There’s a limit to age-based mitigation
Recently there have been a series of controversial cases in Scotland, where men have had their sentences for extremely violent crimes reduced because they were under 25 when they committed the acts on the...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Threads: Strangled at Birth
Today Instagram, a division of Meta which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, launched their social media app, Threads. This has been marketed as a “Twitter killer” for several weeks as Elon Musk continues to...
Who really “hates the NHS”?
Yesterday (Saturday) I saw, on the front page of the BBC’s News app, an article by Laura Kuenssberg titled “Like it or hate it, the NHS is here to stay”. Kuenssberg is a BBC...
Boris Johnson: goodbye, and good riddance
Last weekend, the former prime minister Boris Johnson stepped down from parliament in anticipation of a committee report that was expected to find that he had misled parliament over his activities during the Covid...
What part of ’32 weeks’ don’t people understand?
Today (Monday), a woman in Stoke-on-Trent in England was sentenced to 28 months’ imprisonment for aborting her pregnancy at between 32 and 34 weeks. She did this by deceiving a major abortion provider, the...
The need for a representative academia
Last week the BBC’s File on 4 ran a feature on affirmative action, the American academic policy of taking aspects of an applicant’s background, including their race, into account when awarding university places. This...
Well, you did mention the guns
The other day I was reading a discussion on a forum I belong to, and someone mentioned that her husband had bought her a handgun the day they married. The discussion quickly moved on...
Post-Covid transport policy and ‘Eco-Ableism’
Today I read a news report about a disabled woman in Brighton who has been left trapped in her home since January by a road closure the city council has imposed on her street...
Thank a Boomer?
A while ago I saw a long Twitter thread aimed at young women whom its author accused of ‘ageism’ and of forgetting the sacrifices and struggles of previous generations of women, in particular the...
Just how deep-rooted is antisemitism, really?
This week the Guardian published a cartoon (above) by its regular cartoonist Martin Rowson, depicting the resignation of the former BBC director-general Richard Sharp. The cartoon is entitled The Copros Touch (a pun on...
Diane Abbott and racism then and now
Today (Sunday) the Observer printed a letter from Diane Abbott, the Labour (well, now suspended from the party) MP for Hackney and Stoke Newington in inner east London, who is Black, opining that white...
Every little clanger: what Tesco gets wrong in its Eidvert
Recently a short video has been doing the rounds on Muslim social media: an advert by Tesco, the British supermarket chain, to get us to celebrate the forthcoming Eid al-Fitr with food from Tesco....
Why are children in care being sent miles from home?
In today’s Observer, there is an investigation into children in care in England being sent sometimes hundreds of miles from home for lack of care placements in their home areas; they note that children...
What is ‘snitching’? When is it bad?
Earlier this week the blind YouTuber Anthony Daniels (right), whose channel is called Third Eye Visions, did a video on ‘snitching’ and on whether it is OK to inform on bullies or on people...
Not fine at home, not fine in school
Last week there was a piece on the BBC News website by Terri White (a “journalist, author and broadcaster” though this was the first time I’d heard of her) on the importance of school...
Is this abuse?
Yesterday the Observer carried a story about pupil protests in some schools in England against school rules around shorts, short skirts and locking toilet doors during lessons so that pupils are only able to...
Khalid Mahmood should lose the Labour whip
A clip has been circulating on Twitter of the Labour MP Khalid Mahmood addressing a webinar on the recent Prevent programme review by the Tory-aligned think tank Policy Exchange, a notorious source of anti-Muslim...
What use is Manston? A geography lesson for corporate ‘local’ media
Anyone who uses Facebook will have noticed a pattern recently: that their news feed has less of their friends’ posts and more adverts and clickbait from various ‘news’ sites. The clickbait is often poorly...
Who really lost, and why?
By now it’s becoming obvious to most people that 13 years of Tory rule, with or without Lib Dem or DUP help, has been a disaster for almost everyone except the super-rich, and at...
Age like wine, age like milk?
This morning I was alerted to a video on Twitter by an Internet personality who calls himself “The Sunnah Guy”, a young man with no apparent qualifications dishing out advice to whomever might be...