Unite, but follow me
As a Muslim I have much experience of being lectured about 'unity' by certain people and most of it has come from people primarily responsible for causing the division. For example, almost every Ramadan...
Author: Matthew Smith
Mental health campaigner Claire Greaves dies in Cygnet unit
I learned this morning that Claire Greaves, a mental health blogger and campaigner who has worked with Mind, Fixers and eating disorder charity Beat until she was moved to a secure unit in 2016,...
Woman’s Place: Is the tail wagging the dog?
Last night I went to a public meeting organised by a group called A Woman's Place UK (@Womans_Place_UK on Twitter), ostensibly to discuss the potential impact on proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act...
Bawa-Garba supporters must stop attacking parents
In a previous post I expressed the opinion that the erasure of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba (right) from the medical register was a miscarriage of justice and that a medical practitioners' tribunal should not be...
Another FGM wild goose chase
Yesterday a Somali man living with his family in Bristol was cleared on the judge's direction of a child cruelty charge, brought as a result of his supposedly telling a passenger in his taxi...
Swype dies unnoticed
Swype, for a long time my favourite keypad to use on Android phones which I first encountered on my Samsung Galaxy S back in 2011, has been killed off after years of slow development...
Review: Dispatches, “Inside the Priory”
This documentary on Channel 4 last night (19th Feb) exposed abusive practices, short staff, over-reliance on temporary staff (including the undercover reporter for this programme) and poor safety at a hospital unit, The Dene...
Let’s investigate “death threats”
So, in the wake of Mary Beard's ill-considered (patrician, soft-racist) tweet last week about how she wouldn't go out to a disaster zone and do what those brave Oxfam staff (accused of sexually exploiting...
Mary Beard and the defence of low expectations
Earlier today Mary Beard, the Cambridge historian well-known for championing the role of women in academia as well as for her TV series, posted tweet defending aid workers accused of sexual abuse in disaster...
A lesson they’ll never forget
Every time there's a mass shooting in the United States, the anti-gun-control lobby insist that the right way to stop such incidents is for there to be more guns rather than less; that the...
Why Aditya Chakrabortty (may have) called himself Paul
This morning I saw a Twitter thread (starts here, ends here) from Haringey councillor Joe Goldberg, purporting to expose the middle-classness and inauthenticity of the pro-little-people and anti-establishment stance of the Guardian columnist Aditya...
If you don’t like trucks, don’t buy stuff
A member of Kent County Council has called for trucks to be banned from roads in Kent, claiming they cause "more damage than 10,000 cars" driving through his village. Seán Holden, council member for...
Zac Goldsmith, an authority on FGM?
Earlier today, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour featured a 6-minute segment on FGM, tomorrow apparently being "International Zero Tolerance on FGM Day" and who better to invite on than the co-chairs of the All-Party...
Review: Silent Witness, “One Day”
Silent Witness is a series based on the work of police pathologists: the "witness" refers to the body of a murder victim. It's been running since 1996 and the stories are always in two...
It’s not just the Far Right
Yesterday (Friday), Darren Osborne, who drove a van into a crowd of Muslims after a night-time prayer (taraweeh) last Ramadan and killed a 51-year-old worshipper, Makram Ali (right), who had collapsed prior to the...
Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba, racism and the appeal to authority
Last week the High Court ruled that a doctor whose mistakes contributed to the death of a young boy in 2011 should be erased from the medical register for life. Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba had...
Esther McVey and the Samaritans: a conflict of interest
This week it was revealed that Esther McVey, the new work and pensions secretary (after Justine Greening refused the job) in the Tory government, was on the advisory board of the Samaritans, the charity...
Who’s behind “Survivors Against Terror”?
I don't mean who's at the front of it: the public faces of it are on their website and include Brendan Cox, the widower of the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox, and some survivors...
Polygamy and “violent societies”
I saw this video being tweeted out by the Economist, a London-based weekly news magazine, this morning. It posits the idea that polygamy is strongly linked to violence in a society. Polygamy is still...
One lesson from Richard Handley’s inquest
Shitstorm. | Who By Fire The inquest into the death of Richard Handley (right), who died of faecal impaction in Ipswich in November 2017, is ongoing and is being live-tweeted on the account @HandleyInquest,...