Azeem Rafiq, racism and redemption
Over the past few weeks the cricketer Azeem Rafiq revealed racist treatment he had received over many years when training and then playing at Yorkshire Cricket Club, a scandal which has resulted in the...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Did Linux succeed? Did BSD fail?
This morning, I had a Quora digest with a set of tech questions, including the usual number of plainly stupid ones that asked why something was true that wasn’t or why something happened that...
Autism, female diagnosis and trauma
Yesterday the feminist psychologist Jessica Taylor (of Why Women Are Blamed For Everything fame) made a series of tweets about the rise in women being diagnosed with autism and ADHD and suggested that it...
“Lone wolf” terrorists aren’t a myth
Last week, the anti-Muslim writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali (notorious for whipping up hatred towards Muslims in the Netherlands where she’d lived after making a false claim for asylum, before fleeing to the US where...
The NHS versus the Trusts
Yesterday Channel 4 broadcast a Dispatches programme presented by Matthew Syed (a long-standing writer for the Times newspaper) titled Clapped Out: Is the NHS Broken?, on the failings of the NHS and whether it...
Can Labour tackle the private school problem now?
Yesterday I saw a tweet by the Labour MP Rachel Reeves saying that, “as Labour chancellor”, she would end the charitable status of private schools which costs the public £1.7billion per year, and move...
Sarah Everard, the police and the public
Last week, a former Metropolitan (i.e. London) Police officer named Wayne Couzens was sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a woman he falsely arrested on Covid rules violation...
Time for legislation on disability and late abortion
Last week the High Court in London rejected a suit from a woman with Down’s syndrome, Heidi Crowter (right), to overturn an aspect of the abortion law in the UK which allows a baby...
We don’t need irrational old weights and measures back
Yesterday the government announced that merchants were to be allowed to sell food and other products solely using imperial weights and measures again, a practice that was banned some years ago when we were...
Celebrity imams and dodgy marriages
In the last week or so, two Muslim celebrities, one a social media celebrity with a spot on a mosque board and the other a well-known Qur’an reciter who could draw crowds and was...
On imposing medical treatment without consent
The other day the Muslim scholar and blogger Musa Furber published a brief article on his blog answering claims from some Muslims that Muslim authorities do not have the right to impose medical treatment...
What was it all for?
Last weekend, the Taliban completed its takeover of Afghanistan (well, it took the capital; it’s possible that pockets of resistance remain) after the Americans and British withdrew their troops which had been propping up...
Plymouth murders, armed losers and terrorism
Last Thursday a man named Jake Davison murdered his mother and then four others in Plymouth before turning the gun on himself. It has been revealed that Davison had made YouTube videos in which...
It’s not just Brexit
Anyone who shops in any British supermarket (which is to say, pretty much anyone who lives in the UK) will have noticed that there are shortages of some goods, with some whole areas of...
A pile of mud won’t save Oxford Street
The other day a Twitter friend posted a picture of a large mound which had been erected (temporarily) on the island next to Marble Arch in London and said she hoped this was a...
False neutrality
Last week the European Court of Justice ruled that employers have the right not to allow employees to wear ‘religious’ clothing (in this case, as is usual, the hijab or headscarf worn by Muslim...
Relaxing drivers’ hours is a bad idea
Last week the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, announced that the government were going to be temporarily relaxing the maximum daily driving hours for truck drivers in the UK by an hour. Normally the daily...
The wrong time to end the mask mandate
Yesterday, the government announced that most if not all the current rules and restrictions aimed at preventing the spread of Coronavirus, including the requirement to wear masks in enclosed public spaces and to keep...
Conservatorship is a disability issue
A theme I keep coming across in discussions of the Britney Spears conservatorship case is the presumption that she is in this predicament because she is a woman. Yesterday I came across a meme...
“Have you tried boarding?”
The other day a parent I follow on my social media, whose autistic daughter has been out of school for much of the past several years, mentioned a programme that was on Radio 4...