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....
Author: Matthew Smith
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...
SwiftKey’s bogus adventure (and not so bogus bugs)
Earlier this afternoon I saw an announcement on Twitter from SwiftKey, the people behind my favourite keyboard on Android: a new way of using their keypad that they called "SwiftKey Tilt", which meant you...
An Ahmadiyyah geography lesson
This letter appeared in yesterday's Daily Mail in response to the article by David Goodhart about the Ahmadiyyah centre in Morden last Monday (see earlier article). The letter starts off by stating that her...
When will people realise the Bulger killers were children?
BBC News – Three men jailed for selling information to the Sun On Wednesday a former prison worker and two former policemen were jailed for selling information to the papers, and the information the...
Open letter on murder of disabled man — please sign
Open letter to Keir Starmer regarding Jordan Sheard (public) – Google Drive The above is an editable open letter — it is editable so that you can add your name to the bottom of...
“Merton’s not white anymore”, moans former liberal in the Daily Mail
A mega mosque in a suburb that was 90 per cent white 30 years ago and the polite apartheid dividing Britain | Mail Online Barely a month ago I responded to an article in...
Go after abusive media companies, not bloggers
Samuel Johnson famously asked, in an essay written during the American war of independence, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”. These days, we hear...
Seven Years in the Making
Jessica Taylor has severe ME, and has been bedridden for seven years. She has previously made another video, “The World of One Room”, in which she describes how the disease has affected her life:...
Perfidious Albion
BBC News – Leading music college loses border licence Point Blank Music College, a well-regarded college which seems to specialise in modern music (teachers include DJ Pete Tong, alumni include Goldie and Leona Lewis)...
Because nobody gets raped in England, do they?
BBC News – Barbados rapes: MP warns travellers island is 'unsafe' Stephen McPartland, Tory MP for Stevenage, has been putting pressure on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to declare that Barbados is “not a...
Don’t be tempted not to vote!
Yesterday, in response to the abstention by most Labour MPs (and the party itself; forty Labour MPs voted against, including John McDonnell and Dennis Skinner) on the retrospective legislation to excuse the government for...