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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Comment piece
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…
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Ay up me Dutch!
The fascinating story of the ‘twinning’ between one of Nottingham’s most famous boozers and a wonderful real ale pub in Amsterdam. I wrote it up for Nottingham cultural magazine Left Lion. leftlion.co.uk The Lincolnshire Poacher’s Brother From Another words: Benedict Cooper “Oh! You’re from Nottingham!” the smiling, bearded barman bellowed as he loomed over my table, the tang of some powerful herb tingling my nostrils. “I went to the Poacher last year!” Sitting in an alley on the edge of Amsterdam’s red-light district talking about the Lincolnshire Poacher has a surreal kick to it, especially when you’re getting passively stoned. We all know it’s one of Nottingham’s magic little corners:…
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The age of unreason
Jon Snow has “no recollection” of screaming ‘Fuck the Tories!’ at Glastonbury this year. Neither does he remember adding a cheeky, ‘I’m supposed to be neutral’ to a breathlessly happy fan, who then tweeted it (and then deleted it). Maybe he doesn’t, maybe he does. Self-evidently it’s the sort of thing he might have said, otherwise he would have issued something more substantial than a good old fashioned non-denial-denial. I’m guessing being either quoted or misquoted as saying “Fuck Jeremy Corbyn!”, for example, might have elicited a slightly more strenuous response. But here’s my point. Imagine, just imagine, what would have happened if Laura Kuenssburg or Nick Robinson had been…
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Mourning isn’t enough
This comment piece appeared in the i newspaper in the wake of the Manchester attacks We should be angry about the Manchester attack How inevitable it is, that at times like this all the sordid clichés and false apprehensions come out. That if it weren’t for a “reckless foreign policy” the Salman Abedis of this world would wish only peace upon the West. That without an innately Islamophobic British population forcing disenfranchised young men into the arms of the radicalisers, the Salman Abedis would not exist. That love and unity alone will protect our children from people who see them as fair game for nail-bombs. ‘People like Salman Abedi don’t…
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Nottinghamshire guidebook
I was commissioned to write a guide book of my home county, Nottinghamshire, by Kingfisher Publishing. This covered all aspects of life in Nottinghamshire, from shopping to sports to where to dine out. You can view an e-version of this here. Tweet
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Yes Mr Hunt, this is unacceptable
One of the few positives to note about Jeremy Hunt’s perennial tenure at the Department of Health, is that he’s actually been there long enough to witness his own policies, and rhetoric, unravel. Take the decision last year to scrap bursaries for student nurses. At the time it was obvious to seemingly everyone outside of the Cabinet that encumbering future nursing students with huge private debts would harm applications and jeopardise recruitment, not free up 10,000 new places as was spun at the time. Now the figures are bearing those warnings out – applications for nursing and midwifery training places for September are down 23% year on year. Of course,…
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Welcome to the left
The thing about momentum, is that it has to be sustained. You can’t restart momentum; if something is slowing down it’s decelerating, with inertia the ultimate conclusion. The thing about Momentum, is that there’s absolutely no surprise it is decelerating. It was at best a bad idea, at worst a malevolent ploy, from the offing. There are those who say that Jeremy Corbyn’s doubters – yes, plotters before you scream it at me – had it in for him from day one. Well, they’re right, but I think they might have the wrong day in mind. From the day Momentum was set up, he lost all hope of ever winning…
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Turkey is at a crossroads between democracy and dictatorship
In November the European Parliament voted to freeze Turkey’s bid to join the EU, with dire warnings over human rights violations, the systematic abuse of women and children, daily arrests of MPs and journalists, and a brutal campaign against the Kurdish minority. With a referendum in April likely to hand President Erdogan almost total executive power over Parliament, Turkey stands poised at the crossroads. The world needs to watch carefully to see which way it goes. “The police are at my door”, tweeted Selahattin Demirtas, in a last desperate message to his followers. Seconds later, officers forced their way in, arrested the MP, and dragged him off into the night.…
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Let’s drop the myth that Corbyn is the Messiah, then maybe we can make some progress
This article was posted on the Huffington Post in the week of Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election as Labour leader Let’s drop the myth that Corbyn is the Messiah, then maybe we can make some progress I take precisely zero pleasure in this. I’m actually quite depressed. If it weren’t for the private messages I receive on social media, or the frank conversations over a beer or two, with Corbynistas doubting their own Corbynianity (while still publicly whooping his name), I might not have the confidence to say all this. I’ve been to two Corbyn rallies now, with almost exactly a year in between, and the same thing has happened on both…
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The Corbynite legions have become the Tories’ most valuable allies
This comment piece originally appeared on The Huffington Post UK Politics section in July 2016 The Corbynite legions have become the Tories’ most valuable allies In a less surreal political era the sudden forced resignation of the Conservative Prime Minister would be a moment of panic for the Tories, and a golden opportunity that Labour would have jumped on. But nothing is quite as it should be now we’re through the political looking-glass. On one bizarre Friday morning alone we witnessed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. A little over a week later the UK is poised to leave the European Union; the faction of the Conservative Party…
