Category: prejudice
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If you were honest, what would you say?
Or Janice’s Goats ***Long Read *** I used to think I lived in a free country – born in the UK in the 1960s, it was a long time before I questioned the idea. Even when I discovered it wasn’t entirely true, I was still aware that as countries went, our country in the 20th…
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Thirty Years Ago
***Long Read*** I’ve been reading a report called Blood Sweat and Tears, about a project in the 1990s, instigated to address rising racial tensions, crime and related problems on an estate in Bermondsey. I have this temptation to make a terrible joke first, and I think I’m going to give in to it, and say…
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Make lousy politicians a minority
We could do this. Here’s how… There are millions of people in this country who, like me, have used the phrase ‘politically homeless’. They have been thrown out of, or lost faith in, their ‘natural’ choice of party. There are also increasing numbers of people who, like me, have realised there’s more to politics than…
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Christmas lights on the beach
Dear Home Secretary, Fairy lights are on the trees and the lamp posts in the town centre, and the coloured lights are appearing in the shops and the windows of everyone’s houses, but these lights are the ones people of Hastings took to the sea-front, as a farewell message to the families who drowned in…
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Transports of delight!
Oh, what an original idea! Gather up all these alarming, inconvenient people and send them to some far-flung corner of the world we have a bit of control over. It worked before, didn’t it? That’s why Australia is what it is. Come to think of it, lots of UK citizens who hadn’t been marked as…
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Forced teaming has dreadful consequences
Imagine Neptunian people are your thing (I know, I know but just imagine… ). Imagine the Neptunian Support Group has been the centre of your life and activity for decades. Then one day, the Neptunian Support Group is offered a load of funding for promoting Plutonian welfare. I mean, Plutonians are nice and all that,…
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My pronouns are I/me
For most of my life, feminists have called upon women to resist stating their ‘gender’ in work situations, to discourage sex harassment and/or discrimination. Many public authority jobs used to be advertised and processed in a sex-blind and race-blind manner, to avoid discrimination in recruitment. Then someone decided the way to check for and correct…
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Tell me one thing that’s right about women in prison
My Dad worked on prison reform, way back in the last century. Obviously (I thought!) because he was a bloke, he worked in male prisons (I just learned that female prisons also have male officers but there you go). One of the things dad often said was that people are obsessed with how many *years*…
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To the person handing out leaflets outside FiLiA in Portsmouth
Was it the ‘good cop, bad cop’ approach? The kiddies filled the square with obscenities and threats while you did nice and polite leafletting by the conference entrance? Well, maybe you really did mean well and had no idea what they were doing so just in case that is so, here’s a polite reply to…
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Why politicians are stupid
Never mind Starmer, Johnson or any other besuited blaguers. This line from Ceri Williams, in the informal, ‘thank you and good night’ speech at the end of an unofficial fringe meeting, was, in my opinion the most important utterance of this year’s entire political conference season. It’s like when you go to Spain with the…
Kay Green 