The Brighton Hill Roundabout. (Source: Auto Shenanigans) Today I saw a video by a couple of guys who make YouTube videos about roads, accusing Hampshire county council in south-eastern England of spending £20 million on making a bad roundabout even worse. (Not the first time they’ve accused councils of doing this.) The roundabout is the Brighton Hill Roundabout on the A30 in Basingstoke, where it meets the old by-pass (now a local road) and three other local roads, and previously had a network of subways under both it and some of the feeder roads, linked by walkways inside the roundabout. Now ..read more

The proposed new block of flats in Riddlesdown Road, Purley (source: Polaris Passivhaus) Last week Chris Philp, the Tory MP for Croydon South, a wealthy district on the southern edge of London where suburban streets rise up into the North Downs, posted a blog entry and an accompanying Tweet about the new Tory council’s refusal to allow a small block of flats to be built on the space of what he calls a “family home” on Riddlesdown Road, one of the aforementioned downside suburban streets. He calls the proposed building ‘ugly’ and says of the decision that it is “a welcome further example of the ..read more

Sadiq Khan Today the Tories published on their Twitter/X account a video claiming that Sadiq Khan’s London was the model for how the country would be governed if Labour were to win the forthcoming general election, and it is the most bizarre apocalyptic video I’ve ever seen from a mainstream political party. The video is in black and white and features a voice with a faint American accent telling us that London’s “ancient streets bear witness to a different tale, not of kings and queens but of crime and desperation” as a result of being governed by the Labour party. This itself is a dubious cl ..read more

The Namazgah mosque in Tirana, Albania The issue of women’s access to the mosque and the inadequate space for women in many mosques in the UK has been a thorny issue in the community for decades, way back before blogs (though this blog has covered it in the past); the issue was covered in at least one issue of Q-News back in the day. Many mosques in the UK simply have no spaces for women to pray at all; many have a fraction of the space afforded to men, and often the space is inaccessible or inadequate: dingy, dirty, lacking ablution facilities, lacking access to the imam. The root of the prob ..read more

Last Sunday the Mail printed extracts from a new book by Earl (Charles) Spencer, the brother of the late Princess Diana, on his time at a private boarding school in England called Maidwell School (the school claims it has changed, but still offers two-weekly boarding for children as young as seven) which he attended between ages eight and 13; he experienced sexual abuse from a female staff member he described as a “voracious paedophile” while the then headmaster dished out “brutal beatings” and appeared to gain sexual pleasure from doing so. Early boarding — sending children to boarding schoo ..read more

Demonstrators in London, Nov 2023 Over the past week, some of the same politicians and think-tankers who couldn’t hide their resentment at George Galloway winning a by-election and were accusing anti-genocide demonstrators in London of being controlled by extremists behind the scenes and making London a “no-go zone for Jews” (a claim reported uncritically by the BBC, who could have asked the police if their statistics back this claim up) were also telling us to stop using the term ‘Islamophobia’ and stop paying heed to those who do. According to them, Islamophobia is a term made up by Islamist ..read more

A demonstration in London against the Gaza genocide in November 2023. (Taken by me.) Since Brexit, there has been a particular theory about why people voted the way they did: that it wasn’t about immigration or racism, it was about something called ‘identity’. It was to do with people wanting to go back to an older Britain in a simpler time when we were supposedly self-sufficient. It doesn’t matter, according to this theory, if our economy suffers from leaving the EU because it was about something so much deeper than GDP. A few years ago I wrote a piece on homesickness and nostalgia (which is ..read more

Galloway: “the best cars are to be found here in Rochdale”. (Source: George Galloway, X.) Last week a by-election in Rochdale saw the former Labour MP and more recently former leader of the Respect coalition, George Galloway, elected as an MP for a third time in a third constituency on the back of Muslim votes, this time about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Until the early 2000s he was a Labour MP for a Glasgow constituency; in 2005, having been expelled from Labour, he was elected for Respect to represent Bethnal Green and Bow in east London on the back of anger about the Iraq war, and not lon ..read more

Brianna Ghey. (Image source: TikTok.) A few years ago I wrote an article on what I called “stable-door logic”: the tendency, after a disaster or atrocity, to look for ways to make sure that said disaster could not have happened if they had been in place, and to do those things. This came after a German passenger aeroplane was flown into the side of a mountain in the French Alps by its pilot while his co-pilot was out of the cockpit to use the toilet, and the co-pilot was unable to get back in because of security measures put in place after 9/11. We have been seeing the same in the wake of the ..read more

Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl murdered by the Israelis who also murdered the two paramedics sent to her rescue. (Source: Ehab Hamada, Instagram) Last week I listened to the BBC’s File on 4 programme about the murder of Brianna Ghey last year in a village outside Warrington after the two teenagers responsible had been sentenced. Brianna was a 16-year-old who was transgender; her killers had pretended to be her friend, but in fact had her on a “kill list” because of her gender and because of trivial personal slights. One of them had been moved from another school to Brianna’s after giving an ..read more