Environmental activist Wangari Maathai. Photo: Gianluigi Guercia I joined the Kenyan feminist movement in my 20s, inspired by the Women’s Conference in Nairobi in 1985 and by powerful women’s and other progressive movements around the world. I was lucky to be living...
Image: Unite Debt Advice Network Debt advice is a crucial public service that provides a lifeline for people drowning in debt. However, proposals to change how debt advice is funded and delivered are threatening massive job losses and cuts to support services across...
Pimlico Academy, where students protested racist and discriminatory policies in March 2021. Credit: ClemRutter In September 2021, a school in South London attracted media attention for its prohibitive policy on spoken language, which targeted a number of linguistic...
School strike for climate in Australia. Credit: Julian Meehan For as long as there has been civilisation, there have been people predicting its collapse. From the Maya’s great cycle to the second coming of Christ, whether it be by flood, comet, or the rising of the...
Pinhead from Hellraiser (1987) (Credit: New World Pictures) To know capitalism is to experience horror. This remains as true now, in the early decades of the 21st century, when accumulation still depends on the twinned violence of expropriation and exploitation, as it...
Image: Oedipus and the Sphinx (Internet Book Archive) The Sphinx of ancient mythology was a fearful monster who waylaid passers-by and ripped them apart if they couldn’t solve the riddle it put to them. It was a good deal more alarming than the docile statue that...
A poster on work suicides by the Hazards Campaign Group In September 2021, an inquest in Halifax heard that a 24-year-old call-centre worker had been suffering from workplace stress and anxiety in the weeks before she took her own life. According to her GP, she had...
This essay was first published in the Autumn 2021 issue of Red Pepper Why did I leave the Labour Party after 40 years and move beyond my federalist, German-style vision of regional autonomy to become a member of the Northern Independence Party, whose vision is an...
The Witches Sabbath by David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690) Horror has always been with us. As a genre it serves a particular human need to provide us with a vicarious and safe thrill, but as a cultural artefact it introduces us to ideas that help to secure social...
Dawn Ray’d playing live (Credit: Thomas Brooker) If horror is marked by a fascination with the dangerous and the macabre, then few forms of music embody that spirit like black metal – a controversial subgenre of heavy metal characterised by a raw, uncompromising...
Sadako Yamamura from Ringu (1998) (Credit: Toho) Though increasingly marketable since the turn of the millennium, ‘Asian horror’ is neither a homogeneous category nor a regionally inclusive label. The term ‘Asian horror cinema’ has been largely used to refer to scary...
(A Covid mutual aid group in London. Credit: Youth Deliver.) As Covid-19 hit the UK and we entered the apocalyptic scene- scape of bare supermarket shelves and boarded-up pubs, it was hard not to recognise that our economic system for organising society had failed....