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...
Author: Matthew Smith
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...
Call a racist a racist
A few years ago I saw someone say on Twitter that people would happily call each other feminazis or grammar Nazis, but would not call a Nazi a Nazi. In the past year or...
Damn your feelings (but mind ours)
The saga over the Aston Villa versus Maccabi Tel Aviv football (soccer) fixture next month revealed a lot about how far our political establishment will go to defend Israel and to spare the feelings...
When is a British value not a British value?
When it’s Muslims doing it. This past week there’s been a big brouhaha in the British media about a mosque in east London which put on a fun-run in a local park as a...
You stop killing, we stop marching
Last Thursday it was reported that a man had stabbed two people to death outside a synagogue in Manchester. Today the man’s name was revealed to be Jihad al-Shamie, a name widely ridiculed by...
Am I intimidated by the English flag?
Recently there has been a movement, spearheaded by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (the football hooligan and racist rabble-rouser known as Tommy Robinson) and his associates to fly both British and English flags off buildings and lampposts,...
Charlie Kirk: Crocodile Tears
I am not sure I knew of the existence of Charlie Kirk when he was assassinated in Utah last Wednesday. I saw a tweet from a Muslim account on Twitter which drew attention to...
The company you keep
Last Thursday in the Guardian, there was a letter from one Desmond Hewitt telling us we should watch what we say about the people ‘protesting’ outside hotels housing asylum seekers in the UK. Referring...
Cycling Mikey vs the Fiat: right, but …
Last week some videos went around showing a road safety activist (some call him a vigilante) named Michael van Erp, AKA Cycling Mikey, trying to stop a Fiat 500 going the wrong way up...
Policing for the dealers of death
Yesterday, at a protest organised by Defend Our Juries in Parliament Square, London, more than 500 protesters, many of them elderly, were arrested for holding banners supporting the organisation Palestine Action, proscribed last month...
Why are we “so bad” at infrastructure?
Recently Radio 4 broadcast a series about HS2 (in ten fifteen-minute parts, starting here), and how it went from being a mere idea on a bit of paper to being a grand infrastructure project,...
Home education must be defended
Last Wednesday, BBC’s Radio 4 broadcast an episode of their File on 4 Investigates programme which exposed a ‘school’ (not actually a school as such, but a centre for home educators) called Hope (Home...