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In which this feminist listens very carefully to socialists talking about anti-racism
***Long read for the weekend*** When I was a Labour Party officer, there was a real hunger for political education amongst Corbyn-supporting members, and my constituency party had a Political Education Officer who delivered. We had films, we had workshops and we had debates. We sent people to political conferences (not just the Labour Party…
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How did our country become “Rip off Britain?”
Distractions, distractions We’re so good at distractions. Somehow, there’s always something to stop us thinking about what we need to deal with. Where was our attention, when Jimmy Savile waggled the old eyebrows and said “I’m hiding in plain sight”? Where was our attention when Johnny Rotten warned everyone about him? Where was our attention…
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Postman Pat and the sweet shop lady
Two treasured memories from my childhood. Where I lived when I was a kid, the sweet shop on the corner was also a Post Office. When I moved to Hastings, I used to use the Post Office counter in the bookshop on the seafront — and I still prefer the one in that little supermarket…
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If you’re not a big rally person be a local picket person
And what to do if you too want to fight back against government-induced austerity but you can’t do either of those things. Thursday and Saturday were both RMT strike days. There are still people working on our railways who are campaigning to reach a basic living wage… …whilst the railway execs continue to get ridiculously…
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On resisting “bubble thinking”
From Gary Lineker through Brexit to women’s rights via Timothy Snyder ***Long read*** Let’s go back in time and give some attention to how we got here, and how we might go about getting to a better place. This is a discussion about a YouTube clip from Channel Four, of Krishnan Guru-Murthy talking to Timothy…
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“A dark journey into what ails America”
In his 2022 book The Storm is Here, US-born journalist Luke Mogelson starts out, surrounded by the heavily armed members of various self-instigated militias, talking to a barber who defied lockdown over ‘the right to a haircut’. It’s not entirely clear who is there defending what from whom, although the New World Order, the Russians,…
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Oh alright, I’ll talk about toilets again
For the last five years, I have regularly had people throw that one about “are you going to look up people’s skirts in the loos” at me, and I have regularly had people say to me, “don’t mixed sex toilets solve the problem”. I generally answered – truthfully, that the women’s sex based rights campaign…
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A Radical Review
What I learned from Issue Eight – ‘the disputes edition’ – of The Radical Notion and from reading Maya Forstater’s critique of it Click here for a TRN download link. Click here to buy a paper copy of TRN. Just in case you’re thinking about last summer and saying… Oh, no, please, no! …this, after…
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The Jaguar Smile
This is a review of The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie. I read it in 2023 because… From time to time, I like revisiting ‘old’ books, because until I was involved in the book trade, I didn’t know how casually ‘back list’ books are treated, nor how easily they can drop off into the ‘not…