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...
Category: Media
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...
Please sign this petition: leave our hijab alone!
Petition · Lyn Brown MP: Make Neena Lall remove the hijab and fasting ban at St Stephens in Newham! · Change.org This is a petition to the local MP in Newham, east London, against...
What’s “not Canada”?
This is a front page from today's Toronto Sun about the 11-year-old girl who was attacked in the street by a man who cut her hijab with a pair of scissors as she walked...
Review: House of Saud, episode 1
So, last night the first episode of a three-part series on BBC2, House of Saud: A Family at War was broadcast. I commented on the trailer last night as the language had been troubling...
Niqaab is not relevant to sexual harassment
What will women gain from squawking about sex pests? Niqab | Daily Mail Online This piece appeared in today's Daily Mail and has been widely derided by both Muslims and feminists on Twitter, and...
Anti-Catholic prejudice? Really?
400 years on from Guy Fawkes, Britain’s Catholics still face prejudice | Catherine Pepinster, the Guardian Currently on the BBC there's a serial about the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholics in...
Why did they lie?
Earlier today I saw an article on Medium titled "Why did Andrew Norfolk lie?". Andrew Norfolk is the investigative reporter who wrote the story about the "Christian" girl being fostered with the Muslim foster...
So, it was all a lie
The truth about the young girl fostered with a Muslim family in east London that appeared in the Times on Monday was revealed yesterday in an anonymised court judgement (PDF). The Times' story was...
Muslim foster story is naked hate
The Murdoch Times has a front-page story today exposing a 'scandal' in which a young "white, Christian" girl was placed by Tower Hamlets council's social services into the care of a Muslim foster family...
Dumping Hopkins didn’t hurt LBC’s ratings
LBC sees audience numbers rise after Katie Hopkins departure | The Independent According to Rajar, the organisation which researches the listener base of radio and TV stations, the national talk station LBC did not...
Good story 1, Facts 0
The other day I came across a story which a lot of people were sharing on my social media feeds since the appalling terrorist attack in Manchester on Monday night. The story, published on...
Facebook, “fake news” and junk news
Since the 2016 election in particular, there has been a lot of discussion about how social media helps to disseminate "fake news", often without really enumerating what that term means. Last week Facebook asked...
The alt-right’s Barry Kent
Readers of a certain age will remember the character of Barry Kent from Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole series of books about a young man growing up in the Midlands (of England) in the 1980s...
Foreign criminal scum!
The Sun are OUTRAGED this morning because an “American strangler”, as they call him, has been deported from the USA to this country after serving nearly 40 years in a New York state prison...
Jill Saward, the Press and civil liberties
Last week Jill Saward (pronounced Say-ward), best known for having been the victim of the notorious "Ealing Vicarage" rape attack in 1986 in which she was raped and subjected to other sexual assaults and...
Lego and the Daily Mail: Before you get too excited …
Lego ends advertising with Daily Mail after calls for companies to 'Stop Funding Hate' (from the Independent) According to this report, widely shared by people I know on social media, Lego have announced that...
What is the real “education gap” in politics?
How the education gap is tearing politics apart | David Runciman | Politics | The Guardian This was the Guardian's "long read" Wednesday before last, and it explores how education levels are becoming a...