Tag: united kingdom

Amelia Victorious: How to Lose the Culture War With a Video Game

There’s something genuinely funny going on in the United Kingdom right now.

The British government’s Prevent office, housed under the Home Office (think Department of the Interior, but allergic to dissent), partnered with a media nonprofit called Shout Out UK (like a PBS focused on preventing “radicalism”) to come up with a clever new way to re-educate British youth.

The concern, as always, was “radicalization.” They thought the solution was inspired: a choice-based video game. Kids like games. Games involve decisions. Decisions shape values. What could possibly go wrong?

Thus Pathways was born, a government-funded interactive morality play designed to gently shepherd British children toward being properly antiracist, properly accepting, and properly enthusiastic about the ever-increasing number of migrants reshaping their country. Civics class, but fun. And digital. And corrective.

As part of this effort, the designers introduced a character named Amelia, a cute, purple-haired, vaguely goth girl who carries a Union Jack and talks about Britain being for the British. She was meant to function as a warning, a living illustration of how nationalism can look attractive, even charming, and yet be dangerous to the impressionable youths of Britain who may not have fully internalized the idea that Brexit is bad and they are to obey their elitist overlords.

What they did not anticipate was that the public would take one look at adorable, charming Amelia and decide she was the good guy.

What Prevent Was Supposed to Be

To understand how Pathways ended up here, you have to rewind to what Prevent was originally meant to do. The program emerged from the post-9/11 security logic that shaped Western counter-terror policy across the board. The target was not opinions or aesthetics. It was violence, and specifically Islamist terrorism and the recruitment pipelines that fed it. “Radicalization” meant movement toward planning or committing acts of terror.

The rationale was simple and, frankly, understandable. Governments have a duty to stop people from blowing up buses and concert halls. Identifying grooming networks, interrupting recruitment, and diverting individuals away from violent ideologies was the job. That’s why Prevent sat under the Home Office in the first place. Bombs and bodies are not abstract problems.

Over time, however, the definition of “radicalization” began to stretch. Then it stretched again. Eventually it stopped describing a trajectory toward violence at all and started describing a trajectory away from approved social and political consensus. The concern shifted from what someone might do to what someone might think, or worse, what they might feel attached to.

This is where Prevent quietly stopped being about prevention and started becoming about management, and specifically the management of populations rather than threats. Cultural signals like flags, language, and other symbols of national belonging were reclassified as early warning indicators. Discomfort with mass migration was treated less as a political opinion than as a diagnostic symptom. Belonging itself became something to be solved.

Once the mission changed, the tools followed.

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Britain To Roll Out Facial Recognition in Police Overhaul

Britain’s policing system, we are told, is broken. And on Monday, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced that the fix would arrive in the form of algorithms, facial recognition vans, and a large check made out to the future.

The government plans to spend £140m ($191M) on artificial intelligence and related technology, with the promise that it will free up six million police hours a year, the equivalent of 3,000 officers.

It is being billed as the biggest overhaul of policing in England and Wales in 200 years, aimed at dragging a creaking system into the modern world.

The ambition is serious. The implications are too.

The plan is for AI software that will analyze CCTV, doorbell, and mobile phone footage, detect deepfakes, carry out digital forensics, and handle administrative tasks such as form filling, redaction, and transcription. Mahmood’s argument is that criminals are getting smarter, while parts of the police service are stuck with tools that belong to another era.

She put it plainly: “Criminals are operating in increasingly sophisticated ways. However, some police forces are still fighting crime with analogue methods.”

And she promised results: “We will roll out state-of-the-art tech to get more officers on the streets and put rapists and murderers behind bars.”

There is logic here. Few people would argue that trained officers should be buried in paperwork. Technology can help with that. The concern is what else comes with it.

Live facial recognition is being expanded aggressively. The number of police vans equipped with the technology will increase fivefold, from ten to fifty, operating across the country. These systems scan faces in public spaces and compare them to watch lists of wanted individuals.

This is a form of mass surveillance and when automated systems get things wrong, the consequences fall on real people.

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Nine Bureaucracies Walk Into Your Browser and Ask for ID

By the time you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance that somewhere, quietly and with a great deal of bureaucratic back-patting, someone is trying to figure out exactly how old you are. And not because they’re planning a surprise party.

Not because you asked them to. But because the nine horsemen of the regulatory apocalypse have decided that the future of a “safe” internet depends on everyone flashing their ID like they’re trying to get into an especially dull nightclub.

This is the nightmare of “age assurance,” a term so bloodlessly corporate you can practically hear it sighing into its own PowerPoint.

This is a sprawling, gelatinous lump of biometric estimation, document scans, and AI-ified guesswork, stitched together into one big global initiative under the cheery-sounding Global Online Safety Regulators Network, or GOSRN. Catchy.

Formed in 2022, presumably after someone at Ofcom had an especially boring lunch break, GOSRN now boasts nine national regulators, including the UK, France, Australia, and that well-known digital superpower, Fiji, who have come together to harmonize policies on how to tell whether someone is too young to look at TikTok for adults.

The group is currently chaired by Ireland’s Coimisiún na Meán.

This month, this merry band of regulators released a “Position Statement on Age Assurance and Online Safety Regulation.”

We obtained a copy of the document for you here.

Inside this gem of a document is a plan to push shared age-verification principles across borders, including support for biometric analysis, official ID checks, and the general dismantling of anonymity for the greater good of child protection.

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Fury as NHS tells midwives to back cousin marriage as ‘only’ 15 per cent have deformed babies

The NHS is teaching midwives the ‘benefits’ of cousin marriage despite it increasing the risk of birth defects, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

New guidance says concerns about the risks of congenital diseases are ‘exaggerated’ and ‘unwarranted’ on the grounds that ’85 to 90 per cent of cousin couples do not have affected children’. The national average rate for unaffected children is 98 per cent.

Admitting there are some ‘risks to child health associated with close relative marriage’, the guidance says these should ‘be balanced against the potential benefits… from this marriage practice’.

And marrying a relative – fairly common in the Pakistani community – can offer ‘economic benefits’ as well as ’emotional and social connections’ and ‘social capital’, the document says.

It adds that staff should not ‘stigmatise’ predominantly South Asian or Muslim patients who have a baby with their cousin, because the practice is ‘perfectly normal’ in some cultures.

Critics have accused the NHS of turning a blind eye to an ‘indefensible cultural practice’. 

Richard Holden, a Tory MP campaigning to ban cousin marriage, said: ‘There are no benefits to marriage between first cousins, only massive downsides for health, welfare, individual rights and the cohesiveness of our society.’

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Government-Controlled Digital ID is Not the Optional Convenience It Is Being Sold As

The UK government has pledged to introduce a digital ID system for all UK citizens and legal residents by the end of the current Parliament (so no later than 2029). The integration of digital ID into government services, though already under way, has hitherto been largely voluntary. However, it is becoming steadily less optional, as the government has said it will now be required as a precondition for work in the UK, and a version of it (GOV.UK One Login) is already being imposed unilaterally upon company directors throughout the UK.

Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones has suggested in a recent interview (19/11) that digital ID is completely optional and will simply make government services more accessible and convenient. But this is a rather disingenuous sales pitch. On the one hand, Starmer himself insists that digital ID will be required as a precondition to work legally in the UK; on the other hand, like any new technology, there will be a transition period, but voluntariness is unlikely to last forever. 

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Police launch new cold case probe into one of UK’s longest running unsolved murders – and hope AI will help finally track down killer of nightclubber Melanie Hall, 25, whose body was only found 13 years later

The mystery behind who killed nightclubber Melanie Hall could finally be solved with the help of AI, as police launch a new review of the cold case 30 years on. 

Melanie, a 25-year-old clerical worker, was last seen sitting on a stool at the edge of the dancefloor speaking with an unidentified man at Cadillacs nightclub in Bath, on June 9, 1996, at about 1.10am. It was the same night England played Switzerland in the opening match of Euro 96. 

Her remains were not found until October 5, 2009, when a workman discovered them 28 miles north from the city, next to a slip road on the M5 near Thornbury, Gloucestershire.

She had suffered a fractured skull, and reportedly had a broken jaw and cheek bone, indicating she had been subjected to a vicious assault. Her body was naked and had been tightly bound in bin bags, secured by thick blue nylon rope.

Three decades on, Melanie’s killer remains on the loose. 

Detectives at Avon and Somerset Police announced this week that have launched Operation Denmark, a fresh investigation into the unsolved murder. They remain hopeful Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology could help provide answers for the young woman’s devastated family.

The contents of 90 crates of evidence are currently being digitised, while police have suggested AI could be deployed to analyse the cold case.

Police previously identified around 100 ‘persons of interest’, which has now been pared down to less than 20, while alibis are being re-examined. 

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Uncovered: Secret room beneath Chinese embassy that poses threat to City

China is to build a hidden chamber alongside Britain’s most sensitive communication cables as part of a network of 208 secret rooms beneath its new London “super-embassy”, The Telegraph can reveal.

This newspaper has uncovered detailed plans for an underground complex below the vast diplomatic site in central London, which Beijing has sought to keep from public scrutiny.

Despite the apparent security risk, Sir Keir Starmer is expected to approve the embassy before a visit to China later this month, when he is due to meet Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.

The plans, which are redacted in all publicly available versions, can only be revealed because The Telegraph has uncovered the unredacted documents.

The drawings show that a single concealed chamber will sit directly alongside fibre-optic cables transmitting financial data to the City of London, as well as email and messaging traffic for millions of internet users.

The same hidden room is fitted with hot-air extraction systems, possibly suggesting the installation of heat-generating equipment such as advanced computers used for espionage. The plans also show that China intends to demolish and rebuild the outer basement wall of the chamber, directly beside the fibre-optic cables.

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Bank of England must plan for financial crisis sparked by aliens

The Bank of England must plan for a financial crisis being triggered by an official announcement confirming the existence of alien life, one of its former policy experts has claimed.

Helen McCaw served as a senior analyst in financial security at the UK’s central bank, preparing for events that could impact the economy.

She has now written to Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s governor, urging him to organise contingencies for the possibility that the White House may one day confirm we are not alone in the universe.

McCaw, a Cambridge graduate, believes a declaration of that magnitude would send shockwaves through the markets and could trigger bank collapses and civil unrest.

Until recently, suggestions that governments were covering up the existence of alien life were limited to a small coterie of conspiracy theorists and UFO activists.

However, a host of senior American officials, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, have recently indicated their belief in the possibility of intelligent non-human life.

Rubio, a close ally of President Trump, told the makers of the recently released UFO documentary The Age of Disclosure: “We’ve had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it’s not ours.”

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UK Asylum Seekers to Be Given Taxpayer-Funded Personal Therapists: Report

The British government will reportedly provide taxpayer-funded therapists for alleged asylum seekers who entered the country illegally.

The Home Office has commandeered the Cameron Barracks in Inverness, Scotland, to accommodate around 300 male asylum seekers as it seeks to transition away from the practice of block-booking hotels throughout the country to house illegals.

However, the Cameron Barracks plans have also sparked controversy after The Telegraph reported this week that the illegals set to be housed at the site will have their own dedicated therapists provided to them at taxpayer expense.

Highland councillors were told this week that having therapists provided at the site would mean that the illegals would not have to access local NHS services.

“Primary health care will be available on-site, including mental health support. Funding for these services will be provided by the Home Office to minimise impact on local GP surgeries and NHS resources,” they were told.

However, some have noted that this would effectively mean that illegal migrants would be given preferential treatment, given that people in the area often wait around five months before being able to see an NHS therapist.

Thomas Kerr, a spokesman for Reform UK, said: “The Cameron Barracks is simply the wrong location for a facility like this. Local people are rightly angry and demanding their voices be heard.

“To now learn that taxpayers will also be paying for mental health support for people who have come to this country illegally is a massive slap in the face.”

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The Great Grok Bikini Scandal is just Digital ID via the Backdoor.

wo days ago, the British government announced a U-turn on their proposed digital identity, and that the much-anticipated “BritCard” would no longer be mandatory to work in the UK.

This was welcomed as a victory by both fake anti-establishment types whose job is to Pied Piper genuine opposition, and some real resistance who should know better.

The reality is that reports of the death of digital identity have been greatly exaggerated. All they said was that it would no longer be mandatory.

Having a bank account, a cellphone, or an internet connection is not mandatory, but try functioning in this world without them.

As we said on X, anybody who understands governments or human nature knew any digital ID was likely never going to be gun-to-your-head, risking-prison-time mandatory.

All it has to be is a little bit faster and/or a little bit cheaper.

Saving you half an hour when submitting your tax return, faster progress through customs, lower “processing fees” for passport or driver’s license applications.

An hour of extra time and 50 pounds saved per year will do more coercion than barbed wire and billy clubs ever could.

Running alongside this is the manufactured drama around Grok’s generation of images of bikini-clad public figures, something which it suited the press and punditry class to work up into “sexual assault” and “pornography” whilst imploring us all to “think of the children!”

Inside a week, X has changed its policy, and Sir Keir Starmer’s government has promised a swift resolution of the issue using legislation that was (conveniently) passed last year but has yet to be enforced (more on that in the next few days).

This issue became a “problem”, had an hysterical “reaction” and was supplied a ready-made “solution” all inside two weeks. A swifter procession of the Hegelian dialectic would be hard to find.

So, we have the reported demise of mandatory digital identity occurring alongside the rise of the “threat” of AI “deepfakes”.

Nobody in the mainstream press has actually linked these stories together, but the connection is as obvious as the next step is inevitable.

This next step is the UK introducing its own version of the Australian “social media ban” for under-16s. In effect, age-gating all online interaction on major platforms and ending online anonymity.

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