Happy Friday, I shall be spending the day sorting out the living room so I can paint it tomorrow and having lunch with Jo and Ms T. This weeks links are very political. You have been warned.
1) Willie Nelson being cool and calling for equal rights.
I never thought of marriage as something only for men and women. But I’d never marry a guy I didn’t like.
Some call these myths. I call them lies. We are being told lies about who caused this crisis and lied to about the best way out of it. But I know one thing to be true: this government’s polices will make millions of people poorer and more afraid. To do that when you do not have to, when there are other options, is obscene.
3) Zoe Williams on Wednesday’s Daily Mail headline. Just when you think they can’t get any worse..
In part, this is just what hardship does. Generosity drops away and distrust is amplified and embellished, to use as a fig leaf over a spirit of meanness. But the roots go back further than the financial crash, to the widening inequality that has had as its inevitable side-effect a growing and real suspicion between social groups, whose lives and circumstances bisected one another less and less.
5) MP for Durham on what it’s like to live on very little indeed. I fed myself on £15 a month 2 years ago for nine-ish months. It was tough and I had all the cooking things I needed and a freezer. I also had family and friends who weren’t in the same boat and took me to dinner now and again and bought me the odd bottle of wine. But two years ago Sainsburys basic flour was 48p a packet and now it’s 65p, the cost of food has gone massively and given the weather last summer and this winter it’s not going to get any cheaper..
Most shocking of all was the fact that come Sunday I ran out of food—there was literally nothing left to eat that night. If Ministers are happy with the notion that 660,000 of our fellow citizens are literally not going to have enough to eat by the end of the week, all I can say is that I pity them because they have no pity and no conception of what they are going to do to the people in our constituencies who will be faced with this bedroom tax.
Nic Dempsey 