Natalie Bennett: Paul Mason’s colourful, thoughtful History 1.3 version of this turbulent, unfinished period

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics.

BBC journalist Paul Mason in a blog post early in 2011 titled Twenty reasons why it is kicking off everywhere, which almost instantly filled my Twitter feed and discussion on multiple email lists. You might have called it the History 1.0 version of explaining the Arab spring, Occupy, the indignados of Europe – everything important from 2011. He has just returned to the subject, with Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. You might call it version 1.3 – a few initial kinks ironed out, a little more perspective obtained, a few more experiences added. (more…)

Rupa Huq: Unemployment Explained

Apologies for lightness of posting of late. It’s been busy work-wise (loads of marking including exams sometimes written in inscrutable handwritten script).

Anyway got myself down this weekend to this event hosted by the charity Healthy Planet (at Park Royal, spitting distance from where the Ealing Borough election count was last year) which you might have seen on BBC Breakfast or Newsround. The aim is to reccyle unwanted stuff and give it a second life rather than the expensive waste of landfill. It’s a win-win situation, clear your clutter while you’re at it and the landlord who owns the hitherto dormant warehouse that hosted it avoids the commercial business rate for having empty space. (more…)

Rupa Huq: Orton the exhibitionist finally gets his moment on display

Happened to be in the Finsbury EC1 area today (not to be confused with Finsbury Park N4) and happened across a public library containing an exhibition of Joe Orton’s defaced library books. A really fascinating find. To think the same man who became playwrite of such curios as “Loot”, “Entertaining Mr Sloan” and “What the Butler Saw” served a custodial setence under a 1916 Larceny Act for his fruity jacket-adaptations in an action brought by Islington Libraries is now being feted by the Islington Library Service in an exhibition of the covers that also includes photos of his collage style Holloway bedsit wallpaper constructed from plates removed from the books and his original typewriter purchased for £80 along with some pricey ribbons. (more…)

Natalie Bennett: The ‘precariat’ – a useful idea, stretched beyond its limits

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

I finished Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class thinking that the parts were rather more than the whole. There’s lots of fascinating statistics, facts and anecdotes, and the idea of the precariat – while already well established in general form in debates about casualisation and commodification of workers – is a useful one, but the author’s determination to fit without a particular political framework, to declare, with a specific set of technical meanings, that this is a new class, weakened rather than strengthened his arguments. (more…)

Natalie Bennett: Inequality – why the workers’ loss of income, and the bosses’ triumph, has broken our economy

A shorter version was originally published on Blogcritics.

Stewart Lansley’s The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of The Super-Rich and the Economy is full of figures to make the blood boil.
* According to Forbes, the number of American billionaires jumped 40-fold in the 25 years to 2007. In that period general US incomes stagnated in real terms, but the aggregate wealth of the top 400 soared from $169 to $1500 billion. (p. 7) (more…)

Rupa Huq: Perils of Twitter

This August I was enthusing about Twitter and its part in keeping me up to date with the riot news to an academic acquaintance who decried it with the words “but the level of analysis”…

Yes 140 characters sure is not the same thing as a 90,000 word long PhD thesis but that hasn’t stopped Twitter becoming newsworthy in the last couple of days. As you’ll know by now two of Labour’s big guns have been caught out in the Twitterspshere and the medium has truly become the message. Diane Abbot claimed the limiting nature of the word-limit as her defence after her colonialism-inspired “divide and rule” comment became front page stuff on a slow news day. Now the Murdoch Sun has avenged itself for its harrying at the hands of Ed Miliband this Summer by putting a mispelling by the Labour leader on its front page – a Twitter event also ripped into by the Telegraph. (more…)

Lee Chalmers: Lunch

Lee Chalmers: Things my husband says

Rupa Huq: Curry and spice and all things nice…

Just before the Xmas season proper began I was lucky enough to break bread with an interesting bunch: sociologist Sean Carey who I sometimes link to here for his New Statesman and CommentisFree columns, Tower Hamlets education bigwig turned Labour councillor in Newham turned educationalist in Bangladesh Ayub Korom Ali and one-time world kickboxing champ Ali Jacko (pictured here with Pele), all hosted by Bashir Ahmed at the fine Kasturi Indian restuarant in Aldgate. Good food and great company. Jacko who was Channel 5′s face of boxing for a bit is starting a foundation that will finance a hospital in Bangladesh and setting up a football stadium – both are to be in Sylhet. Ayub has become director of a school also in the same region where he has headhunted a UK head-teaching to rule the roost. The co-educational establishment is for kindergarten  to secondary level. (more…)

Rupa Huq: North Korea and the Gunnersbury Avenue Connection

Just saw this at my fellow 2010 Walpole ward Labour candidate Paul Conlan’s Facebook page so I thought I’d nick it.

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