Had a love affair with Nina In the back of my cortina A seasoned-up hyena Could not have been more obscener She took me to the cleaners And other misdemeanours But I got right up between her Rum and her Ribena Billericay Dickie – Ian Dury and the […]

I know, I know. The words ‘Vote Dorries’ are just about the last thing that anyone would expect to read here at the Ministry but just this once she’s a contender for an award that she undoubtedly deserves; New Humanist’s annual Bad Faith award. Admittedly its strong field […]

If there’s one piece of law that, more than any other, is guaranteed to generate media coverage that makes you want to headdesk then it has to be section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, which reads as follows: 5 Harassment, alarm or distress. (1)A person is […]

As you might well imagine, the Catholic Herald is anything but regular reading at the Ministry. Nevertheless, a couple of recent articles published in the Herald have caught my eye because they disclose one or two interesting tidbits of information in relation to issues I’ve covered in a […]

A couple of months back I wrote about what appears to to me, and to quite a lot of other people, to be a utterly ridiculous and abusive libel action against a blogger by the name of Vaughan Jones. To save time, I won’t run through the particulars […]

Simon Caldwell’s article in yesterday’s Telegraph, which tries to suggest that BPAS and Marie Stopes International may have made inflated claims about the number of women who book consultations with them but then decide against having an abortion is, to say the least, another veritable cornucopia of tendentious […]

I was, to say the least , slightly perplexed the other day when, according to my internal site stats, a couple of visitors turned up at the Ministry by way of a link from a quack website called Positive Health. I’m getting citations from quacks..? What the hell […]

One of the potential highlights of the summer blockbuster season, if you’re a fan of science fiction, is the upcoming ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes‘, a reboot of the series which will lay the foundations for a new Apes franchise by providing an origin story for […]

I want to share something with you that you may not have seen before. The text that follows was written, originally, back in the 1950s by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin and, with a number of revisions along the way, was finally published in 2006 in a posthumous […]

I feel a bit of a rant coming on and I should warn you in advance – if the title isn’t already a dead give away – that it may get a bit sweary in places, although I will try to hold it together for the sake of […]