Peasant, and proud.
Manchester
Joined August 2021
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On Thursday I wrote about the 2014 injunction Russell Brand obtained against a woman who accused him of assault.
I've now obtained the final order. It's breathtaking.
She had no lawyer. No trial. Yet she was silenced for life - even barred from speaking to the police.
🧵:
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Let’s do the actual math of the imperial supply chain.
Take a mother working in a garment factory in Bangladesh.
She works a 12-hour shift.
During that shift, she sews more than 150-200 t-shirts for H&M.
Her pay for the entire day? Less than 5 dollars.
Now look at the other end of the ledger.
H&M takes those exact same shirts and sells them to European consumers for more than 20 Euros each.
That is over 4,000 Euros in retail value. Generated by her hands. In a single day.
Her cut is less than a fraction of a percent. The rest goes straight to shareholders in Stockholm.
What is the human cost of this math?
This mother spends 12 hours away from her child. She works until her body gives out. And she goes home to a wage that barely covers the bare minimum food to share with her family at the dinner table.
This is what Western "free trade" actually looks like on the ground.
The European consumer gets cheap fashion. The corporate boardroom gets record dividends. The Bangladeshi mother gets starvation.
H&M runs massive ad campaigns in Europe talking about "conscious" fashion and "sustainability."
But there is absolutely nothing sustainable about a system that requires a mother to sacrifice her child's childhood just to keep the company's profit margins intact.
This is why the factories are shutting down.
They aren't just striking for a few extra cents. They are striking for the right to actually sit at the dinner table with their kids.
All power to the striking workers of Bangladesh.
They are hitting the empire right in the ledger.
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I make no apology for banging on about the Russell Brand affair, because it shows just how hyper-mediated the consciousness of people on the left and the right really is. Brand's later association with Trump-land is not my concern; the right-wingers can have him as their martyr if they like. My concern is what the episode reveals about the left. Even so-called revolutionaries are hopelessly captured by the conventions of fame and celebrity. Every one of them assumes the working class are dumb sheep who will do whatever a celebrity asks of them. That is why they all latched onto Brand over a decade ago: they thought he was the prole whisperer, and that he would deliver them the young working class. They were, as always, disastrously wrong — and they endorsed a man who by his own admission had behaved in a manner no socialist should endorse or tolerate, and that on the basis only of what he had admitted in his own book. This confirms yet again that rebuilding working-class politics has to start with the rejection of all these desperate, media-driven tactics, and of the short cuts so many seek.
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There is a saying: Neil you are the company you keep.
You have publicly stood by Brand. You criticised the media treatment of the allegations, hosted him at your home, and continued the association after the claims were already public. Those who dismiss the allegations are effectively saying the women are lying. That same logic has been used to wave away victims in other cases, including Savile and the grooming gangs. It fails to understand power and control. A famous man with status and access can continue after a woman says stop. Prior consent to other acts does not make that consensual.
The 2012 LA allegation fits the same pattern. The woman went to a rape crisis centre the same day. She did not report it to police because she did not think she would be believed. She messaged him “when a girl says NO it means no.” He replied that he was “very sorry.” Dannii Minogue publicly called him a “vile predator” who wouldn’t take no for an answer in 2006. The Times began looking in 2019. His public right-wing turn and baptism came after the allegations were already circulating. That timing looks like a smoke screen, not a sudden revelation.
A jury heard the evidence and convicted him of rape and three sexual assaults. The offences were in 1999–2009. The conviction matches the behaviour that was already widely known.
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Washington: "Iranian youth are ready to rise up"
Iranian youth: "The Strait is in our hands. We've brought them to their knees. Trump is nothing compared to our country."
There are fascist countries and communist countries. It doesn't matter which one you live in. It's time to pick a fucking side.
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In 2013 Russell Brand “joked” about being a rapist. The audience laughed.
“ I raped someone once,” Brand said in 2013, to raucous laughter from the interviewer and audience.
As @LizKershawDJ writes in her Telegraph article, “Brand was a creation of some of the most powerful players in the media. They were in his thrall. And he was egged on. He was their performing monkey. He made “great telly”. His colleagues were collateral damage.”
Media bosses at the Sun newspaper who celebrated him as “Shagger of the Year” three times (2006, 2007, 2008) and executives who turned a blind eye to his sexual activities with competition winners in BBC lavatories, and allowed him to regale his Radio 2 audience with “what he’d like to do to a newsreader under the desk” should hang their heads in shame.
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You think Hegseth is a patriot? He raped a woman while his then-wife was home w his 3 sons and then-sidepiece/now-wife was home w his 7-week-old newborn daughter. I see patriotism as necessarily meaning a person is not a totally disgusting piece of human garbage. Who raised you?
