Politics

Often, a man is only going to get what he thinks he deserves. Yammering is an easy task, that anyone could indulge in, but to truly act is another matter entirely. This is also applicable to the people of a nation bound in hopes of prosperity. Greenland, no not the island in the Arctic Circle but the country in the Western Region of Africa. It will only be as good as the populace think it should be. The polls are nigh and the nation is desperate, so desperate, we might actually swap a poorly cooked meal for cow dung as long as the cow dung appears to be a delectable meal from afar. For years over, we blame the government for all the excesses and ineptitude evinced in our nation's history, but very little a time do we point the same accusative fingers at ourselves. If the truth be...

For Trayvon Martin and All Lynched Black Boys How do you raise a black child? Embraced by your womb and your heart But diminished by the whiteness around you Priceless angel in your arms But prison fodder to American justice A laughing smiling face in your eyes But a menace in a hoodie in the eyes of the law How do you raise a black child? While you searched frantically for your baby The police let his body languish as a John Doe We were brought to these shores as disposable people Shackled and chained Beaten and tortured Diminished and dehumanized They still do not see us as people But they readily see us as perps Has our value yet been redeemed? Have we yet been embraced as Americans? How do you raise a black child When society says he has no...

Dear Green Party, Look, I’m an anarchist, and voting isn’t something I do any more. But sometimes, I look at the Green Party and think “they look like they might stand a chance and they’d probably be the least terrible. Maybe I’ll vote for them.” It was growing inside me, the knowledge that you, at least, might make things tolerable rather than terrible. All that’s gone now, because you’ve made yourselves look no different to the others. I’m talking, of course, about your Cambridge candidate, Rupert Read. It turns out he’s a really, really nasty piece of work. The clues came when he tweeted the sort of dogwhistle comment which alerts the wise to transmisogyny: he went for the old “don’t call me cis” type bollocks. Digging deeper it turns out that yes, he’s a transmisogynist, and...

I was in Berlin a year after the wall came down and asked an East German journalist how it felt to young people to now be free. He replied: “It’s great – the problem is we don’t know how to use that freedom.” My community of Marlborough has had a 32-year relationship with the Muslim community of Gunjur in The Gambia. In conversation with friends there since the events in Paris, they have said they are all appalled at the murders that took place, supposedly in the name of Islam. At the same time, they are confused by the demands for the protection of freedom of speech when that speech is gratuitously offensive, not even humorous and is fundamentally about making money through the sale of a magazine. Hands up, those who do not think that with freedom comes responsibility. Dr...