So, last Friday Theresa May, the British prime minister, gave a speech in Florence (full text here) in which she told us what sort of Brexit she hoped she could achieve, notably rejecting both the “Norway model” in which the UK would be a full member of the Single Market without a seat at the table when EU policies are made, and the “Canadian model”, the latter being a straightforward free trade agreement. One section of her speech that has caused a lot of upset was this:
The strength of feeling that the British people have about this need for control and the direct accountability of their politicians is one reason why, throughout its membership, the United Kingdom has never totally felt at home being in the European Union. And perhaps because of our history and geography, the European Union never felt to us like an integral part of our national story in the way it does to so many elsewhere in Europe.
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Earlier this week the minicab firm Uber, which allows people to hire cabs using an app which calculates the fare to their destination, 
I’m a Muslim and an anti-Zionist. The latter means I support the right of the Palestinian Arabs to their country: all of it. Right now, part of it is a settler state that allows some remnant of the former Palestinian population to remain as citizens, part of it is occupied by that same settler state, and parts of it are under a form of limited self-rule, mostly without access to their external borders and subject to incursions, curfews and other impediments to normal daily life at the will of the Israeli army. These facts are the reason there is a well-established movement to boycott the state which oppresses the native people of Palestine and the settler state of Israel, and to bring an end to the oppression as has been done with similar régimes, ‘democracies’ which exclude a large proportion from any say in their own lives or how the country they lived in was run, in southern Africa. The settler state, however, has powerful friends in the West which denounces this movement as inherently racist and accuse it of desiring to see genocide against the Jews, effectively another Holocaust. Both these accusations are groundless.
In another chapter of the ongoing battle to bring to book those responsible for the death of Connor Sparrowhawk (known as Laughing Boy or LB) in a bath in an NHS learning disability facility in Oxford in 2013, today the NHS trust responsible, Southern Health, pled guilty at Banbury magistrates’ court, Oxfordshire, to breaching section 3 of the Health and Safety Act, namely failing to ensure the safety of people other than employees. Sentencing was meant to take place on 12th October at Oxford Crown Court (the magistrate can only levy a very inadequate £5,000 fine) but the trust are in court on charges brought by the Care Quality Commission that day, so it is likely to be delayed until the new year. The management has changed somewhat since Connor’s death, with the then CEO Katrina Percy resigning in October 2016 (after having served in an ‘advisory’ role since nominally stepping down as CEO in August 2016) and all the non-executive directors resigning in March 2017; Connor’s mother, Dr Sara Ryan, 
I’m a truck driver and for the most part I enjoy my job. I get to see different parts of the country every day and much of what I see apart from roads (and industrial parks, service stations etc) consists of green fields, hills and valleys and pretty villages and small towns. Most of the jobs I do are low-pressure, varied, not banal and do not require me to be in close proximity to others (strangers) for long periods in the day. It can be tedious, motorway driving especially, but I can listen to the radio or stock up on podcasts and audio-books to listen to on the way. A lot of driving jobs, however, consist of the same trip every day, often from a pallet freight depot somewhere to a ‘hub’ somewhere in the Midlands in the evening and returning in the early morning. Every night the motorways are filled with these lorries, mostly ‘double-deckers’ about 16 feet high, usually about three of them from each of about five companies in each postcode area. In the USA, they are already testing a system they call ‘platooning’, or running three trucks together with only one ‘active’ driver, the others controlled by computers connected to the truck at the front, and tests of these set-ups are shortly to take place here. I think this is a bad idea.
The persecution of the Rohingya in Burma (Myanmar in the main native language) has picked up in the last few weeks, with obvious signs of genocide or as the UN has called it “classic ethnic cleansing”, the burnings of villages and half-hearted attempt to disguise the burnings as the 
Hot on the heels of the Tower Hamlets Muslim foster care hoax, the Times today printed a story (behind firewall) claiming that home schooling was part of “a breeding ground for extremists and future terrorists”, a claim made by Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Neil Basu at a police superintendents’ conference in Stratford upon Avon:
Earlier today I heard an 
Earlier today I saw an article on Medium titled 
The truth about the young girl fostered with a Muslim family in east London that appeared in the Times on Monday was revealed yesterday in an 
Update: The Home Office has apologised after it established that Shane Ridge was indeed 
The Murdoch Times has a front-page story today exposing a ‘scandal’ in which a young “white, Christian” girl was placed by Tower Hamlets council’s social services into the care of a Muslim foster family in which the wife wears the niqaab (which they explain is indicative of “Wahhabi” beliefs, which is not true) and which has not allowed her to wear a cross on a chain around her neck or eat pork in the house and encouraged her to learn Arabic; the current foster carer supposedly wears a “burka” (a term nobody uses here, and the garments known as burkas abroad are not worn here) which covers her whole face when outside. The Times’s version of the story is paywalled, but the Daily Mirror has published 
The State is Peter Kosminsky’s four-part drama series on a group of young people from western Europe (the two central characters are British) who travel to Syria to join ISIS. It was shown on four consecutive nights at 9pm starting last Sunday night. Peter Kosminsky previously directed Britz, a mini-series from 2007 about two young British Muslims, one who kills herself after being subject to a control order and one who becomes a suicide bomber as a result. That was widely criticised for its unconvincing storyline and manipulative plot devices as well as the use of language Muslims would not use. The State, although it had its unconvincing parts and annoying details, clearly shows that Kosminsky has done quite a bit more research this time around; the two central characters are ‘believers’ in the mission of ISIS on arrival, but gradually come to understand the dark side of life in Raqqa and the corruption of its leaders; one escapes while another comes into conflict with the leadership and at the end is on the verge of imprisonment or execution.
Earlier today, the health minister Jeremy Hunt posted some tweets claiming that Professor Stephen Hawking was wrong in his assessment of the data regarding the “weekend effect” (the notion that people admitted to hospital over the weekend were more likely to die than those admitted during the week because fewer doctors, and in particular fewer consultants, are working). The ‘effect’ has been cited by the Tories and the right-wing press to support Hunt’s proposals for a “24-hour NHS”, while others have debunked the idea. Professor Hawking is to make a speech at the Royal Society of Medicine today criticising the plans and is accusing Jeremy Hunt of 
There’s a claim that has been repeated a lot on social media by former Hilary Clinton supporters (the graphic on the right 
There was an article on the Independent last week 
I was listening to the BBC’s You and Yours programme and heard 
It’s no secret that the bulk of the support for the campaign to pull the UK out of the European Union last year came from the Right — UKIP and large sections of the Tory party — but it has been part of the hard Left’s campaign for decades as well, was Labour policy in the early 1980s and has the support of a number of Labour MPs; Jeremy Corbyn’s support for remaining in was thought to be lukewarm. The other day I saw a conversation between two online friends after one of them asked if anyone she knew who had voted for Brexit could tell her why. The other responded that the EU was “neoliberal, ruled by people lacking both public support and expertise, vindictive, selfish and tyrannical”, examples being the treatment of Greece and migrants. As true as these things might be, they are all at least as much British diseases as European ones.
The Hulu TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel set in a New England taken over by a fundamentalist Christian theocratic police state that styles itself the Republic of Gilead, concluded on Channel 4 last Sunday night. The series (like the novel) follows the story of Offred, AKA June, who has been conscripted as a ‘handmaid’ to provide children to wealthy élite families in a society beset by a so-called plague of infertility which seems to be affecting other countries (such as Mexico) as well. The series has been described as not fiction but “a warning” by an Australian feminist columnist, and it seems many people are watching it despite finding it distressing, most likely because everyone is talking about it so everyone else needs to understand it. I found it a very weak and unbelievable piece of TV and its biggest weaknesses are its back-story and its handling of race, which are connected.