Labour’s Tim Young is now officially recognised as the front runner to dislodge the surprise Tory candidate for MP who snuck in last General Election cycle.
Tim Young, a local lad (rather than a shipped in candidate targeting a marginal) has many years and family invested in our wonderful town and rather than be a mouth piece for big business interests, or parroting his party’s monotonous mantra, Tim is actually interested in working for us – the people of Colchester.
We met up with Tim for a chat and a walkabout to see how passionately he feels about getting things done and becoming our MP.
The Lib Dems used to be in power in Colchester – best part of two decades. Labour voters lent their votes to keep Colchester from joining the sea of blue that is Essex.
Now that Labour have overtaken the Libs, it’s time for their supporters to do the honours in return and vote tactically to remove the self-serving blip that is our current Tory MP.
Why?
More Tory austerity in store otherwise…
Maybe the way Essex County Council ignores our congestion problems really irks you. Something the Lib Dems never managed to sort out, and neither has the Tory MP, despite his party controlling the County.
Maybe you’re a student or have a family member who could do with not being saddled by debt for their life.
Tim is your man!
But mostly you cannot help but realise that our NHS is in crisis. The Tory MP will try to argue that he secured a million for the hospital, but in reality we all know this is a drop in the ocean when it comes to running a busy general hospital. It would have been nice if his government hadn’t stripped our poor local health services in the first place.
NHS staff are voting Labour in their millions.
Join them!
So, if you believe in your town, vote for Tim Young. He’ll have your back.
Ask yourself what has the Tory MP done to improve Colchester?
Is a retired former MP who was happy gardening and doing history walks going to have the energy required to come from third place and beat the Tory out of Colchester?
Only Tim Young and Labour will make the fair and necessary changes to our incredible home town.
Pro-Corbyn blogger @Rachael_Swindon is one of the most tireless campaigners for Labour, Corbyn and a fairer society that you’ll ever find.
As well as blogging and creating some of the strongest memes to support Labour’s message, she is a full-time mother of two kids who also cares full-time for her disabled husband, who recently took a turn for the worse. As a result, she and her family are in the support group of ESA and PIP, which allowed them – just about – to scrape by, except when the DWP screwed up.
Until now.
Because of her effectiveness, Rachael has angered right-wingers both inside and outside the Labour party. Because she has a ‘donate’ button on her blog, in case the occasional donation comes in to help eke out meagre benefits, someone made a malicious report to the DWP, triggering an investigation.
Somebody put newsprint in the standard refuse bin!
On the morning of Friday 28th Oct, I had occasion to be in the vicinity of the foyer of the Odeon cinema. A strange foyer it is too. Chatting with a member of Odeon staff a while back, I was told that the reason for it’s oddly chasm-like appearance and unused ticket desk is funds shortage.
In this cinema foyer there is a newspaper stand full of the oft-vilified Sun newspaper. I’d noticed it before, gleaming red as it does next to the rubbish bin and the tiny notice of the show times. The stand offers the passer by the following temptation:
ODEON THE SUN
PICK UP YOUR
FREE COPY
OF THE SUN
Previously I had disregarded this. Something about the way the wind was blowing on Friday 28th Oct made me feel differently this time. I was with our son, and as he is never one to shy away from acting impulsively, I made a suggestion.
From the get-go, I should state that I am not a fan of The Sun. I wouldn’t buy it. I find that if someone is reading it, loud sirens go off in my head about that person. To be perfectly frank, I am in hate with The Sun and all that it stands for.
With that knowledge floating around in your mind, you are now ready to hear that I had suggested emptying all the free copies into the recycling bin – handily just outside the Odeon. I can’t claim this as a completely original idea. I had see video of a big burly guy in an airport I think it was, taking out the entire pile in one and dumping them wholesale into a nearby bin. I can at least claim innovation – I wanted this paper recycled. I care about the environment.
So young Master Colcestrian and myself set about shifting the whole lot of papers, in batches, from the red stand offering “Please take a free copy” to the council recycling bin outside. At one point a couple of young girls stopped us and one of them said “You can’t put all those in the bin.”
“It’s ok,” i said. “We’re recycling them.”
“Oh, no problem then!” she replied, and we carried on.
We carried on until there were none left, and the recycling bin was groaning after it’s equivalent of a Thanksgiving Feast and Christmas dinner all rolled into one. My son and I parted company when his friends arrived , we congratulated each other on a job well done and I began to walk home, putting together a little tweet using some pics I’d taken of our handiwork.
Little did I expect than within half an hour there would be around 50 RTs. What was going on? It didn’t stop there – more and more RTs, likes, comments from people all over the UK – not just my wonderful home town of Colchester. It was going bananas, and I sat back not knowing what to think. I thanked a few people, made a few comments and just absorbed the viral nature of it all.
It had been very much a spur of the moment thing; a sudden urge to remove what I viewed as a scourge of the mainstream media from the level of children walking in to watch Trolls. It was done as a throwaway thing and I hadn’t thought more of it. I didn’t expect the response I got. As of writing this blog, the tweet has been seen by just over 65,000 people, it’s had over 8,500 people press the little pictures with their fingers or mouse (that gets me the most for some reason!) and it’s been RTd 633 times and Liked 829 times. Considering most of my tweets get ignored and if I get one like or RT I’m surprised, you can picture the slack-jawed guppy walking around Colcestrian Manor…
I have to say that the overwhelming majority of response this tweet received was favourable, bordering on frantic enthusiasm (see below). But, a small percentage seemed to come at the ‘stunt’ as nothing more than a childish prank to attack free speech and the freedom of the press. One particular lonely voice amongst the congratulatory public was a councillor for the local area (also see below) who made it very clear over and over to me and other voters that free speech was being trodden on here and I was taking away the common person on the street’s choice.
I know, I know what you’re going to say… isn’t there a newsagents just next door to the cinema that sells all colours and flavours of the news chronicles that the lovely people of this fair land like to get informed by?
Yes, yes there is. Any Colcestrian – not just the one badly hitting these keys at the moment – could freely walk into Jane Bloggs Cinema Newsagents and purchase The Sun, The Guardian, The Financial Times and stroll off happy. I question whether the two Colcestrians in the body of myself and my son were really harming the choice of news material for the local area.
And this is where we get to the crux of why I’m writing this blog. Why pick this point? Why did the councillor and some other people (a couple of whom I knew) take such an opposing view point and feel the need to point it out repeatedly?
Is it ideological? Were they making a point of principle?
I kind of hope so, because the other reasons are petty vindictiveness, and plain cranky lack of finger on the pulse of the people. There are so many other things to get on your high horse about, both locally and further afield. Why decide to go after one man and a boy staging a peaceful protest against the machine?
I didn’t harm the right to free speech by recycling a bunch of Sun papers. That implies a level playing field where the common person’s voice is as loud as that of an oligarch. I think Newscorp might have more influence over the spread of news than me.
I wonder whether these people would have stayed the arm of Winton from 1984 when he wished to rail against Big Brother. “Come on mate, I’m no fan of BB, and I know he controls all that we see, say and even think, but freedom of the press and all Winny!”
It has really made me question if I’m living in the same reality or world-view as some other souls that I walk the Earth with.
At the same time as I was handing a nice bit of pulping revenue to the local council, not far away a homeless man had made it to safe harbour having been set upon viciously by an anonymous gang. His injuries were so severe that he required immediate medical help and was concerned to be seen by those helping him.
The Sun plays a huge part in feeding the kind of narrative that leads to divisions which make us fear ‘the Other’. It’s a nasty, sexist, misogynistic, racist, inciting, vile war-mongering piece of tabloid filth, and the sooner it and others like it disappear into the heart of the actual sun, the better humanity will be.
This is the reason stores around the country are refusing to stock the publication. Why there are groups like Justice for the 96. This is why millions of people get behind Lily Allen and Gary Lineker, rather than side with the press. I’m not in the minority, wanting to see the back of Murdoch’s populist rag. The minority are those shouting ‘Free Speech oppressor’ at me for recycling some papers from the foyer of the Odeon.
I know I’m not damaging The Sun’s readership by removing a hundred or so copies from circulation. In fact, I may well have given them the impression their free ‘sales’ were up. This in turn could lead to more advertising revenue for them, and so on and so on… but!
But, i’m not just recycling papers. I’m also tweeting about it. I’m getting into arguments with local councillors. I’m one of many people raising the profile of #DontBuyTheSun. I’m calling out The Odeon for entering into the uniquely monopolising stance of giving just one newspaper away in their foyers.
If the people vociferous against this kind of action were as vocal about the things The Sun did, I think things might be slightly better.
So have a go at people doing this if you must, and say we’re wasting our time – that’s fine. Say these acts will have no effect, by all means. But don’t call it censorship, when clearly it isn’t going to quiet the voice of multi-billionaires in any way.
I will leave you with something a wise woman once said to me:
I met my wife in the flesh in the spring of 2001. That was a strange year and one that for some reason seemed always predestined to be so. For people of my generation it seemed like the future. We’d always envisaged living in space by that time or at the very least large black monoliths on the moon. 2001 seemed like it would never really happen, even in the run up to it. All that hubbub about the y2k virus crashing all the electronic systems in the world… Seems so juvenile now.
I remember seeing the eclipse that never really was in 1999 and thinking that year was crazy. Everyone was partying like it was that year then 2000 came, nothing blew up and there was a kind of anti climax when we entered 2001. The computers hadn’t broken down or turned against us, nothing had blown up… Yet.
Granted there was a sense of growing promise. There was a seed of having made it that far and therefore anything might be possible. Just maybe there would be colonies in space. Ok, so they’d be a little late for the party but we’d get there. Maybe we could all get along and wars would end. Maybe a decent president would take over in the U.S. Maybe maybe maybe
And then something did blow up. So many things blew up.
And it all ended. Everything.
All the hope – all the maybes – all the possibilities for a better future.
It was gone. A chain of events had led to a cataclysm in time and everything changed.
The thousands of deaths didn’t do it. The media images beamed around the world on the burgeoning internet didn’t do it. The fear didn’t do it.
Those were symptoms. Something had shifted. Something had been removed suddenly like a massive bandaid being ripped from an open wound. Something had gone wrong that should never have happened and an innocence – some might say ignorance – was lost.
We are now children of a new world. And our children. Oh my…
I was on a plane with my new wife just a month after it happened. We flew the same airline in the same direction as the killers. We were so scared. We didn’t want to have just found each other to then lose each other so soon to what everyone feared would be a string of copycat events.
But it didn’t happen. We are still here and it’s further into the future I could never fathom as a child. It’s 2016 and we’ve been married fifteen years. We live in a very different world to the one I knew.
A few years back, watching an ice skating competition show doing a retro 1984 theme we both were seeing what a very strange and alien world that was. 2001 was never the alien future. I should have realised at the time. The past is alien. When you step over the chasm which was 2001 you have said goodbye to an alien world which you never knew you lived in. Our son, seven at the time, commented that 1984 seemed a very nice time. Yes it was and yet we lived with threat of nuclear holocaust, war around the world and prejudice and inequality everywhere. We were striving for a better world and look where we are.
We’ll never forget 9/11 – we can’t. It was the endgame of the creation of our current world.
My thoughts and love go out to those who were involved.
Those who were biologically born with male bodies just do not have to deal with the bizarre and extreme things as those who were biologically born with female bodies.
In my mis-spent youth I have overheard, in dingy grotty Southend pubs, men with a full week’s stubble on their otherwise bald heads, threaten other men saying “You’ll be pissing blood tomorrow mate!”
I have to admit if I were passing blood when I used the lavatory, I would be concerned.
But, those with female bodies, no matter what gender they identify as, have to deal with passing blood from before they hit their teens, most commonly.
If you have that connection with the earthy and gory reality of human life from such an early age, it must affect you. These people are strong in a way that the swarthy oaf I recall from my younger days couldn’t possibly understand.
The female body was made to create and hold life – the sloughing process that follows the monthly cycles (28 day cycle if they’re lucky, 10 day cycle if they’re not…) is a constant reminder that we are fragile and wet beings. We are connected to a very visceral life on a planet of other people.
The process is also rather upsetting to wake up to. That first trip to the bathroom isn’t just a scratching-your-privates-and-releasing-your-gasses walk of sleepiness. It’s a horror show.
Think also of the poor little ones who meet their first period without forewarning or very little preparation and how it seems to them. What a pivotal shaking moment that is in their lives.
So this is just a little call out to those of you who are strong, and have to deal with that stuff all the time. You’re powerful, you’re continuing the human race, you’re loved.
Well done.
And you oafs, who haven’t considered this before… go find someone buying their sanitary products and shake them by the hand for the enormous amount of biological hardship they go through which you don’t.
I have been quiet for a while. Over the last couple of months I have stayed away from twitter and Facebook, and spent most of my spare time at home, avoiding people and life as much as I can. I am no longer a happy introvert. I am an unhappy hermit.
I have PTSD.
It’s very early days – diagnosis is recent. Assessments are being done, what treatments and support will be required are being evaluated. The path to recovery has barely started, but at least now I know there is a path.
So I hang on, between the appalling sleeplessness, the incessant noise in my brain from flashbacks I cannot control, that tight constriction in my gut from the anxiety and fear, the mind numbing worry of how I might cope financially if I have to stop working, and the nerve shredding panic every…
I went into Colchester Town Centre a few days ago, a typical family activity you may think, with my task being to purchase shoes for when the kids return to school in September. We perused the usua…
I went into Colchester Town Centre a few days ago, a typical family activity you may think, with my task being to purchase shoes for when the kids return to school in September.
We perused the usual outlets when my son became upset and agitated which is usually a sign that his personal hygiene needs have to be seen too.
I hate it when this happens in town, but have to suck it up and change him on the floor of a public toilet.
The first place we visited was Lion Walk disabled toilet, on the approach we noticed the outside was wet as I peered inside, the sink had been stuffed with tissues, and someone had run the tap flooding the floor. I cannot change my son there.
A bright idea was then to go to Three Wise Monkeys, as I remembered that they have a disabled toilet. However…
A couple of month’s ago my employers had the temerity to make me redundant. They were obviously unappreciative of all the magic that was created by my sheer presence.
Instead, they decided to go down the path to rack and ruin without their A+ prime time player.
A few months have passed, and my delusions of grandeur have subsided only mildly, I have found myself having to go through the indignity of signing on.
A temporary glitch in the Matrix indeed, and after the usual bureaucratic faff, I’m sat in front of Mr Smith himself.
I made the effort to look fresh as f**k, along with cravat and gloriously camp oversized pocket hanky; my aim was to impress this gentleman.
Naturally, after dining with Dukes and Maharaja’s this experience was far from Supercalifragilistic.
My pittance was assigned to me, which was designed to ‘help’ me find work. Even though it…
Hello all!! I am writing this blog on my phone, such is my dedication to both blogging and the subject at hand today. Forgive me for any errors, I am used to writing on a keyboard, and to me, part …
Labour’s Tim Young is now officially recognised as the front runner to dislodge the surprise Tory candidate for MP who snuck in last General Election cycle.
The Colcestrian 