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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.
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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...

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.
2025 Is the Year Extinction Rebellion Demanded We Should Go Zero Carbon but 'Britain Has Woefully Failed'
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...

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.
All the Big Government Reforms the Media Hasn't Been Telling You About
You won't have read much abo...

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...

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...

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...

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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The Government has already approved some airport expansion plans, but these two will be a bigger test of Ministers' climate commitments
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.
Bad Cops: Why the Climate Crisis Keeps Getting Worse No Matter How Many Conferences World Leaders Hold
Governments and businesses keep talking the talk on preventing a catastrophic climate breakdown, while consistently refusing to walk the walk
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...

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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Olly Haynes
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 ...

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 ...

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...

This article was originally published in the January 2025 print edition of Byline Times
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The launch of Pop Idol in 2001 was arguably a pivotal moment in modern pop history. The reality TV series, which turned 'ordinary talent' into household popstars, launched countless careers, led to a global TV franchise, and inspired hundreds of copycat talent shows keen to muscle in on the winning format.
One of those was The X Factor, which created pop sensations such as One Direction. But at some cost. In October, Liam Payne - who was made world-famous in the boyband alongside Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson, and Niall Horan - was found dead after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires. The 31-year-old had alcohol, cocaine, and a prescription antidepressant in his body at the time.
His death shocked younger generations across the world that had grown up with the band's Beatles-like iconography, while others with experience of the reality TV entertainment industry said it was yet another example of how shows such as The X Factor care little for the toll such sudden fame, its rules, and its consequences, have on the mental wellbeing of those in its throes.
Singer Will Young was 23 when he beat Gareth Gates to win the first series of Pop Idol. A Byline Times supporter, the now 45-year-old reveals why rapid fame as a young gay man - which saw him transformed from an unknown singer into a TV star almost overnight - was a double-edged sword, and the stories that have still to come to light about the reality TV music world.
You became well-known at quite a young age. What was it like for you?
Being recognised by people isn't normal, and there were extremes.
I remember once having to escape through the fire exit of a service station because I'd gone to use the loo and the paparazzi all came into the garage. It was right at the height of the madness.
I remember going to Marks and Spencer another time and they had to shut the doors as fans were trying to follow all of the Pop Idol cast there. It was right off the back of such a popular TV show and we were doing a tour. If you had more than a couple of us, it would go bonkers.
That level of fame is quite fun - it goes back to the kind of mania over pop stars in the 1960s, and maybe even the 1950s, that really started with Elvis, then the Beatles. I had a smattering of that, though never on the same level.
I remember having a meeting about doing international promotion. Someone said that, after working with me, he wouldn't be able to walk down any street in the world without being recognised. I left the meeting because I said that was my idea of hell. So I didn't do any international promotion. I was one of the only artists to turn it down.
The context of being famous over 20 years ago was the press, which is so different now.
You can't discuss it without talking about phone-hacking and the lawlessness of photographers and celebrity magazines. This was before social media, and there was a shaming element that came with those magazines. It was typically very bad towards women - you'd see headlines like 'look how awful she looks on the beach' or they'd circle a roll of skin on some woman.
It affects other people too - my friends and family included, because the press would be doorstepping them.
Then there were people saying not very nice things in the papers, but you have a choice whether you want to read it or not.
Did you ever find it too much, and did you have support for coping with sudden fame?
I was pretty resilient, and I was very driven. I concentrated on why I was famous - I wanted a career as a singer and actor. I tried to have as normal a life as possible. The other option of blacked-out cars and posh restaurants seemed pretty grim. I probably became hardened to the attention.
It was enormous then - shops would let paparazzi in [to chase me]. Even smart restaurants would. Being followed was scary. What would you do if you were a n...

Though often mistaken for one because it doesn't toe any single ideological line, Byline Times has never been a 'centrist' paper - and this year of elections, which have shown the vulnerability of liberal democracies in Europe and the US, have also exposed the weakness of centrism.
If your principles are just an average of the political and social sentiment of the day, then you're always going to be prey to normalisation - narratives that make extremes seem central. That's why we are committed to the opposite: pluralism - which highlights the non-average and tries to explore issues and amplify voices that others ignore.
The idea of pluralism affects everything we publish - whether it's untold scandals, the variety within an individual's identity, grassroots movements, or fact-based investigation - because we believe it provides us with a better, more accurate, picture of the world. Pluralism permits us to remain sceptical but not cynical; to change our minds when events demand change. Like the fable of the reed and the oak, it allows us to survive the storms when more rigid structures break.
The political culture of America since the re-election of Donald Trump is an abject object lesson in the media's capitulation to extremes. We saw this before the 5 November vote, when the owner of The Washington Post - which coined the motto 'democracy dies in darkness' during Trump's first term - spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Haris. Since then, billionaire Jeff Bezos has spoken warmly of Trump and is reportedly intending to donate $1 million to his inaugural fund.
Likewise, the owner of the LA Times, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, also spiked the paper's normal endorsement of a presidential candidate. Since Trump's election victory, Soon-Shiong has taken a "number of previously unreported steps" designed to reduce Trump-related commentary and "required" the editorial board to email him "the text of every editorial and the name of its writer".
The fear rife among American commentators and journalists is not without reason. Trump and his acolytes have made it clear that they intend to harry and punish any media organisation that covers them critically. The ABC network backed down on a weak libel case and paid Trump's campaign $15 million. Even pollsters, who deal with data rather than defamation, are in the firing line, with Trump planning to sue Iowan pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register newspaper for publishing a poll days before the election that projected Kamala Harris had a 3% lead in the state, which Trump went on to win by 13%.
Even without any mention of 'Musk', there could be few better illustrations of the dangers of oligarch-owned media, and its imperative - for commercial reasons - to 'obey in advance'.
As Marc Elias had observed in Democracy Docket, "not… all legacy media has given in to Trump. But enough have, including too many owners, that it affects the overall effectiveness of the industry… Trump is a master at leveraging the legacy media's need for news with his ability to provide access to it… A weakened legacy media, with greater pressures on it, is simply no match for an emboldened Trump".
Cosy Connections and Corporate Comms
The British press was already much more partisan than the US newspaper market and, with hedge fund owner and GB News backer Sir Paul Marshall's takeover of The Spectator this year, it has shifted significantly to the right. As Hardeep Matharu notes in the editorial of the January Byline Times print edition, the worrying sight of Labour politicians and 'liberal democrat' journalists attending the Spectator's recent annual parliamentarian awards, raises the issue of how "truly living one's values and doing what is comfortable are different decisions".
Meanwhile, the sale by the Guardian's Scott Trust of its 253-year-old Sunday newspaper, the Observer to the small and relatively unknown company, Tortoise Media, is another worrying sign that the centre cannot hold against the on...

This article was originally published in the January 2025 print edition of Byline Times
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One of the factors which brought Labour to power was the widespread sense under the last Conservative Government that 'nothing works any more', especially when it comes to public services. It carried the implication not just that government spending needed to increase, but also that it needed to be better targeted.
It's possible, of course, to argue that Labour's entire framing of fiscal policy is wrong and that Keir Starmer's Government should substantially raise general taxation and also borrow more freely. But there is little public appetite for the former, while bond market reactions to the new 'fiscal rules' announced in October's Budget suggest the latter has already been stretched to the limit. Even in a much freer fiscal environment there would still be decisions about where to raise taxes and focus spending.
That is the background to two of the most contentious fiscal decisions the Government has taken so far - limiting winter fuel payments, and reducing the inheritance tax exemptions on farms.
There is a rational case for both.
Why should people who really don't need the winter fuel payment get it when there are such pressing needs for money for public services? And why should farming land be used as a device to avoid inheritance tax by the super-wealthy? In those terms, these are small but sensible ways of reallocating public expenditure to higher priorities.
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It is also true that those just above the cut-off point for winter fuel payments will genuinely suffer. And that, although the numbers involved are disputed, some family farms will suffer, and even disappear, caught in the net of inheritance tax changes.
The point, however, is not the merits of these particular changes - it is that they illustrate how any re-targeting of resources adversely affects some while benefitting others, with the losers far more vocal than the beneficiaries.
But if every attempted change faces a huge backlash of protest, then the danger is that no change is possible or, perhaps worse, that those who can most loudly and effectively protest become untouchable.
Conversely, the weakest or most unpopular groups suffer. For example, it is widely known that prisons are in a disgraceful state. But it is much harder to mobilise public anger about that than it is for groups who can be sympathetically presented, such as freezing pensioners or hard-pressed farmers. Who will blockade the streets for criminals?
The result is a kind of 'fiscal nimbyism'.
Just as people may agree that new houses need building but baulk at them being built near them, they want government spending targeted at where it is most needed - so long as they don't lose out in the process.
If the consequence isn't simply inertia, then one approach is to 'spread the pain' by making a large number of relatively small changes to how public money is used. The danger - and it seems to be happening now - is that the Government faces so many disparate challenges that it becomes seen as embroiled in a rolling crisis.
The even greater danger is that governmental willingness to tackle big, important problems disappears. For example, almost everyone recognises that the council tax system is broken. Based on property valuations from 1991, it is irrational and unfair. Similarly, most recognise that the social care system is broken, with knock-on damage to the NHS and, actually - far more than inheritance tax - reduces what many people end up being able to pass on to their children.
These and similar problems, and their solutions, are well-documented in endless reports and reviews. They are things which, from outside government, are subject to repeated calls for root-and-bran...

This article was originally published in the January 2025 print edition of Byline Times
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I was recently discussing the new and unnerving film adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley's 2015 folk horror novel Starve Acre with my son. We both liked it, but he regretted the fact that the folkloric elements - centred around a vengeful local spirit called Jack Grey - had been invented. The story wasn't 'real' and that annoyed him.
This got me thinking about traditions and rituals generally. After all, this is the time of year for them.
As a child, torn away from what I felt was my imaginative birthright by my parents' decision to emigrate to New Zealand, I became a zealous student of the stories of old England and Christmas traditions in particular.
Despite it being midsummer, I had my family wassailing apple trees and playing the fine old game of snapdragon in which a dish of brandy containing raisins is set alight and players must pluck the fiery orbs and swallow them. I still play it at Christmas.
My bible was a gazetteer called British Popular Customs Present and Past compiled in the 1870s by the Rev. T.F. Thiselton Dyer, with the attractively Ronseal subtitle "illustrating the social and domestic manners of the people". I pored over its slightly-foxed pages to discover what lost rituals I could single-handedly revive.
It is telling that the book sounds an elegiac note - "an account of customs which, if not already obsolete, are quickly becoming so" - a theme that was to animate the turn-of-the-century folk revival led by scholars and collectors such as Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp.
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Some of the customs my research unearthed still baffle me.
On Christmas Day, the butcher of Merton College, Oxford (which was I later to attend) would invite the scholars to his house where he would "provide a bull for the steward to knock down with his own hands, whence the treat was called The Kill-Bull". Evidence of ritualistic animal sacrifice and the survival of the Mediterranean bull cult in medieval Oxford? Or just ye olde Oxbridge version of a meat raffle? In any event, no trace of the custom survives today.
Which is rather the point about traditions. They wax and wane according to usage.
Years later, when I discovered Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's 1983 classic, The Invention of Tradition, I was struck by the distinction they made between invented traditions, which were largely used to prop up the agendas of populist nationalism, and "the strength and adaptability of genuine traditions". The challenge, then as now, is who gets to choose what is genuine?
Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the vexed history of the mummers' play.
The English version is a masked folk play that was popular across southern England and usually (though not always) performed at Christmas.
Its cast changes from county to county, but the action revolves around Father Christmas, who introduces the other characters, and St George, who fights either a Turkish Knight or a soldier braggart called Slasher. A doctor administers a special medicine which revives the slain soldier. Other characters include a fool playing music, Beelzebub (who carries a club and frying pan), a poor man, and Little Devil Doubt (a money collector). The costumes are made from strips of cloth or paper and the actors collect money from the audience once the action is over.
Trying to source the deep origins of the drama became an obsession for a generation of folklorists, most of their digging inspired by James Frazer, who in his influential 1890 "study in magic religion", The Golden Bough, suggested that the plays might be the record of pre-Christian, possibly prehistoric, fertility ritual.
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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.
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The BBC is constantly accused by its critics in the right-wing press of being biased to the left and "woke".
In reality, any bias is in a quite different direction, with a growing perception that its news agenda too often shadows that of the Conservative press and that its panels are regularly stuffed with pundits from the self-same right-wing newspapers and Tufton Street pressure groups
And that's without mentioning it apparently taking every opportunity to platform Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and now Tim Montgomerie - in spite of Reform UK having a mere five parliamentary seats.
But there again, as Farage is, according to BBC political editor Chris Mason, "a master of political storytelling", the BBC perhaps see his yarn spinning, however poisonous, as being good for audience numbers and thus not to be discouraged.
Faced with this criticism, the BBC recently undertook a consultation on its draft Editorial Guidelines in which much was made of the issue of "impartiality".
The Consultation Document notes that:
The scope and prominence of impartiality in BBC terms has changed significantly since the publication of the current guidelines, with evolving applications well beyond politics, public policy and other areas which used to encompass what were seen as 'controversial issues'
Of course, one of the main reasons why this has happened, although the BBC doesn't say so in so many words, is because the culture wars have gifted the traditional enemies of the BBC, who have long accused it of being overly liberal, with the perfect opportunity to yoke their cause to the anti-"woke" bandwagon.
It is thus extremely disturbing to find the consultation appearing to cede ground to these culture warriors by stating that: "The guideline on breadth of opinion has been expanded and recognises that appropriate breadth and diversity, combined with freedom of expression, may mean the inclusion of views some in the audience find offensive".
It also notes that: The section on 'Contentious Views and Possible Offence' now puts greater emphasis on freedom of expression and the need to sometimes take into account impartiality in judgements about 'offence', which itself may now encompass issues beyond, for instance, extreme political views.
The problem here is that both offensiveness and freedom of expression have been comprehensively weaponised by the culture warriors. Those who argue for the regulation of certain kinds of speech generally do so not because they find such speech offensive but because, among other things, it stirs up hatred and division, propagates disinformation or is used to harass, bully and threaten.
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Calls for its regulation are then characterised by the likes of the Free Speech Union and Elon Musk as demands for censorship, which has now shifted from being a concern primarily of liberals to becoming a hobby horse of the libertarian right. In doing so it has essentially mutated into a demand for consequence-free speech and for those who object to such speech, or are victims of it, to shut up.
It would thus be more than unfortunate if the BBC were to follow the line of Ofcom, which has allowed GB News to drive a coach and horses through the impartiality clauses in its Broadcasting Code in the name of a half-baked libertarian conception of freedom of expression.
One really does not have to have read Sir Isaiah Berlin (or more recently ...

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
The Labour party-funding owner of energy firm Ecotricity has told Byline Times he is "interested" in funding a breakaway media outlet staffed by disgruntled Observer staff, amid the title's controversial sale to the website Tortoise.
On Thursday, industry title Press Gazette confirmed that a "legally binding" Business Purchase Agreement had been signed by Observer owner Guardian Media Group and Tortoise, run by former BBC executive James Harding.
It comes despite opposition among Guardian/Observer staff to the sale, which will see GMG owner The Scott Trust secure a nine per cent stake in Tortoise, while losing full control of the Observer, the world's oldest English language Sunday newspaper.
Hundreds of staff at the Guardian group have joined two waves of strikes over the move, garnering support from figures ranging from singer Billy Bragg to senior Labour MP Emily Thornberry.
On the picket line last week, Byline Times heard rumours of a potential breakaway news outlet being considered by disgruntled Guardian/Observer staff.
Asked if he was aware of the discussions, Vince - who has given £5 million to the Labour Party - said: "I am aware, and I am interested."
When news of the Observer-Tortoise deal became public this summer, Vince held meetings with senior figures at the firm and said he was willing to step in and purchase the publication instead. However, GMG said they were in "exclusive talks" with the Tortoise media in relation to a sale
Vince told Byline Times this Friday that Guardian bosses did not show him the financials underlying the Observer, making it difficult to proceed.
He added he was "disappointed" that the sale to Tortoise now appeared certain, but added: "If it's not a done deal, or if Tortoise fails, I'm ready to step in."
Asked if he would consider buying another outlet, he said: "I wanted to save the Observer, I don't want to be a media owner for the sake of it." Nonetheless, he is open to funding a website for departing Observer/Guardian staff, some of whom may take voluntary redundancy following the buyout.
Vince also called for the Government to get behind media reform, noting that much of Britain's press was owned by foreign oligarchs - including Murdoch-owned News UK which runs The Times and The Sun.
"Foreigners like Rupert Murdoch - an Australian-born US citizen - should not be allowed to own our media," Vince said, making clear this wasn't "prejudicial" but about media owners having a firm stake in the country their outlets are covering.
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"We need overhaul of media ownership in this country," he added, pointing to a handful of firms running the majority of the local and regional press, and a small number of powerful newspaper owners having significant political sway.
Speaking to Byline Times on the picket line at Guardian/Observer HQ King's Place last Friday, Simon Hattenstone - one of the longest serving writers at the organisation - said: "We're one of the oldest newspapers in the world, and the financial proposals are bizarre.
"First, [The Scott Trust] said they were selling the Observer, then it became a giveaway, and now we're giving them money," referring to the £5 million investment being made by the current owners.
"It's like someone coming to your house and asking you to pay them to take away your possessions," Hattenstone, who has been with the title for 34 years, said.
"We've become a comp...

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
Another Friday, another morning-after-the-night-before for Labour in local government by-elections.
On Thursday night in Dudley, Labour's vote was down a massive 34.7% in Brockmoor and Pensnett, pushing the party into third place behind a surging Reform - on 30.1% - and the Conservatives who took the seat from Labour, up seven per cent to 35.4%.
And in Swale, Labour was down by over thirty points, smashed into third place behind Reform who took the seat from Labour with 33.9% of the vote. In solid Labour West Thamesmead, Labour's vote was still down 12.3% - to 49.5 per cent - with turnout estimated to be a lowly 15%.
Week after week it is the same story - a plummeting Labour vote, either with Labour holding on with much-reduced support, or outright defeat. The local collapse in support and morale reflects the overall national picture. Keir Starmer's personal ratings have headed relentlessly downward for months.
For Ipsos, latest research has just 27% of the public satisfied with Starmer's performance, with 61% dissatisfied. Public satisfaction with the Government is also low, with a net satisfaction rating of -49.
Perhaps inevitably, but certainly very early on in the parliament, there is now speculation that Labour's poor performance may mean that Starmer will not survive as Labour leader and Prime Minister into the next election.
That has come at the end of a terrible week in which Starmer's work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, refused any compensation for the Waspi women, despite years of Labour politicians supporting a resolution of their cause and with the ombudsman having found maladministration in their case.
We are seeing that whilst a great deal of media noise was made over inheritance tax for farms, Labour's biggest problems flow from the consequences of its policies for its own base of working class support.
Labour's problems on domestic policy flow overwhelmingly from the adoption of a right-wing framework for its economic policy.
This is the root cause of repeated 'tough' choices: rejection of the Waspi women, cancellation of pensioners' winter fuel payments, rising student fees, increased bus fares, retention of the two-child benefit cap, and so on.
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Job cuts in the civil service and the announcement of the Government's recommendations on public sector pay are lining Labour up for a confrontation with public sector workers.
The Government's recommendation to the pay review bodies for a limit of a 2.8% pay rise for thousands of public sector workers has already united the teaching unions in opposition, not least because it is unfunded, meaning it would have to come from existing budgets. As the NEU general secretary has argued, "austerity is ended in deeds not words".
Labour has tied itself up by refusing to raise necessary resources through taxation, relying on an argument that growth in the future will deliver a resolution to the country's problems.
Furthermore by ruling out so many other tax options - such as on profit, income and wealth - Rachel Reeves stuck her tax rise on employers' national insurance, a tax that rests on the number of people companies and charities employ.
In doing so, Starmer and Reeves gave the CBI a new pretext to oppose the measures contained in the Employment Bill.
And on that panacea of growth, the OBR's latest growth forecasts are woeful, and demolish any sense that the Government i...

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
Because I'm such great fun, I often share announcements from various Government bodies on Bluesky and Threads, provided they sound vaguely intriguing.
One thing is always certain: the comments will be full of surprise from people who haven't seen the news anywhere else.
It's debatable whether this is down to the state of Britain's media, the Government's poor communications game, or both - so we'll come back to that.
But in the spirit of goodwill, we've dug through various projects, policies, and plans from different government departments - largely over the past few weeks - that we think most people probably haven't heard about.
This list is by no means conclusive, and it is up to you whether you think the news items are good or bad. However, they do offer a flavour of some of the things we could, and arguably should, all be talking about.
Anti-Corruption Unit
Last Thursday, the Government announced that the Home Office and City of London Police have established a new pilot 'Domestic Corruption Unit'.
It has been warmly welcomed by transparency groups, as an "incredibly important and welcome tipping point", according to the charity Spotlight on Corruption.
Security Minister Dan Jarvis made the announcement at the Economic Crime Congress in central London. Responding, Duncan Hames, Director of Policy and Programmes at Transparency International UK, said: "We know corruption is not just a phenomenon elsewhere, it is happening right here at home, but not enough is understood about the nature and scale of the problem.
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"The Government is right to identify the challenges to investigating and prosecuting bribery and corruption taking place here in the UK, and the need for a dedicated response. We look forward to contributing to building a clearer intelligence picture of bribery and other forms of corruption in our country, and seeing police act on it."
Boosting Criminal Legal Aid Funding
The Ministry of Justice announced plans on Thursday night to increase criminal legal aid funding by 12% over this Parliament.
Politico reports that a consultation on the new rates will start in the new year. The Law Society has called it a "welcome step forward…but only a step".
This Tuesday, the Government announced an extra 2,000 Crown Court sitting days over the next year. Courts will sit for a total of 108,500 days - the highest figure in almost a decade, helping to tackle the court backlog, officials say.
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Fees for criminal legal aid work in police stations and youth courts have been increased by £24 million. And the Government has also announced its 'intention to consult' on an increase to civil legal aid fees for housing and immigration cases.
Major cuts to legal aid under the Conservatives have been blamed for preventing access to justice among some vulnerable groups.
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In November, I was invited to speak to Cambridge University's Varsity newspaper about why Byline Times is a necessary addition to Britain's media landscape. That evening, I discussed values - something the students said no one ever mentioned when it comes to journalism.
Why do we become journalists? What are the ideals that propel us into a career so competitive and precarious? And who are the journalists we go on to become? What are the realities that test, and compromise, those ideals - leaving our internal compasses pointing in the wrong, or unexpected, directions?
To illustrate the point, I used the example of that revered spectacle of the media-political classes: the Spectator party - attended by a number of big-name 'liberal democratic' journalists and politicians, who would no doubt profess not to share the same politics as the right-leaning magazine, home to the likes of Douglas Murray.
Would there ever be an incentive for these journalists and politicians to stop attending the parties? I was asked by one of the Cambridge students. I responded by saying that I didn't think so unless fundamental, structural, reform of the media took place. After all, these journalists weren't 'bad people' for enjoying the Spectator's hospitality - they were simply schmoozing with friends. It's a social thing. A club.
Truly living one's values and doing what is comfortable are different decisions, was my concluding comment to the students that evening.
It is a moment that has come back to me at several points in the weeks that have followed - during which the prospect of Nigel Farage's Reform UK becoming a defining force in British politics is now being widely discussed as inevitable, while the Labour Government appears to have its head in the sand about the rolling political revolution that is happening all around us, too big to grasp.
In the middle of all this, a number of those journalists and Labour ministers I had been alluding to in Cambridge found time to attend the Spectator's annual parliamentarian awards.
Farage picked up best newcomer.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting (the "guest of honour") took a public dig at his colleague Louise Haigh, who had recently resigned as Transport Secretary.
Meanwhile, the magazine's owner Sir Paul Marshall - also the funder of GB News - enjoyed the festivities alongside Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner ("politician of the year"), Labour MP Jess Phillips, Sky News Political Editor Beth Rigby, The News Agents' Emily Maitlis, ITV News Political Editor Robert Peston, and BBC Politics Live presenter Jo Coburn.
All very cosy. But at what cost?
I am proud to be a young female editor of colour in the British media landscape. This matters. Why? Because to be clear: the prospect of a more extreme politics coming to Britain via the ballot box is a very real, visceral, concern of mine. I do not have the privilege not to be concerned by this and, by leading a newspaper like Byline Times, I am clear about my values in this regard.
Days before this year's General Election, Reform activists were caught on camera referring to Rishi Sunak as a "p*ki" - comments responded to by Farage with the remark: "They're just talking like ordinary folk." During the riots that then swept the country after the 4 July poll, a number of Reform members' Facebook groups were rife with support for the far-right extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known as 'Tommy Robinson').
Recent weeks have seen reports emerge that Trump advisor and the world's richest tech-media baron, Elon Musk, wants to donate millions to Farage to make his movement mainstream in the UK. After the riots against migrants and Muslims, the X (formerly Twitter) owner openly claimed on his platform that civil war was "inevitable" in this country because of its multicultural, multi-ethnic nature. Imagine how this threat of violence sounds to millions of non-white Brits like myself?
Added to this, Tory journalist Tim Montgomerie; Rael Braverman, husband of Suella; bu...

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.
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As a Criminal Barrister working at the coalface of the English and Welsh Criminal Justice System and specialising in rape and serious sexual offences, I have watched the Avignon courtroom and the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 co-defendants with interest.
Like many others I have admired the dignity and fortitude with which the victim in this case, Gisele Pelicot, has conducted herself throughout an ordeal that has been horrific on every possible human level.
And, although the scale of the allegations and in particular the sheer number of those accused is staggering, sadly, many aspects of the case are depressingly familiar to anyone who is involved with this type of offence in the UK, and probably most other places in the world.
There has been over the last few years a significant increase in the number of sexual offences that are reported in the UK and elsewhere, with the Office of National Statistics reporting a 31% increase in the reporting of sexual offences in the year 2022, a trend that hasn't abated since.
There are number of factors that play into this, including the increasing awareness of women about sexual offending and their willingness to report this type of crime, together with the Police and CPS's improved methods of investigating these allegations.
But, although that might explain the increase in reporting, it doesn't explain the reasons why more men are committing sexual crimes and doesn't help address the ways we can reduce this type of crime.
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Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia
My personal view, based upon the anecdotal evidence of prosecuting and defending in dozens of sexual cases each year for 25 years, is that the prevalence of pornography is a massive contributor to the increase in sexual violence towards women.
Increasingly often, the sexual offence cases I am involved with have a defendant who has an inclination towards the habitual use of pornography, often involving rape, torture and children. I wasn't surprised when the details of Pelicot's use of online pornography and his distribution of sexualised images and videos of his wife and other female members of his family were disclosed by the court.
If we are to keep women and girls safe, then we cannot ignore the prevalence and impact of online pornography. Clearly, better education for young people is vital, but, so is the ability of the criminal justice system to properly protect those who are becoming sex offenders as a result of early online sexualisation.
And it won't be easy, as we are dealing with a generation who have grown up in a world where porn is readily available on their phones and tablets. The providers of online services must be held to account. The Online Safety Act 2023, already seems outdated and the woefully inadequate powers and resources given to OFCOM to regulate the gargantuan monolith that is the internet are like the trying to stop a tsunami with a paddle. The penalties for failing to protect children, range from non-existent to simply inadequate.
Society must be given the ability to properly punish not just the perpetrators of sexual offences, but also those who seek to place into the public domain the material that so often sets these sexual offenders on their way - as such, OFCOM must be given proper resources and the ability to constantly improve and expand its remit in the battle against the constantly expanding providers of online ...

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
With the re-election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States, there are growing demands to try to find a resolution to the war that has raged across Ukraine since 2022.
Trump himself has repeatedly talked about ending the war in Ukraine, "in 24 hours". However, this is going to be an impossibly tall order, for the simple reason that such calls for a quick solution to this conflict simply don't understand its many complexities.
Those making these calls tend to begin by suggesting that Ukraine must cede some territory to Russia in order to bring the war to an end. This may sound simple. Surely Ukraine just needs to concede Crimea, and parts of the Donbas and the War can be brought to a swift end, right? Wrong.
In reality any such negotiation would not simply be about specific territories or lines on a map, but about what people on either side of the line will be subjected to.
Negotiating away land would mean abandoning human beings. And even if we ignore this, the truth is that "Crimea and parts of the Donbas" would never be enough for Putin, while also overlooking territory along the coast of Azov that was occupied in the Blitzkrieg of February and March of 2022.
If you think that Putin may be appeased by offering up Crimea, you miss out entirely on the single early goal of the 2022 war, which was the seizure of parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts in order to keep occupied Crimea supplied. Without Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, therefore, "have Crimea" will not be an acceptable offer to Putin.
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The other suggestion by those pushing this line is that people in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are somehow ethnically, and by dint of language preference, "Russian" and therefore rightfully should be a part of Russia.
However, what this misses is that this is ultimately a question for the people of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson themselves. Show me where, in any of the years since independence, but especially in the years between 2014 and 2022, those people ever collectively expressed any such opinion. They didn't.
The same can be seen with what happened to Mariupol, in Donetsk Oblast. The story of Mariupol is yet another which shows that Russia is neither wanted, nor welcomed, in any part of Ukraine. The film 20 Days in Mariupol shows what happened when Russia, uninvited, returned in 2022. They murdered tens of thousands of people.
The world's richest man, Elon Musk is among those who have famously floated a plan proposing that referenda be re-run in these areas, under UN supervision, "to see who they really wanted to be with."
However, we can already see, from the examples of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and indeed Mariupol, that occupation was not welcomed. Does that not say enough?
The Russia Problem
Two further statements from Russia in recent days also show that "Crimea and parts of the Donbas" will not be enough for the warmongers in the Kremlin.
Putin has set a policy to have captured all of the four partially occupied regions by the end of 2025, and Medvedev has stated that "all of Ukraine has a choice, to be part of Russia or to cease to exist". This does not suggest that Russia is ready to make a deal. And therein lies the biggest obstacles to peace - Russia itself.
If a "compromise" is to be sought from Ukraine, what compromise will be demanded of Russia? What can be done to get the Kremlin to not only agree to terms of...

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.
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Thousands of Ukrainian refugees have had their hopes of remaining in the UK dashed after the Government ruled that, in contrast to those fleeing other parts of the world, they will not be able to count the years they've already spent forging new lives in Britain, towards their claims for permanent residency.
Refugees from other parts of the world can count all of their time spent living in the UK towards permanent settlement status, which is normally granted after 10 years.
But in a statement quietly slipped out in a written parliamentary statement by migration minister Seema Malhotra, that route has now been specifically closed off to Ukrainians.
The Home Office told Byline Times that Ukrainian refugees had been excluded due to the "express wishes of the Ukrainian Government" that their nationals should return to rebuild the country after the war.
However, Natalia Kogut, who dodged Russian bombs in Kyiv before escaping in 2022 told the Byline Podcast that the development, has left her "in stress, in anxiety, in depression".
After moving to the UK, Natalia lived for months in a homeless shelter before getting a job as an academic researcher at the University of Birmingham.
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That enabled her to secure a rented house in the city where she now lives with her two children and her mother. Her brother is also a refugee to the UK.
Natalia is estranged from her husband and her father has died, leaving her with few ties back home.
"Job, school, all my family …everything's here", she said.
"We have nothing left in Ukraine."
More than 200,000 of her compatriots have legally arrived in the UK since Russia's full scale invasion in 2022, under the 'Homes For Ukraine' initiative and similar schemes.
Most have found work and, like Natalia, are contributing to the UK economy.
The UK Government announced in November that these refugees will all be allowed to apply for an 18-month visa extension - but the immigration rules were changed to specifically exclude Ukrainians from the 'Long Residence' route to settled status.
Natalia said: "They say the Ukrainian Government would like people back, but we also should think that there are human rights.
"No country can claim citizens back, and it will have been four and a half years after the extension."
She acknowledges many of her compatriots will wish to return home once the conflict is resolved, but one survey suggests that two thirds of Ukrainians living in the UK would now like to stay permanently.
Natalia is one of them, partly because she fears the psychological impact on her children, who are both students, of having to uproot and start again for a second time.
Then there's the question of where, precisely, all these Ukrainians might return to.
"Part of Ukraine is occupied, so there is nowhere to go back to there," she says referring to the large areas in the south and east of the country, now controlled by Russia.
"There are millions of displaced people internally and lots of destroyed buildings.
"I know plenty of people who don't have their houses back in Ukraine and who don't have jobs anymore.
"Enterprises have been ruined physically or economically."
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Natalia emphasises her immense gratitude to the UK for its assistance to dat...

This article is co-published with Carole Cadwalladr's newsletter on Substack
On a chilly December morning two weeks ago, at a location deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside in the grounds of one of Britain's most spectacular stately homes, cars began to arrive carrying some of the most powerful players in global energy.
Guests stepped out into a courtyard that boasts an Anish Kapoor sculpture and a stunning reflecting pool overlooking the Vale of Aylesbury and entered a stunning converted dairy firm transformed into a discreetly luxurious art and events space in the grounds of Waddesdon Manor.
Waiters circulated with breakfast snacks prepared by a Michelin-starred chef as the hosts, James Harding, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Tortoise Media; and Patrick Handley of the Brunswick Group, a City PR film - the current clients of which include Saudi Arabia's Aramco - welcomed guests from around the world.
The annual event is a jewel in Tortoise Media's crown, held in partnership with Brunswick and the Rothschild Foundation, set up by Harding's friend and mentor, the legendary financier Jacob Rothschild, the 4th Baron Rothschild, whose family seat is Waddesdon Manor, and still managed by the family.
Harding, a former Editor of The Times and Director of BBC News, had other matters on his mind that day too. Because 5 December was also the second day of a historic strike by Guardian and Observer journalists - the first in half a century. They had overwhelmingly voted to do so in protest against the 'sale' of the Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper and a core part of the Guardian's news organisation, to Harding's Tortoise Media.
Although it was a freezing December morning out on the picket line, spirits were high. Journalists didn't yet know that, later that day at an emergency meeting of the Scott Trust, the private company that owns the historically progressive and liberal Guardian and Observer, would agree to the deal, even as they were still on strike.
Nor did they know - until now - that, as they stood on the picket line, Harding was greeting members of Tortoise's energy 'advisory board', including a name all too familiar to those who track the geopolitics of global energy: Bob Dudley, the former Chief Executive of BP who is best known in the US for overseeing the clean-up of the disastrous Gulf of Mexico spill and cheerleading for Donald Trump. Last month, he toured TV studios to tell viewers how a win for Trump was a win for US energy and business interests.
But Kremlin observers know Dudley too: he led BP's tumultuous joint venture with Russian oil company, TNK; and subsequently took a seat on the board of Rosneft, a Russian oil company chaired by one of Vladimir Putin's closest allies, Igor Sechin.
In fact, Dudley was on Rosneft's board when the company joined Roman Abramovich in a lawsuit against investigative journalist Catherine Belton that 18 press freedom organisations described as a 'SLAPP' (a Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation), designed to chill Belton and other journalists' reporting.
Belton's case became a cause célèbre and added to public and political pressure to reform the law. Dudley, in contrast, made no public comment and resigned his position only after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
But Dudley didn't just sit on Rosneft's board at that time. He sat on - and still sits on - a Tortoise Media energy 'advisory board'.
Harding - who spoke at this year's 'Truth Tellers' conference dedicated to investigative journalism convened by Tina Brown in memory of her husband, the legendary Sunday Times Editor, Sir Harry Evans - declined to comment on Dudley's association with a news organisation.
Dudley had been part of the group that had brought this event together, shaping its contents and even, in 2022, just months after he had finally stepped down from Rosneft's board, putting his name to the invite alongside James Harding; Jacob Rothschild; and the director...

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
Eight climate groups have signed an open letter urging the new Transport Secretary to pause decisions on whether to expand Gatwick and Luton airports.
The campaign groups, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, want the Government to hold off while they review Britain's "outdated" aviation policies.
Climate charity Possible backed the open letter on Tuesday, alongside several prominent NGOs including the progressive New Economics Foundation think tank, writing to the new Secretary of State for Transport Heidi Alexander to demand a halt to the airport expansion decisions.
On Wednesday, the Transport Secretary announced that she would delay the decision on Luton Airport expansion by three months, to 3 April 2025, so she could have more time to consider the application. Owner Luton Borough Council wants to increase the airport's annual capacity from the current 18 million passengers to 32 million.
Climate groups argue any airport expansion would significantly increase carbon emissions, "posing a direct threat to the UK's ability to meet its legally binding climate targets."
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And the signatories say the proposals are "incompatible" with the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee and the UK's climate targets.
The expansions are subject to Development Consent Orders (DCOs) and require sign off from the Transport Secretary.
Existing air-travel policy frameworks in England - the Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS) and the Making Best Use (MBU) policy - are outdated, the letter argues, as they were before the UK's legal commitment to Net Zero in 2019.
And the NGOs argue airport expansion risks undermining the Government's Clean Growth Plan.
Britain's Climate Change Committee (CCC) has consistently advised the Government that airport expansions should not proceed unless the aviation sector demonstrates it is outperforming its anticipated progress in reducing emissions - a condition that, according to the NGOs, has not been achieved.
They also argue the economic case for airport expansion is getting weaker, as the growth in air travel is "now driven primarily by leisure travel, which contributes to the UK's current account deficit rather than bolstering economic strength."
The Government and aviation industry appear to be relying on "speculative technologies" outlined in a so-called Jet Zero strategy, such as alternative fuels and zero-emissions aircraft, which remain unproven at scale. Climate groups caution against "locking the UK into unsustainable emission levels" that conflict with climate goals.
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The new Government recently upheld restrictions on weekend flights at London City Airport - but rubber-stamped an increase in passenger numbers at the airport.
Possible, and the other signatories, are urging the Government to align its aviation policies with the CCC's recommendations and Britain's next upcoming 'carbon budget', before approving projects that could derail the UK's Net Zero ambitions.
Alethea Warrington, Head of Aviation, Heat, and Energy at climate charity Possible, commented before Heidi Alexander's announcement of a delay on Luton expansion, saying: "The new Government should be laser focused on effective policies to tackle the climate crisis. It is therefore mind-blowing that we are now facing the serious risk that further airport expansions will be approved.
"Airports' plans to expand benefit only their ...

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, the pro-Trump billionaire owner of X, is reportedly considering donating up to $100 million to Nigel Farage's Reform UK to help them fight and win the next election.
The two men posed for a picture together this week at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, alongside the party's new multimillionaire Treasurer Nick Candy.
The subject of a donation was reportedly discussed by the three men, with Musk later posting an approving Tweet in response to Farage's suggestion that "Britain needs Reform".
Reports of a potential financial alliance between Musk and Reform has led to calls for a loophole allowing foreign billionaires to bankroll British political parties to be closed.
UPDATE
Keir Starmer Considers Closing Elon Musk Donations Loophole to Stop 'Foreign Interference' in UK Elections
A rumoured $100 million donation from Musk to Nigel Farage's Reform would be banned under the proposal
Josiah Mortimer
Under the current rules foreign donations to UK political parties are banned, but money originating from outside Britain can be funnelled through a firm with a permanent base in the UK - like Musk's company Tesla.
Asked last week by Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rennard whether the Government has plans to change the law on political donations, DHLG minister Lord Khan replied that the Government is "considering changes that will help protect our system from foreign interference" adding that these could include "such as "tighter controls on donations."
He told peers: "The Government [has] committed to reforming political finance rules…The Electoral Commission has pointed to a need to consider the rules on company donations. Details of these proposals will be brought forward in due course."
However, even without any such donation, Reform is already drawing significant funds from Elon Musk, through his website as part of its "creators" program.
Reform UK MPs Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe have both declared payouts from the company in their recent parliamentary register of interests.
BREAKING
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On December 3 Rupert Lowe Reform's MP for Great Yarmouth, registered a payment of £3,259.18 from X Corp for 28 hours work on the platform. Lowe's office told Byline Times that this was "advertising revenue from the dates between 01/02/2023 to 22/11/2024".
Nigel Farage, Reform UK's leader, has 2.1 million followers on the platform. The X Creator program was introduced under Elon Musk's ownership of the platform, it entitles holders of a blue tick to a share of advertising revenue.
Since July Farage has registered several payments from the platform totalling £5,341.73.
Farage's office told Byline Times, "This is not a story. X launched Creator Revenue in July 2023 and Mr Farage has been signed up since. Nigel has been declaring these relatively small payments since he is now an elected MP. Even Byline Times (or any other member of the public could also do this). They are certainly not political donations".
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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
Senior Conservative MPs are seeking to scrap Brits' legal rights to maximum working hours, guaranteed annual leave, and holiday pay, as Labour's landmark workers' rights bill makes its way through Parliament.
The Conservative MPs on the bill's scrutiny committee, the Shadow Business Minister Greg Smith, Assistant Whips Nick Timothy and Sir Ashley Fox and Peter Bedford - have sought to table amendments to Labour's Employment Rights Bill that would strip workplace protections from millions of British workers, including the complete removal of maximum working hours regulations.
The efforts would revoke the Working Time Regulations 1998, which currently ensure British workers have rights to paid holidays, rest breaks, and a 48-hour maximum working week.
The rights are already a watered-down version of tougher restrictions in the EU after the UK secured an 'opt out' to maximum hours if workers agreed.
An amendment pushed by Conservatives on the committee demands "revocation of the Working Time Regulations 1998". The MPs explained their amendment in black and white, as "This new clause revokes the Working Time Regulations 1998 together with other Regulations which give effect to the Working Time Directive in UK law."
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Conservatives have also suggested that new prohibitions on workplace harassment could infringe freedom of speech, pushing for an amendment that would assess the measures' impact on the matter. The legislation would ensure that "employers to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment."
Conservative frontbencher Greg Smith MP said in a recent committee debate on the bill: "We must question whether the benefits of these clauses will be outweighed by the burden on employers and, in certain respects, by the chilling impact on free speech." He said he was concerned that employers would be burdened by having to "police that which most of us…would call more innocent banter."
Labour's Alex McIntyre MP replied at one point: "There is already a test within the current law to avoid some of the free speech arguments the shadow Minister is making. He is seeking to trivialise the experience of many people in those industries who face unacceptable harassment in the workplace."
Legal experts warn the move could breach the UK's post-Brexit trade agreement with the European Union.
Speaking to Byline Times, Prof Keith Ewing, professor of public law at King's College London, pointed out that the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement explicitly prevents either party from weakening labour protections below levels in place at the end of the Brexit transition period.
He noted it could abolish the right to paid holidays, adding: "The question for the Tories is how it is compatible with the trade and co-operation agreement with the EU which the Tories themselves negotiated to govern post Brexit relations."
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The Conservatives' own Brexit deal states in Article 387(2): "A Party [i.e. the UK or EU] shall not weaken or reduce, in a manner affecting trade or investment between the Parties, its labour and social levels of protection below the levels in place at the end of the transition period, including by failing to effectively enforce its law and standards."
Prof Ewing added: "The purpose is to ensure that there should be no significant regression from standards derived from EU law during our membership which were in place at the time...

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
Brad Shreve and his husband had often talked about leaving the United States. To start with, it was just an idea.
But when their fellow citizens returned Donald Trump for a second term as president this November, they began to pack their bags in earnest.
"We don't feel safe here. It's not just Trump, it's the fact half our country voted for him," Brad said.
They had seen the tide of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment rising in America over the last decade. Nevertheless, they were shocked into silence when broadcasters confirmed the former president's return to the Oval Office.
"We were almost completely silent for two weeks," Brad told Byline Times. "He and I would barely talk, and if we did it was not about the election."
He is now one of the many LGBTQ+ Americans who no longer feels safe in their own country due to increasingly hostile rhetoric towards their community from Trump and MAGA Republicans.
The last half decade has seen a growing number of anti-LGBTQ+ laws introduced across America. The American Civil Liberties Union found that at least 510 such bills were introduced in state legislatures in 2023 alone - nearly three time the number introduced in 2022.
Brad, an author and podcaster originally from Michigan, had consulted a relocation specialist when Joe Biden declined to drop out of the race - especially following the outgoing president's disastrous debate performance against Trump in June.
Kamala Harris' nomination in Biden's stead gave him some hope that the Democrats might prevail, but he kept his options open to leave America nonetheless.
"We really did not think Trump was going to win. But as it got closer, we said we would go if it did happen." Now that Trump is returning to the Oval Office, Brad and his husband have resurrected their plans to move to Uruguay - a country he selected due to its strong record on LGBTQ+ rights and progressive values.
Online database Equaldex ranks Uruguay first in Latin America for LGBTQ+ rights and fourth in the world, only behind Iceland, Norway and Spain. In 2013, Uruguay became the third country in South America to legalise same-sex marriage after Argentina and Brazil.
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'They're Going to Overturn Gay Marriage'
Toby from the West Coast had no faith that Kamala Harris would win the election. He and his partner had already made all necessary preparations to leave the country.
"We were doing it regardless of the election result, but we knew it was going to be the result it was," he told this paper. "We had no optimism whatsoever."
Toby, who is in his forties, said the United States has changed a lot over the past decade since Trump first ran for president. "There's a lot more racism and hatred. The behaviour is just out in the open.
"It's such a negative atmosphere. We don't want to be a part of it anymore."
In his first term in office, Donald Trump filled three vacancies on the nine-strong US Supreme Court - a move that further entrenched the court's conservative majority.
Trump appointed justices were instrumental in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that guaranteed abortion rights across the United States.
Toby believes the court will likely now look to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges -a 2015 ruling that extended equal marriage rights to same-sex couples in every state. "They're going to overturn gay marriage, 100%," he said. "They're probably going to wait un...

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
One of my proudest achievements as a British diplomat was to instigate the creation of a new strategic partnership between the UK and Georgia during my time there as Ambassador, in 2015. This became known as "The Wardrop Dialogue" in honour of the British diplomat, Sir Oliver Wardrop, who was the first British Chief Commissioner to the TransCaucasus in 1919, and his sister, Marjory, who became a champion of Georgian culture.
Under the partnership, the UK supported Georgia in three broad areas - security, economy and good governance.
Examples of our security cooperation included the conduct of joint military training, the construction of a state-of-the-art national security operations centre in Tbilisi, support for the EU Monitoring Mission patrolling the administrative boundary lines between Georgia and the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; and assistance to internally displaced populations from those territories following Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia. On the international front, we used our vast diplomatic network to lobby in support of Georgian resolutions at the UN, reaffirming Georgia's territorial integrity, and condemning Russian occupation of Georgian territory.
On the economic front, we backed the establishment of a business council, to encourage the development of business-friendly policies, and to attract investment. We arranged study tours for Georgian farmers and small businesses to the UK, to learn how to develop and market goods into the EU. We shared best practices on government budgeting, such as the role of the Office of Budget Responsibility. We also provided top-level communications training to Georgian officials, including the Prime Minister and his entire Cabinet, to help them push back on Russian misinformation, and give out accurate information about what EU membership entailed.
Under the heading of good governance, we supported the Georgian Parliament's efforts to improve its transparency, and the work of MPs in holding the Government to account. We provided training for up-and-coming politicians on how to develop election platforms and engage voters. We increased the number of prestigious Chevening scholarships for Georgians to study in the UK. We ran initiatives to help Georgia's minority populations, primarily ethnic Azeris and Armenians, integrate into Georgian society. We supported numerous human rights and democracy initiatives, and even engaged members of Georgia's orthodox Church, to dispel myths about EU stances on contentious issues such as gay rights.
Taken together, this amounted to an unprecedented level of attention from the UK to such a relatively small country. In my three-year stint as Ambassador, we organised four Ministerial visits to Georgia, two of them at Cabinet level, as well as numerous defence and parliamentary exchanges. Most embassies in countries of comparable size consider themselves lucky if they manage to get even one junior Ministerial visit every three years.
The Media Must Report On Georgia Violence: 'Their Fight Is Ours, and the Scale of the Atrocities is Agonising'
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Other western countries, such as the US, and members of the EU, had similarly large programmes of engagement and assistance to Georgia. We all regarded Georgia as the leader among former Soviet countries in terms of democratic development, a worthy recipient of our aid, who could moreover provide a beacon of hope for other countries in the region trying ...

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"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." So the old adage goes, one which rings truer than ever in the age of social media misinformation.
The quote is often attributed to Mark Twain. And Winston Churchill. And Thomas Jefferson. Fitting then, that it wasn't any of them, but most likely the satirist Jonathan Swift.
The problem it highlights, however, is the bread and butter of UK-based fact-checking organisation Full Fact. And their workload is only increasing now that generative artificial intelligence tools are making misinformation easier to create on a mass scale than ever before.
"We're at a critical moment," the non-profit group's CEO Chris Morris tells me. "We're only 15 years into what is probably a 100-year information revolution, and goodness knows where it's going to end up."
And it coincides with the apparent decline of traditional broadcasters' status - like the BBC's - as a single, hegemonic source of trustworthy information. That has risks and opportunities.
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"It's good that we're not in an era of deferential news, where the BBC or others handed down truth like tablets from the mountain. We don't want that - skepticism is good. The trouble is the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, where you've got a million narratives on social media," Morris says.
Nor are the public taking politicians' words at face value. Trust in politicians has hit crisis levels, with only 18% of the public having "at least a fair amount" of trust in the ability of MPs to tell the truth, compared to three-quarters (76%) of Britons who doubt their honesty, according to YouGov research this September.
The latest Ipsos Mori Veracity Index also shows politicians remain at the bottom of the pile - only 11% of people in the UK believe they can trust politicians to tell the truth, up from last year's worst-ever 9%.
Morris describes the very clear findings as "appalling". In a wide-ranging interview with Byline Times, the former BBC journalist argues we are merely "15 years into what is probably a 100-year information revolution," with major implications for truth and democracy.
And while predictions that artificial intelligence would destroy the credibility of our elections 2024 haven't materialised in the UK, that's not the case elsewhere.
Morris points to Romania and the Russian influence exerted online, which caused the Constitutional Court to annul their latest presidential election this month. In Moldova, TikTok was 'flooded with anti-Europe disinformation before the EU referendum on 20 October' Moldovan journalist Paula Erizanu noted. Election officials are fighting back. But it could be a taste of what is to come. Did the UK have a lucky escape this July?
"The threat is real. One reason it didn't happen much in the UK is that if you're running a bot farm in St Petersburg, when parties said [a few] weeks before the election 'we know we've lost', there's not much point in interfering," Morris says.
The "jury is still out" on how much mis- and disinformation influenced the recent US election, he adds. "Their electoral system's vulnerabilities, where it comes down to tens of thousands of people in various states, make it ripe for potential foul play." The UK's first-past-the-vote electoral system also, by this reasoning, makes election meddling through fake news particularly appealing if it can be targeted to a handful of highly-significant swing seats, in a future - closer - election that we saw this summer.
UPDATE
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Nearly 40% of asylum seekers living at a former military site in Essex are survivors of torture, meaning they are not fit to live at the site, campaigners have warned.
New research by Doctors of the World and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) reveals that 39% of the 580 asylum seekers (226) housed at RAF Wethersfield, in Braintree, survived torture.
The two organisations are calling for the site to be closed, warning it "feels like a prison and it looks like a prison", and further suggest it is not equipped to deal with mental health difficulties.
They also warned, in a briefing to media last month, that many of the asylum seekers are stuck wearing flip-flops and "very thin jumpers", as temperatures fall below freezing in parts of the UK.
The site has been condemned as unsafe since it opened in 2023, particularly after a report by the Ministry of Defence - published earlier this year - warned that Wethersfield is home to unexploded ordinance and radiological contamination due to how it was previously used.
Jacob Burns, UK operations migration project manager at MSF, said asylum seekers at Wethersfield tend to be "incredibly vulnerable" because of what they experienced in their home countries, and during their migration route to the UK.
"Then they're being re traumatised again by being housed in a place like Wethersfield, which feels like a prison," he told Byline Times.
According to research by MSF and Doctors of the World, one in four people at Wethersfield have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while 41% have experienced suicidal thoughts while at the site.
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More than 70% of the men who attend a mobile clinic at Wethersfield - run by Doctors of the World - have shown signs of "severe psychological distress", the charity found.
The media briefing also included testimony from three residents at Wethersfield, one of whom said they knew of ten people who had tried to take their own lives while there.
"I feel like I'm always in an empty, dark place, because I don't know what is going to happen," the 23-year-old man said.
In Wethersfield, they mentally torture you, it's like they play a game with your mental health.
asylum seekers at Wethersfield
He added that is very isolating, as it is a half hour walk to the nearest town, saying: "We cannot do anything, just be here - they do not treat us like human beings, from the day we arrive."
The man, who gave an anonymous testimony, added that he had "lost my chance of having a life".
Up until late 2023, torture and rape survivors could not be housed at sites like Wethersfield. But, in January, a Home Office policy change meant it could still send them to those sites if it decided there was a proportionate amount of support available.
During the briefing, the organisations also flagged concerns over the cold - weeks after snow fell in parts of south Essex. In mid-November, the Met Office issued a yellow weather warning for ice across the east of England, including all of Essex.
"We're very worried [about the cold]," said Dr Emma Withycombe, who runs the mobile clinic and is a doctor and medical activity manager at Doctors of the World.
Most of the asylum seekers living at Wethersfield - all single men - are sent to the site "very quickly after they arrive in the UK", she said. That leaves a lot of them with very unsuitable clothing or limited to Home Office clothing.
We definitely see people come t...

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Lazare Maglakelidze asks to meet by an old warehouse in Tbilisi's northern outskirts. Here in the quiet, few cars pass along the dirt track winding amid mounds of rusted metal and derelict buildings, the scrap yards and repair shops.
But his caution is hard-won, speaking from behind a mess of gauze, with yellowed eyes bedded in ribbons of vicious purple, a cardboard cast, and a tangle of hooped bandages holding his bludgeoned nose in place.
"Those blacked-out vans they use, they're nothing but mobile torture chambers," the 20-year-old student activist told Byline Times.
People need to understand, this isn't just a couple of guys improvising, it's an entire system at work. As soon as somebody hears one of the vehicles is free they get all riled up and the threats start coming, how they're gonna rape you with their batons, because we're 'pederasts' and 'you guys like that, right?'
Lazare Maglakelidze, activist
On 2 December, Maglakelidze became one of the now-hundreds of people brutalised by the gangs of masked assailants currently roaming Tbilisi, unleashed by Georgia's disputed government to quell mass protests that have, over the past two weeks, spread to almost every corner of the country following the ruling Georgian Dream party's decision to suspend the nation's constitutionally-enshrined bid for EU membership.
Coming hot on the heels of parliamentary elections widely slammed as rigged, critics describe the mounting crackdown as the latest instalment of a violent authoritarian campaign designed to rob Georgia of its democratic progress since independence from the Soviet Union, reorienting a once Western-facing country back toward Moscow's orbit amid the war in Ukraine. And, despite, sustained support from more than 80% of the population for further European integration.
A Spiralling Political Crisis
In the face of sanctions, suspensions to strategic partnerships and an indefinite halt to government aid from Western allies, Georgian Dream has doubled down on its autocratic course, intensifying the violence visited on protesters and carrying out targeted arrests of opposition politicians, civil society leaders, prominent activists, even beloved actors and poets.
The party has recently announced a slate of new legislative measures including streamlining the process for firing public sector employees who voice support for the growing popular movement, banning face coverings at protests, widening grounds for detention, and introducing harsher penalties for minor violations like graffiti and obstruction of traffic.
The country's State Security Service has issued warnings that "criminal actors," backed by "special services of foreign countries," are forging ahead with plans to foment a "colour revolution" with the goal of disrupting presidential elections on Saturday.
For the first time in Georgia's independent history, those polls will see the country's head of state appointed not by popular vote, but an electoral college described by critics as made up almost entirely of ruling party loyalists.
Given Georgian Dream's rhetoric and increasing use of repressive measures, there's mounting concern that firebrand anti-Western nominee Mikheil Kavelashvili may seek to institute a state of emergency once he formally takes over the presidential office from the pro-European incumbent, Salome Zurabishvili, on 29 December.
The Media Must Report On Georgia Violence: 'Their Fight Is Ours, and the Scale of the Atrocities is Agonising'
Pro-European protesters are raging against the Putin-aligned Georgian Government's decision to scrap the country's bid to join the EU
Mathilda Mallin...

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After the Government unveiled its white paper to Get Britain Working, here's a stark fact that should influence the statute book: less than 5% of people from a certain part of our population are currently in work, even though 86% want to be.
These statistics, about adults with a learning disability, reflect an untapped potential. Worse still, this low employment rate has consistently fallen over the years - from an already abysmal 6% a decade ago (the comparative employment rate among non-disabled people is 75%).
If Labour truly is the party for rights, equality, and social justice, then here is an opportunity to harness the contribution of a willing yet undervalued workforce.
With 750,000 working-age learning disabled adults in England alone, the Government's new employment plan could trigger a reimagining of how the state perceives those usually neglected when it comes to full citizenship.
Of course, we need more practical detail about the vision of the "biggest reforms to employment support in a generation". Especially in relation to how plans for supported employment, or the proposed review of inclusive workplaces, might affect disabled people with learning disabilities.
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Yet, we know that paid employment positively impacts independence, health, and mental health and reduces the benefits bill. Marginalised groups such as learning disabled people are in desperate need of this, as Byline Times has previously reported.
Having worked alongside learning disabled collaborators on Made Possible, a book about how this group can contribute to society like anyone else, I know that huge potential exists.
Campaigner Shaun Webster, who was involved in that project, has part-time roles at a self-advocacy charity and as an advocate at a NHS trust. He claims the personal independence payment (a benefit to help with daily living costs). For him, "employment empowers you, it can change your life and inspire other people to work".
But one of the challenges in closing the disability employment gap is that employers often see giving people jobs as a charitable act, he says, meaning that a shift in attitudes is required - so people not only get work, but then progress into those roles.
Webster also refers to the problems of navigating benefits, as entitlement depends on hours worked: "I often hear from people who are scared of losing their benefits if they work more, and that stops them looking for jobs."
Keir Starmer wants to get Britain working, but he also wants to cut the "bulging benefits bill" - this is a problem for those who rely on benefits to help them find and keep jobs. The Prime Minister's stigmatising rhetoric alienates the very people he is hoping to encourage into work.
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A related barrier is that, despite equality laws and employer schemes such as Disability Confident (launched by the Conservatives to encourage employers to recruit a diverse workforce), workplace access and inclusion is dire. If it is considered at all, it is usually in relation to physical issues rather than adjustments for learning disabled employees, such as video CVs or acces...

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One of Britain's biggest trade unions Unite is caught in a bitter intra-union battle with the GMB union, which represents Unite staff - in a fight mired in allegations of bullying, harassment and factional power plays.
Some members of the GMB union working for Unite went on strike last week and are formally in dispute with their employer. The irony of staff in Unite's 'Bargaining and Disputes Support Unit' going on strike has not been lost on union figures.
Eight GMB members in that unit, plus supporters, picketed Unite's London HQ, protesting what they claimed was a "toxic workplace culture". They allege bullying by their boss Jack Clarke - who is the husband of Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham - and other managers in the disputes unit.
The GMB union says the eight staffers "voted to walk out after Unite failed to suspend managers accused of bullying and victimised those who spoke out." And they claim Unite engaged in "union busting" by suspending all their striking members ahead of the walkout, which ran from December 3rd-6th.
Unite claims its investigations into the original bullying allegations against Clarke and other managers found "no evidence", and alleges they were made "vexatiously".
But the picture is muddied by the fact that neither side is willing to say specifically, on the record, what the dispute is really about. We've tried our best to find out.
Unite figures have responded in turn by accusing the GMB members of engaging in factional warfare against Graham, and suggesting provocatively that they have "much to lose" by inquiries into alleged corruption under the union's previous leadership.
A four page legal letter Byline Times received after we put the claims to the union last week makes clear that Unite is taking the dispute and GMB's allegations very seriously indeed.
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Claims and Counter-Claims
In the letter, lawyers acting for the union - as well as Sharon Graham, and dispute unit boss Jack Clarke - hint at potential defamation proceedings.
They claim the GMB union is engaged in a "factional" attack on Unite leader Sharon Graham - and make counter-allegations that two GMB members were suspended in March over claims of male harassment against a female colleague. The GMB is categorical however that "there are no sexual harassment allegations against our members."
Byline Times understands that in March this year, five trainees in Unite's bargaining/dispute unit demanded a pay rise. A Unite source suggested it amounted to £15,000 per staffer, to around £70,000. These five are believed to be at the heart of the current dispute.
Update 1pm 13th December: GMB has responded to this claim, saying: "One part of the the grievance was about establishing pay parity with other researchers employed by Unite.
"Unite are spinning this as a demand for a £15,000 pay rise, when all that was asked for was for Unite to pay the collectively agreed rate to all researchers who are employed to carry out essentially the same role."
Byline Times was told that around this time, two Unite employees - believed to be GMB members - were then suspended pending an investigation into the alleged bullying of a female member of staff in the BDSU. The investigation is ongoing.
Senior Unite sources say that after this, the two employees accused of bullying and a number of others submitted a collective grievance against the BDSU management. This included their initial pay dispute, as well as accusations of "bullying and harassment" against BDSU management. Which includes Graham's husband, Jack Clarke.
Fast forward to October and November,...

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"First, children's healthcare must always be led by evidence. Medicines prescribed to young people should always be proven to be safe and effective. Secondly, evidence-led, effective and safe healthcare must be provided to all who need it, when they need it. Thirdly, this Government believe in the dignity, worth and equality of every citizen, and recognise that trans people too often feel unsafe, unrecognised and unheard, and that must change."
With those words, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting MP began his announcement that overseas and private prescriptions of puberty blockers for trans children would be permanently banned when the current 'emergency' ban expires at the end of December.
Yet while there may be little for most people to disagree with in the words that he chose, things start to change once you dig into the uncomfortable details of what they actually mean.
First a quick explanation. Puberty blockers, or gonatrophin-releasing hormone agonists, basically block the receptors for estrogen and testosterone. These are the hormones which help the body develop secondary sex characteristics, such as breasts or facial hair. They have been used for almost 40 years to pause puberty where it is unwanted, for example in early or 'precocious' puberty, or when a teenager starts the "wrong" puberty because of a hitherto undetected intersex condition, or when a trans teenager starts puberty and finds it distressing.
As part of a concerted and alarmingly well-funded campaign to roll back trans people's rights and inclusion in our society, the provision of puberty blockers as part of the NHS's care package started to come under scrutiny about six years ago. A handful of people who worked at the GIDS clinics alleged, among other things, inappropriate and hasty prescriptions of puberty blockers.
A case in the High Court in December 2020 ruled that those aged under 13 could not have the competence to agree to be prescribed these drugs, and questioned whether those aged under 16 had competence. For under 18s it strongly suggested that courts should be involved before puberty blockers were prescribed. Within hours NHS England changed their policy to ban all new prescriptions of puberty blockers to those under 18s who might be trans.
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Despite the case being overturned on appeal nine months later, NHS England didn't overturn its policy, laying the ground instead for a review - the Cass Review - of healthcare for young trans people.
In April 2024, the Cass Review published its final report, which claimed that the evidence base that puberty blockers were safe and reversible was "weak", and expressed concern that young people may be harmed by taking them.
The report also claimed that there was no real evidence of benefits, stating that the mental health of recipients had changed little. Hidden in the depths were the statistics that showed that only around one in four were referred for puberty blocker prescriptions, with an average number of six appointments. The data did not support the initial allegations. Yet the report didn't state this clearly.
I don't know if you've noticed, but the media and policy landscape around trans people has shifted quite considerably since 2018. Six years ago we were talking about moving to a self-declaration model for legal gender recognition, along with most of western Europe, as well as ...

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We've got Georgia on our mind. But we're not in good company. The protests rocking the small country of Georgia have lost their fragile grip on the Western news agenda, just as events have rocketed beyond the "protests" they were initially headlined as being.
Hundreds of thousands of Georgians are two weeks into pro-democracy demonstrations that have been met with escalating totalitarianism by a government widely perceived to have stolen the election.
The 26 October election was treated as a de facto referendum on EU membership, which polling consistently shows some 80% of Georgians support.
But 16 days ago, the ruling Georgian Dream party (led by Georgia's richest man) said it was aborting EU accession talks until 2028, following the bloc's denial of their electoral victory.
This led to tides of citizens halting and even risking their lives to take to the streets and declare support for Western-associated ideals of democracy, liberalism, tolerance and humanism.
But the world-stage onto which they have walked has a waning and disengaged audience. "It seems to me that it was only covered like an ordinary protest," Georgian journalist Tata Chikviladze said, as she criticised the international coverage on Media Storm podcast.
She says her country's events have been downplayed as "clashes against the demonstrators and the police forces", and tells, instead, a different story.
To me, it is a gang against the people willing Georgia's Euro-Atlantic integration. To me, it is the men in police uniforms against the youth of Georgia. To me, it is the oligarch with his ruling party who captured the Republic of Georgia
Tata Chikviladze, Georgian journalist
No doubt, December has made most journalists' heads spin, from South Korea's declaration of Marshall law, to the live manhunt of a UHC assassin, to the accusations against Jay Z, to the absolutely tectonic events in Syria - competition for attention is fierce.
It is true, too, that many major Western news outlets have had to reduce their coverage of smaller countries and centralise foreign bureaus due to budget constraints. Local freelancers are relied on to plug these gaps, but right now, the Georgian Dream party is actively suppressing their output.
But Georgia is on political fire, and its people need the world to care.
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Our media's selective empathy is guided by Western perceptions of Georgia as a peripheral actor on the global stage, overlooking its strategic importance as a democratic ally at the intersection of Europe and Asia.
Coverage often ranges from paternalistic to dismissive. There's a tendency to categorise Georgia under a broader "post-Soviet" narrative, lumping it with other countries and ignoring its unique political and social dynamics.
Georgia is painted as a "troubled post-Soviet state," or a "geopolitical battleground". But while neglecting Georgia's strategic value as a potential ally may be self-fulfilling, it is also not the point.
To frame the value of Georgian civil society in terms of Western interests does not just minimise their agency and contributions, it deprioritises our shared humanity in a way that hurts us all.
We are watching fellow people fight back against corrupt and extremely wealthy individuals in their own society who are weaponising courts and elections to steal the people's power. Their fight is ou...

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Since becoming a major force in American politics, Elon Musk has attacked the UK's new Labour Government on multiple occasions through his social media platform X (formerly Twitter). He claimed civil war was "imminent" as riots swept across the country this summer. He has signal-boosted one of the riots' instigators, the currently jailed convicted far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known as 'Tommy Robinson'). And he is now reportedly considering donating up to a $100 million to Reform UK Leader and MP Nigel Farage.
This all prompts the question: why does Musk suddenly care about what's happening in Britain?
In my new book, published by Byline Books, Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy Democracy From Within, I explain Musk's pivotal role in the network behind Trump's return and the forming of a new 'techno-utopian fascism' that merges corporate tech power with the state.
Musk and X are part of a broader network of billionaire oligarchs with questionable views on race, tech platforms, and far-right groups that are fed up with democracy as we know it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is an integral player in this network. And this has significant implications that the Western national security establishment ignores at everyone's peril.
X - Marks the Spot: Russia's Second Front
Peter Jukes looks at the mounting evidence that Elon Musk is using his social media platform as a vector to attack Ukraine and support Putin's murderous invasion
Musk and the Russian Propaganda Maestros
SINCE 2022, CREDIBLE REPORTING HAS SUGGESTED THAT MUSK has engaged in multiple, direct, and secretive communications with Putin and other high-ranking Russian officials.
These interactions have encompassed discussions on personal issues, business interests, and geopolitics. At one point, Putin reportedly personally requested Musk not to activate his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favour to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Musk apparently complied.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk has been in regular contact with Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin's first deputy chief of staff, who holds enormous sway over the Kremlin's war effort and control of Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
Kiriyenko was identified by the US Department of Justice in September as a key figure linked to 32 internet domains that appeared to be legitimate American news sites but were, in fact, created specifically to amplify Russian Government disinformation campaigns.
The domains were operated in breach of US money laundering and criminal trademark laws by three Russian companies under Kiriyenko's control. He used these domains, and other platforms, according to the Department of Justice, to "covertly spread Russian Government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in US and foreign elections, including the US 2024 Presidential Election".
Tennessee-based 'Tenet Media' was one of the platforms under Kiriyenko's control. It received $10 million through the Russian state-owned broadcaster RT and paid right-wing US influencers to disseminate Moscow-approved content.
Kiriyenko is under US, UK, and EU sanctions for such criminal activities.
Kiriyenko's influence operations targeting America can be traced back a number of years. As can his relationship with Elon Musk.
In 2021, it was Kiriyenko who first announced that Musk was slated to speak at a glamorous Russian state-sponsored education conference organised by the Znanie Society. Musk subsequently addressed the event via video link. He acknowledged that his invitation to speak had come directly from Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, who hosted the conference and introduced Musk.
Peskov is also now facing sanctions. The Znanie Society was originally founded in 1947 by Stalin, and controlled by the Central Committee of the Communist Party ...

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"Farmers descended on Westminster in a convoy of tractors to protest the tax changes", Politico reported on Wednesday afternoon, after owners of multi-million pound land and property-holdings blocked the roads around Parliament.
The protest, over moves to introduce inheritance tax for the largest estates, saw dozens - perhaps hundreds - of tractors effectively blockading swathes of central London.
By Thursday, the protest had fallen off the agenda, with only the Financial Times featuring the demonstration against inheritance tax on their front page.
All of which is odd, because when reports emerged in 2021 of Insulate Britain climate protesters apparently blocking ambulances in central London, it received furious, wall-to-wall coverage and condemnation in the press and on television and radio discussion shows. The same goes for nearly every other climate protest that has slowed traffic in London over the past five years.
A report from GB News that August received widespread write-ups from other outlets, despite there not appearing to be any actual footage of climate protesters blocking an ambulance. One image of apparently-delayed ambulances in October that year got a write-up from the Daily Mirror and others.
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This Wednesday however, while trying to get a bus that had been delayed by the farmers' protest, I walked along Westminster bridge, as tractors slowly crawled over the Thames to the streets surrounding the South Bank - and St Thomas' Hospital. The HQ of the London Ambulance Service is also nearby.
The roads around Waterloo were carnage, as traffic slowed to a trickle, impeded by dozens of tractors laden with banners and honking horns. And unlike many of the tabloids that railed against Insulate Britain and others, we actually have footage showing what happened. There were more trying to make their way under the tunnel, judging by the sounds of the sirens.
I watched (and filmed) as ambulances struggled to make their way through. Most tractors did try to move to the side. But London's roads are not designed for slow-moving, hulking agricultural machinery. It is undeniable that the tractors impeded the ambulances, which were battling to make their way through the road any way they could.
And of course, many of the tractors could not move - they were wedged in or just too large to let others pass. So at one point an ambulance went up on the pavement on the other side of the road - into the oncoming traffic - to make progress.
I have no problem with farmers' right to protest. I say this almost without caveat. Peaceful protest should be defended as a right, whether you agree with their cause or not. It is often disruptive. It is often a nuisance.
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But you can watch the videos and decide for yourself what you think: whether the British press treats wealthy farmers - who are attacking a Labour Government removing a loophole affecting a progressive tax - with the same standards it treats those opposing catastrophic man-made climate change that is already affecting billions worldwide.
Hundreds of people have responded to the footage - real first-person evidence of ambulances being disrupted by pr...

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
If you use a food delivery app then the chances are that you have come across some of the many so-called 'Ghost Kitchens' or 'Dark Kitchens' that have spread across the UK since the start of the pandemic.
These outlets appear at first glance to be entirely independent restaurants offering local consumers a wide choice of high-quality meals, at premium prices.
However, further investigation reveals that they are in reality merely one of hundreds of corporate-created virtual brands, offering effectively identical meals, which are often prepared in the exact same kitchens.
One such virtual brand that you may have come across on your favourite food delivery app is the 'The 88th Street Burger Bar'.
An outlet going under this name in Plymouth claims to be "inspired by familiar American classics [and] takes them up a level in the 88th Street way". Their burgers range in price from £8.75 to £10.95 with fries and sides an extra £5 - £6. However, a glance at their reviews shows a low rating of 3.5/5 with the majority of negative feedback referring to incorrect orders, badly cooked food and poor value for money.
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Luckily for local burger aficionados there are plenty of other new outlets to choose from, such as 'Sin City' and 'Mighty Burger', which describe themselves respectively as "Sinfully delicious" and "Iconoclastic trendy Burgers matched with classic home style sides."
However, a scroll through the online menus of each outlet reveals that Sin City, Mighty and 88th Street are all selling what appear to be identical food items. The pictures and prices vary slightly, but the names and ingredients are exactly the same.
A deeper dive into their JustEat profile reveals that all three outlets operate from the exact same address - 5 Union Street - which is also the address of the local Walkabout Bar.
In fact, our investigation discovered 141 "88th Street Burger Bars" across the UK and an equal number of Sin City and Mighty Burgers, all operating out of pubs. As none of the pubs list these ghost outlets on their websites, finding out who owned them took a little time, but eventually led us to a company called Peckwater Brands.
Peckwater describe themselves as "an operating platform that helps existing kitchen operators to make a success of food delivery". Offering their partners the choice of "a software package…a digital food license to produce one of our brands, or a full high-street dark kitchen fit-out", they provide existing food outlets with the ability to run multiple food brands from a single kitchen. Their website lists a few of the 600 ghost brands they claim to own but there is no comprehensive list and our email requesting one never received a response.
In the case of 88th Street Burger Bar et al, Peckwater provides Walkabout and other pubs with the branded packaging and even the precise cooking instructions for their food items, but the food itself remains the responsibility of the pubs. So anyone who orders from these outlets, is likely getting essentially the same food they would be getting from the pub itself, prepared to the specifications of a single recipe, but re-packaged and sold as different items.
While not all of the pubs we looked at were Walkabout bars, they are all owned and operated by the Stonegate Group; a conglomerate which owns (among others) Walkab...

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Nigel Farage remains a defining figure in British politics, with his transformation from a fringe European MEP to a mainstream leader of the populist Reform UK party.
Recently recognised as the Best Newcomer in British Politics by The Spectator, Farage has aligned himself with populist figures like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán, tapping into public discontent with a simple, emotionally charged message that resonates with many.
Despite his political setbacks, Farage continues to shape the national conversation, often leaving his opponents scrambling to respond.
The political establishment still struggles to handle Farage, and those on the centre-left must move beyond dismissing him as a fringe figure or with desperate attempts to silence him as David Cameron did in 2016 with the Brexit Referendum.
Farage's appeal lies in real frustrations - economic insecurity, cultural unease, and political alienation. Addressing these grievances with clear, empathetic tactics and offering better alternatives is key to countering his influence.
Alastair Campbell's performance on Question Time last week offers a roadmap for handling Farage.
By challenging his rhetoric directly, using facts combined with compelling storytelling, and framing issues in terms of shared values, Campbell demonstrated how to effectively take on populists.
Here's ten ways others can follow suit:
1) Understand the Grievances and Issues
Farage's populism thrives on real concerns - stagnating wages, strained public services, and cultural shifts. These issues resonate because people feel ignored by traditional politics, not because they are inherently bigoted. To counter this, politicians must validate these concerns while challenging Farage's scapegoating tactics.
Acknowledge economic struggles and Government failures, but redirect blame to systemic issues like inequality, corporate greed, and inadequate investment, not vulnerable groups or immigration. Immigration challenges must be acknowledged, but policies should balance control with compassion.
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Labour, for example, could show examples of immigration being handled fairly while also highlighting the economic benefits immigrants bring to the UK, such as their contributions to the NHS and local economies. Politicians can say, "yes, we messed up, but we are listening and we will fix it."
2) Engaging Confidently With Some Cockiness
Farage is thin-skinned when directly confronted. He has often been flustered in interviews, like when James O'Brien questioned him in 2014, or more recently when journalists asked about Reform UK MP James McMurdock's violent past.
Campbell's approach on Question Time - engaging head-on, exposing contradictions, and demanding evidence - shows how populist rhetoric collapses under scrutiny.
When Farage touted Brexit as a sovereignty win, Campbell questioned its economic and social costs, forcing him to defend an indefensible position. Direct engagement forces populists to clarify their positions or evade, which damages their credibility.
3) Facts Work Well With Emotion
Data and facts alone will not sway voters who are moved by Farage's emotive appeals. Counterarguments must combine evidence with human stories.
Instead of citing GDP figures, which ...

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The Labour Government's response to calls to clean up the lobbying industry has so far been even weaker than the last Conservative administration, according to analysis by independent experts at Spotlight on Corruption.
The anti-corruption campaigners' assessment shows that on two out of eight recommendations on improving Government transparency, which had been accepted by Rishi Sunak's Government, the new Labour Government has either backtracked or made no concrete commitment to further reform.
The non-profit group has assessed whether the Government plans to implement recommendations made by the Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL), which have been backed up by parliament's Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC). The reports followed a raft of lobbying scandals under previous Governments.
These include "significant" commitments made by the last Government to create a new central database of Government lobbying data, and moving from quarterly to monthly releases of information on who ministers are meeting. The last Government agreed to move to monthly reporting, though didn't implement this in time for the General Election.
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On four further recommendations made by watchdogs, on improving transparency reporting by the Government, there has been no concrete commitment made by the new Government.
These include ensuring informal lobbying activity is properly declared, and stronger sanctions for failing to release information on time and accurately.
Four other recommendations to bolster the current Lobbying Register have also yet to be committed to by Starmer's government, including on closing significant loopholes that allow foreign lobbyists to avoid scrutiny, and requiring more details about what meetings with senior politicians were about.
Since coming to power however, the Government has tightened rules on the second jobs MPs can do, including fully banning MPs taking part in paid lobbying work. That fulfilled a manifesto pledge to immediately "ban MPs from taking up paid advisory or consultancy roles".
Labour says it plans to enforce restrictions on ministers lobbying for the companies they used to regulate "with meaningful sanctions for breaching the rules." The Commons leader Lucy Powell has also launched a new Modernisation Committee which is looking at further restrictions on MPs' outside work, which could include clamping down on paid media gigs with the likes of GB News or LBC.
Currently, the "revolving door regulator" ACOBA has no power to enforce its recommendations or implement sanctions if former politicians ignore their advice, as has happened repeatedly with Boris Johnson.
Last week, Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Paymaster General, told Parliament that the new Government is: "Committed to transparency around lobbying. That is why we will have regular transparency updates. The approach that we take will frankly be in stark contrast with that of the Government who preceded us."
However, in October, Baroness Twycross for the Government told the House of Lords that "transparency data for ministerial meetings and overseas travel, special advisers and senior officials will continue to be published quarterly as it has been under previous administrations."
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When Keir Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions, he decided to prosecute Kay Gilderdale for the attempted murder of her daughter, Lynn.
Gilderdale confessed how she helped her daughter end her "unimaginably wretched" life in 2008 after discovering she had made a failed attempt to do so herself, having lived with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) for over 16 years.
The case made national headlines and Starmer's decision was publicly questioned by three judges amid debate over why he had pursued a charge of attempted murder, rather than assisted suicide. Gilderdale was found not guilty of attempted murder in January 2010.
The case reignited the debate on assisted dying, but it did something else too: it shone a spotlight on the realities of severe ME. That, one would hope, would have given the current prime minister some insight into a disease that is even more pressing today.
ME had left Lynn Gilderdale bedridden, unable to speak or eat and having to live in a quiet and darkened room, and in unrelenting pain that meant she required increasingly high doses of morphine.
Despite often being seen as 'rare' or simply causing 'chronic fatigue', the illness varies in severity and by long-outdated estimates, it afflicts around 250,000 people in the UK - more than Parkinsons or multiple sclerosis - with one quarter thought to be severely ill. But that overall figure has massively increased since the pandemic - now thought to be 1.3 million if those (like myself) with Long COVID who have ME symptoms are included.
Some may ask: is it any wonder the number of people off work with long-term sickness has increased by 500,000 since 2019? It now sits at nearly three million.
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So perhaps Starmer's "basic proposition" that "people need to look for work, but they also need support" sounds reasonable - on the surface. But what about underneath that?
ME is characterised in part by a hallmark symptom little seen in other diseases: post-exertional malaise (PEM). It refers to the worsening of symptoms after even minimal energy use - so what someone can manage one day, they can't necessarily keep up with the next.
Not only that, but an activity that feels doable in one instance can in turn make someone deteriorate, especially when that deterioration can take hours or days to show itself and the warning signs of exceeding their energy envelope aren't immediate.
It's why charities like Action for ME emphasise the importance of pacing to reduce the chances of PEM. For some, simply concentrating on a conversation or sitting upright at a desk could cause a worsening.
But for the most severe, mere movement or sensory stimulation - the vibration of nearby footsteps, the touch of a familiar hand, or the slightest bit of light - can push someone who's already severely ill into a more dangerous level of sickness.
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Kirsty Stanley, an occupational therapist supporting people with long COVID told Byline Times the importance of understanding PEM is "huge - it's the invisible aspect", but almost every aspect of the disease - its existence, its symptoms, its causes, how to treat it - has long been debated, and sufferers still struggle to get ap...

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Israel's Government is accelerating its plans for complete annexation of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank in the wake of a new, incoming sympathetic American administration under President Donald Trump.
Simultaneously Tel Aviv is providing military support for settler attacks on Palestinians, aimed at destroying Palestinian property and driving them off their land, as the world's attention focuses on the exploding regional violence and the degradation and collapse of neighbouring militias and powers, including Hezbollah and former Syrian President Bashar Assad's Government which are and were both supportive of Palestinian rights and statehood.
On Monday, Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told a meeting of the Religious Zionist Party (RZP) that "The time is now" for seizing control of the Gaza Strip and for taking decisive action in the West Bank by strengthening Jewish settlements and creating facts on the ground to prevent a Palestinian State.
"2025: the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria," wrote Smotrich on X.
Another Knesset member from the RZP also proposed a bill that all Israeli legislation officially replace the name of the West Bank to Judea and Samaria, the old biblical names for the occupied territory.
Smotrich has also ordered preparations for the annexation of the occupied West Bank ahead of Donald Trump taking office in January 2025. The finance minister, who lives in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank, is also a minister within Israel's Defence Ministry where he oversees the Israeli Civil Administration of the West Bank and its settlements.
In a statement released on Monday he voiced hopes that the new administration in Washington would recognise Israel's push for "sovereignty" over the occupied territory.
Trump was behind the 2018 move of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem - despite Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem being illegal under international law - and also the 2019 recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
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Smotrich also announced the confiscation of 24,000 dunums (5930.5 acres) of the occupied West Bank, the largest confiscation of Palestinian land since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, classifying them as state land.
"More than 23,000 dunams of land for the benefit of the settlement in Yosh. We determine facts on the ground and thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state!" he said.
Israeli human rights organisation, Peace now, said the government in addition to completing the annexation moves, by transferring power from the army to an administration under Smotrich, was also legalising settlement outposts (which were previously illegal even under Israeli law) by providing them with financing, infrastructure and bypass roads.
Furthermore, the Israeli authorities are strengthening enforcement laws against Palestinian construction and promoting settlement growth and the building of new settlements, said Peace Now.
In an effort to ethnically cleanse the West Bank the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have also accompanied and protected Israeli settlers who carry out daily and nightly attacks on Palestinians, their property and their land. Should Palestinians retaliate with stones they are shot, sometimes killed, and arrested.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that duri...

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The brutal dictator Bashar Assad has fallen and taken refuge in Russia. The Soviet Union and then Russia has long been an ally of Assad and, before him, his brutal father Hafez Assad. Assad's ignominious flight to Moscow has deprived a lamppost of a cameo appearance in history, but has also seen the doors of horrible prisons flung open, leading to joyous reunions and the revelation of disgraceful crimes against humanity perpetrated by Assad's enforcers.
I've been an observer of this wretched conflict since 2012 when I first started helping Eliot Higgins with reports on chemical weapons, in what eventually grew into the phenomenon known as Bellingcat. The situation in Syria is still evolving, but there are already some key observations and lessons that we must learn from this
Dictators Are In Power Until They Aren't
As recently as 10 days ago, people were talking about Assad like he was a permanent fixture. Then he wasn't. These things can go very quickly. The collapse of the Assad regime happened faster than the fall of Kabul. One wonders how this is being observed in Pyongyang and Moscow. Or in the Georgian Dream party HQ.
The Immediate Return of Refugees Would Be Unwise
Certainly, no Syrian refugee should be denied the opportunity to return to their home. Many are doing this right now. But now is not the time to end asylum for the numerous refugees abroad. Uprooting people and dumping them in a country with a wrecked economy, no jobs, and hundreds of thousands of destroyed homes is a recipe for increasing chaos when we should, in fact, be striving to reduce chaos.
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We Need to Chase the Paper Trails
Assad's car collection or family photos of Assad's relatives in Nazi-themed T-shirts are certainly worthy of remark, but what the world really needs to see the paper trail. One hopes to find many interesting things left on paper and hard drives. The world needs to see the supply chain that kept both his conventional and chemical weapons programme going. Suppliers and those that handled the money to pay the suppliers need to be identified and investigated. While it may be mildly amusing to see how Asma Assad managed to buy things from Harrods while under sanctions, it is of deep interest to see where certain lots of chemicals came from. And it will be useful to see the connections between the regime and the long list of people who were loud advocates for it in the West. Assad's fellow travellers have much to answer for. But if some of them took money or direction from his regime, they have even more to answer for.
What to Do With Stranded Russians and Their Arms
Russian military forces are now stranded in Syria. This is an interesting situation. Perhaps now that Syria is no longer a combatant nation, these forces need to be interned. Their weapons and ammunition need to be impounded. Certainly, the world should think twice about letting combatants go back to Russia where they can aid the unlawful invasion of Ukraine.
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The world vowed to rid Syria of chemical weapons in 2013 after the Assad regime's brutal murder of civilians in Ghouta with rockets filled with the nerve agent Sarin. Much money and effort were spent pulling chemical weapons-related materials out of Syria and disposing of them, only to have further chemical weapons attacks occu...

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Last Wednesday, Members of Parliament voted in favour of a bill to introduce proportional representation for elections to the House of Commons. It was symbolic - it was the first stage of a no-hoper, backbench bill - but it was historic.
Why? Because, by my reckoning, it was the first time that MPs had ever voted in favour of a bill to introduce proportional representation for elections to the Commons.
In 1917, the House of Commons rejected a move to proportional representation, despite a cross-party Speaker's Conference recommending it. The move fell by just seven votes. British history might be very different had a few Conservative MPs skipped the vote.
Then in 1931, the House of Commons backed a Bill which would have introduced the Alternative Vote system, to let voters rank candidates by preference. But it wasn't PR. And at any rate, the Government fell before the law could be passed.
A world war was fought and empires have fallen since.
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But Westminster's winner-takes-all voting system has remained, despite Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all rejecting it.
Its warping effects are more visible than ever.
Six months on from this year's General Election, the Electoral Reform Society has crunched the numbers, and found that the General Election in 2024 was "not only the most disproportional election in British electoral history but one of the most disproportional seen anywhere in the world."
In other words, MPs elected do not represent voters' preferences, by a long stretch. It is obvious to anyone who saw the outcome: Labour securing 411 seats on 34% of the national vote - "a lower vote share than their election loss in 2017," as the authors point out.
"Underneath this headline lies a story - one of a volatile electorate, fragmenting party system and an electoral system that cannot keep up. The result for voters, and for parties, is a system out of step," writes chief exec Darren Hughes in the democracy group's latest report.
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They highlight some stark findings:
1. Nearly 78% of votes did not directly affect the local outcome in 2024 - 21.2 million votes in total. That means they were either surplus to requirements (e.g. Labour votes above the winning total, in a super-safe Labour seat), or for parties and candidates that didn't get any representation locally
2. 554 constituencies (85% of all seats) elected their representative on less than 50% of the vote.
3. The Conservative's vote share was just 27%, making it their lowest ever recorded. The previous low was in 1832 (29.2%).
4. 72 MPs is a new record haul for the Lib Dems. But their vote share was barely four points higher than the 8% of votes they received in 2015 - when they recorded their lowest ever number of MPs (a rump of eight).
5. Nearly 43% of votes went to parties (and independents) other than Labour or the Conservatives, a record high.
6. The sub-60% turnout was the second lowest voter turnout since universal suffrage was introduced, only narrowly beating the 2001 low of 59.4%.
7. One in three voters said they made a tactical vote instead of voting for their preferred party, according to polling for the democracy group
8. ...

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The Israeli Government's attacks on international human rights organisations that have been critical of Tel Aviv continue to escalate as leaked documents point to secret cooperation between a pro-Israel group in the UK and the Israeli government.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is under enormous pressure, from Israel and its Western allies, to drop the arrest warrants issued several weeks ago against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
Last week Judge Tomoko Akane, the president of the ICC, said threats facing the institution, including possible US sanctions and Russian warrants for staff members, "jeopardised its very existence".
During the annual conference of the court's 124 members, Akane said the Court had been subjected to attacks - seeking to undermine its legitimacy and ability to administer justice and realise international law and fundamental rights - including "coercive measures, threats, pressure and acts of sabotage".
Additionally, more warrants have been issued against court employees.
Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan said in his speech to the conference that it was clear by any metric, by any benchmark, that this assembly was at a pivotal time.
Khan is currently being investigated for accusations of sexual misconduct by an external inquiry.
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The threats against the ICC were made by the US and Russia.
"Outrageous" was how US President Joe Biden described the ICC charges against the Israeli premier and former defence minister.
Earlier in the year the US House of Representatives passed a bill to sanction the court in response to Khan's request for arrest warrants against the Israeli leaders.
Washington is currently working on a list of ICC officials whom they plan to sanction.
The US threats also included sanctions against its allies if they, as they are required to do as signatories to the Rome Statute, arrest Gallant or Netanyahu should the two step foot on their soil.
However, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Senior Fellow, David J. Scheffer, warned that "given the membership in the ICC of almost all US allies and friends across the globe, any US initiatives to penalise the ICC or member governments supporting it could undermine other vital American interests with those allies and friends and embolden such adversaries as the Russians and Hamas."
Critics have labelled the US' behaviour as hypocritical, especially in light of the Biden administration, and particularly Secretary of State Antony Blinken, constantly claiming to uphold a so-called "rules-based international order", while accusing US adversaries like China of supposedly violating it.
The ICC has arrested and prosecuted numerous African, Arab and Muslim leaders over the years but their warrants against the Israelis marks the first time the court has targeted a country allied with the West.
"During the first 20 years of its operation, the court sought to prosecute people solely from the African continent," said Scheffer. "As a result, it was criticised for having an "Africa problem" and channelling the "assertion of neocolonial domination," he added.
Indeed, the credibility of the ICC has come repeatedly under question with accusations of it being in the pocket of the powerful West following its failures to take action against the atrocities of Western armies in relation to Palest...

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An investigation by Byline Times and legal campaigners Good Law Project has revealed further close ties between a Government adviser who has called for tougher anti-protest clampdowns - and major defence industry players who could stand to benefit from it.
Lord Walney, who is the Government's 'independent adviser' on political violence and disruption, was appointed by Boris Johnson in 2020, after the former Labour MP backed the Conservative leader against Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 election. He has remained in the post under PM Keir Starmer.
The crossbench peer, who has backed calls for restrictions on protests by pro-Palestine groups and climate campaigners, has extensive links to the defence industry, including as a paid lobbyist. Walney, whose real name is John Woodcock, is "engagement director" of the Purpose Coalition - part of the lobbying firm Crowne Associates.
He is also vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for AUKUS, the security partnership between Australia, United Kingdom and the United States of America.
The AUKUS parliamentary group, formed after the signing of the agreement of the same name in March 2023, has received substantial funding from prominent defence firms.
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Arms manufacturers BAE Systems and military engineering firm Babcock International have contributed £15,000 each to the group's operations over the past year, while defence industry lobby group ADS provided secretariat services of around £1,500 in the year to July 2024.
Groups such as Palestine Action have often targeted BAE Systems, which has produced F35 military jet parts used by the Israeli state. Palestine Action was named by Lord Walney over a hundred times in his May report calling for harsher anti-protest laws, as a supposed "anarchist, anti-Israel activist group" that the Government should consider banning.
All-Party Parliamentary groups have been criticised for offering an avenue for little-scrutinised lobbying of parliamentarians. In 2022, there were around 750 such groups, however following a tightening of the rules there are now just over 270.
The connections have garnered fresh attention due to Lord Walney's report from May this year, "Protecting our democracy from coercion". It was published under Boris Johnson's Government, and was publicly endorsed by the ADS Group.
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The controversial peer's extremism report backed a series of restrictions on protests, hot off the heels of two major anti-protest laws. The recommendations included:
The power to ban or limit the frequency of protests on the grounds of cost
Powers to ban protest groups from organising, or raising money if they were judged to be causing 'serious' disruption
A broadening of the definition of 'serious disruption' to allow police to outlaw a wider range of protests
New powers to allow businesses to sue protest groups for disruption
Allowing police to make protest groups pay for the policing of their own protests - a move branded unworkable by policing experts
Powers to impose exclusion zones around 'places vital to the functioning of democratic governance' such as Parliament, in order to protect them from 'unreasonable p...

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In December, the LA Times' theatre critic lamented a bygone era in which "critics bestrode the media universe like giants, issuing cultural verdicts with the gavel-pounding authority of high court judges". This sentiment is not unique.
Prospect magazine recently dissected the cultural role of far-right commentator Douglas Murray. Murray, known for inflammatory musings - such as suggesting the forced removal of Palestinians from Gaza - has been lauded as a leading public intellectual by figures such as the French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy. Prospect concluded that this state of affairs says "nothing good" about modern society.
The shift from critics as cultural giants to divisive figures like Murray reflects a broader erosion of intellectual rigour and ethical responsibility.
Once, critics were cultural cartographers, mapping art, literature, and architecture with insight and vision. Figures such as Ian Nairn and Robert Hughes didn't merely critique; they offered imaginative frameworks for society's aspirations. They were provocateurs of thought, inspiring audiences to engage with the world more deeply.
Today, their role has largely been usurped by ideologues and algorithms. In place of thoughtful analysis, we see clickbait, performative outrage, and shallow commentary optimised for engagement rather than substance.
The critic, once a navigator of meaning, is increasingly irrelevant in a landscape dominated by metrics and mediocrity.
In place of thoughtful analysis, we see clickbait, performative outrage, and shallow commentary optimised for engagement rather than substance
Thoughtful Lost Giants
More than two decades ago, I experienced this shift firsthand while working with Jonathan Meades, one of the last great cultural critics.
I was his researcher for a BBC documentary on the architecture of Luis Barragán and Ricardo Legorreta in Mexico City. But the series was abruptly cancelled, with the then BBC2 controller Jane Root deeming Meades too "pale, male, and stale" for modern audiences. This decision effectively ended his television career. Imagine a British commentator today being commissioned to examine Mexican architecture - it seems unthinkable in a media climate that can prioritise superficial diversity over intellectual depth.
Shortly afterwards, I interviewed for a position as a researcher on Robert Hughes' series Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore. During our meeting, news broke of his near-fatal car accident. Though he survived, the injuries diminished his towering creative presence.
The sidelining of Meades and the loss of Hughes' vitality were milestones in the decline of cultural criticism.
Upon Hughes' death, The Wall Street Journal remarked that he left "many admirers but few followers". This grim assessment encapsulates the modern critic's plight.
Since the turn of the century, 80% of American newspaper and magazine cultural critics have been dismissed, and Britain's intellectual landscape fares no better.
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The Decline of Cultural Ambition
The loss of these figures is a cultural tragedy.
Critics like Ian Nairn, whose 1955 Outrage condemned post-war Britain's architectural mediocrity, didn't just voice complaints; they issued moral indictments against societal complacency.
Hughes' 1980 documentary series The Shock of the New didn't merely document modernity's chaos but provided audiences with a lens through which to engage with it meaningfully.
These critics were cultural stewards, challenging power, inspiring imagination, and connecting society to a broader continuum of human endeavour.
Today, these voices have been replaced by metrics-driven mediocrity.
Consider The Critic, a publ...

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A coalition of academics and healthcare professionals have backed an open letter critical of the Government and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation's (JCVI) decision to restrict access to COVID-19 vaccines.
Campaign group Clinically Vulnerable Families (CVF) has expressed concerns over vaccine access for autumn 2025 and spring 2026.
Until now, COVID policy prioritised protecting "at risk" groups such as those with chronic heart failure, COPD, or diabetes, but using a bespoke, non-standard cost-effectiveness assessment developed by the Department of Health and Social Care, the JCVI has advised that only the following groups should be offered vaccination in spring 2025:
adults aged 75 years and over
residents in a care home for older adults
individuals aged six months and over who are immunosuppressed (as defined in the 'immunosuppression' sections of tables 3 or 4 in the COVID-19 chapter of the Green Book)
The JCVI is also withdrawing its offer to pregnant women, despite them having been recognised for years by the NHS as being at increased risk.
Vaccinating pregnant women helps protect their babies; COVID has been linked to developmental issues. The UK is now one of only a small number of countries including Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Turkmenistan, which doesn't recommend COVID vaccines for pregnant women.
Professor Christina Pagel of University College London and Professor Sheena Cruickshank of the University of Manchester expressed their concerns about the JCVI's decision in a piece for The Conversation, urging the JCVI to "either reverse its criteria on vaccination in pregnancy or provide a much more detailed and transparent explanation for why it has been discontinued".
CVF's letter highlights how restricting access to vaccines doesn't align with "evidence based public health principles, as supported by the WHO, as we do for the NHS flu vaccination programme". It prioritises a range of at risk groups including those with diabetes and asthma, and frontline health and care workers.
The JCVI has not released the full calculations and evidence base to explain the discrepancy in its approach to COVID compared to flu.
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The study provided by the JCVI notes data for clinically vulnerable groups is limited, meaning the most at-risk could fall through the cracks.
CVF are concerned the JCVI is sending a message to at risk groups that the vaccine is no longer necessary and that they are safe, a signal many may trust and believe.
At risk individuals have the option of paying for vaccines, but this financial barrier will add to inequality.
The open letter notes that private COVID vaccinations are priced around £100 per dose "an amount far beyond the means of many at-risk people". The price of vaccines supplied to the NHS are approximately £35.04.
"Private charges will leave many vulnerable people unprotected, amplifying health inequalities and increasing the need for recourse to antiviral treatments, ultimately leading to an increase in hospitalisations," the letter explains.
Eligibility criteria for COVID antiviral treatments is at odds with the JCVI's decision on vaccination, the letter notes.
In January, NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) recommended COVID antiviral treatments for those over 70, or with conditions such as diabetes, a BMI of at least 35 kg/m,...

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
Keir Starmer is considering plans to close a loophole that allows foreign billionaires like Elon Musk to bankroll British political parties, one of his ministers has signalled.
Recent reports suggest the X-owner is considering donating up to $100m - around £80m - to Nigel Farage's Reform, after signalling his support for the party.
While there are restrictions on foreign citizens donating to British political parties, these can currently be evaded under the law, if the donation is made via a UK-based company.
While both Farage and Musk have denied suggestions of any imminent donation, the Reform leader has also said he would accept money were it offered.
Asked on Thursday by Lib Dem peer Lord Rennard whether the Government has plans to change the law on political donations, DHLG minister Lord Khan replied that the Government is "considering changes that will help protect our system from foreign interference" adding that these could include "such as "tighter controls on donations."
He told peers: "The Government [has] committed to reforming political finance rules…The Electoral Commission has pointed to a need to consider the rules on company donations. Details of these proposals will be brought forward in due course."
On Monday, Elon Musk's father said that Nigel Farage could get a $100 million donation if it was needed to ensure that Reform UK wins the next General Election, saying "I think it's a good idea".
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Lord Rennard cited reports from Transparency International this week on "how dark money from dodgy sources can infect British politics" and called for a £10,000 cap on individual donations, as recommended by the Committee on Standards in Public Life.
Interestingly in a week where speculation about Elon Musk donating to Reform UK has run rife, Government spokesman Lord Khan adding that the Government's "primary concern is reducing the threat of foreign interference" and they are developing proposals while engaging with stakeholders like the Electoral Commission.
Labour peer Baroness (Margaret) Hodge added that it's "vital that the new Government take every step to clean up our politics" and called for greater transparency, banning foreign donations, and strengthening the Electoral Commission's powers. Baroness Hodge was speaking during a panel on the issue organised by the campaign group Transparency International earlier this week.
Conservative peer Lord Forsyth used his slot to stick the boot into the Lib Dems, who back reform (unlike the Conservatives). He told the chamber the party had received funds from a "convicted fraudster, Michael Brown" and asked if parties should have to return money from fraudulent sources.
UPDATE
Elon Musk's $100m Threat to Bankroll Nigel Farage and Reform Exposes the Gaping Loopholes Endangering UK Democracy
Keir Starmer is being urged to act now to prevent foreign billionaires from exploiting these gaps in our electoral system
Josiah Mortimer and Adam Bienkov
Fellow Conservative Baroness Finn asked if donation caps would "also extend to clothes and glasses," a jibe at the PM and his wife receiving gifts from Labour peer Lord Alli. Labour frontbencher Lord Khan said it was not relevant to the question.
Others in the debate called for a focus on so-called unincorporated associations, which allow large donations to be made anonymously through private clubs and unregistered bodies.
Labour's Lord Beamish said the method "has been used by the Conservative Party on an industrial scale to make it very difficult to know where large sums of public money affecting our elections are coming from."...

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
Attending the sold out O2 Arena in November 2023 for the launch of Jordan Peterson's 'Alliance for Responsible Citizenship' (ARC), I was struck by how the supposedly secular political event resembled a megachurch.
It's fitting that the event's star speaker, Canadian psychologist and author of self-help bestsellers 12 Rules for Life (2018) and Beyond Order (2021), has turned his furrowed brow to religion.
Peterson has become a major player on the Right - fronting ARC, creating content for the Daily Wire, interviewing conservative figures on YouTube (subscribers: 8.4 million), and endorsing Donald Trump for US president. So what is Peterson telling his flock about matters spiritual?
In his new book We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine, Peterson argues that stories help us make sense of the world, and that the Bible contains "the story on which Western civilisation is predicated". (This neglect of ancient Greece is significant.)
Rather than draw on biblical scholarship to look at the stories in historical context, Peterson reads the Bible as a guide for how to live today. In Peterson's hands, this reduces the text to a vehicle for reactionary politics.
The first thing you have to know, as Peterson reminds us on every other page, is that the 20th century saw the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism.
The second is that Peterson (based on his reading of Dostoevsky) blames this on the loss of the restraining effects of religion.
Peterson believes that the road to totalitarian hell is paved with having a good time, and the book is really a polemic against liberal hedonism and the decline of traditional values.
The Book of Jordan
Peterson goes through the Bible stories and describes in tortured prose what he sees as their deeper meaning and modern relevance. He traces a broader story arc about what he calls "prideful" rebellion against God, starting with the serpent in the Garden of Eden (representing Satan) and going through to Cain and his descendants.
Inside this macro point, we get specific political arguments, often as digressions. The story of Adam and Eve is used to defend traditional gender roles, with the Fall blamed on women being too compassionate and proud, and on men for listening to them.
"The temptation that eternally confronts the woman", Peterson writes, "is the idea that maternal benevolence can be pridefully extended to the entire world, to even the most poisonous of snakes" and "used to claim unearned moral virtue".
As for men, the temptation is "to hearken to this false voice" in order to impress women. The sexism aside, do we detect here the virtue-signalling liberal and the feminised "cuck" of right-wing caricature?
UPDATE
Elon Musk's $100m Threat to Bankroll Nigel Farage and Reform Exposes the Gaping Loopholes Endangering UK Democracy
Keir Starmer is being urged to act now to prevent foreign billionaires from exploiting these gaps in our electoral system
Josiah Mortimer and Adam Bienkov
In the same vein, Cain's slaying of his brother Abel is deployed to attack social justice warriors and identity politics: "It constitutes a pattern for the victim/victimiser narrative that plays such a key role in the ideologies of resentment that so truly characterise our time…" Peterson specifies people who suggest inequalities of "sex, race, class, ethnicity, 'gender'" are caused by "compulsion and force", rather than natural differences.
The chapter on Noah and the flood has a bizarre attack on "hypocrite" vegan animal rights protestors, who are likened to "the Pharisees who conspired to crucify Christ". The Abraham chapter laments the sexual revolution o...