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'Elon Musk's Venal 'Rape Genocide' Claims About Keir Starmer and Grooming Gangs Are Absurd'
Épisode 33
vendredi 10 janvier 2025 • Durée 13:58
Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.
To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.
Help us build the better media Britain deserves
For those of us employed in the criminal justice system the assertion by Elon Musk that there has been a "rape genocide" in the UK and that the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who held the officer of Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) between 2008 and 2013 is "complicit", evoked feelings ranging from bewilderment to rage.
During my career at the Criminal Bar, which has spanned a quarter of a century, I have watched as successive governments and every DPP has agonised over the unique challenge of ensuring that sexual offences are investigated meticulously, prosecuted effectively and tried fairly.
The challenge is a profoundly complicated one because sexual offences are, by definition difficult to investigate, prosecute and try.
Sex offences committed against adults often take place within the parameters of a relationship and the distinction between a complainant who has consented to a particular sexual act, and a victim who has been groomed or coerced to 'give in', is not always clear.
Evidentially, allegations often involve drink or drugs and drunk witnesses who are not sure about certain parts of an incident; sometimes the allegation is accompanied by thousands of pages of telephone evidence which can take months to sift through or complicated DNA evidence, but, just as often the evidence doesn't go beyond one person's word against another.
Offences committed against children have their own unique difficulties; children may not have the language to describe what happened to them, children may be embarrassed about certain aspects of what happened, and their accounts may change as they recall or feel able to articulate different parts of what happened.
Defendants are also less helpful upon arrest - a person accused of drug offences, or even violence, may accept the crime or parts of the crime, but a person accused of child abuse or rape, will rarely offer the police anything beyond a stonewall "I didn't do it, it's all a lie," meaning that the case will have to be investigated with a view to putting the evidence before a judge, barristers will become involved and a trial process embarked upon where the outcome is never guaranteed.
And, sadly, because of the backlog of Crown Court cases, which grew out of the austerity measures of the Cameron years, trials may only take place months if not years after the original complaint has been made.
Court Case Backlog Worse Now than Before £477 Million Investment to Curb Delays, New Report Reveals
National Audit Office figures show MoJ way off target of reducing court case backlog by more than 14,000 cases and more than 6,000 are two years or more old
David Hencke
All of these things mean that the challenge of dealing with sex offences properly is massive.
Which is why the suggestion that the United Kingdom as a country has a particular problem with sexual offences, and that our Prime Minister has contributed to that, is an assertion that doesn't hold water whilst the attempts to make political capital out of this issue are brazen and unfounded.
In my experience, the reality is that in the last twenty years profound improvements have been made in the investigation and prosecution of sex offences.
When I did my first trials back in the first years of this century, complainant's were still mainly treated in exactly the same way as any other witness, they would typically have their sexual history paraded in the full view of a jury in the hope that their previous behaviour might assist in the attempt to persuade a court that they were promiscuous; children would be asked questions that were excruciating, in language that was utter...
'2024 Was the First Year Above 1.5C of Global Warming - Here's How We Should Respond'
Épisode 50
vendredi 10 janvier 2025 • Durée 10:35
Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.
To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.
Help us build the better media Britain deserves
Today the world was told that 2024 was the first year that global average temperatures exceeded 1.5C according to the EU's Copernicus Earth Observation Programme. In fact it's worse than that. It's 1.6C.
The increase in global temperatures has blind-sided scientists who are struggling for explanations. Temperatures were expected to cool after the end of the El Niño season in April of 2024. The Met Office's central estimate for 2024, for example, was 1.46C - i.e. cooler than 2023. That didn't happen.
Breaching 1.5C for a full calendar year might sound technical, geeky, and not a big deal but that's what the world's governments agreed we should aim to keep temperature rises close to, in Paris, in 2015.
To put this seemingly low number into context, every 0.1 C places 100 million people in unliveable temperatures. So the number may seem small, but the implications are enormous.
It also matters not just because impacts increase with temperature, but also because the heating amplifies feedback loops in the climate system, and as we move past 1.5C we increasingly cross tipping points. This means that things will not only get worse, but will get worse faster.
Tipping points are abrupt and/or irreversible changes in natural systems which accelerate the impacts of climate change.
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The Government is 'absolutely not going to save us… 2025 needs to be the year we start to save ourselves'
Rupert Read
For example, melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will catastrophically raise sea levels, the death of warm-water corals destroys a natural carbon sink, the melting of permafrost releases powerful greenhouse gasses and the breakdown of Atlantic ocean circulation changes how heat is distributed across the planet.
We are at risk of crossing some of these tipping points already. As the 2023 Global Tipping Point report explains:
These threats could materialise in the coming decades, and at lower levels of global warming than previously thought. They could be catastrophic, including global-scale loss of capacity to grow major staple crops. Triggering one Earth system tipping point could trigger another, causing a domino effect of accelerating and unmanageable damage. Tipping points show that the overall threat posed by the climate and ecological crisis is far more severe than is commonly understood
2023 Global Tipping Point report
A threshold could be passed where feedbacks uncontrollably tip the system into a Hothouse Earth scenario where the climate stabilises in the long-term at 4-5C higher than pre-industrial levels and with sea level rise of 10-60m higher than today.
The scientific mainstream has been systematically underestimating the risks of feedbacks and tipping points in both their models and their assessments.
"Because feedback loops are not yet fully integrated into climate models, current emissions plans might fall short in adequately limiting future warming," leading climate scientists warned in October.
Was COP29 a Cop-Out? Those Bearing the Brunt of Climate Change Say Yes
"In many ways, this COP was a deep disappointment", those feeling the full force of catastrophic climate change tell the Byline Podcast
Chris York
In order to determine if the long- term average has crossed 1.5C scientists tell us we need another ten years of data. But they are also telling us that we need to act with even greater urgency than before and that that action needs to be transformational.
And you don't need to be a scientist to see what is happening right on our own door...
'I Am Troubled When the BBC Treats This as a Serious Story'
Épisode 44
jeudi 9 janvier 2025 • Durée 08:59
Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.
To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.
Help us build the better media Britain deserves
Elon Musk has jumped on a long-trundling, far-right bandwagon and has been using his huge global platform on X to weaponize child sex abuse, in order to call for the resignation of Keir Starmer who he claims is "complicit" in an infamous grooming scandal.
In his latest post on the matter on 8 January, Musk appealed to the British public to "call your member of parliament and tell them that the hundreds of thousands of little girls in Britain who were, and are still are, being systematically, horrifically gang-raped deserve some justice in this world".
"This is vitally important or it will just keep happening", he added.
But Musk appears to be omitting one important factor in his bizarre crusade against Starmer - the truth.
"I can't think of a better word for it than bullshit", Tom Baldwin, author of Keir Starmer: The Biography, told Adrian Goldberg on the latest edition of the Byline Podcast.
In 2010, the towns of Rochdale, Oldham and Rotherham became the center of a huge scandal as the prosecution of men for the grooming and sexual abuse of thousands of young girls began.
An inquiry led by Prof Alexis Jay concluded in 2014 that around 1,400 children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage.
The Centrists Cannot Hold: Client Journalism and Our 'Concierge Media' Are Threatening Liberal Democracy
Obeying in advance by US and British media means they cannot combat the march of the hard right Broligarchs
Peter Jukes
In 2022, the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) said child sex abuse was "endemic" across England and Wales across all sections of society, not just among men of Pakistani heritage.
The IICSA was launched in 2014 in the wake of the scandals involving Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris, and highlighted abuse in communities including the Catholic and Anglican churches.
Despite this, the far-right - and now Musk - decided to ignore the approximately 85% of child sex abuse carried out by white offenders, and focus solely on the cases like those in Rochdale.
This was reflected in Starmer's response to Musk who on 6 January hit back at those "spreading lies and misinformation", saying they are "not interested in victims, they're interested in themselves".
Starmer has become a target for Musk as he ran the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) between 2008 and 2013 and was responsible for bringing charges against those who committed crimes in England and Wales.
Shortly after Starmer took over, the CPS decided not to prosecute those accused of child sex abuse in Rochdale.
This decision was overturned in 2011 by Nazir Afzal, the then-chief prosecutor for north-west England, who has said Starmer was "100% behind the decision".
Nine offenders were then brought to justice in 2012.
"Keir Starmer has done an enormous amount as Director of Public Prosecutions in his job beforehand, to not only prosecute rape gangs, but to make the connection and bring these people to justice in a way that very few people have," Baldwin said.
"And he's got an incredibly good record about this. And when he talks about violence against women or girls, it's a really personal mission to him. He really feels it intensely."
Stamer highlighted his record while defending himself, saying: "I changed the whole prosecution approach because I wanted to challenge, and did challenge, the myths and stereotypes that were stopping those victims being heard. So we changed the entire approach, not without criticism at the time, I might add.
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You won't have read much abo...
'Keir Starmer's Transformational Political Project is Being Grossly Underestimated'
Épisode 45
jeudi 9 janvier 2025 • Durée 10:18
Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.
To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.
Help us build the better media Britain deserves
It is no time at all since Keir Starmer's Labour Party achieved a Blair-style election victory from a relatively small share of the vote. With support perfectly spread across marginal constituencies, it was an astonishingly efficient result which was described by the political journalist Anushka Asthana, in Taken As Red, as nothing less than 'a strategic coup'.
However, during this first phase of Starmer's newly-minted Government criticism has been relentless, verging on the complete delegitimisation of its right to be in Office.
One line of attack focuses on perceived political own goals, not least the removal of the winter fuel allowance for all but those entitled to pension credit.
Yet, we hear relatively little about the distributional policy effects of the 14 years of Conservative rule. How retirees, possessing a lion's share of accumulated assets, and beneficiaries of the triple lock, were better protected from the privations of austerity than the working age population. Younger demographics particularly struggled with stalled incomes, precarious employment and unaffordable housing. This inter-generational unfairness could cynically be attributed to a propensity on the part of the over-65s to vote Conservative.
Other disparaging attack lines include equating Starmerism with a form of re-heated Blairism, or centrism, which is likely to suffer a similar fate to that of US President Joe Biden, or German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, come the next UK general election.
FREE PREVIEW
2024 In Review: The Year The Tory Story Ended
Russell Jones looks back at how the 'worst parliament in history' came to its calamitous conclusion
Russell Jones
Radical Intent
Yet deriding the new Government, merely on the part of privileged vested interests too used to having their bidding done, but also by those guilty of what Chris Grey in Byline Times has referred to as 'fiscal nimbyism', gives insufficient credit to the sweep of its reform programmes.
Those reforms embrace the labour market, railways, transition to clean energy, early years provision, school metrics, a better resourced and differently focused NHS, national care service, rental market, house building targets, policing strategy, sentencing policy, migrant trafficking, tax avoidance by the wealthy, employment services and local transport provision.
That is by no means all. There is the closer collaboration with UK regions and nations, bringing more coherence into local government structures, re-setting European relations and a broader planned re-wiring of the British state. Account must also be taken of institutional innovations such as a National Wealth Fund, Great British Energy and those around a new industrial strategy. And perhaps most significantly the revision of fiscal rules in the first budget delivered by Rachel Reeves to upgrade much neglected public infrastructural investment.
Of course, most of this is still needs to come to fruition, though reform will clearly gather momentum as 2025 progresses.
The sheer volume of disparaging criticism is particularly notable given the truly lamentable record of Conservative Governments between 2010-24. An economy starved of investment, further damaged by austerity, Brexit, a mismanaged pandemic and trickle-down Trussonomics all contributed to a woeful legacy. The consequence was low growth, poor productivity and stagnant living standards, with indicators as basic as life expectancy defying previously improving trends and leaving a dire fiscal inheritance for an incoming Government. This is to barely mention the endemic scandal and corruption that defined it, most notably duri...
Elon Musk Is the One Bond Villain None of Us Asked For
Épisode 6
jeudi 9 janvier 2025 • Durée 15:23
Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.
To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.
Help us build the better media Britain deserves
Having told the Venice Carnival of his latest technological venture to save the world, a media tycoon in his 50s embarrasses the British and Italian Governments, while escaping their attempt to arrest him for illegally trading fuel for nuclear weapons.
He celebrates his victory by telling a guest, "A piece of advice, Mr. Bond. Don't screw with a man who buys ink by the ton. It's deadlier than uranium."
Fast forward 27 years and replace "ink by the ton" with "X", and Jonathan Pryce's theatrical villain in Tomorrow Never Dies with Elon Musk, and you have a good picture of where we now are.
Of course Carver's quest for global domination rested on starting a simple war between the UK and China.
Musk's on the other hand is far harder to believe, beginning with his attempts to undermine and topple a whole series of Western governments, while feeding racial, ethnic, and class tensions across the globe.
No lie appears too big to achieve his aim. No political party is too deviant to be supported and, if it does not momentarily follow Musk's agenda, jettisoned. And no misogynist, hard-right, or even neo-Nazi actor, from Germany's AfD to the UK's Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate, appears beyond his embrace.
Toppling the UK Government
Not content with his role as the unelected co-President-elect of the most powerful nation in the world, Musk has also sought pretexts to assail other governments, from Canada to Germany to the UK.
On New Year's Day, Musk noticed a tweet by Jonatan Pallesen, an advocate of "less mass immigration, more births", about "Pakistani child-rape gangs". The tycoon replied, "Who in the government and judiciary allowed this to happen and which of the legacy media covered it up?"
Mario Nawfal, the host of "The Largest Show on X" and boasting 1.8 million followers, jumped in with a declaration by then-UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman from April 2023:
"Some of these gangs have been overwhelmingly British-Pakistani males. Some areas absolutely failed to take action because of cultural sensitivities - not wanting to come across as racist."
Braverman's statement was deceptive. A 2020 Home Office report found that group-based sex offenders are "most commonly white".
Perhaps more importantly, Braverman was trying to divert pressure on the Conservative Government to take action over sexual abuse of juvenile girls. While there had been historic police failures in investigation of the "grooming gangs", there had been a series of steps - including by Keir Starmer, then Director of Public Prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service - and national and local inquiries to rectify the failure to listen to and protect victims.
This culminated in the 2022 Jay Inquiry, a national examination which produced 20 recommendations, such as mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, financial compensation for victims, creation of a Child Protection Authority, a single set of core data, and extension of the list of people barred from working with children.
Up to its departure in May 2024, the Sunak Government took no significant action. As Professor Alexis Jay, the head of the inquiry, said on Monday, "Our mission is not to call for new inquiries but to advocate for the full implementation of IICSA's recommendations."
Kemi Badenoch's Refusal to Distance Herself From Elon Musk is an Act of Moral Cowardice
The Conservative Party leader's refusal to criticise the X owner's dangerous misinformation campaign against the UK should exclude her from ever returning to high office
Adam Bienkov
But Musk was either ignorant of this, or did not care, as he reposted and commented on scores of twe...
President Zelensky Exposed Lex Fridman's Own Bias on Ukraine
Épisode 47
mercredi 8 janvier 2025 • Durée 07:43
Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.
To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.
Help us build the better media Britain deserves
Earlier this week the podcaster and YouTuber Lex Fridman dropped what he hopes will be the first part of a two-part special, exclusive interviews with both Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin. At the time of writing the video of his interview with President Zelenskyy has gathered almost four million views. I doubt he will ever get his hoped-for interview with Putin. And even if he does, he will certainly not get the sort of open, flowing and factual conversation, he was granted by Zelensky.
One criticism of Fridman is that he failed to be genuinely impartial in how he framed some of his questions. This is true. However, it may not be deliberate. Those who are most vociferous in pushing their version of "peace" in Ukraine are frequently those who understand least about this war and the causes of it. Fridman spent the best part of three hours demonstrating his ignorance because he failed to hear, or understand, what the Ukrainian President was telling him.
Fridman's failure to understand, despite enormous patience from President Zelensky, was not the fault of any translation problems, as he tried to claim. His failure to understand comes from the fact that he has lived a very different reality. The host repeated his desire to see Putin, Trump, and Zelensky in a room together to hammer out a historic peace deal. Fridman failed to understand that when replying to this Zelensky acted as a representative of all Ukrainians in displaying their implacable opposition to Putin. The reality is there's never going to be a coming together moment, guided by Trump or anyone, ever.
This Ukrainian attitude was first expressed in the opening discussion, about the language of the discussion. Fridman was genuinely puzzled by the fact that the President of Ukraine would not, for his convenience, speak the language of the aggressor. If you have not lived, or seen firsthand as Zelensky has, the horrors committed by those who speak that language, how could you understand why people would find that offensive? The answer lies in empathy and basic decency.
Fridman then went on to state the flawed notion that most people think that there has to be a compromise between the two sides. In his response, and losing his patience somewhat to drop his first swearword of the conversation, Zelensky asked how that compromise would apply to murderers? Fridman appeared to wrongly take the question as hypothetical.
"What about the murderers? If your child was killed and you asked who did it and someone said "well, that guy, but you can't touch him" What would you do? You'd knock his fucking block off anyway" is a fair summation of Zelensky's reply.
In spite of the faults and failings of the host and his preconceived notions, this is nonetheless a very important interview because his format afforded Zelensky the opportunity to respond at length to many important questions.
The thing about a 'peace deal' is that you do not have one at all until you have all elements in place. There's no moment where we can go "ceasefire agreed, job done" because the "job" is nowhere near "done" without agreement on what happens next.
This long-form interview offered other examples of where Fridman's inherent bias seeped out into his questions.
"What about corruption?" Fridman asked. "What about the lack of democracy since martial war was declared?" was another question. To the first, Zelensky rolled out another expletive. "When we have a shortage of weapons at the front, do you think someone is going to get away with selling trucks of guns? The other soldiers would fucking kill them." To the second, "a state of war was int...
2025 Is the Year Extinction Rebellion Demanded We Should Go Zero Carbon but 'Britain Has Woefully Failed'
Épisode 16
mercredi 8 janvier 2025 • Durée 08:57
Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.
To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.
Help us build the better media Britain deserves
Happy New Year? 2025 is already a failure in at least one key respect: because it was the year Extinction Rebellion (XR) targeted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by.
I helped launch XR, in 2018. The target of Britain going zero carbon by 2025 was set to demonstrate seriousness in thinking this as an emergency; and also, simply, because, if Britain was to decarbonise fast enough to fairly reflect the share of world emissions it is entitled to, especially once one takes into account our huge historic emissions, then 2025 came out as the year by which we should decarbonise in full.
Obviously Britain (and the world) have absolutely, categorically, and woefully failed to do this. As a result, tragically, we are now moving far deeper into the climate more-than-emergency even than XR foresaw as possible. As the recent insane flooding episodes show.
Very clearly, Britain going zero carbon this very year is not going to happen! What do XR themselves say about this?: "When XR was launched in 2018, 2025 was a realistic date, seven years in the future, with plenty of time to do what was needed. We keep this target to show how much time has been lost."
So XR are notionally retaining the (now impossible) target of going net zero by 2025, to make a point. It's a fair point.
When we launched XR in a blaze of glory and excitement and, more importantly, hope, I believed we would make a difference. And we really did, at first.
XR's greatest achievement was successfully dragging the eco-agenda into the light of day - and that's something to be hugely proud of. We successfully forced a national conversation on decarbonisation.
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Josiah Mortimer
But in terms of XR's theory of change, serious blockages emerged. The high visibility of the radical flank polarised the emerging national conversation on climate: this has been very harmful, over time.
Moreover, XR's plan relied on the Government responding to demands and, ultimately, getting their act together. And whether Conservative, or now Labour, that was never going to happen, at least not remotely sufficiently.
So we - all of us - need to reflect on what we do now.
What lessons should readers draw from the stark failure of the radical climate movement to achieve its central demand?
One key lesson is that we urgently need a mainstream climate-more-than-movement, a wave of wider mainstreamed action. If we are to have a future. Climate/nature action needs to occur way beyond activism. It needs mainstreaming. And the space needs depolarising.
Another key lesson is that it is time for climate activists and thought-leaders to let go of fantasies of achieving decarbonisation, directly. Instead, we need to pivot hard towards climate adaptation.
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Mike Buckley
We are living now with the consequences of failure, and will do so ever more so for a very long time to come. We need to move to protect ourselves from and through this (as well as demanding protection via the state too).
Climate realists need to stop pretending that full decarbonisation is achievable within current human/political timetables, and switch to calling for and enacting deep, strategic and transformative adaptation t...
Kemi Badenoch's Refusal to Distance Herself From Elon Musk is an Act of Moral Cowardice
Épisode 49
lundi 6 janvier 2025 • Durée 08:11
Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.
To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.
Help us build the better media Britain deserves
Within the last few days alone, billionaire X owner, and close adviser to Donald Trump, Elon Musk has:
Spread dangerous misinformation about British people being victims of a "rape genocide" by British Pakistanis
Called for the US to "liberate" the United Kingdom from this "tyranny"
Demanded the UK's current Prime Minister be imprisoned for facilitating "child rape"
Campaigned for a far-right criminal who was convicted of contempt of court to be released from prison
Demanded another UK Government minister be locked up instead as a "rape genocide apologist"
This is deeply dangerous behaviour, taking place as it does just months after racist riots spread across the UK and within recent memory of a British MP being murdered on the street by a far-right terrorist.
It is therefore obviously vital for all senior UK politicians to publicly condemn such behaviour, and offer their support to those being targeted.
Yet rather than do so, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch has done the complete opposite.
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Instead, Badenoch and her Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick have repeatedly backed Musk's demand for a full public inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, despite being part of a Government that itself repeatedly refused such an inquiry and despite their own government failing to implement the recommendations of thee multiple investigations that did take place.
Not only have they mirrored Musk's demands, but his rhetoric too.
In a deeply inflammatory statement, posted on Musk's X platform, Jenrick suggested that rapes by British Pakistanis had been "legalised" by the state, with the crimes being covered up due to "sectarian" voting, following the "importing [of] hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures".
It comes after Jenrick declined to respond to multiple requests by Byline Times to confirm or deny reports that he privately messaged his admiration for a prominent far-right X account.
Responding to Jenrick's latest comments, former Conservative Special Adviser Samuel Kasumu told the BBC that he had become the most divisive politician in the country and warned that his language would put lives at risk.
Yet rather than sack Jenrick, or even marginally distance herself from his comments, Badenoch instead condemned Kasumu for criticising them, and insisted that her party would not shy away from having such "tough conversations" about the grooming scandal.
"We MUST be free to have tough conversations, no matter how difficult that may be to hear," Badenoch Tweeted.
"We need moral courage, not silencing of debate through personal attacks. This is a classic example of why politicians stop being honest with the public, and the problems have stacked up over decades. The Conservative Party is under new leadership and that means confronting difficult truths."
Yet the truth is that far from having the "moral courage" to have such "tough conversations", Badenoch has demonstrated the complete opposite.
Rather than taking the genuinely brave step of criticising Musk for his dangerous and racist misinformation campaign against the country she wishes to lead, Badenoch has instead repeatedly sought to gain his preferment.
EXCLUSIVE
Conservative MPs Want to Scrap Workers' Rights to Paid Holiday and Annual Leave
They are also seeking to overturn workplace protections from sexual harassment, calling them an attack on "free speech"
Josiah Mortimer
Rather than showing the "moral courage" to defend her parliamentary colleagues ...
Time to Build a Wall - Against Autocracy
Épisode 46
dimanche 29 décembre 2024 • Durée 09:47
Donate to help Project Citizen cover their rising legal costs for this important follow-up to the Russia Report
Perhaps Trump is right about one thing. Democracies are in desperate need of effective protection from foreigners. But not from the poor refugees he despises. The real threat comes from the subject of Trump & Co's unceasing fascination: the world's most powerful autocrats, sitting on trillions of stolen money, surrounded by hordes of their spooks, assassins and diamond-encrusted oligarchs.
In her latest book, Anne Applebaum aptly defined this murderous motley of interests as Autocracy Inc, as the world's wealthiest despots increasingly cooperate on a global scale to attack, oppress, avoid sanctions and launder money wherever they want it. And while at it, undermining our democratic systems, as they use their considerable resources to sponsor Western complacency.
They do it by buying influence and friends in high places, and by weaponising a whole toolkit of political manipulation. Importantly, it includes "active measures", ranging from social media and funding an array of MP's offices, election campaigns, think tanks and research, to KGB-style dirty tricks.
After the summer of 2020, when the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee's Russia Report accused MI5 of "taking the eye off the ball", the Service, together with SO15, has been scrambling to catch up with the Russian intelligence activities after years of neglect.
Delayed by Prime Minister Johnson until after the 2020 election, the massively redacted report did not go as far as to suggest that there has been any meaningful foreign interference in our democratic processes, but it did appear to effectively accuse the Security Service of not considering it a threat to national security.
A thriller BY PROJECT CITIZEN, featuring Carole Cadwalladr, Peter Jukes and Sergei Cristo that exposes an alleged secret spy ring operating at the very heart of the British establishment
Combatting Active Measures
Perhaps over-compensating for the criticisms in the Russia Report, MI5 is unusually open about its counterintelligence successes. We have witnessed a string of spy scandals being paraded by the authorities in front of the stunned British public, something unheard of in the past. There were spies from Russia and China with Parliamentary passes, and most recently a Chinese citizen in the inner circle of Prince Andrew, as well as a frightful group of Bulgarian freelance spies tasked by the Russian intelligence to follow, spy on, honey trap and kill investigative journalists.
While these showcases went some way towards reassuring the worried electorate, they only represented a small part of the Russian intelligence effort directed at Britain over the past decade. Back in the times of the USSR, the KGB used to spend most of its foreign budget not on the infiltration and running of agents in foreign governments but on the so-called "active measures" (up to 80% of the First Chief Directorate budget, according to some sources), operations to influence government policies and public opinion in Western democracies.
Active measures operations often do not require to have an agent in place. While the tools available to intelligence operations have evolved since then, there is little evidence that Moscow's overall intelligence approach in that respect has changed in any drastic way.
In our podcast Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, produced by Project Citizen and funded by public donations, we will offer you some evidence that MI5 underestimated the power of Russian active measures around the Brexit referendum and subsequent elections. The Government seemed to protest that there was nothing new with the Kremlin trying to interfere in elections.
However, never before, as far we know, has the Russian Government managed to channel funds to the Conservative Party, which was in power at the time, and individual MPs (almost all of them dyed-in-the-wool Brexiteers), providing ...
2024 In Review: The Year The Tory Story Ended
Épisode 38
jeudi 26 décembre 2024 • Durée 28:19
This article was originally published in the January 2025 print edition of Byline Times
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An English parliament has existed for more than 800 years, and there have been some startlingly bad ones: the Mad Parliament of 1258; the Bad Parliament of 1377; and the Merciless Parliament of 1378. But, following this vigorous start, terrible parliaments took a 646-year break so they could get a really good run-up to the Conservative one that ended in 2024.
This was a parliament that took the biscuit (and then probably tried to have sex with the biscuit, or chopped it up for snorting, or flogged it to their mates). Even the Telegraph described it as "the worst parliament in history" - and not without cause. Of the MPs elected in 2019, a record number were expelled or resigned due to some depravity or other.
How we laughed as Rishi Sunak promised that he was about to conjure "integrity, professionalism and accountability" from the cast of self-serving crooks, xenophobes, and charlatans that formed his party. How bereft of laughter it seems now.
The year began with an ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which shoved the story of Britain's biggest ever miscarriage of justice into every living room, hot on the heels of 14 years of heroic governmental apathy.
Kemi Badenoch, at the time the Business Minister most recently responsible for doing nothing at all, immediately decided the buck stopped several miles away from her: she phoned the Post Office's chairman, who she had never even bothered to meet, and sacked him on the spot. "Well, someone's got to take the rap for this", she told him, while instructing him via civil servants to stall compensation payments, so they'd land on the desk of an incoming Labour government, thus allowing the Tories to "limp into" the general election.
And limp they did, largely as a result of shooting themselves in both feet, not least over asylum seekers. Credit where it's due: the Conservatives had guaranteed an illegal migration policy, and that's precisely what they delivered. The Supreme Court ruled the Rwanda plan was unlawful, because the country was an unsafe destination. So the Tories attempted to declare it safe by parliamentary fiat. Why didn't they just vote to make Gaza safe, if that's how it works? Or Chernobyl? Or putting your fingers near Jonathan Gullis' mouth?
Sunak's inevitable failure over Rwanda was enough to make Andrea Jenkyns demand yet another Tory leadership election, so she could serve under a "new and true Conservative leader". By the year's end, her search for a new and true Conservative led her to Nigel Farage, an old liar from the Reform Party. But, in the meantime, Sunak spent the six months prior to Farage's inevitable return to the spotlight tackling more urgent biggest problems: his immediate predecessors.
Liz Truss was like an actor who had been cast in a single episode of Star Trek, and then eked it out into a lifetime of Comic Con appearances. In her endless quest for relevance, the least popular premier in the history of British polling launched a faction called 'Popular Conservatism', which was designed to unite the party but, in a dazzling return to form, managed to split in two during its actual launch event. Four speakers had been invited, but only Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg turned up, like a jump-scare. Kwasi Kwarteng decided - only 14 years too late - that it would be better if he quit politics entirely. And Simon Clarke was forced to pull out because his most recent coup attempt left his colleagues describing him as "a self-indulgent tosser".
Meanwhile, as Russia became ever-more dangerous, we discovered Conservative funding cuts had left the Army unable to afford enough bullets. Luckily, we could depend on our volunteer force. "Lance Corporal Johnson reporting for duty, Sah!", declared Boris Johnson, secure in the knowledge he was 25 years too old for military service. But at least he'd moderated his ambitions. Where on...
