Freelance writer & editor (formerly of @thirdway). Lover of words, animals, foreign parts, cycling, cinema, Shakespeare, Wagner, peace and love, peace and love
Joined October 2007
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It’s so exasperating to hear Tony Blair declaring that “far-left” politics will destroy Labour, it prompted me to check how the party had done since his day. I know the only metric that really matters in the end is whether an election was won or lost, but it’s still revealing. /1
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Meet one of the most intelligent and caring women alive today. Expert on Israel's war on childhood.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a Palestinian scholar who has spent decades studying what happens when political violence enters the bodies, bedrooms and minds of children.
Here are ten of her most devastating insights.
1. You can destroy a child's childhood without killing the child. Fear, imprisonment, humiliation and the constant possibility of death can rob a child of everything childhood should be.
2. Before you can brutalize a child, you must first make that child seem dangerous. Strip away innocence. Replace it with suspicion. Violence becomes easier to justify.
3. Call it security, and almost any cruelty can become a precaution. Even children can be treated as enemies.
4. Terror enters the mind long before a bomb strikes. The sound of footsteps, a knock on the door, a strange noise at night. Fear colonizes the imagination.
5. Occupation enters the bedroom. It determines whether families can live together, whether parents can protect their children, whether a home can remain a home.
6. Destroying a house destroys more than walls. It destroys the place where a child learned to feel safe.
7. Palestinian women face multiple forms of domination. Political violence from outside, patriarchal control from within. Neither should excuse the other.
8. Even death does not guarantee dignity. Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes about ashlaa’, the Arabic word for scattered body parts. Parents searching rubble for pieces of their children. A ring identifying a mother. Pajamas identifying a child.
9. How can a child recover from trauma when the trauma never ends? There is no meaningful after while the terror continues.
10. A little girl in Gaza begged her cat not to eat her if she was killed by a bomb. Shalhoub-Kevorkian understood something profound in this plea: even a terrified child was trying to preserve the dignity of her own body.
And when parents gather the scattered remains of their children, they are doing more than preparing a burial.
They are refusing to let violence have the final word about who their children were.
That is perhaps the most extraordinary insight of her work: even when human beings are reduced to fragments, love still struggles to make them whole.
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The Bank of England has raised interest rates to 4%, supposedly to tackle inflation.
There is just one problem with this decision. The Bank knows that much of the inflation we are suffering is being driven by rising oil and energy prices, largely resulting from conflict in the Middle East.
It also knows that raising interest rates cannot reduce those prices.
So why is it doing this?
The answer is that the Bank believes it must suppress demand elsewhere in the economy to compensate for rising energy costs.
In other words, it is deliberately making mortgages more expensive, increasing business borrowing costs, discouraging investment and reducing household spending power.
And all this when people are already struggling with higher energy bills. That is problem number one.
There is, however, another problem. Higher interest rates increase costs for businesses, which can then feed through into higher prices. They can, in that case, add to inflation rather than reduce it.
The Bank is imposing economic pain to address a problem its chosen policy cannot directly solve.
That is not sound economic management. It is the consequence of an economic dogma that refuses to recognise the difference between inflation caused by excessive demand and inflation caused by supply shocks.
When will we learn?
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You left this part out…weird.
The midterm results send a clear message: How we show up in the world affects our lives at home, and Americans understand that. When we alienate allies, appease autocrats, impose arbitrary tariffs, and drive needless conflict, American families pay the price. The Administration’s actions over the last two years have had real consequences for our security, our economy, and our everyday lives. Americans have spoken loud and clear. We should act on the message they're sending. A good place to start: a diplomatic resolution to President Trump's war of choice with Iran.
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The "Jewish vote" in Michigan went to El-Sayed. Almost no Jews switched. The whole narrative of Jewish safety was just as a gigantic fraud.
“The results of that analysis show despite millions of dollars spent by AIPAC and Republican groups to move Jewish voters towards Mike Rogers, the final Michigan vote shows little to no difference in Jewish support for Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic candidate for Senate in 2024, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in 2026.
Across the targeted 72 precincts, the percentage shift of support from Slotkin in 2024 to Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was only a drop of 1.3 percent.
There was only a 6.2 percent difference between the vote percentage for Abdul El-Sayed - 60 percent - and Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic candidate for Governor - 66.2 percent - above him on the ticket.”
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Lawyers for the UK government today claimed in the Supreme Court that all these pensioners and priests getting arrested was itself an act of terrorism:
as it was Palestine Action seeking to overwhelm the justice system.
They really did say that!
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The British government says in the Supreme Court that those thousands of pensioners being arrested for holding placards are criminals and are engaged in terrorist activity.
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We're hugely excited to be bringing to #Bath on Friday November 6 the celebrated Palestinian writer, scholar and activist Tareq Baconi, in conversation with Max Porter about his new book, "What Now: On Palestine, freedom, and our global future".
bit.ly/TareqinBath
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Outside the Supreme Court, where the Palestine Action appeal hearing closed for the day, a man was arrested for saying, "In the UK, it's a crime to say, I support Palestine Action".
Police reportedly said it was due to the length of the pause between "crime to say" and "I support.."
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"Really important to recognise the concessions being made" whilst the Labour Government still push through laws more right wing on immigration than the Tories.
This is Labours new strategy. Announce something awful. Then row back a little and pretend they've won concessions.
Exclusive: Sadiq Khan has welcomed the Home Secretary’s watering down of immigration reforms, saying it is “really important to recognise the concessions that have been made” on ILR
Around a million migrants living in London do not hold a UK passport
mylondon.news/news/zone-1-ne…
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You’re literally providing US bombers with access to UK bases.
You didn’t have to approve this and you could end your complicity today. But you won’t, because you’re too busy licking the boot of Donald Trump.
Stop gaslighting the nation. Get US troops off UK soil NOW!
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If you're feeling even the tiniest bit of hope today, listen to this from @GretaThunberg.
I always feel inspired listening to Greta speak. She's got a very rare power of being able to use words to catalyse feeling into action, even when we don't necessarily have all the answers. Such a natural and motivating speaker.
Very grateful to her for joining us on the podcast with @ZackPolanski, which you can listen to here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcas…
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My hotel room was forced while I was in the Supreme Court and the jamb spilt apart. But nothing was taken, £180 cash left on the table.
Please note just in case. I am not suicidal, I have the most wonderful family and friends and many battles to fight.
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.@craigmurrayorg was at the Supreme Court hearing today to Deproscribe Palestine Action - here he describes brilliantly what happened
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Trump and his Republican allies lost the US elections because of their alliance with Netanyahu and their complicity in the genocidal war he is waging against the Palestinian people, as well as the aggression and devastating war they ignited against Iran in the Arab Gulf region.
Palestine was present in every election, as more than a political issue: it was present as a matter of humanity, justice, and the conscience of people around the world including in the USA.
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UPDATE: 62% of voters say the war in Iran was the wrong decison; 74% say it was a "crucial" or "major" factor in their vote.
responsiblestatecraft.org/ir…
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Hilarious watching politicians and journalists in Britain hail the victories in the US midterms and celebrating categorical and uncompromising politics, as if they haven't been losing their marbles over a mildly critical Green Party motion.
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Congratulations to Dr @AbdulElSayed and to all US candidates who have defeated pro-aparheid lobby’s effort to elect politicians that support Israel’s ethnic cleansing and atrocity crimes in Palestine.
May this be the beginning of the end of the rule of lawlessness brought upon us
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News just in. Mahmood harsher on legal immigration that anything implemented by the Tories or advocated for by Braverman or Jenrick at the time. Does this sound like a soft-left turn by Burnham?
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Ro Khanna on Israel: “The Democratic Party needs to be very clear. We need to call it a genocide. We need to say zero aid. We need to say zero military sales that are being used to kill civilians. And we need to say in the first week we’re gonna recognize a Palestinian State, put an embassy in Ramallah and East Jerusalem, and we’re gonna stop protecting Israel in the United Nations”
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A reminder that this Labour government were elected with a *173* seat majority. Larger than Clement Attlee’s majority.
Andy Burnham promised to ‘end 40 years of neoliberalism’.. yet he won’t even use this historic majority to even introduce rent controls.
Remember this in 2029.
I see the nonsense “rent controls are back” takes keep coming.
There is no rent control in England.
The legal right to challenge rent increases at tribunal was introduced by the Thatcher Government in its 1988 Housing Act.
It was rarely used in practice only because it inevitably resulted in a landlord serving a Section 21 notice.
Labour’s Renters’ Rights Act abolished Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions and renters are now rightly empowered to challenge unfair or above-market rent increases.
In both the recent cases that have been the cause of so much debate, the tribunal has been operating exactly as it should – determining that the landlords in question were charging rents that simply did not reflect local market values for comparable properties.