From Chartists and Suffragettes to Irish republicans and today’s Palestine activists, the treatment of hunger strikers exposes a consistent pattern in how the British state represses those it deems political prisoners, says KEITH FLETT
IT WON’T astonish Morning Star readers to hear that in the great houses of the Victorian and Edwardian period the use of broad beans was governed by the class system.
The family — that is, the employers — would eat the broads just for the first few weeks of the season; as soon as the beans grew much bigger than peas, they became food fit only for the workers.
They would no longer appear on the family table, but there’d be plenty of them in the staff kitchen. You can’t help suspecting that this daft rule of snobbery was invented by a cunning member of the below-stairs classes.
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