Democracy in Britain leaves a lot to be desired – like actual democracy, for example. Governments secure unconscionable power with 33% of the popular vote; parties run multi-million pound election campaigns, ensuring they owe some millionaire or business, something, sometime; the anachronism of the constituency MP is still firmly in place and not going anywhere [...]
Nine years after Oldham burned in horrific race-riots, we’re finally getting round to the only workable solution to racial segregation. The report into the incident concluded that de facto segregation in the community was a root cause of the incident, and a more recent report stated that “Segregation and divisions between Oldham’s communities is still [...]
The key headlines of the past few weeks have focused on pre-election measures and proposals aimed at trying to square the multitudinous circles of simultaneously getting the UK’s spiralling debt under control, creating a more equitable system, not cutting key public services, and reforming the financial system in a meaningful way in the midst of [...]
“He thinks we’re all bloody bourgeois” scoffed Austen Ivereigh, as he puffed on his Montecristo in a trendy bar in King’s Cross, whilst reading aloud David Broder’s response to yesterday’s Strangers Into Citizens demonstration. “This looks like it was written thirty years ago,” he chortled to himself. Ivereigh is a founder of the Strangers into [...]
175 years ago this week there was a march of 100,000 people from Copenhagen Fields in Islington (before it became gentrified, of course) to Kennington Green, in support of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were sentenced to transportation to Australia, for setting up a union. There is a week of commemoration of these protests in and [...]
I’m a country boy at heart. I grew up in the vast untamed wilderness that is Suffolk. A land of endless green fields and cow shit, of tractors and farmers, where everybody knows your name but no one knows how to speak English. As such, and as much as I’m drawn by the faster pace [...]
