On the Epstein conspiracy theories
Since the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, there is a body of opinion that will not accept that his death was indeed suicide and that others must have been involved. The thinking goes that Epstein...
Category: News
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...
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...
Shamima Begum, ‘grooming’ and responsibility
Last week it was revealed (or rather, re-reported, as this matter had been known for some time) that the man who helped Shamima Begum and her two friends over the Turkish-Syrian border to join...
Rushdie, Khomeini and Muslims here and there
I was a child, and a long way from becoming Muslim, when the Rushdie affair happened. My mother was in college going through teacher training, and one of her college friends had a sister...
Why the Tories broke the Covid rules
This past two weeks or more, the news here has been dominated by revelations about the behaviour of Boris Johnson and his friends during the two lockdowns in Spring 2020 and Winter 2021 (January...
What is and what isn’t eugenics?
As more and more of the British population has received vaccination against Covid-19, it has been reported that most of the people who are still becoming very ill with the virus are the unvaccinated,...
On imposing medical treatment without consent
The other day the Muslim scholar and blogger Musa Furber published a brief article on his blog answering claims from some Muslims that Muslim authorities do not have the right to impose medical treatment...
Relaxing drivers’ hours is a bad idea
Last week the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, announced that the government were going to be temporarily relaxing the maximum daily driving hours for truck drivers in the UK by an hour. Normally the daily...
The wrong time to end the mask mandate
Yesterday, the government announced that most if not all the current rules and restrictions aimed at preventing the spread of Coronavirus, including the requirement to wear masks in enclosed public spaces and to keep...
Dad names his child after his nana. World goes wild.
Last week Prince Harry’s and his wife Meghan’s second child was born, and they named her Lilibet Diana. The second name refers to Harry’s mother; the first to his grandmother, the Queen. The name...
National mourning?
Today Prince Philip died. Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark was the Queen’s husband and had the title Prince Consort and was known as the Duke of Edinburgh. He was probably best known for...
Did Anthony Williams get lucky?
Last Thursday a man who throttled his wife to death last March, shortly after the initial Coronavirus lockdown was imposed, received a five-year jail sentence after a jury accepted his plea of guilty to...
Zero Covid: totalitarian? A cult?
I saw a piece by Freddie Sayers (former editor-in-chief of YouGov, now at UnHerd) billed as a look “inside the Zero Covid campaign”, a report from the conference of the “Covid Community Action Summit”,...
Where did Captain Tom’s money go?
Earlier this week Captain Sir Tom Moore, a World War II veteran who raised £33million for NHS-related charities by walking miles in the form of multiple lengths of his back garden during the first...
Vaccine ‘scepticism’ is not about religion
Sneering scientists won’t win over anti-vaxxers by Giles Fraser (UnHerd) This article is sub-headed “Public intellectuals risk alienating religious believers” and the author is a vicar in an inner London Anglican church with, as...
Subsidise eating in, not eating out
There was talk yesterday that the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme, which ran through August and saw restaurants subsidised to offer a substantial discount on meals eaten in on weekdays, might be revived...
Why use Hermes?
This week a video appeared on social media and in some newspapers of a Hermes van driver picking up a cage full of parcels and throwing them with great force into the back of...
Expanded congestion charge is just an unjust tax
It’s been reported over the last week or so that, in exchange for a government bail-out of Transport for London, the London public and road transport body overseen by the mayor, that the government...
A tax on progress
Today it was announced that the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, was considering introducing an online sales tax, citing such reasons as a need to “protect the high street” from fears about coronavirus...