A fire at the Cattle Market in November wrecked four buildings and damaged several more. But it could have been worse. We went down to see what Notts would be missing if the whole thing had gone up..  www.leftlion.co.uk The blaze at the Cattle Market was so intense, and the flames so high, that looking out of the skylight in my flat on Forest Road, a hazy orange aurora hung behind the city centre, casting Nottingham in a strange, ominous backlight. If it hadn’t been for the direction of the wind, and the rapid response from the emergency services, we might well be ruminating on what we lost the night the Cattle Market burned down. The feelings would probably range from mournful loss of a beloved Nottingham institution, to a lingering regret at not visiting more often, as was the reaction of a student I spoke to a few days after the fire: “Uhh, what’s the Cattle Market?” For those who don’t know, the Cattle Market is a ragbag of a bazaar just outside the city, in the shadow of the Meadow Lane Stadium. It’s home to one of the most serious live auction houses in the country, an open-stall market selling pretty much anything you can get in the high street but cheaper, a flea market, and a rackety open-air thrift store. You can walk out with a quid’s worth of biscuits past their sell-by date, or £30,000 worth of 200-year-old mahogany furniture. Or nothing. You can just traipse […]

    Take a placard calling for a ‘People’s Vote’, spin it around. You might well find the reverse bears another slogan: ‘Stop Brexit’. Keep spinning: Stop Brexit – People’s Vote – Stop Brexit – People’s Vote – Stop Brexit, until the two phrases blur into the political axiom of the day. Ostensibly – and perhaps practically, if it comes to it – they don’t mean the same thing at all. But assuming, as the post-referendum Remain camp confidently does, that a re-run vote does lead to Brexit being overturned, what then? Addled and vile as they are, the thugs caught on camera abusing Remain MP Anna Soubry outside Parliament in January might stand as a portentous answer; one of the first penetrating bursts from the fire raging beneath the ice on which the second referendum campaign is standing. You could have called round a dozen casting agencies looking for someone to play ‘Enraged Leave voter’ at the last People’s Vote demo I was at – in Nottingham city centre last November – and not got a better fit than the man who crashed the party, bellowing “GET THE F***ING FOREIGN BASTARDS OUT!! WE VOTED BREXIT!!” Useful idiots often invade political rallies. And this idiot was particularly useful. As the epitome of everything the post-referendum Remain campaign believes it is up against: nothing more than a hoard of mindless racists and square-jawed white van bigots, just like this awful man. Later that week an email from Stand Up To Racism […]

This article appeared in the Guardian Society section in October 2018. I was left to fight alone for NHS whistleblowing protection Blowing the whistle in the NHS is meant to be easy. Medical bodies such as the Department of Health and Social Care, the General Medical Council (GMC) and individual hospital trusts all encourage the practice – on paper. But when Chris Day, a junior intensive care doctor, raised numerous concerns about understaffing and safety at the intensive care unit of Queen Elizabeth hospital in Woolwich, he found out all too quickly the toll it would take on his career. Day says he made a “protected disclosure” to hospital management and to Health Education England (HEE) – which oversees junior doctors’ training and career development – about the understaffing. But he says that far from being believed, he became the victim of a pernicious effort to discredit him and the issues he’d raised. A number of counter-allegations were made against him, and his HEE training number was deleted, effectively forcing him out of his career. “Looking back it was incredible that so much effort was going into discrediting me and my safety concerns,” he says. Day went to an employment tribunal on the basis that his initial concerns hadn’t been taken seriously, and that he was suffering detriment, including loss of earnings, as a result of having raised them. The tribunal was set for February 2015, the same month, incidentally, that Robert Francis QC – author of a damning review […]

My piece for LeftLion magazine on the history of Canning Circus, Nottingham SIX ROADS meet at Canning Circus. From the north, three of the major highways into the city form a delta in the urban space between them; converging then splitting off, renamed, they ferry traffic and people down the hill out into the splintering, winding channels and streams of the city. To the south lies the city centre, to the west, the Park Estate and the Castle. To the north, Lenton, the university, Wollaton Park and Radford, and to the east a canopy of green trees shelters thousands of gravestones, sweeping all the way down to Waverley Street and the Arboretum. This meeting of flows has deposited centuries of memories on the land around it. From as early as the 8th century, multifarious lanes and pathways all led to the area once known as sandhills; people travelled and made their way in and out of the city, and life and times progressed. In medieval times traders and travellers arriving in the dark of night would rest up in the inns and houses clustered around the junction, before making the final push into the city. In the morning they’d wake to the sounds of the windmills cranking and creaking away in the breeze, and the horse-drawn carts of commerce trundling over the earth. When Queen Victoria was on the throne, the area was still known as Zion Hill – it has only been called Canning Circus since 1931 – and […]

This comment piece appeared in the Times online at the end of July By nothing more than my increasingly hollow-feeling membership of a particular Labour Party constituency, I am now officially affiliated with one of the most contentious, offensive groups in left-wing politics. Actually it was very straight forward. An emergency motion was proposed, there was a show of eager upstretched hands, a prolonged round of applause, and that was it. We’re in. Nottingham East is officially affiliated with Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL). There was no mention that JVL has deeply and routinely offended Jewish party members ever since it was set up just under a year ago. When JVL organised a counter-demo in Parliament Square in March against the protest against antisemitism in the Labour Party, which was reduced, in JVL’s own words, to the “Board of Deputies’ attack on Jeremy Corbyn”, where Jewish members were jeered at openly and harassed in the streets. JVL activists consistently brush off Jewish Labour members’ and MP’s claims of being victimised as lies and “smears against Corbyn”; there are still those who claim never to have even seen, read or heard of any incident of antisemitism in the party, in other words, that it doesn’t exist. And it is a side in this odious debate. A partisan, sectarian, divisive side whose founding function was to take on the Labour-affiliated Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) and to abrogate all claims that Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t doing enough to stamp out antisemitism. A contact of […]

A comment piece I wrote for the New Statesman, covering Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s visit to Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. The visit came a few months after the party had lost the seat to the Conservatives for the first time in a century; Corbyn vowed to the crowd that Labour would win it back. newstatesman.com Brexit-voting Mansfield turned Tory in June – now Jeremy Corbyn believes Labour can win it back By Benedict Cooper Dig beneath the topsoil of the East Midlands, and you will find Labour, in all its layers. This unassuming region includes some of the most overt of Corbynsceptic MPs, as well as his most vociferous allies. It is home to some of the country’s most deprived post-industrial former pit towns, still reeling from the Thatcherite treatment, and some of its most green and pleasant lands. Some East Midlands voters will die before they vote Tory. Others have gone blue – or purple – with barely a pang. Some of the most Leave-voting seats anywhere in the UK are in the East Midlands. Dennis Skinner’s Bolsover – which contains Shirebrook, where Sports Direct HQ sits metaphorically on the site of the old pit – returned a 70.8 per cent Leave vote. The Beast of Bolsover is just one of the big-hitters of the region. In the blue corner sit the Tory party’s most outspoken Remainers – Anna Soubry, Nicky Morgan and Ken Clarke, no less. Then there are Labour MPs of all shades of red – Gloria De Piero, Chris Leslie, […]