When racists rage against racism
The controversy that started last week when someone dug up a five-year-old Facebook comment by Jeremy Corbyn on a picture of an anti-Semitic mural by an obscure London artist has not gone away. What...
Author: Matthew Smith
‘Sloven Health’ fined £2m
Today, the Hampshire based NHS trust Southern Health was fined nearly £2,000,000 for health and safety breaches in regard to the preventable deaths of two patients: Connor Sparrowhawk, the "Laughing Boy" of the Justice...
Thinking of becoming a Tory?
This week someone dug up a Facebook post from October 2012 by a muralist called "Mear One" which shows a mural of a bunch of bearded figures (which he explains as representing Jewish bankers)...
Why I’m not closing my Facebook account (yet)
Since the scandal broke about Facebook data being leaked to Cambridge Analytica, a New York-based political consultancy which served the Trump and Brexit campaigns and used the data to channel propaganda to susceptible voters,...
Why disrupt a picket line?
Footage has emerged of a group of trans activists, all women, one of them perhaps trans, protesting at a Bectu union picket line outside a cinema in Brixton (where there is a long-running pay...
Enough of the naivety about Putin
Last week the British prime minister, Theresa May, took most of the action she had promised to do after the Russian government did not answer for the attempted murder of a former spy and...
Silent liberals?
Last week a half-hour feature by Nick Cohen of the Observer on the supposed "silence of the liberals" on the 'plight' of liberal Muslims in the UK who are, he alleges, facing death threats...
The myth of the “conference of 72 sects”
The other day on Twitter someone retweeted a Qadiani (a member of the so-called Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam) repeating a much-rehearsed claim: that according to a newspaper report at the time, 72 sects of...
Who’s more culpable for the M1 truck crash?
Last August there was a three-vehicle crash on the M1 outside Milton Keynes in which eight people were killed, all of them in a minibus which was crushed when a moving truck from behind...
Corbyn stands no chance without a second referendum
With every week that passes, new disadvantages to this country from Brexit become clear: yesterday it was revealed that Theresa May had confirmed that the UK would not be part of the EU's Digital...
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...
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...