ISIS and the “three silly girls”
Recently three young girls, British Bangladeshis from east London, left the UK for Turkey apparently intending to join ISIS in Syria, and the media have been up in arms about the fact that someone...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Thomas Rawnsley: funeral today
The funeral of Thomas Rawnsley, the young man with Down’s syndrome and autism who died at the Kingdom House unit in Sheffield earlier this month, where he had been held on a Court of...
Gender, ‘censorship’ and campus free speech
Last Sunday there was a letter in the Observer, the Sunday sister paper to the Guardian, from a long list of people (the principal signatories being Beatrix Campbell and Deborah Cameron; the others appeared...
Where were you?
Today the Guardian published a long article on the late Lucy Glennon, who wrote for the paper, most memorably about her condition (epidermolysis bullosa or EB), but also about food and about the effects...
Review: 100 Days of UKIP
UKIP: The First 100 Days (Channel 4; viewable for next 29 days in UK only) Last night, Channel 4 screened a programme which imagined what the first 100 days of a UKIP government would...
Of course the ‘FGM doctor’ was innocent
Last Wednesday a doctor who had been charged with inflicting FGM (female genital mutilation) on a woman in the UK was found not guilty after a trial lasting two and a half weeks and...
LB on Newsnight while BBC plugs Southern Health unit
So, last night Newsnight did a feature (34min in) on the ongoing ‘effort’ to get people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour out of assessment and treatment units (ATUs), more than two years after...
Thomas Rawnsley (1994-2015): abuse, separation, unexplained injuries … heart attack
Updated 5th February Yesterday I learned that a young man with both autism and Down's syndrome whose family were fighting to get him out of a 'specialist' hospital back to his family in Bradford...
No rape culture except Muslim rape culture?
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, author of the book Love in a Headscarf, earlier posted a link to a ridiculous article by one Liam Deacon (whose other writings are at the Huffington Post) which was briefly...
Review: The Theory of Everything
The Theory of Everything is a bio-pic of Professor Stephen Hawking, the British professor of theoretical physics and former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge university, who is best-known for his book A Brief...
“Due process”: the baneful legacy of Magna Carta
This year marks the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta, the treaty which protected the rights of the Norman barons during the reign of King John, and has since become a byword...
Message to the animal rights lobby: women aren’t vermin
These days a regular annoyance is getting an email from a petition-hosting organisation (having absent-mindedly signed up for their emails when you signed a petition once) asking you to free someone who’s been “caged”...
No, not “regrettable errors”. Lies. #FoxNewsFacts
Fox Correction: "We Have Made Some Regrettable Errors On-Air Regarding The Muslim Population In Europe" | Video | Media Matters for America Fox News, on which a number of ludicrous and obviously false claims...
Walking into Trouble: How ‘shared space’ shuts blind people out
Some friends drew my attention to the above video, which is about how the ludicrous "shared space" fad (in which 'street furniture' is ripped out, pavements and roads levelled, and surfaces smoothed out to...
How France can really ‘protect all religions’
France 'to protect all religions' (BBC News) The French president, François Hollande, has announced that France "will protect all religions" and that Muslims are the "main victims of fanaticism" in a speech at the...
Panorama: a parade of irrelevance
So, on Monday night BBC’s Panorama responded to last week’s massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices by dusting off a 25-minute feature on “British Islam”, in which John Ware, who had fronted a previous...
Charlie Hebdo and the limits of free speech
Last week three gunmen raided the offices of the French ‘satirical’ magazine Charlie Hebdo (Weekly) and killed its editor, three other contributors, two policemen and various other staff (including bodyguards but some not named)...
Review of 2014
Two big things happened in my life in 2014. The first was that my Grandad died, in January. He had been living with us since the previous November, and had been getting steadily weaker....
City Link failure shows limits of cost-cutting
City Link: 2,000 staff to be made redundant on NYE – RMT Last week the British logistics firm City Link went into administration, with the potential loss of nearly 5,000 jobs once self-employed contractors...
Nick Cohen shows his irrational hatred for the Muslim Brotherhood
Why must we tolerate police spies in our midst? | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer Nick Cohen, as long-time readers will know, has a long-standing hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood,...