A bridge to Ireland?
Last night BBC's File on 4 programme was dedicated to how well the government's declared intention to get people with learning disabilities out of short-term mental health care and into the community where they...
Category: Politics
Want justice? Tell us your whole life story first
Yesterday it was reported that the police in some parts of the UK, notably London and Merseyside, demand that women reporting rape submit both medical records and an extraordinary array of electronic data to...
Karanbir Cheema case: intention matters
Last week an inquest opened on the case of a 13-year-old boy with a severe allergy to dairy products who died in a London school playground after allegedly having cheese put down his shirt....
Who gets believed?
Recently a lot of people have been retweeting a tweet by one Amanda Brown Lierman, "political & Organizing Director for @theDemocrats" (not sure if she means the whole party or a local branch of...
Teenage boys do know rape is wrong
In the debate over whether the conservative American judge Bret Kavanaugh is fit to serve as a Supreme Court judge, an accusation has emerged that when in high school, he held down and groped...
On mental health care and staying connected
A few years ago I wrote a post on here (The Importance of Staying Connected) about how the Internet had changed from being a niche service which few people outside academia had access to,...
Why Muslims should protest public insults to the Prophet
Geert Wilders (or Geert Hitlers as I call him), a far-right Dutch opposition politician, has cancelled an event he had been planning (or claimed to have been planning) this coming November, a contest for...
Why “Jewish fears”, even if genuine, are misplaced
Last week I saw two blog articles published by self-described left-wing Zionists, one of whom I know through disability activist circles, about why they are concerned about the "rising tide" of anti-Semitism in the...
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...
Rex Bob Lowenstein would make a bad politician
As I mentioned two posts back about the niqaab controversy, Boris Johnson found an ally in the former (and possibly future) UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who made a comment on BBC London radio to...
Another lesson in diplomacy
As Muslims face the consequences of Britain's one-time "top diplomat" insulting an ethnic minority (and, by extension, the women of a number of the countries where Britain could do with having friendly relations) and...
Niqaab row brings out the ‘Muslimanders’
Two days after the controversy over Boris Johnson comparing Muslim women who wear the niqaab to letterboxes and bank-robbers became big news, the party is facing calls to demand an apology from him (which...
Boris Johnson’s latest insult (and the Muslims who unwittingly side with him)
Yesterday, in one of Boris Johnson's new columns for the Telegraph (which you may recall the paper made a big announcement of after he resigned as foreign secretary), he registered his half-hearted opposition to...
Corbyn and Anti-Semitism versus Brexit
The Labour anti-Semitism crisis has not disappeared from the headlines after yet another week. It is noticeable now that the issue has moved on from any specific incident of anti-Semitism by any Labour politician...
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...
One big no, many small yeses
This week two cabinet ministers (David Davis, for Brexit, and Boris Johnson, foreign secretary) resigned, and a handful of junior ministers and parliamentary private secretaries also resigned over the government's "Chequers" Brexit plan formulated...
NHS deaths and “blame culture”
Last week a report was published by the Health and Social Care Advisory Service (HASCAS), commissioned by the NHS Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group, about the death of Nico Reed (right), a young man who...
Christopher Chope, upskirting and Parliamentary games
A Tory called Christopher ChopeGave perverts everywhere hope.‘Hooray!’ said these twits,‘We can film women’s bits!Maybe next make it legal to grope?’ — Jonathan Coe (@jonathancoe) June 15, 2018 Yesterday a bill was expected to...
The White People’s Party
Over the last few months there have been some low-profile media stories about Islamophobia at various levels of the Conservative party. Yesterday there was an interview on the Independent with a former Tory parliamentary...
Green light for gridlock
Today the government gave its backing to plans to expand Heathrow airport in west London by building an extra runway to the north-west of the existing site, with all the necessary access roads and...