By now you’ll surely have seen the that IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, has recommended that MPs should receive a 9% increase in their pay in 2015/16 which, on top of the 1% increases they’re due to receive in the next two year, will raise the basis […]

If there is one thing I learned very well back in the days that I worked in and with the Public Sector it’s that once you get above a certain level of seniority, the staff become highly adept at creating unnecessary work purely for the sake of creating […]

Of the many variations on Martin Niemoller’s famous ‘First they came for…’ speech I’ve seen kicking around the Internet none, so far as I can recall, has ever started with the line ‘First they came for the sex offenders”. As population sub-groups go, it’s difficult to think of […]

A little over a month ago you may recall that there was a bit of a short-lived furore over claims that female TV presenters routinely disappear from our screens once they reach the age of 50. The source of this claim was a Labour Party policy review group […]

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last three weeks or so debunking a variety of spurious claims about online porn. Amanda Platell claimed to have watched a child porn video she found using Google, but that proved to be an old commercial porn video in […]

Warning: May contain actual evidence. Three weeks ago, I published a couple of articles in the space of two days that conclusively debunked Amanda Platell’s claim that it was easy to find child pornography online using nothing more than Google proving, first, that a porn video she described […]

The latest newspaper to jump on the burgeoning anti-porn bandwagon is the Sunday Times, which recently put its name to a “symposium” on the “dangers to children of online pornography” in conjunction with the Tory Think-tank Policy Exchange: The Sunday Times is organising a symposium on the dangers […]

Having parked its [septic] tanks on Google’s lawn, the media’s efforts to generate a full blown moral panic around the existence of online pornography continued this morning with an appearance on the BBC’s Breakfast News programme by Susie Hargreaves, tbe current CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation. To […]

In the wake of the convictions of Stuart Hazell and Mark Bridger for sexually motivated murders of children, the papers are awash with speculative commentaries on online child pornography. The Daily Mail (of course) wants to know ‘What WILL it take for Google to block child porn?’ even […]

For this article I’m going to return to a subject I covered yesterday, that of ‘porn statistics’ or, to be more precise, statistics published widely on both the internet and by newspapers and other media organisation which purport to show that large numbers of children and young people […]