Home schooling is vital
Hot on the heels of the Tower Hamlets Muslim foster care hoax, the Times today printed a story (behind firewall) claiming that home schooling was part of "a breeding ground for extremists and future...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Snooping round our door
Earlier today I heard an interview with Sir Martin Narey, a former director-general of the prisons service and later chief executive of the Natoinal Offender Management Service, then CEO of Barnardo's and more recently...
Why did they lie?
Earlier today I saw an article on Medium titled "Why did Andrew Norfolk lie?". Andrew Norfolk is the investigative reporter who wrote the story about the "Christian" girl being fostered with the Muslim foster...
So, it was all a lie
The truth about the young girl fostered with a Muslim family in east London that appeared in the Times on Monday was revealed yesterday in an anonymised court judgement (PDF). The Times' story was...
Shane Ridge case: Shurely shome mishtake
Update: The Home Office has apologised after it established that Shane Ridge was indeed automatically a British citizen. I've filed this under "Immigration" even though the 'immigrant' in question, Shane Ridge from Colne, Lancashire,...
Muslim foster story is naked hate
The Murdoch Times has a front-page story today exposing a 'scandal' in which a young "white, Christian" girl was placed by Tower Hamlets council's social services into the care of a Muslim foster family...
Review: The State
The State is Peter Kosminsky's four-part drama series on a group of young people from western Europe (the two central characters are British) who travel to Syria to join ISIS. It was shown on...
The authority fallacy and the “7-day NHS”
Earlier today, the health minister Jeremy Hunt posted some tweets claiming that Professor Stephen Hawking was wrong in his assessment of the data regarding the "weekend effect" (the notion that people admitted to hospital...
Trump, Clinton and a fair voting system
There's a claim that has been repeated a lot on social media by former Hilary Clinton supporters (the graphic on the right posted to Twitter by Victoria Brownworth being an example) that Trump won...
Honi soit qui mal y pense
[Outcry over sexualised hijab schoolgirl](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/hijab-girl-in-childrens-books-is-sexualising-fouryearolds/news-story/ba831356aa747865914da54ffe24367a) (from *The Australian*) *Honi soit qui mal y pense* is a Norman French phrase, meaning “shame on he who thinks ill of it”. It appears on the British royal...
Respect your elders, young ladies!
There was an article on the Independent last week calling for younger feminists to concern themselves with the plight of the so-called WASPI women, the women born in the 50s who are being caught...
Ain’t got the Knowhow
I was listening to the BBC's You and Yours programme and heard a feature on ransomware (malware that encrypts your files and then demands money for the key to decrypt it), and having data...
The Lexit delusion
It's no secret that the bulk of the support for the campaign to pull the UK out of the European Union last year came from the Right — UKIP and large sections of the...
The Handmaid’s Tale: speculation so white
The Hulu TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel set in a New England taken over by a fundamentalist Christian theocratic police state that styles itself the Republic of Gilead, concluded...
Dumping Hopkins didn’t hurt LBC’s ratings
LBC sees audience numbers rise after Katie Hopkins departure | The Independent According to Rajar, the organisation which researches the listener base of radio and TV stations, the national talk station LBC did not...
Reverting to type
Democracy is dying – and it’s startling how few people are worried | Paul Mason | Opinion | The Guardian This was in today's Guardian, and uses a few examples of democracies turning back...
We all knew Kevin Myers was a bigot
Today, social media has been abuzz about a column by Kevin Myers, about whom I last wrote on this blog in 2009 in response to a column full of stock false Islamophobic assertions by...
Charlie Gard and NHS versus private care
So, the tragic story of Charlie Gard, the terminally-ill baby boy whose parents have fought a legal battle to stop doctors at Great Ormond Street in London from turning off his life support, has...
Blaming the colonials for everything
Over the weekend I saw a touching story about an elderly Moroccan lady who completed the first grade of her country's school system after having been illiterate all her life and having spent three...
A 20-year-old is not a baby!
Yesterday a young man called Rashan Charles was killed in an encounter with the police in London, and the footage has been posted on social media with the hashtag "Justice for Rash". The footage...