Freedom News

The freedom to do as you’re told

Ever since the RMT announced a mighty three days of strike action on the railway lines the press has gone into overdrive in condemnation, followed by its loyal social media echo chamber. The regular lines are dusted off by miserable complainers from Falmouth to Aberdeen. “It should be illegal” … “the strikers are selfish” …

Fuel to the fire?

Will the energy crisis spark a wider revolt? The craft of being in power is a delicate one. To paraphrase P.T Barnum, you can piss off some of the people all of the time, you can piss off all of the people some of the time, but you can’t piss off all of the people

Jailing the Peaceful

James Brown, the Extinction Rebellion protestor and partially sighted paralympian who glued himself to the top of a plane has had his prison sentence reduced from twelve to four months by the Court of Appeal. “Yay! for kindly Lord Chief Justice Burnett!” I hear you cry, maybe. Well actually it ain’t that good. Let’s look

In defence of ‘In defence of Extinction Rebellion’

It would be prudent for me to open with the affirmation that this is an ‘opinion piece’. It is the opinion of one aging anarchist who has been active in class struggle and ecological resistance for the best part of four decades. As the bandwagon of political focus has shifted over the years, my own

In defence of Extinction Rebellion

“The next popular climate movement can only avoid a slow death if its politics are as red as they are green.” – Mark Montegriffo – Jacobin Magazine “TALK’S CHEAP, BUT IT TAKES MONEY TO BUY WHISKEY” – anon (trad) If the torrential rains, firestorms and heat domes didn’t cut through, the release of the IPCC

RECLAIM THE 90s!: Parallels and differences between the CJA and the policing bill and routes to resistance

There’s been a ton of commentary since the new policing bill was thrust into public consciousness by the police attack on the Sarah Everard vigil in Clapham. A lot of it has drawn comparisons with the struggle against Thatcher’s Poll Tax , a real solid working class victory we can all be proud of. However,

I was a teenage Luddite

Two books are on the black desk of my teenage bedroom. Age fifteen, I pick them up, hold them, put them back down. George Orwell’s 1984, of 1949 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, of 1932. A third one is invisible. I never owned it, reading it on the internet in a secret act in

HS2- high speed high tension

Over the last fortnight I have gone down a High Speed 2 research wormhole, sparked by the thought that I hadn’t heard much about what was going on lately with this bloated project. I started to google around and to read the media outside my usual reference points, which led to a fair few discoveries,

Notes from the US: COVID-19 edition

‘Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action’ (Goethe) Readers of Freedom News will be familiar with (and probably sick of hearing) accounts of the Trump administration’s misconduct during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. They were expected; they were worse than predicted. So this month’s ‘Notes from the US’ contains some of the salient moments,