Jewish white privilege is no myth
Jewish Privilege is a myth by Giles Fraser (from Unherd) In this article Giles Fraser, a London vicar married to an Israeli, complains that Jews are commonly left out of definitions of ‘BAME’ (Black,...
Author: Matthew Smith
Did Anthony Williams get lucky?
Last Thursday a man who throttled his wife to death last March, shortly after the initial Coronavirus lockdown was imposed, received a five-year jail sentence after a jury accepted his plea of guilty to...
Not expensive
Yesterday a report into the death of a partially-sighted man, Cleveland Gervais, who was hit and killed by a train at Eden Park station in south-east London last February was published by the Rail...
Newark: a pointless road scheme
On Thursday the Guardian reported that the government had ignored official advice to review a massive road-building programme on environmental grounds; taking such advice has been a legal requirement since 2014. This revelation forms...
Zero Covid: totalitarian? A cult?
I saw a piece by Freddie Sayers (former editor-in-chief of YouGov, now at UnHerd) billed as a look “inside the Zero Covid campaign”, a report from the conference of the “Covid Community Action Summit”,...
Do they know what representation means at all?
Last Thursday the BBC radio programme Woman’s Hour (10am, Radio 4) interviewed Zara Mohammed, the new secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain and the first woman to be elected to that role, and...
Where did Captain Tom’s money go?
Earlier this week Captain Sir Tom Moore, a World War II veteran who raised £33million for NHS-related charities by walking miles in the form of multiple lengths of his back garden during the first...
Call this devolution?
I saw a tweet earlier this week from the political scientist Matthew Goodwin, a noted media and Twitter Brexiteer, hailing the “devolution deal” that came into force this past weekend which paves the way...
How should Muslims react to Holocaust education?
Someone on Facebook shared an article from Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, on how immigrant (or immigrant-descended) Muslims in Germany react to Holocaust education efforts such as trips to concentration camps. The article notes that...
Vaccine ‘scepticism’ is not about religion
Sneering scientists won’t win over anti-vaxxers by Giles Fraser (UnHerd) This article is sub-headed “Public intellectuals risk alienating religious believers” and the author is a vicar in an inner London Anglican church with, as...
The ex-boyfriends aren’t the villains
Last week, following the publication of a report into the abuse of women incarcerated in church-run institutions in Ireland in the mid-20th century, I saw series of tweets assigning guilt to the men who...
On fronted adverbials and other fancy names for everyday things
Recently my Twitter feed has been buzzing with talk of “fronted adverbials” with tales of children losing marks in their school English work for not using enough of them, parents having to ask their...
Carrier indemnity must stay
In the most recent episode of the BBC tech series Click, it was revealed that the new US president Joe Biden is seeking to repeal the law that indemnifies “big tech” from what people who use their services say.
Tearing down statues of oppressors is not censorship
Murderers are not a section of society that is held in great respect in our society, much as in others. Until the 1960s if convicted they were hanged; since then they have been subject...
Who is, and who isn’t, a terrorist?
Earlier this week a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters, whipped up by Trump’s baseless claims of ‘fraud’ in last November’s presidential election, invaded the houses of Congress in Washington, DC, with the apparent help...
A politicians’ and grifters’ Brexit
So, the Tories finally negotiated a deal to take Britain out of the EU single market and customs union a little over a week before the transition period ended (the end of the year)...
The danger of a return to the death penalty
The same weekend the government signed a wretched trade deal with the European Union which preserved the zero-tariff regime on goods but sacrificed almost every other advantage we had from being an EU member...
There’s already a Queen Elizabeth II Bridge
In today’s Guardian there’s a news story that there is a dispute between local politicians in Gloucestershire and South Wales about a plan to rename the old Severn Bridge. The Welsh want it renamed...
Blaming ‘Remainers’ for hard Brexit
There is an article on the Guardian website by Owen Jones, probably due for publication in the print/daily edition tomorrow, blaming those he calls “hard Remainers” for the current threat of no-deal Brexit (and...
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...