Catholic Voices, Cherrypicking and CiF Belief

The Guardian’s CiF Belief section is currently running a head-to-head debate article which pits Austen Ivereigh, co-ordinator of Catholic astroturfing operation ‘Catholic Voices’, against Tina Beattie, a professor of Catholic Studies* at the University of Roehampton. * Quite why anyone would feel the need to study Catholics, least […]

Eastleigh Tory Candidate more extreme than Dorries?

There is a suggestion doing the rounds that Maria Hutchings, the Tory candidate in the Eastleigh by-election, holds even more extreme views on abortion than Nadine Dorries: The Conservatives’ candidate in the Eastleigh by-election has even more extreme views on abortion than Nadine Dorries, it has emerged. Maria […]

Fetish Dungeons (& Dragons)

To be brutally honest, Fifty Shades of Grey is one of those books that ranked pretty high on my personal list of books to avoided like the plague even before I discovered that it had started life as a bit of dodgy BSDM fan-fiction using characters from the […]

Not just the Met failing women.

I don’t know how much national press coverage this story will get but today’s Birmingham Mail is reporting another sorry case of a Police officer falling down on the job: A “rogue” policeman has quit the West Midlands force after admitting retracting a domestic violence victim’s statement without […]

Thoughts on the This Morning Abortion Debate

It feels a little odd to be writing about a segment on ITV’s This Morning – not a programme I’d usually look in on – but as the segment pitted Kate Smurthwaite against Nadine Dorries in a ‘debate’ on the upper limit for elective abortion I felt that, […]

Push-polling and same-sex marriage

Desperation has clearly set in at the offices of the Amalgamated Union of Bigots, Godbotherers and Allied Dinosaurs, AKA the Coalition for Marriage, which has commissioned no less than seven separate opinion polls for publication this week in the hope of wrapping the issue of same-sex marriage in […]

Dodgy Advertorials at Lib Con?

As independent blogs go Liberal Conspiracy is, for the UK, a pretty sizeable operation and, I assume, quite expensive to run, so one can hardly be surprised to see it running a bit of advertising in an effort generate a bit of revenue to pay the hosting bills. […]