How often do we think of the Roman empire?
Last week or the week before, a meme went around claiming that women don’t realise how often men think of the Roman empire, which must be at least once a day, and various people...
Author: Matthew Smith
Uniforms and punishments for poverty
Last week and the week before, there was another wave of news stories, as we have come to expect in early September, of children being punished in one way or another, usually by being...
The fork-tongued “devil dog” defenders
Last weekend a video circulated of a terrier dog attacking people in a busy street in Birmingham, one of the victims being a young girl. The dog was initially believed to be an American...
On the Daniel Jou “virginity test” controversy
The other day I watched a YouTube video by a sister called Aisha Murray, who wears the niqaab, lives in Scotland and has made videos for BBC social media as well as her own...
The ‘elitism’ of mere thought
Last week Matt Goodwin published an article on his Substack (most of it paid-for, which I refuse to do, but you can read the first few paragraphs free) claiming that the controversy over the...
I nearly got scammed
The other day I was working for a printing company delivering their products in north London, and I pulled over on a road outside Enfield and took a fifteen-minute break to drink my coffee....
Let’s de-toll the M6 Toll
In the wake of yesterday’s court ruling that the extension of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to the outer suburbs can go ahead in the face of opposition from Conservative-controlled outer London borough...
Rosie Jones: Am I a Ret*rd, reviewed
This documentary by the comedian Rosie Jones, about the online abuse and trolling she received a lot of on account of her disability, has been the subject of a lot of debate in the...
Labour should have won Uxbridge
Yesterday three by-elections were held to replace three Tory MPs, including the former prime minister Boris Johnson, who resigned last month for reasons including the ‘partygate’ scandal (involving politicians who held parties while everyone...
Mosque at the Trocadero is good for it and the community
It has been announced that a plan to convert part of the Trocadero in Piccadilly, London, into a mosque has been approved by the council. The mosque is being proposed and funded by the...
There’s a limit to age-based mitigation
Recently there have been a series of controversial cases in Scotland, where men have had their sentences for extremely violent crimes reduced because they were under 25 when they committed the acts on the...
Threads: Strangled at Birth
Today Instagram, a division of Meta which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, launched their social media app, Threads. This has been marketed as a “Twitter killer” for several weeks as Elon Musk continues to...
Who really “hates the NHS”?
Yesterday (Saturday) I saw, on the front page of the BBC’s News app, an article by Laura Kuenssberg titled “Like it or hate it, the NHS is here to stay”. Kuenssberg is a BBC...
Boris Johnson: goodbye, and good riddance
Last weekend, the former prime minister Boris Johnson stepped down from parliament in anticipation of a committee report that was expected to find that he had misled parliament over his activities during the Covid...
What part of ’32 weeks’ don’t people understand?
Today (Monday), a woman in Stoke-on-Trent in England was sentenced to 28 months’ imprisonment for aborting her pregnancy at between 32 and 34 weeks. She did this by deceiving a major abortion provider, the...
The need for a representative academia
Last week the BBC’s File on 4 ran a feature on affirmative action, the American academic policy of taking aspects of an applicant’s background, including their race, into account when awarding university places. This...
Well, you did mention the guns
The other day I was reading a discussion on a forum I belong to, and someone mentioned that her husband had bought her a handgun the day they married. The discussion quickly moved on...
Post-Covid transport policy and ‘Eco-Ableism’
Today I read a news report about a disabled woman in Brighton who has been left trapped in her home since January by a road closure the city council has imposed on her street...
Thank a Boomer?
A while ago I saw a long Twitter thread aimed at young women whom its author accused of ‘ageism’ and of forgetting the sacrifices and struggles of previous generations of women, in particular the...
Just how deep-rooted is antisemitism, really?
This week the Guardian published a cartoon (above) by its regular cartoonist Martin Rowson, depicting the resignation of the former BBC director-general Richard Sharp. The cartoon is entitled The Copros Touch (a pun on...