Category: activism
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Credit where it’s due
[Header image: a video by The Canary, as the police inform those standing vigil that an ambulance is finally on its way to Bronzefield] To friends who aren’t willing to give Your Party a go, and to those who’ve given up in exasperation – I get it, I really do! But – well, the following…
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There’s a one-in-five chance you just don’t matter
What if someone convinced you that we have a government that has consciously abandoned around one fifth of our population to a miserable life and an early death? Doesn’t it make you angry? Doesn’t it make you want to leap over all the bullshit and fix this hellishly dysfunctional country? In the course of education…
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A cascade of burning books
Three books, a short film and a talk This morning, I read somewhere that Israel has a huge mental health crisis to deal with after all the tormenting and killing of Palestinians the IDF have been doing in Gaza and across the West Bank. It made me think about what kind of trauma must be…
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How do you salve a guilty conscience?
Well, one way is to point attention away from yourself – spread the guilt around as far as you can. This weekend saw protests like these all over the UK – five of our own in Hastings were arrested. Our local activists have been on pretty friendly terms with Hastings police, especially those who have…
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This is what we mean by erasing women
‘Your Party’ have chosen the delegates for their first conference ‘by sortition’. They said this would ensure that a genuinely representative cross section of their supporters would be present. I suppose as we’re aiming for a ‘bottom up’ democracy, the fact that this has ruled out some of the natural leaders who’ve been working for…
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FiLiA – across the divide
A feminist response to the ‘feminist response to the silence around October 7th‘ I was going to write about this event. I watched the video, I took notes, I asked for help and a friend with better ears than me gave me her notes. I thought about the sisters sitting there, about the sterling work…
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Why are we ‘obsessed’ with Palestine?
Quite a few of the attendees of the recent FiLiA conference in Brighton have been asking this question. Women I know and have great respect for have asked this question, their tone suggesting we were being unsisterly imposing our concerns on this, our annual, internationalist conference. I was told waving flags and chanting wasn’t the…
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Viva FiLiA!
It’s three weeks now since I got my hands on a copy of Rahila Gupta’s ‘British Feminism Through a FiLiA Lens.’ I’ve been reading furiously ever since, and have only just emerged. 384 closely printed pages about all that FiLiA has instigated, inspired or been a part of over the last ten years. To say…
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Artificial Ignorance
So, today it happened to me. I saw a Facebook ‘friend”s post, which was making a political point, based on a photo. I got the point, although I suspected her motivation was a bit odd (all that stuff about what’s feminism, what’s racism and how the heck did I get lost somewhere between the two).…
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FiLiA: I had a bit of a tantrum
What it feels like Having been bawled out of the Labour Party, union activism and a whole load of less important things over Palestine, the sex-and-gender issue or both, I have, like vast numbers of others, been trying to help set up locally to be ready for the re-birth of left politics. When I sent…
Kay Green 