Yes, he is a thug
There’s an image which has been circulated on Facebook which compares two articles about violent crimes in London. One refers to a ‘thug’ named Kersan Euell who kicked a female police officer into the...
Category: Media
Who is the philistine here?
There’s a letter in today’s Guardian in response to a debate about the virtues of Pimlico comprehensive school, a concrete-and-glass building designed by the architectural team at the then Greater London Council which was...
“My parents say I’m ugly…”
There is a letter in the weekend section of today’s Guardian from a teenage girl to an advice columnist called Annalisa Barbieri, who answers a question each week about difficulties with family relations. This...
Who’s really the “elite” here?
There was an anecdote I forgot to insert into my previous entry about the stereotype of the “liberal elite”. Back in the early 2000s I was working as a van driver for a major...
What is and what isn’t ‘gaslighting’?
‘Gaslighting’ is a term coined fairly recently to refer to a kind of behaviour displayed by abusive individuals (particularly domestic and intimate-partner abusers) in which they use tricks to cast doubt on their victim’s...
Against the “liberal elite” media trope
A favourite claim of the alt-right, populist right, whatever you want to call them, is that their liberal opponents (whether they be in the Labour party, the Lib Dems themselves, the pro-European wing of...
Why the Daily Mail’s “volunteer army” should be resisted
Today, the Daily Mail launched a campaign to recruit a “volunteer army” to “help” the NHS starting next Spring, in conjunction with a “new social movement called Helpforce”. The roles that volunteers are expected...
So, you don’t want to call “Tommy Robinson” a thug…
This morning the Today programme on Radio 4 covered the story of Gerard Batten, the new leader of UKIP, hiring Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the former leader of the English Defence League, anti-Muslim agitator and self-styled...
Holby City: the Gaskill saga’s denouement
I’ve been a fan of the BBC dramas Casualty and Holby City since the 1980s, although I only started watching them on a regular basis again more recently (Casualty was a fixture when I...
Is Britain really the most tolerant country in Europe?
Last Thursday, on the BBC’s Question Time programme (a weekly late-night political panel show in which a panel of politicians and an academic, writer or other lay ‘expert’), there was a contribution from an...
Muslimander TV: Are Asian lads lost, or is Mehreen Baig?
Lost Boys? What’s Going Wrong for Asian Men (BBC iPlayer, available in UK only until about 12th September) Last Sunday there was an hour-long programme on BBC2 purported to be about the problems facing...
Who wears the burqa?
In an earlier entry I discussed the unhelpful ‘defence’ of niqaab that only a few thousand women wear the garment. However, a side argument is that only a few hundred wear the burqa, the...
Why don’t they call it rape?
Yesterday some of the papers reported that, according to a report by the charity Save the Children, child migrants mostly from sub-Saharan Africa were “being sexually exploited” or in earlier versions “selling sex” in...
Does polygamy cause violence?
A few months ago The Economist put out a video on its Facebook page which tried to make the case that polygamy made a society more violent and prone to civil war. I noticed...
Who says the Left hates the white working class?
I saw a post on Medium last weekend, “Burning Down the House: Identity Politics and its Discontents”, which posited that white working-class voters who had voted for politicians like Donald Trump had faced “a...
Times forced to admit: we printed garbage
Last year, the Times carried a story that a young girl of Christian background had not been allowed to eat pork under her Muslim foster carers’ roof, on their front page. They also claimed...
Review: Silent Witness, “One Day”
Silent Witness is a series based on the work of police pathologists: the “witness” refers to the body of a murder victim. It’s been running since 1996 and the stories are always in two...
It’s not just the Far Right
Yesterday (Friday), Darren Osborne, who drove a van into a crowd of Muslims after a night-time prayer (taraweeh) last Ramadan and killed a 51-year-old worshipper, Makram Ali (right), who had collapsed prior to the...
Review: Panorama, “White Fright”
Last night a 30-minute Panorama programme was shown on BBC1 that looked at Blackburn, a town of about 140,000 in Lancashire (north-western England) where the white British majority live largely separate lives from the...
It was the Muslims
So, last Friday the school in Newham, a borough in east London with a large Asian and Somali Muslim presence, which had introduced a ban on girls under age 8 wearing the hijab or...