In JRR Tolkein’s The Lord Of The Rings, the One Ring crafted by the evil wizard Sauron is the key to all the Rings of Power. The wearer of the One Ring can control the nineteen other Rings (and, through them, their owners). This makes it both the linchpin of Sauron’s threat to Middle Earth and the key weakness of that threat. If the One Ring can be destroyed - the goal which pretty much the whole of Tolkein’s doorstep-sized novel is devoted to - most of Middle Earth’s troubles immediately go away.

I have to admit, it would be great if Britain’s many problems had a solution as simple as throwing a single small piece of jewellery into Mount Doom. Sadly no such easy way out is available - but that doesn’t mean our struggles don’t have a lot in common with Frodo Baggins’s. We might face many problems as a nation, but most of them - not all, but definitely most - can be traced back to one thing, one single malign element that, like the One Ring, corrupts and degrades everything it touches.

That element, of course, is mass immigration.

But We Need Immigration… right?

No, we don’t. In fact it’s the source of most of our misery.

Now, I know there are a few readers of my Substack who will be very angry with me for saying this, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It is simply a fact that many of our problems can be traced directly back to mass immigration, and that if we end mass immigration (and of course remigrate the people who should never have been allowed to come here) those problems will simply disappear. It’s true there are plenty other problems that aren’t linked to immigration, but if we can solve the ones that are we will be in a much better place as a nation. Personally, I think we can improve things enough that we’ll have a solid foundation to start fixing everything else that’s wrong.

But what are these problems that stem from mass immigration? Well, there are a lot of them. Let’s make a start on a list, shall we?

The Housing Crisis

There’s no reason why housing should be so expensive, or in such short supply. After all, Britain has had no natural population growth for over five decades now. All we need to do is build 50,000 or so new houses a year to replace old ones that get demolished, and there should be plenty of homes for us all to live in. There aren’t, though - and we all know why.

Since Tony Blair took office on 2 May 1997 more than sixteen million people have immigrated to Britain. Not all of them have stayed, and of course a significant and growing number of native Britons have fled what our country has become, but immigration has still added well over eight million to the population in less than 30 years. To put this into perspective, more immigrants have come to Britain every year since 1997 than arrived in the one and a half thousand years up to 1945.

It’s no surprise we’re short of houses, is it?

Now, let’s look at why house prices and rent have become so unaffordable. This goes back to one of the most basic ideas in economics, the concept of supply and demand. Quite simply, in a free market prices are set by the interaction of how many people want a thing and how much of that thing is available. When supply exceeds demand, prices go down. When demand exceeds supply, on the other hand, prices go up. When the number of people willing to pay the new price equals the number of items that are available, price reaches equilibrium:

The problem with housing is that demand for it is what economists call inelastic. People can’t just decide they don’t want a home because it’s too expensive. We all need somewhere to live; it’s not like the latest iPhone, where if the price is too high we can just decide to do without it and order a refurbished Samsung Galaxy from Amazon for £39.99 instead. This inelasticity means the effect of excessive demand on price can ramp up really dramatically.

Starmer’s government says it wants to build millions of new homes to take the pressure off the housing market, but it’s never going to happen; they’re already hopelessly behind schedule. Anyway, why should we concrete over our countryside just to build houses for people we never wanted here in the first place?

And make no mistake: Immigrants are having a huge impact on the supply of housing. In London, the 2021 census revealed that 48% of council homes - “social housing” as we’re now supposed to call them - were occupied by people born outside Britain. That’s 376,700 homes. Imagine the difference freeing up 376,700 homes would make to London’s ludicrously expensive housing market.

If immigrants need to claim council housing, they should go back to their own countries and claim it there.

Stagnant Wages

We’ve already discussed prices and the concept of supply and demand. Now here’s a reminder of a little fact about wages that many people seem to forget: A wage is a price. It’s the price of labour. If there is an excess of available labour, the price goes down. If there is a shortage of labour, the price goes up.

What do you think happens to wages at the lower end of the market when you dump eight million immigrants - mostly unskilled third worlders - into a country with a workforce of just under 30 million? That’s simple. This happens:

When businesses are struggling to find the staff they need, they offer more money to attract people away from their competitors - but when they have access to an endless supply of cheap immigrant workers, wages stay low.

Of course, governments love to interfere with this in various ways, such as by legally enforcing a minimum wage. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The problem is that businesses employ people because the labour they put in generates more income for the business. Right now it costs a business £14.65 per hour to employ someone on Britain’s £12.71 per hour minimum wage. If that employee generates less than £14.65 per hour in additional revenue, guess what? They get made redundant, because there is no reason to employ them.

If you want to get paid more, vote to protect our borders and deport low-skilled foreigners.

The Benefits Bomb

Britain’s benefits system is crushing the life from our economy. We currently spend over five times as much on welfare as we do on defence, and the cost of government handouts is spiralling out of control. A large, and growing, proportion of those handouts are going to foreigners and people of immigrant descent.

The scale of welfare spending is difficult to comprehend. In the last complete financial year we have records for, 2024/25, Britain’s defence budget was £60.2 billion. By comparison the government spent over £70 billion on health and disability benefits alone. The total welfare bill was a mind-boggling £313 billion - and by 2029/30 it’s predicted to rise to over £373 billion.

This level of benefits spending is a luxury we quite simply can’t afford. Last year the government borrowed £151.9 billion to fund its unsustainable spending spree. We’re now paying more than £100 billion a year just to cover the interest on the national debt; none of the major parties even pretend to have a plan to start actually reducing the debt itself (and, contrary to the ravings of the Modern Monetary Theory lunatics, it is a real debt).

It would be bad enough if we were borrowing ruinous amounts of money, handing it out to people who can’t work because they have “anxiety” then importing millions of foreigners to do their jobs for them, but in fact it’s a lot worse than that: Out of the 16 million immigrants who swarmed into Britain since 1997, under a fifth came on work visas. Many of those who did come to work are doing unskilled, low-paid and often frankly unnecessary jobs - let’s face it; would it kill anyone to pick up a kebab from the shop themselves, rather than paying £3.50 to have it brought to their door by a Bongolese on a bike? - and are eligible to claim benefits to supplement the low wages that were largely caused by immigration in the first place. Many more who came to work are in fact not working, and of course for every worker we have four dependants, students and other people who simply leech off our system without contributing to it.

Official data shows that the white British consistently have a lower unemployment rate than all other ethnic groups in this country. The unemployment rate among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis is three times that for the white British, and many of those who do work are solely serving their own “communities”, doing things that are of no benefit to the rest of us. Out of almost eight million people who currently claim Universal Credit more than a million were born overseas, and that million take almost £10 billion in handouts every year. This number is growing rapidly, turbocharging the unsustainable growth of the benefits bill.

Nobody is denying that there are many hard-working people from ethnic minorities who provide jobs, pay tax and contribute to what remains of Britain’s wealth; equally, nobody is denying that there are far too many white British people who could work but don’t want to. But, at a group level, the fact is it’s the white British who keep our economy more or less afloat - and all other groups are a drain on it:

We simply cannot afford to keep paying out billions of pounds to people who come here from other countries, and there is no reason why we should. If immigrants can’t support themselves in Britain without claiming benefits, they should go home.

Crime

I can already hear the yelps of “Most crime is committed by white people!” Yes, it is. So what? That’s exactly what you’d expect in a country that, within living memory, was over 99% white. However, let’s not forget those magic words that lefties have so much trouble comprehending - “per capita”.

It is undeniable that immigrants and their descendants commit a wide range of crimes at a grossly disproportionate rate. Around 16% of the people currently in Britain were born abroad - in itself a shocking statistic; historically it has usually been 1-2%, most of whom were born in the British Empire. As bad as that is, though, foreigners and those of “unknown nationality” - so more foreigners, then - commit 23% of sex offences in this country. Afghans and Eritreans are particularly notorious in this category, committing sex offences at rates that are respectively ten and nine times higher than the white British. The same applies across other categories of crime, with Algerians 18 times more likely to commit theft than natives and Congolese almost twelve times more likely to commit violent crime. The league tables for every category of crime are dominated by third world nationals, with native Britons at or near the bottom:

And before anyone starts squealing about racism, similar patterns emerge in every country that compiles statistics. Germany has also found a massive over-representation of foreigners in its crime statistics (A EuroFactCheck aimed at debunking claims they committed 60% of violent crimes ended up proudly proclaiming that the real figure was “only” 40%). The most detailed - and revealing - figures of all, surprisingly, come from famously liberal Denmark:

We have police and a justice system because crime occurs in every society - but as I’ve never heard a persuasive argument that the native British don’t commit enough crime, it is senseless and harmful to import more criminals. It is morally repellent to then let those criminals stay in our country because of trivial arguments about their “human rights”. Nobody has a right to come here and break our laws.

Terrorism

Britain is no stranger to terrorism. It took us over 30 years to defeat the Provisional IRA (and yes, we did defeat them; that’s why they’ve disarmed and disbanded, Northern Ireland is still in the UK and the Republic of Ireland amended its constitution to give up its long-standing claim on the North). Now, though, terrorism in Britain overwhelmingly means islamic terrorism - and that is an entirely imported problem.

There are currently just over 43,000 people on Britain’s optimistically-named terrorism watch list (we don’t have the resources to actually watch more than a tiny fraction of them) and more than 90% of those people are muslims. Of 104 people who have died in terrorist attacks in Britain this century, 101 were murdered by muslims. The government and media can scream about the largely imaginary “far right” threat as much as they like, but if we hadn’t imported Islam and millions of its adherents terrorism would have largely disappeared in this country with the defeat of PIRA.

Today, we suffer under increasingly oppressive security measures - and run the risk of being blown up or stabbed by some screaming maniac - because mass immigration has brought foreign ideologies and foreign conflicts to our shores.

Social Cohesion

I was born in 1970, in a country that was still upwards of 97% white British. I grew up surrounded by people who shared a common history and culture with me. While the 56 million people who lived in these islands back then had a wide - one could even say “diverse” - range of opinions on politics, sports, music and everything else under the sun, the vast majority of us were all steeped in the same traditions of democracy, free speech (remember how, when someone said or did something outrageous but not illegal, the inevitable defence was “It’s a free country”? When did we stop saying that?) and respect for our national institutions.

Just look at the mess we’re in now. From a nation dominated in every respect by its own people, and therefore able to comfortably absorb a small number of immigrants, we’re already well down the road to being a patchwork of ethnic tribes. I should note that, historically, this is not the norm. Most countries throughout history have been completely dominated by a single ethnic group: The French in France, the Japanese in Japan, the Persians in Persia and of course the British in Britain.

History also tells us that multiethnic - I’m going to say “diverse” again - countries are where most of the trouble starts. Here are a few examples:

• Bosnia is a multiethnic country, and the diversity it’s been cursed with by history caused not only its own genocidal civil war in the 1990s but the War To End All Wars itself; Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke of Austria-Hungary in 1914 because, as an Orthodox Serb, he didn’t want to be ruled by Catholic Austrians.

• Lebanon is a multiethnic country; once the last remaining majority-Christian country in the Middle East, it was torn apart from 1975 by a fifteen-year civil war started by its growing muslim minority and the Palestinian refugees it had foolishly accepted. Now it’s a weak state whose puppet strings are pulled by a strong Iranian-backed terrorist group, Hezbollah, which is using it as a weapon against Israel - with, of course, horrible consequences for the luckless Lebanese people.

• Rwanda is a multiethnic country. In four months in 1994 one of those ethnic groups, the Hutu, chopped up hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and other ethnic minorities with machetes. Why? Economic jealousy, historical rivalry and a generous helping of “because they could”. Somewhere between 520,000 and a million people died. The actual death toll is vague partly because of the poor record keeping endemic in the third world, and partly because many victims were so badly mutilated (and sometimes partly eaten) that it was impossible to count the dead. In fact the 1994 genocide was just the most prominent act in a long history of inter-ethic violence in Rwanda. Rwandans seem very enthusiastic about chopping people up - and, of course, we all saw the horrific consequences of allowing knife-obsessed Rwandans into our own country in the 2024 Southport massacre.

• Iraq is a multiethnic country. As soon as Saddam Hussein’s brutal grip loosened in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, a three-sided ethnic war broke out between Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs and the Kurds. In 2003 this escalated into an anti-Sunni genocide by the Shia majority (when people say a million people died in the 2003 Iraq war they leave out the fact that 95% of them were slaughtered by their fellow Iraqis). The rise of ISIS expanded the killing to Christians, Yezidis and other minorities.

Britain is now well on the way to becoming a multiethnic country along the lines of Bosnia or Lebanon. We already have ethnic enclaves where the native British have almost entirely disappeared, and where the cultures - and often laws - of foreign lands dominate. The effect of this on social cohesion is obvious; increasingly the British and those our politicians have inflicted on our home live separate lives. We don’t understand each other, and language barriers make it more and more difficult to even talk to each other; in the space of my lifetime the number of people in Britain who speak English as a second language has rocketed from almost none to around six million. There are now at least two schools in England where not one child is a native English speaker. Now we see political parties issuing election leaflets in foreign languages that discuss sectarian, imported issues with no relevance to the British people - who can’t even read them anyway.

We are turning into a balkanised nation. As someone who was sent to the Balkans with a rifle in my hands three times to sort out the mess, I feel qualified to say that this is not a good direction to be going in.

Vote Mount Doom

And, at last, we can get back to the One Ring. Famously, if this doom-laden trinket was held in a fire, a glowing inscription would appear round its circumference. It was quite a hard inscription to read, what with being written in a wholly fictional script that Tolkien invented, but it certainly looked suitably dramatic:

Translated into English, it reads:

One ring to rule them all,

One ring to find them.

One ring to bring them all,

And in the darkness bind them.

The uniparty’s dismal One Ring of mass immigration is doing its job; it’s bringing them all, and in the process plunging Britain into darkness. If we’re going to rescue our country from the abyss of diversity, there is only one way out: Mass immigration must end.

At the next election we have to make stopping, and then reversing, the influx of foreigners our top priority. If we can do this, we can fix all the other problems later. But if we don’t do this then Merry’s grim warning, of the consequences of failing to destroy the One Ring, will come true:

The fires of Isengard will spread. And the woods of Tuckborough and Buckland will burn. And... and all that was once green and good in this world will be gone. There won't be a Shire, Pippin.

Well, I think the Shire is worth preserving.

Buy Me a Coffee

The Green Party has been making a lot of headlines recently, thanks to its charismatic but deeply stupid new leader Zack Polanski. One outlier poll even showed it in the lead, slightly ahead of Reform UK. I don’t put too much weight on that poll for various reasons, but there’s no doubt the Greens have broken out of their traditional strongholds of Brighton and Bristol to become a national political force.

In many ways this is deeply unfortunate, because while many people still see the Greens as a party of cuddly Save The Whales activists in sandals and badly knitted pullovers, the reality is that they’re far-left extremists who are promoting a wide range of dangerous, and often frankly insane, policies. If they were to end up in government, either alone or as part of a coalition, it would be a disaster for Britain.

One reason the Greens are so dangerous is that they can’t see a passing bandwagon without feeling compelled to jump aboard. You name it; if it attracts hordes of frothing far-left nutters, the Greens will get involved. They want open borders, with anyone from anywhere in the world allowed to come here and have the rights to vote and claim benefits from the day they arrive. They want to legalise methamphetamine and crack cocaine. They want to make date rape drug GHB available “for recreational purposes” (no, I am not joking).

And now they’ve embraced the lunatic demand for Britain to pay trillions of pounds in “reparations” for slavery.

The Case Against Reparations

In case you haven’t heard of this nonsense before, what’s happening is that various former colonies - mostly in the Caribbean - are agitating for vast sums of money to compensate them for the historic evil of slavery. A minor argument against this is that it’s unfair for British people who never owned slaves to pay huge handouts to people who never were slaves. A major argument against it is that the whole thing is ahistorical rubbish.

It’s certainly true that many British people were involved in the slave trade. Well, so what? At the time, people from everywhere were involved in the slave trade. Every civilisation in human history has, for at least part of its existence, practiced slavery. Slavery is described in the Torah. It’s described in the New Testament. It’s described in the Koran. Moses owned slaves. Mohammed owned slaves. The ancient Greeks and Romans owned slaves. Slaves built Egypt’s pyramids, and watered the steps of the Aztec pyramids with their blood. Slavery was everywhere, and nobody except some (not all) of the slaves themselves thought it was wrong.

If you have an image of British (and French, and Spanish, and Belgian, and Portuguese, and… well everyone’s) slavers running round the African jungle with a big net, catching people to be shipped to America, think again. Most early European explorers were terrified of the African interior, which had a well-deserved reputation for a horrible climate, dangerous wildlife and, most of all, disease. An old sailors’ ditty about the Bight of Benin in West Africa sums up everyone’s feelings about the area:

Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin,

There’s one comes out for forty goes in.

Luckily for them, European traders didn’t need to hunt slaves in the African interior. When they first reached the area they found it already had huge, thriving slave markets. Well, of course it did - because Africans had been selling each other in large numbers for centuries. European traders only bought what Africans were already selling, and let’s be brutally honest about this: African slaves were much better off being shipped to Jamaica or South Carolina than marched along the Hyena Road to an unspeakable fate in the harems and rowing galleys of the Middle East.

And there’s even more to the story. Not only is Britain not uniquely to blame for the undeniable crimes of the slave trade; we are uniquely responsible for ending it. This country was the first to develop a real abolitionist movement, which started to gain political power in the late 18th century. In fact slavery had disappeared in Britain itself by the 12th century; the new abolitionist movement had the much loftier and more ambitious goal of stamping it out everywhere. British participation in the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1807. A year later the Royal Navy formed the West Africa Squadron, which for the next 59 years patrolled the slave coast, intercepting suspect ships and freeing an estimated 150,000 abducted Africans from slavery. Almost 1,600 men of the Squadron died carrying out this mission, mostly of disease. Finally, in 1833, the British government bought every single slave in the British Empire, freed them all and completely banned the institution of slavery throughout the Empire.

Britain’s decades-long (and ruinously expensive - we didn’t finish paying off the costs until 2015) crusade against slavery faced plenty of opposition. Other European nations, and several former colonies in South America (Brazil was a particularly stubborn supporter of the trade) pushed back against what they saw as Britain’s arrogance and bullying.

The British Empire, of course, didn’t care what anyone else thought. Once slavery had been stamped out within the Empire itself, the Imperial centre used every lever at its disposal to pressure other countries into ending it too. Favourable trade terms were made conditional on ending slavery. Economic pressure and sanctions - even outright blockades - were used against holdouts. Ultimately, if those didn’t work, the Empire had no qualms about using force to eradicate the vile trade.

And that brings us back to the Green party.

The Green Slavery Scam

Like any far-left group the Greens include a multitude of special interest groups and extremist factions, and one of these is the Global Majority Greens. This appears to be a group of anti-white lunatics, and naturally it has a “Spokesperson on Reparations” who wants Britain to shell out trillions to people in the third world over crimes someone else committed against their ancestors centuries ago. This spokesperson is Antoinette Fernandez, who despite her Franco-Spanish name is Nigerian. She’s an upper-class Nigerian, too; her father was a multimillionaire businessman and the country’s ambassador to the UN, and she’s actually descended from Nigerian royalty. Nevertheless, she feels hard done to by the British Empire, and a couple of years ago she decided to have a good whine about it on Twitter:

The first thing I have to say is that what Fernandez claims here is absolutely true: The Royal Navy did threaten to bombard Lagos unless Oba Dosumnu signed a treaty that turned his kingdom into a protectorate of the British Empire. Dosumnu signed on 6 August 1861; he was allowed to remain on his throne, but from then until the territory’s absorption into the larger protectorate of Southern Nigeria in 1906, the Obas of Lagos ruled under British guidance and in accordance with British law. The 1861 treaty effectively ended Lagos’s independence.

So Fernandez is telling the truth but, naturally, she isn’t telling the whole truth. What she neglected to mention is why Royal Navy gunboats showed up off Lagos and threatened to flatten it unless the Oba accepted British rule. Awkwardly, it’s because Lagos had entered the slave trade in a big way in the early 18th century and, by the 1840s, had some of the largest slave markets in West Africa. The British Empire had become increasingly unhappy about this over the course of several decades, culminating in the 1851 Reduction of Lagos. On that occasion a naval squadron did bombard the city, deposing Oba Kosoko and replacing him with Dosumnu’s father Akitoye. However, even that wasn’t enough to eradicate the trade from Lagos and the territory it controlled. The 1861 intervention was a different matter. After the annexation of Lagos the kingdom’s people came under the full protection of British law - and in the mid-19th century, with the Empire at its height, this was powerful protection indeed. It would be a very unwise slaver who tried capturing and selling British subjects, because Britain was likely to show its displeasure in a fairly physical way. “Gunboat diplomacy” was a very real thing in the 19th century, and this country was the master of it.

This Is Malign, Not Misguided

Of course, Fernandez knows all this. She isn’t stupid - just greedy and dishonest. She is fully aware that Britain deposed her great great grandfather as part of our campaign to wipe out the slave trade. She just… doesn’t care. All that matters to her is that the nasty British shut down her family’s lucrative slavery racket, and now she thinks we should pay for it.

This is the sort of people who run the Greens now. They have no coherent political ideology; the same party embraces both extreme interpretations of gender ideology and fundamentalist Islam, whose followers would quite happily throw all the gender ideologues off a roof. To the Greens, that doesn’t matter. They have no grand plan to fix all the things that are wrong with our poor suffering country. What they have instead is a huge bag of grievances and nutty ideas, and the only reason they want power is so the party’s many factions can each inflict its own brand of insanity on us. Whether it’s open borders, rape drugs or deliberate poverty, they’ll just keep pushing through crazy new laws until the whole mess collapses into infighting and disaster.

The Greens aren’t just misguided or incompetent: They are actively dangerous. This demented party must not get into government - because, if they do, Britain will not survive the experience.

Buy Me a Coffee

The Good

In 2014 the US Army started to wonder if, instead of having its light infantry (Airborne and so on) walk everywhere carrying all their worldly goods in big heavy rucksacks, it might not be nice to give them vehicles so they could drive around instead. They weren’t looking for a combat vehicle that soldiers could fight from, just basic transport to let them get to the battlefield much more quickly. So they bodged up some prototypes out of stripped-down pickup trucks and gave them to soldiers to test.

Based on the tests they decided this was quite a good idea, so in 2019 they asked three companies to make prototypes. They liked the GM Defense one the best, even though it’s basically just the running gear of a Chevy Colorado truck with some mudguards, nine seats and a roll cage stuck on top. They bought a few dozen and gave those to soldiers to test.

The soldiers tested them, went to the local equivalent of Halfords, bought lots of bits - luggage racks, tow hooks and so on - and bolted them to the vehicles to make them more useful. A few months later the army collected them again (complete with all the extra bits the soldiers had added), gave them back to GM and said, “Make them like this. And make lots of them.” In 2020 GM started mass production. In 2021 the first vehicles (complete with factory-installed tow hooks, luggage racks etc) were delivered to units as the M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV). Now they have over a thousand of them, with dozens more arriving every month. As well as the basic troop taxi there are now electronic warfare, cargo and fire support versions, all produced by simply removing some of the seats and bolting on other off-the-shelf components. There’s even an anti-drone variant, equipped with radars, a big generator and a laser weapon system. The whole project, including development and the purchase of 2,065 vehicles, has cost under a billion pounds.

The Bad

The British Army’s Ajax reconnaissance vehicle can be traced back to a project called FLAV (Family of Light Armoured Vehicles), which started in 1985. It’s been axed and restarted from scratch twice and reorganised twice more, first becoming FFLAV (Future Family of Light Armoured Vehicles), then TRACER (Tactical Reconnaissance Armoured Combat Equipment Requirement), then FRES (Future Rapid Effects System) and finally FRES SV (FRES Specialist Vehicle). So far the project has been running for 41 years, has officially cost at least £5.5 billion (and probably twice that, in reality) and hasn’t delivered a single usable vehicle.

The CVR(T) vehicles Ajax was supposed to replace were all totally rebuilt in the mid-1990s, because their replacement was clearly not imminent, and finally retired three years ago. They had served for 53 years, instead of the 25 they were designed for. Now the British Army has no armoured reconnaissance vehicles at all, until Ajax is finally operational - if it ever is; Initial Operational Capability was declared last year, then withdrawn in January after it turned out the vehicle’s notorious noise and vibration problems still haven’t been fixed.

The ISV is a much cheaper and simpler vehicle than Ajax, so in some ways it’s an unfair comparison, but even so the difference is stark. The US Army had an idea, started testing it, and five years later soldiers were driving around in prototypes. A year after that, operational vehicles were coming off the production line ready to be shipped to units. Meanwhile, after 41 years and a huge pile of money, all we have to show for the Ajax project is a bloated, overweight shed that leaves its crews dizzy, deaf and vomiting.

And The Ugly

The MoD, the British government and even some senior military officers do not take defence seriously. They prefer forming endless committees, writing endless reports and issuing endless new specifications to actually giving soldiers equipment that’s good enough to do the job and affordable enough to be bought in large numbers. And, with the collapse of the post-Cold War delusions of a peaceful world ruled by international law, this expensive idiocy is putting us in a very dangerous place.

Buy Me a Coffee

At the local elections in May, voters in the Sparkhill area of Birmingham will be confronted with possibly the most disgusting candidate in British electoral history. A convicted terrorist is running for a seat on the council - and, thanks to the wonders of diversity, there’s an excellent chance he’ll win.

Shahid Butt - and there’s a hint of extremism problems in his background right there, because the name Shahid means “martyr” in Arabic - was born in Pakistan 60 years ago. His parents brought him to Birmingham as a child; by his early teens he had formed a violent Pakistani street gang, and spent time in prison for assault. And it all went downhill from there.

The Bullies Of Bosnia

In the early 1990s Butt travelled to Bosnia as an “aid worker”, which may have been a front all along as he soon joined the Bosnian army as a foreign volunteer. I did two operational tours in Bosnia and I know exactly what kind of non-Bosnian muslims went there to fight. The country’s islamist president, Alija Izetbegovic (he actually gave Osama bin Laden a Bosnian passport in 1993), grouped the foreign jihadists into a unit named the Handzar Brigade, after the Bosnian Waffen-SS division Izetbegovic had tried to join as a teenager. That may give you a clue what they were like.

After the war, when most Bosnian soldiers just wanted to go home and get on with their lives, the foreign volunteers rapidly pivoted from fighting the Bosnian Serbs to oppressing the Bosnian muslims. A key fact about Bosnian muslims is that they’re not, on the whole, actually all that muslim. They drink beer and slivovitz. They eat pork. They’re as lackadaisical about religion as almost everyone else in Bosnia. As the late, great PJ O’Rourke put it in All The Trouble In The World:

“So the difference between Serbs and Croats is that the Serbs don’t go to Eastern Orthodox services and the Croats don’t attend Mass. And the difference between Serbs and Muslims is that five times a day the Muslims don’t pray to Mecca.”

This slapdash approach to Islam didn’t go down well with the foreign fighters, and as soon as the actual civil war ended in December 1995 the jihadis turned on the local population. I spent the first half of 1996 in the Bihać Pocket, a muslim area in northwest Bosnia, and it wasn’t long before stories started filtering in about intimidation by foreigners. Armed jihadis assaulted customers in bars and destroyed any alcohol they found. They machine-gunned hundreds of pigs on local farms. They ordered Bosnian women to wear the hijab - not something they traditionally do. In one spiteful incident in the city of Bihać itself, Arabs kidnapped a baby and refused to give it back until its mother changed out of the miniskirt she’d been wearing.

Jihadi thuggery actually had a peripheral impact on my own unit. I was part of a small team - six British and two Americans - based in Ćoralići, a village roughly twelve miles north-ish of Bihać. The locals were friendly and happy to have us there, and the threat was low enough that we could go out for meals in local restaurants. Our favourite restaurant, where we inevitably ended up if someone had a birthday or work went particularly well that day, was a pizzeria in Cazin, a small town three miles east of Ćoralići. It was owned by a muslim veteran of the Bosnian army, and it was excellent. My personal dinner favourite was the Pizza Amfora, a sort of mutant calzone with a ham and mushroom omelette in the middle. I just checked, actually, and I’m pleased to see it’s still on the menu:

It very nearly wasn’t still on the menu, though. and neither was anything else. One night in March 1996 foreign jihadis, outraged that the owner sold ham and his customers ate it, stuck a time fuse into a salvaged anti-tank mine and threw it through the front window of the (thankfully empty) restaurant. The blast demolished half the building and caused massive damage to the rest. Luckily the owner was unharmed, and managed to rebuild and reopen in about six weeks.

Foreign muslim volunteers didn’t go to Bosnia to fight for the Bosnian people. They went there to fight for Islam, and when they realised that Bosnians practiced Islam very differently from themselves they had no hesitation in trying to force their own values on them. Shahid Butt was one of those extremist thugs.

The Next Step

It seems that bullying Bosnians didn’t slake Butt’s appetite for violence, and his next trip was to Afghanistan. In the mid-1990s Afghanistan was being torn apart by a brutal civil war between the Northern Alliance - a coalition of the insurgent leaders who had fought the Soviets - and extreme islamists centred around the vile Hezb-i Islami Gulbuddin and the newly emerged Taliban. Obviously Butt didn’t go there as a tourist, and while I don’t have actual confirmation of what side he was fighting for I think we can all guess, can’t we?

Butt next moved on to Kashmir, where Pakistan-based terrorists have been murdering people since 1989. Of course most Pakistanis in Britain originate from the Mirpur area, which is in Azad Kashmir, so it’s possible Butt’s trip there was innocent. His next one, however, definitely was not.

And So To Yemen

At some point during all this jihadist activity - probably in Bosnia - Butt came into the orbit of Abu Hamza al-Masri. You remember him; the one-eyed, hook-handed Egyptian imam and terrorist that took eight years to extradite to the USA, because an endless stream of human rights lawyers were worried the nasty Americans would do bad things to the poor lamb. Well, Hamza is now rotting in a supermax cell in Florida, but he caused a lot of mischief before we managed to send him there. One of the things he did was dispatch Shahid Butt, along with one of Hamza’s sons and half a dozen other scumbags, to Yemen in 1999 to take part in a terrorist campaign against government and western targets in the country.

By the time Yemeni police caught up with Butt his group had devised a plan to carry out bomb attacks on the British Consulate, an Anglican church and a hotel. Each of these planned atrocities had the potential to kill dozens of people. It wasn’t idle chatter, either; they had the bombs and other weapons, although naturally Butt claims these were planted on him. Despite his unconvincing denials a court convicted him of “associating with armed groups, plotting murder and destruction and possessing weapons”, and sentenced him to five years in jail.

Butt was released in 2003. At this point the Home Office should have decided that Butt’s presence in Britain was not conducive to the public good and removed his citizenship, but of course what they actually did was send a consular official to escort him back to this country and then turn him loose.

Since then Butt claims to be a reformed character who regrets his past, but I’m no more convinced than that Yemeni court was. Among other things, Butt called for “every muslim” to confront Israeli football fans, although in fact the game ended up being cancelled because West Midlands Police produced fake evidence to justify a ban. He also told an interviewer muslims shouldn’t be friends with jews or christians, which rather shoots down the idea that he’s opposed to bigotry and division. He’s praised muslims who went to fight for ISIS in Syria, claiming they’re “doing it out of compassion”, and of course he’s a vocal supporter of Hamas.

Jihad Comes To Birmingham

Now Butt is standing for the Sparkhill ward as part of the “Independent Candidates Alliance”, which of course isn’t made up of independent candidates at all. It’s an organised network of pro-Hamas lunatics, set up by Akhmed Yakoob and Shakeel Afsar. Yakoob is a lawyer - for now, at least; he’s been suspended and charged with money laundering - and achieved notoriety when he defended the Pakistani thugs who assaulted police at Manchester Airport in 2024. Afsar is an “activist” and homophobic bigot.

There are already four “pro-Gaza independent” MPs in Parliament - five, if you count Jeremy Corbyn - and we’ve all seen what a pack of squalid anti-British racists they are. Unfortunately similar people are likely to get elected in many council wards in May, because there are now plenty wards where a majority of voters will vote for an openly islamist candidate like Butt.

The Sparkhill ward is a perfect example of this: It’s around 70% muslim. No doubt Labour and the Tories will also run “community” candidates in an attempt to capture the sectarian vote, but that tactic is dying; when there are candidates like Butt, who don’t even pretend to care about British issues and just run as islamists, the old parties are helplessly watching their influence with the “community” slip away. Offered a councillor who will focus solely on muslim issues, a lot of people are going to vote for him.

Butt’s backers describe him as “well respected in the Sparkhill community” - and I have a horrible feeling they might be right.

This Can’t Go On

The fact Butt is even able to run as a candidate - never mind that he’s likely to win - is the inevitable end point of decades of failures by the British state. It’s true that the law doesn’t disbar him from standing, but clearly it should. If the law says a lifelong troublemaker with a history of violence and a conviction for actual terrorism is allowed to run for elected office, it is a bad law and must be changed. Even that isn’t the real issue, though. Why was Butt allowed to come back to Britain after his conviction? What brain donor thought this country would be a better place with another convicted terrorist in it? He should have been stripped of his citizenship and left to either return to Pakistan or rot in Yemen. We don’t need him.

But now we’re stuck with him, and there’s an excellent chance that on 8 May he’ll actually be in a position of some power. This is insane. Shahid Butt should not be in Britain at all. We need a government with the courage to remove him from this country - and if the people of Sparkhill are vicious and bigoted enough to elect him, perhaps their future here needs to be re-evaluated, too.

Buy Me a Coffee

One of the great mysteries of Keir Starmer’s government is why he’s so determined to give the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which is 1,200 miles away and has never owned them. Even now, as he desperately fights for his political survival, Starmer is pushing ahead with plans to give away the strategic archipelago then pay tens of billions of pounds to lease back one of the islands. It’s an odd thing to be so focused on - but whether his compulsion to surrender the islands is driven by corruption or naivete, it’s sending out signals of weakness. And those signals are being noticed.

The Maldives Makes A Grab

Last Thursday the Republic of Maldives announced that it had rejected the UN International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea’s ruling on its maritime boundaries, and sent an armed boat to carry out a “special surveillance operation” in the northern part of the Chagos island’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The Chagos EEZ is claimed by Mauritius, but of course actually belongs to Britain until Starmer’s surrender deal is approved by Parliament. However, the Maldivian government has now decided to make its own claim on the area - and it’s very publicly doing something about it. The “coast guard vessel” CGS Dharumavantha - a former Turkish Navy fast attack craft - is now operating in the area, along with drones from the Maldives National Defence Force Air Corps.

Of course, the Maldives has no real claim to the Chagos islands or any part of their waters. The country - a tiny group of islands southwest of Sri Lanka, with a land area of just 115 square miles - was a British crown colony from 1796 to 1953, and a British protectorate until 1965. Like Mauritius, it has never owned the Chagos Islands. However, it’s just 300 miles away from them, much closer than Mauritius. It appears that its leader, President Mohamed Muizzi, has decided that if the key British territory is up for grabs the Maldives should be the ones to grab it. It’s true the Maldives doesn’t have much of a navy, but then Mauritius doesn’t have much of a navy either and is a lot further away. If the Maldives can seize control over part of the extremely valuable Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA), and even possibly some of the northern islands, there isn’t a lot Mauritius can do about it.

Why would the Maldives be so keen to seize part of the Chagos EEZ? That one’s simple. Under British protection, the Chagos MPA (which is the largest marine nature reserve in the entire world) has been officially off limits to commercial fishing since 2010 but, in practice, has barely been fished at all since 1968. This makes it a unique and potentially lucrative resource in the Indian Ocean region, which has seen its ecosystems devastated by destructive fishing methods. The wealth of the MPA is the main reason Mauritius wants the Chagos islands. Its own coastal waters have been blighted by overfishing, including the destruction of coral reefs by explosives and bleach injection, and now it wants to plunder the MPA. The Maldives is also busily engaged in destroying its own fish stocks (fishing is the country’s largest industry and employs half the population) and is desperate for new waters to pillage. They don’t just want access for their own boats, either. Like Mauritius, the Maldives under Muizzi’s rule is an increasingly close ally of China.

The Scourge Of The Seas

China has the world’s largest fishing fleet, and it’s not even close. Over 44% of all commercial fishing is carried out by Chinese boats - and they’re notorious for flouting international law. Chinese boats regularly change their names and disable their satellite tracking systems to conceal their identity, then fish illegally in other countries’ waters. They violate quotas, catch protected species and strip whole swathes of ocean clean of any life much larger than plankton with massive, indiscriminate drift nets. Chinese fishing boats have also been implicated in people trafficking, drug smuggling and acting as spying and covert action platforms for the Chinese navy.

If either Mauritius or the Maldives gain control of the Chagos MPA it’s a certainty they will immediately give Chinese boats access, and this priceless nature reserve will rapidly be trawled and drift-netted into a barren, lifeless wasteland. From China’s point of view, of course, it doesn’t matter which of their lackeys takes over the Chagos islands as long as one of them does, so don’t expect them to step in to help Mauritius. They don’t care who they get the fishing rights from.

Naturally, if Britain tears up the surrender deal and keeps the Chagos islands, China won’t get fishing rights - and there are many good reasons why we should scrap the deal:

• Mauritius has no claim to the Chagos Archipelago. It specifically renounced any claim at independence in 1968.

• A 1966 British-US treaty requires Britain to keep sovereignty over the islands.

• The UN has called on Britain to pause the deal because it doesn’t respect the Chagossians’ right to self-determination.

• The “international law” Starmer claims we need to comply with is actually just a single non-binding judgment by a court that has no jurisdiction over the Chagos islands, and had no right to even discuss this case at all:

I note that the ICJ judge who issued the judgment is Xue Hanqin. She’s Chinese. She is in fact a member of the Chinese Communist Party, and a former official in China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Why are we letting foreign communists tell us what to do with our own land?

We Are Signalling Our Weakness

Anyway, back to the Maldives. It’s actually largely irrelevant what either they, Mauritius or China thinks about who owns northern Chagos waters, because until the handover deal is ratified by Parliament those waters are still ours. If the Maldives illegally sends a boat into our waters, it’s up to the British government to rapidly expel it. That shouldn’t even be difficult; after all, while CGS Dharumavantha is rather well armed for a “coast guard” vessel it’s still just a 436-ton glorified patrol boat with a three-inch gun. A Type 23 frigate is ten times the size and a lot more heavily armed, and should be able to send it packing easily enough.

Except we no longer have a spare frigate to send, so instead the Foreign Office has released a wimpy statement that “the question of sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago is between the UK and Mauritius.” Never mind that it’s actually a question for Britain alone, because it’s our land; all they can do is issue this snivelling legalistic non-event. No order to the Maldives to get its grotty little boat out of our waters. No warning of consequences if British sovereignty continues to be violated. Just a whine.

Well, this is what happens when you look weak. Soon enough, predators will start to wonder what they can get away with. Other countries will be watching the Maldivian incursion to see how we respond. And if we don’t respond - which we can’t, because the Royal Navy has only a handful of warships left and no new ones have been ordered since 2019 - there will be more incursions, more grabs at British territory.

The Chagos islands are just one of fourteen British Overseas Territories. Several of them are at risk of annexation by other nations - in every case, against the wishes of their inhabitants. The Falkland Islands and Gibraltar are the best-known examples, but the Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus are also threatened, as are South Georgia and the British Antarctic Territory. You can bet that Argentina, Chile, Cyprus and Spain are watching with interest to see if Starmer’s government actually intends to do anything about this outrageous provocation by the Maldives.

So far, they haven’t done a thing. This weakness is putting the freedom - and perhaps even the lives - of British people in danger. We need a government that’s willing to spend the money to rebuild the Royal Navy, and that isn’t afraid to flex its muscles in defence of British interests. And we’re not going to get that government by voting for the same tired old parties.

Buy Me a Coffee

Last August I wrote about the strange tale of Dundee’s mad axe girl. This brief sensation began when a video showing a young girl (later identified as 12-year-old Lola Moir) brandishing a knife and axe started circulating online. Inconveniently for the “diversity is our strength” crowd she was brandishing them at a man who was following her, filming her and taunting her in a thick foreign accent. As soon as the video started to gain attention the mainstream media piled in, writing Lola off as a violent racist and sanctifying the hard-working, law-abiding immigrant couple she’d chosen to menace with cold steel. Within a few days the story had been suitably neutralised, and vanished into obscurity.

It shouldn’t have.

Who Were The Real Criminals?

Last September, right after the media stopped talking about how they’d been innocent victims of a racist child, the immigrant couple at the centre of the incident were arrested and charged with multiple crimes, including attempted sexual assault. For some reason journalists failed to give this anywhere near as much attention as when the same immigrant couple were confronted by a young girl screaming “Don’t touch my sister, she’s only twelve years old.”

On Friday the couple appeared in court, and it turns out the people who’d assumed this was yet another case of an immigrant man sexually assaulting young British girls were right after all. Ilia Belov - not the name he gave to the Daily Mail in their fawning interview with him after the attack - is accused of following a group of four young girls, making sexual remarks to them, then grabbing one of them and pushing her to the ground. His sister, Nadjedzha Belova, is accused of grabbing another girl by the hair, pushing her down then punching her in the head.

At the time of the assault, everyone in the establishment jumped in to condemn the girls. Police Scotland warned against spreading “misinformation” that blamed Belov for causing the incident. Former Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf dismissed rumours that Belov had sexually assaulted the girls as “utter mince”. Now, they’re all silent.

This Is Part Of A Pattern

Now, you could argue that instead of going home and grabbing an axe and knife, Lola should have called the police. After all there’s no reason a working-class white British girl might think the police would take the side of the immigrant sex pest who’s harassing her, right?

Oh wait…

The ugly truth is that a lot of people quite simply no longer trust the police where immigrant criminals are concerned. There have been far too many stories of indifference, two-tier policing and cover-ups. It doesn’t help that Police Scotland is notoriously woke and politicised even by British police standards, but would Lola have been any safer if she’d gone to the police in, say, Rotherham? The evidence suggests not - so honestly I’m not at all surprised she made the choice she did. In her place I would probably have done the same.

The British establishment’s impulse to soft-pedal crimes committed by immigrants has reached pathological levels. Just a couple of weeks ago it emerged that, last September, Judge Nirmal Shant ordered that a jury (and the media) not be told the rapist they were trying was an asylum seeker from Pakistan. If it wasn’t for Reform UK MP Lee Anderson, the fact this vile crime had been committed by an immigrant might have been concealed from us. On Tuesday, Judge Amjad Nawaz let 70-year-old Chaudhry Zaman off with a suspended sentence for his sexual assault on a 12-year-old girl. Crimes committed by immigrants appear to be consistently covered up, dismissed or treated with infuriating lenience.

Is it any wonder that Lola didn’t trust the system to protect her?

Buy Me a Coffee

Independent journalism is a pretty grim business right now. Writing about the state of our poor broken country can be soul-destroying. Good news is thin on the ground; new calamities seem to arrive daily, either a fresh atrocity committed by an illegal immigrant or some new Labour assault on our freedom. So it’s nice when something a little more light-hearted comes along - even if it does make some serious points, too.

A couple of weeks ago the media started reporting a new online game funded by Prevent, the government’s (completely dysfunctional) department for diverting people away from extremism. Commissioned by Hull City Council and produced by “creative social enterprise” Shout Out UK, the game - called Pathways - is intended to “Encourage learning about the concept of extremism and radicalisation through the process of choice and safe exploration.”

As games go, this is a spectacularly dull one. Players choose a character, from a very limited selection - there are two, one male and one female, but they’re both called Charlie and use they/them pronouns. They then have to navigate their character through a series of scenarios, answering multiple-choice questions. The idea is that if you give the “wrong” answers you’ll get referred to Prevent, but it soon becomes obvious that almost any answers will get you referred to Prevent. The constant theme is that there are approved views and ways of acting - which don’t, for example, include doing research to find out if something you saw on the internet is true or not - and that, if you deviate from this, the state will step in to “support” you. A lot of this support looks suspiciously like re-education:

In the second scenario we’re asked to decide Charlie’s response to anti-immigration comments made by another student in his class, a goth girl with purple hair. In the fourth scenario we learn that this girl is “Amelia, Charlie’s close friend”. Amelia, obviously, is one of those dangerous right-wingers who tempt people like Charlie into extremism; she is the villain of the piece. Or, at least, that was clearly the intention.

Of course, if you know much about the online right, you’ll probably see the problem already. As one stunned Reddit user commented, "Wait, are you telling me they made the cute goth e-girl the 'racist'? Do they understand how the internet works?"

Well, they certainly do now.

The Daily Telegraph published an article about Pathways on 9 January, bringing the game to public notice. That same day, X user Bovril-Gesellschaft posted “I think I’m in love with Amelia”. It seemed many other right-wingers were too, because within hours Amelia memes were appearing in large numbers. Mostly produced with AI, these depicted Amelia in a wide range of styles (probably reflecting their creators’ personal tastes), but all featured her purple hair and most stuck with the outfit of a pink dress and purple hoodie or cardigan the game depicted her in. Images ranged from cartoons in the style of the original game to photorealism. They depict Amelia doing all sorts of things, for example marrying Charlie:

Or displaying inconvenient statistics on immigrant crime:

Organising the mass deportation of illegal immigrants:

And of course saying things that would get her referred to Prevent along with Charlie:

At some point, inspired by the trend of Iranian girls lighting cigarettes on burning photos of Ayatollah Khameini, Amelia lit up too - a demonstration of how unpredictably memes can interact and evolve:

Finally another X user told X’s Grok AI to collate all the memes and use them to generate a video, which I have to admit made me laugh:

Oops?

There’s a lot to laugh about in this. For example, brightly coloured “danger hair” has generally been the hallmark of women on the far left. Amelia subverts this by giving our new heroine her distinctive purple bob. Will we see the pro-Hamas nuts and trans cultists abruptly return to natural hair colours to dissociate themselves from Amelia? That would be funny.

It’s definitely very amusing to imagine the horror in the Shout Out UK office as they realised they had inadvertently created a right-wing icon. There’s even been speculation that someone on their team may have deliberately sabotaged the project:

I don’t actually think this is what happened, though. I think it’s a simple case of Shout Out UK getting lazy and arrogant. After all, they were just spending taxpayers’ money; who cares what sort of work they turned in? My guess is that they never considered the risk of Amelia becoming a right-wing pinup because they simply didn’t bother to put that much thought into what they were doing.

Prevent Is Gaslighting Us

Naturally, what they’re doing is pushing a relentlessly left-wing viewpoint. Shout Out UK is one of those nebulous groups that has no democratic accountability - we didn’t vote them into their jobs, and can’t vote them out again - but is used by the state to send out messages the government wants us to hear. As I already mentioned, it describes itself as a “social enterprise” and claims its money comes from selling “learning packages” to schools and other organisations. However, it does admit that “We also regularly bid for (and thankfully win) government and NGO education or civic engagement tenders” - in other words, they get hired with taxpayers’ money to spread propaganda.

And it is propaganda. One sample project from their website, “Media Literacy to Combat Extremism in West Sussex”, taught about “the origins of Far-right ideology”. Another, “Media Literacy to Combat Extremism in Rotherham” - yes, grooming gang Rotherham - focused entirely on “online radicalisation” and didn’t mention Pakistani rapists at all. Let’s be honest; is the nonsense influencer Andrew Tate (yes, it did mention him, quite extensively) posts on social media really the biggest problem facing girls in Rotherham? I have my doubts.

Shout Out UK is just a small part of the problem, though. A much bigger part is Prevent itself. I’ve discussed this sorry excuse for an organisation before, and I won’t rehash it all here, but suffice it to say that Prevent has gone wildly off course. The vast majority of the terrorist threat to Britain comes from radical Islam - over 90% of those on the security services’ terrorism watchlists are islamists - and that’s what Prevent should be focusing on. But it isn’t. The organisation has increasingly turned its attention to the largely imaginary “far right”, and is funding activities (like this idiotic game) that promote this distorted narrative.

Prevent can get away with this because it’s just one cog in a vast, fundamentally left-wing machine. The organisation itself is left-leaning. The proxies it uses to “educate” us about extremism (like Shout Out UK) are left-leaning. Worst of all, the groups that refer possible extremists to Prevent - schools, and so on - are also left-leaning. That’s why we keep getting newspaper headlines like “Huge rise in far-right cases sent to anti-terror programme Prevent”. It’s not because there’s actually a growing (or even significant) far-right terrorism issue; it’s just that the people doing the referrals have a left-wing, and often pro-islamist, bias. That’s why referrals to Prevent are 26% “far-right” and 10% islamist, while in the 21st century islamist terrorists have murdered 98 people in Britain and the “far right” have murdered two.

We all know who’s killing us, and it isn’t the “far right”.

Prevent is beyond saving. The whole system is fundamentally corrupt - and, as the Pathways farce shows, it’s also fundamentally stupid. At this point, anyone who trusts Prevent to protect us from terrorism is just delusional. The organisation isn’t really interested in countering extremism any more, and is simply churning out propaganda to divert attention from islamism and further demonise anyone opposed to mass immigration. Now some of that propaganda has backfired spectacularly, so let’s all have a good laugh at Prevent’s expense.

And God Save Amelia!

Buy Me a Coffee

Today Ofcom, the telecommunications regulator, opened a formal investigation into social media platform X (formerly Twitter). The justification for launching this probe, the first step towards banning the platform from Britain, is that Grok, an AI tool owned by the same company, can create fake images of people wearing rather fewer clothes than they perhaps want to.

On the face of it, the considerable outrage about this is perfectly reasonable. After all, if a rogue AI app is generating pornography - including child pornography - something clearly needs to be done about it. And, if that app is integrated into a social media platform - which it undeniably is; you can access Grok directly from X - then the platform itself needs to be dealt with. There’s certainly no shortage of Labour MPs calling for an urgent ban on X.

However, as is so often the case, there’s more to this story than meets the eye.

So What Is Grok Doing?

Firstly, it’s important to keep a sense of proportion about what’s happening here. Let’s start with what isn’t happening. There are hundreds of posts on X complaining that Grok is “undressing women and girls”. Clearly it isn’t. It’s just an AI tool. It can’t reach out from the screen and whip your top off. What it can do is edit images, and that includes changing what the person in the image is wearing. But can it create fake nudes? Well, let’s see.

As an experiment, I uploaded a photo of Angela Rayner getting out of a car in Downing Street and told Grok, “Put her in a bikini”. Grok obligingly did so:

A startling sight, I’m sure you’ll agree. However, it isn’t exactly pornographic, is it? So let’s turn things up a notch and make Big Ange topless…

Ah. It seems that, out here in the real world, Grok won’t do that. So in fact all these stories about how Grok can create child pornography and deepfake nudes may be slightly exaggerated. Editing an image so someone appears to be wearing a bikini seems to be about the limit of Grok’s depravity.

It’s also important to note that Grok isn’t literally removing the person’s clothes in the image to show what’s underneath. It is generating a new, completely artificial, image. This image does not reveal the subject’s actual skin. It is, in a word, fake. Distasteful? In the wrong circumstances, certainly - but still fake.

Now, I’m not defending people who take a photo of some unsuspecting woman, edit it to depict her in a bikini then distribute it with the intent of humiliating her. Frankly, there is no defence. It’s an inexcusable thing to do. I’m not really all that comfortable with having produced edited images myself, even for the purposes of illustrating this post. The fact is, though, there are despicable people out there who will do this. The problem is not Grok. The problem is the people who are abusing it. And let’s be honest here: Banning X wouldn’t stop them. It wouldn’t even slow them down.

The fact is you don’t need Grok to create fake images like this, which makes it somewhat suspicious that Grok/X is the only company being targeted by Starmer’s government. There are three big AI platforms; Grok, ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Guess what? They can all create bikini pics:

Incidentally, X recently restricted Grok’s image generation tools to premium users only. ChatGPT and Google Gemini have not done this, and X is getting a lot of criticism for doing so. The company’s detractors are claiming that owner Elon Musk is cashing in on the situation by “turning paedophiles into paying customers”. In fact what it’s doing is ensuring that, if anyone does try to use Grok to produce child abuse images, X knows exactly who did it - and can pass that information to police. Meanwhile, ChatGPT and Gemini users can retain their anonymity.

Oh, and it gets worse. All three major AI platforms will create bikini pics; all three will refuse to do anything more than that. Unfortunately there are also a lot of minor AI platforms out there - and many of them advertise themselves as “uncensored”. These platforms will produce nude images. They will produce fake child abuse images. And yet Starmer’s government isn’t pressuring Ofcom to go after them.

Odd, isn’t it?

The Real Agenda

In fact it’s not odd at all. In November 2024, leaked documents from the London-based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) revealed that one of the pressure group’s main goals was to “kill Musk’s Twitter”. Like many pressure groups, CCDH claims to be independent but actually has strong links to the Labour Party. Its offices are in the same building as the offices of Labour Together, a Labour Party think tank that played a major role in Starmer’s 2024 election campaign. This isn’t just a coincidental choice of office space, either; CCDH was actually set up by Labour Together, and both organisations used to have the same person as director. That person is Morgan McSweeney, and the reason he stepped down as director of CCDH and Labour Together - which he founded, by the way - is that he’s now Starmer’s chief of staff.

So we have an organisation which according to its own internal documents wants to destroy a specific, named social media platform. We know that this organisation was set up and run by someone who has been working for Keir Starmer for years. And now Keir Starmer is leading the charge to ban that very same social media platform on grounds that, to put it mildly, appear somewhat shaky. Interesting, isn’t it?

Not that long ago Twitter, under the control of its founder Jack Dorsey, was notorious for its left-wing bias. Right of centre views, however mainstream, were routinely censored. When Musk bought the platform that ended. Lefties now complain about its “far-right bias”, but the fact is X just allows all viewpoints to be expressed - including some fairly disgusting far-left and islamist ones. Left-wingers have just got so used to dominating social media that they fly into an outraged fury if the right are allowed to speak too.

What particularly outrages them about X, though, is that Musk introduced an interesting feature called “community notes”. This allows users to append clarifications to posts, in a way that makes sure everyone who sees the post will also see the community note. For a politician as prone to making misleading or flatly untrue statements as Keir Starmer, you can see why this would be unwelcome:

This Isn’t About Protecting Women

The truth is that Grok isn’t some perverted artificially intelligent monster that’s slaking its vile desires on women and children. It’s just a tool that some people can use to create inappropriate images. Those people are the problem, and banning X won’t stop them because they have plenty other tools to choose from; other AI apps, Photoshop, Paint.NET, GIMP and many more - and that’s not even starting on more traditional ways of creating nude images, like a simple pencil and sketch pad. If perverts want to create nude images of women without their consent they’re going to do it. The answer is to go after the perverts, not one specific tool that just coincidentally happens to be owned by someone Keir Starmer hates.

Meanwhile, if Labour really wanted to protect women and girls, they’d be stopping the flood of third-world rapists entering our country and moving ahead with a full inquiry into the Pakistani grooming gang scandal. They’re not doing those things, and in fact are actively trying to block them from happening. I’d say that makes it clear where their real priorities lie.

Buy Me a Coffee

Yesterday was Boxing Day, a traditional bank holiday and, for most of us, a day when we can relax after the bustle of Christmas Day. It’s a very pleasant holiday, in my opinion; we have our new gifts to play with, plenty Christmas dinner leftovers to turn into sandwiches, and the freedom to spend the day in a warm fuzzy haze of alcohol and good company. Naturally, we also had ample time to puzzle over why Keir Starmer chose to post a frankly offensive message on Boxing Day of all days.

While all the sane, normal people were relaxing in their armchairs brushing bits of turkey sandwich off their laps, Starmer took to X to share his delight that Alaa Abd El-Fattah “is back in the UK and has been reunited with his loved ones”. Who is Alaa Abd El-Fattah, I hear you ask? Well, he’s a British citizen who had been locked up in an Egyptian jail since 2019. Last September his mother started a (rather half-hearted) hunger strike outside Downing Street to draw attention to his plight, although he was already a minor cause celebre on the left; Starmer explained in his X post that “Alaa’s case has been a top priority for my government since we came to office.” He was finally released in September; then, on 21 December, Egypt lifted a travel ban it had imposed on him and yesterday he arrived in Britain. So, a triumph for freedom and British diplomacy then?

No.

Naturally, El-Fattah isn’t really British. He was born in Cairo and didn’t become a British citizen until April 2022. Even then he only obtained it on a technicality, because his mother was born in London to Egyptian parents. Until yesterday El-Fattah hadn’t even been to Britain. He’s an Egyptian, who’s spent most of his life in Egypt and the rest in South Africa.

Of course his tenuous connections to this country didn’t stop him from immediately demanding consular support from the British government as soon as he got citizenship. Given how stupid most of the British government is, you won’t be surprised to hear that before the ink was even dry on his new papers the Foreign Office released a statement saying they were supporting “a British national detained in Egypt” and “urgently seeking consular access”. Now their efforts have paid off, and El-Fattah is now in Britain (and, no doubt, being offered generous taxpayer-funded support).

An Innocent Victim?

Now, this would be somewhat forgivable if El-Fattah had been wrongfully imprisoned or given a wildly disproportionate sentence for some minor crime, but that isn’t what happened here. El-Fattah is a political activist, just like the rest of his family. His parents led far-left opposition to the Egyptian government in the 1970s. He himself has a long history of instigating protests that always seem to degenerate into violence; his first arrest was for being a ringleader at the October 2011 Maspero riot, in which 24 died. He was arrested again for inciting violence during a 2013 protest, then two days later arrested again for burning down a presidential candidate’s campaign headquarters. A string of other arrests followed, culminating in the 2019 one for “undermining national security” that finally put him in jail.

Although El-Fattah is just a Middle Eastern malcontent with no real connections to this country, the Foreign Office has been trying to secure his release for the last six years. Why? He wasn’t even a British citizen for half his time in prison, and only seems to have claimed citizenship so he could add Britain’s diplomatic weight to his campaign for freedom. He certainly didn’t claim it because he loves Britain so much:

It’s honestly mind-boggling that officials were stupid enough to give British citizenship to someone who so openly hates this country. It’s even more mind-boggling that they actually pressured Egypt to let him come here.

Yes, Some Immigrants Do Hate Us

But, naturally, it gets worse. Starmer, and Labour politicians in general, love to tell us how much they hate racism. I really have to doubt their sincerity, though, because they’re welcoming El-Fattah to this country despite the fact he’s a self-confessed racist:

And then there are Labour’s unconvincing bleats about how much they hate antisemitism, won’t tolerate it in this country etc etc. Unless it comes from a muslim, of course:

Meanwhile, Lucy Connolly got sent to jail for sending a single tweet that didn’t even incite violence, while El-Fattah has posted a string of comments calling for mass murder:

He isn’t just a keyboard warrior, either; he openly admits that he, personally, is violent:

Send Him Back

There’s a lot more of this out there, but I think you get the picture: El-Fattah is a troublemaker, a violent agitator who instigated riots that led to dozens of deaths. A racist who hates this country and its people. A bigot, a supporter of terrorism and generally just an all-round squalid nuisance. If he’d arrived here on a boat from Calais I would have no hesitation in saying he was the worst kind of immigrant, a prime candidate for immediate deportation. But he didn’t just show up uninvited in the Channel; our government actively worked to bring him here.

I do not want to share my country with vermin like Alaa Abd El-Fattah. He needs to be stripped of his British citizenship - which, given his loathing of us, he isn’t fit to hold - and be deported back to Egypt. And if bad things happen to him there, well, that isn’t our problem and it never was.

The vast majority of murderous, rapey foreigners who come here are allowed in because our government - not just this one; El-Fattah was given British citizenship under a Conservative prime minister - are weak and stupid. Starmer’s actions in bringing El-Fattah here are a whole different order of wrong, though. This is a man who by his own admission is a violent racist, hates Britain and promotes civil unrest wherever he goes, and yet Starmer’s clique didn’t just decide to bring him here; they then befouled our holiday by boasting about what they’d done.

El-Fattah’s presence in our country, and Labour’s active role in him coming here, are not just weak and stupid. They are positively malevolent. I hope the next government will strip him of his citizenship and send him straight back to Egypt - and I don’t care a whit about his fate when he gets there. In welcoming the likes of El-Fatteh to Britain we are not being compassionate or generous; we are, as a great man once said, busily engaged in heaping up our own funeral pyre.

This must stop - and those who brought Alaa Abd El-Fattah to this country must face justice for what they’ve done.

Buy Me a Coffee

Our current government didn’t get off to a great start, and last November’s appalling budget pretty much drove a stake through the heart of Starmer’s hopes of re-election in 2029. A dismal combination of fiscal incontinence, political cowardice and poorly hidden spite made Rachel Reeves’s first attempt at rearranging the economic deckchairs one of the worst in living memory. Unbelievably, though, her second attempt was even worse.

There was a lot of bad news in last week’s budget. Reeves introduced a slew of new taxes on things as diverse as mansions and milkshake, and pushed existing ones to the breaking point and beyond. In total she plans to strip an additional £26 billion out of the economy over the next year, although it’s unlikely her clumsy grab will actually raise anything like that. In fact there was so much bad news that I’m not even going to try to cover it all in one post. Instead I’m going to focus on just one thing - the extension of Rishi Sunak’s vile freeze on income tax thresholds, and particularly how it interacts with the minimum wage.

Meet The Taxpayers

Now, minimum wages are a complicated subject and I should probably dedicate a post to them at some point, but they do destroy jobs if they’re set at an inappropriate level. The short (and grossly simplified)1 version is that if the minimum wage is £12.21 an hour, and a worker doesn’t generate at least £12.22 an hour in extra revenue, it quite simply isn’t worth employing them. The best way to raise wages isn’t by government diktat; it’s by restricting the labour supply, for example by cutting off the availability of cheap immigrant workers, so employers have to compete on wages to attract staff. However, I don’t honestly think Reeves’s decisions in this budget were about raising wages at all.

By increasing the minimum wage, Reeves is forcing employers to move more money into a place where it’s subject to income tax. And then, by extending the freeze on income tax thresholds for another three years, she’s plundering that money as much as she possibly can.

Worst of all, this stealth tax hits low-paid workers the hardest. Let’s take three typical taxpayers to analyse how Reeves’s tax grab will affect people:

• Alice is a corporate diversity manager and earns £50,000 a year. She’s a higher rate taxpayer and currently pays £9,946 per year in income tax, including £4,920 at the higher rate.

• Bob is an IT technician and earns the average wage of £36,972 a year. He’s a basic rate taxpayer and currently pays £4880.40 per year in income tax.

• Charlie is a cleaner in an NHS hospital. He works 37.5 hours a week for the minimum wage, earning £23,809.50 per year. He’s a basic rate taxpayer and currently pays £2,247.90 per year in income tax.

In the budget, Reeves raised the minimum wage from £12.21 an hour to £12.71 an hour, an increase of 4.1%. Good for Charlie! Let’s assume that Alice and Bob also get a 4.1% pay rise. Now here’s the situation:

• Alice is now earning £52,050 a year. Because the thresholds are frozen the amount she pays in basic rate income tax is unchanged, but she’s now paying £5,620 in higher rate tax. Her total tax bill has risen by £700.

• Bob’s salary has increased to £38.407.85. Much to his amazement, despite being on the average salary he’s magically become a higher rate taxpayer since his income has risen past the frozen £37,700 threshold. He’s now paying £5,229.14 in income tax, including £203.14 at the higher rate. His total tax bill has risen by £384.74.

• Charlie is working the same hours and now gets £24,784.50 a year. He’s still a basic rate taxpayer, paying £2,443.14 a year in income tax; his tax bill has risen by £195.24.

On the surface this seems fair enough; Alice has the highest salary and is paying the largest amount in extra tax. Charlie has the lowest income and pays the smallest amount in extra tax. Bob is in the middle. All good, right?

Wrong.

Punishing The Poorest Workers

Let’s look at the percentage increase in the actual tax paid. If we do this a rather different picture emerges:

The amount of tax Alice pays has risen by 7%. Bob is facing a similar increase, at 7.1%. Charlie, on the other hand, has just seen his tax bill jump by a whopping 8.6%. The reason why, by the way, is quite simple: The frozen threshold pushes a higher percentage of Charlie’s modest income into the taxable bracket.

Reeves’s budget hits the lowest-paid workers the hardest. Those on the lowest incomes are seeing their tax rise much faster than higher earners. And Reeves must have known this would happen.

Rachel Thieves

Any remaining claim that Labour had to be the party of working people has just gone right out the window. The reality is that Labour is now the party of well-paid public sector employees and benefit claimants - it’s worth noting that while the minimum wage will rise by 4.1% next April, Universal Credit will rise by 6.2%.

So Bob and Charlie, who are actual working people (and therefore probably support Reform UK), bear the brunt of Reeves’s tax raid; Alice, the leftie diversity manager, faces the smallest tax increase. And don’t even get me started on Daalmir, the unemployed mother of six from Somalia, who isn’t just getting a whacking great UC increase of one and a half times the minimum wage rise but can now claim child benefit for an additional four kids, too.

And, worst of all, this was all deliberate. Before the budget, and in her speech, Reeves claimed there was a hole in the public finances and said she was “asking ordinary people to pay a little bit more” to fill it. She insisted that “those with the broadest shoulders” would bear most of the load - which will be news to Charlie, as he looks at Alice’s new car - and says she’s asked “everyone to contribute” (except Daalmir and her kids, of course).

But none of this was true. There was no hole that needed to be filled; weeks before the budget the OBR, the government’s finance watchdog, had informed Reeves that she had more money to play with than expected. Instead, she briefed that the OBR had downgraded productivity estimates and forced her to push taxes to a new record high. That was a lie, and it was a lie made with a single purpose in mind - to buy off Labour’s new non-working support base with yet more increases to the bloated benefits bill. Workers, especially the lowest paid workers, are suffering unnecessarily so Reeves can spaff their hard-earned money on more handouts (including over £10 billion to foreigners who shouldn’t even be here; if immigrants can’t support themselves in Britain without benefits, they should go home).

Even by the abysmal standards of Starmer’s government this is an unparalleled scandal. Reeves must go. Starmer, who knew she was lying about the state of the economy, must go too. And we must be given the chance to choose a new, more competent, government at a general election.

Buy Me a Coffee

We’re nearing the end of the first full year of Keir Starmer’s government, and it’s been predictably awful. Naturally, Labour’s reluctance to deal with immigration has been one of the worst failures - and has played a big part in the inexorable rise of Reform UK in the polls. Nigel Farage’s party has now led every opinion poll in 2025, and is now running at roughly the same potential vote share as Labour and the Tories combined. Faced with this, even Labour can see that the British people have had enough of mass immigration, and will not allow it to continue.

The Times, They Are A Changin’

In a desperate bid to claw back voters from Reform, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is now putting together the biggest crackdown on illegal immigrants and asylum seekers in decades. Some of her headline plans are:

• End permanent refugee status. Mahmood wants anyone granted asylum in Britain to have their case reviewed every 30 months. If their home country is now safe, they will have to go back there.

• End the automatic right of refugees to bring their families to Britain. Currently, anyone granted asylum can bring their spouse and children here - even if they can’t support them. They’ll now need to meet the same standards (covering earnings, English language proficiency, not claiming benefits and having a clean criminal record) as other immigrants before they can bring in relatives.

• Anyone who enters Britain illegally will have to wait twenty years before they can apply for permanent settled status. Right now, they can get Indefinite Leave to Remain after just five years - and as soon as they have it, they get access to the full range of benefits.

• Support for destitute asylum seekers will no longer be a statutory duty. The government has a legal obligation to provide housing and a weekly cash allowance to anyone granted asylum. Mahmood wants to scrap that obligation for asylum seekers who are allowed to work but choose not to.

• Countries that refuse to take back their illegal immigrants will face visa restrictions, starting with the axing of fast-track visa schemes and running up to a total ban on British visas.

• Illegal immigrants will only be allowed one appeal against deportation, ending the present mess where they can submit one appeal after another, claiming the right to stay on a string of different grounds until they find one that works.

• Finally - and potentially the biggie - Mahmood will tell judges to stop putting the human rights of migrants before the safety of the British people. Just to make sure they get the message, she plans to bring in legislation to make this mandatory.

If this all happens it will be a remarkable shakeup of our completely broken immigration system. Predictably, social media is full of left-wing outrage that a Labour politician is planning such a crackdown - particularly one, like Mahmood, who’s a second-generation Pakistani immigrant herself. The general opinion seems to be that it’s just a cynical move to win back Red Wall voters who have defected to Reform. On the other hand, by the (admittedly dire) standards of the current cabinet, Mahmood may actually be one of the better ones. Paul Embery, a traditional leftie who I have a lot of time for (if you haven’t read his book Despised, you really should), believes her determination to deal with illegal immigration is genuine:

Whether Mahmood is serious about securing our borders or not, though, the fact she’s putting forward this agenda is important in its own right: It tells us we’re winning the argument. If Mahmood is planning a massive crackdown, that shows the government has finally got the message that the country is fed up of mass immigration and wants it stopped. The cozy pro-open borders consensus that’s blighted Britain since the days of Tony Blair is over. To have any chance of victory at the next election, parties need to show that they’re willing to take action and have a plan to do so.

Keep The Pressure On

Of course this is great news, but don’t relax just yet. The steps Mahmood plans to take are necessary, but not sufficient. Illegal immigration is a great evil that’s been perpetrated on the British people by a succession of useless governments, and it needs to be stamped out - but in terms of the demographic damage that’s being done, legal immigration is an even bigger threat. That needs to end too, and millions of people have to be encouraged to return home. Labour - even Mahmood - won’t do this. We can’t afford to sit back and think “OK, they get it now,” because at a fundamental level they still don’t. It’s essential that at the next election we choose a government that’s committed not just to net zero immigration but to the remigration of the vast influx of the past 25 years. As Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe said, “It’s not enough to turn off the tap. We need to start emptying the bath.”

But, if Mahmood’s assault on illegal immigration isn’t a solution to the problem, it’s at least a sign that solving the problem is now mainstream. We have shifted the window; it’s no longer a question of whether to crack down on immigration, but how - and this shift is so obvious that even Labour have finally noticed.

Buy Me a Coffee

Adding Insult To Injury

Hadush Kebatu, a 41-year-old illegal immigrant from Ethiopia, achieved notoriety in July when, just eight days after arriving in Britain on a small boat, he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl in Epping. Next day he assaulted another woman; his perverted crime spree triggered a series of protests outside Epping’s Bell Hotel, which quickly spread to other asylum hotels. In September Kebatu was found guilty of five sexual offences and jailed for twelve months. Instead of wasting taxpayers’ money keeping him in jail for his whole sentence, however, the Home Office decided to deport him immediately - a sensible decision, for once. Last Friday he was scheduled to be transferred from HMP Chelmsford to an immigration removal centre, so he could be sent back to Ethiopia. Incredibly, though, instead of waiting for Home Office transport to arrive, prison staff handed him £76 and released him.

It seems even Kebatu knew this wasn’t what was supposed to happen; one witness says Kebatu tried to return to the prison several times, but was repeatedly turned away and pointed towards the local railway station by staff. Finally he seems to have taken their idiotic advice; CCTV footage shows him on Chelmsford High Street, and he later got on a train to London. He had time to get well clear of the prison by the time anyone realised what had happened, and it wasn’t until Sunday morning that the Metropolitan Police managed to find and arrest him in London’s Finsbury Park.

Chillingly, he was arrested just yards from a children’s play area.

This Wasn’t The First Time

Naturally I was infuriated when I heard Kebatu had been released, and my temper wasn’t improved when various newspapers reported that another criminal had been accidentally released recently. However, it’s now emerged that in the year to March no less than two hundred and sixty-two prisoners had been accidentally released - more than double the figure for the previous year. Unfortunately I don’t have a breakdown of those figures by month (if anyone does, please let me know) but I would not be at all surprised to learn that the rate of accidental releases suddenly shot up as soon as Starmer’s government began its early release scheme last September.

The fact Britain couldn’t even handle the deportation of a high-profile criminal like Kebatu without an epic screw-up is simply staggering. After all, his crimes kick-started protests against migrant hotels and played a significant role in pushing public opinion on immigration to the right. You’d think the very least the government could do would be to make sure he was securely transported from jail to the deportation centre, instead of just handed a wad of tenners and pushed out the prison gate. Sadly our disintegrating system couldn’t even manage that. But, as bad as it was that Kebatu was turned loose to prowl our streets again, the fact that thus apparently happens all the time is infinitely worse.

Anyway, I’m sure you all remember Lucy Connolly, who in an infamous but not at all politically motivated show trial was sentenced to 31 months in jail for sending a single angry tweet (and, incidentally, is now a subscriber to this Substack). Lucy, who sadly has a certain degree of insider knowledge of the prison system, had this to say:

The thing is, as much as Lucy should be right about this, clearly she isn’t. The accidental release of convicted criminals is now within touching distance of being a daily occurrence. Our justice and prison systems are no longer fit for purpose, and need to be fixed. Unfortunately the traditional parties of government have shown that they’re incapable of fixing them. They need to get out of the way and give someone else a chance.

Buy Me a Coffee

Illegal immigration is quickly becoming the cursed albatross of British politics. It isn’t actually the biggest threat the country is facing - the scale of legal immigration makes it far more dangerous to social cohesion - but there’s something about illegal immigrants that really grates on most people. The Tories’ failure to bring the boat invasion under control played a major part in their electoral wipeout last July; now Keir Starmer, who’s already the most unpopular prime minister since records began, is terrified that it’s going to bring him down too.

Left-wing politicians have now launched a truly bizarre attempt to blame the Channel crisis on the very people who are trying to stop it. At the Liberal Democrat conference last week, Ed Davey claimed we should be calling the Channel dinghies “Brexit boats”. In his keynote speech at Labour’s own conference on Wednesday, Starmer went one step further and specifically blamed the crisis on Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. This sounds completely bonkers, of course. After all, Farage has almost single-handedly forced politicians to take the public’s frustration with immigration seriously. He’s regularly been accused of being “far right”, “xenophobic” and even “worse than a racist”. So why is he getting the blame for a flood of unwanted boat migrants?

Naturally it all goes back to the EU, from whose stifling embrace Farage played a large role in liberating us. Specifically, it’s to do with the third version of something called the Dublin Regulation (Dublin III), an EU law that determines which member state is responsible for looking after someone who enters the bloc to claim asylum. If you listen to Davey and Starmer, when we were in the EU we could deal with illegal immigrants by simply returning them to the first member state they’d entered; now that Farage has dragged us out - and they do talk as if he was single-handedly responsible; they gloss over the fact that 17.4 million of us voted to leave - we’re no longer able to do this. Therefore it’s all Brexit’s fault, and the invading dinghies should be called “Farage boats”.

And Now For The Reality.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the truth is a little different. The Dublin Regulation said that whichever country first fingerprinted an asylum seeker and registered their personal information was responsible for deciding their asylum claim. The problem was that bit about registering them. If a migrant evaded authorities in the first EU country they entered, then turned up in Britain, we couldn’t return them to that first country. In the cases where we could return them to that country, other barriers to actually doing so quickly emerged. Human rights lawyers used their familiar tactics to argue that the illegals actually had a right to stay here. Even when our completely dysfunctional immigration courts didn’t decide to let an illegal stay, much of the time other EU countries simply refused to take them back.

So how bad was it? Frankly, it was awful. In 2018, for example, Britain attempted to remove 5,510 people under Dublin III. However, just 209 of them - a mere 3.8% - were actually removed. In the same year other EU countries tried to send 1,940 asylum seekers to Britain, and 1,215 of them (62.6%) were accepted. Lefties and remainiacs claim Dublin III was an effective way to remove illegals; the truth is that in 2018, our membership of this clunky and ineffective EU scheme ended up with us taking in 1,006 more uninvited foreigners than we would have if we weren’t a member.

It’s true that 2018 was a particularly bad year for Dublin III, but over the period 2015-2020 there was only one year when we successfully used it to remove more illegals than it forced us to take in. Over that six-year period we applied to remove 30,713 asylum seekers, actually removed 1,763 - only 5.7% - and accepted 3,961 from the EU in return. The net result of Dublin III was that we gained 2,198 extra migrants. As a mechanism for reducing illegal immigration it quite simply did not work:

They’re Not Brexit Boats - They’re Blob Boats

The reality is that the Channel boats aren’t coming because of Brexit in general or Farage in particular. They’re coming for two reasons. The first is that the previous route of choice for illegal immigrants heading for Britain has been largely shut down. For a long time, illegals mostly came here in trucks. Sometimes they broke into trucks at the Channel ports and stowed away - at least two truck drivers were murdered when they caught illegals in the act of breaking onto their trailers. More often, drivers employed or bribed by smuggling gangs would agree to bring in a load of migrants.

I often drove through Calais during that period, and it was extremely unpleasant. The last few miles of the motorway, and the exit ramps, would be lined with menacing gangs of illegals. Often they’d throw branches or rubble into the road in an attempt to stop vehicles so they could break in. In the end, after a lot of pressure, the French cracked down on the migrant camps around Calais and improved security at the port. Fences, dogs and scanners make it almost impossible to illegally enter Britain in a truck now. That is why they started using the more dangerous, but less controlled, boat route; it had nothing to do with Brexit.

Once the boats started coming the volume quickly grew to match, and then hugely surpass, the number that used to come in by truck. The reason this happened is simple; the traffickers, and the migrants themselves, soon realised that the British establishment - the notorious Blob of obstructive civil servants, weak politicians and malignant charities - was at best haplessly unable to stop the dinghy traffic and at worst actively supportive of it. The Border Force boats we send into the Channel should be turning the migrants back, not acting as a taxi service to bring them half of the way. We should be detaining and deporting any who arrive, not giving them cash, putting them in hotels and Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs), then letting them prowl British towns and assault British girls. Our government, border guards and police should be controlling the migrants, not acting as their logistic enablers.

The boats keep coming because far too many people - Border Force, immigration judges and politicians among them - flatly refuse to do what’s necessary to stop them. It wasn’t Brexit that caused the boat invasion; it was the Blob. And until the Blob is dismantled, the Civil Service brought to heel and the police reminded that their job is to protect the British people, nothing will change. Only when there is no more Blob will there be no more boats.

Nigel Farage is, currently, the only politician with both a declared intent to do something about the Blob and a realistic chance of becoming prime minister. He didn’t cause the boats - but if we give him our support he might just stop them.

Buy Me a Coffee

Last Friday, Keir Starmer decided it was time to announce his latest unpleasant surprise. Although there was no mention of it in the Labour manifesto, it now turns out Starmer wants everyone in Britain to be forced to have a digital ID, provisionally called the “Brit Card”, which we’ll have to show whenever we apply for a job, use public services or try to buy or rent a home. Naturally, this immediately sparked furious opposition and gave a massive boost to a petition calling for the government to rule out the idea of digital ID (if you haven’t signed it already, please do).

Naturally the plan has its defenders, too. Labour MPs and an army of social media drones are claiming the new digital ID will strengthen our borders. Of course, it won’t. Illegal immigrants who arrive without one aren’t going to be turned away at the border. They’ll still be allowed in, just like they are now. They’ll still be accommodated in a requisitioned hotel of House in Multiple Occupancy, just like they are now. And they’ll still be allowed to roam freely despite us having no real idea who they are or what crimes they may have committed, just like they are now.

Digital ID isn’t about strengthening borders, because only people who already live inside our borders will be required to have one. In fact the whole point of borders is that by having them, and keeping them secure, you don’t need oppressive things like digital ID - because the people digital ID is supposedly meant to protect us against get stopped at the border and turned away. We don’t need to worry that an illegal immigrant might be working for Deliveroo if he’s been sent back to France.

Of course, digital ID won’t prevent people from working illegally anyway. Employers already have a legal obligation to make sure anyone they hire has a right to live and work in Britain, and they have plenty of ways to check. The first, and most basic, is the National Insurance number; without one of those you can’t go on the payroll. Then employers have to check government-issued ID like a passport or driving licence, and a utility bill as proof of address. There are robust systems in place to make sure new employees are actually allowed to work here.

But if there are already checks in place to prevent it, how do so many illegal immigrants manage to work illegally? Well, I’ll let you into a little secret: Unscrupulous employers who hire people off the books and pay them in cash don’t do the checks. They don’t ask to see an NI number, or a passport, or a recent gas bill. So why do you think they’re going to ask to see a digital ID?

Not Just An ID Card

So far the main attack line taken by fans of a digital ID is that it’s just one more form of ID added to the many we have already. “I have a passport, a driving licence and a Tesco loyalty card,” they bleat; “What’s the problem with having a digital ID, too?”

The problem, of course, is that a digital ID isn’t just an ID card. It isn’t a card at all, in fact; the government’s plan is that it will be a smartphone app which everyone must have. That does raise the interesting question of what will happen to the estimated three million British adults who don’t have a smartphone, but never mind that for now. Let’s just look at the implications for those of us who do have a smartphone, and will be compelled to install Starmer’s ID app on it.

If you use a passport to prove your identity, the proof is contained entirely within the passport itself. It’s a slim dark blue booklet that contains a photograph of you and a machine-readable chip with biometric data. It doesn’t rely on anything external, so it works just as well at a rickety booth at some desert border crossing as it does at Heathrow.

A digital ID isn’t like that. The actual proof of identity isn’t on your phone; it’s held centrally on a government database, and the government can switch it off. They can either set limits on what you’re allowed to use your digital ID for, or just disable it entirely. There are already mocked-up images circulating of what could happen should you displease the powers that be:

It Could Get Even Worse

The real danger comes when digital ID is combined with a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). These are similar to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, in that they use a security system called a blockchain that tracks every single unit of currency. You’d keep them in a “digital wallet”, probably on your phone, and use them to pay for things the same way as you currently tap your phone on a card reader. The difference, however, is huge.

If you have a tenner in your pocket, nobody knows about it. If you spend that tenner nobody knows where you spend it, what you bought with it, that you no longer have it or who has it now. Traditional cash is anonymous; once you have it, what you do with it is entirely up to you. Nowadays we tend to do a lot of our spending electronically, which obviously isn’t as anonymous as cash, but you do still have complete control over your money and what you do with it. It is possible for the government, armed with the appropriate warrants, to find out what you’ve been spending it on - but it can’t actually stop you.

With a CBDC, that all changes. Every Digital Pound would be tracked by the blockchain, which would be controlled by the central bank - and while the Bank of England is nominally independent, be under no illusions about how real that independence is. It was nationalised in 1946, and is now wholly owned by the Government Legal Department. If the government wants access to the data on who holds all the Digital Pounds and what they’re doing with them, it can get it. And that’s where the already alarming implications of digital ID become downright terrifying.

Using AI, the government would be able to track what you’re doing with your money in real time - and, if it felt like it, prevent you. Trying to buy your third bottle of wine this week? That would put you over your 14-unit recommended alcohol limit; transaction denied. Want to fill up your car but you paid for two long-haul flights last month? Exceeding your annual carbon cap; transaction denied. Identified at an anti-immigration protest by a facial recognition camera? Digital wallet locked. And thanks to AI, this level of control doesn’t even need a vast, Stasi-style army of informers any more; it can all be done automatically.

So yes, the government could use digital ID to control behaviour in a swathe of new and intrusive ways. Do you hold a touchingly old-fashioned belief that it wouldn’t? Well, just think back a few years to the pandemic lockdowns, when people were being quizzed about why they’d left their house for an hour - and fined if they gave the wrong answer. Now consider that the party currently in power spent the whole lockdown period calling for it to be even stricter. Oh yes, they’d use digital ID to control us - and in fact Keir Starmer has already admitted that’s the aim. In his speech on Friday he said that in the future, digital ID “will be used to tackle poverty, conflict and climate change” (my emphasis). So how is it going to be used to tackle climate change if not by restricting our ability to spend money on things that cause carbon emissions?

In case you think the idea of Britain having a CBDC is purely hypothetical, by the way, no it isn’t. The Bank of England is “looking at the case” for one right now.

A Dangerous Path

China has digital ID. They also have what’s known as a social credit system, which the Chinese Communist Party quite openly uses as a tool to coerce its citizens into doing what the Party wants them to do. If you score enough black marks against your social credit score things will start happening to you, from having your face displayed on an electronic billboard as a public shaming exercise to being barred from travelling outside a designated area.

Now, digital ID is not in itself a social credit system - but it’s an essential element in building one, and once it’s up and running it can be expanded into one very easily. After the pandemic experience, do you really trust the government not to go down this path? Imagine lockdown but with a state-controlled enforcement system capable of shutting down most of your life. Imagine a vaccination programme where, if you didn’t comply with the NHS’s orders, you were blocked from buying petrol or a train ticket. With digital ID and a CBDC, the government could do that.

Now here’s a little thought exercise for you. Whether you’re politically on the left or right, imagine that vast power being handed to a government that represents everything you hate. If you’re a Labour voter, imagine Nigel Farage wielding it. If you’re not a communist, imagine Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s fingers on a digital kill switch that could blast your life to pieces. Still think it’s just an ID card?

Frankly, digital ID is a solution looking for a problem. A certain kind of politician wants it - Tony Blair has been lobbying for it for years - but they can’t admit why they want it; instead, they propose it as the answer to issues that it would in fact not solve.

It would not solve illegal immigration - so let’s hear no more about it.

Buy Me a Coffee

If you’re British there’s a good chance you’d never heard of Charlie Kirk until he bled to death in a Utah hospital yesterday with a bullet through his neck. He was a well-known figure in America, but much less so on this side of the pond. Nevertheless his life, and hideous death, are very relevant to our own situation.

Who Was Charlie Kirk?

Charlie James Kirk was a happily married, 31-year-old father of two. Thirteen years ago, at just 18, he was a co-founder of conservative campaign group Turning Point USA. TPUSA promotes right of centre politics in schools and universities, and was intended as an antidote to the left-wing dominance of the education sector. Kirk himself always believed that a significant number of students actually held right-wing views, but were scared to say so; his mission was to convince them that they could, and should, speak up.

Like many American conservatives, Kirk had a lot of views I don’t agree with. He also had a lot of views I do agree with, but neither of those points actually matters. What does matter is that he was dedicated to promoting discussion and debate. He was always happy to discuss any topic, even - perhaps particularly - with people who vehemently disagreed with him. He believed that dialogue was essential, and spoke passionately about how talk was the alternative to violence. There are plenty videos of him making this point.

Yesterday Kirk visited Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, to hold one of his popular public debate sessions. At around 12:20pm local time, as he was answering a question about mass shootings, a single bullet struck the body armour he was wearing under his T-shirt and was deflected up into his neck, severing his carotid artery. Moments later a man was seen running across the roof of a nearby building. Kirk’s death was announced at 2:40pm.

Of course, this being 2025, there’s all sorts of wild speculation about who killed him. Some are saying it was Israel (which he has always passionately supported); others blame President Trump (ditto). The most commonly cited “evidence” for this is that to accurately shoot Kirk in the jugular vein from such a long range the shooter must have been a military-trained (or “intelligence grade”, whatever that means) sniper. Obviously this is complete nonsense.

The Curse Of Internet Experts

Firstly, the range wasn’t long at all. The shooter fired from the roof of the university’s Losee Center, which at its closest point is just 135 yards from where Kirk was sitting. With it being a flat roof there’s a limit to how far back from the edge they could have fired from before the roof blocked their sight line, so my estimate is that the shot was fired from no more than 150 yards. To hit someone at that range isn’t much of a challenge for the average Army recruit half way through basic training, using a rifle with iron sights. With an optical sight, it’s a trivially easy shot. More or less anyone with any shooting experience at all could quite reliably hit their target in the chest at that range.

Deliberately hitting a specific vein or artery, of course, is a different story. In fact it’s essentially impossible. I’ve already discussed how even the most accurate rifle will put bullets into a circle, not a point, and at 150 yards that circle is going to be significantly larger than the width of the vein unless you’re using an extremely expensive rifle held firmly in a clamp. Actually taking an aimed shot, and deliberately hitting the vein, is not achievable for any shooter. In any case a trained sniper would never have even tried. Snipers aim for the centre of mass - the chest - or, occasionally, the head. They never aim for the neck, because there’s simply no reason to do that. Now, of course, we know that Kirk’s murderer didn’t aim for the neck anyway.

The idea that Kirk must have been shot by a trained sniper or professional assassin (and the truth is that hitmen for hire with any degree of real skill are as rare as rocking horse shit) is just ridiculous. In fact the killer clearly wasn’t a professional, because their fieldcraft was absolutely terrible. Running around on a roof skylining yourself is not professional at all. The murder weapon has now been found in a wooded area near the scene; it’s a “high-powered bolt-action rifle” and what appears to be a leaked Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) document say it’s a Mauser hunting rifle chambered for the .30-06 round. This is an expensive German gun that fires probably the most popular hunting calibre in the USA; it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a professional assassin’s weapon. The same document says the empty casing in the rifle’s breech, and three more rounds in the magazine, were engraved with messages expressing “transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” Kirk, naturally, was a hate figure for radical trans activists who were furiously opposed to his traditional christian beliefs and understanding of basic reproductive biology.

Political Hysteria Is Killing People

But why shoot Charlie Kirk? There’s no doubt that many people disagreed with what he was saying; as I said already, I disagreed with much of it myself. In a civilised democracy, though, if you disagree with what someone is saying the only appropriate response is to use your own words to counter theirs. Anyone who disagreed with Charlie Kirk should have debated him, tried to change his mind or, failing that, tried to convince others that Kirk was wrong and should be ignored. There were plenty opportunities to do that, too. Kirk loved to debate with people. He positively gloried in it. And not only was he willing to talk to his political opponents - something that’s increasingly rare in these horribly polarised times - he thought it was vital to do so:

Chillingly, the person Kirk said this to immediately responded with “You think that’s not emotional violence?” When he pressed her, asking if open discussion made her uncomfortable, she said “It makes me angry.”

Emotional violence? No. There is no such thing as “emotional violence”. There is no such thing as “verbal violence” either. Violence is the use of force. It’s fists and clubs and knives and bullets. It’s hurting and damaging. It’s physical. Words are never violence. They may express violent ideas, but they are never violent themselves. And if you try to insist that they are, if you try to claim that Charlie Kirk’s words were violence, your finger was on his murderer’s trigger.

“It makes me angry.” And angry people, of course, often get violent.

When Words End, Killing Starts

People who say “words are violence” are, quite deliberately, taking away the firebreak that separates words from violence. They are creating a false continuum on which words are something to which it’s legitimate to respond with a fist or a bullet. When you say “words are violence” you’re saying it’s OK to shoot people who say things you don’t like.

By the way, if your instinctive response to finding out someone is more right-wing than you is to immediately snarl “Nazi” or “fascist” or (I’m looking at you, Keir Starmer) “far right”, you’re just as guilty. Nazis were officially Very Bad People. We shot hundreds of thousands of them, and bombed their cities into wastelands of charred rubble. If you call someone a Nazi just because they don’t believe your gender woo, you are saying it’s OK to kill them.

All this hysterical demonisation needs to stop, right now.

And if you refuse to stop shrieking “Nazi!” at everyone you disagree with, I have some advice for you. If you ever find yourself aiming a gun at someone because you don’t like what they’re saying, do the world a favour: Turn the weapon round, put the muzzle in your own mouth, and pull the trigger. That way you’ll kill a real fascist.

Buy Me a Coffee

Yesterday, the general secretary of Britain’s largest trade union called on Keir Starmer to go to war with Israel. Former communist (and current Labour Party member) Christina McAnea, the leader of Unison, told a Trades Union Conference fringe meeting that “the time for diplomacy is over” and urged “direct action” to end Israel’s war against the Hamas terrorist group.

McAnea’s union has around 1.4 million members, who overwhelmingly work in the public sector, and is a major financial contributor to the Labour Party. It’s also historically backed left-wing Labour politicians, including Jeremy Corbyn and Angela Rayner. Naturally, it supports Palestine with the sort of frothing intensity more usually seen in a student union; not even the slaughter Hamas perpetrated on 7 October 2023, which began the current war, was enough to change that. Now McAnea, a former Glasgow City Council employee who’s never had a real job, is demanding a British military intervention along the lines of the 1999 Kosovo operation to “force the borders open”.

Of course, there’s a problem.

The Cupboard Is Bare

In fact there are several problems, starting with what the USA would do to us if we attacked Israel, but the problem that makes McAnea’s fever dream of a final solution to the Israel question completely impossible is that, thanks to 35 years of salami-slicing by successive British governments, we simply don’t have the strength to do this even if we wanted to.

Let’s begin by looking at the raw data on the relative military power of Britain (population: 67 million) and Israel (population: 9.5 million):

So right away we’re not off to a great start. In every category except 5th generation combat aircraft - F-35 stealth fighters, in both cases - where we’re dead even, Israel has a numerical superiority in all the critical areas. It isn’t even close, actually; Israel’s superiority runs from comfortable (troops) to ridiculous (tanks).

The really good news - for Israel - is that these numbers don’t even tell half the story. The troop numbers, for example, only include regulars. Bring reserves into it (and mobilising reserves is something Israel is much better at than we are) and the British Army grows from 73,800 to about 108,000 - but the Israeli ground forces balloon from 126,000 to 525,000. Britain has 219 tanks, but less than a hundred are actually operational right now; over 400 of Israel’s 1,300 are currently in service. The Israeli Air Force has a long-standing reputation for maintaining very high availability rates for its combat aircraft; since the end of the Cold War the RAF has gained a much less impressive reputation, thanks to an embarrassingly high percentage of its combat aircraft being grounded through lack of spare parts (and more recently, thanks to senior officers’ obsession with diversity, lack of pilots too). On top of that, most of Britain’s operational F-35s are currently on an aircraft carrier just off Tokyo. On paper, the IAF has about three times as many combat aircraft as the RAF. In terms of how many each force could actually put into the sky above Gaza? It’s more like ten to one. And no, I am not exaggerating.

Not that it matters, anyway. Israeli airspace is protected by some of the most advanced air defences in the world. The David’s Sling SAM system was designed to destroy ballistic missiles; it’s absolutely lethal against aircraft, and it has a range of 190 miles. It’s literally capable of shooting down RAF Typhoons as they climb away from the runway at Akrotiri.

As for tanks, forget it. It’s hard to say how many of our Challenger 2s are actually fit for combat, but if it’s within touching distance of three figures I’d be amazed. Some have already been stripped down to bare hulls, ready for rebuilding as Challenger 3s. The rest? Ukraine’s had most of the spare parts and ammunition, and nobody’s made ammunition for the CR2’s main gun in 15 years. Even if we had a couple of hundred operational tanks, though, there’s no way to get them ashore. The Israeli navy’s Shayetet 7 submarine flotilla has six modern conventional submarines, based on the Type 209 and Type 212 U-Boat classes. Yes, U-Boats; they’re all German-built. Germany has traditionally been rather good at building submarines, and it shows. In the confined waters of the Mediterranean these small, extremely quiet boats are very dangerous opponents, and would make it almost impossible to mount any kind of landing without total air superiority. Which, obviously, we wouldn’t have.

Of course the idea that Britain would send forces to attack Israel and force a ceasefire in Gaza is ludicrous anyway, but even if we were stupid enough to contemplate it - and not even Starmer is that stupid - we simply don’t have the combat power to do it. We are thoroughly outgunned by a country with a seventh of our population and a slightly smaller land area than Wales. Personally I find this embarrassing, but that’s where post-1991 spending priorities have brought us.

So the answer to your stupid suggestion, Christina McAnea, is no.

Buy Me a Coffee

Anyone remember Ratner’s the jeweller? For over 40 years a Ratner’s shop was a fixture on most British high streets, a reliable purveyor of cheap necklaces and wedding rings that turned your finger green before you’d left the church. Everyone knew Ratner’s products were, to put it politely, manufactured with an eye more on price than on quality, but as long as nobody said so out loud that could be politely ignored.

Then Gerald Ratner said so out loud.

On 23 April 1991 Ratner, who had grown the family business from a couple of hundred shops to a multinational empire with over 1,300 branches, delivered a fateful speech to the Institute of Directors. In it, he explained that the reason Ratner’s could sell a drinks set of a decanter, six glasses and a silver-plated tray for £4.99 was that it was “total crap”, and added that Ratner’s could sell you a pair of earrings that at 99p were cheaper than a Marks and Spencer prawn sandwich - but “I have to say the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings.”

Gerald Ratner had spent 25 years building the company he’d inherited into the undisputed king of Britain’s affordable jewellers. It took him just 32 seconds to bring it all crashing down again. Within a day, plummeting share prices had wiped more than £500 million off Ratner Group’s value. Sales slumped, and over 300 shops closed; in 1992 Ratner was forced out of his own family business, which renamed itself Signet Group and did everything it could to disavow its old boss.

Phillipson Drops A Truth Bomb

Yesterday I watched, stunned, as education secretary Bridget Phillipson blurted out what should become the Starmer government’s prawn sandwich moment. During an interview with Sky News, presenter Trevor Phillips brought up the saga of the Bell Hotel in Epping.

Last week the Home Office appealed against a High Court injunction ordering all asylum seekers to depart from the hotel by 13 September. In an astonishing submission, lawyers for the Home Office claimed that asylum hotels are “essential national infrastructure” and said local residents near them will just have to accept “some level of perceived nuisance.” Personally I think the long and growing list of rapes and sexual assaults committed by asylum seekers is a bit more than a “perceived nuisance”, but the Home Office clearly believes it’s an acceptable price to pay.

The lawyers went on to make it very clear that they are not on the side of the British people. Edward Brown KC, representing the Home Office, told the court the rights of those on opposite sides of the case were “not equal” and “are fundamentally different in nature”. As he was arguing for asylum seekers to stay in the hotel against the wishes of locals, the meaning is absolutely clear: The rights of illegal immigrants are more important than those of Epping residents.

It’s worth noting that while most major news outlets reported that the Home Office was arguing the case, they seem to have been rather selective about what arguments they mentioned. The BBC, ITV News and so on were happy to talk about how the injunction impacted the Home Office’s statutory duty to accommodate asylum seekers, for example, but only a couple of right-leaning newspapers mentioned Brown’s inflammatory claim that the migrants’ rights rank higher than ours. The whole thing was kept remarkably quiet, which was easy to do because the media were just reporting on what happened in court and it was well wrapped in sleep-inducing legal jargon anyway.

But then Phillips asked Bridget Phillipson about it, and he did so in clear language that demanded a clear answer. In fact it took him five attempts to get that clear answer, as the pitifully inept Phillipson flailed and waffled, but eventually he pinned her down hard enough that she had to reply.

Phillips reminded the hapless minister, “Your lawyers under your guidance have said, in terms, that the rights of asylum seekers are more important than the rights of residents in Epping Forest,” then asked “Do you agree with what your lawyers, said, or don’t you?” - and Phillipson replied, “Yes, of course we do.”

Seriously. She really said that. Do you agree that foreigners who came here illegally are more important than the British people you govern on behalf of? “Yes, of course we do.”

It’s been impossible to watch Starmer’s government over the past 13 months without developing an extremely strong suspicion that the welfare of the British people is not their highest priority. Now, though, there can be no doubt whatsoever. A cabinet minister has come right out and said the unsayable - to the people whose first duty is to protect us, we are less important than illegal immigrants.

Bridget Phillipson has done a Ratner. What she said should be enough to finish not just her, but this whole rotten government.

Buy Me a Coffee

In evolutionary biology the Red Queen Hypothesis is the idea that living things need to constantly evolve - developing immunity to new diseases, getting stronger or smarter, adapting to different food sources - just to hold their position. The hypothesis is named after the Red Queen in Through The Looking Glass, the second of Lewis Carroll’s books about Alice in Wonderland. After an exhausting and fruitless race the Red Queen explains to Alice that “here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

It feels like that’s what we’re doing on the issue of immigrants and young girls - expending a lot of effort, but not getting anywhere.

A Hero Rises…

On Sunday a video started spreading through social media, as these things do. This video showed a pair of visibly stressed young girls, one shouting at the cameraman and the other brandishing a knife and axe at him as he followed them around taunting them in a strong foreign accent. The video lacked context, but considering that people are currently protesting over immigrant attacks on teenage British girls it was no surprise many viewers drew certain conclusions from the fact one of the girls was screaming “Don’t f**king touch my little sister, she is f**king twelve.”

The internet being what it is, AI-generated images of this unexpected heroine quickly appeared. Despite the lack of clarity around exactly what had happened, and the fact the girl was undeniably breaking a variety of offensive weapon laws, it was soon clear where most people’s sympathies lay:

…And Falls

That wouldn’t do, of course. This is Britain in 2025, after all; whenever a native Briton and an immigrant have a confrontation, the left will quickly swing into action to make it clear that, as usual, this was all whitey’s fault. People soon started posting alarming (albeit unverifiable) comments about the awfulness of the girl, identified as Mayah Sommers: She’s been arrested for carrying a knife before; her mother’s a racist crack addict; her family hate immigrants and make fake allegations like this all the time. Then, just for balance, the Daily Mail tracked down the man involved and published a glowing article on him:

The article revealed that rather than the muslim asylum seeker many people had assumed was involved, the man is actually a legal immigrant from Bulgaria named Fatos Ali Dumana. He’s been here for four years, worked in an Indian restaurant for a while and is now a “digital creator”. He lives in a council house with his wife Fatos Yulianova, and the couple have an eight-month-old baby. Dumana says they were on their way to the local Farmfoods shop when the girl appeared with her array of blades and blocked their way. So there you go; psycho racist ned - chav, to those south of Hadrian’s Wall - attacks devoted family man.

Don’t Rush To Conclusions

Let’s not rush to blame all of this on Mayah Sommers just yet, though. For a start, it turns out Mayah Sommers probably isn’t Blade Girl anyway; her mother - the racist crackhead, allegedly - has stated that while her daughter was at the scene she wasn’t one of the girls in the video. According to Ms Sommers those girls were Ruby, aged 14, and Lola, aged 12. She claims Dumana and his wife assaulted Ruby, leaving her with head injuries (which does tie in with the girls shouting “kid bashers” at them) and that Lola then got the knife and axe to defend her sister. Is this true? I don’t know. Is Ms Sommers really a racist crackhead? I don’t know. Did Blade Girl pick on a random young couple for reasons unknown and stop them going to the shop? I don’t know that either (although it seems rather an odd thing to do).

What I do know is that there’s more to Fatos Ali Dumana than the highly selective picture presented in the Daily Mail. With his name now out there, it’s the work of a few moments to find his social media - and oh my, isn’t that interesting?

Firstly, though, why is he in a council house? He’s only been in Britain for four years, and came here to do a pretty low-grade job that any one of millions of unemployed Britons could have filled. His wife is also an immigrant, and their son, born to two immigrant parents, is only British on paper and has no roots here. It’s not like we need these people; if they can’t support themselves they should just be deported, not given a council house. There are 1.3 million British citizens on social housing waiting lists; why is an immigrant jumping the queue?

Now, on to the social media. The first thing I noticed is that for a former curry server who qualifies for social housing, Mr Dumana seems to have access to rather a lot of money. There are multiple videos on his TikTok showing him flicking fat rolls of £20 notes, or throwing showers of tenners around a room. Where’s all that cash coming from?

Maybe it’s coming from organised crime. After all, he adds the caption “gangsta” to some of his videos, and he has a tattoo on his neck with a picture of a Kalashnikov rifle and the word “Mafia”:

By the way, Bulgarians are slavs and have names like Georgi Ivanov. The name Fatos is Turkish, Dumana is most common among Roma gypsies and Ali is one of the most popular names among muslims but almost unheard of otherwise. On various photos and videos Dumana describes himself as a gypsy. Coincidentally, at least one Roma gypsy grooming gang has been operating in Dundee recently. There’s no evidence that Dumana has any connection to such a gang, but he does seem to have some pretty questionable attitudes to women:

We’ve Been Here Before

Whatever alarm bells start clanging when you look at Dumana’s social media, the official line is that he’s a respectable family man. Meanwhile the girl has already been arrested and labelled as a troublemaker.

Does any of this sound familiar? Because it should. During the establishment’s decades-long effort to ignore the Pakistani rape gangs, victims were routinely arrested. Their credibility was systematically attacked, usually by referring to their “troubled” backgrounds or mentioning previous misdemeanours. Rapists were repeatedly given the benefit of the doubt even when there were numerous indicators that they were in fact rapists. The rush to make Dumana the victim here, and the girl the villain of the piece, has exactly the same filthy stench to it as the cover-ups in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and a score of other places.

I’m not saying Dumana isn’t innocent. It’s possible he had a perfectly legitimate reason to be following a 12-year-old girl around, and filming her on his phone as she screamed “get away from us”. The fact he refers to women as whores doesn’t necessarily guarantee he’s an abusive, misogynistic scumbag. There might be any number of reasons for a non-criminal to get “Mafia” and a picture of an AK tattooed on his neck, although I can’t think of any right now. But considering how horribly wrong the establishment got it over the Pakistani rape gangs, let’s not let eagerness to avoid asking difficult questions about immigrants get in the way of finding out what’s really going on here. Because in the horrible balkanised Britain we’re forced to live in now, when a girl is shouting “Hands off my little sister” at a man, we need to know why.

Buy Me a Coffee

In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, protagonist Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth. His job, essentially, is to change the record of the past to suit whatever is convenient for the regime in the present. Messages drop from a tube above his desk, telling him which paragraph of history is now false; he writes a new version, amended copies of books and newspapers are run off, and the historical record now says what the Party wants it to say.

Sometimes Winston’s forgery is a creative process; for example, faced with an empty space to fill on the front page of the Times, Winston simply invents war hero “Comrade Ogilvy” to replace an inconvenient article about a now-disgraced Party official. This is actually quite similar to how teachers and pro-immigration advocates invented Mary Seacole, the “black Florence Nightingale”. Yes, a person called Mary Seacole actually existed, but the Mary Seacole children learn about in school - a nurse, working in a military hospital - is every bit as fictional as Winston’s fabricated helicopter pilot.

Other times, what Winston does is simply banal. In one example, the Party has promised the chocolate ration won’t be cut - but the socialist economy has been running with its usual efficiency, there isn’t enough chocolate and the weekly ration needs to be cut from 30g to 20g. Rather than admit its failure, though, the Party simply tells Winston to “correct” the record; he digs out the old newspaper and amends it to say the ration will be increased to 20g.

Personally I find this sort of low-grade falsification much more disturbing than the invention of Comrade Ogilvy (or, for that matter, Nurse Seacole). You can understand inventing a news story to conceal the fact you’ve had a popular subordinate arrested and shot, but falsifying something as trivial as a chocolate ration? Seriously? That’s what tells us we’re in the realm of dystopian fiction. Here in the real world no regime, however corrupt and stupid, would expend effort on that.

Oh wait…

Here we have Keir Starmer claiming his government is making travel cheaper with a £3 cap on bus fares. There’s only one problem with this: It’s a lie. Starmer has actually made bus travel more expensive.

The bus fare cap was introduced by Liz Truss’s government in September 2022, in an effort to ease the cost of living crisis. The thing is, Truss didn’t set the upper price limit for local bus fares at £3. She set it at £2. Then, in January, Starmer increased it by 50%. Now he’s saying he made it cheaper. This is right up there with Winston’s chocolate ration. It’s a stupid lie, and it’s a pointless lie. Everyone who actually uses the buses will notice that Starmer’s saying one thing and the ticket machine is saying another. Nobody will be fooled.

Starmer Lies About Who Did What

And then there are the migrant hotels. Following a string of sexual assaults and rapes committed by foreign men living in asylum hotels, they’re becoming the focal points of increasing public discontent at the immigration crisis. Of course the hotels aren’t the actual problem - mass immigration, both legal and illegal, is the problem; the hotels are just a symptom of it - but Starmer’s government has somehow persuaded itself that closing down the hotels will make the issue go away. I’m not convinced (I think scattering the hotel residents into rented houses across the country is going to make things much, much worse) but anyway, Labour ministers are claiming “We’ve already brought the number of asylum hotels down from 400 at the peak of the previous government to 200 now.”

In a very narrow technical sense this sentence isn’t quite a lie; you can’t put your finger on anything and say “That’s the bit that isn’t true”. On the other hand it is deliberately misleading. It’s true that the number of hotels used for asylum seekers peaked under the last Tory government, at more than 400 - just over 480, in fact. It’s also true that it’s just over 200 now. What’s not true is that Labour made the difference. The peak number was reached in September 2023; by the general election in July 2024 it had fallen to 213. Currently it’s 210. So while even the Tories managed to cut the number of hotels by 270 in under a year, Labour have only cut it by three in a somewhat longer period. And, although there are slightly fewer migrant hotels than there were last July, the number of actual migrants in them has risen by 8%.

Labour say they’re fixing the asylum system - but that isn’t true.

Labour Lies Are Everywhere

I was going to write a section on Starmer’s lies about the economy, but honestly I’d still be working on it next Christmas. He says he’s putting more money in working people’s pockets, while in reality inflation has almost doubled. He says he’s creating jobs, but payroll numbers are down 157,000 and there are fewer than half as many job vacancies as last summer. He says he’s fixing the foundations, but a non-existent £22 billion Tory black hole has been replaced with an all too real £50 billion Labour one.

Starmer promised no tax rises for “working people”, then hiked employers’ National Insurance contributions. Employers’ NICs are literally a tax on working people; now, thanks to Labour, employers are forced to pay more tax on their workers - so they have less money to pay in wages to their workers. Starmer boasted of £880 million in extra funding for social care, but didn’t mention that this didn’t even cover the £900 million the NI increase cost the sector. Starmer has claimed he inherited interest rates of 11% from the last government - but he lied. Interest rates haven’t been that high since 1991; the real figure was 5.25%. Starmer claimed his Chagos surrender would cost £3.4 billion; then it turned out he’d ordered civil servants to use a range of underhand accounting tricks to massage that down from the real figure of £35 billion. Almost everything he says about the economy is a complete fabrication.

Politics isn’t a famously honest business. Whenever any politician says anything it’s probably wise not to just believe it unquestioningly. Investigative journalists have made lucrative careers out of revealing the difference between the truth and what politicians said. Even by that low standard, though, Keir Starmer is remarkably dishonest. He seems to lie about everything. It doesn’t matter if he’s clearly going to be caught out immediately. It doesn’t even matter if there’s no point lying at all. It seems his first instinct is to mislead and deceive. No wonder the British government is quickly morphing into something Winston Smith would find worryingly familiar.

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Within minutes of the verdict the Jones case was being compared with that of Lucy Connolly, who’s still in prison serving a 31-month sentence for sending an irate tweet in the aftermath of last year’s Southport murders. Equally quickly, dozens of people popped up on social media to insist that there was no comparison. Most of this came from the left, but there was a smattering of it across the political spectrum. Basically the argument goes “Lucy Connolly pleased guilty; Ricky Jones pleaded not guilty and was cleared by a jury. Therefore this isn’t two-tier justice.”

Yes, This IS Two Tier Justice

Well, that’s definitely an argument, but it’s a very simplistic one. It’s true that Connolly pleaded guilty, but that wasn’t exactly an unforced choice on her part. She was denied bail, and told that if she pleaded not guilty she could be held on remand for up to a year before her case went to trial. On the other hand, she was advised, if she pleaded guilty she’d be out of jail by Christmas 2024.

Ricky Jones of course was not denied bail, despite his alleged offence being much more serious. He was able to take legal advice and spend a year preparing the list of excuses he would later use in court - for example, that he was traumatised because, 50 years ago, he had to do primary school PE in his underpants. Is anyone supposed to take this rubbish seriously?

Lucy Connolly would almost certainly have been acquitted too, if she’d pleaded not guilty and faced a jury. After all, she had somewhat more convincing grounds for mitigation than Jones did - the fact her child had essentially been murdered by the NHS, for example, and she was extremely distressed that three other children had just been stabbed to death by someone whose identity the establishment seemed very keen to conceal. But she never got her day in court; faced with the prospect of rotting in a cell for a year, she took what she’d been assured by her lawyer was the sensible option. And then she got jailed for 31 months.

The question is, why was Lucy Connolly denied bail while Ricky Jones wasn’t? Was it perhaps because Keir Starmer stood up in the Downing Street briefing room and told the nation that those arrested for anti-immigrant protests “will be held on remand”? Jones, of course, was a Labour Party member and involved in a counter-protest, so it seems the judiciary interpreted Starmer’s remand order as not applying to him.

So while it’s true that Lucy Connolly pleaded guilty and Jones didn’t, that doesn’t erase the stench of two-tier justice that hangs over this issue. She pleaded guilty because she had been put under immense pressure to do so - pressure which was not applied to Jones. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Connolly was punished in line with the prime minister’s instructions by a left-wing pro-immigration judge, while Jones was spared because his politics align with the government’s.

At this point, by the way, I’m going to break ranks with the otherwise admirable free speech advocates who’re saying neither Connolly nor Jones deserved jail. Connolly certainly didn’t; she said on X that she didn’t care if someone burned the asylum hotels, and the last time I checked, indifference isn’t actually a crime. Jones, on the other hand, told a mob of angry left-wing protesters that they should cut the throats of the “far right”. There’s a real difference here, and if only one of them went to jail then, in my opinion, it should have been Jones.

It Gets Worse

Anyway, back to the two-tier treatment that’s now fuelling real anger in the country. Whatever you think of what Lucy Connolly tweeted, at the end of the day it was just a tweet. She didn’t actually hurt anyone; she just said something angry and unpleasant, then calmed down and deleted it. It was an act committed, as Ricky Jones successfully argued in court, in the heat of the moment. It certainly wasn’t a violent act. She didn’t knock someone to the ground, then punch them repeatedly as they lay there helpless.

Mike Amesbury did that, though. Last October Amesbury, who at the time was the MP for Runcorn and Helsby, launched a drunken assault against a constituent who had dared to challenge him in the street. In February Judge Tanweer Ikram, who has an atrocious track record of handing out lenient sentences to far-left and pro-Hamas activists, sentenced him to just ten weeks in jail - less than one thirteenth of the sentence Lucy got for typing a few words on social media. Even that was too much for Amesbury, though. He appealed his sentence and, before he’d spent even a single day in prison, the already laughable jail time was suspended for two years and he walked out of court a free man. Amesbury, of course, was a Labour MP. Is it any wonder that 53% of Britons have “not very much confidence” or “no confidence at all” in our once world-renowned justice system?

Now, two-tier treatment is spreading beyond the courts. A couple of weeks ago a group calling itself the Weoley Warriors started to decorate lamp posts in the Weoley Castle area of Birmingham with English flags. Although I’m not English myself, I thoroughly approve of this; it makes for a patriotic and colourful display. Birmingham City Council, however, were not amused. They immediately claimed the flags were “dangerous” and “put lives at risk”, then started removing them.

Birmingham City Council, remember, is bankrupt. The city is vanishing beneath piles of rubbish because the council can’t pay its bin men. And yet it has money to waste tearing down flags that local residents put up? Well, some of the flags local residents put up, anyway. Specifically, British and English ones. Palestinian flags, on the other hand, can stay. Why? A leaked email from the council admits that it’s too dangerous to take down Palestinian flags without police protection, a nice admission that pro-Palestinian activists are in fact violent thugs. But if the council can leave those up despite the “risk to life” do they have no idea how bad it looks to take down British ones?

Maybe they don’t. After all, this is the same council that just lit up Birmingham’s main library on consecutive nights to celebrate the independence of Pakistan and India. Notably, they didn’t light it up for St George’s Day in April or the commemoration of VJ Day on Friday. Britain’s history is ignored, while foreign events get celebrated. Two-tier commemoration.

Breaking Point Is Near

Frankly, people are getting sick of this. They’re tired of being told to celebrate every culture but their own. They’re fed up watching violent islamists and leftists get let off with derisory sentences while a stressed English housewife sits in a cell for a tweet. They’re losing patience with a political class that fawns over Palestinian and Pakistani flags, but tears down British ones. The mood has shifted - but the left don’t seem to have realised it yet. For years they’ve been used to pushing multiculturalism and foreign celebrations, while the British just accept it all with resigned tolerance.

That tolerance is almost exhausted now. A tide of resentment is rising, symbolised by the cross of St George flying from a thousand lamp posts and women in pink shouting “Protect our kids” outside asylum hotels. Kipling’s chilling poem, The Beginnings, is on the verge of becoming reality. If politicians, judges and activists don’t stop doing things that seem deliberately calculated to enrage the native people of these islands, there is going to be an explosion. And explosions hurt people.

Two-tier treatment of the British people in our own homeland needs to end - and it needs to end now, before the growing native anger bursts into open rebellion.

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