Mangled metal bars jut out onto the pavement, as if a wild animal had ripped open its cage. The creature responsible, however, is a mechanical beast. 

This is the view of guardrails I encounter on one of my regular cycling routes through the borough of Brent. 

I witness the evolution of them as they appear more twisted and destroyed, then are removed, and replaced entirely, only for the new rails to be disfigured again a few days later. 

As the moonlight shines through these bars, their distorted transformation is mesmerising, making my …

Post truth Trump who is vying to get a second term as president of America in 2025.

“Cat-eating Haitians” – the most recent buzzworthy but baseless claim amplified by the Trump campaign, sparked hyper-salivation amongst MAGA fans, and disbelief in the rest of us. While researching this latest xenophobic rumour, a Springfield, Ohio police report revealed how easily Trump’s post-truth world can be debunked.

In 2016, the same year Trump successfully campaigned to become the 45th POTUS, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year was “post-truth” and is defined as: “relating to or …

“Not a pretty picture: A Tory legacy of divide and rule” The Illegal Migration Bill highlights a party that has a history of xenophobic policies.

The UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s controversial Illegal Migration Bill has caused a lot of concern with protests and open letters condemning its harshness, even exposing division within the Tory Party itself. If the Bill is to become a law, in its current state, it contravenes European and international human rights laws. Yet this policy is part of a tradition of xenophobia in Tory party politics …

“He sits at his table long as a fable planning a banquet of death too sharp are his claws too aglow are his eyes Putin of the great war cry dragging his carcass of history.”

The war in Ukraine has brought together a unified international stance that is saying no to conflict, no to imperialism and no to Putin! This was never more apparent than when poets took a stand in London on 27 March at the JW3 centre, to raise funds for Ukraine in a Poem-a-Thon. Sponsored poets read in relay …

Disturbed by the number of masks of varying types that I have seen since the pandemic when walking around London I decided to do a small experiment.
I wanted to see just how many I could find within 15 minutes. Without barely even looking I found six. This is a disturbing number of them to come across if you think of how short that time period is.
This is of course just a microcosm of a bigger issue and a report released this year by Greenpeace states that “Since masks became compulsory, it’s estimated …

The effect of the pandemic must be combatted not just through medicinal but monetary means.
Benjamin Maslow who created his hierarchy of needs stated in his book The farther reaches of human nature that “The need for ‘dignity, for example, can be seen as a fundamental human right in the same sense that it is a human right to have enough calcium or enough vitamins to be healthy.”
These words written in 1971 have a very poignant meaning in today’s society during a pandemic which has exposed not just a broken …

The March budget presented free ports as the remedy to economic uncertainty in the face of Brexit and COVID, but are they a good solution?
The Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak’s budget speech hailed free ports, where imported goods are exempt from tariffs, as a silver bullet to fix the economic uncertainty caused by both Brexit and COVID. Finding viable economic solutions is imperative during this time for the UK government which has been criticised for letting down fishermen in the Brexit deal, as well as being criticised for not acting …

The new year continues with the pandemic being used by some authoritarian African leaders as a way to cling to power. 
Saturday saw Yoweri Musevini win his sixth term in office after the election was postponed in 2020 due to the risk of Covid, with Mr Musevini telling Ugandan NBS Television that “To have elections when the virus is still there… It will be madness.” However, after much deliberation it was decided that the election would actually go ahead in 2021 despite the virus persisting into the new year with Uganda’s …

Mickey vs Donald.

The first time that the Tory Party finally mentioned the housing crisis, since the snap election, was during  Hammond’s November budget. However unlike these elitists, who clearly only care about their influential wealthy friends, most of us deal with the problem of affordable housing in this city and country on an every day basis. And some of us, like the artist known as EnterHUMAN, highlight the issue in their work.
Guardians: the school we lived in, was her insightful documentary photography exhibition, that took place at the BSMT Gallery space from 19 to 23 May. It highlighted the …

For over 20 years activists within the intersex community have been calling for changes to how operations are performed on those born with the condition and last year a United Nations convention condemned the practice that it describes as “Intersex Genital Mutilation” within 15 countries including the UK.

No sooner had China put a ban on ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings, than the following week the FCA issued a statement on their website about how to use them. Should UK companies who use this fundraising system be worried?
Initial Coin Offerings are a means for cryptocurrency companies and Blockchain industries to crowdfund. ICOs release crypto tokens, which are commonly exchanged for Bitcoin, Ether, other crypto currencies and even fiat money as well. The end result sees the company receiving their capital and the participants their crypto token shares, which they …

Donald Trump’s policy towards Europe is like a glaring white avalanche careering down a hill. The US is on a path to an isolationist freeze, set in motion by Trump’s nationalist rhetoric in which the president is considering changing long-standing foreign policy and this is starting to have a powerful impact on the political landscape of Europe.

The room that I currently write this in will probably no longer be here in a few weeks. The building is going to be torn down. I am a property guardian in a school in central Hackney. What was meant to be six months of accommodation turned out to last just over a year.
I was lucky on that point and on the location, Hackney my eternal home, and also the fact that I live with eight other individuals who are great.
They, like myself, will be out of a home but …

Even though some Eurosceptic parties in Europe have seen an ebb within support from voters recently, the changing political landscape could mean that their political presence and influence within the union might be irreversible.
The 2008 recession formed a catalyst for Eurosceptic parties across the political spectrum on the continent. Support rose due to a number of factors such as the conditions of imposed austerity and dissatisfaction with the establishment ruling parties and their policies.
Yet currently some eurosceptic parties’ support is on the decline. Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, Front National …

 
Putting personal political perspectives aside, I hate to say that I was right in my prediction that Ed Milliband would not win the last election. But his influence certainly left his mark on the party with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters, yet I still feel that it is not enough to resurrect Old Labour policies. The electoral map of 2015, pictured to the left, proves the point that we do live with rose-tinted glasses in our leftist island of London engulfed by a sea of blue.
Jeremy Corbyn is a …

I laughed myself silly on this Telegraph piece on how people have resorted to make money or to prove the existence of a supernatural being. Try photoshop, vinegar art, and just plain coincidence.
So I tried an experiment and found my own faces without trick photography or fabrication, problem was I only got skulls, demons, monsters and no messiahs!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

It was a cold Tuesday and high above the hustle and bustle of Mare Street people reclined in couches in the Hackney Picture House Cinema to watch the young and the old showcase their films at the LSFF. The festival, which this year ran from 9 to18 January, had been going all week with many categories. That night I saw the screenings of the New Shorts Lo-budget mayhem category. The LSFF’s website had this to say about the category: “ […] a selection of 26 out-there gems from bad taste …

It was while reading the salmon coloured pages of the Financial Times that I came across an excellent piece by Tony Barber in the Global Insight section entitled:“Baltic states fear Kremlin concern for their ethnic Russians”.
This FT piece sparked a memory of a point that I had raised to a Goldsmith’s lecturer, when I attended a guest class in leadership this year. I spoke about the fact that Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Crimea 2014 were the age old dictatorial excuse of defending ones own indigenous population in other corners of the …

Brett Bailey’s planned Barbican installation, Exhibit B has come under fire from criticisms that it is racist as it shows black models in poses as slaves.
Yet to see is one thing and to understand is quite another. Bailey has been known for his other work that confronts racism and colonialism.
I personally support the exhibition, just because we live in an age of PC does not mean that prejudices in all their forms do not exist. PC has become a blanket, a way to cover up the evils of the past …

 
It all started with a brown trench coat, a tuft of ginger hair and a white dog. Yep it was while growing up reading Tintin annuals that I became enthralled with the concept of reporting and the world of journalism. Here was a character who did not just travel the world but he righted wrongs, fought against injustice and had some bloody interesting friends.
As I got older I started to get more involved with researching society and politics and to analyse the world that we live in and why it works …

 
Journalist James Foley’s death highlights a bigger problem for freelancers out there desperate to put themselves in harms way to make a living for what they love! 
Read the Guardian piece by Martin Chulov, it illustrates the lack of care and of training by news organisations as they quite happily take the stories of those on the frontline and pay them peanuts in return.
Who is the real cannon fodder in these conflicts? Many of us just sit back and gobble up information easily provided to us and never realise what someone went through for …

 
Press, smut peddlers have their whole operation opened and dissected by Rich Peppiatt, former tabloid reporter, in a new documentary called One Rogue Reporter. Shown as part of the films of the East End Film Festival at the Rio Cinema in Dalston last weekend.
Peppiatt worked for the Daily Star  tabloid until a road to Damascus moment that made him see the error of his ways. In his former job he was forced to be a hater inventing negative sensationalist stories on Muslims. He stood up, said enough, had his resignation letter …

 
 
Daniel Ginns expresses his artistic versatility through continuous line drawings and Mark Rothko wall photos. Recent work was for the Tate Britain as part of a project created by Scottish artist Alan Johnston called Tactile Geometry.
Ginns and I went for a cup of tea to talk about nature over nurture, chance, and what the future holds for an art graduate. The 24-year-old graduated last year with a BA in Illustration, from the Camberwell College of Art. His distinct look is a colourful bandana tied around his forehead to keep his wild …

One of London’s last independent cinemas, the Rio in Dalston, hosted shorts by two visionary women filmmakers at a private screening on Sunday 21 July.
The two directors portrayed gang life in the city through different approaches. Dionne Edwards, 27, from Bristol, who moved to London when she was 18, took the fiction route. Eva-Marie Elg, 30, who came to London in 2003 from just outside the industrial town of Borlänge in Sweden, took the documentary route.
Edward’s film Got Got, shot in colour with a running time of just under 13 minutes, was …

Dr Benedetta Brevini, responsible for communication in the Media Reform Coalition (MRC), a coalition consisting of 20 different organisations from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to the Hacked Off group headed by actor Hugh Grant, says the outcome of a Royal Charter  as the new press regulatory body wasn’t quite what  they had envisioned.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in a noisy café in North London, Dr Brevini sipped her coffee and with a serious look on her face said: “This Royal Charter is an ancient constitutional way of regulating. From a …

Taught by volunteers and inclusive to all, squat schools provide an alternative to Cameron’s Big Society free schools, without cost to the taxpayer.
Talia Rose, 28, who has been an English Foreign Language (EFL) teacher for the last nine years, volunteered as a facilitator in free schools in squats. She passionately exclaimed how she became “part of a collective that did an arts free school in the building behind the Bank of Ideas.”
In 2011, the Occupy movement devised the Bank of Ideas, a free school held at the disused UBS office …

Flat Earth believers have been around since biblical times and even photos of Earth taken from space have not deterred them.
Michael N Wilmore, 27, was born in London and moved to Ireland in his teens. He is the vice president of the Flat Earth Society, which he joined in 2006. Wilmore first went into the society as a devil’s advocate, but after about four or five months he was a convert. He said: “I believed in a round Earth theory, I went to school and learnt the same things as …

Seeing the world through Stjepan Sedlar’s eyes requires a lot of patience and having no fear of the dark. His parents are from Croatia and this Hamburg born photographer, who lives in Berlin, would stray into parks at night taking colour photos without lighting.
It is late afternoon on a cold Sunday in Berlin in the area of Prenzlauerberg. Sedlar, 29, has medium length dark hair and stubble. He rolls a cigarette from his tobacco pouch and proceeds to light it as the last rays of sun begin to fade out of view.
“The …

 
Propaganda is a documentary purported to have been made in North Korea with images of decadent western lifestyle, capitalist culture and a message of salvation. A couple claiming to be North Korean dissidents approached a translator in Seoul handing her a DVD on condition that she translate and disseminate it.
All the hundreds of images in the documentary are  from TV and archive footage and  revolve around a North Korean scientist, whose identity has been concealed, who explains under different headings what is wrong with the western world.
From reality TV shows to …

 
Ruggero Galtarossa is from a small city in Northern Italy called Padova. He is 22 years old he has been living in London for two and a half years. He is in his third year studying journalism and sociology for a BA joint honours degree.
The Italians have an exceptionally high average life expectancy – above 74 years for men and 80 years for women. We talked about a special village in the North called Stoccareddo whose inhabitants do not suffer from heart disease or diabetes and live into their 90s …

The Paralympics brought with them a positive change in attitudes towards disabled people, yet there is still a long way to go.
The French company Atos, contracted by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to reasess the situation of 2.6 million people on incapacity benefits by 2014, was one of the sponsors of the Paralympics. The government claimed that over £600m were overspent on benefits each year for people who no longer qualified for them. The company’s treatment of those it deemed “fit for work” resulted in some suicides as …

Most people have some idea of what an addiction is, but sex doesn’t seem to be one that first comes to mind.
When Steve McQueen’s Shame, a film about a sex addict living in New York, hit the cinema earlier this year, it provoked a lot of controversy. It seems that sex addiction is still a taboo subject that most of us have never have been confronted with.
Medical organisations have been debating whether “sex addiction” really is a condition, or whether it is just an excuse for a high sex …

 
A senior Muslim cleric from the UK was threatened with arrest by an extremist in Saudi Arabia last month.
Dr Usama Hasan, a physics lecturer at Middlesex University and Senior Researcher of the Quilliam Foundation, a Muslim counter-extremism group, was on a pilgrimage in Mecca, when a former president of the Muslim Society of London’s City University confronted him.
Hasan said: “I was accosted by one of these extremists after I bumped into him and he tried to call the Saudi police on me. He was a part of some of the …

Before instruments there was nature, and Ebe Oke is an artist who lets certain elements of this world resound through his music.
It was this unique sound and his voice that caught the attention of Geoff Travis, the founder of Rough Trade Records, who offered the US musician a development deal. Travis introduced Oke to the guitarist Phil Manzenera of Roxy Music, who he then collaborated and recorded music with. Recently, Oke has been picked for the line-up at Brian Eno’s Punkt festival in Kristiansand, Norway in September.
I met Ebe Oke for an …

Donnacha De Long is president of the NUJ and last week he chaired a debate on the topical Leveson inquiry for the Benn Lectures. He became President in April 2011 after being a National Union of Journalists (NUJ) member since he was 19. As his role as president is coming to an end, his Irish revolutionary roots seem to be pulling him back to his homeland. He has started to write a book about his family history, focusing on their involvement in the 1916 uprising and the Irish War of …

 
An information bill that is being debated in the next few months in South Africa could put democracy to the most extreme test.
Nelson Mandela came out of prison in the 90s at the end of apartheid, which was a state led separation and oppression of non-whites, and assumed power in 1994 with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party. For 27 years he had carried a vision that all citizens would be equal under the law and that a free press would finally be allowed to flourish without hindrance from …

 
The sound of a brass band greeted me as I walked into Queen Mary University’s Library Square for the Anarchist Book Fair. This is the  fifth year running that this event has been held at the campus in Bethnal Green.
The book fair was started in 1983 by a group of organisers who were involved in the Socialist book fair, which no longer exists, and as anarchists they felt that they wanted their own event that represented them. Like all book fairs, this was to be a place where likeminded people …

 
 
Dynamite comes in small packages and Stéphane Hessel’s book Time for Outrage! is a testament to this, delivering an exceptionally powerful political punch in just 37 pages.
The metaphor of explosions are extremely fitting here as the author survived world war two as a resistance fighter in France amongst other things blowing up Nazi railways and trains. As well as that he is also Jewish and with the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s these two points did obviously not put him in good stead with the occupiers. The Gestapo did …

Wikileaks has lost its capital and possibly its founder, yet a few months ago at the Frontline club Assange seemed untouchable. The  talk was between Julian Assange and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and was hosted by Amy Goodman of  Democracy Now! on 2 July 2011  at the Troxy, a beautiful art deco theatre in Bounders Green, East London.Vaughn Smith, the founder of the Frontline Club (Click link to see video of event) and personal friend of Assange, coined it, “the largest Frontline event to date.”
About 2000 people turned up and at …

When We Walk on Ice start playing their captivating tight sound, it is hard to believe that only two souls are creating it.
Their unique Indie sound reminds me of at least two bands that I love: Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star.  We Walk on Ice have a similar ethereal feel to their songs which is then punctuated by experimental jagged guitar riffs that pull you back into this plane.
It was a hot 29-degree Sunday night and I went to watch their gig at Hoxton Bar and Kitchen.  I walked into a …

Since the recession of 2008 there seems to be more than just financial issues at stake. The disillusionment with traditional politics has resulted in hung parliaments in Britain and in some countries in Europe.
The knock on effect of this lack of support has seen voters trying to find solutions. Some have even turned to the extreme right as the economic woes of countries are blamed on scapegoats through xenophobia and Islamiphobia.
Right wing democratic governments in Germany, Britain and France have spoken about the failures of the multicultural ‘experiments’ in their …

 
An exhibition about life in a Communist-era  town in the former East Germany is highlighting what its organisers claim is the real nature of the Prime Minister’s much vaunted ‘Big Society.’
The exhibition at the Red Gallery in Shoreditch displays the changing nature of the murals that once adorned the walls of a factory in the small town of Schwedt. During the Communist-era they portrayed image of  hope and community – but after re-unification that optimism faded and the town went into economic decline.
On show are copies of the murals, as …

Streets full of noise and faces full of smiles – that was the picture that was apparent in London at the student protests on the 10th November. Even the sun was out to illuminate the way.
The feel was like every other march that makes this revolutionary city such a special place: camaraderie, unity. It was apparent that a lot of young hopefuls for university who looked old enough to be finishing their A-Levels were out there due to sheer survival for the outcome of their future.
Since the Coalition government has …

“The Call” was the national anthem and the voice of the orange, white and blue the colours of the oppressive regime that was South Africa. The masses beaten into submission by the nightstick known as apartheid.
I was very young in the 1980s when I saw the photographs in the papers showing protesters in the streets of Cape Town being pushed back with water cannons, rubber bullets. The Afrikaner and his regime: their distorted dream of “Separate but equal”, indeed, for whom?
I was younger when my parents told me about the exile …