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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What does a post-brexit UK look like?

In the lead up to ‘Brexit’, it is worth considering what it was that it’s instigators had in mind for a post-brexit UK. And when I say it’s instigators I don’t mean those carefully sampled and then edited members of the general public that are now the staple of ‘unbiased’ and ‘democratic’ reporting. I mean the sub-group of the political and economic ruling class that were keeping time for the ‘journalists’ from the early days…

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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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Anarchists, Nazis and the People’s Olympics

In 2012 several things came together in my life at the same time, the essay Gold or Freedom is the first manifestation of that direction. I had been toying with the idea of writing a novel set during the Spanish civil war for several years. During the research stage I came across several historians that were writing in a way that went beyond the standard history texts. Professor Helen Graham's short introduction and Chris Ealham's…

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