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.

“Reform UK is now a non-profit, with no shareholders, limited by guarantee.”

Previously, Nigel Farage literally owned Reform UK. He held the vast majority of shares, in a highly unusual arrangement for a political party.

Farage pledged to change that. The party remains a company, but the majority-shareholder model is gone, and a formal constitution, member conferences, and voting rights are now in place. Up to a point.

Byline Times has got hold of a copy of Reform UK’s constitution, adopted in September last year, and it shows that Reform UK is still not the member democracy its leading lights have suggested.

The resolution adopting Reform's new constitution states that it "robustly democratises participation within the party by the membership."

What the actual constitution itself suggests however is that Reform UK is a DINO – Democracy in Name Only.

While the new governing document introduced a party Board, containing (some) elected members, and formalised member ballots for the leadership, Nigel Farage retains an extraordinary degree of power.

Some of the arrangements will be familiar to frustrated members of other parties. Motions carried at Reform’s conference are advisory only, and simply have to be discussed by the Board.

Members vote in internal elections – but those are at the whim of the party Board. Article 4.3 of the constitution notes the Board has absolute discretion over party ballots.

But the democratic sheen comes off completely when we look at how Farage could be removed. The answer is: it’s almost impossible.

To call an emergency general meeting or to issue a vote of no confidence in the leader, requires written requests to Farage's appointed Chairman, currently ex-Conservative MP Lee Anderson, from at least 50% of all members “in good standing” (There is another mechanism to call such a vote, but only once Reform has over 100 MPs).

Reform has around 270,000 members, according to recent tallies, meaning around 135,000 members would have to write to Anderson, within 60 days, to demand a no-confidence vote in the Chairman’s boss.

Imagine, if you will, Lee Anderson combing through 135,000 hand-written letters and deciding if each of the writers are a) members and b) in ‘good standing’.

The Chairman’s Gatekeeping Powers

Members are deemed of ‘good standing’ if their subscriptions are up to date, they are not subject to any suspension or exclusion by the party, and they owe no debts to the party older than 30 days and more than £100.

The leader-appointed Chairman has extensive powers over what counts as ‘good standing’. He can refuse new membership and renewals, revoke membership in specified circumstances, exercise emergency disciplinary powers “in cases of exceptional gravity and urgency”, suspend candidates (subject to Board approval after the fact), oversee the membership database and exercise overall responsibility for party organisation.

The Discipline Committee of the Board, composed of serving members, calls most of the shots on member suspensions or expulsions – and it is chaired by the party secretary. That role is appointed by Nigel Farage. (There is an appeals process which is more independent, for those who want to keep fighting).

Should a no-confidence motion in Farage be called – after meeting that impossibly-high bar – the decision goes to the Board.

Farage sits on that Board, and there’s no requirement to recuse himself from the vote. He also has an in-built majority on the body.

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

An In-Built Majority

The Board does have power. But only three of its eight places are actually elected by members.

Three members are appointed by the party leader – while the leader himself and the party Chairman he appoints also sit on there. That gives an inbuilt five-in-eight majority for Farage – or any successor – on the party’s governing body.

The Chairman does not usually vote, so in practice the leader’s in-built majority is usually 50% – with the chair (who can be sacked by Farage) casting any deciding vote.

It is the Board which approves policies and manifestos, while the leader directs policy development with the Board’s agreement.

Article 6.20 of the constitution is particularly telling. And it was, strangely, left off the summary handed to members at Reform conference last summer.

It states: “In between meetings all powers of the Board are delegated to the party leader who may exercise those powers at his discretion.” That bears reading again.

“Any decision made by the party leader that would have been made by the Board is subject to ratification at the next meeting of the Board or, should the party leader consider it necessary, by email.”

The Board ordinarily meets just twice a year. Between meetings, the leader can make any decision the Board can, ratified after the fact – by a body he controls.

The Board’s powers – and therefore the leader’s between meetings – are sweeping. It manages party funds and structure, policy and manifesto approval, party discipline and procedural rule-making. The board can establish, suspend or disband branches.

The resolution adopting the constitution in September 2025 states: "A well-structured Constitution is essential for maintaining internal democracy, transparency, and the effective functioning of the party." Readers can decide whether the rhetoric matches the reality.

Should the shine continue to fade from Nigel Farage – despite his recent re-election in Clacton – he will not be removed by party members. That decision will be made by one man: Mr Farage himself.

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

A Snapshot of Nigel Farage’s Powers Within Reform UK

Policy and political direction

• Farage gives political direction to the Party and is responsible for developing its policies, with the agreement of the Board — Art. 7.1 of the constitution
• Farage makes or approves national statements of Party policy and how they’re communicated — Art. 7.3.3
• Farage may form advisory groups at his discretion on any matter pertinent to his functions, informing the Board of their membership — Art. 7.2
• Farage has the right to be a full member of all sub-committees and working groups set up by the Board (Art. 7.3.1), including finance, discipline, policy, standing orders and members liaison

Appointments

• Farage appoints three ordinary voting members of the Board; at least two must hold or have held elected public office in the UK — Art. 6.3.2
• Farage appoints the Party Treasurer, Party Secretary, Party Chairman and Deputy Leader — Arts. 6.5, 7.3.2, 7.11. The Chairman appointment is subject to Board approval
• Farage may make such other appointments as he thinks fit, informing the Board at its next meeting — Art. 7.3.4
• Farage fills casual vacancies on the Board (even if the vacancy is of an elected member) — Art. 6.18
• Farage renews the terms of Board members. All serve two years, renewable without limitation “at the discretion of the party leader” — Art. 6.15. On a plain reading this captures the three member-elected seats

Executive authority

• Farage, between Board meetings, holds all powers of the Board, exercisable at his discretion and subject to later ratification — Art. 6.20. The constitution doesn’t specify any consequence if ratification is withheld
• Farage must be present for the Board to meet — Art. 6.21. The minimum attendance (quorum) is four voting members “including the party Chairman and party leader”
• Farage selects candidates for parliamentary and other non-local by-elections, in consultation with the constituency association or branch — Art. 12.12

Joint and veto powers

• Farage, jointly with the Board he controls, determines co-operation with other parties, institutions and organisations (such as electoral pacts) — Art. 3.3
• Farage holds an effective veto wherever unanimity of the Board is required: admitting an otherwise-prohibited member (Art. 4.9), amending the constitution without a members’ ballot where legally required (Art. 13.6), and correcting “errors in logic, numbers, grammar, or spelling” (Art. 13.7)
• Farage sits on the Board, which determines a motion of no confidence in him, with no recusal provision — Arts. 6.28–6.31

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

The legal action comes as new documents obtained by Byline Times, reveal how Uniserve, and a Conservative MP linked to the company, successfully lobbied ministers to push through the deal, which ultimately left the Government tens of millions of pounds worth of unusable PPE.

The deal was hugely controversial due to the involvement of a Conservative peer and the fact that the firm owns an office complex which houses the constituency office of Conservative Party MP and ex-Cabinet Office minister Julia Lopez.

The company, owned by businessman Iain Liddell, prides itself on being the “UK’s leading logistics & global trade management provider.

However, despite the company having no track record of supplying PPE to the NHS, they were awarded multiple contracts in 2020 to provide vast quantities of masks, gloves, aprons, face shields and goggles.

Uniserve saw its turnover and profits surge during the pandemic as a result of the contracts, which generated payments of £1.15 billion from the DHSC, up to April 2023.

The contracts, valued at £303 million, were made possible after Conservative peer and Cabinet Office minister, Lord Agnew referred Uniserve onto the so-called 'VIP lane' for preferential contracts.

It was subsequently discovered that huge volumes of PPE supplied by Uniserve under these deals were not fit for purpose. According to data obtained by Spotlight on Corruption, 182 million items of PPE supplied by Uniserve, totalling £178.5 million were assigned into the ‘do not supply’ category. 

Uniserve was also handed a £572m contract in March 2020 to provide freight services to the DHSC. The deal required the firm to assist the Government in delivering PPE located in China and South-East Asia to the UK and included the management of sea freight arriving at Felixstowe – where container storage was causing a major headache for officials due to the shear volume of PPE ordered by the DHSC. 

A spokesperson for Uniserve said they procure products for customers, and had a global network of contacts that specialise in PPE. “We did not actively sell our procurement services to the DHSC, we were asked to help”.

Uniserve and the Conservative Connection

New documents released to Byline Times following a lengthy Freedom of Information battle with the Cabinet Office can reveal the true extent of the political lobbying between Conservative party Ministers and Uniserve in the build-up to the huge VIP lane deals being awarded.

Despite having no track record of supplying PPE, the lucrative deals were awarded to Uniserve without any competition. The company does however share the same address as former Cabinet Office Minister Julia Lopez MP and is based in her constituency. 

Liddell and Lopez, who continues to rent an office space from Uniserve, spent years denying they were in contact with each other regarding the PPE deals, in 2020 Uniserve explicitly told reporters at the Guardian, “Uniserve or Mr Liddell were never in contact with Julia Lopez regarding bidding for these contracts.” A statement echoed by the then Conservative-controlled Cabinet Office. However in late 2025 the pair finally came clean and admitted that they were in email contact prior to the VIP lane deals being awarded.

Lopez declined to explain to the Guardian whether or not she acted on Liddell’s email. 

However, for the first time, Byline Times can reveal what happened next. 

By March 2020 DHSC and Uniserve were already in discussion over the transportation of medical goods, however attention soon turned to the supply of PPE.

Uniserve lobbied Lopez on 02 April 2020, complaining that PPE procurement needed “serious thought” and officials were “taking too long” to deal with his company's offer.  

Remarkably the very next day, on 03 April 2020, Lopez’s ‘Senior Parliamentary Advisor’ escalated Uniserve's complaint to a fellow Cabinet office minister's office and health officials.

Lopez’s assistant told officials that “Julia and I have known” Iain Liddell “for a number of years” before continuing to press officials to consider Uniserve's offer.

Lopez’s team repeated Uniserve's desire to "escalate it to the top to make sure they are aware of the situation”.

Just 40 minutes later, the Private Secretary to the then Cabinet Minister Lord True picked up the batten and lobbied PPE officials further, stating:

“I have been contacted by the constituency office of Julia Lopez MP who is one of our ministers here (Currently on [redacted] leave). The enquiry relates to Uniserves offer to source PPE which I gather you’re working on. Their MP states that he has had to ship a finite number of products elsewhere. Do you have an update on this particular offer that I can go back to the Minister with please? I am fully sympathetic to the extreme pressure you must be working to but keen we can provide a little info”.

Lord True’s office did not stop there. Three days later on April 6 2020 and again on April 8 2020, the ministers office continued to pressure officials to look at the Uniserve PPE offer, and provide an update for Cabinet Minister Julis Lopez.

The Private Secretary to Lord True pleaded with officials to “help” as Uniserve were being “hanstrung by certification processes” and they needed to get back to Lopez’s office “with a bit more information”.

Less than ten minutes after the latest emails from Lord True’s team, a Cabinet Office officials replied: “these guys are coming into Govt from all sides.( [redacted] cc’d) into your email is dealing with them in an escalation from Penny Mordaunt's office". So it is firmly in the system..”

The sustained political pressure from the former Conservative party ministers appeared to pay off and within a few days huge PPE contracts started to flow towards Uniserve via the VIP lane. 

On April 13 2020 , just five days after the lobbying efforts from Julia Lopez and Lord True’s offices, health officials handed an £8million contract to supply one million gowns to Uniserve - without any formal competitive tendering process.

However, this contract was eclipsed less than a week later, when the DHSC awarded another deal worth £86.2million to Uniserve, to supply a further 10 million gowns - Again, this contract was awarded without any competition.

Shockingly, Uniserve were paid in full for  all 11 million gowns provided via the two VIP lane deals - despite the DHSC eventually confirming they were “unifit” for use and subsequently destroyed without ever being used in the NHS.

It is these two contracts that sit at the heart of the £90m legal action brought by the UK government against Uniserve and yet another reminder of the disastrous consequences of the previous government’s unlawful VIP lane. 

Iain Liddell Group Managing Director and Founder of Uniserve told Byline Times:

“Uniserve did not actively sell its procurement services to the DHSC. The Government’s PPE procurement team approached Uniserve because of our unique capabilities, our expertise, and our proven track record. Uniserve was approached directly by the Department of Health and Social Care on 22 March 2020 to support the urgent transportation of critical equipment from China to the UK. That was before the email to Julia Lopez referred to in your questions. Uniserve did not contact Julia Lopez regarding bidding for Covid contracts. Any limited communications  with politicians or officials were about process concerns and delay in circumstances where Uniserve was already engaged with DHSC during an unprecedented national emergency. Uniserve had no knowledge at the time of any VIP lane or High Priority Lane, did not seek access to one, and did not understand its. engagement with DHSC to be taking place through any politically favoured process. Uniserve denies the allegations made by DHSC in the current proceedings. Those allegations are disputed and should not be presented as findings of fact. Uniserve is proud of the role it played in supporting the country during the pandemic. Public scrutiny is legitimate, but it must be based on a fair and accurate account of the chronology and the facts.

Julia Lopez MP said “I was on maternity leave during the period in question”

DHSC spokesperson said “We do not comment on active legal cases”

The Cabinet Office was approached for comment.

Related reading: Matt Hancock and Three Conservative Peers Referred 60 Suppliers Onto the PPE COVID VIP Lane

UK Government sues Uniserve for £90m

Five years on two of the PPE contracts handed to Uniserve via the unlawful VIP lane are at the centre of a huge legal action. In April this year the UK Government filed papers with the courts and laid out its plans to sue Uniserve for over £90million. The eyewatering sums follow hot on the tail of the DHSC recent high profile, legal victory with PPE Medpro - Another VIP lane PPE supplier with strong links to the Conservative Party, who have been ordered to pay back £122million - although the bill remains unpaid.

The DHSC claim that two huge contracts awarded to Uniserve in April 2020, to supply 11 million gowns for a total value of £90,200,000 were “not fit for their purpose” and couldn’t “lawfully be used and/or marketed as PPE”.

The DHSC argue that the gowns did not have required CE markings and “were not accompanied by any declaration of conformity”. Without this crucial accreditation the gowns were then deemed unfit to be used in the NHS and eventually destroyed.

Furthermore, it’s claimed that Uniserve procured the gown via a manufacturer not “permitted” in the contract agreement between the two parties.

For these reasons, the DHSC argues that Uniserve should re-pay the £90.2million as well as the million of pounds spent on storing, moving and ultimately destroying the unused PPE.

Uniserve have denied all the allegations, arguing that the gowns did not violate PPE safety regulations. 

A History of Waste

By December 2020, six months after the last Conservative Government had stood down its controversial PPE procurement channels that operated during the pandemic, at least 14 billion items of PPE remained unused and stored across dozens of warehousing facilities around the country. Circa 5.6 billion items of equipment remained locked away in metal shipping containers. 

17,848 shipping containers loaded with circa one million pallets of PPE remained in the country. The astonishing number of containers arriving into the UK crammed full of unwanted PPE had been steadily rising since October 2020. Felixstowe port was in “chaos” partly due to the estimated 11,000 containers full of PPE blocking the quay – ships unable to unload due to the “serious port congestion” were being redirected to other ports.

Officials were desperate to clear the backlog of containers at Felixstowe and in an eight week period between October and December 2020 approximately 8,000 shipping containers were removed from quayside and stored elsewhere. Mountains of multicoloured shipping containers stacked five high began popping up in unusual places – A disused airstrip at Mendlesham Airfield in Suffolk suddenly became home to 1000 containers of PPE, stacks of PPE laden containers were also spotted at an empty site near Melton railway station also in Suffolk and several thousand containers were moved from Felixstowe port to the Port of Ipswich. 

There appeared to be little strategy from the Government on the next steps and what were they planned to do with billions of items of PPE stored in 17,848 shipping containers and approximately 50 warehouses. While ministers grappled with the situation the stockpile of excess equipment procured during the pandemic remained in storage, a decision that would eventually lead to a further £1.4 billion of taxpayer money being wasted.

An analysis of historic spending data, published quarterly by the DHSC demonstrates the department spent a staggering £1.39 billion on “storage costs” between October 2020 and April 2023. This figure includes the storage of PPE and unused covid tests and ventilators procured during the pandemic. The biggest benefactor of this expenditure was a company called Uniserve Limited, the Essex based firm was paid a mind-blowing £543.7 million for storage related costs by the DHSC over the same time period.

Definitions of “communism” are a bit like definitions of pornography: hard to pin down but everyone is pretty sure they know it when they see it. For the Republicans echoing this new midterm strategy, communism just means Democrats.

For the donors who fund Trump and the MAGA movement, communism means anything that hints that the gargantuan fortunes they have acquired are anything less than the righteous reward for their genius.

For the MAGA faithful, communism happens whenever some big-city or brown progressive person says something critical about the cost-of-living crisis or Papa Trump. 

For many immigrants from formerly communist regimes, along with those whose political identities were forged by the Cold War, it means rule by thuggish authoritarians claiming to represent ‘the people’. Because the term is such a vague catch-all for ‘everything that scares me’ it proves so useful for the demagogues who now control the Republican Party.

The messaging strategy is also circulating in some of the more conservative circles in the UK and the EU. At this year’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship gathering, which drew about 4000 attendees to London’s Olympia conference center last June, several speakers merged their praise for Western civilization with dark threats about the spread of communism and its apparent equivalent, socialism. 

Related reading: Trump Went to War In Order to Break Iran and Left It More Powerful Than Before – US Defence Analyst

“It is almost universally recognised that the West shows the world the way of economic development,” said Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a pianist and composer and the son of Aleksandr, the famous Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate. “Socialism of any style and hue leads to a comprehensive destruction of the spiritual essence of man.”

Like Christian nationalists in the US, he laid the blame on humanism. “The turn effected by the Renaissance,” he asserted, led to a “headlong dash from the spirit toward matter” and a “dangerous tilt toward worship of man and material goods.”

Tell that to the well-dressed attendees who flew business class to this £1500-per-ticket event.

The American video producer and podcaster John Papola similarly invoked “communists,” “Marxists,” and “New Jacobins,” along with the insufficiently pious, as the supposed enemies of fathers and families. Where precisely can you find these nefarious types? At the “woke madrasas” otherwise known as America’s educational institutions.

The history of Red Scares is grim. In the scare of 1918-1920, the federal government under President Woodrow Wilson criminalized political dissent, engaged in warrantless searches as a matter of policy, and put thousands of individuals, many of them immigrants, under detention without due process. (Does any of this sound familiar?) In the 1950s, too, red-baiting deprived thousands of individuals of their civil rights and careers. More than that, Red Scares were used to undermine American movements for civil rights and labor rights, allowing reactionaries to sideline and silence opponents without having to engage with the facts.

The Red Scares of earlier times always came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. It is no accident that they often invoked the language of religious authoritarianism. If God is on our side, according to the paranoid style of American politics, then the other side should have no rights at all. The presence of religious supremacy combined with a rejection of pluralism and equality—a Christian nationalist ethos—was always a sure indicator of profoundly anti-democratic intent.

In comparison with previous iterations, the present version of the Red Scare might at first seem like a bad joke— a case of history laughing at itself. This time the red-baiters can’t point to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 or the Cold War as an excuse for their excesses. The alleged “communists” in the Democratic Party aren’t advocating for a global proletarian revolution, and the tiny number of Americans who self-identify as communist tend to focus their ire on the Democratic Party just as often as the GOP.

For the most part, the Democrats being smeared as “communists” are proposing forms of universal healthcare, investments in public education, voting rights, higher taxes on the wealthy, and other “crazy” schemes that people in Canada, the UK, and Europe think of as Western civilization.

Republicans point to the candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America who have won their races—never mind that others have failed. Notwithstanding the presence of some noisy individuals on the fringes whose years-old tweets have received extraordinary amounts of attention, the politics of the Democratic Party remain, on balance, closer to the centre than even those modest proposals. 

But words matter, even when they come from a deranged President and his corrupt cronies. Republicans are using the Red Scare tactics now for the same reasons as before. It’s not about promoting democratic debate (should the wealthy be exempt from taxation?); it’s about distracting from the current administration’s corruption and incompetence, criminalising dissent, and laying the groundwork for authoritarianism.

As the writer Bradley Onishi noted, the framing of the present Red Scare matches the wording of one of Trump’s more outrageous (I know – how to choose?) executive orders.

Last year, the president attempted to criminalise the belief system of a non-existent group supposedly called “Antifa.” The beliefs were characterised as “anti-Christian,” “terrorist,” and anti-family. These imaginary miscreants, Trump said, would be prosecuted under federal law. The order was unconstitutional in both spirit and letter. Yet the equally fictitious “communists” that have allegedly infiltrated the Democratic Party are now described in precisely the same language.

What to do? This is no time for Democrats, progressives, and others in the pro-democracy coalition to return to the familiar defensive crouch. Rather, they must blow the whistle on this effort to distract from the failures and corruption of the worst administration in American history.

The next step is to reverse the charges.

What people rightly abhor about the communist states of the past is that they used the label as cover for kleptocratic regimes run by, and for, a party elite. Welcome to Trump’s America! We are now a country where dear leader and his friends use every lever of government to direct money away from you and into their pockets.

The other thing that has given communist regimes a bad name is that they involve a merger of corporate power with state power. Well, nobody does that better than Trump.

In America today, we have a Cabinet, with a collective net worth around $7.5 billion, making policy for the benefit of billionaires; we have major AI investors “regulating” AI; and defense contractors overseeing defense contracts (especially when one of the president’s sons is involved). And we have sectors of the corporate world supplying Trump with free legal services, ballrooms, and whatever else he craves at any given moment.

The difference between this and state socialism is that, under the Trump administration, profits are privatised while the costs are spread out among the population.

Finally, Democrats must own an element of the attack that has a grain of truth. Yes, there is a major internal debate about the future direction of the party. On the whole, that’s a good thing; this is the noise that democracy makes. Yes, some people in the party are advocating major changes in the economic system. That’s a good thing, too. Universal healthcare isn’t “communism” any more than public roads are communism.

Rolling back the supposedly “beautiful” No-Billionaire-Left-Behind tax giveaway isn’t “communism” either. Affordable housing and a living wage aren’t extreme ideas. But these proposals involve change—and change can be scary, especially for today’s beneficiaries of wealth concentration at the tippy top of the economic ladder. The fear that powers the Red Scare is just the fear that American might one day become the free, fair, and democratic society that it has always promised to become.

(An abbreviated version of this piece first appeared in The Contrarian)

On Friday 14 August, Reform UK’s Nadhim Zahawi appeared as a guest on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, discussing the Clacton by-election result. The vote saw Reform leader Nigel Farage return to Parliament last Thursday, following the by-election he called to counter standards investigations into his funding.

Host Kate Garraway noted that the anti-Farage candidate received 9,455 votes, securing over a quarter of the vote in an election where the main opposition parties did not stand.

Reform defector Zahawi replied: “Yeah and he got, by the way, he got I think £180,000 from Dale Vince, who is a big Labour supporter. He got activists from the Conservative Party and from Labour going out to try and knock on doors for him.”

His statement follows a report in the Telegraph on 9 July stating: “One of Labour’s biggest donors has pledged to fund Count Binface in his Clacton by-election battle with Nigel Farage…[Dale Vince] could donate up to £180,050 to Count Binface to spend on campaigning materials during a by-election.” However, no donation appears to have been made from the businessman and activist.

In a statement on social media, Count Binface – real name Jon Harvey – wrote on Friday Zahawi’s claim was “untrue.”

“Dale Vince has never donated any money to me, and at no point have I asked activists from any other party to knock on doors for me. If anyone did so, it was not at my direction and was of their own volition.

“I’m sure Mr Zahawi will want to correct the record at his earliest convenience.”

Dale Vince told Byline Times Zahawi’s claim was: “untrue, totally false, a fantasy.”

He claimed it was “unconnected with reality and unchecked by anyone at Reform (no-one asked)." Vince added: "Who does that?” The entrepreneur's team is set to contact Zahawi.

He confirmed he had donated nothing to Count Binface.

“Reform plays fast and loose with the truth, not just dodgy donations. There are five million (secret) reasons why complaining about someone else’s funding is just plain daft. Even if it were truth as opposed to fantasy,” the green entrepreneur added, referring to crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne’s pre-election ‘gift’ of £5 million to Nigel Farage.

A spokesperson for ITV told this outlet it had already issued a clarification on this morning’s GMB programme at 6:28am.

Presenter Ranvir Singh said: “Before we get into today's stories on Friday's programme, Nadhim Zahawi said that Count Binface had received £180,000 from the businessman Dale Vince and had asked Labour and Conservative Party activists to go and knock on doors for him. While Mr Vince did offer financial support to Count Binface, it was never accepted. Count Binface also says he has never asked activists from other parties to knock on doors for him. We are happy to clarify that position.” 

Zahawi defected to Reform UK this January, claiming he did so to protect free speech. The former Conservative was briefly Chancellor in the dying days of Boris Johnson’s premiership, calling for Johnson to resign less than 48 hours after being appointed to the top economic role. Johnson then did resign, only for Zahawi to later endorse calls for the former PM to return to the top job.

Zahawi had previously strongly criticised the Reform leader. In 2015, Zahawi told LBC that previous remarks made by Farage were "deeply racist," and comments of which "Goebbels would be proud" - referring to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Zahawi has since disowned previous criticisms of the Clacton MP.

In May 2024, the then-Conservative MP admitted that he paid nearly £5m to HMRC to settle his tax affairs, following allegations of tax avoidance. He had previously hit out at reporting on the issue as "smears."

Reform UK and Nadhim Zahawi were contacted for comment.

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

There will be another Jason Arday.

We know this. Because the media knows this. 

We are told the press 'isn’t free’ if it lacks the impunity to do anything it likes. It is how power protects itself. By declaring it has none.

That is why there will be another Jason Arday. 

It doesn’t matter that a 41-year-old took his life after days of disproportionate media coverage even after his resignation from Cambridge University. 

It doesn’t matter that this mass exercise in hate-drenched fury, sneering, and self-righteousness was fuelled by his race and his class – and whether anyone wants to admit this or not. (No one argued that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, elected politicians no less, weren’t qualified enough to take the economy to the brink). Those in the media know that someone white and/or posh wouldn’t be denigrated in the same way. Because none of their actions are treated in this way. No matter the 'truth’ of what they say.

It doesn’t matter that media outlets across the spectrum have had nothing much to write now that his children are without their father. That is not respect. That is the point. News cycles move on. Algorithms attract other eyeballs. Business as usual. 

It doesn’t matter that columnists at a few of these outlets are now writing of their own ‘failure’ of Jason Arday. Because they will continue to take the money these outlets pay them. And, in doing so, shield these outlets of any blame.

It doesn't matter that the rage-bait has moved on on social media platforms designed to ensure that other rage-bait takes its place. Some continue in their attacks. Hate pays.

It doesn’t matter that a human being was reduced to an object of lustful frenzy upon the instincts of the mob. Not when division and desensitisation is the operating system our dehumanising political-social-media culture runs on.

That is why there will be another Jason Arday.

Because there is no check to fetter power when unfettered power resides in the check. 

There is no 'neutral arbiter’. Only a media invested in its own status to shape how we see the world; who is ‘up’ and who is ‘down’; who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’; what happens to people’s lives. Only a media that cries ‘public interest’ even when it is not: it is the exercise of unchecked power.

There was a public interest seven years ago when this publication first reported on the questionable finances of Reform UK's predecessor party and Nigel Farage and his association with a convicted fraudster who is “like a son”. No outlet followed up. Now they are fearless watchdogs. 

After nearly a decade in which Farage has been elevated as the next prime minister-in-waiting, it is time to turn up the scrutiny so as not to get caught out backing the wrong horse. No matter that the horse long bolted because they opened the gate.

The media’s own interests; and the public interest: different stories, indeed.

That is why there’s not yet any media interest, enough to establish a public interest, in a follow-up of the six-month investigation, spanning some 20 sources, published by Byline Times last month about the institution the press has been fixated with day after day: Cambridge University.

There is not yet any public interest, it seems, in the activities of another – white, middle-class, right-wing – professor there, James Orr, who is simultaneously a public figure in political life as Farage’s Head of Policy at Reform. When this publication put to Cambridge the extensive findings of his activities at the university, including concerns around the safeguarding of students, the press office of my alma mater had nothing to say.

It passed our questions straight to Orr’s lawyers. When we asked it why, its only response – which it said we couldn’t publish – was to state that “we are unable to engage with the approach as a legitimate media enquiry”. You can read the full investigation here and decide for yourself. (It redacts the name of the property from which Orr operates, and in which he houses students, in Cambridge – even though this is already in the public domain – because his lawyers argued that it would leave him open to the risk of violence).

That is why there will be another Jason Arday.

Because the same media that sees it as its right to scrutinise every detail of a person’s life even when the public interest is hard to justify, even when their vulnerability is clear, is the same media that refuses to hold a mirror up to itself. One rule for them, another for everyone else. I have written in these pages previously, and I will say it again: it is one of the biggest scandals and stories of our time. An ethical void that is depthless.

The media can’t be voted out. No one in political power is willing to go near it – precisely because of the unfettered power they fear will be unleashed upon them if they try. But it is also because too many of us are more complicit in this than we would like to believe. 

Through our passivity and easy consumption of that which we would never want to happen to ourselves, we go along with this as how things are. As the world burns and people struggle to hold it together, materially and psychologically, in these difficult times, by keeping our own heads down – staring at our feet or at our phones – we betray the powerless: those for whom no compassion, no redemption, no other possible way ahead is an option.

We turn a blind eye to our dehumanisation. We cannot – do not – lift our heads enough to comprehend that we could get to a point where there will never be another Jason Arday. 

That is why there will be another Jason Arday. 

Hardeep Matharu is the Editor in Chief of Byline Times

It comes amid a fiery conflict over the remains of Advance UK, the far-right Reform competitor party that formally deregistered with the Electoral Commission in July.

Advance UK was established by Ben Habib, who was the co-deputy leader of Reform UK from October 2023 until he was removed and replaced by Richard Tice in July 2024.

Habib quit the party in November 2024, after falling out with leader Nigel Farage and then chairman Zia Yusuf – with businessman Habib backing a hardline stance in favour of mass deportations. Habib, who was born in Pakistan, had also called on far-right MP Rupert Lowe to be readmitted to Reform.

On 30 June 2025, Habib took over what was then the Integrity Party, relaunching it as 'Advance UK'. That same day, former Reform MP Rupert Lowe launched his own project, 'Restore Britain' – which soon outflanked the party in every respect. Restore began as a 'pressure group' but formally registered as a party this February, and secured 9% of the vote in the recent Greater Manchester Mayoral election.

It is polling around three per cent across Britain and is seen by Reform as a threat to its chances of securing a majority – with Lowe and Nigel Farage recently engaging in a very public spat over potentially working together.

This July, Ben Habib announced his intention to merge Advance UK with the non-party campaign group 'Great British PAC', which he chairs. He launched a ballot of members to certify the move. Around 8,000 members voted from the 38,000 potential voters, with the vast majority eventually backing the transfer.

Advance UK will continue to exist as a company – with, this outlet understands, around £250,000 in funds – but will no longer be regulated by the Electoral Commission. And it will give cash to GB PAC on a case-by-case basis.

Who Are GB PAC?

GBPAC was set up in 2024 as a pressure group, "in the mold of American political action committees", as Hope Not Hate puts it. The group writes: "GB PAC spends much of its time opposing the government's Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius. It has also supported Tommy Robinson events and a protest opposing puberty blockers for trans youth.

"Plans to launch an academy to teach future right-wing leaders, host a conference, and publish a list of legislation it wishes to overturn appear to have stalled," the anti-hate group said in a February briefing. Its advisory group includes far-right activists like Carl Benjamin (AKA YouTuber Sargon of Akkad).

Despite Habib's stated aversion to 'ethno-nationalism', a regional director of GBPAC has previously shared a website containing Hitler's speeches and pointed his online followers towards a video asserting Hitler "never ordered the extermination of a single Jew". Another, the group's England director has also bemoaned the supposed decline of the British "gene pool", writing on X: "By importing loads of sub Saharan Africans plus Muslims that inter breed the IQ is in severe decline."

GBPAC's founder and sole director Claire Bullivant told this outlet Advance UK's funds were "not being transferred to GBP Corporation Limited or to Claire Bullivant personally, nor is the Great British PAC acquiring that sum [£432,000 outlined in the last accounts] as part of the arrangements between the organisations."

"We understand that Ben Habib and the Advance UK College will determine how any remaining funds should properly be applied, including potentially supporting causes and legal cases they consider worthy. Should Advance UK independently decide to support a cause or legal action also being undertaken or supported by the Great British PAC, any such arrangement will be dealt with transparently and in accordance with applicable law."

Asked whether Great British PAC had received, or might receive, funding from overseas, Bullivant did not deny it.

"The Great British PAC is not a registered political party. The organisation may receive lawful financial support from individuals or organisations outside the United Kingdom where permitted.

"Any such funding will be accepted and used subject to the laws and regulatory requirements applicable to GBP Corporation Limited and to the activities on which those funds are spent."

She said Great British PAC would "register with the Electoral Commission in any capacity in which registration becomes legally required." They made need to register as a 'third party campaigner' if they do eventually promote another far-right party.

"We will comply with the relevant electoral and campaigning legislation applicable to our activities," Bullivant told this outlet.

On whether there was a conflict of interest in Ben Habib being chairman of GBPAC while also transferring his party's members to the non-party group, Bullivant said: "Ben Habib's roles in the two organisations have been transparent throughout the process.

"GBP Corporation Limited is a separate legal entity and Claire Bullivant has represented its interests as its director. Mr Habib does not own or control GBP Corporation Limited and is not one of its statutory directors." She claimed the groups had followed legal advice over the transfer, and that transfer of Advance UK's membership information "has been treated as a data-protection matter from the outset."

She denied that GBPAC had "controlled the [Advance UK] ballot or its outcome."

Related reading: A Police Report, Legal Threats and a Splinter Party: Inside the Demise of Advance UK

Money and Mergers

Speaking to Byline Times, Ben Habib said members' money will not be transferred to GB Corporation Limited – the company name for GBPAC.

"We've cut the running costs of the organisation down to close to nil — there are some monthly costs, but they're cut down mostly to nil."

However, he later confirmed that the party has spent £157,000 in "expenses" over the past six months. It is not clear what these expenses involved, though there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

"The idea is that if GB PAC, or indeed any other political movement, comes up with a proposition that makes sense and requires funding — wants a donation — then Advance UK will look at that, see whether it meets its aims as a political organisation, and then, subject to agreement with the college, the donation will be made," Habib said.

"I'll act as first gatekeeper on any applications for donations, and if I think it's worthy, it goes to the [party's] College and they decide whether the donation should be made," he added.

He noted, though, that Advance UK's governing body, the College, had dwindled to about a dozen members, from a peak of around 30 earlier in the year.

Asked how Advance would apportion its circa £250,000 now, Habib said: "One of the reasons we didn't just hand the whole thing over on day one to GBPAC is that it's owned by one person — it's got one director.

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

"The College and I felt it was important to make sure the funds we've got are used genuinely for proper political initiatives. I'm not suggesting for a moment that Claire [Bullivant] wouldn't do that — I'm sure she would — but it's much clearer for us if she comes to us and says, 'I need a donation of £20,000 because I want to fight this case, or run this campaign.' Then we can look at the merits."

Habib also pointed to the "bizarre oversight of electoral regulations" that Advance did not have to declare where its existing money came from on registering with the Electoral Commission as a party. "You don't actually have to say where your funds came from before you register as a party. But I can tell you the vast majority of our funds came from pure membership."

"[We got] probably over £400,000 just from membership. And I put in £100,000 myself."

"We ran the party pre-registration as if it were registered — we had three or four donors who put in £25,000 each, and we checked that all of them were on the electoral roll, which is a requirement, and they were."

When Restore Britain registered with the Electoral Commission, they reported having around £2.6m in the bank – none of which they had to prove came from permissible (i.e non-foreign) sources.

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission told Byline Times: “Permissibility requirements for donations only apply from the point of registration…

“Given the requirements only apply from registration, parties are not required to provide any further detail on the source of their funds prior to registration,” except a statement of how much money they have in the bank.

Related reading: Talk TV Host André Walker Found Guilty of Assaulting Climate Protester at Pro-Trump Dinner

Asked whether he considered merging Advance UK with Lowe's Restore Britain, Habib said: "I wouldn't want to merge Advance UK with Restore Britain. There are two fundamental problems with Restore Britain.

"One is that Rupert Lowe has set it up as a company limited by shares, and he owns the only share in issue — which means he is the beneficial owner of all the cash in Restore.

He continued: "That is an untenable position for me as far as a political party is concerned…I fought a six-month campaign, when Farage came back to lead Reform, for the democratisation of Reform, including Farage giving up his majority shareholding in the company. Restore suffers from exactly the same problem." He also claimed there was "a very thick vein of ethno-nationalism running through Restore, which I denounce."

"There is a significant number of people who hold views I find repugnant, frankly."

He had considered a merger with Restore previously. But he said: "The ethno-nationalist material about Restore wasn't clear to me until late February 2026 — it only really came to the fore after it converted to being a political party." Outright neo-Nazis have since endorsed the party.

However, Advance's decline was gathering momentum prior to its wind-up. "By mid-January, Restore was already bubbling as a potential competitor. We started losing members of the College," Habib says.

For his own part in dismantling Advance, Ben Habib says "I think what we did was the responsible thing for a political party to do, which was effectively out-positioned by Reform to its left and Restore to its right. It doesn't help to confuse the political landscape."

"I'm materially financially worse off as a result of having set Advance up. I donated £100,000, never took a penny out of it, didn't get a single train fare reimbursed, didn't get any meals reimbursed — nothing. I ran it absolutely in that way, to make sure there could be no reproach whatsoever against me as leader of the party, and I'm the thick end of £150,000 worse off for the experience."

He hopes GBPAC, which he has chaired from the outset, will fare better. Away from the Electoral Commission's gaze, it will certainly have a lot more potential funding streams.

This is the second of a two-part investigation into the demise of Advance UK. The first part is available here.

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