Category: Labour
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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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Our Thanks to the Opposition
(Is it okay, guys, if I write a bit of a tongue-in-cheek piece to entertain the wimms?) The other day, I put out a blog post calling for an end to people nagging the women’s rights campaigners. I was fed up with our organisations having to deal with non-stop slander and sabotage, whilst being constantly…
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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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What kind of country tolerates police seizing people’s books?
Yep, it happened. It happened in Wales. As one woman put it to me recently, surely that’s a red line for everyone. This was a gathering in support of a woman who was arrested, detained for ten hours, and has been messed about ever since. The police searched her house, and took a book they…
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A message from Mrs Mouthy
We were all anxiously talking about the founding of a People’s Assembly for our town: It’s the People’s Assembly Against Austerity. The purpose is to facilitate a group coming together in each and every town in the country, to defend our services and demand the resources to provide for our people and our environment. It…
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Why sign that petition?
In many ways, the petition text does not actually touch on the issues that most people see as the ‘Sir Tony’ problem. I’d say there’s a big one, and an earth-shatteringly enormous one – but I keep changing my mind over which is which. Here they are, in no particular order… The ‘rescind Blair’s knighthood’…
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Local politics – identity v solidarity
If there is anything like a progressive alliance in May, or at the next General Election, it’s going to have to be based on something better than party politics. Last week, I wrote a piece calling for independent candidates for next year’s council elections (well, any elections that happen next year really) because it seems…
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Make lousy politicians a minority
We could do this. Here’s how… There are millions of people in this country who, like me, have used the phrase ‘politically homeless’. They have been thrown out of, or lost faith in, their ‘natural’ choice of party. There are also increasing numbers of people who, like me, have realised there’s more to politics than…
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Crosscut your community
In November 2021, the news hit Hastings that a group of refugees had drowned trying to cross the channel. It hit us hard, because being a southern coastal town, the victims of failed attempts tend to wash up on our shore. This has never been a problem we are able to ignore. Local reactions are…
Kay Green 