Tag: united kingdom

UK’s Burnham Moves Toward Authoritarian Rule, and That Means Trouble for the U.S.

Here we go again: leftists have shown us again and again that they hate dissent and debate, which are the foundations of any free society. Now the U.K. is heading decisively toward authoritarianism as its crazy-left prime minister, Andy Burnham, has just announced that he plans to establish a “National Centre for Information Defence” in order to fight — you guessed it — “disinformation.”

The “National Centre for Information Defence“ is a canny name. It beats Old Joe Biden’s abortive “Disinformation Governance Board” in couching the whole totalitarian move as “defense” (as we spell it in the land of the free and the home of the brave) rather than “governance.” This is intended to give Burnham’s hapless citizenry the impression that what’s being done to them is not more control from the ruling elites, but protection from the evil machinations of deceivers.

Yeah, Andy, the Mafia offered protection, too. Anyway, GB News reported Wednesday that Burnham, “the Prime Minister, addressing the United Nations, announced the centre to improve ‘community cohesion’ and prevent a ‘distorted and untrue narrative about Britain.’” As a result, Burnham “ordered security chiefs to set up the quango, which will detect, attribute and disrupt ‘hostile information attacks’ and ‘deepfakes’ which hurt British interests.”

A “quango” is an organization that receives government financing but is ostensibly an independent group. And we all know that the far-left British government will stay fastidiously out of the affairs of an organization that is charged with stamping out “hostile information attacks” that supposedly “hurt British interests,” now, don’t we?

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How the British Crown profited directly from human trafficking

The question of slavery and reparations has recently returned to the center of international debate, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean. The conference held in Ghana on reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, as well as the petition filed by a Jamaican delegation to the British king, engaged in the struggle for historical recognition. The debate has also been brought into sharper focus by an investigation published by The Guardian, which examined the involvement of the British monarchy in the system of slavery and the historical links between the Crown and the trafficking of Africans.

Taken together, the developments raise a fundamental question: How can the British monarchy and the British state genuinely address a past in which the Crown was directly connected to the economic and political structures of slavery?

There are symbols that, on their own, encapsulate centuries of history. A crown branded with a red-hot iron onto the skin of an enslaved human being is one of them. It was a real, documented practice carried out by the South Sea Company, directly supported by the British monarchy during the reign of Queen Anne.

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Jamaica demands Britain pay billions in slavery reparations

Jamaica wants £10 billion from Britain for slavery reparations. Ezra Levant has a response on Tuesday’s Ezra Levant Show. It’s not £10 billion. It’s one coin.

“Two men, a European and an African, standing face to face, shaking hands,” Ezra described, holding up the medal. Around the edge: “We are all brethren.” Underneath: “Slave Trade Abolished by Great Britain, 1807.”

Flip it over and the other side isn’t English. It’s Arabic. “Sale of slaves prohibited in 1807 Christian era, in the reign of George III. Verily we are all brothers.” Why Arabic? Because of who was selling the slaves.

“The way this is taught now, you’d think slavery was invented by Englishmen in the 1600s. It wasn’t,” Ezra said. “Slavery is as old as civilization. It’s in the Torah, the laws of Moses regulated. It’s in the New Testament. It’s in the Quran. Every one of those books treats slavery the way we treat the weather, a permanent fixture of the world, to be managed, not abolished.”

What had never happened before in human history, he argued, was a group of people deciding it was wrong and acting on it. “Overwhelmingly, evangelical Christians. Wilberforce, Clarkson, the Clapham sect.” 

“The moral code of the entire world changed, and it changed because of them,” he said.

“Here’s the part they don’t teach you in school,” Ezra said. “The Atlantic slave trade ran for about 350 years. The Arab slave trade ran for about 1,300 years. It started in the 7th century and it didn’t stop until the 20th. In fact, in some parts it still lives.” He cited Ronald Segal’s book Islam’s Black Slaves, which puts the total at “somewhere between 11 and 14 million souls.”

“There’s a reason there is no large black population in Arabia today, the way there is in Brazil or Jamaica or Alabama,” he continued. “Most of the men were castrated. Most of those died. The ones who lived were sold as eunuchs at seven times the price of a man who hadn’t been cut.”

The medal, Ezra explained, was written in Arabic precisely because of who it was directed at.

“When the Royal Navy showed up on the coast of West Africa in 1808 to enforce the new law,” he said, “the men marching slaves down to the beach to sell them to the ships were very often Muslim slave traders from the interior, men who read Arabic. That is who this medal was for.”

The museum says plainly it was intended to deter Arab-speaking African traders from sending slave caravans to the coast. “It’s not a souvenir. It’s not actually money. It’s a warning.”

Britain backed that warning with a navy. The West Africa Squadron patrolled for 60 years, capturing roughly 1,600 slave ships and freeing about 150,000 Africans at a cost of approximately 1,600 British lives.

Two University of Chicago academics calculated the bill. “They found the campaign against these slave ships cost Britain about 1.8% of its national income, of its GDP, every year for 60 years,” Ezra said.

“You know, NATO’s target for a country’s entire military is 2% of GDP. Canada’s not even at 2%. Britain spent nearly that amount for two generations just on other people’s freedom and got nothing back except a lot of dead British sailors.”

Then in 1833, Parliament abolished slavery itself across the British Empire. Eight hundred thousand people freed. And Britain did something no other country has done: it paid for it. “The slave owners got 20 million pounds. That was about 40% of the entire national budget that year.” 

The loan, arranged by Nathan Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, wasn’t paid off until February 1, 2015. “If you paid tax in Britain before 2015, you were still paying for the end of slavery, literally paying for it.” Measured as a share of the economy, the economic historians at Measuring Worth put that at roughly £133 billion in today’s money — “about $250 billion Canadian dollars. A quarter of a trillion dollars was borrowed by the UK to buy the freedom of other people.”

Against all of that, Ezra turned to the reparations push now underway. The Caribbean reparations commission hired the Brattle Group, which produced a number: $24 trillion US. “Trillion with a T. That’s roughly seven times the size of the entire British economy.” 

In March, the UN General Assembly voted 123 to 3 declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity and urging reparations — “the transatlantic trade, mind you, not the Arab one, which ran four times as long.”

Nobody, Ezra noted, is asking Saudi Arabia, which kept slaves until 1962, or Oman, until 1970, or the descendants of the African kings who sold the captives. “They’re just asking Britain — the one country that spent 60 years and 2% of its economy stopping it.”

“No force in human history has done more to free the slaves, to stop the slave trade, and to enforce that ban around the world than the United Kingdom,” Ezra said, reiterating it took “60 years of its Royal Navy” and “a loan that took 180 years to pay off.”

He held up the coin one more time. “This little piece of bronze is what it looked like on the ground. A handshake, three words, and a sentence in Arabic. And so the men who’d been doing it for a thousand years would understand, it’s over. We are all brethren. They meant it.”

“Do you think anyone would strike a medal like this today?”

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Burnham Announces ‘Ministry of Truth’ to ‘Defend Democracy’ From ‘Russia-Amplified Far-Right Narratives’

The belief that the United Kingdom is experiencing decline, the view that there are negative elements to modern life, and the feeling of unrest after terror attacks are among “far-right narratives” pushed by Russian intelligence that bear “no resemblance to reality,” Prime Minister Andy Burnham declared as he announced plans for a new National Centre for Information Defence.

The UK has more experience than most Western countries in being attacked with information warfare and will establish a new government body to disrupt “hostile state information attacks”, Andy Burnham said during his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, while tipping that this model could be exported to other countries to protect them from unwelcome information as well.

Though the wide-ranging speech touched on a series of issues, the lion’s share of the new British Prime Minister’s speaking time was spent explaining how narratives contrary to his view of modern Britain not only bear “no resemblance to reality”, but are engineered by foreign powers to undermine national security.

The country’s deeper experience in this sort of warfare goes back ten years, Burnham said — not naming the defeat of progressive sentiment in the Brexit referendum ten years ago in 2016, but tacitly implying this was the first battle in this shadow war against information — stating British elections had also been targeted by Russia.

Because there is “no national security” without a cohesive society to build it on, Burnham said the level of threat he intended to fight justified extraordinary reach for this new information control body, stating:

The Kremlin spends about £1.3 billion each year on manipulating information. We’re talking about an insidious campaign that reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community, creating a narrative of decline, stoking division, and sowing despair… we are going to help our people to strengthen their resilience, because faced with their information warfare, security starts in every home.

The variety of opinions being forced on unsuspecting Britons by Russia was, the Prime Minister said, considerable, and conveniently aligns reasonably neatly with practically everything his Labour Party stands against.

This “industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment in the UK” by “Russian agencies” includes spreading disinformation to prey on ordinary people’s fears, he said, and amplifying “far-right narratives” by stoking “tensions and unrest in the wake of horrific events”, terror attacks.

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UK Government’s Apple iCloud Backdoor Secrecy Called “Farcical” in Court

The British government’s policy of neither confirming nor denying that it had ordered Apple to put a backdoor into iCloud has been described as “farcical” during a court hearing.

The London-based Royal Courts of Justice is the venue of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which on Thursday heard that the “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) stance was “logically unsustainable” given that everybody already knows the fact.

Ben Jaffey KC, who represents the campaign groups Privacy International and Liberty, told the court that the government was defending a secret that no longer exists.

The tribunal is hearing Apple’s complaint alongside the complaint from Privacy International and Liberty, challenging the home secretary’s power to issue secret orders, known as technical capability notices (TCNs).

The January 2025 leak to the Washington Post revealed that the Home Office had issued a TCN to Apple, requiring access to end-to-end encrypted messages and data stored by Apple customers worldwide in iCloud. Apple did not comply with the order and instead pulled its Advanced Data Protection service from UK users.

But within hours of the Washington Post story, Home Office sources confirmed the report to the Times. In October 2025, the Home Office issued a new TCN, reportedly narrower in scope and aimed at UK users.

As the tribunal was told, this was not the only confirmation of the original order. A post on X by former US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in August 2025 was seen by more than three million people, while in December 2025, the investigatory powers commissioner, Brian Leveson, said that “lawful access can be achieved in a way that strikes a balance between maintaining strong encryption and ensuring law enforcement and the government can protect the public from terrorism, serious crime, and hostile state activity.”

Gabbard had reported that the UK had agreed to “drop its mandate” for Apple to provide a “backdoor” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens.

Jaffey told the court that it was unlikely that Home Office sources would have confirmed the TCN without “tacit approval” from the government. “But here, within hours of reporting by the Washington Post, multiple sources were confirming to the Times the existence of the orders,” he said.

Leveson’s statement, Jaffey continued, “gives the game away.” The commissioner’s report would have been “clearly prejudicial to issues that might come in front of him in the future” had there been no TCN issued at all.

And while the Home Office is sticking to its NCND policy, WhatsApp and Google have confirmed in witness statements that they have not received any such orders – something they are free to say because there is no legal bar on disclosing that you have NOT received a TCN.

Apple, on the other hand, is in a different position because it did receive the order, and is now in court trying to force the government to confirm this, and by extension, admit that the TCN is still in force.

Another argument made by Jaffey is that Apple had to ask for permission before it could discuss the order with the US government, and that permission was granted. “The fact that Apple even needed to ask permission confirms there is a TCN,” he said.

The government’s argument against abandoning the NCND policy is that it would damage national security and hinder the investigation and prosecution of “serious crime,” including terrorism and online child abuse. But Jaffey said that “the horse has long bolted” as far as secrecy around the TCN is concerned, and that the government’s stance is “ridiculous” and “understates the principle of open justice.”

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Bank Of England Spends £85k Researching How Best To Erase Churchill

The Bank of England has spent more than £85,000 of research money to justify wiping Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, J.M.W. Turner and Alan Turing off Britain’s banknotes and swapping them for hedgehogs, foxes and puffins.

A Freedom of Information trail shows Savanta was paid £49,000 to run focus groups that told officials historical figures were “elitist and divisive.”

Another £22,500 went on public consultations about which animals should replace them. The Bank called the result a “positive evolution,” not censorship.

The October 2025 Savanta report, delivered months before the nature theme was announced, warned that portraits of notable Britons were “contentious and not representative of the UK’s cultural and natural diversity.”

Officials were told historical figures represented “a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.”

Most of the 119 focus-group participants said featuring such people was “potentially divisive, elitist and disconnected from their own experiences.”

Churchill sits on the current £5. Austen is on the £10, Turner on the £20, Turing on the £50. All are scheduled to go. King Charles stays on the front.

Governor Andrew Bailey is due to pick the animals by the end of 2026 from a shortlist that includes the European hedgehog, red fox, Atlantic puffin, barn owl, common frog and bottlenose dolphin.

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U.S. Secretly Removed Accused Pedophile Diplomat From Britain: Report

American authorities allegedly removed a U.S. diplomat serving in London from the country in a secret operation after he was accused of possessing child porn.

A report from The Sun — Britain’s top circulation newspaper — has claimed that U.S. secret agents carried out a clandestine operation on UK soil without informing local police, seizing an American diplomat from his London flat, taking him to a U.S. air base, and returning him to the United States.

The diplomat was reportedly under investigation after allegedly receiving indecent images of children from his brother. According to the report, American agents received a court order in the U.S. before carrying out the raid on the diplomat’s apartment in Putney, London, on August 25th. An investigation of the flat is said to have confirmed that the diplomat was in possession of the child pornography in question.

The move to remove the unnamed man back to the United States has riled feathers in London given that American officials have no authority to carry out policing operations in the United Kingdom.

A British government source is quoted by The Sun saying: “They should have told Scotland Yard when they carried out the raid, and certainly when they found material. Instead, we think they have taken him to a US airbase and flown him 4,000-plus miles to where his brother was being investigated. We think it was a dawn raid before they then took him to the base in a US military convoy.

“If there are child-abuse crimes, there are possibly other crimes he could have committed. There are fears the Yanks are trying to keep this in-house and it’s a cover-up. And we now don’t know if we’ll ever get him back to face British justice.”

An American diplomatic source reportedly defended the action, saying that the United States “acted decisively” and that if it had not acted swiftly, “there could have been delays and diplomacy that could have gone on for weeks or months.”

It is not the first time that American officials have avoided the British judicial system for crimes allegedly committed in the UK. London has previously raised the alarm over the case of a U.S. fighter pilot, Captain Jacob Wulfson, who strangled a woman in Cambridge. Rather than facing trial in England, Capt. Wulfson was tried on a U.S. air base.

He was acquitted of sexual assault and aggravated sexual contact, but was found guilty of strangulation, for which he received a six-month sentence. Downing Street said that it was “very concerning” that he avoided prosecution in Britain.

Commenting on the latest report, a U.S. Embassy spokesman said: “We are aware of allegations concerning an individual assigned to the U.S. Embassy in London. The United States government expects all personnel to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, and we take these allegations seriously.

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UK Government Reserves Two-Thirds Of Elite Jobs By Race; Leaked Doc Exposes

Sixty-six per cent of the slots are ringfenced for staff who are ethnic minority, disabled, or from a lower socio-economic background. Everyone else – including the white working-class kids the same government claims to champion – can take whatever is left. They’ve essentially built a public-sector caste system.

The Cabinet Office’s defence is the same tired formula used across the British state. The scheme, it says, complies with the “positive action” provisions of the Equality Act. In plain English: race, disability status and class background are now official sorting criteria for who gets accelerated towards the top of the machine that writes the country’s laws.

Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf put the objection in one line: “Jobs and opportunities should be awarded on merit, not handed out according to someone’s ethnicity.”

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US To Sell Black Hawk Helicopters to Argentina, Despite Renewed Tensions With the UK Over the Falkland Islands

Argentina is arming itself, and the US is helping it.

We have been reporting here on TGP about the renewed designs by Argentina over the oil-rich Falkland Islands – situated off its coast, but currently a British possession.

Argentina and the UK fought over the territories back in 1982, with the Europeans coming out on top.

But since then, a lot has changed, including the fact that the British can’t rely on automatic support from the US, after their Globalist leaders’ refusal to aid in the military operations against Iran.

And today (11), it arises that the US will sell Black Hawk military helicopters to Argentina for the very first first time.

The Telegraph reported:

“The State Department said the proposed $140m (£103m) deal – which would give Buenos Aires four UH-60L helicopters – would improve Argentina’s ability ‘to meet current and future threats’.”

“The move follows Donald Trump’s inflammatory comments about the Falklands, with the US president suggesting he would not help Britain fight an invasion of the islands by Argentina.

Last week, The Telegraph reported that the US could also oppose Britain’s claim to sovereignty over the islands to encourage Andy Burnham to spend more on defense.”

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FALSE FLAG? Russia Arrests Guard at UK Embassy in Moscow Accused of Spying on British Diplomats on Behalf of Ukraine, Part of Terrorist Plot to Make London Join Kiev’s Fight

A ‘False Flag’ to lure Britain into Ukraine’s war against Russia was foiled, Moscow says.

Out of all the warmongering European powers, no other country has become a bigger enemy to Russia than the United Kingdom.

So why is the Russian Security Service arresting a guard in the UK embassy in Moscow for spying on British diplomats on behalf of Ukraine?

Because that’s (allegedly) exactly the point.

Russia’s FSB alleges that the man was involved in a deadly terrorist plot targeting British diplomats to force threw the UK into joining Kiev’s war – a classic ‘false flag’ attack.

The Telegraph reported:

“The Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed the man, a Russian citizen working for an agency guarding the British embassy in Moscow, had gathered detailed information about the movements of British diplomats, including Nigel Casey, the ambassador to Russia.

It alleged that Ukraine intended to use the intelligence to stage a terrorist attack against British envoys and pin the blame on Moscow, to draw Britain into direct armed conflict with Russia.”

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