Artist Jude Montague, ever interested in the history of radio and TV, has produced a lively and sometimes extraordinary graphic novel, detailing the beginnings of radio in Manchester. It’s a personal story, featuring (among a cast of dozens) her grandfather Sydney Wright and his wife Marjorie. Sydney was a cellist in a trio (playing in a Manchester picture house) who were recruited to take part in the second BBC broadcast from Metropolitan Vickers, which was the next broadcasting base after Marconi’s and named 2ZY.

It was a unique era – four years after the end of the unspeakable carnage of WW1, launching radio all over the country in a year that was, internationally, exceptionally creative in all the Arts, 1922 being an annus mirabilis for so many literary, artistic and social pioneers. A handful of these intrepid innovators broadcast live music, the first children’s programs, news, and French lessons, all from a tiny makeshift studio at an engineering works with a dominant, newly-built radio tower.

Montague has re-imagined her grandparents’ history in the context of the cultural history of the era, from the crackling of an aerial in 1920, and the birth of experimental wireless stations, to the first long distance ‘radio relay’ transmission, inaugurated at 2ZY and represented in Jude’s book with comparative sketches of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and the radio tower at Metrovicks. Her rapid drawings and text cover the pages in a random format, plentifully interspersed with dream sequences, word associations, vignette sketches of Manchester (a Lowry-like depiction of the entrance to Metropolitan Vickers covers a page, for instance), old train carriages, war tombstones (with a list of first names), a sequence of a woman chatting and cutting her hair into a bob (so significant for the flappers of the time), woman-to-woman conversations about the replacement of silk stockings and lingerie by exciting man-made nylon fibre equivalents, and the then thriving tailoring business in the North. At one stage the protagonists fly in a biplane – presumably a Vickers.

NO FEAR OF FLYING

It’s an unashamed, fascinating, and rather wonderful brain dump, arising out of Montague’s undeniable facility with pen, brush and design straight on to the page, and some cogent research. There are scans of newspaper articles and old photos at the back, which for me could have done with enlarging, as they look as though they might help to indicate the trajectory of the narrative, but only the headlines are big enough to read. Even the title has a generous assemblage of meanings – the ‘air’ as in broadcasting ‘on the air’, the network, the ‘air’ as in the surrounding culture, the ‘air’ as in the general Zeitgeist, the anxiety and exhilaration of creating a New Age. And there’s flying in the air too – a proliferation of owls, dreams of flying, and (when listeners started to write in to the station) a reference to a local story about a flamingo lost from the park. There are incidental chats about spiritualism, the opening of a box radiating the ‘energies’ of jewels (remember crystal sets?), the ‘crackle and the static of the air that waits’ – ‘so luscious – a spirit language’, all rapidly and copiously illustrated. And there’s a page on which the rows of Manchester terraces ‘seem to know a New Age is dawning’.

The introductions, by broadcaster and radio historian Paul Kerensa and musician Alan Hempsall, ex Manchester band Joy Division (now of Crispy Ambulance), are essential reading. They help to ground the reader in the narrative, which digresses so plentifully (sometimes wildly) through local and national culture of the time. The novel’s form, however, exactly echoes the content: it was the age of random and sometimes unintentional discovery, of burial of the past and celebration of the new, of an incorporation of science and technology into art (partly via the Futurists and the Vorticists) and the dismantling of representational tradition and the re-evaluation of Art itself. And if you get slightly confused about who’s who in Montague’s plethora of characters, and whether the illustrations are about imagined conversations or real social history, well then you’re into the moment of creation, as they all were.

What’s In the Air can be obtained from Montague Armstrong on 15 Kings Road (open Sats) any time, or online at montaguearmstrong.com. Book launch, readings, and presentations at Hastings Book Festival, 3 September

This timely book is subtitled ‘How the British establishment made the Far Right respectable’. A great deal of contemporary discontent amongst the public emerges from the huge and growing wealth disparities we see all around us. Much of this is rooted in neoliberal capitalism; deindustrialisation and the emergence of ‘the City’ as a core economic growth area whilst the regions, peripheral to ‘the home counties’ were left to decline; the banking bailout in 2008, which instigated an ‘austerity’ regime designed to ‘balance the books’ by further fleecing the poor to pay for bailing out the rich; and the failures of Brexit.

Looking at this objectively, one might expect ‘the left’, which traditionally supports social and economic democracy, to benefit from discontent. Yet, we are on average very much seeing the opposite. Trilling’s book seeks to analyse why and how, instead, the ‘far right’ has benefitted and manipulated this discontent. Amongst numerous factors behind the rise of extremists on the right of the political spectrum, one stands out to Trilling, which is ‘failure’ of the centrist parties of ‘the establishment’ to pour oil on these choppy waters and cool things down. Some of this failure is down to decisions within our elites, and some is down to extraneous factors, such as, not to put too fine a point on it, foreign interference backing openly treasonous opportunist populists on the right.

The possibilities to control the narrative have been significantly influenced for the worse by online trollery via social media platforms, owned, and manipulated to varying degrees by their owners – who are, of course, billionaires, and foreign, thus not really having the nation’s interests at heart. This goes for the bulk of our news media too, such as the Mail and the Telegraph, who number amongst the most toxic of a bad bunch – but print media sales have been dropping for years, as online activity has grown.

EFFECTIVE ECONOMIC SOLUTIONS COME FROM LEFTWING ECONOMICS

The power of social media platforms grew over the last two decades, but really became the go-to echo chamber we see today through lockdown. During the covid years, millions of us were habituated to an online world that a significant proportion of us remained locked into after we were opened up again. This push to online supremacy was a boon to online markets such as Amazon, and has accelerated dissatisfaction with ‘the death of the high street’. It also was a boon to rich opinion manipulators, and once Elon Musk acquired ‘Twitter’ the potential to queer our politics went into hyperdrive. It is no exaggeration to put at least two-thirds of the misdirection of dissent away from the rich towards minorities, especially those who sought refuge here from resource wars carried out on the homeland by the West, down to platforms such as ‘X’ (and in the last weeks, the Facebook app too). This is a key aspect of why ‘the right’ have benefitted the most: deflecting public ire away from themselves had to be toward ‘the right’, as effective economic solutions for our situation all come from leftwing economics which are another threat to the overweening wealth of the super-rich.

So, much of what we need to control is to a degree out of our hands. Suggestions such as banning youngsters from social media ignore the fact that the majority of toxic right-wing support is from an entirely different demographic, ‘the over-50s’, a wide and slightly misleading category, similar to blaming ‘the red wall’, but nevertheless with more than a kernel of truth. It is doable, though, to block at least the casual onliners, as proven by the block on Russia Today. Yes, of course it can be bypassed, but if, for example, ‘X’ was blocked, most users would probably not bother to tinker with what for many appears to be highly technical IT issues (though in reality they are pretty simple). At the same time, there remains, on the left as well as on the right, distaste for censorship. But, in an increasingly ‘online world’, with the rise of AI, the move away from a cash economy, and increasing surveillance (including hacking, but also spying by the biggest app developers), makes it incredibly difficult to control the misinformation engine. The rise of algorithms, putatively designed to monetise platforms by leading users toward posts ‘For You’, has obviously been utilised by Musk to push a rightward narrative, one where to ‘save Britain’, this week, we must vote Restore; one where ‘Tommy Robinson’ is a ‘freedom fighter’ not a terrorist thug; one where the Tate Bros manosphere is not toxic extremism, but a redress of an overly feminist ‘communist’ leftwing phantom… 

A BETRAYAL OF DISILLUSIONED WORKING PEOPLE

Trilling looks in more depth at ways in which the establishment here has failed us, indeed all too often deliberately. It has been a consistent strategy politically to try to co-opt extreme outlier parties and lobbyists by pandering to some of their concerns: a classic example is Cameron’s ‘hostile environment’. Rather than attract ‘moderate’ far-right supporters to the Conservatives, it has led to them haemorrhaging leading politicians, as well as voters, to Reform. This has shoved the Overton window so far rightwards that ‘even’ the Labour Party have moved, in many regards, somewhat right of Thatcherism. A significant part of Trilling’s book is titled ‘Cowards’, and it really can’t be ignored that this, too, has been a very real part of the establishment’s problem containing the alt-right.

Trilling thinks ‘more democracy, not less’ is part of the answer to our problems. Personally, once again, I must say that we need ‘citizens’ for this to work, and one of the things biting the elites in the butt is their past reliance on ensuring our ‘education’ system fails to create citizens. Ironically, hoist by their own petard, but it is the ordinary disillusioned working people that they’ve betrayed who will ultimately suffer the worst consequences: the very people being conned by Reform and their ilk.

As Mary ‘Liz’ Truss brings over to us the very right wing American CPAC; as the likes of Tommy and Trump squeal about ‘free speech’ whilst shutting down left attempts to engage in dialogue since what they really mean is the freedom to spread hate; as Musk bankrolls far right ‘freedom’ marches and appears on giant screens in London to promote his racist agenda; as US evangelical nationalist Christians infiltrate the UK far right; and as Rubio invites 60 nations to a conference on ‘left wing extremism’, it is hard not to conclude that fascism, on an internationally organised scale, is reaching its next stage: the one where they in effect, or perhaps literally, organise a coup against forces that may oppose them. As a student of history, I’d love to be wrong, but all the signs are there.

TIM BARLOW

One day I’ll climb the Empire State with you 

To fly a flag and go down on one knee 

But just for now our love is clandestine 

This new romance proceeds in secrecy 

Tonight I’ll scale the statue of Victoria 

At Warrior Square, where she stares out to sea 

I’ll crown her with an orange traffic cone 

And tell you it’s a sign to you from me 

And when you pass her by tomorrow morning 

Gazing from the top deck of your bus 

You’ll clock my late-night prank and shyly smile 

And wonder what the future holds for us 

For we are spies who prowl the house of love 

We cannot shout from rooves and window ledges 

So we will send these secret, sacred signals 

In place of bold and brazen public pledges 

We won’t yet tell the world about our passion 

We’ll act as if we’re friends who only chat 

But one day we will rise above Manhattan 

And reminisce about Victoria’s hat.

Those paying attention to world affairs today know there is something of a ‘hope’ deficit. It is with this in mind that I have chosen to review Barney’s book looking at successful movements ‘driving social change around the world’ or as he calls them, ‘the disruptors’. Each of the groups covered have limited goals and limited success, but taken together give cause for at least some hope!

In his introduction, Barney touches on the double-edged sword of hope for change versus reality, so he is not a naive optimist, which makes his book all the more beneficial. His introduction talks about Just Stop Oil, and their relatively successful early ‘nonviolent direct action’ and much more successful ‘marketing’, but also the limits imposed by changing legislation aimed at smothering people-powered lobby groups. In this case, that was Suella Braverman’s amendments to the Public Order Act of 1986. And, since the book was written, we have seen ‘Labour’ extending the reach of legislation to stop any protests they don’t like, and even ensuring police action continues despite the courts overruling the government. This is, of course, an unacceptable attack on our civil liberties, and taken alongside other extensions of policing of protest from the Thatcher era, the Criminal Justice Act of the early 90s, and Blair’s reforms after the 2000 petrol strike, gives the framework for future governments to enforce a police state clampdown on us all.

Nevertheless, amongst the weeds and cobbles there is still hope for new shoots to sprout. The trick is ‘how to achieve social change’ despite the obstacles. Barney has, as he puts it, ‘met and quizzed activists, lawyers, political scientists, campaigners, graffiti artists, anthropologists, peace-builders, hacktivists, charity directors, authors, Olympians, refugees, researchers and every other kind of change agent you can think of. For this book.’

TEN PARTS BY THEME

He takes a global approach, from Greta Thunberg, through Black Lives Matter, to Greek refugee NGOs and reconciliation activists in the Sahal. The book is divided by theme into ten parts. The first addresses environmentalist groups, such as Extinction Rebellion and Freetown Christiania; the second, race-related activism and education. In part three, Barney looks at issues around abortion law in Turkey and in Ireland, and the social movements fighting for justice during Brazil’s ‘Zika crisis’. The fourth part is ‘Health and Healing – Creative Confrontation’, and touches on mental health politics, drug legalisation, and the ‘wall museum’ in Palestine – the latter is especially poignant given the genocidal war that has no doubt destroyed such initiatives since.

In the fifth section Barney looks at legal roots to change in Spain; Mary Hwyere’s ‘International Alert’ group, building peace by confronting trauma in the Sahal; and the Columbian peace accords. Parts six and seven cover the fightback against censorship and repression in Albania, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Turkey. Part eight takes on hacktivism in Iran and resistance to internet control in Ethiopia. This latter has global importance today. At the time of writing, Barney records that ‘whilst there have been policies restricting access to the internet across the world, they had arguably never been attempted on the scale seen in Ethiopia’ in 2016. Attempts to control access to Facebook, YouTube and ‘X’ have since become ubiquitous from China to here in the UK; banning VPNs to those without digital proof of identity; the ‘great firewall of China’ that former Hastings MP Amber Rudd advocated for copying in Britain, and that Starmer gives every sign of also wishing to perpetrate, all seek to censor and control dissent. As with the clampdown on protest in the streets, this adds to an arsenal of dubious control that is just begging for a paranoid extremist future government to misuse even more blatantly than today. Analysing successful methods of resisting this is imperative.

Part nine looks at refugees and asylum seekers, in the face of state attempts to effectively criminalise NGOs seeking to help them. Speaking of Greek attempts to shut down humanitarian support, Ellim Xenou of charity ‘Doctors of the World’ states that ‘the new asylum law and the defaming and blaming of NGOs…  they are all different pieces of the same puzzle that is to make refugees and migrants lives unbearable so as not to create a pull factor for more to come to Europe. [Yet] ethnocentric policies may add a challenge – a barrier – but you don’t put an end to the people’s hope for a future, for a better life, for peace this way.’ The last chapter in part nine addresses women’s rights in sports in Qatar.

The last part looks at the role of Human Rights Watch and Legal Agenda in Lebanon, and the relative success at the time Barney was writing of anti-corruption protests in Israel, which, like Just Stop Oil here, used non-violent direct action in the form of roadblocks. Sadly, the military events that have taken place since 2023 will have negated any successes. Then Barney looks at anti-Beijing activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with the activist collective Scholarism, and the ‘Umbrella Movement’.

Barney is not unrealistic about the limits of these activist and legalist movements, but sees them as demonstrating ‘the imagination, independent thought and optimism fundamental to all social change movements’, the importance of international links, and of solidarity and ‘shared leadership’. Activism for positive change is a ‘permanent revolution’, with a step forward here and a step back there, but the green shoots persist. To quote Galaxy Quest, “Never give up, never surrender!”

PETE DONOHUE

i’m writing my will

on the toilet

drinking strong coffee

laden with whiskey

waiting for that

familiar movement

of mind & bowels

when i’ll think about

what i might leave

behind

if anything

& who shall get

each part of me

or those parts that

haven’t already

wasted away

or gone down

the toilet

elvis died

like this

i hope i don’t

i haven’t yet finished

my will

or this shit.

By Sarah Bearchell
Published by Icon Books, 2025, rrp £10.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON

This book is pretty good on the crises that are coming, yet a bit overly optimistic in some of its recommendations. Primarily, my issue with them is over the expectation that mechanisation is any kind of real or sustainable answer, and that gene hacking can save us. Both treat science as a magic trick that will save us come what may, not a process that may or may not help us ‘just in time’, and indeed may preclude a ‘fix’ that accidently scuppers us still more. A case in point here is ‘geo-engineering’, which, on a small scale can perhaps help but that is just tinkering around the edges: but on a large-scale is certifiably stupidly dangerous.

If you wonder why I am putting this review into my occasional series ‘Oil Be Damned’, this quote from Yasuhiro Niji, on the website Medium, is pertinent: “The food crisis will begin not as ‘there is no food’ but as ‘food cannot be delivered’.” This is already occurring and far faster than any conventional food crisis scenario assumes, accelerated by idiocies such as Trump’s attacks on Iran which is a major disruptor of international trade.

Yasuhiro Niji again: “When the Iran war broke out, the world’s attention focused on gasoline prices. But that is only the surface. Oil’s true value is neither electricity nor gasoline. It is the raw material for virtually every-thing we use. Plastics, synthetic fibres, synthetic rubber, paints, adhesives, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, chemical fertilizers — nearly all the materials that constitute modern civilisation are derived from naphtha, the foundational feedstock of petrochemistry. Food packaging, clothing fibres, building insulation, automobile parts, medical equipment – all are petrochemical products. There is a common argument: “When oil runs out, we’ll just generate electricity from renewables.” But solar panels themselves are made of plastics, silicon and synthetic resins. Wind turbine blades are made of glass fibre-reinforced plastic. The very equipment that produces renewable energy cannot be manufactured without oil.”

THE NEED FOR NAPHTHA

Of most direct relevance to Bearchell’s book, chemical fertilizers too are entirely dependent upon fossil fuels due to the need for naphtha in the processing. Productivity was massively increased when we first introduced artificial fertilizers, but the gains have dropped year upon year since the 1950s, till recently many areas hit the same productivity as pre-’green revolution’ agriculture, especially in the wheat belt. Take these fertilizers away, and crops will rely upon the extremely nutrient and microorganism depleted soil left over, and yields will drop still further. Add the effects of altering climate on our food supply biomes and you can see that we are in for a salutary and painful reminder of why our global human population exploded so excessively since the second world war, and how over-reliance on short-term agricultural methods will inevitably lead to a population crash. This again will be exacerbated by climate change.

The discovery and utilisation of oil fields in Pennsylvania in the 1850s saw the first step in allowing a larger human population. Discoveries such as penicillin did yet more, as did the invention of plastics, but it was the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fertilizers that really set us on a course for a population explosion. Take fossil fuels out of this equation, add rocketing average climate warming (and potential winter cooling for us), and you have a recipe for collapse. Recently a story ran in the papers claiming that the government had suppressed a DEFRA report on our ecologically challenging future, as it was so negative. I have yet to see the full report, but the headline findings were published last autumn as ‘Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security: A national security assessment’ – it makes a grim read.

REGENERATIVE FARMING

So, what future is there for agriculture that can mitigate these issues? If you take away Bearchell’s utopian musings on GM and automation, reading only her excellent chapters on climate, and on what she calls ‘the great balancing act’, leaves a grim picture.

In her final chapters she addresses ‘the big question – meat’, and here is a facet of the issue that we can address more effectually. It is in no way controversial, any longer, to admit to ourselves that livestock takes up huge acreage of land we need for far more fruitful plant crops (and, indeed, for biodiversity). If you look at Dr Mae-Wan Ho’s Dream Farm 2, still archived out there on the interweb, you’ll see a model sustainable farm. It includes necessary livestock, and does not require us to all go vegan, but limits livestock availability ‘on your plate’ to realistic and sustainable levels.

Also useful is her chapter on reducing waste. She references ‘regenerative farming’, but I would like to have seen a whole chapter on this, and less teleologically dubious technophilia. Massively decreasing land wasted on resource-intensive livestock, regenerative farming, rewilded countryside, and waste reduction cannot ‘solve’ our problems and are slow-burn methods, but they are necessary and can certainly reduce the impact of the coming crunch: although ‘mitigation’ inevitably still leaves a lot of people behind, it is in reality the least worst option. If we act, and preferably act, erm, a decade or four ago. Nevertheless, “We can’t be only fighting because there’s hope. If there’s only despair, the reasons to fight are even greater.” (Arundhati Roy).

PETE DONOHUE

gulls standing sentinel on net shop apex

queens & kings of black boarded jungle

charabancs rattle over pot-holed pathways

laden with freshly scooped silver sea fish

beach boats beached winched to their stations

seafarers boys ashore shingle-foot to bar

mingling on sun-shot smokers terrace with

awestruck visitors seafood aficionados

dodging slow-burning harsh summer rays

black-flagged from a powdery blue horizon

residue of rusty early morning supermoon

guiding boats over carousel waves

nets lowered raised & sorted for discards

dreams of a craft beer at slaking throat

rum & whiskey spicing the passage

slither of cockles at winkle island

pinted prawns with crunching crab claws

banter to haul away workaday aches

faithful dogs among scale-spattered feet

contraband baccy skunk at the lips

deckhands to feed us real fresh food

with organic growers for veggies too.

In 1977 Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull penned his classic song Jack-In-The-Green. His ‘Jack’ ‘quietly sits under every tree’, ‘with his long tail hanging down’. Worse, he sings that ‘It’s no fun being Jack-In-The-Green; No place to dance, no time for song’. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a great song but those who attended Hastings’ own ‘Jack-In-The-Green’ last weekend will know that our Jack is certainly not quiet, nor does he miss out on a bit of outrageous festival, albeit a bit tired and battered by the end of the day!

Somewhat more on point is XTC’s Green Man, which brings the festival mood – ‘Please to dance round for the one called the Greenman; Dressed in the fruits of the wild’.

Our best-selling occult zine, Hellebore, has arrived in its fifteenth edition, and this time is dedicated to the greening of Spring, and our British folklore traditions that herald the season. This issue kicks off with an essay by Katy Soar titled On the Trail of the Green Man. She exhumes the folkloric roots of ‘the green man’, finding his modern incarnation to date from the 1930s, and folklorist Lady Raglan. Of course she looks further back as well to, for example, Tudor pageantry where the green man was taken from older mediaeval myths of the Wild Man of the woods. This was ‘in turn based on ancient stereotypes, a primitive race of strong, hairy forest-dwelling humans who wore leaf crowns and wielded clubs or branches as weapons’. The essay has much more to tell, ranging from pub signs, through the Green Knight and Robin Hood. Missing is our own hairy human, Keith Leach, co-architect of the Hastings Jack-In-The-Green.

RICH WITH WOODCUTS AND TINTED GRANULATED PHOTOGRAPHY

The next piece brings in Pan, the arcadian god. Paul Robichaud brings him to us through Peter Pan & Wendy, titling his article The Piper at the Gates of Neverland – which gives me the excuse to promote The Piper in Norman Road, named by its owner, Chris, after the Pink Floyd album Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Paul gives a fascinating and detailed account of the relationship between Barrie’s ‘Peter’ and the Greek god Pan, refracted through a lens of Jungian unconscious and the collective psyche.

Following this is the folklore of flowers penned by the zine’s editor, Maria J Pérez Cuervo. This, like all the writing herein, is copiously illustrated, one of the great selling points of the zine. As always, it is rich with woodcuts and tinted granulated photography.

Nick Freeman takes on a journey through Songs from the Witchwoods, which encompasses Arnold Bax and Ralph Vaughan Williams, through to the Strawbs and, yes, Jethro Tull. Along the way a few literary connections are made, not least to Kentish author Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood series (the best of which, in my opinion, is Lavondyss), and Algernon Blackwood whose works are back in print.

FAIRIES, ELVES AND TREE WORSHIP

Ally Wilkes is next, with a fascinating piece on plants and consciousness. She ranges from Brazilian folklore, through Darwin, Wells, and M Knight Shyamalan, to Hildegard von Bingen and Merlin Pendragon.

Verity Holloway brings us the Roots of the Jack-In-The-Green, which of course brings in May festivals – Of which Hastings Jack-In-The-Green is one. Verity says the contemporary view of the Green Man as ‘an ancient pagan rite of fertility’ in fact obscures its roots in the industrial revolution. This latter element is still apparent in our festival, with the chimney sweep drummers for example. The plight of working people and of child labourers, especially Black Peter and his fellow sweep assistants, not to mention milkmaids, are here seen as a more genuine root of our modern ‘paganism’.

The Green Issue is rounded off with a feature on fairies and elves in fiction of the last century, and their antecedents in older mythologies. Who Dwells within these Trees is brought to us by Oxford historian Francis Young. He brings us Roman cults of early tree worship, Scottish ‘clootie trees’, ‘unholy trees’, and Shakespeare’s reference to Herne the hunter, who walks ‘round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns’.

The last page is given over to credits for the artwork. In such a lovely publication this cannot be ignored, for the art is a large part of Hellebore’s perennial attraction – it remains the king of British folklore zines!

As a bonus, last year Hellebore published its first short story collection, Tales of Occult Britain, also available at Bookbuster for £15.

NEVER AGAIN

OLI SPLEEN

Overwhelmed by a world 

That will not hear the cries 

That twists the truth 

That lies

That gaslights and denies

Enables genocide 

In self-defence disguise 

Labelling us terrorists 

It is they who terrorise 

Demonise / dehumanise 

Deem us extremists and equate

Pleas for peace as cries of hate 

So much projection and distraction 

Orwellian refractions

To make us feel

That it is we

Who have lost our minds

We who daily bare witness

To manifold horrors 

Enacted without shame

The perpetrators / traitors 

Act the victim as they blame 

Those of us just crying out; 

“Please, not in our name”

all that we are saying is;

“Never again means never again”

Sheila Denning was a brilliant painter who lived during the twentieth century, from 1920 to 2015. This memoir recounts her life as seen from the perspective of her daughter Teresa Thornhill, and gives accordingly a unique view with points of illumination no one else could have offered. While there will inevitably remain parts of Sheila’s life to which Teresa had then and has now no access, this somehow adds to the appeal of the book – it is unashamedly subjective and personal, as proclaimed in its very title: Sheila: Portrait of an Unknown Artist (through the eyes of her daughter.) It is further enriched by excerpts from Sheila’s autobiographical notes, and from her letters and poems. These in turn give us, in Sheila’s own voice, repeated and eloquent glimpses of how it was for her in real time – the kind of direct testimony that is so compelling to read now. And at the core of the book, threaded throughout, is the collection of colour reproductions of many of Sheila’s paintings, in particular her wonderful portraits. Thornhill, herself a painter, delves into each of the paintings to provide background and to share a way of looking at them. These are undeniably exquisite works of art, so that we can see for ourselves what it was that Sheila had to offer, and through them, that passion that kept her painting in the face of all of the obstacles that Thornhill recounts.

DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM DELIVERED BY MALE ARTISTS

Like so many women of her generation, and despite her extraordinary talent, Sheila was overlooked in her time. She was caught in the societal mesh that affected the lives of these pre-and post- second world war women – notwithstanding some incipient achievement of rights gained around the time they were born – as they struggled to achieve their rightful place in the world beyond the kitchen and the children of whose nurture they so often ended up as sole providers. Things are a little better now, at least for some women who have been able to push at the boundaries that confined those captive souls before us; and we, their children and grandchildren, can perhaps look back at their lives, and compare them with our own, and ask ourselves, ‘what if?’ – and wonder, ‘if only’.

Sheila studied at Camberwell School of Arts, but found little encouragement there. Although her talent was occasionally and perhaps grudgingly noted, overall the experience was profoundly damaging. As Thornhill notes: “Destructive criticism delivered by male artists in positions of authority was something experienced by many young female painters of Sheila’s generation.” Soon married to the author’s father, she found her life as a painter relegated to the background with his own artistic needs and career taking priority in their lives together. Eventually they separated, and her new situation as a single parent bringing up Thornhill and her sister was not a comfortable position either financially or socially in that period, during those decades immediately after the second world war. Through all this, she continued to paint.

HITHERTO HIDDEN FROM PUBLIC GAZE

A further strand woven throughout the book concerns Thornhill’s relationship with her father, and this adds yet another dimension from which we can understand Sheila’s own life. There are also vivid reminiscences of Sheila’s experiences during the second world war, which again bring to life the reality of living through a time when a beloved brother is killed, and other young men who might otherwise have become life partners also disappear.

Thornhill’s devotion to her mother permeates the book and gives it a singular authenticity, while her commitment to bringing Sheila’s work back into the light at last underpins it throughout. Furthermore, Thornhill’s specific perspective as Sheila’s daughter provides an intense immediacy which will surely resonate with many women who watched their own mothers try to cope with, and tackle, the constraints that prevailed in the post-war period in the 20th century and which so often suppressed or ignored their talents. For myself, Sheila’s story evoked memories of my own mother, also talented and curious and wanting to get right out into the world and in fact make it a better place – but who found herself in the kitchen with a steady stream of progeny for some decades ( I was the first of six, and it was my advent that put a definitive end to her medical training). In this way, the book is multi-layered: a view of an artist and her beautiful works of art hitherto hidden from public gaze: a compelling expression of love for the person who nurtured her daughter from her first moment on this earth and who never gave up on her children: and a story of a childhood and its complex family relationships, which again will resonate with so many of its readers.

This tender account thus touches its reader on many levels. As I put it down, I had two main reactions: on the one hand, the resonating memories of my own mother that were so powerfully evoked, and on the other, a strong desire to see Sheila’s paintings ‘in real’ – perhaps sometime, somewhere, there could be an exhibition of them to accompany this compelling book.

Sheila: Portrait of an Unknown Artist is available at Hastings Contemporary art gallery or through tinyurl.com/Buy-Sheila

WILLIAM BULLIN

Realpolitik – Sweet as Lemons

If Jesus had been crucified on Hastings’s seafront

outside a chip shop, they might have rubbed salt into his wounds

and offered him vinegar to drink.

But tell me, where would anyone have found salt and vinegar at

Golgotha?

There would have been no fish bars for miles around that town.

No. A soldier took the wine he had been swigging.

Lifted the skirt of his tunic with a twinkle in his eye.

Mixed water into wine

and took the piss while the others wet themselves laughing.

In Hastings, no one spat.

Just the seagulls shat on his head.

If you think that’s funny or blasphemy, remember,

Easter is the day when God has the last laugh

And Pilate demanded their report for Trump.

By Laleh Khalili
Published by Profile, 2025, rrp £11.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON

Khalili’s new book is unexpectedly timely. Its subtitle is ‘how commodities and cronyism drive the global economy’. It is a short and accessible introduction to ‘the backbone of globalization’, which she sees as ‘low-cost labour and rapacious corporate control’.

Amongst the subjects here are shipping lanes and container ships, assaults on unionisation, assaults on national autonomy, and the major extractive mineral industries. She also covers the construction of China’s belt & roads ‘new silk route’. The ‘cronyism’ chapters take a well-aimed swipe at commodity traders and ‘super-yacht’ owning billionaires, private equity and ‘management consulting’, the offshoring of capital, and the ‘shell game’ of company registration and flags of convenience.

So, ‘extractive’ here is about asset-stripping through financialisation measures, deregulation, and privatisation. And ‘special economic zones’ and freeports are, of course, central to this for us in the UK. Since at least the 1980s ‘Reaganomics’ free market extremism through to Brexit and the current phases of what I call ‘Operation Asset-Strip UK’, our financial and material assets have been subject to a garage sale that will leave us floundering in a financial black hole. The recent Chinese sell-off of $688 billion of US Treasury debt will severely impact the US economy and naturally their pain will be offloaded to US vassal states, of which we are one.

NEW US IMPERIALISM

‘Extractive’ also includes minerals, rare earth metals, sand and oil. I wrote a recent review on the former issues, about the book The War Below. On the latter issues, not many people will be aware of the monstrous size of global sand movements, and the environmental catastrophes developed economies inflict on sand-rich river and beach communities (because of their demand for concrete).

Oil, other minerals, and shipping lanes, though, are the key items that make Khalili’s book even more relevant than when she wrote it. The hard question is ‘where to start’! 2026 is unfolding as an especially concerning inflection point, and we are already careering faster than ever down the wrong track.

At the heart of our current crisis is the new US imperialism. The Monroe Doctrine was first stated in 1823, and posited that anything that occurred in the domestic politics of central American states was the direct business of the USA. It was a formalised sign of things to come – for example, if you dared elect a left-wing government, the USA regarded it as just fine to back a coup and install a puppet-government, no matter how vicious. The two centuries since President Monroe’s imperialist policy has seen the doctrine extended, frankly, to the whole planet. January 2026 has seen it rebadged as the Donroe Doctrine, in response primarily to Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and his threats to annex Greenland. I wrote about the latter five years ago for HIP, in a review of a book on Arctic Security, at which time it was already eight years after Trump first voiced his imperialist policies for the Arctic.

CURSE OF ‘INTERESTING TIMES’

In both cases, oil and other minerals are a core concern, though for Greenland we can add a potential ice-free north-west passage and a climate change-induced freeing up of the Arctic Ocean for competitive resource extraction. This is code for a cold war with Russia and Europe over who can get in there first, with a real risk of hot war attached.

Meanwhile, Trump is also wanting to break BRICS and force Iran, one way or the other, to open up to US markets, and resource extraction. This has been a long game for the USA: having ousted a democratic government in 1953, and installed a murderous regime (remember, ‘he may be a bastard, but he’s OUR bastard’ is US policy), and then being embarrassed on the world stage by the ‘Iran hostage crisis’ as a different regime took over that was not going to play ball with the West, the USA has long planned revenge. Khalili writes here about ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian’, which has included shelling Yemen into the stone age and embargoing Iranian oil, which is the tip of an evil iceberg in undermining the Iranian nation. I don’t know how many fronts Trump wishes to open up at the same time, especially as the China-Taiwan crisis is also hotting up, never mind Ukraine.

None of it seems wise, and I believe the curse of living through ‘interesting times’ may be very much in play.

Extractive Capitalism is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

Molly The Bourne
BEN BRUGES

From some distance in time, Turner’s print

centres the stream, rushing down towards

the sea, a foot-bridge over this open sewer

links the impoverished fishing community

to the more affluently shod of the Old Town. 

He didn’t include mischievous Molly Hawkins,

chased with stolen skirt-full of apples over

the rickety bridge, the splash into muck, standing

around, watching her struggle, watching her drown. 

Forward to now, the black top tamps down

the stream, which growls and murmurs below, 

sometimes breaks free from privatised neglect,

before flowing past Christina Rosetti’s convalescence 

to the passageway where tiny Molly appears 

distressed, a struggling, filthy apparition,

sigil of cruelty, neglect, impoverishment,

held where the stall holders let her drown—

their theft of her life as a warning against theft.

This book traces the endeavours of one German Jewish family to escape from Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War.

The inspiration for it came from a cache of anonymous but annotated negatives dumped in a street in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1980. Individuals and family groups were pictured across a range of European locations. The accompanying notes indicated that the majority of the photos had been taken between 1929 and 1935.

Sheri Blaney, a young Jewish American woman with an interest in photography, was offered them by a friend and, intrigued by their quality but without making a detailed inspection, squirrelled them away for future enquiry. It wasn’t until Covid lockdown 40 years later that she turned her attention back to them.

Ms Blaney noticed that one of the family pictures showed a Star of David on a drawing room wall. From clues in the annotations followed up by research into public documents, she was able to establish that the photographer was Marion Samter, an emigree to the USA from Germany in 1938. Mrs Samter was long deceased, but had a daughter living in Oregon, who was able to supply a detailed back story.

The result is this book, written by Hastings author Julian Beecroft from the photographic record, from manuscript notes compiled by Ms Blaney, and from his own meticulous documentary research.

The title is ironic, like so much of its melancholy narrative.

REFUGEE RIGHTS

The Nazi regime put obstacles in the way of emigration – initially financial rather than institutional. Up to August 1939 Jews could get out of Germany if they were willing to abandon their property and/or business assets. On the other hand, there was no international convention conferring any refugee rights. Other countries of Europe and the USA could pick and choose whom they would admit.

Since the Aliens Act of 1905, passed specifically to curb a previous wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, Britain had limited the arrival of foreigners to its shores; and under the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914, enacted on the first day of the First World War in August 1914, the Home Secretary was empowered to regulate their entry and subsequent residence. The increasing oppression of Jews in 1930s Germany did not persuade British governments of the time to relax immigration controls. On the contrary, with some exceptions such as the Kindertransport mission in 1938-39, they maintained a regime designed to limit the in-flow to very small numbers of applicants who could show they would not be a drain on the public purse.

Other European countries operated similar restrictions. Even the USA, traditionally the refuge of the Old World’s “huddled masses”, had imposed immigration quotas from the 1920s onwards. These quotas favoured entrants from northern Europe, but there could be no passage across the Atlantic without a prior visa issued from a US consulate, generally obtainable only under proof of a job offer or other evidence of both financial sustainability and political suitability.

Destitute Jews needed helping hands. This study shows how, within one family, some might be rescued, others not.

SOCIAL RESPECTABILITY

The family of Kurt Grelling, the central character, had enjoyed comfortable affluence over at least three generations. Louis and Isaak Simon, respectively his maternal grandfather and great-uncle, were cotton manufacturers, acknowledged before the First World War as ‘Kaiserjüden’ (Jewish associates  of Kaiser Wilhelm). His brother-in-law’s father had been a coal magnate in Silesia. The next generation embedded themselves in professional and scientific circles at the heart (they believed) of respectable German society.

Early chapters of The Right of Passage set out this background, and describe briefly the ways in which, from 1933 onwards, the Nazi regime picked on its Jewish population and stripped it of status, money and employment. Kurt is immediately forced to resign his teaching post in a Berlin Gymnasium, and from then on struggles to find alternative work. He maintains intellectual friendships with leading philosophers of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, including Otto Neurath, and manages to relocate to Brussels, where a wealthy art dealer pays him a modest salary to undertake recondite investigations in maths and philosophy.

One after another of his extended family and associates take further flight – to England, Ireland, Switzerland or the USA, in most cases shorn of their wealth but able to start or renew professional careers. His academic friends have also been making their way across the Atlantic to fill philosophy posts in American universities.

LEFT BEHIND

Kurt gets stranded, having neither the money nor the social connections – nor, perhaps, the personal energy – to find his own lifeline out. His wife Greta is stuck in Berlin. She herself is not Jewish (and has brothers who are well-placed within the Nazi party), which seems a potential benefit for a while but ultimately isn’t. Their children are being educated in Switzerland, now in permanent separation.

From May 1940, when the Germans invade Belgium, Kurt finds himself interned as an ‘enemy alien’ and sent to a squalid internment camp in southern France. When France in turn is overrun, the new Vichy government continues to incarcerate those interns who are Jewish. They remain undesirable aliens as far as Laval and co are concerned, though those who can obtain entry visas to the USA (neutrals in the war until December 1941) are still allowed to depart.

The book’s narrative, supported by a full archive of contemporary correspondence, follows Kurt’s increasingly desperate efforts to become one of the escapees, preferably with his wife and children in tow. Meanwhile, it chronicles his continuing devotion to the abstract world of logical positivism despite such appalling personal circumstances.

A novelist might have been tempted to give Kurt a more endearing personality – more heroic, less socially awkward. But Beecroft has set himself the dual task of paying maximum tribute to his historic archive while keeping the attention of the general reader.

The story is told with unflinching honesty and painstaking objectivity. And it has resonance for our time, as millions of refugees worldwide look for their own right of passage.

PETE DONOHUE

the quietude takes willpower to abandon

so distant from the rush of morning soundscape

each movement drops the temperature with cruelty

& routine pain kicks off this newest day

with one flight gingerly concluded

the pulse of blood induces apprehension

when necessary functions are completed

i take position ‘midst the glass & tiles

the fountain from above comes hot & sturdy

with cleansing foam so soft & aromatic

until the panic waterboards my breath away

& i am done for with exhaustion.

Henry Normal, Janine Booth and Attila the Stockbroker are setting out on a tour of various Sussex seaside venues, bringing radical and left-inclined lines to the towns. The verso versifiers will be found at several cultural gathering spots along the coastline – including Shoreham, Seaford, Brighton and Arundel – but, in particular, at the Hot Tap Theatre in St Andrew’s Mews, Hastings on the evening of Valentine’s Day.

Each event will contain a plethora of subversive poetry with special guests on most nights. There will also be an anthology of the poetry available, featuring many diverse voices – both young and not so young – titled Class Lines and Red Rhymes. The book contains twenty five poems of change, absurdity and resistance. The proceeds from the book will go to a range of progressive causes.

STOCKBREAKING THE SYSTEM

Janine Booth is an extraordinary woman. Her sheer energy has made her many things. She is a marxist trade unionist, a socialist-feminist historian, a neurodivergent organiser and campaigner, a poet and a self-confessed ranting, angry middle-aged female human being.

At a slight angle to Janine is Attila the Stockbroker: an absolute legend of punk-poetry. He has been flinging poetic subversion at people for over forty years. He describes himself as “ranting rebel MC and Dean of the Socialist Surrealist University.” He is more than that. He is that increasingly rare thing today: someone shouting against the creeping moronicisation of our cultural life.

IMAGINE A NEW NORMAL

By slight contrast, Henry Normal is not only a poet but something of a comedy genius. Indeed, his poems, whilst being obviously calls for change, do so with a wit that lifts his work far above mere political rhetoric or pompous posturing. As Henry says, “touring with Attila and Janine is always fun but also energising.”

But there is obviously a serious side to all this. Times are fast lurching to the right. Those of us who want something different need to speak to each other. Or as Henry puts it, “thought is the mother of the deed, so to achieve a just and more equal society we need to examine where we are and imagine where we could be.” That is definitely a thought.

Details of the tour can be found at janinebooth.com

TRUMP ‘DERANGEMENT’ SYNDROME

Henry Normal

I can’t come in today

I need to convalesce

I’m sick – so the doctors say

I’ve got TDS

Triggered by Trump on TV

And his nonsense in the press

I’ve OD’d on his absurdity

It’s a problem to process

The Diagnosis is – I hate him

Something I confess

And my need to berate him

Has become an excess

It’s not a Derangement

A Distaste – at a guess

More Disgust than Disorder

Disrespect at best

The D could stand for Dislike 

Disdain or Distress

He and It – may last full term

Hopefully less

St Leonards-dwelling filmmaker, author, artist and performer Duncan Reekie has recently compiled and published an impressive, 324pp full-colour history of the Exploding Cinema – a low-budget/no-budget film collective that emerged out of South London in the early 1990s and is still putting on shows, some locally. Boom! is a dazzling collage of archive photos, film programmes, rants, and pithy short articles written by Reekie and other members of the group, celebrating 35 years of radical cinema.

Formed as a reaction to sterile, state-funded ‘art house’ film spaces, the Exploding Cinema – along with similar film groups such as MyEyesMyEyes, Omsk, and the Halloween Society – enabled countless filmmakers to get their short-format films before audiences in a welcoming, inclusive environment. Their evolution ran in tandem with the changing face of the UK counterculture, which was in its second-wave ascendency at the end of the ’80s and flourished in those pre-internet ‘years of hope’ of the 1990s.

THE FREE PARTY SCENE

The past 30 years have seen a clampdown on autonomous zones of radical resistance and an increase in state powers enabled by new technologies. Back in the summer of 1993, the collective put on an all-night film ‘happening’ at the then-squatted Brixton Lido in Brockwell Park, South London, which attracted 2,000 people. This was a time before legislative powers such as the Criminal Justice Act of 1996 pulled the plug on the free party scene, and before property prices went sky-high. The book features numerous photos of long-defunct, much-missed venues, celebrating a time before community arts venues were seized, sold off, defunded or demolished.

The distinctive, incendiary graphic design elements of the group’s publicity materials have been central to the Exploding Cinema’s identity. Pages taken from their montage-style film programme booklets leap out in all their provocative glory as a dynamic, defiant history that’s part pop-art puzzle, part situationist manifesto. The group has never applied for or accepted state funding, and takes special pleasure in lampooning the elitist selection processes of bodies such as the Arts Council and the BFI. But at the (very big) heart of the group, there has always been a sense of fun along with its determination to screen open-access short film events.

REFRESHINGLY ‘UN-CURATED’ AND DEMOCRATIC

Boom! is a fascinating countercultural history, with a month-by-month chronology that shows how UK underground filmmakers brought colour and carnival to political protest events over the past 35 years, including the Poll Tax Riots and the Occupy movement. It is also a history of the broader UK underground film movement, which has largely been ignored in official histories of the ‘independent sector’ of British film. Staging online shows during the Covid-19 years, and harnessing every bit of digital technology available to them, the group has remained at the cutting edge of underground media while staying true to their original vaudeville spirit. Truly and proudly independent, the Exploding Cinema shows remain refreshingly ‘un-curated’ and democratic. The book is a valuable and colourful addition to anyone interested in, or pining for, the days of future utopias.

Boom! is available from explodingcinema.org/shop priced at £23 or other outlets: ISBN 978-1-0369-2476-8

This time around, we give you another folklore-oriented review!

DON’T BLINK!

First up, Hastings author and artist John D’Anter gives us a fabulous look at the supernatural in Hollington. In an edition of 200, all numbered and signed in silver, this is strikingly illustrated with white text on black paper and numerous appropriately moody period photographs. John has collected ‘a selection of those tales that I heard growing up in the area’, as well as discussing the occult matters raised by these, mostly oral, tales. Herein you will find the Wishing Tree Ghost, the Spectral Schoolboy, Bogeyman and Spring-Heeled Jack, and the Phantom Coach & Carriage. You will find smugglers and witches, and haunted houses!

Naturally, Church in the Woods is given central stage in by the far the longest chapter as it unearths numerous legends focussed there. Here’s Charles Lamb’s description: ‘a small country Church (by whom or when built unknown), standing bare and single in the midst of a grove, with no house or appearance of habitation within a quarter of a mile’, not so different from today. A spooky location births spooky tales, and John has uncovered a fair few.

Amongst these is a modern vampire tale, from the 1970s, perhaps inevitable in the age of Hammer Horror. And for Dr Who fans there is the stone angel, reputedly ‘watching you in the churchyard, and indeed, may even turn its head to monitor your movements as you walk about it’… don’t blink! There would appear to have been a regular coven meeting there at Halloween once upon a time, or at least goth pretenders.

A section is given over to some ‘musings’ under the heading ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’, and gives a good précis of the historical context for some of the esoteric folklore linked to Hollington but also found all over the country. As regards the church, John links its spooky history to one shared by many churches in England, the tradition of siting Christian buildings on ground associated with our old pagan gods.

The final chapter gives us a nice walking tour – choose an appropriately foggy December eve and you too can wander the eldritch corners of Hollington!

LOOK IN THE MIRROR

Our best-selling occult zine, Hellebore, has arrived in its fourteenth edition, and as always it is pretty great! This time the focus is on mirrors, reflections, and doppelgangers. There is a piece by the editor, Maria J Pérez Cuervo, and Helen Cornish on the magical uses of mirrors. This is followed by an article by Elizabeth Dearnley on changelings and fetches, and spirit traps. Did you know that ‘in 1691, Reverend Robert Kirk wrote of the belief that every person has a double in the fairy realm’? Do you have one? Kirk called his The Co-Walker, what is the name of yours?

There are two pieces on mirrors in cinema, one from John Gwatney about the cult film Lucifer Rising, which has a loose connection to Hastings, insofar as its director Kenneth Anger was influenced by our very own demon, Aleister Crowley. Another covers ‘four classic on-screen tales where the mirror shows what is hidden and becomes a portal to another world’, and features ‘The Haunted Mirror’ from the 1945 anthology film ‘Dead of Night’; ‘The Gatecrasher’ from another anthology film, 1975’s ‘From Beyond the Grave’; and a Hammer House of Horror short from 1980, ‘Guardian of the Abyss’.

Katy Soar writes on the ‘connection between mask, ritual and transformation’, and Maria adds a page here on ‘Ritual Masks in Film’. And the inevitable vampire turns up in Sam George’s ‘The Vampire’s Lost Reflection’ – no gags about moonlight being reflected sunlight, please! Last, Tunji Offeyi contributes an interesting essay comparing Yoruba cosmology and British folklore – ‘in the Ifá tradition of West Africa’, too, ‘mirrors, polished to a sacred gleam, function as portals’. As always, Hellebore is also wonderfully illustrated throughout.

As a bonus, this year Hellebore has also published its first short story collection, Tales of Occult Britain, available for £15 at Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

OLI SPLEEN

I was broken from the winter

I was washed up on the shore

’til you came to me and calmed me

Pulled a splinter from my paw

Once my dreams were torn and broken

Once my hope was almost spent

Now the dream has reawoken

Let this be my last lament

The vagaries of the Art world are wondrous strange. The ‘Rokeby Venus’ by Velázquez– so named because it was first brought to England by a prosperous Yorkshireman to hang in his neo-Palladian pile, Rokeby Park – is probably better known for having been slashed by a Suffragette in 1914, than for being among the most sinuous and sensuous (not to say lecherous) paintings of a female form.

The Suffragette slasher was known as Mary Raleigh Richardson, who said later that she did it because of ‘the way men visitors gaped at it all day long’. The act remains one of the more radical by the women who, just over a century ago, fought (even died) for the right to be treated as thinking citizens, who could reasonably decide whom they wanted to represent them in government. It has become, like women chaining themselves to railings and throwing themselves under horses’ hooves, symbolic of the movement, of a truly radical change in the position of women in this country.

It is absorbing, therefore, that in a new biography of Mary Richardson, local author Helena Wojtczak reveals her not as a stalwart political campaigner and long-time party activist but rather as a wealthy dilletante who readily changed her name from Perkins (probably to avoid the stigma of a court conviction for theft, which is documented), and henceforth maintained an extremely casual relationship with the truth. ‘After being immersed in studying Mary for over two years’, writes Wojtczak, ‘I am persuaded that it was not solely a yearning to choose between [male] parliamentary candidates that drove her to commit acts of destruction.’

DEBUNKING THE MYTH

Meticulously researched, illustrated and annotated, it’s a splendid debunking job. The author’s stated opinion is that Richardson (who later joined Mosley’s fascist party), though the perpetrator of many acts of violent protest, was not quite the principled heroine she later claimed. Her often-quoted autobiography, Laugh a Defiance, was a tissue of lies: her original motivation was probably attention-seeking and a ‘craving for excitement.’

The act of destruction of a publicly-owned painting is made to seem, in retrospect, impulsive and a little disingenuous rather than a carefully-considered act of rebellion. Not one of Richardson’s anecdotes of the movement ‘dovetails with primary source accounts’ and most of them are ‘a mixture of truth, distortion, embellishment, uncorroborated assertion and chronological inaccuracy or impossibility.’ Indeed, Richardson’s stated reason for the act, the release of Sylvia Pankhurst from prison, had actually been achieved before she entered the art gallery.

So far, so fascinating. But this book does not seek to denigrate the ultimate achievements of the Suffragist movement: on the contrary. Wojtczak relies on various trusted sources to document the events surrounding the various arrests of Mary, of Sylvia Pankhurst, and several other militant women. It’s harrowing: women were beaten up in demonstrations, treated on (frequent) arrest as common criminals, brutally and painfully force-fed in prison. A radical subgroup, the Young Hot Bloods, nevertheless escalated the protest action to arson and other acts of extreme violence.

LEGACY OF THE SUFFRAGISTS

In spite of the severity of the movement, many of the newspaper comments were patronising and belittling in the extreme – H. G. Wells, for example, called their activities, including those of Richardson, ‘skylarking’. Women in this country who feel that ‘politics don’t concern them’ may wish to consider exactly what it took to enable them, as women, to make such a choice in the first place. It should also not need to be restated that what they call ‘politics’ is not something apart but is present in every aspect of our lives, down to the cost of a pint of milk or a loaf of bread.

Though matters have progressed, there is still a deeply ingrained cultural inequality between men and women. It’s present in our advertising and in the assumptions behind much of our language. It’s rampant on social media, encouraged by the popular press, ratified by the more regressive media outlets. But whatever their personal vagaries, Suffragists made a groundbreaking change in the position of women in this country.

Available from Bookbuster,
39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE and other local bookshops or direct from hastingspress.co.uk 

ALAN PEPPER

Buying my clothes

Boots and togs —

Huckells Two plus one Underground

Get the latest sounds

That’s doing the rounds —

Record shop Stylus Disc Jockey

Meeting girls

Twists and twirls —

Aquarius Scallywags Bonitas

Friends with cars

Going to bars —

Escorts Minis and Vivas

Dressed up great

And out at Eight —

Brogues Levis Ben Sherman

Dancing to the music

All night long —

Disco Motown Reggae

D.J.’s playing

Our favourite hits —

Steve Maxted Terry James Johnny Francis

Buying rounds

And spending pounds —

Crypt Cutter Pumphouse

Drinking frothy coffee

Eating sticky toffee —

Fiesta Dimarcos Divitos

Meet the trouble and strife

For the rest of my life —

Enjoying Hastings Town together ⁄

Marilyn Garson’s book Jewish not Zionist was published in late 2024 in her home country of Aotearoa New Zealand. It has now been republished in a UK edition, by Circaidy Gregory Press, because of its acute relevance to everyone here too who is concerned with what it means when someone says they are Jewish, but not Zionist, at this time. Marilyn Garson looks not only at the crux of what it is to be Jewish, but also, of what it is to be human, and fellow-human. As quoted on the front cover of the UK edition, the book is indeed ‘essential reading for Jews and non-Jews alike’ in these days of the confusion so often expressed about the tangled and varying interrelationships between Jewish people, Judaism, Zionism and Israel.

Although Garson’s story takes place in Aotearoa New Zealand, she brings to it her lived experience across the world: her Zionist upbringing in Canada, her training in philosophy and other disciplines, her journey from and then back into Judaism, and her work over many years in the war grounds of Afghanistan, Cambodia and, for four years, Gaza.

When Garson returned to New Zealand in late 2015 from Gaza, having lived through Israel’s massive bombing campaign of 2014, she embarked upon her first book Still Lives: A memoir of Gaza which re-

counts her time there and the lives of the talented and vital young people with whom she worked to help develop the various enterprises to which they were dedicated. With this story, she wanted to puncture the dehumanisation of Palestinian people that she had encountered so repeatedly throughout her life, and to open up some new understandings both within her religious community and beyond it.

But she found herself the recipient of outrage from her own synagogue, and from further afield. She was accused of treachery simply for having lived and worked in Gaza, and her attempts to argue the equal humanity of the Palestinian people were buried in the sustained abuse that poured upon her, unceasingly, from the community to which she had thought she belonged.

IMMENSELY THOUGHT- PROVOKING

While Jewish not Zionist chronicles this traumatic experience, it is also the story of her survival of it, and the subsequent founding of the group Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ) (AJV) for those who take a critical view of Zionism, who see Palestinian people as having equal human rights, and who want to explore their own stance as Jews of the diaspora.

Her introductory explication of ‘Why I am an anti-Zionist’ reflects:

‘Anti-Zionist Jews walk a paradoxical path of loss, exclusion and discovery as we outgrow everything we have been told. We situate our Jewish selves in the actual world before our eyes. The motif of passage is familiar to us. We are inveterate wanderers, explorers, guests on the threshold hoping to be welcome.’

Part One describes her return to New Zealand from Gaza, the ostracism from her synagogue, the silencing of her voice in many other public spaces, and the profound trauma, both mental and physical, that she endured over a period of several years. Then comes the story of her emergence from this, and her co-founding of AJV, as described above, which now has a strong profile and representation across many institutions including at governmental level in the country.

Part Two starts with two major essays, respectively on human rights and on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism (the IHRAWDA, usually abbreviated to the IHRA).

Both discussions are immensely thought-provoking. Her discussion of the IHRA constitutes a seminal analysis of this ‘definition’ of antisemitism, which was never intended to be the final word, has no legal status despite its adoption by so many official organisations, and was in fact renounced by its author more than seven years ago for being badly misused to stifle free speech.

PROFOUNDLY ENRICHING

Garson argues that:

‘The IHRA[WDA] is a definition, a project and a strategy of influence. […] It is the enforcement regime of the Zionist project of occupation and power.

The IHRA definition has hemmed in the space of speech and protest, rendered statements of Palestinian identity and rights suspect, foreclosed on millennia of Jewish pluralism, and elevated political difference to the absolute wrong of racism. […] Every message must now be filtered (or rammed) through a language that places Zionist-Jewish discomfort before Palestinian survival.’ 

A further invaluable aspect of the book is the interweaving throughout of posts from press articles and the AJV blog, each one a short but sharply illuminating reflection on its particular topic; collectively, these provide a riveting and enlightening counterpoint to the personal narrative. The book concludes with her ‘Afterword: the new Jewish International’, which discusses, in her words, the ‘growing presence of Jewishness beyond Zionism’.

A reader of this book has noted that: “For people like me, who are not Jewish, this book brings welcome assistance in the struggle to make sense of and to distinguish between Jewish race, religion and culture, and, when looking at ‘Judaism’ and ‘Zionism’, to distinguish the religious and the political. People like Marilyn Garson are ideally placed to help develop the growing movement for united anti-racism across the world.”

For those of Jewish heritage, like me and so many others all over the country, whether religious or secular, who can neither identify with nor support Israel’s actions – and who are often confronted by family and friends who take another view – the book is at once profoundly enriching in its huge sweep of experience and knowledge, and a source of solace and wisdom.

Buy from kaygreen.blog/2025/02/17 or email KayGreen lit@gmail.com Or ask in Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings, or your local bookshop, for Jewish not Zionist

town of poets

PETE DONOHUE

in the cobwebbed glow of our basement kitchen

where moths and wasps have given up the ghost

i perch on the edge of the autumn ercol

sunny studio couch and welcoming daybed

playing with my punnet of breakfast blueberries

celebrating quietly as each one is swallowed

down to a single bloom-dusty layer

& my breathing is almost completely at ease

i am reading poetry consideringly slowly

savouring the sweetest essential juices

line after line & verse after verses

emotions & images slip from the pages

at my swollen feet californian zinfandel

a bottle of old vine convenient screwtop

the effort to move & discover a wineglass

seems pointless & saves on the washing up

my fragile nerves are now shot to fragments

following a week of mystery bleeds & bloods

an ecg & a doppler flow test

& yesterday’s harrowing cruel ct scan

caught in the trauma of carrying a canula

fraught on a bed in its glidings & jerkings

frantic spins through the donut of life

breathe in hold your breath & then breathe again

when the radiologist had perfunctorily checked

those revealing images of my sliced-up self

the canula was free to flee from my vein

leaving me gasping in this cubicle world

were i not needle phobic to such extremes

i could’ve been one of my dead junkie friends

ironically those jiggling anxiety feet

probably helped with my pooling blood

this book i am reading is called poet town

the poetry of hastings & thereabouts

my hardback contributor’s copy feels warm

as i cradle the cover & stroke each page

many mates & acquaintances grace these leaves

also berries of strangers & fruits of the dead

we all come to rest in creative commune

sharing our stories our inspiration.

Boredom

ALISON YOUNG

My friends are always working

My boyfriend’s in the shop;

My cat is always sleeping –

I might as well get a job!

Imperial Leather

ALISON YOUNG

I think I smell of you;

Then I realise, through sharing baths,

I smell of your soap;

So I do smell of you –

And now you smell of me

Part Two of Left Behind is titled ‘Spiralling Up’, and is a detailed look at how previously ‘left behind’ places have in fact triumphed and reversed the trends. This is the meat of the book, with chapters on ‘how places renew from the grass roots’, ‘inclusive prosperity’, ‘building the sinews of the State’, and ‘the morality of common purpose’. 

Collier accounts for England’s special status as a failing economic state by reference to other countries’ choices to devolve power, investment, and both public and private finance. Thus, regions in danger of being ‘left behind’ may in fact be able to build in more resilience. Much of the book details examples of different tactics, few of which our politicians seem interested in, but which set out possible roots away from neglect and poverty for areas ‘left behind’.

Possibly most resonant for us in England is a section on ‘crisis as opportunity’. The emergence of a possibly true Left political party in the last few weeks may be seen as a national opportunity to fight the entropy dragging this country down, that is, if they can find a way to see off the threat from the entropy accelerators of the nationalist right. Examples Collier uses include post-1945 West Germany, Bangladesh after 1970, and the Basque region of Spain. Renewal ‘from the grass roots’ is in the author’s view a foundational step toward reversing trends in ‘neglected places’.

The role of the Quakers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are briefly outlined, as they ‘believed in living simple but purposeful lives in which every member of their community had equal agency’, as opposed to an ossified and hierarchical approach taken by the established church and state. Other dissenters serve as examples as well – without Quakers, Baptists and Methodists we might have had no successfully emergent trade unions, credit unions, building societies, etc, and ultimately perhaps no Co-Operative Party or Parliamentary Labour Party. These religious dissenters catalysed and focussed working-class organisation.

WE NEED A ‘THICK’ STATE

Entropy is a term originating in thermodynamics. In essence, it is defined as a force that brings disorder to ordered systems. In thermodynamics this is a result of energy draining from a system, and changing to cooler forms. Used in sociological, political or economic systems theory, it is an ever-present drain on energy. Indeed, I see it as the true ‘invisible hand’ in the market. It does, sadly, the opposite of the invisible hand Adam Smith mooted in passing – it was never an important element in his economic ideas. As in chemical and physical systems, it takes a great deal more energy to push a system up a hill than it does to roll it back down again. For local economies that suffer from underinvestment this creates huge issues, and ultimately ‘neglected places’ will no longer be peripheral but everywhere, unless, despite ‘free market’ ideals, governments, councils, and community bodies curb the market, intervene in the markets, and inject a great deal of energy in renewal. 

For this to work for everyone, rather than the current dead-end of massively increasing the wealth of the few at the expense of the many, Collier suggests a number of requirements. As with the Quaker example, we need ‘inclusive prosperity. We need a state apparatus that is inclusive, unlike out current elitist, indeed predatory, state, and ‘thick’, which Collier differentiates from ‘big’. Big states tend towards over-bureaucratisation, and thin states allow too much power to unelected unaccountable non-state apparatus such as corporations and their think-tanks and lobby groups. Thus, Denmark is an example of a successful ‘thick’ state, that ‘uses its large revenues to be inclusive’.

Other topics covered are ‘liveable cities’ with controlled urbanisation; service industries that are people-focussed or even -owned, such as utilities, transport, schools and libraries; embedding ecologically sustainable building practices; effective taxation and regulation of the mega-rich, amongst whom Collier investigates fossil fuel companies, with a section on ‘how Norway beat Britain’. Regulation and taxation require controlling ‘slippery accounting’, off-shoring to tax havens etc. Resource development requires strict controls on how it impacts local communities as well as the environment.

BLUEPRINTS FOR POSITIVE CHANGE

Perhaps his most important chapter is ‘Building the Sinews of the State’. All the above is all very well to suggest, but nothing happens by magical thinking. One example would be the ‘capacity to tax’. Collier gives some insight into how a low-tax low-infrastructure state such as Uganda historically succeeded in increasing tax revenues. The current media propaganda against taxing the wealthiest more, with the new ‘project fear’ bogeyman of ‘capital flight’ indicates how much of an issue the capacity to tax can be

Collier is a ‘communitarian’, and like others of that ilk, such as Amitai Etzioni, has a grand catholic plan that describes the problems very well, but often seems errantly optimistic in its prescriptions. His views here are expressed in the chapter ‘The Morality of Common Purpose’. Contemporary ideology suggests morality is automatically served by the market and that supporting those ‘left behind’ is a wasted effort – see every Daily Mail headline on benefits (except pensions, I wonder why, eh?). This ideology must be named Enemy and expunged with extreme prejudice, yet is grows stronger by the day.

Nevertheless, whilst our era often suffers from a preponderance of ‘individualism’, some assumptions communitarians make tend to ride roughshod over individuals for the sake of community. It is a hard balance to maintain, and one might agree that we have shifted too far from community, but we must keep sharp or we stand to lose as much as we stand to gain. I would wish to see a lot more power imbued in the grass roots too, as a state is by definition hierarchical in ways that, again due to entropy as much as design or intent, are inimical to the fight to not be ‘left behind’. Overall, I think Left Behind’s blueprints for positive change are important, so long as approached and enacted critically.

Left Behind is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

Published by Moth Light Press, 10th September 2025
RRP: £12.99 paperback, £15.99 photo edition
PREVIEW BY PETE DONOHUE

It’s almost upon us – the much-anticipated publication of the biggest ever literary recognition of the poetic energies of Hastings. Poet Town spotlights and celebrates the inspirational works of a broad range of local, and locally connected, poets spanning two centuries. Along with the likes of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Christina Rossetti it focuses on the work of more than 50 contemporary writers, each with their own take on our beloved seaside town.

The fascinating poetic links to this historic place are shared in an introduction by the editor, Richard Newham-Sullivan. Newham-Sullivan, who is from Hastings, was inspired to create the anthology by the sheer volume of poetic output from the town. He tells HIP: “It’s the only coastal town where there are more poets than seagulls. Alongside the best-sellers and well-known names, there are many hidden gems in this book, exciting new poets to discover.”

One featured poet, Tim Rich, comments: “Poet Town is a bold idea that has captured the imagination. It has the potential to inspire writers across the country to celebrate and share the poetry happening in their own towns, villages or cities.” Joelle Taylor describes the anthology as: “A song to belonging, to the home towns that never leave us. Tender, uplifting, irreverent, and glorious.” Luke Wright adds: “These poems hit you in the eye like an arrow. At turns funny, melancholy and celebratory – there’s all of life in these pages.”

Poet Town is not your typical local poetry anthology as the most cursory glance at the contents makes clear. Among those included are bestselling and prize-winning authors (Iain Sinclair, Salena Godden, AK Benedict, Orna Ross, Penny Pepper), a million-selling children’s poet (Brian Moses) a legend of British TV comedy (Henry Normal, writer and producer for hit shows like The Royle Family and Gavin and Stacy), a former band mate of Eric Clapton (the British Beat poet and songwriter Pete Brown), a renowned cartoonist (Martin Honeysett) and classic poets known and loved the world over.

These stars of page and screen have joined forces with fresh talent to celebrate the poetic legacy of Hastings – our seaside town known for its fish and chips, its towering castle, and its thriving artistic and cultural scene. Salena Godden, renowned poet, author and regular on BBC Radio 4, has written the foreword to the book. She says: “Poet Town is a book where some truth is shared, some magical inspiration is found and all the weather is weathered. These poems are from here, they are deep and salty, they are lurking in the crash of sea water around the legs of the pier, as much as they are wafting in the salt and vinegar on your fish and chips.”

Poet Town: The Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts will be launched at the Hastings Book Festival, running from 12 to 21 September 2025. The book will be available from all good online book retailers and locally in Hastings Waterstones and elsewhere. The Photo Edition features a selection of full-colour photos of some of the poets at beloved spots around Hastings, by local photographer Maxine Silver. An exhibition of Maxine Silver’s photos of the poets will feature in events to mark the launch of the book. 

HASTINGS WIND

SHARON LISA RHODES

Hastings wind whispers stories old

Of asylums closed and stories untold

A community woven frayed and strong

Where empathy’s thread runs life long

They came in the eighties lost and displaced

When Thatcher’s cold hand left futures erased

Hastings embraced them offered a home

A place to heal no longer to roam

Here I walk a known and loved face

My mind a kaleidoscope a unique space

The locals they smile they understand

The rhythm and rhyme of this seaside land

But newcomers arrive with London’s cold sheen

Seeking cheap houses a different scene

They see not the heart the history deep

But a “mad woman” label cruel words they keep

Last night the whispers turned to sharp knives

Gaslighting’s dark shadow cut through my life

They lied they twisted to shield their own wrong

Branding me “mad” where I’ve belonged so long

My heart breaks the pieces scattered and torn

By judgements so hasty with prejudice born

I fight for our minds for voices unheard

An activist’s spirit a passionate word

Hastings my haven my strength and my pain

Where kindness and cruelty reside in one lane

I’ll rise from the ashes my voice clear and bold

My story my truth will never grow old

(a poem for mental health awareness)

Collier’s project here is to discuss what he calls ‘a new economics for neglected places’, which we can readily apply here. The book has a global perspective, covering for example parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. But he reserves a special place in his analysis for England. Part One of the book, ‘Spiralling Down’, ‘is the story of damaging ideologies and the politics of greed’ and how they impede attempts to narrow the wealth-gap and keep the base of an economy fluid and viable through investment and welfare. Thus, England is seen through the lens of an extreme version of the ‘free market’ imposed on us from Thatcher’s 1980s onwards, one he sees as more extreme than any other country: despite the propaganda, ‘far from remedying the syndrome, market forces accentuate it’. He also accounts for England’s special status as a failing economic state by reference to other countries’ choices to devolve power, investment, and both public and private finance.

Collier has relatively little to say about ‘class politics’, but does point out the need for workers unions, willingness to compromise and cooperate between workers and bosses, and the need for resilient welfare support. The latter has been especially badly dismantled in the UK, especially since 2008, with little sign of the recent change in government addressing that, with the Labour government instead stating that it is only interested in ‘working people’. And so we fall yet further behind.

MANY IN HASTINGS DRIVEN INTO THE GROUND

Let’s get an elephant in the room out of the way. Collier has a warped perspective regarding ‘the South-East’, one typically found ‘up north’. We are, apparently, all terribly well-off down here. Only the post-industrial North, Wales, and Cornwall are badly ‘left behind’. This is disappointing in what is, in many ways, a compulsory read, dense with information. And ironic, too, because he in general acknowledges that many places outside the capitals or resource-rich regions of countries can easily be ‘left behind’ as the wealth-gap expands, as it is doing, and rapidly, in our country. It is a patchwork with mixed results, such that areas such as Hastings can experience a growth in ‘average earnings’, driven in part by equity-rich blow-ins, and at the same time evisceration of the base economy that mainly impoverishes locals and previous generations of, equity-poor, blow-ins – also driven in part by recent equity-rich blow-ins. This has the effect of masking a detrimental ratcheting down of our community. This is a phenomenon Collier would be sure to recognise exists in ‘the South-East’ too, if he didn’t show such a caricatured anti-Home Counties bias.

Perhaps this is a misperception explained by the relative recentness of this phenomenon, at least in its current form. After years of austerity driven by elite economists’ and politicians’ choices in how to address the 2008 banking crisis, plus the rise in popularity of AirBnBs, the economic pressure pushing many away from an overly expensive capital, the effects of Brexit on small businesses, and the iniquities of the Universal Credit system that replaced the fairer and stabilising Working Tax Credit system, many in Hastings have been driven into the ground, compounding the growth in the wealth-gap.

Nevertheless, these pressures that we suffer here are acknowledged in other areas of the UK, and in other countries. So, if we put aside his biases, this first part of Left Behind is as important and valid for us here as for his much-lauded post-industrial Yorkshiremen, which means we, as readers, can roll our eyes at him but still join the dots ourselves. A ‘society’s spirit’ can be ‘crushed by despair’, and Collier analyses ‘social psychology’ to explain ‘social fragmentation’ in neglected places.

Part Two of the book, ‘Spiralling Up’, however, is a detailed look at how previously ‘left behind’ places have in fact triumphed and reversed the trends. This is much more positive, and represents the meat of the book, taking up two-thirds of the narrative, with chapters on, for example, ‘how places renew from the grass roots’, ‘inclusive prosperity’, ‘building the sinews of the State’, and ‘the morality of common purpose’. And it is to this I will return next time…

Left Behind is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

Jemia De Blondeville has been around on the Hastings poetry scene for a good few years and our paths have crossed at several events. HIP has published some of her work on this page’s Poetry Corner. Now she has gifted us this delightful collection of lyrical feel-good poems in her new chapbook Where Fairies Once Dwelt.

Her poems here are divided into three sections: The Fairy Moon, Dark Butterflies and The Girl and the Dragon. The overall feel of this collection is an ethereal one, as might be expected from the title and section headings, with themes of nature, fantasy, surrealism and a little philosophy thrown in. Jemia uses repeat words in different poems – zephyrs, butterflies, flowers, velvet, fairies – linking us into the optimistic and childlike (but not childish) view of her creative world. She also explores different styles of poetry from regular verse through to haikus, an acrostic, a poetic prose piece and an ‘A-Z of British Birds’.

At £3 for a collection of 30 (10p per poem!) this wonderful chapbook, which includes photos and illustrations, is a great tonic to uplift our spirits during times when the world may seem overcomplicated and less than harmonious. More good news is that all proceeds go straight back into our community, namely to Arts in the Park and its wellbeing groups.

Where Fairies Once Dwelt is currently available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road TN34 1RE, 1,200 Postcards at 80 Queens Road, and soon other outlets around the town.

Guy Shrubsole is the author of the bestselling The Lost Rainforests of Britain. His latest book, out now in paperback, includes some of the remnants of our temperate rainforest, along with 92% of English land – land we have no right to roam upon. Indeed, much of the 8% left over upon which we may walk is privately owned. The recent farce over camping on Dartmoor highlights this for us, and Guy, who himself lives in Devon, covers the court case over access here. The book went to print before the victory was won against the landowners last month – judges unanimously dismissed an appeal by Alexander and Diana Darwall against a 2023 ruling upholding Dartmoor Commons Act.

Lewis Winks of protest group Right to Roam, in an article in the Exeter Observer, said “Dartmoor remains the only place in England and Wales where the public has a right to wild camp and can lawfully experience the magic of sleeping under the stars. And the fact that one wealthy landowner, Alexander Darwall, was able to temporarily remove a right that belonged to everyone, demonstrates how England’s system of access is utterly broken.” ‘He added: “The Labour Government must now pass a new Right to Roam Act to defend and extend the public’s rights to access nature in England. Ministers must urgently change the law not only to protect the right to wild camp on Dartmoor from future challenges, but to expand the public’s right of responsible access to the wider countryside.”

‘AN END TO FEUDALISM’

Shrubsole’s hardback edition The Lie of the Land was subtitled ‘Who really cares for the countryside’. The paperback is more combative, with the new subtitle ‘How a tiny group of landowners wrecked the countryside, and how the public can restore it’. The book takes a look at who owns the countryside, how many landowners propagandise about what a great job they do as stewards and suggest the ‘townies’ will just treat the countryside as a garbage dump. Shrubsole gives this elitist claim short shrift. He gives us many examples of how these self-professed ‘guardians of the land’ in fact cause great damage. This ranges from agricultural run-off, through destructive alteration of the course of rivers and degradation of wetland including SSSIs, to the effect rape of the land has in the name of grouse and pheasant hunting for toffs. The latter alone causes immense destruction of our native flora and fauna for a sport which accounts for per annum CO2 emissions of half a billion tons. At the same time, he acknowledges and praises those landowners that do in fact care for their land.

All this makes for a fascinating read, and I recommend it. And I could fill this review with the dastardly behaviour of our elites – but in fact, the best thing about the book is its sections dealing with the second half of its new subtitle, how we can address stewardship and ownership issues. As Shrubsole notes, currently ‘in a country where 1 per cent of the population owns half of all England, such decisions are made by a tiny elite’. One clear change required to begin to solve pressing issues around degradation of our natural environment, and urgently enhancing the sustainability of our native food supply, is a widening of involvement in decision-making. It is an uphill struggle, landowners are rich, influential, and often angry – in 1983 effigies of conservationists on the Somerset Levels were hung by the neck by farmers opposed to plans to rewet drained wetlands.

The focus on England is tempered by reference to the various successes in protecting land, beyond the right to roam, in Scotland. Shrubsole gives over a fair few pages to the public acquisition of vast swathes of the former Buccleuch Estate, and what the Scottish government fairly describe as ‘an end to feudalism’, focussing on community ownership as well as the right to access. Centuries after the eviction of Highlanders from the land they lived on and farmed by arrogant lairds who could be richer with sheep than tenants, the ancestors of the victims of the clearances in Sutherland now have the right to buy the land. A Heritage Trust now owns the Isle of Eigg… Needless to say, in England we remain quite definitely ‘feudal’, with a disproportionate amount of land still owned by earls, barons, and lords granted vast acreage after the Norman Conquest. Globally, more and more land is owned by venture  capitalists, and even Utah’s Mormon Church. And changes of governance under Thatcher ‘closed down debate about the public ownership of land for a generation’.

‘THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM’ LAND OWNERSHIP

So, read this excellent book all the way through! But, here I will round off this review with a quick potted rundown of Shrubsole’s main recommendations for action. He says that reform must be a democratic process, a million miles from where we are now. There must be stricter prioritisation, as much land is deemed ‘multi-use’ that in fact has quite narrow requirements if it is to be protected, such as our vanishing wetlands. One might mention the disconnect between those who think we can address the decimation of our forests through massive monoculture plantations, and those who see that different biomes should be seeded with appropriate native trees and flora in order to recover. And none of this means diddle-squat without addressing ‘the elephant in the room’, land ownership. To do this requires agriculture and forestry be bought into the planning system, as, unbelievably, they are not!

He finishes on a ten-point programme, beginning with protecting our greatest carbon sinks, moorland and the fens, and banning moorland burning and grouse-shooting. King Charles, our supposedly ‘green’ royal wouldn’t like that. Second, institute a community right to buy in England. Third, use public money to ‘buy land for nature’. Fourth, levy a carbon land tax on polluting landowners. Fifth, stop letting landowners unleash hundreds of thousands of imported pheasants on the land in shooting season (indeed, why not ban shooting?). Sixth, create a ‘right of responsible access’ giving the public rights to become whistleblowers when finding nefarious land practices on yer lordship’s manor. Seventh, let national parks serve the interests of nature, especially important now rare-metal rich uplands such as Dartmoor are now technically within the new ‘enterprise zones’. Eighth, ‘put in place a land use framework for England and open up data on land’. Ninth, ‘require landowners to give an account of their stewardship’, Shrubsole’s ‘Ecological Domesday Book’, and, tenth, not a policy suggestion, ‘but a plea to everyone reading this book’ – ‘Join campaigns to hold landowners to account and change the laws of the land’.

We cannot go back to ‘subsistence rights on the common land’, as once granted under the Carta de Foresta, not with a UK population of 70 million people, but we can and must be activists for change. Scotland is proving it works. Solidarity is the way.

The Lie of the Land is available at a specially reduced price from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road
TN34 1RE

BEN FAIRLIGHT

Now that our sun softens its glare

To smile among shape-shifting starling clouds

As jackdaws call in startled crowds

That gift a fifth dimension to the tainted air,

Our scraping footprints knead each leaf

To know its beauty unbonded,

While we cling to our dough, our booty bagged,

To save us all from winter grief;

We sidle the rim of this pan of clay

And mostly sniff the other way

To spite our black hole’s no escape

Wringing the abyss with an echo now hoarse:

How many seasons more of earth rape

Will those high-court judges grant us?

In 1948, when George Orwell published 1984, he imagined the Thought Police. That is, he imagined a form of surveillance where those whose personal thoughts displeased the Party were hounded out by the State and punished. To Orwell, to his readers then and now, the attempt to suppress everything that did not conform to Party lines, whether merely mentioned, or discussed in public or private places, was the most heinous aspect of despotic control. Big Brother was watching everyone, whether they liked it or not.

STATE CONTROL AND INDIVIDUAL OPINION

Tiffany Jenkins is a historian, writer, journalist, and broadcaster living in Hastings. Her powerful history, Strangers and Intimates, takes us back to the time before Henry VIII and his self-serving declaration of the separation of Church and State. The rule of God was paramount and a man’s individual ‘conscience’ immaterial, if it existed at all. The Monarch was God’s appointed and the Church and the State and the Law and the Individual were all one. There was not a word for ‘private’ until the beginning of the sixteenth century.

It’s a sobering thought: don’t we often concur that as individuals we have formed our own life-rules, our own convictions about what is right and what is wrong? But our right to our own opinions, and a private space where we can do and think what we like, was pretty well unknown, Jenkins points out, even until Victorian times. People “had interior lives. They did retreat for reflection. But against the structures of power, the demands of society and the community, there was no…aspect of life where others could not legitimately intrude.”

In her extensive examination of the distinction, in a final summary chapter, ‘Saving private life’, Tiffany Jenkins argues passionately for society to retain the distinction between the two spheres. “It is important to recognize and accept” states Jenkins, “that we naturally present ourselves differently in public and in private. Both modes of behaviour are authentic: neither is fake.”

The word ‘naturally’ here worries me slightly, since the bulk of the book refers not to nature but to public legislation. Jenkins certainly made me aware, through successive historical chapters, that actually our thoughts are not our own, that the way we imagine events, the rules we live by, our ‘internal’ consciences, are formed through hundreds of years of collective cultural conditioning. Our belief in our right to private lives and opinions has been ingrained, and enshrined in Law, so that, until recently, it was difficult to imagine a life where a citizen’s privacy was not inviolable. Events and technological developments over the last fifty years have, however, affected the boundaries.

THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR OWN INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS?

Jenkins argues, through examination of a succession of public events, that the private sphere is in danger of breaking down. Examining specific historical developments, she works through an early example of a Big-Brother type programme called An American Family, to the Clinton/Lewinsky exposé and its knock-on effects (one wonders whether in the Trump era this would be a cause for celebration rather than presidential resignation), to the very public row between Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds, Prince Harry’s kiss-and-tell, and the general demand, in the name of transparency, for the publication of the private text messages of public figures.

Massive technological developments like the invention of photography, TV and, subsequently, the internet, have been instrumental in this change. There’s a whole telling section of the book beginning with the vision of Steve Jobs and the launch of the Apple Mac in 1984. “1984,” he announced, “won’t be like 1984.” Now, messaging services like WhatsApp have eroded our assumption of privacy in ways that even Orwell did not imagine. Even sex, a hitherto relatively private act, can now be viewed by millions on any social media, if people bother to look. For Orwell’s book, this would have been more satisfactory to the State than any private act of love between consenting adults. Have we used technology to engineer the destruction of our own individual rights? Time will tell. 

BEN FAIRLIGHT

A jolt, a dull clatter, and doors suck open

Raucous caws with cold-fronted air honed

High in the thin trees, where nine black frazzles

Squabble over six twiggy raggle-bags.

They’re not discussing the length of this year’s

Catkins or wriggling lambs’ tails reflected

In marshy waters and promises of frog

Spawn in time for their raw hatchlings’

Breakfast. Or the weather. Or, like, the train

Full of, like, thumb-gossiping youngsters’ fine

Appreciation of the black in the blue.

Maybe, like me and you, they’re deaf and blind

To what’s happening now. Or worse, they’re cursed

To never know. The next station will be Wadhurst.

This new book by locally based author and poet Paul Green channels the spirit of J G Ballard. It features seven stories, and three essays. Paul is a few years older than myself, but we share considerable cultural influences. These might be described rather simplistically as encompassing elements of sixties counter-culture, eighties cyberpunk and nineties ‘Mondo2000’ alternative tech-oriented culture, all subsumed in the nineties, by, I believe, Forbidden Planet bookshop in, then, New Oxford Street, under the banner ‘Slipstream’. Authors in this category, which spans fiction, non-fiction, and pseudo-fiction, include: William Burroughs, Noam Chomsky, Brian Aldiss, Timothy Leary, Iain Banks, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, William T Vollmann, Robert Anton Wilson, and even perhaps Erich von Daniken.

And, of course, Jim Ballard. Paul and I were both influenced by Ballard. This shows in much of Paul’s writing, but comes to the fore in this excellent new collection. One of the essays looks at some of the tropes that appear in Ballard’s work, through the lens of one of his early novels, The Wind From Nowhere. Paul thanks David Pringle, former editor of the great UK SF magazine Interzone, a worthy successor to New Worlds, for his feedback on the essay. In the early nineties I had read a piece on Pringle’s fascination with Ballard. Interzone ran a competition, which I entered, to ‘rewrite Alien as if novelised by Ballard instead of Alan Dean Foster’. I pitched my entry towards Pringle’s take on Ballard, coming, as I recall, second in the competition – my entry is buried in a box somewhere in the Interzone archives at Liverpool University. The winning entry was printed, it took a minor liberty, adding ‘…and directed by David Cronenberg’ and was very good.

PAUL COVERS THESE TOUCHSTONE TROPES WELL

Reading Paul’s stories reminded me of my own tribute to Ballardian obsessions. Few have captured his tone and ecology of ideas as well as Paul has. Some of the early stories of Eric Brown, in his The Time-lapsed Man come to mind.

Ballard was a bit of an existentialist. His leading, male, characters reflect this philosophy. His female characters are of his time; in my imagination they are often highly-strung and faded, clinging to an outmoded comfort-zone, looking perhaps a bit like Nanette Newman. They are usually living in suburbia, or post-apocalyptic hotels, amongst jaded middle-class professionals. There is often an eccentric public school antagonist. The time-space the main character occupies is as much the ‘inner space’ of the mind as it is the external environment, and the latter is often arguably an existential extrusion of that mind.

It is often assumed that Ballard’s childhood, interred by the Japanese in Shanghai during the war, followed by post-war London, and in later life suburbia in the form of Shepperton is the key to his mentality. No doubt there is more to it than that, but his memories of the camp and of the austerity of post-war England are I think central to the atmosphere of novels, such as The Drought, The Crystal World, and The Drowned World – perhaps, too, in some aspects of one of my favourite Ballard novels, Hello America. One way or another, deserts are the heart of his most elemental novels and stories. Paul covers these touchstone tropes well in his stories, and explicates them in his essay on ‘The Poetics of ‘Studio 5, The Stars’, which inhabits the ambience of the collection Vermilion Sands. One of my favourite shorts appears here, The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D.

A CLASSIC TAKE ON BALLARDIAN APOCALYPSE STORIES

Paul channels other threads in Ballard’s work, especially in his story Monaco, which has shades of Crash, The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race, though he doesn’t go so far out as the Ballard of The Atrocity Exhibition here.

I think my favourite stories here are The Final Analysis, The Seismic World, and Shadow People. The former inhabits an alternate reality where the UK has joined the war in Vietnam, and the Russians have also arrived there, Profumo is PM, and characters include Jim and his friend Christopher Evans, in Wimbledon instead of Shepperton, but in different roles to our world, and a very Jim-esque lead in David Carlson. Carlson works for a trade rag, ‘Plastic World’, whereas Ballard worked for the trade rag, ‘Chemistry and Industry’. Paul has placed a number of amusing parallels amongst his work here. Seismic World is a classic take on Ballardian apocalypse stories, especially, perhaps, The Wind from Nowhere. The latter story, Shadow People, I like because I find it redolent of classic paranoid kids’ TV such as Time-Slip, Quatermass, and Children of the Stones, as well as of Ballard himself. It may recycle 70s TV, but ‘hauntology’ and ‘psychogeography’ have rendered nostalgia for that era current once more.

Highly recommended.

Terminal Transmissions is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

In the 1880s, chief Concomly, of the Native American Chinook tribe, “tried [..] to develop a system of equitable and peaceful trade between tribes and white merchants. He was confounded by the necessity for profit that underlay the whites’ system of trade. And he could never fathom the reason for funnelling profits to distant owners, people who were not part of the economy”, said Barry Lopez in his monumental work, Horizon. Lopez later points out that “The hedge fund manager who amasses material wealth with no thought for the fate of the pensioner he cheats ruins lives. He is a kind of suicide bomber.”

In Vassal State, Hanton demonstrates the degree to which ‘America runs Britain’. Make no mistake, whilst two centuries past England was the world leader in exporting exceptionalist mayhem and terror for profit, America has fulfilled that role since at least 1945, and now they are coming for us, suicide-bombing our economy.

HANDS AROUND THE UK ECONOMY’S THROAT

Those who regularly read my reviews here will already know I’m a tad cynical and, as people so often do, mistake my realism for pessimism. However, this important book, which I picked up ‘knowing’ whereof it spoke, still managed to shock me. We all know American corporations carve up companies the world over, undertake large-scale mergers and acquisitions, asset-strip, and walk away with a country’s material and financial wealth in the name of ‘free’ markets, and happily back the IMF and World Bank in imposing neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’ conditions on bail-outs and loans, which further hollow-out developing and failing economies.

But few are fully aware of how deeply they have plunged their hands around the UK economy’s throat, how hard they are squeezing. I have known since school in the late ‘70s the USA to be the greatest threat to world peace. Now it’s getting real for us here too, ‘ally’ or not. In essence we are owned by the USA. UK assets held by American corporations exceed the total of US assets in the whole of the rest of Europe, and the majority of taxation on their profits is evaded by registering for tax in Ireland and Luxembourg, Switzerland and Holland. Estimates are that monies shipped abroad work out at over £2100 per annum for every British household. More than a quarter of the top 350 British listed companies are US-owned. US companies’ share of ‘our’ assets is equivalent to a stonking £53,000 per UK household, a significant proportion of it acquired from 2019 onwards. By some measures it is estimated that the US share of UK assets increased by one-third in 2023 alone. The 2008 crash, Brexit, and the pandemic have all fed this beast.

The US plans long-term, the UK investor culture has a ‘very short-term focus’: basically, shareholders want money now and damn the consequences. Yes, that’s right – much of this is self-inflicted. Countries such as France and Germany have rules restricting foreign ownership, but we are having a jumble-sale. US private equity control “Morrisons, Travelodge, the AA, Alton Towers, Gatwick Airport, Biffa, Center Parcs, and Burger King”. “Our high streets are hosting many American-owned chains, such as Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, KFC, Gail’s Bakery, Majestic Wine, Taco Bell, Nike, Gap, TK Maxx, Abercrombie & Fitch, Timberland, Foot Locker, Levi’s, Costco, Subway, Hotel Chocolat, Waterstones, Ralph Lauren and Sweaty Betty,” to name but a few. Under post-2008 ‘Universal Credit’ rules, self-employed small businesses are eviscerated, and with the last tranche transferred from WTC to UC last year, many more will disappear over the next year as we hit the wall created by cynical UC rules. Only the large chains will benefit, and the US will have an eye to taking over yet more of those.

A SLAVE NATION

The book also covers ‘big tech’, subscription services, the drive on the part of Visa, Mastercard, Worldpay, PayPal and others to push all financial transactions online where American firms take a cut of every pound we spend. Every credit card machine, every cash-machine, every Amazon, eBay or AirBnB sale gives a cut of UK financial assets to America. Usuriously out-of-control credit card rates, set by companies such as Visa, are dumping our nation into ever deeper debt like never before. As Hanton puts it, we are indeed a ‘vassal state’ of the USA. Further, a slave nation. Yet still we bang on about the ‘special relationship’. In reality, we are an annoying yappy terrier running round the Big Apple’s legs, and after getting the occasional kick enthusiastically coming back for more abuse.

The idea that Starmer, and his City handler Rachel Reeves, are anything but continuity neoliberal ‘safe hands’ is deranged. As Hanton puts it, “it is clear that the invitation to buy up Britain, first extended by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and reiterated by every prime minster since, has been enthusiastically accepted by Americans”, who just loved Johnson, Sunak and Truss. The so-called (parliamentary) ‘Labour Party’ today certainly follows in their footsteps. As Cameron put it, we are ‘open for business’, and it’s a garage sale.

The much-sought unicorn, a ‘Brexit bonus’, doesn’t exist for the voters who erroneously thought they were ‘getting their country back’. Nope, only private equity, City traders, including Farage and his henchmen, the cynical rich, including Hannon and Banks and the others who paid for the Brexit they wanted, and foreign powers (principally the USA) are ‘getting our country’. Jeremy Hunt, recently knighted for his crimes against the British people, and his ‘Labour’ successor Wes Streeting, know that the NHS is ‘on the table’ in any ‘deal’ with America and both are in the pocket of US health insurance providers. Not to put too fine a point on it, these people have committed massive treason against this country and its people.

RESTRICTIONS ON PROTEST

Is there any hope? Hanton suggests a few options. Stop the sell-offs; actively support home-based innovations, especially in tech; invest in people, the opposite of government policy; increase our autonomy from these globalising tyrants; radically transform our tax regime; learn from European structures, attitudes and values – especially acting to reverse our demented ‘bonfire of the regulations’, our refusal to address monopolies, anti-competitive foreign corporate behaviours, and curbing the overweening dominance of US culture in the UK. These options may be too little. And impossible to impose without deposing our City, Establishment, and public-school elites with extreme prejudice – after-all they are the main indigenous engine of off-shoring and rule-breaking, it’s why they lied to us all and paid for the ‘Brexit’ they wanted: one in which we dodge Europe’s attempts to rein in all the ‘torrent-out’ asset-stripping, which can only impoverish the majority of us even further.

And they know we are coming for them, sooner or later, as witnessed by the entirely paranoid increasing restrictions on protest. If we are not vigilant, next it will be restrictions on unsanctioned assembly everywhere.

Vassal State is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE.

The first image inside the new edition of Claude Cahun’s Disavowals, more literally retitled Cancelled Confessions, is a complex photomontage by Cahun’s partner, Marcel Moore. That name was the alias for illustrator, designer, and photographer Suzanne Malherbe. Cahun was born Lucy Schwob. Malherbe and Schwob met at their local art school in Nantes, and lived in Paris, associating both intimately and artistically, for the next forty years. 

THE CONSTRUCTION OF MYSTERY

The centre of this montage (cut out here) is obviously the eye – this vision is cupped by two graceful hands which end at the forearm with a pair of lips. In other parts of the image, another pair of hands cradles a globe, and a pair of cloaked fists grasp something that looks like a lens gazing into a confined world of classical sculpture. 

Cahun’s text is a long, fascinating, not always easy read. Presented more-or-less chronologically, the chapters of her ‘narrative’ are all preceded by similar photomontages. The beginning of each chapter appears to correspond roughly to its preceding image, but the text soon veers off in all directions, often following no discernible sequence and sometimes adopting a different form of address paragraph by paragraph. It is objective and subjective, metaphorical and literal, poetic and prosaic. “When the mechanism has been completely deconstructed, the mystery remains intact” writes Cahun.

This intentional creation of mystery, along with the prominence of hands and eyes in the images, broadly suggests a Surrealist intent. In addition, (after stars and hearts in other chapters) the sections of the last chapter are separated by small eyes. Think of Max Ernst’s unforgettable Eye of Silence, Man Ray’s Glass Tears, Magritte’s False Mirror. To the Surrealists, the Eye represented a gateway to the Subconscious, a tool for revealing hidden truths. André Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924) refers 91 times, literally or metaphorically, to the eye.

In Breton’s Manifestoes there is also un chien  – the “Alsatian that has one blue eye and one yellow eye, the dog of the anaglyphs of my dreams.” One of the lasting projects by arch-Surrealist Salvador Dali was his input (with Louis Buñuel) to the film Un Chien Andalou, an acknowledged milestone containing a wealth of Surrealist references, including the famous sick-making razor eyeball-slitting scene. A clear gel emerges from that wound: death, hope, or liberation? In dreams these are often one and the same.

Like many of her literary Modernist contemporaries, Cahun pays homage to her Classical antecedents. For example, she devotes a whole chapter to herself as an ‘aurige’ (Latin Auriga, charioteer). Cahun’s wordplay, throughout the book, assumes readers’ ready familiarity with the classics. She references Christian texts and ceremonies, philosophers and historians ancient and modern, Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology. She refers, too, to works by more recent luminaries, and her contemporaries: Apollinaire, Oscar Wilde, Molière, the symbolism of Rimbaud, the Da-da and Surrealism of Breton.

ART AND QUEERNESS

Another feature of this unique text, especially relevant in recent times, is a connection between Art and Queerness. Bring to mind famous artistic couples (and triangles): Michaelangelo and Cavalieri, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Duncan Grant, Oscar Wilde and Bosie, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo. Think also about the present-day activity that is (still) called cross-dressing. Marcel Duchamp, Grayson Perry, David Bowie, Beyoncé, Marilyn – all have created gender-defying alter-egos. Dali, too, was happy to wear a dress. Cahun and Moore were an unconventional couple; like a number of the aforementioned, they lived slightly outside regular society, but their kind of relationship was far from unknown among artistic radicals. So the fluid, unclassifiable writing of Cancelled Confessions is Modernist, Surrealist, of its time, but simultaneously infinitely contemporary. Its blend of reality and fantasy, the (Freudian) Conscious and the Subconscious, is unique, the intellectual reach, extraordinary. 

As a most courageous work even for its time, the book’s disjointed form seems very relevant to today’s copious fragmentary literary blogs, and also perhaps to the now heavily blurred association between the physical and the digital. It is a biography, though not at all as we might expect. Some sections could be called self-examination, but the text is so varied in form that the self being assessed becomes divided, fluid, and indistinguishable from its accumulated intellectual background. 

This is, therefore, a timely reissue. As a physical object it is supremely well-produced, tissue-bound, reverse-engineered to look very like it might have looked in the original edition by Editions du Carrefour (a copy of which, incidentally, recently sold at Christie’s for £3,500). It is perhaps important to notice, though, that while the original cover contained a few jolly neolithic nudes, the newer, more anodyne cover has cropped them out. Is nudity somehow less acceptable now? The eyes, though, are everywhere.

Available from thinmanpress.com

It is increasingly obvious that global capitalism, in its industrial mode, is creating an environmental crisis of epic proportions. It is also apparent that the post-Thatcherism and post-Reaganomics mode of capitalism, one which is focussed on ‘financialisation’, is increasing the wealth of a tiny minority at the expense of everybody else, as it is essentially fed on debt, not production. Decades ago, visionary thinkers, such as Ivan Illich and Murray Bookchin, saw the broad outlines of our current crises coming.

In Bookchin’s case he developed a political philosophy based on attempting to ‘square the circle’ between socialist, ‘anarchist’, and ecological ideas. Like Rachel Carson, he was early amongst radical thinkers in seeing the extent to which environmental degradation was a threat to life on our planet. Unlike Carson, his political experiences in the 1950s meant he saw solutions that were not merely ‘instrumental’ tinkering, but that would attack the capitalist and industrial productivist behemoth at its roots.

He named this ideology ‘social ecology’. Throughout his life, he amended the details as experience required. Much of his writing was focussed on critique of topical crises of the day, and on theoretical underpinnings to his ideas. But he  also, and necessarily, was involved in real-world practice, and concerned with how to create new forms of political consociation that were compatible with a sustainable and liveable future society. Because, as we surely must admit by now, our current way of life is driving us off a cliff.

YOUR BOWELS WILL LOOSEN

This book, subtitled ‘From Bookchin to Rojava and Beyond’, is a welcome analysis of how the ideas central to ‘social ecology’, and thus central to our survival, have been expressed in the real world. Theory is all very well, but practice is where hope is forged. I have written here before about the Kurdish experiment in ‘socially ecological’ living. As with other areas on the periphery of the Western global hegemony, such as Bolivia, space has been, at least temporarily, available to experiment with Bookchin’s ideas. Within ‘developed’ nations there are fewer spaces to act, but the Occupy movement is one area in which Bookchinite ideas were able, in a few locations such as Oakland and New York, to flourish.

Primary among these ideas, and dating from his later writings, is ‘libertarian municipalism’, expressed in the ‘real world’ through ‘people’s assemblies’. Here in Hastings we have had a few attempts at creating such bodies. The idea would be to get as many local people as were interested and free to pop along to meetings where ideas can be shared and a consensus reached on actions. Optimally, decisions made would be able to be enacted. Town councils on a libertarian model find it hard to get traction where ‘representative’ councils exist, and even more so where these are embedded in local, county, and national bureaucracies. But their necessity is more apparent every day.

As is the necessity that discussions include as a core focus our relationship with the land. How much of our food is locally produced? How much is farmed in an ecologically sustainable manner? How is it integrated with the natural world? How much of our energy provision is local, under our control, and genuinely sustainable in the long term? Think about such things for a minute and your bowels will loosen. By these measures, and many more, we are nowhere near any kind of self-sufficiency and have no resilience to global supply issues. So eco-communities, direct democracy, education that teaches us to think and analyse for ourselves and thus function as citizens, are a necessity if we are to address any kind of survivable future.

WHAT LITTLE AUTONOMY HASTINGS HAS

The role of popular assemblies is about to be challenged: they were never easy, but dissolving local authorities and pushing the locus of power up to the level of county-wide or even larger ‘unitary boroughs’ will take what little autonomy Hastings has away from us. As Julia Hilton discussed in issue 273 of this paper, there may still be wiggle-room, but frankly right now is a ‘counter-revolutionary’ moment without the preceding ‘revolution’.

Meanwhile, Finley has found numerous examples of people-power, of eco-communities, directly democratic fora, and federalist alternatives to ‘nationalism’–in the best cases, based around ‘biomes’ and balanced ‘ecological footprints’. She says ‘there is no single blueprint for a democratic and ecological way of life. Indeed, if the last decades of emancipatory social movements and democratic experimentation have revealed anything, it is that each community must reinvent real democracy for itself.’

Currently, the nationalist-populist far-right is on the ascendant all across ‘the West’, clearly including the UK. They offer ‘business as usual’ whilst promising a better life for those who will buy into their tacit promises to deal with structural problems that their leaders are getting rich from, in fact increasing. Any kind of solutions must come from elsewhere, though none can contain the enormity of what’s coming. Finley’s approach to the praxis of social ecology gives us a few clues. ‘Our task is not to rehabilitate the past but to move forward with lessons in hand’, lessons which clearly preclude the kind of ‘reforms’ promised by our parliamentary system, least of all ‘ReformUK’. 

A RESILIENCE AND LOVE OF FREEDOM

Some of Bookchin’s ideas were predicated on us acting in sensible ways in order to head off problems that today are like a tsunami we’d seen on the horizon and ignored but that ‘suddenly’ is upon us. Thus, he may seem optimistic where, when I first read his work, in the early 1980s, his ideas seemed realistic, as well as necessary. He did warn us, over and over. I argued as early as 1990 that the narrow window of opportunity was closing fast. Once slammed shut, only bad options would remain. Now, in 2025, it appears all too likely that we have passed significant ‘tipping points’, ones that lock in horrific changes in our biosphere, that will crash our civilisation, create wars, famines, and disease, and trash yet more of the natural world that we are entirely dependent upon, no matter how alienated from it we may be in our current siloed way of living.

Real positive change at the local and regional level is more urgent than ever, to at least mitigate the worst of what is coming. Of those who are acting for positive change in the face of a new great depression, or worse, she says ‘their perseverance speaks to a resilience and love of freedom embedded in nature itself’.

OLI SPLEEN

The present I hold only in contempt

For it is now and now and always now 

Whereas the past embroiders on itself

With recollection’s corners worn by time

The future holds its openness unwrit’

It is a breath that has yet to be breathed

Or that of death, to suffocate diseased

When what was planned reveals the opposite 

Now’s sad stone certainty, I scrutinise 

Whereas the times of joy just seemed to fleet

Sit back on life, relax and close your eyes

Until nostalgia brings life back, complete

This book is subtitled The Memoir of a Child Protection Lawyer. The writer lives locally, having recently retired from practice as a barrister specialising in care proceedings. Without sensationalising, soft-pedalling or patronising, she paints at first hand a devastating picture of the legal process that ensues when local authorities intervene in situations of family trauma.

Lawyers, like doctors, are bound by strict rules of confidentiality that aren’t relaxed by time or distance. Ms Thornhill is barred not only from citing the true names of the adults and children involved but also from providing any physical descriptions, including of courtroom or council locations, that would allow readers to guess identities. She tells us at the outset, therefore, that the cases which she will recount in compelling detail are “fictitious creations… I’ve combined, for example, elements of the background of real family A with elements of the trauma suffered by the child or children of family B with a little of the courtroom experience of real client C”. Names, ethnicities, ages, genders of both children and adults have been altered accordingly.

That does create a problem for a literal-minded reader. Given the artificial construction of both the characters and their circumstances, how can we judge the verisimilitude of the events she narrates? Wouldn’t it be cleaner to embrace the fictional elements whole-heartedly and turn the reportage into an autobiographical novel?

POTENTIALLY HEARTBREAKING

On the other hand, Ms Thornhill’s experience as a jobbing barrister also limits the extent of her narrative. She is called in, often at no more than an evening’s notice, to present a case for a mother or father whose children are at risk of being put into care, whether for fostering or for outright adoption. She may have no previous knowledge of the client and will have no ongoing responsibility for what happens after the court has made its decision.

Subject to these limitations, however, Ms Thornhill describes both with admirable clarity and with human feeling the issues which the court has to deal with, and how the different actors – parents, guardians, social workers, lawyers, judges – present their points of view or react to others. The process of any court in action is intrinsically dramatic, and the subject matter – the future lives of traumatised and vulnerable children – is potentially heartbreaking. Ms Thornhill enhances the intimacy of her professional experience by counterpointing it with scenes from her own private life, having to balance her legal career against her own responsibility as single mother of a son who moves through adolescence to adulthood through the course of the book.

In the background, but having increasing impact as the years of economic austerity turn into the experience of Covid-19 lockdown and beyond, is the sense of mounting pressure on local authorities and their financially squeezed social services departments to cope with the ever-rising tide of family breakdown. In the book’s grimmest chapter, ‘Locum’, Ms Thornhill takes a temporary job as the senior in-house lawyer in a local authority child care team, required to progress multiple casework in a hot-desking open plan office under oppressive strip-lighting with a recently digitalised case management system that keeps going down. Most of the social workers around her are fellow locums. Reading her account, you have to wonder how children whose lives lack above all the ingredients of stability and reliability are going to be satisfactorily served by this chaotic environment. The potential for more child victims like Victoria Climbie or Baby P is palpable.

ENGROSSING, INSTRUCTIVE AND ENTERTAINING

There is a bigger question, though, which Ms Thornhill only faces up to in her epilogue: how could any child protection system, however well funded and professionally staffed, cope with the extent of family breakdown which is now occurring. She notes that the number of children in care in England increased by 30% between 2010 and 2023 (and at a still higher rate in Wales). She adds: “A lot of the children who come before the Family Court in public law cases are being raised by lone mothers, who could parent better if they weren’t constantly struggling to keep a roof over their children’s heads, food on their plates and money for heating in the pre-payment meter. Many of these women are struggling with their mental health and it’s not hard to see why.”

She suggests that better support for families living in poverty plus better children’s social care would end up not only reducing human misery but saving the higher social and economic costs incurred in dealing with the fall-out: prevention would be cheaper than the cure.

That may be so. What she doesn’t comment upon is the prevalence of lone mothering in the first place. A recent statistic: 50% of first-born children in this country are no longer living with their two original parents by the age of 14. That’s not to say that lone parents cannot bring up healthy, functioning and well-adjusted children. Not only was Ms Thornhill raising her own son in the absence of his father; her own parents too, she relates, had a “troubled” marriage which ended in a long-drawn-out divorce overshadowing her own childhood. But she perhaps feels that she’s not in a position to endorse the virtues of joint parenting in a single household. None of her sample cases exhibit such a set-up.

On the other hand, she rightly laments the absence of properly conducted research into outcomes of care decisions, including adoptions. However unpromising the prospects of a child being left within the household of a drug-addicted, abusive or otherwise feckless parent, what’s the evidence that being shuffled in and out of a local authority care system has better long-term consequences?

Ms Thornhill writes that at the start of her career as a barrister she felt “like an imposter in the legal world”, wondering whether she shouldn’t have pursued a career as a writer or activist instead. Fortunately, she seems to have kept these alternatives primed for eventual deployment. Her book is engrossing, both instructive and entertaining, and should appeal both to other professionals within the system and to the general reader.

JUDE MONTAGUE

Old, old bones

What have you got to say?

Nothing, you can’t talk.

You’re old, old bones.

Maybe you’d say, ‘You’re stupid.’

Or ‘We’re not stupid,

why do they think we’re stupid?’

Maybe we shouldn’t have kept you,

Old, old bones.

But one time you were special

and you walked about in flesh and blood

then we couldn’t get over the fact

that you died.

Now you can’t walk, you can’t talk

and things have changed

so much we can’t deal with it.

Old, old bones

though you can’t see or smell it

the blossom and lambs are here again

we’re getting a glorious spring.

Old, old bones

don’t dance, don’t sing.

Do what you do best,

lie in your box

and make us think.