Enoch Powell was never an ‘Unperson’
Last week Simon Heffer wrote a piece for the Spectator, a British Tory-associated news and opinion magazine, alleging that the politician Enoch Powell, an MP from 1950 to 1987 (with a break in 1974,...
Category: Racism
Again: who counts?
Last week three men were stabbed in London by the same individual, a man born in Somalia though now a British citizen who had previously been imprisoned for stabbing a police officer and his...
Epsom and the “two tier policing” myth
Update 17th April: police have found no evidence to suggest that the crime happened at all. As I suspected, this is likely to be a hoax. Last weekend a woman reported that she had...
Whose comfort?
Earlier today I saw a short video on Facebook or Instagram, I forget which, by a woman called Tamara who migrated from Croatia to the United States (I don’t know which part). I saw...
Who counts?
Last week the chief constable of West Midlands Police, Craig Guildford, retired after admitting presenting inaccurate information sourced from an artificial intelligence app, Microsoft CoPilot, in a report on the security situation that would...
Badenoch and the know-nothing right
Last week, the government announced a new initiative to combat misogyny among young men, targeting both schoolchildren and teachers. The £20m programme will include training for teachers to “spot and tackle misogyny in the...
Why Farage’s teenage racism matters
Over the past few weeks there has been a series of revelations by people who were at school with Nigel Farage who was a pupil at Dulwich College, the prestigious private school in south...
Sara Sharif review and its implications for race relations
Today an independent review into the murder of a ten-year-old girl of mixed Pakistani and Polish parentage, Sara Sharif, was published. The review (PDF) by the Surrey Safeguarding Children Partnership (SCP), identified five particular...
Call a racist a racist
A few years ago I saw someone say on Twitter that people would happily call each other feminazis or grammar Nazis, but would not call a Nazi a Nazi. In the past year or...
Diane Abbott, Labour and the Travellers
Diane Abbott, Britain’s longest-serving woman MP, was yesterday suspended from the Labour party after a BBC Radio 4 interview in which she reiterated remarks she made in a letter to the Observer in 2023,...
Grooming gangs, rape and racism
Last week Louise Casey’s report (PDF) on the long-running issue of grooming gangs, a system of criminality in which young girls are ‘groomed’ through younger boyfriends, plied with alcohol and free food and then...
Does Croydon deserve the nickname “the Cronx”?
Anyone remember the “Chav craze” of the early to mid 2000s? Early on in this blog’s history I wrote a piece called “Cursing the Darkness” which looked at websites dedicated to slagging off the...
Axel Rudakubana is guilty, and nobody else
Last week Axel Rudakubana, an 18-year-old man born in Cardiff of Rwandan parentage, pled guilty to three murders and multiple counts of attempted murder and carrying a knife in connection with last August’s Southport...
Musk, Goodwin, racism and rape
The past week or so we’ve seen the incoming American presidency flex its muscles by threatening countries hitherto thought to be their allies, with Donald Trump proposing the annexation of Greenland, a country that...
The benefits of learning Jewish history
The other day I saw a tweet by Stephen Pollard, former editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle, columnist, TV personality and Zionist — no, not the one complaining about all the ads on dating websites...
Racist thugs on the rampage
Last week, following the murder of three young girls in Southport, Merseyside, who attacked a number of other girls and their teachers at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, gangs of racist hooligans have been...
The need for a representative academia
Last week the BBC’s File on 4 ran a feature on affirmative action, the American academic policy of taking aspects of an applicant’s background, including their race, into account when awarding university places. This...
Just how deep-rooted is antisemitism, really?
This week the Guardian published a cartoon (above) by its regular cartoonist Martin Rowson, depicting the resignation of the former BBC director-general Richard Sharp. The cartoon is entitled The Copros Touch (a pun on...
Diane Abbott and racism then and now
Today (Sunday) the Observer printed a letter from Diane Abbott, the Labour (well, now suspended from the party) MP for Hackney and Stoke Newington in inner east London, who is Black, opining that white...
NUS and antisemitism on and off campus
Last Friday the BBC published a report by Hazel Shearing, its education correspondent (inexplicably filed under “Young Reporter” (a term normally used of student reporters, which she isn’t), about antisemitism in and around universities...