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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…
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Samud: an afternoon in Chalton Street

Today, I went to the last day of the Palestine exhibition at P21 gallery in Chalton Street, London. You can see quite a lot of it here… Click here to watch the reel on Facebook When I arrived, I recognized the face on the screen in the main hall. It was Wael Dahdouh, talking about…
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It’s Galloway — be happy — really!

Galloway wins by a landslide. He finished way ahead of Labour’s former MP, a right-wing racist and the candidate they abandoned shortly before the election. I know Galloway’s an egoist, I know he hasn’t got his head round the urgency of climate crisis and I know the nascent party he supposedly heads will probably implode…
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I found the racism, now what?

At least the BBC has the decency to mention the Pennines, the Co-operative Movement and Gracie Fields but other than those reasons to think about Rochdale, this article is mainly rattling with racism and as far as I can see, that’s really not the fault of the people of Rochdale. I decided to spend a…
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Is something burning?

I hope not, I really do – but I was reminded today of a tweet that blazed across the screens from women’s groups a few years ago. I had no idea who this guy was, but he said… … That was two and a half years ago. And THAT was several years after women started…
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The collective noun for feminists

It is an annoying cliché that a gathering of feminists is inevitably an argument, and I’m not going to argue with that, I’m going to tell you why it’s both inevitable and perfectly okay. Women in general A gathering of women is more likely to be noisy and argumentative than a gathering of men or…
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Inspiration from old bags

I love those bags you get given at conferences. As a trade union and a Labour Party officer a few years ago, I became a gleeful picker up of pens, badges, note books and above all, what I insist on calling book-bags, because when I wasn’t doing political conferences I was doing book fairs. Those…