Below are the
most popular posts on this blog, as judged by unique page views, by month, for
2018. The blog is closing now until the New Year.
Happy holiday
to all our readers.
January
It is not
just a lefty like me pondering this matter, the Tories are openly posing this
question themselves. Rumours are circulating that membership has fallen to as
low as 70,000, and this is causing some soul searching in the party.
February
I am from a
Labour party supporting background, raised in local authority housing, schooled
and paid for and maintained in higher education by the same municipality, a
Labour run council. My dad was a shop steward in the engineering union too, so
it’s no surprise then that I have never even considered supporting the Tory
party.
March
Being gay in
Pakistan is a much bigger deal than in Britain, and this news could well
endanger Sanni’s family. Why Parkinson decided to make public the fact he and
Sanni had had an eighteen month relationship, is not entirely clear, but it
certainly looks like an attempt to smear Sanni’s revelations in some way as
unreliable.
April
The local
authority elections on 3 May, are the last full scale elections in England
before our departure from the European Union in March 2019. Yes, it looks like
we will get a transitional deal which will last for almost two further years,
when to all intents and purposes nothing will change, but we will no longer be
a member of the EU. So, this is the last chance to send a message to the Labour
and Tory parties, whose leaderships are in favour leaving.
May
After writing
about the Royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle recently, I got to
thinking about the overall cost of the Monarchy to UK taxpayers. Estimates put
the cost of the wedding itself at around £32 million, but this is just an added
extra. The more you look into the matter, the more you wonder why we put up
with this historical privilege?
June
“It’s not the
despair, I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.” So says John
Cleese in the film Clockwise. This quote rather sums up the attitude of England
football fans as each World Cup and European Championship comes around. The
2018 World Cup in Russia began yesterday, and England fans and pundits are in
familiar territory.
July
With stories
circulating about the British government stockpiling food, as part of a plan to
cover the eventuality of a no deal Brexit, there is talk that the UK should
become more self-sufficient in food once we leave the European Union (EU). Of
course all this would take time, certainly longer than by our exit from the EU,
which will happen in eight months’ time. But as a longer term objective, this
would surely be a sensible thing to do. It would avoid tailbacks at ports and
environmentally concerned people should welcome it, too. But is it feasable?
August
It is more
than two years now since the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European
Union (EU), where of course we voted to leave. It has been a feature, during
the referendum campaign itself and in the period since, that those who
advocated Brexit haven’t come up with any sort of plan for life outside of the
union. What kind of relationship with the EU do they want, if any at all?
September
In fighting
antisemitism for a long time, the threat has been adequately understood as
‘hostility towards Jews as Jews’. But
this simple definition does not suffice for a different political agenda,
namely: conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel in order to attack the
Palestine solidarity movement and intimidate its supporters. This article will explain the attack, its
background in a racist agenda and the necessary anti-racist response. For
numerous sources, see hyperlinks in this piece.
October
In her
closing address, Theresa May, the prime minister, told the Conservative Party
Conference removing the cap on local authority borrowing against Housing
Revenue Accounts (HRA) would help the Government achieve its ambition of
building 300,000 homes a year by the middle of the next decade.
November
Following my
involvement, on Saturday 17 November, in Extinction Rebellion’s very successful
Rebellion Day 1 in London, friends have said I should feel proud of what I
did. ‘Yes’, I was one of over 6000
climate protectors who, peacefully, blocked 5 of London’s central bridges for
most of that day - my allocated one was Lambeth Bridge:
December
Capitalist
climate governance has always relied on pseudo-reforms that leave the richest
free to accumulate capital, while dumping taxes on working people to nudge them
in the ’right direction’. But as the protests of the gilets jaunes show, many
working people no longer accept the moralising terms of capitalist approaches
to climate change. In this article, Andreas Malm argues that if we really want
to save this Planet, we must pursue a different kind of climate politics, one
that could learn a great deal from the methods and tactics of the gilets
jaunes.
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