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Hastings: are we about to lose our council?

No, I don’t know either. I know there’s been talk about ‘unitary councils’ for some years, and that Labour has been making plans lately, which some have cynically suggested might enable them to cancel local elections that they are likely to lose. What came as more of a surprise to me, when I happened to…
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12 Radical Notions, 34 meetings and a betrayal

At the end of November 2024, Women’s Place UK officially drew the final curtain. It was logical. The founders set up WPUK because the new-fangled, ill-defined concept of ‘gender identity’ was being mooted as justification for allowing males to self-identify into women’s spaces and services, and the call from some women’s groups for impact assessments,…
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What is your information worth?

Just before Christmas, when I went to check my bank balance, I got one of those annoying ‘do what we want before you do what you want’ dialogue boxes. My bank wanted to ‘confirm my details’. As we all do when inconveniences like that come up, I huffed and muttered a bit – one minute…
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The likeable chaps who destroy worlds

This area I’ve been trying to think about – the whole sweep of countries that Israel seems to have a license to bomb – it’s been going under the name of ‘The Middle East’, normally pronounced in news reports with the prefix ‘Troubleinthe’: here in the UK, the BBC brought me up to be very…
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The Fifth Risk, and then some more risks

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis This book was published in the UK in 2018. It has date stamps in the front from 2020 and 2021 (some of the Sussex libraries still sometimes do things the old way). I borrowed it earlier this year, to read just in case. Since then, the Biden/Harris circus shot…
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Debate is unpleasant?

Well, it can certainly be challenging. Ever since FB started religiously removing anything telling that I tried to contribute to the worldwide effort to stop a genocide, I’ve been wondering what exactly these community standards are that I apparently keep going against. I read everything I could find and nowhere did I see anything that…
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A wonderful opportunity

There are so many reasons to be interested in Marilyn Garson’s writing. She has worked in Afghanistan and Palestine, and has written a book about her experiences in Gaza during the 2014 bombardment. She describes the mission she gave herself as aiming to ‘rehumanize’ the people of Gaza. I love that focus. It brings strong…
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Knowing is believing

People need their hope back. Here it is… The reasons why it’s so hard for ‘the left’ to re-group and push back into party politics are many but the main one is that getting back into party politics may not be what we need. The real tragedy is that many who have lost faith in…
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When the war is lost and won

An ode to Hampden Park The spuggies were singing at Hampden Park this morning. They were called sparrows when I was a kid, and they were everywhere. Every bush and tree went cheep! cheep! Every sudden movement by humans was answered by the whir of a hundred sparrows taking flight. A generation ago But my…
