The idea of the NHS took root in the political imagination less as an example of social entitlement's victory over private provision, and more as the embodiment of brand Britain.Collection: Imagination
My great-great-aunt was a terrorist. I'm not talking about the sense in which the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi was branded a terrorist by the British parliament in 1932: Pritilata Waddedar was an active participant in armed struggle against the British state. She supplied explosives. She fired a gun. And I'm proud of it.
It's worth pointing out that conflicts between racially oppressed people often result from the fact that colonialism worked on divide and rule. Certain ethnic, religious, racial or indigenous groups were deliberately privileged over others in order to create a sense of investment in upholding the power structure.
Immigration has tremendously changed the fabric of this country. Immigration is what built our NHS, when Britain invited people from the Commonwealth, from nations it had formerly colonized, in order to rebuild this country after the ravages of the Second World War.
It's important to recognise that opposing racism isn't just about presenting an alternative set of values; it's about looking at how the far right play on people's hardships in order to nurture a sense of enmity between white people and those racialised as migrants.
Let me be clear: I recognise the necessity of tackling antisemitism in the Labour party head-on.
When you're a second- or third-generation migrant, your ties to your heritage can feel a little precarious. You're a foreigner here, you're a tourist back in your ancestral land, and home is the magpie nest you construct of the bits of culture you're able to hold close.
So, there are lots of different reasons why people came out to protest Boris Johnson, but what they were united in was their disdain for a system which has imposed a prime minister who is deeply divisive on the rest of the electorate.
Lots of us have been plugging away, building a platform to talk about libertarian communism and post-scarcity economics.
This is what people have been missing: politics shouldn't be about the dour cultishness and pomposity that dominated the left for decades - it should be joyful and exuberant.
As a long-termist, I acknowledge there are more pressing causes than the abolition of private property.
If you want any hope of staying in the EU, or having a Brexit that doesn't mean capitulation to ethno-nationalism, you've got to tie it to a wider vision of political and economic transformation.
I believe that nothing so arbitrary as money should be able to come between a person and the means of survival. And that's a really fancy way of saying that it doesn't matter if you're poor - you should have top-quality health care.
There shouldn't be a barrier between rich and poor in terms of the kind of health care that they can access.
Human labor cannot compete with fixed capital - that's just a fact.
But communism is the only thing which says all things should be brought into the hands of commons to benefit all people. In the past, you'd call that communism. I think in the future, we'll have to call that common sense.
Offering a politician's non-apology that accepts everything but responsibility isn't the same as accountability.
Britain's done a lot of changing in the past 50 years. The decline of manufacturing and heavy industry under Margaret Thatcher ripped the economic heart out of huge swathes of the country, and dramatically transformed class composition.
No one but the ruling class wins in a culture war.
There is something deeply wrong with a political culture which only wants to talk about incarceration in the aftermath of a tragedy.
Our priorities are all wrong if we only care about how long people are in prison for, and not what goes on inside them, and what happens after people are released.
Austerity hasn't just decimated our public services. It has corroded the political imagination.
The launch of the National Health Service in 1948, one of the world's foremost examples of something being decommodified in the interest of the social good, was met with nothing less than horror by those with vested interests in the private provision of medicine.
Here's the problem with downplaying the radical nature of decommodification: when you empty something of political content, politicians are free to wield symbols as they please.
Our modern understanding of cultural appropriation is highly individualised. It's all about what Halloween costume you wear, or who's cooking biryani. But the way in which the idea was first used was to describe a relationship of dominance and exploitation between a global ruling class and a globally subjugated one.
Not all cultural borrowing is a form of social violence: some of it is just cringe.
The reason Brexiteers have been so effective is that they have made the fight about broad political values.
You can't debunk memes with facts. It's like bringing tap-shoes to a gunfight.
The key to stopping the hard-right nationalist forces poised to pounce on Brexit isn't going to be finessing a reprieve for the status quo. It's about actively creating consent for meaningful change, and expanding democratic participation beyond a second referendum.
The left cannot be complicit in the marginalisation of Palestinian people in the interest of fighting racism. We can, and we must, do much better than that.
My mum was an anti-racist activist in the 70s and 80s.
While I agree that embracing vibrancy and joy is an essential bulwark against the left's tendency towards energy-sapping endless meetings, pop culture alone won't save us from racism.
The demand for adequate social housing provision is something that transcends race, religion and settled status.
Nothing in this life is certain aside from death, taxes and English literature graduates writing in the Guardian and spoiling your enjoyment of things you had previously thought were fine.
The Simpsons has shaped my psychology to a degree one would usually attribute to a parent, or a particularly devout upbringing. I am a zealot.
Ezra Pound was a pioneer of the most exciting aesthetic movement of the 20th century.
I can't help but feel that trying to locate a universal femininity in either consumer culture or particular bodily functions serves as a way to opt out of dealing with the multiple processes that impede our full participation in society.
Feminism isn't about curating or policing the boundaries of womanhood.
International Women's Day, if it is to claim any kind of political relevance, has to reject ladies' Christmas consumerism and lowest-common-denominator universalism. Look beyond the pink beer and pyjamas; as feminists we need to be concerned with payslips and passports.
It is up to us to push for a transformation in political culture in which the basic human dignity of migrants is unequivocally respected.
Repressive measures taken by the British government to quell Indian nationalist agitation meant that expansions of the franchise regarding legislative councils were met by mistrust: Indian politicians in Bengal refused to participate in the 1920 elections, and formally adopted a policy of boycott and non-cooperation.
Bengal in the early 1930s was a hotbed of anti-British revolutionary activity - and women were at the heart of this insurrectionist moment.
British women's history was never confined to the British mainland; and contesting the narrative around enfranchisement shows us that rights were not bestowed by the state, but extracted from it by force.
More draconian forms of policing and punishment are no guarantee of a reduction in violent crime.
As in health, so in crime - prevention is better than cure.
Research has shown that the availability of mental health care prior, during, and after imprisonment reduces violent offending drastically.
Study after study has shown that the availability of stable employment, reduced income inequality and post-imprisonment neighbourhood affluence are three of the most significant factors in reducing the frequency of violent offences.
I mean, the thing is, is that Britain has got a great tradition of irreverent political satire.