May’s speech rewrote history
So, last Friday Theresa May, the British prime minister, gave a speech in Florence (full text here) in which she told us what sort of Brexit she hoped she could achieve, notably rejecting both...
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...
Charlie Gard and NHS versus private care
So, the tragic story of Charlie Gard, the terminally-ill baby boy whose parents have fought a legal battle to stop doctors at Great Ormond Street in London from turning off his life support, has...
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...
Jail for poor taste, and May and ‘autism’
Somebody has already been imprisoned for offences relating to the Grenfell Tower fire in west London, and it's not someone who signed off on the dodgy cladding; no, it's a local who had been...
Election 2017: Hope, but not victory
So, the election results are in ([1], [2]), with only one seat remaining at the time of writing. The Tories have lost their majority, coming 8 seats short of the 326 needed to form...
Protect your rights — vote the Tories out
This will be the last blog post I make before the election starts tomorrow (Thursday) morning. The front pages of the two biggest-selling newspapers are full of propaganda against the Labour leadership, branding them...
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...
Adult education versus university tuition fees
Earlier this week Jeremy Corbyn announced that if Labour wins the election next month, they will abolish university tuition fees, which were brought in under Labour in 1998 and were increased dramatically by the...
On hijab, ‘neutrality’ and threat
Last week I heard a conversation between Shelina Janmohammed, the author of Love in a Headscarf and Generation M and a columnist for The National, a Dubai-based newspaper, and the LBC presenter Sheila Fogerty,...
Before you trust the Tories on mental health …
So, today it was announced that Theresa May has promised new legislation on mental health if her party wins next month's election, which will "rip up" the 1983 Mental Health Act under which people...
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...