Kester Brewin

Category: Politics

  • Mutiny | Withdrawal of Labour in the Age of Zero Hours

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    I’m no firebrand when it comes to trades union activity (though I am a lead rep in the education union I am a part of) but when a Tory government starts rattling sabres and threatening even more draconian legislation to outlaw strikes, it has me worried. Last night I finally got round to watching The…

  • Getting High…in 1753 | The Gin Craze

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    ‘In all history there’s never been a culture in the world that didn’t have some drug of some kind to lift people out of themselves.’ Poverty, war, terrifying religion and women experiencing liberation… Could so equally have written Getting High about the Gin craze era of the mid 1700s 🙂 In Our Time, brilliant, as…

  • Post Truth 1

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    Two stills from Adam Curtis’ excellent polemical documentary, Hypernormalisation.  They’re from a section on the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, and the parallel collapse of any sense that any grand claims could be trusted, among a people who had been asked to believe one pack of lies, and then revolt, only to –…

  • Radical Politics: Position and Momentum

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    Earlier today, Cameron Freeman – who runs a Facebook group on Radical Theology responded to something I’d posted about Nigel Farage’s resignation with the following: Kester, I’d really like to hear sometime how do you mesh your (very) radical theology with you’re support for the centralized undemocratic control of an external top-down power like the…

  • ‘Dervish at the Door’ | Farage and His Tired Jokes

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    ‘We haggle and make jokes, to keep what we own for ourselves’ This poem by Jelaluddin Rumi (1207 – 1273) speaks rather beautifully, I think, to a picture of modern Britain these past few days, to our too-often selfish and soulless relationship to those who have come to our borders in need. ‘A deserted place.’ Sterile.…

  • When Democracy Delivers the Abyss, We Need More Democracy

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    ‘We must respect the democratic will of the people.’ So said Chancellor George Osborne this morning, after just shy of 52% of the 72% of the British population voted to leave the EU. A vote was held, the results were counted, and the fundamental principle of democracy requires that we respect the decision. But what…