Ministry of Truth

Oh dear, it would appear that Grouty the Snout Baron has stirred up a bit of a shit storm: He said some cases of date rape or sex with under-age children might not qualify as rape “in the ordinary conversational sense”. He also refused to agree with the […]

Stephen Hawking, great man that he is, seems to have upset a few people with his observations on the non-existence of heaven: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that […]

Now here’s a funny thing. When a Member of Parliament makes use of parliamentary privilege to place serious allegations about a company or individual on the public record you’d expect them to have made every effort possible to check the accuracy of their statements before addressing the House. […]

I’m tied up with other stuff this morning, so this is going to be a bit of drive-by by my usual standards… The Sunday Telegraph has a front page report which claims that a Council of Europe committee are planning to recommend a ban on mobile phones and […]

My attention has been drawn, this morning, to a thoroughly absurd attempt to defend the provision of homeopathy on the NHS by a Dr Clare Stanford, a reader in experimental psychopharmacology at the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Pharmacology, University College London. The text that follows comes from […]

In today’s Indy: Bullets similar to illegal dum-dum ammunition and designed to cause catastrophic injury are to be used as standard by police marksmen in London. Senior officers at the Metropolitan Police have selected the bullet because it is better at incapacitating a target and is less likely […]

From the Torygraph: The Duchess of Cornwall yesterday launched an outspoken defence of freedom of the press in Britain, describing it as a cornerstone of democracy. In a surprise intervention, set against the backdrop of the debate over privacy and the courts, she said that she “passionately” believed […]

Over the last few years I’ve written quite a lot on the subject of teenage pregnancy, abortion and related issues, much of which has been prompted by the dull-witted and willful ignorance of a single MP – Nadine Dorries, of course. If there’s one pertinent observation that crops […]

Looking back over the speech given by Nadine Dorries when introducing her ridiculous 10 minute rule bill, there are several factual innaccuracies to be added to list I started the other day. Take, for example, Dorries’ claims about the opinions of Dame Joan Bakewell… I am sure that […]

If you visited the BBC News website late last week then you have have seen this story prominently featured in its education news section: Many parents ‘oppose school sex education for children’ More than half of parents do not think sex education should be taught to children in […]