The country I grew up in is dying

Theresa May struts around as if she owns Britain and yet domestically and globally she is Britain’s worst enemy. Nearly a year has passed since the catastrophe of Grenfell Tower. Even at the time it was played down by Theresa May and it quickly became clear that it was a political football, a battle of […]

Truth in politics

Seeing the title of this piece, readers can be forgiven if their immediate reaction is that I am just being ridiculously naive. Politicians and lying go together like a horse and carriage, fish and chips, Batman and Robin, Theresa May and Brexit cluster fuck. Surely everybody knows that! When David Cameron became Prime Minister in […]

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the past is present

Within Britain’s historic class system the idea of an upper class person getting a job was unthinkable, that’s what common people did. Today, within the Rees-Mogg household, the idea of Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher Rees-Mogg growing up and wanting a job would be a cause for outrage. It’s not the done thing, and ‘the done […]

Everything is bonkers

Regular readers will know I lose the plot from time to time, but I have to say the last month has definitely been one of my more spectacular ones to live through. As a writer, finding I have nothing to say and no way to say it anyway, is itself a crisis. It’s like falling […]

The state is our enemy

The system is broken, and by that I do not mean accidentally, oops how careless of me, broken, I mean wilfully and deliberately broken. I have lived my life with mental ill health and what I described as ‘social phobia’ years before any such description existed. Doctors told me I was agoraphobic, which then and […]

Email from America

My grateful thanks to my friend Eileen for cutting through the crap and for her kind permission to use the following. I’ve never heard of Aberfan. The photographer at Aberfan that day, David Hurn said, “In this case it’s pretty obvious what had happened was obscene; you wanted to show that this is exactly what […]

Slave nation

Workfare Sanctions Jobcentres – Britain’s secret penal system Zero hours contracts Cuts to workplace protections Cuts to legal aid Gig economy Getting rid of safety ‘red tape’ Scrapping social housing Scrapping housing benefit for young people Food banks Child poverty Extreme inequality The ‘free’ market economy Government attacks on disabled people The intention to scrap […]

Disgusting over privileged oafs

In 2010 the incoming government was handed a note penned by departing treasury minister Liam Byrne which read, “Dear chief secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam”. It was, of course, a joke, the kind of joke shared between colleagues which us Brits are, or were, rather good […]

I am not a democracy

On March 17th 2012 I chose to enter the political ‘arena’ in a pro-active way by writing ‘a letter a day to number 10’. It was a personal decision because I had passed the tipping point in what I could stomach from a government which continues to have a callous disregard for the lives and […]

For the many

The Conservative party has thrown all caution to the wind in their self interested pursuit of privilege and power over the cares, concerns, and needs of ordinary people and anyone who is not outraged at what they are doing fails the litmus test for basic humanity, as indeed do the Tories themselves. The fundamental problem […]