Normalising Extremism

Human beings have always tended towards definitions relative to themselves. We feel most at ease with that which is somehow intrinsically the same as ourselves, and when we go searching for something new, it is always in terms of otherness – foreign holidays, alien planets, ethnic cooking, as though our own cooking is not tied to our ethnicity.

Some People are Bisexual, get over it!

Since the RadFem furore, a whole new wave of anti-woman feminism has rolled in, supplied by Julie Bindel. Ironically, I deleted her name from my last blog post before publishing. The paragraph that starts “Dear RadFems” entirely applies to her. Julie’s latest work has elicited some excellent ripostes, but I want to add something from the perspective of an outside observer on this sorry mess.

On the Immovability of Marriage

Media agent provocateur George Carey, a man who is so maligning his former office I don’t even want to name it, has struck out once again. This time, he’s trying to claim that the definition of Marriage is so set in stone, no one can possibly alter them. But alter them we have, and today’s ‘institution’ and ‘sacrament’ look and feel very different.

UK Riots: Hopelessly Violent?

This has certainly proven to be a year of unrelenting, if deeply contrasting uprisings, and it shows no sign of abating, with India the latest to enter the fray with anti-corruption protests that saw more arrests than our riots did. If its possible to make objective comparisons between the #ukriots and all the other uprisings of recent months, then I intend to do it.

The Ramifications of Free Choice

There is an argument that about free choice that goes something like this: I have the right to make my mind up, and to decide as a I choose but if somehow my decision results in a later problem or inconvenience to myself, it wasn’t free choice in the first place. This arguments is applied in everything from bank bailouts to sexual health to the Christian doctrine of Salvation.

“The Tiananmen Question”

It is probably one of the most iconic protest photos in history. A single human facing down a huge, ugly symbol of totalitarianism. China’s recent history has shown that capitalism is more than capable of thriving in the absence of human rights and freedoms that many in the West have long contended go hand in hand with economic liberalism.

Why Tories might be happy to cut police

As I have already written, these cuts could create strange bedfellows. Its odd to think I could defend the rights to work of a desk admin who has processed the stop and search forms from a demonstration I have attended. But is there a reason Cameron and Clegg might be happy to lose a front-line police that shows they have, in fact, learnt from the history of the 1980s and the miners’ strikes?

France deports Roma: The last acceptable racism?

Whilst I’ve written quite a number of posts blasting the British government lately, I thought it would be good to return to a wider viewpoint and write something pointing overseas. Yesterday (Saturday) saw two notable sets of protest coverage (Blair in Ireland being the other), but the marches in Paris and elsewhere caught me eye, because they speak of a topic largely unmentioned in Britain: racism against the Roma peoples.

Amoral Conservatism

I’ve been pondering some of the motives for Cameron’s exuberant welcoming of the Lib Dems into coalition with his party. Apart from the obvious (who couldn’t really govern without them), I’m left wondering whether he hasn’t in part played a very shrewd move when it comes to the socially and morally conservative elements in his party.

Network Rail’s strike injunction hurts us all

As most of you will gather by now, the RMT Strike against Network Rail has been forcibly cancelled by a high-court injunction on account of supposed voting irregularities. The injunction might bring short-term relief to thousands of rail users, but as the strike was planned for working days, its a very short-sighted gain, and people simply shouldn’t be celebrating it.