It will make a lot of Labour members in Birmingham Yardley, and beyond, extremely happy if their MP Jess Phillips is ‘triggered’ in a vote tonight. Phillips is one of Labour’s most prominent working class female MPs, one of the few MPs whose appeal reaches out to the wider electorate; a member of the Women and Equalities Committee, who came into politics to do more to protect victims of domestic abuse; and in the last fortnight alone has stood out for standing up to Boris Johnson in the fight to keep the Domestic Abuse Bill alive. But none of that matters in the Labour party today if you’re not a Corbynite.…
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Driving the winds of change
A feature I wrote for leading real estate trade journal Property Week, on the strides being made in sustainable energy infrastructure investment. Click here to view the full article. Tweet
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‘The Ministry of Truth’ at Five Leaves Bookshop
‘1936 was the year in which Orwell himself said that “history stopped”; in The Ministry of Truth, Lynskey adds that “history stopped, and Nineteen Eighty-Four began”.’ From my write up on the Orwell Society blog up of ‘The Ministry of Truth’ by Dorian Lynskey, who came to talk at Five Leaves Bookshop last week. George Orwell left London for Catalonia on December 22nd 1936. He fled Barcelona in fear for his and Eileen’s life six months later, hastily across the French border at Perpignan, through France by train, “away from the mountain and the vine, back to the meadow and the elm”, and was back in the family home in…
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Lost children of Empire
In the 1980s a Nottingham social worker uncovered a “government-approved programme of betrayal, institutional abuse, colonial callousness, racism and deceit”. Here’s my feature for @LeftLion on Margaret Humphreys and the child migrants scandal https://www.leftlion.co.uk/read/2019/july/margaret-humphreys-home-children-child-migrants-trust/#.XSSJYUsxjv4.twitter Gripped with terror, a young mother races along the crowded platform at Liverpool’s Lime Street station, her eyes wildly scanning for any sight of her son. She hasn’t lost him in a moment of lapsed attention – her little boy has been taken from her. Then suddenly, amidst the tumult and the smoke, there he is. Her only child, helpless and confused, on board a train that in a few seconds is going to grind into…
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Farwell, The Maze
The Maze is Closing For Good 19 April 19 words: Benedict Cooper (link to feature on LeftLion) Gaz and Steph Peacham have announced the closure of much-loved pub and venue The Maze. You have until the end of June to get your last orders in. Here’s the full story in their own words… Gaz Peacham can still remember the moment, to the beat, when he knew The Maze could be something really special. November 12 2007, Israeli funk band The Apples were just getting into their set, building up slowly, climactically, to one of those rare indescribable moments you get in live music; when the crowd and the venue and…
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“F**k’em”
What used to be said, disdainfully, of Leave voters – ‘They were duped…they didn’t know what they were voting for.. things have changed etc.’ – has been reduced to a single sneer over the past few weeks: “Fuck’em” (that’s a direct quote). But isn’t turning over the referendum going to destroy millions of people’s faith in democracy? “Fuck’em.” Isn’t stopping Brexit a gift for the far-right? “Fuck’em. They shouldn’t have voted Leave.” But aren’t these the people who are going to be most hurt by no-deal? “Fuck’em. Serves them right.” Every day for the past 1000 days, there are those who have woken up refusing to accept the result of…
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What we might have lost
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…
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The People’s Vote movement is playing with far-right fire
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…
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The NHS whistleblower
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…
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The city’s ancient hill
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…
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“The Labour Party is not the natural home of the Jews these days.”
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…
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Rebel City! Nottingham’s radical activist history
There was a day in the summer of 1985 when the two great political movements of the era converged in Nottingham. On the Forest Rec, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) staged a mass rally urging solidarity with striking miners, while over on Victoria Embankment, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) welcomed thousands to the Nottingham Peace Festival. The hardest part for the organisers was driving guest speakers between the two; some of the same speakers, maybe the same speeches. “We saw it as one cause,” says Ross Bradshaw, owner of radical Nottingham bookshop, Five Leaves, who was one of those fighting the traffic between the rallies. “It was all…
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Stories of the Streets
This article initially appeared in the Guardian in July 2018. ‘Give a homeless person a camera and they will see the city in a different way’ “You’re worth nothing,” Colin’s stepfather used to tell him as a child. Even now, sleeping rough on the streets of Manchester, the words haunt him; as a child he started believing it himself, and is still racked with self-doubt. It’s easier not to think what demons might be plaguing a person sleeping rough. Much simpler to keep walking, pass them by: out of sight, out of mind. It’s the natural response, says Alex Greenhalgh, co-founder of social enterprise People of the Streets. “The norm…
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Little John the Bare-knuckle Boxer
When Pete Radford arrived backstage for the closing night of Romeo and Juliet, the first thing the director noticed was the state her actor was in. His lip was split in two from front to back; he had a shiner under his right eye, a graze under his left eye, his cheeks were still swollen and he bore the unmistakable pallor of a man who’s been in a scrap… “She wasn’t too impressed,” admits Pete. “She suggested I use some concealer.” There wasn’t a lot of concealer being handed out the last time I’d seen Pete, backstage at a very different venue on a very different night. The shabby dressing…
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The Kurds are being left to twist in the wind
Britain and the US have fought alongside the Kurds in Syria. Now they are leaving them to the mercy of a Turkish President vowed to “cleanse” them from their homes. The last time they were left in such peril, they were massacred in Kobane. This time the consequences could be even worse. With the first Turkish bodybags returning from Syria, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s latest drive against the Kurdish people is officially underway. But the grand plan has Russian chess manoeuvres written all over it, and taking the fight wilfully to where the U.S. has troops could force a capitulation that leaves the Kurds well and truly stranded. Not that any…
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The Labour Party is becoming a closed system of thought
Preparing to run a blogging workshop for a group of media students in December, I was gifted a news story for us to get stuck into. Donald Trump had just retweeted those Britain First videos: a comment writer’s bread-and-butter. For potential angles for a piece, I told the group, the possibilities were endless: whether it was presidential behaviour to be tweeting anything at all, let alone the postings of a known far-right organisation; how social media was impacting political discourse; the pernicious right-wing agenda. And, I added, it posed the question, what the hell is going on this world where gay men are being thrown off rooftops by religious fascists?…
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Corbyn visits Mansfield
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…
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Corbyn vows fightback
When Jeremy Corbyn came to address a rally in Mansfield, I caught up with him and interviewed him for the Nottingham Post. It was the first time Corbyn had been in Mansfield since the Labour Party had lost the seat to the Tories – for the first time in a century. Corbyn promised the crowd that the seat would be won back. Jeremy Corbyn vows to win back Mansfield during rally Labour lost the seat for the first time in June Jeremy Corbyn spoke at the rally in Mansfield (Image: Nottingham Post) Jeremy Corbyn has vowed to fight to win back the Mansfield constituency by giving young people the hope…