Crispin Black on the Binyam Mohamed torture judgment: Massive sense of perspective fail

So it’s now official –  Binyam Mohamed was tortured while he was detained by the US, and MI5 knew this, but lied about it. Needless to say, this is pretty serious, so who should we be getting pissed off at first? The US, for doing the torturing? MI5, for lying? The House of Commons’ Intelligence [...]

POWER 2010: The Pledge Revealed

After 4,500 submissions and 100,000 votes, the POWER 2010 pledge has finally been revealed.
1. Introduce a proportional voting system.
2. Scrap ID cards and roll back the database state.
3. Replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber.
4. Allow only English MPs to vote on English laws.
5. Draw up a written constitution.
I, and others writing for [...]

Thanks but no thanks

So the Tories want to incentivise marriage? Who says romance is dead?
I got married two years ago (please contain your disappointment…). Contrary to popular belief I did this by choice. It hasn’t made one iota difference to our relationship, it does however change how others treat you (I now get patronised even more by bank [...]

America Takes a Step Towards Universal Health Care and the 21st Century

The Obama administration will be breathing a sigh of relied today as the House of Representatives narrowly approved the President’s flagship health reforms. A battle still remains in the Senate, of course, and amongst the crazed zealots in the country crying ‘freedom’ whilst attempting to deny millions of the poorest Americans the right to basic [...]

An Interview with Nick Clegg

In an exclusive interview with The Third Estate, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg sets out his vision for change
It can’t be easy, being the leader of Britain’s third major political party. Caught between a disintegrating New Labour and a resurgent Conservative Party waiting for its coronation, convincing the British public that what you have to [...]

Hysterical Newspaper Headlines Are Not the Answer to Immigration

Guest post by Oli
The government’s chief legal adviser, Attourney General Patricia Scotland, was fined £5000 today and forced to make a public apology for employing an illegal immigrant as her housekeeper. Sad to say, I first discovered this story via the front page of the Daily Mail.
That a positive case for immigration is rarely put [...]

Update: Dana Ali

Last week, I reported on the case of Dana Ali, an Iraqi immigrant being held in Oakington detention centre because of an apparent Home Office mix-up in his paperwork. Tonight, Dana has been released and has been allowed to return home while his case is considered. He has not yet been granted leave to remain [...]

The Curious Case of Dana Ali

Iraqi immigrant, Dana Ali, faces deportation after an alleged Home Office blunder fails to recognise his marriage to a British citizen.

Dana Ali was born in 1975. He grew up in Halabja, the Kurdish town in northern Iraq that the world first heard about on March 16th 1988 when 5,000 people were massacred by Saddam Hussein’s [...]

Review: The Age of Stupid

It’s extremely easy to criticise the politics of cultural products if you don’t agree with absolutely everything they say. If you consider your understanding to be more nuanced, it is very easy to say that a book, a film, or an article doesn’t go far enough. The point is that not every great film is [...]

Birth, pain, and why we still need feminist obstetrics

Today the Observer published an extremely alarming report that Dr Denis Walsh, “one of the countries most influential midwives,” has argued that women should be receiving less pain relief in child-birth, in favour of “yoga, hypnosis, massage, support from their partners, hydrotherapy and birthing pools as natural ways of alleviating their pain.” Walsh mixes up [...]