Category: activism
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On burning ambulances

On March 23, 2025, the Israeli military attacked five ambulances, a fire truck, and a United Nations vehicle, killing 15 aid workers. Exactly one year later, someone attacked three Jewish volunteer-run ambulances in Golders Green. No one thought it was a co-incidence, but beyond that, reactions fanned out in a range of ways. It serves…
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Stand up to misogyny

This morning, I asked Shereen Benjamin if I could reproduce a post from her social media for a blog article. Here it is… Edinburgh Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) said this: Yesterday’s demo would not have been possible, or half as much fun, without the amazing Tom and Nathan from @cabaretagainst 🎶 Constantly keeping the…
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Fly a kite, tell a story, read a book…

In February last year, I went to a talk by Dr Zahira Jaser, which focused on what it’s like being a Palestinian woman in the UK lately. One of the issues mentioned was some people’s attitudes to people wearing the keffiyah. These days, people seem to think it means ‘terrorist’. Jaser spoke eloquently about the…
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The air that we breathe

When Israel bombed Iran last time, I thought – my dentist’s in Iran, visiting her mother. Please don’t kill my dentist! It sounds like a joke when I write it that way, but that’s what normal people do, when a war starts. We think of the people we know, and try to find out if…
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Democracy – who needs it?

This is a personal view of what’s currently happening in my town. Please note – it’s my opinion – I am all too well aware that there are currently people who seem to remember things panning out quite differently and I have no intention of ‘doing a whatsapp’ and setting my version against theirs. Reality…
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What is Your Party really dying of?

With thanks to Chetan Bhatt and Paul Knaggs for some definitions of things that we know but are very good at forgetting to take into account. A very wonderful am dram group presented a rendition of Peter and the Starcatcher in my town last Christmas. Good it was, funny it was, troubling it was, because…
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But seriously, folks…

Are you still ‘for the many’? Are you one of the 850,000 who signed up as soon as Jeremy Corbyn declared a new party? Are you one of the (now less than) 50,000 who are still hanging on? Or one of the 4,000 or so who are still engaged enough to join in the endorsements…
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Campaign to save the NHS from Palantir

I had a wee rant the other day about Palantir, and my doctor’s surgery’s inability to communicate with humans. This evening, I listened to Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project meeting discussing how to fight back for our NHS. Corbyn spoke about how well the government petition against Digital ID worked, getting over a million…
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Bolivar circles

There were around 20 of us – we’d come along to this month’s Left in the Cinema in Hastings. We’d just watched The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, to remind ourselves of some of the history of Venezuela. Now, the film was done, and we gathered in a circle to discuss it. We weren’t all…
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What do we need slates for?

As ‘Your Party’ struggles and spats its way to getting started, I’ve read some of the current arguments about this and that slate for Executive Committee elections, and I think this might be a key issue. What are slates for? When loads of us joined the Labour Party to support the Corbyn movement, many of…