AI revolution? What revolution
The other day I heard the former British prime minister Tony Blair being interviewed on Radio 4, twenty minutes after the more recent former PM Rishi Sunak being interviewed on the same channel. Blair...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
In defence of the National Trust
I’ve been a member of the National Trust, a British conservation charity which maintains a large number of estates including parks, stately homes, gardens and landscapes, since 2019. I’ve spent many an afternoon wandering...
Enoch Powell was never an ‘Unperson’
Last week Simon Heffer wrote a piece for the Spectator, a British Tory-associated news and opinion magazine, alleging that the politician Enoch Powell, an MP from 1950 to 1987 (with a break in 1974,...
Fumbling towards catastrophe
Last week local elections were held in the UK, mainly for district and unitary authority councils in England but also for the Welsh and Scottish parliaments. For the second time, Reform UK gained majorities...
Again: who counts?
Last week three men were stabbed in London by the same individual, a man born in Somalia though now a British citizen who had previously been imprisoned for stabbing a police officer and his...
Epsom and the “two tier policing” myth
Update 17th April: police have found no evidence to suggest that the crime happened at all. As I suspected, this is likely to be a hoax. Last weekend a woman reported that she had...
Whose comfort?
Earlier today I saw a short video on Facebook or Instagram, I forget which, by a woman called Tamara who migrated from Croatia to the United States (I don’t know which part). I saw...
The feminists who don’t listen to women
In the last couple of weeks, two articles by white feminists have been published in the British right-wing media attacking the niqab, and peddling some very familiar generalisations about women who wear it. The...
A past that we know was never real
Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth elected on a Reform UK slate in 2024 who subsequently went independent because his views on immigration were too extreme even for Nigel Farage, has now formed...
2010: Looking back in anger
There’s a certain type of politician and political activist who is quick to take credit when his party wins, but will blame everyone but himself and his allies when they lose, and can be...
We don’t all know each other
The grooming gangs issue has been all over social media the past few weeks: three weeks ago, a group called Open Justice UK published the transcripts of the 2019 Bradford trial in which nine...
On defunding or abolishing ICE
Imagine that there was a boarding school where children were being abused on a daily basis; where bullying was rife, where staff were casually physically violent and verbally abusive, where the food was routinely...
Who counts?
Last week the chief constable of West Midlands Police, Craig Guildford, retired after admitting presenting inaccurate information sourced from an artificial intelligence app, Microsoft CoPilot, in a report on the security situation that would...
Hierarchitis
Recently I listened to two BBC podcasts in the Crime Next Door strand. One was about the kidnapping of Lesley Whittle, the teenage daughter of a local bus company boss, in the mid 1970s...
Badenoch and the know-nothing right
Last week, the government announced a new initiative to combat misogyny among young men, targeting both schoolchildren and teachers. The £20m programme will include training for teachers to “spot and tackle misogyny in the...
When a fallacy isn’t
Last weekend I saw a set of pictures on Instagram with the lead picture containing the headline “The Ten Most Dangerous Logical Fallacies”. The author, Sahil Bloom (author of a book called The Five...
Assisted dying and democratic niceties
Currently in the UK, Parliament is debating a bill introduced by Kim Leadbeater, the sister of the assassinated Labour MP Jo Cox who was selected for the same seat after Cox’s successor was elected...
Why Farage’s teenage racism matters
Over the past few weeks there has been a series of revelations by people who were at school with Nigel Farage who was a pupil at Dulwich College, the prestigious private school in south...
Web services that suck
At the tail end of the last millennium, before blogs and definitely before social media, there was a book published called Web Pages That Suck, a guide to badly-designed web pages aimed at people...
Sara Sharif review and its implications for race relations
Today an independent review into the murder of a ten-year-old girl of mixed Pakistani and Polish parentage, Sara Sharif, was published. The review (PDF) by the Surrey Safeguarding Children Partnership (SCP), identified five particular...