Latest news with #Brexity
New Statesman
28-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Nigel Farage's booze offensive
Photo byChampagne breakfast with Nigel Farage, four bottles of fizz delivered to the stand, chauffeur service so the permanently inebriated don't drive and a porter on tap are merely a few reasons why a corporate £250,000 'accelerator package' at Reform UK's weekend national conference in Birmingham this September is one of the most, ahem, unusual to be offered by a political party aspiring to power. Which, if any, companies and organisations buy access to the leader and book exhibition space will be a pointer to where the wind is blowing. Whether any executives recall who they met after unlimited complimentary drinks in a platinum bar is another matter. Not exactly short of advice, Keir Starmer's right ear is to hear more. Labour's fledgling red wall group of MPs is to launch as a formal Brexity, migration-hostile faction at the party's conference. Head insurgent Jo White revealed details on Politics Inside Out, a new podcast by Gloria De Piero and Jonathan Ashworth. The Bassetlaw MP's most startling disclosure was that her mother was a communist which means so too was the mother-in-law of White's hubby, hammer of the left Lord John Mann. Harry Pollitt would be wondering where it all went wrong. Herculean seed sower Boris Johnson's one-man campaign to reverse Britain's declining birth rate may exacerbate big daddy's strained family relations. Baby number four with third wife Carrie, his ninth in all (that we know about), arrived shortly before a daughter with second wife Marina marries this weekend. Invitations and the seating plan would be a challenge for the diplomatic corps. After guest editing last week's New Statesman, Gordon Brown made his successor as Labour Prime Minister appear a little smaller by delivering a 60-minute mesmerising John Smith memorial lecture without notes. The son of a preacher man reeled off stats, cracked jokes and recited poetry. Hair-shirt Broon expressed contempt for fees charged by Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon. His quip that Liz Truss should pay to be heard, prompted a Tory to scoff so should one-gear Keir. The current PM is monotone even talking of subjects he loves like Arsenal. Twice-divorced Nigel Farage returning early after the bank holiday to float tax breaks for married couples triggered ridicule after he'd been caught playing hooky, missing Starmer's European deal to sneak away on holiday before the parliamentary recess started. One Labourite wondered aloud whether a self-styled man of the people, registering nudging £1m from outside interests on top of his £93,904 MP salary, booked ahead to beat school holiday surge prices. With 10 'second' jobs Farage could afford any £80 fine for unauthorised absence. Kevin Maguire is associate editor(politics) of the Daily Mirror [See also: The economic fantasies of Reform UK] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Yahoo
How Britain's police went from being the most revered to most despised
By his own admission, Danny Theobald is no saint. As a young man, he spent time behind bars for robbery and cultivating cannabis. Then he became a father and turned his life around. He has spent the last 13 years building a successful business and doing his very best to be a good role model. In his spare time, he volunteers as a football coach for local children and works with the disabled. A year or so ago, he had dramatic interaction with the police. Video footage shows up to 12 police officers and multiple police cars outside his Surrey home. What on earth was going on? Had he reverted to his bad old ways? Apparently not. In what is becoming an alarming new trend, the heavy-handed police response was prompted by nothing more than a complaint of 'malicious communications' following a minor argument with a local councillor. No further action was ultimately taken, after the complaint was withdrawn. What an absurd waste of everyone's time! How is it that the police, who spend so much time whining about lack of resources, are able to find the means to go all-out in their pursuit of cases such as this? While the overwhelming majority of real crimes go unsolved (less than six per cent of reported offences result in charges), forces across the country appear to have no shortage of time and energy to investigate obviously inconsequential complaints, rushing to arrest decent citizens for choosing the wrong words on social media or causing fleeting offence. The weight and speed of the response of some forces to the flimsiest allegations of hate crime or 'harassment' is breathtaking and raises serious questions over the judgement of commanding officers. Already, public trust in policing is hanging by a thread, following umpteen high-profile failures and scandals. As examples of outrageously heavy-handed responses to matters that should be of no concern to law enforcement continue to emerge, something terrible is happening. Once admired all over the world for their high standards and professionalism, our police are falling into disrepute. In some cases, wildly disproportionate responses to petty or vexatious complaints appear to arise from simple stupidity. Take the appalling treatment of the retired volunteer police officer who was detained over a social media post about anti-Semitism in Britain. Blundering officers appear to have misread Julian Foulkes' innocent warning about the growing threat to Jews as an indication that he is anti-Semitic himself. Cue an appalling invasion of his privacy, as his house was turned upside down in search of non-existent evidence of non-existent offences. As officers rifled through his books, they were captured on camera commenting on the discovery of 'very Brexity things,' – namely, innocuous 'small c' conservative literature, such as copies of the Spectator magazine and works by Telegraph contributor Douglas Murray. How crashingly ignorant and foolish these officers and their bosses now look. In other cases, police forces are allowing themselves to be exploited by individuals and organisations with obvious political agendas. Witness the ridiculous incident in a town square during the recent local election campaigns, in which police could be heard warning a man that telling someone to 'speak English' could be perceived as a 'hate crime.' Why on earth did officers waste any time engaging in what they could surely see was nothing more than a silly verbal spat between rival party activists? Such cases – along with many others, including the now notorious police pursuit of Telegraph writer Allison Pearson – cry out for officers to exercise sensible discretion, as they are absolutely entitled to do. Unless there has been a blatant crime, they cannot be forced by their superiors to make arrests. In the case of Mr Foulkes, the constables who took it upon themselves to treat him like a terror suspect could just as easily have sat down to talk to him over a coffee; swiftly established the facts, and – in police speak – 'non crimed the allegation.' That was all that was required, if they truly had no choice but to follow orders to knock on his door. Which brings us to the murky matter of quotas. This little secret may explain quite a lot. According to well-informed police sources, senior figures in some forces set informal targets for arrests, pressurising junior officers to 'book' a minimum number of people every week or month. The idea is to ensure everyone looks busy. How much easier it must be, to haul in some quiet middle class retiree, than challenge a Pakistani rape gang suspect or drugs kingpin! The downside is ending up looking completely ridiculous – and rapidly losing what little remains of our respect. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
It's no longer hyperbolic to ask if Britain is still a free country
'Very Brexity.' These were the words police officers breathlessly uttered as they rifled through Julian Foulkes' book collection, looking for evidence of thoughtcrime. The bodycam footage from the 2023 arrest of Foulkes – a retired special constable from Kent, who was cautioned for sending 'malicious communications' – sent a chill down my spine, as I'm sure it did for many Telegraph readers. If not liking the European Union is enough to raise the eyebrows of England's poundshop Stasi, then I guess I'll see you all in the gulag. Foulkes' horrendous treatment was as absurd as it was illiberal. The offending tweet that led six police officers to his door was actually condemning anti-Semitism. He accused London's 'pro-Palestine' hate-marchers of being 'one step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals' – a reference to a recent anti-Semitic riot at an airport in Dagestan. The subtlety was apparently lost on Kent's finest, who cuffed Foulkes, held him for eight hours and began ransacking his house as if he were a drug kingpin. Last week, Kent Police apologised and wiped the caution from Foulkes' record. But to chalk this up as some kind of hapless error risks normalising this new breed of authoritarianism – even more so than it already has been. Being slammed in a cell for hate speech is really not nothing. Foulkes feared he'd never be able to visit his daughter abroad again. He feared his neighbours would think he was a paedophile, as cops hauled out laptops in evidence bags. No free nation can allow this state-led harassment of innocent people, merely for expressing their opinions on the internet, to become routine. But it has. A recent Times investigation found that at least 30 people a day are being arrested for saying 'grossly offensive' things on the internet. According to Greg Lukianoff – president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in the US – this means that Dear Old Blighty is already, easily, arresting more people for speech crimes today than America did during the first Red Scare. It's no longer hyperbolic to ask if Britain in 2025 still qualifies as a free country. Were we just going after genuine hate-speakers, that would be bad enough. No one should be arrested for an opinion, no matter how odious. But it's obviously gone far beyond that now. As two parents from Borehamwood found out recently, even criticising your daughter's school too vigorously can lead to a knock at the door. YouTube comics have been convicted for off-colour jokes. Lying social-media attention-seekers have been convicted for being lying social-media attention-seekers. This really isn't normal. Or at least, it shouldn't be. The establishment appears to have imbibed the paternalistic notion that censorship begets harmony. That involving the police in even the most minor social-media squabbles is essential, lest widespread unrest ensue. This oozes contempt for the public, of all backgrounds – as if white Brits are only ever a few spicy tweets away from a pogrom and minorities would rather be protected from offence than violence and burglary. Well, the treatment of Foulkes and many more reveals that censorship only begets more censorship. Our decades-long experiment in policing 'hate' has ended up with pensioners being handcuffed for criticising anti-Semites. Yet more proof that we cannot trust the state to decide what is right, good and true – and that speech codes, however tightly drawn, can balloon to include totally innocent, even righteous, speech. So it's time for a people's revolt against our supposed betters – against a distant establishment that thinks it has the right to dictate what we can say, think and do. Very Brexity, I know. But they surely can't arrest all of us. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Daily Mirror
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
'The immigration speech Keir Starmer would have made, if he told you the truth'
Today we publish a White Paper on immigration. It's not a law and it's not about immigration, but I want you to think of it as a crackdown. It might even be a crackdown, if the White Paper ever becomes a Bill, and the Bill ever becomes law, and it comes into force at some point before we all die of rage. Let's pretend that's what is happening. It is a strategy absolutely central to my plan for change, which is to do nothing you could really complain about too loudly. I saw what that did to Boris, and Liz, and Rishi, and by God you'll never catch me out doing something so dangerous as changing things. I'm going to change all that. The first thing I'm going to change is the truth. I'm going to start using three-word slogans like "take back control" and "smash the gangs" and before you know it, it's like we never changed governments at all. There. Doesn't that feel better. The Tories weren't Tory enough. Frankly, they weren't Brexity enough. That's why I'm going to be tougher than they were on immigration, axing the care visa, tightening up the need for English comprehension, doubling the length of time it takes to be British. Immigration, immigration, immigration. Tough, tough, tough. Immigration. Tough. Crackdown. Is this thing on, Morgan? People who think they know about politics will say this is all about the local election results and the surge in support for Reform. But this is what I truly believe. Today, at least. How I ended up in the Labour Party is a mystery to me too, but here we are. With the Tory vote collapsing across the Shires, clearly the wisest strategy is to be a bit more Tory. So I will tell you the nation is being torn apart and you're right to be worried about immigrants taking your jobs and don't worry I'll smash them for you, and I absolutely won't tell you the truth. Perhaps I should? I don't know. Someone tell me what to do. I could be really honest with you, and say that the reason you've no jobs is the technological revolution which no government has had the wit to keep up with. I could say that you have higher prices and a stagnant economy because you have been consistently failed by those in power. Politicians have to buy their way into government with airtime and social media ads and nice suits from friends, so we climb into bed with all sorts of wrong'uns. And not always for pleasure. Then when we get in, we're often beholden to them and even if we're not, they have our phone number and our dinner invitations and our ear. The real cause of immigration is stuff we can't do a damned thing about. We'd like to fix climate change, but it's expensive and if we try the billionaires shout at us. We'd like to tax tech companies, but it's complicated and if we try the billionaires set the troll farms onto us. We'd like to sell arms for wars in far-off places while importing some conflict minerals for a battery industry we don't have, but it has a worrying tendency to drive refugees our way and then the billionaires.... you get the picture. And who are the most stateless people in the world? Who has the most rapacious thirst for rare metals, and slave labour, and computer servers to store every dime and every post and every pointless picture of your tea? Who drives down the wages and cuts the jobs and automates production because robots are cheaper, who dodges their tax, who ignores borders, who demands government subsidies while giving next to nothing back? Here's a clue. If they arrive on a boat, it's not a small one. It's a massive motherf***er with a helipad and its own submarine. The billionaires do more than any other individual to cause climate change, to foment wars, to boost or crash economies. Thousands of people rely on Tesla, for example, for jobs worldwide, and their mortgages are all at risk because of one rich incel's bid to make himself the most unpopular person on Earth and tank the share price. A man who, in normal circumstances, should be fixing photocopiers has splurged eye-watering sums first to get divorced and second to send his improbably-breasted girlfriend on a near-Earth orbit hen night. There are plans to overrun the planet with a clone army of extremely idiotic clever people, because some dips*** thinks that would help. These refugees from normality are the only people to whom border controls do not apply. But I'm not going to say a single word of that publicly, in case Elon sends a tweet or Vicky's Amazon parcel gets dropped en route. No Prime Minister has ever been brave enough to say that Britain's problems have been caused by the people who run it, and own it, and boss you about. I mean we'll blame the last Prime Minister, and warn you against the next one, but that's as close as we get. Whatever we try to change gets stopped and that's why it's easier to do what I'm doing, and change nothing much at all. So I've announced a crackdown, but I won't begin it for, ooh, a couple of years. I've said it's tearing us all apart, but the evidence shows we're actually chewing our own leg off. I've said it's not about Nigel but it is, and I'll tell you it's what I believe even though I don't. When people voted in a Labour government, they voted for change. Not functioning and affordable public services, not solar panels on every house, not taxing billionaires and being more reasonable to each other in general. No, they wanted to change the Labour Party from a bottom-up organisation of people who wanted to make the world a better place into a top-down autocracy that punishes dissent like a mullah with a migraine. They wanted me to ignore the Post Office, the armed forces, Hillsborough Law, and nuclear veterans. So I have. If I carry on like this for another four years I'll be able to hand the keys of Downing Street over to my friend Nicotine Nigel, who wants to reverse all the changes since 1952 and make Britain racist again. Being honest would make us an island of strangeness in an ocean of lunacy, so let's stick with performative press conferences, appeasing lunatic billionaires, and blaming the wrong migrants for the things they didn't do.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
I am reading Douglas Murray. Should I expect the police to come knocking?
I have a confession to make, and I do hope Police Scotland are taking notes. I am currently reading Douglas Murray's new book: On Democracies and Death Cults. There, I've said it. My God, it feels good to get that out there after so many days of trying to hide it! It feels like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. So all I have to do now is await the knock at the door. Will they send two police officers or more than that? What will the neighbours think as I'm cuffed and put in the back of the police car, its blue lights illuminating the neighbourhood, almost as a warning to others not to go down the same dark path down which I've trod? It's the same path taken by retired special constable in the Kent constabulary, Julian Foulkes, who was arrested in 2023 for a tweet (what else?). Such an arrest, in a country where young people are detained for speculating about the sexuality of police horses, would not in itself be headline news. Who hasn't been arrested and detained for a tweet? What made Mr Foulkes's experience even more bizarre was the search of his home by six police officers (obviously the physical threat this 71-year-old posed to others was thought to be considerable) during which one officer, rifling through his book case, was heard to mutter in astonishment that Mr Foulkes's reading material was 'a bit Brexity'. The other surprising thing about this incident is that Mr Foulkes has now received a personal apology from Kent's chief constable. A British police force accepting it made a mistake? We live in strange times indeed. So it occurs to me that, once in the dock and formally charged with possessing, reading – and I might as well admit this now and get it over with – enjoying Murray's latest work, I might have to ask for other offences to be taken into account. There's a scene in the classic Hollywood comedy, Robin and the Seven Hoods, a Rat Pack vehicle full of memorable tunes and funny one-liners, where a sleazy speakeasy is instantly transformed into a gospel hall whenever the police arrive to raid it: bottles of wine and whisky are replaced by Bibles and prayer books, the patrons' tables and chairs become pews, and the strippers and burlesque dancers are replaced on stage by a pulpit, complete with Bing Crosby delivering a sermon on the evils of 'Mr Booze'. In our new, puritanical times, I have started to yearn for a similar device that will instantly transform my own home library. With a pull of a single lever, my copy of Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life would be whisked away, to be replaced by Greta Thunberg's The Climate Book, while my library of the very un-PC Flashman books by George Macdonald Fraser could be instantaneously placed on a chute leading to the recycling bin outside while their vacant space on my shelves could be filled instead by the collected works of Oprah Winfrey. May the court have mercy on my soul if its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer (who is bound to be a trans ally) discovered either of my copies (hardback and paperback) of The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht or the autobiography of gender-critical comedy writer Graham Linehan. Better surely to at least wrap them in the dust jackets of a George Monbiot book or, in extremis, an Owen Jones one. And should I voluntarily divulge my greatest crime – leading the Scottish Vote Leave campaign back in 2016? You can't get more 'Brexity' than that. True, some of my Labour Party friends still haven't forgiven me for that act of political apostasy, but even they would draw the line at a prison sentence. Most of them, anyway. If Mr Foulkes was handcuffed and interrogated for hours at his local nick for the 'crime' of publishing a tweet with the word 'Jews' in it, then what treatment can I expect from Police Scotland, now operating under Humza Yousaf's infamous hate speech law? Claims of restrictions on free speech, not least by America's vice-president, JD Vance (I've got his book too!) are often overblown. But for six police officers to conduct a search of someone's home, to comment disparagingly about a citizen's taste in literature and to describe it pejoratively as 'a bit Brexity' – Brexit, let's remember, having been the choice of a majority of those officers' fellow citizens nine years ago – only serves to give ammunition to those who compare the UK in 2025 to Orwell's dystopia of 1984. Maybe it was plain stupidity on the part of the officers and their chief constable, in which case, why do they still have jobs? That is doubly so if their motivation was political spite. If even police officers haven't got a clue about the law, shouldn't we all be scared? Anyway, I've prepared my defence and informed my wife of the visiting hours at the local prison. I just hope my cell has Wi-Fi otherwise this column will be a bit sporadic in the months ahead. And now I've just realised that I also have Charles Moore's three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher. Signed by the author! They're going to throw away the key, aren't they? Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
