Inquest travesty
This week the inquest into the death of Thomas Rawnsley, the young man with Down’s syndrome and autism who died in 2015 in a privately-run care home, Kingdom House, where he had been placed...
Author: Matthew Smith
Subsidise eating in, not eating out
There was talk yesterday that the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme, which ran through August and saw restaurants subsidised to offer a substantial discount on meals eaten in on weekdays, might be revived...
“Liberals think conservatives are evil, while conservatives just think liberals are wrong”
Yesterday I saw a thread by the American comedian Jeremy McLellan (known to the Muslim community for opposing some Islamophobes a couple of years ago) which identified what he saw as the main difference...
Why use Hermes?
This week a video appeared on social media and in some newspapers of a Hermes van driver picking up a cage full of parcels and throwing them with great force into the back of...
Expanded congestion charge is just an unjust tax
It’s been reported over the last week or so that, in exchange for a government bail-out of Transport for London, the London public and road transport body overseen by the mayor, that the government...
Why the male pill won’t replace the female pill
Earlier today I saw a tweet by one Mohamad Safa, a diplomat at the United Nations (he does not say from which country) and CEO of “Patriotic Vision”, about birth control and whose responsibility...
Don’t Tell MAMA, she’ll go crazy
Recently I’ve been hearing on Twitter about Freedom of Information Act requests in the UK being refused on very obviously spurious grounds (this being a particularly egregious example), leading to speculation that there is...
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...
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...