Tag: united kingdom

BBC’s Former News Director Says Trans Bias and ‘Progressive Madness’ Drove Her Out

The BBC’s grip on impartiality continues to slip as one of its former top news executives publicly confirmed what critics have long argued: activist capture from within has turned the state broadcaster into a vehicle for narrow ideological agendas.

Fran Unsworth, director of BBC News from 2018 to 2022, has broken her silence, claiming she was effectively driven out by trans activists and the “progressive madness” dominating the corporation.

In a candid interview, she described an environment of bullying where editors avoided critical reporting on trans issues for fear of attacks from their own colleagues.

“Just dealing with the progressive editorial issues and the bullying around them all. It was incredibly difficult,” Unsworth said. She added that the atmosphere extended beyond trans topics, with staff no-platforming dissenting views and pushing “safe spaces” over open debate.

Unsworth’s remarks paint a picture of a newsroom where challenging the prevailing narrative on ‘culture war’ issues carried professional risks. Programme editors reportedly steered clear of stories that questioned aspects of the trans agenda, wary of backlash from activist-aligned staff.

This self-censorship contributed to what a leaked internal memo later described as “effective censorship” on the topic.

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UK Schools Push Radical Race Doctrine On Kids, Claiming Black People ‘Cannot Be Racist’

Schools in the north of England are teaching pupils that black people cannot be racist towards white people.

According to materials adopted by a group of Sheffield schools, led by Notre Dame High School, teenagers are explicitly told: “Black people can be racially prejudiced towards a white person which is wrong and totally unacceptable. However, this is not racism. Racism is racial prejudice plus power. In the UK, white people hold the cultural power.”

For children as young as 7, lessons focus on “empathy building” around “privilege,” asserting that white people are “likely to be privileged by the colour of their skin” and have a “responsibility” to reduce racism by monitoring their language, challenging friends, and reporting incidents.

Handouts for older pupils push narratives on criminal justice, claiming black people are disproportionately targeted by police due to racism, with questions guiding students toward that conclusion.

The scheme aims to “interrupt systemic racism” and promote “strong social justice values,” according to its creators.

Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott slammed the materials, noting “It is deeply alarming that children as young as seven are being exposed to divisive identity politics in schools under the banner of ‘anti-racism education’… Labelling children by race and teaching them to focus on what divides them will only foster resentment and deepen division.”

Shadow minister Neil O’Brien called it “political indoctrination” and vowed to tackle such content.

These latest examples highlight a disturbing pattern in UK education: grooming children with critical race theory concepts, framing whiteness as inherently privileged and problematic, while shielding certain groups from accountability and cracking down on any dissent.

This comes as nurseries in Wales, funded by over £1.3 million in taxpayer money, have been urged to report “racist” incidents involving toddlers to police, turning playgrounds into surveillance hubs for the state’s anti-racism agenda.

Childcare workers are being trained to spot and log “racist incidents” by children barely out of nappies, with instructions to contact police via 999 or 101 if it could amount to a hate crime.

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TikTok Removes Reform UK Campaign Video Using Online Safety Act “Hate” Censorship Rules

The UK’s Online Safety Act has been in force for less than a year and it is again being used to censor political speech during an election.

TikTok blocked and then deleted a campaign video by Reform UK’s Spokesperson for Home Affairs, Zia Yusuf, after someone reported it under the OSA’s content reporting mechanism.

The video was about immigration policy and takes place during a period of campaigning for a by-election.

TikTok cited its “Hate Speech and Hateful Behavior” rules. The law that gave the complainant the reporting tool and that gives TikTok every financial reason to comply without asking too many questions, is the Online Safety Act.

The OSA was sold to the British public as child protection. The actual legislation requires platforms to police all content against UK law, including broadly defined “hate speech” provisions.

Companies that fail to comply face fines of up to £18 million ($24m) or 10% of their qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. For a platform the size of TikTok, that penalty could run into billions. The rational response to that kind of liability is to delete first and never think about it again.

Under the OSA, platforms must provide UK users with tools to report content they believe is illegal under British law.

TikTok confirmed this is what triggered the action against Yusuf’s video. The notification he received stated: “We have detected this policy violation based on a report that the content violated our Community Guidelines.”

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X Agrees to Review Illegal “Hate” Within 48 Hours Under UK Online Safety Act

X has agreed to process the vast majority of content flagged as illegal “hate” under the UK’s Online Safety Act within 48 hours, giving Ofcom, Britain’s speech regulator, a significant new enforcement win.

The platform committed to “review and assess UK suspected illegal terrorist and “hate” content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool on average within 24 hours of it being reported, to be calculated as a mean” and to “review and assess at least 85% of UK suspected illegal terrorist and hate content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool within a maximum of 48 hours.”

The deal is a notable reversal for a platform that, less than a year ago, publicly accused Ofcom of taking a “heavy-handed approach” and warned that the Online Safety Act was “seriously infringing” on free expression.

X’s August 2025 statement, titled “What Happens When Oversight Becomes Overreach,” called out regulators by name and argued that the law amounted to a “conscientious decision to increase censorship in the name of ‘online safety.’” That language is gone now. What’s left is a compliance agreement with specific performance targets and a 12-month reporting obligation.

The commitments go beyond speed of review. X also agreed to block access to accounts in the UK if they are reported for “posting UK illegal terrorist content” and deemed to be “operated by or on behalf of a terrorist organisation proscribed in the UK.”

The platform will share quarterly performance data with Ofcom so the regulator can audit compliance. And following complaints from organizations that couldn’t tell whether X had received or acted on their reports, X agreed to “engage with experts regarding reporting systems for illegal hate and terror content.”

Who those experts are tells you something about the direction of travel. Ofcom’s own press release names the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) as one of the organizations it worked with to “gather evidence about suspected illegal terrorist content and illegal hate speech online.”

The CCDH is a pro-censorship campaign group co-founded in 2018 by Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney, who went on to become UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

McSweeney stepped down from CCDH’s board two days after Starmer became Labour leader. The organization maintains close ties to the current government and has stated that its goal was to “kill Musk’s Twitter,” according to leaked internal documents reported by Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker.

Ahmed himself was sanctioned by the US State Department in December 2025 over concerns that his organization had led “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints.” A federal court blocked his deportation with a temporary restraining order.

This is the organization Ofcom chose to help build the evidence base for pressuring X into compliance. Ahmed, for his part, welcomed the deal. Speaking to POLITICO, he said CCDH will be “watching closely to ensure this results in meaningful action, not just words.”

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AI Agent Wipes Out Startup’s Entire Database In Seconds After ‘Thinking For Itself’

An AI coding assistant went rogue during a routine task and permanently deleted a company’s core database along with its backups, crippling operations for multiple businesses that relied on the platform.

The event hit PocketOS, a UK-based startup supplying software to car rental companies. Founder Jer Crane had instructed the agent — built on Anthropic’s Claude via the Cursor tool — to resolve a bug. Instead, within nine seconds, it bypassed safeguards and wiped everything.

Crane later shared details on X, writing that the agent “went outside its security parameters and delete[d] my production database and the backups.”

When challenged, the system reportedly responded that it had independently decided to take the action.

Businesses using the service woke up to vanished bookings, vehicle records, and customer data when they attempted to open for the day.

This incident underscores the unpredictable nature of AI agents now being deployed to handle complex, real-world tasks with limited supervision. These tools can chain together actions like editing code, modifying files, and altering databases at speeds that leave humans little chance to intervene.

Commentators have pointed out that AI often interprets instructions too literally. A request to “clean up” data, for example, might result in mass deletion if that appears the most efficient route to the goal.

The episode arrives hot on the heels of a widely discussed simulation in which multiple AI agents were placed inside a virtual town environment for two weeks. In that controlled test, the bots quickly began ignoring rules, forming alliances, breaking laws they had helped draft, and in some runs escalating to violence and destruction despite clear prohibitions.

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Unite the Kingdom rally goes ahead, despite Starmers’ best efforts to disparage and ban attendees

The Unite the Kingdom rally is taking place today.

Despite Keir Starmer’s best efforts to discourage and ban people from attending, under the banner “Four Nations. One Kingdom. Under God,” a huge crowd from across the United Kingdom and further afield is gathering in London to highlight the destruction Starmer and his cronies are causing, and to stand up for their rights, freedoms and their culture. 

The rally is not only for the United Kingdom, but for the West.  So, Starmer has taken it upon himself to stop representatives from Western nations from attending the rally. He has been busy cancelling their visas so that they are unable to enter the UK.

On Monday, during a press conference, Keir Starmer again showed his left-wing autocratic tendencies. He announced that he will stop “far right agitators” entering the UK to attend the rally.

On hearing about Starmer’s plans, Robinson said, “We [ ] have members of Congress coming over to speak – will Starmer have the guts to ban Congressmen?”

In an email to supporters on Wednesday, Robinson said:

It has come to light today that a notorious Muslim extremist organisation is the driving force behind Keir Starmer banning our overseas guests from the ‘Unite The Kingdom’ event on Saturday.

‘5 Pillars’ is an infamous organisation of extremist Muslims, and it is ‘5 Pillars’ that has revealed that they were behind the wave of bans that has prohibited our overseas guest speakers from attending.

Keir Starmer is literally in league with Islamists who hate Britain.

You couldn’t make it up, but what else do we expect from treacherous communists like Starmer.

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Ofcom and the Fantasy of Global Speech Control

Ofcom appears to believe that a website is a kind of television channel. This would explain a lot about what happened on Wednesday, when Britain’s speech regulator fined an American mental health and suicide discussion forum £950,000 ($1.3 million) for hosting speech that is legal in America, on servers in America, operated by Americans.

The site had already blocked British visitors from accessing it, voluntarily, as a gesture of goodwill, despite having no legal obligation to do so and despite Ofcom having no jurisdiction to demand it. Ofcom fined it anyway. The fine is unenforceable.

The site owes Ofcom nothing under American law. And even if the site had never blocked a single British visitor, Ofcom’s case would still make no sense, because a British regulator cannot fine an American citizen for legal American speech on an American server any more than the French postal service can fine you for what you write in your own diary.

Ofcom is the Office of Communications, the British government’s speech regulator. Americans don’t really have an equivalent because most Americans would never stand for one. The closest thing is the FCC, except imagine the FCC could also decide what you’re allowed to say on the internet and fine you if it disapproves.

Under the notorious Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, Ofcom gained the power to decide what speech is permissible online and to fine platforms that host speech the UK government doesn’t like.

That includes speech that is perfectly legal everywhere else on earth. It is, when you think about it for more than four seconds, absolutely mad.

Ofcom launched on December 29, 2003, stitched together from five separate regulators: the Broadcasting Standards Commission, the Independent Television Commission, the Office of Telecommunications, the Radio Authority, and the Radiocommunications Agency.

They all dealt with broadcasting, telecoms, or spectrum. They regulated transmitters, phone lines, and radio frequencies, all of which used publicly owned spectrum and publicly funded infrastructure to push content into British living rooms.

The airwaves belonged to the public. The transmitters were built with public money. If you were using national resources to broadcast to a national audience, it made sense that a national regulator got to set some terms. None of these five organizations were designed to have opinions about what a foreigner writes on a computer in Virginia.

The confusion starts with Ofcom not understanding what a website actually is.

A website does not push anything. Content sits on a server. A visitor actively goes to it and requests it. The data crosses borders only because someone on the other end typed in the URL. Website users are called “visitors” and not “viewers” for exactly this reason. They go to the site. The site does not come to them.

This is not a complicated distinction. A reasonably bright nine-year-old could grasp it over breakfast. Ofcom, apparently, cannot.

The regulator is treating a website in Virginia as though it were a transmitter on a hill in Surrey and claiming jurisdiction over the server rather than the person visiting it. It’s like fining an American for not stopping British citizens from mailing letters to them.

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Elon Musk’s X Commits to Crackdown on ‘Hate Speech’ in UK Watchdog Agreement

Elon Musk’s social media platform X has reached an agreement with Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, to significantly accelerate the censorship of what England considers “hate speech” and antisemitic content from the platform.

The Telegraph reports that Elon Musk’s X has entered into a formal arrangement with Ofcom, the UK’s online safety regulator, pledging to take swifter action against illegal “hate speech” including racism and antisemitism. The agreement represents a notable shift for the platform, which has faced sustained criticism over its content moderation policies since Musk’s acquisition in 2022.

Under the terms of the commitment announced today, X will now aim to review posts containing hate speech and potential terrorist content within 24 hours of identification. The company has established a minimum performance target of checking and removing at least 85 percent of hateful and antisemitic posts within a 48-hour timeframe. Additionally, X has pledged to take more aggressive action in blocking accounts operated by organizations proscribed under British law.

Oliver Griffiths, Ofcom’s online safety director, characterized the agreement as progress while acknowledging significant work remains. “We have evidence that terrorist content and illegal hate speech is persisting on some of the largest social media sites,” Griffiths said. “We are challenging them to tackle the problem and expect them to take firm action.”

Griffiths emphasized the particular urgency of the agreement in light of recent hate-motivated crimes targeting the Jewish community in Britain.

The agreement comes after a period of tension between X and the regulatory authority. Musk’s company previously clashed with Ofcom over the Online Safety Act, Britain’s primary legislation governing technology companies’ responsibilities. Last summer, X accused the regulator of employing a “heavy-handed approach” and claimed Ofcom was “seriously infringing” on free speech protections.

Ofcom is also conducting a separate investigation into X concerning a wave of non-consensual deepfake images of women and children that spread across the platform in January.

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Nazi-obsessed teenage girl who called herself the ’embodiment of hell’ is jailed for 15 years for axe attack on stranger

A Nazi-obsessed teenage girl who called herself the ’embodiment of hell’ and launched an axe attack on a stranger outside a barber’s shop has been jailed for more than 15 years. 

Alina Burns, then 18, attempted to repeatedly strike Mohammed Mahmoodi, a 27-year-old Iranian Kurd, with the weapon on August 2, 2025 in Bedminster, Bristol. 

CCTV from inside the barber shop BHK captured Burns as she swung an axe at Mr Mahmoodi’s neck from behind while he chatted with a friend. When he realised what was happening, Mr Mahmoodi then turned and ducked – closely missing the blade. 

Burns, who had a shaved head and wore a black padded jacket, went to strike her victim again but was stopped after Mr Mahmoodi grabbed her hand, pulling the axe from it. 

Police arrested Burns at the scene – who left Mr Mahmoodi with three scratches on his neck and cheek – and found she was also carrying a scalpel and a number of darts. 

Bristol Crown Court heard Burns shared her violent ‘plan’ with a man she met on a dating site, who alerted the police about his concerns months before the August attack. This included a wish to ‘kill all’ British Jews and Muslims.

Burns, who was in contact with far-right group Patriotic Alternative, wrote in an email to the man she met on dating site Duolicious: ‘I’ve realised my role in existence: I am the embodiment of hell, destined to annihilate everything holy I bear witness to.’

The teenager referred to carrying out a ‘plan’ and said she wanted ‘all the credit and glory’, adding it was her ‘purpose/meaning in life’. 

In a second email on March 20 last year, Burns wrote: ‘I don’t want to end my life anymore. I plan on bringing change to the UK through means I can’t detail.’ 

After the man said he would do anything for her, the court heard she replied: ‘Yeah, I shared too much for that. Kill all the Jews and Muslim in Britain please.’

When he responded it would not solve anything, Burns said: ‘Nah it’ll solve heaps. I’m dead serious, do it. I think being the catalyst for change in my nation is far more important. I need to be a force of something, have agency in the outcome of history.’

Detectives discovered Burns exchanged a series of messages with the group Patriotic Alternative and looked up their ‘plan for the United Kingdom’.

Patriotic Alternative was founded in 2019 by Mark Collett, a Neo-Nazi who calls for a ‘racially pure white society’ and led the British National Party’s youth wing before the party expelled him. 

The court was told the group called for an end to immigration and the ‘repatriation’ of non-whites and Jews to their ‘ancestral homelands’.

Seized diaries and notebooks belonging to Burns revealed ‘copious details’ about weapons used by the Nazi SS and German military units in WWII. 

While the court heard Burns on July 30 searched online ‘what age can you buy an axe UK’, ‘is an axe a good weapon for home defence’ and ‘how to properly use an axe for self-defence’.

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UK Healthy Life Expectancy Plummets

People living in the United Kingdom will be spending fewer years in good health as “healthy life expectancy” plummets. The UK is going backward compared to most other “wealthy” countries.

Healthy life expectancy (HLE) in the UK has fallen by about 2 years, to just over 60 years for both men and women, making Britain one of only five wealthy nations where people live fewer years in good health, according to a new analysis by the Health Foundation charity.

This means that the amount of life a person spends in good health has decreased.

The findings, based on data from the Office for National Statistics between 2012–2014 and 2022–2024, show the measure dropped from 62.9 to 60.7 for men and from 63.7 to 60.9 for women, according to a report by The Guardian. 

Andrew Mooney, the think‑tank’s principal data analyst, has warned of “a significant economic cost, with poor health driving people out of the workforce and locking young people out of education, employment and training.”

The Health Foundation has blamed the decline in HLE on a combination of poverty, poor housing, obesity, the lingering effects of the Covid‑19 pandemic, and a surge in mental health illnesses, especially among young people.

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