Nicklinson ruling was the right one
Tony Nicklinson died on the morning of 22nd August 2012, having contracted pneumonia over the weekend. Last week the British High Court ruled that the courts could not allow doctors to end the life...
Category: Politics
Gold medals won’t cure cancer
As the British team in the London Olympics surpassed its previous gold medal record (its all-time record from 1908 is unbeaten, but that was when the rules were very different from now), politicians started...
The Olympics, Ramadan and racism
So, the Olympics has finally started. I had been planning an article last week about the chaos in the preparation for the Games, the security etc., and the traffic disruption that would result from...
‘Problem families’: just take them into care?
Last week, a civil servant called Louise Casey published a report identifying 120,000 “problem families” and proposed an intervention scheme whereby social workers would actually sit in people’s houses and make sure they get...
On Freedom of Information, the IRA and the Taliban
For the digital revolution, this is the Robespierre moment | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian Simon Jenkins is arguing that he agrees with Tony Blair who said in 2010 it...
Niqab ban reflects Islamophobia and a security-obsessed culture
Lessons in Islamophobia (from CounterFire) This is an article about a Muslim mother who was barred from parents’ evening at her son’s school because the staff insisted on her removing her face-covering for “security”...
Ukraine: BBC exposes abuse of disabled and slave labour
BBC iPlayer: Ukraine’s Forgotten Children (viewable in UK only until 28th June); more here Last night (Monday), the BBC broadcast a 90-minute exposé on the state of care for orphans and disabled people in...
The Jubilee and British values
The last four days, the UK has seen a whole lot of events related to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (marking 60 years on the throne) and these included a flotilla on the Thames through...
RadFem 2012, “male privilege” and censorship
Yesterday it was announced that a radical feminist conference that was to be held at Conway Hall in London has had to find another venue after an online campaign led to the venue’s owners...
We must do away with the “ignore and it’ll go away” myth
Catcalls, whistles, groping: the everyday picture of sexual harassment in London (from the Independent) Yesterday (Friday) it was reported in the Independent newspaper in London, and discussed on the Vanessa Feltz show on BBC...
Carole Malone: a new low in victim-blaming
This was on “This Morning”, a chat show that goes out on weekday mornings on ITV1, earlier today (Wednesday): Carol Malone, a tabloid newspaper columnist, gave her judgement on the family of which six...
A law unto themselves
What do medical staff and airline staff have in common? What separates them is that airline staff do not train for their jobs for five years, yet have the safety of dozens, if not...
Why I believe Ken Livingstone lost
Last night, we discovered that Boris Johnson, the Tory mayor of London elected in 2008, had been re-elected: he gained 44% of first-preference votes against Livingstone’s 40.3%; when second-preference votes were counted, his vote...
Postal vote reform and Britain’s disabled voters
Last week the issue of postal voting reform in the UK was in the news again, after a judge who had found six Labour councillors in Birmingham guilty of postal voting fraud in 2005,...
How do we deal with the care home abuse problem?
I’m starting writing this just before a Panorama programme featuring video’ed evidence of violence against an elderly lady in a care home is aired on British TV. If you don’t have the stomach to...
Baby boomers didn’t cause all the world’s problems
Yesterday, on the Jeremy Vine news discussion programme on Radio 2, they were discussing the proposition that the “baby boomers” (the generation born within about 20 years after the end of World War II)...
Trayvon Martin and rad-fem bigotry
Name the Problem « You think I just don't understand, but I don't believe you. (also here) I don’t normally follow American (or any other) radical feminist blogs, but I saw this when a...
Will YOU pay for disabled people’s services?
Rachel Cohen Rottenberg recently blogged about the recurrent problem of parents of children with severe disabilities (usually autism) murdering them, and the stock response being that the mother (as it usually is, but not...
Babar Ahmad should be freed now
Last night, BBC’s Newsnight interviewed Babar Ahmad, the man wanted for extradition to the USA on the grounds of receiving classified information and assisting mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan and Chechnya through his website, Azzam...
Thusha Kamaleswaran, disability and anti-Black hostility
Last Monday, three men were found guilty of a shooting in south London that left a 5-year-old girl of Tamil origin, Thusha Kamaleswaran, paralysed from the chest down, and injured an Asian man, Roshan...