Police were warned against arresting violent BLM protesters who assaulted officers or caused criminal damage to avoid “triggering” them, a leaked document reveals.

An internal police risk assessment published during the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020 warned officers of potential “trigger points” that might cause crowds to riot.

One trigger point was “police arresting individuals (such as for assault on police or criminal damage)”.

In the summer of 2020, dozens of police officers were assaulted by BLM activists across Britain, including some 62 in London alone.

According to a 2024 report by Lord Walney, the Government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption, officers were “kicked to the ground” and pelted with bottles and other missiles.

However, during the riots, police were told to “be mindful of possible increased tensions when interacting with the BAME community”, and warned against arresting violent agitators.

The risk assessment came from the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC), a body that coordinates police responses across the UK during times of crisis. The organisation, created by Theresa May in 2013, plays a cent

ral role in planning and coordinating the policing of major protests, riots and other large-scale public order incidents.

Following the death of George Floyd, a black man who died while resisting arrest in Minneapolis, the NPoCC warned the BLM protests would impact “UK community tensions” and could lead to “large scale disorder”.

Lord Walney’s report on the BLM riots describes an incident during which officers were “chased down Whitehall as demonstrators hurled objects and attacked them with sticks and rocks”.

Protesters also threw fireworks at the police, while one mounted officer was thrown from her horse, suffering a cracked collarbone, broken ribs and a collapsed lung.

National monuments and statues were also vandalised and destroyed across the country, including protesters spraying “was a racist” on Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square.

The NPoCC memo stated that for riots to occur “a significant trigger would need to emerge”, for example “death in police custody of a respected member of the BAME community or of a prominent gang member, or significant police altercation at protests”.

The document continued: “Reporting from the solidarity protests in London to date has identified trigger points for negative crowd reactions, which include… police arresting individuals (such as for assault on police or criminal damage).”

The NPoCC then recommended that “All forces [are] to consider potential trigger points at protests”.

The risk assessment has led to accusations of two-tiering policing, where ethnic minority groups are treated differently from white British people.

Suella Braverman, former Home Secretary and Reform Party MP, said the memo provided “two-tier policing is real in this country”.

She continued: “Can you imagine if pro-British protests were policed in such a weak manner? No. Because it is inconceivable that senior figures within the police would change how they operate for anyone other than BLM.”

“The policing of the BLM riots remains one of the darkest and worst moments in recent policing history.”

In 2024, officers firmly cracked down on protests and riots following the mass stabbing of young children by Axel Rudakubana, the child of Rwandan immigrants.

Harry Farrer, a 22-year-old with no previous convictions, was sentenced to two years and three months in prison for throwing a plant at the back of a police officer during the protests.

David Spring, a retired train driver who was caught at a protest shouting “Who the f**k is Allah?” was given an 18-month prison sentence.

Peter Lynch, a 61-year-old grandfather, was jailed for two years and eight months, despite the judge admitting: “You did not yourself attack any police officer, as far as can be detected, but what you did was encourage by your conduct others to behave violently and you were part of this mob.”

Lynch, who was filmed screaming at police “protect my children” and “we are on the streets now to protect our kids,” was found dead in his cell after committing suicide just two months into his sentence.

Priti Patel, who was Home Secretary during the BLM protests, has faced criticism for presiding over “two-tier” justice.

A senior Reform Party source told me: “The institutional failure within the Home Office is directly the result of the catalogue of failures instituted when Priti Patel was Home Secretary.”

“Her chaotic reign not only led to the floodgates being opened on mass immigration, but completely eroded trust in the police and mob rule.”

Read more

“The thing about Steven is”, said former prime minister Liz Truss, turning to me at a DC cocktail party, “is that his legs should be tied together, his body weighted with stones, and thrown into the Potomac”.

Truss had uttered her death wish without the hint of irony, or a smile.

Just a few months prior to this encounter, I had sat down with the ex-PM for a fifty-minute exchange for GB News. During the interview, I gently pointed out that Truss, far from being the “Populist Conservative” she was claiming to be, had governed on the far-Left of the Tory Party.

With the CPAC conference being held in London this week, hosted by Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, it is worth reflecting on the record of the many Conservative Party politicians now rebranding themselves as anti-establishment insurgents.

And, with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey arriving in cinemas this week, it seems an apt moment to revive an ancient warning: beware Tories bearing gifts.

Truss gave me the interview to promote her book lamenting ‘the woke’. Her enemies were clear: “CINOs (conservatives in name only)”, “trans activism”, “leftist hegemony”, and excessively high immigration.

The only trouble? Since 2021, Truss, in her various ministerial roles, supported all of these things. She backed a ban on so-called “transgender conversion therapy”, was pictured holding a sign declaring herself an “LGBT+ ally”, and told the Equality and Human Rights Commission that the government did not intend to prevent biological men identifying as transgender from using female-only facilities.

As Secretary of State for the Department for International Trade, Truss’s permanent secretary sent weekly emails to the entire department promoting “Transgender Day of Awareness”, “Non-binary Awareness”, Black Lives Matter, cross-dressing officials, and trans activist charity Stonewall.

In response to these points, Truss admitted it was a mistake to have held the LGBT sign, but refused to criticise Antonia Romeo, who, as prime minister, she had wanted to promote (and who is now Cabinet Secretary).

As International Trade Secretary, Truss argued that post-Brexit trade deals should involve relaxing immigration rules. In 2021 she praised the “massive rise” in Indian students coming to Britain and argued for greater “business mobility” between the UK and India. Reports at the time made clear that expanding visa access for Indian nationals formed a key component of the trade negotiations she championed.

By 2022, during her premiership, Truss was considering easing English-language requirements for certain visas in order to bring more foreign workers into Britain, according to a report in The Times. Her government was also examining expanding the shortage occupation list and increasing the number of seasonal workers entering the country. The official “Growth Plan” produced under her premiership stated that increased skilled migration was important for economic growth and productivity.

While these points may have irked Truss during our interview, what I suspect really provoked her were my questions about history. It is one thing to admit hypocrisy, and quite another to reveal ignorance.

Truss served for some time as Foreign Secretary, a role previously held by titans such as Palmerston, Grey, Eden and Canning. With these figures and their intellectual seriousness in mind, I asked: Are you more of a Gladstonian, or Disraelite, in terms of foreign policy? Truss looked at me with glazed eyes.

For an even shorter period, as we all know, she served as prime minister, evoking even more titanic figures: William Pitt the Younger, Lord Salisbury, Stanley Baldwin, the Iron Duke, and Robert Peel. Who then was the best Tory PM, excluding the obvious answers of Churchill and Thatcher? After a long pause, she finally replied: “Javier Milei”.

Her post-government conversion to the radical Right is typical of Conservative Party MPs, ministers, and prime ministers. It is all very convenient to chuck out red meat on immigration, wokeism, and Net Zero after you leave elected office.

For some years it has been a mission of mine to hold Conservative and Reform politicians accountable from a Right-wing perspective. Too often Conservatives in particular have been given an easy ride by Britain’s media class, if by accident.

Read more

“O beautiful for halcyon skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,”

Katharine Lee Bates, America the Beautiful

At the edge of the Grand Canyon, atop snow-topped peaks in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, on the slopes of the green sea of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I have discovered the wonder that is America.

On its 250th birthday, I want to offer my reflections on the country that rebelled against my own—and that I have called home for the last two and a half years.

During my years reporting in the United States for GB News and The Telegraph, I have witnessed some of the country’s worst horrors. In Seattle, I watched homeless drug addicts inject heroin into their arms while others wandered the streets in a fentanyl-induced stupor. I was attacked by vagrants in San Francisco, and narrowly avoided them in Washington, D.C. I have confronted Antifa activists in Portland, radical Islamic clerics in Detroit, and illegal immigrants in Denver.

And while there are many problems in the United States, from gun crime to welfare dependency, the country is far more than these extreme elements.

Upon moving to Arlington, a city bordering Washington, D.C., I was shocked at how clean the streets were. Accustomed to London’s piles of rubbish, pavements covered in chewing gum, and every public surface covered graffiti, I was reminded that another way of life is possible.

And I moved to the D.C. area at the perfect time. President Trump has beautified its public spaces, cleaning up the grand Union Station and refilling water fountains in parks across the city. The National Guard patrols the city daily, acting as a visible deterrent to would-be criminals. The murder rate has declined more than 40% in a single year.

D.C. is, admittedly, a standout American city. Its buildings are low-rise, and the capital’s monuments attract international visitors. It is walkable, safe, clean, historic and beautiful. It even has exceptional public transport.

Most cities in the US feature interchangeable skyscrapers amid concrete interchange networks choked with traffic. The car beat the train, and is a necessity in most places. While Europeans often dismiss the car, and embrace the tranquility of trains, they sometimes overlook the singular romance of the American road trip.

The sky somehow feels bigger in America. Driving 75 mph down a wide highway in the Texas plains, patriotic country music blasting, unlocks a joy unattainable in Europe.

Beyond the sprawling urban landscapes lie some of the nation’s most spectacular sights.

Driving through the deserts of Arizona and over the soaring mountain passes of Colorado, one cannot help but appreciate the genius of the people who built the richest nation on earth in little more than two centuries.

They did so in some of the roughest, and most spectacular, environments. Thousands of feet above sea level sit marvels of civilization: Denver, the Mile High City; Salt Lake City beneath the Wasatch Range; and Albuquerque, perched on the edge of a high desert.

In two years I have hiked more than 1,000 km across the North American continent. Nothing has brought me more joy than these adventures.

Most weekends I have driven out of Arlington to the Shenandoah Valley. The drive is about an hour and a half, through English-esque green fields with cows, barns, and MAGA signs. After an hour driving through flat countryside, the road dives down, and then immediately up, and you finally see them: the outlines of shallow, ancient green ridges formed hundreds of millions of years ago, the sky tinging the ridges blue.

On a mountain overlooking Harper’s Ferry in Maryland, a small 18th century munitions town that changed hands no fewer than eight times during the Civil War, I came into contact with a bear. On slopes where grey-coated Confederates once hauled hefty bronze cannons, a black bear strode across the wooded trail fifty metres ahead of me. After a brief standoff, the bear backed away.

During another Virginia hike, in an absent-minded march, I passed a large black snake which aggressively reared its head at me. I picked up pace, and my heart pumped faster. On such occasions a primal instinct kicks in: fear of the predator filled my veins with adrenaline, and for a moment I felt as those American frontier men must have felt every day as they expanded their nation westward.

Descending into the Grand Canyon, in awe of the vast landscape in front of me, surrounded by the sound of silence, was a semi-mystical experience. So too was trudging up two feet of deep snow in the mountains surrounding Provo, Utah, where there was no other human for miles. Sitting on a bench overlooking a gushing waterfall while eagles soared above was the American experience. Though I do not believe in God, I somehow felt closer to him. These wonders, preserved through the National Parks programme, should be seen by all.

A naked patriotism exists nearly everywhere outside of the major Left-wing cities. In Britain, the Union Jack has become a symbol of Right-Wing protest; in America the Star and Stripes is displayed proudly from airports, homes, diners, shops and petrol stations alike, a unifying symbol for most Americans.

Despite the rise of Mamdanism—a third-world, anti-American, anti-white movement—this is still a nation exuberant in pride and optimism.

Politically, there is much to be hopeful about. Though the MAGA project is by no means complete, no other Western country has voted for such a radical programme of mass deportations and delivered results.

After millions flooded the border in the Biden years, Trump shut it on day one. More than 600,000 people have been forcibly deported since January 2025. Compare this with the fourteen-year Tory government in Britain, which failed to deport a single migrant to Rwanda, and instead housed hundreds of thousands of illegals in hotels at taxpayer expense.

Legal immigration has also been targeted, the first Republican President to do so in decades, with, among other measures, major reforms to the H-1B visa programme. One estimate suggests that, for the first time in fifty years, America saw more migrants leaving the country than entering in 2025.

USAID, which propped up Left-wing NGOs with billions in taxpayer funds, is all but eliminated. Transgenderism, DEI and anti-white racism have been fought across the federal government and in universities. Whatever your criticisms of the second Trump administration, there is no doubt it has been the most effective right-wing government of any Western country outside of Hungary in the last decade.

It is not America’s politics, landscapes, or overt patriotism that fills me with most awe, however. It is its people.

In Springfield, Ohio, which saw nearly 15,000 Haitians flood the town of 58,000 during the Biden administration, I met Mark Sanders, a retired father. One morning Mark received a text from his eleven-year-old daughter. She had sent a picture of an overturned yellow school bus, surrounded by injured children. The bus, just ahead of her own, had been hit by an illegal Haitian migrant driving unlawfully. A child was killed, another was mauled. Mark’s daughter told a counsellor she was terrified to go to school, and would feel safer with her dad driving her bus. So Mark came out of retirement, and now drives his daughter’s yellow bus to school every day.

In Aurora, Colorado, I met Shannon Peterson, a softly spoken schoolteacher who for three decades voted Democrat. She once ran a group called Teachers United for Immigrant Rights, campaigned for gun control, and welcomed immigration as a moral good. Then a Venezuelan gang established itself in an apartment block just outside her home. Gunfire became routine. Bullet holes appeared on nearby buildings. Rather than flee, Shannon helped organise a neighbourhood watch to protect her peers. She now owns a handgun and has become a passionate supporter of Donald Trump. “If it wasn’t for Donald Trump,” she told me, “we still might be living next to gang members.”

Just around the corner lived Cindy Romero. She stayed in her apartment even as armed gang members occupied neighbouring flats. Instead of hiding, she installed cameras outside her front door, documenting men carrying rifles through the corridors, break-ins and shootings. Her footage became some of the defining images of the 2024 election campaign. After one gang member came to her door warning her not to call the police, he was shot dead outside her apartment just hours later. Yet she refused to be intimidated, taking her story to the media, thereby helping to expose the disastrous state of migration under Joe Biden.

In California I interviewed a brave whistleblower from FedEx, who exposed how her company outsourced her entire department’s jobs to India. I also met Bryan Peña, who had once made a living helping companies hire foreign workers before concluding that the system was failing his fellow Americans. He now runs organisations helping to support US workers laid off in favour of H-1B migrants.

These were not isolated encounters. Across America, I met countless ordinary people of extraordinary character.

And we must not forget where America came from.

England should be proud of its legacy as the founders of the thirteen colonies. There would be no United States without England; our language, our laws, our liberties all make America great.

God has indeed shed His grace on thee. Happy 250th birthday, America.

Few companies embody all three trends more clearly than IBM. The tech giant recently agreed to pay $17 million to settle allegations from the U.S. government that it discriminated against employees on the basis of race and sex. Federal authorities alleged the company tied bonuses and hiring decisions to demographic targets and restricted certain opportunities on the basis of identity. At the same time, IBM has relied heavily on imported labour, receiving 32,725 H-1B visa approvals over the past decade according to USCIS data. And increasingly, the company’s future appears rooted outside the United States altogether: under Indian-born CEO Arvind Krishna, IBM now employs roughly a third of its 280,000 workers in India, a figure that may rival, or even surpass, its American headcount.

If IBM represents the model, then the direction of travel is clear: less reliance on American workers, more dependence on imported labour and overseas workforces, and a growing corporate intoxication with India as both an economic and cultural destination.

“You can see that the world is moving into the Indian era,” declared Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the end of 2024. Since then the company has doubled its headcount in India to more than 14,000.

It was not an offhand remark. Nearly three decades earlier, as a young executive, Benioff travelled to southern India in a trip he would later describe as transformative.

In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, he recalled arriving in a remote village in Kerala, “like a scene from a movie… everybody dressed in white and orange, incense wafting through the air.” There, he met a guru who, he says, changed his life. “In your quest to change the world, don’t forget to do something for somebody else,” she told him.

For many workers, the blossoming of the Indian era marks the end of America’s.

One such worker is Jane (not her real name), a FedEx employee whose job was recently offshored to India. “There were several managers in my department, and one of them, who we thought was visiting family in India, was actually training our replacements,” she said.

As layoffs sweep through the US tech sector and corporate America, some of the country’s biggest companies are simultaneously expanding in India.

FedEx announced a $300m investment in an air cargo hub in Navi Mumbai in February; The company’s CEO, Raj Subramaniam, even flew out to the site of the new facility for a photo op.

At around the same time, Jane’s entire team’s jobs were sent to India. “I was really mad,” she said, adding that there was little she could do.

Some employees noticed a change in the company when Subramaniam, who was born and raised in India, took over from FedEx’s legendary founder Fred Smith in 2022. “Little by little things started getting worse, they put in place a program to reduce costs,” said Jane, who had worked at FedEx for almost two decades.

“When it was created back in the 1970s by Frederick Smith, it was a rags-to-riches story. People loved working there and worked there for decades. It was wonderful. You could call 1-800-Go-FedEx, and customer service was in America,” she recalled. In recent years FedEx has outsourced much of its IT operations and customer service functions to India.

Behind the growing corporate enthusiasm for India lies a straightforward economic reality: labour there is vastly cheaper than in the United States.

The median 2025 salary for engineering & data roles in the United States is $150,000; for the same roles in India workers are paid a median $22,000, according to a report by Deel and Carta, a payroll and compliance platform and equity management firm.

At a conference in San Francisco in September last year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the Indiaophile Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff that he “called the Prime Minister of India on Sunday night” to announce some important news.

Pichai recalled how, as a child, he “used to take this train through the south of India” in a town called Visakhapatnam. The audience at the conference cheered upon hearing the town’s name.

He went on: “We announced our largest ever AI investment outside the US, a $15 billion, one gigawatt plus data centre, 80% powered by clean energy with subsea cables going in.”

“The chance to transform a region like that with that kind of investment, it really meant a lot to be able to call the prime minister, who really cares about developing the country.”

Benioff commented that it “sounded like there’s a lot of folks here from India” and asked the audience to “stand up if you’re from India”. Dozens rose from their seats applauding.

Since 2020, Google and Salesforce alone have accounted for nearly 50,000 H-1B visa approvals.

To critics of Silicon Valley’s growing ties to India, the exchange was revealing.

“Here you have two tech CEOs, who have gotten rich by hiring foreign workers at cut-rate wages, bragging about how they are giving back to India. What about everything they have taken away from the United States by ignoring American labour?” comments Matthew O’Brien, Deputy Executive Director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

Yet for many executives and professionals, India’s appeal extends beyond lower labour costs alone.

Silicon Valley-based immigration lawyer Navdeep Meamber says “there’s a lot of these tech industries in the States actually looking at India and moving jobs to India because of the attractions there.” She said salaries can be comparable to those in the US, and in India “you have domestic help, you have a driver, you have cooks, you have chefs. Life is much better than here. Here you’re doing everything yourself.”

Stephen Vivien, an engineer and former Google contractor based in the Valley, says Google asked him to train employees in the Philippines to take over the work of his team. “It felt humiliating in a way, to think that Google cared so little about your investment as a worker on their product, that they would just throw it to any group that they thought might be able to do it.” He said training his replacements felt “mean” and “harsh”.

Vivien said he worked closely with foreign tech workers at Google who came in on the H-1B visa program: “There were a lot of H-1B workers. Guys that had come from India, maybe some guys from other countries in Asia, they would create their own little network, their own little clique.”

Was there really a shortage of American workers? “Absolutely not”, Vivien said. “The Bay area is full of smart, American born, American educated, folks. And I kept looking around, I was like, “where are the guys and gals from San Jose State University, or Cal Poly [California Polytechnic State University]?””

In recent years there have been mass layoffs at major tech firms, blamed largely on improvements in AI. Companies have faced criticism for firing Americans while offshoring jobs, or relying on imported foreign workers.

So far in 2026 more than 142,000 workers have been impacted by layoffs in tech firms across America according to tracking platform TrueUp.

Deepika Singh, an immigration attorney, believes that in many cases, there simply aren’t enough capable Americans available to fill roles. “In general Indians come with a little more,” she said.

Singh, who moved to America from India more than twenty years ago, stressed that attitudes towards education are more vigorous in India than in the United States. “The education system is very robust in India,” she added. “Indians are born that way, we adapt ourselves to quick learning, we can pick up things easily.”

She argued that this can translate into an advantage in hiring. “When an H-1B is being filed, [Indians] do have an edge over some other applicants.”

The debate over H-1B visas has also drawn attention to the OPT [Optional Practical Training] programme, which allows foreign graduates to remain and work in the United States after completing their studies.

Kevin Lynn, Executive Director of the Institute for Sound Public Policy, described the OPT work authorisation program for foreign students as creating “competition for that bottom rung of the ladder, that first job out of college”. Under the OPT scheme foreign graduates are authorised to work for up to a year (and up to three if they are a STEM worker), and employers are exempted from paying FICA taxes. Under these conditions, foreign graduates can be much cheaper to hire than Americans. 294,253 students are in the US on the OPT program as of 2025; roughly half of them are from India.

The “Indian era” celebrated by Silicon Valley executives is not simply about economics. It reflects a deeper shift in the loyalties and identity of corporate America itself. The old model of the American corporation, rooted in national success, domestic workers, and long-term loyalty, is steadily disappearing. In its place is a global managerial class with little attachment to the West, and in some cases explicit loyalty to their home countries, such as India.

For the American worker, the fear is not merely losing a job. It is becoming a stranger in his own economy.