Nigel’s March for Freedom
- March 02, 2019
- by
- Matt
As an instrument of protest and civil disobedience, the protest march has a long and illustrious historical pedigree. Think of Gandhi’s 24-day ‘Salt March’ in 1930. Or the 1936 Jarrow march. Or the 1963 Long March for Jobs and Freedom in the US, where Martin Luther King delivered his ‘ I have a dream speech’...
Small Island: A Brief History of British Immigration ‘Concerns’
- January 18, 2019
- by
- Matt
Politicians tend to defer almost as a matter of course to popular ‘concerns’ about immigration, as though they were a novel reaction to the unprecedented 21st century phenomenon of ‘mass immigration’.
But these ‘concerns’ are actually part of a longer historical tradition, in which racist and xenophobic prejudices have been attached to different groups of people, in...
The Intensification of Calamities: Catalonia’s Unlikely Cheerleaders
- October 29, 2017
- by
- Matt
Of all forms of war, the ancient Greeks recognized that civil war was the worst and most destructive form of human conflict. This is because civil war shatters the bonds that hold societies together, tearing families, neighborhoods and communities apart, unleashing hatreds, divisions and conflicts that can only be resolved, not through negotiation, compromise...
Taking Our Country Back: Brexit and the Seeds of Hate
- June 27, 2016
- by
- Matt
There was a time, in the country that so many Brexit voters would like to take ‘back’, when it was commonplace to have signs in the windows of rented accommodation that read ‘no dogs, no Blacks, no Irish. ‘ We have spent decades moving away from the society where such discrimination was semi-respectable; ...
Freaky Friday
- June 25, 2016
- by
- Matt
In the Jamie Lee Curtis comedy Freaky Friday, a mother and teenage daughter wake up to find themselves trapped in each other’s bodies as a result of a magic spell. Yesterday I underwent a similar but even more disturbing transformation. On Thursday night I dreamt that Remain had won the referendum....
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