June 3rd 2023
RAF: Applicants described as ‘useless white male pilots’
Leaked emails show the pressure apparently being applied to filter out white male recruits and fast-track women and ethnic minorities. It can also be revealed 31 white men are to receive £5,000 each to compensate them for being unfairly disadvantaged by the approach.
White men seeking to join the Royal Air Force were described as “useless white male pilots” in leaked emails.
A serving Metropolitan Police officer faces trial for allegedly stalking a woman he had a sexual relationship with and suggesting she became a prostitute while going through money problems. PC Jonathan Simon, 43, allegedly started a sexual relationship with the complainant after she called police over a dispute with a neighbour.
Simon, who has been suspended by the Met Police, where he is attached to the East Area Command Unit, was arrested on Monday (July 4) and held in custody overnight before appearing in the dock on Tuesday (July 5). Westminster Magistrates’ Court heard he encouraged the woman get into prostitution and recommended a website to her.
Prosecutor David Roberts said Simon stalked her while he was on duty, turning up at her home and the bank where she worked, in full uniform with a colleague, after she told him she no longer wanted to see him.
June 1st 2023
House prices fall at fastest pace in nearly 14 years, says Nationwide
By Nick Edser
BBC News
UK house prices fell at their fastest annual pace for nearly 14 years in May, the Nationwide has said.
The building society said prices in the year to May dropped by 3.4%, the biggest decline since July 2009.
It also warned that more rises in mortgage interest rates could hit the housing market.
Mortgage rates have risen recently on expectations that the Bank of England will have to lift interest rates again because of stubbornly high inflation.
As a result, the Nationwide said “headwinds to the housing market look set to strengthen in the near term”.
House prices edged down by 0.1% in May itself, the Nationwide said, and the average property price now stands at £260,736.
Average prices are still 4% below their August 2022 peak, it added.
A drop in house prices would generally be welcomed by first-time buyers, who have watched property values continue to climb in recent years, even during the pandemic.
However, rising interest rates means that mortgage costs are now higher than many people looking to get on the housing ladder might have planned for.
New figures from the Bank of England showed the amount of mortgage debt borrowed was at its lowest level on record in April, excluding the period since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Overall, borrowers repaid £1.4bn more on their mortgages than banks lent out.
The Bank also said net mortgage approvals for house purchases fell to 48,700 from 51,500 in March.
Official figures last week showed the UK inflation rate – which charts rising prices – slowed in April by less than expected to 8.7%.
That led analysts to predict that the Bank of England will have to raise interest rates above their current level of 4.5% to as high as 5.5% to try to slow price rises.
In the wake of the inflation data, a range of lenders increased their mortgage interest rates, with Nationwide making the most significant move with a rise of up to 0.45 percentage points.
According to financial data firm Moneyfacts, the current average interest rate on a two-year fixed-rate mortgage is now 5.49% compared to a year ago when it was 3.25%.
A five-year fixed-rate deal is currently 5.17%, above a 3.37% rate this time last year.
Figures released earlier this week also showed that nearly 10% of UK mortgage deals have been taken off the market since last week.
Nationwide noted that interest rates were also projected to remain higher for longer.
“If maintained, this is likely to exert renewed upward pressure on mortgage rates,” said Robert Gardner, Nationwide’s chief economist.
However, he said that the building society was not expecting a dramatic downturn in the housing market, given that “labour market conditions remain solid and household balance sheets appear in relatively good shape”.
Recent figures have indicated that the number of property sales has been falling. According to HM Revenue and Customs data released on Wednesday, the number of transactions in April was 82,120, down 25% from a year earlier.
Sarah Coles, head of personal finance at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the recent changes in mortgage costs and availability may well have brought confidence in the property market “crashing down”.
While she said we would not see a repeat of the turmoil seen in the wake of last year’s mini budget, mortgage rates are likely to rise in “the immediate future”.
“We can expect this to filter through into less demand, lower sales, and weaker prices.”
She added that the latest mortgage lending figures from the Bank of England made “miserable reading”.
“It reflects just how property sales have dried up at the start of 2023.”
What happens if I miss a mortgage payment?
- If you miss two or more months’ repayments you are officially in arrears
- Your lender must then treat you fairly by considering any requests about changing how you pay, such as lower repayments for a short time
- They might also allow you to extend the term of the mortgage or let you pay just the interest for a certain period
- However, any arrangement will be reflected on your credit file, which could affect your ability to borrow money in the future
Are you affected by issues covered in this story? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.
Related Topics
May 31st 2023
Price Crap
The terms east and west took on a very new and sinister meaning following World War One and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The concept of communism versus the free world was born.
In world where 3 % of the population own 62% of the world’s wealth and living in a country where 10 % of the population own 90 % a land where 90 % of the population are condensed onto 10 % of the land, it is hard to take the concept of freedom seriously. Meanwhile the indigenous masses are labelled racists and xeophobes for objecting to the chattering well paid comfortable classes offering a warm welcome, labelling all illegal migrants as asylum seekers. This is the same pleasure bent elite arrogance that put Hitler in power in 1933.
There is also the related nonsense of democracy to consider. In my long lifetime I never heard it so rammed down people’s throats until Tony Blair’s MKII Tory Party came to power. This party operated under the camouflage of being socialist. Blair and his governments of mainly lawyers knew how to dazzle and mislead the dumbed down U.K masses. Lies about our dubious freedom was replaced by the more jelly like expression : ‘our freedoms.’ When Blair was lining the country up for illegal war on Iraq in 2003, he ignored 1.5 million protestors on the streets of London. His criminal lies led to the death of U.N weapons inspector Dr David Kelly because he dared to tell the truth about Blair’s bare faced lies.
Blair and Bush had their reasons for victimising Iraq over the twin tower attacks , blaming them for an atrocity that the CIA and MI5 knew was going to happen and with all the finger prints of their favourite Middle Eastern ally ; Saudi Arabia.
Britain and its U.S offspring have always been adept at lying for the profits of wars that the masses pay for in cash and blood. Blustering bumbling Churchill could not wait to undermine Russian Communism after the 1914 – 18 Great Imperial War. His class knew there would be a depression. My favourite economist John Maynard Keynes wrote two books about the moron minister Winston Churchill. These were : ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ and the ‘Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill.’ Chancellor Churchill had no interest in the sort of Keynesian economic policies that brought prosperity to 1930s Germany , Italy and United States. Back in 1911, as Home Secretary, he ordered troops to fire on striking starving Welsh coal miners.
In 1915 Churchill helped orchestrate the disastrous Dardanelles naval campaign and was also involved in the planning of the military landings on Gallipoli, both of which saw large losses. Following the failure of these campaigns, Churchill was demoted and resigned from government.
Always an arrogant big mouthed self important wind bag fool at best interested in only his aristocratic upper class, he was sure that destiny had his fame in store. The Russian Communist threat had to be dealt with, so the rise of Hitler was encouraged as a bulwark against Stalin whose rise was an outcome of Lenin’s lingering death following a British MI6 backed assassination attempt.
British Royalty never got over their Russian cousins execution in 1917. Churchill needed World War Two for his glory and political salvation. Such war would make the German masses the British masses’ enemy , not the ruling aristocracy. . Shortly before midnight on 10 May 1941, Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess landed at Floors Farm, by Waterfoot, south of Glasgow, where he was discovered still struggling with his parachute by local ploughman David McLean. Identifying himself as “Hauptmann Alfred Horn”, Hess said he had an important message for the Duke of Hamilton. Hess’s peace deal was the last thing Churchill wanted. He didn’t care how many people suffered and died because of his class conscious vanity. He had the same mesmerising effect on his masses as Hitler on his. Russia, like today, simply fought a defensive war.
As with today’s NATO proxy war on Russia for so called freedom and democracy, the British masses are being deceived. War mongers and vainglorious psycho former soldiers have rushed to join the mercenaries with government blessing. With so many domestic problems, as with the absurd Covid lockdown, this fake freedom war , so long in the NATO planning, is perfect cover. Crops around my locality are stunted due to absence of fertiliser caused by sanctions. Goods delivery costs are inflated, as with domestic energy prices, are through the roof. Global investors dividends and share prices must be protected. But don’t worry, the rate at which things are getting worse is slowing down. So its all good news in the end.‘In the long run we are all dead’ said economist John Maynard Keynes.
R J Cook
May 30th 2023
Police – Plain Mental by R J Cook
This is a comment on the following report on police and mental health care – a very plain mental role typical of police states. Legal reasons prevent me from writing all that I know about Britain’s mental health care and incestuous police directed system. The police are the last people to be trusted to care for these vulnerable people. I recall a senior West Mercia Police firearms ‘expert’ describing the tasering of a 12 year old girl as ‘awful but lawful.’ Police have done their best, partly through abusing the Police Street Triage system, to have me sectioned several times.
The first was in March 2008 and the latest that I know about was on August 25th 2020, 5 months after a consultant psychiatrist, Dr C R Ramsay and two assistants gained entry to my home just before my bedtime after 14 hours out working as a truck driver. In the space of one hour, while I was desperate for sleep, Ramsay ‘diagnosed ‘ ( sic ) me as a paranoid schizophrenic, bi polar delusional personality ‘ more likely to die by misadventure than suicide. Ramsay noted on his report, which was uploaded to my NHS records 3 days later, that ‘Roberta would be very upset if she saw all the records filed about her.’
Of course I know why police have such a dangerous attitude to me. Once they can establish one big lie, the records snowball. Too much has emerged about police corruption extending way beyond the capital. Too much attention is paid to the failings of the poorly educated lower ranks who interact and ride rough shod over the masses. Applying the ‘history of mental illness ‘ has been a good method of rubbishing trouble makers ,and very Stassi. The real issues are with the personality types emerging from the police morass and rising to the top.
As someone who decided to add evening classes in post graduate psychology to my post graduate teaching certificate during my time at London University, I drew the conclusion that I needed to know much more than what I had been taught to pass my exam before making damning judgements on people’s behaviour.
However, my experience of the modern police on all levels, suggests that senior officers have played a game , including getting dubious tax payer funded sociology degrees, to get to the top where they perpetuate institutional corruption. These people prioritise their status, fat salaries and fringe benefits. Even rookie officers have a high starting pay rate with gold plated pension. All told they are the last people to be trusted with mental health care – or little else for that matter.
Deeper questions are never asked with any seriousness. For example, why are so many young people suffering serious mental health problems regardless of gender ? What does the system, with its reliance on the tick box DSM ( Diagnosis Statistics and Medication ) apart from anti psychotic medication ? Antipsychotics are a type of psychiatric medication which are available on prescription to treat psychosis. They are licensed to treat certain types of mental health problem whose symptoms include psychotic experiences. This includes: schizophrenia.
Today I chatted with a local secure unit out Patient known to me. He is a former art student who told me : ‘ I don’t hear the voices any more. That was terrible. I hated it. The voice in my head sounded like my voice.’ I asked him about his student experiences of recreational drugs. He replied : ‘I tried every drug going. Lots of them.’ I asked him if he still painted his pictures. ‘Not much. I don’t do very much.’
In my case, police went out of their way to tell my primary care doctor that I have a history of mental illness and alcohol abuse – but refused treatment. Outside of ungovernable London , I expect the bloated police ‘Big Beasts’ and their minions will continue to enjoy casting judgement picking on the vulnerable. This is what West Mercia Police’s PC Benjamin Monk and his officer girlfriend did to black footballer Dalian Atkinson, who died after multiple taser shocks. This was a reality which West Mercia big wigs covered up for 5 years before justice was done. This is the terrifying reality of U.K Police who should have no role in health care. They are grossly overpaid , especially at senior level. They need a totally separate police force to investigate and punish without prejudice. As for the NHS, that is a matter for another essay. Briefly, its staff have unrealistic ideas of what the system is financially able to pay them via suffering taxpayers. Top heavy hierarchical management along with importing third world poverty , related health issues – including mental – and raised expectations, means the system can only get worse at an accelerating rate.
- antimuscarinic effects
- bed-wetting
- blood disorders
- body temperature problems
- emotional effects
- eye problems
- heart problems
- liver disorders
- metabolic syndrome
- neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS)
- neuromuscular side effects
- sedation (sleepiness)
- seizures (fits)
- sexual and hormonal problems
- skin problems
- suicidal feelings and behaviour
- tardive dyskinesia (TD)
- tardive psychosis
- weight gain
Certain types of antipsychotic may also have other side effects which aren’t listed here. The British National Formulary (BNF) has an A-Z list of drugs licensed for use in the UK. This list has links to find out more information about each drug, including information about side effects.
See our page on coping with side effects for guidance on what to do if you experience one of these side effects.
Antimuscarinic effects
Antimuscarinic effects are side effects caused by changes to the level of the chemical acetylcholine in your body. These effects are sometimes called anticholinergic effects.
If your level of acetylcholine changes, this can have effects all over your body. These effects include:
- blurred vision
- confusion and agitation
- constipation, which may become life-threatening if not treated
- difficulty urinating
- drowsiness
- dry mouth, which can cause tooth decay in the long term
- erectile dysfunction
- hallucinations
- hot or dry skin, and decreased sweating
- increased pressure in the eye
- low blood pressure (taking hot baths increases this risk)
- nausea (feeling sick)
- rapid heartbeat and disturbed heart rhythm.
Antimuscarinic effects are more common with some antipsychotics than others. In particular, clozapine may be more likely to cause severe constipation than other types of antipsychotic.
R J Cook
Councils ‘not ready’ for Met’s mental health withdrawal
By Mark Conrad | 30 May 2023
Local authorities are not ready for the major consequences of the Metropolitan Police Services’ (MPS) ‘unilateral’ decision to withdraw from non-emergency mental health callouts, experts warned this week.
Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley wrote to the police’s health and social care partners last week outlining a new approach under which officers will only attend incidents if there is a threat to life.
Police to stop attending mental health calls
Health services have been given 99 days notice to plan for the change.
Shutterstock
The move is to allow officers to spend more time dealing with crime and supporting victims.
The Metropolitan Police are to stop routinely attending mental health incidents in an attempt to shift responsibility back onto healthcare providers.
Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has written to health and social care providers warning that officers won’t be sent to incidents unless there is an immediate threat to life.
The move is to allow officers to spend more time dealing with crime and supporting victims.
Announcing the change, Sir Rowley explained, “In the interests of patients and the public, we urgently need to redress the imbalance of responsibility, where police officers are left delivering health responsibilities.
“Health services must take primacy for caring for the mentally ill, allowing officers to focus on their core responsibilities to prevent and detect crime, and keep communities safe and support victims.”
In the letter, he gives health services 99 days’ warning to plan for the change, with the new rules coming into force at the end of August 2023.
Chronically under-resourced.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych) has said they sympathise with the police, but warn all public services are “chronically under resourced”.
RCPsych President Dr Adrian James added, “we are surprised and concerned by the unilateral declaration by Sir Mark Rowley to withdraw the police from attending emergency related mental health incidents, by the end of August.”
Dr James explained that Police have important legal powers to convey a patient to a place of safety, force entry into a home and arrive quickly at incidents on blue lights.
He continues, “Mental Health services have been underfunded for decades, and while there are times when the police are involved in situations where they are not the appropriate agency to respond, three months is again just not enough time to put a system like this in place to meet the needs of some of the most vulnerable in society.”
“It takes 14 years to train a psychiatrist and there are currently 1.4 million people waiting for treatment, but we can’t create a workforce that doesn’t exist, without funding and an effective workforce plan.”
Handcuffed Winslow resident being taken from her home in 1999. Image R J Cook
May 27th 2023
BANNED SITE IN U.K DEMOCRACY.
If I could award a prize for my most loyal British Following in the U.K Police and mental health departments of the NHS, it would have to be : 86.163.34.226. This user runs a 24/7 observation on this site which is blocked in the U.K unless you switch of your anti virus screening or ignore the warnings.
R J Cook
Ukraine war: Russian Ambassador Andrei Kelin issues warning of escalation in Ukraine
By Laura Kuenssberg
Presenter, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg
Russia has warned Western supplies of weapons to Ukraine risk escalating the war to levels not seen so far.
Andrei Kelin, Russia’s ambassador to the UK, told the BBC his country had “enormous resources” and it was yet to “act very seriously”.
His remarks come despite more than a year of fighting and widespread evidence of Russian war crimes.
In the interview with Laura Kuenssberg, he suggested he was offended when challenged about Russia’s conduct.
Speaking exclusively to the BBC, Mr Kelin warned of a “new dimension” in the war.
Insisting Russia “hasn’t just started yet to act very seriously”, the ambassador said “Russia is 16 times bigger than Ukraine. We have enormous resources.”
The length of the conflict, he said, “depends on the efforts in escalation of war that is being undertaken by Nato countries, especially by the UK”.
He added: “Sooner or later, of course, this escalation may get a new dimension which we do not need and we do not want. We can make peace tomorrow.”
- ‘We’re ready to begin counter-offensive’ – Ukraine
- Russia attack on hospital ‘pure atrocity’ – Zelensky
- Hundreds of expelled Germans set to leave Russia
The ambassador’s comments came as one of Ukraine’s most senior security officials, Oleksiy Danilov, told the BBC the country is ready to launch its long expected counter-offensive against Russian forces.
But Mr Kelin’s claim that Russia has “enormous resources” available to fight clashes with multiple reports on the ground of its forces being poorly equipped and without proper training.
- On this week’s show are Health Secretary Steve Barclay, shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth
- Watch live on BBC One and iPlayer from 09:00 BST on Sunday
- Follows latest updates in text and video on the BBC News website from 08:00
Those warnings have even come from the head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has been heavily involved in the conflict.
He has been one of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest supporters, but has been increasingly vocal and critical of the regime, suggesting in the last few days “we could lose Russia” if the war carried on without extra resources being provided.
Earlier this month he publicly scolded Putin’s ministers in a post on social media, surrounded by dead bodies of his fighters. “Where is the… ammunition?”, he said. “They came here as volunteers and die for you to fatten yourselves in your mahogany offices.”
The denial of the situation on the ground by Mr Kelin was accompanied by his repetition of baseless claims about Russia’s invasion, which he still insisted on calling a “special military operation”.
Mr Kelin was speaking in his residence, underneath a chandelier, where the chairs are gilt and coffee served by staff with white gloves.
He tried to blame Ukraine for provoking the conflict. It’s a familiar and untrue claim that has been used by Russian leaders for more than a year to try to justify its illegal invasion of Ukraine in the first place.
https://emp.bbc.co.uk/emp/SMPj/2.49.3/iframe.htmlMedia caption,
Laura Kuenssberg challenges Andrei Kelin over war crimes in Ukraine
Like his ambassador, President Putin continues to claim a neo-Nazi regime was set up in Ukraine in 2014 and that it was even seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, which meant Russia had no choice but to invade.
And the ambassador denies reality when it comes to the behaviour of Russian troops on the ground during the conflict, too.
Confronted with evidence from an official United Nations report of widespread crimes, torture, rape and the forced deportation of children, he replied by claiming Ukrainian forces had committed crimes against civilians too.
There is evidence of a small number of human rights violations by Ukrainian forces. But the scale of Russian abuses is widespread, well-documented and beyond doubt.
When pressed that Russia was simply lying about what has happened, and the clear patterns of appalling abuse, the ambassador claimed in our interview to be offended.
And he had no other response to the latest missile attack in Dnipro other than to say “the problem is that the shooting is going on for nine years, and every day shooting is going on Luhansk, Donetsk and all of that”, claiming that the western media was ignoring acts being carried out by Ukrainian forces.
The ambassador’s comments that the war is not yet “serious” contradicts the experience of so many Ukrainians whose lives have been turned upside down by the war, and many Russians who are suffering.
But as Ukraine plans its counter-offensive, and Russia shows no sign of retreat, the war may indeed get more serious still.
You can watch our interview with Ambassador Kelin on the show tomorrow morning at 09:00, where we talk about what is going on in the conflict and also about how President Putin deals with criticism, how he can justify war crimes, and when the conflict could end.
And, after a big week or the NHS, when both Labour and the Conservatives set out their plans, we’ll be joined by the Health Secretary, Steve Barclay.
Comment Pure BBC Propoganda pap for the jingoistic masses. Anglo U.S led NATO reneging on Minsk caused this war, just as NATO expected it would. If Russia had no right to respond to this, then what right had NATO to invade Iraq , Afghanistan or all those U.S Latin American adventures ?
This woman is on a six figure salary but can’t take the ambassador’s point. The best she can do is trot out the same bullshit about Russian War Crimes as if the Anglo Americans don’t commit them large scale. When are the white liberal chattering and media classes going to talk about and release Julian Assange ?
How about a pardon for Chelsea Manning and why was a young U.S National Guardsman arrested for telling the world that Anglo U.S Macho Special Forces had done more than enough too provoke Russian attacks on NATO ? Ukraine, like the western elite club it is expecting to join, is hideously corrupt. Zelensky is super rich and a perfect fit. Russia is fighting an existential crisis against a world led by liars who call their lies ‘official secrets.’
R J Cook
May 25th 2023
Unsustainable By R J Cook
It is incredibly easy to welcome and plead for more so called asylum seekers and Third World Economic Migrants. As an Economics Graduate, former officer of H M Inspector of Taxes and tax adviser to a London West End Accountant getting paid handsomely for helping rich people avoid taxes – not evade which is illegal. So I know how the tax system works. Also since U.K Police have gone out of their way to destroy my professional reputation, I spent 12 years working as an HGV driver experiencing and witnessing the struggles the bottom 40 % endure just to pay the bills along with 60 % of the taxes.
The chattering upper middle classes and the very secure upper classes, topped off by King Charles III and his entourage, talk down to the patriotic masses. Mainstream media does not encourage spatial awareness. So telling people that 90 % of the population live on 10 % of the land and that the top 10 % own the other 90 % of the land – and more besides- is meaningless to them. They are always happy to wave the flag for Royalty and cheer lead for the sick NATO proxy war on Russia. That war for the corrupt Ukrainian regime to join the western elite’s planet eating club is the reason why prices have escalated, interest rates rises along with ever higher taxes.
So add the cost of so called asylum seekers prioritised for low cost accommodation, impossible demands on the failing inefficient NHS, and Britain is already a well established police state with all the glittering people waving down from palace balconies or armour plated limousines. Those people are policing priorities with an increasingly heavy handed approach to inevitable and serious conflict in this absurd so called multi cultural set of islands ridiculously called the United Kingdom.
The ruling elite want mass immigration for low wages and high profits in an internationally competitive investment market. Say a word against it and you have committed a hate crime. This elite are bringing the empire home, with all its poverty , religious bigotry , diseases born of rampant overpopulation, drug gang crime ,dividing and ruling. This is why transsexuals are herded into the LGBTQI box , encouraged to go on comforting exhibitionist Rainbow Marches. The elite needs to come clean, male to female transsexuals cannot be accepted as just normal women within mainstream culture. They have to consider themselves lucky to be part of an official freak show. To speak otherwise would upset fantasy world creator J K Rowling, feminist rank and file , Muslims and morons in the police.
The result of all the top down fake democracy propaganda is higher costs for appalling public services, social chaos and identity crises way beyond mere gender. Public servants demand ever more money for their trouble commensurate with work that dirties their hands and scares them. Meanwhile productive private industry shrinks with migrant labour seeing £5 an hour,free benefits and accommodation as well worth the trouble getting here. It is unsustainable.
R J Cook
UK net immigration hits record high of 606,000
Pressure mounts on Sunak but statistics agency says inflows are now stabilising
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.comT&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/674525e8-ce3e-42aa-b5d1-36260d17179a
Net migration to the UK rose to an all-time high of 606,000 in 2022, piling pressure on Rishi Sunak’s government, but the country’s statistical agency said the influx was now levelling off. Thursday’s record figures fell short of some previous predictions that net immigration reached 700,000 last year. However, they contrasted with the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto pledge — reaffirmed by Sunak — that “overall numbers will come down”. “Numbers are too high, it’s as simple as that,” the prime minister told ITV after the release of the 606,000 figure. “And I want to bring them down.” The Office for National Statistics said the total — which compares with a 2021 net immigration figure of 488,000 — was driven by people coming to the UK from outside the EU, including from Ukraine and Hong Kong. But it said that net migration to the UK was now stabilising, with immigration slowing and emigration rising. The statistics agency also noted that the mix of migrants had changed over the year, with proportionally fewer new arrivals coming as students and more through humanitarian routes. The ONS estimated gross immigration from outside the EU at about 925,000, up by 287,000 from 2021. Students and their dependants made up more than a third of that total, with 235,000 arriving on work visas and about 250,000 as asylum seekers or through humanitarian routes. Non-EU emigration also increased, largely due to students returning home, leaving net immigration from outside the EU at 660,000. Immigration from the EU, which accounted for more than half of arrivals as recently as 2018, totalled just 151,000 in 2022. With 202,000 EU citizens leaving the UK during the year, net EU immigration is now negative.
UK net migration hits record high
Rishi Sunak faces Tory backlash as net migration reaches record high
The Dick Factor by R J Cook
It is a job to know where to start , without repeating myself on the subject of the U.K Police. They and their Crown Prosecution Service ( CPS ) court allies are institutionally corrupt. That is a bland statement of fact glossing over the miseries their corrupt practices , cover ups and lies are causing. Only a separate force for investigation and severe punishment with full public accountability can rectify the situation. Chief Officers, as the Plebgate Scandal of a senior police officer, rewriting an inspector’s report, protecting three senior officers from a gross misconduct hearing, characterises the very serious problem. Officers of Chief Superintendent and above have the power to enter or cause to be entered unsubstantiated false records on the Police National Computer. Junior officers would commit career suicide if they had concerns. Even Cleveland’s Chief Constable Sue Sim was frozen out for demanding internal reform. She was the wrong sort of woman , lacking the Dick Factor
The Metropolitan Police’s treatment of Coronation anti monarchy protestors, flexing their Government enhanced muscle power ,was a sample of worst to come.Sir Mark Rowley had nothing but praise for his officers who arrested 64 protestors , locking one innocent woman up for 16 hours. None of these people had committed offences but were arrested under Draconian powers on suspicion that they might.
Sir Mark Rowley was appointed to the post on 8 July 2022 ,on a salary of £292,938 per annum. The rank of Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is regarded as the highest in British policing. Absurdly , Rowley was presented, by Sadiq Khan, to gullible Londoners as ‘a new broom’. The fact that he had made his come back after years as a senior Metropolitan Police Officer who had retired on a fat pension to work in the lucrative private security sector.
In the aftermath of his police force’s rough handling of coronation protestors, Rowley told mainstream media that his officers were highly trained and were doing an excellent job in difficult circumstances. I tend toward the conclusion that police do their best to create difficult circumstances.
When I asked my retired Southampton Magistrate friend, V F Church, if police lied, he struggled to stop laughing before answering me : “All the time.”
It is significant that the two young men killed as a result of police bullying action, came from a deprived area. Juxtapose that with Rowley and so many fat cat colleagues and obscene public sector salaries, and I question their motivations for joining the police , back stabbing, smarming, lying and framing innocents on their way to the top. As Bob Dylan wrote : “ All the criminals in their coats and their ties are free to drink Martinis and watch the sun rise.”
How incredible that the masses must suffer the ‘cost of war crisis’ for the bogus cause of ‘defending democracy and our freedoms.’ Of course one must not be too hard on the masses in a nation of declining literacy where the elite and government controlled mainstream media pander to the lowest common denominator with such propoganda – where such drivel as Russia bans protest is beyond hypocrisy.
It is noteworthy that Police Scotland have admitted sexism and racism to curry favour with liberals , feminists and BLM. That is a convenient distraction. The vile lying homophobic transphobic bullying culture has a wide range of targets and victims – including honest officers and whistle blowers.
R J Cook
Police insist two teenagers who died in e-bike tragedy that sparked Cardiff riots were NOT being chased at time of crash – as grieving uncle blames officers for deaths and witnesses blast ‘lying’ cops after CCTV emerged showing ‘pursuit’
- Cars were torched and 15 officers injured in horrific scenes on Monday night
- Did you witness the crash or events leading up to it? Email rory.tingle@mailonline.co.uk
By Rory Tingle, Home Affairs Correspondent and Natasha Anderson and James Tozer
Published: 09:05, 24 May 2023 | Updated: 10:04, 24 May 2023
A police boss today insisted that two teenagers who died in a road accident which sparked riots in Cardiff were not being chased at the time – as a grieving uncle blamed officers for their deaths and witnesses accused the force of ‘lying’.
Cars were torched and 15 officers injured in horrific scenes on Monday night after claims that Kyrees Sullivan, 16, and Harvey Evans, 15, were being pursued by a police van while riding an e-bike.
Yesterday, Alun Michael – Labour’s police and crime commissioner for the area – denied to the BBC that any police chase had occurred. But CCTV footage then emerged a police van following a bike 3,000ft from the crash site minutes earlier.
South Wales Police has now admitted that officers had been following the boys and referred itself to the police watchdog, but continues to insist there were no police vehicles on the street when the fatal collision took place.
Mr Michael told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning: ‘I was assured and I’m still assured that youths were not being chased by the police at the time of the road traffic accident.
Best friends Kyrees Sullivan, 15, and Harvey Evans, 16, (pictured together while they were younger) were knocked off their bikes by a vehicle near their homes on Snowden Road, in the deprived suburb of Ely at around 6pm on Monday
Yesterday, Alun Michael – Labour’s police and crime commissioner for the area – denied to the BBC that any police chase had occurred
May 20th 2023
The real history of Queen Charlotte, and the problem with Netflix’s Bridgerton spinoff
Shonda Rhimes’s new show imagines an interracial romance that remakes Regency England. That sure didn’t happen.
By Nylah Burton May 5, 2023, 3:10pm EDT
The first time I heard someone call Charlotte, Queen Consort to King George III, the “first Black queen of England,” I thought they were taking the piss. But even though the evidence for Charlotte’s Black heritage is weak, many do genuinely believe it. And now, millions more will believe it too.
The premiere of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, a Shondaland production based on the romance novels by Julia Quinn, tries to cement the public image of the monarch as an undeniably Black woman. The prequel series gives Queen Charlotte (India Amarteifio in youth and Golda Rosheuvel in her later years) the spotlight. Here, she is a Black teenager whose interracial marriage to the mentally ill King George III (Corey Mylchreest in youth; James Fleet as the older version) led to an event called “the Great Experiment.” In Queen Charlotte and the original Bridgerton series, the Great Experiment refers to Britain’s (clearly fictional) decision to fully integrate Black people and other people of color into their society, including the noble class. In Queen Charlotte, the stakes of the Great Experiment are most vocally echoed by Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh in her later years and Arsema Thomas as a young woman), who is revealed to be African royalty with wealth that exceeds that of most of the British nobles but has to fight to be accepted among British nobility.
Most people know this didn’t happen.It’s common sense that Black people were not accepted into all levels of British society in the 18th and 19th centuries. And, if Meghan Markle’s experiences as part of the royal family are any indication, they’re not accepted among British nobility now. Although people widely understand this element of the story is fantastical, many do consider the real Queen Charlotte to be Black. And Netflix and Shondaland are fanning that flame. Netflix even threw a royalty-themed event with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to celebrate the premiere. The messages Queen Charlotte sends about the politics of wealth, interracial relationships, representational politics, and empire are dangerous. At the core of its danger is the choice to double down on the likely false idea that Queen Charlotte was Black.
The weak evidence for Queen Charlotte’s Blackness
Although Charlotte and George did not have an interracial relationship that changed the course of history, there was public debate about Charlotte’s appearance. Some accounts and portraits of her suggested that she had fair skin and “European” features, others showed her having slightly darker skin and “African” features. She was also often called ugly and plain. In A Tale of Two Cities, referring to George and Charlotte, Charles Dickens wrote: “There was a king with a large jaw, and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England.” Her physician reportedly described her as “small and crooked, with a true mulatto face.” Sir Walter Scott wrote that she was “ill-colored.” A prime minister once said: “Her nose is too wide and her lips too thick.”
The show reconstructs the vague reports of her appearance into Charlotte experiencing both racism and ties of kinship with other Black people; King George III’s mother Princess Augusta (Michelle Fairley) complains about Charlotte’s skin being “very brown” and a minister meekly replies, “I told you she had Moor blood.” Her brother admits that no one who “looked like” them had ever married into the British royal family (even though Charlotte and George in real life were related), wedding guests murmur in shock at Charlotte’s jewel-encrusted Afro, and Lady Danbury has a wide-eyed look of joy upon seeing the new Queen is “on our side.”
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24635692/GettyImages_919807500.jpg)
Even though Queen Charlotte’s contemporaries made it clear that they thought her face didn’t meet their beauty standards, there are almost no records of anyone explicitly saying that Charlotte, born into the royal family of the northern German duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, had Black parents, Black siblings, Black cousins, or Black ancestors on either side. In 1997, historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom claimed his research showed she was descended from the “illegitimate son of King Alfonso I of Portugal and his Moorish mistress [Madragana].”
However, King Alphonso I was born in 1109 or 1111, and Queen Charlotte was born in 1744. That’s more than 600 years of distance between Queen Charlotte and her rumored African ancestor Madragana — who cannot conclusively be proven to be Black or related to Queen Charlotte, as art historian Amanda Matta explains on her podcast, Art of History. Some amount of inbreeding might account for these features to endure for a few generations, but not enough to be significant. And with King George III and Charlotte sharing close ancestors, it’s poor logic because it would mean that swaths of British and European royalty, including Prince Harry and Mary, Queen of Scots, would now have to also be considered Black. Are we prepared to say that Charles, who will be crowned King on May 6, is also Black? Should we say that any royal with full lips or wide nostrils is presenting evidence of Madrigana’s endlessly enduring genes? It sounds ridiculous, but that’s the road that race science and faulty genealogical methods lead us down.
Also, while both Madragana and Queen Charlotte were called “Moors,” the word had a vast range of meanings. Originally, it meant the Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and Malta during the Middle Ages. But it also meant someone with darker skin, sometimes referring to people who would be considered Black today and sometimes referring to people who would be considered European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Latinx today. Steven Pincus, historian of the Global British Empire and professor of history at the University of Chicago, tells Vox that the term “Moor” as a static racial or ethnic category “is subject to much dispute,” adding that Sephardic Jews were sometimes also called Moors.
Even though the real Charlotte was, at best, ludicrously removed from Blackness, Queen Charlotte leans heavily into representational politics while still making egregious errors of substance. It’s especially hard to feel good about shallow representation when we spend three episodes watching Lady Danbury be raped by the husband she was forced to marry as a child, sometimes multiple times in a single episode. This means that the only characters to have been raped in Netflix’s Bridgerton universe are both Black.
For some Black women, this all makes the series feel emotionally manipulative. “Shonda [Rhimes] is probably playing very heavily into the correlation between what’s currently happening with Harry and Meghan Markle, and what she would like us to envision was happening back then, even though it’s not historical,” says April Morris, editorial director of Off Colour magazine.
What it means — and meant — to force a narrative of Blackness onto Queen Charlotte
So, if Charlotte most likely wasn’t Black, why did the theory become so popular? The rapid expansion of the slave trade in the late 17th century through to the end of the 18th century plays a role. Pincus says of this time period, “Slavery became a much more prominent feature of the British empire. It was also increasingly the source of unbelievable accumulation of wealth.”
Slavery is notably absent from the world of Bridgerton, although vague mentions of “the colonies” are peppered in so quickly that you’d likely miss it. In the Bridgerton universe, none of the Black people are concerned about human or civil rights. Rather, they want to host balls and be invited to hunts. They want to marry white people without sassy comments from the ton and be given noble titles and more land. They don’t even want money — they just want the opportunity to be treated like the monied people they already are. For Morris, these questions of wealth and assimilation are part of “parallels that [Shonda Rhimes] is trying to draw for the Black upper-middle class of today.” Pincus, although he says he enjoys the show as a relaxing watch, points out that “it is clearly a show which is targeted to the wealthy.”
This is perhaps the most salient and cohesive political framework undergirding the Bridgerton universe: the love of money. And the love of money is also what defined the British Empire’s relationship to Black people. By the time Queen Charlotte became consort, the British Empire was struggling with slave revolts in all its colonies, and economic concerns (which outweighed the moral arguments) pushed more people to become interested in ending the slave trade. The heightened discussion of slavery, slave rebellions, and abolition fueled debate about Queen Charlotte. “In the time period in which she was Queen, there was increasing concern regarding abolitionism,” Harris explains. “And one of her portrait painters [Allan Ramsay] was a noted abolitionist who may well have been interested in exploring these ideas that she had African ancestry within the context of discussing and debating slavery.”
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24635716/QUEENCHARLOTTE_104_Unit_00917RC.jpg)
When Lady Danbury finally wins her battle to host the ball of the season, it takes a while for the crowd to thaw, with white people on one side and Black members on the other. Then, after seeing Charlotte and George dance, more and more interracial dancing pairs join the floor, to the tune of Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You” on the violin. After the ball, George and Charlotte are in her bedroom and George declares in wonder, “With one evening, one party, we have created more change, stepped forward more, than Britain has in the last century,” adding that with Charlotte by his side, he can do anything. And of course, in the original Bridgerton show, interracial marriages are now so commonplace due to George and Charlotte’s example that no one even considers race or ethnicity something worth mentioning.
Again, even though the series is obviously ahistorical, these messages we receive matter; they stick with us. Viewers may logically know that this scenario didn’t occur, but it functions as a nod toward an incredibly deep-seated belief, one that says Britain and King George III ended slavery out of moral concerns and altruism. When really, it was the resistance of slaves and colonized people that led to abolition and the withdrawal of British troops from the colonies.
According to Gerald Horne, professor of history and African-American Studies at the University of Houston, slave rebellions were rising during the Georgian and Regency eras, which had a tremendous impact on Britain finally ending slavery in 1834. “The Haitian Revolution was decisive in abolition’s fortunes … London felt they could either move to circumscribe the slave trade in 1807, three years after Haiti’s triumph, or … [run] the risk of having enslavers liquidated physically. Wisely, they sought the option of delimiting the slave trade, then abolition by the 1830s.”
This is a rich and complicated history. Reducing it to “interracial love saved the world,” even for a romance, feels cheap and intellectually bankrupt. It’s necessary to point out that Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels — save the one she questionably decided to write about Queen Charlotte post-Netflix series — feature white people only. During a panel, Quinn once said she only wanted to write happy stories and chose not to have Black characters because their “unhappy” stories weren’t the kinds she wanted to tell. Given that she and other writers on the show evidently couldn’t tell Lady Danbury’s story without a shocking amount of marital rape proves perhaps she should have steered clear.
To not want to write about racism is not a morally depraved stance or even an illogical one. To not write about people with identities you can’t relate to is perhaps a wise choice. But to refuse to write Black characters for most of your career because you can’t imagine them happy, and then rake in momentous amounts of money by emotionally manipulating Black people with shallow representation years later does feel morally bankrupt. If Netflix and Shondaland wanted to portray Black people being happy during the Regency era, Beverly Jenkins is just one example of an author of steamy, loving Black romances set in the 17th-20th centuries. Why do studios not invest in developing her stories for the screen?
The answer is clear, if depressing. Queen Charlotte was never about representation for Black people or telling Black stories. It was about money, and about reifying empire and wealth, and placating Black people by claiming that we too can have a place among the most powerful. To recast a queen who — whether she was sympathetic toward enslaved people or not — presided over a vast empire and lived a life built on genocidal labor as a Black woman fighting for her people is a coherent and abhorrent neoliberal political statement. It seeks, above all, to protect the institution.
May 19th 2023
Democracy – Does Your Opinion Count ?
| Reduction, reduction, reduction! On his flight to Japan earlier this week, the Prime Minister said to the accompanying journalists: “When it comes to legal migration, the key thing for people to know is we’re in control of why people are here, the circumstances and the terms on which they are here, making sure they contribute, to public services like the NHS for example.” No, Prime Minister, we are not in control of either illegal or legal immigration, or anything like it; as next week’s net migration figures for the whole of 2022 will make only too obvious. Nor is all immigration contributing to the economy and filling gaps in the NHS and services. What’s more, the public are utterly fed up with this sort of specious waffle. They were taken in back in 2019, but won’t be again. There were, however, some bright spots this week. The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, was spot on when she said that it is not racist or xenophobic to want to bring immigration down to manageable levels. More common sense from a sensible Home Secretary. If only she had the support she needs from around the cabinet table where the economic liberals and the Treasury rule the roost. The high immigration zealots (including the PM?) think they can get away with focusing on the Channel and screaming ‘stop the boats’ while doing nothing about massive, long-term surges in legal migration, which is running at over ten times the rate of illegal migration across the Channel. We repeat, and as we noted on social media this week, even those heading the great offices of state, like the Home Office, cannot get anything done without the support of the whole government but especially that of the PM. The Conservative party must stop caving to the bloated and self-seeking business lobby. The political and economic elites have to wean themselves off cheap foreign labour. And the higher education sector and its powerful lobby must end their reliance on, and championing of, higher foreign student fees. For many of those coming, all the student visa does is provide a route to work and opportunities to be joined by dependants. It also helps keep weak universities going and damages the world-wide reputation of our universities for excellence. Despite the ‘narrative-control’ going on ahead of next week’s data bombshell (that’s what it will be) on the current scale of mass immigration, the public won’t be fooled. The numbers will speak for themselves. How much longer will the British public tolerate continual gaslighting and cynical messaging on mass immigration and what it means for the future of our society? Our sense is, not much longer. BLOG OF THE WEEK Population Projected To Rise By Seven Million By 2060 As Officials Predict Dramatic Fall In Immigration Levels The Office for National Statistics (ONS) earlier this year released a population projection for the UK which estimates that the number of people living here will rise from 67 million in 2020 to 74 million by 2060 – a rise of 7 million people over 40 years. This projection strikes us as wildly out of kilter with what is going on and what it means for future population growth. However, population growth even of this magnitude means a population increase of about 172,000 per year – this bears no resemblance to what has been going on in recent years, of course. Read our full blog here. MIGRATION WATCH UK IN THE NEWS The Sun: MIGRANT MAYHEM Record numbers of foreign crooks including killers & sex offenders still in UK after failed deportation bids ‘This is an appalling failure of immigration enforcement. ‘The human rights of criminals cannot be allowed to take precedence over the safety and security of the British people.’ Talk TV: Peter Hitchens’ Half Hour: “There Is No Obligation For A Nation To Take In 7 Million People” ‘If you read the House of Lords debate in which Archbishop Lord Welby took part last week, it’s absolutely fascinating, there are several contributions, notably from Lord Green of Deddington, who used to be head of Migration Watch, and also Peter Lilley, coming up with figures, and what Lord Green points out is that in the last twenty years the population of this country has increased by seven million. That is absolutely colossal.’ Express: Criminals get £1,500 pay-out from taxpayer to return back to Albania ‘Ministers must double down and ensure those who seek to exploit the system know they will be returned home.’ iNews: How migration to the UK really impacts the economy, as Cabinet tensions continue to boil Migration Watch UK, a think-tank advocating for lower levels of immigration to the UK, has expressed concerns about the additional housing burden during an existing crisis, and added GP demand when NHS wait times are already high. It claims the UK is the most densely populated country in Europe. Talk TV: Net migration levels are ten times illegal Channel crossing numbers ‘Going back over twenty years, the population grew by eight million. Now, 85% of that was due to migration and children of migrants.’ MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD Our political leaders are remarkably adept at dodging accountability having broken their promises. There is always an excuse. We won’t let them get away with it. If you haven’t already, please join us in the battle for common sense policies that will bring down immigration levels, by writing to your MP today. We wouldn’t be able to continue this work without the help of our supporters. If you would like to donate, please click the button below. Our supporters are all as concerned about the future of our country as we are. Some have been kind enough to remember us in their will. If you wish to consider leaving a bequest to Migration Watch UK, or wish to discuss anything else, do please get in touch. Our email is: admin@migrationwatchuk.org MAKE A DONATION TO MIGRATION WATCH UK |
May 18th 2023
At last the incredible £162 million cost of the taxpayer funded Royal Wedding has been revealed. Add that to the amazing cost of the Coronation, at £100 million plus and we have one incredibly expensive arm of government in Police State Britain – the land of marching chocolate soldiers and hypnotic military bands. No one wonders why British soldiers originally wore red coats – to hide the bleeding bodies.
Meanwhile most people alive during Margaret Thatcher’s vile governments of economy and society destroying war mongering governments, don’t see the damage done. British people thrive on bullshit, football and propaganda. So its a waste of time telling them that the reason the water and sewage system is run down and not fit for purpose is because it was privatised for the benefit of elite profit and bonuses for the parasites running it. The same goes for the railways, buses and electricity companies. Even schools and health care have tasted the poison of privatisation. Parliament produces more laws every week that a drunkard could vomit.
Never mind there is a war on. Ukraine’s virginal little democracy needs more weapons and Britain is ever eager to protect its virtue. The masses need to remember there is a war on. The elite has slaughtered our sort before and they are happy to do it all again – but don’t call it World War Three.
Things are going well and it looks like a result in Belarus. Europe has been rife with rumours ofBelarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s ill health. Speculation began after the 68-year-old autocrat was reportedly rushed to a hospital last week, after attending a Victory Day parade in Moscow.
Lukashenko’s health is significant, since he is one of the only allies Vladimir Putin has left in Eastern Europe since the Russian president launched his brutal invasion of Ukraine last year. Putin used Belarusian territory as a staging point for a failed attack on Kyiv, and Ukraine’s allies worry that Lukashenko could officially join the war.
In a bid to tamp down speculation about Lukashenko’s poor health, Belarusian state TV published footage on Monday showing him visiting an army command centre. His hoarse voice and heavily bandaged arm, however, further fuelled the rumours.
Looks like the poison is working well. British assassins are the best, but only work for the good of democracy which is why they arranged to shoot Lenin. The British elite and their media are also the best at lying and hypocrisy.
R J Cook
Sewage spills: Water bills set to rise to pay for £10bn upgrade
By Esme Stallard
Climate and Science Reporter, BBC News
Bills could rise after water suppliers in England said they were ready to spend £10bn on tackling sewage spills.
The privately owned companies have apologised for the amount of contaminated water being discharged into rivers and seas, amid mounting public anger over the practice.
Some campaigners have cautiously welcomed the move, but others say firms are shifting the cost on to billpayers.
The industry paid out £1.4bn to shareholders in 2022.
Musician and environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey called it a “half apology” that was another attempt to extract more money from customers.
“What I am actually hearing is no apology for the fact we have paid them for a service we haven’t got, they are now suggesting we pay them a second time for a service we haven’t had,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“We should have an apology for the suggestion they are going to put bills up by £10bn for their incompetence and their greed. This is nothing to celebrate.”
Companies are sometimes allowed to spill sewage into open water following heavy rainfall to prevent the system becoming overloaded and backing up into people’s homes.
But campaigners have long said these spills are happening too often. In 2022, raw sewage was dumped into rivers and seas for 1.75 million hours – or 825 times a day on average.
Untreated sewage contains bacteria such as E.coli and viruses like hepatitis, that can be harmful to animals and humans. Swimming in water where untreated sewage is discharged can lead to serious illnesses such as stomach bugs, which may cause diarrhoea and vomiting, as well as respiratory, skin, ear and eye infections.
Wildlife including fish and insects can also experience kidney issues and die from sewage pollution.
Water UK, the body which represents England’s nine water and sewage companies, apologised on behalf of the industry for not “acting quickly enough”.
Ruth Kelly, the organisation’s chair, told BBC News: “We’re sorry about the upset and the anger from the fact that there have been overspills of untreated sewage onto beaches and into rivers over the past few years.
“We’re sorry that we didn’t act sooner, but we get it.”
Environment Agency chairman Alan Lovell welcomed the companies’ apology but said he wanted to “see action and a clear plan for delivery”.
The companies said on Thursday they were ready to spend £10bn raised from investors to tackle the problem – but admitted customers could see a “modest” bills rise as firms looked to recover the costs over time.
Water regulator Ofwat said on Thursday it would review the commitment to assess what impact it could have on consumers before spending begins.
There are many ways that water companies can spend the money to reduce sewage spills including:
- Increasing the capacity of the sewage system
- Separating out rainwater and wastewater
- Installing natural systems such as planting trees which absorb the water
But the water companies have come under significant criticism for suggesting bills could be raised to pay for this investment whilst continuing to pay out profits to shareholders.
English water companies have handed more than £2bn a year on average to shareholders since they were privatised three decades ago, Whilst customers have seen their bills rise 7.5% since April, water companies say it is below inflation.
Downing street has said that water companies should put “consumers above profits”.
The prime minister’s deputy official spokesman said the apology from water companies was welcome but acknowledged that more needed to be done.
“And we’ve been clear throughout that we don’t want to see things disproportionately impacting customer bills, especially given we know that there are people up and down the country who are struggling with the cost of living, which is why we provided the help we have in that area.”
It is not yet known how much bills could rise with the new investment as Ofwat will not make a decision until the end of 2024 on spending plans.
Marine conservation charity Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) welcomed “the long overdue apology” but said the investment should not be paid for through higher bills.
“The UK public has already paid for environmental protection from sewage – but we’re yet to see it. And whilst the water industry rakes it in, this investment pledged by Water UK must come out of water company profits, not from the bill payer,” said Izzy Ross, campaigns manager at SAS.
Commons Environmental Audit Committee chair, Conservative MP Philip Dunne, told the BBC he hoped Ofwat would approve the investment plan.
Last year his committee warned the UK’s rivers were a “chemical cocktail” of raw sewage, microplastics and slurry.
“The water and sewage sector is in listening mode and has provided a promising plan to tackle poor water quality and take vital steps to improve the country’s ageing sewerage infrastructure,” he said.
Jim McMahon MP, Labour’s shadow environment secretary, said the government was partially to blame for the situation.
“Thirteen years of Tory government failure has left a broken system, capped by an appalling track record of inaction. The Conservatives are the problem not the solution,” he said.
This sentiment was supported by Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey. “The one apology missing here is from the environment secretary,” he said. “This Conservative government has been pathetic on stopping sewage discharges into rivers.”
The Green Party called for water and sewage companies to be brought back into public ownership.
Water UK said the companies also committed to cutting spills by up to 35% by 2030 and sharing real time data on how often sewage was being spilled into rivers and seas.
But this is not a new pledge, as the government announced last month the sharing of data would be a legal requirement for water companies by 2025.
Water UK also said companies would reduce the number of sewage spills by up to 140,000, compared with 2020, when there were more than 400,000 spills.
Environmental campaign group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution (Wasp) said that promise was “meaningless” unless the volume being spilled is also reduced. Currently, water companies are only required to monitor if a spill is happening but not how much is released.
Peter Hammond, from Wasp, told Radio 4’s Today programme: “All they are promising to do is reduce the number of spills, we still don’t know whether they are trickles or tsunamis of sewage going into the river[s]”.
Water and sewage services in the UK are devolved and in Scotland and Northern Ireland are provided by government-run companies, in Wales it is not-for-profit. They have their own action plans to tackle sewage spills which are not included in Water UK’s announcement.
Additional reporting by Jonah Fisher and Sophie Woodcock.
May 13th 2023
Power struggle over who should watch over police in England and Wales
By Joshua Nevett
BBC Politics
The number of elected regional mayors has grown in recent years, but the role of police and crime commissioners (PCCs) has remained relatively obscure.
And now there are signs that PCCs are gradually being phased out.
Rishi Sunak’s government wants to create more elected mayors – but is keen for them to take over, rather than run alongside, the role of PCCs.
This matters because policing has never been under more scrutiny and public confidence in some forces is at rock bottom.
Although PCCs do not have operational control over local forces – they are watchdogs rather than “police chiefs” – the hiring and firing of chief constables is among their powers.
Some mayors would quite like those powers for themselves and may seek a mandate to take them when they’re next up for election.
The next PCC and mayoral elections are due in 2024, and there is already a power struggle over who should have the job of holding the police to account.
One Labour PCC has accused the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands of plotting a “hostile takeover”; while other PCCs fear their role will be weakened if it is taken over by mayors, leaving a messy political landscape of overlapping local leaders vying for control of policing.
Transfer of duties
Originally, PCCs were David Cameron’s big idea, to bring US-style local democracy to England and Wales. They replaced police authorities – committees of councillors and other local figures – in 2012, under a law passed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
The first PCC elections were billed as the biggest shake-up of policing for decades, but the turnout was the lowest nationally in the UK’s peacetime history.
Criticism has followed since, with opposition parties complaining about the leadership of police forces by PCCs and calling for them to be scrapped.
Then, in a policy paper last year, the government stated its preference for “mayoral control of Police and Crime Commissioner functions where boundaries align”.
Since then, a draft law that would allow mayors to take control of PCC duties without the consent of councils in their area has been making its way through Parliament.
A government spokesperson said the transfer of PCC duties to mayors “will not always be a suitable option, and mayors are only able to exercise PCC functions if they have been elected to do so”.
PCC powers are already held by the mayors of London, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire, while other mayors have stated their intention to acquire them.
Mayors can appoint an unelected deputy for crime and policing to do the job on their behalf, as those in Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire have done.
Marc Jones, who is the Conservative PCC for Lincolnshire, said the main strength of his role “is the directly elected element”.
He said he’s worried about the consequences of more hand-picked deputy mayors making “decisions around community policing and safety one step removed from the person who’s elected”.
“I’m still nervous about where that might end up,” said Mr Jones, who took office in 2016 and was re-elected in 2021 with a 57.9% majority.
But some PCCs have already been given their marching orders by mayors.
Power struggle
When Alan Billings’s current term as South Yorkshire PCC ends in 2024, his role will be wound up.
In office since 2014, the Labour PCC had already decided to stand down before the new mayor of South Yorkshire, Oliver Coppard, announced he would absorb his responsibilities.
The PCC role “is being diluted now with elected mayors”, Mr Billings said.
Despite his unease, Mr Billings has said he would work with Mr Coppard, if the Labour mayor wished to take on his PCC duties.
An amicable handover from one Labour politician to another seems possible, whereas other PCC-mayor relationships are not so harmonious.
In the West Midlands, there’s a bitter feud between the region’s Labour PCC, Simon Foster, and its Conservative mayor, Andy Street, over policing powers.
Proposals to transfer policing oversight to the mayor were supported by a majority of respondents to a public consultation in 2019.
To the fury of Mr Foster, the government is now backing mayors who want to abolish the PCC in their area.
“Make no mistake, this is not an evolution or a merger,” Mr Foster said. “It is profoundly undemocratic, it is deeply divisive, and it is nothing more than a proposed hostile takeover.”
Mr Street did not wish to comment.
Unlike Mr Street, the new mayor of the North East won’t have the option to disband any PCCs when they’re elected next year. That’s because the mayoral boundaries do not align with those of police forces in the area.
That takes the heat out of a political hot potato for Kim McGuinness, who is running to be the mayor of the North East for Labour, but currently serves as the PCC for Northumbria.
Even though she does “support a model of running the two things together where it’s possible”, she doesn’t think we’re heading towards the abolishment of PCCs.
“We’ve been instrumental in the national conversation about violence against women and girls and sexual violence,” she said.
Her party has not always seen the value of PCCs.
Political shift
Back in 2014, when Ed Miliband was Labour leader, the party said the model was “fundamentally flawed” and “costing too much”.
Now a Labour source said the party currently has no plans to make changes to PCCs.
The Liberal Democrats have been on a similarly sinuous journey with PCC policy.
When they were in government with the Conservatives, Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers – including current party leader Sir Ed Davey – backed the law that introduced PCCs.
But by 2014, the party turned against PCCs, branding them a failure. Almost a decade on, the party is renewing its call for PCCs to be abolished, saying they would replace them with local police boards made up of councillors and spend their funding on new community support officers.
“When most crimes in this country are going unsolved, it is the biggest waste of money to be funding their pointless roles,” Sir Ed said.
With no costings for the party’s policy, it’s not possible to know if scrapping PCCs would save money or not.
One of the strengths of PCCs, says Joy Allen, the Labour PCC for County Durham, “is their ability to secure vital extra funding to support their safety goals”.
“These grants amount to millions of pounds each year and include funding to deliver critical support services for victims of crime including those impacted by domestic abuse and sexual violence.”
PCCs, she says, “play a critical role in reducing crime and reoffending in their communities”.
With PCCs up for election again next year, voters will be the judge of that.
- Police commissioner reassured by CSE progress
- Published18 April
- What does a police and crime commissioner do?
- Published19 April 2021
Door Is Always Open – R J Cook
| Weak border policies and a loose system taking their toll |
| The proponents of high immigration and the shockingly loose points-based system have been out in force ahead of the net migration figures for the whole of 2022 to be announced on May 25. As we we wrote last week, these numbers will be way above the half a million we saw to the end of June 2022. Nothing that we have been told so far or that the government has proposed, is going to reduce immigration anytime soon, if at all. The number of foreign students, who will be here for years on end, will continue to come to prop up struggling and, it has to be said, not always very good universities. Many will come for postgraduate courses and bring their families. Having completed their course, all can stay on for a further two years to do any job. And a significant proportion will settle here. It’s all very well to suggest that numbers will fall back eventually when conflicts such as the one in Ukraine are resolved and Hong Kongers stop coming (they won’t). Let’s not forget that there are 3.5 million (plus dependants) Hong Kongers who can take advantage of the open-ended invitation to take the path leading to settlement. And then, there are the small boats. What an utter fiasco that remains. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s deeply questionable intervention this week speaks volumes about our completely out-of-touch elite. As our Chairman Alp Mehmet said to Nigel Farage this week: ‘What planet is His Grace on? What I would suggest to him is… please stop engaging with the virtue-signalling world of woke and engage with reality.’ |
| Census Reveals The Massive Impact Of Immigration On Our Society As already mentioned, the May 25 net migration figures will be breathtaking. It is worth revisiting our report on the census results published in the autumn which revealed the massive changes the UK has witnessed due to population surges driven almost entirely by immigration. In the past 20 years the population of England and Wales has increased by around eight million people. Nearly seven million was due to migration and the children of migrants. This has meant huge population shifts and churn in different areas of the UK but particularly in London, the South East and East of England, and the West and East Midlands. As a result, the white British are now a minority in London, Birmingham and Manchester. See our full blog here. |
| MIGRATION WATCH UK IN THE NEWS |
GB News: Net migration levels are already at a record high…and could get even higher! Nigel Farage: ‘Are you suggesting that the Archbishop of Canterbury is in effect encouraging the traffickers to carry on with their trade?’ Alp Mehmet: ‘That is precisely what His Grace is effectively doing by suggesting it is ok to jump into a flimsy boat and come here illegally, risking your life in doing so.’ Financial Times: UK plans curbs on visas for overseas students’ family members Alp Mehmet: ‘The net migration number for the whole of 2022 will be much higher than the record 500,000 for the year to June 2022. This is over 10 times the number who crossed the Channel last year.’ BBC: What’s being said in support of the Illegal Migration Bill? Another crossbench peer, the founder of Migration Watch Lord Green of Deddington, backed the Bill, which he says is a small part of the fight against large scale migration. A “real reduction in wider migration is now essential to preserve the country that many of us love”, he says. The Sun: MIGRANT SURGE More than 700,000 migrants arrived in the UK last year, official figures set to reveal as Tories fear backlash Alp Mehmet, from Migration Watch UK, believes net migration for last year will “massively” exceed 500,000. He said: ‘The loose points-based system that followed Brexit has sucked in more and more people, as we said it would.’ Talk TV: The huge impact of record net migration ‘It will be significantly more than half a million. Housing, schools, the NHS, your GP, will all be hugely impacted.’ GB News: Wasn’t Brexit supposed to mean lower levels of immigration? ‘The numbers are going to keep rising until the government actually does something to stop it, and in recent years there’s been little interest from government, with the odd exception, to do that.’ |
| MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD |
| It is not just the people traffickers on the Channel who are taking British voters for mugs. It is the politicians too. They want you to believe that the record level of legal migration is just a blip due to current uncertainties, that it will all calm down and that there is nothing to worry about. Well, immigration will continue rising for so long as the present soft system is in place. Time to let them know that you are not fooled and you won’t be voting for more of the same. Write to your MP today to remind them what you voted for. |
| We wouldn’t be able to continue this work without the help of our supporters. If you would like to donate, please click the button below. Our supporters are all as concerned about the future of our country as we are. Some have been kind enough to remember us in their will. If you wish to consider leaving a bequest to Migration Watch UK, or wish to discuss anything else, do please get in touch. Our email is: admin@migrationwatchuk.org |
May 11th 2023
Feral Britain
May 10th 2023
Comment On Judge Only Rape Trials To Increase Convictions
By R J Cook
Anglo Americans are obsessed with feminism and sex crimes. This is all very well but leaves certain things out of the equation. Women and girls do tell lies. Upper class men like Prince Andrew are more likely to get away with it. Police officers on or off duty are also more likely to get away with it. Sarah Everard’s killer was a weirdo cop
Rape is a sacred subject for women. Aged 72, I have had men tell me I look rape-able. Is that , apart from surprising me, an insult or a compliment to my desirability. Rape can be a female fantasy, possibly more so than a man’s.
First Minister Humza Yousaf has defended the plan. He pointed to a “weight of evidence” that juries are affected by rape myths and misconceptions.
Legal professionals have said the scheme, proposed to tackle low conviction rates, could undermine the judicial system.
There is no doubt that the object of the exercise is to convict more men,weighing scant or dubious evidence accordingly. The Trump case is highly significant. A very unpopular man in New York and Washington, his whole term Presidential term was obstructed by impeachment hearings. Now a jury of his ‘so called peers’ have judged him guilty of indecent assault and battery. Because the assault apparently happened 28 years ago and the ‘victim’ couldn’t remember the date and Trump can’t even remember the woman. He said he never knew her, He is 76 and his victim is 79. Memories get lost as we age, thankfully perhaps. Still ,with no evidence, Trump was judged to have probably committed the crime, so it cost him $4 million. Now an army of ‘me toos’ are after him.
Juries in this case did Trump no favours and juries can be rigged. But judge only is high risk. I faced a judge only Crown Court Hearing in September 2018 and was given a 6 month conditional discharge for leaving intemperate messages in the message box of a police officer who tried to fit me up for working as a prostitute in a non existent brothel run by my son and his gangster associates. That case was pure malice and the tremors are still twitching. It was a lesson in police corruption ,lies and vindictiveness.
British justice is a disgraceful conveyor belt. Juries are selected from ‘respectable’ types. They have prejudices in a country which manufactures ‘nice’ acceptable ones. The system is a conveyor belt and target driven. If justice was a garden gnome factory, close inspection would show the gnomes deformities and cracks in the ceramics.
Even an honest judge would have trouble passing not guilty verdicts on rape cases. The press and feminists would be mad if there was ever a not guilty verdict. The fact so few cases result in convictions is because there is no evidence. Blair tried packing juries with women and convictions went down because it takes a woman to spot a lying woman. Six of the nine jurors on the Trump case were men.
Men romanticise women and are more likely to be deceived. Many women who are not feminists, are easily deceived because they lack confidence and are too submissive. Those are dangerous dynamics. Biological women are important for having children. But disobedient men will soon face allegations , including rape. They will lose everything and end up on the streets. All they will see is the bill for maintenance.
What goes around comes around. Ever more men chase transsexuals who are more tolerant,understanding, stylish ,elegant and not slaves to feminism. Transsexuals aspire to present old fashioned femininity. Men like that. Femininity has always worked better than Viagra -effectively a rape drug. Women expect to control sex, but rape allegations and female favouring laws are a great turn off. Women have just become too masculine, angry self righteous know alls and intolerant. Women can hit men ,even stab maim and kill them. It will always be the man’s fault. Women are,on the other hand, victims or potential victims. A man raising his voice threatens report for fear of violence constitutes domestic violence. Feminists are free to teach the mantra of toxic masculinity. Feral youth is a by product. There has never been so much loneliness,mental illness and suicide in the western world. Putin has more than one reason to spot its decline.
If these laws are trialled in Scotland, they will extend to all U.K and other areas of law.
R J Cook
May 9th 2023
Lawyer boycott of juryless rape trials ‘to be unanimous’
Lawyers across Scotland are expected to join a near “unanimous” boycott of a pilot scheme for juryless rape trials.
Stuart Murray, vice president of the Scottish Solicitors Bar Association, said at least seven bodies had voted against the government proposals.
Legal professionals have said the scheme, proposed to tackle low conviction rates, could undermine the judicial system.
First Minister Humza Yousaf has defended the plan.
He pointed to a “weight of evidence” that juries are affected by rape myths and misconceptions.
- Yousaf defends rape trial scheme as boycott grows
- Why are lawyers threatening to boycott rape trials?
The pilot was proposed by Scotland’s second most senior judge, Lady Dorrian, in a review that informed the Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill.
It would see anyone accused of rape or attempted rape stand trial before a single judge or sheriff, who would decide whether or not they are guilty.
In the most recent figures, conviction rates for rape and attempted rape were 51%, compared with 91% for all other crimes.
The Scottish Solicitors Bar Association represents criminal defence solicitors across the country.
Mr Murray, who practices in Aberdeen, spoke out against the pilot scheme after the Aberdeen Bar Association confirmed it was joining Glasgow and Edinburgh associations in a boycott.
He told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme that associations in Dundee, Airdrie, Falkirk and Paisley had also joined the backlash.
“It is spreading, there are now seven or eight that have come out in the last week or so, just of bar associations across the country,” Mr Murray said.
“There are more votes within the various bar associations across the country in the next week or so. I’ve no doubt it will be effectively unanimous across the bar associations.”
‘Knee-jerk reaction’
The lawyer said he hoped the boycott would put an end to the scheme, but said he could not say for certain because the Scottish government was “so unpredictable”.
He said lawyers had responded to “a knee-jerk reaction from the Scottish government – a blatant attempt to increase conviction rates”.
Mr Murray blamed shortcomings in pre-trial investigations for lower conviction rates.
“There are substantial failings which are highlighted in Lady Dorrian’s review of the lack of communication from the Crown, lack of involvement with the police, matters being delayed at an investigative stage, all issues which impact on the conviction rate,” the lawyer said.
“The way to deal with this is not to remove a jury of your peers.”
He said rape cases are also “more intimate” and typically lack evidence such as CCTV footage and extensive witness testimony, leading to lower conviction rates.
Mr Murray said the scheme would hamper efforts to diversify the legal system, and countered the Scottish government’s point that 80% of trials already took place without a jury.
He said: “That’s a slightly disingenuous point. Those trials are lower level, consist mainly of minor assaults, shoplifting, cases that are far less serious than cases involving sexual offences.”
He echoed concerns about the Scottish review of rape trials lacking relevant evidence, with rules prohibiting researchers speaking to former jurors.
“There’s been almost no investigation or review carried out in relation to the pilot scheme in Scotland,” Mr Murray said.
“The Scottish government is going about this in entirely the wrong manner and rather than engaging with the profession, they are ignoring the profession.”
‘Experimental guinea pig’
The dean of the Faculty of Prosecutors and Solicitors in Dundee confirmed the group had unanimously agreed to boycott the scheme.
“The crime of rape is a high court matter which has to prosecuted and defended expertly,” a statement read.
“It is not in the accused’s best interests to be an experimental guinea pig for such a serious matter.”
Justice Secretary Angela Constance said she was “determined to proceed in partnership” with lawyers, adding it was “quite simply not true” that the government has ignored the legal profession.
She told BBC Scotland there is “overwhelming” evidence that juries have misconceptions about rape.
“There is international evidence, 50-plus studies most of which have taken place in the past 20 years, that demonstrates the diversity of juries does not overcome unfair influences,” the minister said.
She insisted the legal profession, victims and academics would be consulted as part of the parliamentary process.
“No part of the system is beyond scrutiny, including court processes,” she said.
‘Legitimate grounds’
Ms Constance added: “I think we have legitimate grounds to have concerns and we have legitimate grounds to proceed with a pilot.
“But it is important that we engage with all the voices and that’s part of our parliamentary and democratic process.”
The proposal for juryless trials have been welcomed by victim support group Rape Crisis Scotland, which has warned too many women are being let down by the justice system and too many rapists are walking free.
Chief executive Sandy Brindley said: “What we all want is a system where we can be confident that the evidence being heard in rape trials is being assessed fairly and objectively, and isn’t influenced by false assumptions or attitudes towards women.
“Everyone has the right to a fair trial but that does not automatically mean a jury trial. A single-judge trial is still a fair trial.”
Related Topics
May 8th 2023
Revolting Royalty By R J Cook
My view of yesterday’ s coronation was how nauseating hypocritical and grotesque for an alleged democracy. Rushed legislation meant police , numbering 11,000, were there to make sure all the happy people enjoyed their day – many had travelled hundreds of miles in terrible weather, camping out. Sixty Four anti monarchy protestors were marked men and arrested before they did anything, They included the organisers who were trailed on the internet and the first victims of rolling out facial recognition technology. The Royal’s admiring subjects had no worries about that , intoxicated by the glamour and glitz, the pomp and circumstance.
I recall being present at a contrasting type of protest, while working as a photo journalist in Aylesbury. Protestors were the English Defence League ( EDL) and were also waving Union Jacks and St George’s Cross. The psychological mindset mechanism for these flag wavers and yesterday’s was the same. The difference was that the EDL were effectively outlawed. Only the press were allowed through the police cordon.
Ultimately it is all about power. Power, Privilege and Patronage. are the Unholy Trinity. As one of my recent reports demonstrates. British Royalty are descendants of a long line of chancers ,cheats and cut throats. King Charles & Co are working on a new brand, or should I say a new bland. New Public Order offences and language policing are essential to the British Police State. Those of us who write books must please the diversity qualified sensitivity readers. The new bland is about bringing the Commonwealth back home.
.
Ofcom has allegedly been flooded with complaints after a Bridgerton star told ITV that the view of Buckingham Palace balcony was ‘terribly white’ on Coronation Day. Ms Andoh said yesterday: ‘We have gone from the rich diversity of the Abbey to a terribly white balcony. I am very struck by that’ One commenter slammed Ms Andoh’s comments as ‘ridiculous’, tweeting: ‘How can she get away with that? Anyone of white colour would have to make a public apology.’
So we had the wonderful colourful diversity of the rich, famous , great and good. We are being forced into a world of boxes for the masses ,like LGBTQI. In this context sex changes are a joke because we have to respect mainstream criteria bigotry and prejudice. Feminists and Islamists must have sensitivity to trans women but they won’t give sensitivity back because they are sui generis always right.
To argue that Prince Charles will be serving us not him is ridiculous. We are his subjects in this fake democracy. So sui generis, the powerful , privileged and patronised ( police and armed forces ) are the ones who give the orders with King Charles III on top of the dung hill. Ms Andoh’s self centred racially motivated comments miss the point. What is wrong with that balcony scene is that this ancient ruling class – and those it patronises, like the dreadful fawning bland ‘stars’perfornming for Charles at Windsor tonight – is the problem with billionaire Charles a significant power behind the scene.
As I write, a documentary plays about Charles’s accused sex offender brother Andrew. He has not been convicted because his mother paid off his accuser with £12 million of tax payers money. That shows the inherent evil in the system. These people have ridden rough shod over the masses for years. The terribly white stars on that balcony looked old, awkward irrelevant and tired. King Charles III talks in cliches but his sort don’t have to be in touch with anything but their wealth. Wealth and power have never been in so few hands. Those hands are shaking. The fear of revolution haunts these people.
There are palace balconies in far away places where the uniforms are dazzling and the faces suitably black. Those people , as we see in Sudan, are never too far from the machine guns and escape routes. The Windsors’ experiment with mixed race Megan hasn’t worked but lessons have been learned. The Royal Firm will survive. Protest will only ever be symbolic for the foreseeable future – what the late U.S Sociologist called ‘latent tension mamagment’ as one of his ‘pattern variables.
However things look, there is always a pattern and everything comes down to predicatble numbers. In some areas those numbers of diverse elements are getting critical. So it is not about who is King of that ruling class but what that class will be ruling – and of course how many cops and machine guns they will require to do it.
R J Cook
May 6th 2023
Coronation Day – by R J Cook
When my inspirational old A level history teacher, a Welsh firebrand, paid one of his many visits to my home, we discussed the 1917 Russian Revolution. I cringed when he said that the Romanov’s deserved to be put up against the wall and shot. He expressed similarly unpleasant thoughts about the British Royal family, descendants relatives of the Romanovs. I didn’t argue because he had come to discuss a lecturing job he had arranged for me at Aylesbury College.
Many years later I reflect on my revulsion at the thought of a family lined up against the wall of a dirty cellar, to be shot, knowing they were facing oblivion. My outlook now is no longer benign. The Romanovs lived in luxury while their people starved. When confronted by starving protestors storming the Winter Palace in 1905 – as with Britain’s Peterloo Massacre of 1819 in England -troops were ordered to shoot them, This is the age of western rolling regime change, currently performing on the Ukraine stage, but plans rolling east.
It makes me laugh when our militaristic leaders accuse Russia of election fixing. News broke today that the EU has given 40 million Euros to Moldova to promote and protect its chosen government as it did in Georgia and Ukraine. The U.K alone has spent a fortune on subversion in Russia. This country supplies RAF top personnel and weapons supporting genocide in Yemen because they fear Russian backed Iran threatening their favourite dictatorship; Saudi Arabia. The Western clique sees no problem with this hypocrisy because they ‘know’ sui generis that ‘God is on their side.’
So we come to today’s militaristic fake Christian coronation of King Charles III. It seems incredible that such appalling ostentation and militarism is used to taint Jesus’s very simple teachings. If he were on earth today the fakes would rout him out to crucify him again. The last thing the elite and their slavish masses want is any sign of truth.
All the posh media folk were out in force on air today. On ITN one female suggested that people across the nation might be wondering what the £100 million plus^ Coronation Day was all about. A posh resonating male quickly butted in saying, “It doesn’t matter what the purpose is. It is whatever it means to each of us in the joy of coming together.” This day was all about choice and celebrating our freedoms within a multi faith multi cultural society.” TomTugendhat , Tory Security Minister insisted that the tough new security law was necessary to allow citizens to enjoy their freedom. Protests must not inconvenience or spoil peoples’ enjoyment of big events like today’s Coronation. Anyone police find doing so face jail an unlimited fine.
King Charles and Queen Camilla are serious business with much being made of their British Commonwealth leadership bringing nations together. It doesn’t matter that this is vacuous drivel and that Africa needs more than a couple of aged upper class monarchs to solve it or any old colonial outposts problems. The British Monarchy are at best another religion. The last things those old Third World dictatorships need is another religion, with a living God and Goddess.
However , in free democratic Britain you are still free to protest as long as you are not seen or heard. You must not wear bright highly visible clothing as anti monarchy protestors discovered today. Nor must your placards carry any colourful and or offensive messages likely to draw attention to your cause. Police have been given powers to conduct suspicion less stop and search operations in areas and events at likely to attract protest That is life in the developing story of Orwellian Police State U.K. The latest joke is , from The Scotsman’s feminists writer inisting that “ It is OK to be a transphobe and it is undemocratic to ‘cancel’ them while transsexuals must be cancelled.”
R.J Cook
St Edward’s Crown, which will be used in King Charles’s Coronation, has a dramatic royal history
St Edward’s Crown has a dramatic history, having been completely remade following the English Civil War and the Restoration
By Emma Samuel
3 May 2023
When His Majesty King Charles III is crowned on 6 May 2023 at Westminster Abbey, the crescendo of the ceremony will be when the Archbishop of Canterbury lowers St Edward’s Crown onto the new Sovereign’s head. Now, as King Charles’s Coronation draws closer, Tatler looks at the fascinating history of the dazzling diadem.
Read More
St Edward’s Crown secretly removed from the Tower of London ahead of King Charles III’s coronation
The movement of the priceless crown, which was originally made for Charles II in 1661, was kept under wraps until it was safely delivered
Composed of a solid gold frame and standing 12 inches tall, the crown is set with 444 precious and semi-precious stones including rubies, sapphires, amethysts, sapphires, garnets and tourmalines. The crown features an ermine trimmed headband beneath a band of four golden crosses-pattée and four fleurs-de-lis. A velvet cap is encased by bejewelled arches which join at the top to support a central orb and cross. It’s also extremely weighty, at 4.9lb, so is only worn briefly, being replaced with the Imperial Crown after the ceremony.
WATCHA Closer Look: Sovereign Orb | The Crown Jewels
Most Popular
- Advice for Harry and Meghan? Princess Märtha Louise of Norway says she maintained family ties after stepping back from royal dutiesBy Natasha Leake
- Princess Eugenie celebrates husband Jack Brooksbank’s 37th birthday with touching photo galleryBy Stephanie Bridger-Linning
- First Buckingham Palace Garden Party of King Charles III’s reign is a triumphant successBy Stephanie Bridger-Linning
The original version of the crown was named after Edward the Confessor, ruler of England from 1042 to 1066, and he can be seen wearing it in the first scene of the Bayeux Tapestry embroidered 1,000 years ago. King Edward was canonised in 1161 and the crown was kept at Westminster Abbey as a holy relic used at royal coronations for the next 400 years, including that of Anne Boleyn as Queen Consort in 1533.
Read More
King Charles III’s Coronation gets the 21st-century treatment with new emoji
Despite the historic nature of the event, the King’s coronation has been updated with some modern twists – including a social-media savvy emoji
By Hope Coke
However, during the English Civil War of the 17th century, enemies of the Cavaliers executed Charles I and seized and sold the crown along with much of the royal regalia so when the monarchy was restored in 1660 a new and impressive crown was needed. Royal goldsmith Sir Robert Vyner was commissioned to create the version we know today to be presented at the coronation of Charles II in 1661 and at numerous enthronements since, including the Queen’s grandfather, George V, and father, George VI, in 1911 and 1937, respectively.
Such is the legacy of the St Edward’s Crown, its image was chosen by Queen Elizabeth II to be used throughout her reign as the widely recognisable regal emblem for services such as HM Revenue and Taxes, police badges, passports and the Royal Mail. Despite an attempted theft in 1671, the Crown is usually housed at the Tower of London.
Ahead of King Charles’s Coronation, it was removed from the Tower of London to be resized for His Majesty. The movement of the priceless crown was kept secret until it had been safely delivered. In just a few days’ time, the crown will play in starring role in history once again when it will be placed on the head of the monarch in one of the most momentous occasions of the 21st century.
The Coronation of King Charles III: all the latest details
The Queen Consort will be crowned with Queen Mary’s Crown, made by Garrard (who also made Princess Diana’s engagement ring) for the 1911 coronation of King George V which will be ‘re-cycled’ for the Coronation. A purple crown encrusted with glittering diamonds, it is a change from the crown which was used for the coronation of the Queen Mother which features the controversial Koh-i-Noor diamond. As one of the biggest cut diamonds in the world, India has made claims to the Koh-i-Noor, and so there were concerns that using it would have been problematic diplomatically.
Buckingham Palace has said that ‘the choice of Queen Mary’s Crown by Her Majesty is the first time in recent history that an existing crown will be used for the coronation of a Consort instead of a new commission,’ and that the use of Queen Mary’s Crown is in the ‘interests of sustainability and efficiency’.
Most Popular
- Advice for Harry and Meghan? Princess Märtha Louise of Norway says she maintained family ties after stepping back from royal dutiesBy Natasha Leake
- Princess Eugenie celebrates husband Jack Brooksbank’s 37th birthday with touching photo galleryBy Stephanie Bridger-Linning
- First Buckingham Palace Garden Party of King Charles III’s reign is a triumphant successBy Stephanie Bridger-Linning
Special People – by R J Cook
The British Royal Family represent the best and worst of Britain. Britain entered a modern age with Henry VII ‘s victory over Richard III. So began this Welsh upstart’s efforts to unite Scotland with England and Wales. He married daughter Margaret off to James IV of Scotland. There was only the Roman Catholic Church then , but Henry VIII broke with Rome to get a divorce. This arguably liberated the powerful from Rome’s stranglehold and oppression, accidentally creating the environment for new thinking and the rise of capitalism – feeding into the Industrial Revolution. But one of Henry’s daughters was from Catholic Catherine of Aragon, causing conflict when she came to power
Her father had Catholics burnt alive. Smithfield, settled on the fringes of Roman London, was once a place of revelry. Jesters and crowds flocked for the medieval St Bartholomew’s Day celebrations, tournaments were plentiful and it became the location of London’s most famous meat market. Yet in Tudor England, Smithfield had another, more sinister use: the public execution of heretics.Spanning the reigns of British history’s most remarkable dynasty, The Burning Time is a vivid insight into an era in which what was orthodoxy one year might be dangerous heresy the next.
The first martyrs were Catholics, who cleaved to Rome in defiance of Henry VIII’s break with the papacy. But with the accession of Henry’s daughter Mary – soon to be nicknamed ‘Bloody Mary’ – the charge of heresy was levelled against devout Protestants, who chose to burn rather than recant.
At the centre of Virginia Rounding’s vivid account ,‘The Fires of Smithfield’ of this extraordinary period are two very different characters. The first is Richard Rich, Thomas Cromwell’s protege, who, almost uniquely, remained in a position of great power, influence and wealth under three Tudor monarchs, and who helped send many devout men and women to their deaths. The second is John Deane, Rector of St Bartholomew’s, who was able, somehow, to navigate the treacherous waters of changing dogma and help others to survive. The Burning Time is their story, but it is also the story of the hundreds of men and women who were put to the fire for their faith. It is a gripping insight into a time when people were willing to die, and to kill, in the name of religion.
The Tudor’s Stuart successors began a period of British history lasting from 1603 to 1714 during the dynasty of the House of Stuart. The period ended with the death of Queen Anne and the accession of King George I from the German House of Hanover. George I was invited over from Hanover to block Catholic Stuart rival Bonnie Prince Charlie. George I, in full George Louis, German Georg Ludwig, (born May 28, 1660, Osnabrück, Hanover [Germany]—died June 11, 1727, Osnabrück), elector of Hanover (1698–1727) was the first Hanoverian king of Great Britain (1714–27).
He was the eldest son of Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and his wife, Sophia of the Palatinate. Sophia was the granddaughter of King James I of England through her mother, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia.
In June 1745, Charles Edward Stuart (b1720) had one key aim: regaining the thrones his grandfather, the Roman Catholic convert James VII of Scotland and II of England and Ireland, had lost in 1688–90 to his nephew and son-in-law William of Orange (who reigned as William III). This ‘glorious’ revolution had confirmed a Protestant succession, in a predominantly Protestant Great Britain, which, from 1714, was embodied in the Hanoverian dynasty.
Following George I’s accession, several risings in support of the exiled Stuarts occurred, most notably in the years 1715 and 1719. By this stage, on the death of James VII and II in 1701, the chief claimant (or ‘old pretender’) was his only legitimate son (and father of Charles) James Francis Edward (b1688).
Bonnie Prince Charlie was the grandson of the Catholic King James II (1685-1688) who was deposed from the British throne in favor of his protestant daughter Mary II, and his son-in-law William III. In 1745, the Young Pretender, Charles Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) landed in Scotland. There he built support, and bolstered by early successes, marched into England. He was the elder son of James Francis Edward Stuart, and the Stuart claimant to the throne of Great Britain after 1766. A French invasion of Britain in support of the Stuarts in early 1744 had been abandoned, mainly due to severe weather, leaving Charles, who had arrived in France to lead the invasion, kicking his heels in Paris.
The 1745 Jacobite Rebellion was a turning point in British history. Believing the British throne to be his birthright, Charles Edward Stuart, aka ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, planned to invade Great Britain along with his Jacobite followers and remove the Hanoverian ‘usurper’ George II.
Instead of the popular uprising he had counted on, he met apathy. Although he reached as far south as Derby, indecisive leadership and lack of popular support meant that Charles had little option but to retreat into Scotland. There he was eventually brought to bay at Culloden Moor, near Inverness, where the Stuart cause finally ended in slaughter.
Charles himself escaped to the Isle of Skye and eventually to France, where he ended his life a pathetic drunkard.
George II (1727-60) continued the Hanoverian rule. Early in his reign (1736) John Wesley began preaching in England. The subsequent Wesleyan societies and later Methodist churches acted as a conservative deterrent to the tide of social unrest and political radicalism that swept much of Europe during the 18th century.
George I accepted Parliament’s generous invitation with all the privileges, widespread acres of land and palaces on condition he did not have learn English. It didn’t bother him to be a mere figure head to block revolutions. And so it went on. Queen Victoria ,according to A.N Wilson’s enjoyable study,was possibly illegitimate. But who cares. This fecund beauty named the new Industrial Age and Imperial power grabbing. She also brought us her son Edward VII , nicknamed ‘Tum.Tum’ and famous for his nine course meals – see‘The Isle of Wight, Wish You Were Here’ ( 1997 ) by Robert Cook. No doubt due to Edward VII being incapacitated, by excessive weight, for love making, his wife was rumoured to have had over 200 male lovers.
Prince Charles , his late wife Diana and mistress now Queen Camilla invoke that same spirit of lust and lusciousness from those earlier years. Prince ‘Randy Andy’ might seem exceptionally awful , but who knows given the example of his opportunistic Prince Phillip and his ‘Hell Fire Club’. Princess Diana revealed truths about the Royals that mass media Coronation gloss should not disguise. But it will because the hard pressed masses need something to believe in and to feel they are part of. What would perfidious Albion be without the Royals ?The people are desperate for a sense of identitity. So from the wonders of Victorian invention, engineering and empire,we have reached more of the worst for the underclass and more of the best for the privileged.
R J Cook
May 4th 2023
An Old Story & Same Old Dirty Cops :
I was approached to infiltrate animal rights groups. I asked my recruiter, where’s the bad guy? Why would I spend years infiltrating a group of people who want to rescue beagles?
My nation needed me, I was told. If the group of businesses that relied on animal testing left the UK, then we could lose 5% of GDP overnight. I was disturbed by the idea that police were being directed by political motivations, [and] being used to protect a specific sector of business and the investments of shareholders.
– Neil Woods, former spy cop
Throughout its 14 year history, SHAC attracted spy cops from a variety of police units. Many of these officers carried out and incited criminal activity and attempted to pressure activists to confess to crimes they had not committed.
JAMES ADAMS
James’ was the pseudonym given to an undercover officer working for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). In 2010 he pretended to be an executive for pharmaceutical giant and HLS customer Novartis.
Debbie Vincent and another SHAC activist held a series of meetings with Adams and Andrew Jackson, Global Head of Corporate Security at Novartis. They thought the purpose was to reach a compromise over the company’s draconian injunction but in reality it was a sting to try to implicate Debbie in a blackmail conspiracy.
Shortly afterwards Adams followed Debbie onto the underground and attempted to pressure her into confessing to crimes she had no knowledge of.
ROD RICHARDSON
‘Rod’ stole his cover name from the grave of a dead child. He was a police officer from the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) and infiltrated environmental and anti-capitalist groups between 1999-2003.
He was involved in several SHAC protests and played a key role in an action against HLS customer Glaxo SmithKline. He helped flood their carpark with Horlicks during a mass mobilisation. The home secretary, Jack Straw congratulated Thames Valley police for the way they responded to the Horlicks incident in the Houses of Parliament, describing the protestors involved as being “both bad and mad”
Richardson was predominantly active in London, Essex and Nottingham.
He left the activist scene in 2003 claiming to be moving abroad to live with his girlfriend Jo, who he had been with throughout his deployment.
DAVE EVANS
‘Dave’ joined London Animal Action (LAA) in September 1999. He attended most of LAA’s meetings as well as many demonstrations. On a number of occasions Evans was accompanied by a woman named Wanda who claimed to be his girlfriend but almost certainly was a spy cop too.
He drove a minibus for LAA on the SHAC Day of Action in February 2001, which was also attended by Rod Richardson.
He also drove activists to the G8 Summit in Scotland in 2005. All those in Evans’ minibus were arrested but the charges were later dropped. This was the last confirmed sighting of him.
GARY RAYNER
‘Gary’ was an NPOIU agent who spied on animal rights activists from 2006-2010. He was mainly involved in the SPEAK campaign against Oxford University’s animal lab and was the replacement for Ritchie Clarke (see below). For the first two years he had a partner named Abigail who is believed to have been another undercover police officer. He lived in Oxford and claimed to be a freelance web-designer who worked from home.
In 2008 Rayner went to the International AR Gathering in Norway with other activists. While there he spent time with Debbie Vincent, and took photos of her which were later used in her trial. The spy cop quit animal rights to allegedly move abroad in 2010.
RITCHIE CLARK
‘Ritchie’ was an NPOIU agent deployed in animal rights from 2002-2006. He lived in Bedford and was heavily involved in Bedford Animal Action as well as SHAC.
Clarke drove minibuses and cars on “home demonstrations” against people connected to HLS. He went hunt sabbing and attended animal rights gatherings in the UK. On a number of occasions he was arrested. Clarke supposedly had an on/off relationship with a Scandinavian woman who occasionally visited him in the UK. In late 2005 he said he was moving to Norway to be with her as she was pregnant. He told activists “don’t try and look me up” and left the movement the following year.
ADRIAN RADFORD
Radford was a data analyst, who infiltrated SHAC on behalf of the British police. His ruthless ambition, combined with the state’s crusade to eradicate a movement, created a perfect storm which resulted in many lawful activists being sent to prison.
He formed an ‘Animal Liberation Front’ (ALF) cell, and carried out a number of serious crimes, which were used as justification for rounding up SHAC activists in the largest animal rights case ever tried.
Radford’s role was not disclosed at trial despite his involvement in phone calls to HLS customers, newsletter creation, and research documents which were heavily relied on in court. Requests to the then Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer were turned down, and he maintains, “there is no reason to doubt the safety of [their] convictions.” What are the police and public prosecutors trying to hide?
When Adrian left the animal rights movement, he pretended to have a terminal illness. He now works as a hypnotherapist, and owns a pet shop in Hitchin. Read more about Adrian’s role here.
CAN YOU HELP?
If you have any information that could assist SHAC activists with a potential appeal against their convictions, please contact us or our legal team directly.
Questions remain over animal rights activists’ case
Paul Lewis and Rob Evans
An undercover operation 25 years ago that led to the jailing of two animal rights activists now appears shrouded in mystery
Wed 13 Jun 2012 17.40 BST
It seemed like – and may well have been – a heroic police triumph that thwarted a campaign to firebomb department stores. When anti-terrorist officers caught two animal rights activists red-handed as they assembled incendiary devices to set fire to branches of Debenhams, it appeared their timing could not have been better.
As police burst in, the Old Bailey was later to hear, the activists were sitting at a table using a soldering iron that was still hot.
But on Wednesday, 25 years after an audacious police investigation led to the jailing of two activists for inflicting damage totalling £9m on three Debenhams stores, new questions have been raised in parliament about the ethics of the operation and the conduct of one particular police spy.
The MP who raised the case – Caroline Lucas of the Green party – conceded that much of the infiltration of a cell of the Animal Liberation Front in 1987 remains shrouded in mystery.
What is unlikely to be disputed is that an undercover police officer, Bob Lambert, adopted a fake identity to live deep undercover among hardcore activists – gaining crucial intelligence about their campaign against the fur trade.
The question raised on Wednesday was whether Lambert went further, potentially acting as agent provocateur. According to the accusation levelled by one convicted activist – and aired by Lucas in parliament – Lambert is suspected of planting one of three incendiary devices in branches of Debenhams. Lambert has strongly denied the allegations.
A long-standing investigation by the Guardian has brought to light various aspects of Lambert’s clandestine surveillance unit, set up in 1968 to gather intelligence about anti-Vietnam war protesters.
Police continue to maintain an army of spies living long-term in activist groups – the most infamous example being Mark Kennedy, who was last year exposed as a police officer after a seven-year deployment among green activists. Kennedy’s double life as ‘Mark Stone’ ended in ignominy last year after it emerged he had developed sexual relations with women while undercover.
Since Kennedy was unmasked, a further eight undercover police officers have been identified, most of whom stand accused of developing sexual relations with activists – behaviour police chiefs insist is banned. They include Lambert, who has apologised for deceiving “law-abiding members of London Greenpeace” during his deployment and admitted he tricked an innocent woman into having a long-term relationship with him, to lend credibility to his alter ego. Lambert also fathered a child with a woman activist he had been sent to spy on.
Responding to Lucas during the parliamentary debate, the policing minister, Nick Herbert, said police officers can start sexual relationships with suspected criminals if it means they are more plausible. He said that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa), the law that has governed their activities since 2000, does not explicity prohibit sexual relations, but requires the operations to be strictly managed.
Herbert said it was important police were allowed to have sex with activists because otherwise it could be used as a test for outing suspected undercover officers.
In his almost total adoption of a new identity, and his willingness to develop close personal relations with women activists, Lambert followed a similar path to that of Kennedy. His journey into the core of the animal rights movement started around 1984.
Like other members of the covert unit, then known as the Special Demonstration Squad, Lambert radically changed his appearance, growing his hair long to reinvent himself as the militant animal rights activist ‘Bob Robinson’.
Insiders from the covert police unit confirm Lambert’s work inside the ALF burnished his reputation as one of their most successful spies. He went on to become a spymaster in the unit before leaving the police for a career as a lecturer at St Andrews University.
However, his respected record was placed in doubt on Wednesday when Lucas raised questions about the extent of his involvement in a campaign to target Debenhams stores with incendiary devices. Lucas admitted “we just don’t know” exactly how far Lambert may have taken his operation.
By 1987, Lambert had infiltrated the small ALF cell co-ordinating arson attacks on stores in protest against their sale of fur. The relatively simple devices – the size of cigarette boxes – were placed under inflammable objects in the stores and were designed to set off the sprinkler systems, causing extensive flooding. They were set to go off at night so that people were not harmed, according to the activists. In July that year, the incendiary devices were simultaneously planted and ignited at three Debenhams stores in Luton, Romford and Harrow. But only two activists – Geoff Sheppard and Andrew Clarke – were caught and convicted. It appeared that the perpetrator who planted the third device had got away.
Lucas told MPs: “Sheppard and Clarke were tried and found guilty but the culprit who planted the incendiary device in the Harrow store was never caught. Bob Lambert’s exposure as an undercover police officer has prompted Geoff Sheppard to speak out about that Harrow attack. Sheppard alleges that Lambert was the one who planted the third device and was involved in the ALF’s co-ordinated campaign.”
She added: “Sheppard says that two months after the three Debenhams stores were set on fire, he and another person were in his flat, making four more firebombs, when they were raided by police. Sheppard alleges that the intelligence for the raid was so precise that it is now obvious that, and I quote, it ‘came from Bob Lambert’ who knew that the pair were going to be there making another set of incendiary devices.”
The suggestion that intelligence gathered by Lambert thwarted two activists planning a firebombing campaign is likely to be uncontroversial. On 9 September, police burst into Sheppard’s bedsit in Hillside Road, Tottenham and caught the pair red-handed surrounded by paraphernalia for making the devices – alarm clocks, copper wire, bulbs and batteries.
Victor Temple, for the prosecution, said at the time: “They were in the process of what was clearly a well-practised method of constructing incendiary devices similar in every significant respect to those used at Harrow, Luton and Romford.”
Previously, Lambert has spoken about his role in the police operation against the ALF, and his specific involvement in the investigation into Sheppard and Clarke, saying: “I succeeded in my task and that success included the arrest and imprisonment of Geoff Sheppard and Andrew Clarke.”
What is likely to prove more controversial is the suggestion, relayed by the MP, that Lambert may have gone further than a mere observer, and planted the third incendiary device in order to bolster his credibility and “reinforce the impression of a genuine and dedicated activist”.
That is an allegation that Lambert has firmly denied. He told the Guardian: “It was necessary to create the false impression that I was a committed animal rights extremist to gain intelligence so as to disrupt serious criminal conspiracies. However, I did not commit serious crime such as ‘planting an incendiary device at the [Debenhams] Harrow store’.”
One possibility is that police chiefs authorised some kind of controlled explosion at the Harrow store – which the court heard suffered £340,000-worth of damage – to maintain Lambert’s cover story. That, however, would raise further questions.
If Lambert did not let off the incendiary device, who did? And if police knew about the plan to start fires in three branches of Debenhams, why did they let them go ahead, causing £9m in damages and lost trade?
Both are likely to be questions explored by an internal Metropolitan police inquiry into the activities of undercover officers in protest groups between 1968 and 2008 – a review that has been continuing for several months.
The Met said in a statement: “Any matters arising from the review will be assessed and where appropriate will be referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).”
Whatever the precise nature – if any – of Lambert’s involvement in the firebombing campaign, his success in duping hardened animal rights activists into believing he was a fellow campaigner is beyond doubt.
In 1988 – a year after the Debenhams fire attacks – Lambert later went abroad, telling friends he was escaping the attentions of Special Branch. They could not have known he was in fact one Special Branch’s finest operatives.
Following their arrests in 1987, Sheppard and Clarke were convicted for planting devices in the Debenhams branches. Sheppard was jailed for four years and four months, and Clarke for more than three years. Sheppard was jailed again in the 1990s but says he stopped doing illegal protests some years ago.
Sheppard said he did not doubt the motives of the man he knew as ‘Bob Robinson’ until his true identity was revealed in the Guardian. The convicted activist told the Guardian: “For 24 years I have believed that my friend … Bob Robinson was on the run and had most likely gone to a different country and probably made a new life for himself and I just thought – good for him, he was the lucky one that managed to get away.”
So instinctively did Sheppard trust Lambert, he said, that he was grateful to him when he visited him in jail. Sheppard said: “I remember thinking ‘Bob’s still there for me’. Actually, he was the guy who put me there.”
Clarke declined to talk about his role in the arson campaign but his lawyer, Mike Schwarz, said: “These allegations are very serious. If true, they cast doubt on the safety of my client’s convictions. Over a month ago I wrote to the director of public prosecutions asking about these issues. It is of great concern that the Crown Prosecution Service have still not replied to me.”
His letter to the DPP, Keir Starmer, states that Lambert played an “active, participating and crucial” role in the firebombing campaign, and the failure of prosecutors to diclose his information about his role would render Clarke’s conviction unsafe.
Herbert indicated on Wednesday that the Home Office was not inclined to investigate the Lambert case. It may therefore turn out to be in the courts where the latest allegations are resolved.
Last year the court of appeal quashed the convictions of 20 environmental activists infiltrated by Kennedy. The key issue was the failure by the Crown Prosecution Service to disclose details about Kennedy’s undercover operation to the defence team. On the face of it, the Lambert case presents another example in which police or prosecutors did not disclose all the evidence they had amassed.
In July last year, when overturning the convictions of green activists, the three senior judges said they had evidence indicating Kennedy “was involved in activities that went further than the authorisation he was given” and was “arguably, an agent provocateur”.
During her speech in parliament, Lucas suggested Kennedy may not be the police spy to have “crossed the line”.
“The latest allegations concerning Bob Lambert and the planting of incendiary devices would beg the question: has another undercover police officer crossed the line into acting as an agent provocateur?” she said. “And how many other police spies have been encouraging protesters to commit crimes?”
Police Never Forget By R J Cook
Corruption is not a strong enough word to describe the British Police. Conniving toadyism are good words to describe the press and television news and documentary persons who give police such and easy time and opportunities for self glorification.
When I asked my old friend Vernon Church -whom I gave reference for a position as a Southampton Magistrate back in the 1990s – if police ever lied, he laughed. Then he replied, struggling not to continue laughing at the naivety of my question: “All the time.”
I laughed when I learned that the now knighted Mark Rowley had been brought back to head the Metropolitan Police after a lucrative spell enjoying his large public service pension and a new career in private security.
This so called ‘new broom’ whinged to the media that it is not police chiefs fault that seasoned criminals, wife beaters, serial adulterers, rapists and other lying weirdos infest the nation’s police. It is the fault of the employment tribunals who overturn senior officers decisions to sack criminally dishonest and sexually perverted officers. He is either an idiot or liar.
Two famous cases of West Mercia top brass covering for corrupt officers are featured in my previous report below. The ones reinstated by employment tribunals tend to be those who don’t fit the appalling bigoted and otherwise unhealthy sub culture. The other mass idiocy in relation to corrupt police is the pathetic trust so many people have in top cops.
The whole system is,as former Chief Constable Sue Sim, herself a victim of the police moron culture, said “It’s a boys club where the main interest is perks and pay. It is rotten to the core.” Her efforts to reform Cleveland Police led to her being ostracised and accused of various transgressions to get her sacked. True to form, her and her daughter continued to be harassed. There is a saying in legal circles,”the police never forget.” Unlike my friend Vernon, I do not consider the police a laughing matter. They are very dangerous people. Their main loyalty is to their own. They close ranks to avoid anyone whose face fits, getting disciplined , let alone fired.
R J Cook
May 3rd 2023
Two Met Police officers arrested after woman ‘kidnapped’ from Kingston nightclub and ‘raped’
One officer has been bailed until June and a referral has been made to the Independent Office for Police Conduct
By
- 10:45, 3 MAY 2023
Two serving Met Police officers have been arrested after a woman was allegedly ‘kidnapped and raped’. She claimed that she had met two men at a nightclub in Kingston on Sunday, April 30, and that they took her in a taxi against her will to a house in North London, where she was allegedly raped.
She reported the incident and two Met Police officers, who remain unnamed, have been arrested in connection. Scotland Yard confirmed that the officers, who were both in the Met’s North West command and off-duty at the time, have been suspended following the arrests.
One was arrested on suspicion of kidnap, rape and common assault and has been bailed to return in June in relation to the rape. Following consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service, the other charges were dropped.
READ MORE: Woman in her 30s stabbed to death was ‘ambushed while on the phone to her gran’
The second officer was arrested on suspicion of kidnap and possession of class A drugs, while a third man, who is not a police officer, was arrested on suspicion of kidnap. Both have been released with no further action.
A Met Police spokesperson said: “Two serving Met officers have been suspended from duty after being arrested. A PC, based on the North West Command Unit, was arrested on Sunday, April 30 on suspicion of kidnap, rape and common assault. Following consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) he was bailed to return on a date in June in relation to the rape. He was released with no further action in relation to the other alleged offences.
“A second PC, also based on the North West Command Unit, was arrested on suspicion of kidnap and possession of class A drugs. A third man – who is not a police officer – was arrested on suspicion of kidnap. Both were released with no further action after consultation with the CPS.
“The arrests relate to an incident that occurred on Sunday, 30 April and began in Kingston. The officers were off duty at the time. A woman is being supported by specially trained officers.
“The Directorate of Professional Standards has been informed and a referral has been made to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.”
Police officer charged with raping woman while on duty in Plymouth
Charges against David Stansbury relate to three alleged incidents in 2009 reported to police in 2020
@stevenmorris20Mon 17 Apr 2023 15.09 BSTFirst published on Mon 17 Apr 2023 13.08 BST
A serving police sergeant has been accused of raping a woman while he was on duty more than a decade ago.
Sgt David Stansbury, 42, is due to appear before magistrates in Devon on Wednesday (19 April) where he faces three rape charges.
The three alleged offences took place in Plymouth in 2009 and were reported to the police in 2020.
In a statement, Devon and Cornwall police said: “A former Devon and Cornwall police officer is due to appear before Plymouth magistrates court charged with rape. David Stansbury is charged with three counts of rape of a woman aged 16 years or over.
“The charges relate to alleged incidents in Plymouth in 2009, whilst he was on duty, and have been under investigation since being reported to Devon and Cornwall police in September 2020.”
Stansbury, who lives in the Somerset town of Ilminster, was an officer in Devon and Cornwall between 2009 and 2011. He is now a Hertfordshire police officer and is suspended from duty.
A Devon and Cornwall police spokesperson said: “If you have any information that you feel may assist this investigation, please contact the independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously by calling freephone 0800 555 111.”
Met Police misconduct: 1000 sexual allegations to be investigated against officers
March 21, 2023
800 Met Police officers are being investigated, facing sexual and domestic abuse claims and other accusations of potential Met Police misconduct
Following the arrest and announcement of PC David Carrick, who pleaded guilty to 49 offences, including dozens of rapes, Met Police misconduct is being thoroughly investigated and checked with 45,000 Met officers and staff.
The Met has announced that a total of 1,633 cases of alleged sexual offences or domestic violence involving 1,071 officers and other staff are also being assessed from the last ten years to ensure suitable judgements were made.
A culture of corruption, racism, and misogyny
Despite the national shock of PC Carrick’s unveiled abuse, the Met Police has undergone an array of scandals that have eroded women’s trust in the force, such as the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021.
Another instance which eroded public trust in police due to racism and sexism is the case of Child Q, in which Four Metropolitan police officers are being investigated for gross misconduct after a 15-year-old black schoolgirl was strip-searched while at school for wrongly being suspected of carrying cannabis.
Another includes two other officers being jailed for taking and sharing photos of murdered sisters. A different serving officer was also convicted of being a member of a neo-Nazi group.
Despite having five public complaints to his name, David Carrick had passed checks to become a firearms officer
Despite having five public complaints to his name, David Carrick had passed checks to become a firearms officer when he transferred to the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command in 2009, and he was vetted again in 2017. This entails those above Carrick had not completed appropriate checks looking into potential Met Police misconduct.
Over 150 police officers from the UK’s biggest force are being prevented from holding public-facing roles because they are under investigation over allegations of sexual misconduct or racism.
The public’s trust in policing is “shattered”
A prime minister spokesman noted that high-profile cases such as Carrick’s had “shattered” the public’s trust in policing – adding to a list of controversies which carried through 2022.
The Met revealed the number of officers on restricted duties at the end of November arising from allegations of sexual misconduct stood at 118. The number of allegations of racism was 43.
More than 230 officers with sexual assault allegations
However, Scotland Yard released figures which also demonstrated results were awaited in the case of investigations underway into more than 230 officers over sexual assault allegations alone.
Results arose from probes, which were then launched into allegations, finding complaints of racism against 556 officers.
Coronation protests allowed, security minister Tom Tugendhat says
- Published
- 25 minutes ago
Related Topics
By Oliver Slow & Dominic Casciani
BBC News
Anti-monarchy groups will be allowed to protest at the King’s Coronation on Saturday, security minister Tom Tugendhat has insisted.
However they will not be permitted to “disrupt others”, Mr Tugendhat said.
His comments came after protest groups received letters reminding them about changes to the law targeting “serious disruption” including attaching themselves to people or infrastructure.
The controversial Public Order Bill came into effect on Wednesday.
The letter, sent on 28 April by the Home Office’s Police Powers Unit to groups including Republic, which campaigns for abolishing the monarchy, said that upon coming into effect on Wednesday the Public Order Bill would include penalties for “specific criminal offences” including locking-on and interfering with key national infrastructure and processions.
“I would be grateful if you could publicise and forward this letter to your members who are likely to be affected by these legislative changes,” the letter said.
Graham Smith, CEO of Republic, described the letter as “intimidatory” and very odd”.
“We’ve been liaising closely with the police about the protest for weeks – we’ve had meetings with them,” he told PA news agency.
“They’ve said very clearly that they have no problems with our plans. I just can’t understand why the Home Office thinks it’s appropriate to send a letter like that, which was anonymous in terms of no person’s name on it,” he said.
He added that there are plans for 1,700 people to protest in London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday.
Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, Mr Tugendhat said that anti-monarchy groups have the “liberty that anybody in the United Kingdom has to protest, what they don’t have the liberty to do is to disrupt others”.
He added that the complexity of the security operation for the Coronation was heightened by the presence of foreign leaders.
“It’s perfectly possible that we’re dealing with protest groups that have nothing to do with the UK, but are seeking to protest against a foreign leader who’s visiting, or seeking to make a complaint about something that’s happening hundreds or thousands of miles away,” he said.
Mr Tugendhat refused to discuss what actions could be punished at the Coronation “for fear of encouraging people to find loopholes”, but said they were introduced in response to protests in the UK becoming “disruptive” and “intrusive”.
The Public Order Bill includes a penalty of up to six months’ imprisonment or an unlimited fine for “locking on” – which involves individuals attaching themselves to others, objects or buildings.
Any action which “prevents or significantly delays the operation of key infrastructure” including airports, railways, printing presses and oil and gas infrastructure has a maximum penalty of 12 months in prisons, an unlimited fine, or both.
Tunnelling – which includes creating a tunnel, participating in creating a tunnel and being present in a tunnel – can be punished by up to three years in prison, or an unlimited fine, of both.
Police stop and search powers have also been enhanced to be “suspicion-led”.
The Home Office describes them as “sensible and proportionate measures” in response to actions by groups such Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain that have caused “serious disruption”.
Read the latest from our royal correspondent Sean Coughlan – sign up here.
Related Topics
- Peers defeat plans to curb protest disruption
- 7 February
- How will the Police and Crime Bill change protests?
- 28 April 2022
May 2nd 2023
It’s A Bomber by R J Cook
“Previously unreleased CCTV footage shows four police officers surrounding Mitchell during the confrontation at the gates of Downing Street on 19 September 2012. The footage, filmed from a camera opposite the gates, also shows three passersby within feet of Mitchell as he is shown out of the side gate by PC Toby Rowland. It is at this moment that Rowland accused Mitchell of referring to the police as “fucking plebs” – a claim Mitchell strenuously denies.
In logs of text messages released officially for the first time, another of the Downing Street police officers, PC Gillian Weatherley, boasted about being about to “topple the Tory government”. She wrote in a text message to a fellow police officer two days after the Plebgate incident: “This will make you feel better, I’m the officer that stopped the chief whip leaving Downing St in Wednesday. He didn’t swear at me but Toby that let him out the side gate. I could topple the Tory government x.” The following month, Weatherley sent a jokey text to a neighbour that said she would “still have time to bring the government down”.
Andrew Mitchell (right) shown on Downing Street CCTV on 19 September 2012. Photograph: Dispatches/Channel 4 News
PC James Glanville, who was sacked after a misconduct hearing found that he leaked details of the altercation to the Sun, maintained in a police interview that he “regretted the amount of media interest that occurred but still believed that the public had a right to know how a senior politician was treating police officers in such a derogatory manner”. Glanville exchanged six telephone calls and 10 text messages with Tom Newton Dunn, the Sun’s political editor, over three days following the incident.
Tom Newton Dunn, who broke the Plebgate story in the Sun on 21 September, told police in a statement that it was the responsibility of the press to publish such articles and his professional obligation as a reporter to protect his sources. “In my opinion this was an example of good-faith whistleblowing about misconduct by a senior politician, which was rightfully exposed publicly,” he said in an extract of his statement published on Monday.
In other text messages released for the first time, one unnamed diplomatic protection officer messaged his partner, Emma, on the day of the Plebgate confrontation to say he was “sorting out what could turn into a major prob lol not for me though x”. The next day, he texted her: “One of the cabinet government ministers that I’ve had a run in with before got ump with being told to use pedestrian gate with his pedal cycle, told one of our guys ‘you don’t run the country we do your all a punch of fucking Plebs. In front of a load of public, the officer warned him if he swears again he will nick him! I’ve been told by Friend in the press office of number 10 it will be on the front pages unless they can block and might have to resign lol x.”
Scotland Yard’s report also laid bare details about Mitchell’s previous altercations with police about access to Downing Street. A former head of security and business continuity at No 10, who is not named, said there were two incidents dating back to 2011 when Mitchell swore out of frustration at not being allowed through a back entrance. The civil servant said he believed Mitchell said “they should have fucking known who I am” after the first incident. After the second altercation months later, Mitchell apparently swore again and said the situation was “becoming ridiculous”. He is also said to have threatened to write to the Metropolitan police commissioner to make a formal complaint.
Operation Alice unearthed signs of earlier confrontations between Mitchell and Westminster police officers. Patrol reports from 2005 and 2006 described encounters with Mitchell that officers brought to the attention of their superiors, although no further detail was given on what took place.
The Plebgate affair has “damaged public trust and confidence” in the Metropolitan police, said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Patricia Gallan, head of Operation Alice. She said: “The police service is here to serve the public, without fear or favour, with honesty and integrity. Where our staff fall short of those standards they must be held to account. We wanted these discipline boards to be held in public, but legally we were unable to direct that this happened. Ultimately four police officers have been dismissed from the MPS, one of whom was sent to prison. Every serving police officer has cause to feel let down by those colleagues who fall below the standards we all strive to uphold.”
Investigators took 1,100 statements over the course of Operation Alice, the majority from diplomatic protection group officers, who were on duty on 19 September 2012 and the following days.”
That is life in Police State U.K It will be very interesting to see how Police will respond to anti monarchy protestors this weekend. Protestors need government permission or face life changing consequences. The Coronation extravaganza is expected to cost at least £100 million.
R J Cook
Be the first to comment on "Death After Life In Police State Britain -II."