Category: Corbyn
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HILP! HILP! HILP!

Why do we think the UK is no good at radical? A message to my country, and to my local Labour Party. We had our first revolution almost before anyone invented the concept. Just before lunch, we used to gibly say when I was at school – the Magna Carta, 12.15 (actually, that was the…
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We have got what we need

We wanted a Corbyn government. The others wanted a ‘more electable leader’. No matter. Meanwhile, the Tories wanted to stay in charge, despite not having anyone remotely suitable, so the nation got Boris the Liar, Boris the evil clown who let his friends run away with anything that wasn’t nailed down, then literally sat there…
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The original mistake?

Has it ever occurred to anyone that the founding of the Labour Party might have been a mistake from the start? I have spent a large part of my political time over the last decade on campaigns arguing for workers’ rights and women’s rights. The Labour Party has been, to put it generously, a fair-weather…
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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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We must rebuild trust – Ha ha ha!

***Long read for the weekend*** I’m writing this as I anxiously await the results of local council elections. It’s been a strange one for me, because it’s the first election since I foreswore party allegiance (I maintain that I didn’t leave Labour, Labour left me) – but the result still matters to me, because I…
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Another War to End All Wars

I remember I remember a ‘cross over’ lecture by Chomsky, when his reputation as a political commentator was beginning to overtake his reputation as a linguist. (He made one mistake, okay? The ‘language acquisition device’ was a red herring. That’s what academics do – they posit theories to be tested and write about them. The…
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Left in the Middle with You

It has been a very wearing experience being a woman doing battle for the Corbyn movement in Labour, and then a woman doing battle with the remainder of the left in Labour after Corbyn. (Yes I had to stop and read that sentence back, too.) This is an article about solidarity In the Corbyn years…
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Beware the Thatcherite Greens

I was in the Green Party once but, it feels like a lifetime ago. Just about all the socialists in the Green Party left to support the Corbyn movement in Labour – it seemed the best opportunity in our lifetime to bring both socialism and environmentalism into our government. Unfortunately, that failed. Many of the…
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Politics: the viral divide

I begin to think the virus blame-game is even more misleading than the rest of the political hot potatoes put together. Sham lockdown When the whole masks and lockdown thing started, many of us thought it impossible to ‘stop’ a virus in a crowded country where many people still had to go to work. Many…
