Although its been quiet for some time and rather dropped off the public radar, this is still an ominous sign for any senior Tory:
We have now learnt that a number of Conservative MPs who are now familiar with Mrs Hammond’s version of events have approached the chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee to demand that [...]

Today, two very different but inextricably linked news stories caught my eye.
In the first, I find (via The f-word) that Nadine Dorries has tabled another amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill that would, if accepted, reduce the upper time limit for abortions to twenty weeks. Dorries is seemingly taking a leaf out of [...]

I can be as hardnosed as anyone when it comes to dealing with harsh political realities but even I draw the line when it comes to this:
Gay and lesbian asylum-seekers can be safely deported to Iran as long as they live their lives “discreetly”, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has claimed.
In a letter to a [...]

George Carlin (May 12 1937 – June 22 2008)
Hope you’re good at Twister, George.

Today sees the release of the latest set of abortion statistics by the Department of Health and, naturally enough, this has brought Nadine Dorries and other pro-lifers crawling out of the woodwork, once again, to tell us all that the sky is still falling.
The headline figure is that the overall number of abortions is up, [...]

Life is full of ironies and politics even more so, and so it is that on the day that one MP resigned his seat in the House of Commons to fight a by-election on the issue of preserving our traditional civil liberties, we also find our two largest political parties engaged in a pissing contest [...]

Via Chris, I find that there’s an ‘atheism meme’ going around that, unusually for such things, is actually worth picking up and responding to, so…
Q1. How would you define ‘atheism’?

An absence of belief in gods, supernaturalism, etc.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?

That’s a tougher question than it looks.
I went [...]

It’s come to my attention that David Davis has opened up a new website in support of his campaign in the upcoming Haltemprice and Howden by-election.
Now, content-wise its a little thin at the moment, but as the domain was only registered on 13 June, we’ll not hold that against him, but scooting round the site [...]

When Iain Dale leapt to Caroline Spelman’s defence a little over a week or so ago, some of what he had to say in her defence seemed, to me at least, to pose rather more questions than it provided answers, for example…
I remember when Caroline Spelman was first elected… I remember she had an [...]

As spin seems to be the main topic of the day, let’s repair to the London Evening Standard where an ‘old friend’ of the Ministry has seemingly resurfaced:
Fury as BBC gives money to disgraced Holocaust denier who ‘pestered bereaved families after the 7/7 bombing’
The BBC paid expenses to a disgraced academic who has pestered families [...]