Charlie Gard and NHS versus private care
So, the tragic story of Charlie Gard, the terminally-ill baby boy whose parents have fought a legal battle to stop doctors at Great Ormond Street in London from turning off his life support, has...
Author: Matthew Smith
Blaming the colonials for everything
Over the weekend I saw a touching story about an elderly Moroccan lady who completed the first grade of her country's school system after having been illiterate all her life and having spent three...
A 20-year-old is not a baby!
Yesterday a young man called Rashan Charles was killed in an encounter with the police in London, and the footage has been posted on social media with the hashtag "Justice for Rash". The footage...
Polygamy and being Muslim
Earlier a Facebook friend (an African-American Muslim woman) posted a status that Black Muslim men should just accept that most Black Muslim women hate polygamy and that "no amount of guilting and shaming is...
Are ISIS really Khawaarij?
Yesterday I saw a Facebook post which linked to a story about a paper by Craig Considine which claimed that "newly translated" stories from the time of the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam)...
HS2: worst of all possible worlds
The juggernaut of HS2, the new high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham and, we are told, eventually beyond, ploughs on. Today the government awarded the contracts to various major construction companies to build...
Charlie Gard: What if they’re just wrong?
The case of Charlie Gard, the baby boy with a mitochondrial disease and allegedly irreparable brain damage whose life support doctors have been trying to turn off as they believe there is no hope...
Why Muslims aren’t pacifists
Martin Luther King junior famously wrote a Letter from a Birmingham Jail, a response to local White clergymen who had urged him to be less strident and roll back on the direct action. One...
What value “100% attendance”?
Last Sunday I saw a Facebook and blog post by a mother who said her son would not be accepting his award for 100% from his school, which would have meant a trip to...
Tories’ road fund is no revolution
This morning it was announced that the government was diverting just over a sixth of the £5.8bn assigned two years ago to the National Roads Fund (NRF) from trunk roads and motorways to regional...
Seven Days of Action: poor excuses for poor care
This week sees the third Seven Days of Action event to raise awareness of the people with learning disabilities who are trapped in psychiatric units, usually so-called Assessment and Treatment Units, sometimes for lack...
In defence of the friends of Nabra Hassanen
Early last Sunday morning in a northern Virginia town, a young lady was kidnapped off the street during or after the taraweeh prayer (the night-time prayers held during Ramadan) having gone to get food...
Jail for poor taste, and May and ‘autism’
Somebody has already been imprisoned for offences relating to the Grenfell Tower fire in west London, and it's not someone who signed off on the dodgy cladding; no, it's a local who had been...
Tory press is Tory, and on packing bags
So, after the intial flurry of sympathy and devastation for the people affected by the Grenfell Tower fire last Wednesday, by Friday evening the Tory press had started to show their true colours: as...
Labour, Tories and fire regulations
Grenfell Tower: Tory minister declined to include sprinklers in fire safety rules as it could discourage house building | The Independent This pretty much sums up why I'll be supporting Labour in any repeat...
Grenfell Tower fire: not terrorism
This shouldn't need to be said, but … In the wake of the fire in the Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey public housing block in west London, in which at least six people have died...
Election 2017: Hope, but not victory
So, the election results are in ([1], [2]), with only one seat remaining at the time of writing. The Tories have lost their majority, coming 8 seats short of the 326 needed to form...
Protect your rights — vote the Tories out
This will be the last blog post I make before the election starts tomorrow (Thursday) morning. The front pages of the two biggest-selling newspapers are full of propaganda against the Labour leadership, branding them...
What’s wrong with telling people you’re safe?
Last Saturday night there was a terrorist attack in London, and as often happens in these situations, Facebook activated its "safety check" or "I'm safe" feature, by which people identified as living in London...
Nefarious Tories?
One of the enduring weaknesses of the liberal left is a sense of moral piety: we assume that our values are superior, that we care about the weak and the vulnerable more than the...