Welcome home and happy birthday
Back in February, I featured the story of Joshua Offer-Simon, who was at the time being held in a hospital unit in Birmingham. He had been under section for two years as a result...
Author: Matthew Smith
“Not exactly Mother Teresa”
So, today the Pope led a ceremony in St Peter's Square in the Vatican to canonise Mother Teresa, the nun who ran a chain of institutions for the sick, dying and destitute around the...
Listen to women — but which women?
Last Friday the highest court in France, the Council of State (Conseil d'État), struck down the ban on full-body swimsuits or so-called burkinis which had been imposed by some 30 municipalities in southern France...
Let’s be clear: the French swimsuit ban is about hate
In the past couple of weeks several coastal regions of France, including the districts that include Cannes, Nice and Menton, have banned women from wearing the full-body swimsuits known as 'burkinis' that are popular...
Schools should provide books, not require iPads
Back to school bill: pencil case, pens, rubber … and a £785 iPad (from today's Guardian) This is about how state schools (private schools have been doing this for a while) have started asking...
Yes, Black lives matter. But so do other people’s journeys
Last week I was working at a site just north of Heathrow airport, the quickest route to which is down the Heathrow spur and off at the bottom. On Friday morning I was returning...
The Investigation that revealed nothing
Last Thursday night, the last in a four-part series called The Investigator showed on ITV. The series attempted, or purported, to investigate the death of Carole Packman, who disappeared in 1986 after attempting to...
The loser of Sagamihara
Last Monday a former employee of Tsukui Yamayuri-en, a care centre in Sagamihara, Japan broke into the centre during the night and murdered 19 disabled residents. We do not know the names of the...
Apricot kernels
Earlier today I was browsing the mentions of Kate Granger, the doctor best known for setting up the "Hello, my name is…" campaign aimed at encouraging doctors, nurses and other health professionals to introduce...
So, where’s your inspiring leader?
This week, as the Tory leadership election gets underway and a bunch of five ghastly right-wing, anti-immigrant, mostly Islamophobic extremists compete to be the next prime minister, people who are in or more inclined...
Brexit: A misguided vote
So, on Friday morning we woke up to the news that Britain had voted narrowly (51.9%) in favour of leaving the European Union, with Scotland overwhelmingly against and Northern Ireland also mostly against, but...
What happened to the child’s best interests?
Last Wednesday, Ben Butler, a convicted armed robber and serially violent offender from Sutton in south London, was convicted of murdering his six-year-old daughter Ellie in 2013 and sentenced to life in prison, with...
Appeal to Muslims on Brexit
Recently I've seen a couple of articles online appealing to Muslims to vote for Britain to leave the EU in this Thursday's referendum. The claims are that the EU is anti-Muslim, that it could...
Brexiters are lying
Coming home the other day over a flyover on the A3, I saw a poster from Vote Leave, the official campaign for Britain to leave the EU, which proclaimed "Turkey (population 76 million) is...
Who flies an English flag?
There’ll always be an England … and Labour must learn to love it by Tristram Hunt (from the Guardian) Tristram Hunt, in this article which appeared on the Guardian website Sunday before last, argues...
Undercover: Some impressions
I couldn't write a full review of Undercover, the six-part TV series about a police spy (Nick, played by Adrian Lester, right) who fell in love with and married the woman he was meant...
Make corruption history?
Who remembers the slogan "Make Poverty History"? It used to be found on banners on streets, on pamphlets and on the top corners of websites. I remember Bob Geldof trying to get a crowd...
No, Labour can’t “just win”
One of the candidates standing for the Labour party's National Executive Committee (NEC), having replaced Ken Livingstone on the centre-left slate, is a lady called Rhea Wolfson, who came to my attention today when...
Sexist trolls shouldn’t be able to ruin a petition
Update 2: I've run a search for the phrases "kuenssberg whore" and "kuenssberg bitch" on Twitter, using both TweetBot (which searches recent tweets) and TweetDeck (which searches all tweets). I really advise that you...
Who really “made Islam a hot topic”?
There has been an article published on the Daily Beast, the American news website that owns Newsweek, by Maajid Nawaz, explaining to their American audience the "real reason" why Islam was made an issue...