General Politics

Sometimes I just need a space to rant about the Tories. Here it is! Enjoy.

I've not always been interested in politics. In fact, I made a point of saying how uninterested I was in politics all through secondary school, as if it was a unique personality trait.

What a difference a few years makes.

Ever since I read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine in 2019, I've been left-wing. If there's any book that'll radicalise you from apathy about politics, I can't imagine many better than Klein's shocking account of neoliberalism. It did also help that I turned 18 that year, old enough to vote for the first time in an election between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson.

Below is a selection of blogs on various political topics - from arts funding to lockdown dancing. Most of it is satirical in tone, and not all of it is that great. A lot of these are more for my own benefit than anyone else's, and I think that's how they read.

Nonetheless, here's some rants:

Cancel All Non-Vegans - 16/11/2023

I Don't Know Enough - A Dialogue - 10/10/2023

They're Partying, and We're Not Invited - 09/12/2021

No Control in the 21st Century - 20/03/2021

Truth is Dead. Long Live Truth! - 12/11/2020

Rishi Sunak: Saving Artists From Themselves - 10/10/2020

Introducing Spacebook: Facebook's New Programme for Interdimensional Travel - 24/08/2020

Metaphors are not Heroes (And Similes know Exactly what this New Culture of 'Essential Wording' Worship Looks Like) - 27/07/2020

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My Defense Statement

On April 3rd 2022, myself and a group of other activists from Just Stop Oil blockaded an oil refinery. We stopped the distribution of fuel from a site owned by the biggest private oil company in the world, for a total of eleven hours. As a result, I went to court with eight other activists, charged with 'aggravated trespass'. Most of us represented ourselves in court, which means we had the opportunity to give a an 'evidence statement'. This is where we are given free reign to lay out why we were doing what we were doing on the day of our arrest. None of us were there to deny what we'd done, so we pled the 'necessity' defense - meaning, essentially, that we did it because we had no other choice . Here is the statement I gave, under oath, in a court of law, as evidence that taking direct action on the climate crisis is absolutely necessary. *** Standing in a courtroom, as a young person with what the legal system describes as “good character”, the remainder o...

What Lauren Lives

Lauren is still getting used to her world. Her world is still getting used to Lauren. She stumbles where she would swoosh, stammers where she would speak, sits slowly, still unsure of how to swing a skirt over even a low bench. She still sings; music moves her the same, although "man, I feel like a woman" now sends shockwaves, shivers, spineward. Lauren gets looks. Lauren gets looks of curiosity from children, of love from those who know her, who know where she comes from; Lauren gets looks like Lauren came into the world on the bottom of a boot. A boot that had walked through a hundred miles of shit. Lauren gets looks from herself, posing back at herself, posing as herself, posing. She poses. In front of clothes-shop windows, reflection as feminine as the mannequins without heads who stare with their slender shoulders into the flowing of bodies on the street. Lauren looks at the looks she gets, lucky to get good looks or to feel good-looking and even luckier to not care. Tho...

The Famine and the Food Trucks

Famines are always man-made. This fact has been recognised at least as far back as the Victorian era; famines are never merely about a lack of access to food - they're about the active withholding of access to food, from one group of people, by another. And no famine in history has been more obviously manufactured than Israel's famine in Gaza, in which thousands of tonnes of food sit hundreds of meters away from scenes like this: There are literally tens of thousands of trucks waiting to get food into Gaza. One phone call from Donald Trump could get them in. One order from Netanyahu could get them in. Israel, the US, and Israel's 'allies' (a better word would be accomplices ) in Europe, have chosen every day since October 9th 2023 to withhold food and water from an entire population. And this isn't the first time for Israel. Back in 2005, Israel launched Operation 'First Rain' on the people of Gaza. As the Israeli-British historian Ilan Pappé writes: ...

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