Category: Labour
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Useful idiots
Whatever your personal political position is, please indulge me while I set the scene with a couple of paragraphs of reminiscence. It’s 2017, and I am a lefty delegate from a lefty CLP. Lefty CLPs are in exuberant ascendancy, and we came to conference, one and all, with the intention not just of furthering our…
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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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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…
