Category: Politics
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Living with privatized ‘services’
The header pic is a screenshot from Southern Water’s latest self-promoting newsletter, passed to me in the week they managed to leave 31,000 households in Hastings with no water coming out of their taps, in some cases for five days straight. Southern’s incident updates made much of the fact that they set up three ‘water…
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Why we all hate Southern Water
Over the last few years, as utility bills have pushed more and more of us onto the breadline, and increasing numbers are falling over the edge into destitution, Hastings has had numerous problems with both electricity and water supplies. Water is the big issue just now. In my part of town, the taps ran dry…
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Braybrooke – I will be voting after all!
I always write a blog about my ward’s elections just before voting day. I really thought I wouldn’t this year, local politics being as it’s been lately but – look, I’m doing it! This has been a very strange election campaign period for me – a few years ago, I would have been right in…
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Who’s a racist, then?
We really aren’t that racist. What matters most to most people is figuring out how to be decent humans and get along with everyone. That doesn’t mean that racism and all the other dreadful behaviours aren’t out there – they are, and they’re deadly – but out and about amongst people, you don’t see much…
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24 hours in the slough of despond
This is a long read, and it’s all about those times when the political gets really, really personal. I hope it’s useful, and hope it reads okay! Rocking and reeling and finding the way home Yesterday was one of those slough of despond days. I’d been on the edge since a sobering experience at a…
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Urgent appeal for brains and courage!
“I will thkweem and thkweem until I’m thick. I will throw myself on the floor, I will blow up the world if you don’t give me what I want.” Anyone who’s ever cared for a two-year-old will recognize the catastrophic tantrum, the baby-turned monster who’s realized the world does not always bend to its needs.…
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Cameron, Lord of the Manor, bringer of referendum
Header pic: detail from a Peter Brookes cartoon Do you remember those history lessons at school, where we learned about feudalism, and how it was an odd system they had in the UK centuries ago? A world where the people we now call citizens were called ‘serfs’ or ‘peasants’, and they and their work literally…
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Persecution, prejudice and propaganda
What do you make of a situation where a UN investigator reads a certain name, and says “out of nowhere, I was overtaken by a host of disparaging thoughts and almost reflexive feelings of rejection”? He says he didn’t even read the email about that person, because he’d been convinced this wasn’t a topic he…
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Getting rid of Netanyahu won’t solve the problem
Don’t get me wrong – seeing Netanyahu out of his job and behind bars is probably a good first step on the long road to justice and peace. That has to happen but, now world leaders are (Finally! Will wonders never cease!) finding it hard to act as though nothing much is wrong in Israel,…