How effective will the ULEZ be?
This April a new low-emission zone, the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), will take effect in central London. This will mean that drivers or owners will have to pay a charge to drive a...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Books aren’t clutter and a cactus is just a plant
Today my social media was abuzz with people, mainly women, laughing uproariously at a picture sourced form the Daily Mail in which an “interiors therapist” with a background in feng shui, named Suzanne Roynon,...
Mail’s Corbyn exposé is pathetic
Today, the Mail on Sunday devoted more than a dozen pages to a new ‘exposé’ of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, in a feature which declares him “unfit for office”, most of it culled...
Two fundraisers: a well and a mosque
This morning a British rapper, Blaine “Cadet” Johnson, from south London was killed in a car accident on the way to a show at Keele university in Staffordshire. He was 28. Some people I...
Why aren’t more young women feminists?
Earlier this week I saw a piece on the BBC news website asking why more young women do not identify with feminism or as feminists. According to a 2018 YouGov poll, 34% of women...
Yes, the severely autistic do need a voice, but …
Recently a new organisation has been set up in the USA, the National Council on Severe Autism, based in California and run by a combination of parents and academics, a combination which has attracted...
Should we cut ties with Saudi Arabia?
Yesterday there was a debate at Intelligence Squared in London on whether the West should cut ties with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia because of its use of torture and such crimes as the...
Review: Skipping School (Dispatches, Channel 4)
Last night, at the rather late hour of 10:15pm, Channel 4 broadcast an hour-long Dispatches programme, presented by the children’s commissioner Anne Longfield, about concerns that home-schooling is being used as a cover for...
New claims, scant evidence as FGM activists play whack-a-mole
Last week the number of successful prosecutions for female genital mutilation (FGM) in Britain went from zero in more than 30 years since a specific FGM law was passed, to one. A Ugandan woman...
What is racism, and what isn’t?
Recently I came across the podcast by In the Days of Noor, presented by sister Noor (right), an Islamic studies teacher from New Jersey (she also has a YouTube channel). In a recent episode...
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...
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...