Responding to a Freedom of Information request, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) confirmed to this newspaper that Director General of Defence and Security Jonathan Allen attended US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s ‘Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism’ in person in Washington, D.C. on the 16th of July following an invitation from the US State Department.

This was no typical international security summit. Framing the issue in explicitly political terms, Rubio – standing alongside White House policy advisor Stephen Miller, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent – proposed a new global counter-terrorism doctrine targeting expansively defined left-wing “political terrorism,” urging allied governments to coordinate intelligence, law enforcement and financial powers against the emergent left-wing threat.

The meeting was accompanied by the announcement of a new visa policy, in which the State Department will target “far-left terrorist and other aligned groups”, for violent actions as well as “economic sabotage including against public and private property” – which could encompass certain recognised forms of protest.

The 'Ministerial' has been heavily criticised as an attempt to internationalise a law enforcement strategy already being pursued domestically, where the Trump administration has cast an extraordinarily broad range of political opponents and protest movements as potential security threats – and completely omitted any mention of rising far-right violence.

Britain sent a top security official with decades of experience spanning counter-terrorism, intelligence and national security. Allen’s attendance is, of course, not proof of UK compliance with Rubio’s expansive new doctrine – but it is emerging evidence of serious high-level engagement with it.

Allen previously served as the Foreign Office’s Director of National Security and, more recently, Director General for Defence and Intelligence. Earlier in his career, he worked in the Home Office’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, where he established and led the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), a controversial counter-extremism strategic communications operation associated with the Prevent programme.

Related reading: Trump’s Crackdown on Dissent Won’t Stop With Antifa

Thomas Renard, Director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), told Byline Times that Allen’s attendance can only be understood in the context of considerable European uncertainty and “unease” over the Trump administration’s new “politicised” direction.

US State Department officials had spent months touring Europe seeking support for the initiative, he said, leaving allied governments with an awkward diplomatic calculation. European counter-terrorism services recognise that violent far-left extremism warrants some attention, but Renard said that “no one that I’m aware of shares the perception of the United States that left-wing extremism has become the main threat” – certainly not in Europe.

Beyond concerns about stifling lawful opposition, “politicising counter-terrorism is the main risk of this whole circus,” Renard said. “If this politicisation reaches further into the actual daily work of European intelligence services – they will end up completely neglecting the far-right violent extremist threat and some other threats on the horizon.”

Neither the Foreign Office, Cabinet Office, nor Allen himself directly addressed this newspaper’s queries about the impact the meeting had on Britain’s security and counter-terror strategy going forward.

'Enemies of Civilisation'

From the day Donald Trump took office in January 2025, the executive branch has been sidestepping Congress to turn law enforcement and counter-terror infrastructure against political enemies – including the administration's many lawful dissenters. Rubio's Ministerial sought to bring in international allies (potentially including the UK) to help enforce this new framework globally against the "blind spot" of "left-wing terrorism."

Speaking in sweeping ideological tones, Rubio condemned all left-wing ideology as “a hatred for civilisation itself.” “It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.” The left, he said, has “an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built.”

Rubio cited a wide array of disparate cases that he implied fit the bill for the emergent terrorist threat he was talking about: George Floyd rioters, cross-border “Antifa militants,” transgender shooters, Luigi Mangione (who has pled guilty to the murder of health insurance CEO Bryan Thompson), Tyler Robinson (the alleged killer of Conservative influencer Charlie Kirk), and those who obstruct Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

There is no clear ideological or organisational link between these groups and individuals. The Trump administration has sought to frame 'Antifa,' for instance, as a singular, organised, leftist paramilitary operation – but security experts describe it as a decentralised assortment of individuals opposed to racism and authoritarianism. Data analysis from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) shows that Antifa "poses a relatively small threat in the United States, particularly compared to violent white supremacists."

Data from the United States more broadly shows that right-wing violence is far more prevalent than left-wing violence – and that state violence, particularly from ICE, is on the rise. Leftist and anarchist networks have carried out more attacks in Europe in recent years, though EuroPol found that they overwhelmingly targeted infrastructure and private property rather than human beings.

Speaking at the Ministerial, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller boasted that Trump had "taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognising left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism." He was referring to an executive memo signed in September 2025, known as NSPM-7.

In Miller's own words, it "directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.”

The memo’s broad definition of “domestic terrorism” encompasses labels including “anti-Americanism”, “anti-capitalism”, “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and opposition to “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

That framework has continued to expand into areas of ordinary political dissent. The administration has sought to draw pro-Palestine activists into its counter-terrorism dragnet, and opponents of the ongoing Iran War have faced accusations of effectively aligning themselves with a hostile foreign power.

Even the rising local backlash against AI infrastructure has now come under the national-security umbrella, with federal agencies circulating warnings about a new category of “anti-tech extremism” encompassing opposition to data centres, Flock surveillance cameras, and the tech industry more broadly.

Appeals to civil liberties by this array of alleged left-wing extremists, Miller told delegates at the State Department summit, “must fall on deaf ears,” because when a leftist claims their rights are being violated, governments must understand that “he is lying.”

This is America's new framework, a radical and ideological re-orientation of the national security counter-terrorism system. The question that remains – given America's enduring geopolitical dominance over European security – is the extent to which Britain and the continent will play along.

A Transatlantic Feedback Loop

On August 26, the Trump administration followed Britain’s lead and designated UK-based direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Announcing the move, the State Department explicitly linked it to commitments made at the July Ministerial.

Defending their original designation of PA, the UK Government argued that the group's actions – activists breaking into RAF Brize Norton and damaging two military aircraft they believed were related to ongoing military operations in Gaza – crossed the threshold into terrorism. Critics view this use of terror legislation as a dangerous escalation threatening civil liberties, with Home Office figures showing that 86% of Palestine Action-related arrests were for peaceful displays of support. The UK categorisation is currently up for appeal before the Supreme Court.

There is no evidence that Allen’s attendance had any connection to the State Department's new designation, nor that Palestine Action was a topic of discussion at the meeting. Further documents and meeting details requested in this newspaper’s original FOI request were withheld under national security and international relations exemptions.

What it shows, however, is that both the US and UK have been expanding the national-security architecture into contested areas of political activism well before this Ministerial took place. Both countries' terrorism designation powers broadened massively during the global War on Terror, and US and UK governments have both been accused by civil liberties groups of using those powers to stifle political perspectives.

Asked by Byline Times whether Britain shares Rubio’s assessment that counter-terrorism has a “blind spot” towards left-wing extremism, the Foreign Office did not answer directly. Instead, it pointed to the Government’s recently published Protecting What Matters counter-extremism strategy.

That strategy adopts a broad, non-statutory definition of extremism originally put forward by former Communities Secretary Michael Gove, encompassing those who “create a permissive environment” for others seeking to undermine liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights. The strategy proposes embedding this definition more deeply across government and policing, allowing authorities to identify and disrupt supposedly extremist activity even where it falls below the threshold of criminality.

Muslim advocacy groups have described it as "Prevent on steroids".

Britain's framework, then, is still not America's. It recognises the existence of far-right extremism, and – while it was accused of excessively targeting and surveilling Muslim communities – it does not have such an official and binding bias against the political left.

But with the Trump administration exerting tremendous pressure, Britain is continuing a historic tightrope walk – balancing between the existing areas of convergence while attempting to steer clear of an official political crackdown.

It's worth noting that other nations, including Claudia Sheinbaum’s Mexico, opted to boycott Rubio's summit entirely. “It was not prudent to attend,” the Mexican President remarked, adding that the meeting had a “predominantly political character” and that from her administration’s perspective, it was not a productive space to cooperate on genuine security issues. 

“Some people argue that, as with Mexico, Europeans could be confronting the United States a bit more on a lot of these positions, but at the moment that is obviously not the position that Europeans have been taking,” Renard told Byline Times.

Additional reporting by Caroline Orr Bueno

COR Research, which worked for the Brexit Party in 2019 and for Reform UK in 2024, has no Companies House entry, no social media presence, and ten key invoices are missing on the Electoral Commission website – something Reform UK has been criticised for by the elections watchdog.

The Commission’s own spending database records the supplier as an individual. The sole trader's only public presence is a single-page website carrying a logo, the line "The best vision is insight", and a contact form.

It gives no address, no named individual, and no description of what the business does. The domain was registered on 28 January 2019, three months before the first invoice. The payments were between May 2019 and July 2024.

Most of the spending – £529,160 of the £645,560 – was paid by the Brexit Party across the 2019 European and general elections, while £116,400 was paid in 2024, after the same party was renamed Reform UK.

Invoices filed with the Electoral Commission in 2024 list only a serviced office address near the Bank of England. Earlier invoices redact the address altogether.

The earliest invoices charge no VAT and state in print that none is payable. Analysis by this outlet of the Commission’s published spending records places the VAT registration window for the mysterious supplier roughly between 15 July and 25 August 2019. Every COR Research invoice in that period is blank on the Commission’s website.

The record for a £15,360 payment of 25 August 2019 — the invoice that would settle the question — is an empty document.

No Trace in the Industry

Two polling industry figures this outlet spoke to had no information about the firm. COR Research is not registered with the British Polling Council, the Market Research Society or ESOMAR. The last invoice in July 2024 – just before the General Election – was for “Final Four Seat Target Polling.” Polling on that scale would normally require a substantial fieldwork team, according to polling experts this outlet spoke to.

Lord (Mark) Pack, a Lib Dem peer who runs The Week in Polls Substack, told this outlet: “Reform are doing themselves no favours with the lack of transparency over the campaign spending. Transparency rules are a fundamental part of how we protect our democracy from malign influences such as foreign states and billionaires such as Elon Musk. They could, and should, do better.”

On the Commission’s published figures, COR Research’s total billing crossed £85,000 – the threshold at which VAT registration becomes compulsory – in late August 2019, at almost exactly the point the recorded amounts begin to be consistent with VAT being charged. On that analysis, registration appears to have been made when it fell due rather than late.

However, despite that £36,000 invoice charging £6,000 of VAT, it states at the bottom: “By virtue of paragraph 15 of Schedule 1 and paragraph 9 of Schedule 3 to the Value Added Tax Act 1994, no VAT is payable. Business name registration is voluntary in the United Kingdom. No business name has been registered.” Accountants this outlet spoke to say it makes little sense, though it may be boilerplate text which was never removed after registration.

Dr Sam Power, a leading expert in political financing, electoral regulation and corruption at the University of Bristol, told Byline Times the situation "does seem odd."

"Political parties using businesses with rather opaque names which sound like they've come straight out of an Apprentice task (for services we know little about) is nothing new, but usually with a little bit of digging one can find out more."

Not only was this not the case with COR Research, "the sheer amount that is spent on [the organisation]" struck him.

Dr Power and colleagues conducted an audit of invoices from the 2019 election in 2022 and ranked COR as commanding the second highest total spend from Reform. Reform spent close to £1 in every £10 they spent in 2019 on the mysterious firm.

"Usually, a company commanding this amount of money from a party is either a) a multinational everyone has heard of [like] Google or Facebook, or b) a consultancy/campaign firm run by former party campaigners [like] Hanbury strategy.

"In some senses the whole point of doing this kind of work is to put yourself in the shop window so that you can secure further business for other clients and at other elections. So, if nothing else, there being no wider information about the company is rather bizarre business practice," Dr Power added.

The academic believes that researchers and journalists "ought to pay just as close attention to what the interests of [parties'] suppliers are, and the way in which they might shape political outcomes, as we do people like Christopher Harborne," the source of Nigel Farage's undeclared £5m 'gift' in 2024.

Related reading: Raft of Senior Reform Councillors Fail to Declare Interests

Watchdog's Findings

In response to a Freedom of Information request, seen by this outlet, the Electoral Commission said Reform’s spending return “was investigated for a failure to deliver a complete campaign expenditure return for the 2019 UK Parliamentary General Election regarding missing invoices.”

“Offences were found, but it was not proportionate or in the public interest to propose sanctions.”

The Electoral Commission’s published list of investigations records, under April 2022 to March 2023, shows Reform was investigated for failure to deliver a complete campaign expenditure return for the 2019 UK Parliamentary General Election over missing invoices, together with a separate issue of late payment of claims. The watchdog said the number and value of the missing invoices and late payments were “minor.”

However, the ten missing invoices, nearly all covering July–September 2019, are still not published. The unpublished COR payments amount to £80,920. Another record, marked as spending of £5,760 for COR Research on the Electoral Commission database, shows an invoice for an apparently unrelated branding firm.

The EC stated that ‘there is no VAT number displayed on any COR Research invoices’, though a COR invoice published on the Commission's own website — for £34,800 of internal polling and message testing, dated 24 September 2019 — carries a 'VAT Number' field with a redaction box beside it. If the Brexit Party and Reform were not VAT-registered, there was no obligation for a VAT number to be listed on the invoices.

In response to the findings of this story, a spokesperson for the Electoral Commission said: "Parties are required by law to provide an invoice or receipt for each reported payment over £200. Where invoices are missing from a return, we engage with the party to obtain the outstanding information and to ensure the reporting requirements are met.

"This engagement can take place both before and after the statutory deadline. The published record includes a placeholder where no invoice was available, and the register reflects the documentation provided to us."

The watchdog's spokesperson added that where requirements are not met and parties do not provide invoices, the Electoral Commission considers the matter in line with its Enforcement Policy.

"We only take enforcement action, including using investigatory powers and sanctions, where we are satisfied that it is necessary and proportionate to do so."

The elections body would not release further information on the "detailed considerations that form part of any investigations."

Related reading: Gold Firm That Employs Nigel Farage Predicts Unrest and Violence Under a Reform Government

A Pattern

Lloyd Hatton MP (South Dorset), member of the APPG on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, told Byline Times: "A ghost pollster, missing invoices, and £645,000 of unanswered questions. This is exactly the kind of dirty money loophole that gives politics a bad name. If Reform can't tell us who they're paying or why the paperwork keeps disappearing, that's not an accident — it's a warning sign. As such, the landmark elections bill [Representation of the People Bill], currently before Parliament, could not be more timely."

The Labour Government appears to have committed to standardising accounting and spending returns for parties following the Rycroft review into foreign interference. Dr Sam Power believes it will "make it much easier [to] catch this kind of non-compliance in real time."

"It is also beyond welcome that the spending categories that parties report under are likely going to be updated to reflect modern campaign practices, as it stands they are spectacularly uninformative...The number of blank or uninformative invoices is hugely problematic."

Dr Power and colleagues estimated that at the 2019 general election about 14% of total party spending (about £6.5m) couldn't be reliably categorised. "That is a huge transparency black hole that small changes can prevent. Enforcement is only a small part of the story though," he said.

Empowering the Electoral Commission to update and reshape their political finance online database is also key for anti-corruption efforts. Developments in AI mean that information about election spending can feasibly "be released much sooner after an election is completed as opposed to, as was the case in 2024, over a year after the event," Dr Power adds.

The revelation follows on from Byline Times’ recent investigation into firms with links to party insiders via their directors. As previously uncovered, Reform spent £440,000 on marketing and canvassing work with a series of firms run by donors, party activists, and a former party chairman.

Among them was Touchpoint Strategy, which had never filed any accounts, and was incorporated three months before Reform paid it over £72,000 for market research work. One of the firm’s directors stood as a local Reform candidate, and the company had received a compulsory strike-off notice in February 2026, though this was later suspended.

Byline Times has also documented seven firms which collectively donated £485,000 to Reform while on the brink of being dissolved, struck off, or in otherwise poor financial standing.

Reform UK did not respond to a request for comment.

Update 10:30pm 28 August: An earlier version of this article stated that twelve COR Research invoices totalling £125,880 were missing from the Electoral Commission's website. The confirmed final figure is ten invoices, totalling £80,920, being blank, while a further payment of £5,760 appears on the Commission's site with an invoice from a different supplier attached. The article has been amended. (Note from Josiah: 'The error is mine. Mea culpa.')

Do you have any more information about this story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

That means you can now install a solar panel kit and plug it straight into your mains socket, to reduce your bills and reliance on the grid. It’s undeniably good news.

However, much of the reporting has missed out very crucial pieces of information.

I will try not to rain on any parades, because today is a step forward. But consumers need to have the right information to avoid being taken for a ride.

First, some background. The plans, largely copying Germany where balcony solar has been a huge success, could save households up to £110 a year on their bills through “clean, homegrown power” the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero says.

Each plug-in solar kit produces up to 800W of power. The Government estimates it’s enough to provide up to 20% of an average home’s electricity use. It’s probably easier to see it as comfortably covering your ‘baseload’ energy usage. A typical fridge, television, Wi-Fi router, laptop, phone charger and so on.

What has changed today is that you no longer need sign-off from an electrician to install the systems, and the planning rules have changed meaning they constitute ‘permitted development’ and reducing the chance of fights with your local council. (Fights with neighbours aren’t dealt with by the legislation).

So the benefits. No installation cost, less energy taken from the grid, lower costs, renewable power at home. Good timing ahead of the 4% energy price cap increase too.

Ministers say the legal changes follow rigorous, independent safety testing, covering all key electrical elements, which shows that compliant panels are safe and compatible with UK wiring. Officials say the UK safety specification is more stringent than that of Germany, where around half a million new devices were plugged in last year.

But the key is in the word ‘compliant’. Almost none of the coverage directs people to see what devices are actually compliant that are for sale in Britain (not Northern Ireland, it’s not permitted there yet).

We’ve had a look. At time of writing, just seven – seven – kits can be sold legally in Britain today, to plug-in without an electrician’s approval. Officials have not denied this. It’s no wonder the Government appears slightly coy about pointing people to the official dashboard monitoring this stuff (ENA Connect). It tells you if products meet the new ‘Plug-in Solar Device Interim Product Specification’.

Every retailer – and there are many – that fails to make clear whether their devices are compliant for installation without an electrician is failing the public.

If you buy any other kit, it will need sign-off from an electrician to be compliant. So that’s seven permitted devices, from just one company. More products are expected to be signed off over the next week, I’m told, but at present a firm called UKSOL has the monopoly on compliant kits.

Competition is not there yet (at least not legally). Therefore, prices will remain high.

Or rather, prices for compliant kits will remain high. I’ve seen countless testimonies on forums and social media in recent weeks from people simply buying their own panels and microinverters (the bit that connects the solar panels to your electrical circuit) and installing them themselves.

You can do this for much cheaper than the all-in-one kits – roughly £330 vs £600 – but without the all-clear from an electrician, it wouldn’t be compliant with the new regulations. Something home insurers will no doubt be watching closely.

Officials have also confirmed to Byline Times that people need to notify their local grid within 28 days after installing a plug-in solar system, so the network operators know how much power is flowing around, and how demand might change. Again, that is nowhere in the official announcement or the media coverage about the changes. (There is though, as of this afternoon, an easy website to register your solar kit and notify the grid operator.)

We received a briefing today from a renewable energy advisory firm, which should know better, which failed to include any of these basic details.

Like, for instance, what renters’ rights are. Plug-in solar is often sold as a boon for renters. But there is nothing in the legislation ensuring that tenants have a right to install it. Hostile or skittish landlords and management agents can (and often will) say no. Permission is needed if you’re a leaseholder or a renter, and it can be denied.

Plug-in systems must be capped at 800W going into your property. Your panels can exceed that, but the microinverter must ensure it doesn’t go above that. Of course, you can find thousands of microinverters above that limit, being sold in the UK, which contain no reference to this.

Batteries are largely a no-go. You can’t have a home battery hooked up to your plug-in system unless an electrician signs it off. There are expectations this could change next year, but right now, the rules are strict.

Related reading: Britain’s Solar Revolution Is Here and We Should Be Shouting It From the Rooftops

The Planning Rules Explained

Little of the coverage mentions that planning rules do still exist, and we’ve pulled them from the actual legislation. Skip this section if it's too in the weeds for you.

The table below covers England – Wales and Scotland are set to have their own rules, but for now the likely position is that they will fall back on existing regulations on permitted development rights for solar, which weren't drafted with plug-in solar in mind.

There are two different planning classes for plug-in solar now in England.

Class A covers equipment on the building or a building in its curtilage (associated structures like sheds). Class B covers stand-alone equipment in the garden. Different rules apply.

Class A — on the house

Protrusion limits:

Not allowed under permitted development rights (i.e. without planning permission) under the rules in England:

• Panels on listed buildings — any solar PV on the dwellinghouse or a building in its curtilage
• In a conservation area or World Heritage Site: panels on a wall, balcony or ‘roof enclosure’ that fronts a highway. A ‘roof enclosure’ is defined to include balustrades, railings and parapets.
• Panels on any wooden wall, balcony or enclosure, or on any timber-clad part of the exterior

So no putting plug-in solar set-ups on your wooden shed, without speaking to the council first.

Class B — stand-alone in the garden

Here are the height limits in England, measured from ground level, with the lowest applicable limit being the one you need to pay attention to:

Again, no panels allowed on any wooden: fence, gate, wall or other means of enclosure.

And even where free-standing solar is permitted, if you’re in a conservation area and the set-up is “nearer to a bounding highway than the house”, you have to check with your council whether prior approval is needed.

Rules are stricter if you’re in a World Heritage Site or it’s a listed building. Get advice from the council if you’re in a conservation area, listed building or a World Heritage Site (like Bath, Saltaire, or the Lake District). (If you’re in a World Heritage Site, garden-mounted systems are almost always not classed as permitted development — anything within 5 metres of a boundary is excluded.) You can read the full planning regs here, if you’re so inclined.

Related reading: From Steel Nationalisation to Plug-In Solar: Keir Starmer’s Final Acts in Government

Gaps in Official Guidance

The Government announcement points people to the Energy Savings Trust’s checklist when installing plug-in solar. Respectfully to them, it’s clear as mud. It says: “Don’t buy plug-in solar panels before getting relevant permissions.” There is no detail whatsoever on when ‘relevant permissions’ might be needed.

Perhaps most bafflingly for a guide promoted by the Government, it also says not to install panels on wooden fences “unless you get advice from a professional to ensure that it’s safe”.

The new regulations are very clear. Plug-in solar on a wooden fence, gate, wall or other means of enclosure is not permitted development at all. In other words, it’s banned without council permission. No professional advice, however good, can get around that.

Finally, you’re only allowed one plug-in solar device per property. So you can’t have one system on your shed and another on your garden wall. The cap is 800W per household.

All this information is pretty crucial and should be explained to people. We have buried ourselves in secondary legislation to find it out.

Many people will not know about all these rules, and simply install non-compliant (and arguably less safe) systems, or end up with angry letters from their freeholders and landlords.

The Government may have decided to roll this out and make all that clear later. They may have the calculation that it is simply better to get this done to help with the cost of living, and handle teething-issues further down the road. There are certainly trade-offs involved here.

In the meantime, buyer beware. May the solar revolution continue. Safely.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

This outlet has found a large number of firms owned by Reform councillors which have, until now, been obscured from the view of voters and council officers. Kent County Council has been led by Reform since May 2025, winning 57 seats. It has since seen a spate of defections, expulsions and suspensions from the party, and is down to 47.

Three councillors amended their transparency filings within 48 hours of Byline Times raising missing or improperly registered companies that the governing-party politicians owned. A fourth, the council's deputy leader, updated his on Wednesday 26 August.

In total, Byline Times identified potential errors and missing company ownership information in the registers of at least nine Reform councillors in Kent. The county council is the largest in the country, representing around 1.6 million people.

Deputy Leader Cllr Brian Collins's register recorded "None" on his entry for 'securities' (which includes shares) for fourteen months, despite owning half of a local kennel, Colldale Airedale & Terriers Ltd. His wife Caroline owns the other half. The business's website describes the associated Haven Boarding Kennels as owned by "Brian & Caroline Collins" and as "a real family business".

Section 30(3) of the Localism Act is clear that the financial interests of spouses and partners must be declared by councillors. The rules exist to provide transparency over potential conflicts, for example where spouses own firms the council works with – or is in dispute with.

Before updating his register, Cllr Collins told us the council "is aware of the companies in which I have an interest, which I have declared", adding that "advice has previously been given to me as to how I manage this" – a separate issue to registering an interest for public scrutiny. He said he would "pick up further with the Monitoring Officer and make any required updates".

His register was amended at 9 am on 26 August to declare both holdings and to correct the company's name, which had been given incorrectly as "Colldale Airedale & Welsh Terriers LTD". He did not answer questions about why the entries had been missing, or what advice he had previously received.

Cllr Beverley Fordham, Cabinet Member for Education and Skills, held a shareholding in a Kent-registered company from before her election that went undeclared for fifteen months. She disclosed her ownership of Fortax Ltd, formerly BB Payroll Services Ltd, herself after being contacted by this outlet, though it formed no part of our enquiry. She signed an application to strike the company off on 19 August, the day before declaring it, and the day we contacted her.

Cllr Fordham said the securities section of her register "was completed incorrectly", calling it "a genuine administrative error on my part", and that she contacted the Monitoring Officer for advice and updated the register.

On Fortax, she said she "only became aware of the omission during a review of my declarations", adding: "It was an oversight, and there was no intention to conceal the interest." The dormant company had been considered as a vehicle for tax services, she said, but she had concluded she lacked the capacity to pursue it. The decision to strike it off "was not prompted by your enquiry," she said.

Reform Cllr Mark Mulvihill is Deputy Cabinet Member for Environment, Coastal Regeneration and Public Health. He is a director of 'P Wave Medical Ltd', which appeared nowhere on his register of interests, despite being Kent-registered and active. He did declare a separate firm, Wantsum Medical Group Limited, in full.

P Wave Medical's legally required confirmation statement has been overdue since August 2023, and its accounts since August 2022. Cllr Mulvihill's cabinet post covers public health, meaning he interacts with many medical firms. He also sits on the council's Pension Fund Committee, helping oversee a multi-billion-pound fund, while a director of companies whose statutory accounts are up to five years overdue.

Six of his firms have previously been dissolved without ever filing a confirmation statement – Wantsum Ambulance Service, Property's Abroad, Wantsum Events, Wantsum Radio, The Wantsum Group, and P Wave Medical Academy. He is an ambulance clinician employed by London Ambulance Service. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Cllr Diane Morton was cabinet member for social care until May this year. She amended her declaration after this outlet noted that her firm 'RJM Civil Engineering' and the size of her holding were missing from the 'securities' section of her register. Her shareholding was registered with Companies House on 23 June 2026, six days after her register was published. Asked if she had notified the council, she said: "Yes, I have notified the relevant officer within KCC."

Her register, published 17 June 2026, also declared she was a "Director of DMD (Gravesham)", thirteen months after she had in fact resigned as a director. That entry was deleted entirely from the amended register published shortly after we made inquiries. Cllr Morton told us she remains a "franchisee" of the community interest company, which provides transport in Kent. That is listed nowhere on her updated form. It is not clear what, if anything, she earns from the role. She did not respond to follow-up questions.

Related reading: Gold Firm That Employs Nigel Farage Predicts Unrest and Violence Under a Reform Government

Contradictory Filings

Cllr David Wimble, Cabinet Member for Economic Development and Special Projects, amended his register after Byline Times raised a litany of potential errors and missing information.

He had also failed to declare that he is a director and shareholder of The Looker Newspaper Ltd (800 of 1,000 shares), Feel Great Radio Ltd (all 1,000 shares) and Marsh Media Limited (all 500 shares), all registered in the KCC area.

Cllr Wimble says Marsh Media Ltd was incorporated into The Looker Newspaper Ltd – but it remains a live firm on Companies House, of which he is owner and director. His Kent Model Exchange Ltd was incorporated on 18 March 2026 and declared on 20 August 2026: roughly five months, against a 28-day legal duty.

The Looker describes itself as the only free newspaper covering Romney Marsh, Hythe, and Sandgate, all areas under the council's remit. It regularly publishes articles by Cllr Wimble, according to local outlet Kent Current.

However, even Cllr Wimble's amended register now contradicts his own Companies House filings – it records a 10% shareholding in Radiowaves Media Ltd. Companies House records him as owning 75% or more, and he is the sole officer. Both figures cannot be true.

His amended register still records "None" against the 'securities' section, while listing four shareholdings, three of them over 80%, in Kent-registered companies in the voluntary declarations section of the same form.

He told us his declaration was completed at the time of his election "under the guidance of the relevant Member Services officer at Kent County Council", and was "correct at the time it was submitted". He added: "None of my businesses has any dealings with Kent County Council or, to my knowledge, any other local authority. My understanding was therefore that there was no further legal requirement for me to declare interests beyond those I had already disclosed." He also said: "I have listed the companies which I own or in which I have a significant shareholding."

Cllr Wimble said his declaration "would next be reviewed in May, at which point I would naturally update any information where necessary". He amended it four days after our approach.

He also criticised the local citizen journalism outlet ShepwayVox, which has previously reported on discrepancies in his register and whose reporting he had left uncorrected for thirteen months. He claimed the site had "over a period of approximately 16 years, published material about me which I consider to be false". ShepwayVox says it has existed for 11 years. He asked that material originating from it be "independently verified against primary sources before being treated as fact".

None of Byline Times' reporting came from ShepwayVox.

Reform's Cllr Peter Osborne held 50 of the 100 shares in Associated Vehicle Solutions Ltd, which traded as Brenzett Car Sales, and which does not appear to have been declared on his register. Public profiles listed the firm as trading in Romney Marsh, which is firmly under KCC's authority and therefore needs to be declared. The company was dissolved on 7 April 2026, about eleven months after his election. Cllr Osborne is Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Related reading: Reform’s First 100 Days in Norfolk: ‘Flag Fights, Resignations, Broken Promises’

What The Rules Require

Under the Localism Act, councillors must ensure their registers are up to date and accurate, and update them within 28 days of any change. KCC's Code of Conduct, paragraph 21.60, requires written notification to the Monitoring Officer within 28 days of becoming aware of "any new Disclosable Pecuniary Interest or change to any interest already registered". The Code of Conduct adds that "it is entirely your responsibility to comply with the provisions of this Code", appearing to undercut Cllr Wimble's reliance on Member Services advice. Other sections make clear that spouses' relevant interests must be declared.

Until now, Kent County Council appears to have checked none of these registers for accuracy. The discrepancies came from the council's own published documents set against Companies House, and were corrected, in some cases, only after we asked. Kent Police say pecuniary interest breaches under the Localism Act are for council Monitoring Officers in the first instance. Byline Times' extensive reporting on the subject has found that this is frequently flouted, with apparent impunity.

A KCC spokesperson said: "It is the responsibility of individual Members to ensure that their declarations of interest are up to date and accurate. Additionally KCC, as with all local authorities, participate[s] with the National Fraud Initiative which requires the submission of payroll data that includes elected Members, matched against Companies House and KCC's creditor data."

If this is the case, it is unclear why several senior councillors had missing or incorrect entries, discovered using Companies House and public information by Byline Times.

The spokesperson said training on the Code of Conduct "was provided for all KCC Members…shortly following their respective elections", and that complaints are not recorded by political group. The authority would not comment on whether it had made, or considered making, any referral to the police under s.34 of the Localism Act.

Most startlingly, the council suggested there are no sanctions for failing to maintain a correct and up-to-date declaration: "There are no specific sanctions for [breaching] this. Advice is provided by the Monitoring Officer as may be required." Asked if it would review all members' registers, the spokesperson said: "Advice has been given to all Members. It remains a Member's responsibility to keep the form updated if their circumstances change."

Related reading: Wine, Vapes And ‘Woke Mental Health’ Jibes: Leaked Emails Expose Reform Council Meltdown

Calls For Probe

Phil Brickell, MP for Bolton West and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, said: "The British public has every right to expect elected officials, whether that's the Prime Minister or their local parish councillor, to be open and honest about personal interests. Without this kind of basic disclosure, voters can't accurately judge whether their politicians are using their privileged powers in the public interest or for their own corrupt personal benefit."

He added: "These allegations are extremely troubling. They must now be investigated thoroughly and, if any rules have indeed been broken, the individuals in question must be held to account."

Tom Brake, director of Unlock Democracy, said: "Elected officials are required by law to disclose accurate and complete details of their business interests. This serves a simple purpose: flagging any potential conflicts of interest that might arise in relation to their council's financial decisions. This transparency helps guarantee that local residents' money is spent wisely."

Cary Mitchell, Executive Director of Strategy at Best for Britain, which campaigns to keep the radical right out of power, added: “With Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, under investigation in Parliament for failing to properly declare his finances, the party clearly has questions to answer about whether it has allowed a culture of disrespect for voters and democratic values in its ranks and whether its representatives, at all levels, are upholding the high ethical standards voters expect.”

Kent's Reform leader, Cllr Linden Kemkaran, and the national party did not respond to requests for comment.

This article has been updated to note that The Looker remains an active publication.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

How is that going?

In May, Reform was polling nationally at nearly 28%, with Labour a distant second at just under 20%. The results were inevitably dreadful for the governing party. Labour's county councillors were reduced from nine to one, while Reform swept in with 40 seats – mostly at the expense of the Conservatives.

I was one of those Labour winners, elected for the Hethersett division by three votes. It was the first time Labour had ever won this seat. Never let it be said that your vote doesn’t count.

I entered the chamber in late May as the only Labour representative on the most right-wing Norfolk County Council I can remember.

As our first full council meeting got underway, it became clear that a few of the higher-ups in Reform wanted to make a splash.

My first motion called on the new administration to protect Norfolk’s social safety net: the voluntary organisations, community services, and early interventions that stop vulnerable people from falling into crisis and often save taxpayers considerably more further down the line.

It voted it down.

Other opposition motions followed, including proposals to support households reliant on heating oil. Reform and its Restore Britain allies voted those down too, scrapped three political assistant posts, refused to extend the meeting to finish debating the remaining business, and all went home to sit in a dark room.

“They don’t like change, do they?” came the response from the Reform Deputy Leader here.

But change certainly came.

Reform turned its attention to the important work of deciding which flags were permitted to fly over county hall. It withdrew the Local Member Highways Fund, taking away the pot councillors used to get small but important local schemes over the line.

It was as if somebody had let Reform loose in a rage room but accidentally handed it the council’s standing orders and social media passwords instead of a sledgehammer.

Then chief executive Tom McCabe resigned.

A month into Reform’s administration, one of the most senior and experienced people in Norfolk local government had somewhere, anywhere, else to be.

Then, one of Reform’s own councillors resigned after just 25 days, citing ill health, and triggering a by-election costing taxpayers approximately £20,000.

Reform lost it to the Conservatives. Its 40 councillors became 39.

Electoral momentum, it turns out, has a reverse gear.

Intimidation and Reorganisation

Some of what followed was considerably less funny.

On 18 June, Labour MP Terry Jermy left a Thetford Town Council meeting and was pursued through the town by a jeering group of approximately 30 protestors angry about plans to place asylum seekers in MOD Barnham. They followed him for hundreds of metres in the same week as the 10th anniversary of the murder of Jo Cox.

I called on Reform’s council leader to condemn mob rule and reassert the council’s commitment to free democratic debate and its opposition to political intimidation. My comments were dismissed as “unworthy”.

Next came local government reorganisation.

The previous Conservative administration had already started threatening legal action against the Government’s plans. Reform inherited that fight and enthusiastically picked up the baton, launching a judicial review at taxpayers’ expense.

Related reading: Gold Firm That Employs Nigel Farage Predicts Unrest and Violence Under a Reform Government

There is something magnificently Reform about this.

A party awash nationally with money donated by the super-rich gets elected promising taxpayers value for money, picks a political fight with a Labour Government, and sends the legal bill to the residents of Norfolk.

Perhaps its “laser focus on value for money” meant its own rather than yours or mine. And let’s not pretend this is some dry dispute about the finer points of local government law.

Politically, the attraction is obvious. Reform gets to posture as Norfolk’s plucky defender against Westminster while somebody else pays for the lawyers.

The case for local government reorganisation is straightforward: maintaining eight separate councils across Norfolk means duplicated political structures, management, and back-office functions.

Reform’s answer is not a different model. It wants the whole thing scrapped and the existing two-tier system preserved.

Having been elected promising efficiency and value for money, its position is now to defend a structure in which local government remains split between a county council and seven district councils.

When the Government refused to abandon reorganisation, Reform reached for the lawyers. Because accepting that somebody else’s proposal might have merit appears to be particularly difficult.

Its politics seems increasingly built around a simple proposition: if someone else suggested it, it must be bad.

Then came the appointment of a new £215,000-a-year chief executive.

At a full council meeting called specifically to decide whether Dennis Bacon was the right person to run Norfolk County Council, I raised concerns not only about the recruitment process, but about whether his professional record demonstrated that he was the right person to lead an organisation responsible for thousands of staff, billions of pounds, and some of our most critical public services.

Those seemed fairly pertinent questions given that this was, quite literally, the meeting at which we were being asked to decide whether to give him the job. Those concerns were “unworthy” too.

Related reading: Wine, Vapes And ‘Woke Mental Health’ Jibes: Leaked Emails Expose Reform Council Meltdown

Apparently questioning the preferred candidate’s suitability at a meeting convened specifically to determine his suitability was beyond the pale.

Opposition councillors also questioned a recruitment process in which the final interview lasted around an hour and included no psychometric testing. I spent longer deciding which toaster to buy in John Lewis.

The Reform leadership was adamant it had found the right person. Perhaps conviction is enough. But conviction is not a recruitment process.

Where are the Results?

This brings us back to the promise made 100 days ago: a “laser focus on value for money” and “the best possible services”. Where is it?

Where is the bold programme to improve Norfolk’s bus network?

Where is the breakthrough on the endless roadworks and utility companies repeatedly digging up the same roads?

Where is the transformation of adult social care?

Where are the roads being repaired faster, the villages being better connected or the bureaucracy being stripped away?

Most importantly, where are the tangible improvements residents were promised they would actually notice?

Because those are the things that matter.

Residents do not wake up in the morning excited about the flag protocol at county hall. They do not care about Reform’s latest fight with Westminster. They do not measure the quality of their council by how many angry Facebook posts it can produce before breakfast.

Perhaps that is what has struck me most about Reform’s first 100 days. There has been no shortage of politics. No shortage of fights with Westminster, rows about flags, attacks on net zero, judicial reviews, or angry posts about whatever happens to be exercising the national Reform movement that morning.

Some of Norfolk’s Reform councillors have even found time to head off to Nigel Farage's constituency of Clacton; and to Liz Truss’ Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in London, where delegates could listen to discussions on "Taking on the British Deep State” and “Fighting the Lefty Blob”.

Meanwhile, back in Norfolk, the potholes remain stubbornly resistant to culture war rhetoric. The buses have similarly failed to respond to Nigel Farage. And utility companies, disappointingly, do not appear to coordinate their roadworks any better because somebody changed the flag outside county hall.

That is the thing about local government. Eventually, you have to govern locally.

I have seen considerably more enthusiasm from parts of this administration for the national grievance machine than I have for the difficult, tedious work of improving things in their own divisions.

Because residents do not care how angry their county councillor is about “the blob”.

They care whether the bus turns up. Whether the pothole gets fixed. Whether a child with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) actually receives the support they have been promised. Whether their elderly parent can get decent care. Whether a dangerous junction gets made safer. That is local government.

Reform promised Norfolk a “laser focus on value for money” and “the best possible services”. One hundred days in, we have had flags, resignations, a lost by-election, legal fights, and plenty of national political theatre.

For an administration promising a laser focus on Norfolk, an awful lot of the laser seems to be pointing somewhere else.

Cllr Ben Weston is a Labour county councillor representing Hethersett in Norfolk.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

It goes on: “If a Reform government pushes through its agenda, resistance from those ideologically opposed to that direction could severely undermine national stability.”

If this doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement for Nigel Farage’s party, it’s not meant to be, of course. It’s a promotional video to sell gold bullion. Gold-movers often benefit from fears over the state of the economy and the wider nation.

What makes this promotional material different, however, is that the firm’s most high-profile ambassador is none other than Clacton MP Nigel Farage.

The video from Direct Bullion, titled ‘50-Year Crisis Repeating?’, is riddled with grim warnings about the state of British politics. And it puts some of the blame – or perhaps, for the firm, opportunity – at the door of the right-wing party.

Nigel Farage is a brand ambassador for Direct Bullion, and has declared three payments from the company totalling £415,500. £189,300 landed on 5 December 2024, £91,200 on 6 January 2025, and £135,000 on 31 October 2025.

These latest revelations suggest that Farage has been paid more than £400,000 by a company whose marketing appears to treat the political division he is associated with – and the expected disorder that would result if he became Prime Minister – as a commercial opportunity to exploit.

The video asks if “sterling can survive what’s coming.”

Amid a jaunty musical backdrop, it goes on: “Nigel Farage has said that if elected, his government would withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights and build migrant detention centres in areas that vote Green. When asked about the possibility of violent protest from left-wing opponents, Farage appeared undeterred.”

The narrator adds: “The risk of political unrest would become far more serious” under Reform’s plans – similar to the “poll tax riots of 1990”.

In the minds of gold-sellers Direct Bullion, the scenario is a reason for viewers to buy physical gold.

The Unanswered Questions

After being alerted to the video, Byline Times put some questions to Farage and Reform UK:

• Does Nigel Farage remain a paid brand ambassador for Direct Bullion, and has he received or been promised any further payments beyond the £415,500 declared?
• Are any of his payments linked to Direct Bullion’s sales or performance?
• Was he aware of the 12 May video before publication, and did he or his representatives see or approve it?
• Why does he accept payment from a firm whose promotional material tells customers that his own party taking power would raise the risk of civil unrest – and does he think that is appropriate for a serving MP and party leader?
• Has he asked Direct Bullion to withdraw or amend the video? If not, why not?
• How does he reconcile more than £400,000 in outside earnings, and the time this role requires, with his duty to give priority to his constituents in Clacton?
• Does Reform UK have any other financial relationship with Direct Bullion or its directors?

We have not received a response.

The December 2024 payment of £189,300 from Direct Bullion to Farage was for a "maximum" of four hours’ work per month, according to the MP. "It also includes payment for work undertaken prior to my election,” he stated in his register of interests.

When £91,200 came in just a few weeks later, on 6 January 2025, Farage said again it was for four hours’ work per month. Then when £135,000 landed in October 2025, Farage stated it was for four hours’ work per month “over the course of a three-month period”. The filings suggest he is paid more than £10,000 an hour by the company.

Labour MP and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, Phil Brickell MP, told Byline Times: “It should come as no surprise that Farage is taking thousands of pounds from a company trying to cash in on betting against Britain. Once again, it is clear that he is more interested in feathering his own nest than fixing our problems.”

He called on the Reform leader to “distance himself from these doom-mongers and return his ‘earnings’.”

The Bolton West MP is calling for a ban on second jobs for MPs “to restore trust in politics as a force for good”.

Tim Picton, senior advocacy advisor at the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption, told this outlet it “beggars belief” that a company would pay an MP hundreds of thousands of pounds and then “seek to leverage the potential future social unrest their leadership of the country would bring in order to sell its product”.

“The big question here is whether it is at all appropriate for individual MPs to be allowed to leverage their public profile to help a company sell its goods.”

He added: “There has been real inertia from ministers and parliament on tackling second jobs and the kinds of serious risks that they bring. The government must now get on with bringing forward legislation that ensures MPs put constituents first and ends the lucrative side hustles”.

Related reading: Wine, Vapes And ‘Woke Mental Health’ Jibes: Leaked Emails Expose Reform Council Meltdown

The video itself ignores the fact that the 10-year gilt yield – the cost of long-term borrowing for the Government – fluctuates and has risen significantly recently due to the Iran war energy shock. In June, it dipped to around 4.7% and it had been as low as 4.25% in February. There is no widespread expectation among economists of a collapse in Britain’s currency.

The March spike in borrowing costs was driven by the external energy shock and the repricing of Bank of England rate expectations, not Reform’s rise or fears of political violence. Many economies have seen government borrowing costs rise amid the energy crisis.

One story from The Telegraph provides the only real evidence citation in the video.

What the video does not point out is that Reform's support in the polls has been on a downward trajectory, going from an average of 31% last September to around 26% when it was published. Reform has since dropped further, with Labour now level-pegging around 24%.

Direct Bullion was contacted for comment.

Full Transcript

The following is a full transcript of the video, titled ‘50-Year Crisis Repeating?’, published on 12 May 2026:

“Britain is entering dangerous territory, politically and financially, and your savings could be caught in the fallout unless you prepare properly. The division and unrest affecting British society are far from over, and until those deeper fractures begin to heal, the country still has a long way to go. That also means the economy may have further to fall before it finally reaches the bottom.

“So, we have to seriously consider whether sterling, having already lost most of its value since Britain effectively left the last gold standard, can survive what may still be coming.

“And in that environment, ordinary people are being forced to put themselves back on their own personal gold standard because relying on sterling alone is no longer enough.

“Last week’s [May] local elections showed a major shift toward Reform, alongside smaller gains for the Green Party. Further evidence that two-party politics in Britain is breaking [music] down.

“Reform leader Nigel Farage has said that if elected, his government would withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights and build migrant detention centres in areas that vote green.

“When asked about the possibility of violent protest from left-wing opponents, Farage appeared undeterred. If Reform were to win a large enough majority to implement those policies, the risk of political unrest would become far more serious.

“Many will remember the poll tax riots of 1990. And if a Reform government pushes through its agenda, resistance from those ideologically opposed to that direction could severely undermine national stability.

Related reading: Reform Councils Accused of Seeking to Hide LGBT+ Books in Libraries as Unions Fight to Keep Pride on the Shelves

“The problem for us all is that Britain’s finances are already balanced on a knife edge. As reported by The Telegraph, the country could once again be heading toward an International Monetary Fund bailout just 50 years after the last one. And if that happens, it could mean austerity.

“The IMF does not provide financial support without strict economic conditions attached, and austerity imposed from outside the country could trigger widespread political unrest, further damaging Britain’s standing in international markets.

“If 5% yields on 10-year gilt already look alarming from the government’s perspective, then conditions could become far worse before they improve. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine Britain getting through the next few years without a rise in political violence.

“The markets will likely not respond well to that, and the economic cost could be severe. In a period of political instability, financial uncertainty, and weakening currencies, physical gold becomes our insurance policy."

It ends with a call for viewers to subscribe so they can learn about gold and "how you can protect your wealth in these uncertain times.”

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

HM: Asad, last August you became the first person of colour to lead Friends of the Earth, as its chief executive, in its more than 50-year history. You’ve previously had roles at Amnesty International UK and War on Want. Fighting injustice is clearly threaded through your journey. How did your background and upbringing shape you as a political activist?

AR: I was born in Pakistan and my parents came to the UK as economic migrants. They ended up in the north-west of England, where a lot of people from our part of Pakistan, in the Punjab, were originally brought over to work in the factories and mills. We lived in Burnley, which was one of the places that was experiencing rapid deindustrialisation. It was a very white, working-class area, and I was one of the first non-white kids in my primary school. People often ask: how did you get political? And I say: I had no choice, because of the context and reality of racist violence I grew up in. 

The National Front used to sell newspapers in my secondary school. Every day, there would be some form of racist abuse, some physical attack. People would pour beer on the Asian women. They would use dogs to terrorise them when their husbands went to work. The house we lived in was firebombed and constantly scrawled with swastikas. And the police weren’t doing anything. In school, it was basically paki-bashing. The break-time bell rang and all the non-white kids would pretty much barricade themselves into one classroom because, if you were down the corridors or in the playground, you would be attacked. Teachers were too scared to do anything.

Racists forced me to learn more about black history because of the stuff they’d say to us. You’d get beaten up, but it would spur me on. What was going on on television screens would play out on the streets and at school. When Roots first aired [in 1977], they’d say to us: ‘say your name is Kunta Kinte’. But then, when in the show [the character’s grandson is] given Chicken George as his slave name, the kids would say to us: ‘say your name is Chicken George’ – and we’d say, ‘no, it’s Kunte Kinte’. Apart from that there was Mind Your Language, Love Thy Neighbour, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – popular, casual racism was on TV screens. 

At 14 or 15, I organised a school strike against racist violence – we would go to school but not go in. It was a necessity just to organise. We moved to another area which had slightly more non-white people and an Asian community, because it was safer, but that area was close to the Burnley football ground – so on Saturdays, you’d get football fans come through doing a bit of paki-bashing, smashing a few windows. Every morning, all the kids going to school would get together – we’d put the younger kids in the middle, and then we’d head off – if you went by yourself, or one or two, you’d definitely be attacked. So it was organising without thinking it was organising – just for safety. 

Being seven, eight, nine was different, because you felt totally powerless. An example of how random the violence could be… when I was in primary school, I was stood at the bus stop and somebody walked by with a cricket bat and smashed me right in the face. As a kid, you’re thinking, ‘I’m not going to go home because my parents will be more worried, I’ll go to school’. We didn’t want to tell our parents too much of what was happening because they then felt even more powerless. But when you got to 12 and 13, and a few more families moved in and they had kids who were 15 or 16, we suddenly became a bit more able to stand up for ourselves.

I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists, a youth wing controlled at that time by the Trotskyist Militants, and they were a whole bunch of lefties who were like ‘ooh, a non-white person and lefty who wants to talk about these things’. So I found an outlet. Then one day, an Indian nurse, who had come to my house to see my mum, showed me a [leaflet for the] Asian Youth Movement around the Bradford 12 [a group of young Asian and black men, many of whom were members of the United Black Youth League, who were charged in 1981 with terrorism offences after making petrol bombs to defend against racist attacks. In 1982, they were acquitted by an all-white jury on the grounds of lawful self-defence]. So I set up an Asian Youth Movement in Burnley. 

That period was super-political. You’d turn on the TV and there was Boys from the Blackstuff, it was Thatcher, three million unemployed, riots on the streets in Brixton and Handsworth, Israel was bombing Beirut, Soweto… It was hard not to be political and draw these threads.

How do you think things have changed? The moment we’re in now feels very alienating for a lot of people. While people of colour might not face the same level of racist attacks in the streets or discrimination that is as overt, at the same time, the story of progress when it comes to racial justice in Britain is complicated…

When I was growing up and you’d talk to people in the Indian Workers’ Association or those kinds of organisations – people who came to the UK in the 1950s and 60s – they told a really horrific story of what it was like, and it was very different. My parents would constantly say ‘it doesn’t matter how long, but one day, they’ll kick us out of their country – like we kicked them out of our country. The only thing they can’t take from you is your education’. It’s the immigrant story, right? Your education is your way out of poverty. We were the first generation who said: we’re not like our parents – we’re not dreaming about going back home, we’re here.

My parents’ generation was deeply religious and had a sense of ‘everyone’s in our community’. Yes, there was all this horrific stuff, but there was also a quiet sense of solidarity amongst lots of people. I remember during the 1984 miners’ strike, my mum – who didn’t speak English – watched the television and turned to me and said, pointing at Arthur Scargill, ‘he’s a good man, he cares about ordinary people, they’re like us, it’s really bad what’s happening to them. Go and knock on the aunties’ doors and say I said we’ve got to give food for the miners’. So, even people who didn’t have English as a language had a political language. My parents would talk about themselves as being black – asi kaala haan. 

I think the biggest change between then and now is that there were far more structures and institutions that allowed you to shape your values and stories – stronger trade unions, community organisations. That has hollowed-out. So people felt more agency. Even though we were being defeated, like in the miners’ strike, you still felt that this was a fight; and you still felt that you could fight and win things. We mobilised. We ran protests. In 1986, I spent my weekends going to Wapping from university to stand on the picket line with striking print workers. The first time I went, there were BNP members there and I was told ‘hey pakis we don’t want you’. But, by the end, the far-right had been driven off – and the print workers were saying this was about community and that they now understood what we [the black and Asian community] meant when we spoke about police violence. 

So it always felt like there were real moments and bonds of solidarity. And much more of a sense of possibility. Places of community – they were being built and you never felt alone; you always felt like it was a collective experience, not that you were dealing with this in isolation. There was a subtle ‘black person’s nod’, which used to speak so much. We would see each other.

And that collective identity, that shared struggle which people from different minority backgrounds and working-class communities, found together beyond race has also fragmented…

It was deliberately engineered. 

When I finished university, I was lucky enough to get a job at the Newham Monitoring Project in east London, an area that was at the heart of radical black institution-building. It came out of the murder in East Ham of Akhtar Ali Baig, who was stabbed to death for a five-pound bet on ‘who could kill the first paki’. There were huge protests. On the back of countless other racist murders and incidents – Altab Ali was murdered in Whitechapel – people in the community at that point said: we need something from ourselves. And so the Newham Monitoring Project became this incredible organisation – you could ring up at any point in the day or night and we’d have volunteers come to you. [Formed in 1980, the Project provided legal support, advocacy, and casework, as well as emergency helplines to minority communities dealing with racist violence or state misconduct]. It was building pressure and framing the state as having an obligation to protect us, which it was failing to do – at the same time, police were the instigators of violence against us. 

[The establishment] were really fearful of this ‘lair’ of radical black organising. So, where we were fighting for an anti-racist society, they started talking about ‘multiculturalism’ – that we have to live and just be tolerant of each other. But, for us, the most important thing that mattered was the state’s ability to use violence against us and the economic and structural questions. They started saying ‘what we need is Afro-Carribean organisations and Asian organisations and then Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian organisations. And then, if you’re Muslim, Gujarati and Pakistani Muslim centres’... The community was constantly being fragmented, while we were trying to consciously weave it together to create a positive collective identity. We used to run campaigns together and talk about our common experience: you had to forge blackness politically, it was not a given. 

These were identities that were formed through struggle – and they were deconstructed in a very deliberate way. 

Extremism always evolves. It seems paradoxical, but also logical, that at the same time that racism moved away from street violence such as the National Front, and conversations about multiculturalism and diversity went national, elements seen as fringe within the far-right 30 years ago have now entered the mainstream – both as a backlash and a continuation of what has always been there under the surface?

I’ve got an old National Front leaflet somewhere with a call for demands – and many of them are now being put forward as mainstream policy. 

I remember Jean-Marie Le Pen said [in 2007 after finishing fourth in the French Presidential Election], ‘we have won the battle of ideas: the nation and patriotism, immigration, and insecurity have been put at the heart of this campaign by my adversaries’. In the 1970s and 80s, there was the threat of far-right violence on the streets from the National Front. From the 1990s to the 2000s, it was replaced by the British National Party, which didn’t have quite the same extent but was very violent in key areas such as east and south-east London – it used a ‘rights for whites’ campaign in a 1993 by-election in Tower Hamlets. But, at the same time, the state was saying that we now welcome and celebrate being a multicultural society (they didn’t say we should celebrate being an anti-racist society).

Now, for the first time, we’ve got them not just on the streets, not just in Parliament, but also controlling the public square – in a way that the far-right have never been able to do. I know to some this will sound like an analogy too far, but when people ask ‘is this like the 1970s?’, I say: no, it’s more like the 1930s, where you’ve got a large part of the establishment willing to go along with far-right ideas. 

When you see the ideas of displacement, the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, remigration – these [used to be seen as ] nutty far-right, and now they are mainstream. You won’t destroy your career if you say these things – you can be on television every other day and say these things; you can have a television station like GB News and radio stations all saying these things, because it’s all valid now. And in that way, fundamentally, the terrain and the landscape is very different now.

I’ve long explored how ‘identity’ is complex and how we all have more ‘multiplicity’ within ourselves even if we don’t think about it like that. But most political and media discussion of identity is reductive and binary, feeding ‘identity politics’ and ‘culture wars’. One example is how those on the right are increasingly making the distinction between ‘Britishness’ as a civic national identity that everyone – including people of colour who have ‘assimilated’ – can have; and ‘Englishness’ as a distinct ethnonationalist identity that only people with ancestors born here carry. 

The past year has also seen ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ putting St George’s and Union flags on display in towns across England – a campaign with ties to far-right networks. Yet, this summer’s World Cup reflected modern England in the way only our national team can do. How do you feel about where we are at with Englishness?

The Englishness debate sits alongside interesting other debates about the nation we’re in. Scottish nationalism, for example, went through a sense of Scotland and Scottishness being an ethnicity to now saying it’s about ‘are you in this place?’ That was a big debate I remember having with the SNP at the time – between the old SNP traditionalists and the new, who said: if your feet are on the soils of Scotland, you are Scottish. We used to remark how interesting it was that you’d get Asians in Scotland in kilts and turbans singing the Scottish anthem in a way that was more inclusive than English nationalism had been. 

It’s hard for some generations. It’s hard for me personally because I grew up always being told ‘you are not English, this flag isn’t yours – “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack”’. But now, I also see my nephews in England tops, cheering for England, saying: that’s my team – ‘look, this team is full of black and brown people, this is our team’. It is strange, because I have no problem holding the Saltire or the Welsh flag, yet I do have a problem holding the cross of St George because of what it meant to me throughout my life. But I also understand that that’s not now the experience of young black people who see in that flag something different; who see Bukayo Saka and Jude Bellingham. That’s great. 

If someone says to me ‘where are you from?’ I say Burnley – I still have a strong identity with the town even though the experience for me was horrific. But I can live with that. But, if someone says ‘you’re English’, I say: no, I’m not. But I’m also not willing to cede the ground that Englishness is purely about a form of ethnonationalism. 

I think what the left or progressives have failed to do is understand how much place matters to people in their identity. We talk often in very universal ways, which is right, but for a lot of people whose lives are within a 40-minute radius of where they were born, and all their friends and family live there and they work there, that’s their world – that is the lens through which they look at absolutely everything. Sometimes, what we talk about doesn’t land with them and the far-right can talk to them about place. And often in a way that’s nostalgic – about what the flag represents, which is contested. 

For me, it’s about: how do we capture that moment at [the opening ceremony of the London 2012] Olympics and say: that’s our nationalism? There is so much about solidarity [in our shared history] that is more than the flag. I’m not interested in the flag – I’m interested in the story of who we are, however we have come together. 

Race, class, inequality: this is the political lens you have brought to your role leading Friends of the Earth. Why is this intersectional approach to the climate crisis so key – at a time when the right is framing net zero as antithetical to the very real struggles people are dealing with in their everyday lives?

I used to say many years ago that I’m a reluctant environmentalist, right? Because I didn’t come to environmentalism through the environment. I came to it because originally I was very active in the anti-globalisation movement [an international network of organisations fighting for global justice and highlighting the impact of neoliberal policies]. As somebody who had come through radical black and progressive politics, I was an internationalist and suddenly in these spaces I met all these movements from all around the world and they would talk about what was happening to them. For them, the climate crisis was a systemic problem… There was a weaving together [of issues] and the anti-globalisation movement tried very hard to bring together the labour, human rights, and the environment movements, finding commonalities and connections… 

We were always thinking intersectional. Our lives are not experienced in this way that the mainstream left or progressives think of as – poverty ‘over here’ and environment ‘over there’. So through that experience, I came across the issue of climate. And I would be like: how is it that this thing which everyone says is potentially going to devastate the world, which is going to unravel everything we’ve ever fought for, [is being talked about] as being for your grandchildren [to deal with]? And they’re talking about it with a polar bear on an iceberg? And they’re talking about it in such ways that it’s about a plastic bag and a fucking plastic straw? To me, it just made no sense at all. Here’s this picture of catastrophe and you’ve totally depoliticised it. 

Through that experience, I came across Friends of the Earth, and it’s not like other environmental groups – it talks about environmental justice. We recently released new data which showed people of colour and those on lower incomes are twice as likely to live in neighbourhoods most at risk of flooding, extreme heat, noise pollution, and lack of green space. Twenty years ago, this mapping told the same story – the idea that there are ‘sacrifice people’ and ‘sacrifice zones’. So it’s never simply about what [climate injustice] is doing in the rest of the world, but also what is being done here; that some people’s lives are just not seen as worth it. That was my experience of growing up in Burnley – there were whole groups of people’s lives [where the state said] ‘you don’t count’. 

So when I came to work in climate, I said, no: we’ve got to stop talking about carbon and start talking about justice. This is a structural question. It’s not just a matter of temperature levels. We need to ask not just why is it happening, but why can’t [those in power] stop it? Because they are calculating that the people dying of it are the people they think are expendable. 

Many years ago, I remember being in a room full of NGOs and government – I couldn’t tell the difference between who was in government and who was in the NGOs – and everybody was white and middle-class and talking in a very similar way. It was all alien to me. I challenged the UK government on its position from a Global South perspective, and somebody apologised to the minister in front of me. I was told ‘the problem is Asad, you’re not being pragmatic’ – [what they meant was] that I should not ask for what was needed, but was feasibly possible in the politics of what the government was comfortable with. And I said ‘yeah, you know why I’m not being pragmatic? Because I’m not white and middle-class. If you were the ones dying you wouldn’t be pragmatic, you’d be saying “let me tell you the truth”’... [There was a sense of] ‘don’t push the government too much, let’s recognise what it can do, and then celebrate that as a great win’. 

But I said: that’s not enough because you know what is going to happen. The climate justice movement was calling for a global average temperature rise of below 1°C above pre-industrial levels, whereas the mainstream was calling for 2°C – because economists had worked out that the cost of keeping temperatures below 1°C would be too much of a disruption to the economy, whereas with 2°C they could accommodate those costs – as most of that damage would be done in the Global South and not to European and Western economies. They were literally sacrificing lots of people for economic interests. And I would ask: how are you talking about a world where you are accepting this idea that black and brown people in the Global South are expendable?

I’m from Pakistan. Large parts of it are agricultural. Four out of 10 people live in multidimensional poverty. When these extreme weather events happen, they’re not in abstract. In a heatwave, no one escapes to air-conditioning, sits at a fountain, or eats an ice cream – you’re out in the fucking fields and the Pakistan government starts digging mass graves for people because there’s just nothing you can do. I would be struck by this reality; and then this comfortable reality which kept saying to people ‘it’s your plastic bags’. It did not make sense to me. So, our movements were saying that you cannot allow the narratives of climate to be shaped by this kind of lens; we must bring this justice lens into it. 

Friends of the Earth – which I’ve worked at before, I previously led its international climate and environmental justice work – was the only brand organisation that sided with the climate justice movement on a slightly more radical position. 

Then, after working at [poverty and human rights charity] War On Want for 10 years, and with movements all around the world – whether they were fighting for economic justice, trade unions, farmers, garment workers – the question we would always have was: we can fight, but the decisions are being made in the Global North, so where is the movement in the Global North that is standing with us? How are we weaving this story together? Because our story is of justice and being able to live with dignity; and your story is about carbon tonnes. 

If you look at the rise of the right, the fact that they’re weaponising inequality, anti-Muslim, anti-migrant, anti-climate [sentiments]… it’s part of the playbook everywhere in the world where the right are growing because they’re weaponising inequality against climate. They’ve put us into their story – we’re the villains in their story; we’re the middle-class, woke literati who are making people’s lives too expensive. And, to some extent, the climate movement is tone deaf if it talks about carbon and doesn’t talk about the fact that people can’t afford energy, or to buy a home or pay rent, when they’re talking about ‘warm homes’ – it just doesn’t connect to where people are.

Even though the UK has been experiencing continuous extreme heat this summer, it still feels as if the climate crisis is ‘far away’ when it comes to political and public perception of its impact and where it is on our list of priorities. How can this human instinct to not look at something because it’s ‘over there’ or at some distance be countered?

The climate science tells us that we have breached the critical 1.5°C guardrail [of global warming above pre-industrial levels]. We are heading towards 2°C in the next 20-25 years. A child born today will live in a world of 3°C. People cannot comprehend what that will mean. Everything that has been predicted to happen in the future is already happening – and it’s landing in an unequal world. Not just between societies, but within societies. Working-class and minority communities are on the frontline. 

We’re being told that the climate crisis is something ‘over there’. So, first, we’ve got to tell a very different story, about people, and we have to start with inequality – which means that, when the heatwaves happen, [you’re much worse off temperature-wise] if you live in a council estate in blocks of concrete. If you’re living in an area with high air pollution, it’s the air pollution that’s making heatwaves even worse. If you’re living in areas vulnerable to flooding, for some people, it’s more of a financial problem and they can ask their insurance to take care of it; but for a lot of other people, it’s devastating – they lose everything. Flooding in this country is devastating lots of communities. Now, of course, their experience is very different from the experience of people in Pakistan who are flooded – but there are a lot of commonalities. If you’re poor, you’re experiencing this in a profoundly different way. 

But, if you say to people in working-class areas like Burnley, ‘tell me about climate’ – they’ll say ‘yeah, we need to do something about it. Nature? We should have these things. But what matters to me is I can’t pay the bills. What matters to me is the cost of living’. Opinion polls tell us that, if you ask people what is the one thing that is shaping their lives, [the majority of] people will say the cost of living. That forces us as an environmental movement to say: actually, if you want to win, where the right have weaponised inequality against climate action, we have to connect inequality to climate and nature. We have to say it’s not an or, it’s an and. 

So, yes, we should have warm homes – but first of all, let’s build affordable homes, let’s put rent caps on homes, let’s put homes in the right places, let’s build homes with nature all around them, and let’s make sure they’re retrofitted. Why aren’t we doing street by street retrofits by local authorities? Why aren’t we planting trees by neighbourhood? Yes, we want energy to be clean, but does it matter if it’s renewable energy if I’m still paying bills where the money goes to the offshore account of a sovereign wealth fund somewhere? Why can’t I own it or my community own it? 

The challenge also seems to be about community-building – especially when it comes to tackling the weaponisation of the right, which is pitting different groups and issues against each other? 

Something very profound that the climate scientists have said is, yes, you need capital investment in things like seawalls and flood defences, but just as importantly, you need social investment – investment to make communities stronger because, what matters when a crisis happens is whether those communities are resilient enough to withstand it. The social indicators of that are whether you have social protection and social housing, whether you have a health service that works – whether you have these basic things is what determines how crises are experienced by communities. So, no longer can you say that you want to cut emissions, it’s also about how we can adapt to a warming planet and build the resilience of a community given the fact that these things are now a reality.

So, as Friends of the Earth, yes, we should be campaigning for green spaces for every kid. Everyone should have access to green spaces – we saw that during the pandemic; those people who had access to green spaces or had a garden, generally had a far better life than if you were on the 24th floor of a tower block with no access to green space. We know it’s good for your mental health and wellbeing, and that it cools your area. But, if I say this to people who are working three zero-hours contracts and struggling, what matters to them is whether their kid can have a free school meal. So why aren’t we saying: your kid should have green spaces and a free school meal? How are we connecting and rebuilding this sense of community? 

Only this way will we be able to stop the rise of the right in our communities because they are using the fact that too many people feel forgotten and left behind. I’m heartbroken when I look at the people going on Tommy Robinson’s marches because I think, 30 years ago, we would have all stood on the same picket lines together. Now, they are angry and marching with these people, and they should be marching with us – because we’re fighting for the same thing. And that’s our failure, not their failure. How are you hard on the politics but soft on the people? How do we connect and think of a new kind of story that puts people in the centre and is about democracy and being proud of the places we live in? 

Who tells you the story of who you are and where you came from? The trade unions used to tell you that story, the working men’s club used to tell you that story… there were institutions in a community that told you ‘these are our values’ and ‘we’re the people who did this a hundred years ago’. They gave a sense of who you are in a changing world, and drew from the past to give a shape to the future. But they’re not there anymore. And the people who are now telling you a story are in your algorithms saying: remember when you used to have dignity? Remember when people gave a shit about you? That was before, innit? ‘Let’s return to that nostalgic world when being white meant something and you could be proud of being white’. [Going from dignity to whiteness] it’s quite a jump. 

We have to say everybody has a right to live with dignity. And we know that, when people don’t feel economic uncertainty, they are generally more accommodating. If people aren’t struggling to pay their energy bills, they can lift their heads up. In Burnley, we’re in a valley with some of the most beautiful landscapes. People say it’s a beautiful, beautiful countryside – and I always say: the problem is, when you’re struggling, you can never lift your head up to look. It’s only when you’re not struggling that your head can begin to lift, and you begin to notice the beauty of nature. People innately want that. 

Friends of the Earth has put ‘postcode gardeners’ into working-class communities, into places where people don’t have social capital, or time, or groups of guerilla gardening, planting things out in the street – and it’s been transformative. Not just because people have been able to grow things together, but because people see they can do things together. Our postcode gardeners can bring groups of pensioners, mums, and migrants together to plant something. In that action, they see each other, and then they see something they’ve planted which grows – they can feel that ownership. 

We’ve been given a sense of having no agency, that nothing changes, that nobody gives a shit, which has been deliberately engineered. So I think this moment of crisis actually is a profound moment of hope and justice: we can fix the problems, because the answers to the climate crisis are the answers to the inequality crisis; the answers to the inequality crisis are the answers to creating better communities. 

Which is why, as Friends of the Earth, we’re committed to building safer, greener communities – putting deep organisers into communities to bring people together around a common agenda. But, at the same time, we need to tell a story about who’s to blame – it’s the billionaires, who say ‘blame your neighbour, don’t blame us’. We have to shift that. 

You ask a Reform, Labour, and Green voter about water companies and they all say the same thing: that that’s what is broken about this country – that people can poison your rivers for money. In some senses, they are way more progressive than where our politicians are. How can water be owned by a private company? These are the commons, the things we need to contain for ourselves because we are living on a planet with finite resources, and yet we know we’re over-consuming. The same 1% who have accumulated the world’s wealth are the same 1% whose carbon footprint is as much as two-thirds of the world’s population. 

So this forces us into building what I would call ‘the movement of movements’, and a positive vision. If I can’t talk about a positive vision, I can’t fight for it. If I can’t see myself in that vision, why am I going to fight for it? 

Hardeep Matharu is the Editor in Chief of Byline Times

The inquiry, which was published last month, is the first democratic evaluation of the UK-France border deal since the initial Le Touquet agreement, which allows UK border checks to be carried out on French soil and French checks in the UK, came into force in 2004.

The findings have highlighted the violent consequences of the policies implemented in northern France. The inquiry found current border policy to be “irrational from a democratic standpoint, dangerous for human rights, and ineffective regarding their stated objectives”. 

The inquiry has recommended stopping the use of tear gas against children and vulnerable people, as well as addressing the severe living conditions experienced by migrants at the border, such as insufficient access to shelter, sanitation and other fundamental rights.

Katie Hall, advocacy lead at Project Play, a charity that supports families and children in northern France, responded to the report’s findings:

“The conclusions of the French inquiry confirm what we see every day – a situation of violence and inhumanity manufactured by a politics devoid of empathy, funded in no small part by UK taxpayers.”

The inquiry also found that no public record had been kept of how money from the UK had been spent. This means that since 2018, there are no accounts of how £648 million of UK taxpayers’ money has been spent.

Ms Hall added: “The UK Government’s obsession with borders to distract attention from their failures at home is leading to taxpayers funding serious human rights abuses against men, women and children – with zero transparency about how that money is used.”

Given that the UK Government is set to spend a further £660 million over the next three-year period ending in 2029, the report calls for “greater transparency of data” to ensure “democratic control”.

Despite the inquiry’s strong condemnation of UK-funded policy, the report has received little coverage in UK mainstream media.

Since the time of this article’s publication, mainstream outlets such as BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4 News, the Guardian, the Telegraph or the Times have not reported on the inquiry.

Death and Border Security

Since the first agreement in 2004, at least 444 people have died attempting to cross the Channel, including at least 54 children.

Despite increasing investment from the UK Government into border security, the frequency of deaths in the Channel has been growing in recent years.

Since the previous deal in 2023, when then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak agreed a £460 million pact with French President Emmanuel Macron, there have been at least 146 deaths and missing persons recorded in the Channel, according to Calais Appeal.

Figures compiled by the Centre for Sociodigital Futures at the University of Bristol and Swiss research agency Border Forensics have revealed that deaths in the Channel have risen alongside an increase in spending on border securitisation.

Travis Van Isacker, research fellow at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, told the Independent the significance of these findings:

“These distinct but entangled border policing practices have had the cumulative effect of creating more dangerous circumstances for migrants.

“They have shown state policies to prevent small boat crossings as being a clear driver in the increased number of deaths amongst migrants in the Channel.”

The research also argued that increased French policing, a result of the previous deal, has forced smugglers to use more dangerous tactics, leading to severe overcrowding on boats. This includes increased confiscations along supply routes and has resulted in more poor-quality dinghies being used, as well as contributing to greater overcrowding on board.

Data published by the Home Office has shown that the average number of people per small boat has increased over recent years. The figure has risen from seven people per boat in 2018 to an average of 62 in 2025.

The evidence suggests that this trend is only getting worse. So far this year, the record for people crossing the Channel in a single boat has been broken on two separate occasions. In July, 165 people made the crossing on a single vessel. But on 10 August 2026, the record was broken after a boat carrying 230 people arrived on UK shores.

Salomé Brun, communications lead for Calais Appeal, a coalition of six grassroots groups working in solidarity with displaced people in northern France, said:

“Since 2018, increased UK funding into border securitisation has pushed people toward more dangerous routes to avoid persecution and police violence on the coast.

“Repressive measures preventing boats from departing around Calais and Dunkirk have not stopped departures – they’ve simply forced larger numbers onto fewer boats. Repression does not deter people from crossing; it only puts them in greater danger.”

Calls for a Parallel UK Public Inquiry

In response to the findings, the report has issued 33 recommendations, including an end to the use of tear gas for preventing crossings, and encouraging the UK Government to introduce safe routes to asylum for certain protected groups.

Calais Appeal argues that this is the first step in what needs to be an urgent cross-border response.

“There is an urgent need for the UK Government to respond to this report, and a clear public interest case for it to do so. We join calls for the Government to launch a public inquiry into UK border funding, and to halt all security-focused spending – redirecting those resources toward safe housing, reception infrastructure, and safe and accessible routes for people seeking asylum. A system which prioritises human rights over hostility is possible and urgently needed,” said Salomé Brun.

An existing petition calling for a UK public inquiry has already attracted thousands of signatures. The Home Office was contacted for comment.

The response of the Pentagon was to deny only the most outlandish claims, but not the ones published in the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes. President Trump when asked whether the Lincoln had been left on station for too long, responded in his inimitable way that the there were no problems, and that the deployment wasn’t “nearly long enough.”

There have been people on social media criticising these sailors for being “soft” or weak, but from a historical perspective what they are being subjected to is unprecedented: this is six straight months of combat operations without a port visit, while at the far end of a stretched logistics pipeline.

During the Vietnam War, individual continuous stints "on the line" at Yankee Station typically lasted around 30 to 35 days before a carrier headed to a port like Subic Bay in the Philippines for maintenance and rest. However, individual milestones were pushed further— for instance, the USS Ranger (CVA-61) set a notable historical benchmark when it spent a then-record 59 continuous days on Yankee Station in March 1965.

Prior to the USS Abraham Lincoln's modern record-breaking stretch, the longest consecutive period a US aircraft carrier had gone without a port visit was 206 days, set by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these were not combat operations. Which leads to the second part of the problem for sailors on a carrier in combat operations: which is crew rest.

The US Navy surface and submarine fleet has long had a problem with working people beyond the point of exhaustion. During an Operational Reactor Safeguard Exam (ORSE) on board the USS Augusta in 1995, I was working 36 on, 6 off, on 6-hour shifts for two weeks because I wasn’t allowed to sleep during the “day” when drills were going on, and that meant that I only got to sleep every other night effectively. At the end of that time frame, I was a hollow-eyed zombie that routinely fell asleep standing up.

The Navy determined that fatigue was a major cause in the collisions at sea of the USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald in two separate incidents in the 2010s. These mishaps occurred after only a few weeks’ worth of time at sea and the accumulated fatigue. The crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln has been working 18-hour shifts for at least 6 months, if not longer. The fact that combat operations, general quarters, drills, threats of Iranian attack, and other disruptors mean that even this brutal schedule is likely being routinely disrupted. I cannot even begin to imagine the level of tiredness these people are facing, and neither can you: no one has ever had a deployment like this before.

Fatigue is not just a symptom of depression; severe physical and mental exhaustion can actively drive depressive states and increase suicide risk. Chronic exhaustion impairs brain function, lowers coping capacity, and makes life feel unmanageable, which deeply amplifies feelings of hopelessness and suicidal ideation. The conditions on the ship only make it worse.

Ships haven’t been meant to spend 9 months away from port, even in the age of sail. When I deployed to the Gulf on board the USS Arthur W. Radford in 2000, poor scheduling left us without a port visit or Underway Replenishment (UNREP) for 21 days. The Lincoln is also reportedly on a 21-day menu rotation. By the end the food was rice, beans, and freezer-burned beef sukiyaki that tasted like the chemicals they cleaned the freezer with. We tolerated it for a few days. The Lincoln’s crewhas been enduring it for months. Even if the allegations of the crew subsisting on 500 calories a day are not true, the pictures show the crew eating food that looks exactly like what we were eating in 2000 when we were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

In days past, carriers on-station in the Middle East could pull into port at Jebel Ali or Dubai. Not so now. The nearest available ports are either in the Red Sea, or Diego Garcia about 2,500 km away. UNREP requires supply ships, which are perilously high demand / low density assets after decades of the US neglecting the Military Sealift Command.

UNREP typically doesn’t bring random parts (except perhaps for aircraft) to fix dryers, heads, etc. If something breaks, and the part isn’t in inventory, it’s likely to stay broken unless you can convince someone to fly it out via Carrier On Board Delivery (COD), which just got a lot more difficult after the US Navy retired the last of the C-2 Greyhound aircraft and replaced it with the CMV-22B Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, which spent much of 2025 grounded for safety reasons. Over time, the broken washers, dryers, heads, showers, etc add up.

Another part of the problem is that since the end of the first Gulf War, the US has slowly drawn down from 15 aircraft carriers to 11. The earth is the same size, but the number of carriers trying to cover it has gotten smaller. This means that when a carrier is needed out of cycle, they’re going to spend more time deployed. The US hasn’t fought a sustained war like this since Vietnam, and the 11-carrier fleet is proving to be unsustainable and insufficient. The ships are breaking almost as fast as the people manning them.

The US is replacing the Lincoln on station with the USS George Washington (CVN-73). However, this comes with a cost: the USS Washington was the last US carrier left in the Western Pacific. This comes as China has been significantly increasing its military activity around Taiwan. Combined with a reported shortage of missiles, the US Navy has not looked so weak in the Pacific since its nadir during the period between World War I and World War II.

Trump, just like dictators, seems to blame the collapse of morale on the sailors who have been pushed to the breaking point. However, the world is watching, and seeing the  endurance, logistics, and capabilities of the US Navy have definite limits, and the Trump administration just drew them into sharp relief via a war of choice with Iran that it cannot negotiate its way out of.

Former Reform councillor Kenny Hope – now sitting as an independent – alleges that Durham's Reform council leader Andrew Husband said "mental health is woke" during an April 2026 cabinet working group meeting, while two cabinet members are said to have opened wine and one vaped.

Another former Reform councillor – again now sitting as an independent – Cllr Kate Rowland, said a Reform meeting “includ[ed] drinking wine at 3:30 in the afternoon, vaping openly, laughing, joking, showing blatant disinterest, and belittling mental health.”

“[It] showed an appalling lack of seriousness,” she claimed, in council-wide emails shared with Byline Times.

Leader Cllr Andrew Husband told this outlet: "I stated Virtue Signalling about mental health in such a way is woke". He did not deny branding some of his colleagues "narcissists".

On Tuesday, emails flew around to all councillors between the Reform leader and his own councillors – and former members – concerned about the handling of complaints and the leadership’s attitude to mental health issues.

Amid a flurry of personal attacks, on Wednesday, Cllr Husband wrote to councillors: “This is a request to quit the spamming. The three amigos [former Reform councillors] have now had multiple warnings about abusing this platform. I will be reaching out to individual group leaders to put this nonsense to bed.

“I suggest training for those who don’t understand how local government works.”

He added: “Rest assured the Reform leak has been found so business as usual. These people can’t even leak properly.”

“I will be asking the council to conduct a risk assessment of this abnormal behaviour, for the benefit of members to safeguard against such levels of harassment that we are experiencing. It seems that no lessons have been learned from last month's embarrassing behaviour.”

Responding to the claims at the heart of the dispute, Cllr Husband continued: “‘Mental health is woke?’ Random. I mean who even says that?

“What is ‘woke’ is weaponising the mental health card in a standards process to try and call out officer conduct and behaviour. With no powers or local government legislation to underpin this – a fruitless exercise that results in a complete episode of virtue signalling.

“Virtue signalling in politics is woke. Google it. I stand by my advice which (previous) standards ignored.”

A vote of no confidence has now been called by one of the former Reform councillors, Cllr Kenny Hope. Cllr Husband told councillors: “Good luck getting two parties to support this farce.

“Regardless, I will enjoy the challenge should it reach the chamber.”

He also claimed on X Cllr Hope was a "bitter ex reform misfit who was suspended [and] now Restore wannabe nut job.”

On Thursday morning, the Chief Executive also reportedly sent an email to the all-members distribution list telling councillors their behaviour was unacceptable.

The Standards Committee Row

The saga follows a row over how a Reform councillor (an independent at the time), Cllr Paul Sexton, was cleared over bullying and harassment claims by a panel with a Reform majority. The one non-Reform councillor on the panel is understood to have found he breached the member’s code this January, following a drawn-out process going back to at least 2023.

There were four complaints about his alleged treatment of council officers in 2023. However, they were all dismissed by the Reform-majority committee. He joined Reform in May 2025.

Reform councillors claimed there were "institutional failings" for why the process took so long and wanted an overhaul. Two Reform members on the Standards Committee began drafting a document – later titled the "Proposal for Institutional Recovery" – recommending changes they believed would make council officers accountable for members' mental health and welfare, stating that the long investigation had harmed Cllr Sexton. Cllr Husband said they had no authority to do so or to alter a decision notice issued for the committee.

Related reading: Reform UK Tells Its Activists ‘Don’t Drink and Tweet’ Because ‘The Biggest Threat to Reform Is the People in It’

One member, Cllr Rowland, was then removed from the Standards body. She says she walked out of a meeting with the leader “after making clear that trust had broken down in circumstances where an issue [mental health] had in my view been treated jokingly.”

“I was then told we were being removed from standards.” Cllr Husband described her behaviour as “petulant”. Cllr Rowland resigned from Reform.

A private Teams call between Cllr Rowland, Cllr Catchpole and the committee's vice-chair Cllr Louise Taylor was also recorded and passed to the leadership. Asked if she recorded it, the Reform councillor did not deny it, instead saying: "Leaking information is a long way from discussing serious issues with leadership (no one else)".

She says her concerns over the changes were vindicated by the council's legal advice. An email from the Chief Executive summarising the external legal advice, marked privileged and confidential, was circulated by Husband in the all-councillor email thread.

Comment Reported To Police

When now-independent Cllr Rowland set all this out to every councillor on 16 August, the row spilled into a Reform group chat in which named committee chairs and cabinet members are accused of lashing out at two ex-members — including a line, written by the Leader, that ex-Reform councillor Kenny Hope would "get a kicking at full council". Reform claims Hope had been suspended by the party at the time (he now sits as an independent).

The comment has been reported to the police by the councillor, claiming it was a threat of violence. Leader Cllr Husband said: "The metaphor is pretty obvious. The chamber is the political arena."

In an email to members on Tuesday night, leader Cllr Husband said: “See you in standards Kenny [Hope]”. He was accused of weaponising the process.

Ex-Reform Cllr Rowland had kicked off the all-councillor spat saying: “I feel compelled to share a clear, unvarnished context regarding the events of the last four months during my time as Chair of the Standards Committee, and to highlight the deep inconsistencies in the narrative you may have received from party leadership.”

The Reform administration had already overhauled the standards process for handling complaints last year, introducing a new sub-committee – a Standards Assessment Board (SAB) – which sifts all complaints from the Monitoring Officer, before they can be handed to the main Standards Committee for a decision. The new sifting body has two Reform members, one Independent Group councillor, and a co-opted parish member who cannot vote.

Related reading: Reform’s Nadhim Zahawi Accused of ‘Fantasy’ After Falsely Claiming Labour-Backer Dale Vince Bankrolled Count Binface

Anti-Woke WhatsApp

But the group appears to be beset by in-fighting. On Wednesday, a third Reform councillor of the year quit the group. Cllr Catchpole said on Facebook that while his “political ideas align very closely with those of Reform" he felt forced to quit over the leadership's stance on mental health, cabinet members who showed "a complete lack of empathy", and comments in the DCC Social Chat group he called "utterly appalling". He said he was speaking as a veteran who has experienced personal loss through mental health issues.

In a discussion about the process, senior Reform councillors have been accused of mocking mental health issues.

A series of WhatsApp messages shared in the Reform Durham County Council WhatsApp group, DCC Social Chat, seen by Byline Times triggered an email to all councillors earlier this week hitting out at the administration.

The screenshots show:

10:28 Council leader Andrew Husband: "Don't do woke things and make us look woke!"

10:30 Husband, on a proposed Standards overhaul he opposed: "An investigation to force [council] officers (which is unlawful) to take more care of members mental health? Nice concept but then officers will just say members need to take care of THEIR mental health. You end up with something that will never happen…Which makes us look woke politically. Hence"

10:32 Husband adds: "I might do a motion for us all to hold hands and sing Kum Ba Yah"

10:33 Second Reform councillor: "That would actually be quite funny 😂😂😂"

10:35 Third Reform councillor posts a South Park GIF with "Oh Lord, Kumbaya"

One opposition councillor told this outlet Reform members are not being found guilty by the new sifting committee, adding the process was not fair: "They're marking their own homework."

There is “heavy infighting” with Reform councillors spending “too much time…arguing on Facebook” they added.

A spokesperson for Durham County Council said the meeting of the Standards Committee regarding Cllr Sexton in January was “held in private, and its decision was not made public.”

“It would, therefore, not be appropriate for us to comment on the matter. Nor would we comment on matters relating to confidential complaints and allegations regarding officers or elected members.”

The spokesperson added: “Should a councillor wish to make a complaint regarding any concerns they may have there are agreed mechanisms in place by which they can do so.

“We remain committed to maintaining the highest standards of governance and conduct and to supporting all councillors in carrying out their roles effectively.”

Commenting on the police report over the “kicking” comment by the Leader, a spokesperson for Durham Constabulary told this outlet: “Under established College of Policing and NPCC guidance we cannot confirm or deny whether a named individual is being investigated until such time as they have been charged with an offence.”

Reform UK was contacted for comment.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

In recent months, Reform councillors in the Midlands counties of Staffordshire and Warwickshire have sought to reduce the visibility of LGBTQ+ books and other materials in local libraries.

In Staffordshire, library staff have reportedly been instructed not to celebrate Pride and to remove Pride-related displays, events and communications. A spokesperson for the council told this outlet a decision to "review and refocus the use of discretionary library display space" was made by the Reform Cabinet member for culture.

"Whilst the review takes place, all displays that do not promote the core library offer or wider council services have been paused or removed.  This has included Pride displays but applies to all other discretionary displays too. No books or materials have been removed from library stock, and LGBTQ+ titles and resources remain available to borrow as part of the wider library offer," the spokesperson said.

In Warwickshire, the Reform council leader has criticised librarians wearing LGBT+ Pride rainbow lanyards, and displays of books he claims promote "gender ideology". He indicated that new policies for libraries and other public spaces are being developed.

It comes as a new report from the Trades Union Congress (TUC), ‘LGBT+ Workers – threats to workplace equality and community inclusion’, sets out the scale of political hostility to LGBT+ events on Reform-run councils – despite continued public support for diversity and LGBT+ rights.

It finds strong public support for maintaining key workplace rights and equality protections. YouGov polling for the report, exclusively seen by Byline Times, suggests 77% of Brits support retaining provisions in the Employment Rights Act 2025 requiring employers to take "all reasonable steps" to prevent sexual harassment and introducing protections from third-party harassment, while 74% support retaining the Equality Act 2010 which enshrines LGBT+ rights in law.

“Support for these protections exceeded support for repeal across the wider public, including among Reform voters,” the TUC analysis notes.

In February 2026, Reform’s Deputy Leader and business spokesperson Richard Tice announced plans for a ‘Great Repeal Act’. If passed, t would repeal “key legislation that provides workers with fundamental protections,” the TUC says, including the Employment Rights Act 2025 and the Equality Act 2010.

The union body states: “If Reform were to enact their ‘Great Repeal Act’ it would remove a range of employment rights, including sick pay, bereavement leave, pregnancy protections and protections against discrimination at work. They could also allow the return of fire-and-rehire practices.

"These are not simply regulations; they are hard-won rights that help make work fairer, more secure and more equal.”

Reform has pledged to introduce a “Women and Motherhood Protection Act” to replace some lost rights, but the details so far are sparse.

The majority of LGBT+ respondents (around 300) to the YouGov poll believed that repealing the Equality Act and Human Rights Act would negatively affect LGBT+ workers and lead to “increases in discrimination, bullying, harassment and exclusion at work, alongside wider impacts on mental health, confidence, physical health and work performance.”

The report notes that Reform-run councils such as Durham and Warwickshire were the first to take steps to “remove local authority support for LGBT+ communities,” and since then similar policies – such as removing funding for Pride events and banning Pride flags on council buildings – have subsequently been adopted across a widening range of Reform-controlled authorities.

They include Essex, Norfolk, Gateshead, Sunderland, Barnsley, Havering and St Helens, suggesting, in the union federation’s view, “a broader and increasingly coordinated approach to limiting LGBT+ visibility and inclusion.”

Book Bans

A new poll of UK adults for the TUC finds that the restrictions that Reform council leaders are putting on libraries are at odds with the public.

In response to a question that asked if respondents supported or opposed banning the promotion of Pride events in local public libraries, 54% opposed bans compared to 30% support (the remaining 16% said they do not know).

The TUC is calling on Reform politicians in Staffordshire and Warwickshire, the latest councils appearing to launch similar policies on this, to “recognise that they are out of step with public opinion and to keep libraries inclusive.”

More widely, among those that voted Reform in the 2024 General Election in Britain, 44% said the Equality Act should be kept, compared with 34% who said it should be repealed, while 21% said they did not know, the new YouGov polling shows. The figures are similar in the Midlands, the latest source of controversy over LGBT+ event bans from Reform.

The findings suggest that Reform UK’s proposed "Great Repeal Bill" that would remove protections secured through the Equality Act 2010 is out of step with national opinion and is not supported by the majority of people who voted Reform UK at the 2024 General Election.

Related reading: Reform UK Tells Its Activists ‘Don’t Drink and Tweet’ Because ‘The Biggest Threat to Reform Is the People in It’

'Put Pride Back'

The TUC has launched a petition calling on Councillors George Finch and Martin Murray, the respective leaders of Warwickshire and Staffordshire County Councils, to "leave librarians to decide how best to ensure these vital community services are inclusive and relevant for local people from all backgrounds."

The petition states: "We believe that libraries should be inclusive spaces that help to educate, inform and entertain people of every age, gender, sexuality, background and political belief. They are here to help open minds, not close them."

The TUC is inviting support for the petition from everyone who "believes that libraries should be inclusive places for all."

Midlands TUC Secretary Stuart Richards said: "Our libraries are for everyone. And they should be free from political interference. But Reform politicians are restricting the freedoms of our libraries and librarians. And they are singling out the LGBT+ members of our local communities for attack.

"We've launched this petition to defend the freedom of our libraries. And it's to show solidarity with our friends, neighbours and colleagues who are targeted by this attack on LGBT+ inclusion."

Related reading: Chairman Farage: How Reform UK Operates as a Democratic Party in Name Only

TUC Northern Secretary Dave Pike added: “Trade unions and the LGBT+ community have stood side by side for decades, united by the similarities in the challenges we face. The battle for a fairer, more equal society is a fight that trade unions and the LGBT+ community know well.  

“This is important for LGBT+ workers who often experience bullying and harassment at work. As this study has shown, we can see how much a commitment from Local Authorities to stand with their LGBT+ residents matters. This is why we still need Pride - not only to celebrate, but to organise and demand better."

Pike noted that Durham Pride went ahead this year, this time without the Reform council's support, and was "bigger and better than ever.”

The TUC petition 'Put Pride back in our libraries' petition is here. The new report can be found here. 

YouGov’s polling fieldwork was conducted between 15 and 16 July 2026, with a sample size of 2,317 UK adults. It was conducted online and weighted to be representative of the population. 

Hayley Coles, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Communities and Culture at Staffordshire County Council told Byline Times: “We are committed to transforming our libraries into vibrant community hubs where people can learn, connect and get practical support.

“We are currently reviewing the use of our library display space and, as part of this, any display which doesn’t promote our core library offer or council services has been paused until the review and community impact assessments take place.  

 “A wide range of books and materials can still be loaned from us. These cover topics and authors of interest to the LGBTQ+ community and many others. No books or materials have been removed from the library.” 

Warwickshire council and its leader were contacted for comment.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

The human rights organisation Liberty argues that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the Public Order Act 2023, and the Crime and Policing Act 2026 have significantly curtailed the capacity of the climate movement to participate in protest and other forms of direct action.

The Acts include various new restrictions on protest and impose much harsher sentences for people who break these laws. For instance, people found to be in breach of the Public Order Act can also face unlimited fines.

In July 2024, five Just Stop Oil activists were sentenced to four to five years for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, after discussing an M25 protest on Zoom. Following an appeal supported by Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK, the court found the sentences “manifestly excessive” and reduced them.

Hundreds more have been arrested for taking part in climate protests.

The most recent Home Office data on the use of protest powers was published earlier this year and found that since 2022, around 90% of the protests with police restrictions applied to them were ‘environment’ related.

Liberty has also raised concerns that the Crime and Policing Act 2026 was rushed through before the publication of Lord Macdonald's Independent Review of Public Order and Hate Crime Legislation, which was commissioned by Keir Starmer's Government and is expected to make key recommendations on reforming protest laws.

The campaigners argue that protest is critical to a healthy democracy and are urging the new Prime Minister to “change course” from previous governments.

A recent Ipsos poll showed that 74% of Britons are concerned about climate change following a severe heatwave summer, up from 69% before the summer.

In an interview with Byline Times, Melissa Dring, interim head of policy and campaigns at Liberty, said a spate of anti-protest laws have “layered on new restrictions, new offences and new penalties” onto protestors – from arrest and imprisonment to electronic tagging and unlimited fines in some circumstances – as well as giving police new powers to enforce the law.

“We've ended up with quite a confusing situation, both for protesters and for the police in terms of enforcing it. It's difficult for people to know how to protest in a way that is within the bounds of the law, how to do so lawfully and safely. That's why we say it has become harder and riskier for people to protest,” she said.

Mask-Free Zones and New Offences

The recent Crime and Policing Act is now in force, giving police the power to designate an area as a mask-free zone, so that no one is allowed to wear a face covering within it.

Dring said: “There was a defence inserted for health, religious and work purposes – but it's a defence, not an exemption. That means anyone who does wear a mask, for example for health purposes, and happens to be in an area designated as a mask-free zone, can be arrested, and only then, at charging stage or even at court, can they use that defence and say, ‘Well, I was wearing a mask for health reasons.’”

Other anti-protest laws – passed under both the Conservatives and Labour in recent years – mean “there's a clear line to be drawn between those new restrictions and why we're not seeing really big environmental protests,” according to Liberty.

The non-profit group has a legal team that provides advice to activists who want to know where the line is between legal and illegal protest. “That line is more and more difficult to explain,” Dring said.

There are also new provisions clamping down on “cumulative disruption”, which effectively bans repeat protests – “which is, of course, what makes protest successful in the first place,” Dring adds. “These are really significant new advances. Each time we've seen a new piece of legislation, there have been significant increases in restrictions and offences.”

“The balance has now tipped too far into protest being treated as something to be restricted and managed, rather than a fundamental right that is very important to democracy and should actually be protected and promoted by the government,” she said.

On the official Home Office figures showing that 90% of processions that have had police restrictions applied since 2022 were ‘environmental’, Dring notes that many of these were in 2022 and 2023: “You can see that [since then] the number of these has actually reduced quite significantly.”

Related reading: Is Andy Burnham About to Create a British Constitution?

Calls to Change Course

Ruth Ehrlich, director of external relations at Liberty, called for new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to “change course from his predecessors and start treating our right to protest like the important part of British democracy and culture that it is”.

Reshima Sharma, deputy head of politics at Greenpeace UK, added: “Protest movements have secured many of the environmental protections we enjoy today. From the creation of our national parks to the ban on fracking in the UK, it was ordinary people coming together to make their voices heard who paved the way for change.

“But the government's crackdown on protest puts the creation of new movements for climate and nature at risk – at the very same time that the impacts of the climate emergency are greater and closer to home than ever.”

When the Bill was passed in April, Dal Babu, former Chief Superintendent at the Metropolitan Police, said in a Government press release it was “welcome”.

“It will help police to deal with the emerging problems of some demonstrators masking up to use anonymity to attack police and deliberately disrespect memorials to the dead.

“Although the majority of protestors are law-abiding, a hard core from across the political spectrum attend marches masked up, with pyrotechnics designed to attack police and oppositions. The new legislation will help deal with this worrying trend.”

A Home Office spokesperson told this outlet: “Following representations from the police and local communities affected by repeated, large protests, we granted officers the powers needed to manage protests safely.

“In October 2025, the Home Secretary asked Lord Macdonald to lead an independent review of public order and hate crime legislation to ensure it is fit for purpose and adequately protects communities from disruption, intimidation and hatred. This will be published in due course.”

Lord Macdonald’s review into protest laws will assess whether the legislation is fit for purpose, whether it adequately protects communities from intimidation and hate, and whether it strikes a fair balance between freedom of expression and the right to protest with the need to prevent disorder and keep communities safe. 

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

He was speaking in Sheffield. The occasion was the launch of his far-reaching, seven-page Cabinet Statement that proposes to decentralise power across England. It promises legislation that will empower regional mayors to raise their own income as well as having a share of tax revenues as a right. Its ambition is to “fundamentally re-wire the way our country works”.  The Prime Minister acknowledged that the Cabinet paper points towards “a new constitutional settlement” and “will increase the case for … a written constitution”, and “a new clear set of principles about how this country should be run.”

In saying this Burnham unlocked the safety-catch on the fundamental feature of British rule: that the totality of its arrangements remains uncodified and informal. A feature that ensures our government belongs to those who govern us and not to the people as citizens.

It’s important to say that Burnham did not pull the trigger. But until that July day, no British prime minister when in office has ever endorsed the possibility of a “written constitution” in a positive fashion – a fact which makes this a watershed moment.

Indeed, from what I can work out, no prime minister when in office ever used the phrase ‘written constitution’ until 1989, when Margaret Thather was obliged to respond to a letter sent to her from the constitutional and electoral reform campaign group Charter 88. Its lead signature was Lady Ewart Biggs. I should admit that I drafted it.

Related reading: Burnham Wins in Makerfield: Can the ‘Politics of Place’ Now Offer an Antidote to the Poverty of Possibility?

Our request: “Basic rights to be entrenched in law; accountable and open government; electoral reform; regional power and a written constitution.”

Thatcher replied that, “The government consider that our present constitutional arrangements continue to serve us well…” with her unmistakable sense of a Royal ‘we’. She added: “the government does not feel that a written constitution in itself changes or guarantees anything: Everything depends on how constitutional guarantees, whether written or unwritten, are interpreted and applied in daily life.” An important observation I will return to.

Prime Minister Burnham faces a barrel-full of major issues: economic, diplomatic, military, environmental and social. Why should he add to these by unleashing the historic process of a written constitution? What is the problem to which it is the answer?

The problem has three parts: First, how do we decentralise the British state to release and empower regional judgment and creativity? Or, to put it negatively, how do we stop what is now the husk of an Empire State throttling our democracy in the all-too-familiar way it is programmed to do? Second, how do we protect and enhance our rights and freedom as citizens? Or, to put it negatively, how do we reverse the attacks on, for example, our right to protest, to privacy on the internet, and to vote?  Third, and crucially, how do we restore popular consent to how we are governed?

All constitutions, whether written or not, contain the rules for changing the rules. In so doing they establish three things:

1. Relations of power between different part of society: who can do what to whom
2. The liberty and rights of citizens
3. What kind of society the country aspires to be

The British state is undergoing a breakdown on all three fronts. Burnham seems most concerned about the first. Many activists care most about the second. It is the third that really matters. Only a new constitutional settlement, forged out of popular participation, can roll back the corruption of our public sphere and re-establish the legitimacy of the State, now an essential condition for its successful re-wiring.

In other words, it is just the sort of project that should attract a successful politician who aims to replace the market priorities of neoliberalism.

Forty years ago, Thatcher’s authoritarianism created a very different kind of crisis. Back then, Britain still had something that many countries with mere paper constitutions lacked: underlying public consent. The arc of the ruling institutions, the monarchy, the armed forces, the judiciary, as well as parliament, created an arena in which, despite deep conflicts, there was still an underlying loyalty and shared self-belief. Historically, this legacy saved the country from the fascism that swept almost all Europe. John Major, the son of a music hall artist and garden gnome entrepreneur, remains its last true representative.

Over the course of this century, public belief in the British system has cratered. There are many descriptions. One will suffice, the introduction to the Report on the UK’s Future, headed by Gordon Brown, that Keir Starmer commissioned and then binned. I like it because the authors don’t hide the shock they experienced on realising the gravity of the problem. “A clear majority in all places and supporters of all parties”, they report, “currently believe it doesn’t matter who you vote for, nothing will ever really change in Britain. Even more – a figure consistently above 60% – believe that Britain has a ruling class who will always rule the country no matter what happens”.

They headline this opening section “Loss of Trust”. A much-used formula that implies voters are responsible for losing something which a better-behaved government could help them re-find.

What has taken place is altogether more serious.

The public is right to withdraw its trust. It is the state that has lost its legitimacy. A process now actively reinforced by the privatisation of the public sphere and the penetration of politics by the super-rich, alongside social media consciously antagonistic to honest, democratic norms.

The mere promulgation of a written constitution cannot reverse this. As Thatcher’s letter said, everything depends on how things are actually carried out “in everyday life”.  Nor is the difficulty one of composition. W Elliot Bulmer has just published a polished draft of an English constitution. In 2014, Graham Allen oversaw the publication by the House of Commons itself of a complete draft of a constitution for the United Kingdom, when he chaired its short-lived Political and Constitutional Reform Committee.

What matters was set out with unequalled brevity by the old song: “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. That’s what gets results”. How we get to a written constitution will determine how it is lived. Which is more important than any actual words. The route to a democratic outcome has itself to be democratic, not top down. The process of writing the rules must itself be open and participatory, relying on citizens assemblies, which as Ireland has shown, can overcome party and media antagonism. While clear guidelines, such as clarity, simplicity and flexibility, are essential, it is now the turn of our governing elites to trust the public.

Why is there such resistance to something so apparently attractive? It is not indifference. Many politicians will tell you that “on the doorstep” voters are not interested their main concern being potholes. Don’t you believe it! When asked, millions mobilised to “take back control”, the most abstract of constitutional concepts.

One reason is that the Anglo-British elite fear anything that might give England a parliament. The national question lurks in Jonathan Sumption’s denunciation of Burnham’s interest in a written constitution as being “Fundamentally un-British”. Another is corruption. Which brings us to a third – the Labour Party itself.

Ten years on from the failure of Brexit, the country is ready for far-reaching, democratic change that works. But Burnham desires to govern as a Labour leader. And his Labour colleagues, many personally sieved by Peter Mandelson, will resist radical decentralisation not to mention an honest, citizen-based constitution. A stunning example of the Labour machine’s conservatism is how it has prevented a cap on the individual donations that now corrupt British politics. Apparently, nothing must threaten Lord Sainsbury giving the Labour Party more than £100,000 a year.

In this year’s Attlee Foundation lecture, John Major bears witness from the perspective of the traditional regime. “We need a spring clean”, he said. “Is political funding corrupted if ‒ with no qualifications other than money ‒ donors receive honours or preferential access to Ministers?  Should political donations be capped to protect against undue influence?  I believe the answer is – yes”.

It is not just a matter of preventing the limitless funding of the Reform Party or Badenoch’s Tories. The larger message envelopes Labour as well. If the Government continues to permit the unlimited exercise of private and corporate wealth to buy influence, it is not unreasonable for the public to conclude that ‘all politicians are alike’ and ‘politics is stolen’. Only a party entrenched in the existing regime and its privileges could fail to see the democratic consequences. It means that inside the Labour machine, the old Mandelsonian instincts remain intact.

If they are to be overcome, a mighty battle lies ahead for Andy Burnham.

The 41-year-old resigned from Cambridge University as Professor of Sociology of Education after allegations of plagiarism and questions about aspects of his public biography. Arday denied plagiarism, while acknowledging errors in his work.

He described “an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack”, saying that the "relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love".

In the days before his death, friends described a man overwhelmed by what had happened. 

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of Cambridge University's Autism Research Centre, said that Arday told him “they’ve destroyed my life”. He said that “the personal attacks on him have been so immense”. 

Academic and author Kehinde Andrews said that Arday “felt that there was no way out”.

Arday's family has said that a “campaign of misinformation” became too much for him.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan described what happened as “an unacceptable public hounding and campaign of abuse” – “a pernicious public shaming”.

The Prime Minister called for “a moment for reflection”.

In that reflection, perhaps we might contemplate the author George Eliot’s comment that “cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself; it only requires opportunity”. And there was plenty of cruelty; white hacks lining up to outdo each other in their cruelty towards Arday.

The volume and tone of the attacks on the man were quite shocking.

Related reading: There Will Be Another Jason Arday

In the fortnight before his death, the Spectator published a succession of articles in which its writers repeatedly turned Jason Arday into an object of personal ridicule.

On 31 July, Toby Young wrote that “the more I read about Jason Arday... the more convinced I am he’s [Sacha Baron Cohen’s] greatest creation”. He later imagined him as an “Ali G-like character”.

On 6 August, John Power penned a purported fact-check of Arday as a guide to the claims of “our modern-day Walter Mitty”.

That same week, the Spectator's Commissioning Editor Lara Brown described Arday as a “charlatan” and wrote that “even in the world of racial grievance peddling, Arday was mediocre”.

On 10 August, Owen Matthews called him “the serial fantasist poster cry-bully of our times” and dismissed his work as “twaddle”. That same day, Peter Wood put Arday in the tradition of “imposters”, “tricksters”, and “cozeners”.

On 11 August, Julie Burchill called him “daft Jason Arday” and “the nutty professor”. 

Together, it took on the appearance of a gang of leering, bullying faces crowded over a cowed man, each eager to be the next to weigh in, each finding clever ways to turn their anger and violence into something that might, in a London salon, sound even witty. 

Clearly, it wasn't to Jason Arday.

To add injury to their insult, the Spectator published a piece after it was announced that Arday’s body had been found with the headline ‘The tragedy of Jason Arday.’ In it, Melanie McDonagh said that “in death we all should be remembered in our humanity, even in our flawed humanity. And Jason Arday was very human; he bled”. She did not note that it was the Spectator that was there doing the stabbing, the cutting, the slashing, and the gouging.

It was not just The Spectator.

In the three weeks before Jason Arday’s death, the Telegraph published dozens of articles, columns, and news reports about him. 

“Cambridge’s diversity poster boy in plagiarism row” on 24 July.

“The Cambridge fantasist is proof that stupid intellectuals…” on 4 August.

“Jason Arday reflects a much deeper rot within universities” on 5 August.

“Jason Arday is living proof that you reap what you sow” on 6 August.

“The fall of Jason Arday: Cambridge’s woke poster boy…” on 6 August.

“A PhD is no longer a sign of brilliance – take it from Dr Arday” on 13 August.

And so on and so on.

Indeed, between 24 July and Arday’s death, The Times, The Sunday Times, and the Telegraph each published at least 40 articles about him. The Daily Mail and MailOnline produced nearly 40. The Independent ran approximately 24. The Spectator more than 20. The Guardian approximately 19. 

And the pursuit did not necessarily end when an article was published.

Journalist Carole Cadwalladr has highlighted paid advertising by The Times promoting its coverage of Jason Arday – including one advert which she said had reached 195,746 people and was still running on 16 August, two days after his death.

Cadwalladr argues that this raises an even more uncomfortable question: whether the targeting of Arday was not simply an editorial phenomenon but a commercial one.

She points to the newspaper’s earlier sustained coverage of the black artist Misan Harriman, some of which, she says, is also still being promoted through paid advertisements.

Her charge is that this is not merely journalism pursuing legitimate stories, but “monetised racebait”: a business model in which racially-charged outrage is amplified because outrage attracts attention, and attention makes money.

Related reading: The Peter Thiel-Linked Race Science Network that Penetrated Cambridge University and Targeted Jason Arday

But it takes people to be willing to take part in such bait and so, commercial interests aside, on a personal level, I think it is fair to say this: that many of those people who wrote about Arday in such a way are cruel. They are cruel people. 

For let it be clear: it was their bullying that goes to the heart of Arday’s death. 

The worst thing is, he was not the first victim where Fleet Street’s teeth have torn a soul to pieces.

Back in 2003, the weapons expert Dr David Kelly was propelled from relative anonymity into the centre of the political battle over Iraq. The Ministry of Defence advisor was found dead on 18 July 2003 in woods near his home in Oxfordshire. His widow told the Hutton Inquiry that her husband "hated it" when press reports belittled him after his name became public as a "junior" figure.

Lord Hutton later concluded that Kelly’s exposure to press “attention and intrusion” was “obviously very stressful”.

In 2012, the Mail published Richard Littlejohn’s column about primary school teacher Lucy Meadows, who was transitioning. He wrote: “He’s not only in the wrong body... he’s in the wrong job.” Littlejohn argued that Meadows was not “entitled to project his personal problems on to impressionable young children”.

After Meadows died by suicide, the coroner, Michael Singleton, delivered an extraordinary rebuke. He accused sections of the press of “character assassination”, “ridicule and humiliation”, telling journalists at the inquest: “Shame, shame on all of you.” He went further, announcing preventive action because, without change, similar conduct “could lead to further fatality”. Clearly no such action has been taken.

In 2014, Sky News confronted Brenda Leyland outside her home about abusive tweets concerning the parents of Madeleine McCann. Reporter Martin Brunt asked: “Why are you using your Twitter account to attack the McCanns?” Leyland replied: “I’m entitled to.”

She took her life two days after the report was broadcast. The coroner later formally recorded that she had “recently been upset by public exposure in the media”. Her son described that exposure as “the final straw”. 

Then came Caroline Flack.

Before her suicide in 2020, allegations that the ex-Love Island and X Factor host had assaulted her boyfriend generated sustained tabloid coverage. The coroner later said that Flack understood prosecution meant “she knew she would face the media, press, publicity” and that “it would all come down upon her”.

The finding identified press attention surrounding the trial as an acute factor in the deterioration of her mental health.

What connects all these cases is not that journalism alone led to the deaths. There is no evidence to fully justify that claim. Each person was caught up in a whirlwind of their own travails and personal horrors.

But what we see with Jason Arday and the others is the hyper-charged metamorphosis of  human failure into mass spectacle; done so with words that came with the intentional weight of violence.

The civil servant became the “MoD mole”. The teacher became a 'culture war’ symbol. The anonymous Twitter user was confronted on television. The celebrity allegation serialised as drama. The academic became a clown. 

And perhaps it was this that was sufficient to push them over the edge.

There is another recurring trauma.

Yes, individual journalists sometimes express profound remorse. Martin Brunt said that the experience would remain with him. But the institutions that publish the attacks rarely accept responsibility. 

The Telegraph even deleted, without fanfare, the word ‘living’ from the headline of Stephen Daisley's article on Jason Arday. It now reads 'Jason Arday is proof that you reap what you sow’. 

That small edit speaks volumes. The words might have been edited, but the logic of the publication model – culture war clickbait masquerading as political commentary – carries on. 

And there is no reckoning with the cumulative effect of dozens of articles, the ridicule layered upon accusation, or the transformation of a flawed human being into a public object upon which anyone with a column could take another swing. Responsibility dissolves into the defence that each individual article was legitimate. 

Yet cruelty can be cumulative. Forty defensible blows is still a beating.

So, yes, journalism cannot operate without scrutiny, accusation, and often uncomfortable questions. But neither can it pretend that ad hominem attacks, repeated insults, and public humiliation come without consequence. 

Melanie McDonagh signed off her piece on Arday, written as if the press had no role whatsoever in his death, Requiescat in pace.  

Requiescat in pace, perhaps. But for those of us that remain, there should be no peace for this kind of journalism. We must rage against its cruelty, against the casual conversion of humiliation into entertainment, against the idea that because each blow can be defended in isolation no one bears responsibility for the beating.

When the pack gathers again, as it surely will, we should remember Jason Arday. We should rage – rage against the journalism of cruelty.

His coordinated targeting by an explicitly anti-black race science network did not come out of nowhere, Byline Times can reveal.

Backed by the pro-Trump Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, this network has spent a decade penetrating Cambridge University before reaching Reform UK, Restore Britain, and the pan-European far-right.

This phase of the campaign against Jason Arday began when academic and anti-black racist Nathan Cofnas raised claims of plagiarism in Arday's work in a Substack post last month.

The story it fuelled was then dissected in more than 200 articles across the majority of the British press in the weeks that followed, both in print and online.

It was striking that many of these articles did not acknowledge that the central accusations were being made by a man who believes that inherited racial differences make black people less intelligent and would leave black people absent from virtually every elite position in public life outside of sport and entertainment.

They also did not mention that Cofnas had used the terms “retarded”, “illiterate”, and “mentally disabled” to describe Jason Arday, while noting that he was “black”.

Cofnas said that an unidentified male Cambridge faculty member had supplied him with information about Arday. Before even examining Arday's PhD thesis, completed at Liverpool John Moores University, Cofnas had dismissed him as “just another DEI hire”, referring to 'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ schemes.

At the ideological centre of the network is Aporia, an online magazine which serves as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation – now known as Polygenic Scores.

The Human Diversity Foundation was a rebranded and relaunched version of the Nazi-era Pioneer Fund, which sought to mainstream its eugenics doctrines through Aporia.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel has cultivated ties to key actors in this network: to Cambridge Professor James Orr, through whom he channelled a donation to Cambridge; to Orr’s Cambridge circle; to online magazine Quillette which published attacks on Arday; and directly to Nathan Cofnas and Aporia senior editor Noah Carl.

Orr linked this infrastructure to politics. Reform UK's Head of Policy, and an advisor to the Free Speech Union organisation, he invited Aporia into national conservatism.

At The Sanctuary, a right-wing hub in Westminster, the Orr-backed Cambridge Scrutonian Society has an office provided by crypto-billionaire Ben Delo; while Aporia is able to book spaces for events there through the venue's internal booking system.

Delo gave Reform £4 million in early 2026. He has also sponsored the Free Speech Union.

By understanding this network and its ideology, a more accurate picture can be developed of the motivations behind the disproportionate attacks on Jason Arday that continued even after his resignation from Cambridge University.

'A Random Black Person'

On 21 July, Nathan Cofnas published the article which launched the campaign against Jason Arday.

Titled ‘DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge’, he portrayed Arday’s appointment to Cambridge University in 2023 as evidence that it had “grabbed a random black person” and abandoned academic standards in pursuit of diversity.

On 9 August, Cofnas said that a male faculty member at Cambridge University – who he said he was not allowed to name – had contacted him on 13 June with information about Jason Arday. He referred to this person as a whistleblower who feared professional retaliation.

Cofnas then examined Arday’s PhD thesis and published his allegations about alleged plagiarism.

Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) had already formally tested the central allegation about Arday’s PhD the previous year, following claims by The Times and The Telegraph.

Its inquiry found citation defects but did not uphold plagiarism, concluding that the problems were caused by “honest and reasonable error”, compounded by inadequate supervision regarding Arday's learning disabilities.

Arday told The Times that his autism affected how he processed information and that his early academic work relied heavily on mimicry to make sense of material. He accepted responsibility for mistakes but denied dishonesty.

LJMU reached its finding independently of this explanation. It is plausible that these issues may explain questions around some of Arday's other papers.

The allegations drove a national news cycle of more than 200 articles across The Times and The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, The Independent, the Spectator, the Guardian, the Daily Express, The Sun, and Novara Media.

That volume cemented disputed or unproven claims about Jason Arday's scholarship and biography far beyond the anti-black race science network that launched them.

Related reading: There Will Be Another Jason Arday

The Book that Wasn't Published

A 'double standard’ was applied to scrutiny of Jason Arday's work.

One example of this was on the subject of Arday’s supposedly “phantom” book, Being Young, Black and Male.

It was initially described as a forthcoming Palgrave Macmillan title. But later academic and public biographies listed Arday simply as its “author”, alongside already published books.

Palgrave Macmillan nevertheless confirmed that it had accepted the proposal, Durham University recorded it as a “manuscript in preparation”, and it was still being described in 2022 as an upcoming book.

Compare this to James Orr, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University.

For at least six years, from 2019-20 through 2023 and 2025, public biographies repeatedly listed Orr’s apparently unpublished Being and Eternity: Phenomenology and Thomism in Edith Stein among his existing “publications and policy papers” – without describing it as unfinished or forthcoming.

In 2024, a podcast went further, introducing Orr as a “published author” who had “written” Being and Eternity (Orr did not dispute the characterisation).

Yet, Orr’s Cambridge University biography page still lists the unpublished title as “forthcoming, 2022”.

These repeated presentations of an apparently unpublished book as an established part of Orr’s publication record has not attracted anything approaching the scrutiny directed at Jason Arday.

Neither case proves dishonesty. Stalled books and recycled biographies are mundane features of academic publishing. But Arday’s discrepancy became national ‘evidence’ of fraud.

Charity Runs and 'Seven Up'

The portrayal of Jason Arday as a dishonest fantasist extended to his charity running.

His claim to have completed 30 marathons in 35 days – ridiculed across dozens of articles (even after his death, for instance, in The Times by Sarah Ditum) – is supported by contemporaneous records.

A January 2010 JustGiving page announced the dates and route before it began. TES magazine reported on the challenge while it was underway. The Richmond and Twickenham Times reported its completion on 25 August.

Arday's claim to have raised or helped raise £5 million for charity was also widely ridiculed by newspapers. When asked by the Guardian if his general figure of charity fundraising of £5 million was accurate, Arday said that the money had been raised through "many fundraising collectives over a two-decade period", and that the other people who had taken part had signed NDAs to stop them from being identified.

A Byline Times analysis of the publicly identifiable charities Arday was associated with for two decades found that they had a combined gross income of approximately £1.4 billion to £1.5 billion – putting his £5 million collective fundraising claim at well under 1% of their overall income.

Arday had, for the most part, repeatedly described his fundraising in collective terms – referring as early as 2009 to what “we” had raised, and later to being “part of” fundraising initiatives and to “our fundraising projects”. 

It is also clear that Arday did play semi-professional football, despite speculation in the press that he did not.

Another supposedly 'impossible lie’ that the press accused Jason Arday of is notable when considered in a different context.

In a discussion at the University of Bath in 2022, Arday was asked to “take us back to the beginning” of his journey. He recounted his childhood developmental difficulties – including his diagnosis aged three of autism and global development delay, and the years he spent with behavioural psychologists and speech therapists.

He said: "I was part of a programme which doesn't really exist any more, but was called Seven Up at the time. Seven Up is basically when they follow you over the duration of your life, so they follow you at seven, 14, 21. I was pulled out of the project when I was 14."

The television programme Seven Up was first broadcast in 1964. The Telegraph claimed that Arday had said he “appeared” in Michael Apted’s famous series – but Arday himself had not said this.

His comment that the “programme” no longer existed also sits uneasily with that interpretation: 63 Up – presented by ITV as part of its continuing 7 Up Collection – aired in 2019.

Arday later told The Times that he had been referring to an informal community initiative supporting black mothers raising children with complex learning needs.

His wording was plainly confusing. But the claim on which the story rested – that he had said that he appeared in the television series – is not what he actually said.

Reporting also repeatedly blurred the quality of the evidence against Arday.

Accounts in the Guardian and elsewhere from former pupils who said they were in the year above Jason Arday at school, were presented simply as testimony from “schoolmates”.

Claims that he had spoken, joked, or sung with particular children were treated as disproving other credible descriptions of him as effectively non-verbal until he was 11 – despite the fact that autistic children and those with selective mutism or severe communication difficulties can speak in some settings while remaining largely silent in others.

Once plagiarism allegations emerged, these conflicting childhood recollections were simply folded into a wider narrative that Jason Arday had fabricated his entire life story. 

Though unproven, the PhD plagiarism allegation circulated as fact, while the notion of Arday as a “fraud”, “fabulist”, and “plagiarist” hardened into supposed ‘hard-fact’ findings about the academic.

As Cambridge University announced that it would look into emerging claims about Jason Arday, media articles about his life were already loaded with the assumption of sustained and deliberate fraudulent dishonesty.

The potential impact of his learning difficulties and autism was ignored.

Arday had long reported being diagnosed aged three with autism and global developmental delay, including severe language difficulties, while people who knew him as a child recalled significant learning needs and additional support.

In his memoir, he described early memories as impressions of images, sounds and sensations rather than discrete events – significant because research has found that some autistic people can have greater difficulty retrieving and narrating specific autobiographical memories.

This potentially provided a plausible explanation for muddled recollections or inconsistencies that journalists should have considered, before treating them as prima facie evidence of deliberate deception.

'Enjoying Vengeance’

On 2 August, Steve Sailer – an advocate of “human biodiversity” whose work claims that black people are innately less intelligent and more criminal – hailed Nathan Cofnas on X as “the hero of the Jason Arday Fiasco”.

Emil Kirkegaard, who co-founded online publication Aporia, amplified the post, saying it was an example of why academia needed “non leftists”.

On 8 August, Aporia published an article calling Jason Arday's case the “bitter fruit of equalitarianism”. The platform had already built Cofnas’ public profile through interviews, a podcast, a live debate, and an essay portraying opposition to Cofnas’ race science as persecution.

Five days before Arday was found dead on 14 August, in an interview with the historian David Starkey – himself renowned for a record of derogatory comments about black people – Nathan Cofnas said that Arday was “not intelligent in the way that a professor should be” and that "he’s not, like, that retarded that he can’t speak”.

Cofnas said he did not know whether Arday “could do addition”, called him “completely illiterate mathematically”, and later described him as “a black person who seems to be, in this case, literally mentally disabled”.

Cofnas suggested that Arday had merely “learned to talk their talk” and used accusations of racism to repel criticism. His comments fused Arday’s race, autism, and academic standing into a single racialised claim of innate incapacity.

Starkey praised Cofnas as the man who had defeated Cambridge’s “DEI” system and celebrated Arday’s resignation by stating that “the reason we are both grinning is that we are enjoying vengeance. Good, honest, straightforward and Christian vengeance… we can rejoice together”.

The historian racialised the onslaught, calling Arday a “professor draped in laurels as well as dreadlocks” and repeatedly describing him as stupid. 

In 2024, Cofnas was dismissed from his role at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University (though the university faculty continued to sponsor his fellowship), after publishing a blog in which he argued that black people are less intelligent and that, in a meritocracy, the number of black professors at Harvard University "would approach zero percent".

After supporting Nathan Cofnas through two university inquiries and sponsoring his unsuccessful legal action, the Free Speech Union – the organisation established in 2020 by journalist Toby Young to campaign for freedom of expression – turned its public advocacy against Jason Arday directly. (David Starkey is a Free Speech Union advisor).

On 10 August, the Free Speech Union attacked Arday over complaints he had made to the Metropolitan Police about the risks to his mental health following journalistic inquiries about claims of plagiarism.

Young wrote to the Met Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, asking for an explanation. Meanwhile, Jack Grove, an editor at Times Higher Education (known as THE), who had launched the original plagiarism dossier about Arday's PhD, said that the academic’s complaints to the police were an illegitimate assault on free speech and important public interest journalism.

On 12 August, James Orr – a founding member of the Free Speech Union's advisory council – posted on X: "What terrifies me is if it turns out Jason Arday’s DEI qualifications were fake, his DEI chair was fake, his DEI discipline was fake, and his faculty + college were DEI bootcamps. Imagine the backlash against hardworking DEI hires?"

At 5.51am on 14 August, before the news was reported that Arday had been found dead, the online magazine Quillette – whose editor Claire Lehmann is also a Free Speech Union advisor – published an essay calling Jason Arday a “fantasist, fabulist, fraud”.

A second article published on the same day defended research into group differences in intelligence and positioned Nathan Cofnas as its latest persecuted scholar. 

Over six days, this network generated the same racial frame across race science media, a free-speech lobbying outfit, a political magazine, and Reform's Head of Policy James Orr.

The Pioneer Fund Rebrands

The campaign against Jason Arday did not come out of nowhere.

The Cambridge network that Byline Times first exposed in 2021 began forming in 2016 and 2017, when Thiel Capital chief of staff, Charles Vaughan, attended meetings at the university. He encouraged conservative academics to build ties, recruit sympathetic people, and build media and political influence.

The clearest mass-market distillation of the Pioneer Fund’s worldview was Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s 1994 book The Bell Curve, which argued that black people were less intelligent than white people partly for genetic reasons.

The Pioneer Fund, established in New York in 1937, harboured direct ties with Nazi eugenicists. Thirteen scholars whose work it relied on were Pioneer Fund grantees, while the Fund financed nearly all research cited for its central race and IQ claims.

James Orr hosted Charles Murray at Cambridge University in 2021.

In 2022, the Pioneer Fund relaunched under its new Aporia brand, incorporating the Fund’s old personnel, assets, and publications. Aporia's founder Matthew Frost said that the magazine wanted to “move the Overton Window” – the range of politically acceptable ideas – and gain “legitimacy via association”.

Peter Thiel – who, as Byline Times has revealed, made a secret five-figure donation to Cambridge University through James Orr at the time of Orr's hiring – also harboured his own direct ties to the founders of Aporia.

Thiel sought introductions to Nathan Cofnas and Aporia editor Noah Carl before giving them what Aporia’s co-founder Emil Kirkegaard called the “Thiel treatment”. 

A July 2024 photograph posted by Richard Hanania – another race science sympathiser whose book, The Origins of Woke, was endorsed by Thiel – underscores Cofnas’ proximity to the wider Thiel-linked US right: it shows Cofnas arm-in-arm with Hanania and Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin, whose software company was funded by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, claims that white people are genetically more intelligent than black people, whom he repeatedly calls “negroes” and casts as better off under slavery.

As Byline Times first reported earlier this year, the Free Speech Union is directly connected to Aporia. Companies House records list the Free Speech Union’s founding general secretary, Toby Young, and Aporia senior editor Noah Carl, as co-directors of Skeptics Ltd.

Alongside James Orr, David Starkey, and Claire Lehmann, another Aporia contributor Eric Kaufmann sits on its advisory council. Cofnas himself was a recurring contributor and guest at Aporia, while Lehmann’s Quillette lists six articles under his byline.

In 2021, Byline Times reported an allegation in Max Chafkin’s biography that Peter Thiel had also been “secretly funding” Quillette around 2016. Lehmann denied the claim.

The Sanctuary

It was James Orr who first opened Aporia’s route into mainstream national-conservative politics.

The magazine thanked him for “organising and inviting us” to the 2023 NatCon summit, documenting his direct role in giving the race science platform access to senior politicians and organisers.

The summit was attended by Cabinet ministers including Suella Braverman (now a Reform MP) and Michael Gove (now Editor of the Spectator), as well as figures such as David Starkey.

But James Orr’s role in bridging race science via Cambridge University into organised politics forms part of a wider approach that has alarmed students and academics across the world-renowned institution.

A six-month Byline Times investigation – based on interviews with nearly 20 current and former Cambridge students and academics – found that Orr has been using the university as a recruitment ground for a hard-right political project linked to his role as Reform's policy chief.

The investigation revealed activities including the housing of postgraduate students at his own home where they mingle with race science advocates and hard-right political figures.

Senior academics told this publication that the arrangement raised concerns over safeguarding, student welfare, and indoctrination. Several complaints about James Orr have reached Cambridge’s senior leadership, but no action has been taken.

At a live Aporia event in July 2024, Nathan Cofnas appeared alongside Eric Kaufmann, a Free Speech Union advisory council member, and Aporia co-founder Matthew Frost. Kaufmann spoke at the event about “the problems with… black culture”.

The previous year, Frost had attended a notorious neo-Nazi gathering in Estonia known as the “Scandza Forum”, hosted by Scandinavian neo-Nazi Fróði Midjord and renamed “Guide to Kulchur” after a book by Nazi sympathiser and Holocaust supporter Ezra Pound.

The Aporia event hosted by Frost in 2024 was held at The Sanctuary, a discreet political hub overlooking Westminster Abbey, where major Reform donor Ben Delo funds office, events, and podcasting space. It is understood that Aporia has access to The Sanctuary's internal booking system to secure office and events space on an ad hoc basis.

The Sanctuary gave Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party a free space to launch what it called the most comprehensive deportation policy produced in the UK, proposing to remove millions of migrants from the country.

The anti-extremism organisation Hope Not Hate has revealed that Delo has also helped fund the Free Speech Union.

The Cambridge Scrutonian Society, founded by two of James Orr’s students with his behind-the-scenes support, occupies a separate Sanctuary office underwritten by Delo.

Unanswered Questions

Cambridge University has questions to answer.

As Byline Times documented last month, it took no action after repeated internal safeguarding complaints about James Orr and his involvement with right-wing extremist groups.

Asked repeatedly to comment on the extensive findings of this publication's six-month investigation, Cambridge University's press office merely stated: "Byline Times has sent the university a slew of unsubstantiated allegations, wilful mischaracterisations, and falsehoods, which we strongly reject. The volume of misleading claims and conjecture means we are unable to engage with the approach as a legitimate media enquiry." 

The university had also retained Nathan Cofnas’ fellowship after Emmanuel College severed ties with him in 2024 over his debunked anti-black claims about intelligence and academic representation.

These decisions sharpen the questions for Cambridge.

Who in its faculty put Nathan Cofnas forward as a research associate?

What safeguards were put in place for Jason Arday as the news coverage and reputational attacks on his life story intensified?

Why was LJMU’s settled finding on the plagiarism allegations against Arday quickly displaced by public presumption in the eyes of the institution?

Nathan Cofnas denied coordinating with Aporia, James Orr, David Starkey, the Free Speech Union, or Quillette in his campaign against Jason Arday.

Claire Lehmann, Editor of Quillette, told Byline Times: “Quillette had no contact with Nathan Cofnas, Aporia, the Free Speech Union, or James Orr about Jason Arday before publishing either article. Neither piece was solicited, coordinated, or discussed with any of those parties.”

She added that, after Jason Arday’s death, she “sent Nathan Cofnas a private message asking whether he was alright".

James Orr told this publication that he had not "amplified", taken part in, or condoned "any alleged campaign against Jason Arday".

"I have not communicated with Nathan Cofnas, with anyone at Aporia, or the Free Speech Union, or indeed with anyone else from any other organisation about my former colleague either before or after my social media post of 12 August," he added.

The Free Speech Union did not respond to a request for comment.

This article was amended on 19 August 2026 to correct an error confusing the Times Educational Supplement and Times Higher Education; and on 24 August 2026 to clarify that Aporia does not have a designated office space at The Sanctuary.