Last Wednesday in Manchester, a 64-year-old man with learning disabilities, David Askew, collapsed and died after two youths broke down his garden gate and tampered with his mother’s scooter. He had not been physically assaulted, but had been the subject of a campaign of intimidation by a gang of local yobs. Neighbours described […]
Continue reading about Harassment “commonplace” for those with learning disabilities
Today I found a post at the blog The Answer’s 42 alleging that the so-called burqa was to blame for the increased incidence of vitamin D deficiency in Asian women in the UK and resulting rickets in their children. The author linked a discussion between Nigel Farage and Salma Yaqoob on the Radio 4 […]
37 years of solitary confinement: the Angola three | Society | The Guardian
I had heard of the Angola Three before today, but this article puts the whole case into very clear detail for anyone else not familiar (and I wasn’t). Two African American men, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, have been held in solitary […]
Today the Guardian carried a front-page story about how various Tory MPs and activists are being given training by an offshoot of the party’s youth wing, Conservative Future, named the Young Britons’ Foundation ([1], [2]). The group’s leadership regards the NHS as a waste of money, disbelieves global warming and condones waterboarding on the […]
Continue reading about Tory think tank compared to “madrasa”
One of the two men who were convicted of the murder of James Bulger as boys was recalled to prison about a week ago, something the public found out yesterday and was all over the papers today. There is a lot of speculation about why this happened; it could have been down to a […]
Continue reading about Old wounds opened by Venables re-arrest
Yesterday I had a brief exchange of tweets with Organica, who told me of her enthusiasm for the British comedian, Ricky Gervais, best known for writing and starring in The Office, his stand-up shows, and most recently the critically very unacclaimed film titled The Invention of Lying. She was enjoying learning British English from […]
Continue reading about Ricky Gervais on ME, and other bad comedy
BBC News - Heathrow armed robbery accused on run from London court
Today a guy who was on trial for an armed robbery at Heathrow airport in 2004 jumped bail after having left the Royal Courts of Justice in London, ostensibly to consult his lawyers. This is his third trial; the previous two collapsed because […]
In 2002 Teresa May, the chairwoman of the Tory party appointed by Iain Duncan Smith, told the party’s conference that people called her party the “nasty party” and that their base was too narrow as were their sympathies on occasion. Norman Tebbit noted that this “nasty party” won three general elections but that it […]
Does anyone remember what Robert Kilroy-Silk was like before he wrote that column in the Daily Express — AKA Daily Spew — saying that the West owes Muslims nothing, being as we are all limb-choppers and women-repressers etc., and then tried to make a name for himself by getting involved with UKIP?
A YouTuber who suffers […]
I’ve been following the media coverage of the Lynn Gilderdale attempted murder trial with some interest as I found it quite emotionally affecting, and have found most of the coverage to be sympathetic to Lynn’s mother, Kay Gilderdale, who was acquitted last Tuesday. It now turns out that Panorama, the BBC documentary series, had […]
Continue reading about Panorama and other media coverage of the Gilderdale affair
Earlier this week, a mother named Kay Gilderdale was acquitted of the attempted murder of her daughter Lynn in December 2008. Lynn Gilderdale had been bed-bound since the age of 14 with severe ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis). She was paraplegic (earlier on in her illness, she had been functionally quadriplegic, but she remained without […]
Continue reading about The differences between the Inglis and Gilderdale murder cases
Yesterday a man who attacked someone who had burgled his house and terrorised his family had his sentence cut and suspended (having had his conviction overturned) and released. Also yesterday, a woman who had killed her brain-damaged son by giving him an overdose of heroin was jailed for life, with an unusually low tariff […]
I didn’t watch the Muslim Driving School programme, which was on BBC2 last Tuesday (at the right time to clash with Defamation, which I reviewed in my last entry), but I finally got round to seeing it just now, and I was pleasantly surprised. It was all shown in the north of England around […]
Continue reading about Muslim women driving, and contrasts on niqab
So, once again a terrorist associated with al-Qa’ida has nearly taken out an aeroplane, and governments are scrabbling around trying to find ways to prevent that exact type of attack from ever happening again. This time, we are being threatened with full-body scanners, and Gordon Brown — against official advice — has decided to […]
The noughties are defined by fakery | Hadley Freeman | Comment is free | The Guardian
Hadley Freeman, normally a fashion columnist for the Guardian and someone I normally agree with fairly readily, opines that this decade has been defined by ‘fakery’:
The noughties, or whatever we end up calling them, were surely defined by […]
A while back, before I got the hang of Twitter as a means of announcing blog posts and conducting cross-border conversations without having to log into a chat client (and well before getting my Android phone yesterday and being able to tweet on the go without incurring international text charges), I thought Twitter was just […]
Continue reading about Arrogant privilege rears its head again
BBC News - Romanian workers reveal true cost of beauty
This is a story about Romanian workers who were tricked into coming to the UK to sell cosmetics on a “commission-only”, “self-employed” basis. This involved selling the products in a department store and being paid only for what they sold, not for the time they […]
Continue reading about Romanians bilked by self-employment scam
It seems that offence has been taken at my reference to two bloggers in my last entry who reacted to the vote against minarets in Switzerland last Sunday to the effect of “I won’t be going there then”. I’ve Googled the first name of the person who took the offence and I can’t find […]
I’ve been asked to offer my opinion on the result of yesterday’s referendum on minarets in Switzerland, perhaps inevitably. I had expected such a law to be passed, contrary to the opinion polls which suggested that it wouldn’t, because a country where a major party can use such openly racist imagery as the “black […]
Continue reading about The Swiss minaret law and its implications
Why Conservatives failed the test on Islamic schools - Education News, Education - The Independent
It appears that the Tories overlooked a number of things while criticising state funding for two schools supposedly linked to Hizb-ut-Tahrir in Slough and north London:
The most obvious mistake was the allegation that they appeared not to have been […]
Continue reading about Why Tories messed up in attack on Islamic school
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