I sat and watched Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, and I want to tell you what it looked like from where I am standing. Not from a green leather bench. From a desk, across from real people, every single working day — people on benefits, and every one of them struggling. So when I watched Kemi […]
As misleading headlines go, this Express headline has to be one of the worst. The figures show almost the exact opposite, so how did the Express get it so wrong? To be fair to the Express, the “shocking new study” they refer to in the subheading was a study released by the Centre for Social Justice, which also […]
As many readers will have spotted, Claudi lives and works in Scotland, but her lived experience and powerful analysis is just as relevant to people here in the West Country. The government has spent the last few days wringing its hands about “NEETs.” If you’ve not come across the term, NEET means Not in Education, […]
Sit down. This one is going to make your blood boil. In 2024-25, the Trussell Trust handed out 2.9 million emergency food parcels across the UK. Over a million went to children. One parcel every 11 seconds. Up 51 per cent in five years. Add the 1,172 plus independent food banks Trussell doesn’t count, the […]
As a transplanted northern Californian, one thing I can’t get my head around, is the British way of naming foods. I’ve already talked about biscuits in an earlier article, but now I want to take on other foods that don’t actually say what they are. I’m bringing this up (so to speak) because it troubles […]
Buckle up, today will be a double debunk; Firstly the headline and article, and secondly, the online claims sprouting from this article. The Claim So let’s start with the claim that 67 dog breeds could be banned in Britain. The Daily Mail begins with: Sixty-seven dog breeds could be banned in Britain if new breeding guidelines set […]
Here is part 2 of my “they’re cancelling Christmas” debunk. I will try and cover as many of the ludicrous rage bait claims as I can, so you have the facts to hand when your Facebook-indoctrinated relative brings up these myths over the festive period. In part 1, I debunked the claims that Tesco had renamed their plastic Christmas […]
A myth-busting explainer on Tesco trees, ‘renamed’ cakes, and the real purpose behind these manufactured panics. I vowed I wasn’t going to do a ‘they’re cancelling Christmas’ Substack after doing a quick Bluesky thread on it, and talking about it very briefly on James O’Brien’s LBC show. However, I’ve changed my mind for several reasons: So buckle up for your […]
As press and certain politicians seek to load all the ills of our society onto people arriving in small boats, it is high time we faced up to the fact that there are consequences to any country’s actions, not just in the sense of war and conflict, but also resulting from empire-building. And while the […]
Last weekend, an elected member of parliament (Reform UK’s Sarah Pochin) went on Talk TV and said, “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people, full of people who are basically anything other than white people.” Let that sink in. We have reached a point in the political discourse […]
A handful of parents, a far-right outrage machine, and the damage misinformation does to real communities: A simple school assembly in Swansea, where a visitor from a local mosque spoke about her faith, became the latest culture war story fuelled by far-right activists, misinformation, a Reform councillor and GB News. Earlier this month, a small […]
The campaign organisation HOPE not hate‘s Weekend of HOPE will see hundreds and thousands of leaflets delivered to houses in the UK and thousands of people will take to the streets with a simple message: communities are stronger together. We live in an era in which certain politicians and oligarchs are hellbent on dividing us […]
On a late August afternoon in Halifax, a woman who has spent fifteen years caring for patients in Britain’s National Health Service was racially abused and assaulted in front of her young daughter. Apple Moorhouse, a 42-year-old nurse originally from the Philippines, was walking with her family in Manor Heath Park when a simple request […]
The Daily Mail recently ran an article: “List of perks taxpayers are funding for asylum seekers”. The Conservative party then took that list, created a handy little graphic and then posted it on X: REVEALED: The huge list of freebies and perks channel migrants are entitled to once they land in Britain. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves is taxing […]
Knock on the doors of the manosphere, and what I have discovered isn’t merely a collection of grievances and muscle-flexes – it’s an entire microclimate, its own weather front pressing against the future. Here, in these digital territories, fossil-fuelled bravado becomes the very air young men are taught to breathe, each exhale a small act […]
The Conservatives have claimed migrants from small boats are “24 times more likely to end up in prison”, but this figure is wrong on so many levels! On Thursday, I was sent this headline from the Daily Mail and asked if it was true… “Migrants who cross the Channel into the UK ‘are 24 times […]
Three baseless taboos are derailing national renewal – but they need not The question is not whether the UK needs a decade of national renewal as Sir Keir Starmer claimed. We can see the need in nearly every city in the UK. Shops close and are boarded up; and when they reopen, it is often as charity […]
I could feel the fear in a hall full of primary school parents in Totnes as they listened to campaigners going through the evidence about the impact of smartphones on kids at secondary school. The statistics are shocking: Nearly one in 10 children aged eight to 14 have watched online pornography Almost half of children […]
What happened in Moygashel, Northern Ireland on July 10, was a disgrace. An effigy of a migrant boat was paraded and set alight as part of a so-called celebration. It wasn’t just the model of a vessel that burned, it was a grotesque caricature of human suffering, complete with mannequins in lifejackets and banners declaring […]
To really appreciate the importance of Exeter’s Respect Festival, just imagine some of the reactions if a two-day celebration of anti-racism, equality and diversity in the city was proposed for the first time today. It would prove divisive. Many people would love the idea, but you can bet there’d be some pushback, with the word […]
I am writing to express deep alarm and disappointment at your recent announcements opposing a youth mobility scheme and cancelling care worker visas. These decisions are not only irresponsible and damaging — they represent a political miscalculation of staggering proportions. They are accelerating the breakdown of our health and care system in an extremely dangerous […]
My father, a political journalist who spent more hours of his life in Westminster than is good for you, always told us not to be too cynical about politicians. For every bad apple, he would imply, there were five good ones. You might not share their politics, but you knew that most of them were […]
Shortly after sending a happy birthday message to one of my grand-daughters, the news came on Radio 4 at 08.55 this morning that Pope Francis had passed away. Jorge Mario Bergoglio had left this life at 07.35. Hardly a shock, given his age and his recent debilitating illness, but an emotional shock nonetheless. Soon afterwards […]
We could probably do with a break from Trump this weekend, and when I saw this tweet over on X, with 5000 likes and 3,600 comments – overflowing with anti-Muslim rhetoric, it felt like a classic example of a post designed to make you think: “That’s outrageous!” Which, of course, is precisely the point. So let’s look […]
Celebration lunches, chocolates and a glass of fizz will be on the menu this Sunday, 30 March, as families get together for Mothering Sunday. But for one group of women in Plymouth, the table will be bare – except for leaflets, stickers and other material demanding an end to child hunger and poverty. Six local […]
The Anglo-German Family History Society (AGFHS) is a well-established group for all those who are interested in researching their roots among people from the German speaking parts of Europe, who have emigrated over centuries and settled in Great Britain or Ireland. We have developed considerable expertise and resources, and new members are always welcome. Here […]
The Labour leadership can and must do better Imagine your son came home from school one day making derogatory comments – clearly picked up in the classroom – about a refugee kid in his class who had just acquired a new British passport. Knowing your son was well-meaning but easily led, you might encourage him […]
Set against so much worrying and negative news, the situation in Spain is very encouraging! We’ve just come back from two weeks there, and as so often in recent years we’ve observed a country that’s going places – in a very positive direction! A spate of articles recently, such as in the Independent, The Week […]
Let’s break down a few things, both about ID cards and Labour’s ill-advised tactics on “fighting Reform”. First off, I personally don’t think ID cards would work in UK, because we are objectively bad at things like this, but they work elsewhere so this isn’t about them per se. Fairly obviously ID cards have zero […]
Elon Musk doesn’t like it. Stronger legal measures are in the pipeline to rein in the spread of dangerous lies and misleading claims on social media platforms including X, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Google. The racist riots last summer, following the Southport murders, didn’t only show how social media disinformation can provoke real-life violence on […]