Category: Politics

The authority fallacy and the “7-day NHS”

Earlier today, the health minister Jeremy Hunt posted some tweets claiming that Professor Stephen Hawking was wrong in his assessment of the data regarding the "weekend effect" (the notion that people admitted to hospital...

Trump, Clinton and a fair voting system

There's a claim that has been repeated a lot on social media by former Hilary Clinton supporters (the graphic on the right posted to Twitter by Victoria Brownworth being an example) that Trump won...

Respect your elders, young ladies!

There was an article on the Independent last week calling for younger feminists to concern themselves with the plight of the so-called WASPI women, the women born in the 50s who are being caught...

The Lexit delusion

It's no secret that the bulk of the support for the campaign to pull the UK out of the European Union last year came from the Right — UKIP and large sections of the...

Reverting to type

Democracy is dying – and it’s startling how few people are worried | Paul Mason | Opinion | The Guardian This was in today's Guardian, and uses a few examples of democracies turning back...

A 20-year-old is not a baby!

Yesterday a young man called Rashan Charles was killed in an encounter with the police in London, and the footage has been posted on social media with the hashtag "Justice for Rash". The footage...

Charlie Gard: What if they’re just wrong?

The case of Charlie Gard, the baby boy with a mitochondrial disease and allegedly irreparable brain damage whose life support doctors have been trying to turn off as they believe there is no hope...

Nefarious Tories?

One of the enduring weaknesses of the liberal left is a sense of moral piety: we assume that our values are superior, that we care about the weak and the vulnerable more than the...

Corbyn’s dreadful interview

I didn't see Jeremy Paxman's interview with Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May last night which social media was agog over, but I did hear his interview with Emma Barnett on Radio 4's Woman's Hour...

On Ian Brady and the death penalty

Last week Ian Brady, a serial murderer of children from the 1960s, died in a "special hospital" (a high-security hospital which takes criminals who are mentally ill) aged 79. He had been convicted of...

On Corbyn, trains and renationalisation

Earlier today I heard Owen Jones, the Labour-supporting Guardian columnist and author of Chavs and The Establishment, on Radio 4's Today programme defending Jeremy Corbyn's plans to "re-nationalise" the railways if he became prime...

If we ever leave a legacy…

Today all the papers are marking the 20th anniversary of the Blair landslide, in which Tony Blair's Labour party won a majority of 179, unmatched before or since, defeating John Major's Conservative government and...

UKIP, the ‘burqa’ and FGM

Over the weekend the so-called UK Independence Party published as part of its 2017 election manifesto an "integration agenda" which includes a ban on face coverings, which it describes as a "deliberate barrier to...