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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…
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From Hastings to Gaza
Through this coming half term week, there is a series of workshops, and an exhibition of poetry and art for, by and about Palestinian children. Whether you want to spend a few minutes in the quiet hall, just looking at the paintings, to sit down and make use of the art materials provided to write…
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In memoriam
In the course of his career, John Pilger made 61 documentaries, all questioning the ‘establishment narrative’ on big, international news stories. Topics he’s covered include Palestine, the Thalidomide scandal, Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and the ‘Coke v Pepsi’ battles. Bottom up journalism People often talk about ‘bottom-up v top-down’ politics, but Pilger believed in bottom-up…
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“Do more!”
Did you think it was you being childish, impatient? Did politicians manage to convince you that they’re more sophisticated than you, did they say they are not ‘playing safe’, they are ‘playing a longer game’? Among her reasons for not calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, my MP assured me that the government was doing…
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We keep winning, why haven’t we won?
This is for all those councillors, MPs, TU reps and organization heads who think women’s rights is a minority interest. The accurate answer to ‘transwomen are women’ is ‘no, women are women. Transwomen are transwomen‘. Unfortunately, the people running all our councils and government departments and big organizations hardly ever hear the right answer, so…