Indigo Jo Blogs Blog

Not the ‘ally’ Muslims need

In today’s Guardian, there’s an article by Laurie Penny attacking those who have been campaigning against the supposed gender segregation on British university campuses (meaning, the separate seating arrangements at some Islamic society gatherings),...

Woolwich murder was perverse, not merely extreme

Last Thursday, the two men who murdered the soldier Lee Rigby in the street outside an army barracks in Woolwich and then paraded on camera with bloodied hands and a meat cleaver, were found...

The danger of knee-jerk closures of NHS units

A couple of weeks ago, a Care Quality Commission report was published that revealed that two NHS units for people with learning disabilities on the same site in Oxford were dreadful — they failed...

Separate seating is not segregation

The last couple of years various groups have stirred up a controversy out of nowhere about the tendency of some Muslim groups to separate men and women at lectures on university campuses. This has...

What’s so great about TomTom?

Last week I bought a new sat-nav, a TomTom Pro 5150 Truck Live, which is a specialist one for truck drivers which has information about vehicle size limits and truck speed limits (normal sat-navs...

Mehdi Hasan’s phoney apologetics

British Muslims should stand up and say it: there is nothing Islamic about child marriage (at the New Statesman and also the Huffington Post) Mehdi Hasan argues that it is British Muslims' responsibility to...

Renewed harassment of McDougalls is indefensible

On Sunday I read, via Sarah Ismail, that the McDougall family (Mark and Kerry McDougall, née Robertson, and their sons Ben and Lochlan) have faced renewed “investigation” since they have returned to Dunfermline, their...

CyanogenMod and ungrateful users

Recently, as I posted here last week, I upgraded my main phone (a Nexus 4) to run CyanogenMod 10.2 which is based on Android 4.3 — they are starting work on the next version...

Taking care of business

The last few weeks I’ve not been blogging as much as I used to, and there’s one important reason for this: I’ve been working on getting my HGV (truck) licence. You have to do...

CyanogenMod 10.2 and the Nexus 4

I bought a Nexus 4 a couple of months ago when it was reduced to clear, having previously been using a Galaxy Nexus which ran CyanogenMod 10.1, which was based on Android 4.2. This...

A fortnight of upgrades

The past couple of weeks, I've upgraded the operating systems on all three of the computers I own (not including my mobile phone and tablet). I've a Mac, a desktop PC and a laptop...

“Either HS2 or more motorways!”

We must invest in high-speed rail or new motorways, warns HS2 chairman (from the Guardian) The Guardian reported yesterday that Douglas Oakervee, the chairman of the HS2 project (the new high-speed railway line from...

Quilliam out of their depth with Tommy Robinson

This week Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), the erstwhile leader of the English Defence League, announced that he was leaving the organisation he helped found to start some kind of new anti-extremism organisation...

We don’t need another Crystal Palace

Last week I read that a Chinese businessman has presented plans to rebuild the old Crystal Palace on its old site at the top of Crystal Palace Park in south-east London. Ni Zhaoxing, chairman...

What breeds anti-intellectualism?

From the Archive: Paul Johnson on the Know-Nothing Left This article first appeared in the New Statesman in 1975 when Paul Johnson was still associated with the British political left (in the late 1970s...