Tag: united kingdom

UK Police Force Invites Non-Muslim Staff To FAST During Ramadan As Act Of SOLIDARITY

West Midlands Police force is actively inviting non-Muslim officers and staff to go without food and water during Ramadan as a deliberate “act of solidarity” with Muslim colleagues. 

The force presents this as a way for officers to grasp the “significance of Ramadan” for Muslim residents in one of Britain’s most diverse regions. Critics see it as yet another example of public institutions bending their culture around one faith while the foundational principle of policing without fear or favour collapses under diversity dogma.

The invitation comes from the West Midlands Association of Muslim Police. Colleagues of all backgrounds are encouraged to fast for a day during the month-long festival, with the money they would normally spend on lunch donated to charity.

A force spokesman confirmed the practice has run for a number of years: “The West Midlands Association of Muslim Police has, for a number of years, invited colleagues from all faiths and backgrounds to fast for a day to raise money for charity during Ramadan. It is entirely a matter for officers and staff if they wish to take part.”

“This is an initiative which is undertaken at a number of organisations around the country. The West Midlands has a large and diverse population, including many Muslim residents, and it is important for officers and staff to understand the significance of Ramadan to those communities,” the spokesman added.

Documents obtained by the Telegraph through freedom of information requests show the force is held up as a model of inclusivity. A New Forest council diversity training memo praises West Midlands Police for supporting fasting colleagues with flexi-working so they can spend time with families.

It notes: “What’s more, increasing numbers of non-Muslim staff have taken up fasting each year as an act of solidarity with their Muslim colleagues, adding to the family feel of WMP culture.” Councillors were urged to brainstorm their own versions of such inclusivity.

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Trafalgar Square Gets Diversity Barriers…

London’s most iconic public space has been turned into a fortified zone. 

Heavy steel and concrete barriers now ring Trafalgar Square, hemming in Nelson’s Column and the open plaza that once defined the heart of the capital. Critics are calling them exactly what they are: diversity barriers. The temporary metal structures clearly exist for one purpose only—to stop vehicles being driven into crowds.

Footage circulating this week shows the bright yellow and concrete-style anti-ram units lining the approaches to the square. Tourists and locals navigate filter gaps between the devices while Nelson looks down on a landscape redesigned for a threat the authorities refuse to name.

These are not temporary crowd-control fences for a one-off event. They form part of a growing pattern across Britain.

Just days earlier, similar devices appeared at a family beach event in Nottingham’s Market Square. Fifteen Husson H-Stop units blocked the entrances there, designed to tip a three-and-a-half-tonne truck travelling at 30 mph.

Councillors described them as an “additional safety measure” following advice from a multi-agency group that included counter-terrorism officers. Organiser James Mellors admitted they “don’t look very pretty” but insisted the high-footfall area required them.

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MI5 directors who plotted IRGC ‘terror’ ban exposed in leaked emails

Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone show both a current and former MI5 director secretly lobbied for the British government’s move to label the IRGC a terrorist entity as well as the UK’s adoption of the draconian National Security Act.

The correspondence reviewed here offers extraordinary insight into how the MI5 influences Downing Street and manipulates public perceptions of dubious or non-existent threats.

On July 13, the government of former Prime Minister Keir Starmer officially listed the IRGC as a terrorist organization, citing supposed kidnapping and assassination plots by the Iranian military branch. Now, merely publishing Iranian-supplied casualty figures could be categorized as “terrorism,” potentially landing British citizens in prison for up to 14 years.

Leaked correspondence reviewed by The Grayzone reveals that when first proposed in 2023, the push to proscribe the Iranian military branch was coordinated among the former heads of British intelligence agency MI5. Those plotting the designation included the MI5’s current Director General Ken McCallum and previous Director General Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller – who was privately credited with the passage of Britain’s draconian National Security Act.

The spymasters appeared to view Labour’s then-Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as a key ally in constricting civil liberties and convincing government officials to formally designate the IRGC a terrorist entity.

In private discussions, McCallum acknowledged the “direct operational benefit” of proscribing the IRGC was likely to be “modest.” The MI5 chief nonetheless considered it “sensible to contemplate” such powers, and potentially extending them to include a ban on supposedly state-affiliated factions such as the now-defunct Russian private military company Wagner.

McCallum’s behind-the-scenes lobbying of Cooper and Starmer was the culmination of a wider effort by veteran MI5 officials who’d sought to “help the opposition to be ready to govern” once they took office in July 2024. 

Starmer and his shadow cabinet proved highly receptive to clandestine approaches from McCallum and his veteran MI5 forebears. Meanwhile, McCallum deployed scaremongering about the supposed threat of China, Iran and Russia – frequently coordinated with Manningham-Buller – to justify ratcheting up budgets and powers for the spy agency, whose ultimate targets appear to be domestic dissidents.

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UK High Court Moves To Ban Display Of English And British Flags

A Liberal Democrat council has secured a High Court injunction that effectively bans the unauthorised display of the St George’s Cross and Union Flag on lampposts and public highways across an entire English county.

What began as a grassroots campaign to raise the colours of the nation has been declared a threat to community safety, with the full force of the courts now deployed against it.

Oxfordshire County Council, run by the Liberal Democrats, won its landmark case after months of legal action against the Raise the Colours campaign.

Justice Dexter Dias granted the order prohibiting unidentified persons from attaching England or Union flags to highway infrastructure or painting flag imagery on roads. Breach carries the risk of imprisonment, unlimited fines, or asset seizure.

Council leader Tim Bearder celebrated the outcome, stating “This is a welcome judgement. We’re very pleased with the result,” adding “This sets a legal precedent and will hopefully deter people in not just Oxfordshire but around the country from partaking in this criminal activity.”

He described those involved as “very challenging people, not patriots.”

The council claims the flags created highway safety risks, trespass, and obstruction. It spent roughly £80,000 removing them and a further £40,000 on legal fees, costs it now intends to recover.

Staff tasked with taking the flags down reportedly faced hostility, to the point that some were instructed to wear face coverings and check their vehicles for tracking devices after one worker’s home address was published.

The judge noted that maintenance teams had been “working in fear” and that people directed by the council had been obstructed “to the extent that at times they have simply given up on the removal.” He concluded there was “little prospect absent an injunction that it will stop.”

The new order does not prevent flags on private property, and the council insists it flies both the Union Flag and St George’s Cross at County Hall.

This is the same Oxfordshire authority that earlier issued formal stop notices branding the widespread installation of national flags an “act of intimidation and division.”

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UK Puberty Blocker Trial to Begin Recruiting Children as Young as 11

A controversial impending clinical trial on puberty blocking drugs in Britain will begin on Saturday to recruit hundreds of children as young as 11-years-old.

The so-called “Pathways” trial being run by King’s College London (KCL) will start recruiting some 226 children between the ages of 11 and 16 on August 1st as it seeks to determine the benefits or risks of puberty blockers on supposedly transgender children, the BBC reported.

In 2024, a review from paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass found that previous justification for the use of such hormone-altering therapies in children was “built on shaky foundations” and thus the National Health Service (NHS) should not proscribe them.

Yet, Dr Cass said there should be an exception for clinical trials, despite the potential of permanently damaging participating children. Cass said last month that the study was “essential” to determine “whether these drugs are helpful or not”.

The clinical trial was originally set to commence in January but was delayed following legal action taken by Bayswater Support Group, which represents hundreds of concerned parents.

However, this challenge was thrown out by the High Court on Friday after Mr Justice Chamberlain ruled that the child participants would be assessed for months by doctors who will have “formed the opinion that a child has a reasonable prospect of receiving a clinical benefit from the treatment”.

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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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