// __ issues. in code. __ //
Through a discussion club I run at school I got to thinking about the coincidence of two recent major news threads: immigration and space travel. I know, never a dull day in teaching. In the back of my mind were good friends in a sea-side village about 200 miles from London who have been getting
When was the last time someone questioned you about your faith? Whereas once the question would have been ‘are you a Christian,’ the phraseology is now more often along the lines of ‘would you call yourself a Christian.’ The first is an objective statement of being, an absolute. The second a subjective assessment – you
I’ve been following the discussions that have been going on in the Church of England recently over the issue of whether women should be able to be bishops. It appears that the answer is going to be ‘no’. Or, at least, ‘not yet.’ What I’ve not quite been able to tease out is precisely why.
Interesting piece on the Today programme this morning, re-visiting the constituency of Smethwick – a safe seat in which was notoriously won by the vile Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths in 1964 following his campaign which ran under the slogan ‘If You Want A Nigger For A Neighbour, Vote Labour.” Smethwick reacted to chuck out the
Interesting storm blown up over the Press Complaints Commission’s censure of a piece written by right-wing blogger Rod Liddle in The Spectator recently. In it he wrote that “overwhelming majority” of London’s violent crime was carried out by young, African-Caribbean men. In his evidence to the PCC he provided statistics that confirmed that certainly a
Occasionally two things from the news catch your ear and resonate together. Today it was the news that Obama has cancelled Nasa’s new moon programme. And [ht Barry Taylor] that Gil Scott-Heron is back with a new album. The connection? I’ve always loved Scott-Heron’s early, hard-hitting social commentaries. And the lyrics of ‘Whitey on the
Despite Nick Griffin making an ass of himself on television last week, fascist and extremist parties never talk complete nonsense. There is always a dangerous fraction of truth within their rhetoric – a miniscule grain upon which they then build racist and mindless policies. Unless serious politicians are willing to admit these small fractions of