Category: activism
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An open letter to Sir Keir Starmer
Dear Prime Minister, This is probably the one and only time I will send you a genuinely well meant message of encouragement, so I would like to take this opportunity to assure you that it is sincere, and is the heart-felt opinion of many Labour supporters and members, past and present. Yesterday saw the issuing…
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Thinking about faces I didn’t see at Conway Hall
I was musing with a friend about the variety of things each of us had seen and done at Conway Hall over the years – from TU campaign meetings through poetry society gatherings to arts and academic lectures. It was at Conway Hall that I first met John McDonnell, and got myself sufficiently embroiled in…
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Message from the margins
I read ‘Apology’ from Another Angry Voice’ today, because I have a desktop covered in blogs I started writing in the last few weeks and lost faith in along the way, and it set me wondering — whatever the personal circumstances around it — just how many lefty bloggers must be embroiled in doubts and…
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Keep and Eye on Cooper
Those of us who were chased out of the Labour Party so Starmer and Co would not be troubled by any vestiges of socialism or any variety of that “better, kinder politics” Corbyn offered have no illusions about the foul culture of Westminster. We see team Starmer, bank accounts sloshing with hedge-fund donors’ money, nevertheless…
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It’s hard
It’s hard to write about anything except Palestine now. The two topics on my agenda now are categorized as Palestine and everything else. And I’m beginning to feel that the deeply dysfunctional, worse than useless people that we have instead of politicians and journalists, nationally, regionally and locally, are quite happy that most of our…
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Forced back into the closet, after all we’ve been through
*** Guest post by Paula Boulton*** Introduction by Kay Green I’ve written a lot in recent years about the extent and the consequences of attacks on women’s rights, attacks usually presented under the banner of “trans activism”. The same, perhaps worse, is happening when lesbian and/or gay groups attempt to organize. The terrible thing is,…
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What journalists and reporters should be doing
On home affairs, every day, all the time, they should be asking politicians why they apply ‘austerity’, saying there is no money, when they want to take things away from people (the winter fuel allowance, for example) and then proudly announce vast sums to be spent on private, profiteering projects such as carbon capture (which…
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Bombs, poverty and toilets
At an academy school in the UK in the 21st century They have anti-bullying toilets – wide halls opening onto the main corridor with toilet cubicles down each side and rows of dirty sinks back-to-back in the centre. Originally, they were boys-side and girls-side – so that if you, for example, needed to rinse something…
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Outcry and Condemnation
Yesterday, at the Parliamentary Committee of the Council of Europe, Kristin Hrafnsson made an appeal that should have gone straight to the hearts of all the journalists in the UK, as well as any citizens who have managed to hang onto their moral compass, or any memory of the basic requirements of democracy and human…
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Sausages, pylons and prisons
Notes from afar on the post-socialist ‘Labour’ conference Actually, the bit about the sausages was the most effective of Starmer’s strategies I was surprised to hear there appeared to be at least three socialists left to attend conference – well, people with a scrap of conscience, anyway. One was assaulted and dragged from the hall,…
Kay Green 