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April 26th 2024

D-Day 80: WW2 veterans share frontline memories with London pupils

Published

7 hours ago

Post Office paid widow in instalments for silence

Image caption, Former Post Office executive Angela van den Bogerd

Tom Espiner

BBC business reporter

Oliver Smith

BBC business reporter

Published26 April 2024, 16:52 BST

Updated 4 hours ago

The widow of a sub-postmaster who took his own life had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the Post Office in exchange for staggered compensation payments, an inquiry has heard.

The family of sub-postmaster Martin Griffiths also had to agree not to pursue legal action to try to clear his name and get more money.

The details emerged as part of a long-running inquiry into the prosecution of hundreds of sub-postmasters by the Post Office.

During a second day of questioning, former Post Office executive Angela van den Bogerd was shown emails where she and her colleagues discussed hiring a media lawyer after learning that Mr Griffiths was seriously ill in hospital.

It also emerged that the then chief executive, Paula Vennells, questioned whether Mr Griffiths had “previous mental health issues and potential family issues” to feed back to the board.

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted hundreds of sub-postmasters for offences such as theft and false accounting on the strength of faulty Horizon accounting software.

Mr Griffiths had been pursued for a supposed shortfall amounting to £100,000 at his post office in Cheshire.

He had written to the Post Office that July about a £39,000 shortfall at his branch between February 2012 and May 2013.

He was also being held culpable for losses from an armed robbery at his branch in May of that year.

An email from campaigner Alan Bates to Post Office executives quoted Mr Griffiths’ mother saying that “the Post Office had driven him to suicide”.

The email was eventually forwarded to Ms van den Bogerd with a suggestion from the communications head Mark Davies to hire a specialist media lawyer.

Counsel for the inquiry Jason Beer KC asked Ms van den Bogerd: “The immediate reaction was not ‘what can we, the Post Office, do to help this man’s family’, was it?”

She replied: “Not at this point.”

Mr Beer asked if that was what it was like working in the Post Office at this time. “That the first thought was, we need a media lawyer?”

She replied: “In all my time with Post Office from very, very early on, I was very conscious that PR was very important.”

‘I would never do that’

Following his death, the family was offered £140,000, with the condition that they do not pursue the Post Office for any more money, and keep quiet about the deal.

The payments were staggered, which the Post Office “asked for as an incentive to Mrs Griffiths maintaining confidentiality”, according to a 2015 email from Post Office litigation lawyer Rodric Williams to Ms van den Bogerd.

She said the deal had been offered as a way of getting money to Mrs Griffiths more quickly than through the mediation scheme the Post Office had set up.

In further questioning, Ms van den Bogerd was hit with accusation after accusation from lawyer Ed Henry, each of which she denied or disagreed with.

Mr Henry accused her of “deliberately supressing the truth” to which she replied: “No I would never do that.”

Mr Henry said she was “letting wrongful convictions stand”, to which she said: “No.”

The hearing was attended by a number of former sub-postmasters, including Parmod Kalia.

He used to work at the Orpington branch, and was given a six month jail sentence after being falsely accused of stealing £22,000 from the Post Office.

Mr Kalia sat in the inquiry room with tears in his eyes as lawyer Ed Henry questioned Ms van den Bogerd about a letter she sent to him in 2015 insisting that the Horizon system was robust.

As the inquiry broke for lunch, Mr Kalia told the BBC that the exchange was “very tough” to watch.

“He [Mr Henry] brought back memories of my mum. I had to beg and borrow from her, and I could never pay her back.”

“It was very important for the barrister to bring it up.”

He said he wanted “some kind of acceptance” from Ms van den Bogerd.

“I haven’t got what I’m looking for, which is a public apology to me personally. I know she apologised to everyone yesterday, but that was off a bit of paper.”

“She’s broken me” he added.

Ex-Post Office boss “opposed stopping prosecutions”
- Published2 days ago

April 24th 2024

Will Labour’s plan make train tickets cheaper?

What will it mean for train tickets?

Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh said she could not say that Labour would lower fares, but they would simplify them.

“We’ll make them more accessible, more transparent and more trustworthy for passengers, ” she said.

Ms Haigh also said Labour would deliver a “best fare guarantee”, so people could be sure they are always paying the lowest fare for their journey.

Labour pledges to renationalise most rail services within five years

However, railway specialist Tony Miles – who has covered the industry for over 40 years – said any savings were likely to be minimal because the private operators’ profit margins are already so small, at an average of 12p for each passenger journey.

He argued this would mean Labour would only be able to pass on very small savings per journey.

From just after the Second World War until the 1990s the UK rail system was fully nationalised, with the government owning the rail networks and all of the trains.

The industry was privatised in the 1990s, with services run by a variety of train operating companies.

At the moment the infrastructure is managed by Network Rail, while passenger train services are run by individual operators.

However, there are degrees of nationalisation. During the pandemic, the government in effect took control of the railway, with most train companies in England moving onto contracts where they get a fixed fee to run services, and the taxpayer carries the financial risk.

Are other countries’ trains under national control?

Luxembourg operates a fully state-run system where all train journeys are free, and train tickets in other European countries with more state control than the UK can be much cheaper.

However, those networks also receive lots of government investment, which can mean higher taxes.

Mr Miles argues the UK’s franchising system, whereby the government owns the network through National Rail and hands out operator contracts to private companies, was the “envy of Europe” before Covid hit.

He said passenger numbers have increased as a result of the franchise system, but added that the contracts written during Covid were done so “in a rush” and are “too generous”.

Will Labour’s plan really cost nothing?

A Labour government could wait until the current franchise contracts run out and take them on itself, as the government did during Covid. There would not necessarily be any upfront costs to do this.

However, doing so would also mean taking on the railway operators debts, leases, and liabilities, such as their pension fund pots and the lease contracts for the trains.

If Labour wanted to invest in the railway network or buy back the trains, that would cost money.

Labour says its plans would save the taxpayer £2.2bn a year, but Louise Haigh said she had no guarantee that all this money would be reinvested in the railways.

Girl, 13, charged after Ammanford school stabbings

A 13-year-old girl has been charged with three counts of attempted murder after two teachers and a pupil were stabbed at a school in south-west Wales.

Dyfed-Powys Police said the teenager was arrested at the scene at Ysgol Dyffryn Aman, in Ammanford, Carmarthenshire.

Two teachers and a teenage pupil were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening stab wounds.

They have all since been discharged.

The school went into lockdown for about four hours at 11:20 BST on Wednesday after teachers Fiona Elias and Liz Hopkin were injured.

Supt Ross Evans said: “A 13-year-old girl was arrested at the scene, I can confirm, she has now been charged with three counts of attempted murder.”

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

You can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on Twitter to get the latest alerts.

Extremist Ahmed Alid guilty of Hartlepool knife murder

Ahmed Alid after his arrest (picture shown to jury and use approved by prosecutors throughout the trial) — Image caption, Moroccan asylum seeker Ahmed Alid denied murder and attempted murder

By Duncan Leatherdale

BBC News, North East and Cumbria

An Islamic extremist has been found guilty of murdering a passer-by in the street.

Moroccan asylum seeker Ahmed Alid, 45, stabbed 70-year-old Terence Carney multiple times in Hartlepool in October.

He later told police it was in protest against Israel and the Gaza conflict.

Alid was found guilty of murder and the attempted murder of his housemate, who he had attacked before the fatal stabbing of Mr Carney.

He will be sentenced on 17 May at Teesside Crown Court.

‘Truly horrific’

In a statement released after the verdict, Mr Carney’s family said: “For us, things will never be the same again.”

The family thanked a number of people, especially Mr Nouri and two other men who gave evidence, Ariyan Karimi and Mohammed Karimi.

“What they themselves endured that night was truly horrific, they believed they too were going to die.

“Despite this, they fully assisted the police with their enquiries and gave their evidence in court, which is testament to their characters.

“These three men were the voice of our loved one, when he was unable to speak out for himself. For this we will forever be grateful to them.”

A bedroom with blood stains at the Wharton Terrace Home — Image caption, The court heard Alid forced his way into Mr Nouri’s room and stabbed him multiple times

Alid, who spoke through an Arabic interpreter during the trial, had admitted stabbing the two men but denied he had intended to kill or cause really serious harm.

The court had heard he arrived in the UK illegally in 2020 and lived with three other asylum seekers at a house on Hartlepool’s Wharton Terrace.

Prosecutors said Alid followed an “extreme interpretation of Islam” and had issues with his housemate, Iranian-national Javed Nouri, 31, who had converted to Christianity.

A ‘considered’ attack

At about 05:00 BST on 15 October, Alid forced his way into Mr Nouri’s room and stabbed him multiple times with a kitchen knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar”, meaning “God is greatest”.

After Mr Nouri fought him off, Alid fled into the street and came across Mr Carney, who was out for a regular early morning walk on nearby Raby Road.

CCTV footage of Alid in the street holding a knife — Image caption, Alid fled into the street after stabbing his housemate

Jurors were shown CCTV of Alid confronting Mr Carney, chasing him a short distance and stabbing him six times, while the 70-year-old repeatedly shouted “no”.

Prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford KC said it was not a “frenzied attack” but “considered”, as Alid circled Mr Carney and stabbed him, with one wound fatally penetrating his heart.

Police responding to a 999 call about the Wharton Terrace attack found Mr Carney lying in the street, where he was pronounced dead.

Alid was arrested by armed police a short distance away.

Hartlepool murder-accused’s ‘raid’ ended by hand injury

In his 87-minute police interview, Alid, who believed he had killed Mr Nouri, said the “whole issue” was the “independence of Palestine” and “to have two dead victims [was] better than more”, adding Israel had “killed a lot of children” so he “killed two old people”.

He said Mr Carney was a “poor” and “innocent” man who had “committed no faults”, but he was killed because Britain had “created” Israel and “should make it leave”.

Alid also told officers he would have killed more people if he had not injured his hand while stabbing Mr Nouri, and would have slain “thousands” if he had a machine gun.

When questioned about his interview in court, Alid denied he had made such comments and blamed the Tunisian interpreter helping him in the interview.

‘Stuck with terror suspect’

At the end of his interview at Middlesbrough Police Station, Alid verbally abused the Tunisian interpreter and then lunged at the two female detectives questioning him.

The court heard a panic button was pressed multiple times but was not working, and Alid’s solicitor who was also in the room called 999 to say they were “stuck in a room with a terror suspect”.

Other officers, who were monitoring the interview from a different location, ran in and restrained Alid.

Jurors also found him guilty of two counts of assaulting emergency workers.

The kitchen knife used in the attacks — Image caption, Alid used a kitchen knife during the attacks

The trial heard Mr Nouri had complained to housing managers and the police about Alid, who had taken to carrying a knife and was making regular threats.

Two days before the attacks, a Cleveland Police officer said no crime had been committed so no further action was taken.

The court was told Alid was a patisserie chef who ran a coffee and pastry shop in Algeria but left in 2007, moving around Europe before arriving in the UK illegally in 2020 via a ferry from Amsterdam.

His asylum claim had still not been processed at the time of the attack.

Following the verdict, Cleveland Police’s Deputy Chief Constable Victoria Fuller said the stabbings “shook the local community to its core”.

She said: “Alid’s actions not only left a family devastated, but also caused significant fear and distress amongst residents in Hartlepool and beyond.”

April 23rd 2024

U.K National Priorities – The Neo Liberal Reality.

RNLI drops “opt-in” policy as donations fall
Third Force News
https://tfn.scot › news › rnli-drops-opt-in-policy-as-don…

A charity has reversed its opt-in marketing policy after a fall in donations. RNLI took the bold decision for an opt-in only approach,. The RNLI lifeboat rescue service has earned a reputation for being the illegal migrant’s rescue service. Average tax payers pick up the bill for accommodation, rising prices and in downward pressure on wages. I dare not make much mention of the other social consequences linked to drug trade, gang knife crime and other violence.

Teen girl arrested after two teachers and pupil are stabbed at Welsh school

Dyfed-Powys Police said a teenage girl had been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder following the stabbing at Amman Valley School.

dailyrecord

Police have confirmed that a teenage girl has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after two teachers and a pupil were stabbed at a Welsh school.

Emergency services attended Amman Valley School, also known as Ysgol Dyffryn Aman, in Carmarthenshire, south-west Wales, just after 11.20am on Wednesday.

Superintendent Ross Evans, of Dyfed-Powys Police, said: “Three people – two teachers and a teenage pupil – have been taken to hospital with stab wounds. The family members of all those injured have been informed.

Turd World Britain

Thames Water, which has 16 million customers, has been one of the worst offenders, with analysis last year revealing that it had pumped at least 72bn litres of sewage into the River Thames since 2020 – the equivalent of 29,000 Olympic swimming pools.

Margaret Thatcher and her greedy asset stripping governments sold of the water utilities, among so much else in state assets, with shares at rock bottom prices to the public. That public quickly sold them on the stockmarket for four times the price. I know because I was one of those people,

At the time of the Thtacher sell off, Thames Water had no debts. Now, with so much inefficiency, under investment and massive directors fees and dividends, Thames Water has £15.5 billion debt and is carried by the taxpayer. In Turd World Britain life can only get worse. Who do you think will pay for the latest £500,000,000 military aid which will go towards major projects like demolishing the symbolic Kurch Bridge ?

R J Cook

Rwanda: Why a migrant plane won’t be taking off anytime soon

***Don’t bl;ame France. Migrants use it as a staging post.*** The logic of the current situation is that anyone and unlimited numbers have the right to flood to Britain for a better life. Matters can only get worse. Brexit was a confidence trick, Britain is not home to freedom or democracy,so it is not worth voting. I removed myself from the electoral register years ago after 17 years as a local politician who was asked to stand for parliament in 1997. I am glad I didn’t bother. R J Cook.

Europe migrant crisis

Members of the staff board a plane reported by British media to be first to transport migrants to Rwanda, at MOD Boscombe Down in June 2022 — Image caption, Legal challenges meant the first Rwanda flight was cancelled shortly before take-off in June 2022

By Dominic Casciani

Home and legal correspondent

@BBCDomC

The government’s Rwanda bill – to send UK asylum seekers to be processed in Africa – has finally been approved by Parliament, after two years of legal battles and political wrangling. So how soon is a plane bound for Kigali likely to take off?

Let’s just say the engines on the planes will be staying silent for now.

While the bill has now passed through Parliament, the quickest a flight can take off is – technically speaking – 12 days after the King has given royal assent, which then formally turns the bill into law.

In practice, the date of the first flight is likely to be later than that – according to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 10 to 12 weeks, meaning late June or early July.

“That is later than we wanted,” Mr Sunak said on Monday, admitting the government would miss its own Spring deadline for a flight, “but we have always been clear that processing will take time.”

52,000 people

The only people who could be sent to Rwanda are asylum seekers – people who have sought the UK’s protection and who have arrived without authorisation from another safe country.

That essentially means people who have taken a dinghy to cross the English Channel. It’s worth stressing that this is before the government has decided whether they are genuine refugees or not – the plan is to have the legal claim for protection dealt with in Rwanda.

There are 52,000 people in this pool.

They are currently in Home Office-funded accommodation and are not allowed to get a job – having not yet had their case heard to be either removed from the UK, or get protection and a new life away from their homeland.

And the government is unlikely to put them all on a plane any time soon. It would take more than three years to remove them all, even if the Home Office hits a high of 15,000 forced deportations a year, which was last seen in 2012.

That number collapsed after departmental cuts and Brexit – although it has now reached 5,000 a year again.

The quickest someone could go from being picked up in the English Channel to Rwanda’s tropical heat is around two weeks.

Once officials select a migrant who fits the government’s criteria, they are given at least seven days’ notice that they might be put on a flight. After that, officials can tell them they will be on a plane five days later.

Migrants will appeal.

That 7+5 notice period (it’s a week longer if someone is not being held in an immigration removal centre) means a targeted individual can take advice on whether they want to challenge their transportation to Rwanda.

If officials dismiss their pleas, then a migrant can try to go to the courts.

Once there, a potential passenger would ask a judge to temporarily block their removal to Rwanda by seeking a court injunction. An injunction would give them time to prepare their case. If several migrants get an injunction at the same the time, it could lead to whole flights being grounded.

Legal challenges

In June 2022, the battle to put the brakes on the first flight went all the way to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The first flight to Rwanda was cancelled minutes before take-off following a ruling by the court.

The ECHR told ministers the plane could not leave until British judges had been given the opportunity to properly examine the arguments being made against the Rwanda plan. And the UK’s Supreme Court later ruled unanimously that the Rwanda scheme was unlawful.

Migrants will face a really tough challenge in the courts because the new Rwanda legislation tells judges to ignore a range of human rights safeguards baked into the UK’s complicated constitution.

So expect to see specialist expert refugee organisations also knocking on the doors of the courts and launching a wider challenge to the plan.

There is also speculation that unions involved in the immigration system and civil service could join the fight if they conclude an order to ignore human rights laws in preparing to send migrants is, itself, unlawful.

Finally, we might even see a case launched to look at the plan’s most controversial legal element. The new law orders the courts to treat Rwanda as a safe country – even though the Supreme Court said it is not presently.

Expect legal equivalent of fireworks there because that raises the question of government tying the hands of the independent judiciary.

And then the battle could quickly go to Europe. The law is designed very clearly to exclude the British courts from stopping flights in all but the most exceptional circumstances.

If the UK’s top judges don’t intervene to temporarily stop flights, then migrants will go to the ECHR.

They will want to argue that the law has breached international safeguards that prevent people from being harmed. Strasbourg will only intervene if there is a risk to a migrant of irreparable harm.

If the ECHR orders the flight to stay on the runway, ministers have created a new power to ignore that injunction.

The government says it can ignore the ECHR’s “interim measures” – but most lawyers disagree and say that would be a breach of international law.

What’s the practical effect though?

Last year, France ignored an ECHR provisional order not to deport a man to Uzbekistan. The result was that the highest court in Paris ordered the government to bring the man back again – much to the embarrassment of ministers and officials.

And there could be another sting in the tail.

If the first flight takes off without any court intervention, it does not stop there.

In the worst case scenario for ministers, judges could later rule that a deported migrant had a genuine case – and order the government to return them to the UK.

This has happened before, albeit rarely – and is unlikely to happen before a general election.

April 22nd 2024

‘Social inequalities’ pushing disproportionate number of children into care in north of England, new report finds

In the light of the findings, a parliamentary group has made a number of recommendations, including targeting additional investment in the North to reduce child poverty.

Shingi Mararike

North of England correspondent @ShingiMararike

Wednesday 17 April 2024 00:45, UK

Image: One in every 52 children in Blackpool is in care. File pic: PA

Why you can trust Sky News

One in every 52 children in Blackpool is in care compared with one in 140 across England, according to new analysis, which researchers say exposes “deeply rooted social inequalities”.

The report also found the north of England accounts for just over a quarter (28%) of the child population, but more than a third (36%) of the children in care, the analysis by the Child of the North All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) said.

Professor David Taylor-Robinson, the co-author of the report, said the findings reflect a “doom loop”, with poverty pushing children into the care system at an additional cost to local and national government.

He said: “Cuts to prevention services, things like Sure Start, family support, investment in youth services have been cut, particularly in the areas where they’re needed most.

“In those places poverty has gone up, that’s increased the number of children in the care system and it’s putting incredible pressure on health and care systems.”

The report was researched and funded by Health Equity North – an organisation focused on finding solutions to public health problems and health inequalities across the North of England. It used existing data including official statistics and academic studies.

The analysis also suggested the higher rates of children entering care are estimated to have cost the North at least £25bn more in the past four years.

In the light of the report’s findings, APPG members and the report authors have made a number of recommendations, including policies to reduce child poverty such as scrapping the two-child limit and benefit cap, as well as more investment in prevention strategies such as targeting additional investment in the North.

‘A part of you ripped away’

One person who has benefited from this type of grassroots support, is Kirsty, a mother from Newcastle.

She became a mum at the age of 17. Her daughter was taken into care twice, in moments she described as “tragic”.

“I’ve been through a lot in my life, but losing a child is the most traumatic, unexplainable feeling that I could ever imagine,” she said.

“It’s like having a part of you ripped away, then not understanding and not feeling good enough.”

Kirsty previously struggled with a drug addiction and had been a victim of domestic abuse.

She was also previously homeless before eventually joining a narcotics anonymous group, and later being supported by Reform, an organisation in the area aimed at improving the outcomes of mothers at risk of child removal.

Their work involves creating a “sisterhood” in the form of a safe space aimed at allowing women to share their experiences and finding them the right support for issues like addiction, domestic abuse and homelessness.

Reform’s chief executive Amy Van Zyl feels the social care system needs to be better equipped and better funded to help people with complex needs.

She said: “Women who come to our service don’t have friends and loved ones. What they gain when they come into our service is friends and loved ones, we can then signpost them to services.”

Kirsty, who is speaking about her experiences at an event in Parliament on Wednesday, feels she could have benefited from early intervention.

She said: “If there was anything like Reform back then or anywhere else it would have made a massive difference.

“Because I felt like I was the only person, I felt like I not only failed me but I failed my family and I brought shame on everyone because I wasn’t able to look after my child and that wasn’t the case.

“All of the reports that were done by social services said that I was a good mum, and that I was really good with my daughter. It was just my lifestyle. I didn’t have accommodation and my drug use and all that stuff could have been helped. It’s curable.”

In response to the report, a Department for Education spokesperson said: “Early intervention is at the core of our ambitious children’s social care reforms – including a £45m investment in pilot areas across the UK to help us shape a future system where we provide families with the right support at the right time, delivered by the right people.

“For those leaving care, we are investing £250m over three years to help them succeed – providing housing, access to education, employment, and training.”

April 21st 2024

Minister ‘deeply concerned’ by Met protest row

A screengrab from the video — Image caption, Gideon Falter was stopped by police on Saturday

Eve Watson & PA Media

BBC News

20 April 2024

The policing minister has said he is “deeply concerned” after a Met Police officer described an antisemitism campaigner as “openly Jewish” during a pro-Palestine march.

Gideon Falter, chief executive of Campaign Against Antisemitism, was wearing a kippah skull-cap when he was stopped in the Aldwych area of London and threatened with arrest on 13 April.

Mr Falter was told by police his presence was causing a “breach of peace”. The Met has since apologised but Mr Falter called for the force’s commissioner Sir Mark Rowley to resign or be sacked.

Policing Minister Chris Philp said he would meet Sir Mark to discuss his concerns.

He said: “No-one should be told their religion is provocative, nor an innocent person threatened with arrest solely because of someone else’s anticipated unreasonable reaction.”

Scotland Yard has apologised twice for the officer’s phrase.

An initial apology from the Met on Friday was withdrawn after it was criticised as victim-blaming and the Met issued a second statement saying that “being Jewish is not a provocation” and apologised again.

It said: “Jewish Londoners must be able to feel safe in this city.”

In a video clip shot at the march, the police officer said: “You are quite openly Jewish, this is a pro-Palestinian march.

“I’m not accusing you of anything but I’m worried about the reaction to your presence.”

Protesters in London — Image caption, Crowds protested in London on Saturday

In a statement issued on Saturday, Mr Falter said what happened at the march was a “disgrace” but the Met’s response in the aftermath was a “stain” on the force’s reputation.

He said Sir Mark should resign or be sacked and he claimed “racists, extremists and terrorist-sympathisers” had been “emboldened” by the Met’s “failure to curtail the marches”.

Mr Falter said there had been a “surge” in anti-Semitic crime and he accused the Met of “inertia”.

‘Everybody must feel safe’

Earlier on Saturday, a Home Office spokesperson said the government recognised “the complexities of policing fast-moving public protests” but added being Jewish or of any other religion should not be seen as “provocative”.

The spokesperson added: “Anyone of any religion should be free to go about their lives and feel safe doing so.”

It is understood that Home Secretary James Cleverly has written to both the Met and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan about what happened.

A spokesperson for Mr Khan said: “Everybody must feel safe going about in London wherever they please.

“The way the original incident was dealt with by the Met was concerning and the original response put out by them was insensitive and wrong.

“The Met have an extremely difficult job – particularly so when it comes to operational decisions taken while policing marches – but in the end the Met must have the confidence of the communities they serve and it is right that they have apologised for the way the incident was handled and their original public response.”

Tens of thousands of pro-Palestine protesters had gathered in London to call for a ceasefire and to urge the UK government to stop all arms sales to Israel.

Mr Falter said he had been walking in the capital after attending synagogue and was not there to counter-protest.

In the clip, another officer said to him: “There’s a unit of people here now.

“You will be escorted out of this area so you can go about your business, go where you want freely, or if you choose to remain here because you are causing a breach of peace with all these other people, you will be arrested.”

Comment Thatt’s multi cultural Britain. In my view, the police officer may have been clumsy in his use of language, but was aware of a public safety issue for Mr Falter and his friends. Wearing a Yom Kippur cap made this man visible and a potential target in these dangerous times.

We certainly need serious police reforn, but that won’t come from petty politically correct sensitivities victiminsing and individual constable. If Mr Falter had been seriously assaulted or even murdered, the police officer would have been blamed. Pro Palestinian marches are dangerously mobile and best avoided unless you are a fanatic and on side. Marchers must be in step

R J Cook

April 20th 2024

24 serving Thames Valley police in sexual misconduct cases

By Miranda Norris Senior reporte

Crime

Oxfordshire

By Miranda Norris Senior reporter

4 Comments

The force has also dealt with seven accusations of rape – three in 2021, two in 2022 and two in 2023.

Thames Valley Police has published a report into complaints made against officers and staff of sexual misconduct between February 1, 2020 to the end of December 2023.

40 officers, former officers, and staff have been disciplined for sexual misconduct over the period with 24 of those being serving officers.

Six police staff and 10 former officers were also disciplined.

The sanctions that have been imposed range from written warnings to being dismissed.

25 officers or staff have been sacked, in four cases a final written warning was issued, in 12 cases a written warning was given and in 19 cases the sanction was reflective practice.

There have been 106 cases of sexual misconduct opened involving 178 officers and staff since February 2020, the report showed.

154 of the staff concerned were men and 18 were women. In six cases, the gender was unknown.

Of the 214 allegations made over the three-year and 11-month period, 40 (19 per cent) are still being investigated.

The report’s author Dee Hackling, of PSD Analysts, said: “Whilst the above summary shows as a percentage of police officers and staff, complaints and conduct investigations of sexual misconduct are small, they have increased significantly in previous years, with many of these allegations still being investigated.

“This shows that confidence is starting to increase in the reporting of these allegations.

“It also shows that Thames Valley Police will take decisive action when sexual misconduct allegations are made.”

The report also stated that between February 2020 and March 2024, the number of full-time equivalent officers has risen from 4,527 to 5,185, a rise of 14 per cent.

In the same period, the number of police staff has risen from 3,348 full time equivalent staff to 3,760, a rise of 12 per cent.

The report was published on the TVP website after the force’s Professional Standards Department saw an increase in the number of Freedom of Information requests submitted by both the public and Thames Valley Police’s own officers and staff asking for information about sexual misconduct cases against serving police officers.

The force said the report “is designed to be transparent with the reporting and findings of allegations of sexual misconduct to improve confidence in reporting these matters”.

April 19th 2024

Autistic first-time mother, 22, killed herself hours after learning her six-month-old baby might be put up for adoption, inquest hears

Fern Foster died on July 8, 2020, after learning that her baby might be adopted
The inquest concluded that local authority failings contributed to her death
For confidential support, call Samaritans on 116 123, visit samaritans.org or visit https://www.thecalmzone.net/get-support

By Lettice Bromovsky

Published: 10:39, 19 April 2024 | Updated: 13:34, 19 April 2024

An autistic mother took her own life hours after being told her six-month-old baby might be put up for adoption, an inquest has found.

Fern Foster, 22, died on July 8, 2020, after an email sent to her partner by his solicitor outlined the news that their child might be adopted.

Fern’s baby had gone into foster care almost a month after she was born, in January 2020, after the support Fern’s family believe she was entitled to was not put into place.

The inquest which concluded yesterday found that a lack of an independent advocate on a regular, consistent and continuous basis contributed to Fern’s decision to take her own life.

Fern Foster, 22, died on July 8, 2020, after an email sent to her partner by his solicitor outlined the news that their child might be adopted

Senior Coroner for Buckinghamshire Crispin Butler concluded that the lack of an independent advocate and the way in which news of the adoption of Fern’s child was communicated to her contributed more than minimally to her decision to end her own life

The court heard that Fern, from Monks Risborough, Bucks, was diagnosed with autism at 15 and struggled to get the support she needed, often using self-harm as a way of communicating her distress.

Fern found out she was pregnant on 25 July 2019 and shortly after, Buckinghamshire Children’s Services became involved.

The court heard that Fern, who aspired to become an English teacher, was delighted when she found out she was pregnant, and the news changed her outlook on life.

While she was pregnant, and up to the point of her child being taken from her, she did not engage in any self-harming or other behaviour that would put her or her baby at risk.

It heard how Fern had described the process that ultimately led to her child being taken out of her care as a ‘runaway train’.

Senior Coroner for Buckinghamshire Crispin Butler gave a narrative conclusion, recording the cause of death as suicide.

He added that the lack of an independent advocate and the way in which news indicating the adoption of Fern’s child was communicated to her was contributing more than minimally to her decision to end her own life.

Fern found out she was pregnant on 25 July 2019 and shortly after, Buckinghamshire Children’s Services became involved

The court heard how Fern needed help at a much earlier stage from an independent advocate who could help her understand and engage with professionals.

This was the single largest reasonable adjustment that could have been made to support Fern’s needs.

Fern had previously indicated intentions of taking her own life were her child adopted, and the court heard that the manner in which plans indicating adoption were communicated to her was a key trigger for Fern’s actions.

No communication plan had been put in place and Fern became aware of the news via an email sent to her partner by his solicitor.

Fern’s family describe her as bright, kind, caring and conscientious and someone who left a lasting impression with everyone she met.

Fern’s sister Rowan said: ‘We are pleased that the lack of advocacy provided in Fern’s care, and the inappropriate delivery of the proposed care plan for adoption that the local authority had submitted, have been recognised as the causes of Fern’s death.

‘Mothers who face their children being removed should be supported, especially autistic mothers, as autistic women have a 13 times higher risk of death by suicide.

‘It is tragic that there was never a clear plan to support Fern to be a mother, nor to protect her safety when she was told that would not be possible.

‘These essential requirements were repeatedly ignored, inevitably pushing Fern to breaking point. This was no way to treat a vulnerable, disabled, first time mum.’

‘We believe that the lack of understanding and acceptance of autism in women and girls significantly contributed to the poor care that Fern received.

‘She was diagnosed late, repeatedly labelled with a personality disorder that she did not have, and the stigma around this led to her being harmed.

‘Fern was open about her suicidality, yet she was not taken seriously.

‘The misdiagnosis of personality disorders must end, as must the punitive and dangerous culture of care which comes alongside them.

‘Finally, we feel that the right of autistic parents to access the support they deserve is not adequately protected in policy or law. It is imperative that this changes and that autistic parents are protected in future.’

Caleb Bawdon, a Leigh Day solicitor who represented the family said: ‘Fern’s family welcome the coroner’s conclusion which acknowledges that she was badly let down before her death.

‘It is approaching four years since Fern’s death but her family have been clear from the very start about the difference that access to independent advocacy would have made to the outcome.

‘It is a testament to the strength and courage of her family during this time that the coroner has now agreed with them, and they are grateful for the care and consideration he took in conducting his investigation.’

My daughter’s school has turned into a prison… a child …The Sunhttps://www.thesun.co.uk › Fabulous › Parenting

1 day ago — A MUM has insisted her daughter’s school has turned into a prison, after a child was placed into isolation for a symbol on their socks.

April 18th 2024

Peter Murrell charged with embezzlement in SNP finance probe

Peter Murrell arriving back at his home near Glasgow after he was charged with embezzlement

By Katy Scott

BBC Scotland News

The husband of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been charged in connection with the embezzlement of funds from the Scottish National Party.

Peter Murrell, 59, was taken into custody at 09:13 on Thursday and was questioned by Police Scotland detectives.

He was previously arrested as a suspect on 5 April 2023 before being released without charge.

BBC Scotland understands Mr Murrell has resigned his SNP membership.

He was charged at 18:35 after further questioning by officers investigating the funding and finances of the party as part of Operation Branchform.

Mr Murrell has since been released from police custody at Falkirk Police Station and returned to his home near Glasgow shortly after 20:00

He resigned as the SNP’s chief executive in March of last year after 22 years in the job.

An SNP spokesperson said: “While this development will come as a shock, the police investigation remains ongoing and it would, therefore, be inappropriate to make any comment.”

nicola sturgeon and peter murrell — Image caption, Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell

Police Scotland launched a formal investigation into the SNP’s finances in July 2021 after receiving complaints about how donations were used.

Questions had been raised about more than £660,000 in donations given to the party for use in a fresh independence referendum campaign.

When Mr Murrell was arrested last year, police searched the house he shares with Ms Sturgeon near Glasgow and the SNP headquarters in Edinburgh. The couple married in 2010.

The house was sealed off with blue and white tape, while a tent was erected on the driveway. Items were brought from the house to the tent, where the BBC understands a vehicle was parked.

Police activity outside Mr Murrell's home — Image caption, Police erected a tent in front of the house Mr Murrell shares with Ms Sturgeon when he was arrested last year

Police also seized a camper van from outside the Dunfermline home of Mr Murrell’s mother.

The Niesmann and Bischoff vehicle, which can retail for more than £100,000, was seized by police the same morning that Mr Murrell became the first senior party figure to be arrested in the probe.

On 18 April 2023, SNP treasurer and MSP Colin Beattie was arrested and interviewed by police before being released pending further investigation. He later resigned as treasurer.

Ms Sturgeon was arrested on 11 June when she voluntarily arranged with Police Scotland to be questioned as part of the investigation, a spokesperson said at the time.

She was released without charge seven hours later pending further inquiries.

Ms Sturgeon had unexpectedly announced she was resigning as SNP leader and first minister four months in February 2023.

A Police Scotland spokesperson said: “As this investigation is ongoing we are unable to comment further.

“The matter is active for the purposes of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 and the public are therefore advised to exercise caution if discussing it on social media.”

Whose Been Cook – ing the Books ?

***Arrogant Post Office fat cat pleaded ignorance in the great post office scandal. The well paid MD blamed overworked sub post masters for ‘having their hands in the till.’***

Royal Mail workers expose “toxic workplace environment” and destruction of mail service for corporate profit

“It is a toxic working environment and has unfortunately been this way for some time now. It seriously worries myself and my colleagues as to where we are heading.”

Read more

April 15th 2024

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Our immigration and asylum system is a shambles, and the fallout affects us all

In most cases, real-life stories hit home harder in a way that numbers, important though they are, don’t. Take the case of Abdul Ezedi, who brutally attacked a woman and her kids in Clapham. The whole affair, from the moment it happened to confirmation that the body found in the Thames was that of Ezedi, is a glaring example of what’s wrong with our asylum system.

This Afghan had already been denied asylum twice and had a record for sex crimes. Yet, instead of being deported, he got a third shot at asylum. His new claim? He converted to Christianity and faced danger should he be returned to his home country.. As they used to say in the Eastenders of old, “yer ‘avin a larf.“ We only know the full story because there was a public outcry and demand for transparency, which resulted in the tribunal releasing details (through gritted teeth).

But this isn’t just about Ezedi. It’s about the increasing tendency of our courts’ not to make pertinent facts public. The increasing incidence of such cases, especially ones resulting from immigration offences, is extremely worrying. Why are immigration courts overturning so many Home Office decisions to refuse asylum?

We learned only this week following some excellent work by our friends at “The Centre for Immigration Control” that the success rate of appeals has shot up from 29% in 2010 to a staggering 51% in 2023. The lawyers say the immigration judges (they were simply known as adjudicators when the monster that is now the immigration and asylum appeals system was first introduced in the early 1070s) are just following the law. We would argue it is not a matter of following the law but more about interpretation of the law. For us, it is inconceivable that experienced Home Office officials, who are also following rules and guidance based on the law, including case law, are getting it wrong in 51% of decisions. Perhaps it is time that immigration judges held up a mirror and asked themselves the question, am I getting this wrong?

If the public are to trust the system they need to understand why so many asylum decisions are overturned. In Ezedi’s case, despite his lies, a judge bought his claim to have converted to Christianity after a Church of England priest vouched for him. He was allowed to stay on human rights grounds. Following his drowning in the Thames he was buried with Muslim rites.

Those who come here illegally, illegal immigrants by any other name, are committing a crime for which they should be tried and if convicted automatically deported. If only we had as much faith in this or any other UK government to put in place the right laws and the backbone to stand up for their own legislation and rules.

Channel migrant crisis
Rumour has it that internal Home Office assessments are pointing to a figure in excess of last year’s 29,500 ‘small-boaters’. In fact, the flow is greater to this point in the year than it was in 2022 when 45,755 came by year’s end? We don’t want to worry the folk in Marsham Street but at the current rate we are heading for another all-time record by the end of 2024, perhaps to well over 50,000 people coming in small boats alone.

Stopping the boats was one of Rishi Sunak’s key pledges, and it’s becoming increasingly clear why it matters. The impact of high migration levels and the use of numerous hotels to accommodate asylum seekers is felt nationwide. Despite bold plans to process asylum applications in Rwanda, not a single flight has departed from the UK.

The Safety of Rwanda Bill returns to the Lords next week. We believe it will eventually get onto the statute book and some flights may even take off but to what avail? The small number who might go to Rwanda before the election won’t discourage the traffickers from plying their evil trade, not least when they believe Labour are likely to form the next government and quickly scrap the scheme once in office.

Labour politicians have, of course, seized on the latest Channel migrant surge, declaring Rishi Sunak’s “Stop the Boats” policy a failure. No one can argue against this.

Nevertheless, the government is pushing back, arguing that it’s still early in the year. Perhaps he thinks Mr. Macron is going to do the business and earn some of the hundreds of million we have given him over the years and stop the boats from setting off. And pigs might fly. However, regardless of how they spin it, there’s no denying the shocking reversal in numbers.

As for Labour stopping the boats, as we have said time and again, unless they come up with fresh proposals, the ones they’ve announced to date, far from stopping the boats, will propel the numbers upwards.

Our courts’ contortions to put the interests of immigration offenders before the interests of the British public were in evidence in another case this week. A convicted Afghan sex offender, known only as DH, was granted refugee status by an immigration tribunal judge. Why? Because his lawyers argued that his mental illness made him likely to offend again, putting him at risk of “ill treatment” if he were sent back to Afghanistan.

DH’s crimes, which included outraging public decency and exposure, landed him in a London court, where he faced the possibility of deportation as a public threat. However, his lawyers appealed on the grounds of his deteriorating mental health, arguing that it would lead to risky behaviour (including masturbating in public) if he returned to Afghanistan. Doing so in his native land, could lead to a full-blown riot. So, instead of kicking him out, the court decided that he remain here, free to roam and potentially offend again.

Not that DH’s case is unique. As we have already mentioned, more than half of asylum appeals are successful, and many rejected applicants don’t leave but stay on illegally. It’s a mockery of justice. Home Office minister Laura Farris might say she’s looking into it, but when are we going to have effective action, rather then weak, submissive words?

We can’t keep letting criminals game the system while innocent people pay the price. It’s time for immigration policies that put the British public first.

Migration Watch relies entirely on the generosity of our supporters who fund our work. If you would like to help us with our efforts, please click here to donate.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK

Yolande Makolo, The Telegraph – Rwanda: Our new and better nation is a safe country for everyone.

“In the febrile debate over the UK’s Safety of Rwanda Bill there have been many baseless accusations thrown around about Rwanda, mostly by people who have never set foot in our country.

The critics on the Left conveniently ignore the progress we’ve made in advancing the rights of women, just as they gloss over the huge strides we’ve made in advancing the right to life (life expectancy has increased from 39 to 69 over the past 30 years).

Rwanda is by no means perfect. We are worthy of legitimate criticism, as every nation is, because we are a work in progress. But the fact that we’ve come such a long way in only 30 years, especially when it comes to equality, we think should be at the very least acknowledged by those passing judgment on our country.”

MIGRATION WATCH IN THE MEDIA

In a recent interview with Patrick Christys on GB News, Dr. Mike Jones, Executive Director of Migration Watch, delved into the ongoing illegal migration crisis and the Home Office’s struggles to remove foreign offenders and other illegal entrants. According to Mike, the root of the problem lies in our outdated legal system, which simply isn’t equipped to deal with the challenges of modern migration:

April 14th 2024

Turd World Britain

‘End Private Prosecutions’ Amid Post Office Scandal – YouTubeYouTube · TalkTV6.4K+ views · 3 months ago

In the wake of the Post Office scandal, former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith calls for an end to private prosecutions.

Post Office Scandal: Starmer Refuses To “Carry The Can” …Labour Heartlandshttps://labourheartlands.com › Labour Party

12 Jan 2024 — Although most Post Office prosecutions were private, the CPS tried 11 cases during Starmer’s tenure from 2008-2013. These occurred while he was …

So apparently in UK law, the post office carry out their own …Hacker Newshttps://news.ycombinator.com › item

It’s likely they won’t step in if the organisation in question has the resources to handle prosecutions at the required scale. The CPS did prosecute some cases …

Post Office scandal could lead to rules change on private …

Reddit · r/unitedkingdom 8 comments · 3 months ago

The CPS were unable to put together a good enough case to convict him because they lacked the time, expertise, and funding. Lots of important …

I’ll crowdfund legal fight against Post Office chiefs if I have toThe Timeshttps://www.thetimes.co.uk › article › alan-bates-intervi

Alan Bates considers private prosecutions of Post Office …BBChttps://www.bbc.co.uk › news

1 day ago — Former sub-postmaster Alan Bates says he will consider raising funds for private prosecutions of Post Office bosses over the Horizon IT scandal.

Missing:~~CPS~~ ‎| Show results with: CPS

April 12th 2024

Turd World Britain

Then Came The Asset Stripping – Post Mortem by R J Cook.

Post Office MD Alan Cook, ‘the man who didn’t know anything’ was anxious to apologise for Post Office Crimes, but had said that because of lockdown “The subbies ( sub post masters ) had their hands in the till.” What an appalling excuse for a man. Those who lie and conspire to put innocent people in jail, even if it is just to cover their own lies and incompetence, deserve no mercy and should face jail themselves, espcecially senior police officers in this institutionally corrupt country which is a perfect friend and partner for corrupt Ukraine.
***R J Cook.***

I have spent several hours listening to the sickening post office inquiry today. It is ongoing. Knowing how the U. K’s self congratulating democracy works, I should not be surprised that former Post Office Managing Director ( MD ) Alan Cook was accused in court of being an out and out liar. That was my impression. The inquiry saw a ream of e mails from his reign as MD 2007-10. From my own considerable experience of working for and being on the receiving end of the British Establishment. Here, a certain type of person is recruited and promoted by like minded persons who in turn had been recruited and promoted by the same. Their is a culture of complacency, greed and corruption involving seriously overpaid officialdom.

One hundred and sixty sub postmasters were maliciously prosecuted for stealing from the Post Office. Janet Skinner had to children when she was jailed for nine months. She was one of over 900 innocent sub postmasters maliciously prosecuted because of high level fat car cover ups.

This morning Alan Cook, who was managing director of the Post Office from 2006 to 2010, told the Horizon inquiry he had not heard anything “sufficiently categoric” to suggest that the Post Office was the sole party involved in choosing to prosecute sub-postmasters until 2009.

This whole establishment scandal should be an epithet for the Thatcherite seismic cultural change that wrecked the British social fabric, opening the way for a culture of brazen greed, hypocricy and obsession with the distraction of promoting a diversely stupid multi culture of puppets and string pullers who don’t care how the play ends as long as they are on top. Britain is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, warmongering desperate for all the riches that World Three can offer. Once again MI6 and the BBC are doing their best to destroy Donald Trump. They want Biden to do their bidding. Britain’s elite have the best brainwashing and propaganda specialists in the world. They need to conquer Russia to reduce it to the same idiot level they thought they had achieved with Yeltsin.

British idiocy in the private postal system was perfectly displayed during my five years working for City Link. Cowboy outfits like this one, where feral staff relieved their boredom by playing football with the parcels, was the benchmark Royal Mail had to aim for. City Link was following all competition by pushing costs south so that profits went north. Royal Mail and the Post Office were still one company when the Postmaster Horizon Scandal surfaced. The new computer system was insecure and part of the cost cutting.

Management did not want to know. They were doing well, and as we saw with Alan Cook today, they were only interested in themselves and finding scapegoats when Gwyneth Hughes documentary hit the Channel 4 small screen. I know from bitter experience fighting the U.K Police, that it takes the media to expose these overpaid patronising arrogant lying fat cats before anything gets done. But these types will fight to the death and lie through their teeth to protect their status and life style.

I worked the back and night shifts in charge of heavy freight, which gave me a double hernia, confining me to the office for 8 months. Here I had a key role in customer care which seemed non existent. I could have stayed there in the office but it was boring, full of gossiping back stabbing imbeciles reminding me of my years in the tax office, So I seized the chance to drive the delivery vans and trucks for bulk deliveries,where I enjoyed meeting and talking to the customers. I especially enjoyed delivering around the Cotswolds. Having found and read company documents in my many idle office moments, I knew City Link were losing 10 pence on every parcel delivered. Experiencing the delights of delivering and making collections around the Cotswolds, I realised why. In this way my knowledge of the industry was significantly expanded and deepened. We had a chain smoking night shift manager fresh from Royal Mail Parcel Force. He told us the government pumped in a fortune of tax payer’s money for state of the art equipment. Then they put it on the market for international private investors. Then came the asset stripping. That is Turd World Britain.

R J Cook

Post Office scandal: Bosses earned millions despite Horizon scandal

Composite image of Nick Read and Paula Vennells

By Ben King

Business reporter, BBC News

How much did the people running the Post Office get paid while the flawed Horizon system was in place?

By looking through the company accounts for the Post Office and Royal Mail, the BBC has come up with a figure – £19.4m over 24 years.

Before 2012, Royal Mail and the Post Office were part of the same organisation – and its three successive chief executives, John Roberts, Adam Crozier and Dame Moya Greene, made a total of £12.8m. All three of them are due to appear at Horizon Inquiry which resumes on 9 April.

From 2012 onwards, the chief executives of the separated Post Office, Paula Vennells then Nick Read, have made a total of £6.5m.

That’s an average of less than £1m a year – compared to the £3.91m the average boss of Britain’s 100 biggest listed companies earned in 2022.

It’s a huge sum compared to the salary of average workers, or for sub-postmasters still waiting for compensation.

The Post Office argues that it is a very large, complex business which has to compete with other organisations for talent, and uses external consultants to advise on executive pay. So who are the Post Office bosses and what did each of them earn?

Nick Read, Post Office chief executive 2019 to present

Mr Read, a former captain of Dragoons who had been chief executive of Nisa Retail, joined in September 2019, a few months after 550 sub-postmasters won a dramatic High Court victory.

He agreed a much higher base salary than his predecessor, Ms Vennells, earning £415,000 a year compared to her £255,000.

However, he has less scope to earn bonuses – and those bonuses have fallen around £500,000 below the maximum he could have made because of the pandemic, the Horizon Inquiry, and the financial performance of the business.

As a result has ended up earning slightly less on average than Ms Vennells.

He returned £54,000 which was incorrectly paid for helping the Inquiry to finish – it’s still ongoing.

For 2022/23 he made a bonus of £137,000 out of the maximum £383,210 he might have hoped to earn.

In February, it emerged the Post Office had asked government for permission to double his pay.

Paula Vennells, Post Office chief executive 2010-2019

Ms Vennells took over as Post Office managing director in 2010, and stayed in the top job until April 2019. This period saw the prosecution of more than 100 sub-postmasters, a failed mediation scheme, and the sub-postmasters’ court case culminating in a victory in the High Court.

A part-time Church of England vicar, she became one of the most recognisable faces of the scandal, featuring prominently in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs. the Post Office.

Ms Vennells earned £5.1m during her time at the helm of the Post Office, peaking at £718,300 in 2018. That year her base salary was £253,800 and she earned £390,800 in bonuses (plus pensions and other benefits).

Through her lawyers, Ms Vennells issued the following statement: “I remain truly sorry for the suffering caused to sub-postmasters, their families and all those whose lives were torn apart by being… wrongly prosecuted. I continue to fully support and focus on co-operating with the Inquiry.”

Adam Crozier, Royal Mail chief executive 2003-2010

Mr Crozier became the Royal Mail’s chief executive in 2003, following roles as boss of the Football Association and the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi.

He regularly drew headlines for his high salary – he earned as much as £3m in pay and bonuses in 2007-08, raising the ire of unions protesting about the closure of thousands of Post Offices.

He made a total of £9.7m in pay and bonuses in his time at Royal Mail, as well as a pension valued at £1.1m in 2008. From 2003 to 2009 the Post Office secured more than 400 convictions in England and Wales using Horizon data, according to evidence released to the Inquiry.

At the time the Post Office was part of Royal Mail, but had a separate board which Mr Crozier didn’t sit on. He said in a statement: “While I did not have any involvement in the Horizon issue during my time at Royal Mail, I feel deeply sorry for those whose lives were ruined by what happened.”

He left unexpectedly in 2010 to become chief executive of ITV.

Moya Greene, David Smith, Alan Cook, David Mills

Canadian Dame Moya took over in July 2010, and earned a total of £1.88m before the Royal Mail formally split with the Post Office.

Mr Smith briefly filled in as managing director of the Post Office before Ms Vennells, from April to October 2010, before moving to chief customer officer of Royal Mail. He was the one who greeted the conviction of Seema Misra, the Postmistress from Surrey who was wrongly jailed while pregnant, with the words “brilliant news,” according to evidence submitted at the Horizon Inquiry. He was paid £636,000 in 2010-11.

Mr Cook was Post Office managing director from 2006 to 2010. He earned a total of £3m in that time, including £1.2m in his final year. He was quoted by his local newspaper, the Milton Keynes Citizen saying he would “never forgive himself” for not knowing that hundreds of people were being prosecuted while he was in charge. He said he didn’t know there were problems with Horizon until shortly before he left.

In 2010, a long-term bonus scheme paid out to a number of Royal Mail bosses, including Mr Cook. That year the Post Office convicted 58 people in England and Wales.

Mr Mills, a former HSBC banker who founded the pioneering telephone bank First Direct, joined as Post Office chief executive in 2002.

He earned a total of £1.8m in pay and bonuses over four years, peaking at £816,000 in the year he left, 2006, which included £486,000 compensation for loss of office.

John Roberts, Post Office/Consignia/Royal Mail chief executive, 1995-2002

Former Royal Mail and Consignia chief executive John Roberts — Image caption, John Roberts

Mr Roberts, who spent his whole career at the Post Office, was chief executive for six years, a period he described as a “rollercoaster ride”.

His time in office saw the disastrous launch of Horizon and the short-lived rebrand to “Consignia”.

From 1999 to his retirement in 2002 he earned £1.2m. In his last year he earned £225,852 including benefits (with a final-salary pension on top). He and the finance director Jerry Cope both agreed to waive their salary increases for 2001-2, citing the “perilous state” of the business. The next year he earned £503,000 which included £119,000 pay in lieu of notice.

John Roberts declined to comment. Alan Cook, Dame Moya Greene, and David Smith did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment.

Ex-Royal Mail CEO casts doubt on Post Office boss’s ‘I did not know’ defence

12 April 2024 • 5:00pm

Post Office inquiry live: Ex-boss blamed ‘subbies with their hand in the till’ for Horizon shortfalls

Former Post Office boss did not realise he was head of prosecuting authority

Paula Vennells ‘likely’ signed off on £300000 trial bill over £25000 shortfall

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CHlB2f9kmK4%3Fmodestbranding%3D1%26embed_config%3D%257B%2522adsConfig%2522%253A%257B%2522disableAds%2522%253Atrue%257D%252C%2522enableIma%2522%253Atrue%257D%26enablejsapi%3D1%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%26widgetid%3D1

Key moments

Chosen by us to get you up to speed at a glance 3:02pm ‘Surprising’ that Cook did not know the Post Office was prosecuting staff 2:33pm I did not know Post Office prosecuted its own sub-postmasters, claims Crozier 12:27pm Cook apologises directly to wrongly imprisoned sub-postmistress 11:49am Cook denies asking for ‘robust defence of Horizon’ instead of independent review 10:17am I didn’t realise Post Office prosecuted its own staff, ex-boss claims

The Royal Mail’s former chief executive has cast doubt on a ex-Post Office’s boss’s claim that he did not know the organisation brought prosecutions against its own staff.

This morning Alan Cook, who was managing director of the Post Office from 2006 to 2010, told the Horizon inquiry he had not heard anything “sufficiently categoric” to suggest that the Post Office was the sole party involved in choosing to prosecute sub-postmasters until 2009.

Yet Mr Crozier, who was chief executive of Royal Mail Group from 2003 to 2010, told the inquiry he would find this “surprising”.

Jason Beer KC, the lead counsel to the inquiry, asked: “How do you feel about Mr Cook’s claim that in his period of office he did not even know that the Post Office had a prosecutorial function until 2009?

“I would find that surprising,” Mr Crozier said.

Mr Beer continued: “At the time did he strike you as a man who was so out of touch with the business that he was running, that he wouldn’t know one of its functions was to prosecute its own staff, resulting in many of them being sent to prison?”

The Great Post Office Robbery

***A must read for those interested in justice U.K style.***

Oppose Royal Mail’s assault on the USO! Defeat CWU’s collusion!

Mother of two and former sub postmistress Janet Skinner was sacked and jailed for the crime of stealing from the post office. Now privately owned Royal Mail are picomh on their workers in the pursuit of profit.

The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (UK) has called an online meeting to discuss a fightback against Royal Mail’s assault on postal workers being facilitated by the CWU bureaucracy.

Read more

Government owned U.K Post Office which has been separated from Royal Mail so that the latter can be more profitable in this age of cut throat competition, and attract private investment. I worked for Royal Mail in the late 1960s. It was a great job, but postal workers tell a different story today. I also worked for City Link, a private parcel delivery firm and DPD. They were hell on earth. That is the savage profit hungry world that Royal Mail are competing with. It is a race to the bottom. .

***A working day begins for the morning shift at DPD Interlink Express.***

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April 11th 2024

Caroline Flack: Met Police to re-examine decision to charge TV star

By Francesca Gillett

BBC News

The Metropolitan Police says it will partly reinvestigate what made it decide to charge TV presenter Caroline Flack as “new witness evidence may be available”.

The TV star was facing prosecution for assaulting her boyfriend when she killed herself in February 2020.

The Crown Prosecution Service had said Flack should get only a caution – but the Met appealed and she was charged.

Ms Flack’s mother has repeatedly criticised how police handled the case.

Christine Flack told Thursday’s Daily Mirror that she had made a fresh complaint to the Met because the family have been left with “important unanswered questions”.

Her daughter was known for presenting roles including on Love Island when she was arrested for allegedly assaulting her then-boyfriend, Lewis Burton, in December 2019.

Following her arrest, the CPS initially decided that Ms Flack, 40, should receive only a caution – but a senior Met officer appealed and instead she faced a charge of assault by beating.

A coroner later ruled the presenter killed herself because she knew she was facing prosecution and feared the publicity a trial would attract.

Following her death, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) – which investigates complaints against the police – carried out a review of the Met’s decision to charge her. It did not find any misconduct.

Comment It is very sad when people are driven to suicide by unjust outcomes of gender relationships. I know the feeling well. However, women and their pressure groups campaigned for what they dubiously like to call equality, as if all women belong to a helpless herd of sheep needing ever more laws to protect them from potentially violent men. Women’s groups put domestic violence and sex crimes on top of the police agenda. But those resultant laws were only passed on the premise that only men commit those crimes. The mantra is that women are only violent in self defence and never lie. The simple reality of Flack’s case is that Ms Caroline Flack was a former children’s TV Presnter who used her blonde glamorous good looks to get a job hosting a blatantly moronic sex obessessed TV Show called ‘Love Island’ and dressed accordingly.

Childless and in her 40s, her and her toy boy enjoyed the high and London club life. Then Ms Flack discovered she was perhaps not old enough for her boy, spotting his text messages to a sixty something woman. Had her lover been scanning Flack’s message, it would have been called coercing controling behaviour. Had he attacked her, while she slept, with a heavy table lamp causing hospitalising injuries, he would have been arrested, convicted, jailed and ruined.

When it is a woman attacking a man, it is akways his fault for provoking her, especially when she is glamorous and wealthy. When it is a man accused, there is not even need for evidence or statute of limitations. That is the reality for men. Ironically it was a female police officer who wanted to prosecute because women know women better than men do. Feminism has relied on romanticisng men to support them, usually father’s of daughters who are reponsible for the massive imbalance of power in favour of women’s rights.

Campaigns for men’s rights are the subject of mainstream media, feminist and consensus politics nasty ridicule. This is based on a similar feminist presumption written in stone, that men are all potentially liars and abusers – excepting black men who feminists award equal victim status – a herd of raging bulls when in close proximity to womens. The assumption is that white men are ‘toxic’ and ‘privileged’ regardless of class. In this connection, there is a presumption that white men, regaedless of wealth, status and class, have all the rights. So a bulk of those so called human rights, particularly regarding intimate and domestc relationships, must be transferred to women. Increasingly men realise their growning vulnerability, hence the INCELS and plethora of male to female ( mtf ) transsexuals outraging powerful TERF feminists like J K Rowling because they want to escape the stigma of being men..

R J Cook

April 9th 2024

Alan Bates says Post Office was run by ‘thugs in suits’

Former subpostmaster Alan Bates speaks to the media outside Aldwych House after giving evidence to the Post Office Public Inquiry in London, United Kingdom on 9 April 2024

By Tom Espiner

Business reporter, BBC News

Former sub-postmaster and campaigner Alan Bates has said the Post Office was being run by “little more than thugs in suits” in 2010.

In a strongly worded witness statement to the public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal, he accused the Post Office of lying about the accounting system.

He also said the organisation had spent 23 years trying to “discredit and silence” him.

The Post Office apologised for hurt caused by the scandal.

It also said it regretted not disclosing documents to the inquiry “as early as all parties would have liked”.

Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office due to the faulty Horizon software, which showed errors that did not exist.

Some lost their jobs, businesses and homes. Many were left financially ruined. Others were convicted and sent to prison and some died while waiting for justice.

‘The Post Office has ruined every happy moment of my life since 2005’

Mr Bates has been campaigning on behalf of sub-postmasters for decades and was recently catapulted into the national spotlight by an ITV drama about the scandal, Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

On Tuesday, the public inquiry resumed and Mr Bates was the first person to provide evidence ahead of more key witnesses appearing over the next 15 weeks.

In response to a letter from former postal affairs minister Sir Ed Davey in 2010, Mr Bates wrote back: “It’s not that you can’t get involved or cannot investigate the matter, after all you do own 100% of the shares and normally shareholders are concerned about the morality of the business they own.

“It is because you have adopted an arm’s length relationship that you have allowed a once great institution to be asset stripped by little more than thugs in suits, and you have enabled them to carry on with impunity regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict.”

Responding to Mr Bates’s statement, the Liberal Democrats said: “As Alan Bates told the inquiry, the bulk of the blame lies with officials.

“Ed was the first minister to meet with Mr Bates and hear his concerns.

“He put those concerns to the Post Office, but their officials lied to him as they did to so many people.”

Mr Bates told reporters after the hearing had ended on Tuesday that it had been an “an interesting day”, adding he wanted the original group of sub-postmasters to “get their money”.

He joked that once the whole process was over, he planned to “buy a little post office and put his feet up”.

‘Campaign to expose truth’

In Mr Bates’s witness statement, the former sub-postmaster said he had “spent the last 23 years campaigning to expose the truth, and justice”.

He also told the inquiry that before he was sacked he had repeatedly raised concerns about Horizon, including in a letter he had sent in December 2000, two months after the system had been installed in his post office branch in Craig-y-Don in Llandudno.

When Horizon was first installed he had been “quite positive” about it, having had experience with retailing and accounting software since 1986.

However, he soon found “frustrating” problems with it, including a lack of transparency over transaction data.

He refused to accept that shortfalls in his accounts were his responsibility to make good, maintaining that it was the software that was faulty.

When his employment was terminated in November 2003, he was “annoyed” with that “to put it mildly”.

But he added that his sacking was “partly expected, in a way, because it was pretty obvious [the Post Office] were after me one way or another” after he repeatedly raised concerns about Horizon.

Post Office chief executive Nick Read speaking to the BBC at the inquiry — Image caption, Post Office chief executive Nick Read made a surprise appearance at the inquiry hearing

The inquiry was shown slides from an undated presentation prepared by Dave Smith, a former Post Office manager, which said Mr Bates “had discrepancies” but was “dismissed because he became unmanageable”.

“Clearly struggled with accounting, and despite copious support, did not follow instructions,” the presentation said.

When asked by lead counsel to the inquiry Jason Beer KC if it was ever explained to him that he became “unmanageable”, he smiled and said: “No, not at all.”

He also denied having ever struggled with accounting, or being given “copious” support.

Over more than two years he and his staff made 507 calls to the Post Office helpline, 85 of which related to Horizon.

He said the helpline was not much help. “Stating the bleeding obvious is one description I might use. It was all things that I’d tried.”

In a surprise appearance on Wednesday, Post Office chief executive Nick Read was present in the inquiry room.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Read admitted financial redress for sub-postmasters had been “slow”.

While he did not want to go into the specifics of Mr Bates’s case and why his claim had not yet been settled, he said he wanted to “demonstrate [his] support” for sub-postmasters and for Mr Bates.

A Post Office spokesperson said: “Post Office is deeply sorry for the hurt and suffering that has been caused to victims and their loved ones, and we are committed to ensuring that they receive the justice and redress that they so deserve.”

Following criticism of its document disclosure by Mr Beer, the Post Office said it had disclosed the “vast majority” of documents needed for the next round of hearings in a timely way.

But it said it regretted that “a very small proportion of documents were not disclosed as early as all parties would have liked”.

G20 death: PC Simon Harwood sacked for gross misconduct – BBC

Ian Tomlinson pathologist Freddy Patel struck off | The Independent

Comment My Personal experience of the U.K police over the last 16 years informs me that they are institutionally corrupt from the top to bottom. Governments, Opposition and backbenchers are afraid to push reform because the Police Federation and NACPO will wipe the floor with them.

R J Cook

April 8th 2024

Rowling Along– by R J Cook

Updated April 9th 2024

J K Rowling seems determined to destroy the transsexual world. If she is allowed to continue, with fellow feminists allies, then Britain and the World will not be safe for transsexuals. Her new project about a war between good and evil is a worthy successor and even greater phenomenon than Harry Potter. Maybe her new fantasy work could be called Harriet Potty, Transvestite Rapist of Hogwash Towers. The case of young trans girl Brianna Ghey’s brutal horrific murder means nothing to feminist campaigner Rowling and her ‘Gender Critical Women’s’ feminist argument. It said a lot about twisted young female minds that the female killer of Brianna’s murderous duo noted in her plan for the attack : “I want to see how big its dick is.”

Young Brianna Ghey, sadistically murdered by a boy and girl from her school because she was transsexual, the killer girl noting that she wanted to see ‘how big its dick is’. Brianna Ghey thought she was meeting her friends in the park. Super wealthy fantasy author
J K Rowling said that transsexual women are a threat to women in their safe spaces and should not have the same protected status as women. They should not even be allowed to use fenale pronouns or expect others to use them toward themselves . She has tweeted her extreme views, offering her support to other women with sharing her ‘Gender Critical’ views, in defiance of Scotlands new anti hate legislation. ***Rowling has the agreement of the U.K’s Hindu Tory Prime Minister. This puts an already vulnerable group at extreme risk. So Gender*** Idenity Clinics and any other involved medical practitioners should give would be and existing patients fair warning for their safety. Trade descriptions should also become involved to inform these people exactly what dangers they are letting themselves in for.

It is clear that Rowling recognises no difference between a transvestite and a transsexual. Women only do wrong because men force them according to the TERF mantra. Women are a protected status, something no man having hormone treatment and surgery can ever aspire too. He can wear a dress with makeup, even complete surgery, as a mark of ‘him’ being a rapist in waiting, but can never be called ‘she’. He must be outed to protect women’s ‘safe spaces’.

The problem as Rowling sees it is that British women are just too damned sexy and vulnerable. This means that many men will go to the full extreme of sex change to abuse and rape them. Image RJ Cook Appldene Photographics Portsmouth 2020.

***The World needs more women like this Belgium Health Minister who has sex on her mind and wants to do something about it.***

So why should women be allowed to claim the word ‘actor ?’ Why should girls be allowed to claim the word ‘guys’ ? Why is Rowling able to mislead dumbed down readers by using the name Robert Galbraith ? Why should women, especially lesbians be allowed to use men’s names ? Why are lesbians in female clothing allowed in ladies toilets and other ‘female safe spaces?’ Why can’t men be free of female sensitivities and policing in their safe spaces ? Given that women are free to make allegations against men, without need of evidence and that men’s allegations against women are very rarely believed and therefore not investigated, men need protection every bit as much as women do.

Thus it is not surprising that ever more men seek sex change,which is now politely re named gender reassignment ( GRS ). In my research and experience, there are many causes for individuals taking this dangerous course. Many are socially disadvantaged and or from single parent homes. These boys may blame absent fathers for their impoverished situation, where they are natural targets for school bullies and mocking girls. In 18 years of school teaching, starting in North and South London, I have pretty much seen it all.

However it has to be said that urban schools have got very much worse since I quit in 1996, continuing as a Special Needs Governor of a Middle School until 2000. It is a moot point as to whether it is wise to teach about transgender and alternative sexuality at that stage of learning. I do not think that it is and don’t believe the average U.K school is fit for purpose in any thing it does. Mass immigration, where the reality is serious cultural conflict, so called multi culture and diversity has not created the rainbow world of the self styled liberal left. It has made gender teaching a cause of more trouble than it is worth. Islamists will never accept transsexuals because Allah does not approve. Meanwhile feminists are on a roll claiming ideolical truth and right to make any gender debate all about them. That is where Rolling is coming from.

***Privileged White Men enjoying life in Newcastle England, 2002. Image by R J Cook Appledene Photographics.***

Rowling not only sees transsexuals as the same commodity as tranvestites ( they are not people to her ), but considers only one motive for their behaviours. She proudly and brazenly signals her contempt for Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order laws being applied to transsexuals for their protection, citing the likes of multiple rapist Isla Bryson who took advantage of Nicola Sturgeon’s bright idea that men could self identity as women, with no psychiatrist, GRS, or other qualified medical input. Bryson was looking for the softer option of a female jail.

***A typical transsexual in Rowlings opinion. This one comes complete with erection as can be seen from the little bulge in those sexy leggings ( sic ).***

***Here’s another one carefully selected by Gender Critical Women’s Protector J K Rowling.***

Very briefly a teacher, Rowling has produced work which is class biased, sexist, cliched, derivative and not notable for intellectual content which is why it has been so popular with children and adults in an expanding world of intellectually retarded teachers and academics. The idea that there are multiple causes for the explosion of demand for male to female (mtf ) gender reassignment is beyond her simplistic comfortable bourgeoisie upbringing. The world has to be as Rowling and her feminist clique want it. Here white men should obey women, accepting their fate, only using their strengths in a self effacing and depracating way for the benefit of women.

Black men are all underdogs and fellow victims of white men’s imperialism, misjudged by the ‘white gaze.’ They need special exemption from the Gender Critical Women’s rule book. Rowling, like all feminists and their male supporters protecting their daughters, expect men to change to fit their self interested version of truth. So it is incomprehensible to suggest to them that rampant feminism is more likely to make males of all ages hate their sex than to hate women.

In Rowling’s elite world , books must have the right hidden messages – or should I say ‘left’ hidden messages.’ Rowling’s genius is in not doing cause and effect. I suggest she should be nominated for the growing army of moralising simplistic female peers who wanted a 20.00 hour curfew for all men after a serving police officer raped and murdered 30 year old Sarah Everard. For Rowling, as I have said, it doesn’t matter about men taking female hormones. They are all suspect, so must never be allowed out on their own or without female permission. Meanwhile, women must have as many safe spaces as they like. Rowling wants everything reordered according to magic, all for female betterment and according to her own magic perfect image of women as a blob.

My considerable research into the subject of transsexualism, transvestitism and feminism led to my novel Man Maid Woman, where my thesis was then very akin to Germaine Greer’s, back in 2003 when it was published. Greer’s view was and presumably still is that men who seek change in sexual identity are failures as men. She has fallen out of the public eye since saying that most rape allegations are really about ‘bad sex’ . Unlike Rowling, who has the same cis female centred perspective, I am not bourgeois and grew up in a working class world where my ex war time soldier father turned truck driver,was dead by the age of 41, worn out like my mother. Apart from being a trained social scientist, I had much to think about and learn over the years. I have never lived in the pampered and protected cis female world inhabited by J K Rowling and her kind. Her splendid self righteous isolation, and supercilious self confidence defines all of her work. My world has always been very different.

When my father died in October 1962, my sister was 15, mother 38 and I was 11. I didn’t even take the 11 plus, staying at home sitting by the electric fire at the bottom of my parents hard won new double bed, while my father told me all about his life, before they took him away to hospital to die. He would often stop talking to cough up more phlegm into a toffee tin, ocaassionally dragging his wasted body out on to our three foot square landing to empty it into a bucket on our three foot square landing. The bucket also served as our indoor toilet. Four times a day, mother went out working as the Lollipop Lady seeing children across the busy A413 road in and out of school for 30 shillings a week and then her other jobs and looking after father. My sister went off the rails after his death, becoming pregnant by a married Irish building worker with two children and another on the way, when she was in the local grammar school sixth form. The father was 10 years older and has outived her wasted life.

In my world, I saw men and women struggle to survive in a world where ordinary men and women had very few rights worth having. For all the irritating drivel about u,s now being in a war for democracy ( sic ), I see only idiocy ,delusion, exploitation, scapegoating and oppression in a white working class culture that once aspired. In those days before quotas and tick box exams, only 3 % of the population went to univerisities and we had enthusiastic teachers with a curriculum to make us think. Most of my contemporaries were arrogant and upper middle class. They caused terms to over run into vcations because they liked protests and sit ins as practice for future careers in public service and politics. It annoyed me because I wanted to get back to the construction and road work where I spent my twenty weeks a year vacations – thanks to my sister’s Irish boyfriend who got me into this lucrative but dangeorus industry by passing me off as his younger brother over from Ireland

***R J Cook Back Driving a digger doing ground work in 2018. Image Appledene Photographics.***

***R J Cook visiting the Unioversity of East Anglia for a 1970s reunion in 2005. Image Appledene Photographics.***

Those bourgeoise 1960s and 70s student ‘know alls’ wanted a revolution and a never ending war for human rights which they have at the expense of the white working classes. Here are the feral children, the exploding hopeless male prison population, drug addicts, alcoholism, so many sleeping rough, broken homes and slick lying, over paid, robotic, career politicians, boasting their diversity and a demcracy so full of its own importance that they insist is worth the NATO proxy war on Russia to make the whole world the same.

From my perspective, the masses have even fewer rights now that society has never been more reified or the elite propaganda machine more refined and powerful. Multi culture and diversity is a divide and rule confidence trick. One of the jobs I had to do as a boy after school,was work on a farm. I helped herd and drive sheep on open roads and herded the cows. I even helped a farmer friend recapture his bull which escaped one morning while I was interviewing him for a newspaper.

I knew how to talk to animals when I was very young because Aunt Flo next door had lots of cats. Then in 1957, my father brought home our Alsatian ‘Prince’. I was only 7 years old. Father had transferred to the Military Police after being wounded at Dunkirk. As an MP, he had trained Alsatians. Father and the farmer I worked for, taught me how to talk to the animals. The trick is very short and definite sounds and signals. Anything more is too much for their brains, it is information overload I was taught the same technique as a journalist. It is all about short sentences and short paragraphs. The ruling class elite, their media and consensus politicians know the sounds, DEMOCRACY being their hypnotic nauseating favourite rallying calt buzz word. It is being repeated from the elite system, in newspapers, television, mainstream websites and even new books – pop into Waterstones in Oxford for some really intellectual brainwashing. Humans are being herded at all levels toward supporting and taking part in their hideous power grabbing wars. J K Rowling takes the subtly dangerous feminist war on men and transsexual to the most sublime level, mesmerising,herding women and a certain type of male into oblivion of species being. The rest are just ;a labelled as what spiteful Hilary Clinton called ‘the deplorables.’

Rowling told the Times Educational Supplement about her inspirational English teacher. She said :

“Lucy Shepherd was one of my English teachers at Wyedean comprehensive, near the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. I became head girl there – possibly the only head girl to be warned about smoking behind the bike sheds.

“She was quite young – in her twenties and didn’t look authoritarian, but she had no problems with discipline because she had an aura around her that inspired respect. I had a great relationship with her, but she did not try to be friends or court being liked. In fact, she was rather abrasive, but also dry and funny. Yet she was the only teacher I ever went to with a boyfriend problem, although she would not have been most people’s first choice for a friendly chat.”

Rowling took inspiration from her schooldays, also noting another inspiring teacher, John Lawrence Nettleship who taught her chemistry at Wyedean School, Gloucestershire.J. K. Rowling, apparently said that he was a major inspiration for the character of Severus Snape in Rowling’s fantasy novels. Harry Potter was set in a typical upper class private boarding school. Rowling was a teacher for a brief period. I was a teacher for 18 years in demanding state schools,starting in London. I had to focus on earning a living and had been looking after my mother since my father died in October 1962. From that moment on I could never be bothered with fantasy stories again. For nine months visiting my dying father in an Aylesbury hospital, I heard at least one man dying with his death rattle every week. Then it was my father’s turn.

I have never made a fraction of the money that Rowling has made from writing, but I have experienced the struggle with a paranoid coercive controlling jealous spouse whose family took the view that I was delusional in my ambition to write professionally. I was told I was akin to being like Walter Mitty. The same went for my music and song writing ambitions, When I was invited to play lead guitar in a former student’s band, my ex wife broke into a practice in my large study in a house remote from neighbours, shouting at the young band leader “I’ve got to tell you Adam, Robert’s an alcoholic. My eldest son witnessed the incident. She used this excuse to undermine me because I had a bottle of wine on my desk to help me relax and improvise. After she left the room, they all laughed to break the tension, then took out their beers and we jammed while I made up lyrics and recorded our work.

But I was unhappy because I knew there would be hell afterwards and the band was finished like my marriage. It was January 2008 and we were shaping up after I had been invited into the band the previous year, so after my fellow musicians had gone, my wife screamed at me again : “You’re only in that band to run off with young women.” After my divorce I found a particularly good CD recording, where I had played lead on my favourite amplified classical guitar, snapped and dropped down behind the dresser.

My point is that women do the nasty jealous stuff too and are more than capable of violence without provocation. Rowling has a mind only for women like herself. Her writing was popular with children because it is simplistice and escapist.

***Hopeful author R J Cook with first published book in August 1989,with fan Peg Paintin.***

R J Cook, with another fan, at a book signing, in Waterstones Portsmouth, of the second edition of the book on Brutalist Architecture he co authored with Dr Celia Clark of Portsmouth University in December 2010. Image Portsmouth News.

***Hopeful Singer Song Writer R J Cook in the back garden in 1974. Image N G Cook, R J Cook’s mother.***

R J Cook’s parents marrying at Winslow St Lawrence Church, May VE Day 1945. These people thought they had fought for a better world. Inevitably 1939-45 was just another rich man’s war, just as the NATO Ukraine Proxy War on Russia. My Cockney ( Londone ) father was worn out and dead 17 years later.

My late mother, still smiling in spite of her hardships, with my nephew David in our little front room,a few feet from the busy A413 main road in 1974, the year I graduated from the University of East Anglia. Image R J Cook

The myth is that women never lie about being victims of domestic abuse and coercive controlling behavious, without statute of limitations or need for evidence other than hearsay. I have no reason to doubt that Rowling’s husband gave her a slap because he admitted it and that type of behaviour may be a cultural norm in Portugal, but having been on the receiving end of multiple admitted assaults, I know domestic assaults on men are treated as a joke and something that the man provoked.

When a perverted Metropolitan Police Officer Wayne Couzens used his credentials to abduct and rape 30 year old Sarah Everard, this Dame of the House of Lords demanded a curfew on all men, not on all policemen. This was just another example of deranged man hating feminism whch has done so much to provoke the astonishing level of mtf transsexuals which these virtue sigalling feminists love to hate.

***PC Wayne Couzens, Sarah Everard’s rapist and killer. My experience and research of U.K Police informs me that he is not atypical of this institutionally corrupt organisation.***

Rowling’s fame was built on a fantasy where non threatening young Harry Potter used magic to vanquish the epitome of male violence Voldemort, a character she described as the most evil wizard for hundreds of years, adding that he is a raging psychopath devoid of normal human responses.

In my view this characterisation offers powerful insight into Rowling’s psyche. Though much of Harry Potter is derivative, the dark image of looming male violence is redolent when he is symbolically slain by the unassuming Harry Potter with his super powers for doing good. Rowling comes from a comfortable middle class background and went to a nice school, where she was a little bit naughty ,because she was, in her memory, the only head girl whoever smoked. She sounds a little like Hermione Granger.

Her experience of her swarthy charming Portugeuse journalist turning from romance to fear, appears to have fed into her Voldemort character as the dark transformative personification of all that is evil about men unless they are outed, taught their place, or locked away. This appears to have mutated into her obsession with transsexuals, though she clearly believes they don’t exist as such. To her every diagnosed and treated transsexual is actually a perverted transvestite who dons female clothing for the purpose of invading women’s safe spaces for the purposes of sexual assualt and rape

A multiple rapists dons women’s clothes, says he is a woman to get into a female jail and so international Harry Potter fantasy creator J K Rowling aka Robert Galbraith says he is a trans woman, even though at most he is a transvestite, and all trans women are a threat to women in their public toilets and rest rooms. Curiously adopting a male persona for her crime novels, in her book entitled ‘Troubled Blood’ she depicts a transvestite serial killer of women. I haven’t read more of the Galbraith alter ego masterpieces, but presume she has an heroic ethnic feminist police officer from either gender, catching all the public toilet rapists. So far Rowling seems to have nothing to say about the significant cases of ftm transgender cases, their motives and which safe spaces they may enter.

All of the people in this picture are male transvesites parading in a beauty contest at Southampton’s Mayflower Club. I discovered them during research for a book commissioned for W H Smith. The big question is ‘why do men do this ?’ I was about to embark on my most ambitious book project to date in 2006, to find out. Its working title was ‘Henrietta 612’. It became of interest to a major publihing agent and also the police.Because of the latter I had to drop the project, but hopefully I will eventually be able to write a book about the book and a book about the police.

Where are these public toilets ? Twice married Rowling is bourgeois but claims to speak for and about all women because that is how the media system works. She was born on July 31, 1965, in Yate, near Bristol, England. She grew up in Gloucestershire England and in Chepstow. Following graduation from the University of Exeter in 1986, Rowling began working for Amnesty International in London, England.

Interestingly railways played a key role in J K Rowling’s life. Her parents Anne (Volant) and Peter (“Pete”) James Rowling had met on in a train, sharing a trip returning to Kings Cross Station in 1964 London, to their naval postings at Arbroath Scotland. Pete was the son of a machine tool setter who later opened a grocery shop.

Following graduation, J K Rowling began working for Amnesty International in London. The idea for the Harry Potter stories came to J K during a train ride in 1990. In the early 1990s she travelled to Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. Here she met the Portuguese journalist she called an abusive husband. After a short marriage and the birth of her daughter, she returned to the United Kingdom, settling in Edinburgh, Scotland. Living on public assistance between work as a French teacher, she continued to write, as often as she could on scraps of paper and napkins. It is the classic story of the struggling literary genius making it against the odds, going from rags to riches to become a voice for all women.

R J Cook

April 8^th 2024

April 7th 2024

Former police officer jailed after having sex with woman …

Jordan Masterson, [21/01/96], is of Liverpool, Merseyside. He was found guilty of one charge of misconduct in public office at Chester Crown Court on 1 February. On 5 April, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment at Chester Crown Court. A restraining order, until further order, was also imposed.

‘Shameful’ Cheshire Police officer jailed after having sex during 999 call-out

April 6th 2024

Turd World Britain

April 5th 2024

The Lunatic Asylum

If these fake asylum seekers want to ‘live like us’ ,why do they bring their repressive Dark Ages religion, rampant overpopulation, sexsist rap, intolerance of Jews, honour killings, Shia Law, female genital mutiliation, street crime, intolerance of male to female transsexuals, racist grooming gangs, misogyny, arranged marriages, sex offenders, adherence to benefits, anti working class white racism and gang culture with them ?

In a nutshell, thanks to Tory politicians who love cheap labour and WOKE Labour under former head of corrupt CPS boss Sir Kier Starmer and a whole army of comfortable white liberals, with their white man hating feminsist battalions, the lower class white working classes will be taking the blame for the inevitable violent conflict and picking up an ever increasing tax bill. This has, with massive encouragement from the U.K Woke Folk, become a massive problem across Europe and will infect Russia if NATO’s proxy war succeeds.

***Class War. No prizes for gessing whose side the police are on*** .‘Step outa line the man come and blow you away’- Buffalo Springfield.

R J Cook

Immigration stats: are they telling us the truth?

We often hear the saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Statistics can of course be twisted, and often are, but when done properly they are a powerful tool for uncovering the truth. By laying out the facts and the methods used to analyse them, statistics can shed light on complex issues.

Government departments and the Office for National Statistics keep meticulous records on a myriad of topics, from agricultural output to NHS waiting times. But when it comes to immigration statistics, the picture gets murky. Under David Cameron, there was a push for open data but increasingly, departments have regressed into a secretive mindset. The government (or is it civil servants?) cannot withhold information by making spurious claims that it would cost too much to collate information which we have a right to access. In any case, such data are collected for analysis and scrutiny. This allows for performance to be assessed, future planning and the the allocation of resources. Keeping such data from people only erodes trust in public bodies and government.

Take the net migration figures, for example; according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), it was 6.3 million between 2001 and 2021. Yet, in the 2021 census, some 6.9 million people claimed they arrived in England and Wales (where over 90% of migrants go) during that time – almost a million more than the net migration figure. And the discrepancies don’t stop there. When it comes to specific migrant groups, like EU nationals, the situation has proved even more confusing. We have often referred to the official estimates of how many EU nationals would sign up for the EU settlement scheme. We were told it would be between 3.5 and 4.1 million. In the event, 5.7 million people were granted settlement and well over 6 million had applied. Is it any wonder our hospitals, schools and GP surgeries are under such pressure and housing is persistently in short supply, when it turns out there are millions of people here that the planners didn’t know were in the country?

But it’s not just about headcounts. We’re also in the dark about the economic impact of different types of migration. HM Revenue & Customs used to publish data on tax contributions by nationality, but this no longer happens. Similarly, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) stopped releasing figures on welfare claims by nationality.

Other countries, like Denmark and Germany, have sophisticated systems to analyse the fiscal contributions of migrants and tailor their immigration policies accordingly. We should follow suit; as we at Migration Watch have been calling for over many years.

Immigration and crime
We have recently taken part in informal discussions with a variety of people and organisations who take a close interest in the impact of migration. We are often asked what data on immigration and crime we have. The answer has invariably been, very little. We were pleased therefore to see that the evermore formidable Robert Jenrick has proposed a league table of nationalities with the highest crime rates in a push to shed light on an oft-neglected topic: the relationship between immigration and crime.

At the heart of the proposal is the belief that understanding the problem is crucial to fixing it. We agree. Without accurate data on the impact of migration, it’s that much more difficult to develop effective policies. This is a gap that the publication of the nationality, visa status, and asylum status of criminals convicted in England and Wales would fill.

Similar initiatives in countries like the US and Denmark have proved useful in informing targeted visa and enforcement policies for migrants from countries with higher crime rates. This approach not only strengthens border control but also enhances public safety by focusing resources on the right areas.

Of course, there will always be those who question the ‘practicality’ of such a system. But at Migration Watch, we firmly believe that the benefits far outweigh any possible downside and could pave the way for smarter decisions and safer communities.

Let’s be clear: shining a light on immigrant crime isn’t about pointing a finger at entire groups of people. It’s about spotting trends and taking appropriate steps to ensure the safety of all.

Reliable data and transparency can only inform debate and policy. We will write more on this important issue in future newsletters. Meanwhile, there are a couple of excellent articles below on the issue of data transparency.

Migration Watch relies entirely on the generosity of our supporters who fund our work. If you would like to help us with our efforts, please click here to donate.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK

Neil O’Brien, The Times – Migration conundrum requires decent data

“[Migration] is the place where officials fight hardest against open data. Officials think the public can’t be trusted. The Home Office won’t answer parliamentary questions on the immigration status of prisoners — questions such as: “Were they here legally?” Government has the data but doesn’t publish it. The Ministry of Justice does publish the nationalities of current prisoners but won’t provide further analysis, such as how many of them are repeat offenders. It claims the cost of providing this information would be too high. In reality, officials simply don’t want this in the public domain.”

We also liked:

Tom Jones, Conservative Home – If we want more informed debate about migration, we need more data, not less

MIGRATION WATCH IN THE MEDIA

Speaking to Nigel Farage on GB News, Migration Watch chariman Alp Mehmet talked about the Channel migrant crisis, how the EU lacks proper border controls, and why the Home Office won’t share stats on immigrant crime:

Comment By R J Cook: ‘Very simply, governments always lie to their people. A perfect example is when they say we live in a democracy. Even when they are dead ‘They lie still.’ They could not survive without official secrets and nor will anyone who exposes them, as Julian Assange has learned.

Mainstream elite owned and elite operated media does not want to know, or us to know the truth about Julian Assange. He could not have been delivered unto hell without the enthiusiasm of Britain’s ‘wonderful western style democracy. R J Cook.

April 4th 2024

UK population projected to hit 74m by 2036

Read now

Laurence Fox’s downfall ‘is his own doing’

Read now

UK citizen army: Preparing the ‘pre-war generation’ for conflict

By Jonathan Beale

Defence correspondent, BBC News

Talk of wider war in Europe and the potential need for mass mobilisation or a “citizen army” may sound alarming. But the head of the British Army Gen Sir Patrick Sanders is not alone in issuing a national call to prepare for a major conflict on European soil.

Last week, another senior Nato military chief said countries needed to be on alert “and expect the unexpected”. Adm Rob Bauer, who heads the alliance’s military committee, said the public needed to change their mindset for an era “when anything can happen at any time”.

The UK’s defence secretary has also warned that we need to be prepared for a war. In his first major speech on defence, Grant Shapps said the country was moving from a “post war to a pre-war world”.

He highlighted numerous threats, but there is one common thread amid all these warnings – Russia.

Germany’s Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, recently told a German newspaper “we have to take into account that Vladimir Putin might even attack a Nato country one day”. While he said such an attack is unlikely now, “our experts expect a period of five to eight years in which this could be possible”.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has focussed the West’s military minds.

As Gen Sir Patrick Sanders stated several times in his speech on Wednesday, “Ukraine really matters”. Russia’s ambitions, he said, were not just about seizing territory but “about defeating our system and way of life politically, psychologically and symbolically”.

How are other countries preparing?

There is a sense in the upper echelons of the British military that many politicians and most of the public have not grasped the threat they see. It is the duty of the military to analyse that threat, and they still might be proved wrong. But European nations closer to Russian borders appear to be taking it more seriously.

Gen Sanders specifically mentioned Sweden. Earlier this month, its civil defence minister told a defence conference “there could be a war in Sweden”. Carl-Oskar Bohlin asked the public “have you considered whether you have time to join a voluntary defence organisation? If not – get moving!” His remarks were backed up by the country’s top military commander, who said Sweden should prepare itself mentally.

Jailed for refusing conscription

A number of northern European countries, including Sweden, already have a form of conscription for their armed forces.

Conscription requires young men and women to serve for a limited time in uniform. It means that some of the population will have had some military training – and can then be assigned to reserve units should war break out.

In Sweden and Norway, conscription is partial – not everyone gets drafted. But it boosts the strength of the professional armed forces, which is often relatively small.

Finland, Nato’s newest member and a country which has an 800-mile border with Russia, has wider conscription. Around 80% of the male population complete some form of military service. Refusal can mean a jail sentence, though there is the option of civilian service out of uniform too.

The overall effect means Finland can muster one of Europe’s largest armies. The size of its active armed forces is only 19,000 personnel, but it can call on another 238,000 reserves.

Is UK conscription for a citizen army a realistic plan?

In the UK, National Service – the country’s old name for conscription- ended in 1960. There are no plans to bring it back.

Gen Sanders was not calling for conscription in his speech. He is a strong believer in a professional army made up of volunteers. But he was making the point that if war broke out troop numbers would be too small.

Cuts have already seen the size of the British Army fall from more than 100,000 in 2010 to around 73,000 now. Gen Sanders said that within the next three years the British Army needed to be 120,000 strong with the addition of reserves. But he said even that is not enough – so the Army should be designed to expand rapidly “to enable the first echelon, resource the second echelon, and train and equip the citizen army that must follow”.

He added that: “Ukraine brutally illustrates that regular armies start wars; citizen armies win them.”

So, what did he mean by a citizen army? He was not making a case for conscription or for an imminent call up of volunteers. Instead, he was urging Britain to prepare for a mass mobilisation of tens of thousands of people, should war break out. That would require planning and a change of mindset in government.

Downing Street does not seem keen – it said the general’s hypothetical scenarios were not helpful.

General Patrick Sanders with Defence Secretary Grant Shapps during a visit of Swedish Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel to the STANTA training camp in East Anglia.

April 3rd 2024

The Post Office is owned by the government, and operates the 11,500 post offices around the UK. Royal Mail is owned by private shareholders, and runs the collection, sorting and delivery of post.The Post Office is owned by the government, and operates the 11,500 post offices around the UK. Royal Mail is owned by private shareholders, and runs the collection, sorting and delivery of post.

The British Post Office scandal, sometimes called the Horizon IT scandal, arose from faulty software, provided by Fujitsu and known as Horizon, creating false shortfalls in the accounts of thousands of subpostmasters. It has been described as one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice in British history.

Yet the Army is already looking at how it might create a citizens’ army. One Whitehall source told the Times that the training of Ukrainian civilians on UK soil could act as a rehearsal for rapid Army expansion.

To train and equip that larger army would inevitably require more money. The government says it wants to spend 2.5% of national income on defence – but has still not said when.

Gen Sanders’ speech was intended to be a wake-up call for the nation. But without political support, the mindset of a country that does not feel like it is about to go to war is unlikely to change.

One ex senior minister suggested to me that there was a generational divide between those who had lived with the threat of the Cold War era, and those who had not. The former minister, currently a serving Conservative MP, pointed out that the prime minister grew up without that existential threat.

Three Years On From Its Sale, The Privatisation Of Royal Mail …

Why was the post office sold off?

The key argument the government used to justify the sell-off was that Royal Mail had to be a private company so that it could access private capital. This was always a fallacy – Network Rail, for instance, is in public ownership and has always been able to undertake significant borrowing.15 Oct 2016

Did Royal Mail make a profit before privatisation?

Why was Royal Mail privatised? Politicians justified the sale by saying it was failing, but it wasn’t – privatising was an ideological decision. Just before being sold off, Royal Mail’s annual profits had risen to £324 million, with a high level of public satisfaction with the service.

How the Post Office’s Horizon system failed: a technical breakdown

Let’s take back the Royal Mail – We Own It

What went wrong with the Post Office?

What went wrong? The system was simply not up to the tasks placed on it. The Post Office knew as much as early as 1999, when trials run in preparation for the launch revealed “severe difficulties being experienced by subpostmasters”, the inquiry into the scandal heard.9 Jan 2024

weownit.org.uk https://weownit.org.uk › public-ownership › royal-mail

Search for: Did Royal Mail make a profit before privatisation?

Royal Mail wants to cut days for second-class post

By Lora Jones

Business reporter, BBC News

Royal Mail has proposed cutting second-class letter deliveries to every other weekday.

It wants to keep its six-day-a-week service for first class letters under the proposals to reform the company.

It comes after regulator Ofcom suggested Royal Mail could reduce the number of delivery days from six to as few as three per week for all letters.

The firm has struggled as letter volumes have plummeted in recent years, leading to heavy financial losses.

Its performance has also been poor, with households and businesses complaining about delays on deliveries of important letters detailing medical appointments or legal documents.

The company’s boss said the suggested plans would give it a “fighting chance” to change and keep its “universal service”.

Royal Mail, which was split from the Post Office and privatised a decade ago, is legally obliged to deliver a one-price-goes-anywhere postal service, which means it has to deliver letters six days per week, Monday to Saturday, and parcels Monday to Friday.

While it is planning to cut second-class letter deliveries under its reforms, the company has said parcels – which have become more popular in recent years and are more profitable – would still be delivered seven days a week.

It comes as the price of stamps increased on Tuesday, rising by up to 13% for a second class standard letter which now costs 85p to send. The cost of a first class standard letter also went up 8% to £1.35.

Second class stamps being priced at 85p mean they are now the same cost as first class one was at the start of 2022.

The Door Is Always Open – R J Cook

This failed asylum seeker had leave to stay and study in the U.K. He deliberately stabbed 3 innocent white people and killed them. Two were young students and the other a caretaker looking forward to retirement. The killer stole his van, drove into Nottingham City Centre, deliberately driving in to 3 white men who were buying newspapers. This killer was acquitted on grounds of diminished responsibility and mental illness. He is being treated at NHS expense. The attacks were not considered racist. It’s an old story that must not be questioned.
***R J Cook***

Multiculturalism has failed In March 2021, the quiet town of Batley was thrust into the spotlight when a religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School faced serious threats for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad during a class. What followed was a harrowing ordeal that exposed deep-seated issues within our society.

The Khan review, led by government adviser Dame Sara Khan, uncovered the shocking reality faced by the teacher at the centre of the Batley incident. Despite being the victim of harassment, he was let down by the council, police, and the school trust. The review highlighted a critical oversight in previous investigations and local leaders’ statements: the failure to acknowledge the personal impact on the teacher. Instead, the focus remained on the perceived ‘offense’ caused by the cartoons, highlighting a troubling trend of prioritising the wishes and concerns of parts of the community over democratic values and rights.

The Batley incident serves as a stark reminder of the dangers of prioritsing cultural sensitivity over fundamental freedoms. Embracing Multiculturalism should never have led to a reluctance to confront controversial issues for fear of causing offence. Institutions, fearful of causing offence should not cave to the demands of vocal groups, undermining democratic principles in the process.

The Batley affair, with the teacher in question still in hiding, shows the inherent risks of law enforcers and institutions like schools behaving as if we still had blasphemy laws in England and Wales. We don’t. Nor are they to be found in Scotland since earlier this year. Yet, there appears to be a lack of understanding and training among law enforcers on religious extremism, leaving them ill-equipped to address such complex issues. This reluctance to confront excessive religious zeal and extremism only serves to embolden extremists and perpetuate a cycle of suspicion, fear and censorship. We cannot continue to face up to uncomfortable truths for fear of stepping on cultural sensitivities.

It’s high time we acknowledged the risks and threats to the country posed by mass immigration. In this regard, we have referred many times to the UK’s population increase of eight million people in the twenty years between the 2001 and 2021 censuses, seven million of which was due to immigration. One element of this increase that we have referred to less frequently is that the Muslim population more than doubled in that period, going from 1.6 million to 3.9 million people. In other words, nearly 30% of the eight million population increase were Muslims. This is a significant part of the mass immigration that has resulted in the population explosion we are experiencing. As we have often said, the huge numbers have serious implications for our housing, services and future wellbeing. However, it behoves us not to lose sight of what the rapid change in the mix and nature of our society also means for its future cohesion and stability.

Ex-immigration minister: PM ‘disinterested’ in migration policy

The former immigration minister, the excellent Robert Jenrick, has dropped a bombshell, claiming that Rishi Sunak only paid attention to legal immigration after he threatened to quit his job. Speaking on a podcast, Mr Jenrick also accused Boris Johnson of not giving a hoot about legal immigration during his time as PM. Pressure mounted on the government, especially after Suella Braverman resigned as Home Secretary. Mr Jenrick was open, saying he had to give Rishi Sunak an ultimatum to get him to do something.

Lest we forget, net migration hit a record-high of 745,000 in 2022. We won’t know what it will be for the whole of 2023 until late May. However, we would not be surprised to see it at around 700,000. Remember, annual net migration of 600,000 will still lead to a population increase of 20 million people within less than 25 years. That’s 18 Birminghams!

We recently wrote about the plan to reduce legal migration by 300,000. It seems Mr Jenrick wanted more and proposed raising the bar for foreign workers and capping care worker visas. In the same podcast, the former minister went on to slam Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit immigration policies, saying they ignored what the public wanted and made things worse. Mr Jenrick believes the lack of control over migration fuels the housing crisis, keeps wages low, and divides society. We wholeheartedly agree with him,

Mr Jenrick also took a swipe at Britain sticking with the European Convention on Human Rights, saying it’s making it impossible to secure our borders. This, he said, was why deportation flights to Rwanda got blocked. When the horse speaks in this way, we would do well to listen.

Channel crisis

On Wednesday, we learned that 4,644 of migrants had made their way illegally across Channel so far this year (it may be even more by the time this email reaches you). This is 12% more than crossed in the same period 2022, when over 45,500 came by year’s end. (Remember, this doesn’t include those getting in undetected or in the backs of lorries or the boots of cars). If the numbers crossing continue at the present rate, we could be looking at well over 50,000 illegal Channel-crossers in small boats this year. Add to this those crossing by other means or who arrive undetected and 60,000 illegal Channel-crossers in 2024 is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Where will we put them?

At Migration Watch UK, we have been calling out the government’s proposals for the post-Brexit immigration system as far back as 2018. We believe we were the first to label post-2019 Conservative immigration policies as a betrayal of those who voted Conservative in 2019. The polls and recent by-election results would suggest that chickens are flocking home to roost for the governments of Johnson, Truss and Sunak.

Migration Watch relies entirely on the generosity of our supporters who fund our work. If you would like to help us with our efforts, please click here to donate.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK

Henry Hill, CapX – Broken Britain is driving everyone out, even our immigrants

“[The] NHS is dependent on immigrant labour in no small part because the supply of domestic medical staff is extremely restricted, and it is so because training them is extremely expensive and the state picks up most of the tab. Obviously, to a great extent the need for training is an unavoidable fact – few people would knowingly roll the dice on a cheap but ill-trained doctor. But in other areas, such as nursing, it is an entirely self-inflicted wound: senior nurses continue to write scathingly about the Thatcher Government’s decision to bow to pressure from unions and make theirs a degree profession.”

Tom Slater, Spiked – Abdul Ezedi and the twilight of the virtue-signallers

MIGRATION WATCH IN THE MEDIA

In an article for The Sun, Migration Watch Chairman Alp Mehmet was quoted about immigrants who have been fighting deportation from the UK using more than £70million in legal aid in just five years. Legal costs totalled £71million between 2019 and 2023, averaging around £38,000 a day:

“Dealing with and removing illegal arrivals swiftly is the only way to discourage them from coming, save the taxpayer huge sums and stem the tide of clients for traffickers and activist lawyers.”

Alp’s comment was also picked up by GB News and The Daily Express.

Finally, in a piece for The Conservative Woman, Migration Watch Executive Director Dr. Mike Jones addressed London’s recent population surge driven by extensive immigration. He also highlighted the National Audit Office’s findings regarding Home Office mismanagement in relocating illegal immigrants, resulting in increased financial burdens on British taxpayers:

“At its core, the most straightforward solution to reducing taxpayer spending on housing illegal immigrants is removal. Moreover, the prospect of speedy removal will serve as a deterrent for would-be Channel-crossers.

“Deportation plays a crucial role in discouraging illegal immigration, safeguarding our borders and our society. The principal stumbling block to removing those who have come illegally is the legal framework we have put in place, which allows the challenging and obstructing of removals. The 1951 Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) are the international treaties that provide the grounds for allowing appeals against removal. However, the government could override the European Court of Human Rights if it chose to do so, were it not for Sir Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) that embeds the ECHR in UK law. We at Migration Watch firmly believe that the legal framework for dealing with illegal immigration and asylum abuse requires revision. We could begin by repealing the HRA”

MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD

Our nation is in the midst of a troubling metamorphosis. The fabric of British society is unravelling as diversity flourishes without a common thread of shared values and heritage. This transformation is fuelled by an immigration system that operates independently of the desires expressed by the British public. What we see unfolding before our eyes is a rapid alteration of our societal landscape, a deviation from the promises made in the electoral manifestos we once voted for. If this situation concerns you as much as it does us, it’s vital to take action. Contact your Member of Parliament and ensure your concerns are heard.

We wouldn’t be able to continue this work without the help of our supporters. If you would like to donate, please click the button below.

Our supporters are all as concerned about the future of our country as we are. Some have been kind enough to remember us in their will. If you wish to consider leaving a bequest to Migration Watch UK, or wish to discuss anything else, do please get in touch. Our email is: admin@migrationwatchuk.org

MAKE A DONATION TO MIGRATION WATCH UK

J.K. Rowling has been miscast as a modern-day witch for challenging the trans dogma but for me she must be 2021’s most inspirational person, writes SARAH VINE

By Sarah Vine for the Daily Mail

Published: 22:06, 14 December 2021

I can’t tell you how my admiration for this woman has grown in recent years. She has gone from being just another famous author to the modern equivalent of writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Simone de Beauvoir; a feminist icon every bit as inspirational — and controversial.

Sarah Vine reacts to the controversial J.K. Rowling … – YouTube

Class War – Headline by R J Cook

Extract From Nimo Omer The Guardian

There is no shortage of horror stories from those who work in British schools. Teachers are grappling with dwindling resources, expanding work loads and meagre pay.

With this in mind, it should be no surprise that schools are struggling to recruit and retain staff. Last year, according to an analysis by the National Education Union (NEU) and the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), the government in England missed recruitment targets by 48%. Even subjects like English, historically a discipline with plenty of trainees, are for the first time ever struggling to recruit. The problem is compounded by the fact that more teachers than ever are leaving the profession or retiring. In the 2021-2022 academic year, 40,000 teachers resigned from state schools – almost 9% of the teaching workforce – and a further 4,000 retired

It seems that no number of inspirational adverts by the Department for Education can reverse this trend. The government’s response to the shortage has been to export the problem by recruiting teachers and trainees from other countries, especially Jamaica, to work in British schools. Paul Whiteman, general secretary of NAHT, has described the plan as “at best a short-term sticking plaster for a handful of schools”..

From Nimo Omer The Guardian April 3rd 2024

April 2nd 2024

Hate Crime & Delusion

I will write more on Rowling, transvestites, transsexuals, Rishi Sunak and the related issue of gender confusion, gender and religious delusion in due course. For now people should remember the brutal killing of innocent Brianna Ghey by two young psychos. The female of the pair made a note to her male partner that she ‘wanted to know how big its dick is.’

Rowling and Littlejohn speak and support such prejudice being incapable of distinguishing between a tranvstite and a transsexual. The majority of police are no better. There will be more Brianna Gheys as a result of this decision, but the press won’t want to know. Rowling has claimed immunity for her social media posts because cis females are a protected status.

There is no doubt that Rowling’s posts are encouraging the view that transsexuals are by and large fantasising transvestites who dress as women to rape cis women. If I made similar allegations about Muslims, calling them and their religion delusional and the incidence of Pakistanis in sex grooming gangs as being somehow related to that mindest, the police would waste no time paying me another visit.

On a more general note, I find it alarming that police can pre empt court in deciding what is and isn’t hate speech. It is also alarming but not surprising that Rishi Sunak is on on the act. All people need to understand that free and hate speech are just more political devices to deceive, frighten and control the matters.

Meanwhile would be transsexuals need to be very careful about their choices and why they are making them. Governments, in the light of Sunak’s support for Rowling, need to think about defunding and banning NHS gender reassignment if their customers are going to be consigned to the ridicule, ostracism and danger from what Rowling and Littlejohn have in mind for them. These people want what are still called ‘transwomen’ wearing big labels on their dresses, shouting Mister Man, making them fair game for the masses and religious objectors, most notably the Muslims.

Rowling made her name with magic. It is a moot point as to whether she represents the dark or light side of magic, but she looks every inch a high priestess of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism and is doing her best to weave a spell to get rid of what she calls men in dresses. She has won over Sunak. Why is this and every other aspect of feminist ideology not open to question ? There is much more to come.

R J Cook

Rowling’s Choice Of Typical And Convenient Transsexuals !!!

***Typical Transsexual or Transylvanian ? Rowling has no doubts.***

***This one is so excited about being a woman she appears to have an erection.***

JK Rowling’s defiant trans tweets are NOT criminal: Police refuse to arrest author amid furious backlash at new SNP ‘hate crime’ laws – as she says she ‘hopes every woman who wants to speak up for importance of biological sex will be reassured’

Scottish force’s response suggests author’s views do not breach hate crime laws
Rowling says of police response: ‘I hope every woman in Scotland is reassured’
READ MORE: Fury of women’s rights campaigners as new law comes into force

By Stewart Carr and Dan Grennan and Emily Jane Davies and Jon Brady

Published: 16:39, 2 April 2024 | Updated: 19:40, 2 April 2024

Police Scotland have confirmed no action is to be taken against JK Rowling after she challenged new hate legislation north of the border with a flurry of gender critical posts on X, formerly Twitter.

Reports were made against the Harry Potter author but police have assessed her tweets against Scotland’s new hate crime laws – already slammed by footballer Ally McCoist – and found they did not breach the legislation.

Ms Rowling, a prominent gender-identity critic, had been reported to police after referring to a number of transgender women including campaigners, convicted prisoners and celebrities as ‘men’ in a range of tweets reported to the force.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13264185/Police-Scotland-confirm-received-complaints-JK-Rowlings.html

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: J.K. Rowling fiasco proves Britain is now one big April Fool’s joke

By Richard Littlejohn for the Daily Mail

Published: 01:36, 2 April 2024 | Updated: 19:56, 2 April 2024

Days like this it’s difficult to know where to start. What’s an April Fool’s joke and what isn’t? Search me.

Is J.K. Rowling going to be arrested and charged with ‘hate crime’ for insisting that women don’t have willies?

Comment https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13259993/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-J-K-Rowling-fiasco-britain-april-fool-joke.html

JK Rowling hate law posts not criminal, police say

Social media comments made by JK Rowling challenging Scotland’s new hate crime law are not being treated as criminal, Police Scotland has said.

The Harry Potter author described several transgender women as men, including convicted prisoners, trans activists and other public figures.

The new law creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to protected characteristics.

The force said complaints had been received but no action would be taken.

Reacting to the news, Ms Rowling posted on X: “I hope every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement, and I trust that all women – irrespective of profile or financial means – will be treated equally under the law.

“If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.”

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 makes it a criminal offence to make derogatory comments based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.

Stirring up hatred based on race, colour, nationality or ethnicity was already illegal in Great Britain under the Public Order Act 1986 but is now included in the new law.

Since the law came into effect on Monday Police Scotland has received more than 3,000 complaints.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak earlier backed Ms Rowling’s stance stating the UK had a proud tradition of free speech.

Mr Sunak would not be drawn on whether he supported her approach, saying that it was “not right for me to comment on police matters, individual matters”.

But he added: “We should not be criminalising people saying common sense things about biological sex, clearly that isn’t right.

“We have a proud tradition of free speech.”

Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf said racist graffiti, which appeared near his home, is a reminder of why Scotland must take a “zero-tolerance” approach to hate crime.

He said the law was designed to deal with what he called a “rising tide of hatred” in society.

A spokesperson for the first minister said: “The prime minister’s comments ignore the fact that the right to freedom of expression is built into the Act and that it also has a high threshold for criminality.

“The legislation does not prevent people expressing controversial, challenging or offensive views, nor does it seek to stifle criticism or rigorous debate in any way.”

Police Scotland said a large proportion of the complaints it had received concerned a speech made by Mr Yousaf in 2020 when, as justice secretary, he highlighted the number of white people holding prominent positions in Scotland.

The force said complaints about the speech were assessed at the time and it was established that no crime had been committed.

The law states that it is a defence for a person charged with stirring up hatred to show that their actions were “reasonable.”

It also references the right to freedom of expression in the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes protection for “ideas that offend, shock or disturb.”

At the heart of criticism of the hate crime law is the fact that it does not include biological sex as a protected characteristic.

The Scottish government points out that it is planning a separate law to tackle hatred and harassment of women which it says will be introduced at Holyrood by the end of the parliamentary term in 2026.

‘Great relief’

Supporters of Ms Rowling welcomed Police Scotland’s decision.

Susan Smith of For Women Scotland, which campaigned against recent proposed changes to gender law, told the BBC’s Newscast podcast that it was “a great relief but it’s only happened because she pushed it”.

“Now hopefully anybody else who says something similar will know that they are protected,” added Ms Smith.

Earlier, Dr Nick McKerrell, a senior law lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University, told BBC Radio Scotland’s Drivetime he thought it was unlikely that Ms Rowling would be prosecuted.

He told the programme: “On balance I think she probably won’t be prosecuted because the test in the legislation states that you have to be threatening and abusive to someone with your language which essentially means that you have to cause them fear and alarm.

“I think it’s close to the edge but I don’t think, as it stands, those communications do that.

“Also, within the law, there is a protection for being offensive or shocking in your language and I think it could fall into that category of being offensive and shocking, but not in the realm of criminality.”

The lecturer added: “There is a test for stirring up hatred, which the courts have recognised. It’s quite a high level to stir up hatred.

“So any group that thinks this law is going to lower that is wrong.”

April 1st 2024

RNLI faces ‘perfect storm’ of more lifeboat callouts as funds fall

Lifeboat crews and lifeguards are being called out more often to save lives but the charity is suffering from a shortfall, largely created by the economic climate and a drop in money left to the charity in supporters’ wills. Mark Dowie said he hoped to make the organisation more efficient.

RNLI ‘treated as taxi service’ by Government, ex-crew …Daily Expresshttps://www.express.co.uk › News › UK

11 May 2023 — TOPSHOT-BRITAIN-FRANCE-EU-MIGRATION. A former lifeboat crew member says the RNLI is overstretched due to the small boats crisis ; BRITAIN-FRANCE- …

‘Woke’ RNLI ‘is turning down calls from stricken boaters …Daily Mailhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk › news › article-9851673

2 Aug 2021 — The RNLI is having to delay other rescue work because of the number of migrants it is now picking up in the Channel, it was claimed today.

What was all the fuss about? CBBC’s reboot is a delight – iNews

Well, it turned out that the only real change is that Aunt Fanny, played by Ann Akinjirin, and her daughter George (Diaana Babnicova) are black. The new, second episode in the series, “Peril on the Night Train” begins with some neon opening credits and twangy pop music.

RNLI ‘treated as taxi service’ by Government, ex-crew …Daily Expresshttps://www.express.co.uk › News › UK

11 May 2023 — TOPSHOT-BRITAIN-FRANCE-EU-MIGRATION. A former lifeboat crew member says the RNLI is overstretched due to the small boats crisis ; BRITAIN-FRANCE- …

March 31st 2024

TURD WORLD BRITAIN

How much money has UK given to Ukraine?

The UK’s non-military support to Ukraine since the start of the invasion comes to £4.7 billion. This includes £4.1 billion in fiscal support, and over £660 million in bilateral assistance.24 Feb 2024

Western elite politicians and elite media continue to propulgate and amplify a one sided account of the origins and causes of this war. Britain is third behind the U.S and Germany in terms of financial and other support for institutionally corrupt Ukraine, a country led by western placeman and one time comic actor Zelensky. Britain is berating Germany for not supplying Ukraine with their Taurus missiles to Ukraine because they are afraid of Russian reprisals. Britain wants them used to destroy the Kerch bridge. Boris Johnson wanted that from the start because as a Churchill wannabe, his top military men advised him to do it before the Russian invasion and even sent a gunboat into the Black Sea as a provocation.

With Britain facing a General Election, the major political parties are competing to rekindle Britain’s popular support for Ukraine, thus promising their masses a futher decline into poverty and the consequences of another rich man’s World Wat. The suffering and social conflict will be passed off to the gullible masses as more of the ‘cost of living crisis.’

It is most noteworthy and definitive of Britain’s class system that Queen Camilla, King Charles III’s former concubine, while visiting church today, carried a handbag worth £3,500. It should seem incredible that such comfortable pampered people should have any say in governing Britain or any other countries currently pretending to be a democracy.

It is a disgrace that governments can make such claims while presuming without referendum on the basis of full finanancial and war implications, that they can mislead the voters that this is a war effort to prevent Russia from taking over Europe and then the world. The same trick is being played across Europe and the United States, China and Iran being dragged into the equation, describing the alliance as an axis as evil.

The campaign against Trump in favour of the far from Democratic Democrats has been taken to extremes, such is the greed and despertion of the planet eaters who have to destroy Julian Assange because he has exposed the filthy lies and hypocrisy of those who would have us believe the NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia is about ‘our freedom’ and democracy. Dumbed down by brain washing social control education and elite patronising mass media, they will inevitably believe this.

Meanwhile the war will go on, paid for by the lower class masses for the sake of the super rich who have feared come uppance since the French and Russian Revolution. That is why the likes of King Charles III, Queen Camilla, whiter than white Princess Kate as the new ‘Peoples Princess’ and her Prince Charming William are so important. Cancer striking two of them was the reason for the clumsy faked family photo of Kate and her family. It was officially released to world press, putting on a show that all was well. This was and sill is a crisis for Britain’s ruling elite because they were hiding that Princess Kate, like her father in law was being treated for cancer at the same time.

Britain’s social fabric, with so much of the old Imperial ethnic groups squeezed into 10% of the tiny British Isles along with the rest of us outside the elite, is fragmented and unstable made worse by the social and economic cost of mass immigration. Migrants arrive with competing cultures and chips pn their shoulders psyched up by white middle class liberals and their feminist battalions. In this context, Royalty, ideology of diversity and fighting for Ukraine ignoring risk of nuclear was are interwoven processes and vital to the ruling elite. As turds floating in the famous River Thames, thanks to Thatcher privatising the water utilities who have sucked out massive dividends, neglected infrastructure and given us the most expensive water bills in Europe, this is TURD WORLD BRITAIN.

R J Cook

Britain’s ruling class sporting uniforms in style beloved of Third World Countries. How apposite. Vladimir Putin beware, the British military master class still wear blood red uniforms dating from the old terror days of ***World’s largest empire. They are riding back with their beloved U.S*** ***offspring who they are also busy , with the BBC, protecting, The New World from a resurgence of Donald Trump.***

BBC share fears Trump will end the Ukraine war, costing them a fortune in investment in rebuilding and exploiting a new even more corrupt Ukraine. It will turn the Biden government’s waste of trillions of dollars and interest payments into a humiliating nightmare.

War profiteers fear an end to this gravy train. Obviously there has been a large dedicated Democrat Research & Media Department aided by the FBI, digging for dirt on Donald because he has to be stopped at all costs. As FBI founder J Edgar Hoover said, you can find a sex scandal for anyone you need to dispose of. He should know, he was a transvestite very friendly with his hand picked second in command. ***R J Cook***

***These are the class fearing Russian asserting its right to security. Only these people matter.***

***History has to be rewritten and censored to protect a bankrupt system increasingly reliant on lies, oppression and ever more police social control.***

***Ruling Class Power Deployed by cops on overtime during the 1984-5 Coal Miner’s Strike.***

***The epitome of power :*** ***King Charles III , The Nation’s ultimate leader and heriditary monarch***

***Definitive proof that the U.K is the most sophisticated Police State Tyranny.***

Boat Race: Oxford rowers criticise sewage levels in River Thames

University of Oxford rowers have criticised sewage levels in the Thames after losing the Boat Race to Cambridge.

High levels of E. coli have been found in the river where universities race every year.

Leonard Jenkins of the Oxford men’s team told BBC Sport he had been vomiting before the race.

Thames Water has said improving river health was a “key focus” for the company.

On Wednesday, Environment Agency figures revealed raw sewage spills doubled last year in England to 3.6 million hours of spills compared with 1.75 million hours in 2022.

Within the spills are human waste, wet wipes and sanitary products which can pose a serious risk to swimmers.

Boat race crews had been given safety advice to avoid swallowing water splashed up from the Thames.

Cambridge, who won both male and female races, was also warned against throwing the cox into the water as is tradition.

March 30th 2024

Labour Really Cares About The White Working Classes -Just Don’t Mention or Show The Flag.

Also don’t mention your culture or any pride in your race. Never say white lives matter or you will lose your job if you are lucky enough to have one. Remember Britain is an equal opportunities employer. That is why the army have stopped discriminating against men with beards. There is going to be a great future for Muslim men and for women in Britain’s ‘New Model Army.’ R J Cook

***‘The truth will out, as my old Portsmouth landlady used to say.***

Keir Starmer faces discontent as Labour MPs reject union …The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com › politics › mar › starmer…

Exclusive: Members say flag may alienate ethnic minority voters as some associate it with far right.

Starmer faces Labour unease over use of Union flag in …Newham Recorderhttps://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk › news › national

election leaflets “plastered with Union Jacks”. Keir Starmer visit to West Midlands Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer at the launch of the …

***Muslins terrifying Jews of London’s Golder’s Green hurling abuse and waving the Palestinian Flag – flag favoured and respected by many U.K Labour voters.***

Proud struggling white working class protestors holding the Union Jack Flag are denigrated as Far Right Fascists by elite media and mainstream politicians who are on high salaries. Image by R J Cook Appledene Photographics.

March 29th 2024

Secret papers reveal Post Office knew its court defence was false

Montage showing Joan Bailey — Image caption, Joan Bailey, whose branch is mentioned in the report, said its contents made her “very angry”

By Hannah Price and Tom Beal

BBC News investigations

A draft report uncovered by the BBC shows the Post Office spent £100m fighting sub-postmasters in court despite knowing its defence was untrue.

The document reveals the Post Office was shown evidence by 2017 that losses could be due to errors in the Horizon IT system or remote tampering.

But it kept arguing in the Bates v Post Office Ltd case that theft or mistakes by sub-postmasters must be to blame.

The Post Office said it would be “inappropriate” to comment.

Patrick Green KC, the lead barrister for the sub-postmasters in the Bates case, said the BBC’s findings were “absolutely shocking”. After reading the report, he added: “I don’t think the case should have happened.”

Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted because of faults with Horizon, which was developed by the Japanese IT company Fujitsu.

The landmark Bates v Post Office High Court case – portrayed in a recent ITV drama – ran from 2018 to 2019 and was brought by 555 sub-postmasters. They argued that the real cause of their missing cash was not theft but flaws with Horizon or failed attempts by Fujitsu to correct system errors remotely.

The total cost to the Post Office in the legal action was £100m of public money.

Image caption, Patrick Green KC said the draft report “would have made a huge difference” to the Bates case had it been disclosed

The draft report, titled Bramble, was commissioned by the Post Office in March 2016 and carried out by consultants Deloitte.

Throughout the draft report, Deloitte refers to having already discussed its findings with “Post Office management” and even the fact that some of these were shared with the Post Office’s investigators for further analysis.

Tim Parker, the Post Office’s chairman at the time of the draft report, also told the BBC via his legal representative that Post Office lawyers liaised with Deloitte about Project Bramble and were responsible for handling, distributing and disclosing it. He added that the Post Office’s lawyers were also involved in the “strategy and day to day management of the litigation”.

This raises questions as to whether Post Office lawyers met their responsibilities to not mislead the court.

Post Office: Former sub-postmasters and politicians call for police inquiry

Former sub-postmasters and politicians have called for the Post Office to face a police investigation after BBC News revealed the company knew of flaws in its Horizon IT system.

A document shows bosses and lawyers knew of issues in 2017, but kept arguing sub-postmasters were to blame.

Kevan Jones MP, who advises ministers on Post Office compensation, said “the police need to start looking at this”.

The Post Office earlier said it would be “inappropriate to comment”.

More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 due to supposed losses flagged by the faulty Horizon IT system used in its branches.

Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68691257

Comment One corrupt U.K institution to investigate another.

R J Cook

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68663750

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-68690923

March 28th 2024

From Our West Country Correspondent – F.S

We were visited by our parliamentary LibDem candidate? I didn’t warm to him. He’s as bald as an egg, and the sun glinting off his dome was quite off-putting. Despite living in a house with no driveway, he bought an electric car – then complained in the local paper that there was nowhere to charge it. What a plank. When I told him I wasn’t going to vote because I have no faith in politicians, he didn’t try to convince me otherwise, which I thought was interesting. I asked him how the Libs were going to fix our economy now it’s been completely scuppered, and his only reply was that the LibDems have had lots of conferences and have made lots of policies. How impressive.

I was in Gloucester this morning. There seemed to be a Failed Weight Watchers conference in town, and the Embarrassingly Bad Tattoos Association was meeting too. I try to like Gloucester, but the people don’t make it easy. I was paying for a book in a charity shop when a bag fell out of my pocket. An odd chap, with eyes closely set and a distinctive aroma made what seemed to be a threatening remark – which I interpreted almost instantaneously as ‘That’s your bag, mate.’ I thanked him, and he continued to stare at me as if he was sizing me up for a coffin. My mood was lightened by a fellow in a coffee shop whose penny farthing was parked outside. Spectacular.

F.S March 28th 2024

March 27th 2024

Julian Assange faces ‘a living death sentence’ of 175 years in a concrete coffin cell – with a window just four inches wide… as America’s revenge for exposing its dirty secrets

By Sarah Oliver

Published: 17:15, 21 February 2024 | Updated: 20:03, 21 February 2024

Just days from now, Wikileaks boss Julian Assange could be standing shackled on a British airfield preparing to board a plane to the US. Once he disembarks and the sound-proofed door of a supermax prison cell closes behind him, the man who’s made himself America’s most wanted will – finally – be silenced.

Lawyers fear the 52-year-old could be confined alone in a ‘concrete coffin’, a 12ft by 7ft chamber – with a window 3ft high but just four inches wide, designed to ensure that the inmate has no view other than sky or wall. Inside it, his bed, desk and stool will be made of poured concrete too.

Read More https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13109341/Julian-Assange-concrete-coffin-hellhole-Supermax-prison.html

These so called traitors’ names and addressed have been published by the tabloids for retribution. If they are traitors then that is further admission that Britain is at war with Russia. There has been no popular vote for this. It is an elite decision backed by feminists and other politically correct persons relying on the ignorance and stupidity of the masses who must share responsibility and face the consequences.
***R J Cook***

‘***It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, It’s the poor what gets the blame.***‘

***Who would choose such an outfit for party fun ?***

Queen Nazi salute film: Palace ‘disappointed’ at use

Published

18 July 2015

Buckingham Palace has said it is disappointed that footage from 1933 showing the Queen performing a Nazi salute has been released.

The Sun has published the film which shows the Queen aged about seven, with her mother, sister and uncle.

The palace said it was “disappointing that film, shot eight decades ago… has been obtained and exploited”.

The newspaper has refused to say how it got the footage but said it was an “important and interesting story”.

‘Misleading and dishonest’

The black and white footage, which lasts about 17 seconds, shows the Queen playing with a dog on the lawn in the gardens of Balmoral, the Sun says.

The Queen Mother then raises her arm in the style of a Nazi salute and, after glancing towards her mother, the Queen mimics the gesture. Prince Edward, the future Edward VIII, is also seen raising his arm.

The footage is thought to have been shot in 1933 or 1934, when Hitler was rising to prominence as Fuhrer in Germany but the circumstances in which it was shot are unclear.

The Real Time Lord was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who fell for the claims of clock-fiddling charlatans

As you may read here

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13232163/PETER-HITCHENS-ANYBODY-call-time-crazy-Kaiser-Bills-clock-meddling-folly.html

Books by Peter Hitchens

ANITA’S STORY: WHY WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT

Every year around 700 families bereaved by deaths in police custody, prison and mental health settings contact INQUEST. Our vision is to end deaths caused by unsafe systems of detention and care, use of force and institutional failure. 

Anita Sharma, our Head of Casework, has been fighting alongside bereaved families for 13 years. Read Anita’s story to find out why our work is more needed now than ever.

We are facing challenging times. We’d be so grateful if you’d consider supporting us or sharing this blog.

Become a regular donor today

NO MORE DEATHS CAMPAIGN

Bereaved families tell us why they support our No More Deaths campaign.

Every year, hundreds of people die preventable deaths in state custody or care or where wider issues of state accountability are in question. Yet life-saving recommendations are repeatedly ignored.

We asked bereaved families why they’re supporting our No More Deaths campaign for a national oversight mechanism.

Take action now to save lives

The Justice Select Committee is currently conducting a follow up inquiry on The Coroner Service. We brought together a group of bereaved families inparliament to give evidence about their experiences of the inquest process.

Bereaved families often tell us that they want no one else to go through what they’ve been through. Our Director Deborah Coles also gave evidence to the committee and spoke about the impact of repeated deaths with no meaningful change.

Liz French on the 40th Anniversary of the British Miners’ Strike: “We were betrayed by the TUC and Labour Party.”

The WSWS spoke with Liz French from Betteshanger, a former pit village in the Kent coalfield in south-east England. Liz was a founding member of the National Women Against Pit Closures during the 1984-85 Miner’s Strike. Among the 200 miners imprisoned during the 1984-85 strike, Liz’s late husband Terry received one of the longest prison sentences of five years.

Read more

***A Police Officer wrestles a striking coal miner to the ground in the 1984-5 class war against the strike.***

Junior doctors mount 96-hour stoppage against de facto pay cut by Labour-run Welsh Assembly

The British Medical Association junior doctors’ leadership presents the Labour controlled Welsh Assembly as a supposed ally in a fight against the Sunak Conservative government in Westminster.

Read more

Comment The authorities wouldn’t dare wrestle striking doctors to the ground. Once again, it is an issue of class and privilege.

R J Cook

UK High Court puts Assange on the brink of extradition to the United States

The essential task posed before Assange’s supporters is to link his defence to the mass movement emerging in opposition to these crimes. The same eruption of militarism and aggression fuelling the persecution of Assange is producing a mass radicalisation among workers and young people.

Read more

Comment It would take a lot more than reformation to turn the U.K into a democracy. It would take revolution. The fact that the British authorities have sought assurances that Assange will not be executed is fatuous and another sop to the dangerous and working myth that Britain is a democracy. It is also about salving their conscience. Britain contrived with Sweden, a fellow U.S fake democracy, to trap and smear Julian Assange with a fake rape charge which was dropped just as soon as the police got him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy following a U.S backed coup in Ecuador.

That put him where he is today. The fact that he has committed no crimes in the U.K or anywhere else and is an Australian citizen does not bother the British Ruling Class, Assange is a serious war crimes whistle blower. That fact is even more sensitive as the Anglo U.S NATO proxy war propaganda machine relies heavily on misrepresenting everything Putin and his government does in respect of Ukraine, as war crimes.

It is an established fact that Gulf War 2 was illegal, leading to the not so mysterious of UN Weapons Inspector Dr David Kelly as well as massive hideous war crimes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Libya was something else we must never know the truth about as the Western Global elite’s lust for wealth and power knows no bounds. All has to be covered up at all costs. Executed or not, Julian Assanged is a dead man walking.

R J Cook

March 26th 2024

Julian Assange faces further wait over extradition ruling

By Ian Aikman

BBC News

The US must assure Julian Assange has freedom of speech protections and will not receive the death penalty before he is extradited, judges have ruled.

The UK High Court said the Wikileaks founder could be allowed to launch a new appeal against being sent to the US without those commitments.

US authorities say Mr Assange endangered lives by publishing thousands of classified documents.

His lawyers have argued that the case is a form of “state retaliation”.

The court has adjourned its final decision on Mr Assange’s extradition by three weeks to give the US government time to comply with its order.

Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68662881

Comment The sooner Britain and the U.S stop pretending to be a democracy the better. Anyway who cares about Democracy and a serious war time whistle blower when Britain has Royalty and a new ‘Princess of Hearts’? We must believe everything the BBC tells us because they ‘verify’ all the news and tell us it is totally ‘unspun’.

R J Cook

Kate rumours linked to Russian disinformation

By Sean Coughlan & Marianna Spring

Royal correspondent & Disinformation and Social Media correspondent

Security researchers believe a Russia-based disinformation group amplified and added to the frenzy of social media conspiracies about the Princess of Wales’s health.

In the days before Catherine revealed her cancer diagnosis in a video message, there had been a surge in online rumours and often wild claims about her health, adding to the emotional pressure on the princess and her husband Prince William.

Now security experts analysing social media data say there were hallmark signs of a co-ordinated campaign sharing and adding to the false claims and divisive content, both in support of and criticising the Princess of Wales.

The researchers say this is consistent with the previous patterns of a Russian disinformation group.

Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68637136

U.K & U.S.A Are Not Democracies – R.J Cook

Comment Obviously the dastardly Russians are responsible for all evil in Britain and the world and Princess Kate is ever immaculate and a guiding light. Soon the authorities and media will be blaming Russia for her illness. Russia certainly knows about hitting Britain where it hurts.

R J Cook

March 25th 2024

Inflation and the 2% target | Bank of England

The Government sets us a 2% inflation target But if inflation is too low, or negative, then some people may put off spending because they expect prices to fall. Although lower prices sounds like a good thing, if everybody reduced their spending then companies could fail and people might lose their jobs.

Comment Governments need inflation. Business is international and capital is global. Around 3% of the world’s ever expanding population own 62% of global wealth. Through shareholdings and banking interests they control the rest – along with key decision making. That is why western democracy is a sick joke. Covid Lockdown was government obedience training for when the war comes. They got a result albeit at the cost of inflating doctors’ egos. Now parliament and press are open about this being a pre war era. War against Russia, followed by China if necessary, was planned years ago.

Western masses are being brainwashed into believing Russia wants the world when it is Anglo U.S NATO that wants it, pandering to Germany’s vanity and gullibility. It is also good cover for the Anglo European open door immigration where U.K capitalist elite competes for the most cheap labour while their liberal elite enjoys the profits of virtue signalling. International investors love the British leadership and opinion makers. They flaunt their obscene wealth from ill gotten inherited wealth from the likes of slave trading and other historical abuses and exploitation.

The western elite’s money chases the highest interest rates and dividends. So combined with mass immigration, housing inflation and everything else, inflation won’t be low for long. More importantly, the ruling class want you prepared for all the wartime shortages soon to come, along with higher taxes and resources devoted to killing Russians in their name. The rulers and their lackeys will ensure the masses don’t know why and how they provoked the current appalling war to cover Ukraine’s Donbas atrocities and westerm lust for Ukraine & Russian wealth.

But never mind, this is the rainbow world of diversity and equality for the masses, where they can stop killing each other and refrain from institutionalised domestic violence. Instead they can turn their hatred and killing lust on the Russians who will be more than happy to nuke them.

R J Cook

Nottingham attacks: Prosecutors ‘correct’ to accept triple killer’s pleas

By Alex Smith & Greig Watson

BBC News, Nottingham

Prosecutors were right to accept manslaughter pleas from the Nottingham attacks killer but could have handled the case better, a review has found.

Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, and Ian Coates, 65, were stabbed to death on 13 June.

Valdo Calocane was given a hospital order in January for manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility.

The government has now been urged to review homicide laws in the wake of the case.

The victims’ families said they were “disappointed but not entirely surprised” with the report’s findings.

Emma Webber – mother of Mr Webber – said: “Until the law changes in this country, the diminished responsibility charge and plea means murderers will get away with murder.”

She added: “We have never disputed Calocane’s mental health problem, but what I would say at the moment in this country if you commit murder and you have mental health issues, then it is very unlikely you are going to be tried for murder.

“And it is abhorrent it could be downgraded to manslaughter, just because it is how the law is stated.”

Mr Coates’s son James said the families “can’t breathe until everything is done and dusted”.

“We can’t see when it’s going to finish,” he said. “It’s been made a lot easier by being able to support each other.”

Asked about his grievances with the charges, he said there was “no opportunity to disagree and push back, we felt we were told what was going to happen and we weren’t given an option”.

Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-68643143

***This man, a failed asylum seeker, cannot be called a murderer because he has mental health problems.***

Comment Whenever deranged white men have driven vehicles into Muslim crowds the knee jerk response has been ‘far right’ and racism. In my view all religious extremists are deranged. I may have Christian views and beliefs due to my upbringing and culture but would not wish to attack others who disagreed with me. The killer here was a rejected Asylum seeker. How can cultural and racial issues be ruled out of his emotions and motives. In my view anyone who kills for religion – where science should be pushing back the bounds of thinking, not greed and religious bigotry – is insane so have licence to kill. White liberals who dominate wester media, politics and education do not undestand the deranging and obsessive power of religion because their religion is hypicrisy, virtues signalling and expediency.

R J Cook

Say one thing, do another? The government’s record rise in net migration

By Ros Atkins

BBC Panorama

Think back to the 2019 election campaign. Quite reasonably, you may not remember every detail of the Conservatives’ manifesto – but perhaps you do recall one promise: to reduce immigration.

Think back further, to 2016 and the Brexit referendum. Then there was a promise to “take back control” of the UK immigration system. And since it left the EU in 2020, the UK does have more control.

But the numbers of people who’ve moved here didn’t go down, they went up.

Since the Brexit vote and the Conservatives’ victory in 2019, the 12 months to June 2022 saw the fastest population growth since the 1960s. Current projections from the Office for National Statistics put the UK on course for 74 million people by 2036 – six million more than there are today.

You’d be well within your rights to ask how that could be? The answer, according to the ONS, is largely immigration.

And one aspect of immigration has received huge amounts of attention from the government and the media. Statement after statement, story after story, has focused on migrants crossing the Channel in small boats – and the government’s efforts to stop them.

Indeed you’d be forgiven for thinking small boats are a major part of why immigration is up. But they aren’t.

Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68626430

March 23rd 2024

The Royal Wave: Royal Interaction with the Public

Ford: Queen’s intimate wave meant more than just hello

Why members of the royal family have a special ‘royal wave’Marie Claire UKhttps://www.marieclaire.co.uk › news › celebrity-news

28 May 2020 — According to The Royal House of Windsor, a documentary currently on Netflix, the reason for the royal wave comes down to preventing an injury.

Pristine Princess & Royal Waves – By R.J Cook

It seems the British love a Royal wave. I grew up in the 1950s when the British masses trembled at the thought of losing the empire so many of their husbands fathers, sons, uncles, and brothers had died or been maimed fighting for. They trembled more when masses of the dying decadent religion obsessed empire’s ever expanding population started to move in to the 10% of the land where 90% of these fawning deluded Royal and Churchill worshippers lived.

In their minds, the Royals, who headed the elite that owned 90% of the land, had watched over and protected them during ‘the war’. Their continued presence would offer them the continuing illusion of belonging to something worthy and worth dying for.

That’s where Britain’s rampant support for the Ukraine NATO proxy war on Russia comes in. Britain is a complex divided corrupt entity where Terf and more moderate feminists overwhelm parliament and mainstream media, apologising for London’s black gang crime, Islamic terror and taming the white men. Though these men are being lined up for World War Three, soldiers must be referred to as ‘people.’

The truth of U.K and NATO pretensions that women will swell the U.K’S depleted infantry is belied by the truth that Ukrainian women were offered a a fast track escape route west, away from imminent war and men forced to stay. This is the only insight we need to the nonsense of democracy.

Looking for democracy is like seeking water in the desert. The hope of finding it keeps people going, warding of insanity until they drop. Monarchy is not commensurate with freedom or democracy, but offers illusion and false hope.

Princess Kate was being groomed as the new Peoples Princess alongside and understudy hand waver and charity figurehead to Queen Camilla, Prince Charles’s concubine when he was cuckolding his friend Major Parker Bowles. I know little of Princess Kate other than her being very popular at Edinburgh University. Here she met her Prince Charming while apparently modelling a dress at a student fashion show. Seeing his future Pristine Princess in a see through dress displaying her underwear overwhelmed Britain’s most famous football fan. This, the tabloid press, led us to believe, caused a case of love at first sight.

The ludicrous and patronising Buckingham Palace effort to deceive the masses into believing that Kate was well, tells us two things : 1 ) She is regarded as vital cement and distraction to hold this shambolic so called diverse society together 2 ) The patronising ruling elite believes it perfectly acceptable to use fake images and lies to placate and bond the masses with this Royal Jelly. As a Princess Kate got Royal Treatment in an exclusive private clinic while the masses wait so long that most have little hope,

Cancer is a terrible thing. I became aware of that while visiting a terminal ward in 1962 when I was 11 years old., over 9 months. Here my wartime soldier father was dying. I heard the sound of prematurely aged working class men dying every week until it was my father’s turn, aged 41. Both of my parents had hard lives. My mother died in a squalid NHS hospital having contracted Cdifficile there. I see no reason why I should make Princess Kate a special case for concern. I know and have lectured and taught British and European history. Britain’s 17^th century merchant class rose up to dispose of tax grabbing religious maniac Charles I. The consequent republic was short lived. It ended with Oliver Cromwell’s death. The elite and new monarch had learned lessons in social control. They are like ivy clinging to an old tree, you can’t get rid of them.

I am not interested in the Princess or where her cancer was found. Fact is, the masses have no right to privacy and have to wait too long for care in a squalid NHS overwhelmed by legal and illegal migrant demand. The country deliberately does not train enough doctors, relies on migrant staff while the best of British flee abroad. Those that remain demand ever more money, especially since Churchill wannabe Boris Johnson inflated their already Zeppelin sized sense of self importance during Covid Lockdown, pressing the terrified Great British masses to clap them every night. It was yet another display of this country’s invisible Nazism, where Democracy is at best a process of voting in or out a new board of directors for U.K Plc, on the basis of which one will offer an even better set of illusions and opiates.

R J Cook

March 23^rd 2024

William and Kate ‘enormously touched’ by public support

By Daniela Relph, royal correspondent & Ali Abbas Ahmadi

BBC News

The Prince and Princess of Wales are “enormously touched by the kind messages” they have received following Catherine’s cancer diagnosis, a Kensington Palace spokesman has said.

Saturday’s statement also added they were “grateful” that the public understood their request for privacy.

Catherine revealed in a video message on Friday that she had begun treatment.

She received her diagnosis after tests carried out following abdominal surgery “found cancer had been present”.

A spokesperson for Kensington Palace said: “The Prince and Princess are both enormously touched by the kind messages from people here in the UK, across the Commonwealth and around the world in response to Her Royal Highness’ message.

“They are extremely moved by the public’s warmth and support and are grateful for the understanding of their request for privacy at this time.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68646314

March 22nd 2024

Desperate remedies The truth about antipsychotics Are side-effects being ignored? ANDREW SCULL 6 MINS

Who Are The Real Londoners ?

London Mayor Sadiq Khan sparked controversy when he responded to this London tourist promotion photograph with the comment “These are not real Londoners.” As someone with my roots in what used to be my real London in the 1950s, with most of my family there, where I have worked lived, ran for a London athletic club and studied as a post graduate at London University , I find Khan’s comment offensive and a disturbing sign of the times. R J Cook

London’s population boom

London’s population has surged to a new record high, driven by a sharp rise in migration and a shift away from the Covid-era “race for space.” According to research from the Centre for Cities, the capital has “almost certainly” surpassed its pre-pandemic peak of 10.1 million people, raising concerns about the strain on infrastructure and services.

During the Covid pandemic, thousands of Londoners sought more spacious accommodation and greenery outside the city, leading to a decline of 75,500 people between mid-2019 and mid-2021. However, this trend has now reversed, with migration fuelling the capital’s population growth.

In 2022 alone, 66,000 people moved to London, nearly reaching its pre-pandemic peak. With figures for 2023 yet to be published, it’s expected that the population has indeed exceeded its previous record. The report attributes much of this growth to fewer workers working from home and a significant increase in international migration.

Make no mistake: London’s population explosion is a direct consequence of uncontrolled mass immigration. The government’s promises to ‘take back control’ and reduce numbers to the ‘tens of thousands’ have proven to be nothing but empty rhetoric. Instead, we’re seeing net migration in the many hundreds of thousands, with visas dished out like confetti. Imagine,1.2 to 1.4 million long-term visas seems now to be the norm.

The impact on Londoners is clear: soaring house prices, strained infrastructure, and overwhelming pressure on essential services like schools and healthcare. Mass immigration is not just affecting our quality of life; it is also putting lives at risk by prolonging NHS waiting times.

Curiously, the Centre for Cities (rather good) report glossed over the contribution of migration to London’s population surge, focusing instead on internal migration patterns and proposed infrastructure solutions.

While infrastructure improvements are of course necessary, imposing an overall cap or perhaps a range of caps on categories of legal migration would offer a more immediate solution and help alleviate pressure on London’s strained resources.

In other news, the government’s initiative to cut costs by relocating asylum seekers to alternative accommodation has backfired dramatically. What was meant to be a cost-saving measure has turned into a growing financial burden for the taxpayer.

The National Audit Office’s latest report reveals shocking details about the government’s handling of this plan. Initially projected to save £94 million compared to housing asylum seekers in hotels, the four designated sites (RAF Scampton, RAF Wethersfield, Huddersfield, and the Bibi Stockholm) have instead become costly endeavours. The total bill now stands at a whopping £1.2 billion.

Despite significant investments totalling at least £230 million by the end of March, progress has been slow and inadequate. Only two out of the four planned sites are operational, housing a mere 900 individuals by January’s end.

The government’s mismanagement extends beyond financial missteps. The Home Office’s hasty approach resulted in a series of red flags raised by internal assessments. Large-scale accommodation projects were deemed unachievable, with procurement risks and unrealistic timetables exacerbating the challenges.

Despite initial cost estimates suggesting significant savings compared to hotel accommodation, the reality has proven otherwise. Revised assessments indicate inflated costs, with some sites exceeding initial projections by tens of millions of pounds and profound dissatisfaction within local communities. It has proved to be yet another debacle with taxpayers ultimately footing the bill.

At its core, the most straightforward solution to reducing taxpayer spending on housing illegal immigrants is removal. By returning individuals to their countries of origin (or to third-party safe countries like Rwanda), the financial burden associated with their accommodation would significantly diminish. Moreover, the prospect of speedy removal will serve as a deterrent for would-be Channel-crossers.

Deportation plays a crucial role in discouraging illegal immigration, safeguarding our borders and our society. The principal stumbling block to removing those who have come illegally is the legal framework we have put in place, which allows the challenging and stymieing of removals. The 1951 Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) are the international treaties that provide the grounds for allowing appeals against removal. However, the government could override the European Court of Human Rights if it chose to do so, were it not for Sir Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act 1998 that embeds the ECHR in UK law. We firmly believe that the legal framework for dealing with illegal immigration and asylum abuse requires revision. We could begin by repealing the HRA.

Migration Watch relies entirely on the generosity of our supporters who fund our work. If you would like to help us with our efforts, please click here to donate.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK

Lee Anderson, The Telegraph – The Rwanda Bill is a mere distraction from the real issue

“The Rwanda Bill is a distraction tactic, being used by the Prime Minister and this failing Government to divert the public’s attention away from the real issue of record high legal migration. The current numbers are changing the face of our country beyond all recognition and we at Reform have a plan to slash legal migration and stop the boats.”

We also liked:

Fraser Myers, Spiked – The anti-democratic arrogance of the House of Lords

MIGRATION WATCH IN THE MEDIA

Speaking to Martin Daubney on GB News, Executive Director Dr. Mike Jones discussed the population surge in London, fuelled by increased migration and a departure from the Covid-era trend of workers seeking more spacious living areas. The consequences for Londoners are evident: skyrocketing housing costs, strained infrastructure, and immense pressure on vital services such as education and healthcare:

In an article for the The Conservative Woman (TCW), Migration Watch Chairman Alp Mehmet delved into the government’s mishandling of both legal and illegal migration. Alp argued that the Labour party lacks a credible alternative and suggests that recent reforms by the Tory party will only have a marginal impact:

“Going back to the latest changes to the immigration rules, will they make a difference? Possibly a marginal difference, although we won’t know until after the election. Fact is, employers and universities will have control of who they bring in. Employers still won’t have to look locally first. There is still no limit to the number of workers or students who can come. Moreover, there will still be only cursory vetting of visa applicants and no interviews in the country of origin.”

Alp was also quoted in Breitbart discussing London’s population boom. He highlighted projections from the Office of National Statistics suggesting that with the country expected to add another 6.1 million foreigners by 2036, London’s population could exceed 12 million within the next 12 years:

“London’s population explosion is a direct result of mass and rapid immigration. The government’s promises to ‘take back control’ and reduce numbers have once again been shown to have been hollow. “While Mayor Sadiq Khan’s passion for migration both adds to the problems Londoners face with housing, health and transport and encourages more people to come. The crises we face in the sectors will not be solved without big cuts in immigration.”

Lastly, in an article for The Daily Express, Alp provided exclusive insights into the hollow nature of the pledge to ‘take back control’, a cornerstone of the Vote Leave campaign in 2016. He also criticised the pro-immigration agenda of London Mayor Sadiq Khan: “London’s population explosion is a direct result of mass and rapid immigration. “The Government’s promises to ‘take back control’ and reduce numbers have once again been shown to have been hollow.” He added: “While Mayor Sadiq Khan’s passion for migration both adds to the problems Londoners face with housing, health and transport and encourages more people to come. “The crises we face in the sectors will not be solved without big cuts in immigration.”

MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD

Legal migration has been skyrocketing, as has illegal immigration (the number of illegal Channel-crossers has passed last year’s number for the same period). The Conservative Party has broken its promises and misled the British public, while the Labour party has waffled on about illegal migration and largely ignored legal migration. Indeed, despite warnings and public opposition, the Conservatives have deliberately increased legal migration and made a pig’s ear of illegal migration policy. If the two main parties’ performance and proposals anger and frustrate you, as they do us, do please speak up. Contact your Member of Parliament or prospective parliamentary candidate and make your concerns are heard.

Sunak UK government oversees “catastrophic” teacher shortage and education funding crisis

Teacher numbers in the UK are showing no signs of improving as recruitment and retention of teachers continue to fall due to the pressures of the profession.

Read more

Our Quest for Freedom: Building

winter oak March 22 by Paul Cudenec[This is from my latest book Our Quest for Freedom and other essays]You don’t necessarily need to have a written plan before you start building something, but ideally you should have a general idea of what you are planning to do and what the end product should look like!Our building for a free future therefore necessarily starts with imagining it.By coming together to discuss this, by exchanging ideas, we are in fact creating a culture.Because this culture stands outside all the thinking of the current system, and bases its outlook on completely different, even opposite, principles, it is a counterculture.Fellow freedom fighter Crow Qu’appelle has called for “a strategy of cultural inversion (creating a counterculture by consciously rejecting the values of the dominant culture), exodus (exiting mainstream society), and ethnogenesis (turning a counterculture into a permanent culture)”.

From this, it is clear that a sense of purpose forms as much a part of this counterculture as it does of the individual who devotes his or her life to spirit, truth and freedom.It is a conscious rejection of current society – an “inversion” that is, in truth, merely the reversal of this society’s inversion of natural order.Our rejection has the conscious purpose of exiting this society and creating something real and long-standing outside its control.This kind of idea has been around for a long time of course, but I have noticed that it is one that has been seriously revived in the 2020s.There has been a reaction in the human soul against the grim future presented to us by the Covid-pretexted Great Reset, a strongly-felt yearning to live otherwise.In practical terms this means seeking a simple, self-sufficient life beyond the urban matrix of control.

We can all take immediate steps in that general direction – I thought some useful suggestions in this respect were made by a now-disappeared blog, At the Grassroots.It quoted Bill Mollison in pointing out: “To let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them.“We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves”.

It also quoted Jules Dervaes of urbanhomestead.org: “Growing food yourself has become the most radical of acts.“It is truly the only effective protest: one that can – and will – overturn the corporate powers that be.“By the process of directly working in harmony with nature, we do the one thing most essential to change the world – we change ourselves”.So the psychological change that we need in order to revolt goes hand in hand with a physical change, the embracing of the need for simplicity and self-sufficiency as the purposeful foundation of a counterculture that aims to cut itself free from the system.[Audio version]Our Quest for Freedom and other essays can be downloaded for free here or purchased here.

March 21st 2024

A Smug Political Consensus – revised March 22nd – by R J Cook

Britain’s smug, dull back slapping war mongering political consensus was traumatised the day George Galloway won the Rochdale by election. Rochdale has great historical significance in the evolution of the British Labour Movement because it was the birthplace of the Co-op movement. This was a working class subscribed collective to obtain and supply good wholesome food at affordable prices. It has now a bastion of hopelessness.

***Rt Hon George Galloway A Worthy Blast From The Past***. He mocked Parliament’s smug politically correct unthinking self righteous posturing quoting and then paraphrasing Rudyard Kipling’s famous nineteenth century line :”We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money too.” He correctly observed dramatically :”We haven’t got the ships. We haven’t got the men and we haven’t got the money.”

I have never seen a British politician so idealistically animated since the ‘us & them’ good old days of the pre Thatcher self seeking asset stripping revolution. Let’s hope that George will revive the spirit of those idealistic Rochdale Equitable Pioneers, otherwise known as the Co-op Movement back in 1844. Capital was provided by potential and then working class existing customers who received regular dividends for their share holding. However, by the 1970s, a management con trick stripped the by then vast Co-op national assets, replacing the dividends with trading stamps. Shareholders became the usual city spivs, so even the stamps fizzled out,

George Galloway is one of a rare breed of socialist idealists which is why slick New Labour kicked him out for his out of line attitude and speeches when Blair and Bush set fire to the Middle East. Galloway was right then and right now. So he is already in the Sunak & Starmer firing line.

These self righteous smug anti Russia war mongers were shown up today for what they represent in a House of Commons debate on the future of the British armed forces. There were frequent efforts to shout him down. Reminding the sparsely populated House of Commons male and female stuffed shirts, that he had never been a pacifist and had been a boy soldier, he asserted that Britain could not go on choosing to fight wars in a Rudyard Kipling fantasy world, wherever it liked, He ridiculed their revival of nineteenth century Jingoism. He quoted Kipling’s line :”We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men and we’ve got the money too. “Sarcastically, the off wall Scottish MP said, “ Mussolin had this problem going around the world threatening countries with Germany’s army. Britain cannot go around the world threatening countries with America’s army.”

The righteous gathering of cross party consensus overpaid elite politicians became very uppity having spent what seemed like hours reprising and praising Britain’s past glories and latest weapons. George just could not help telling the gathering of mainly rubber stampers, what they did not want to hear. He told them of Britain’s first Dreadnought class battleship and how it could have wiped out the entire French and Spanish fleet in no time at Trafalgar, rendering a massive arms race in the build up to Britain’s Imperial war on Germany. But the wise old man’s words were unwelcome and his warning fell on deaf ears.

The deaf ones, as in 1914 and 1938 just wanted to chastise him for taking his full 13 minutes and refusing to give way. They wanted to pump themselves up and demand defence spending be increased to 7% . There was no point the Rt Hon. George Galloway telling them the country could not afford these arms and troops when so much public infrastructure was collapsing. He mentioned talking to ex soldiers just out of jail, on thre streets, still traumatised and drug addicted with the prospect of more to come if we weren’t nuked first. He noted that the head of the arms select committee had misled the Parliament, covering for inadequacies with an army that could be easily accommodated in Villa Park stadium.

But the protected parliamentary species have an answer to that. It is called conscription. They talk of British ‘people’ not men, being ready to fight in the 1930s and these ‘people’ will be ready again. I am sure women will be doing something just as they did when they fled the Ukraine War.

Hopefully superficial women and greedy posturing delusional men will not get their way to World War Three. George Galloway offered a ray of hope when he horrified group thinking consensus MPs with his pronouncement that “Change is coming. Trump will be back in the Whitehouse. He doesn’t believe in this war. If the U.S withdraws, the U.K will have to increase its defence spending to7% of GDP to keep up.” He mocked fellow MPs for their Gilbert & Sullivan mentality. “Have these people who want this war seen the state of the NHS, our streets, public services, public transport and councils ? Who is going to do the fighting ?”

New Labour saw their future as female. Thatcher had wiped out the trade unions so they needed new underdogs breeding endless grievances for new votes. This lady is a perfect example, She followed George Galloway’s brilliant unscripted speech with the sarcastic comment of promising not to take a whole 13 minutes. This was just as well because at best she repeated what the others had said in between reading her script. She was dull, monotonous and boring which is perfect distraction for a public that doesn’t want to ask questions.

No doubt they will be handing out the white feathers to men not in uniform, as they did to my Uncle Arthur after he was badly wounded at Dunkirk. These people have no idea about war and what is coming to them. Men like Galloway are rare and from the pre Thatcher Blairite past. Starmer’s is a smarmer. His crack team will be busy working on a squeaky Labour, probably a young black female, replacement candidate for this years General Election. British politics prefers surface to substance. Elite mainstream media will also be muck raking and preparing smears, to get Galloway out of their way to war. There is also the matter of the Reform Party to be discredited as extremists.

R J Cook

March 21^st 2024

13:00 – JOAN SMITHWill the nurse who supported J.K. Rowling see justice? Amy Hamm was under investigation for praising the author

March 20th 2024

Rachel Reeves: Is this the worst economic inheritance since WW2?

Published

26 minutes ago

https://emp.bbc.co.uk/emp/SMPj/2.51.0/iframe.htmlMedia caption,

Rachel Reeves: economic situation is ‘a dire inheritance’

By Gerry Georgieva & Anthony Reuben

BBC Verify

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves claims that whichever party wins the election, it will inherit the worst set of economic circumstances since World War Two.

There are certainly problems facing the next government, but other governments in the last 80 years have also faced big economic challenges.

Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 at the time of an oil crisis and rapidly-rising prices and the coalition government of 2010 followed a global financial crisis.

Ms Reeves told the BBC that the current situation was “a dire inheritance” as she laid out the measures she was basing her claim upon.

We have had a look at the evidence for each of them.

Debt

Ms Reeves said: “If you look at debt as a share of our economy that’s the highest since 1951.”

Actually, the Office for National Statistics, which compiles the figures, says: “Net debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is currently at levels last seen in the early 1960s.”

Ethan Ilzetzki, from the London School of Economics, described the current level of debt as being “high but nowhere close to where it was in the 1950s”.

And on the overall claim about the worst conditions since World War Two, he said: “I struggle to find a metric that would make that statement correct”.

The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank said: “The next government is likely to face some of the most difficult economic and fiscal choices the UK has faced outside of pandemics, conflicts and financial crises.”

Taxation

The shadow chancellor said: “The tax burden is the highest for 70 years.”

The tax level, measured by how much of the country’s economic output (measured by GDP) is raised in tax revenues, is estimated to be just above 36% this year.

This is high historically. It has only been higher last year and in the first two years on record, 1948 and 1949, a time when the UK was recovering from the war and the NHS was founded.

Taxation is projected to rise to 37.1% in the next five years which would be the highest level on record.

Growth

When asked about her claim, Ms Reeves pointed out: “The economy is currently in recession.”

GDP has been relatively flat over the past two years and the UK went into recession because the economy shrank in the last two quarters of 2023.

But there have been deeper and longer ones since World War 2, including recessions during the mid-70s, early-80s and the 2008 Financial Crisis that resulted in shrinkages in the economy for two years in a row.

Change in GDP in the first six months of recessions suggests the highest drop was in 1980, followed by 2008, with the 2023 recession being the mildest one

While it is rare for a country to be in recession during the run-up to an election, if that happens it would not be the first time.

Both the 2010 and the 1992 elections, for example, happened right after years when the UK was in recession.

Stephen Millard, from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research think tank, pointed to the recession at the time of the February 1974 election in which the economy contracted 3.7% while inflation was over 10%.

“These numbers suggest to me that the incoming Labour government in 1974 inherited an economy in worse shape than currently,” he said.

Living Standards

“This will be the first Parliament on record where living standards have gone backwards not forwards,” the shadow chancellor said.

The change to living standards is best reflected in households’ real disposable income (RHDI) per person, which fell by 2.2% in 2022-23 – the biggest drop since records began in 1955.

It is projected to rise by 0.8% in 2023-24.

Nevertheless, living standards are obviously considerably better than they were in the 1940s, with current households’ disposable income more than four times higher than after World War Two.

Real household disposable income grew from £1,266 in Q1 1955 to £5,237 in Q3 2023

Other indicators

There are other indicators that the shadow chancellor could have looked at that show a different picture.

Inflation is at 3.4%, which is well above the 2% target, but much lower than some previous governments have had to deal with.

The rate of unemployment is at a relatively low level although there is concern about the number of people who have withdrawn from the labour market.

And the volume of retail sales is below pre-pandemic levels but is still higher than it was at any point prior to 2018.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

March 19th 2024

winter oak

Our Quest for Freedom: Preparing and Boycotting

winter oak March 15 by Paul Cudenec[This is from my latest book Our Quest for Freedom and other essays]PreparingModern life is designed to be congested and complicated.The ruling rip-off merchants have sold us so much surplus material on the basis of the “needs” they have manufactured that many people are quite lost.They do not think they could live without the devices and infrastructures built purely to disempower, exploit and control them.Ridding ourselves of these attachments is a key part of our preparation for the battle to come and the free world that it will deliver.The best way to fulfil all your needs is to reduce them to the bare minimum.Simplifying your life is hacking off one of the ropes that keeps you bound to the system.What do we really need in life? We need food, water, shelter, heat in winter.

We need each other – friendship, co-operation, culture, warmth and love.I would say that we also need meaning in our existence, in order to be fully human.But beyond that? Do we really need all their glittery junk, all the empty artifice of Guy Debord’s Spectacle, all the hypocritical gaudiness of Mike Driver’s Carousel?Or is it rather that they need us to need all of that, to keep our heads turned away from truth and spirit?All their industry – their economic growth and technological “progress” – is a prison in which they have trapped us.It is, at the same time, the physical process by which their usury becomes real, by which they gobble up our lives and our world to further expand the global cyst of their sustainable greed.Investment requires return.

Money is debt. Debt bears interest. On and on turn what William Blake called the “cogs tyrannic” of their dark satanic industrial-financial mills, grinding our children’s flesh into the pulp of their profit.If we can’t see beyond their world, if we can’t rediscover our real needs, if our imagined future is nothing but a reformed version of their future, then we will never escape their tyranny.If we try to build our own future using their tools, according to their designs, based on their assumptions, then we will simply build an alternative prison which they can easily come back and take over.Their world is the physical manifestation of their outlook, that negation of true meaning and value that stands in such stark contrast to the vision that we all cherish in our hearts.We will need to forget that evil world, shake ourselves free of its black spell.We start anew.

We start from the bottom. We imagine a world that corresponds to our inner notion of what is right and proper and natural and beautiful and then we work out together how that might come to be.BoycottingIn La Belle Verte, the remarkable 1996 film by Coline Serreau, visitors from another (green) planet explain to their Earthling friends that they exited their own industrial phase by means of a great boycotting of the system’s products.What happens if we refuse to work for the global mafia, refuse to spend their money, pay their bills?What happens if we turn our backs on their toxic medicines, their devious distractions, their little luxuries, their carefully cultivated habits and dependencies?What happens if we refuse to listen to them, acknowledge them, speak their language, play their game?What happens if we stop co-operating, believing, submitting, obeying – if we finally stop accepting the utterly unacceptable?[Audio version]Our Quest for Freedom and other essays can be downloaded for free here or purchased here.

The Take: What the manipulated Kate Middleton photo says about UK media

After news agencies pull a doctored photo, rumours abound over the Princess of Wales.

Where is Kate Middleton? Aside from a pair of paparazzi shots, the princess of Wales hasn’t been seen in public since Kensington Palace announced she was having surgery in January. A doctored photo released on Sunday only fuelled more rumours about her public absence. What does the public relations debacle say about the state of the royal family, and the media that covers it?

See More https://www.aljazeera.com/podcasts/2024/3/14/the-take-what-the-manipulated-kate-middleton-photo-says-about-uk-media

March 18th 2024

The cult of Land Rover Britain is now a chauffeur to the global elite

WESSIE DU TOIT

Met Police: Sir Stephen House faces no action over rape comments. A former deputy commissioner of the Met Police will not face disciplinary proceedings after he allegedly said the bulk of rape complaints were “regretful sex”, a police watchdog said

By Jess Warren & PA Media

BBC News

A former deputy commissioner of the Met Police will not face disciplinary proceedings after he allegedly said the bulk of rape complaints were “regretful sex”, a police watchdog said.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) investigated after Sir Stephen House was alleged to have made the comments during a meeting.

The watchdog found no indication he breached behavioural standards.

Sir Stephen denied the allegations against him.

“I bitterly regret that these allegations have helped to undermine public confidence in the commitment of the Metropolitan Police to support the victims of rape,” he said.

“I hope that the findings may help to reassure the public of the strength of that commitment.”

Academic Professor Betsy Stanko had accused the senior officer of making the comments during a New Scotland Yard meeting in January 2022.

She first made the allegations a year after the meeting during a television interview.

Sir Stephen denied the allegations and suggested that he had been misheard or there was a misunderstanding.

The IOPC said no minutes were kept of the meeting, and the one person in attendance who had kept notes had no record of the comments alleged to have been made.

It said investigators had to rely on the recollections of the people present more than a year later because of the lack of written documentation.

Comment I am no fan of the police as a proven institutionally corrupt organisation. However, they are the warped product of a warped society. Good people struggle to survive in the police workplace, not simply because they are not sick opportunists and liars – former Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick observed : “It wasn’t my homosexuality that caused me problems in the police. It was my honesty. “

I am not easily persuaded to believe the police, especially senior officers because I have too much evidence of their lies. However, firstly there is no evidence that this senior officer ever said that most rape was regretful sex. Secondly, a few years ago, the world famous prototype feminist Germaine Greer said exactly the same thing, consequently vanishing from the public eye. This is because feminists are fanatical about presenting all women as at risk of rape 24/ 7. It is a fundament of their feminist faith. There is a major political initiative to get more rape convictions simply on a woman’s word – ancient history no problem, as Donald Trump discovered. The U.K Police, politically correct judges and carefully chosen juries are expected to play their part or there will be hell to pay.

R J Cook

British Democracy Leads The World.

Paying illegals to move to Rwanda and a stab at cutting legal migration. Desperate acts?

Our government has, it seems, been contacting (by phone) asylum seekers whose asylum applications have been rejected to offer them £3,000 to move to Rwanda. They will be flown there on commercial flights and be supported while they are establishing themselves in Rwanda where they will be able to work.

The excellent Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, has accused the Prime Minister of “betrayal”, describing the policy as little more than “symbolic flights”.

This isn’t the first time such a scheme has been proposed. In fact, it’s a rerun of a New Labour buyout policy. In 2006, Tony McNulty, then Labour immigration minister, offered a £3,000 incentive for asylum seekers to leave Britain voluntarily. Interesting therefore that Stephen Kinnock, shadow immigration minister, described the new scheme as “a wheeze”, to be treated with scepticism.

There is further irony in recalling that Damian Green MP, the shadow immigration minister in 2006, who went on to be Theresa May’s first immigration minister, also expressed scepticism about the New Labour programme. He commented, “What is clearly driving it is that the Government has missed their target of removals for 2005… [t]hey must be very worried they are going to miss it again.”

So the Labour party, have renounced a policy they once championed, while the Conservatives have embraced a policy of which they were once rightfully sceptical. As Margaret Thatcher said at her last cabinet meeting, “it’s a funny old world.”

Our take on this? Besides it being another clear sign of desperation, our Executive Director, Mike Jones, put it rather well when he said on TalkTV, “This is just an exercise in public relations and optics. They want a photo of bums on seats, on a flight to Kigali, before the next general election. But it’s not going to solve the problem.”

One final comment on Labour’s position on illegal Channel crossings. They simply don’t have a credible alternative to Conservative policies. They propose to abandon the Rwanda scheme even if it were to prove successful, go after the gangs (this is already happening), speed up processing and negotiate a ‘returns’ agreement with the European Union. Perhaps they will also come up with more “safe routes” for asylum seekers? Such a package of measures will not discourage the boats. Numbers will likely shoot up.

The Safety of Rwanda Bill returns to the Commons on Monday, so we will undoubtedly come back to the small boats’ crisis.

Legal Migration
The risks to our security, the cost to the taxpayer and bogus asylum seekers all make illegal immigration newsworthy. It is of course important. We must take it extremely seriously, and we do.

However, Tom Pursglove, minister for legal migration and the border, made this statement in the Commons on Thursday (here). Mr. Pursglove explained that changes to the immigration system would mean that 300,000 dependants who were eligible to come to the UK last year can no longer do so. On top of this, salary thresholds for family visaswill first increase to £29,000 on 11 April 2024; to around £34,500 at an unspecified time later in 2024; and finally to around £38,700 “by early 2025”. Meanwhile, the 20% going-rate discount for jobs on the Shortage Occupation List will be removed.

There are other sensible, if belated, measures and we broadly welcome them. But these tighter measures should have been in place when the points-based system was introduced on 1 January 2021. The massive surge in net migration to three quarters of a million in 2022 was only too foreseeable and Migration Watch warned it would happen time again as far back as 2018 when Sir Sajid Javid, as Home Secretary, instigated his flaky White Paper consultation process. We say ‘flaky’ because well over 100 of those taking part (‘stakeholders’, as they were called) were mainly loose-control, high-immigration enthusiasts and activists. As far as we could make out at the time, Migration Watch were the only Cassandras in the room.

Fraser Nelson wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 29 February that “the post-Brexit immigration surge was an accident” and that the government was “blinded to what was going on when they began to treat faulty OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility] modelling as gospel”.

Jack Montgomery, who was editor of Breitbart in the years we are talking about, posted this message on social media:

“Fraser Nelson says the surge in immigration was “all by accident, not design.” Sadly, this is untrue; I reported four years ago on @MigrationWatch et al warning we would get this result, as the “Australian-style points-based” system has no cap. The Tories knew this would happen.”

He further posted:

“I actually have reporting in this vein going back to 2018, before the end of the Brexit transition, when Javid was still Home Secretary. The idea the consequences of the Tories’ post-Brexit immigration policy were unforeseen is absolutely, 100 per cent bogus.”

Going back to the latest changes to the immigration rules, will they make a difference? Possibly a marginal difference, although we won’t know until after the election. Fact is, employers and universities will have control of who they bring in. Employers still won’t have to look locally first. There is still no limit to the number of workers or students who can come. Moreover, there will still be only cursory vetting of visa applicants and no interviews in the country of origin.

Forgive us for repeating the following numbers but they are critically import and we mustn’t lose sight of them: The number of foreigners granted visas to live in the UK hit a record 1.4 million last year. ‘Net’ Migration(the difference between the number of immigrants and the number of emigrants) isnow about 700,000. Annual net migration of 600,000 means a population growth of 20m by 2046 (equal to about 18 Birminghams). Annual net migration 350,000 (what the Office for National Statistics thinks it will be from 2028) means population growth of 9m by 2046 (equal to about 8 Birminghams). The Office for National Statistics predicts that the British population will grow by 6.6 million by 2036. Shockingly, 6.1 million of this increase (92%) is attributed to immigration alone (that’s roughly equivalent to adding five Birminghams to the UK in just 12 years).

Migration Watch relies entirely on the generosity of our supporters who fund our work. If you would like to help us with our efforts, please click here to donate.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK

Madelaine Grant, The Telegraph – The great university racket is a national scandal
“Many provincial universities are opening dubious London campuses to help recruit these golden geese. Even supposedly first-rate institutions have been accused of lowering entry standards for foreign applicants. Such a reliance on a two-tier admissions system destroys any pretence at rigour and is a national scandal. This situation elicits dishonesty from all quarters. Some MPs champion university expansion for the short-term cash and employment their local institution brings (all subsidised by graduates and their eye-watering loan repayments).”

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Rwanda saga won’t be over even when law is passed

By Chris Mason

Political editor, BBC News

Ten votes are expected in the House of Commons later on the government’s plan to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda.

It is nearly two years since Boris Johnson first proposed the idea, to try to put people off attempting dangerous crossings of the English Channel in small boats.

The House of Lords has backed ten changes, or amendments, to the proposed new law.

The changes include allowing the courts to consider the safety of Rwanda and rewording the plans to allow legal challenges in cases where an individual feels they have been wrongly labelled an adult.

Government sources regard most if not all of the attempts to amend their plans as thinly disguised efforts to delay, disrupt or destroy them.

Conservative MPs are expected to overturn the Lords’ amendments in a series of votes in the Commons this evening.

The bill will then return to the House of Lords, where it is scheduled to be debated again on Wednesday.

If it returns there with all of its amendments rejected, I’m told around five or six further amendments will be attempted to be attached to it again.

But, as the bill reaches these final parliamentary stages, two things are likely.

Firstly, a greater number of Conservative peers will be encouraged to turn up to back the legislation.

And secondly, opponents, particularly the independent, so-called crossbench peers, will begin to lose appetite for maintaining their opposition, conscious they are in the unelected chamber.

So, as soon as Wednesday, the bill may complete its parliamentary stages and be ready to become the law of the land.

Or there may be another round of so-called “ping pong” between the Lords and the Commons.

Either way, the government’s Rwanda plan is likely to be law pretty soon.

So how long will it take after that before some asylum seekers are on a plane to Rwanda?

It won’t happen immediately.

Estimates vary from a few weeks to a month or more.

On Monday, Rishi Sunak said: “I am still committed to the timeline that I set out previously, which is we aim to get a flight off in the spring.”

That first flight departing will be a big symbolic moment.

The government will argue that despite everything thrown at the idea, they have pulled it off.

Most acknowledge privately it won’t be enough for them to win the general election, but it might tempt some to give the Conservatives another look.

Critics, not least Labour, will continue to argue it is a political vanity project that will barely do anything to tackle the problem, as the numbers likely to be sent will be very small.

And there may be ongoing legal challenges which could lead to some people coming back to the UK, even after they have been sent.

The saga of Rwanda trundles on.

Vital services or financial ruin? England’s town hall dilemma

Romford Greyhound Stadium — Image caption, Saturday night in Romford, in the London Borough of Havering

By Alison Holt

Social affairs editor

From bin collections and street lighting to child protection and elderly care, councils provide services we all use, but in England more and more are in danger of going bust. BBC Panorama has followed the struggles of one such authority and the people who rely on it.

On a damp Saturday night at the dogs in Romford, people are out to enjoy themselves.

As greyhounds tear round this 100-year-old track, cash is changing hands rapidly with punters eager to place their bets.

This is the London Borough of Havering, where the eastern edges of the capital make way for the county of Essex.

People move here for the green spaces and transport links, but scratch the surface and many are angry.

Their local council is in a fight to stop itself going bust.

“We’re paying for services, they’re not delivering,” says one man as he waits for the next race to start.

“It’s dire because if you’ve paid your council tax, then your bins should be taken out,” says another.

Over the past five months, BBC Panorama has followed Havering Council as it has struggled to balance its books and wrestled with decisions over which services to cut and which to protect.

This is a quiet crisis, but one that is being played out in town halls up and down England – shaping the quality of our daily lives.

The financial squeeze on town halls

Funding for councils across England is calculated on census information from 13 years ago – Havering has 10% more people living in the borough than in 2011
Havering says 70% of council spending goes on social care for adults and children – along with help for people who are homeless
Since legal changes in 2015, the number of young people in England eligible for Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) – part-funded by councils – has doubled to more than half a million
In 10 years, the amount spent per person on children’s services by town halls in England has risen from £120 to £212 (77%) – the equivalent adult social care spend is up from £252 to £372 (48%)

Sources: London Borough of Havering; DfE; County Councils Network/Pixel

Facing difficult facts

It’s November 2023 and Havering’s chief finance officer, Kathy Freeman, is meeting with councillors in one of the town hall’s wooden-panelled rooms.

They are discussing a budget deficit which Kathy says they are “nowhere close to being able to address in the immediate term”.

The council expects to have a £21m overspend on a budget of £630m this year. In the next financial year, it’s predicted there will be a £32.5m gap.

If Havering cannot plug that hole of more than £50m in its finances over the next 12 months, Kathy is the person who will have to issue what is known as a section 114 notice – council-speak for effectively declaring the council bankrupt.

Image caption, Havering’s chief finance officer Kathy Freeman has lived in the area most of her life

Eight English councils have declared themselves effectively bankrupt since 2018 – among the most recent has been the country’s largest authority, Birmingham.

Experts say that those authorities were not well managed, but they think it’s a different situation for the councils now struggling to balance the books.

In fact, one in five English councils now says that it is danger of going bankrupt.

It’s a crisis that cuts across political party lines. In Havering, councillors from the Havering Residents Association (HRA) form the majority.

As one of the borough’s most senior officials, Kathy is all too aware that cuts will have to be made. But she is also a local resident.

“I’ve lived here since I was seven years old, so I really do care about the impact it has,” she says.

Reducing the number of bin collections, dimming streetlights in the early hours, and increasing parking charges, are among the money saving plans being considered, along with a 4.99% rise in council tax – the maximum a council is normally allowed to impose.

At the meeting, with the numbers set out in front of him, council leader Ray Morgon, describes it as “the most challenging budget I’ve seen in the history of Havering Council”.

“The problem is many people think council tax is primarily spent on cleaning their streets, repairing their roads, providing libraries,” he says. “But it’s not.”

Harley’s bus

In Havering, 70% of the council’s spending goes on adults and children’s social care, along with help for people who are homeless.

One of the areas where demand has increased has been in services for children with special educational needs.

Havering has a legal duty to provide help for people like 17-year-old Harley. He had a brain tumour removed as a child, and he also has autism.

Harley on the bus — Image caption, “I just like being on the bus with my mates,” says Harley

The council has helped adapt the family home to make life easier and funds some of the expensive equipment he needs, such as hoists and his wheelchair.

It also supports Harley getting to and from college. Each morning a bus picks him up from home and takes him and other students to their school.

“The transport is huge because he wants to be as independent as he can, he’s going to college,” says his mother, Ila. “He needs to feel included and to be able to experience as much as he can, the same as everyone else can.”

Havering provides school transport for more than 420 children with special needs at a cost of £6.5m a year.

In its search for cuts, the council is considering reducing the number of buses. For some pupils they could be replaced by car-sharing, but decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis.

Harley is very clear about its importance. “I just like being on the bus with my mates. That’s my life now,” he says.

Under pressure

There is an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) in place for Harley. This is his key to getting support.

Since legal changes in 2015, the number of young people eligible for these plans in England has doubled to more than half a million, according to official data.

The growing demand for a wide range of children’s services is one of the reasons councils such as Havering are under such severe financial pressure.

The County Councils Network and Pixel Financial Management have shared new analysis of per-person spending on children’s services over the past decade with Panorama.

Paying More for Less: Councils in Crisis

Filmed over five months inside a council on the verge of bankruptcy, Panorama explores why many town halls across the UK are in financial crisis.

As the clock ticks down to decision day, Alison Holt discovers how spiralling care costs for children, the elderly and homeless people are threatening to push the council – and others across the UK – into the red.

Watch now on BBC iPlayer (UK Only) or on BBC One at 20:00 on Monday 18 March (20:30 in Wales)

They say in 2013/14 councils in England were spending an average of £120 per person, by 2023/24 that had risen to £212 – a 77% increase.

Spending on adult social care has risen from £252 to £372 per person in the same period – a 48% rise.

And families are under pressure. Calls to Havering’s child protection helpline have increased by 60% in the past four years.

There has also been an increase in the number of children taken into residential care by the council, and the costs have risen steeply.

“These are children with some complex behavioural issues or concerns around exploitation and their need for safety,” says Tara Geere, Havering’s newly appointed director of children’s services.

“In the last 12 months, the highest place that I’ve had to pay for was £28,000 per week. That’s in excess of £1m a year if that child was to stay there.”

Children’s services in the borough are overspent by £9m. In its ongoing search for savings, the council expects to close three of its five children’s centres, even though their focus on early help for families can prevent later problems.

Havering says that while demand for services has increased significantly, the money it gets from central government has reduced in real terms in the last decade.

As with all councils in England, the funds Havering receives are calculated on the number of people living in the area in 2011.

However, its population has now grown by 25,000 people – 10% – since then. It includes a big rise in the number of children – up 15%. That’s the equivalent of 216 extra school classes of 30.

Housing is another pressure point. More families are facing homelessness and turning to the council for help.

Jonelle’s story

Jonelle has spent seven months living in one hotel room with her three small children. They were evicted from their flat after their private landlord decided to sell the property.

She has lived in Havering all her life, but there are few places she says she can afford. She has viewed numerous houses, without any success.

“There would be queues of up to 20 people,” she says, “and they’d all say that people were offering six months’ worth of rent. It was so competitive.”

In the past year, Havering has housed more than 500 families in hotels. Five years ago, there were none.

Jonelle puts her children to bed — Image caption, Jonelle was housed in a hotel with her children for several months

Putting a family in a hotel costs the council about £24,000 a year more than housing them in a rented property. It is a situation that is not working for anyone.

Jonelle feels it has really affected her children.

“Every day is just a set of different challenges,” says Jonelle. “When I do buy food, I can’t buy a lot because there’s no fridge. I do feel very powerless. But I’m trying to keep strong, because it’s either this or being on the street.”

Last week the family was moved to a hostel, where they have a small kitchen. Jonelle says she has been told they could be there for 18 months.

In England, the number of requests for council help from people who are homeless has jumped by 12% in a year to 87,000.

New year, same problems

In January, the government announces some additional money for English councils, including £500m for adult and children’s services. In Havering, council officials expect that will mean they get £2m of this money – welcome news, but not enough to solve their financial problems.

They have asked the government for a loan of up to £54m.

In total, 19 councils in England have borrowed £2.5bn from central government this year.

The government says that local councils are “responsible for their own finances and setting council tax levels”, and points to the extra money it has given.

It also says it has told councils they should be “mindful of cost-of-living pressures while controlling any unnecessary or wasteful expenditures”.

Labour says it views local authority funding as a priority. It says it would change the current one-year financial settlements for councils to two years to increase their stability. It would also consult on a longer-term financial settlement.

The Liberal Democrats say they want to give councils more powers and increase their funding.

There is a blow for Havering’s children’s services in February. The regulator Ofsted, rates them as inadequate.

It says families needing help face too many delays, social workers have caseloads which are too high, management oversight is poor and there are staff shortages. Unusually, it also says more money needs to be put into delivering these important services.

The council apologises to the people of Havering saying children and families are waiting too long for help.

‘Kicking the can down the road’

In early March, hours before councillors are due to agree the budget for the year ahead, Havering is told it will get the government loan it needs.

Councillor Ray Morgon has to sign a letter before the close of business that day, agreeing to the terms.

Councillor Ray Morgon, leader of Havering Borough Council — Image caption, Council leader Ray Morgon: “Local government finance needs a complete reset”

It means not all the cuts will go ahead and it staves off effective bankruptcy, but it also saddles Havering with high debt repayments for the next 20 years.

“It’s relief on one hand,” he says, “but of course, it is only kicking the can down the road. And we’ll probably be in the same position next year.

“The whole system of local government finance needs a complete reset. It’s broken.”

March 17th 2024

Hospital ceiling caves in ‘above ICU patient’

The Princess Alexandra Hospital entrance — Image caption, The NHS Trust declared a major incident as a “precautionary measure”

Shariqua Ahmed

BBC News, Essex

Neve Gordon-Farleigh

BBC News, Cambridgeshire

Published17 March 2024

A hospital’s ceiling caved in above a patient in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), it was reported.

The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust, in Harlow, declared a major incident after medical equipment detached from its fitting and fell to the ground on Thursday.

Essex County Fire and Rescue Services said crews worked to make the scene safe.

The Sunday Times, external said the ceiling collapsed onto a patient on life-support. The trust said the patient was intubated and had not been harmed, according to the publication.

Following the incident, Sharon McNally, chief nurse and deputy chief executive at The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust, said: “We can confirm that an incident took place in our ICU on 14 March, where medical equipment detached from its fitting. No-one was harmed as a result of the incident.

“As a precautionary measure, we have declared a major incident as we have vacated our ICU while we fully assess and check the fittings for other medical equipment in the area.

“We are continuing to manage patients who require intensive care safely within our hospital and we are also grateful to our healthcare partners for their continued support. We are continuing our investigation of this incident to ensure patient safety.

“Our emergency department and wider hospital facilities remain open as usual.”

‘Sewage leak’

Last year the hospital faced building issues of a different kind.

Worsening sewage leak problems prompted calls for an urgent decision on funding to build a new hospital.

More than 40 leaks across the hospital estate were recorded in 2022 with around half classed as unsafe.

The Department for Health and Social Care said it was working with the trust on plans for a new hospital.

What is the situation at other hospitals?

The Sunday Times also reported, external that Meg Hillier, the chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, said on weekends a matron has to check with the property manager that the floor could take the additional weight of new patients.

In an interview with the BBC, Dame Hillier said on a recent trip to Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire the committee’s “jaws were really hitting the ground”.

“Rather shockingly the man responsible for reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete [Raac] issues is a tall man… [and] because of his height he couldn’t even go on the roof because of that weight.

“[Hinchingbrooke Hospital] has to look and assess every time they send someone up on the roof at how many tools they can carry.”

Despite praising the staff’s resilience, she said that having to assess patients on whether or not they can be admitted in this way “is not how people working tirelessly in our NHS are expected to work”.

Follow East of England news on Facebook, external, Instagram, external and X, external. Got a story? Email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk, external or WhatsApp us on 0800 169 1830

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