Hearing Sir Nicholas Soames huff and puff on the Today programme today about the importance of the House of Lords made me smile. This is a man best known for his outdated attitudes towards women (one of whom famously described having sex with him...

"Appleby Fair should make my people happy, and the settled people happy, that's the balance I try and strike", Billy Welch, an English Romany declares, sitting in his caravan up on Fair Hill, from where he organises much of the activity at the iconic gypsy gathering. This is Billy Welch's...

Module One of the judge led Leveson inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the British press following the phone-hacking scandal at News of the World, took evidence in Module One of the relationship between the press and the public. The list of core participants, many of...

I took part in a very well-mannered, English revolution on Easter Sunday, in Redenhall Church, a beautiful 15th century church in the parish of Redenhall in Norfolk, nestling in the tranquil Waveney valley, where the barn-owls hunt in the dusk and where I canoed on the...

I was sent two rather lovely, seasonal gifts of music this week -- one by Pete Lawrence, the British ambient music promoter and producer (among other things) -- and one by Tom Green, who contributed to a number of the Orb's tunes but also has a fine line...

I've been reporting about gypsies and travellers for on and off six years ago, since I first visited the iconic Dale Farm site in Essex, just east of London, for the Economist in 2006.

At that time Dale Farm had just experienced its first real threat of...

Yesterday my children and I were in a council-run adventure playground not far from Finsbury Park, in North-East London. The children there reflect the diversity of our neighbourhood - black, dual heritage, like my own children, Asian, white, all mucking around with the odd spat about territory in the sun....

Every few months in the UK (and in the US and elsewhere, for that matter), there's a shocking news story about a sustained, and often fatal, attack on a disabled person. It's easy to write off such cases as bullying that got out of hand, terrible criminal anomalies or regrettable...

This week, British psychotherapist Susie Orbach will host a summit in London to challenge the cult of the "body beautiful." About time, too. The pressure on young girls (and, increasingly, boys), as well as women of all ages, to conform to a stereotype of beauty has never been...

The rights and wrongs of transracial adoption are in the news in the U.K. again, as the coalition government has proudly pronounced that race should not be a bar in adoption and that too many dual-heritage children are "languishing" in the British care system. The new government is giving British...

The case of the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, is now taking its rightful course through the legal system. Of course anybody accused of a serious offense should stand trial for it -- if the evidence exists. Few women (myself included), defend those who commit sexual offenses against women. Indeed, I've...

I'm nearly at the end of nine months hard slog on my first non-fiction book for adults, - the secret history of disability hate crime. It's not a cheery subject, as my children keep telling me. They want me to write something cheerful next and return to children's literature -...

Today a jury in Luton, a town just north of London, brought in guilty verdicts against six people connected to the Watt family, who were found to have committed familial homicide or murder against Michael Gilbert, a disabled man.

They had held him captive for many years, said the...

I'm in reflective mode this week, as I pack my bags for a stint covering the campaign trail for the next six weeks or so for a national newspaper. I've been reading up on key marginals, the effect of the expenses scandal, the importance of the women's vote...

According to one of our British broadsheets, grub from over here is wildly popular in New York right now, with eaters snaffling up apple crumble, Jacobs Crackers and even Marmite. That's great news - but there's so much more to English food than those three - (I'll take...

The "retard" controversy swirling around public figures in the US has been pretty toxic for the last couple of months, especially for Sarah Palin, who has flip-flopped on the issue of whether words matter (for her, it seems as if it depends whether a right-winger or a left-winger says them)....

The chilling story of a young disabled woman, who was sold for £8000 in a sham marriage to a Chinese man hoping to enter the United Kingdom, is unfortunately not an isolated case. Her brother, Michael Wright, from Wiltshire, pleaded guilty to immigration and perjury offences. His sister,...

Disability hate crime in the UK used to be an invisible crime. I remember my weary summer of phone-bashing to find cases in 2007, when the reaction of local police press officers (and even some prosecutors) was either "we don't have that problem here" or even, damningly, "what is disability...

President Obama condemns Iran's iron fist; there are constant clashes in Tehran and other large cities. Many have been killed, and many others wounded. But the resistance continues.
This is the view of Iran from the outside. I've covered similar stories of bravery, bloodshed and grief in my...

At last the US has the federal hate crime legislation that disabled people (and other important groups) need to protect themselves from the abuse, harassment, and in some cases, torture, rape and murder that comes their way. As President Obama said, in October last year: "No one in...