My experience of the police has been a mixed one. No, I am not a criminal. What I am referring to is how police officers have responded to my requests for help, even my mere presence, over the years, and the responses depended upon which country I was in. Most of my interactions have been […]
Without Fear or Favour? Read More »
One of the essential elements of truth is the use of words according to their accurate definitions. If I think the word red denotes what is classified as green, I cannot accurately identify things that are red. There are layers of meaning to words too. Again, take the word red. It is a colour adjective.
David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary, is a man of contradictions. Despite having studied at Harvard Law School no less, he managed to balls up some pretty easy questions on Celebrity Mastermind some years ago. When asked who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for her research into radiation, he gave Marie Antoinette
The Church of England, an institution that is predicted to be extinct by 2062 by mathematician and R number analyst Dr John Hayward, is yet again doing its damned hardest to fulfil the prophecy. Recently, the Church announced a £100 million slavery reparations fund to provide investment in black British communities it claims are still
Pews Empty Over C of E’s Reparations Fund Read More »
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which is found in his magnum opus The Republic, is used to illustrate how humans are ignorant of ultimate reality. It was written as an imagined dialogue between Plato’s brother and his mentor Socrates. According to Socrates, humanity is like people who are chained in a cave in a position
‘Dear Townies’ Book Review Read More »
As many countries in the EU swing rightwards, Britain has a new left-wing government with an eye-watering majority of 412 out of 650 seats. The Conservatives have clung on to a mere 121 seats. A flawed Brexit, income-crushing levels of taxation and inflation, and a surge in immigration meant that the electorate was in no
Election Aftermath Read More »
In 1849, a British sea captain called Frederick Forbes arrived in the West African kingdom of Dahomey. He had been sent by the British government to persuade King Ghezo to cease selling his fellow Africans whom he had captured in war to European slave traders. The British had banned slave trading in their empire in
The Double Standards of Slavery Read More »
In the summer of 1990, I graduated from academe’s cloisters and entered the mammonish world of sales. Frankly, it was a McJob as I had no idea what career to pursue. It meant I had to move to a market town quite a distance from my home town and which bordered some remote spaces where
To Speak or Not to Speak Read More »
The late Anglo-American writer, Christopher Hitchens, once declared to journalist Alice Fordham the following: “My attitude to posters with swastikas on them has always been the same. They should be ripped down.” Hitchens was right: the swastika is viscerally provocative. Not for Hindus, of course, for whom it is an ancient symbol of good luck
Inverted Red Triangles Read More »
Rightly do D-Day and the Normandy beach landings grip the imagination. Its scale was immense: it was the largest seaborne invasion in history involving thousands of boats, ships and aircraft and around 160,000 troops from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Greece, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. (If I
They Gave Their Today Read More »
