Tag: united kingdom

Goodbye Jury Trials, Hello Digital ID: 10 “recommendations” from the Crime and Justice Commission

The Times Crime and Justice Commission was established last year, with its mission statement being to…

consider the future of policing and the criminal justice system, in the light of the knife crime crisis, a shoplifting epidemic, the growing threat of cybercrime, concerns about the culture of the police, court backlogs, problems with legal aid and overflowing prisons.

And today is that long-promised glorious golden day where they reveal their findings. The white smoke has gone up and we get to witness the result of their long hours of toil.

How are we going to fix everything?

Let’s take a look at the complete list, with some helpful annotations:

1. Introduce a universal digital ID system to drive down fraud, tackle illegal immigration and reduce identity theft;

Digital ID for everybody! It’s going to solve every problem! We’ve talked this to death, it was always going to be in here.

2. Target persistent offenders and crime hotspots using data to clamp down on shoplifting, robbery and antisocial behaviour;

That’s about surveillance. “Data” means your private data which they will get from social media companies.

3. Roll out live facial recognition and other artificial intelligence tools to drive the efficiency and effectiveness of the police;

Again, FRT was always going to feature. I’m not sure what “other artificial intelligence tools” means, but the vagueness is likely the point. “Efficiency” is the word doing the heavy-lifting in that sentence, intended to capture the pro-MAGA, pro-Musk UK crowd.

4. Create a licence to practise for the police, with revalidation every five years to improve culture and enhance professionalism;

That’s just throwing something out for the “other side”. So far it’s all just more powers for the police and courts, this adds some faux accountability framework into the mix to make it look fair.

5. Set up victim care hubs backed by a unified digital case file to create a seamless source of information and advice;

Same as above, with some extra seasoning for the digital identity sales pitch thrown in.

6. Introduce a new intermediate court with a judge and two magistrates to speed up justice and reduce court delays;

This is about replacing trial by jury, and that’s all it’s about. It’s something they’ve been wanting to do for years and keep making excuses to try.

7. Move to a “common sense” approach to sentencing with greater transparency about jail time, incentives for rehabilitation and expanded use of house arrest;

Not sure what this means in real terms, but any use “common sense” in this kind of document should always raise an eyebrow. As should the idea of “expanded use of house arrest”.

8. Give more autonomy and accountability to prison governors with a greater focus on rehabilitation and create a College of Prison and Probation Officers;

No idea what this means yet. Could be about more prison-based work programs (a la private prisons in the US), could just be fluff between important parts.

9. Restrict social media for under-16s to protect children from criminals and extreme violent or sexual content;

Again, very predictable. And, again, very dishonest. As we’ve said a thousand times, “restricting social media to under-16s” – in practical terms – means everyone on social media has to verify their age. So bye-bye online anonymity.

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Democrats Would Like To Suppress Free Speech The Way Britain Does

It’s easy to look at a collapsing civil society in a foreign country and comfort ourselves that, despite all our problems, we’re not as bad off as those people. Americans are especially apt to do this with our cousins in Great Britain, whose country is now in a state of precipitous and probably irreversible decline, and whose political leadership is openly hostile to the native population.

But it’s a mistake to comfort ourselves this way, partly because the corruption of a place like Britain — the online censorship, the criminalization of disfavored opinions, the two-tiered system of justice — doesn’t stay confined to their shores but eventually makes its way to ours. Indeed, many Democrats here in America don’t see the tyranny of modern Britain as a cautionary tale but as a template to follow.

A startling case in point is a recent story from Drop Site News by Paul Holden, who chronicles how a secret campaign to elevate Kier Starmer to prime minister included a scheme to demonetize news outlets deemed unfriendly to the Starmer wing of the Labour Party. One of those news outlets was The Federalist.

In the middle of the 2020 presidential campaign, a shadowy UK-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) worked with NBC News and Google insiders to attempt to blacklist and demonetize The Federalist under false pretexts — an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful. The Orwellian-named NBC News Verification Unit reported in June 2020 that Google had banned the website ZeroHedge from its advertising platform and had warned The Federalist that it too might be banned.

But this wasn’t just “reporting,” it was part of a larger political op. According to the NBC News report itself, Google’s actions came only after the company had been “notified of research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that combats online hate and misinformation. They found that 10 U.S-based websites have published what they say are racist articles about the protests, and projected that the websites would make millions of dollars through Google Ads.”

And who notified Google about this CCDH report? NBC News did. This was a transparent effort by left-wing activists at NBC News, together with left-wing activists at the CCDH, to demonetize and silence The Federalist for the crime of noticing the hypocrisy surrounding BLM protests and strict Covid lockdowns.

But who or what was the CCDH, and why did it target The Federalist? At the time, the CCDH’s connection to the Starmer political machine and the Labour Party was unclear. But as Holden’s reporting reveals, the CCDH was part of a larger partisan political project that targeted The Federalist, Breitbart, ZeroHedge, and others. “As Keir Starmer rose to power in Britain, the political machine responsible for his rise ran a behind-the-scenes campaign to demonetize the U.S. news outlet Breitbart,” writes Holden. “The attacks on Breitbart were part of a targeted campaign against media outlets on both the left and right considered hostile to the centrist faction of the Labour Party, according to a trove of documents that expose the operation.”

At the center of this campaign was a man named Morgan McSweeney, who is now Prime Minster Starmer’s chief of staff. Between 2018 and 2020, McSweeney served as the company secretary and managing director for an organization called Labour Together that funded a think tank called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). At the time, SFFN claimed to be a grassroots effort organized and run by a group of anonymous concerned citizens inspired by the demonetizing campaigns run by Sleeping Giants, which had targeted Breitbart in the U.S. during the 2016 election.

In fact, SFFN was an astroturfing operation created and run by people in positions of real power inside the Labour Party, including not just McSweeney but Steve Reed, now a senior member of Starmer’s cabinet. The original purpose of SFFN, as Holden reports, was “to defeat the left-wing of the Labour Party and the media ecosystem that supported it.” The operations of SFFN, however, expanded to include right-wing outlets like Breitbart and The Federalist, which it saw as impediments to Starmer’s rise.

Eventually, SFFN was absorbed into a new entity, CCDH, whose CEO is a man named Imran Ahmed. Ahmed worked with McSweeney in the London office of Labour Together, which first launched the SFFN project. Ahmed has said that McSweeney gave him a “shell company” called Brixton Endeavors that later became CCDH and in early 2020 absorbed the entire SFFN project. McSweeney has tried to distance himself from all this but as Holden notes, McSweeney was the sole director of Brixton Endeavors between 2018 and September 2019, and remained a director of CCDH until April 2020.

During this time, a plan was developed to target disfavored news outlets by going after their advertisers. As Ahmed himself said in an October 2020 U.S. State Department conference on antisemitism, the CCDH “put together a program called stop funding fake news” designed to undermine ad revenue of certain news sites. He boasted that the weak points of news websites is that they’re expensive to run, so eliminating their ad revenue meant that “within a couple of months, you can completely eviscerate the economic base of a website.”

What Ahmed and his underlings at CCDH needed was a willing news outlet to “report” on its targeting of certain websites for being “hateful” or “racist.” This they found in the NBC News Verification Unit, which tried to goad Google into demonetizing The Federalist and others, and then “reported” it as news.

Take a step back and realize that this is the equivalent of people like Ron Klain or Jeff Zients, who served as chiefs of staff during the Biden administration, running secretive demonetization ops against conservative news outlets in America.

But even that isn’t very far-fetched. After all, the Biden administration’s State Department used its now-defunct Global Engagement Center to fund censorship operations by groups like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, which targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, among others. We here at The Federalist joined with The Daily Wire in a lawsuit against the State Department in 2023, claiming these groups, supported by the federal government, sought to defund and suppress our reporting and commentary in violation of our First Amendment rights.

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Dystopia: UK Woman Recalls Being Arrested by Multiple Officers for Hate Crime While She Was Naked, After Sending Harmless Text Message

The United Kingdom has become an authoritarian nightmare, and the United States must remain vigilant if it does not want to go down the same course.

Elizabeth Kinney, a 34-year-old care assistant, was naked in the bathtub when 11 police officers barged into her home to arrest her.

Her crime was sending insults to another woman via text.

The International Business Times reported Wednesday that Kinney — a mother of four — was detained under the Malicious Communications Act. She had sent texts to a woman involved with a man who had allegedly assaulted her. In those texts, she used the word “f****t” to describe him.

According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, she has been convicted of a hate crime. Kinney is ordered to do 72 hours of unpaid work, complete 10 rehabilitation activity days, and pay a fine of £364. According to the International Business Times, she had initially faced 10 years in prison.

Per the Daily Mail, prosecuting attorney Jacqueline Whiting commented on the incident, “The defendant and the victim in this matter had been friends but had a falling out which resulted in an incident on the October 27, 2024 whereby abusive and homophobic text messages were sent to the victim causing her alarm and distress.”

“The Crown place this offence in the highest category of its type due to the effect related to sexual orientation and the greater harm because it had moderate impact.”

Kinney’s lawyer, Simon Simmonds, tried to help his client by telling the court she was distressed over being allegedly assaulted and was simply venting after an awful situation. “In terms of motivation and hostility, I do not suppose there was much thought process other than unloading a lot off her chest.”

“She was simply upset about what had happened to her. There is reference to another male they had both been connected to and this led to an incident not before the court that Miss Kinney was the victim of.”

Kinney insisted her words were a “thoughtless rant,” not an attack on anyone’s sexuality.

She appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” where she explained the arrest to him.

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Britain Is Lost

A recent interview Tucker Carlson had with George Galloway, a long-time member of the British Parliament and with a show himself in Britain, who was recently detained at the border under terrorism charges for, apparently, the opinions broadcast on his show.

No nation has fallen quicker or more completely than Britain into the totalitarian mindset.

It’s why we highlighted this aspect of modern Europe into the film Deconstruction.

Britain, as long as it pursues the same oppression of free speech as the Soviet Union, can not be called or considered an ally of the United States.

This is what we have to decide as a people, the American people, who will and who will not be our allies. Governments, especially now, are poor judges of character. They will hold onto traditional alliances, when those alliances have long been strained, simply because they would be unsure of what that would do to international relationships. If we lose Britain, France and Germany as allies, what effect does that have on NATO?

My question, however, is what damage does continued alliances with nations who punish their people for what they have said, posted or broadcast do to international perception? Are we not tarnished by their brush? Yes. It also signals that the United States is not determined to uphold the right to free speech. That in order to maintain these alliances will betray their own people.

As Britain, France and Germany turn toward implementing a police state to support immigrants who rape and kill their sons and daughters, put protesters in jail and silence not only their own citizens, but any who arrive through the internet, can they still be considered allies of a free nation? No. So, how free is that “free” nation? It is not free as it supports and continues alliances with nations diametrically opposed, not only to free speech, but a series of democratic principles.

The battle taking place within the European nations draw a stark contrast to the Central and Eastern European nations, formerly Soviet client states, who distance themselves from European Union dictates that promote illegal migration and the silencing of objectors.

The whole idea of democracy comes from the idea that the people have a say in who governs them and the policies they impose. When freedom of speech is so blatantly outlawed and only approved narratives permitted, there is no democracy. I don’t know what sort of government Britain has, but it is not a democracy as it claims. Yes, I know it’s technically a Monarchy, but the King or Queen has nowhere near the political power they once held.

All of this centers around illegal migration, it’s where people like Keir Starmer intend to derive their power, in the end. If he supports the replacement population when it is unpopular to do so, they might look kindly on him when the Islamists take full control of the politics, but he is a useful idiot.

They continue to put forth the idea that a declining birthrate is the reason for the importation of these migrants, but if European and American birthrates are dropping, as it is in all Western societies, it would seem that the logical conclusion would be to outlaw abortion, not import rapists and murderers.

But that’s not the reason. It isn’t the birthrate, it’s an attempt to forever change politics that eliminates the right, the Christians. This point was made clear by Viktor Orban in the film Deconstruction that’s coming out soon.

Communists and Islamists work well together. They have the same goal, supremacy through murder and imprisonment of an uncompliant populace. Democracies must tolerate the naysayers, the critics, that’s the difference. It won’t be long and the UK will be an Islamic nation, just as Iran became an Islamic nation. Are they still allies of the US? If so, why are not all Islamic nations allies? Because Islamic nations are at war with the US. “Death to America” does not seem like the pronouncement of an ally. Will it be heard across Britain, while we still consider it a close ally? Of course.

The United States had better figure this out, too. The only true allies the US has in Europe are the Central and Eastern European nations.

They are also the ones that need more protection from Russia and China, because, as smaller economies, they can’t afford to be too choosy about who they do business with and the more that the United States can be a better economic partner, the stronger we will all be.

The world is changing rapidly and our government is incapable of keeping up with the pace. It has to be led by the people.

The film Deconstruction makes this point. 

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UK soldiers executed toddlers in bed during Afghanistan war: Report

The former director of the British military’s special forces and other top UK army officials were involved in covering up war crimes, including the killing of children, carried out during the war on Afghanistan. 

A senior officer who worked with the UK Special Air Service (SAS) was cited as saying in an independent judicial inquiry that the special forces unit “shot toddlers in their beds” in Afghanistan. 

The inquiry was opened in 2023 and led by appeal court judge Charles Haddon-Cave. It has previously released findings on UK special forces’ involvement in 80 suspicious deaths in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. 

The special forces officer, identified in the inquiry as N1466, said, “We were there in Afghanistan to bring law and order and human security and justice. We failed.”

“It’s not loyalty to your organization to stand by and to watch it go down the sewer,” the officer added, warning of a “cancer” of illicit behavior within a specific SAS unit. 

The officer went on to say that he was “deeply troubled” by the “unlawful killing of innocent people, including children, but also the absence of what I considered at the time should have been the response of all officers, including very senior officers in the chain of command, and I struggled to come to terms with what had happened.”

“When you look back on it, on those people who died unnecessarily … there were two toddlers shot in their bed next to their parents, you know, all that would not necessarily have come to pass if that had been stopped.”

The officer also says that extrajudicial killings were widespread and “known to many” within the special forces. 

He added that he expressed his concerns to the director of special forces at the time, who took a deliberate decision to suppress the information.

Another anonymous officer also told the inquiry that the war crimes being revealed are “probably just the tip of the iceberg.”

“The government is fully committed to supporting the independent inquiry relating to Afghanistan as it continues its work, and we are hugely grateful to all former and current defense employees who have so far given evidence,” a UK Defense Ministry spokesperson said. 

The ministry was initially reluctant to approve the investigation.

This is not the first time British troops have been implicated in indiscriminate attacks and extrajudicial killings during the Afghanistan war. 

Five years ago, a whistleblower disclosed to a UK court that a British army unit in Afghanistan carried out a “deliberate policy” of killing unarmed Afghan men. 

The US army has also been implicated in scores of similar incidents in both Afghanistan and Iraq, which the British army invaded as well, alongside Washington’s forces in 2003. 

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A story of censorship – starting in the 1970s

It’s difficult to know precisely when the censorship and the oppression really began, and it’s always been difficult to know who was behind it. But there has been no doubt in my mind that it has for a long time been very real.

In the 1970s and 1980s, I wrote and campaigned a good deal about animal experiments (of which I always heartily disapproved on scientific grounds as well as on humanitarian grounds) and the police in general, and special branch in particular, started taking a close interest in my work from that time on.

Whenever I went to speak at an anti-vivisection rally, I would have my own video cameraman. He would follow me around and film me and everyone I spoke to.

Robin Webb was the Animal Liberation Front’s official press officer and he had his own police cameraman too. When we met and talked, our two devoted cameramen would stand beside us filming us both. I photographed a bunch of policemen who were following me once and wrote an article about them in the Sunday People. One of the photographs was captioned `The Hand of Plod’.

On one occasion, I was prevented from travelling to a demonstration by a police sergeant who threatened to arrest me simply for driving on the road. I sued the Chief Constable. The judge didn’t like me suing a policeman.

The son of a dear friend of mine worked for Special Branch and told me (via his father) that although they followed all my activities closely, they did not regard me as dangerous in a physical sense. “Following my activities closely” meant that they tapped my telephone, sucked messages off my fax machine and every time I moved house, someone arranged for one or two plainly marked telecom vans to sit parked outside my gate for days at a time. Whenever I asked what they were doing, the men inside the van replied that they were just making sure that my telephone line worked well. And this without my ever making a complaint about a dodgy line.

Another MI5 operative confirmed what I had been told.

The oppression was very heavy in those days because animal rights campaigners were pretty much the only reason for the existence of MI5, GCHQ and Special Branch. My phone and fax machine were constantly tapped.

After that, other campaigns attracted the attention of the various branches of MI5, Special Branch and GCHQ.

My successful campaign to force the government to issue controls on benzodiazepine tranquillisers resulted in my phone not working and my mail disappearing.

And then there was AIDS.

AIDS was the first attempt to control the world with a pandemic. And it was the similarity between the way AIDS was promoted and the way the coronavirus hoax was being promoted which helped me understand the truth about covid right at the beginning – in February and March 2020.

In the 1980s, I wrote a good deal about AIDS. I did a great deal of research and wrote a number of articles for The Sun (for which I was the medical correspondent for ten years), and in a number of them, I explained precisely why the Government and the medical establishment were creating entirely false fears. It was clear from all the medical literature that AIDS was not going to kill us all. (The official line, supported and promoted with great enthusiasm by the British Medical Association and the rest of the medical establishment, was that by the year 2000, everyone in the world would be in some way affected by AIDS.)

For the first months of the scare, I appeared a good deal on television and radio to debate the whole AIDS scare.

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Britain’s Former Anti-Corruption Minister Handed Prison Sentence in Native Bangladesh on Corruption Charges

Britain’s former anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq has been sentenced in absentia by a Bangladeshi court on corruption charges.

The Special Judge’s Court handed her a two-year term and a fine for her alleged role in a plot in which she helped engineer a land scheme using her family ties and political position.

The BBC reports that Siddiq immediately rejected the ruling, saying it should be “treated with contempt”.

She denied every charge, as well as being a Bangladeshi citizen.

The court responded by stating it holds her tax number, identity records, and passport.

Britain has no extradition treaty with Bangladesh, meaning the sentence is unlikely ever to be enforced.

The court ruled that Siddiq had been “manipulating and influencing” former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, her aunt, who was recently sentenced to death by hanging after fleeing to India when her government collapsed last year.

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France & UK Still Insist On Sending Troops To Ukraine, In Effort To Sabotage Trump Peace Plan

As we reported earlier, the important Miami meeting wherein American and Ukrainian delegations hammered out a revised ceasefire draft for some five hours on Sunday did not have European participation. But this is where the real deal-making is taking place. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff is en route to Moscow, where he’s expected to meet with President Putin on Tuesday, in order to present where things stand on the peace plan.

The Miami meeting reportedly focused on where the new de facto border would be in the east, after the 19-point plan featured significant territorial concessions in the Donbass and Crimea. As for Europe, is still touting a “coalition of the willing” which are vowing ongoing military support to the Zelensky government.

At this moment, France and the United Kingdom especially are continuing to push for the deployment of troops from NATO-member states to Ukraine as part of their version of peace settlement, despite this being very obviously unacceptable to Moscow. 

Last week Politico reported that when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio joined a discussion involving the coalition of the willing via phone call, he made clear to all that the White House wants a peace agreement in place before committing to any long-term security guarantees for Kiev.

But UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer tried to push back, arguing that a “multinational force” would be essential for ensuring Ukraine’s future security.

Bloomberg then followed with a report saying that UK officials have already selected the military units they plan to deploy, based on several reconnaissance trips to Ukraine.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron proposed that such troops could operate in the capital area or western regions of the country, far from the front lines. But this would flagrantly cross all Russia’s red lines. NATO troops on its doorstep was key Putin’s decision-making in launching the ‘special military operation’ in the first place.

It must be recalled that the original US-drafted 28-point peace plan, which leaked to the press and more recently was condensed down to 19 points, included an explicit prohibition on deploying NATO troops to Ukraine.

The European-proposed counter-plan, which was also quickly leaked to the media, greatly softened that stance and laid out that instead of a blanket ban, NATO would not “permanently station troops under its command in Ukraine in peacetime.”

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“Bronze Age People Didn’t Do That”: English Team Unearths “Unprecedented” Evidence of 4500-Year-Old Ancient Monument

British archaeologists have made a discovery they believe points to an unusual ancient monument that once stood in Northwest England 4,500 years ago.

The unique find, made by avocational archaeologists with the Wigan Archaeological Society, was discovered on a farm in the Greater Manchester area, after aerial photography of the region revealed an unusual, dark circular area in a farmer’s field.

Initial excavations at the discovery site had revealed what the Wigan team believed to be a burial site near Aspull, a village in the greater Wigan area. However, further studies at the site have revealed that there may be more to this ancient English mystery.

“We think it’s been repurposed from an earlier monument,” said Bill Aldridge, a member of the Wigan Archaeological Society, in a statement. Aldridge and others say the unique evidence they have unearthed, which includes a massive, oval-shaped ring ditch encircling the area, points to the existence of “a neolithic henge” that once stood there.

Such structures were unique to the Neolithic period and were not associated with later groups that occupied the area.

“Bronze Age people didn’t do that,” Aldridge recently told the BBC about his team’s discovery.

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British Transport Police Launch Facial Recognition Trials in London Stations

Some people, when they want to improve public transport safety, hire more staff, fix the lighting, or maybe even try being on time.

The British Transport Police, however, have gone full Black Mirror, deciding the best way to protect you from crime on your morning commute is by pointing cameras at your face and feeding your biometric soul into a machine.

Yes, for many Britons, facial recognition is coming to a railway station near them. Smile. Or don’t. It makes no difference. The algorithm will be watching anyway.

In the coming weeks, British Transport Police (BTP) will be trialling Live Facial Recognition (LFR) tech in London stations. It’s being sold as a six-month pilot program, which in government-speak usually means it will last somewhere between forever and the heat death of the universe.

The idea is to deploy these cameras in “key transport hubs,” which is bureaucratic code for: “places you’re likely to be standing around long enough for a camera to decide whether or not you look criminal.”

BTP assures us that the system is “intelligence-led,” which doesn’t mean they’ll be targeting shady characters with crowbars, but rather that the cameras will be feeding your face into a watchlist generated from police data systems.

They’re looking for criminals and missing people, they say. But here’s how it works: if your face doesn’t match anyone on the list, it gets deleted immediately. Allegedly. If it does match, an officer gets a ping, stares at a screen, and decides whether you’re a knife-wielding fugitive or just a man who looks like one.

And you have to love the quaint touch of QR codes, and signs stuck up around the station letting you know that, yes, your biometric identity is being scanned in real time.

Chief Superintendent Chris Casey would like you to know that “we’re absolutely committed to using LFR ethically and in line with privacy safeguards.”

The deployments, we’re told, will come with “internal governance” and even “external engagement with ethics and independent advisory groups.”

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