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Nice work, BBC – we’re all suitably depressed!
Actually, the word is oppressed. Like many people, I stopped watching the BBC for politics and current affairs long ago. It is not designed to inform, educate or anything else useful. It is designed to obfusticate and divide and to subvert attempts at rational thought. I am, of course, writing this now because like many…
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Under-rated heroes and forgotten wives
Happy anniversary, Gustav and Isobel Holst A guest post by author Philippa Tudor Fame and fleeting, modest fortune Aspiring but not-yet-famous composer Gustav von Holst and Isobel Harrison were married on 22 June 1901. It was a quiet wedding in Fulham Register Office (a former workhouse), witnessed by Isobel’s brother and Gustav’s aunt, who had…
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Four Long Years
It feels like about 200 years ago I stepped down as a Labour Party CLP officer, and got stuck into the women’s rights campaign. Initially, I didn’t have a particularly articulate view of the conflict between women’s legal rights and Stonewall et al’s demands under the title ‘trans rights’, but I did have a very…
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Dear Morrisons, Customers do not ‘have to’ anything.
Dear Morrisons, This morning, as I walked away from your unstaffed kiosk to find somewhere I could actually do what I wanted to do, I stopped to ask the man on the door to please tell the manager they are losing customers. I told him it was around the third time I’ve done that in…
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Excluded by inclusion
Or: who will save us from nice blokes? Mark Drakeford tramples on women’s rights Mark Drakeford is a nice bloke. He was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and, from his comfortable position as a white male with a successful political career, has a firm grasp on the idea that inclusion is always a good thing.…
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We have got what we need
We wanted a Corbyn government. The others wanted a ‘more electable leader’. No matter. Meanwhile, the Tories wanted to stay in charge, despite not having anyone remotely suitable, so the nation got Boris the Liar, Boris the evil clown who let his friends run away with anything that wasn’t nailed down, then literally sat there…
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Oh look, Humpty Dumpty again
Who speaks, who listens, and who is heard? I didn’t watch the Depp/Heard circus. I get that anyone involved in an alcohol-soaked, dysfunctional relationship behaves badly. I also get that Depp was violent and abusive. That had already been proved beyond reasonable doubt in a previous court hearing, so I take the new US court…
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Who speaks, who listens, and who is heard?
The extract above is from a statement by Ruby Cox, a former councillor in Hastings, who has been asked and asked, for months, for her version of something that happened to her but, after all this time, will anyone want to hear? I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of…
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Train cleaners deserve better
Last week, I went to the Hastings Demands Better TUC meeting, and learned a lot about what various local community groups and industrial unions were doing about the cost-of-living crisis. One of the speakers, Bella Fashola, told us about the Churchill train cleaners’ dispute. The overarching issue is clear: how are people who clean trains,…
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The original mistake?
Has it ever occurred to anyone that the founding of the Labour Party might have been a mistake from the start? I have spent a large part of my political time over the last decade on campaigns arguing for workers’ rights and women’s rights. The Labour Party has been, to put it generously, a fair-weather…
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Kay Green 