Category: Politics
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Debate is unpleasant?

Well, it can certainly be challenging. Ever since FB started religiously removing anything telling that I tried to contribute to the worldwide effort to stop a genocide, I’ve been wondering what exactly these community standards are that I apparently keep going against. I read everything I could find and nowhere did I see anything that…
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Knowing is believing

People need their hope back. Here it is… The reasons why it’s so hard for ‘the left’ to re-group and push back into party politics are many but the main one is that getting back into party politics may not be what we need. The real tragedy is that many who have lost faith in…
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When the war is lost and won

An ode to Hampden Park The spuggies were singing at Hampden Park this morning. They were called sparrows when I was a kid, and they were everywhere. Every bush and tree went cheep! cheep! Every sudden movement by humans was answered by the whir of a hundred sparrows taking flight. A generation ago But my…
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An open letter to Sir Keir Starmer

Dear Prime Minister, This is probably the one and only time I will send you a genuinely well meant message of encouragement, so I would like to take this opportunity to assure you that it is sincere, and is the heart-felt opinion of many Labour supporters and members, past and present. Yesterday saw the issuing…
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Message from the margins

I read ‘Apology’ from Another Angry Voice’ today, because I have a desktop covered in blogs I started writing in the last few weeks and lost faith in along the way, and it set me wondering — whatever the personal circumstances around it — just how many lefty bloggers must be embroiled in doubts and…
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Keep and Eye on Cooper

Those of us who were chased out of the Labour Party so Starmer and Co would not be troubled by any vestiges of socialism or any variety of that “better, kinder politics” Corbyn offered have no illusions about the foul culture of Westminster. We see team Starmer, bank accounts sloshing with hedge-fund donors’ money, nevertheless…
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It’s hard

It’s hard to write about anything except Palestine now. The two topics on my agenda now are categorized as Palestine and everything else. And I’m beginning to feel that the deeply dysfunctional, worse than useless people that we have instead of politicians and journalists, nationally, regionally and locally, are quite happy that most of our…
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What journalists and reporters should be doing

On home affairs, every day, all the time, they should be asking politicians why they apply ‘austerity’, saying there is no money, when they want to take things away from people (the winter fuel allowance, for example) and then proudly announce vast sums to be spent on private, profiteering projects such as carbon capture (which…
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Bombs, poverty and toilets

At an academy school in the UK in the 21st century They have anti-bullying toilets – wide halls opening onto the main corridor with toilet cubicles down each side and rows of dirty sinks back-to-back in the centre. Originally, they were boys-side and girls-side – so that if you, for example, needed to rinse something…
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Outcry and Condemnation

Yesterday, at the Parliamentary Committee of the Council of Europe, Kristin Hrafnsson made an appeal that should have gone straight to the hearts of all the journalists in the UK, as well as any citizens who have managed to hang onto their moral compass, or any memory of the basic requirements of democracy and human…