Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
I got into disability activism around 2010, just as the Labour government were leaving office and being replaced by the old Conservative-Liberal coalition (or ConDems) who introduced swingeing austerity measures, instigating a hate campaign...
Suzanne Moore, a former Guardian columnist who now writes for the Daily Telegraph, had a quite absurd piece published two days ago, claiming that antisemitism “has become an everyday quasi-acceptable form of racism that...
In last Saturday’s Guardian there was an article by Jonathan Freedland about the motion since passed at the ongoing Green Party conference in the UK defining Zionism as racism which should be “treated as...
Last Monday on You and Yours (at 43:42), the BBC’s consumer affairs programme broadcast at noon Monday to Wednesday (it used to be every weekday, but other programmes are now broadcast at noon on...
Rod Liddle, former editor of the BBC’s Today programme and then columnist first for the Guardian, then the Spectator, the Sunday Times and men’s magazines GQ and Arena, died last Sunday aged 66. Rod...
Here in Europe we’re in the middle of a disastrous hot summer. In the UK it has not been as severe as in France, where temperatures around 45ºC have been recorded and there are...
Last week, following the murder or assassination of the former Tory, later Reform UK, politician Ann Widdecombe (right) the week before, the Reform party started making demands that the public purse should pay for...
Citizen Vigilante is not only a vicious film, it is an extraordinarily stupid film. Directed by Uwe Boll, the German director behind the films Rampage and Darfur (previously best known for making video games...
A week ago, a report on a maternity care scandal in the Nottingham area was published. The Ockenden Maternity Review had been set up in May 2022 “following significant concerns raised regarding the quality...
The other day I heard the former British prime minister Tony Blair being interviewed on Radio 4, twenty minutes after the more recent former PM Rishi Sunak being interviewed on the same channel. Blair...
I’ve been a member of the National Trust, a British conservation charity which maintains a large number of estates including parks, stately homes, gardens and landscapes, since 2019. I’ve spent many an afternoon wandering...
Last week Simon Heffer wrote a piece for the Spectator, a British Tory-associated news and opinion magazine, alleging that the politician Enoch Powell, an MP from 1950 to 1987 (with a break in 1974,...
Last week local elections were held in the UK, mainly for district and unitary authority councils in England but also for the Welsh and Scottish parliaments. For the second time, Reform UK gained majorities...
Last week three men were stabbed in London by the same individual, a man born in Somalia though now a British citizen who had previously been imprisoned for stabbing a police officer and his...
Update 17th April: police have found no evidence to suggest that the crime happened at all. As I suspected, this is likely to be a hoax. Last weekend a woman reported that she had...
Earlier today I saw a short video on Facebook or Instagram, I forget which, by a woman called Tamara who migrated from Croatia to the United States (I don’t know which part). I saw...
In the last couple of weeks, two articles by white feminists have been published in the British right-wing media attacking the niqab, and peddling some very familiar generalisations about women who wear it. The...
Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth elected on a Reform UK slate in 2024 who subsequently went independent because his views on immigration were too extreme even for Nigel Farage, has now formed...
There’s a certain type of politician and political activist who is quick to take credit when his party wins, but will blame everyone but himself and his allies when they lose, and can be...
The grooming gangs issue has been all over social media the past few weeks: three weeks ago, a group called Open Justice UK published the transcripts of the 2019 Bradford trial in which nine...