Ministry of Truth

In the Independent, Mary Dejevsky is happily professing her support for the churches on ‘gay adoption’. My late, never-married, Aunt Mary went as an Anglican missionary to Persia. She became headmistress – she would have recognised no other word – of a girls’ school, and died at a […]

Watching Channel 4 News about an hour ago, I noticed that an unnamed Home Office Civil Servant (is there any other kind) has taken a dig in the media at John Reid over plans to reopen the two worst prison wings in the UK to shore up the […]

Barry’s Beef on the perils of not paying attention… Any one who knows me would know two fundamental things: 1) I enjoy comedy and 2) I have a hell of a lot of hates. Last night I went to the London Studios in Waterloo to see the filming […]

Back when the Identity Cards Bill was the hottest topic around, probably the hardest task facing its opponents was the decision as to which of the two junior Minister’s fronting the debates was the biggest tosser – Tony McNulty or Andy Burnham. Recent, its been McNulty sweeping the […]

I think its well established that far-right political parties have quite a bit of ‘previous form’ when it comes to taking a rather revisionist view of history. Usually this takes the form of Holocaust Denial and ‘Hitler was just a bit misunderstood’ but if you look closely enough […]

Can someone please remind me which political party Frank Field MP is member of? (rhetorical) Or perhaps remind Frank, as he seems to be more than a bit confused of late, is his latest missive on Comment is Free is anything to go by. A successful terrorist attack […]

With all the fuss about Holocaust denial, should we now start worrying about the possibility of English Civil War denial? Despite being the world’s oldest democracy, the UK has never had a revolution – no great rising of the people demanding the overthrow of the established order.  I […]

Okay, so Sunday’s story in the Independent about Ruth Kelly and the Maximum Tone trying to backslide on the introduction of the Equality Act Sexual Orientation Regulations in England & Wales and slip in a last minute exemption for Catholic Adoption Agencies is hardly a surprise (it is, […]

Remember Mystic Nadine? You know, Nadine Dorries, the Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, who had me in stitches with her hilariously bad grasp of statistics only a touch over a week or so. Well, Nadine’s back and this time its amnesia… Simon Mayo: Did you vote for the control […]

At least two or three times, of late, I’ve made the point that if the Tories are serious about shaking off their reputation as the ‘Nasty Party’ when it comes to their approach to race and ethnicity then they have to be given room to clean up their […]