Not quite Independence Day
Last week I read about two separate distressing incidents that underline the need for support for people with disabilities to remain living with their families if that is at all possible. The first happened...
Category: Politics
Jeremy Forrest: what’s the meaning of abuse?
The week before last (I have only just had the opportunity to write about it due to work), a teacher from Kent called Jeremy Forrest was jailed for five and a half years for...
Mark Littlewood: making the War on Welfare personal
Today the Daily Mail published a quite astonishing and appalling article by Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs (and former spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, the Pro-Euro Conservative Party and NO2ID) calling...
People’s Assembly: a review
Yesterday the People's Assembly Against Austerity, which has been holding "rallies" (I'd call them meetings, rather than rallies which I always thought were held in the street or at least in the open) around...
Alex Spourdalakis: an atrocity, not a tragedy
Last week I heard the news that a 14-year-old boy with severe autism, Alex Spourdalakis, had been murdered by his mother and another female carer in a suburban area near Chicago after they had...
Graffiti and the brutal conformity of the gang
Laurie Penny has an article in the latest New Statesman (not online yet) in which she bemoans the lack of graffiti on the trains and buses in London, which she says is ubiquitous on...
Let’s get the EDL banned
Proscribe English Defence League (EDL) – e-petitions This is a petition to proscribe the English Defence League. This will not force the EDL out of existence, of course, but it will mean no more...
Huge impact? Hardly.
Yesterday a 21-year-old Somali woman from London was given a community service order for posting an offensive tweet about the soldier Lee Rigby after his stabbing last month (but before the full facts about...
London Bravanese mosque firebombed
Police probe mosque blaze amid fears 'firebomb attack' is Woolwich revenge – London Evening Standard Last night a mosque in Muswell Hill, north London, was firebombed and the letters "EDL" were spray-painted onto the...
No, Google can’t censor all the child porn
In the wake of the conviction of Mark Bridger yesterday for killing April Jones, a 5-year-old girl he kidnapped from a green on a housing estate in Machynlleth, mid Wales, last year, the focus...
Anjem Choudary is not Gerry Adams
In the wake of last week's Woolwich stabbing, there have been renewed calls to ban "hate preachers" from appearing on TV, most notably Anjem Choudary, the leader of al-Muhajiroun. Muslims, including myself, have for...
What’s an imam to do?
Last Friday at 1pm, Jeremy Vine had a slot about Islam and Muslims on his talk show on BBC Radio 2 — nice timing. This was, of course, prompted by the brutal murder of...
Grooming: Loss of liberty does not equal safety
Letters: We need an inquiry into sex abuse cases | Society | The Guardian This letter from Anthony Stansfeld of Thames Valley police appeared in yesterday’s Guardian, and attributes the grooming and rape of...
Woolwich knife attack is not terrorism
Yesterday a British soldier was attacked by two men with butchers' knives on a street in Woolwich, south-east London, and killed in broad daylight in public view near to a primary school not long...
Taj Hargey is wrong on grooming
Last week seven men from Oxford were found guilty of various sexual offences, including rape, for ‘grooming’ young girls and ultimately raping and allowing other men to rape them. Many of them were in...
Let’s not over-hype the UKIP ‘phenomenon’
Yesterday there were local elections in large parts of the UK and the news reported the fact that UKIP had made significant gains, with their number of councillors rising from eight to 147 and...
Jordan Sheard’s sentence will be appealed
I received a letter today from the Attorney General’s office, in response to an open letter I had sent (which many readers of this blog had signed) regarding the sentence of Jordan Sheard, who...
Anti-vaxers, ME and desperate people
Recently there has been a major outbreak of measles in South Wales, thought to be largely the result of large numbers of parents not getting their children vaccinated during the MMR scare of 1998....
Freedom for Jenny Hatch
Margaret Jean "Jenny" Hatch is an American woman, aged 29, with Down's syndrome. Until early last year, she lived independently in Newport News, Virginia, and had been working in her friends' store. She had...
Ed Balls
Now that I've got your attention … There's currently a measles outbreak in South Wales, the reason for which is that a lot of parents didn't vaccinate their children with the MMR vaccine during...