Hearty Squirrel from Joel Sharples on Vimeo.

This is a wee film I made with Emma Saunders about Edinburgh's student-run food cooperative. First film I've made so it's a bit rough around the edges but hope you enjoy it.

Apologies for the lack of recent writing, I've been hard at work on my degree and editorial duties at The Student.

I did a quick guest blog for Fair Corp recently on a football tournament I organised for Fairtrade fortnight last month, using their Fairtrade footballs. You can read all about it here

We're hoping to organise another bigger and better tournament for World Fairtrade day on May 12th. Get in touch if you want to get involved.

Getting Figgy With It

Here's my latest satirical column for The Student. Bit silly but, as they say, the pun is mightier than the sword:

War by other means

Sanctions are often presented in the media as a peaceful alternative to war - using economic levers to pressurise countries into compliance.

John Pilger's documentary Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq demonstrates how the structural violence of sanctions can be just as harmful, if not worse, than the actual violence of warfare.

Paying the Price Killing the Children of Iraq from John Pilger on Vimeo.

Death in Custody: Police Shame or 'Excited Delirium'?

Imagine the following scenario: a police officer’s home is broken into by a gang of eleven youths, who chase him into the street and beat him to death while his watching family beg them to stop. There would be national outrage, the perpetrators would face lengthy jail sentences and the Prime Minister would be on television talking about Britain’s broken society and feral gang culture.

catch-up

Bit late, but here's a couple of bits of writing that have been published in The Student recently. I'm now co-editor of the comment section so will be doing a satirical column every couple of weeks, here's the first one about the royal yacht.

Also a piece on Iran that was published back in November. Since it was written things have escalated a fair bit with the EU oil embargo and more assassinations of Iranian scientists. I'll hopefully do another piece on the topic when I get a chance but there are some relevant points here.

Now that I'm editing the comment section I won't be writing as much in The Student but I'm hoping to carry on writing short opinion pieces here as well as reports and photos from protests, meetings, events etc. I realised at the end of last semester I did a huge amount but had little record of anything apart from a few photos so hopefully I can rectify that by keeping this regularly updated.

Edinburgh University collaborating with Bahraini government

It was announced this week that the University of Edinburgh has signed a cooperation agreement with Bahrain's repressive authoritarian regime, which is seeking to create a "network of scientific research" that will link academic institutions to business and industry.

UPDATE - Edinburgh University Investments

Following my piece on Edinburgh University's investment in the arms trade and in oil companies such as Shell two motions were proposed at the EUSA AGM on Nov 23rd, calling on the University to divest from Shell and Cobham Plc. Both passed unanimously, however as the turnout was less than the required 300 the meeting was not quorate and therefore the decisions were not binding. Nonetheless the support for the motions was so strong that the Vice President of Academic Affairs, Mike Williamson, pledged to follow up the issue with the University. Since then it has been revealed that the university has sold its shares in Cobham Plc as a result of student pressure. The next step will be to try and bring about a change in the University's Socially Responsible Investment policy to prevent arms manufacturers from returning to the investment portfolio.

What Lies Beneath

When students begin ploughing £36,000 into the Edinburgh University coffers next September they will no doubt expect that this money is used in a responsible way. The University’s Socially Responsible Investment policy and its Climate Action Plan certainly suggest that it will. However, students’ money is being used to finance some of the most environmentally destructive projects on earth, as well as runaway climate change, arms manufacturing and human rights abuses.

A Fracking Disgrace

When you hear the words ‘renewable energy’, what images spring to mind? Wind farms, solar panels and tidal energy turbines? What about a power station covering the area of 17 football pitches, with a 100 metre tall chimney that belches out the smoke from millions of tonnes of wood that has been shipped over from Florida? This is what Forth Energy is attempting to build in four locations around Scotland, including in Leith where people live just 200 metres from the proposed site. If the application is successful it will potentially receive billions of pounds in renewable energy subsidies from the Scottish Government.

"It's like a hotel with a guaranteed occupancy"

The Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke made headlines this week with his inflammatory rhetoric about a “feral underclass” charged with instigating the recent riots in Britain. However in amongst his comments about the “criminal classes” of Britain there was a serious point about how the British people are being failed by our criminal justice system. An unbelievable 73% of young men who have been to prison will reoffend within a year of their release, not because they are feral members of a criminal class but because their time in prison destroys any opportunities they may have had for gainful employment and leaves them ill-equipped to re-enter society. To his credit, Clarke has recognised this and during his time as Justice Secretary has sought to promote prison as a place of rehabilitation rather than simply incarceration.

A Society of Amateurs

When did the word amateur take on such negative connotations? We talk of an “amateur mistake” or an “amateurish performance”. What? The performance of someone who loves to perform? That sounds like a compliment. The word is derived from the Latin “amator”, simply meaning lover. Over time it has been constructed in opposition to “professional”, and the implication is that anything not pursued with money as the primary motive is second-rate, shoddy, worthless. When did money-making become a guarantee of quality? How many of our favourite albums, books, paintings, plays, films were pursued with dollar signs in the eyes of their creator? Unless your favourite film is The Hangover: Part 2 the answer is not many. In fact there’s a credible argument that anything created simply to cash in will always be tainted by this original sin. It will be soulless and trite (see The Hangover: Part 2.)

Botox on the Beach - A Poem

There's botox on the beach,
There's silicon in the sand,
Poseidon's striding out the sea with a scalpel in his hand,

Offsetting Flares

To the residents of Little Rock, Arkansas, news of Friday's earthquake near Blackpool would not come as a surprise. Shale gas extraction there was halted in March after 800 earthquakes in six months, including the strongest in 35 years, caused some bright spark to realise that perhaps forcing millions of gallons of water into the ground in order to fracture the rock might not have had the best impact on the region's seismic activity. Undeterred by this and evidence that the fracking process poisons water supplies, the chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee of the House of Commons, Tim Yeo, last month declared concerns about the safety of fracking to be "hot air" and recommended that extraction proceed.

The SNP's Greenwashed Facade

Those who oppose wind farms and new power lines on an aesthetic basis would be well advised to pay a visit to Scotland’s central coal belt in Lanarkshire, where thousands of acres of centuries-old woodland have recently been torn up to access the black gold lying under the ground. These new open-cast mines (essentially huge quarries) have destroyed eco-systems, significantly raised cancer rates among local residents and left ugly scars across the landscape. But leaving these concerns aside, surely in this day and age, given what we know about the devastating effects of burning coal on the environment, it is unjustifiable for Alex Salmond’s government to be burning this stuff at a higher rate than ever before.