptor says that I intend to write about ‘books, politics and the terrible fish.’ When I was setting up the blog site, and came to the box that said something like ‘summarise what this site is about’ I gave it about ten seconds thought. For those in the dark, Sylvia Plath […]
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Owen Jones and the Venerable Beard
In which Owen Jones struggles with a difficult idea: Chomsky reminds Jones of the hard road women have had to get their basic rights acknowledged. As you can see from the eyebrows, this is hard going for Jones, who still hasn’t grasped even the precariousness of his own history, let alone women’s – and has […]
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The nature of male privilege
The least successful members of a privileged group tend to be the most belligerent maintainers of that privilege. It’s their dream, their lottery ticket. That’s why many a doorstepping socialist has fallen by the wayside when trying to tell impoverished white males they are privileged. Asking angry people to rise above a lifetime of poverty […]
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Please have pity on the PWATTDWLRWPTDSE
I’ve had some grumbles from the People Who Are Trying To Destroy Women’s Legal Rights Whilst Pretending To Do Something Else. They say I’m blogging far too much, and posting my stuff about the place far too much. Well I would not want to annoy the PWATTDWLRWPTDSE, and looking back, I do seem to have […]
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The Tom Watsons of Feminism
***long read for the weekend (with, as requested, apology to those who work weekends – long read for your day orf, if you’re lucky enough to get one?)*** This post is most definitely for lefties, but if you’re a feminist thinking WTF is going on with all this lefty misogyny and why are they calling […]
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Never let a bully win
I was told when I signed up as a Labour Party officer that I should ‘never let a bully win’. I looked at the situation in the Party and agreed that it was true. The evidence was manifold. We lefties inherited an organisation that was impossible to steer because it had, for several decades, been […]
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To speak or not to speak?
Have the May council elections given women an answer to that dilemma? Surrounded by bullies, propagandists, and comfortable males who can’t be bothered to understand, women have had a hard job working out when or whether to raise women’s issues. There was much discussion in the lead up to the May elections as to whether […]
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Are we being honest, yet?
***Long read*** I have two blog posts that I shut down a few years back, because members of my Labour Party Branch were in danger of dying of apoplexy. That’s a joke okay – I know people do that in Victorian novels when they get very upset but… you know, even as a child reading […]