You stop killing, we stop marching
Last Thursday it was reported that a man had stabbed two people to death outside a synagogue in Manchester. Today the man’s name was revealed to be Jihad al-Shamie, a name widely ridiculed by...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Am I intimidated by the English flag?
Recently there has been a movement, spearheaded by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (the football hooligan and racist rabble-rouser known as Tommy Robinson) and his associates to fly both British and English flags off buildings and lampposts,...
Charlie Kirk: Crocodile Tears
I am not sure I knew of the existence of Charlie Kirk when he was assassinated in Utah last Wednesday. I saw a tweet from a Muslim account on Twitter which drew attention to...
The company you keep
Last Thursday in the Guardian, there was a letter from one Desmond Hewitt telling us we should watch what we say about the people ‘protesting’ outside hotels housing asylum seekers in the UK. Referring...
Cycling Mikey vs the Fiat: right, but …
Last week some videos went around showing a road safety activist (some call him a vigilante) named Michael van Erp, AKA Cycling Mikey, trying to stop a Fiat 500 going the wrong way up...
Policing for the dealers of death
Yesterday, at a protest organised by Defend Our Juries in Parliament Square, London, more than 500 protesters, many of them elderly, were arrested for holding banners supporting the organisation Palestine Action, proscribed last month...
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,...
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...