Category: Hastings
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To our HBC councillors
Dear Councillor, if you’re reading this – I know you’re busy people. There’s a letter to you in the second half of the text. Feel free to scroll straight on down to the bit headed “Can we please re-discover that word “no”? Long-gone local authorities I remember when “the authorities” were in Wellington Square. If…
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Hastings connections
(Hastings loves fireworks) Hastings, UK, has twin town relationships with Béthune (France), Oudenaarde (Belgium), Dordrecht (The Netherlands), and Schwerte (Germany), and Hastings in Sierra Leone, West Africa. I think we’re twinned with the first three because councillors have friends or trade links there. I guess with the last one, it’s because of the name, although…
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Rule One: Don’t give up
There’s lots to do, and plenty of people are in action, learning more every day about how it’s done. First, how it’s not done: I think most people have worked out that our party-political system is – if not broken, certainly captured, and not doing what it says on the tin. It’s taking us a…
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Hastings needs a strong voice
On the probable demise of HBC, and a possible citizens’ answer In the first week of the New Year I said this on FB… I was in a towering rage. Sure, the utterly destructive nature of party politics in recent years had pretty much disabled our local council and yes, a dysfunctional council is hard…
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Hastings – How do we take back our town?
This week, a citizen who happened to be a councillor happened to be at an assemblies planning meeting I went to. She informed me that our borough council is doomed. ‘It’s done and dusted,’ she said. The last couple of years have been a rollercoaster of first-priority issues for anyone even remotely involved in politics.…
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Hastings Genocide Memorial Day
Like many people up and down the country, a group of us gathered in Hastings on Saturday 1st February 2025 in support of Palestine. It was a complex event. First and foremost, we were saying STOP ARMING ISRAEL. But as politicians and the media push us to ‘move on’, just because of an extremely fragile…
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Unbearable MPs
Hastings is one of many towns that’s been enduring an MP who can never talk about Palestine without first agonizing over October 7th. No context, no proportionality. It’s hard to see it as anything but callous, wilful ignorance and you know, I really don’t think they have any idea just how much they have destroyed…
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Hastings: are we about to lose our council?
No, I don’t know either. I know there’s been talk about ‘unitary councils’ for some years, and that Labour has been making plans lately, which some have cynically suggested might enable them to cancel local elections that they are likely to lose. What came as more of a surprise to me, when I happened to…
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What is your information worth?
Just before Christmas, when I went to check my bank balance, I got one of those annoying ‘do what we want before you do what you want’ dialogue boxes. My bank wanted to ‘confirm my details’. As we all do when inconveniences like that come up, I huffed and muttered a bit – one minute…
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Well done Hastings part 2
Picking your enemy at random is stupid but directing people’s anger onto your victims is downright criminal. Wednesday was great – Hastings came out in huge numbers to prevent trouble on our streets. It worked brilliantly. Trouble turned up, here and there in twos and fours, saw us, said “nah, there’s f**** hundreds of them,”…
Kay Green 