This piece is part diary, part analysis, about the Edinburgh Climate Camp, and I’ve *tried* to write it in a way that’s of interest to people with no knowledge of the camp as well as people who went along. If you want to know why we went to Edinburgh, give my pre-camp post a glance. [...]
Guest post by Roland Miller McCall
Australia went to the polls today after the most mundane election campaigns anyone can remember. Neither Labor nor the Coalition opposition has engaged with the big issues nor proposed a vision for Australia’s future. In recent days the debate has descended into high farce with the defining issue of a [...]
For the last two years or so, I have been engaging in a dastardly plot to destroy the Tory party. Yes, by writing silly outraged-liberal letters to my Conservative MP – to which she must respond – on matters she ultimately doesn’t care about, I’ll hopefully waste enough Tory time and resources to destroy the [...]
In a week’s time, about 1000 people from across the country are going to set up a protest camp in or near Edinburgh. Targetting the Royal Bank of Scotland, it’ll probably be the first big protest against a major bank that the UK has seen in this crisis.
In 2008, RBS wasn’t just the biggest [...]
This is the full version of an article I co-authored with Ambika Hiranandani and Roland Miller McCall which was first published in this month’s New Internationalist
It is said that the cow is the mother of all civilisation. Of all the images of India, few are more enduring or endearing than that of the cow, revered [...]
This week I want to write about three things: a film I watched (Milk), one protest I did go to (the Party at the Pumps) and another I didn’t (the Big Gay Flash Mob). What ties these things together is the idea of an activist community.
Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected politician in [...]
There’s a lot to hate about cars. In the centuries to come after the great oil crash, when archaeologists are poring over the remains of our society (presumably by wind-up torchlight), some of the most powerful symbols of our mind-boggling wastefulness will be the images of endless traffic jams, hundreds upon thousands of sterile gas-guzzling [...]
Yesterday I went down again to the Heathrow picket lines, to see how the strike is developing, and also to check out the new community garden squatted by Sipson residents and activists.
Last time I didn’t write about my journey down there. (Quick tangent: a crack-of-dawn piccadilly line farce complete with hundreds of tourists, Japanese cameras, [...]
This week, the Science Museum announced a new exhibition on climate change, set to open in November.* Nothing unusual about that, except that the Museum’s last Climate Change exhibition (“Prove It! All the evidence you need to believe in climate change”) only closed in February. It seems a bit odd to open another one so [...]
As we speak, a blanket of darkness is rolling around the Earth. No, the orcs aren’t invading from Mordor, it’s Earth Hour! That time of year when governments, businesses and hundreds of millions of people around the world make a visual protest against climate change by turning off their lights for sixty minutes. Following the [...]
