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...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
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...
Reflections on the fall of Bashar al-Assad
Last week the 53-year-old Assad dynasty in Syria was finally overthrown by one of the rebel militias which had broken out of Idlib, a city near the Turkish border in the north-west, two weeks...
Nigel Farage will not be Prime Minister
In the last few weeks there has been a lot of talk about the likelihood of the Reform UK party gaining power in the UK in the next few years, about the government or...
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...
There’s a genocide going on
Last Saturday in the British media I saw two articles, one on the BBC News site by a writer whose name I didn’t notice (on a second look, it’s their North America correspondent, Anthony...
The Holocaust, Gaza and “how genocide happens”
On social media this past week or so, in discussions about Israel’s stepping-up of its atrocities against the civilian population of north Gaza, there has been some talk of how genocides are allowed to...
Guardian caves in to racist pressure on Gaza
In today’s Guardian there is a review by Stuart Jeffries of a Channel 4 documentary about the October 2003 Hamas attacks on Israel; it is a four-star review (out of five) which praises the...
The irrelevance of the Blood Libel
Every so often, when an appalling atrocity of the Israeli occupation force against a Palestinian child is exposed in western mainstream or social media, there will be a Zionist loudly condemning the report as...
Motorbikes and me
This summer I’ve made two attempts to learn how to ride a motorcycle. Both failed. On the first occasion, in early July, I was just getting the hang of riding the bike around the...
The ‘special’ schools that aren’t schools
Restrained and scared – the £100k schools failing vulnerable children (from BBC News) There has long been a section of the “special” education system in the UK that really made no attempt to educate;...
They weren’t protests
Last week I was listening to Eddie Nestor’s show on BBC London on my way back from a delivery run out to south Essex, and I heard him tell us he was going to...
Teens, sex and “statutory rape”
Any time the matter of sex involving teenagers is adiscussed on social media, there is someone who insists that the act must be rape because someone younger than the age of consent cannot consent....