Justice matters, and it costs
Last Friday some of the tabloids led with a story whingeing about the money that was spent on the defence of the men convicted of manslaughter in the case of PC Andrew Harper, who...
Author: Matthew Smith
Mandatory life sentences for manslaughter?
A few days ago I got a link on my social media to a story about a campaign for the law to be changed so that there would be a mandatory life sentence for...
London driving and the heatwave
So, the heatwave in the UK has finally ended after six days of temperatures in the mid-30s (Celsius) every day. Yesterday or the day before, much of the south has had at least one...
Corbyn, Brexit, and Labour’s civil war
I still follow a number of Labour ‘left’ accounts on Twitter and among these there is a common explanation for the 2019 election result, which is that Corbyn’s decision to adopt a second referendum...
Why is Boris Johnson popular? Is he?
Last Monday, a piece called Why Boris Johnson just keeps on winning, by the pro-Brexit academic Matthew Goodwin, appeared on the Tory-dominated opinion website UnHerd, which examined why the Tories continue to be several...
A tax on progress
Today it was announced that the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, was considering introducing an online sales tax, citing such reasons as a need to “protect the high street” from fears about coronavirus...
Garmin’s four-day outage reflects incompetence
Last Thursday when I started work, driving a truck for a flooring company, I attempted to connect my new Garmin sat-nav to get software updates. It told me it couldn’t connect to the update...
Potential problems with face masks
So, finally yesterday the government announced that face masks were to be made mandatory in shops in England, as they have been in Scotland for weeks, from the 24th of July (Friday week), which...
Use the justice that’s there
This morning it was revealed that the woman who was videoed making a malicious phonecall to New York police earlier this year after a Black bird-watcher videoed her with her dog off the leash...
Hong Kong migrants: where will they live?
In reaction to the new security law the Chinese government have imposed on Hong Kong, a former British territory returned in 1997 which in theory enjoys autonomy from China under an arrangement known as...
How do we solve a problem like the police?
Since the killing by four Minneapolis police officers of George Floyd, a former work colleague of one of them, there have been worldwide street protests and a revival of the Black Lives Matter movement...
Nothing brave about Starmer’s cave-in
Today Keir Starmer, the Labour leader elected earlier this year, caved in to pressure from the Board of Deputies of British Jews to sack the shadow education secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, who had shared an...
Cruelty over shielding
At the weekend the government announced that the rules for people who are under medical advice to stay indoors to avoid catching Covid-19 at all costs as they are likely to become severely ill...
Not our brothers’ keepers
Last week a young woman named Ellie Williams (right) from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, posted a long message on Facebook describing having been kidnapped by a group of local Pakistani men and taken to an address...
Reflection on “Happy Valley”, series 1
Last week, while looking for something to watch while doing a large stack of ironing during the lockdown, I stumbled upon the first series of the six-part BBC crime drama, Happy Valley. This drama,...
Bread with few roses, as the government push us back to work
Yesterday a draft of the government’s guidance for “getting Britain back to work” was obtained by BuzzFeed: seven documents giving various advice for how companies might minimise the risk for staff coming back to...
Why the ‘English’ are tolerating lockdown
James Kirkup, writer for the Spectator and director of the Social Market Foundation, published a piece on Unherd today entitled “Why the English sacrificed liberty for lockdown”, musing on how readily and with so...
Blaming the public: PPE edition
This morning I read that a group of NHS managers had suggested that the public should not be advised to wear masks while outside as their buying them would endanger the supply of PPE...
Putting the NHS on a pedestal
Last night, for the third Thursday night in a row, people came out of their front doors to clap in support of NHS workers and carers. For the first time, as far as I...
Blaming the public
Two weeks into the ‘lockdown’ imposed on us in mid-March, the government continues to reveal little at its daily evening press briefings. Last week I heard the slogan “only one thing worse than no...