Category: Uncategorized
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Frredom to Hate
Among all the tensions and trauma of our times, or perhaps because of them, it feels like it’s become OK to hate. I was brought up, as I think most people were, to regard hatred as wrong. This was not a grand theological position, but could be distilled in the simple rule: “treat others as…
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It Can Happen Here!
As a child of the Communist Party, I was born into the labour movement. I’ve been part of it ever since. Whenever my commitment wanes, the thing that’s most likely to revive it is the threat of fascism. Alongside the naked lying, the thing that’s most infuriating about false accusations of anti-Semitism against the left…
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Ithaca and the other pandemic
I’ve never been to Ithaca, New York before, or to an Ivy League college, or spent a whole week in a library! But I’ve done all three in the past week. Some of it was surprising and thrilling. Discovering that Ithaca has a serious housing problem was not. This is the new global pandemic. That’s…
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Only Hugh
At this special time of year, we think of the people who are most important to us. For me, that includes Hugh Grant. It’s been a booze-fuelled source of banter in my family for years that I have a thing for Hugh. But I’m also quite serious about it. I think, in due course, Hugh…
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Selected Remembrance Day
11th November is an important date for me. It’s the day our son, Callum, was born in 1997. He died ten weeks later. One of his middle names was Eoin (pronounced “Owen”), in recognition of his Irish roots, but also a tribute to Wilfred Owen, whose poetry captured the obscenity of war and the jingoism…
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“Council housing? It’s not for us.”
I heard this in my local coffee bar this morning. It was an exchange between two people in their 20s, one of whom I know lives in the type of sub-standard private renting many of her generation are now condemned to. They were looking at a near-completion block of what our council is referring to…
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YIMBYISM/NIMBYISM/SOCIALISM
Many people reading this (if anyone does!), will be unfamiliar with an arcane debate between “YIMBYs” and “NIMBYs”. It mostly takes place in an obscure corner of cyberspace called “Housing Twitter”. People with an interest, sometimes pecuniary, in urban policy, slug it out around the question of how many new homes are required to meet…
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STRIKE! (Different this time?)
Yesterday, I joined the CWU protest in Parliament Square. It was an astonishing sight. I’ve been on more things like it, for longer, than I care to remember. But this felt different. Off-the-cuff, I shared that feeling, with a photo (below), on Twitter. It’s been “liked” over 2,500 times. Of course, social media isn’t a…
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Qatar? No ta
Life under capitalism is full of compromises. Moral purity is probably a chimera in any society, but more so in one governed by the heedless pursuit of profit, in which the imperative to make a living often overshadows any assessment of “right or wrong”. Anyone who follows professional sport, at almost any level, is additionally…
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Porter Brook Revisited
The Porter Brook flows for about 6 miles, from the edge of the Peak District, through Sheffield’s leafy south-western suburbs and some wonderful parks, before disappearing into a culvert, eventually joining the river Sheaf in the city centre. The dams and former mills along its meandering course testify to its role in helping power Sheffield’s…
The View from K92 