Above: Arlene Foster speaking at the 2014 DUP Conference at La Mon House Hotel. Explaining to anyone who isn’t from Northern Ireland who exactly the Democratic Unionist Party are – something that’s been asked all over the internet since Friday morning’s dramatic events – and what exactly their problem is (a follow up question usually delivered in the next breath), always feels slightly odd to Tommy Downshire. So, we … Read More
Who’s Afraid Of The Dark?
A UK lobby group has published a report identifying the “culture of fear” that stymies a night time economy estimated to run at £66 Billion a year. The report comes right at a time when London gets a 24 hour tube. One can only imagine what a similar report would have to say about our own archaic Dancehall Act. Finish up their lads. Have you no homes to … Read More
#spareChange: Everybody’s Free.
Yowser, it’s been 20 years since the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act in the UK. The act which spawned Reclaim The Streets and that classic Prodigy inner sleeve that sowed huge curiosity in culchie eight year olds like me. What better way to commemorate the anarchic spirit of that scene than highlighting how the flame it lit has passed on. Four years ago journalists piped up about he return of … Read More
Penalising The Poor
Dennis Curran of the Loaves and Fishes charity tells Scottish Parliament that people are being penalised for being poor and the “heart of the matter is people are starving”. Thousands have turned to charity for emergency food parcels, following changes to the benefits system that were introduced by the UK Government last April. Those who rely on food banks often walk for miles because they cannot afford to pay for transport, and many … Read More
#goggleBox: Bonus Street
Times are good on Bonus Street although drug taking and paranoia are high. Most of these people don’t have a job and now they’re having to learn how to get by on even more money than before. Benefits Street, that hugely controversial show on Channel4 in the UK, purports to be a fly-on-the-wall look at a Birmingham street populated by the feckless underclass. However, working families that were followed for … Read More
#rabbleLols: UKIP vs BNP We All Win
Clive Jefferson, the BNP’s treasurer, publicly harasses UKIP leader Nigel Farage as he goes for a coffee. BNP and UKIP are both standing in a parliamentary by-election on 13/2/14. The by-election is for the Wythenshawe seat and the BNP is putting as much effort in to the campaign as it can. One highlight is the BNP speaker complaning about UKIP ‘violence’. A case of the dog calling the cat hairy … Read More
Benefits Street Scrounger
‘Margaret Thatcher’s pal Nischal is known as Goldfinger and rakes in thousands from families living on the breadline renting out damp homes with faulty heating’ writes today’s Mirror. The squalid rented four-bedroom home on TV’s controversial Benefits Street is so riddled with damp that water runs down the walls. There is no heating because the boiler has long been broken – and the tenant’s children are so frozen at … Read More
99p Store Sale Causes Bedlam
It should be funny but it makes a point about the state of Tory Britain. With over 100,000 relying on food banks across Britain and hundreds of thousands of ill and disabled being forced into sub minimal wage work – the reality is a far cry from the media’s reflection of scroungers on ‘Benefits Street’. Queues dozens deep as items such as cleaning products and end-of-life dried foods flew from … Read More
#rabbleReels: Brandy And Coke
Ewen Spencer brings you this short and sweet trip down garage memory lane. I wonder if any of Dublin’s current crop of DSLR wielding snap happy saps will ever produce a similar collection?
{Jobbridge} Generation Workfare: How UK Activists Are Coping.
The UK state has been making people work for their dole since the 1990s ‘New Deal’. Multiple campaigns, blogs and groups have worked to develop an interesting arsenal of concepts and actions to understand this cruel imposition of austerity.