Hierarchitis
Recently I listened to two BBC podcasts in the Crime Next Door strand. One was about the kidnapping of Lesley Whittle, the teenage daughter of a local bus company boss, in the mid 1970s...
Category: Politics
Badenoch and the know-nothing right
Last week, the government announced a new initiative to combat misogyny among young men, targeting both schoolchildren and teachers. The £20m programme will include training for teachers to “spot and tackle misogyny in the...
When a fallacy isn’t
Last weekend I saw a set of pictures on Instagram with the lead picture containing the headline “The Ten Most Dangerous Logical Fallacies”. The author, Sahil Bloom (author of a book called The Five...
Assisted dying and democratic niceties
Currently in the UK, Parliament is debating a bill introduced by Kim Leadbeater, the sister of the assassinated Labour MP Jo Cox who was selected for the same seat after Cox’s successor was elected...
Why Farage’s teenage racism matters
Over the past few weeks there has been a series of revelations by people who were at school with Nigel Farage who was a pupil at Dulwich College, the prestigious private school in south...
Call a racist a racist
A few years ago I saw someone say on Twitter that people would happily call each other feminazis or grammar Nazis, but would not call a Nazi a Nazi. In the past year or...
Am I intimidated by the English flag?
Recently there has been a movement, spearheaded by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (the football hooligan and racist rabble-rouser known as Tommy Robinson) and his associates to fly both British and English flags off buildings and lampposts,...
Charlie Kirk: Crocodile Tears
I am not sure I knew of the existence of Charlie Kirk when he was assassinated in Utah last Wednesday. I saw a tweet from a Muslim account on Twitter which drew attention to...
The company you keep
Last Thursday in the Guardian, there was a letter from one Desmond Hewitt telling us we should watch what we say about the people ‘protesting’ outside hotels housing asylum seekers in the UK. Referring...
Policing for the dealers of death
Yesterday, at a protest organised by Defend Our Juries in Parliament Square, London, more than 500 protesters, many of them elderly, were arrested for holding banners supporting the organisation Palestine Action, proscribed last month...
Starmer’s Labour has brought the ‘Corbitan’ problem on itself
This past week it was confirmed that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana were launching a new party after both were expelled or suspended and then resigned from the Labour party. They have decided to...
Diane Abbott, Labour and the Travellers
Diane Abbott, Britain’s longest-serving woman MP, was yesterday suspended from the Labour party after a BBC Radio 4 interview in which she reiterated remarks she made in a letter to the Observer in 2023,...
A kinder, gentler machine-gun hand?
Peter Hitchens, writing for UnHerd this week (and in a videoed discussion with its editor-in-chief, Freddie Sayers), makes a case for bringing back the death penalty, abolished for murder in the UK in 1965....
Elephant in the echo chamber
Since Donald Trump won a second term as US president last year and, with the help of Elon Musk, set about slashing the American federal government and sacking officials on the basis of personal...
Axel Rudakubana is guilty, and nobody else
Last week Axel Rudakubana, an 18-year-old man born in Cardiff of Rwandan parentage, pled guilty to three murders and multiple counts of attempted murder and carrying a knife in connection with last August’s Southport...
Musk, Goodwin, racism and rape
The past week or so we’ve seen the incoming American presidency flex its muscles by threatening countries hitherto thought to be their allies, with Donald Trump proposing the annexation of Greenland, a country that...
Nigel Farage will not be Prime Minister
In the last few weeks there has been a lot of talk about the likelihood of the Reform UK party gaining power in the UK in the next few years, about the government or...
There’s a genocide going on
Last Saturday in the British media I saw two articles, one on the BBC News site by a writer whose name I didn’t notice (on a second look, it’s their North America correspondent, Anthony...
They weren’t protests
Last week I was listening to Eddie Nestor’s show on BBC London on my way back from a delivery run out to south Essex, and I heard him tell us he was going to...
Teens, sex and “statutory rape”
Any time the matter of sex involving teenagers is adiscussed on social media, there is someone who insists that the act must be rape because someone younger than the age of consent cannot consent....