Category: Uncategorized
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Can you keep a secret in a village?
Many years ago on holiday in Cumbria, author William Wood was enchanted by a village not unlike that portrayed in his new book. “Imagine what it would be like to live here,” he said to Anna, his wife. Neither ever dreamed this dream would come true. William was brought up in the South East and…
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Cameron, Lord of the Manor, bringer of referendum
Header pic: detail from a Peter Brookes cartoon Do you remember those history lessons at school, where we learned about feudalism, and how it was an odd system they had in the UK centuries ago? A world where the people we now call citizens were called ‘serfs’ or ‘peasants’, and they and their work literally…
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Girls with Balls
Yes, I know what you thought this was about, because I thought it too, when I saw Tim Tate’s book sitting on a library shelf but it was his idea of a joke, you see. The book is subtitled ‘The secret history of women’s football’. It’s all about how popular women’s football was during the…
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Persecution, prejudice and propaganda
What do you make of a situation where a UN investigator reads a certain name, and says “out of nowhere, I was overtaken by a host of disparaging thoughts and almost reflexive feelings of rejection”? He says he didn’t even read the email about that person, because he’d been convinced this wasn’t a topic he…
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Getting rid of Netanyahu won’t solve the problem
Don’t get me wrong – seeing Netanyahu out of his job and behind bars is probably a good first step on the long road to justice and peace. That has to happen but, now world leaders are (Finally! Will wonders never cease!) finding it hard to act as though nothing much is wrong in Israel,…
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Activism works — here’s the evidence
I was a Green Party officer once. I was a trade union officer, and a member of a regional activist group in my union, and I have been a Labour Party officer. Every single time, I stood down from the roles I had because there was some politics that needed doing, and I couldn’t do…
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The Battle for Home
Imagine this: you’ve been barred from your home district while those who are conducting a war got on with it. You’ve spent your time trying to find food and get on with life in the parts of your town that are still semi-functional, whilst trying to teach your kids to recognize and find shelter from…
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Trying to guess what happened in our council yesterday
***There are now two links on the end of this post which, I think, make it pretty clear what happened.*** Hastings Borough Council full council meeting did not happen this week It’s supposed to be a meeting of citizens democratically elected to represent the town, open to members of the public who get to join…
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Trespassers Will: a great, long, monster blog-post posing as a book review
“Ownership insecurity”- a fascinating concept that, especially on the topic of land. It’s a vicious form of paranoia that threatens to manifest as soon as someone lays claim to a bit of land larger than the average family allotment. Until recently, most of us were completely baffled by the obsession Israel and its followers had…
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There’s a tiny chink of light in the darkest hour…
Close on the heels of our nationwide horror at seeing almost all of our UK politicians excusing Israel’s blatant and atrocity-strewn destruction of Gaza, this week we had to witness yet another disgrace in the House of Commons, where MPs claim to be the voice of the people. In a packed House, each MP was…
Kay Green 