Category: prejudice
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Why? We wail, Why?
Why does politics spiral into ever darker pits of cruelty and lies? In an interview by Freddie Sayers (link at the end of the article), author Kate Clanchy, who has recently been the victim of a huge row about what’s racist and what isn’t, has made a good attempt at explaining why some political questions…
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The Mermaid of Black Conch
Life, eh! When you’re tired – years and years tired – of the struggle, of the battering of socialism, of feminism, of the average person’s chance to even earn a crust; when you know you’ve got too bitter and stroppy to do any good, and all but withdrawn from the fight, and a friend passes…
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2022: Sisters, the campaign starts here
“This is the year our collective righteous bloody-minded refusal to shut the fuck up finally broke the impenetrable wall of ‘no debate’” – Jane Clare Jones on Twitter, 31st Dec 2021 Click here to read the whole message. So we have won the right to have the debate. Now, we need to win the debate.…
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Spoonfuls
I am going to found a media corporation, just like all the others. I’m going to call it Spoonfuls. For every court case, dispute, scandal or other human flurry that gets noticed, I will pick a woman or sometimes, for variety, a slightly goofy beardy man, and put that person’s photo in the news every…
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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,…
Kay Green 