Category: Hell in a handcart

  • The ministry of bigotry

    Many people believe that the Conservative MP Liz Truss is stupid. She may have said many stupid things in her career, but she isn’t thick. She’s much worse than that. Truss was previously the UK’s Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, where she was responsible for defending the independence of the judiciary and…

  • News isn’t about making you feel better

    Ruby Lott-Lavigna in Vice: Journalism is not supposed to be a fluffy PR machine for the government (unless you’re working in North Korea, or, I don’t know, the Sunday Telegraph news desk), ready to boost your mood on a less than jolly day with an uplifting story of a dog who saved a duck from…

  • Money keeps you safer than masks

    Yet more evidence that we really aren’t in this together: the Office for National Statistics reports that the Covid-19 death rate in England is more than double in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived. In the most deprived areas the death rate is 55.1 deaths per 100,000 population; in the least deprived,…

  • This is not a lockdown

    It’s May Day, the day when we celebrate international workers’ day. But in England many workers have nothing to celebrate: what the papers call a lockdown isn’t stopping employers from forcing people to come in to work non-essential jobs. Caroline Molloy, in OpenDemocracy: we don’t actually have a lockdown. The government has allowed people to…

  • Glasgow is going to lose another historic building

    To paraphrase The Onion: I can’t believe this is happening in the only city where this regularly happens. Glasgow is set to lose another iconic building, the ABC in Sauchiehall Street. The music venue – one of my very favourite places – was badly damaged by the second Art School fire and has effectively been…

  • “How discriminatory do you have to be before you’re called out?”

    Helen Belcher of Trans Media Watch explains why UK trans people are really scared right now. For some time trans people have understood the current media debate in the UK isn’t actually about the Gender Recognition Act. Instead, it is about our basic rights to live and move as full members of our society. …Most…

  • Using coronavirus for a culture war

    Rachel Shabi in The Guardian: the key issue in the right’s current culture war is the lockdown, which is being presented as a freedom-sucking con – much like the EU. Mirroring the dynamics of climate denialism, those challenging the overwhelming consensus of global expertise cast themselves as lockdown “sceptics”. And cleaving to a rightwing populist…

  • Never trust a Tory

    The UK government’s new equality minister, Liz Truss, has set out her priorities for the coming months. It isn’t good news for trans people. This isn’t a surprise. In 2019 Andrew Gilligan, the journalist who spearheaded The Sunday Times’ scaremongering about trans people, was appointed as a key advisor for No. 10. The conservatives have…

  • Overconfidence and incompetence

    Something we’re seeing a lot of during the coronavirus crisis is the rise of the armchair epidemiologist: the men (it’s mainly men) presenting themselves as authoritative voices about things they have no expertise in. Sarah Weinman, for InsideHook.com: They are lawyers, former reporters and thriller writers, Silicon Valley technologists, newspaper columnists, economists and doctors who…

  • Priorities

    To add insult to fatal injury, the headline that dominates the front page isn’t even true.