Bloody foreigners
There’s a letter in the current (July 2014) edition of Truck & Driver magazine from one D Pardner (address withheld) moaning about everything about foreign truck drivers, particularly eastern Europeans. He claims that they...
Author: Matthew Smith
Ayn van Dyk is coming home at last
On Tuesday Amie van Dyk, mother of Ayn van Dyk who was seized from her home in Canada by social services after briefly wandering from her father’s home in June 2011 (see previous posts),...
Free speech
The last couple of weeks a few things have made me seriously consider the state of free speech in the UK. One was that a man (Michael Abberton, right) who had posted some innocuous...
Thalidomide: David Mason is no hero
Last Thursday there was a BBC documentary about thalidomide, the drug used to suppress sickness in pregnant women which was responsible for serious birth defects in the children of the women who took it....
Make no mistake: "halal hysteria" is malicious
Last week a number of newspapers ran with prominent stories that supermarkets and restaurant chains were using halal meat, or had been doing so without their customers’ knowledge for some time. This is actually...
On the Kim Walmsley gender case
Newspapers are reporting that a woman from Liverpool, Kim Walmsley (right), has had her marriage annulled, and been refused a passport, because the official copy of her birth certificate wrongly records her gender as...
Dudes
This post is part of Blogging Against Disablism Day 2014. Recently a fashion has emerged of referring to people with learning disabilities, particularly autism, as dudes. This fashion has emerged out of the Justice...
Why is T-Mobile censoring disability blogs?
I regularly read a blog, Blogging Astrid, by an autistic woman in the Netherlands who has been blogging about her life since her teens, but since 2007 it has been about her life in...
Rapists to Rio? Are we that desperate?
This past week, a man from Surrey was given a non-custodial sentence for a series of serious sexual assaults against a 12-year-old girl in December 2012. Adam Hulin plied the young girl, whose age...
Massachusetts: The land where torture is legal
Before and during the Afghan invasion twelve years ago, it was hotly debated whether torture of terrorist suspects is justified, particularly (but not only) when a terrorist has been arrested and it is suspected...
Before you say "poor mum" …
Last night three children were found dead at their home in New Malden, at an address half a mile from where I live. Olivia Clarence, aged four, and twins Max and Ben Clarence, aged...
Happiness Will Prevail
Back in the 1980s, Doctor Who featured a storyline in which The Doctor was transported to a land ruled by so-called happy people, a land in which sadness is illegal and punished by the...
Olympic Park: a sea of ugly
Yesterday I decided to have a walk through the Olympic Park, which opened a couple of weeks ago after having been closed since the end of the Olympics in 2012. I was excited that...
Hunt opposes segregation (when it's Muslims doing it)
BBC News – Hunt to warn against schools extremism in Birmingham At a time when a “secret” report about a Muslim plot to take over schools in Birmingham and run them according to Islamic...
Muslim “has job” shock
Harry's Place, a malicious website which is devoted to exposing Muslims as extremists wherever they appear to have influence, today exposed the fact that a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir works as … a psychiatrist. Someone...
Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry: Will they tackle learning disability abuse?
This morning, I saw on the Facebook group for Invest in ME a link to an article on the Mad in America website announcing the launch of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry (CEP), which...
Start of 107 days for LB
This is the anniversary of Connor Sparrowhawk going into the Slade House learning disability unit in Oxford, where he died 107 days later, in the bath, as a result of staff negligence. His supporters...
When will Google fix the Chrome wi-fi bug?
I've been using Linux on the desktop (and laptop) since about 2003, and I've seen it progress from being something that didn't work with most of the hardware I had access to (including the...
Katherine Bowes-Lyon’s death prompts outpouring of sycophancy
Yesterday I read on the Telegraph‘s website that Katherine Bowes-Lyon, a cousin of the Queen who was severely mentally disabled and had lived in an institution most of her life, had died aged 87....
What would Justice for LB look like?
This past week, since the publication of the report into the preventable death of Connor Sparrowhawk in a learning disability mental health unit in Oxford last July, my timeline has been buzzing with reactions...