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princess diana is in all of us 🚩👑🏳️‍🌈 Profile picture
princess diana is in all of us 🚩👑🏳️‍🌈
@joinaunionpls
down with the monarchy, but diana is a comrade | LFC | direct action | civil liberties | decrim + harm reduction | autistic | disgruntled hospitality worker
Apr 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
They literally deploy the "middle class activists" trope not necessarily because they want to have a meaningful debate about class in movement politics but because they don't want to engage with the issue at hand. It's of course interesting because it's not like the trade union movement - which is always framed as some pure & authentic working class movement - has no middle class people in it!
Apr 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Just Stop Oil have repeatedly blocked oil refineries and damaged petrol stations.

They actually have engaged in that form of direct action that is "target specific". The difference is that actions that directly attack a target get less press attention - so you don't usually hear about them, thus you assume that all JSO do is the stuff at art galleries etc.

They're actually much more tactically diverse than many people give them credit for.
Apr 18, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Why did a climate activist interrupt a snooker match?

What's the strategy here? THREAD:

#JustStopOil Image 1. This is an introductory build up action to Just Stop Oil's planned slow marches and general disruption in London.

Initial highly visual actions serve an advertising function.

Before XR did their April 2019 rebellion, they poured fake blood outside Downing Street. Image
Apr 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The two state solution is just impossible "on the ground" because the settlements have been constructed in such a way as to break up Palestinian territory into small, broken up disconnected territory. Then of course the most garish fact here isn't the broken up bits of territory in the West Bank but just the fact that the West Bank and Gaza are vastly separated.

No sovereign territory makes sense like this and it's too complex to logistically solve. Image
Aug 31, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
We are not "cheerleading for the RMT" (ie. An institution with a bureaucracy).

We are "cheerleading" for **railworkers**.

Stop finding cynical excuses to push your scab politics. Ash Sarkar from Novara media is critical of Dempsey fwiw

Aug 30, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
These are really exploitative working conditions, which are very comparable to other forms of gig work.

There's a clear class struggle here which the broader left should engage in as opposed to just moralising about the vibe of the work itself. When people say "sex work is work", what they're communicating is the idea that if it's work then a worker's rights & class war frame needs to be applied.

Getting bogged down in discussing whether the work itself is "good" or "bad" is an abstraction.
Jun 19, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
"No-one on the liberal left seems to accept my loaded, reactionary & illiterate framing of political issues" If you intentionally create a system where there are barely any safe & legal routes, most forms of migration will be "illegal".
Jun 18, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Some GMB scab on the TUC stage talking about how they helped uber drivers.

They've done no organising, undermined IWGB, got a sweetheart deal with the bosses and now on a stage getting cheered.

#tucdemo Sharon Graham's speech has been the best one so far and got the most cheers.
Jun 17, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The Norwegian government in its reports on the policy itself has literally admitted that the legislation creates a "buyers market".

You're placing more power in the hands of johns, Julie. Sex workers cannot screen clients effectively in this model. They are forced to lower prices. They find that their boundaries are being pushed, that they have to do more things like condomless sex in order to get money. Buyer's market. That's what it results in.
Jun 17, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
So they're passing a law that will result in sex workers having to do more dangerous things to get money in order to pay rent? Gotcha. At the end of Molly Smith and Juno Mac's great book 'Revolting Prostitutes', they actually say that they're sex work abolitionists - it's just for them the abolition of it must be done in a way that doesn't harm workers.
Jul 8, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
People often reference Starmer's involvement with the McLibel case to showcase his left-wing credentials, but it's worth noting that the person who helped write the leaflet which the libel case concerned itself with was a spycop infiltrator named Bob Lambert.

#Spycops In other words, Starmer's great moral achievement is tinged with a striking tension: namely that years later, when he chose to whip to abstain on the #Spcops Bill, he effectively declared a callous indifference for the activists he previously defended.
Jul 7, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
David Lammy's repeated insistence on using Churchill - a man who had striking miners shot ("fill their bellies with lead") - in numerous speeches of his as a symbol of human rights & civil liberties, is continually repellent. Of course it's perfectly true that the tradition of political liberty has been suffused with revolting hypocrites and vultures - but it is the task for people nominally on the left, to try to craft a solid narrative about freedom. Use better symbols and figures!
Jul 7, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is a good point fwiw. A lot of the terminology around this ("libertarian" etc) conceals the fact that our opponents actually quite like the state! It's just that they want to use the state to orient it in a way that benefits a particular class interest. The mainstream left-right divide has *never* really been a debate about whether one is pro or anti state but always about how one wishes to use it.

When people on the right of this divide accuse say a keynsian of being a mad statist, they're correct but also hypocritical!
Jul 6, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
almost at 1'000! Image almost a *proper* poster!
Jul 6, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
🚨EVICTION ALERT🚨

1️⃣@WRNewcastle are trying to evict a tenant from a property during a pandemic! 🦠
2️⃣They have harassed their tenant & not fixed a *broken carbon monoxide alarm* 😱
3️⃣The ombudsman said they had caused "aggravation, distress, and inconvenience to their tenant! The tenants demands are:

✊ To be compensated for the mistreatment
✊ For his eviction notice to be rescinded
✊ To be relocated to another unit while repairs take place
Jul 6, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Ish. A lot of the failures of preventing to stop it imo are more placed within the strategic orientation of the movement itself.

A lot of the mobilising efforts were for organising one off (but country wide) "days of action".

That model isn't good enough.

#killthebill The notion that the Bill could have been stopped by sporadic days of action is ludicrous. The orientation should have been towards consistent direct action/civil disobedience: sitting on train-tracks for days on end etc etc.

#killthebill #pcscbill
Jul 6, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I'd go much further though into saying something a bit more provocative - namely that it's not just that the "rule of law" (in its idealised form) doesn't exist, it's that they actively hate the idea of it and would never want it actually enforced. This is provocative only insofar as it detours away from a lot of rhetoric where politicians clutch pearls about the rule of law as an inherent "British value".

But crucially this is a PR ruse. They hate the idea - naturally so! If implemented it would threaten their power!
Mar 27, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
We need to come attuned to the fact that the methodology of policing deployed here is very clearly a policy choice coming from the top down.

Every time:

Wait till it's night. Use dogs and horses and batons. Turn a sit-in into a stand up angrier protest. Apply force

#Bristol This is not an accident. This is not bad apples. This is not a one off isolated incident.

The same strategy & techniques happens every night. The same pattern of events without fail.

#killthebill
#BristolProtest
Mar 26, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
A line in the sand please.

From now on *don't ever* allow the political right or anyone associated with the Conservative Party to *ever* offer moral lectures on freedom.

The #policebill is a disgrace as is the brutish policing of the #BristolProtest.

#killthebill I personally never fell for the whole "Tory civil libertarian" shtick but I hope from now on more people have their eyes open about this.

#killthebill
Mar 26, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Obviously I'm not trying to erase or downplay the authoritarian tendencies pre existent in UK politics but watching this I can't help but feel like we're entering frankly new territory.

We are hurtling into authoritarianism - fast.

#BristolProtest
#Bristol Liberty is delicate and previous. It needs to be nurtured and ruggedly defended.

The spare, unequally distributed & contingent freedoms we have are being pulled from beneath us.

The lesson is obvious: don't allow them to do it.

#BristolProtest
#Bristol
Mar 26, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
My intervention in The Discourse™ on racist white gays is merely to say that the LGBT rights movement in the UK - and politicians that liberalised laws - has often been characterised by what I call "low stakes liberalism".

#whitegays #LGBTQ In other words they are willing to offer reforms & limitations on the state but only for the least contentious issues and for the least immiserated people in the LGBT community.

#whitegays #LGBTQ