National mourning?
Today Prince Philip died. Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark was the Queen’s husband and had the title Prince Consort and was known as the Duke of Edinburgh. He was probably best known for...
Author: Matthew Smith
Avoiding some common scams
The other day the British radio presenter Shelagh Fogarty tweeted asking her followers if a text she had received, telling her she had a parcel to collect but to click a link and “confirm...
‘Free speech’ irrelevant to Batley cartoon row
This week a teacher at a school in Batley, Yorkshire was suspended after showing his year 9 (aged 13-14) pupils, some of them Muslims, a cartoon originating with the French magazine Charlie Hebdo depicting...
The link between street harassment and bullying
Last week, in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard in London, for which a police officer has been charged and is in custody, a lot of women have been sharing stories about...
Burning your child’s past
Last night I saw a thread on Twitter from an individual called “Autismomum” in which she talked of burning the documents about her child’s school life in case they were discovered by the child...
The Queen’s gardens
This past week it’s been suggested by the writers Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (or Alibi-Brain as she’s known in these parts) and Simon Jenkins (in the Guardian) that the Queen should make some of her vast...
Reasons reasons: why the Tube never reached Croydon
This morning I watched a video on YouTube about a plan to build an Underground line that would link King’s Cross and Victoria stations, major London rail terminals serving the north-east and south respectively...
Not just a child
Last week the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that Shamima Begum, the “ISIS bride” who ran away from home to join the self-styled Islamic State aged 15 in 2015, had no right to come back...
Jewish white privilege is no myth
Jewish Privilege is a myth by Giles Fraser (from Unherd) In this article Giles Fraser, a London vicar married to an Israeli, complains that Jews are commonly left out of definitions of ‘BAME’ (Black,...
Did Anthony Williams get lucky?
Last Thursday a man who throttled his wife to death last March, shortly after the initial Coronavirus lockdown was imposed, received a five-year jail sentence after a jury accepted his plea of guilty to...
Not expensive
Yesterday a report into the death of a partially-sighted man, Cleveland Gervais, who was hit and killed by a train at Eden Park station in south-east London last February was published by the Rail...
Newark: a pointless road scheme
On Thursday the Guardian reported that the government had ignored official advice to review a massive road-building programme on environmental grounds; taking such advice has been a legal requirement since 2014. This revelation forms...
Zero Covid: totalitarian? A cult?
I saw a piece by Freddie Sayers (former editor-in-chief of YouGov, now at UnHerd) billed as a look “inside the Zero Covid campaign”, a report from the conference of the “Covid Community Action Summit”,...
Do they know what representation means at all?
Last Thursday the BBC radio programme Woman’s Hour (10am, Radio 4) interviewed Zara Mohammed, the new secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain and the first woman to be elected to that role, and...
Where did Captain Tom’s money go?
Earlier this week Captain Sir Tom Moore, a World War II veteran who raised £33million for NHS-related charities by walking miles in the form of multiple lengths of his back garden during the first...
Call this devolution?
I saw a tweet earlier this week from the political scientist Matthew Goodwin, a noted media and Twitter Brexiteer, hailing the “devolution deal” that came into force this past weekend which paves the way...
How should Muslims react to Holocaust education?
Someone on Facebook shared an article from Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, on how immigrant (or immigrant-descended) Muslims in Germany react to Holocaust education efforts such as trips to concentration camps. The article notes that...
Vaccine ‘scepticism’ is not about religion
Sneering scientists won’t win over anti-vaxxers by Giles Fraser (UnHerd) This article is sub-headed “Public intellectuals risk alienating religious believers” and the author is a vicar in an inner London Anglican church with, as...
The ex-boyfriends aren’t the villains
Last week, following the publication of a report into the abuse of women incarcerated in church-run institutions in Ireland in the mid-20th century, I saw series of tweets assigning guilt to the men who...
On fronted adverbials and other fancy names for everyday things
Recently my Twitter feed has been buzzing with talk of “fronted adverbials” with tales of children losing marks in their school English work for not using enough of them, parents having to ask their...