alan

🤷‍♂️ Andy Burnham, your #SNP26 pass is still waiting to be collected at the front desk.

What’s the difference between Obama and Trump? The man was responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths - why are we welcoming him with open arms? Wild.

Amendment 3 on Jewish safety, clarifying that members will not be targeted for attending Zionist synagogues, has fallen 648 to 1026. Not even close - some Jewish greens expected to leave the party now

Whilst I absolutely respect this gentleman's right to feel the way he does, and to define his identity in whatever way he sees fit, I can't help but question the proposition he presents as fact: “If you were born here, you're indigenous.” There is an important distinction, in my view, between belonging to a place and being indigenous to it. To say that someone born in a country belongs there is an absolute fact, it is home. But to suggest that birthplace alone renders questions of ancestry, historical continuity and indigeneity irrelevant seems to me to reduce something extremely complex to a single geographical fact. We must question what we lose when we do this. If people who arrived in a country only a few generations ago become indigenous simply by virtue of being born there, does the history of their ancestors before that migration somehow cease to exist? Do their ancestors, cultures, traditions, faith, languages and collective memories become irrelevant? Does everything that came before the moment of migration have to be discarded in order to establish belonging in the present? I find this argument particularly interesting when it is presented as a means of combating racism. If the objective is to create a society in which people are not judged by the colour of their skin or the circumstances of their ancestry, surely the answer cannot be to make ancestry itself something that must be forgotten. My identity does not diminish my sense of belonging here, nor does my knowledge of where I come from. If anything, knowing who I am, where my ancestors came from, what they endured, what they created and what they believed gives me a greater sense of rootedness. Knowledge tends to have the power to do that. A person who knows their history can understand themselves in a way that someone deliberately severed from their history cannot. Interestingly, this debate takes place at a time when we're taking things even further, this week we hear of a debate around the removal of words such as "mother" and "father" from our vocabulary. What is the destination of this journey? Why are we hellbent on creating Huxley's Brave New World? People detached from the past, from history, from any sense of belonging and knowledge of who they are, simply manufactured as commodities for the needs of the present. A person without memory may be easier to define, to sculpt into the image of this Brave New World, but a person who knows who they are, where they came from, and what they stand for is much harder to turn into a commodity. So far the debate is being approached from the point of view of white people holding on to their ethnic identity, and being painted as racist. But flip the argument, recall when the argument was made that we must allow more migrants into the country because white people were not willing to do the demeaning jobs migrants are doing. What would those people, in those demeaning jobs that are beneath everyone else in society, amount to once stripped of all history, all identity, all pride in ancestory? Just a convenient underbelly of society? The Epsilons of Huxley's Brave New World? It is impossible to do that to a people who are rooted in a sense of pride in the knowledge of who they are, what their history is. And I'm very suspicious of any argument that pushes us down a path in which all that is sacred to the human experience is stripped away.

I support a four state solution! From the river to the sea, Scotland,Wales, and Ireland will be free!