Last weekend, I led a party of socialists on a walk along Brixton streets.
Author Archives: sedgword
Beyond Borders
As indicated previously, I was raised by socialist peace activists; my parents having been ‘war babies’ who were evacuated to escape the ‘Liverpool Blitz’. (A favourite bed-time story of my father’s was to tell me how,as a child, he had helped his father put out a German incendiary bomb that had fallen on their house, …
Attachment and Loss*
In my first post of the decade I said that my relationship to Liverpool was problematic. During my two visits last Spring old tensions surfaced. After a train journey that, after deluges was delayed by land-slip, facing a bitter wind blowing across the Mersey, I felt the imprimatur of the city’s pivotal position in the …
In a state
In the tense lead-up to the state funeral, after football matches and the Proms had been cancelled, I asked shop-keepers whether they would be open that day. Around the corner are two shops I frequent, both Black-run or owned.At the first, after I had rolled my eyes, the manager said that supermarkets were to close …
On Our Streets
Since my last post – in which I wrote of my late father’s signposting of the Public Order Act 1936 – I’ve been pondering policing. After the 1936 Act was repealed and replaced by the Public Order Act 1986 – in response in substantial part to ‘the Brixton Disorder’ of 1981 – the law developed …
One Hundred Troubled Years
The deep foreboding of the politics of Northern Ireland that I’ve carried since the Brexit Referendum is now made manifest. Young loyalists’ escalating attacks on Northern Irish police so alarmed President Biden that he’s led the international call for calm. That the history of the North is so freighted with conflict means it can be used to …
Five years on
Last week began with a commemoration on BBC Radio 6 Music of the five years since David Bowie’s passing, his own words plugging a programme, simulcast on Radio 4 and Radio 6: “I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.” In the light of …
Two Rivers, Two Women
As this year began, I found myself wondering, after the General Election, what had become of class consciousness. Although my social class was determined by father’s membership of the academy, Edie’s mantra was “I’m from the working class.” ( And arguably, after kicking out my father she resumed that class position. ) Family lore of …
A painful analysis
Since losing a younger friend to the virus I’ve been preoccupied by lives being put at risk. The net is so wide that anyone could have been caught commuting to, or at work, at a mass gathering, whether a music festival, or a football match, or shopping. Pondering other insidious and invidious contaminants, a parallel …
Après le déluge
Waking in darkness a month ago, I crept out of the house. Boycotting the BBC, I wanted to survey the array of banners at Brixton Underground’s newsagents. I wasn’t surprised: we had been here before. In 1984, subdued by Labour’s defeat, I spoke with Raphael Samuel about the implications of Margaret Thatcher’s second victory, after …
sedgword 