Freelance Writer/Author, Eternal Optimist, Pagan, Socialist, & Time Lord aficionada. And yes, I was named after the butcher's dog, January. @janrad.bsky.social
Why's Wes Streeting suddenly pretending to care about the atrocities in Gaza, nearly three years too late?
1. Because it's his only hope of beating Burnham to become leader.
2. Because his silence on Gaza nearly cost him his seat at the last general election.
Don't be fooled.
Jeremy Corbyn:
“Let’s not wait for another miscarriage of justice to take place, and instead attend Woolwich Crown Court on the 12th of June to stand with those who’ve tried to prevent the crime of genocide in Gaza.”
If you want to push back against tech’s encroachment into every corner of our lives, you need to be reading books. They’re keen to create a world in which most people are illiterate & addicted to slop, a world without poetry, imagination or knowledge. Reading is resistance.
Local artist, Light Guerrilla, projected TAX THE RICH on Mark Zuckerberg’s $300M mega yacht. It is docked at Seattle’s Lake Union and the company is laying off 1395 employees in Washington state starting next month
Greedy privatised water companies treat our rivers and seas like an open sewer.
And they've ripped off the public with higher bills while handing nearly £90 BILLION to shareholders since privatisation.
In Parliament, I called for water to be brought back into public ownership.
"A Swiss court has acquitted five Palestine solidarity activists, annulled their fines, recognised the reality of genocide in Palestine, and affirmed that peaceful civil disobedience is protected by freedom of expression."
Please RT this until the UK courts do the same.
Thanks.
Fucking NHS. I woke up this morning with some trouble in my eye. Called the optician. Had tests. Sent straight to hospital with a torn retina.
They insisted on giving me laser surgery there and then to fix it. Didn't want any money for the job. Now I'm home again.
How inconsiderate. Joking aside. Remember there are people out there who want to dismantle the NHS.
There is an event taking place in London on 14 June that openly advertises the sale of land in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank - there is no chance the UK government would allow stolen Ukrainian land to be sold off to people in the UK - why the double standards?
Keir Starmer is forcing tech companies to restrict every device in Britain within three months — unless you submit to ID checks.
This is not child protection.
This is the forced rollout of digital ID and total device surveillance disguised as safety.
Every phone, every laptop, every tablet will be locked down by default unless the government knows exactly who you are.
No public debate. No proper scrutiny. Just another power grab from a government that already spies on its citizens and jails people for tweets.
This is the surveillance state arriving at speed.
Reject digital ID. Reject device controls. Britain will not be China.
EXCLUSIVE: More than half of former Labour voters who intent to back a centre or leftwing party in the next general election have cited the government's record on Gaza as a reason for abandoning Labour, new polling shows.
Mark Zuckerberg, an outspoken critic of "man-made climate change", shows off his new $300 million, 287-foot mega yacht, powered by four gigantic diesel engines.
Yet another stark reminder that Net Zero is only for the peasants
My father was photographed standing outside this very building in 1962, he was attending the TUC conference in Blackpool.
In a few minutes time I will walk on to the main stage and address water industry workers and delegates at the GMB Union annual Congress. @GMB_union
He would have been very proud.
November 1971. Chiswick, West London.
Erin Pizzey is 32 years old. She is not a lawyer. Not a politician. Not a doctor.
She is a woman who talked Hounslow Council into lending her a cold, rundown building on Belmont Road — a former community hall — for almost nothing. Her original plan was modest. A warm room. A cup of tea. Somewhere for mothers with young children to simply get out of the house.
Then the door opened.
A woman stood in the entrance. She was covered, head to foot, in bruises. She was holding two small children. She was shaking.
She didn't want tea.
She needed somewhere to hide.
Erin let her in. She didn't turn her away. She didn't tell her to call the police.
Because Erin had already called the police. They told her the same thing they told every woman in Britain at the time: they could not enter a private home over a "domestic dispute." That was the law. The home was private. What happened inside it was a family matter.
When Erin contacted a female civil servant to report what she was seeing, the response was astonishing. The woman told her flatly: "There wasn't a problem of battered wives until you made one."
Erin put down the phone. Then she went back to her residents and made sure they were fed.
Within weeks, 40 mothers and children were sleeping in four tiny rooms. No funding. No staff. No legal authority.
She didn't stop.
By 1973, word had spread through quiet whisper networks — one woman telling another, "There is a place. Go to Chiswick. She won't turn you away." That same year, Erin hosted the first National Women's Aid Conference in the UK. Women from across Britain arrived, and they all recognized the same thing at once: what she had built needed to exist everywhere.
In 1974, the council set a maximum of 36 residents. At peak times, 150 women and children were living inside those walls — sleeping on floors, on chairs, in hallways. The building smelled of cooking, fear, and something else entirely: relief.
Erin was taken to court for overcrowding. She appealed all the way to the House of Lords.
She kept the doors open the entire time.
That same year, she wrote a book. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. It was the first published account of domestic violence in British history. It used real stories from real women inside the shelter. Overnight, a problem that had no official name was on front pages from London to New York.
The movement spread. Refuges opened across the UK. Then Australia. Then Canada. Then the United States. The pattern she created in four small rooms in West London — no blueprint, no permission, no funding — had been replicated in hundreds of shelters across the Western world.
MP Jack Ashley stood up in Parliament and said: "It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical."
She was ranked 14th in a poll of the 100 women who shook the world. She was awarded the Italian Peace Prize. She received a CBE. The charity she founded — Chiswick Women's Aid, which became Refuge — grew into the largest domestic violence charity in the United Kingdom, with over 460 employees and an annual income of more than £33 million.
Erin Pizzey passed away on October 4, 2025, aged 86.
She never stopped.
It all began with one woman, one borrowed building, and an absolute refusal to say no.
Forty women and children showed up with nowhere to go.
She made room.
Share this if you believe one ordinary person, refusing to look away, can build a shelter that holds the whole world.
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Keir Starmer announcing AI tutors for schoolchildren, and AI Jobseekers tools that will write CVs,
How many millions/billions are we spending on this trash when we could actually be hiring more teachers and creating jobs to get the job done properly?
I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."