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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

Last week, following the murder of three young girls in Southport, Merseyside, who attacked a number of other girls and their teachers at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, gangs of racist hooligans have been ..read more

In the UK there is a charity called “Men Behaving Dadly” which supports fathers and other male carers to improve their relationships with their children through play and other activities (the name is also used by various courses, often run by churches). The phrase sprang to mind after I heard of yet another scandal involving the sexual behaviour of non-scholarly Muslim preachers who build their following on social media. In this case it involved a preacher approaching a divorced woman with children for temporary marriage (though not technically ‘temporary’ as no finish date was specified, whi ..read more

A former polling station in south-west London. We have a general election tomorrow (4th July); it may be today by the time you read this. We have had 14 years of Tory mismanagement, five of them enabled by the Liberal Democrats, during which we relinquished our membership of the European Union, experienced an unnecessary austerity in which the fabric of our society was destroyed and poor and disabled people made scapegoats, saw the rise of grinding poverty that resulted in food banks rising from almost unknown to a fixture in every city and town, and witnessed our government party as the rest ..read more

The attacker’s car (screenshot from Ashley Neal video) In the last few years a whole genre of videos has sprung up on YouTube of compilations of clips from people’s dashcams, or from the channel author’s own. Some of these channels (particularly the American-based ones) specialise in spectacular crashes or egregiously bad driving; the ones here in the UK seem to be full of merely irritating driving — people pulling out in front of the author at a junction where they should have given way, for example. One American channel titled “Idiots in Cars” mostly features crashes, but one episode feature ..read more

Hat Porter, pictured at Parliament last week Last week there was a report (here in PDF and .docx formats) published by the National Survivor User Network, a mental health advocacy group run by people currently in or who have experience of the mental health system as patients, on the way women are treated in British mental health wards during their periods (author Hat Porter, who also addressed a round table at Parliament last week on the subject) was interviewed by Metro here). This includes not being provided with pads or tampons while they were prevented from leaving to buy their own, having ..read more

Auriol Grey Last week a woman who had been imprisoned for (allegedly) causing the death of a cyclist she encountered on a pavement in Huntingdon, a small town in eastern England, and waved her arms and shouted at her not to cycle on the footpath (which is usually illegal, though there was ambiguity about that in this case), causing her to fall off her bike into the path of a passing motorist, was released from prison as her conviction was quashed. It appears that her conviction was for “illegal act manslaughter”, in which an illegal act (such as assault in this case) leads to someone’s death w ..read more