Abundance and the polarisation of wealth

When you stop and think about it, society, civilisation, the growth of human kind, has only been possible because of abundance and that each person, save a few less fortunate who we are perfectly capable of supporting, is capable of producing a great deal more that we individually need to live on. Without that abundance […]

Culling the stock

Last Sunday I read an article on the cost of badger culling. It is enormously costly, between 2012 and 2014 we paid £16.8 million to kill 2,476 badgers, that’s £6,785 per badger. In Wales, where they use vaccinations, the cost per badger is £293, that’s £6,492 cheaper per badger, a saving of £32.5 million and […]

For freedom

Every day the battle lines are drawn The dice are thrown, the choices made As fears and doubts play loud inside Where will I stand in sorrows gaze As the death toll rises in this land My tears fall and I demand to know Who dares play god with other people’s lives? The people who […]

Social exclusion and the Tories proud record

What makes Ken Loach’s ‘I, Daniel Blake’ so powerful is where the plot impacts on life. Most films and documentaries take for granted certain elements of life, like eating and shelter. Such things are assumed, a meal – at ‘home’, in a cafe or restaurant, and access to a home, cafe or restaurant which means […]

The fight against hate

The moment when I realised that the Tories were politicising hate came during George Osborne’s conference speech in 2012 in which he said, “Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping […]

Poverty and the deceit of Theresa May

In Prime Ministers Question time this week, Theresa May indulged in a rather clever piece of deception which effectively told us that in their view those on benefits are very much second class citizens if barely citizens at all. Here’s what she said, I’ll break it down afterwards. “What is important is that we value […]

Those who play us false are themselves false

In the early 1970’s I returned to my home turf of the London Borough of Hillingdon (LBH) having spent a couple of years working for an outdoor adventure company, learning and eventually qualifying to be a canoeing instructor and river leader. Those two pivotal years were spent in the company of a mixed bag of […]