What’s an imam to do?
Last Friday at 1pm, Jeremy Vine had a slot about Islam and Muslims on his talk show on BBC Radio 2 — nice timing. This was, of course, prompted by the brutal murder of...
Author: Matthew Smith
Grooming: Loss of liberty does not equal safety
Letters: We need an inquiry into sex abuse cases | Society | The Guardian This letter from Anthony Stansfeld of Thames Valley police appeared in yesterday’s Guardian, and attributes the grooming and rape of...
Woolwich knife attack is not terrorism
Yesterday a British soldier was attacked by two men with butchers' knives on a street in Woolwich, south-east London, and killed in broad daylight in public view near to a primary school not long...
Taj Hargey is wrong on grooming
Last week seven men from Oxford were found guilty of various sexual offences, including rape, for ‘grooming’ young girls and ultimately raping and allowing other men to rape them. Many of them were in...
Hawking, the boycott and the Israeli CPU
Last week Professor Stephen Hawking pulled out of a conference in Israel, reportedly as part of an academic boycott of Israeli institutions on the grounds of it operating an Apartheid-type regime against its Palestinian...
The British Social Model of Disability and its drawbacks
"I'm not a 'person with a disablity', I'm a disabled person" (from xojane by Lisa Egan) Recently I've noticed that a number of blogs by disabled people in the UK insist on referring to...
Let’s not over-hype the UKIP ‘phenomenon’
Yesterday there were local elections in large parts of the UK and the news reported the fact that UKIP had made significant gains, with their number of councillors rising from eight to 147 and...
Jordan Sheard’s sentence will be appealed
I received a letter today from the Attorney General’s office, in response to an open letter I had sent (which many readers of this blog had signed) regarding the sentence of Jordan Sheard, who...
Rosa Monckton, learning disabilities and independence
This post is part of Blogging Against Disabilism Day 2013 Rosa Monckton, as I have written on this page before, is an extremely privileged lady. I do not mean privilege as in white or,...
Can’t eat on £1 a day? Cheat!
BBC News – How to eat healthily on £1 a day This rather hilarious article represents a BBC journalist's ostensible attempt to live on £1 worth of food a day. You'll notice that the...
Anti-vaxers, ME and desperate people
Recently there has been a major outbreak of measles in South Wales, thought to be largely the result of large numbers of parents not getting their children vaccinated during the MMR scare of 1998....
Innocent till proven guilty? Not if it’s rape
Recently you may have heard that Rolf Harris, a well-known Australian entertainer who has been on the TV for one purpose or another (and in the pop charts occasionally) since the 1960s, was taken...
Longer school times are not child-friendly
Michael Gove proposes longer school day and shorter holidays | Politics | guardian.co.uk Michael Gove, the current education secretary, has announced extended school days and longer terms, allowing schools to stay open until 4:30pm...
Freedom for Jenny Hatch
Margaret Jean "Jenny" Hatch is an American woman, aged 29, with Down's syndrome. Until early last year, she lived independently in Newport News, Virginia, and had been working in her friends' store. She had...
Ed Balls
Now that I've got your attention … There's currently a measles outbreak in South Wales, the reason for which is that a lot of parents didn't vaccinate their children with the MMR vaccine during...
Thatcher cannot be judged on the 1970s
BBC Question Time from Finchley, north London, 11th April 2013 (available in UK until 11th April 2014) Last night the BBC's weekly Question Time programme was filmed in Finchley, the area of north London...
Labour: councils can’t set immigration policy
This is the party election broadcast by the Labour party that was broadcast just now on British TV. You might notice that the first thing Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, talked about was immigration...
Thatcher dead
Only yesterday, someone tweeted that when asked where he was when he heard that Margaret Thatcher had died, the answer was he was on Twitter on all five occasions. Why people publish hoax death...
A scientific approach
Taking Up Space: Women vs. Men | You think I just don't understand, but I don't believe you. Cathy "Bug" Brennan, someone who I have heard described as one of the most extreme and...
Who better represents “Welfare UK”?
This is the front page of tomorrow’s Daily Mail, one which cynically exploits the tragic death in 2011 of six children in a house fire started by their parents and their parents’ friend in...