As I type these words, I do so with a heavy heart; this will be my last column for PN. I would have written to and for you, PN readers, until the end of my days, but circumstances beyond my control are forcing me to step back.
Please know I do so with immense gratitude to every single one of you for reading my words over the past six years. I must also express my immense gratitude to my colleagues; Milan Rai, Emily Johns, Gabriel Carlyle, Emma Sangster and Claire…
A week is a long time in politics. Ha! I promise I don’t need to be investigated by the Gambling Commission, PN readers! Couldn’t make it up.
For those wondering what I’m wittering on about, my last column two months ago urged readers to get out there during the election and make a difference, whenever it was called. Then, the election was called as we went to press.
Now, it’s the first Monday morning of a new government.
Our first Labour government since 2010’s…
Well, it wasn’t a May election. Given that I’m writing this on 20 May, I can say this with some certainty!
Another six weeks of this end-stage-capitalism, this dystopian nightmare that Britain has become under the Tories.
We have patients in hospital corridors. We have people drowning in the Channel. We have profoundly disabled people being told they are ‘fit for work’. We have little kids, barely more than babies, dying in mould-infested flats that are not fit to house sewer…
For the very first time since I began this column in January 2019, this month I have struggled to write. There are of course easily 100 issues I could champion, each as worthwhile as the others.
But I am tired, PN readers. So tired.
When our leaders are not the personification of political stagnation (I’m looking at you, Keir Starmer), they are Tories veering dangerously close to the right-wing in the hopes of capturing The Gammon Vote. The fact that already…
The phrase ‘two-tier society’ has become a fairly commonplace one. We hear it in reference to healthcare, housing, education, and the North/South divide. But the phrase is wrong. British society has at least five tiers. Which tier of society you experience comes down to one thing in modern Britain. The same thing it has always come down to: social class.
We have the Ruling Class, the monarchies, the elite of the Conservative Party, we all know the sort. Unaccountable and untouchable;…
Language is important. It’s one of the things, particularly written language, that sets us, as a species, apart from the animals. Having done a little wordsmithing in my time, of course I’m going to think that. But the science backs me up.
When I Google ‘the importance of language’ there are 3.6 billion results. When I narrow my search to ‘the importance of language in propaganda’ I get 61 million results.
The way propaganda uses language is both insidious and dangerous. It can…
The other day, while speaking to a US friend online, I described the UK as ‘a damp little island with a tea fixation, and a deeply-entrenched class system.’
Now, we all know that the weather and the tea are non-negotiable elements of 21st-century Britain. If we can fix the climate emergency, I strongly suspect that they will be non-negotiable elements of 31st-century Britain – I’m fully okay with this.
But what of the class system?
Anyone who has spent half an hour with…
The latest Tory nonsense is yet another attack on university education. The phrase ‘low-value degree’ is being thrown around. I’m not entirely sure such a thing exists. Well, except maybe ‘PPE’ (politics, philosophy and economics); the Tory career politician degree of choice does not appear to equip folx to lead.
University was not easy for me. An undiagnosed, dyslexic, autistic: burnout and sensory overload followed me around university like my handy wheeled book bag. But it was a…
So, we have a king. That still feels strange to say, never mind sing, come the football, but here we are. Readers who remember my column about the late queen’s state funeral and all the pomp and circumstance and expense around it, can probably guess where I’m going with this. I’m sorry, readers, but I really am as cross as a bag full of badgers about this nonsense.
The figure that has been bandied about regarding the cost of the coronation is £100mn. Let that sink in.
In the…
There are two different ways I am disabled. There is what my body, my individual biology, does that no one can change. I will always have chronic fatigue and I will always have pain. My medical team and I do the best we can to ameliorate both, but they are inevitable.
Then, there are the ways in which I am disabled by society: lack of accessibility, lack of support, lack of knowledge and rampant ableism, to name a few. These are far from inevitable.
The cost-of-living crisis is…
You know what I would really enjoy, readers? I would enjoy being able to write a column that doesn’t involve having to have a rant about Tory policy in one way, shape, or form. Alas, today is not the day for that.
Since PN last went to press, ambulance workers and nurses have been on strike, with further dates coming. Junior doctors are voting on whether to strike. Postal, railway and bus workers have all withdrawn their labour, again with further dates coming. The…
There are a lot of things I could say, write, and otherwise communicate, about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
But let me start with the most obvious, or at least the most obvious to me, an almost life-long sufferer.
Having PTSD fucking sucks.
There. I said it. I think a lot of my fellow sufferers would agree. It sucks all day long and twice on Sundays. It sucks long, hard, wide and sideways. It sucks upside down and inside out. It even sucks at night.
It…
As I write this column, I am watching the state funeral of queen Elizabeth II, and my mind is boggling. The first thought is: ‘Well, this is the one thing we are “world-leading” at these days – pomp and circumstance and pageantry – at the expense of the taxpayer.’ I mean, yikes.
We are in the middle of a cost of living crisis. Thousands, if not millions, of people are genuinely afraid of either starving or freezing this winter, or both. Electricity, food, fuel – the price of…
In mid-May, after a three-year wait (made a year longer by COVID-19) I was diagnosed with autism.
What a relief! After 36 years of feeling like ‘an odd duck’, answers!
A friend of mine once wrote in his blog: ‘self-reflection doesn’t have to be the bastard child of tragedy’. It’s a good way to explain why I started the journey of an ‘official’ autism diagnosis; it is part of my own self-reflection. It is for me.
Medical diagnosis is a privilege only afforded to me…
On 11 May, thousands of veterans of the First Gulf War of 1991, those affected with Gulf War Syndrome, were vindicated.
After over 30 years of official denial and gaslighting, the cause of the veterans’ suffering has finally been identified: sarin gas.
Odourless, tasteless and wildly fatal (a few drops on bare skin can kill), sarin is one of the most toxic chemical weapons known to humankind. Unknown amounts of sarin (and other chemical weapons) were released into Iraqi air…
