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I am not leaving the European Union. I am a European by ancestry and in my own mind. The European Union brought a greater level of peace to this continent than it has ever experienced in the past. I’m staying.…
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Letter to Rebecca Long-Bailey
On 18 January, I wrote a letter to Rebecca Long-Bailey MP as a member of the Labour Party and an abortion rights advocate, to ask her more about her views on abortion, as reported in the Guardian, Telegraph and Catholic…
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Response to a Manifesto by Action:FGM, Dahlia Project, Savera UK, Magool, and The VAvengers
Your Manifesto has been shared with me as someone who has written on FGM and published papers on it in the journal Reproductive Health Matters while I was the editor. I am absolutely not willing to sign your manifesto. Here…
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Don’t call him Boris
Don’t call him Boris. It’s the name for a cuddly toy, a cute little Russian boy a dashing guy from a book by Tolstoy. Don’t call him Bojo. He’s not fast like Flo Jo or sexy like J Lo. Don’t…
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Two letters about the Labour Party and losing the election that I found helpful and worth learning from
The one is a very moving letter from former MP Laura Pidcock (who lost her seat last week) addressed to the residents of her constituency North West Durham: https://medium.com/@laura.pidcock.mp/letter-to-the-people-i-represented-406aea893243 The other is an equally moving comment in the Guardian from…
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Ten reasons why we lost the election and some thoughts about the future
1. There are serious self-defeating political splits inside the Labour Party – with the different sides openly and publicly criticising and working against each other. People criticise each other endlessly on both the right and the left of the party,…
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Tactical voting is a self-fulfilling prophecy that takes political decision-making out of your hands: vote Labour
For the last week, while canvassing, I’ve met several longstanding Labour Party members who said they didn’t know who they were voting for yet. Why? First, because they think defeating Boris is the most important issue. Second, because they needed…
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How not to succeed in publishing a paper on an FGM trial, and keep trying
In February 2019 an African-born woman living in the UK was the first person to be convicted of the genital cutting (FGM) of her small daughter. I observed the trial and wrote a long blog about it, which I posted here. I…
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The role of the police and the courts in prosecuting allegations of FGM: a review of “The FGM Detectives”, Channel 4 TV, and the case that just ended at the Old Bailey
The Channel 4 TV programme was shown on 27 February 2018, reported by Cathy Newman. It depicted the failure of a British detective named Leanne Pook to bring a successful prosecution against a Somali father of a six-year-old girl for…
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Letter to the Editor, The Guardian, 4 March 2018
The article “Sex workers in Haiti speak out on aid agency scandal” (1 March 2018, p.41) is very poor journalism in that it mixes together issues that don’t belong together. Firstly, while it points out that poverty and loss of…
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