Low traffic neighbourhood in London. (Credit: motoringresearch.com) Low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) involve using planters, camera gates, bollards or other measures to restrict motor vehicle use in residential streets. In London, over seventy were introduced in six...
Red Pepper
Review – Misbehaving
‘The spectacle is vulnerable,’ proclaimed the pamphlet Why Miss World? And so it proved to be on 20 November 1970, when activists from the nascent women’s liberation movement deployed rattles, chants, banners, flour, smoke bombs, stink bombs, ripe tomatoes and bundles...
Review – Work Won’t Love You Back
Sarah Jaffe is a rarity in the US. Not only is she one of the few journalists still reporting on the labour movement, but she sits on an even shorter list of writers intent on covering the everyday stories of working people through a lens of dignity and empowerment....
As mayor, I’ll fight to fix London’s broken housing system
Over summer 2020, there was a brief period when the government actually appeared to acknowledge Article 25 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines the right to housing. Rough sleeping was virtually eliminated overnight, and evictions were...
From Kill the Bill to an abolitionist future
Protestors at Kill the Bill demonstrations, credit: Subject Access Sarah Everard’s death, allegedly at the hands of an off-duty officer, and the violent police response to protestors in Clapham Common and Bristol over the past two weeks, have...
Free, safe, legal, local
Alliance for Choice activists protest outside Stormont. Credit: Emma Campbell Northern Ireland has finally emerged from the shadow of a British law that wreaked untold misery on the island of Ireland. On 22 October 2019, tired but buoyed, we celebrated that people...
My pandemic year in the rearview
This has certainly been a year of contrasts. The government has been criticised for its response to the coronavirus crisis, a new wave of Black Lives Matter protests has led to a wider discussion of systemic racism, and I have become a regular columnist at Red Pepper...
A feminist municipalist manifesto
From the report Feminise Politics Now! Municipalism means transforming how power is distributed in our societies. Our strategies question how politics is done, what political institutions do and who runs them. If we want to reclaim politics for common people, we must...
From the Commune to communalism
Barricade at the corner of Boulevard Voltaire and Boulevard Richard-Lenoir during the Paris Commune of 1871 In March 1871, as the second French empire disintegrated, women, workers, and members of the National Guard (a citizen neighbourhood militia) of Paris erected...
How the first Gulf War shaped the British left
Protests in 1990. Photo: Wellcome Images When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the British left was wrong-footed. Despite many British left groups not being particularly supportive of the USSR, the process of seeing the Soviet bloc collapse between 1989 and 1991...
In Chile, a feminist green wave rises
A protester wears a panuelo verde. Credit: Daniel Espinosa Guzman The ‘estallido social’ (social explosion) that kicked off in October 2019 was the largest outpouring of discontent witnessed in Chile since the Pinochet era. While the initial protests were sparked by a...
Lockdown Live: the politics of truth
Have we entered an age of post-truth politics? Can anything stop the spread of conspiracy theories and fake news? Facts, statistics and official figures are becoming an increasingly fragile foundation for democratic politics around the world. But this decay is...











