The Brit Shinobi🇬🇧⚔

I was 23 before it even occurred to me that not starting with sex ever was an option. The feeling of relief was so great I actually cried. 

Also, it’s okay to never date anyone ever. It’s okay to never even try it if you don’t want to. 

"Bloodymary is fucking peak!!" I scream at the enraged mob, hollering at me to die.

On this day, 16 June 1531, English king Henry VIII modified the vagrancy laws he brought in the previous year, which were key in creating the working class. People kicked off communal land who were not in wage labour were designated as vagabonds, and on their first offence were to be whipped, then on the second whipped with half an ear sliced off and upon a third offence they were to be executed. This and similar laws enacted across Europe, backed up by intense state violence, created a class of people forced to sell their labour to survive: the working class. Karl Marx described these legal mechanisms in volume 1 of his work, Capital: "Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system." This expropriation was extended across the globe by violent colonialism. Rather than being a natural state of affairs as it is often portrayed, the creation of the working class was fiercely resisted for hundreds of years, and indeed still is to this day in some areas. Learn more about the expropriation of common lands in this book: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/stop-thief-the-commons-enclosures-and-resistance Pictured: illustration of punishment of a Tudor vagrant

On this day, 14 June 2017, a fire began in the Grenfell Tower block of flats in West London, which killed 72 people and destroyed 151 homes. The fire began due to an electrical fault in a freezer, but it then spread rapidly. The main reason for the fast spread of the fire was the fact that flammable cladding was installed all around the building during its refurbishment by Rydon Construction at the behest of the Conservative local council in 2016. Zinc, more fire-resistant cladding was originally proposed for the work, but instead, flammable aluminium cladding was used because it was £300,000 cheaper. For years, Grenfell’s residents, who were working-class social housing tenants, and mostly people of colour, had complained about inadequate fire safety measures in the building. Rather than blame the landlord, developers or the Conservative government responsible for fire regulations, right-wing media like the Daily Mail began a campaign attempting to demonise residents of the building, and firefighters, for the deaths. Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg even blamed those killed for their own deaths, claiming that they lacked “common sense”. However, a government-commissioned inquiry later determined that the flammable cladding was the primary reason for the high death toll, and that residents had followed the advice of emergency services. After the fire, survivors of the disaster, as well as other local residents and supporters, began a campaign demanding justice for those killed, and working to ensure no such fire happens again in the UK. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/14644/grenfell-tower-fire