Muslims must pay to save Academy
Recently I saw a number of appeals on Facebook and other social media to sign a petition to save a “mosque” in Manchester, the Islamic Academy of Manchester, which had been sold to a...
Author: Matthew Smith
‘Road tax’ and the state of the A1
The BBC's online "Magazine" last week published three articles about transport issues, one of them about the notion of "road tax" and how it's commonly used as a trump card in arguments between motorists...
Benefits Britain 1949: yes, the world has changed since then
Currently Channel 4 is running a series called Benefits Britain 1949, in which people are invited to live on benefits at 1949 levels (supposedly adjusted to inflation) for a week. The Daily Mail has...
No, it’s not fascism
Recently there has been some well-deserved condemnation on blogs and Twitter feeds that I read about the British government’s attacks on immigration, which took the form of vans telling people who are in the...
Twitter silence is not an answer
Recently in the UK (not sure how many of my overseas readers are aware of it) there has been a major controversy about abuse of women activists on Twitter, which erupted when a feminist...
Justice for Jenny: delivered
Woman with Down syndrome prevails over parents in guardianship case (from the Washington Post website) Yesterday Jenny Hatch, who had been fighting to free herself from a restrictive guardianship arrangement which required her to...
Young people’s mental health: failed by the system
BBC Three: Failed by the NHS Last night there was a documentary on BBC Three about young people whose mental health conditions went untreated for months or years by the NHS mental health services,...
Are the Tories evil? What is evil, anyway?
Owen Jones: Cruel? Certainly. Unforgivable? Beyond doubt. But the Tories aren't actually evil – Comment – Voices – The Independent Last week Sunny Hundal posted an article on Liberal Conspiracy in which he made...
Why compulsory school dinners are a bad idea
Ban packed lunches, head teachers urged (from BBC News) The government has commissioned a report by two founders of the Leon restaurant chain (!) that says that take-up of school meals is low (43%)...
Review: Don’t Call Me Crazy
Recently a series called Don’t Call Me Crazy, set inside an adolescent mental health unit in Manchester, the now-closed McGuinness Unit, was screened on BBC Three, apparently the first time cameras had been allowed...
Who’s helping disabled Muslims this Ramadan?
BBC News – Frederic Kanoute supports disabled man's Ramadan fast Imraan Adam is a Muslim who lives in Derby and has cerebral palsy, and earlier this week it was reported that the council in...
Not quite Independence Day
Last week I read about two separate distressing incidents that underline the need for support for people with disabilities to remain living with their families if that is at all possible. The first happened...
No, Andy Murray doesn’t deserve a knighthood (yet)
Sir Andy Murray? David Cameron backs knighthood | Sport | guardian.co.uk So, Andy Murray finally won his first Wimbledon title, and Britain’s first men’s singles Wimbledon title since 1936 (as has been widely pointed...
Is Scotland really full of sexist Neanderthals?
Scotland's handicap? Sexist golf clubs | Kevin McKenna | Comment is free | The Observer There seems to be a trend recently with Kevin McKenna's articles in the Observer, which is to depict Scotland...
Korora 19: not a great advance on Fedora
In my review of Fedora 19 (in the last entry), I noted that I thought Fedora had abandoned the idea of end-users using Fedora and were targeting distro developers instead. There is a Fedora...
Fedora 19: clearly not for end users
A few months ago I published a scathing review of Fedora 18, the last release of the Linux distribution which started life as Red Hat Linux, once the version of Linux that everyone who...
TV adhan: media attack Muslim visibility
Yesterday, the Sun led with a headline “Ramadan-a-Ding-Dong”, a reference to Channel 4’s decision to air the Muslim call to prayer at different times of day during Ramadan. Their article includes an endorsement from...
Jeremy Forrest: what’s the meaning of abuse?
The week before last (I have only just had the opportunity to write about it due to work), a teacher from Kent called Jeremy Forrest was jailed for five and a half years for...
What’s the point of ‘care’?
The other night I saw a Panorama documentary which covered the issue of children going missing from the care system in the UK. I had been expecting this to be about children who were...
Mark Littlewood: making the War on Welfare personal
Today the Daily Mail published a quite astonishing and appalling article by Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and former spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, the Pro-Euro Conservative Party and NO2ID) calling...