The EU is not slavery
So, poorer Brexiters voted to be worse off? There’s nothing wrong in that by Gary Younge (the Guardian, Friday) This piece makes the case that working-class Leave voters were voted by ‘values’ rather than...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Yes, he is a thug
There’s an image which has been circulated on Facebook which compares two articles about violent crimes in London. One refers to a ‘thug’ named Kersan Euell who kicked a female police officer into the...
WordPress 5.0
So, a few weeks ago the new version of WordPress, the content management system I use to run this site, came out. Its major (if only) new feature was the new block-based editor, developed...
Is it really so difficult to track down this rapist?
Earlier this week there was a story in the Daily Mail, among other places, about an autistic woman who contracted HIV while living in a care home in north-west London some time between 2006...
Who is the philistine here?
There’s a letter in today’s Guardian in response to a debate about the virtues of Pimlico comprehensive school, a concrete-and-glass building designed by the architectural team at the then Greater London Council which was...
A law unto themselves
The past few weeks I’ve been in contact with the mother of an autistic teenage girl who was admitted (initially informally) to an adolescent mental health unit last July. She had been bullied at...
Holocaust Memorial Day and Muslims boycotting hostile events
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, and according a poll published today which was commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, 8% of people surveyed (roughly 1 in 20) believe that the Holocaust was exaggerated....
Brexit is a matter of life or death
After my last-but-one post about the behaviour of Corbyn supporters on social media, a long-standing friend cut contact with me as I explained in my previous entry, and I had another exchange with the...
Yes, you do owe them an explanation (Muslims, race, politics and adab)
Sister Noor from the blog Fig & Olive recently did a post about the issue of ‘adab’ or good manners as it relates to activism, and whether people are responsible for their own behaviour...
The Corbynites and the ‘Spinsites’
Earlier today I had a conversation with a friend on Twitter who said that some people believe everything the Tory press spews out about the Labour party and its leadership. Both of us have...
“My parents say I’m ugly…”
There is a letter in the weekend section of today’s Guardian from a teenage girl to an advice columnist called Annalisa Barbieri, who answers a question each week about difficulties with family relations. This...
Prayer mats on the caravan trail?
So says the most powerful man in the world, the self-styled Very Stable Genius, the president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. The fact is this: Muslims do not go round...
Lauren Cooper (Janis Revell)
This morning it crossed my mind to Google the name of Janis Revell, a young lady who was deafblind who died an agonising death in a British hospital in 1999 whose poems and writings...
About that Gillette ad …
So, yesterday the razor manufacturer Gillette published an advertisement contrasting examples of harmful expressions of masculinity, such as fighting and sexual harassment, accompanied by fatalistic or enabling attitudes such as “boys will be boys”...
Review: Garmin Dezl 580
Last year I bought, and then returned, Garmin’s latest ‘flagship’ truck sat-nav, the Dezl 780. The reason I returned it was that a major feature which I used on a daily basis, the ability...
Remainers, the “elite” and Corbyn
I’m a remainer. So why do I feel more and more sympathy for leave voters? by Joseph Harker (the Guardian) This piece, published today on the Guardian’s website (probably for the Observer tomorrow), reiterates...
Foreigners, foreigners and more foreigners
One of my biggest complaints about Remainers is that, when discussing the issue of the end of free movement between Britain and the EU, instead of emphasising the benefits to Britain and British people...
Let’s not be intimidated by Brexiteer thugs
Yesterday we saw a group of thugs in yellow vests, clearly acting in imitation of the fuel protesters in France, intimidate the political writer Owen Jones, the journalist Dawn Foster (who wrote about the...
Do we need “a debate on mental health”?
This is a claim I have seen being made in the media on a fairly regular basis. Usually it’s about general mental health issues, and often includes a strong element of blame towards those...
No injustice
In 2011 Sally Challen was jailed for life for murdering her husband, Richard Challen, at his home (and formerly their marital home) in Claygate, Surrey (which is down the road from where I live)....