Tag: united kingdom

Rearmament: UK Govt Pushes For New Generation of Explosives Factories to Fix Post-Cold War Deindustrialisation

The British government is seeking to build “at least six new munitions and energetics factories” after the Ukraine War experience showed how fast ammunition is used in a near-peer conflict, and how long it takes to make more when the industrial base no longer exists.

The Ministry of Defence has announced a funding package to support 22 unnamed companies to underwrite their costs in building “at least six” new factories to produce what the industry calls energetics, which might better be known as explosives, propellants, and pyrotechnics. The selected businesses will receive up to £300,000 each to “develop proposals for the creation of new factories producing energetic materials used in munitions”, and the winners in the competition will receive contracts “worth up to £5 million each” to get the ground broken on building the new facilities.

According to the government’s statement, the project is intended to move — at least by Whitehall standards — at a very brisk pace. The proposals are due to be made by the end of the summer, and construction of new munitions factories should begin before the end of 2026. The rush to build is part of a century-long story of corporate amnesia in which London has repeatedly destroyed its own armaments factories to save money in peacetime, only to be surprised, yet again, when war returns.

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UK Hands ‘Skilled’ Visa Powers To Islamic Bookshops Selling JIHAD Texts, Wife-beating Guides

The UK Home Office has granted a string of Islamic bookshops the power to sponsor Skilled Worker visas, allowing them to bring migrants into Britain even as those same stores sell texts by Muslim Brotherhood ideologues that promote antisemitism, the overthrow of secular governments through jihad, and guidance on beating wives.

An investigation has revealed that these shops have issued dozens of certificates of sponsorship. One Birmingham bookshop alone has issued up to 16 since 2021. An east London outlet has sponsored as many as 18. A Leicester-area operation and two further east London businesses, including one in Tower Hamlets, have each been linked to up to 10.

Among the titles on their shelves is Milestones by Sayyid Qutb, the influential Muslim Brotherhood thinker executed in Egypt in 1966. The book argues for the toppling of all secular governments through “physical power and jihad” and their replacement with sharia regimes.

Several shops also stock Qutb’s In the Shade of the Qur’an, which contends that Jewish people “try to destroy all values and all that is sacred to mankind” and possess a “wicked nature.”

Works by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna appear alongside writings by Bilal Philips, a cleric already barred from the UK by the Home Office. Philips’s The Fundamentals of Tawheed includes guidance on wife-beating and states that “un-Islamic government must be sincerely hated and despised.”

UK Prison Service inspectors flagged the latter text as extremist material in 2016 and ordered it removed from prison chaplaincies.

None of these publications are illegal under current UK law, and some are available on mainstream platforms. There is no suggestion the shops themselves have broken the law. Yet the Home Office has still handed them official sponsorship licences under the Skilled Worker route.

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UK Committee Hears Calls to Expand the Online Safety Act’s Powers

A row of peers has gathered in Westminster to decide whether the Online Safety Act has been cruel enough to the internet yet. After some hours of evidence, the verdict came back: not nearly.

The Communications and Digital Committee has been quizzing stakeholders about how the law is going, and the charities it called have a grievance: Ofcom is too soft. Andy Burrows of the Molly Rose Foundation put it like this: “I do not get the impression that the companies are quaking in their boots at Ofcom’s enforcement approach.” The boots, by every account, stood steady.

The censorship law, for anyone who missed its arrival, will make Britain the safest place in the world to be online. It says so itself. The maximum fine runs to £18 million ($24M) or a tenth of worldwide revenue, whichever bites harder, which for the biggest platforms would reach into the billions. And still, no boots.

So the room reached for the obvious cure. More of it. Baroness Kidron of the 5Rights Foundation, defending Ofcom and filleting it in the same breath, allowed that “the act is wrong in certain places and does leave certain gaps, and will need some more work.” Some more work. The gaps, you understand, all run in the one direction.

Look at the machinery already bolted on. A platform that performs “Ofcom’s 44 measures, or whichever number it is now” — Kidron’s phrase — is safe. Do the 44 things, claim your safe harbor, go home. Try something cleverer and you forfeit the protection. The law rewards the box-tick over the better idea. A bold design.

And the boxes do get ticked. Nearly two-thirds of daily visits to Britain’s adult sites now pass through an age check. Lord Vaizey told the Lords that Ofcom had begun investigating 47 sites for non-compliance. Ofcom’s own spokesperson said 69. Enforcement is one of those two numbers.

Ofcom says the picture is better than that. Change was already happening, its spokesperson offered; platforms held to account, fast enforcement launched, more protections put forward. Burrows allowed that some of the action already under way might be supervisory, Ofcom working with a firm rather than fining it, though the process is opaque enough that nobody could say how industrious it was.

Meanwhile, the children the whole edifice was raised to protect. On the risk it already knew well, child sexual abuse, Burrows granted Ofcom was doing a good job. His worry was the newer harms. He kept returning to the Com groups; networks largely of teenage boys, whose reported numbers rose sixfold between 2022 and 2024, running a new kind of grooming pointed at suicide and self-harm. The Molly Rose Foundation carries the name of Molly Russell, fourteen, who viewed thousands of images promoting suicide and self-harm before she took her own life.

Rani Govender of the NSPCC laid out the trap: when a platform spots a harm the codes of practice never named, it carries no obligation to act on it. The law covers what the law already wrote down. More scope. More codes. More measures numbered 44, or whichever it is now.

One problem stayed off the agenda. The Act treats two hard engineering questions as things a statute can order into being. The first is reliable age estimation; in the opening days of the new rules, people strolled past the checks using video game avatars to pass as adults. The second is reading encrypted messages without breaking the encryption, which cannot be done, a point Signal made by offering to leave the country rather than build the back door. “If the choice came down to being forced to build a backdoor, or leaving, we’d leave,” its president wrote. A mandate is a wish with a fine attached.

The public has been voting with its downloads. When the age checks landed on July 25, Proton VPN clocked an hourly sign-up increase of over 1,400 percent. Ofcom’s answer was to tell the BBC it would be illegal for platforms to encourage VPN use. To Ofcom, a loophole to close. The verdict in it went unheard.

And the petition to repeal the whole thing has passed 550,000 signatures. Having heard all of this (the avatars, the VPN stampede, the third of a million names) the committee asked whether the age-check regime might also be extended to VPN providers.

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Great Britain Is Dead: Enslaved Burka-Clad Wife Wins ‘British Citizen Award’ for Empowering Young Women

You just can’t make this up.

Burka-clad Khadija Patel recently won the “British Citizen Award” for her work on building a safe and inclusive environment and empowering young women.

Shewas “fondly recognized” by the People’s for her exceptional service to her community and an inspiration she provides to others.

According to Asian Image, Khadija is the founder of the KRIMMZ Girls Youth Club, and her work has empowered hundreds of young women across Bolton through sport and physical activity.

The article reads that Khadija has created a “safe and inclusive” environment where girls can embrace confidence and develop lasting friendships.

Her work has reportedly helped break down cultural barriers and promote equality.

What?

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DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge

“Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told, if the boy who couldn’t read and write at 18 gets a PhD before he’s 30?”

Those are the words of Jason Arday—the 2002 Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education at Cambridge University. Indeed, the story of his metamorphosis from arguably the most disadvantaged person in the UK to elite scholar-athlete-philanthropist would make even Walt Disney raise an eyebrow.

Born to Ghanaian parents, Arday grew up on a council estate (the British equivalent of Section 8 housing) in south London. At age three he was diagnosed with global development delay and autism. Therapists said he would be confined to an assisted living facility. Miraculously, at 11 years old, he spoke his first word (“hello”). When he was 18, he learned to read and write.

Under the influence of a white high school teacher who “gave [him] agency,” Arday pursued higher education. After receiving a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University, he rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education, and inequality. In three years he went from senior lecturer at Roehampton (2018) to associate professor at Durham (2019) to professor at Glasgow (2021). Ivy League universities (plural) tried to recruit him, but he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge. In 2023, at age 37, he became the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.

In his spare time, Arday ran 30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days.

As of 2023, he had worked with “more than 70” charities and raised more than £5 million.

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UK Cities Roll Out More Diversity Barriers; Vehicle-Ramming Threat Now The Norm

A family summer beach event in the UK city of Nottingham now sits behind portable anti-ram steel barrier, the latest admission that open borders have turned public spaces into soft targets.

Local authorities across Britain are quietly installing more of what critics now call “diversity barriers” – heavy portable steel devices designed to stop vehicles being driven into crowds.

The annual artificial “Nottingham Beach” event opened this week behind a line of bright red Husson H-Stop units.

About 15 of the barriers now block the four main entrances. They tip upward on impact, changing a vehicle’s trajectory and generating enough friction to halt a three-and-a-half-tonne truck travelling at 30 mph.

Councillors and organisers insist the move is simply a precaution. The multi-agency safety group that approved them included counter-terrorism officers.

Councillor Neghat Khan, leader of Nottingham City Council, described them as an “additional safety measure” installed “following advice from the multi-agency events safety advisory group, which includes counter-terrorism colleagues.”

Event organiser James Mellors was more blunt: “I don’t think they look very pretty. But the Market Square is a very high footfall area. It’s not always about how things look, it’s about keeping people safe.”

A regular visitor, Amanda Hose Hawley, said she was “not surprised” and called the barriers “a sign of the climate we live in.”

The language is careful, the justification technical. Yet the reason these barriers exist is no mystery.

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Meet Britain’s New Cabinet Of Fakers, Fraudsters And Hangers-On

Britons are struggling to characterize their new Cabinet, following the arrival of a new prime minister on Monday. The Cabinet is not as northern or female as Andy Burnham signaled. Most members have certainly changed. Most are not loyalists to Keir Starmer, even less so to Tony Blair. Like Burnham, many hark back to a mythical golden age of socialism in the 1970s. Like him, most are alarmingly deficient in popular mandate, external qualifications, and even political trust for their new responsibilities.

Let’s start with Burnham himself, a man born in Liverpool who pretended to be Mancunian to win the mayoralty of Manchester. He claims to represent the north but has not lived north or east of Manchester. At best, he represents a narrow part of west-central England, just north of the Midlands.

Burnham has always looked south while talking up the north. Burnham was most newsworthy for agitating for changes in national government, despite sharing a party with Starmer.

As Starmer continued to trip himself up with both feet, Burnham was one of the Labourites who prevailed on ministers to brief against their PM. After Starmer blocked Burnham’s candidacy for an accidental by-election in February, Burnham prevailed on a local MP to resign from Makerfield to force a by-election in June, which Burnham won easily, to return to Parliament, which would allow him to challenge Starmer for the leadership (less than two years into Starmer’s five-year term). Starmer initially vowed to fight on but announced his intent to quit this month. No MP stepped up to challenge Burnham’s presumptive run.

Thus, Burnham has no popular mandate to be PM, even within the party, except in the form of pledges by more Parliamentary partisans in support than against. Opposition parties rightly called for a general election to confirm his premiership, but the constitution does not oblige him.

Burnham’s supporters pretend that his easy rise proves the strength of his candidacy. In reality, it proves the weakness of his party. It could not find a new leader within its own MPs, despite a whopping majority. It triggered an expensive by-election and a more expensive mayoral election to reach outside of Parliament. Meanwhile, Burnham unwittingly poured scorn on that same Parliamentary party by criticizing normal politics and the London elite. (Since then, he has aired the idea of moving the Cabinet from London to Manchester. His current plan is to spend at least one day per work week there. That’s neither efficient nor effective.)

In the many weeks that Burnham enjoyed as rising PM, he remained vague about his Cabinet and his policies.

On Monday, he spent hours appointing just the highest roles in the Cabinet. The other appointments look set to continue for days.

Of the first day’s picks, I must start with the only selectee who can be coded as qualified and mandated (although not loyal).

John Healey becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful position in government. He had quit as defense secretary six weeks ago, over Starmer’s procrastination on filling a hole in defense spending. Healey said that Britain should spend 3 percent of GDP on defense by 2030, which means he will need to find a couple dozen billion pounds per year. Previously, he advocated issuing “war bonds,” but who would buy them when the government is running record debt? He will need to cut other departments or raise taxes (probably both). On Monday, Healey said “fiscal control” would be his “first duty.” You could see the markets’ confidence decline immediately.

Healey’s resignation suggests a certain loyalty to Burnham, but otherwise they barely know each other. More usefully, he was a minister in the Treasury under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Yes, Healey is actually qualified by experience! This is remarkable given that his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, falsified her CV, couldn’t add, and quickly became the most U-turn-prone and hated chancellor ever, as well as the most tearful.

Healey remains constrained by record government debt and his party’s suicidal unwillingness to cut spending. Remember that Starmer increased spending on welfare and benefits, after backbenchers rejected his proposal to cut them. (That was within Starmer’s first year of premiership.)

Burnham is an out-and-proud socialist who had already signaled that his government would spend and tax more. By Tuesday, his administration revealed plans to cut VAT (a sales tax) on electricity, to be funded by cutting the Starmer administration’s planned digital ID. But the minister responsible for that plan, Darren Jones, revealed, after being fired by Burnham, that digital ID was never funded. So Burnham is either ignorant or dishonest. This . . . doesn’t . . . bode . . . well.

In any case, scrapping VAT on electricity doesn’t make much difference to a household electricity bill in which most of the pricing goes to fund green initiatives, debt, stealth taxes, and administration.

Burnham already looks unprepared and unreliable.

Confirmation comes in the form of his deviation from his team’s prior briefings that he would appoint either Ed Miliband or Shabana Mahmood to the Treasury.

Red Ed goes to the Foreign Office, for which he is woefully unqualified and an undoubted liability. He infuriated the U.S. (and most Britons) as energy secretary, with his absolutism about reaching net-zero carbon by 2030, at whatever cost to the consumer. Ed also, by the way, reminds everybody of the weakness of the party’s leadership selection. He was leader from 2010 to 2015, when he literally and metaphorically stumbled at every election husting. Yet Burnham thinks Miliband is the best person to articulate British interests abroad? This won’t last long.

Miliband is already hurt. He has been denied the job he wanted, even though he was the first senior minister to call for Starmer to go, and he helped Burnham with an economic plan. (Some plan: it remains as vague as ever, except for the Soviet-style time horizon of 10 years.)

Meanwhile, Mahmood stays at the Home Office. Under-informed (or biased) souls read this as confirmation of her competence in pushing through controls on illegal immigration in the face of majority opposition from civil servants and backbenchers. In fact, she is hurdling a low bar after decades of government failures to control immigration, despite popular demands and almost every party’s commitments to lower net immigration.

Worse, Mahmood is duplicitous. She tells the right wing that her tweaks to the benefits and the timeline of asylum applications will dramatically control immigration. She tells the left wing that she will make the refugee route easier (which is the route by which almost all illegal immigrants get residency, with more privileges than citizens). Also concerning is Mahmood’s long history of Islamocentrism, which is bizarrely ignored by mainstream media. She tars normative Britons as racists (whites and Jews in particular: isn’t that racist?), campaigned against Israel, played up her status as the first Muslim home secretary, promised that her promotion would serve “her” community, and railed against supposedly routine experiences of racism in her hometown of Birmingham, where her demographic is the largest.

I doubt Mahmood will last much longer than Miliband within Team Burnham. He favors the left of the party, which has characterized her (ridiculously) as a Nigel Farage in Labour colors. For now, Burnham needs to be seen to reward her, if only because one of her allies in Parliament, Josh Simons, was the MP who resigned from Makerfield to make way for Burnham.

So the highest three officers in the land will not last as long as normal, in my estimation. Burnham’s administration will not bring the stability that Britons crave, let alone the competencies that the markets and foreign governments crave.

Talking of high ministers who won’t last long, we must go next to Wes Streeting, who had resigned as health secretary (the poisoned chalice of all ministerial appointments anyway), to build support for a challenge against Starmer. Yet after the by-election, Streeting said he wouldn’t run against Burnham, who now must reward him. Streeting becomes defense secretary. During the weekend’s rumor mill, the former chief of the British Army, Lord Dannatt, said that Streeting “knows the square root of nothing about defence.” Indeed. He’s one acquisition scandal away from a sacking. And that sort of scandal leaks every few months from Britain’s MOD.

From a turncoat Starmerite, we now turn to the loyal Starmerites who remain in government on borrowed time.

The highest-profile survivor is Pat McFadden, who will remain as work and pensions secretary – which is strange given that the government has decreased neither worklessness nor liabilities. Excuses abound for his early dismissal. And since Burnham is committed to the so-called triple lock on pensions and to increasing welfare (he talks about social care as the neglected component, but he’s not talking about cutting anything), McFadden has no obvious options except to increase spending. That’s the vicious cycle that these monkeys refuse to see, hear, or speak.

Jonathan Reynolds was Starmer’s chief whip, a role that Burnham talks about deleting (he must think that everybody will love him forever without whipping). Reynolds will take over the merged departments for Science and Technology, and Business and Trade. Burnham has a short-term interest in Reynolds. Reynolds was an ineffective whip, but in his previous role, as business secretary, he temporarily solved the collapse of British Steel by forbidding more foreign ownership and investing in government ownership. Burnham has always liked public ownership of heavy industry and transportation and has already confirmed a policy to fully nationalize British Steel. But once that process is complete, Reynolds-the-Starmerite won’t be needed. The backbenches are full of untested socialists who think closer to Burnham on public ownership.

For similar short-term reasons, Burnham kept Heidi Alexander as transport secretary and kept Lisa Nandy as secretary of state for digital, culture, media, and sport. The latter is one of the departments with its own unit for countering “disinformation” (i.e., criticism of government) by spreading disinformation. It’s also led the lawfare to punish social media companies for “harmful” content, to restrict children under 18 years of age from accessing social media (an age that makes a mockery of the same government’s plans to lower the voting age to 16), to restrict everybody’s access to VPNs, and to censor information during election season. Burnham supports such authoritarianism. His hopes for the general election in 2029 depend on it.

Yvette Cooper has been demoted from foreign secretary to health secretary, which seems designed to set her up for further failure. Ironically, she is the most qualified minister by experience, having served through the Blair and Brown administrations, but that experience is to the right of Burnham’s ideological bent. (Always strange to describe a Labourite as to the right of anything.) She already has a reputation for indecisiveness, invisibility, and foot-in-mouth disease. She must immediately deal with yet more strikes by medical unions unless exorbitant demands for pay raises are met. These have been going on for years. She won’t last years.

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“Why I’m Writing This Anonymously And What That Says About Free Speech In Britain”

Ann Widdecombe’s murder has reopened a question that surfaces from time to time: should politicians with ‘unfashionable’ views get extra protection? The investigation continues, so I won’t comment on that, but the fact that the question is even being asked in response to a 78 year-old woman being killed in her own home tells you something regardless of how the investigation concludes. We have been here before. Jo Cox in 2016. David Amess in 2021. A pattern is forming, whatever the final facts of this particular case turn out to be.

The debate this triggers is usually framed narrowly: what security do MPs need? I want to push it wider: what if politicians are not actually the group most exposed? They have protection officers, party machinery and a public profile that makes an attack on them a national story. I have none of that. Neither does anyone else who simply has an opinion and a job to protect.

I recently listened to Professor David Betz of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, who argued that Britain may be entering a period of increasing internal conflict in which political violence becomes more likely.

Whether or not one accepts his analysis, it’s difficult to ignore the growing sense that our public discourse has become more hostile and less forgiving.

If expressing political disagreement increasingly carries the risk of intimidation or worse, the answer cannot simply be to provide more security for an ever-expanding list of public figures.

That treats the symptom rather than the disease.

The view from nowhere and a nobody in particular

I consider myself an ordinary person.

Thirty-plus years ago I would have considered myself slightly Left-leaning. I liked to think of myself as one of the good guys.

But somewhere in the last three decades the Overton window slid sideways, and views I’ve quietly held throughout – that mass immigration, legal and illegal, hasn’t obviously benefited the culture I grew up in, that free speech should mean everyone’s speech, including the people I disagree with – are now filed under ‘Right-wing’.

I don’t think I’m unusual. Look at the Brexit vote, which for many people was as much about sovereignty and control over immigration as it was about Brussels. Look at any poll on migration levels. There is a large, ordinary, non-extreme constituency that holds views broadly like mine. And a good number of them, I suspect, keep quiet for the same reason I’m staying anonymous here: weighing up whether speaking out is worth the risk. Silence can easily be mistaken for consensus, and I suspect that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Which raises a question I’ve had to sit with while writing this: am I a coward? Publishing anonymously, after all, is a way of having the argument without paying for it. But I don’t think cowardice is really what’s on display here. A coward stays silent. What I’m doing is closer to something else entirely: deciding that saying this at all matters more than saying it under my own name, while still not being willing to bet my livelihood on it. If that’s cowardice, then I suspect it’s shared by a very large, very quiet number of people who hold perfectly mainstream opinions and have simply done the same calculations that I have. That, in itself, might be the more troubling finding than anything else in this piece.

Fear arrives before the crackdown

This is the part I think gets missed in the security debate. We talk about authoritarianism as something that happens to you: a knock on the door, a lost job, a police caution for a tweet. But before any of that, there’s the version that happens inside your own head. You draft the post and delete it. You bite your tongue at the dinner table. You calculate what a client, a neighbour, or a local WhatsApp group might do with an honest opinion, and you decide it isn’t worth finding out.

That calculation isn’t paranoid. The variables feeding it are laid out in article after article in the Daily Sceptic. Prevent’s own material cites “cultural nationalism”, defined as the belief that Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by specific ethnic and cultural groups, as a sub-category of extreme Right-wing ideology. Two-tier policing is underpinned by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Anti-Racism Commitment, which states that policing should not be “colour blind”, a principle many officers and members of the public have read as licence to treat people differently according to race. It is perhaps no coincidence that public trust in these institutions has been falling sharply. Gallup found that Britons’ confidence in the courts dropped 12 points in a single year to 57%, while confidence in local police fell 11 points to 64%, the largest year-on-year declines on record for either measure. When the referee looks like it’s picking sides, people stop trusting the game.

Campaigners have logged tens of thousands of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ a year, the great majority of them originating from something someone posted online. And after events like the Southport riots, an entire category of people were branded ‘far-Right thugs’ as a matter of editorial habit. None of this needs to end in a prosecution for it to work. Its function is to make you flinch before you speak, not after. And it’s working: a YouGov poll found that 57% of Britons admit to sometimes holding back their views for fear of a negative reaction, and research published earlier this year found the same pattern setting in even among teenagers, with around one in five saying they hide their political opinions at school to avoid being ‘cancelled’. Self-censorship of this kind isn’t a fringe habit. It’s now closer to a majority experience.

Nothing dramatic has happened to me. Nobody has knocked on my door. I have not been arrested, cautioned or sacked. I have simply chosen, before any of that could happen, to leave my name off this piece. That is precisely the point. Fear doesn’t need to become reality to change behaviour. The anticipation of it is enough.

That’s the self-censorship no one puts a number on, and I think it’s doing more to shrink public debate than any single policy or piece of legislation. Its success isn’t measured by how many people it punishes, but by how many quietly change their behaviour hoping never to be punished at all.

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UK’s National Crime Agency Launches Investigation Into Itself over Leaked Financials of Farage’s Reform Party

Britain’s equivalent of the FBI has launched an investigation into itself after financial details of members of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party were leaked to the press.

Following accusations of illegally leaking banking information relating to Reform UK, including transactions involving deputy leader Richard Tice, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said on Friday that it has referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) for investigation, The Telegraph reported.

Earlier this month, a report from the Sunday Times accused Reform leader Nigel Farage of having failed to publicly declare financial support from longtime ally George Cottrell in the year leading up to the 2024 snap election, during which Mr Farage was mostly retired from frontline politics. While the party has denied that Farge broke any rules, questions have been raised, given Cottrell’s previous conviction for wire fraud in the United States and the alleged failure of Reform to declare the donations to the parliament.

Additionally, The Guardian revealed that Cottrell had also provided a brief loan of £80,000 to TisunInvestments, the real estate firm owned by Reform MP Richard Tice. Cottrell’s mother was also revealed to have donated £1 million to Tice’s think tank Britain Means Business, of which half was donated to Reform by Tice.

The transactions were reported flagged to the NCA under its suspicious activity report (SAR) scheme, which requires banks to flag large transactions.

However, Mr Tice said he was only made aware that the transactions had been flagged after he was approached by journalists from The Guardian, who also knew of other transactions from different bank accounts. He claims they would have been able to access such information only through leaks from the National Crime Agency.

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UK government’s policy of adding folic acid to flour is not safe; studies show an increase in cancer

Why Cancer Is The Question

Folic acid forms the building blocks of DNA and drives cell division. Early embryos have cells dividing at enormous speed and they need a ready supply. Anything that helps cell division presents a hypothetical risk for people with cancer and also for the initiation of cancer in healthy people. Consequently, studies have been carried out to try and measure where that hypothetical concern is present in reality.

Measuring the Harm

The strongest test for harm is a randomised controlled trial, in which people are assigned by the toss of a coin to receive either the treatment or a placebo and are then followed up to see what happens. In 2013, researchers pooled every large folic acid trial, involving around fifty thousand people, into one analysis in The Lancet. They reported no significant effect on cancer. That result became the basis of the official safety verdict.

A year earlier, a separate, more careful review split the same trials by dose given. It found an increase in cancer in the trials using lower doses, close to the amount fortification delivers, but none in the trials using much higher doses.

That headline, a six per cent increase reported as no significant effect, is an average across every dose the trials used. Split the trials into three dose groups, on both the published figures and the patient-level data behind the 2013 analysis, and the average comes apart.

The increase is seen at the exact range that fortifying flour will deliver. That is the reverse of how a drug normally behaves, since a larger dose would usually carry more risk, not less. The result below 1 milligram is the same even if the single polyp-prevention trial that critics single out is excluded and it is seen in ordinary adults rather than just in high-risk groups. 

Prostate cancer in particular is a concern. In one trial, men given 1 milligram of folic acid a day were diagnosed with prostate cancer at 2.6 times the rate of those on a placebo, a ten-year risk of 9.7 per cent against 3.3 per cent. The trial had been designed to study bowel polyps rather than the prostate. Sixteen years later, there have still been no further trials to measure this properly. Instead, researchers re-examined the data from the other folic acid trials already run. Pooled together, six trials covering around 25,000 men showed a 24 per cent increase in prostate cancer among the men given folic acid (relative risk 1.24, 95 per cent confidence interval 1.03 to 1.49). A reanalysis at a case level claimed there was no signal but they specifically excluded dosages within the fortification range. Folate obtained from food carried no such risk, which points to the synthetic form rather than the vitamin as it occurs in the diet.

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