Lets hope Clacton puts Farage in the Bin and the Bin in Parliament!

Whatever the result of tomorrow's by election in Clacton, it will be an embarassment for Nigel Farage who won't get what he wants no matter the result or how he tries to portray it.  

Due to his own ego and self-interest, taxpayers' money has been wasted on an unnecessary political stunt called in the constituency after Farage decided to quit, not because he'd had enough of politics, for we all know Farage has never really been interested in his constituents, jetting off around the globe to meet the likes of Trump, but because Farage launched a stunt to save his own skin. 

The charlatan has seen his party's poll lead collapse in a number of polls, trailing both the Tories and Labour in the latest YouGov poll, while his party rips itself apart.  Far from the victory that he thought was so inevitable at the next general election, Farage now faces the prospect of a defeat.

He thought the by-election would allow him to reframe the debate and dominate the headlines, instead Farage has found himself wrong footed by political circumstances. 

Whatever the result tomorrow, his party is now trailing in the polls, and his only way out seems to be trying to form a pact with Restore, whose leader he unceremoniously kicked out of Reform in a public feud.  Now he wants us to believe it was not his choice to quit but rather that he was 'forced out by the political establishment'.

Farage maintains he has done nothing wrong and wants to recontest his seat to let voters judge his actions. Nigel Farage’s decision to resign his seat in the Commons and trigger a by-election followed months of political controversy sparked by reports published by The Guardian and the BBC on 29 April. The reports, published days before voting in Council elections in England and in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd elections, revealed that Farage had received a €5 million gift from Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based cryptocurrency investor and the wealthiest British-born person on The Sunday Times Rich List  

When the story broke, Farage argued the funds were a gift intended to pay for personal security and a ‘reward’ from Harborne for his leadership in the Brexit campaign. He insisted that there had been no need to declare the funds as he had not been a member of parliament at the time they were received.  

On 30th April, the Electoral Commission indicated that it was contemplating an investigation into the matter. With elections a week off the timing could not have been worse for Farage and the Reform Party.Less than a week after the elections the UK Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards announced its intention to open an investigation into whether Nigel Farage should have declared the money he had received after he had returned to Parliament as an MP in 2024.  

During the Makerfield by-election in June, the Labour Party used the publicity surrounding Harborne’s funding to attack Farage and Reform. The Labour Party chairperson Anna Turley, a long-standing ally of Andy Burnham wrote to Nigel Farage urging him to “stop evading reasonable scrutiny” over the €millions received from Christopher Harborne. In the letter Turley suggested: “It’s time (Farage) ended his deafening silence and came clean with the public as to what’s going on here, he can’t keep dodging questions and changing his story.”  

On 5 July the Sunday Times broke another story on support received by Farage revealing he had been provided with staff, support to boost his social presence, security, and accommodation by George Cotterell. 

Cotterell a British cryptocurrency entrepreneur and a long-standing Farage ally had been convicted by the US authorities in 2017 of wire fraud. Two days later, on 7 July Farage announced that he would vacate his seat to trigger a by-election which he would recontest, saying the “people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions”.    

Immediately after Farage announced his decision something of a consensus began to emerge that he had made a huge  miscalculation. Much of the UK mainstream media were scathing of Farage’s decision portraying it as an act of desperation. 

The by-election was characterised as a ‘circus’ with Farage as ringmaster. The Economist characterised the decision as a blatant attempt to distract. The BBC questioned whether Farage’s resignation was “honourable or a psychological game”.  

The main political parties in the UK decided against contesting the by-election. A labour Party  spokesperson called the by-election a “circus” and made it clear that the Party would not stand a candidate. The Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch accused Farage of triggering the by election for his personal advantage rather than to serve the people of Clacton who “deserved better representation” . 

The Conservative Party would not contest the be-election because it would not dance to Nigel Farage’s tune”. In a letter addressed to the voters of Clacton Ms Badenoch accused Farage of calling the by-election “not to help you, but to help himself”, suggesting: “Mr Farage wants the people of Clacton to settle his problems for him”. She promised that when the investigation process has run its course “and there is a genuine contest, we (the Conservatives) will be there”.  

The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey said there should be no by-election until the funding accusations against Farage were fully examined. Announcing that his party had decided not to contest the by-election Davey urged all parties to “stand aside and refuse to give oxygen to Farage’s vanity project”.  

The leader of the UK Green Party Zack Polanski. Dismissed the by-election as “a desperate stunt from a desperate politician whose lifetime of grifting is finally catching up with him” and announced “the Greens will play no part in (Farage’s) political circus.But when the major political parties denounced Farage’s move as a political stunt and boycotted the Clacton-on-Sea election in southeastern England, a trash-talking comedian  named  Binface was launched into prime position as default challenger. 

After  the chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves accepted Farage’s resignation, she said: “If he wants to spend the summer arguing with a bin, I won't stop him.”

The man who hopes to be the U.K.’s next prime minister is probably going  to retain his seaside fiefdom of Clacton .but his self-styled “people versus the establishment” electoral gambit is sowing some seeds of discontent even among loyal supporters. Fear of Clacton becoming a “laughing stock” is a common refrain at this  current time  .

Farage, leader of the far-right Reform UK party, faces 33 other candidates in the record-breaking contest in Clacton, but his most prominent challenger is Count Binface, the satirical alter ego of comedian Jon Harvey.  Farage triggered the vote by resigning as Clacton’s member of Parliament on July 7 over mounting scrutiny over his financial affairs. 

The result is expected in the early hours of Friday after polls close at 10 p.m. Thursday.  The only published poll of the constituency, conducted by Survation in July, put Farage at 73% and Binface at 20%.  

Farage, who has framed the investigation  into  him  as an “establishment hit job” and a media-driven “witch-hunt,” argues that the voters who elected him should decide whether he did anything wrong.  

“The people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions,” he said. “This will be a people versus the establishment by-election.”  But the absence of the main parties has weakened that argument.  Instead, the ballot includes a collection of smaller parties, independents and novelty candidates, producing a record 34-person field.  

Count Binface, who has run against prime ministers past and present, was the first to throw his bucket in the ring when Reform UK leader Nigel Farage abruptly quit Parliament and said he would seek re-election to clear his name over financial allegations. 

 “Game on, Nige,” Binface declared soon after Farage, portraying himself as the victim of a witch hunt, said he would represent the people against the establishment.  

And  as the major political parties denounced Farage’s move as a political stunt and boycotted the Clacton-on-Sea election in southeastern England, the trash-talking comedian was launched into prime position as default challenger. He has been on a nonstop media blitz since.  “I’m the only fresh thing on the menu,” Binface told The Associated Press on a day of interviews with reporters from Japan, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany. “You’re all sick of these politicians, as good as they’re trying to be, but you know you need something different, a little bit of secret sauce.”  

Under Binface’s black cape, rubbish bin and ample body armor that looks straight out of a low-budget sci-fi film is a middle-aged comedian named Jon Harvey trying to keep his cool during a sweaty summer.  You’d never know who was in there from talking to his alter ego. Binface never breaks character, and he delivers snarky ripostes when challenged to lift the lid.  “Has anyone here seen ‘Return of the Jedi’?” he asked a BBC host in reference to the “Star Wars” sequel in which Darth Vader is unmasked. “Nobody wants to know what’s under the recycling. ... It’s absolutely putrefying.”  

Harvey is a married father of two who grew up in London and studied the classics at Oxford. He has been a TV writer on the political comedy “The Thick of It” and the humorous news quiz “Have I Got News for You.” He’s the author of a sports memoir written after his brother’s death, as well as Binface’s memoir: “What on Earth? An Alien’s Guide to Fixing Britain.”  

In a country where almost any adult citizen can run for office — regardless of where they live — eccentric candidates are a celebrated electoral tradition. On the 3-foot-long Clacton ballot, there are no fewer than three members of the Monster Raving Loony Party, including Nick the Incredible Flying Brick and Baron von Thunderclap.  

Harvey’s turn in politics began almost a decade ago when he blasted to Earth from the so-called planet of Sigma IX as Lord Buckethead to run for the House of Commons seat then held by Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May. She won handily, but Binface rocketed to fame and landed on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.”  

But the use of Buckethead, borrowed from a “Star Wars” parody, ended in “an unfortunate battle on the planet Copyright.” He was reincarnated as Binface to take on Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.  

He twice challenged London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who proclaimed in his 2024 victory speech that he was the first person in British politics to win successive victories over Binface.  “Believe me, he made me work hard for it,” Khan quipped.  

In June, Binface lost a parliamentary special election to Andy Burnham, who quickly replaced Keir Starmer as prime minister when Starmer was forced out after Farage’s party battered his Labour Party in local and regional elections.  

Binface, leader of the “Recyclons” on his home planet, continues to reuse items of past campaign manifestos that feature a mix of absurd and hyperlocal policy offerings that don’t necessarily resonate with a global audience.  

Among the more relatable points, he promises to “cut your taxes, and raise everyone else’s,” build one affordable home and nationalize singer Adele. One item that has raised some eyebrows is a vow to relocate the hand dryer in the men’s restroom at the Crown & Treaty pub in Uxbridge to a more sensible location. 

 “Do you want to be using the urinal and have another human blasting your bits with insanely hot air?” he said.  His main selling point is that he’s not Farage, though he has opted not to directly attack his main opponent. Instead, his platform takes not-so-subtle digs at the populist often pictured with a pint of beer.  

In reference to the gift Farage didn’t declare when he was elected, which is the source of a parliamentary investigation, Binface said he would not accept 5 million-pound ($6.7 million) gifts from “crypto billionaires (on Earth).” 

He would also bar members of Parliament who resign midterm from running in the subsequent by-elections and promised to spend more time in Clacton than Washington, D.C., a reference to Farage’s trips to the U.S., where he considers President Donald Trump an ally.  Binface, if elected, has no interest in dealing with Trump: “He’s awful.” But he would “love to cement” the so-called special relationship between Britain and the U.S. “with a galactic union.”  “You’ve still got the Atlantic Ocean. I can’t do much about that, but yes, I’d love to foster better relations,” he said.

With Farage’s popularity collapsing across the country, Britons nationally want a victory for Count  Binface  and to  me  this makes  perfect  sense, I of  course,  fully endorse and  hope  that  Count Binface can  hand Farage the most humiliating defeat in British political history and  end  his  political  career  for  good.  

There are people in the UK who don’t know where their next meal is coming from and Farage this fraudulent grifter is trying to tell us he has our backs and understands.Farage  has  no  actual policies, he  only  offers  a  lot  of  noise, with no  substance  at  all.

His  party is off the scale - of corruption, of advertising spending, of lies and propaganda, of departure from any semblance of the truth.  Fuck off  Farage  we don’t need your faux fawning and divisive hate. Your  just  a stooge. I refuse to support a fake, opportunist, con artist playing a politician,  fighting a bin, while his little band of sycophants are frantically posting their support as though the fate of Western civilisation depends on it.  

The rest of us are simply waiting for this charade to finish so the standard probe into Farage can get back underway. Tomorrow lets hope Claction puts Farage in the Bin and the Bin in  Parliament!  

Whatever happens on Thursday it's a lose lose for Farage a paid up member of the Establishment,Win and they're waiting for him. Lose and he's toast. 

Tomorrow Farage will get a bloody nose, the conman grifter who has done nothing for Clactonians and  even  if  he  wins  the by-election,it will mark the beginning of the end for Farage and Reform and it couldn’t happen to a nastier more divisive lying party.

Either way Farage will always be remembered as the guy who had to throw everything at it to beat a man with a bin on his head,  and once the people of Clacton have voted, they’ll never see Farage  again  as he will be off to the USA again to suck up to Trump.

Celebrating the life of Rebel Poet Hugh MacDiarmid (11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978)

 

Hugh MacDiarmid the pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve one of the most important poets in Scottish history was born on August 11, 1892, in Langholm, Dumfriesshire where his father worked as a postman . 

He attended school at Langholm Academy, and among his teachers was the composer Francis George Scott, who would later set many of Hugh MacDiarmid's lyrics to music. From Langholm, Grieve moved on to become a student-teacher at a school in Edinburgh. Here his literary abilities were recognised and encouraged by George Ogilvie, whose played an influential part in Grieve's life for many years. 

Having entered journalism, he began his writing career as a journalist in Wales,contributing to the socialist newspaper The Merthyr Pioneer run by Labour party founder Keir Hardie.

He  enlisted  in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1915  serving  as a non-combatant in Salonika, Greece and France.  As a soldier in the war, he developed both an intense hatred of the British empire as well as a profound sympathy for his fellow Celts, especially the Irish, whose leaders were being killed in the wake of the Easter Rising: “The picture of Casement hanged, and Connolly taken out on a stretcher to be executed, are two of the great rallying points of my spirit in its eternal and immeasurable hatred of everything English”.

He survived the war and was relieved from service suffering from cerebral malaria. He survived that and became a full-time journalist in Scotland, and married Margaret  Skinner. The  couple  settled  in  Montrose  where  Grieve  worked  for the Montrose Review, becoming also a town councillor and Justice of the Peace. 

It was in Montrose in 1922 that Grieve created MacDiarmid, the most famous  of  his  many  pseudonyms. Other pseudonyms used by MacDiarmid included Isobel Guthrie, A.K. Laidlaw, Arthur Leslie, Gillechriosd Mac a’Greidhir and James Maclaren.

As editor and publisher he produced the anthology Northern Numbers (1920−2), and  the  magazines  Scottish  Chapbook  (1922−3),  Scottish  Nation  (1923)  and  Northern  Review  (1924). His  first  published  work  as  author,  Annals  of  the  Five  Senses,  a  collection  of  avant-garde  short  stories  and  poetry,  appeared  under his family name of Grieve in 1923. However he found his true voice as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid when, influenced by Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary  of  the  Scottish  Language,  he  began  to  write  experimental  lyrics  in  Scots. 

According to Douglas F. Young, even at this early stage in his career, there was an expressed ambition in MacDiarmid to place his poetic talents at the service of Scottish independence:  The whole issue of political nationalism in Scotland at this time was linked with the question of nationalism in literature. Thus MacDiarmid, with his faith in the individuality of the Scottish people, was leading a campaign for the revival of a national literature which would reflect this Scottish individuality and would be written in a language distinctively Scottish.

In the 1920s, MacDiarmid rejected English in favour of Lallans, a hybrid or ‘synthetic’ Scots, in which he wrote his masterpieces Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926),and  A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) His mission was nothing less than the cultural reawakening of a Scotland he saw mired in material and spiritual poverty – a tartan-waving, kilted-kitsch, Burns-night parody of itself distracted by football and religion.  

MacDiarmid hurled poetic abuse not at Robert Burns https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/01/celebrating-radical-robbie-burns.html but at the Burns night celebrants who ignored the realities of Scotlands’s social deprivation and the work and words of Burns himself. 

 “Mair nonsense has been uttered in his name/ Than in ony’s barrin liberty and Christ.”  (More nonsense has been uttered in his name/ Than in anyone’s barring liberty and Christ.)  He castigated the self-satisfied and sentimental Burns nighters for their ignorance of the language. He argued: “No wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote.”   

Soon recognized as the major Scots-language poet since Burns, MacDiarmid inspired other poets such as Sydney Goodsir Smith and William Soutar to take up Scots as a literary medium.His attempt to establish a unified and standardised written form of Scots, in order to prevent a shift toward Standard English writing, met with approval as well as criticism. Poet Edwin Muir https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2013/02/edwin-muir-1551887-3159-orkneys.htmlwas particularly opposed to his use of Lallans, believing that “Scotland can only create a national literature by writing in English”. In the 1930s, however, MacDiarmid ret urned to English,claiming it to be a superior medium for expression. 

In 1931 MacDiarmid's highly influential poem First hymn to Lenin was published. In the same year his wartime marriage ended in divorce, and he suffered extreme psychological alienation and physical breakdown. 

Grieve then  married his second wife, Valda Trevlyn  and in 1933 the Grieves moved  to  the island of Whalsay in Shetland,  with  their young son  Michael where they would live for the next nine years. 

The family stayed in a few temporary houses before settling down in a humble little cottage at Sodom. This cottage was to be their home for the next nine years. Christopher was not a practical man, and on an island where almost everybody did demanding physical work to survive, he was seen as something as an oddity. The family were often helped by the Whalsay folk. People gave them food and, on one occasion, a man called Walter Robertson tried to teach Christopher how to cast peats. It was not a success. The Grieves lived in poverty for most of their time on the isle.  

Christopher came to be called ‘Aald Grieves’ by his neighbours, but he is better known to the world by his nom de plume Hugh MacDiarmid, one of the most revered and controversial poets Scotland has ever produced.  

The Whalsay people thought Christopher didn’t do much in the way of real work. But, in his nine Shetland years, MacDiarmid spent thousands of hours with a pen in his hand, writing long, complex poems that were sometimes inspired by the rocky landscapes he encountered in the isles. 

In 1934 Grieve/MacDiarmid published three books: Scottish Scene, in collaboration with Lewis Grassic Gibbon; a collection of essays, At the Sign of the Thistle; and in Stony Limits (1934) and Second Hymn to Lenin (1935), in  which  he rejected the lyricism of his early volumes in a favour of an austere, philosophical diction. 

The latter including a critical poetic dialogue with the Soviet leader on the complementary relationship between poetry and politics:  Ah, Lenin, you were richt. But I’m a poet (And you c’ud make allowances for that!) Aimin’ at mair than you aimed at Tho’ yours comes first, I know it.  …  Are my poems spoken in the factories and fields, In the streets o’ the toon? Gin they’re no, then I’m failin’ to dae What I ocht to ha’ dune. Gin I canna win through to the man in the street, The wife by the hearth, A’ the cleverness on earth’ll no’ mak’ up For the damnable dearth.  …  Wi’ Lenin’s vision equal poet’s gift And what unparalleled force was there! Nocht in a’ literature wi’ that Begins to compare.

Although an uncompromising advocate of class struggle, MacDiarmid always expressed strong pacifist feelings in his poetry, not least in reaction to the murderous waste of the lives of young Scottish soldiers who had made up the backbone of the imperial British army since the early nineteenth century.

“A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle”, which MacDiarmid published in 1926  is a  long highly experimental modernist work, written in sometimes obscure Scots dialect, containing  a wide-ranging meditation on the condition of contemporary Scotland,

It has been singled out as MacDiarmid’s most sustained, if challenging, poetic achievement, on a par with Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, the Irish writer he most admired. Here’s an excerpt where he gives what for to Burns fans. 

You canna gang to a Burns supper even 

Wi’oot some wizened scrunt o’ a knock-knee 

Chinee turns roon to say, “Him Haggis—velly goot!” 

And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney.  

No’ wan in fifty kens a wurd 

Burns wrote But misapplied is a’body’s property,

And gin there was his like alive the day 

They’d be the last a kennin’ haund to gie—  

Croose London Scotties wi’ their braw shirt fronts 

And a’ their fancy freen’s, rejoicin’ 

That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo,

Bagdad—and Hell, nae doot—are voicin’ 

Burns’ sentiments o’ universal love, 

In pidgin’ English or in wild-fowl Scots, 

And toastin’ ane wha’s nocht to them but an 

Excuse for faitherin’ Genius wi’ their thochts.  

You  can  listen to the full  poem  here. 

In 1936 Grieve's book Scottish Eccentrics was published, with the glaring omission, a friend commented, of a chapter on Grieve/MacDiarmid himself. And in 1939 he published The Islands of Scotland, a personal view of the Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland. 

Hugh MacDiarmid remains a controversial and influential figure. Turbulence was a feature of all aspects of MacDiarmid’s life. He flirted with fascism and in 1923 wrote two essays entitled 'A Plea for a Scottish Fascism' and 'A Programme for Scottish Fascism' both of which seemed to praise Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. But by 1928 he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.  That same year, he founded the National Party of Scotland but was ironically booted out both that and the Communist Party for being a member of the other. 

At one time MacDiarmid believed that a Nazi invasion of Britain would benefit Scotland. In June 1940, he wrote to fellow communist Sorley MacLean: “Although the Germans are appalling enough, they cannot win, but the British and French bourgeoisie can and they are a far greater enemy. If the Germans win they could not hold their gain for long, but if the French and British win it will be infinitely more difficult to get rid of them.”    

In a letter sent in April 1941, he wrote: “On balance I regard the Axis powers, tho’ more violently evil for the time being, less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose.”  

He was prone to extremes and sometimes to extremist and absurdist positions. In a posthumously published poem he posed the question:  “Is a Mussolini or a Hitler / Worse than a Bevin or a Morrison”? – referring to Britain’s wartime Minister of Labour and Home Secretary – democratic socialists who believed in, and fought for, the welfare state.   

George Orwell  named him as a Stalinist and put him on his 1949 list of “crypto-communists” and “fellow travellers”and was under surveillance by MI5 for many years. In a poem published after his death, he expresses indifference to the Nazi bombing of London.  MacDiarmid had a pattern of firing off positions, opinions, ideas, and antagonisms

His autobiography, published in 1943 was entitled Lucky poet: a Self-Study in Literature and Political Ideas. It was a highly individual book, combining prose and poetry in a way that many found irritating, but most also found fascinating.  

MacDiarmid’s anti-war feelings are perhaps more accessibly expressed also in a number of shorter poems in English, such as “The War Memorial”, inspired by the sight of the grey stone cenotaphs raised in almost every town and village in Scotland to remember the war dead – and forget those who survived:  We knew them – queer that side by side in the ranks The immortal heroes alone should all have been slain And only the worthless, the unemployables, the scum Like us spared to come home again.  …  They make a fine fuss about them now they are dead; If they’d survived it would be a different story. They would be treated just as we are, like dirt, With no bunkum at all about honour and glory.

During the Second World War, MacDiarmid expressed similar concerns about the continuing sacrifice of Scottish people. In one such poem, “German Bombers”, written during the Blitz attacks on British cities, he noted the glaring discrepancies between north and south. Unlike around London, there were no air-raid defences to protect the inhabitants of Edinburgh, the Scottish capital:  The German bombers came up the Forth And unchallenged all day o’er Edinburgh flew While not in Edinburgh but only in London The air-raid warning siren blew.  …  The English don’t give a curse so long as England’s all right, And from Scotland to that end withdraw all Scotland’s might On lying pretexts, while the Scots themselves, poor fools, Are content in Scotland’s betrayal to be England’s tools.

Historically, the collective punishment of Scottish people at the hands of the English was made bitterly clear during what became known as the “Highland Clearances”. After the union with England in 1707, there were several uprisings in the Highlands by the Scots who fought to regain their independence. However, after the decisive victory over the rebellious clans at the battle of Culloden (1746), https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2013/04/culloden-shoulder-of-lamentation.html the English proceeded to physically clear the Highlands of its inhabitants in what can only be described state-sponsored genocide. English soldiers marched through the glens burning homes, raping and murdering their occupants. 

In the nineteenth century this barbaric policy of ethnic cleansing continued with the remainder of the Highlanders either recruited by the army or shipped off to the colonies. It is disturbing to note that there were more people living in the Highlands in the 1700s than there are today. Moreover, in the last waves of evictions, the people were often betrayed by their own landowning lairds, as John Prebble concludes in his comprehensive historical documentation of these tragic events:  At Culloden, and during the military occupation of the glens, the British government first defeated a tribal uprising and then destroyed the society that had made it possible. The exploitation of the country during the next hundred years was within the same pattern of colonial development – new economies introduced for the greater wealth of the few, and the unproductive obstacle of a native population removed or reduced. In the beginning the men who imposed the change were of the same blood, tongue and family as the people. They used the advantages given them by the old society to profit from the new, but in the end they were gone with their clans.  The Lowlander has inherited the hills, and the tartan is a shroud.

Living for long periods on the “cleared” Shetland Islands, MacDiarmid became fully aware of this historic crime perpetrated by an unholy alliance between English and Scottish capitalists. In his own poetic response to this national tragedy, MacDiarmid reached out to the ordinary Scots folk, those who more often than not found themselves on the violent receiving end of history.  

MacDiarmid’s Scottish nationalism was always grounded in democratic socialism. It was this ideological combination that transformed his Celtic individualism into revolutionary activism. His poetry could therefore be both lyrical, elevating the everyday “speak” of the people, as well as agitational, summoning the nation to break the chains of foreign domination. After the last clan rebellion of the eighteenth century, the speaking of Gaelic, the wearing of the kilt and playing the bagpipes were all banned by the British government as representing symbolic acts of war. 

It is not surprising therefore that a movement of historically informed cultural resistance has surfaced today in the form of speaking Gaelic (a language development MacDiarmid always hoped for) as part of a new and defiant Scottish political identity.  

MacDiarmid’s own radical working-class sensibilities continued to be refined throughout his adult life – as a soldier, a schoolteacher, a journalist and factory worker living in Glasgow. As a poet however, he remained relatively isolated, marginalized by the literary establishment in Edinburgh and London. Most of his work appeared in small literary magazines or in anthologies with limited editions. It wasn’t until later that he began to receive some critical (and economic) recognition.

However, his maverick amalgamation of Marxism and radical nationalism always made him an awkward public figure, as he himself admitted in his autobiographical poem “The Outlaw”:  I am the outlawed conscience of Scotland, The voice that must not be heard, The bane of all time-servers and trimmers, Helot-usurpers of the true aristocracy of awareness.

He stood for the SNP in the 1945 general election for Kelvingrove South, winning 1,314 votes, and five years later as an independent, being backed by just 639 voters. He stood for the Communist Party in the 1964 general election against Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home in Kinross and West Perthshire but managed less than 130 votes. 

 TV footage of him in the 1970s shows him boasting about being an Anglophobe - someone with a strong dislike of the English. In a conversation about devolution, he also claimed Scottish voters don't "know what they want".  he added: "...until quite recently Scottish schools, colleges and universities had no courses in Scotland literature or the Scottish languages. Now, we're entirely conditioned by English standards.  "I want to break away from that, I want complete disjunction from England. I appeared in Who's Who for the last 40 years or so and given my hobby as Anglophobia. That's not a Scottish peculiarity. It's common all over the world." 

The white rose sported by SNP MPs comes from MacDiarmid's poem The Little White Rose. One line states: "The rose of all the world is not for me. I want for my part. Only the little white rose of Scotland. That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart."

As a follower of the Scottish revolutionary socialist John Maclean, he saw no contradiction between international socialism and the nationalist vision of a Scottish workers' republic, but this ensured a fraught relationship with organized political parties.

MacDiarmid described MacLean as “the greatest leader of the working class of Scotland have yet had”. In a speech commemorating his early death in 1923, MacDiarmid celebrated MacLean as a revolutionary whose socialist vision remained an essential point of departure for the struggle for an independent Scotland:  He was not a straw man blown hither and thither by the wind of party politics. He had the supreme disqualification of thinking for himself on the basis of a thorough grasp of Marxist philosophy. The most advanced elements of the working class in Scotland owe him an enormous debt. Whether they like it or not they are going to have to discharge that debt now – or suffer the consequences. There is no other way. John MacLean was far in advance of his time. But he died over fifty years ago – and only now is an important section of socialist thought in Scotland beginning to catch up with him. It is not too late.

In his poem, “Talking with Five Thousand People in Edinburgh”, MacDiarmid defined his own ideological position as that of a nonconformist Marxist, a status he cultivated throughout his life. It was clearly a radical space he thought necessary to both his poetry and his politics: For I am like Zamyatin. I must be a Bolshevik Before the Revolution, but I’ll cease to be one quick When Communism comes to rule the roost, For real literature can exist only where it’s produced, By madmen, hermits, heretics, Dreamers, rebels, skeptics, And such a door of utterance has been given to me As none may close whosoever they be.

In his post-war poetry, he increasingly shunned the personal and subjective in favour of open-ended epics such as In Memoriam James Joyce (1955) and The Kind of Poetry I Want (1961) which celebrated political and scientific materialism. 

In all Grieve/MacDiarmid published around 30 books and many shorter works and articles. The poetry he produced in his later life is often viewed as difficult and inaccessible, but brilliant. The two volume Complete Poems, published after Grieve's death, ran to 1500 pages.  

MacDiarmid continued to inspire younger Scottish poets and in the 1950s and 1960s was at the heart of the group, including Sydney Goodsir Smith, Norman MacCaig and George Mackay Brown, which met in Edinburgh's legendary literary pub, Milne's Bar.  

To his enemies, MacDiarmid’s adoption of a Scottish language was as fabricated as his name; he was a false prophet; an apologist for dictators and a stooge of tyranny. To his supporters, he was a champion of authentic Scottish culture and of the revival of national pride based not on tartan-waving mythology but on reality and a vision of a better future that was both nationalist and internationalist. 

For all his faults, it was he who proved great literature could still be crafted from the Scots dialect; he catalysed pride in a distinctively Scots culture that was in danger of being swamped  and he was also a very talented poet. 

He lived in relative poverty for most of his long life. and moved with his wife to Biggar in 1951 and that was where died on on 9th September 1978  of cancer on 9 September, 1978, in Chalmers Hospital, Edinburgh..

Christopher Murray Grieve was buried at Langholm. To the east of the town a minor road climbs steeply out of the valley. As it crosses Whita Yett, a short path from a parking place leads to the striking memorial to Hugh MacDiarmid. The memorial is the work of Jake Harvey and was unveiled on 11 August 1985. Made of steel and bronze, it is in the form of an open book, highly decorated with images from MacDiarmid's poetry. 

Nearby is a cairn carrying a verse by MacDiarmid and noting that "Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) was a man of Langholm, a champion of Scotland, a fervent internationalist and one of the great poets of the world."  MacDiarmid remains an important figure among Scottish literary circles as well as among nationalists  for reviving and renewing Scots as a poetic language.

Margaret Tate‘s sympathetic 1964 film portrait captures the essence of MacDiarmid. Seen in a domestic setting (and in evocative black-and-white), he reads three short poems, “You Know Who I Am”, “Somersault”, and “Krang”, along with some lines from “The Kind of Poetry I Want”. (the music in the film is Francis George Scott‘s setting of MacDiarmid’s “The Eemis Stane”, sung by Duncan Robertson with piano accompaniment by Olive Ogsten).

Here  is  a profile from 1972 of Hugh MacDiarmid on the occasion of his 80th birthday. In this film he talks about his uncompromising life and the ideas and circumstances that have shaped its progress.

Resistance is

Ascending to the Sky" (2023) by an extraordinary Palestinian artist whose story and work are pure defiance and beauty: Mohammed Al Rakou

Resistance is having hope

Resistance is sowing  love 

Reistance is being kind 

Resistance is sharing 

Resistance is knowing thyself

Resistance is opposing  fascism

Resistance is speaking aganst injustice

Resistance is speaking up 

Resistance is raising  awareness

Resistance is doing  something 

Resistance is not  indifference 

Resistance is standing against power 

Resistance is carried with strength  

Resistance is freedom unbroken

Resustance is a defiant lifeforce 

Resistance is a carrier of dream

Resistance is holding fast to humanity

Resistance is an act of rebellion"

Resistance is now, and  so necessary

Resistance traverses  all  borders

Resistance is a force for good

Resistance is steadfast never surrenders.

What Happened in Ceuta on July 30 *

On July 30, 2026, thousands of migrants predominantly young men flooded into Ceuta, Spain’s tiny enclave in North Africa largely  by  swimming. Spain is a main point of arrival into Europe for migrants seeking better economic opportunities or an escape from violence in their home countries.  

To reach Ceuta, located on the northern African coast, migrants often swim from the Moroccan town of Castillejos, covering about 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) to reach Spanish territory. Others attempt the crossing from the nearby town of Belyounech, where the distance is shorter.  

What drives thousands of citizens to emigrate from their country suddenly without even carrying personal belongings or a suitcase,  is  something truly strange,  to  be  quite  honest. 

For everyone trying to understand what happened in Spain today, here's the situation: Ceuta, is a Spanish autonomous city located on the north coast of Africa, bordering Morocco. Together with Melilla, Ceuta is one of only two land borders between the European Union and Africa. Although geographically in Africa, Ceuta is sovereign Spanish territory and therefore part of the EU's external border. Ceuta has been under Spanish control since the 16th century.

Ceuta, which is perched on a historical isthmus, has been a Spanish possession since 1580. Its mixed population of Christians and Muslims, Spanish and Moroccan residents and day workers, live in relative harmony behind a border fence that many desperate migrants from across Africa attempt to cross for a better life in Europe

But why has  this  all  happened  now? This many people don’t just turn up at the same time. This is orchestrated. An operation  some  are  saying organized by Washington and Tel Aviv and coordinated with the Moroccan authorities to destabilize Spain, and give a gift to Europe's far right, and punish the country that dared to challenge the American Empire and its armed Israeli henchmen. 

Because Spain said "No."  and  the  Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez refused to allow the U.S. to use two military bases in southern Spain; Morón and Rota to attack Iran. Spain also refused to let ships carrying weapons to Israel dock at its ports. 

Spain recalled its ambassador to Israel. Spain recognized the State of Palestine. In short, Spain refused to act as a submissive puppet of the empire. The punishment - Morocco opened the floodgates. 

The scenes of people streaming across the frontier recall the border crisis of May 2021 when more than 8,000 migrants poured into Ceuta in just two days. At that time, Morocco retaliated against Spain by relaxing border controls, allowing about 8,000 people to pour into Ceuta.

Now, the script is playing out again but on a larger scale and with more sophisticated tools. On the Moroccan side, the auxiliary forces responsible for border security voluntarily withdrew as the crowds passed through. This was coordination not loss of control. And the timing is no coincidence too. 

Spain is approaching an election. A migration crisis is the perfect weapon to undermine the incumbent government, a classic tactic of the Mossad and the CIA. 

Sánchez has bucked the anti-migration trend that has gained ground across Europe and in the U.S.. While the Trump administration and other European countries have tightened their borders and stepped up deportations, Spain earlier this year moved to give residency and work permits to hundreds of thousands of migrants already living in the country without permission.  

Sánchez, a Socialist, argued that it would be good for the economy and the demographics of an aging Spain. Migrants who entered irregularly after January 1, 2026, were not included.

This migration crisis is merely one move in a much larger game. The real prize is the Strait of Gibraltar, a chokepoint through which approximately 10% of global maritime trade and around 100,000 vessels pass annually. 

Let's  bare in  mind  that  in January 2026, Israel and Morocco signed a joint military action plan. Israel now supplies at least 51% of Morocco's missiles. With Israeli support, Morocco is massively expanding its drone production; it has deployed the Israeli "Spyder" air defense system and is locally manufacturing the Israeli SpyX loitering munition (kamikaze drone). 

A joint maritime surveillance center is currently being established on Morocco's northern coast. A U.S. report identifies the Israel-Morocco arms deal as a turning point in the balance of power within the Strait of Gibraltar. Morocco even proposed to Trump that the U.S. bases at Morón and Rota be relocated from Spain to Morocco. A Spanish general admitted: "Morón Air Base will sooner or later be moved to Morocco." 

 Not long after Spain refused to accept ships carrying weapons ultimately destined for Israel, these ships were reportedly accepted instead by Morocco. Now that the Red Sea is closed to Israeli ships thanks to the Houthis, who's controlling the Strait of Gibraltar (the entrance to the Mediterranean) becomes more critical. Ceuta, where 49,000+ migrants poured in yesterday, in a seemingly coordinated fashion, is located right there. 

Washington, Tel Aviv, and Rabat are acting in concert to push Spain out of the Strait of Gibraltar and replace it with a compliant Morocco.Meanwhile, Morocco is emerging as a key implementer of Israel's post-war plans for Gaza. For the first time, Morocco will host training exercises for a multinational force expected to number around 20,000 troops. 

Approximately 30 Moroccan military officers have already entered Gaza to conduct on-the-ground reconnaissance. Morocco is expected to deploy around 500 soldiers to Gaza. Israeli officials now describe Morocco as Israel's most important security partner on the African continent. A nation that uses "support for Palestine" as its diplomatic calling card is now becoming an instrument of military enforcement for Israeli control over Gaza. Sadly Spain is likely to capitulate. 

Let's  not fall into a trap. Morrocco is a zionist trojan horse in the region. They use  these  individuals to put pressure on Spain who supported Palestine.This is political chess, organized by the Morrocan government to put pressure on Spain, on behalf of the US and Israel. 

Its utter nonsense to create fear and panic. "Attack on Spain". is a right wing rage bait, if you like it or not.The  bottom  line is  when people are being trucked to the border in numbers like this, it stops looking like a crisis and starts looking like a deliberate operation. Because it is. 

It looks  lile is  a state sanctioned invasion coordinated by the government and orchestrated by Mossad and the CIA and executed by Morocco against a nation that refuses to become an imperial vassal. The people flooding the Ceuta border are not refugees; they are being used as human battering rams to punish a government that refused to bow. 

That the mass incursion at Ceuta was an organised hybrid attack is not a matter on which reasonable people can differ. Spanish security cameras caught officers of Moroccan intelligence salted in among the supposed migrants. There is verified footage of trucks ferrying the crowds to the frontier, and of uniformed agents shepherding them along 

The Spanish Government estimate 50,000 Moroccans entered Ceuta. As of this afternoon (Friday), a massive reversal is underway. The Spanish Interior Ministry reports that more than 37,500 people have already left Ceuta to head back into Morocco. At its peak, the voluntary departure rate reached about 150 people per minute. The rest remain stranded in Ceuta, as they are not permitted to travel to the Spanish mainland. Spain and Morocco are also co-operating on plans to return them to Morocco. The scaremongers from the  far right can chill now. They're not making their way to the UK  

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez deployed armed forces and police units to reinforce the borders of Ceuta and nearby Melilla to restore order. Mr Sanchez visited the enclave on Friday and said the mass crossing was “an attack, a violation of Spain's territorial sovereignty” and added his officials were in constant contact with their Moroccan counterparts. Mr Sanchez blamed a court ruling earlier this month that stated those arriving to Ceuta by sea could not be immediately expelled.  

Spain said 200 specialised police officers and 60 troops had arrived from the Spanish mainland to reinforce security personnel in Ceuta. 

None of the migrants have  been  able   able to continue onwards to mainland Spain or to other EU states, a senior EU official said. “Moroccan authorities have reacted very quickly and have been mobilised fully to address the situation,” they added.  

The crossing has  though turned tragic, with local officials confirming that at least 34 to 43 people died in the water or along the coast while attempting to reach the enclave.

In a sign of how far Europe’s political pendulum has swung to the right on migration, Pedro Sánchez's fellow European leaders were largely concerned with managing their own domestic audiences.    

Italy formally suspended Schengen cooperation with Spain and closed its maritime and air borders to the country on Friday. Rome and Paris have also agreed to reinforce controls along their shared land border. Elsewhere in Europe, Finland and Denmark piled on to threaten severing Spain from the EU’s free-travel area, while Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, told Spain it “must regain control” of the territory.   

Even though the crisis is swiftly ebbing away as over 48,300 Moroccans voluntarily have now returned home, according to Spanish authorities, the political response continued through Friday.  

Calls from EU national leaders to suspend Spain from Schengen came thick and fast, first from Sánchez’ long-time adversary Giorgia Meloni, who openly supports the Spanish far-right party Vox, and then from Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, nominally a fellow socialist.    

The move to suspend cooperation on Schengen with Spain is highly legally questionable, and was never truly on the table.    

“It is not possible to exclude a state from Schengen in this way, just as it is not possible to expel a member state from the European Union, that is simply a misuse of language,” said Cécilia Rizcallah, a law and human rights professor at UCLouvain Saint-Louis university in Brussels.   

A senior European Commission official suggested the prospect of the migrants reaching the European continent was low.  

 “So far we haven’t seen any onward movements from Ceuta to mainland Spain or other member states,” said a senior EU official, briefing journalists on Friday afternoon. The EU classifies Morocco as a so-called safe country of origin, meaning it is very rare for asylum to be granted to people entering the EU from there.   

Still, Sánchez was left to appeal for unity on Friday. “This is not the time to divide,” he said on X. “It is the time to continue building a strong and united EU.”   

The crisis has been  catnip to the far right. As dramatic images from Ceuta spread across social media on Thursday, Europe’s centre-right and far-right forces engaged in a game of political one-upmanship, vying to land the strongest political blow against Sánchez and his far-left coalition government.  Members of the centre-right European People’s Party, eyeing a 2027 election victory in Spain, were particularly keen to hammer the Socialists for moving to regularise some 500,000 migrants, something they have long chaffed against.    

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League, was the first on social media to call for suspending Schengen cooperation with Spain on Thursday. The campaign rapidly spread with his French allies from Rassemblement National, including Patriots chief Jordan Bardella accusing Sánchez of encouraging an “unprecedented deluge.”    

Key figures in the Italian government, including Antonio Tajani, the foreign minister, then followed with their own public calls to suspend Spain from Schengen on Thursday evening, prompting further admonishments from other European governments including Austria on Friday.   

Such proposals have no legal basis and offer no solution. Where exceptional circumstances require it, temporary border controls can be introduced under existing EU rules. But dismantling Schengen would only weaken Europe.

Let's  remind  ourselves Spain stood with Palestine. Spain opposed Israel. Spain defied Trump. Spain defied NATO. What’s happened at Ceuta is not a coincidence. And are the far-right people who have been weaponising Ceuta, and ignoring its unique political context, aware that 48,300 of the people who entered have now gone back to Morocco? Or are they just ignoring it?

Here are  some  key  points: 

1. Spain says "No": Refusing U.S. bases, Israeli arms shipments, and unconditional support for Israel. 

2. Morocco opens the floodgates: Thousands of migrants pour into Ceuta, creating a crisis to punish Spain. 

3. Israel supplies weapons: Missiles, drones, and air defense systems transforming Morocco into a regional military power. 

4. The US provides cover: Washington supports Israel-Morocco military cooperation and tacitly condones the weaponization of migration. 

5. The Strait of Gibraltar is the prize: a strategic waterway controlling 10% of global maritime trade. 

6. Gaza is the ultimate goal: Morocco playing a "peacekeeping" role in Israeli-occupied Gaza.

Grief Yes - Despair No

 

"Grief Yes - Despair No" (1982) by Palestinian Artist Abdel Rahman Al Muzain.

Like many I am frequently feeling waves of intense grief about the state of the world, but we must  not give in to despair, but nor must we ignore reality, we must face our fragility. 

At the same  time I feel the unbearable weight of sadness, grief, trauma, anguish, heartbreak,agony, tormen of  collective Palestinian souls from 3 years of relentless, ruthless, monstrous, evil, heinous atrocities of Israel's genocide on the people in Gaza which is crushing.  

Everyone of  us will all experience grief in our lifetime. At some point, every single one of us is going to be obliterated by loss. It is the price we pay for loving, for allowing ourselves to care deeply for things in this world that are finite, and momentary.. 

The grief surging through us currently is the collective heartbreak of a fracturing world. It is incumbent on all of us to add our bit, because nobody is coming to save us and we need to give future generations a chance, we must build community to support, encourage and protect one another. 

Grief Yes - Despair no means that sorrow and mourning are natural parts of loving and living, but complete hopelessness should be resisted. Grief is a healthy response to loss.Despair is the loss of hope that anything can change. Grief says: This hurts because it mattered.Despair says: Nothing matters anymore.  

Grief has movement, even when it’s heavy. It longs. It aches. It remembers. Despair is collapse. It feels frozen. Flat. Helpless. It whispers, What’s the point?  Grief connects us to what we’ve loved.Despair disconnects us from ourselves, from each other, from possibility. Because grief ,as painful as it is,is still a sign of love. And love means there is still something alive in you.

It is also important to allow ourselves space to see the beauty and permission to experience joy, because allowing joy is also an act of resistance against those who seek to keep us paralysed by fear!  Allow our shared sorrows become not our ruin, but the very force that awakens, binds and liberates us. 

Have you ever noticed how sorrow grows kindness? We all share a communal cup of loss, and in it we find our deep kinship with one another and the living world. 

Your grief matters and it’s my hope you can find ways to soften the raw edges when you are fighting your way through those moments of despair. You are loved and you don’t have to do this alone. 

Wishing all who are feeling things heavy at the moment wherever you are peace, love, solace and solidarity.    

Boy George criticised for pro-Israel song: ‘’We Will Dance Again"

The singer Boy George has come under fire for his new song, ‘We Will Dance Again’, which supports Israel and denies the “genocide” in Gaza, as declared by a recent United Nations independent commission.

The cod  reggae song which has  been made  with the help of AI  begins: 

“You say genocide / I say war / When you’re attacked / That’s what the army is for / Does it get ugly? / You bet it does / When I know you want to kill / Every last one of us…”  

On June 23, a report by a UN independent commission has found that "Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide and atrocity crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank." 

The report cited a conclusion by the commission last year, which stated that “Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip, found that the intense scale and systematic nature of the Israeli military operations have continued, resulting in unprecedented death, injury and trauma of Palestinian children.”

 “Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law.”  https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167790

The track also criticises artists and public figures who have expressed solidarity with Palestinians since Israel launched its assault on Gaza in October 2023.  "You condemn the Jews, with selective memory, Musicians holding flags, mouthing like sheep , Propaganda fuelled by the Internet feels so weak," the lyrics read. 

The lines were interpreted by critics as an attack on the growing movement of musicians, actors and campaigners who have called for an end to Israel's war on Gaza, backed cultural boycotts of Israel and demanded sanctions against the Israeli government.

In the chorus of ‘We Will Dance Again’, Boy George sings: 

“If you’re ever confused / I stand with the Jews / I don’t need to be brave / I just need to behave / Like a human.”   

The song  has received some praise from pro-Israel supporters online, but has also garnered much criticism from other social media users.

Boy George was a man I once totally respected, and loved since my youth and I even ignored some of his past mistakes, like being convicted and  sentenced to 15 months in jail for falsely imprisoning a male escort by handcuffing him to a wall and beating him with a metal chain in act of appalling  gratitous violence..

He  now  seems to have forgotten Israel has killed over 75,000 Palestinians. Some official bodies say the real figure is likely closer to 100,000. More than half murdered are children. 212,000 are severely injured. More than 4,000 Palestinians require atleast one prosthetic limb. Gaza now has the most orphans than any other country on the planet. Israel now occupies over 60% of Gaza. 

Don't let these facts get in your way though Boy George... any respect I had or love for you has now gone. I never thought you'd turn out to be a genocide denier. Was the price worth it to sell your soul. You  are  very much a narcissist with a god complex and so two faced. You jumps on any bandwagon thats suits you regardless.

Horrible to think that the boy george that everyone worshiped back in the 80s was not real. That person never existed. Irish English. Not Jewish. You're  as fake  as hell. Karma is long overdue for you. Oh was rubbish collection today whatever remained of you in my house has been binned. Now Fuck off.

Farewell to The Goodies Wild Man and Wildlife Conservationist Bill Oddie (7 July 1941 – 25 July 2026)

Farewell  to  legendary broadcaster, comedian, writer, songwriter, musician , Goodies wild man and wildlife conservationist Bill Oddie  who has  passed  away  at  85. 

David Foster, Bill Oddie's agent, paid tribute to the "intelligence and wit" of “Britain’s “best-loved birder”. In a statement, he  said: “It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of Bill Oddie, the country’s best-loved birder.  “Bill was a multi-talented celebrity – wildlife presenter, broadcaster, comedian, writer, songwriter, musician and conservationist. Yet it was never fame that he valued.    “Instead he encouraged us to respect and protect the environment.  

“He taught us the wonder of it. He protested, lobbied and campaigned for it.  He led the way and people of all ages and backgrounds responded to his call. And such a massive contribution to conservation will never be forgotten. 

“As Bill’s agent I witnessed close hand his intelligence and wit. He was my friend and it was an honour and a privilege to represent him for so many years. I will miss him terribly. 

“My thoughts and love are with Bill’s wife, Laura, and his daughters."

Born William Edgar Oddie  near Rochdale, Lancashire on 7 July 1941. His ancestors on both sides were mill workers. However, his father Harry had made good, moved to Birmingham and worked as an accountant at the Midlands Electricity Board. 

The comedian later said his father's work ethic greatly influenced his approach to his own career. But Bill saw little of his mother Lillian during his childhood.  She had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent much of her time in hospital. Oddie later discovered that her depression had followed the premature deaths of his two older siblings. 

As a child, he became interested in bird watching - a record of one of his first observations was even preserved in a West Midlands Bird Club publication in 1956. After leaving King Edward's School, where he was an enthusiastic rugby player, he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge to read English.  There he became involved with the Footlights Club, which numbered Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor among its members.  

Oddie wrote for and appeared in the famous 1964 review, A Clump of Plinths, which, having taken the Edinburgh Festival by storm, travelled to London's West End as well as New Zealand and the United States.  

While still at Cambridge, Oddie wrote material for David Frost's satirical BBC TV show That Was the Week That Was.  He fondly recalled a poem he wrote for fellow comedian Lance Percival in the style of The Ballad of Eskimo Nell about Camberley Kate who seduced dustbin men in Kent.  

Having left university, he went on to join the cast of the BBC radio show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, which featured many of the Footlights performers.  He was also developing as a composer, writing many of the show's songs, some of which appeared on an album Distinctly Oddie in 1967.

While some of the old Footlights team went off to form Monty Python, Oddie - together with Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor - created The Goodies  who  were such a massive part of my childhood . still fondly remember for proving that pure, unpretentious silliness could be every bit as inventive and enduring as the Pythons' more celebrated surrealism. 

Where Monty Python offered the grown-ups philosophical sketches and highbrow absurdity, The Goodies served up slapstick chaos, visual gags, and cheerful anarchy that felt like a Saturday-morning cartoon come to life - complete with catchphrases, ridiculous costumes, and plots that escalated into glorious nonsense within minutes. I loved their madcap, anarchist , zany style who filled  my  childhood with so much laughter. .

It featured three characters on their "trandem" who pedalled about offering themselves for hire with the tagline "We Do Anything, Anywhere, Anytime".  

This spawned a series of comical situations, much slapstick and the use of fairly primitive special effects, mainly sped-up film. One of the memorable episodes was Kitten Kong, in which a giant feline toppled the Post Office Tower. A version of this episode won the Silver Rose at Montreux TV Festival in 1972. 

Oddie composed a number of comic songs for the series, often parodies of contemporary pop music. The most successful, Funky Gibbon, reached number four in the UK charts in 1975 and the trio performed it on Top of the Pops.  Forty years later, the track was re-released and the profits given to a campaign to preserve the primate's habitat.

 A reminder that one of Bill Oddie’s proudest achievements was that a fan died of laughter watching the  following sketch by The Goodies. Alex Mitchell, a brickie from King’s Lynn, according to his wife died in his chair after 25 minutes of uproarious laughter at the TV Goodies in 1975. The  widow actually wrote to the trio to thank them. That's the kind of show this was: childish, anarchic, wildly popular, and far stranger behind the scenes than anyone realised.Oddie cherished the feat for the rest of his life.

Oddie's life  however  was plagued by bouts of acute depression which caused repeated admissions to psychiatric hospitals - where Oddie suffered from severe lithium poisoning as a result of his treatment. 

He would  appear in and voiced many advertising campaigns over the years, from Thomson Directory and B&Q, to Fox’s Glacier Mints and Kellogg’s. Oddie later commented that these advertising gigs were among the most financially rewarding parts of his career.  

But it was with The Goodies that he found his greatest fame. The series combined situation comedy along with spoof ads, for products such as Dreaded Wheat, Gloscalp Dandruff Control and .  

Later, Oddie returned to his childhood passion for birdwatching, becoming one of the UK’s most influential naturalists, hosting multiple BBC nature programmes over many decades  and writing books such as “Bill Oddie’s Little Black Bird Book,” “Birdwatching with Bill Oddie” and “Follow That Bird.”  He also became  a powerful advocate for wildlife  he  campaigned against the ivory trade,warning that poachers kill thousands of elephants a year.   a supporter of a ban on trophy hunting imports. He  joined anti-cull actions alongside hunt sabs.   

Once he wore a Newcastle United top to a patrol, hoping to be mistook for a badger! Always finding a moment for humour.  He  could  be outspoken and  silly  which  is a  good thing . 

A Goodie Egg on being British  who  once  said : “I love that I walk down the road and here’s an Indian shop and there’s another Indian stationers there and this one's run by someone from Iran and there’s a West Indian who runs that bit and we’ve got the Romanian builders next door."

But Oddie had always been prone to bouts of depression and h.e was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder - which he occasionally blamed on his remote relationship with his mother.  Oddie parted company with Springwatch in 2008.  The star told the Daily Mirror in 2018, external: "I never had a proper explanation.  "I was called in and told: 'We won't be asking you to make any more programmes.'"  

Oddie added: "Unfortunately, my bipolar element had come into it and I could be very tetchy." The Mirror reported that the BBC did not know at the time he had a conditon, but later issued a statement saying: "We wish Mr Oddie a speedy recovery."  

Bill Oddie suffered severe lithium poisoning as a result of his mental health treatment  "At the time I was flabbergasted, " he said in a 2015 interview, external with the Independent. "But a year later, I was diagnosed as bipolar. I thought back. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have accepted that I was going through a manic phase."  T

The audience missed him. Before he left, the show had averaged 3.19 million. After he left, that figure fell to 2.55 million. 

Oddie later revealed his condition caused him to try and take his own life.  In 2020, he announced that he had been severely ill as a result of lithium poisoning: a treatment aimed at stabilising his moods.  He later posted on social media that "the past few years have been grim for me.  "Lost enthusiasm, but I am still here." 

His outside interests included music. He once did a spell as a radio DJ playing jazz and his house contained his collection of thousands of CDs. Oddie was also a passionate supporter of the Green Party and gave his time, and fame, to bolster wildlife charities such as the RSPB.

He is survived by his wife, Laura, and daughters Bonnie, Kate and Rosie. Truly a sad loss.  Bill inspired generations to notice, cherish, and protect the animals around them. 

A  unigue and very  special individual. Much respect for a life well lived. From being open about his mental health struggles to his passionate defence of animals and nature. Hope he is somewhere making the spirits or souls laugh uncontrollably.

Bill and the other Goodies leave a lasting comedy legacy that will be watched for years and years to come. Rest in peace. Funky Gibbon!. Fly high amongst your beloved wild birds 💚

If I Must Die - Refaat Alareer (23 September 1979 – 6 December 2023)

Dr. Refaat Alareer was a Palestinian writer, poet, translator, university professor and activist who was born in Gaza City, the capital of the Gaza governorate in Palestine, on September 23, 1979, during the Israeli occupation of Gaza.  

A native of Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood, he received his MA in comparative literature from University College London and completed his PhD in English literature at the Universiti Putra Malaysia.  

Alareer authored If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose (OR Books, 2024), edited by Yousef M. Aljamal and listed as both a USA Today bestseller and one of the top ten books of 2024 by The New Arab. 

Alareer was  also  the editor of Gaza Writes Back (Just World Books, 2014) and coeditor, alongside Laila El-Haddad, of Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books, 2015). 

He was also  a contributor to “Life in Occupied Palestine,” a special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, an academic publication produced by the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, guest edited by Cynthia G. Franklin, Morgan Cooper, and Ibrahim G. Aoude. 

While the editors worked with Alareer and other contributors that summer, Israeli forces killed Refaat’s brother, Mohammed Alareer, during Israel’s fifty-one-day siege on Gaza, leading the editors to dedicate the issue to Mohammed in the spring of 2014.   

Since 2007, Alareer had taught world literature, comparative literature, and both fiction and nonfiction creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. He also  founded  https://wearenotnumbers.org/ an organization dedicated to sharing stories by Palestinian writers.  

On December 6, 2023, he was murdered by an Israeli airstrike along with his brother, sister and their children in Israel's ongoing genocidal siege of Gaza of 2023.  He was 44 years old.  

Just five weeks prior to his killing, he had shared  the  following  moving  poem titled "If I must die", and pinned it to his Twitter profile. 

Amidst the outpouring of grief, as news of his death spread online, many people from around the world paid tribute to Refaat by offering their own translations of his prophetic poem in to their local languages. And since his death, he has been eulogized the world over. 

Like many I am frequently feeling waves of intense grief about  what is happening  on  Gaza but  we must  not  give in to despair,  nor must we ignore reality. 

In a time when so many voices still rise for Palestine, there is still nothing more powerful, nothing more sacred, than hearing the words of Palestinians themselves, voices that have been silenced, distorted, or spoken over for far too long. 

Though Refaat Alareer’s speech was extinguished by Israel, along with  tens of thousands of Palestinians.  It is incumbent on all  of us to  keep  sharing  their voices.  

If I Must Die -  Refaat Alareer 

If I must die,  

you must live  

to tell my story to sell my things 

to buy a piece of cloth 

and some strings,  

(make it white with a long tail) 

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza 

while looking heaven in the eye a

waiting his dad who left in a blaze

— and bid no one farewell 

not even to his flesh not even to himself

— sees the kite, my kite you made, 

flying up above and thinks for a moment 

an angel is there 

bringing back love

If I must die 

let it bring hope 

let it be a tale

Remembering Marina Ginestà, the defiant militia girl with a gun (29 January 1919 – 6 January 2014)

On  this day 21 July 1936 this iconic photo  taken by Hans Gutmann on top of the Hotel Colón in Barcelona. of 17-year-old socialist Marina Ginestà  just three days after the military rebellion against the Spanish Republic had been launched.The rifle she is carrying is  an M1916 Spanish Mauser, manufactured at the famous Oviedo factory in Spain for the Spanish Army. 

 In the photo  she has a look of innocence in her eyes, perhaps, but – as the rifle slung over her back would suggest – her idealistic determination to defend the Republic against the army's treachery and simultaneously implement a Socialist revolution in Spain is equally plain.  

"It is a good photo, it reflects the feelings we had at the time," said Ginesta, whose parents were Spanish trade unionists. "Socialism had arrived and the clients of the hotel" – the now defunct Colon on the Plaza de Catalunya – "had gone. There was a sense of euphoria."   

"We moved into the Colon" – which became the Communist and Socialist combined youth movement headquarters in Barcelona, festooned with images of Lenin and Stalin – "and we started eating good food. It was as if the bourgeois way of life had suddenly become ours as well.  

"They say I have a striking way of looking at the camera. That's possible, because we were well aware of the mystique surrounding a revolution of the proletariat and the Hollywood films of the time, too [with stars] like Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper." 

However, for Ginesta and the other idealists of the time, the summer of 1936 represented the high-tide mark for Spain's revolution, as the bitterly fought Civil War ended with defeat for the Republic and exile or death for its defenders.

The photo  however   became one of the most well-known powerful  images from that war, and represents the fight against fascism and the struggles of conflict. It was a piece of propaganda at a time of rapid social and political change,and  a symbol of hope. Hope like now that continues to prevail as  the rising tide of fascism continues..  

Marina Ginestà was born in Toulouse, France, on January 29, 1919. Her family was working-class and believed in left-wing ideas. Both her parents, Empar Coloma Chalmeta and Bruno Ginestà Manubens, were tailors from Spain.   

The hotel where the picture was taken was destroyed after the war. Today, a building for the Banco Español de Crédito stands in its place. 

Marina was a member of Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (Socialist Youth), the youth organization mainly directed by Partido Comunista de España (PCE, Communist Party of Spain). As the war broke out, she served as a reporter and a translator assisting Mikhail Koltsov, a correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Pravda. 

Marina remained a militant throughout the rest of the war and was drawn to other groups at that time such as the anti-Stalinist P.O.U.M (which the famous writer George Orwell was a member of) and the Anarchist C.N.T. As outlined in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, the militias of a tiny left-wing party, the POUM, joined forces with the Anarchists in Barcelona to rebel against the increasingly dominant Communists, who used the same terraces where the photo of Ginesta had been taken for machine-gun posts as they fought for control of the city. Despite her initial involvement however she quickly grew disillusioned with the path that the Stalinists were taking. 

Sources shed doubt on Marina’s insistence that she did not participate in the fighting. As it turns out, Marina makes an appearance in the diary of Mikhail Koltsova  who was correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Pravda.

In his Diary of the Spanish Civil War, which was published in Spanish long after Stalin had had his friend liquidated, Koltsov writes that Marina never went anywhere without her heavy, antiquated rifle. He would know, because for several months Marina served as Koltsov’s interpreter, translating from Spanish to French. 

In fact, she’d been present at the legendary meeting between the Pravda correspondent and Buenaventura Durruti, the Anarchist leader, in mid-August 1936. Since Durruti’s French turned out to be at least as good as Koltsov’s, Marina’s services were not needed, and the two men excused her. 

“I wouldn’t have understood their conversation anyway,” Marina later said. “I was much too young. But they appeared to like each other a lot. They smiled and seemed to agree on everything. That, I have always thought, must have been one of the reasons why Koltsov was liquidated once he got back to Moscow. Come to think of it, I’m happy I didn’t end up in there, too, as did so many Spanish Communists after the defeat of the Republic.”

Before the end of the war, Ginestà was wounded and evacuated to Montpellier. Marina did not know about the photo until 2006, although the iconic image was printed and circulated everywhere, serving as cover for the book “Thirteen Red Roses” by Carlos Fonseca, and was also along with dozens of other photographs in the book “Unpublished images of the Civil War” (2002). 

When Nazi Germany took over France, Marina had to leave. She went to the Dominican Republic escaping the horrors of war in Europe. There, she married Manuel Periâñez-Martin lived briefly in the Dominican Republic, where their son Manuel was born.  Though, her peace was interrupted again by the rise of dictator Rafael Trujillo  and  they  were  forced to  move  toVenezuela .

A few years later she married Belgian diplomat Carl Werck, with whom she had a daughter, Isabelle. Werck's job took the family to several cities in the 1950s and ’60s, including London and New Orleans.  Ginestà wrote two novels in the Catalonian language in the 1970s; the first, Els antipodes, chronicled the story of Spanish Civil War exiles in the Dominican Republic during World War II. Her final years were spent in Brussels and Paris. 

In the mid-1980s, a trove of Guzmân's photographs of the Spanish Civil War were unearthed, the image of Ginestà and her rifle among them. The portrait captivated those who were intrigued by the tragic war and its ultimate consequences, which permitted fascist regimes to wreak havoc across Europe and Asia. Guzmân had written an identifying caption, giving the date as July 21, 1936, and the figure as Marina Jinesta. The image was used for the cover of a bestseller in Spain in 2004, Las trece rosas (“The Thirteen Roses”).

The Spanish photo agency that held the rights to Guzmân's archive set out to find “Marina Jinesta” in 2006. A researcher discovered Ginestàt two years later in Paris, aged 89, and she spoke about the Hotel Colón days in a documentary that aired on Spanish television. 

And before her death on January 6, 2014, in Paris, the 94-year-old was believed to  be Marina Ginestà, had been tracked down and confronted with this version of her younger self, in 2006, she confessed that she still remembered the dead bodies she had seen, including a mother with two children in her arms, the best part of seventy years before. 

The memory of her comrades, her fellow resistance fighters, most of whom perished, still lingers in the air.