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THE YEAR OF REVOLUTIONS
2011 has clearly been a good year when TIME magazine, of all publications, names “The Protestor” as its “Person of the Year”!...
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DO YOU WANT SOME?
With the Welfare Reform Bill, aimed at slashing the numbers on disability benefits, on its way through parliament, I thought I’d post this poem, based on my experience of the system as it was in the...
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The Headlong Stream -1911
The headlong stream is termed violentBut the river bed hemming it in isTermed violent by no one. – Brecht1Out of nowhere it comesA storm of resistance blowingHard through the night Of imperial...
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BRADFORD SPRING OR FALSE DAWN?
The winning by George Galloway of the Bradford West seat is sending shockwaves through the political establishment, and will hopefully signal the acceleration of a process whereby the decay of...
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CRISIS ACROSS EUROPE – THE NECESSITY FOR A LEFT POLITICS
Two things are quite noticeable looking back over the past year or so: first, that the global nature of the unrest is beginning to have a powerful impact upon the way resistance develops in individual...
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FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS & THE JUBILEE
It’s been a week in which many people seemed to be intent on sabotaging their own best interests. Like US workers in 2004 voting for a president who would savage their health and welfare and give huge...
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SO, WE'RE AGREED ABOUT THE CUTS THEN...
Swansea South Wales Evening Post for June 13 carried an editorial which, in the context of cuts to the police, called for us to ‘accept as reality…substantial cuts in public spending,’ they were...
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VICTORY TO THE ASTURIAN MINERS!
(Much of the detail of the history of the Asturian miners is taken from Andy Durgan's piece in Socialist Worker)For somebody of my generation, writing, especially in Wales, about a miners’ strike has a...
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A SUITABLE CASE FOR TREATMENT?
This piece is a commentary on the impact of austerity and capitalism on mental health, and was first posted on the the HullRePublic website, which can be found on Twitter @HullRePublic…“Depression,”...
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EUROPE RISE UP!
Watching protestors, strikers, trade unionists, students and young people taking part in the European-wide general strike on Wednesday 14 November gladdened my heart. This was, it seems, a...
View ArticleON THE WRONG SIDE OF CAPITALISM
Every morning I wake upOn the wrong sideOf capitalismA vast toad, like Larkin’sIt has embedded itself deepIn my lifeSo that if its slimy legsMerely spasmHuge fissures appear in my daysMy hoursMy...
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DING DONG
So you’re finally dead, you old bastard.Despite the rumours, and the false alarms on TwitterThis time it was true.It put me in mind of such a lotBut most of all made me think of a friend of mineWho I...
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DING-DONG! MARGARET THATCHER & THE POWER OF CARNIVAL
I want to defend the ‘Ding-dong Thatcher’s gone’ street parties and celebrations that have erupted in various towns and cities. Those in the Labour party and the ‘liberal left’ who criticise them for...
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WHERE IS THE UK'S FIGHTBACK?
Laurie Penny’s Guardian article, ”Where are the activists as austerity bites? They have been beaten back” asked an important question. Where is the UK’s fightback? Four days later Thatcher funeral...
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AFTER WOOLWICH - NO TO ISLAMOPHOBIA
Why did the 2005 London bombing, with its 56 dead , not result in the wave of anti-Muslim attacks we’ve seen over the past few days?Crucially, 2005 was 2 years before the economy tanked. Not that the...
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WARS AND REVOLUTIONS...
When Chinese premier Zhou En-lai said to Richard Nixon in 1972 that it was ‘too early to tell’ what were the implications of the 1789 French Revolution, he was actually referring to the Parisian...
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THE GORILLAS ARE AMONGST US
As I watched a film marking the Pinochet coup – 40 years since Chile’s 9/11 - I found myself thinking about how a person would go about dealing with that sort of abrupt, catastrophic increase in state...
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THIS ACT OF CORPORATE VANDALISM MUST NOT BE FORGOTTEN...
George Orwell understood that those who control the past control the future. In his ‘1984’ we see a nightmare world where the past changes to suit the needs of the dictators who rule the present....
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Article 6
It's been a long time since my last blog. Many reasons, including loss of cat… Her name is Kiki: if you are living around Queen's Rd, Sketty, Swansea, keep an eye open for her. If you see her text/ring...
View ArticleProblems of Everyday Life
My last blog post was, I think, back in April. Much blood, both literal and metaphorical, has flowed under the bridge since then. Although I usually blog on politics, history, etc, with a little dash...
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