Who will be criminalised in the post-Roe USA?
Last week a draft of a ruling by the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court was leaked to the American news site Politico (PDF of the document itself here) which indicated that the...
Author: Matthew Smith
Review of Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story
Netflix has released a two-part series on the British TV presenter Jimmy Savile, who over a decades-long career as a club DJ, radio and TV host, charity fundraiser and adviser to politicians and royalty,...
Did Putin do Brexit to us?
In the years since the Brexit referendum in 2016, it has become fashionable among Remainers to blame the result on manipulation. While the racist and xenophobic motives were plain from some of their advertisements...
How ‘fair’ is mandatory water metering?
This week my family got a letter from the local water company, Thames Water, telling us that water meters are going to be installed on our street some time this month and that they will be coming to dig up our street to do it.
No excuse for racism
As soon as bombs began falling on Kyiv, the country’s capital, people began fleeing, mostly to the western borders with countries like Poland and Romania; more than a million refugees have fled the country. Among them are foreign students and others from African and Asian countries, and numerous stories have emerged of racist treatment they had received from border guards, the police, shopkeepers and others while attempting to leave the country.
Travesty of justice, travesty of science
I recently bought and read the autobiography of Jennifer Msumba, an autistic YouTuber, musician and film-maker who lives at a group home in Florida who spent seven years at an institution in Massachusetts, the...
Why the Tories broke the Covid rules
This past two weeks or more, the news here has been dominated by revelations about the behaviour of Boris Johnson and his friends during the two lockdowns in Spring 2020 and Winter 2021 (January...
Loyalty is part of Islam
Last year, it was discovered that two men had been spying on major Islamic organisations in the USA and taking money from a hate group run by someone known since the 90s for spreading...
What is and what isn’t eugenics?
As more and more of the British population has received vaccination against Covid-19, it has been reported that most of the people who are still becoming very ill with the virus are the unvaccinated,...
This scandal has already broken
“It’s a massive scandal just waiting to break” (Morning Star, 6th Jan 2022) This article, by the feminist writer “Dr EM”, most of whose articles are on fringe feminist websites, attempts to expose the...
New Year Dishonour
On Saturday morning we awoke to the news that the former prime minister, Tony Blair, and the broadcaster and former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, had been awarded knighthoods,...
Review: The Fall
The Fall is a drama about a serial killer currently streaming on iPlayer in the UK as well as Netflix; it consists of three series, five episodes in the first series and six each...
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...
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...