Who really lost, and why?
By now it’s becoming obvious to most people that 13 years of Tory rule, with or without Lib Dem or DUP help, has been a disaster for almost everyone except the super-rich, and at...
Category: Politics
Tory members should not pick our PM
So, this coming week, for the second time in as many months, it looks likely that our next prime minister will be selected by Tory party members from two candidates chosen by MPs. The...
Starmer should not be parroting Hindu nationalist talking points
Last week the Labour leader Keir Starmer, who polls suggest is now likely to easily win any general election held in the next couple of years (and one is due no later than December...
Get real about the Royals!
The Queen died Thursday before last and was buried today. As with Prince Philip last year, we saw the BBC cut off all its programmes at the flick of a switch to go to...
What is oppression? Who is oppressed?
The other day I saw a tweet quoted comparing the oppression of Black Americans versus that of women, in the context of Rachel Dolezal, who disguised herself as Black and (among other things) gained...
On the Tories and Britain’s minorities
In the current New Statesman there is an article by Tomiwa Owolade, “a New Statesman contributing writer and the author of the forthcoming This is Not America“, on the notion advanced by the lawyer...
Should Labour be chasing Hindu fascist votes?
In the most recent local elections in the UK, Labour gained a couple of flagship councils from the Tories but lost two councils it had held for some years to the Tories, namely Croydon in the south and Harrow in the north-west.
Who will be criminalised in the post-Roe USA?
Last week a draft of a ruling by the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court was leaked to the American news site Politico (PDF of the document itself here) which indicated that the...
Did Putin do Brexit to us?
In the years since the Brexit referendum in 2016, it has become fashionable among Remainers to blame the result on manipulation. While the racist and xenophobic motives were plain from some of their advertisements...
No excuse for racism
As soon as bombs began falling on Kyiv, the country’s capital, people began fleeing, mostly to the western borders with countries like Poland and Romania; more than a million refugees have fled the country. Among them are foreign students and others from African and Asian countries, and numerous stories have emerged of racist treatment they had received from border guards, the police, shopkeepers and others while attempting to leave the country.
This scandal has already broken
“It’s a massive scandal just waiting to break” (Morning Star, 6th Jan 2022) This article, by the feminist writer “Dr EM”, most of whose articles are on fringe feminist websites, attempts to expose the...
New Year Dishonour
On Saturday morning we awoke to the news that the former prime minister, Tony Blair, and the broadcaster and former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, had been awarded knighthoods,...
The NHS versus the Trusts
Yesterday Channel 4 broadcast a Dispatches programme presented by Matthew Syed (a long-standing writer for the Times newspaper) titled Clapped Out: Is the NHS Broken?, on the failings of the NHS and whether it...
Can Labour tackle the private school problem now?
Yesterday I saw a tweet by the Labour MP Rachel Reeves saying that, “as Labour chancellor”, she would end the charitable status of private schools which costs the public £1.7billion per year, and move...
Sarah Everard, the police and the public
Last week, a former Metropolitan (i.e. London) Police officer named Wayne Couzens was sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a woman he falsely arrested on Covid rules violation...
We don’t need irrational old weights and measures back
Yesterday the government announced that merchants were to be allowed to sell food and other products solely using imperial weights and measures again, a practice that was banned some years ago when we were...
On imposing medical treatment without consent
The other day the Muslim scholar and blogger Musa Furber published a brief article on his blog answering claims from some Muslims that Muslim authorities do not have the right to impose medical treatment...
Plymouth murders, armed losers and terrorism
Last Thursday a man named Jake Davison murdered his mother and then four others in Plymouth before turning the gun on himself. It has been revealed that Davison had made YouTube videos in which...
Relaxing drivers’ hours is a bad idea
Last week the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, announced that the government were going to be temporarily relaxing the maximum daily driving hours for truck drivers in the UK by an hour. Normally the daily...
Unbefitting of a democracy
Yesterday (Friday) the BBC broadcast a Feedback programme largely dedicated to the public reaction to the corporation’s decision to suspend most of its programming the Friday before last to broadcast the announcement of Prince Philip’s death and not resume normal programming for several hours and in some cases days.