Emma Monk trained as a Molecular Geneticist, before giving that up to be a full time Mum. As with many full time mothers she then filled her time with helping to run toddler groups, preschools, PTAs, sports clubs, and more recently several political campaign groups. Having lived in Surrey, Bath, Cambridge and Bahrain, she is now settled in the New Forest with her family
Do you want to hazard a guess at what this “jaw-dropping” list of freebies included? What luxuries asylum seekers are being given “for free” in Thetford? The article The Express article was nominally covering the unrest over recent days in Thetford, sparked by the housing of some asylum seekers in local communities. While the article mentioned the houses whose […]
Why just claiming benefits doesn’t exempt you – and why the headlines saying otherwise could land people with fines I wonder how many people claiming benefits will read these headlines and think they are allowed to ignore any hosepipe ban in their area? Because the headlines are pretty clear in their messaging – if you’re […]
Why did the Telegraph put “Food is too cheap” in quotation marks when Zack Polanski never used those words? You’d be forgiven for thinking, when you saw this Telegraph headline, that Zack Polanski had said the words “food is too cheap” in a recent speech he gave. He didn’t. I’ve listened to the 30-minute speech he gave to the […]
As misleading headlines go, this Express headline has to be one of the worst. The figures show almost the exact opposite, so how did the Express get it so wrong? To be fair to the Express, the “shocking new study” they refer to in the subheading was a study released by the Centre for Social Justice, which also […]
How a misleading headline turned NHS guidance into a culture war myth This Telegraph headline is not true. The subheading is not true. The first paragraph is not true. And I don’t believe any of this was a mistake… The story The Telegraph broke this story about diversity and inclusion training delivered by the Lancashire NHS Trust with materials originally published in […]
The Daily Mail’s claim falls apart the moment you read the actual guidance A post popped up on the Facebook feed of one of my lovely subscribers over the Easter weekend, and she asked me to take a look, for obvious reasons: “It’s grim when your child is banned from bringing home a picture of Jesus to […]
Buckle up, today will be a double debunk; Firstly the headline and article, and secondly, the online claims sprouting from this article. The Claim So let’s start with the claim that 67 dog breeds could be banned in Britain. The Daily Mail begins with: Sixty-seven dog breeds could be banned in Britain if new breeding guidelines set […]
If you’ve been anywhere near any right-leaning news sources this week, you’ll have no doubt seen reports of Britain’s countryside being “too white” or “racist”. I did a Google news search for the terms “countryside” and “diversity”, and here are 4 days’ worth of news articles covering this story: You’d be forgiven for thinking that there […]
I woke up recently to a Times headline: “Crime spree by Met Police officers waved through in diversity push.” As you can imagine, a headline like that got my spidey senses tingling! The article began: “A diversity panel at Britain’s biggest police force overturned vetting refusals, which led to rogue officers and staff committing rapes, assaults […]
Here is part 2 of my “they’re cancelling Christmas” debunk. I will try and cover as many of the ludicrous rage bait claims as I can, so you have the facts to hand when your Facebook-indoctrinated relative brings up these myths over the festive period. In part 1, I debunked the claims that Tesco had renamed their plastic Christmas […]
A myth-busting explainer on Tesco trees, ‘renamed’ cakes, and the real purpose behind these manufactured panics. I vowed I wasn’t going to do a ‘they’re cancelling Christmas’ Substack after doing a quick Bluesky thread on it, and talking about it very briefly on James O’Brien’s LBC show. However, I’ve changed my mind for several reasons: So buckle up for your […]
Last weekend, an elected member of parliament (Reform UK’s Sarah Pochin) went on Talk TV and said, “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people, full of people who are basically anything other than white people.” Let that sink in. We have reached a point in the political discourse […]
A handful of parents, a far-right outrage machine, and the damage misinformation does to real communities: A simple school assembly in Swansea, where a visitor from a local mosque spoke about her faith, became the latest culture war story fuelled by far-right activists, misinformation, a Reform councillor and GB News. Earlier this month, a small […]
What decades of research (and millions of children in Sweden and Japan) really tell us about acetaminophen and pregnancy. It’s been a couple of weeks since Trump and RFK Junior told the world that acetaminophen (aka Tylenol or paracetamol) use in pregnancy causes Autism. Thankfully, there was considerable pushback from doctors and scientists worldwide. I want to bring […]
The bribery started the day Nathan Gill quit UKIP and continued under Farage’s leadership. The press have barely said a word… Nathan Gill, once Farage’s ally and Reform UK’s Welsh leader, has admitted to eight counts of bribery and is likely to serve jail time. Yet you probably haven’t heard about it, because most of the press […]
The Daily Mail recently ran an article: “List of perks taxpayers are funding for asylum seekers”. The Conservative party then took that list, created a handy little graphic and then posted it on X: REVEALED: The huge list of freebies and perks channel migrants are entitled to once they land in Britain. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves is taxing […]
The Conservatives have claimed migrants from small boats are “24 times more likely to end up in prison”, but this figure is wrong on so many levels! On Thursday, I was sent this headline from the Daily Mail and asked if it was true… “Migrants who cross the Channel into the UK ‘are 24 times […]
Nigel Farage is making big promises – lower taxes, higher benefits, and sweeping cuts. But behind the soundbites lies a financial black hole. Let’s take a closer look. Last week, the country got to watch a livestream of Farage, leader of a party with only five MPs, telling us about his plans for the future. He […]
We could probably do with a break from Trump this weekend, and when I saw this tweet over on X, with 5000 likes and 3,600 comments – overflowing with anti-Muslim rhetoric, it felt like a classic example of a post designed to make you think: “That’s outrageous!” Which, of course, is precisely the point. So let’s look […]
T’was the week before Christmas and while the rest of us were preparing for the season of goodwill to all mankind, the Telegraph was busy creating headlines designed to get people OUTRAGED at all the workshy, lazy, benefits scroungers. Bah Humbug and all that! “Majority of Britons receive more in benefits than they pay in […]
On the wet weekend of November 23-24, 2024. a parliamentary petition demanding the government ‘Call a General Election’ really took off, and has been getting many people, especially those on the right, very excited! The petition states: “I would like there to be another General Election. I believe the current Labour Government have gone back […]
Following what I thought was a simple online search, I learnt an important lesson about the trustworthiness, or otherwise, of AI. I asked Google the simple question; “Does ITV get money from the TV licence?” I was fairly certain that it doesn’t but wanted to double check before making that claim online. And as is […]
I was shocked to see that Nigel Farage’s ‘Reform UK’ party came second in 120 constituencies. They got the third-highest vote share on 12.6 per cent of the votes, and even got an MP. All of this against a backdrop of the winning party gaining a vote-share only in the 30’s. Oh no, wait a […]
Four years on from Brexit and I’m taking a look at how various industries have been affected by the realities of our decision to leave the European Union (EU). I’ve already looked at How fishing was gutted by Brexit, and how Brexit has impacted farming. In this article I want to look at how Brexit […]
In mid-April 2024, the Prime Minister got himself a juicy front cover on the Daily Express: PM tells sick Note Britain: Get a grip and get a job. He then put out a thread on X (formerly Twitter) claiming “We now spend £69bn on benefits for people of working age with a disability or health […]
Four years on from Brexit, I’m taking a look at how various industries have been affected by the realities of our decision to leave the EU. The first in the series looked at ‘How fishing was gutted by Brexit’, and this time I’m going to look at how British farming has fared. Before I begin, […]
Having recently ‘celebrated’ the anniversary of Brexit, it seemed like a good time to look at how various British industries and sectors of society have fared four years on from leaving the European Union (EU). This will be done over a series of articles, the first focusing on the Brexit poster child – The Fishing […]
In October 2023, the BBC published an article titled Changing Nature of Covid: Is it just a regular winter bug now? The TL/DR (too long; didn’t read) answer is ‘No. It really isn’t’. That’s not what the article would lead you to believe. It caused a lot of comment on social media, with some wanting […]
Since Labour announced their plans to either remove the charitable status of private schools, or add VAT to school fees, social media and right-wing outlets have been awash with people claiming it wouldn’t raise any money in reality, or it would cause untold private schools failing and ‘flooding’ the state sector with students. I thought […]
Nadine Dorries’ resignation letter in full. It was quite fun to read. I fluctuated between “what on earth is she talking about” to “ha ha, she’s bang on there”; a mixture of whining “poor me” to real hatred towards Sunak! Wow – a lot of the things she thinks she achieved during her time as […]