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...
Author: Matthew Smith
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...
Starmer’s Labour has brought the ‘Corbitan’ problem on itself
This past week it was confirmed that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana were launching a new party after both were expelled or suspended and then resigned from the Labour party. They have decided to...
Diane Abbott, Labour and the Travellers
Diane Abbott, Britain’s longest-serving woman MP, was yesterday suspended from the Labour party after a BBC Radio 4 interview in which she reiterated remarks she made in a letter to the Observer in 2023,...
Grooming gangs, rape and racism
Last week Louise Casey’s report (PDF) on the long-running issue of grooming gangs, a system of criminality in which young girls are ‘groomed’ through younger boyfriends, plied with alcohol and free food and then...
Just don’t call it genocide
Last week I heard the introduction to a BBC debate on whether war crimes are taking place in Gaza, featuring Today presenter Anna Foster and a panel of “expert guests”. She introduced it by...
A kinder, gentler machine-gun hand?
Peter Hitchens, writing for UnHerd this week (and in a videoed discussion with its editor-in-chief, Freddie Sayers), makes a case for bringing back the death penalty, abolished for murder in the UK in 1965....