SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
Latest editorial
Top 3 knife crime myths busted
Fuelled by the right-wing media, a number of myths have grown up around the topic of knife crime - IAN SINCLAIR debunks the three worst offenders
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
WITH the number of knife offences (39,818) and homicides committed with a knife (285) reaching record highs in 2018, according to the Home Office, it’s worth interrogating these falsehoods, and considering interventions which might help.
Myth 1: Knife crime is committed “almost exclusively” by young black men.
Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain in March, co-host Piers Morgan stated “statistically, it looks like in London, right now… the perpetrators and the victims appear to be almost exclusively young black men.”
Reality: Citing Freedom of Information requests made to police forces, in July 2018 Sky News noted that in London “Almost half of murder victims – as well as suspects – were black despite the ethnic group accounting for just 13 per cent of London's population.” However, Sky News also explained “Numbers for the rest of the country painted a different picture, with murder victim and suspect figures more or less proportionate to the makeup of the population.” For example, in February BBC News noted the worst place for fatal stabbings in the UK, in proportion to population, was Inverclyde in Scotland. A few miles to the east the 95 per cent white Glasgow was, until recently, dubbed – by the Daily Mail – “the knife crime capital of Britain.”
More from this author
Despite liberal whining that Trump threatens the ‘international rules-based order,’ the historical record shows Western nations have repeatedly overthrown democracies, backed genocides and violated sovereignty, writes IAN SINCLAIR
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
Detailing the deluge of delusion and dishonesty pushed by the pro-war camp, IAN SINCLAIR identifies four key tactics corporate journalists use to confuse audiences and suppress opposition to the proxy war in the east
New releases from Black Country, New Road, Anouar Brahem, and Jaywalkers
