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....
Author: Matthew Smith
Did immigration really cost Labour these elections?
A little over a week ago, in council elections across the UK and a parliamentary by-election in a historically safe Labour seat, the so-called Reform UK party, whose leader is Nigel Farage who previously...
Haulage industry: treat drivers better
A major driver training organisation in the UK, which is part of a major driver recruitment agency, today claimed that the UK’s haulage industry risks falling into the same crisis of recruitment seen during...
Israel and India: the wilful ignorance of a New Democrat
Since the terrorist attack on Indian tourists in Kashmir this week, in which two of the attackers were reported to be Pakistanis (which according to the Hindu nationalist/fascist government in India implicates the whole...
Gaza vs Bosnia, Hamas and free speech
The other day I saw a Twitter post about the ongoing genocide in Gaza by a local doctor who was asking where all the human rights advocates were, the “moral architects” who “wept in...
Does Croydon deserve the nickname “the Cronx”?
Anyone remember the “Chav craze” of the early to mid 2000s? Early on in this blog’s history I wrote a piece called “Cursing the Darkness” which looked at websites dedicated to slagging off the...
New twist on moonsighting fitnah
The issue of when to start Ramadan and when to have Eid has been a bone of contention as long as I’ve been Muslim and probably for much longer. I was made aware of...
Vishal, PIE and 80s boarding
A couple of weeks ago I got a comment asking if one James Russell had applied for any job at Kesgrave Hall, a boarding school I attended from 1989 to 1993 (ages 12 to...
The Drumlanrig jolly
Yesterday we heard that various minor British Muslim leaders had presented an ‘accord’ to the king that they had agreed with the leaders of British Judaism, including the Chief Rabbi, a major rabbi from...
Why people are deserting the BBC
Late last month it was reported on Bloomberg (archived copy here) that the government were considering making it compulsory to pay the TV licence fee to watch streamed on-demand entertainment online from providers such...
Elephant in the echo chamber
Since Donald Trump won a second term as US president last year and, with the help of Elon Musk, set about slashing the American federal government and sacking officials on the basis of personal...
Two disastrous transport projects
This week the Labour government announced that it supported the plan to expand Heathrow airport with a third runway as well as to build the East Thames crossing, an additional road tunnel (or two)...
Axel Rudakubana is guilty, and nobody else
Last week Axel Rudakubana, an 18-year-old man born in Cardiff of Rwandan parentage, pled guilty to three murders and multiple counts of attempted murder and carrying a knife in connection with last August’s Southport...
Musk, Goodwin, racism and rape
The past week or so we’ve seen the incoming American presidency flex its muscles by threatening countries hitherto thought to be their allies, with Donald Trump proposing the annexation of Greenland, a country that...
Reflections on the fall of Bashar al-Assad
Last week the 53-year-old Assad dynasty in Syria was finally overthrown by one of the rebel militias which had broken out of Idlib, a city near the Turkish border in the north-west, two weeks...
Nigel Farage will not be Prime Minister
In the last few weeks there has been a lot of talk about the likelihood of the Reform UK party gaining power in the UK in the next few years, about the government or...
The benefits of learning Jewish history
The other day I saw a tweet by Stephen Pollard, former editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle, columnist, TV personality and Zionist — no, not the one complaining about all the ads on dating websites...
There’s a genocide going on
Last Saturday in the British media I saw two articles, one on the BBC News site by a writer whose name I didn’t notice (on a second look, it’s their North America correspondent, Anthony...
The Holocaust, Gaza and “how genocide happens”
On social media this past week or so, in discussions about Israel’s stepping-up of its atrocities against the civilian population of north Gaza, there has been some talk of how genocides are allowed to...
Guardian caves in to racist pressure on Gaza
In today’s Guardian there is a review by Stuart Jeffries of a Channel 4 documentary about the October 2003 Hamas attacks on Israel; it is a four-star review (out of five) which praises the...