Category: activism
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What I did on my holidays

There’s no such thing as a part-time activist when you have a predaTory government in power. We set out for one of the most beautiful and peaceful parts of the country we could think of for our holidays, and within ten minutes of our arrival, we were outside the Town Hall, helping to defend the…
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Who or what is coming home?

If football ‘comes home’, I have a question or two. I think I have watched about two ‘proper’ football matches in my life. I really don’t do international level sport-as-a-spectator stuff. So I’m a bit worried about how you go about writing a blog about football. It’s like this – it’s clear ‘football’ has changed.…
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How to be patriotic

I spent this morning at work in my garden. A very, very British thing to do, weekend gardening. I spent this afternoon listening to Jeremy Corbyn and Richard Burgon talking about patriotism and national security. How quickly we forget what it was like when the good guys were getting to do all the big political…
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Telanon

You don’t just not need the mainstream media – you need to liberate yourself from it. I focus here on one newspaper and one TV channel because they tend to be the last ones people give up – the ‘best of a bad bunch’, as it were. Like many people (including you, probably, if you’re…
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You know schools, right?

Sorry for the bar room tone of the title, but it seems to me to match the level of thinking we have been getting from our government. I have huge sympathy with the people who have been agitating all along to keep/get the schools open. I have huge sympathy with the people who want the…
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My Christmas Homework, 2016 (or, why we still look back in anger )

NB This was written in 2020. I am re-posting now to help this petition reach the million mark (We made it! Now, how about 1.5 million, to match the numbers on that famous march in London – or perhaps more, for all those on the other ‘don’t attack Iraq’ marches around the world.) Homework, set…
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Keith and Angela: the true story in all its horrible detail

There’s no shortage of passionate criticism of Starmer and Rayner’s phone bank rewards system out there – but let’s try and stop swearing and explain our frustration properly, because there is an important lesson here for these politicians and their followers to learn. When this image of the Labour Party’s idiot scheme did the rounds,…
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Listen, question, test

This idea is so important I have given it one of those fashionable three-word slogans to help me remember it. It’s unlikely you’ll agree with every statement I’m going to make in this article. If you’re the kind of person who needs trigger warnings to protect you from the trauma of being disagreed with, please…
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For goodness sake

Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!!! For the sake of those struck down by austerity in times of covd; for those who have lost jobs, homes and family; for the sake of refugees still struggling to get a secure foothold in any country; for the sake of black activists being kicked around in the United States, for right-to-return…