A socialist Labour party manifesto … how far we have come

So we are getting to the sharp end of 2019 general election campaign, which I would argue is the first time that we have had the actual possibility of voting in to power a socialist Labour party. And because of this I have taken the time to read the manifesto. I would have read the other two manifestos but I didn’t really see any point. Neither party, in their current guise can be trusted to…

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Conservative Party caught overacting in lead up to pantomime season

So it turns out that the British Parliament has kicked Brexit further down the road, this time under the guise of a general election. And before anyone starts squealing about who is to blame for this, remember the Conservative Party has been in power since the Brexit vote. First Cameron, then May, and then de Pfeffel Johnson. And at no point during all this time has the Conservative Party been a minority party in Parliament.…

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Prime Minister de Pfeffel Johnson and the contemptuous elite he represents

Now that we have had a little time to digest the Supreme Court’s decision on whether “Prime Minister” de Pfeffel Johnson acted illegally in his advice to the crown when asking for parliament to be suspended, and the mainstream media has been able to archive the story in the ‘lets protect the establishment by forgetting that they have been found guilty of criminal conspiracy’ filing cabinet, I thought it would be interesting to start unpicking…

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Talent and hard work isn’t enough

Sorry for the delay between posts. I have had to get a job to pay the bills and keep putting food on the table. I knew it would happen eventually, clearly my talent and hard work was never going to be enough. And as so accurately predicted by everyone I told I was going to write full time, the savings from the last ‘employment’ eventually ran out. So, rather than go back into the ‘office’…

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Teaching superiority, and the class-bias of the ‘expert’ witness

I think there is a case to be made that radicals need to perform a multitude of tasks to help make society less oppressive and exploitative, including pointing out why the current system is flawed. I suppose there is a case to be made that the radical left does have a tendency to spend the majority of it’s time analysing and pointing out the worst aspects of the current systems and structures, and not enough…

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How does ‘rape as entertainment’ factor into the wider matrix of domination

I have been researching in and around the idea of the social construction of identity, and how this plays into a matrix of domination in our wider societies. As part of this, the hierarchies of oppression and exploitation, and the social narratives that misinform about and distract from them, appears more like a series of interlocking processes with shared objectives and mutually beneficial proponents. One could in fact argue that a better understanding of this…

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Anti-war yesterday, solidarity today, equality tomorrow

One of the first pieces I ever had published was about Baby Bush's War in Iraq, and the corresponding mass mobilisation of solidarity in the global anti-war protest of February 2003. And just as it was promised at the time, over fifteen years later the dead are still mounting in Afghanistan and Iraq, democracy is nowhere to be seen, large sections of the Middle-East are at war, and of course the most aggressive regimes in…

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A political caste system ensures the entitlement of the absurd

One of the benefits of actual socialism being represented at the top of the UK Labour party is that, much like a lightning rod, it apparently draws fire from all directions. Helpfully, although not for the peace of mind of the socialists within the Labour Party, by putting actual socialists at the top of the party all the various people in positions of power that are anti-socialist, even if they had previously been pretending otherwise…

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The war on drugs was nothing more than a war on democracy and equality

The third essay in the War on Drugs series is the one that I found most upsetting to write and still find difficult to read. Even though, in terms of the Pax Americana, the 1960s was the decade that many of the calls for equality came together, I would argue that it was during the 1970's when the establishment strategy of presenting authoritarianism as democracy really began to unravel at pace, in the public arena…

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A society riven with hierarchy facilitates sociopaths and gives psychopaths free rein

I have shared my life with many people of many doctrines, beliefs and faiths, some religious and some political. One of the things that has never ceased to amaze me is the moral dissonance that affects so many people, regardless of whether their purported 'ideological core' is based on faith in scripture, or faith in science. Society, as it is structured today, seems to have a tendency to nudge people together into groups, and then…

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