Fumbling towards catastrophe
Last week local elections were held in the UK, mainly for district and unitary authority councils in England but also for the Welsh and Scottish parliaments. For the second time, Reform UK gained majorities...
Category: Politics
Again: who counts?
Last week three men were stabbed in London by the same individual, a man born in Somalia though now a British citizen who had previously been imprisoned for stabbing a police officer and his...
Epsom and the “two tier policing” myth
Update 17th April: police have found no evidence to suggest that the crime happened at all. As I suspected, this is likely to be a hoax. Last weekend a woman reported that she had...
The feminists who don’t listen to women
In the last couple of weeks, two articles by white feminists have been published in the British right-wing media attacking the niqab, and peddling some very familiar generalisations about women who wear it. The...
A past that we know was never real
Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth elected on a Reform UK slate in 2024 who subsequently went independent because his views on immigration were too extreme even for Nigel Farage, has now formed...
2010: Looking back in anger
There’s a certain type of politician and political activist who is quick to take credit when his party wins, but will blame everyone but himself and his allies when they lose, and can be...
We don’t all know each other
The grooming gangs issue has been all over social media the past few weeks: three weeks ago, a group called Open Justice UK published the transcripts of the 2019 Bradford trial in which nine...
On defunding or abolishing ICE
Imagine that there was a boarding school where children were being abused on a daily basis; where bullying was rife, where staff were casually physically violent and verbally abusive, where the food was routinely...
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...
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,...