Category: Politics
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Ordinary politics?
Yesterday (that was 6th April – the nearly-Armageddon day) just like millions of other people, I spent the day trying to earn a crust and thinking that although you can’t live on the state pension, it really can’t come soon enough if I’m to hold my little world together – but also yesterday, the BBC…
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A truly terrible book
I picked this book up because it’s subtitled Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction, and it got a further punch of urgency from the strapline by Eric Idle, ‘Put this at the head of your reading lists immediately’. I thought it might be about one of the emergencies the great and the…
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Complicated?
I still see people around social media saying ‘it’s complicated’. I still see them pointing out creases and chasms in the history of Palestine which they use to suggest firstly, it’s hard to see who Palestine ‘belongs to’ and secondly – and incredibly – that this difficulty means they can’t roundly oppose mass killing, displacement,…
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On burning ambulances
On March 23, 2025, the Israeli military attacked five ambulances, a fire truck, and a United Nations vehicle, killing 15 aid workers. Exactly one year later, someone attacked three Jewish volunteer-run ambulances in Golders Green. No one thought it was a co-incidence, but beyond that, reactions fanned out in a range of ways. It serves…
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Fly a kite, tell a story, read a book…
In February last year, I went to a talk by Dr Zahira Jaser, which focused on what it’s like being a Palestinian woman in the UK lately. One of the issues mentioned was some people’s attitudes to people wearing the keffiyah. These days, people seem to think it means ‘terrorist’. Jaser spoke eloquently about the…
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This article has nothing whatsoever to do with shopping…
…it is a salute to Valerie Coultas and all the other women and men who have hung in there for Your Party, and still hope to build socialism there. Sexism has always been there – where has the socialist understanding of it gone? 1910 When women thrown into prison for marching for women’s rights began…
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The air that we breathe
When Israel bombed Iran last time, I thought – my dentist’s in Iran, visiting her mother. Please don’t kill my dentist! It sounds like a joke when I write it that way, but that’s what normal people do, when a war starts. We think of the people we know, and try to find out if…
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What happened to the ‘Homes for Heroes’?
After the war, the government oversaw a huge building and rebuilding project, to repair and replace war-damaged infrastructure and, under the banner ‘Homes for Heroes’, to provide council housing in particular for the families of returning soldiers, and more widely to address the housing shortage and make homes available for all who needed them. This…
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Democracy – who needs it?
This is a personal view of what’s currently happening in my town. Please note – it’s my opinion – I am all too well aware that there are currently people who seem to remember things panning out quite differently and I have no intention of ‘doing a whatsapp’ and setting my version against theirs. Reality…
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What is Your Party really dying of?
With thanks to Chetan Bhatt and Paul Knaggs for some definitions of things that we know but are very good at forgetting to take into account. A very wonderful am dram group presented a rendition of Peter and the Starcatcher in my town last Christmas. Good it was, funny it was, troubling it was, because…
Kay Green 