Ministry of Truth

Okay, this is a quick public service post for Twitter users who are currently receiving unblockable abusive messages sent by trolls via Ask.FM. Any permanent fix for this issue will have to come either from Ask.FM dealing with their troll problem or from Twitter pulling the plug on […]

Okay, time to get back in the saddle after a short break to recharge my batteries and we’ll start, as so often seems to be the case, with abortion and an editorial which finds the Telegraph in somewhat conspiratorial mood: The decision of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) […]

No matter how often people run afoul of the Barbara Streisand effect, there are some people – and some organisations – who never quite get around to understanding the futility of their own censorious instincts. Take a rather curious organisation by the name of ‘Straight Pride UK‘, a […]

So, while we’re waiting for Twitter to update its systems with a ‘report abuse’* button let’s give some thought to a very simple and non-intrusive change that Twitter could easily make to its platform that would help take the edge off some of the recent issue with rape […]

I’m perhaps one of the last people you’d expect to see stepping up to defend Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) but you’d be wrong because there are principles that come into play whenever a blogger, even one as notorious as Guido, is subjected to an unjustified, hectoring attack […]

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 […]