About

Photo of Christiaan Briggs. © All rights reserved.I ori­gin­ally star­ted this web­site as an altern­at­ive to send­ing emails to friends and family.

Since then it’s become a good out­let for frus­tra­tions, ideas and for the devel­op­ment of web­site and writ­ing skills. It also came in rather handy when I had some­thing import­ant to say.

My main audi­ence is friends, whānau and — most import­antly — me. ;)

For those of you who aren’t friends or fam­ily, I’m from Aotearoa New Zea­l­and. I was once told I was wasn’t rad­ical enough to be an anarch­ist so I call myself a con­ser­vat­ive anarchist. I live and work in Lon­don — as senior archi­tec­tural tech­ni­cian for a small firm design­ing social hous­ing. My favour­ite job here in Lon­don used to be uncle but, alas, my won­der­ful sis­ter and her gor­geous fam­ily finally packed up home to New Zea­l­and after 11 years in Lon­don. Since then I’ve immersed myself in what is a very reward­ing job in architecture.

I’ve been polit­ic­ally act­ive through­out parts of my life but des­pite being vari­ously labelled one — to make a good head­line — I’m not a “peace act­iv­ist” or a “paci­fist” and never have been.

My polit­ical actions have always been pre­oc­cu­pied with justice. Although I myself have per­son­ally made mis­takes in this area I believe abso­lutely that one can be faced with a moral duty to use violence.

Polit­ical activ­ity for me has been an indul­gence; at no other time have I felt more alive than the human shield action to Iraq, and what bet­ter way to indulge in life than to under­mine those who seek to stamp it out?

Why is this web­site called Last Straw?

The last straw is an idiom mean­ing that somebody’s had enough and derives from another idiom, the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” Between the threat of a war to end the world eman­at­ing from the Palestinian/Israeli con­flict, the devel­op­ment of bio­lo­gical weapons, human caused plan­et­ary dev­ast­a­tion and peak oil I think our world could have it’s back broken to some degree unless we can change in a big way.

I also have a love for straw bale con­struc­tion so the name was a wink in that dir­ec­tion too.

The image on this page is copy­righted; all rights are reserved.