Tag: united kingdom

UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood Revives Digital ID Plans

Newly appointed UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has opened the door to the rollout of digital ID systems in the UK, reviving a proposal she has previously supported.

Mahmood’s remarks came during a high-level meeting with allies in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, where migration and security were top of the agenda.

Speaking alongside her counterparts from the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, she laid out her position.

“Well my long-term personal political view has always been in favor of ID cards. In fact I supported the last Labour government’s introduction of ID cards. The first bill I spoke on in Parliament was the ID cards bill which the then Conservative Lib Dem coalition scrapped. So I have a long-standing position which anybody who’s familiar with my view.”

Her comments arrive just days into her tenure, following a dramatic cabinet reshuffle that has reset key departments, including the Home Office.

With illegal small boat crossings continuing to rise and more than 1,000 people arriving in a single day over the weekend, the pressure on the government to deliver results is intensifying. The total number of arrivals this year has already passed 30,000.

Mahmood emphasized that these plans are not borrowed ideas.

“This is a Labour government with Labour policy and Labour proposals,” she said. She insisted that Labour had been preparing these policy positions well in advance of taking office.

Mahmood added that digital ID is something that she has “always supported.”

Now in a position to influence policy directly, she stopped short of confirming a rollout but said it remains under discussion within government. She offered no clear answer when asked whether every UK citizen would be required to have one.

The stated goal is to reduce illegal employment and weaken incentives that draw people to cross into the UK without authorization. For privacy advocates, however, the return of digital ID proposals raises longstanding concerns about surveillance, data control, and potential misuse.

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Britain’s Descent Towards Civil War Is No Accident

Having lived in Australia for the past three years, I sense that this country is the least advanced down the road towards the multicultural dystopia confronting much of Europe.

That is not to say there is room for complacency: Australia has its own canaries in the coal mine, echoing trends observable across the Western world. Yet relative prosperity, firm immigration policies, a distinct welfare regime (mandatory health insurance, means tested pensions), a robust federal system, and above all a unique electoral framework of three-year cycles and compulsory voting all help, willy-nilly, to keep politicians on a short leash and broadly tethered to the popular will.

The greatest safeguard against social fracture and disintegration in Australia, however, is not institutional design but rather watching Britain implode in real time. Many Australians, still bound by ties of kinship and tradition to the old country, see in the United Kingdom both a cautionary tale and an anti-role model: a once-settled, relatively harmonious state busily teaching the world how to dismantle itself through the enthusiastic embrace of liberal dogma.

As an observer no longer resident in Britain, I am reluctant to pontificate on the fate of my homeland. Yet it is a sight to behold: an establishment seemingly bent on self-destruction, clinging to an incontinent immigration system and an almost devotional attachment to international and human rights laws that disadvantage its own citizens. The Epping hotel protests — complete with the Home Office’s recourse to legal appeals — illustrate the point. No doubt the legal complexities are real, as David McGrogan rightly pointed out in these pages, but such manoeuvres only pour petrol on an already combustible national mood.

One is left to wonder whether Britain’s Labour Party, now so hopelessly enthralled by socially progressive ideology, will ever rediscover the ability to represent anything resembling national sentiment — or whether it will, like the Conservatives, simply perfect the art of political self-evisceration.

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Retired UK Police Superintendent Investigated for “Dead-Naming” Trans Activist Online

A retired police superintendent in the UK says she was targeted by her former force after using the name “Fred” in reference to transgender activist Freda Wallace in several social media posts, a move that triggered a police visit to her home and a potential criminal investigation.

Cathy Larkman, who served for over three decades with South Wales Police, said the visit came after she made remarks online about Wallace, including posts on platform X that read, “Fred blocked me” and “Fred, put that drink down.”

The posts were part of an ongoing public conversation around strip-searching policies, where Larkman voiced opposition to allowing transgender women to conduct searches on female detainees.

Although Larkman wasn’t home when officers came to her door, she later learned the visit was related to allegations of “malicious communications.”

The complaint was her use of Wallace’s former name, a practice often referred to as “dead-naming” by gender activists.

A social media account titled SEEN Police Official Open Public Network confirmed a complaint had been filed.

According to The Telegraph, the individual believed to have made the report is Lynsay Watson, a transgender former police officer known for encouraging law enforcement to criminally pursue people who challenge gender ideology. Watson was dismissed from Leicestershire Police in 2023 for gross misconduct.

Larkman’s situation follows a similar incident involving Father Ted writer Graham Linehan, who was arrested by armed officers at Heathrow Airport days earlier over a series of posts.

Raising concerns about what she describes as growing ideological pressure within the policing system, Larkman accused the institution of serving activist agendas instead of the public interest. “The police service keeps demonstrating that it is ideologically captured from the top down. It is failing the public,” she said.

Britain’s free speech environment is deteriorating rapidly under the weight of expansive censorship laws, regulatory overreach, and state-sanctioned content control.

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The Nuclear Waste Problem Haunting UK Energy Expansion

  • Effective nuclear waste management is a critical global challenge, particularly for countries like the UK looking to expand their nuclear power sectors.
  • The UK has a substantial amount of existing radioactive waste and is struggling to implement a long-term disposal solution, with the proposed underground geological disposal facility facing significant hurdles and cost concerns.
  • Public and local community pushback against potential nuclear waste sites further complicates the development of new disposal facilities, making finding a solution an ongoing and difficult process.

One of the biggest hurdles to expanding the global nuclear power sector is the concern over how best to manage nuclear waste.

While some believe they have found sustainable solutions to dispose of nuclear waste, there is still widespread debate around how safe these methods are and the potential long-term impact of waste disposal and storage.

In the United Kingdom, the government has put nuclear power back on the agenda, after decades with no new nuclear developments; however, managing nuclear waste continues to be a major barrier to development. 

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New Artwork by British Street Artist Banksy Appears on the Wall of Royal Courts of Justice, in London – Is Immediately Covered Up, as Police Weigh Charges of ‘Criminal Damage’

The Met Police is doing the work of promoting the new Banksy.

For decades, the pseudonymous street artist Banksy, whose real identity remains unconfirmed, has thrived on controversy – and with his last mural artwork, things aren’t any different.

The new Banksy shows a judge hitting a fallen protester with his gavel, and was painted on the front wall of the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

The image was rapidly covered up by British officials.

Daily Mail reported:

“Security guards were seen patrolling in front of a screen concealing the mural now confirmed as being by the guerilla graffiti artist as his latest creation.

He shared an image of it on his Instagram page, after it was stenciled on an external wall of the Queen’s Building but swiftly hidden by large sheets of black plastic and two metal barriers.”

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Why “Don’t Let America Become the UK” Has Become a Warning for Americans

Many American conservatives are saying “don’t let America become the UK.” The reasons are well documented: unbridled illegal immigration, high levels of legal immigration and asylum seeking, and rising crime including rape, sexual harassment, mugging, stabbing, assaults, break-ins, theft, and sexual grooming of minors.

Housing and rental price spikes, unemployment, wage suppression, heavier burdens on taxpayers and public finances, and benefits paid to illegals, asylum seekers, and immigrants—many living fully or partially on welfare, add to the tax burden on citizens. Immigrants are also demanding that crosses be removed from churches and that the British flag be removed from public places. There is also the rise of Sharia councils creating a parallel legal system.

Protests have erupted that suppress British freedoms and values, some openly supporting Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, with calls for death to Britain. Conservatives also highlight bans on public preaching of the Christian gospel, hate crime laws used to arrest citizens for Facebook posts criticizing immigration or crime, and arrests for displaying the British flag.

Muslims now hold key political positions, including Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London (2016-present) and Shabana Mahmood as Justice Secretary in the UK Cabinet (2024-present). Humza Yousaf, of Pakistani heritage, served as Scotland’s First Minister from March 2023 to May 2024 before resigning. Additionally, 25 Muslim MPs were elected in the 2024 general election, making up almost 4% of the total 650 MP.

Immigration numbers reveal the same upward trend. Small-boat arrivals climbed from 28,526 in 2021 to about 38,000 in 2024, accounting for 86 percent of irregular entries (British government term for illegals). Total irregular arrivals rose from 38,600 in 2024 to about 44,000 in 2025, a 14 percent increase. Asylum claims nearly doubled since 2021, reaching 93,000 in 2023 and 109,000 in 2024, the highest since 2002.

Mainstream media, with its extreme liberal bias, often suppresses or misrepresents the numbers, while authorities in some jurisdictions falsify or reclassify crimes to make it appear that crime rates are dropping. This happens in the UK just as it does in the U.S. Media outlets claimed Trump was wrong when he said Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York had extremely high crime, although any sane person knew the crime rate, particularly murder and violent crime, was high, and citizen watchdog agencies along with primary source data supported the claims of higher crime rates.

UK crime data shows a decided increase since 2020. Sexual offences totaled 163,244 in 2020 and rose to 209,556 in 2025, the highest on record. Knife crime was just under 49,000 incidents in 2023/24 and rose to about 50,500 in 2024. London knife offences jumped from 12,786 in 2022/23 to 16,344 in 2024/2025. Knife homicides were 244 in 2022/23, and rose to 262 in 2023/24.

And for the privilege of these rising crime rates, UK taxpayers are footing staggering bills. The Home Office spent $5.9 billion on asylum in 2023–24, with another $8.0 billion projected for 2024–25. Welfare payments to non-UK nationals reached $9.4 billion, the equivalent of 1.26 million non-citizens collecting checks.

Asylum seekers get support while claims are processed, refugees receive full access once status is granted, legal immigrants qualify after residency, and EU settled status holders enjoy the same. Nearly $10 billion annually goes to foreign nationals.

Education adds another hidden cost. In 2023/24, 1.7 million pupils in England’s schools used English as an Additional Language, 20.8 percent of all students and up to 37 percent in some districts. With average per-pupil funding at $7,500, taxpayers spend $12.8 billion annually, plus $1.0–2.4 billion in language support, for a total of $13.8–15.0 billion.

This excludes translation services, special education, smaller class sizes, and new school construction in high-immigration areas. These costs are buried in the education budget, while the government promotes fee-paying international university students as an economic benefit.

Healthcare is another manipulated figure. The government estimates $1,295 per migrant annually. At least 1.5 million non-UK nationals receive free NHS care, including asylum seekers in hotels, refused applicants, dependents, and 1.26 million Universal Credit claimants, bringing the cost to $1.9 billion.

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UK’s Health Minister Stephen Kinnock claims vaccines are 100% safe. So, here’s my challenge to him

UK Health Minister Stephen Kinnock MP claims vaccines are 100% safe.  This claim has prompted a challenge from Dr. Vernon Coleman.

Dr. Coleman challenges Stephen Kinnock to a live, national television debate on the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, including the covid-19 vaccine.  “He can bring as many advisors as can be fitted into the studio.  And I will argue that he is wrong. Just by myself,” Dr. Colman says.

Britain’s Health Minister, Stephen Kinnock MP, has allegedly told the BBC that the Government was concerned about vaccine uptake and hesitancy, which he said had increased after the covid-19 “pandemic.” He said campaigns explaining “the benefit of getting vaccinated and the fact that this is 100% safe would be brought forward as the Government sought to win this battle against the conspiracy theorists.”

He said the Government was also committed to combating disinformation and conspiracy theories about vaccines on social media.

“It’s our job as the government, and everybody else out there that is on the side of common sense and reason, to make this case and to win this battle against the conspiracy theorists, and misinformers and disinformers out there who need to be dealt with and need to be silenced,” Kinnock added.

Did Kinnock really say that?

Now, I’ve been studying vaccines for over 50 years and my conclusion is that to say that any vaccine is 100% safe is like saying bombs never kill people or that no one has been killed in Gaza.

I suppose it all depends on how you define “safe” but I would argue that there isn’t a vaccine in the world which is 100% safe – though this isn’t the first time that such an absurd claim has been made on the BBC. (To be clear, my dictionary defines safe as “not likely to cause or lead to harm.”)

The big question is: “How does Mr Kinnock explain why governments around the world have paid out billions of dollars to families of vaccine-damaged patients?”

And why does his government pay out huge sums of money to those who have been damaged by vaccines if vaccines are 100% safe?

And what’s all this about “silencing” people?

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Here Are Three Ways Americans Can Fight The U.K.’s Orwellian Attempts To Suppress Free Speech

Yesterday, the news came that Graham Linehan was arrested by five police officers the moment he stepped off a plane at Heathrow. Though he’s less well-known in America, Linehan is an Irish comic genius who created two of the most beloved U.K. sitcoms of the last 30 years — Father Ted and The I.T. Crowd. Linehan’s supposed crime is that he has been a persistent online critic of the transgender movement, and his arrest was over three tweets, which you can read here. Nothing about his tweets are debatable as a matter of free speech or incitement. In a sane society, they would all be protected.

For a while now, people have been screaming that the U.K. has transformed itself into an Orwellian police state. The U.K. now arrests as many as 30 people a day for online speech, and like what happened to Linehan, much of what is punished is benign by First Amendment standards.

Yet, the punishments handed down are quite severe, and there are numerous examples of how political U.K. courts operate according two a two-tiered system of justice. One woman got a 31-month sentence for an offensive tweet that was deleted after four hours; the same judge gave a 21-month sentence to someone who participated in a violent mob that tried to kick down the door of a pub looking to possibly attack the people inside.

Still, arresting someone as high profile as Linehan marks a significant escalation. Not because Linehan’s rights deserve more deference than any normal U.K. citizen that’s been arrested for speech, but because the U.K. government is openly inviting the enormous amount of criticism that will come with such a high profile arrest. Just last year, persistent transgender critic J.K. Rowling dared the Scottish police to arrest her under the country’s new and laughably expansive hate crime law. Scottish authorities demurred, not because they couldn’t punish her under the law, but because presumably they realized the blowback that came with arresting one of the most beloved authors of the last century would be too great.

Still, I hope the Linehan arrest shines a harsh spotlight on the U.K.’s increasingly draconian speech laws and leads to much needed reforms — here is a good primer on where the U.K. should start. But for now, the incident should lead those of us in America to act on some inescapable conclusions to help restore freedom of speech in the U.K. and elsewhere.

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Starmer’s Regime Just Lit The Fuse On The U.K.’s Free Speech Crisis

Robin Wright, longtime member of the Hollywood glitterati, tells The Times that she feels “liberated” in fleeing the United States for the “freedom” of England. 

“America is a s—show,” the leftist House of Cards star told the London publication, declining to fully go into what she believes to be the present state of American politics.  

Wright, who says she’s found Mr. Right after three failed marriages, including her ill-fated union with “Marxist moron” Sean Penn, loves the “freedom of self” she has found in the United Kingdom. 

The Times’ gushing profile was published on Saturday, just two days before five Metropolitan Police officers arrested Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan at London’s Heathrow Airport on charges of expressing an opinion.

Linehan, co-creator of the popular sitcom Father Ted, was returning from the U.S. to the land of “freedom of self” when the speech police grabbed him “on suspicion of inciting violence via his posts on X.” What violence did he incite? The violence of thought, which in no small part has effectively become outlawed in leftist Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Jolly Old England. 

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Britain’s Car Industry: From World Leader to Net Zero Casualty

Britain was once a giant of car manufacturing. In the 1950s, we were the second-largest producer in the world and the biggest exporter. Coventry, Birmingham, and Oxford built not just cars, but the reputation of an industrial nation; to this day, it is a source of great pride that Jaguar–Land Rover, a global automotive icon, still stands between Coventry and Birmingham. By the 1970s, we were producing more than 1.6 million vehicles a year.

Today? We have fallen back to 1950s levels. Last year, Britain built fewer than half our peak output—800,000 cars, and the lowest outside the pandemic since 1954. Half a year later, by mid-2025, production has slumped a further 12%. The country that once led the automotive revolution is now struggling to stay afloat, and fighting to remain relevant.

This is why the news that BMW will end car production at Oxford’s Mini plant, shifting work to China, is so damning, bringing this decline into sharp focus. The Mini is not only a classic British car; Alec Issigonis’s original design made it an international icon. For decades, the Mini has been the bridge between British design flair and foreign investment. Its departure leaves 1,500 jobs at risk at a time when the government is desperate to fuel growth and convince a wavering consumer market that there is no tension between industrial production and Net Zero goals.

It’s a bitter reminder that we in Britain have been here before: letting an industrial crown jewel slip away.

The usual explanations will be offered: global competition, exchange rates, supply chains. All true, in the midst of a global trade war that is heating up and damaging major British exports. But such a diagnosis is incomplete. The truth is that Britain’s car industry is being squeezed by a mix of geopolitical realignment and government missteps.

The car industry has become the frontline of a new trade war. Washington has already moved aggressively to shield its own firms: the Inflation Reduction Act offers vast subsidies for US-made EVs and batteries, an unapologetic attempt to onshore production, and something that became a flashpoint of tension in Trump’s negotiation with the EU in the latest trade deal. On the production side, the Act has poured billions into US manufacturing: investment in EV and battery plants hit around $11 billion per quarter in 2024.

Ripples have been sent across the world in the US’s wake: Europe, faced with a flood of cheap Chinese EVs, has imposed tariffs of up to 35% after an anti-subsidy investigation. Talks have even turned to a system of minimum import prices instead of tariffs. Unsurprisingly, China has threatened retaliation against European luxury marques, while experts warn the tariffs may slow the EU’s green transition by raising prices.

This is no longer a free market: cars are treated as strategic assets, the 21st-century equivalent of shipbuilding or steel. Whoever controls the supply chains, particularly for EV batteries and the mining of lithium, controls not only the future of the industry but an important lever of national power.

The results are visible. In July 2025, Tesla’s UK sales collapsed nearly 60%, while Chinese giant BYD’s deliveries quadrupled. Europe responded by talking up new tariffs. Britain did nothing. In this asymmetric contest, our market risks becoming a showroom for foreign producers—subsidizing both sides of the trade war without defending our own.

The real danger is not simply that Britain loses factories—that would be lamentable, but new industries crop up all the time. The danger comes if Britain misreads the geopolitics of the moment. Policymakers assume that globalization still works on liberal lines, when in reality industrial competition has become nakedly political.

If the government continues to approach this as a morality play about “green obligations” rather than a contest of state-backed strategies, Britain will find itself outmaneuvered by rivals who are willing to fight dirty. The naivety of this government in the geopolitical realm is already on show—all it takes is an unscrupulous actor to take advantage.

Meanwhile, Britain’s car industry is being crushed under the weight of its own government’s Net Zero agenda.

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