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Posts from the ‘Comment’ Category

1
Feb

The Tweeted #PMQs on Welfare Reform Bill Day

So it was the big day for Welfare Reform Bill, with plans of cutting benefit to disabled children, cancer patients and families living in adequate accommodation. Labour had a big chance to show whose side they were on and… well read it for yourself.

Farrely (Lab): You are cutting front line officers. Stop that shit
PM: Labour support the cuts and we’re sacking police pen pushers

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22
Jan

Sanusi Lamido, Nigerian Central Bank Governor defends Fuel Subsidy withdrawal on Monday 23rd January in London

Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria

Date: Monday 23 January 2012
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi
Chair: Professor Judith Rees

More details here

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20
Jan

Why newspapers reflect the opinions of white middle class men

By Mehdi Hasan / @ns_mehdihasan

Newspaper comment pages don’t reflect the diversity of 21st-century readers.

What have the following five individuals got in common: Gary Younge, Hugh Muir, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Amol Rajan and India Knight? They are part of a small group of non-white newspaper columnists who appear regularly on the comment pages of our national newspapers. Well, OK, not quite. They are the small group of non-white newspaper columnists who appear on those comment pages. That’s it. There’s just five of them – the Guardian’s Younge and Muir (both black), the Independent/i’s Alibhai-Brown and Rajan (both Asian) and the Sunday Times’s Knight (mixed race).

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18
Jan

The hypocrisy of Len McCluskey

Union leader slams Ed Miliband but who put him there in the first place?

Credit: Manchester Evening News

By Jerry Hicks

Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey has launched a stinging attack on the Labour leader Ed Miliband claiming that he  is “leading Labour to destruction”. McCluskey lambasts the Labour leader for “failing to support millions of low paid trade unionists” and thereby “disenfranchising the party’s [Labour] core support”.

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14
Jan

Two hundred years on; Haiti still waits for liberation

By Neil Griffiths / @_griff

Historically crippled by international debts, the middle of the twentieth century saw the IMF force Haiti (then occupied by America) to open its market to imported, highly subsidised U.S rice and sugar.

The productive country once known as ‘The Jewel of the Antilles’ was subsequently awash with cheap American grown goods. Some even reported U.S rice dumped on the shores, free to anyone who wanted it. The undermining effect on local infrastructure was deliberate, profound and lasting.

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13
Jan

Unsung hero of the London Riots: Duwayne Brooks

By Matt Potter / @mattpotter

Some stories write themselves. Some never get written, though they’re better by far. There’s something irreducible about them, too many loose ends. They don’t have neat beginnings and endings. They don’t fit our (journalists’, readers’) idea of the arc. Sometimes they’re just collected impressions.

This one’s like that, and I’m setting it down here simply because I think someone should write the story that never got written. Maybe it isn’t a story after all, but a diary of sorts. You tell me.

It starts (though I didn’t know it at the time) nearly 20 years ago. As a newly arrived, young, white Londoner, I followed the Stephen Lawrence case through the 1990s, then the 2000s, if not avidly then certainly with the odd mixture of horror, casual compulsion, mounting disbelief at the catalogue of establishment errors or worse, and something… what was that other thing? I guess it a bit like shame, only less easily pinned down. It was a vague, nagging, sticky discomfort that came and went. Something I didn’t like feeling, but knew it wasn’t to be shied away from. It was an itching unease about what might, for others, lurk beneath the surface of a society that I, white, lower-middle-class and male, may not always have liked, but had always, personally at least, experienced as fair and neutral in its justice.

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10
Jan

How Abbottgate restored white victimhood in order to brush the issue of racism under the carpet

By Koos Couvee

The media storm Hackney MP Diane Abbott caused last week as a result of her ‘divide and rule’ comment on Twitter is indicative of the ways in which Britain’s political elite is still able to turn issues of race and racism to its advantage and brush the lived reality of so many black Britons under the carpet.

When Diane Abbott tweeted: “White people love playing ‘divide & rule’ We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism”, she was not referring to 19th century colonialism, which is what she later said to defend her comment. Firstly, if that were the case she would have put the sentence in the past tense. Secondly, the tweet came as part of a conversation about present day politics with Hackney based freelance journalist Bim Adewunmi, who had expressed concern to Abbott about what she perceived to be the red herring ‘black community’.

Conservative blogger Harry Cole, who at times also refers to himself as a journalist, eloquently summed up the deep pain and outrage felt by white people as a result of Abbott’s tweet in his debate with race and human rights activist Lee Jasper on Sky News. He told viewers that Abbott’s comments were derogatory to an entire ethnic group, based on the colour of their skin. Indeed, Cole pointed out, racism works both ways and should not have been used as a political tool by the opportunistic Hackney MP.

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4
Jan

Video: #StephenLawrence Commentary by @Nabilu: “Who polices the police?”

A video by UpshotTV, commentary by @Nabilu

22
Nov

Crack-heads, racism and Occupy London

by Damien Gayle / @damiengayle

Days after the NYPD imposed a media blackout to stop the world seeing how they evicted the Occupy Wall Street camp, I fell victim to Occupy LSX’s own press ban.

I had been visiting their newest occupation, a vast network of buildings owned by banking giant UBS, on Sun Street, near Moorgate station, on the edge of the City.

IMG-20111118-00261

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18
Nov

The Big Bill Die In

Cartoon graphic in B-Movie style
Tuesday November 22nd
Meet 10.30 am, Parliament Square – Facebook event

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