Why are we “so bad” at infrastructure?
Recently Radio 4 broadcast a series about HS2 (in ten fifteen-minute parts, starting here), and how it went from being a mere idea on a bit of paper to being a grand infrastructure project,...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Home education must be defended
Last Wednesday, BBC’s Radio 4 broadcast an episode of their File on 4 Investigates programme which exposed a ‘school’ (not actually a school as such, but a centre for home educators) called Hope (Home...
Starmer’s Labour has brought the ‘Corbitan’ problem on itself
This past week it was confirmed that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana were launching a new party after both were expelled or suspended and then resigned from the Labour party. They have decided to...
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...
Just don’t call it genocide
Last week I heard the introduction to a BBC debate on whether war crimes are taking place in Gaza, featuring Today presenter Anna Foster and a panel of “expert guests”. She introduced it by...
A kinder, gentler machine-gun hand?
Peter Hitchens, writing for UnHerd this week (and in a videoed discussion with its editor-in-chief, Freddie Sayers), makes a case for bringing back the death penalty, abolished for murder in the UK in 1965....
Did immigration really cost Labour these elections?
A little over a week ago, in council elections across the UK and a parliamentary by-election in a historically safe Labour seat, the so-called Reform UK party, whose leader is Nigel Farage who previously...
Haulage industry: treat drivers better
A major driver training organisation in the UK, which is part of a major driver recruitment agency, today claimed that the UK’s haulage industry risks falling into the same crisis of recruitment seen during...
Israel and India: the wilful ignorance of a New Democrat
Since the terrorist attack on Indian tourists in Kashmir this week, in which two of the attackers were reported to be Pakistanis (which according to the Hindu nationalist/fascist government in India implicates the whole...
Gaza vs Bosnia, Hamas and free speech
The other day I saw a Twitter post about the ongoing genocide in Gaza by a local doctor who was asking where all the human rights advocates were, the “moral architects” who “wept in...
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...
New twist on moonsighting fitnah
The issue of when to start Ramadan and when to have Eid has been a bone of contention as long as I’ve been Muslim and probably for much longer. I was made aware of...
Vishal, PIE and 80s boarding
A couple of weeks ago I got a comment asking if one James Russell had applied for any job at Kesgrave Hall, a boarding school I attended from 1989 to 1993 (ages 12 to...
The Drumlanrig jolly
Yesterday we heard that various minor British Muslim leaders had presented an ‘accord’ to the king that they had agreed with the leaders of British Judaism, including the Chief Rabbi, a major rabbi from...
Why people are deserting the BBC
Late last month it was reported on Bloomberg (archived copy here) that the government were considering making it compulsory to pay the TV licence fee to watch streamed on-demand entertainment online from providers such...
Elephant in the echo chamber
Since Donald Trump won a second term as US president last year and, with the help of Elon Musk, set about slashing the American federal government and sacking officials on the basis of personal...
Two disastrous transport projects
This week the Labour government announced that it supported the plan to expand Heathrow airport with a third runway as well as to build the East Thames crossing, an additional road tunnel (or two)...
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...