A Muslim news outlet has been identified as an Islamist extremist group by a Home Office counter-terrorism unit, leaked documents reveal.

5Pillars, which describes itself as an independent Muslim news organisation, was listed by officials as one of “the higher-profile IE [Islamist Extremist] groups operating mainly on X” and placed in a category labelled “of Islamist Extremist Concern”.

The leaked Home Office documents also identify the accounts of its editor, Roshan Muhammed Salih, and journalist Robert Carter in assessments of Islamist extremist online activity.

The outlet interviewed Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney in June and senior Green Party politicians during February’s Gorton and Denton by-election campaign, while its journalists have appeared on the BBC.

In a memo examining the aftermath of the Golders Green arson attack in March, when four ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer emergency service were set alight outside a synagogue, the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) scrutinised 5Pillars’ coverage of the incident.

RICU accused 5Pillars of downplaying the seriousness of the attack, stating that the outlet and its associated journalists had “minimised its importance, emphasising the lack of fatalities and implying Islamophobic bias in HMG [Government] and media reactions”.

Counter-extremism officials cited a post by Salih in which he acknowledged the seriousness of arson but argued that “the media coverage of this is way over the top compared to the actual incident which resulted in zero casualties”.

A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “These findings are hardly surprising when the past rhetoric of senior figures within 5Pillars includes denying sexual violence in the 7th October Hamas attacks, describing Hamas terrorists as ‘the Palestinian resistance’, and calling Zionism a ‘satanic cult’ when 80% of British Jews identify as Zionist and only 6% do not.”

“Clearly the political echelon should have nothing to do with this extremist outfit.”

The RICU memo continued: “Throughout March and April, IE [Islamist Extremist] influencers, particularly 5 Pillars, the most productive, focused heavily on Islamophobic hate crime targeting mosques”.

Officials said Islamist extremist influencers had used the reaction to the Golders Green attack, alongside other incidents, to “stoke grievance narratives”.

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The deployment of undercover operatives by Left-leaning broadcasters against Reform is not journalism; it is political spying.

ITV have, according to Reform, tampered with passport information and used fake addresses to send an “undercover journalist”, i.e. a spy, to work for the party and report on private conversations over a prolonged period. It is the third such person to be weaponised against Reform in two years, and who knows what other spies are working for Reform now under the guise of “journalism” for Left-wing broadcasters.

This is not fair game. No other political party is subject to reporters spending years secretly recording private conversations, nor is the government. These operatives, some of whom are openly partisan Left-wing hacks, are being used by broadcasters to interfere in British politics.

Reform is a legitimate target. It is right that journalists scrutinise them. I certainly have, and I’ve made no friends by rigorously challenging Nigel Farage and Richard Tice in interviews. But party figures have a right to a certain level of privacy behind closed doors.

This is not the Truman show. Political parties need space to debate policies, vet candidates, discuss strategy and reject bad ideas. A suggestion made in a private meeting is not necessarily a policy. A foolish remark or joke is not always evidence of corruption or bigotry. The distinction matters, particularly when those choosing what to publish have political convictions of their own. If I secretly recorded every conversation inside ITV’s headquarters, or, better still, Channel 4’s, for a year, I am confident I could produce a rather embarrassing highlights reel.

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Watch my latest documentary above

“You will never, ever know what a lovely country this was,” wrote a veteran of the Second World War in 2006.

Writing to a journalist, Geoffrey Prater recalled how his brother was killed by a parachute mine while fire-watching in Stratford in October 1940; how he himself served in North Africa and Italy with the Royal Tank Regiment; and how, in late 1944, his mother wrote to tell him that a V1 had destroyed their home and everything in it.

Six decades later, he looked back on what they had sacrificed. “I am not going to comment on our country today,” he wrote, declaring his love for Queen and country. His letter ended simply: “Was it all worth it? No.”

Prater was not alone. Last November, 100-year-old Royal Navy veteran Alec Penstone told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “I can see in my mind’s eye those rows and rows of white stones.” He recalled his friends who had given their lives fighting for Britain. “For what? The country of today? No, I’m sorry. The sacrifice wasn’t worth the result that it is now.”

Penstone, who died in May, seemed to bewilder ITV host Kate Garraway, who patronisingly offered an “Oh, I’m sorry” in the tone one might use to console a child who had lost a game of football.

Garraway’s co-host Adil Ray was downright rude, abruptly demanding: “What do you mean by that though?”

To answer that question, I have produced a documentary featuring the generation who remember Britain before mass immigration, exploring how the country has transformed within a single lifetime.

It was Nicholas Pringle’s book, The Unknown Warriors, which featured Prater’s letter among hundreds of others, that spurred me to make this project. Pringle put out a request to Second World War veterans in regional newspapers across the country (and parts of the Commonwealth) asking for letters describing their wartime experiences and, crucially, how they viewed contemporary Britain. Here are some of their responses:

“Being an Englishman it is galling to feel that I and thousands of dead and living service personnel feel badly let down whilst this country is pandering to the so called refugees and immigrants who take advantage of benefits,”

“We feel that we are foreigners in our towns and cities. It is no longer a ‘country fit for heroes’. I am afraid Mr Churchill (and Nelson) would turn in his grave. We feel all our war efforts were for nothing.”

“It is now 18 years since I lost [my husband who fought the Japanese] and as I look around parts of Birmingham today you would never know you were in England. He would have hated it. I go nowhere after dark, I don’t even answer my doorbell then.”

“You ask, “What do I think of my country at present?” My answer is that, I don’t think I have a country to call mine anymore. My father was a soldier in the First World War. I, myself, a soldier in the Second World War. In both instances the reason we were told was to defend our freedom and way of life against the forces of evil. In the meantime, the evil we fought against and lost so many good young men to maintain our so called FREEDOM has been betrayed by our political leaders who have allowed, what used to be my country, to be invaded by millions of immigrants,”

“Sheffield sounds like a foreign country i.e. no one speaks English. My feeling is that men who offered their lives have been betrayed and the dead gave their lives in vain.”

“I fought for a green and pleasant land, and freedom. I gave the war everything except my life. Would I do it again, the answer is NO! My free speech is gone. They tell me I live in a multi-culture society, I do not remember voting for this,”

“I was a corporal in the Royal Military Police, wounded and taken POW 29th May 1940. When Stukas dive bombed us my L/Cpl was killed… What rogues M.P’s are. Like many others we are fed up with the way we have been let down. If you are ethnic or an immigrant you are looked after, but being 100% British it is hard luck.”

For my film, I struggled to find veterans of the 39-45 war still alive today. These letters were written twenty years ago; one can only wonder what their authors would make of the country now.

I did manage to interview one Second World War veteran, although it did not end well. His daughter sat in as I asked him about his childhood, his wartime service and, finally, what he thought of Britain today, particularly immigration.

He told me he was unhappy with the state of the nation and opposed immigration. However, a few hours after my cameraman and I left his home, his daughter called to say they were withdrawing permission to publish the interview because of my questions on the subject.

Before the interview, she had told me that Alec Penstone’s family had received a significant backlash following his comments on ITV. I suspect the fear of a similar reaction prompted her call.

Out of respect for her father, I agreed not to air the interview.

The experience struck me as particularly ironic. So many of the veterans’ letters I had read in The Unknown Warriors complained that Britain was no longer a country where people could speak freely, especially about immigration. Twenty years later, I had interviewed a veteran who felt much the same way, only for his words never to be heard.

In the documentary, I interviewed two men in their nineties, two in their eighties, one in his seventies and one in his sixties. Britain’s transformation has happened so quickly, I could have interviewed people even younger and learned of a different country. The homogeneous nation whose population stayed largely the same over the last thousand years, and even beyond that, is now just 74 per cent white British, a number which is rapidly declining.

In 1968, Enoch Powell predicted that Britain would have between five and seven million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants by the year 2000. His warning caused a political earthquake.

William Rees-Mogg, father of Jacob, penned an editorial in The Times entitled “An Evil Speech”, declaring: “This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history.”

Nearly six decades later, the younger Rees-Mogg described the English as a “mongrel people” and argued that Englishness should not be defined by ancestry.

I personally like Jacob, and have argued with him about Enoch Powell and demographic change before. But I will say again: he is wrong. The English exist as an ethnos, and we are fast approaching minority status in our own country. Some demographic projections suggest this could happen by the 2050s, others by the early 2060s - well within my lifetime.

Powell’s warning, however inflammatory, was prophetic. Had figures such as William Rees-Mogg and the Conservative establishment he represented taken it seriously, Britain might have followed a very different course.

Instead, successive Labour and Conservative governments pursued policies that fundamentally changed the character of the nation, without securing a democratic mandate for such a transformation. It is a betrayal that may yet bring about the destruction of both parties.

Labour minister Jenny Riddell-Carpenter recently dismissed a traditional vision of Britain, complete with warm ale, a black Labrador and a country pub, as a “very far-right nostalgic vision” that “never really existed”. It has existed, and still exists, but one day she may yet be proved right about its disappearance, as the country becomes increasingly unrecognisable from the England remembered by the older generations I interviewed.

When Major General Julian Thompson was born in 1934, the British Empire still covered roughly a quarter of the world’s land surface and ruled over hundreds of millions of people. Britain was one of the world’s great powers, and its population was overwhelmingly white British. There was no debate as to what it meant to be English, for England was entirely homogeneous.

Thompson’s father, who fought on the Western Front during the First World War, moved to British India in the 1920s to join an architecture firm. Julian grew up in the Raj, attending schools in Darjeeling and Kashmir, and remembers his childhood as fun.

“I didn’t want to come home,” he told me. In any case, the war kept him in India, as the threat of German U-boats made the voyage back to Britain too dangerous. Thompson told me that, as a boy, he could never have imagined that four million people from India and Pakistan would move to Britain during his lifetime. “Never occurred to me,” he said. Asked how his younger self would have reacted, he replied: “Disbelief.”

Thousands of miles away, in the streets of north London, another boy was growing up in a very different part of the same Empire.

Ronald Clark, now 92, was raised in Tottenham during the 1930s. He too described his childhood as fun. “You played in the road. We played hockey, knocking down ginger and all those silly little things that kids do.”

Tottenham was also unmistakably English. “There was only one person in the neighbourhood that I knew was foreign, and he was an Italian,” Ron told me.

But the Tottenham of Ron’s childhood would not last.

After the war, Ron became a joiner, fitting out the interiors of pubs across East London. It was here that he began to notice newcomers settling in the capital.

Asked how he reacted to immigration in the 1960s, Ron replied: “Move out.”

He recalled an Indian family moving into a house down his road. “Within six months,” he said, other Indian families had begun buying houses along the street.

In December 1967, Ron left London with his family for Norfolk. “I wanted a better area for the children,” he told me.

Today, just 23.2 per cent of Tottenham’s population is white British, according to the 2021 census. I decided to take Ron back to Tottenham for the first time in more than half a century.

Like Ron, I had little idea what we would encounter. I could hardly have asked Hollywood to create a more extraordinary scene of modern “YooKay”. Every shop was foreign; Nearly everyone on the streets where Ron had sold newspapers in the 1940s, watched bombs fall and heard doodlebugs overhead, was of a migrant background. When we approached people, many couldn’t speak English.

I took Ron to Brunswick Road, where he grew up. His childhood home had been demolished and replaced with a car park covered in litter. There, we caught up with an elderly woman with a strong Jamaican accent. “I don’t come out at night,” she told us, explaining that people gathered nearby to take drugs.

Nearby, large graffiti on a wall warned residents: “DO NOT PEE HERE.”

“It’s not English anymore. Not Great Britain anymore. There’s no great about it at all. It’s just a foreign country,” Ron said. Off camera, he told me I had given him nightmares for the rest of his life.

But perhaps his saddest reflection concerned his late wife, whom he had met at a dance in Tottenham more than seventy years earlier. Asked what she would have made of the place where they had fallen in love, Ron replied: “She would have burst into tears and rushed out as quick as she could go. She would have hated it.”

And that brings me back to Alec Penstone.

I suspect ITV presenter Adil Ray knew exactly what Penstone meant, but found it offensive that a Second World War veteran should look upon the multicultural Britain he champions with such despair. Ray’s own parents came from Pakistan and Kenya, part of the great waves of post-war immigration that transformed the country, and whose consequences veterans like Penstone have come to lament.

My documentary concludes with David Starkey, who rightly pointed out that I tend to be rather despairing about Britain’s future. But he insisted that I shouldn’t be. Unlike the fall of the Roman Empire, he argued, Britain’s demographic transformation was not the result of vast populations sweeping across its frontiers, but of laws passed by its own politicians.

“These are not forces of nature,” he told me. “These are the result of deliberate decisions that we took.”

And those decisions, Starkey argued, can still be reversed.

“We still, whilst we are an electoral majority, have the chance to reverse them. But it needs to be done politically and by consent.”

The documentary was produced by me in association with the Mass Deportation Coalition.

Health staff were told to consider that black colleagues could also be “gay, female, disabled, Christian, [or] Muslim” in a leaked Black History Month message.

Samantha Jones, the Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) permanent secretary, told officials that race was only one aspect of a person’s identity, adding: “That matters when we think about inclusion.”

In a Black History Month message accompanying a programme of events for NHS England and Department of Health staff, Jones stressed that: “A Black colleague might also be gay, female, disabled, Christian, Muslim, or have caring responsibilities.”

The message, circulated under the heading “A Note From Sam”, appears in internal Department of Health and Social Care documents seen by this publication.

A DHSC source told this Substack: “As a non-black, non-gay, non-Muslim civil servant I find the permanent secretary’s obsession with these identities creepy.”

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With French schools burning, and images of migrant-background children rioting across the country, is this a snapshot of France’s future?

“I think that the risk of a civil war is very serious,” historian Hélène de Lauzun told me in an interview about immigration and French identity.

Lauzan’s warning is stark, and comes after a new report from the Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie (OID) shook French politics. OID predicts that on current trends, people with no immigrant parent or grandparent, i.e. ethnically French people, will become a minority in France around 2050.

Perhaps of even more concern, the report estimates that by the early 2040s people of non-European origin will account for most of the births in France, and they will become a majority of the total population in the mid-2070s.

Immigrants tend to be younger and have more children than native Europeans, and therefore the wave of French school riots may be a result of demographic changes. The hub of the violence has been in immigrant-heavy suburbs, including Saint-Denis. Right-wing politician Éric Zemmour tied the unrest to immigration, writing on X that it had shown “another France that is largely African, Arab, Muslim… always demanding, even vindictive, and often violent,” waving Algerian, Moroccan or Palestinian flags.

The French government has arrested more than 2,000 people since the student protest movement began on 21 September, which allegedly began over teacher shortages, overcrowded classes and deteriorating school buildings.

Meanwhile in Britain, projects by Matt Goodwin suggest that white British people will similarly become a minority by 2063. By the time I reach retirement, in other words, ethnically British and French people will be outnumbered by those of migrant-origin.

The OID report made a splash in France. It was the cover story of Le Figaro Magazine, the weekly magazine of the centre-right newspaper Le Figaro, on 18 September. Two days later, Marion Maréchal used its findings to challenge former prime minister Gabriel Attal during a televised debate on France 2.

Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti, the OID’s director, told me that French politicians commonly try to avoid discussing demographic change. Unlike Britain, France does not ask about ethnicity in its census, making the scale of the transformation harder to measure. Yet his report had “struck a chord”, he said, particularly on the right, as immigration and national identity take centre stage ahead of next year’s presidential election.

The OID report models three possible futures, depending on the immigration policies pursued over the coming decades.

Its high scenario assumes 350,000 permanent arrivals each year into France. The OID argues this broadly represents a continuation of recent immigration levels. This “high” number may worry some Britons when looking at our own permanent-type migration figures: according to the OECD, Britain recorded 369,200 in 2021, 488,000 in 2022 and 743,100 in 2023, before falling to 435,700 in 2024.

Even OID’s intermediate scenario, with 250,000 permanent arrivals annually, produces a non-European majority in France among births shortly after 2050 and in the population during the 2090s.

De Lauzun approaches the question through history. France, she explained, took centuries to unite its different regions into a nation. That process required shared institutions, loyalties and a sense of belonging. Integration cannot simply be assumed because someone has arrived within the country’s borders.

“It took centuries to build the specificity of the French nation,” she said.

De Lauzun described how her Paris neighbourhood had changed since she moved there in 2013. “It’s totally different from when I arrived there,” she said, pointing to the growing visibility of veiled women. While politicians discuss immigration “in an abstract manner”, she argued, residents see the changes in their streets and shops: “It’s very concrete and you can see it every day.”

Her concern is that France increasingly contains communities living alongside one another without a sufficiently strong common identity.

The report does, however, offer an alternative. Its restrictive scenario cuts non-European immigration by 75 per cent compared with the intermediate case, eventually stabilising the population share with non-European origins at around 30 per cent.

“Within this 30%, there would be many people with only one or two immigrant grandparents,” Pouvreau-Monti told me. Under those conditions, “the ability for assimilation and for integration to work would be way more likely”.

But he stressed that reducing immigration would require political action: “This scenario cannot happen on its own, it cannot happen naturally.” Immigration, he added, “is a political and social phenomenon”.

The study also examines higher birth rates among ethnically French women. It finds that these would slow the demographic shift, but would not reverse it while substantial immigration continued. Its central argument is that migration policy remains decisive.

For British readers, the questions are familiar. Reform is yet to engage seriously about what demographic change means for Britain’s future. This issue will only become more important as the country continues to change.

Neither current immigration levels nor low birth rates are inevitable. Reducing immigration and helping more people have families could change the course of these projections. But that requires politicians willing to act.

The fires outside French schools will eventually be extinguished. But if demographic change continues on current trends, such unrest will only become more frequent. Britain should not assume it is immune.

One of the country’s most controversial judges is an adviser to a Pakistani organisation that described Suella Braverman’s comments about British-Pakistani grooming gangs as “reprehensible”, an investigation by this Substack has found.

I can also reveal that Tan Ikram, the deputy chief magistrate of England and Wales, travelled to Bradford specifically to encourage Pakistani lawyers to join the bench.

His rulings have repeatedly drawn criticism, with his recent refusal of bail to anti-immigration campaigner Danny Tommo bringing renewed attention to his record.

Ikram, a senior diversity judge who helps edit judicial guidance on race and cultural differences, told a Pakistani legal organisation that he had worked to reach “Muslim Pakistani background lawyers” and encourage them to become judges.

“Bradford is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the UK. [There are] lots and lots and lots of Pakistani practitioners in practice in that area, and I specifically went there to reach out to that particular group of lawyers,” he told Women in Law Initiative Pakistan on 15 July 2024.

Ikram is a leading advocate for greater ethnic diversity among Britain’s judges and is linked with several Pakistani organisations.

He is listed as an adviser to the British Pakistan Foundation, which criticised Braverman’s comments about what it called “so-called ‘grooming gangs’” and called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The group also shared a petition calling for Suella Braverman to be removed from parliament.

Ikram is also listed as a visiting faculty member at the Pakistan College of Law and has addressed a legal conference in Lahore.

Grooming gang survivor Fiona Goddard told me: “I find Tan Ikram’s association with the British Pakistan Foundation deeply concerning as a survivor of Pakistani grooming gangs.”

She added: “To call them ‘so-called grooming gangs’ is an insult to all survivors. Why is a senior judge connected to such a partisan group?”

Goddard also called for transparency over any links between judges and such groups, questioning whether those connections could have influenced sentencing in grooming gang cases.

It can also be revealed that Ikram helped organise a meeting at the Old Bailey between judges and some of Britain’s most senior imams.

This investigation examines the record of one of the country’s most senior and influential magistrates, from his most controversial rulings and comments on race to his work with Pakistani and Muslim organisations.

The making of a diversity champion

Tanweer Ikram was born in Slough in December 1965 to Pakistani parents. According to a 2018 profile in Counsel magazine, he spent part of his early childhood in Pakistan before returning to Britain, where he had to “re-integrate during his primary school years”.

“My parents came to England in the early 1960s and neither of them went to school. I was born in Slough, but my Mum today doesn’t really speak English so I kind of felt like an outsider,” Ikram said in an interview with UK Judiciary in 2021.

In the 1980s, he attended Wolverhampton Polytechnic, initially studying engineering before switching to law and graduating with a 2:2. He worked selling mobile phones before entering the legal profession.

He was called to the Bar in 1990, having had to resit his Bar exams, and was admitted as a solicitor in 1993.

Reflecting on his early career in his interview with UK Judiciary, Ikram said he “didn’t see many Asian lawyers of my background” when he joined his law firm, but had used his ethnicity as “a bit of an advantage”.

“Sometimes difference can actually work in your favour,” he said.

Ikram became a part-time judge in 2003 and was appointed Deputy Lead Diversity and Community Relations Judge the following year, a role in which he leads 150 judges involved in pushing diversity.

He went on to become a full-time district judge in 2009 and deputy chief magistrate in 2017, and has also served on the judiciary’s Diversity Committee.

Elsewhere in the 2021 interview, he said: “The first misconception is, who are the judges? We’re not all white, we’re not all old men.” Ikram emphasised that progress on ethnic diversity within the judiciary had been slower than he would have liked.

Addressing the Association of Muslim Lawyers in 2021, he described attending meetings about how to “hasten the diversity of our judges”.

Controversial judgements

On 25 September, Ikram refused bail to Daniel Thomas, known as Danny Tommo, at Basingstoke Magistrates’ Court. The Patriot Platform founder has pleaded not guilty to criminal damage following an allegation that he slashed a small boat in the English Channel while an emergency responder was aboard. He also denies failing to disclose his phone’s PIN number to the police.

Ikram said he was “satisfied there is a real possibility of an immediate custodial sentence in this case”. On 29 September, a different judge also refused Thomas bail at Portsmouth Crown Court. His trial is scheduled for March 2027.

Ikram has presided over a succession of controversial cases involving pro-Palestinian demonstrators, the woman who attacked Nigel Farage and police officers prosecuted over racist messages.

In February 2024, he gave three women convicted of a terrorism offence 12-month conditional discharges, allowing them to walk away without a fine or prison sentence. They had displayed paraglider images at a pro-Palestine protest just a week after Hamas used paragliders in its deadly attack on Israel.

“You crossed the line, but it would have been fair to say that emotions ran very high on this issue,” Ikram told them. He said he had “decided not to punish” the defendants.

Shortly afterwards, it emerged that Ikram’s LinkedIn account had liked an inflammatory pro-Palestinian post. The episode led to a formal misconduct warning in June 2024.

Ikram said the like was accidental and described the post as “repulsive”. The investigating judge accepted that explanation, finding that it had been neither deliberate nor careless.

However, he had breached social media guidance by identifying himself as a judge on the platform. The Lord Chancellor and Lady Chief Justice concluded that his actions had caused significant reputational damage to the judiciary.

Three years earlier, Ikram had warned Muslim lawyers about precisely the reputational risks of social media.

“How embarrassing would it be if you were a judge and you’d said something very, very silly and inappropriate on social media?” he asked in a February 2021 discussion with the Association of Muslim Lawyers.

He said that posting inappropriate material could call into question whether an applicant had the temperament to sit in judgement on others.

In December 2024, Ikram gave Victoria Thomas Bowen a 13-week suspended prison sentence after she pleaded guilty to assault by beating and criminal damage for throwing a milkshake over Nigel Farage during the general election campaign.

“We now live in a country where you can assault a Member of Parliament and not go to prison. The latest example of two-tier justice,” Farage said following Ikram’s ruling.

In August 2023, Ikram acquitted trans activist Sarah Jane Baker of intentionally encouraging an offence after Baker told a rally: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face.”

Ikram said it was possible Baker had been seeking attention and publicity without intending anyone to act on the words.

In June 2022, Ikram jailed former police officer James Watts for 20 weeks after he shared racist memes in a private WhatsApp group, including an image mocking George Floyd’s death.

The following year, Ikram described the case to an American audience.

“This was a police officer bringing the police service into disrepute. So I gave him a long prison sentence. The police were horrified by that,” he said, according to the College of DuPage’s student newspaper.

Lord Wolfson KC, a former justice minister, subsequently questioned whether Ikram had breached judicial conduct rules by publicly discussing a case he had personally overseen.

In May 2024, Ikram convicted Metropolitan Police officer Perry Lathwood of assault following his arrest of a black woman during a bus-ticket inspection. He subsequently fined him £1,500. He ruled that Lathwood had “crossed the line and got it wrong”, despite accepting he had not acted in bad faith.

Four months later, Southwark Crown Court overturned the conviction. Metropolitan Police Federation chairman Rick Prior condemned Ikram’s original ruling as “erroneous and perverse”.

During the same 2023 visit to the College of DuPage in Illinois, Ikram also spoke about race and policing in Britain.

“Why am I here? Well, you started it,” he told the audience, referring to the protests following George Floyd’s death, according to the college’s newspaper.

He also discussed racial disparities in police stop and search and the possibility of unconscious bias among judges.

At an earlier appearance at the college in 2018, Ikram cited Labour MP David Lammy’s review into racial disparities in the criminal justice system, questioning the disproportionate number of ethnic minority prisoners.

“Why is it that a country which prides itself on diversity, equality and justice has so many people of colour languishing in prisons?” he asked, according to a contemporary report.

“We don’t reflect the face of the society that we serve,” he said. “Those people who are exercising power over us are not us.”

Shaping the judicial rule book

Ikram’s influence has also extended to the guidance judges use in court.

He received a CBE “for services to judicial diversity” in 2022, under Boris Johnson’s government. The following year, the Conservative government appointed him to the Judicial Appointments Commission, the body responsible for selecting candidates for judicial office.

Since at least 2019, Ikram has served on the editorial panel of the Equal Treatment Bench Book, which provides guidance to judges on race, religion, cultural differences and other matters. A judicial publication that year named him as one of five panel members responsible for reviewing and updating the guidance.

The July 2024 edition, updated in February 2026, instructs judges to explore any “cultural way of thinking or mode of behaviour”, even when it has not been raised by a party’s legal representative. Ikram is credited as a contributor in the July 2024 edition, although his name does not appear in the February 2026 update.

A section on “saving face”, particularly in East Asian cultures, advises judges against simply asking, “Do you understand?”, as individuals may say yes to avoid embarrassing the judge. It also recommends that judges “soften any negative or critical comments if possible”.

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The Department of Health championed multilingualism among civil servants to help reach “diverse communities”, a leaked document obtained by this Substack reveals.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) ran sessions on “multilingual understanding” and “language learning programmes” for officials as part of a Whitehall diversity drive.

Professor Kevin Fenton, London’s regional director at the government’s Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, was announced last year as DHSC’s “Champion for Languages”.

In a leaked DHSC memo dated 17 February 2025, Fenton said he would lead the department’s approach to a cross-government “languages agenda”, promoting language skills to improve communication with “diverse communities” and address health inequalities.

He described languages as “underpinning cohesive communities” and added: “Whether in international health negotiations, communicating and building trust with diverse communities, or designing inclusive policies, languages empower us to connect, empathise, and innovate.”

Fenton said languages could help tackle health inequalities, citing COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on groups “including those whose first language was not English”.

The memo outlined panels on “multilingual understanding”, a workshop linking languages to health priorities, pilot language-learning programmes for officials and work with HR to track staff skills.

Translation and interpretation services cost the NHS £64 million in 2024/25, more than double the £31 million recorded in 2020/21, according to a Telegraph freedom of information investigation.

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It is nearly two years to the day since Nigel Farage told me that mass deportations were “politically impossible”.

He went further, telling me that such a policy was not even his ambition.

“If I say I support mass deportations, that’s all anybody would talk about for the next 20 years, so it’s pointless even going there,” he added.

My interview, recorded for GB News, never aired on its television channel, but was posted on Twitter and YouTube. The clip became a viral sensation. Millions saw it, and to this day I still get tagged by people reminding Farage of his infamous words.

Gallingly, the Conservatives posted the clip in several attack ads, despite having presided over hundreds of thousands of illegal Channel crossings without deporting a single migrant to Rwanda. Incidentally, their leader, Kemi Badenoch, has refused to do a similar interview with me on multiple occasions.

Soon, Farage’s words began a row between the Reform leader and one of his most outspoken MPs, Rupert Lowe.

In January 2025, Farage blocked Lowe from using the phrase “mass deportations” in a speech to Reform’s North West Essex conference. In March of that year, Farage told The Telegraph that he had stopped Lowe using “mass deportations” and “repatriation” in the speech, describing them as “a very grave, dark and dangerous use of language”.

Just months later, however, Farage was saying “mass deportations” himself.

In August, Farage proposed legislation to allow a Reform government to detain and deport people living in Britain illegally. “The aim of this legislation is mass deportations,” he told The Times.

Reform’s own website now features a quote from Zia Yusuf saying that “every day that passes without mass deportations risks ever more blood on the government’s hands,” while other Reform bigwigs have used the phrase repeatedly.

So why did I ask Farage about mass deportations? And why did his position shift so quickly and dramatically after our interview?

Mass deportation was the slogan of Trump’s successful campaign for president in 2024. It became a rallying cry for Americans furious with Joe Biden’s open-border policy, which saw millions of illegal migrants enter through the country’s southern border.

For American conservatives, the deportation of illegal migrants has become a defining political priority, perhaps the defining priority. After all, what is a nation without borders?

Illegal migrants in Britain and the United States have committed horrific crimes, all of which could have been prevented if said migrants had never entered, or were swiftly deported. Every rape by an Afghan “refugee” or stabbing by a Sudanese “asylum seeker” entering the country via small boat is, by definition, a government failure.

Illegal immigrants are also incredibly expensive. British taxpayers spent an estimated £8 billion on asylum seekers in 2025, according to the independent audit website Asylum Stats.

Then there is the long-term political impact. Illegal migrants who are allowed to remain may eventually be legalised or, in some cases, become citizens and voters. Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration law legalised nearly three million people, while some Republicans today are again backing legislation that would give legal status to millions living in America illegally.

Immigration, in other words, can ultimately reshape not only a country’s population, but its electorate.

My interview with Farage came at the height of the Trump 2024 campaign. Sitting down in a messy hotel room at the InterContinental in Washington DC, I asked the Reform leader about Trump’s campaign slogan, and whether he would apply his friend’s policy to Britain.

Perhaps it should not be surprising that Farage’s answers were tepid at best. Before asking about mass deportations in our 35-minute exchange, I asked whether he was concerned that the white British population had declined from 87% to 74% in twenty years.

“No, that’s not a concern of mine,” he replied, arguing that the real problem was the “population explosion” and the resulting pressure on housing, public services and even traffic.

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“I am the victim,” Khaliz Ali Alshimery, a 46-year-old illegal migrant from Kuwait, told a courtroom in Oxford on 16 May 2024.

He was on trial for raping Sophie (not her real name), a 20-year-old autistic student, in Oxford a few months earlier. She had been walking home from a night out when Alshimery took her into a churchyard and raped her.

For the first time, this Substack can reveal the full story of Alshimery’s vile actions that night and how Sophie was let down by the authorities both before and after her rape.

Drawing on previously unpublished court transcripts and exclusive interviews with Sophie and her father, I reveal how Sophie’s rape has led her to make plans to flee Britain, how her pleas for answers from the Home Office went unanswered, and why she found the BBC’s failure to report her attacker’s immigration status “insulting”.

The court transcripts were obtained and paid for by the Centre for Justice Policy, which shared them with me.

After raping Sophie in the early hours of 19 November 2023, Alshimery was arrested at 11.20am that morning. He told his police interrogators that she had forced him to touch her sexually and demanded money for sex.

When his barrister, Peter Du Feu, repeatedly put these allegations to Sophie in court, her parents feared Alshimery would get away with his crime.

“That was the breaking point for us. We thought it would all be over,” Sophie’s father told me.

Du Feu pressed Sophie hard in cross-examination, asking:

“You were taking his hand and pressing it on to your vagina, weren’t you?”

“You deliberately exposed your bottom to the man in a provocative way, and asked him to have sex with you?”

“You were grabbing at his penis through his tracksuit bottoms and trying to stimulate him, weren’t you?”

“You asked him for £50 to have sex with you, I suggest?”

Sophie denied all these claims.

Alshimery’s barrister continued: “But you hadn’t been raped, had you?”

“No, I have been raped,” Sophie replied.

In 2022, Alshimery entered Britain on a small boat from France. When asked in court whether he had entered the country legally or illegally, he replied simply: “Illegally.”

Speaking through an Arabic interpreter, he told the court that he had come to Britain “to claim asylum [and] bring my family here”, claiming that he had no official papers or basic rights in Kuwait.

After Alshimery broke into the country, the Home Office housed him at the Holiday Inn Express hotel on Grenoble Road in Oxford. Here, he received £9 a week in pocket money and taxpayer-funded accommodation and meals.

He told police he was staying with friends at the time of the attack because the Home Office wanted to move him onto a barge. Contemporary reports show that residents of the Holiday Inn Express were then being transferred to the Bibby Stockholm, a barge in Dorset used to house asylum seekers.

In the days before Sophie was raped, pro-migrant campaigners opposed the transfers. ITV ran sympathetic interviews with residents, protesters demonstrated outside the hotel, and the charity Asylum Welcome published an appeal from the men.

Alshimery told police he had also objected, claiming that he feared “living on the sea or port” and offering instead to stay with friends in London.

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“England expects that every man will do his duty,” signalled Lord Nelson on the morning of his greatest battle, perhaps the greatest battle, and the day of his death.

In 1843, some forty years after that glorious victory, Nelson’s Column was completed, standing 169 feet above his fellow Englishmen, looking towards Parliament.

This week, Nelson was joined by Lady in Blue, a new statue of a large black lady in a neon-blue dress striding forward, meant to represent “everywoman” in contemporary Britain.

The statue is, of course, hideously modern and vulgar. It is a political symbol, proudly chosen by Sadiq Khan’s Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, meant to push their ugly vision of multiculturalism.

Lady in Blue, a bright, tacky figure, contrasts with the Square’s other figures, carved in stone and bronze: Nelson, George IV, Sir Henry Havelock and Sir Charles James Napier. That is the whole point. For Sadiq Khan and his commission, these white men represent everything wrong with Britain: colonialism, a lack of ethnic or gender diversity, and pride in the nation and its conquests.

The people who chose Lady in Blue are explicit in this goal.

Ekow Eshun, chairman of the group that selected Lady in Blue, has himself described the Britain of his childhood as “essentially a racist country” and argued that, despite discovering his ancestor was a white slave trader, he and “all black people” remain victims of the legacy of slavery.

When another Fourth Plinth sculpture, Antelope, was unveiled in 2022, Eshun celebrated it as a “Trojan Horse”. Antelope depicted John Chilembwe, a Baptist minister who led a violent uprising against British rule in Nyasaland (modern-day Malawi) in 1915. Chilembwe’s followers killed two Europeans during the initial attack, including Scottish estate manager William Jervis Livingstone, who was decapitated. His severed head was then carried back to Chilembwe’s mission and displayed during a church service conducted by the preacher the following day.

Although Chilembwe’s statue resembled the traditional bronze works surrounding it, Eshun said the work was “subtly subversive”, highlighting an “underrepresented figure in the history of the British Empire in Africa”.

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Editor’s note: If reporting on or reproducing material from this investigation, please credit this Substack and link to the original article.

One year ago, Charlie Kirk was shot dead; the British government immediately got to work.

Following Kirk’s murder, the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), a government counter-extremism and terrorism unit, began monitoring thousands of social media channels, gauging the reaction of what they describe as “Extreme Right Wing” (ERW) activists.

Published here for the first time, a memo generated by RICU reveals that officials assessed that “Extreme Right-Wing” activists, including Tommy Robinson, would use Kirk’s assassination to “push pro-free speech narratives”.

Counter-extremism agents assessed that Right-wing extremists would use Kirk’s death to “encourage more radical action” and “abandon political moderation in favour of more radical political stances”.

Meanwhile, RICU characterised the Left-wing online response to Kirk’s assassination as “moderate” and largely “factual reporting”, despite thousands of Left-wing activists celebrating the shooting.

RICU’s response to Kirk’s murder has drawn criticism from prominent free speech campaigners, including the Free Speech Union, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the US State Department.

A memo entitled ‘RICU Event Response: Charlie Kirk Assassination’ was circulated across Whitehall, including to officials in the Home Office, Foreign Office and Cabinet Office, as well as police officers, on 11 September 2025, the day after Kirk was shot.

The memo was classified as “Official Sensitive”.

RICU assessed that American and British ERW audiences would present the murder as “a shared attack on the ERW movement and free speech activism more generally”, and monitored the response of Turning Point UK, the British arm of Charlie Kirk’s American organisation.

“There is nothing ‘extreme’ about ‘pushing pro free speech narratives,’” said Sarah Rogers, the United States Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, who served as Kirk’s attorney on First Amendment issues and has led the Trump administration’s advocacy against censorship in Europe.

“That’s why censorship by governments proves so unpopular.”

Rogers added that in her judgment, the RICU report showed “blind spots” which “regrettably were not unique to the UK,” pointing out now-discredited intelligence products rescinded by the CIA “show the same biases.”

“Most glaringly, the memo describes the ‘leftist’ response as ‘moderate,’ despite describing the same leftists as ‘celebratory’ of Charlie’s murder,” said Rogers.

RICU is a government unit based in the Home Office that monitors and analyses terrorist and extremist content and supports government counter-terrorism communications.

Founded in 2007, RICU has stirred controversy over its role in coordinating ‘controlled spontaneity’ campaigns in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, including pre-planned messaging, vigils and demonstrations intended to shape the public’s response to terrorism.

For example, after an ISIS terrorist attack in 2014, RICU created an image of a Muslim woman wearing a hijab with a British flag, which was subsequently published on the front page of The Sun and other British newspapers.

The image was created because, according to a leaked document from the company RICU commissioned to make the image, “the UK authorities wanted to challenge ultraconservative and misogynistic interpretations of Islam”.

Following major terrorist events, RICU analyses tens of thousands of social media channels to monitor the responses of those it classes as extremists.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination prompted a RICU response, investigating messages from “Extreme Right-Wing” (ERW), “Left-Wing and Single Issue” (LASI), and “UK Islamist Terrorist Supporters” (UK-ITS).

The memo reveals that RICU identified 2,000 posts from what it described as global “ERW audiences” discussing Kirk’s assassination, with most appearing within an hour of the attack.

Officials described the reaction as “highly emotionally charged”.

“The dominant narrative within the ERW attributes responsibility for the assassination to the ‘political left’ and claims that it is part of a broader campaign of violence against conservatives and White Christians,” the memo stated.

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A Civil Service talent programme will reserve two-thirds of its places for “diverse candidates”, a leaked document reveals.

The Cabinet Office scheme, designed to help civil servants progress into more senior roles, will give 20 of 30 places available at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to staff who are ethnically diverse, disabled or from a lower socioeconomic background.

Beyond Boundaries offers civil servants support “to develop the knowledge, skills, and networks required to build a satisfying and effective career in the Civil Service”.

“This is proof again of discrimination in civil service recruitment. Jobs and opportunities should be awarded on merit, not handed out according to someone’s ethnicity, disability or socioeconomic background – especially when taxpayers are footing the bill,” Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf told me.

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A black activist who urges pregnant mothers to teach their unborn children about racism addressed civil servants as part of a Home Office diversity programme, this Substack can reveal.

Uju Asika, an expert on “anti-racist parenting”, has claimed that children as young as three are “conditioned to be biased against people of a different race” and urged parents to be “proactive” in countering racial bias.

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Priti Patel’s removal as Shadow Foreign Secretary simply made me wonder: Why was she ever appointed in the first place?

She was, after all, the politician who did the most to open Britain’s borders to low-skilled, third-world migration. Patel also failed to stop the boats, and oversaw the policing of tweets.

Priti Patel was appointed Home Secretary by Boris Johnson in July 2019. Five months later Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, an Afghani, smuggled himself into Britain. He told Patel’s Home Office he was 14, and they believed him; he was sent to a school in Dorset, where he assaulted children and carried knives; he was placed in foster care, where he assaulted his foster mother; he was reported to police for carrying a machete; then, in March 2022, he plunged a knife into the heart of 21-year-old Thomas Roberts, killing him instantly during an argument over an E-scooter. If the Home Office had properly vetted Abdulrahimzai, they would have found he was a 19-year-old on the run for a double murder in Serbia. They didn’t, and Priti Patel left her role as Home Secretary five months after Thomas’s murder, removed following Boris Johnson’s downfall.

Roberts was not the only Brit murdered by illegal immigrants under Priti Patel’s watch. I count Lorraine Cox, James Furlong, David Wails, and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett among the victims. Their killers had no right to be in the country, yet Patel and the Conservative Party failed to prevent their deaths.

During her three years in post, Darren Grimes was investigated for failing to censor David Starkey in a YouTube interview, Darren Brady was arrested for retweeting a meme, and a police officer was arrested and prosecuted for sharing a George Floyd meme in a private WhatsApp group.

Patel’s infamy, however, stems largely from her role in the Boriswave.

From 2019 to 2022, 570,000 Indian nationals, 263,000 Chinese, 200,000 Nigerians, 122,000 Pakistanis, 49,000 Bangladeshis, 28,000 Ghanaians and 27,000 Zimbabweans made Britain their home. These figures do not include the many hundreds of thousands who came after her tenure, enabled by her immigration reforms. They came because Priti Patel (and Boris Johnson) wanted them to come.

Patel opened new routes for “skilled” workers, healthcare workers, international students and their dependants, while abolishing the cap on skilled migration. She also lowered the salary and skills thresholds for skilled workers.

Her skilled visa route allowed kebab workers, Halal butchers, call-centre supervisors, bar managers and gym instructors to come to Britain. The scheme meant that one butcher in Preston alone sponsored 91 visas; one kebab house in Bradford sponsored 14, while another in Birmingham sponsored 12. Across the country, 56 kebab houses and 83 businesses with “Halal” in their name sponsored skilled worker visas between 2021 and 2023.

Patel’s Health and Social Care Visa was meant to fill gaps in the care system. Instead, the number of vacancies in the sector actually increased after the route was opened. Care workers and their dependants were also exempted from paying the immigration health surcharge. And so it became a route for hundreds of thousands of low-skilled migrants from outside of Europe to access Britain. Between January 2021 and June 2024, 647,000 people received Health and Care visas, 270,000 workers and 377,000 dependants. Some care providers sponsored hundreds of workers: one had 498 visas granted since May 2022, while Home Office inspectors found that 275 visas had been issued to a care home that did not even exist.

Patel’s reforms did more to transform Britain demographically in three years than Tony Blair managed in thirteen. The migrants who entered Britain, illegally and legally, under her watch will cost taxpayers hundreds of billions in welfare, the NHS, schooling and housing. She has accelerated Britain’s demographic change, turbocharging the decline of the white British population relative to ethnic minority groups.

In January last year, Patel defended her immigration record, describing those she had allowed into Britain as the “brightest [and] the best coming to the country”. She repeatedly called them skilled migrants and suggested the NHS would have collapsed without them. She refused to apologise to voters who had supported Brexit and the Tories, believing doing so would reduce immigration.

Kemi Badenoch had the perfect opportunity to sack and expel Patel from the Tory Party, as she has done with others, to represent the party’s total break with its immigration betrayal. The fact she did not do so signalled that the Conservative Party hasn’t changed a bit.

The Priti Patel problem was not even resolved by removing her from the front bench. Instead, she was simply given a new role, which Patel described as an opportunity to “strengthen diplomatic links with international sister parties and centre-right movements around the world”. To Marine Le Pen, the AfD, Vox, PiS, MAGA and all the conservative movements around the world, if you want to learn how to open your country’s borders and tank your party to its worst position in over a century, book your meeting with Priti Patel today.

A senior BBC executive sent an email expressing solidarity with non-British staff and condemning “hatred” following unrest in Northern Ireland in reaction to an attempted beheading.

The email, revealed by this Substack, was sent to BBC workers in June after riots broke out in Belfast following an alleged attempt by an African illegal migrant to behead Northern Ireland-born Stephen Ogilvie.

Jack Whyte, the BBC’s Chief Technology Officer, wrote that he wished to “express our solidarity with colleagues who may feel particularly vulnerable or fearful at this time, including those who have come to Northern Ireland and the UK from other countries.”

Whyte condemned “hatred, intimidation, and violence in all its forms” and said the BBC is “committed to fostering an environment where every colleague feels supported, included, and able to bring their whole self to work”.

The email came after Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old from Africa, allegedly stabbed Stephen Ogilvie multiple times, leaving him without a left eye and with deep cuts to his head, face and back.

A source inside the broadcaster said: “The BBC offered solidarity to foreign staff but not to native Brits who might be worried about illegal migrants beheading them.”

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Editors’s note: If you reference or report on these documents, please credit independent journalist Steven Edginton as the original publisher.

Home Office civil servants said the English flag was “triggering” and made them fear for their lives, a leaked recording reveals.

Last year, Home Office staff were invited to a “safe space” to discuss the “concerning misuse of the English flag” and how it had “left some colleagues feeling anxious or unsettled”.

One official said that when he sees the English flag, he now thinks, “Am I in danger? Or are my children in danger?” He continued: “Right now… it is particularly triggering.”

During the half-hour meeting, civil servants discussed how the campaign to hoist British flags across the country made them fear for their lives and those of their families.

One said: “Being a mixed race person of colour I’ve been finding it extremely difficult… I’ve noticed so many more people now using the flag to try and legitimise refusing immigrants into the country.”

Another ethnic minority official said the flag campaign had “caused… concern for my own safety and that of my family and friends”, while one Indian civil servant said: “I’m terrified of bringing a mixed race child into this world”.

White Home Office staff agreed with their ethnic minority colleagues. One commented: “It’s a scary time to be a person of colour in the UK right now, and as a person with white privilege, I can’t speak to my friends’ experiences but I can stand alongside you and be an ally.”

Home Office staff were sent an email inviting them to the event, which included details of 11 different mental-health support services in response to concerns raised about the display of the English flag.

Two civil servants, both describing themselves as British Muslims, said they could “feel the ‘vibes’ of hate when you walk the streets” and that “[the protests] leave me fearing for my safety and that of my family and friends.”

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Eniola Aluko, the former England footballer and Adidas ambassador, has accused “the white media” of sharing the same “demonic spirit” as Jim Crow-era lynchers.

In an Instagram comment posted on Monday, the broadcaster described Jason Arday’s death as a “lynching”, and said: “the white media have the same demonic spirit as the white people in the Jim Crow era who used to have lunch and picnics in front of lynched black bodies.”

She continued: “Same spirit, different generation. They haven’t changed.”

Aluko also called for media companies to be held legally accountable for their reporting on Arday, adding that “there is [sic] established harassment laws in this country”.

Her comments were criticised by free speech campaigners.

Lord Young, Director of the Free Speech Union, said he found her remarks about journalists “grossly offensive”.

Baroness Fox, a prominent free speech campaigner and Director of the Academy of Ideas, said: “It’s so galling and morally repugnant that race is being weaponised to whip up a frenzied assault on media independence.”

Fox described Aluko’s post as “distastefully vicious bullying” and warned that it was “bloody dangerous, not least for free thinkers, democrats, or any members of the awkward squad - whether they are black or white.”

Aluko is a prominent ex-football star and broadcaster. She played women’s football for Chelsea and Juventus, and after retiring in 2020 became a regular pundit for ITV and other broadcasters.

In 2023, Aluko was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to football and charity.

Her Instagram comment was in response to a video published by Kehinde Andrews, a Black studies academic, who described the scrutiny of Jason Arday as a “lynching”, accusing critics of joining a smear campaign and invoking “respectability politics”.

Following Arday’s death, Aluko has made a series of posts about the topic.

She wrote on Instagram that she is “committed to working with people to ensure legal accountability and stricter independent regulation of the media who are responsible for disproportionate racialised harassment.”

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“We are Greeks from Ithaca,” proudly declared actor Himesh Patel in a thick Californian accent, dressed in Greek armour in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

Patel’s parents were born in Zambia and Kenya, though they hail from India, while Patel was born in Cambridgeshire. He grew up speaking Gujarati.

In The Odyssey, he plays Eurylochus, Odysseus’s second-in-command from an island near Ithaca called Same.

Now I ask you to imagine the following scene.

The camera pans down on two Irishmen, pale as ghosts, their bright ginger hair complementing the colourful Indian clothes they are wearing. Playing Arjuna and Yudhishthira in a Bollywood epic of the Mahabharata, they turn to a local villager.

“We’re Indians from Hastinapur,” one tells him in a strong Belfast twang.

Or how about this?

Deep in the Ghanaian interior, a Swede and a Lithuanian, their blonde hair spilling from beneath colourful kente headdresses, play Ananse and Nyame in a Hollywood adaptation of an ancient Ghanaian folklore.

Turning to a local villager, one proudly declares with unmistakably Swedish intonation: “We’re Ghanaians from Kumasi.”

Such scenes would be not only absurd but insulting. They would drag the viewer out of the story, leaving them wondering why a cast of northern Europeans were playing Indian princes or African legends.

Indian Eurylochus is the most prominent example of Nolan “race-swapping” Western characters, though it has been talked about the least. Perhaps if Patel had offered an extraordinary performance, his casting could be forgiven, but he didn’t, and it cannot.

Zendaya’s portrayal of an imagined Athena was flat, dreary and empty. In other words, Zendaya played Zendaya.

Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, and various other African-American actors played Greek warriors or poets. The film opens with Travis Scott, a rapper, playing a bard. Korean-American Will Yun Lee plays Anchialus, another of Odysseus’s crew.

This multicultural cast of “Greeks” looked more like a Halloween party in LA than anything resembling the Bronze Age.

For Nolan, Western canon must be for everyone. It is universal, of no place or people. Our culture, the most sophisticated and extraordinary any civilisation has produced, cannot be credited to Western peoples. That, you see, would be racist and against the principle of equality, which is sacred to Nolan as we shall see.

The erasure of the Greeks from The Odyssey is one of many problems with the film.

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At 2:30am on Monday morning, a ‘small’ boat carrying a record 230 illegal migrants was intercepted by authorities and brought to the Kent coast.

Based on a Dutch study which estimated the lifetime cost of an asylum migrant to the Treasury at £400,000, the 230 men could ultimately cost the British taxpayer a collective £92 million. That’s one expensive dinghy.

But for Kay Burley, the former Sky News presenter, the boat brimming with young African men posed less of a threat than a group of young shoppers at her local Waitrose, writing on X: “I’ve seen longer queues in the ‘five items or fewer’ isle [sic]. Stop it, just stop it!”

She was replying to Reform’s Zia Yusuf, who called the boat an “invasion”.

So who is correct? The small-boats crisis has been ongoing since 2018, during which Tory and Labour governments have facilitated the arrival of more than 200,000 illegal migrants on Britain’s shores. In that time, we have seen innumerable cases of these young men from Africa and Asia (there are almost no women and children) committing some of the most horrific crimes against British people.

Eleven weeks after Sudanese 27-year-old Deng Chol Majek took off from a boat in Dover, he took a screwdriver and plunged it into the face of Rhiannon Whyte twenty-three times. Eleven of those stabs penetrated her skull. It took her three days to die.

Afghan Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai arrived in Britain illegally in 2018 (on the back of a lorry). It took him nearly four years before he took a blade and shoved it into the chest of 21-year-old aspiring Royal Marine Thomas Roberts, killing him nearly instantly after the two had argued over the use of an electric scooter. In his years before killing Roberts, he terrorised school children with knives (after the Home Office bought his story that he was 14, when he was actually 19, and so was placed in a school with Year 9 pupils) and his poor foster mother. He was wanted for two prior murders on the continent, but the Home Office didn’t bother to do proper background checks on him, and so young Thomas had to die.

Egyptian 26-year-old Ibrahim Alshafe and Iranian 26-year-old Abdulla Ahmadi met each other on a small boat from France on 19 June last year. A few months later they raped a woman on Brighton beach, while another illegal migrant they met at their taxpayer-funded hotel, Karin Al-Danasurt, 21, another Egyptian, recorded the attack on his phone.

I could cite innumerable cases of attacks illegal migrants have committed. From terrorism to rape to murder. The cost in blood and treasure to the British people has been immense.

And yet despite all this, to those like Kay Burley these men are as innocuous as M&S shoppers.

There is no invasion. These are simply desperate people from war-torn countries looking for safety (we must all forget that France is a safe country, as is every country they have been to in Europe and most of them in Africa and the Middle East). They are not young men, but women and children.

Responding to Monday’s record-breaking boat, the prime minister’s spokesperson said: “We’ve seen today some appalling images... of young babies being put into these unseaworthy craft... shocking images, and they show the reality behind the ruthless smuggling gangs that are prepared to risk human lives for profit.”

The statement reminded me of when Labour MP Darren Jones said on Question Time: “the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women”.

Official figures put the number of men at around 90% of small-boat arrivals. Labour’s understanding of illegal migration is contemptuously ignorant, wilful or not.

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Editor’s note: This article is based on original reporting by this Substack. Please cite this Substack as the source when reporting or republishing information from this article.

A civil servant is being investigated by Whitehall after describing white culture as “barbarism and violence”, this Substack can reveal.

In a public Facebook post on July 28, Leslie-Ann Mills-Gomez-Glennie, an official at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), said white men feel entitled and linked white culture to sexual violence.

The official also claimed that the Home Office’s decision to ban far-Left American streamer Hasan Piker from Britain was made “at the request of America and Israel”, while in another post she said: “there is no Israel, only historic Palestine”.

A government spokesperson said: “We take these allegations extremely seriously. The matter is being investigated in line with the appropriate procedures, and it would be inappropriate to comment further while that process is ongoing.”

Mills-Gomez was responding to a member of the public on Facebook who described watching a documentary in an African village where teenage boys said they did not need to obtain consent to have sex with women.

The commenter continued: “This was one village out of the many thousands in Africa, I’m not saying any other one had the same thinking because I don’t know.

“All I’m saying is that some cultures can be very different to ours and probably would require some work before they are compatible with our society.”

Mills-Gomez replied: “stop the bull💩 that’s your culture, white men feel entitled. You[sic] culture is barbarism and violence, who wants that”.

Discussing her comments on Israel, a spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “This rhetoric is odious, and some of it draws on classic tropes about Jewish power that breach the International Definition of Antisemitism.”

“Repudiating Israel’s existence – essentially denying the Jewish right to self-determination – is also despicable, and speaks to the abhorrent fantasies of the anti-Israel movement.”

“Clearly someone with these views should not be working in Whitehall, nor with the Royal Family. There must be an urgent investigation.”

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