Tag: united kingdom

Amid UK Turmoil, Push For Digital ID and Cellphone Surveillance Continues

The floundering left-wing Labour Party government in Britain appears intent on imposing as much authoritarianism as possible on the public while it still remains in power, with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer using the King’s Speech on Wednesday to confirm plans to introduce a Digital ID system while plans for deep surveillance of private digital devices are revealed.

When in doubt, break glass for more Blairism appears to be the order of the day. Fighting for his political life following a disastrous performance in last week’s local elections, Prime Minister Starmer has not only turned to major figures from the previous Labour government, tapping Blairite veterans former PM Gordon Brown and Deputy leader Harriet Harman to come on board as advisors, he now seems intent on fulfilling his predecessor’s unfulfilled aims, introducing a Digital ID.

Although the Brown government began to introduce such a system, it was eventually scrapped following the 2010 general election, which the Conservative Party made a referendum on the idea. While long classified as fundamentally un-British — with the UK abandoning national identity cards following the Second World War in contrast to many other European nations — the project of a Digital ID has remained a key goal of the scheme’s architect, Former PM Tony Blair, who remains a key power broker in the background of the Labour Party.

On Wednesday, amid ongoing rumours of potential leadership challenges, Starmer’s government outlined its plans for the upcoming parliament in the King’s Speech, in which the Monarch reads a list of priorities written for him by Downing Street.

“My Ministers will also proceed with the introduction of Digital ID that will modernise how citizens interact with public services [Digital Access to Services Bill],” King Charles III told the State Opening of Parliament.

The government has previously pitched the concept as a cure-all for illegal immigration, saying it could be used to ensure that anyone seeking a job or renting a flat has their citizenship or immigration status instantly verified. Other potential uses put forward include accessing government services and collecting health records.

However, opponents have long raised concerns about Digital IDs, particularly regarding privacy and creeping state intervention. The British government has not showered itself in glory in recent years in terms of keeping digital secrets safe, with it recently accidentally leaking a list of thousands of spies, soldiers, and allies on the ground in Afghanistan to the Taliban, undercutting the notion that it would protect the much less sensitive data of average Britons.

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King’s Speech 2026: Britain’s Monarchy Reads a Doomed Agenda as Starmer Clings to Power

For many years, it was called the Queen’s Speech and delivered year after year by Queen Elizabeth II. Now it’s the King’s Speech — the traditional State Opening of Parliament where King Charles reads out the government’s planned laws. The Prime Minister’s team writes the whole thing, so it’s really their agenda, not the King’s personal views. Think of it like a presidential address to Congress, but with all the robes, crowns, and centuries of tradition.

This year’s speech, delivered on May 13, 2026, felt particularly awkward. Just six days earlier Labour had been hammered in the local elections — losing over 1,000 council seats while Nigel Farage’s Reform UK stormed ahead with more than 1,100 gains and took control of several councils. Keir Starmer is clearly fighting for his job. Dozens of Labour MPs are already calling for him to go, four ministers have resigned, and the party looks in open revolt. Yet there was the King in full ceremonial dress, reading out Starmer’s wishlist as if everything was business as usual.

The optics aren’t great. Critics are right to worry that the monarchy is getting dragged into Labour’s internal mess at a time when trust in institutions is already low. When the head of state appears to back the government’s plans just days after voters delivered a clear rejection, it raises serious questions about whether the Crown is staying truly neutral.

Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic should pay close attention to the six main priorities. Far from listening to last week’s verdict at the ballot box, Starmer’s team looks completely tone-deaf to the issues that drove so many people toward Reform UK.

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Jess Phillips Resigns, Pushes Phone Scanning Law in UK

Stuffed inside a resignation letter about the UK’s Labour Party’s leadership crisis is a proposal that should alarm anyone who owns a phone.

Jess Phillips, who stepped down as Safeguarding Minister today, spent a significant portion of her parting shot to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, complaining that the government failed to mandate technology on every phone and device in the country that would prevent children from taking explicit images.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Phillips framed this as child protection but what she described is device-level surveillance deployed at national scale.

Her letter stated that “91% of online child sex abuse is self-generated by children groomed, tricked and exploited in to abuse,” and that she presented solutions to Starmer “over a year ago” that would “end the ability for children in the UK to take naked images of themselves.”

She wanted this installed on every device in the country.

The government dragged its feet for twelve months before agreeing to “even threaten to legislate in this space. Not legislate, just threaten.” Phillips called this “the definition of incremental change.”

An announcement planned for March got pushed to June. She’d “given up believing it” would happen.

The resignation falls during a brutal stretch for Starmer. More than 90 Labour MPs have called for him to go after disastrous local elections.

Phillips told Starmer he is “a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things” but that she’d “seen first-hand how that is not enough.” His instinct to avoid confrontation, she argued, had paralyzed the government. “The desire not to have an argument means we rarely make an argument, leaving opportunities for progress stalled and delayed.”

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Husbands With Two or More Wives Get Increased Benefits

The Department for Work and Pensions has increased the benefits paid out to households in polygamous marriages from April. The Express has the story.

The DWP has confirmed in its benefits uprating list that “additional spouses” in “polygamous marriages” are being given a 4.8% boost to their benefits from April, which would most likely be for husbands with multiple wives.

Those who are classed as an “additional spouse” in a polygamous marriage and are above state pension age were in 2025–26 able to claim an additional £119.50 per week of Pension Credit or Housing Benefit, with no given limit on the number of separate additional spouses who can claim in one household, other than the overall benefits cap per household per year.

From April 2026, this has been increased to £125.25 per week per additional spouse, a 4.8% increase in line with wage growth, which is how Pension Credit is automatically increased each spring, which is another £5.75 per week, or £299 extra per year.

The money is less than that person would be able to claim if they lived alone (£238 from April 2026), but is still extra money for a three-person household’s income compared to a two-person marriage.

The rule is not new, but the amount given to second wives is still being increased each year.

Although bigamy is illegal in the UK, the act of marrying more than one person at a time – polygamy – is not illegal if the marriages took place overseas.

This is legal where a person has married multiple wives (or husbands) overseas while legally living in a country where this is legally allowed, and then moved to the UK legally afterwards.

In that circumstance, a person now legally living in the UK, who legally married more than one spouse while living overseas, can then see their second, third and even fourth wife (or husband) all claim an additional £125.25 each per week, as long as that additional spouse came to the UK legally in their own right.

The DWP’s benefits and pension rates 2026 to 2027 document states: “If the claimant is a member of a polygamous marriage and all of the members of the marriage have attained pensionable age on or after April 1st 2021, for the claimant and the other party to the marriage [the allowance per week is now] £363.25.

“For each additional spouse who is a member of the same household as the claimant [the allowance per week is now] £125.25.”

It is understood the DWP believe the number of claimants to be small although it has not been able to provide a number for how many second or third wives do claim the benefit.

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Ideological Insanity Has Gotten WAY WAY WORSE In The UK…

A major exam board has now signed off on gender-neutral language in GCSE French, Spanish and German exams – despite the terms being completely alien to how those languages are actually spoken in their home countries.

The move, buried in new specifications for 2026 exams, hands students the green light to ditch standard masculine and feminine forms in favour of made-up “inclusive” pronouns, nouns and adjectives.

Yes, you read that right. They’re letting students make up their own parts of foreign languages in exams.

Staff at Pearson Edexcel have explicitly permitted teens to use “inclusive” pronouns, nouns and adjectives in both written and oral GCSEs. Yet as the article linked above makes clear, “the French do not pander to the same bid for inclusivity, with all their grammatical concepts being strictly categorised into gendered variants.”

Adjectives must match the noun in masculine or feminine endings. Gender-neutral terms simply do not exist in grammatically correct French or Spanish.

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The Most Direct Social Engineering Propaganda You’ll EVER See

A new Channel 5 drama series has delivered what many are calling peak social conditioning: a classroom scene where a teacher is berated by students for failing to instantly adopt preferred pronouns and for daring to stage Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A clip, shared widely on social media, shows an old-school drama teacher clashing with pupils over basic biology, literature, and “respecting identities.”

In the footage, a student corrects the teacher when she uses the wrong name for a student who has decided to swap genders and adopt new pronouns: “Their name is Dee now actually,” one student explains, adding “you just deadnamed them Miss.”

The teacher responds: “I’m sorry. I’ve known you as Daphne for two years and can’t click a switch. I am trying.”

Another insufferable student fires back: “You shouldn’t have to try. You either see them or you don’t. I think you should apologise.”

The teacher then puts her foot in it again and states: “I just did, and am sure she can fight her own battles!”

“It’s they not she… It’s about respecting other people’s identity,” the student lectures.

Later, students challenge the Shakespeare choice, with one suggesting “There’s a consent issue. Titania is drugged before sleeping with Bottom… It’s also anti-feminist portraying women as submissive and dependent on men… to a modern audience it could be quite triggering.”

The scene perfectly captures the absurdity: instant language policing, classic literature deemed harmful for not meeting 2020s standards, and virtue-signalling students demanding deference.

This isn’t subtle. It’s overt social engineering dressed as entertainment.

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Meta Will Fight Ofcom Over the Math, Just Not the Censorship

Meta filed a judicial review against Ofcom in London’s High Court on Thursday over how the regulator calculates fees and fines under the Online Safety Act, the UK’s online censorship law. The company isn’t challenging the law’s censorship powers, its ability to compel scanning of encrypted messages, or its elastic definition of online “harm.” It is challenging the size of the fine.

The dispute centers on whether Ofcom should base penalties on Meta’s global revenue or just what it earns in the UK and the gap between those two figures is enormous. Meta reported roughly $201 billion in worldwide revenue last year, and the Online Safety Act lets Ofcom fine companies up to 10% of “qualifying worldwide revenue,” which puts Meta’s theoretical penalty ceiling near $20 billion. Calculated on UK-only revenue, that number collapses.

“We and others in the tech industry believe [Ofcom’s] decisions on the methodology to calculate fees and potential fines are disproportionate,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries they’re being regulated in. This would still allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in UK corporate history.”

Ofcom pushed back in a statement, saying: “Disappointingly, Meta are objecting to the payment of fees, and any penalties that could be levied on companies in future, that are calculated on this basis.”

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Dozens of Green Party Candidates Investigated over Alleged Antisemitism: Report

The insurgent Green Party is reportedly investigating dozens of its council candidates for alleged antisemitism as the multicultural-leftist faces having its momentum stalled by scandal.

According to a report from the Daily Mail, over 30 Green candidates for local councils are being investigated by their own party amid accusations of widespread antisemitism within the far-left party run by Jewish-heritage London Assembly Member Zack Polanski.

The issue came to the fore last week after two Green council candidates, Saiqa Ali and Sabine Mairey, were both reportedly arrested on “suspicion of stirring up racial hatred” over alleged antisemitic social media posts.

The left-wing Labour Party, which has been bleeding supporters to the more radical Greens, is said to have produced a dossier of social media posts by 25 Green Party candidates, supposedly including a string of “harrowing anti-Semitism, dangerous conspiracy theories and appalling comments supporting Hamas.”

Meanwhile, Green leader Polanski, who has openly courted the UK Muslim vote, was revealed to have liked posts that accused Prime Minister Starmer of being on the payroll of Israel and high-profile Jews.

In the wake of the recent apparently antisemitic mass stabbing attack in Golders Green, London, Polanski came under heavy criticism for sharing a post which claimed that Met Police officers were “repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head” while attempting to detain the knifeman.

The post drew the ire of Met Police chief Mark Rowley, who described it as “inaccurate and misinformed commentary” while describing the heroic actions of the officers as “nothing short of extraordinary”. For his part, Polanski accused Britain’s top law enforcement officer of interfering in the elections by publicly denouncing his post.

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Pastor Found Guilty of Violating U.K. Speech Laws for Preaching John 3:16 Sermon Near Hospital

The United Kingdom, which has been cracking down on speech for years, dealt free speech another blow on Thursday when a district judge found Clive Johnston, a retired Northern Irish pastor, guilty of preaching John 3:16 in public.

The 78-year-old was convicted of two charges under the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zone) Act (Northern Ireland) for holding an open-air service near Causeway Hospital in Coleraine in 2024. This law makes it a crime to do anything that could be seen as “influencing” or “preventing or impeding” people seeking abortion services within 100 meters of a clinic. Eight of these “buffer zones” have been created in Northern Ireland.

However, Johnston did not mention abortion in his sermon. It was also a Sunday, which meant the sexual health clinic was not open for scheduled abortion appointments. Body camera footage shows Johnston speaking about his journey toward faith, playing the ukulele, and preaching John 3:16 (“for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son”) before being interrupted by a police officer. The officer tells Johnston that “this is a safe access zone,” and he must stop preaching or he “may be removed and liable to prosecution.”

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Amid Energy Crisis, Norway Reopens North Sea Gas Fields, Will Sell Output to ‘Net-Zero’ Britain That Refuses to Explore Its Own

Reactivation project will help power millions of homes.

While the United Kingdom continues to be fixated in their ‘net-zero’ lunacy, Norway is set to revive three gas fields in the North Sea.

Norwegians go ‘drill, baby, drill’, reopening the fields for the first time in three decades, as Norway tries to meet growing export demand from Germany and the UK.

Norway is reopening gas fields in the North Sea after almost 30 years.

The Norwegian’s will be selling us this gas.

We could drill for gas, in the same sea.

Is this the smart approach? pic.twitter.com/tYWTA3AU6w

— Looking for Growth (@lfg_uk) May 6, 2026

The Telegraph reported:

“Steinar Våge, the European president of ConocoPhillips, the hydrocarbon company behind the reactivation, said the three fields would produce about 19 billion cubic meters of gas. That is equivalent to powering up to three million homes in the UK.

‘By utilizing existing infrastructure, we can produce substantial resources at low cost, and strengthen gas exports to Europe’, he said.”

“Norway’s push to ramp up oil and gas exploration represents a marked difference to what is happening in the UK, where about 180 of its 280 fields are set to close by 2030. In the last 12 months, Britain spent £20bn buying oil and gas from Norway and that reliance is only set to grow further.”

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