Kenya rights activist freed on bail, charged with unlawful possession of ammunition
Kenyan activists have been on edge over the arrests of government critics since a political blogger died in custody in June, triggering weeks of violent demonstrations in which around 50 people were killed.
Police had arrested Mwangi, 42, on Saturday and said they had recovered unused teargas canisters, a "7.62mm blank round", two mobile phones, a laptop and notebooks.
Mwangi was "found in possession of noxious substances to wit three teargas canisters without lawful authority," according to a charge sheet seen by Reuters. He was also accused of illegal possession of a single round of blank ammunition.
The courtroom was packed with hundreds of activists, some wearing Kenyan flags.
"They have no evidence," Mwangi told reporters, describing his prosecution as "a big shame".
His lawyer told Reuters he was grateful to the court for agreeing to release Mwangi on bail.
Mwangi, who once ran for parliament on an anti-corruption platform, has earned a reputation for speaking out against human rights violations in Kenya and abroad. He was expelled from neighbouring Tanzania in May, where he had travelled to observe a hearing in a treason case against an opposition figure.
Last month hundreds of Kenyans took to the streets to protest against the death in police custody of political blogger Albert Ojwang. Police initially implied that Ojwang had died by suicide but later apologised after an autopsy found that his injuries pointed to assault as the cause of death.
The demonstrations over Ojwang's death reignited protests that had erupted last year over the cost of living and alleged police brutality and corruption.
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Telegraph
37 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Why white working-class rage is surging in Britain
What a difference a year makes. Compare the Labour Government's approach to disorder outside migrant hotels last summer, following the Southport murders, with how they are handling protests and disorder now. The serious violence around last year's protests demanded a tougher response from the state (which the public supported) than this summer's events. On August 4 last year, Sir Keir Starmer, the newly elected Prime Minister, began his statement on the riots by saying, 'I utterly condemn the far-Right thuggery we have seen this weekend.' In conclusion, he added, 'I won't shy away from calling this what it is: far-Right thuggery.' That there was far-Right thuggery involved in some of the protests was clear to see. But what Starmer failed to do was acknowledge the genuine concerns held by ordinary people who were neither thugs nor members of the far-Right. This summer, as protests spread across the country, Labour politicians are going out of their way to show they understand protesters' concerns about mass immigration. An official summary of a recent Cabinet meeting quoted Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, saying that 'economic insecurity, the rapid pace of de-industrialisation, immigration and the impacts on local communities and public services […] are having a profound impact on society.' Starmer's spokesman reinforced her comments, saying that 'high levels of immigration over the last 10 years, including illegal immigration […] have had an impact on our social fabric and social cohesion.' Rayner's intervention was particularly striking given that six years ago she described the Brexit Party, the predecessor of Reform, as a 'racist party'. What is behind the shift? Outlet for working-class voters On the surface, the emergence of Reform has transformed politics. Recent election results and polls show they represent a significant portion of the public; the Government knows Reform is currently heading into government. But more than that, what has changed is the rise of politically organised white working-class rage. While this rage has been a feature of British politics for 25 years, it was fractured and its power diluted. Although working-class voters dealt many shocks to mainstream parties over the last two decades, in referendums as well as local and European elections, they continued to support mainstream parties at General Elections. Their anger often seemed to have dissipated or even died away. This was never true; rather, their rage had no real outlet. Ukip and the Brexit Party were niche parties focused on the side issue of the EU. Reform is different: their primary focus is immigration, but they are developing a policy platform designed to tap into public discontent about other key issues too, especially crime, as well as public service failures and economics. When it comes to public service failures, there is more than enough to fuel frustration. Working-class people with no chance of going private even occasionally are struggling desperately to access the NHS. Many are genuinely fearful about how they will cope with sustained illness or the daily challenges of old age. The Office for National Statistics data this week showed the British population rose by more than 700,000 in the year to June 2024, the second largest increase since records began in 1949, which will have added to these concerns. These sentiments are what could change politics and power in Britain. Resentment towards Tories and Labour It is hard to overstate the anger white working-class voters feel towards the main parties and their senior politicians. Earlier this week, Public First, the opinion research firm I ran until earlier this year, hosted a focus group in the Midlands where one working-class participant described Britain as 'a tinderbox; there's a lot of pent-up emotion and frustration at the moment.' On the protests themselves, which have taken place outside migrant hotels across the country, another participant said, 'It's where they live and they're getting loads of unknown people being skipped in. It's not racist, you're just concerned about your safety.' Another added, 'There's got to be a reset and they've got to get to grips with it. People need to feel safe in their communities.' Elsewhere, during a recent project in the north of England, a researcher started a conversation with a young man in a pub by asking what he thought were the top issues facing the public. The instant response was, 'Labour, because they're a--holes; they don't give a f--- about us; Starmer is a w-----.' Football fans have begun to chant similarly graphic insults about Starmer. At a recent England game, hundreds of fans were singing, 'Starmer is a c---.' While hardly scientific research, the fact that Starmer and politics were even on fans' minds during a national game is extraordinary. And the polls paint a dismal picture for Starmer's Labour. Public First's polling reveals a third of white working-class voters hold an unfavourable view of both the Conservatives and Labour, compared to a quarter of professional voters. More than half of this disaffected working-class group is planning to vote Reform. Asked if Sir Keir represents people like them, 45 per cent of white working-class voters say 'not at all', compared to 35 per cent of professional voters. Research suggests anger is intensifying. On YouGov's tracker, the proportion of working-class people who agree that none of the main parties represent their priorities and values has risen from 42 per cent in 2019 to 56 per cent in June 2025. Over the same period, those saying at least one party represents their priorities and values fell from 35 per cent to 24 per cent. ('Working-class' respondents fall into the C2, D and E social grades, which include manual workers, state pensioners, casual workers and the unemployed.) YouGov's general tracker on Government approval shows working-class voters disapprove rather than approve of their record by 68 per cent to 10 per cent; working-class disapproval hit 73 per cent in May 2025, which was only topped in recent times by the fallout from the Truss mini-Budget in 2022. People gave the Government some slack on most issues after last summer's election, and hostility levels fell as the new administration settled in. But on immigration and crime, among other issues, public hostility towards Labour is now nearing the peaks last seen in the final days of Rishi Sunak's Conservatives. Clueless ministers The main parties are flailing badly in response. Given how strongly the Conservatives are seen to have betrayed working-class voters, they will not begin to shift public opinion until they present specific policy plans to address their mistakes in power. Until then, all their breathless rhetoric and social media videos are a waste of time. From their earliest days in government, Labour strategists were said to view Reform as their primary medium-term opponent and Reform voters as their main targets. Yet this is hard to reconcile with their approach to almost every issue. From cutting fuel payments for older people to releasing serious criminals early, and dragging their feet on investigating grooming gangs, it is as if Labour set out to alienate working-class voters. Over time, it has become clear that Labour has no idea how to handle this growing anger. In recent weeks, Labour politicians have pointed to everything from social media to school truancy to explain working-class frustration. Immigration is mentioned only in passing, as though it sits alongside a dozen other concerns. The main parties' inability to come up with an appealing policy response reflects two key misunderstandings. First, they do not seem to grasp who makes up the bulk of angry working-class voters. Second, they refuse to accept that these voters mean what they say when asked about their policy priorities. On the first issue, there is a tendency to view angry working-class voters as very poor. After these voters helped power Vote Leave to victory in the EU referendum, politics was awash with analysis describing them as 'left behind' or 'at the bottom of the pile.' Politicians often see working-class people as helpless victims, almost like children who will change their minds once properly educated. But the working-class voters who delivered Brexit and who now plan to vote Reform are, by most measures, fairly ordinary working-class people. In my experience as a political strategist, those genuinely living in poverty tend to be completely disengaged from politics. They do not vote, rarely express political views and never turn up at protests. This is clear from the pictures of the hotel protests this summer, where most of the protesters appear to be relatively well-off, working-class people with stable lives. In reality, while these angry voters usually self-identify as 'working-class', they are more accurately a mix of working-class and lower-middle-class people, mostly from provincial England. Although the highest-profile protests against migrant hotels have taken place in Epping, in Essex, working-class anger is strongest along the coast and across the English Midlands and the North. Unsurprisingly, these are Reform's heartlands. Politicians in denial Politicians' misunderstanding of these voters' priorities is particularly odd, given the wealth of opinion research and actual election results that reveal their policy preferences. Left-leaning politicians and commentators especially tend to emphasise the broad, complex causes of white working-class anger because they find it hard to accept that so many people simply want to cut immigration drastically and reject most asylum seekers, especially those arriving in small boats. By stressing multiple, complex causes, they also avoid having to act in the short term. They can claim to be working on long-term solutions that will get to the root of the problem, rather than looking for a 'quick fix.' The reality is that white working-class anger has, on and off for 25 years, been driven by hostility to large-scale immigration. This cannot be avoided: many voters will remain angry as long as legal immigration runs into the hundreds of thousands, and many others will stay angry if they feel politicians do not have control of the borders. This is not new, although the intensity of opposition to large-scale immigration has grown alongside the scale of rising numbers. This pattern has been evident since the 1970s; Ipsos-Mori's historic polling shows that the number of British people who considered immigration an important issue broadly tracked the rise in immigration levels, which surged under Tony Blair's 'open door' approach to arrivals from the EU. Unless and until politicians stop the boats, reduce legal immigration, and reject most of those caught in the asylum system, they will make no progress in easing white working-class anger. This is not to suggest that immigration is the sole cause of white working-class frustration. It is simply to recognise that their hostility to large-scale immigration exists and cannot be explained away. Fairness and control Angry working-class people have always talked about immigration and asylum in terms of fairness and control – almost never race, religion or culture. When you look at how opposition to large-scale immigration has evolved, from concerns about pressure on public services to lower wages or welfare claims, it almost always comes back to these two core issues. In the recent wave of hostility to asylum seekers being housed in hotels, for many working-class voters it is the very idea of hotels being used. For many, hotels are a luxury they could never afford. In numerous communities, hotels are where life's biggest moments are celebrated: weddings, christenings, anniversaries and so on. The idea of people receiving long-term stays in such places for free creates a deep sense of injustice. It isn't limited to housing. Other stories about immigration have touched the same fairness nerve. In January, The Telegraph revealed that asylum seekers could receive quicker treatment in a major London hospital. While those who designed the system may see this as the decent thing to do for people with particular needs, it is hard to think of a single idea more likely to drive struggling working-class voters into Reform's camp. In Epping, and increasingly elsewhere in Britain and Ireland, there are also concerns about the safety of local communities, especially the safety of young women. There have been several high-profile reports of crimes committed by young men from abroad staying in these hotels. This links to the second major theme: control. This has always been the other main driver of hostility to government immigration and asylum policies, repeatedly raised over the past 25 years. Many feel the state is unable or unwilling to exercise proper control over Britain's borders, and, more broadly, over laws that shape immigration and multiculturalism. These are the themes Reform is tapping into so successfully. Sense of unfairness Think about Reform's recent pivot to crime and Farage's claim that the country is lawless. This could prove so fruitful for them because it speaks to a broader feeling that Britain, while barely governed, always seems to make decisions that help other people – not just recent arrivals, but also the rich, big businesses and others. This sense of unfairness has intensified dramatically since Brexit. Look at almost any policy area and the same story appears. Sometimes immigration deepens feelings of injustice, as with the NHS and housing, but the theme stands on its own. The NHS is in crisis and most people struggle to get timely GP or hospital appointments. Meanwhile, the wealthy can simply pay to skip the queue. Wages remain stagnant and people have to work harder for the same pay, yet millions are seen to exploit the welfare system. Crime and anti-social behaviour are widespread, but serious criminals get only a slap on the wrist. Working-class people face rising living costs, yet believe businesses are profiteering during tough times. Young people can't afford to live in the areas where their families have been rooted for generations, while others receive help to do so. In short, working-class voters feel the country is failing and lacks any real sense of natural justice. Farage recently faced criticism for saying he would like to explore deporting serious criminals to harsh prisons in places like El Salvador. Critics dismissed this as unrealistic and said it showed he was all talk. But, as ever, Farage was tapping into something real. At a time when anger runs so deep, driven by these emotional themes of fairness and control, working-class voters want someone who sounds like them, who is as angry as they are and speaks in the same blunt terms. Why? Because only someone like that, they believe, would ever come up with the right policies in the first place. And in any case, someone prepared to talk about sending hardened criminals abroad might at least settle for building a few new prisons here in Britain. For many, that would feel like a fair and reasonable result. Cultural concerns The Left has long assumed that white working-class anger is ultimately driven by nationalism and a desire to protect British or English 'culture'. Over the last 25 years, I can honestly say these themes have barely featured in the many focus groups and polls I have run. Even when I interviewed British National Party (BNP) voters in the late 2000s for an anti-BNP campaign, the working-class men I spoke to talked almost entirely about their wages being undercut and the strain on local services. They rarely mentioned culture at all. However, the sheer scale of recent arrivals is starting to shift this slightly. It isn't that people now talk about Britain being historically white; you certainly never hear them discuss threats to Christianity or the monarchy. Instead, you hear complaints about protests over foreign wars, where people who were not born in Britain take to the streets as though everyone shares their views. The recent protests over the Middle East are a prime example; most people simply find them baffling. You also hear frustration that ordinary displays of patriotism are treated as suspect or offensive, while everyone else is encouraged to express their own identities freely. Until now, national and cultural concerns have barely featured among most working-class voters, but they are growing quickly. This is what risks giving rise to a movement that drifts in more troubling directions. Reform is a mainstream party and will keep a lid on this sentiment for the majority, but around the edges we could see some of the extreme behaviour that Starmer claimed was widespread last year. Either way, Britain now has a fully-fledged working-class movement born of anger. In the short term, Reform will benefit most. If the mainstream parties cannot find a way to respond to at least some of this, they risk being swept aside.
The Guardian
37 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Six great reads: Keir Starmer's human rights record, Jamie Lee Curtis on cosmetic surgery and the best of Euro 25
'Why is Labour's record to date on human rights – the one thing you might expect a Starmer-led government to be rock solid on – so mixed?' asks Daniel Trilling in this comprehensive long read. Due to Keir Starmer's background as a distinguished human rights lawyer, his supporters hoped that he would restore the UK's commitment to international law. Unfortunately, he is being blocked by a powerful man who has conflated protest with terrorism and called for musicians whose views he dislikes to be dropped from festival bills. That man is also named Keir Starmer. Over the past six months, Trilling has spoken to two dozen Labour insiders, former colleagues of the prime minister and leading human rights advocates in an attempt to pin down the shapeshifting PM. Read more 'At 66, I get to be a boss,' says Jamie Lee Curtis. That is very much the vibe of this interview, in which the actor shows up 'aggressively early' to the Zoom chat, opens up about her experience with addiction, and uses – and staunchly defends – the word 'genocide' to describe the impact that cosmetic surgery has had on a generation of women. Emma Brockes speaks to Curtis before the forthcoming sequel to Freaky Friday, which sees the actor reuniting with Lindsay Lohan in the mother-daughter body-swap comedy ('I felt tremendous maternal care for Lindsay after the first movie, and continued to feel that') – but their chat ends up becoming about so much more. Read more 'The lack of integration means I'm not the only remote worker feeling adrift. What happens when the shared spaces of your so-called community are sun-drenched cafes and boutique fitness studios? What does it mean to never volunteer, or spend time with an elderly person, to rarely take public transport, or read the local news?' It's easy to romanticise the life of a digital nomad: swapping the office for a beachside cafe; living in a flat far more spacious than the ones available back home; being eternally drenched in the southern European sun. But this thoughtful piece by Alex Holder, who moved from London to Lisbon, reveals the cracks in this fantasy. 'Maybe,' she wonders, 'it's time to move and make room for someone else.' Read more He had charisma. He had good content. He also had the support of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organisation whose membership has grown from 6,000 or so upon its founding in the 80s to a sizeable 80,000 today. Zohran Mamdani's record-setting success in New York's June mayoral primary was bolstered by 60,000 volunteers knocking on 1.6m doors across the city – a vast effort, Dharna Noor writes, made possible by New York's DSA field team. In this piece, Noor tracks the rise of an organisation that is increasingly shaping American politics – and considers whether it's ready for a face-off with the Democratic establishment. Read more From the match of the tournament and the best player to the most memorable goal, Guardian sports writers nominate their picks and personal highlights from Euro 2025, and share what they'd like to see next for women's football – 'Just more of everything!' Read more They say it takes a village, and parents today are ever increasingly turning to their own parents for help with childcare. One study estimates that 9 million British grandparents spend an average of eight hours a week helping to care for their grandchildren. Ellie Violet Bramley meets members of the 'grey army' and talks to them about the joys – and lows – of taking a hands-on role in their grandchildren's lives. Read more
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
In wartime, demonstrations in Ukraine can never be more than a peaceful protest
Once a decade, Ukraine has a moment in which street protests redefine the country's political direction. The Orange revolution of 2004; the Maidan revolution of 2014; and now, over the past 10 days, the first major wave of protest since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion. A series of unexpectedly boisterous and well-attended demonstrations forced Volodymyr Zelenskyy to execute a swift U-turn on his decision to scrap the independence of two anti-corruption bodies. On Thursday, MPs reversed the contentious changes they had adopted a week previously. Outside the parliament building, crowds whooped and cheered as the result of the vote was announced. The size, scope and demands of this latest protest movement have been much more modest than those of its revolutionary predecessors, but the spectacle has been no less remarkable, given the context of full-scale war in which it has taken place. The final, celebratory gathering came only hours after the latest massive Russian airstrike had hit Kyiv, killing at least 28 people including three children. Hardly anyone had managed a good night's sleep before arriving at parliament armed with banners and high spirits. This wartime context to a large extent inspired the protests: a common sentiment that when people are laying down their lives for the country on the frontline, the government has to live up to a certain set of values. But it also limited their scope. There was none of the revolutionary enthusiasm of Maidan present here; instead, there was a sober acknowledgement that all-out political unrest would only play into Russia's hands. 'There were some people chanting for impeachment and the vast majority of others said, 'Shut up, we do not undermine the legitimacy of the president, what happened is that the legitimate president made a mistake,'' said Inna Sovsun, an MP from the opposition Holos party who attended several protests. Dmytro Koziatynskyi, whose post on social media provided the initial spark for the protest, dismissed any comparisons to Maidan for exactly this reason. 'Even if they don't pass the law, this will never become anything other than a peaceful protest,' he said, in an interview before the parliamentary vote. Koziatynskyi was a masters student in the Czech Republic before returning to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion in 2022 and signing up to become a combat medic. After three years on various parts of the frontline, he left the army in May and now works for an NGO. When he saw the news last week that parliament had rushed through a law curtailing the independence of two bodies specially designed to go after high-level corruption, he found it 'insulting', he said. 'People are not fighting so that our government can do some crazy stuff, that destroys all our achievements since 2014,' he said. He penned an angry post on social media calling on people to protest against the new law. He expected 'maximum 100 people, mostly friends and acquaintances' to join the protest. By the second night there were about 10,000 people outside the Ivan Franko theatre, the nearest point to the presidential office that is accessible to the public. Most of those who came out were young – this has been a protest wave dominated by gen Z, with friends competing for the wittiest slogan or meme reference on their handwritten placards. On Wednesday evening, a man leading the singing of the Ukrainian national anthem through a loudspeaker was holding a sign that bore a single word: 'Cringe'. Suddenly, the fate of two relatively small institutions – the national anti-corruption bureau, known as Nabu, and the specialised anti-corruption prosecutor's office, Sapo – had become the issue of the day among Ukrainian teenagers. Nabu and Sapo were established after the Maidan revolution as part of a drive against the long-running scourge of corruption in Ukraine, financed partly with US money. Some western observers agree that there are problems with Nabu and Sapo: too many cases opened and not enough of them brought to a conclusion, for one. In theory, some streamlining would make sense; in practice, Zelenskyy's move looked a lot like bringing independent investigators under political control. With the Trump administration no longer pushing an anti-corruption agenda, and Europe on summer holidays, Zelenskyy's team appears to have felt they could push the bill through quickly, without anyone paying much attention. That might have been the case were it not for the protests. But the images of thousands of young people demanding the law's repeal forced European politicians to take a stand, and several leaders spoke privately to Zelenskyy to tell him he needed to find a way out of the self-inflicted mess. Sign up to Headlines Europe A digest of the morning's main headlines from the Europe edition emailed direct to you every week day after newsletter promotion 'This became a major breach of trust. It's problematic both from an EU accession point of view and in that it makes it much harder for friends of Ukraine to continue making the case that the country needs support,' said one diplomatic source in Kyiv. Zelenskyy's response was swift and decisive, even if somewhat embarrassing for the MPs of his Servant of the People party, who were instructed to vote against the very thing they had been ordered to vote for the previous week. Now that the status quo has been re-established, there are two very different readings of the whole episode. One sees a leader using wartime powers to try to stifle independent institutions, too out of touch to predict the obvious backlash. Another reflects on how, even in wartime, Ukrainian society is still capable of expressing democratic sentiment, and its leaders still able to react swiftly to it. Koziatynskyi, whose post started off the protest wave, leans towards the second view. 'The protests showed that Ukrainian democracy is as strong as possible in times of a full-scale war, and our society is mature enough to have a dialogue with the government, and the government is able to listen,' he said. Zelenskyy's five-year presidential term should have ended last year, but almost all Ukrainians, including his fiercest opponents, agree that elections are both legally and technically impossible during wartime. With Russia's nightly attacks continuing, and a hope that Donald Trump might finally start getting tougher on Russia, that consensus has not changed. Nobody wants upheaval, but the outburst of protest may yet change the political atmosphere. 'Legally, everything will go back to how it was; politically, it's more complicated,' said Sovsun. 'It's unpredictable what this might have done to Ukrainian society. We have basically lifted the unspoken rule that we don't protest during martial law.'
