Category: Politics
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What’s a fiscal black hole, and how do you fix it?

It’s what you get when the magic money-tree suffers a crop failure. I don’t know whether our old MP Amber Rudd was the first one to claim “there is no magic money tree”, but she was most definitely one of those stashing their income in tax havens whilst telling us there was no magic solution…
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Hastings needs a strong voice

On the probable demise of HBC, and a possible citizens’ answer In the first week of the New Year I said this on FB… I was in a towering rage. Sure, the utterly destructive nature of party politics in recent years had pretty much disabled our local council and yes, a dysfunctional council is hard…
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The day I got Twit-mobbed
Or, Munitions, mobs and mobile phones So here’s a blog I never got around to sharing much back in November 2023… I am posting it now because of a sudden, someone somewhere is sharing it and it reminded me of the way that day went, and how that story links up what I think are…
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Help! I’m being repressed!
I wrote an article this morning about anti-Palestinian racism. There were the tags WordPress recommended… They clearly don’t have any recommendations for ‘Palestinian’ or ‘anti-racism’. Facebook immediately took it down as against community standards, and this is what they did when I objected…. They have done this many times when I write about Palestine, and…
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Why I am wearing that Palestinian badge today

An appeal from a Palestinian woman A year ago we were all shocked (well, those of us paying attention were shocked) to hear of a Palestinian boy reprimanded for turning up at school with a Palestinian flag badge on his coat. Yesterday, I heard Dr Zahira Jaser talking about what it’s like being a Palestinian…
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To AirBnB or not to AirBnB…?

Murder and theft in Palestine is the question. In November, I wrote to the London office of AirBnB. I said… I signed up as an AirBnB host a couple of years ago, partly because I had a bedroom I could spare for a while and it answered the problem of rising household bills, partly because…
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An entirely selfish request

(A request from me that is, not Richard Medhurst, who is merely asking that random police forces could please stop arresting him and nicking his kit.) It’s like this: I’ve been reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It’s the size of a brick, but not really the kind of brick you’d take…
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Hastings – How do we take back our town?

This week, a citizen who happened to be a councillor happened to be at an assemblies planning meeting I went to. She informed me that our borough council is doomed. ‘It’s done and dusted,’ she said. The last couple of years have been a rollercoaster of first-priority issues for anyone even remotely involved in politics.…
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Hastings Genocide Memorial Day

Like many people up and down the country, a group of us gathered in Hastings on Saturday 1st February 2025 in support of Palestine. It was a complex event. First and foremost, we were saying STOP ARMING ISRAEL. But as politicians and the media push us to ‘move on’, just because of an extremely fragile…
