Newsquest Crime & Investigations (Essex) — 4x Weekly Reporter of the Year — 2x Crime & Investigative Reporter of the Year
Joined June 2010
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19 Aug 2020
'Amazing'
'Disturbing'
'Astonishing'
'Shocking'
'Like a real life Line of Duty'
The reviews are in. All episodes are out.
A true crime podcast tells how a local newspaper unearthed a shocking paedophile ring cover-up.
Unfinished: Shoebury's Lost Boys - podfollow.com/unfinished-1/
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There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support the racist conspiracy being espoused here.
It is the exact opposite of the truth.
BAME defendants receive harsher sentences than white defendants convicted of the same offences in British courts.
'We live in a country that if you are non-white, you are treated less harshly by the justice system'
Former Conservative home secretary and now Reform MP, Suella Braverman, explains why her party wants to get rid of the Equality Act.
trib.al/U5dGXlB
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Charles Thomson retweeted
Jun 12
This is barbaric. They were not permitted to explain to the jury why they carried out the attack on the Elbit factory - which makes the weapons that kill Palestinian children. And the jury was never told they would be sentenced as terrorists. /1
Jun 12
🚨 BREAKING: Four Palestine Action activists have been jailed for a total of 22 years for causing £1.2m worth of damage and fracturing a police woman's spine at an Israeli weapons factory
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Charles Thomson retweeted
Jun 12
He's literally using his insane wealth right now to fund and amplify the far right in the UK.
Jun 12
What difference does it make to your life?
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Yep, all you need to do is inherit your dad’s emerald mine, anyone can do it.
Jun 12
Why don't you set up a business making rockets, electric cars and AI, Lewis? It's obviously so easy to do, anyone can do it. 🤷🏻♀️
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Charles Thomson retweeted
Jun 11
Whether its Palantir or anyone else, I would argue that Mark Rowley's insistence that achieving his primary aim of keeping Londoners safe rides entirely on access to one company's software reflects quite badly on him.
Jun 11
'London will be less safe', says Sir Mark Rowley, after London mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a contract between Palantir and the Metropolitan police ⬇️
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Charles Thomson retweeted
Jun 10
This is disgusting behaviour from Google.
It is using its monopoly power to try to force creatives to let it train on their work.
It is career suicide for artists not to upload to YouTube. Arguing that doing so allows Google to train AI on their videos/music - AI that competes with them - is outrageous. Whatever the Ts & Cs say.
Jun 9
YouTube Terms of Service Allow AI Music Training, Google Says in Copyright Lawsuit
billboard.com/pro/google-you…
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Charles Thomson retweeted
David Lammy’s proposals to restrict the right to jury trial have been examined by the Justice Committee of the House of Commons.
And. Well. Um.
It’s *quite* the report.
I think it’s actually worse than politely scathing.
It’s embarrassing 👇🏼🪡🧵
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Charles Thomson retweeted
This is a classic case of seeing prominent media personalities as “the media”.
This post suggests grooming gangs were “airbrushed”.
Yet it was the mainstream media which actually exposed the scandal in the Times.
Blue ticks just dine on the spadework done by real journalists
Jun 2
It is pointless trying to understand the contemporary British media complex as ‘media’ in the conventional sense—journalism, reporting, or even opinion. The correct frame is propaganda: mood and sentiment management, with its sharpest tool today being crisis communications.
The dominant technique, visible daily if you still watch, is inversion—systematic reversal. It flips reality: victim into perpetrator, aggressor into defender, truth into falsehood, good into evil. It constructs Walter Lippmann’s ‘pseudo-environment’, an alternate reality in which the public is meant to dwell.
A key subtype is projection, or ‘accusation in a mirror’, neatly summarised by a Rwandan Hutu propagandist in a 1990s manual: impute to your enemies exactly what you and your own side are planning or doing.
When a genuine crisis erupts—such as the racially aggravated murder of Henry Nowak—the first imperative of the machine is to stall, dampen, and defeat the natural eruption of public outrage.
Call it ‘restoring calm’ if you like the euphemism. In practice, it means herding people back into anaesthetised normality so that inversion can resume.
Once the majority has been shamed, distracted, or bullied into silence, the remnant still angry can be ridiculed by the usual chorus—eye-rolling panellists on Have I Got News for You, columnists sneering at those ‘harping on’, and accusations of crypto-racism or worse.
Thus, the brutal stabbing of an unarmed 18-year-old student, the false cry of racism by his killer, and the police reportedly handcuffing the dying boy as he bled out on a Southampton street is repackaged as another ‘knife crime’ tragedy (note Shaban Mahmood’s flaccid parliamentary statement this afternoon)—preferably illustrated with a generic white face in the style of the BBC's so-called reality-based drama 'Adolescence' or the more recent but equally putridly manipulative 'The Capture'.
Real patterns (grooming gangs, crime disparities, two-tier policing) are airbrushed. This is projection at work: the actual sources of predation and institutional failure are recast, while legitimate grievance is pathologized.
The truth? The system enabled both the attack and the immediate inversion of its aftermath and that stands exposed to anyone with eyes and functioning brain by the video evidence. That’s the problem, your own 'lying eyes', that crisis communications has to handle before there can be a return to normal levels of public mood management can be restored.
This is precisely what Dan Hodges is performing when he labels people demanding we talk about the murder ‘scum’ for refusing to respect the family’s wish that their son’s death not be politicised. It is phase-one grunt work in the inversion protocol: shame the angry back into silence so the pseudo-environment can be restored.
Smart enough to know his role, malleable enough to perform it willingly—exactly as Noam Chomsky described the filtering process that keeps the right sort of voice prominent in the system.
The technique still works on some. But it is wearing thin. Every overplayed inversion, every *scummy* dismissal of raw public grief, prepares the ground for sharper identities and clearer grievances against the system itself. Normal people do not remain moderate forever when the machine insists their reality is the problem.
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Charles Thomson retweeted
Jun 3
New statement from Scott Pelley:
There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.
The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.
“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.
The waste is heartbreaking.
Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.
For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.
At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.
I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.
Scott Pelley
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Charles Thomson retweeted
May 27
Michael Grade was once a great TV executive, but he's no longer fit to hold public office. Under his watch Ofcom have become one of the weakest institutions in the British state. A complete joke.
May 27
I know the heat can make us all light headed but i think I just heard the ex Chair of @Ofcom Michael Grade tell @katierazz on #mediashow that @bbcr4today or any other BBC News programme could be presented by a politician just like @GBNEWS. Can anyone remind me when parliament, the public, licence fee payers or anyone else was asked their opinion on this ?
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Charles Thomson retweeted
May 26
Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.
Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.
Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."
Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."
Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.
They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.
One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."
Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.
That's the metered intelligence business model.
And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.
May 25
SAM ALTMAN: “WE SEE A FUTURE WHERE INTELLIGENCE IS A UTILITY, LIKE ELECTRICITY OR WATER, AND PEOPLE BUY IT FROM US ON A METER.”
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Charles Thomson retweeted
On the saga of jury trials, @AndyBurnhamGM says out loud what everyone is thinking.
He calls for a pause on the deeply unpopular plan to restrict juries, and for reflection on a way forward for our broken system that attracts wider consensus.
Grown up. Sensible. Unarguable.
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Charles Thomson retweeted
May 24
Reform is proposing the deportation of 2 million people - including people legally here.
"Politically it feels quite clever doesn't it," says Trevor Phillips, and leads a discussion that revolves entirely around whether it is affordable and practical.
These are people who sweep our streets, look after disabled people, keep the care sector functioning. People who work incredibly hard and are invariably very badly paid. People who have families, lives, hopes, dreams. Without whom the economy simply wouldn't function.
This country has arrived at an appalling place.
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Charles Thomson retweeted
Something this Southampton CC case demonstrates crystal clear is how important having journalists in court is re scrutinising the CJS.
The CPS press release (naturally) does not include any of the judge's sentencing remarks.
Press release-based court coverage is not sufficient.
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Charles Thomson retweeted
May 23
This is an official government account in a democracy.
This is what Orbanism looks like. The president bragging, via AI video, that he forced a comedian who mocked him off the air and ‘into the trash’.
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Charles Thomson retweeted
I really hate to be the one to break this news to you but your proposed jury trial reforms (making Recorders & Circuit Judges decide some verdicts, exposing them to online and media vitriol) will likely reduce the pool and depth of talent applying to be a Recorder or Judge.
May 22
As the first Black Lord Chancellor, I’m determined to widen opportunity, break down barriers, and ensure talent, not background, determines success.
A judiciary that reflects modern Britain is a stronger judiciary.
theguardian.com/law/2026/may…
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Charles Thomson retweeted
May 21
Imagine if a candidate of any other party was found to have deleted an account with so many disgustingly offensive posts. I suspect we will hear very little of this as the Double Standards Squad continue to ply their trade to the benefit of the 5 million pound man
May 21
EXCLUSIVE: Reform UK’s Makerfield by-election candidate, Rob Kenyon, had a SECOND deleted social media account, and the archived posts are damning.
hopenothate.org.uk/2026/05/2…
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Charles Thomson retweeted
May 20
Scraping websites and having AI summarize them, so that no one visits the websites, is theft.
Training AI on videos, so that it can make new videos that compete with them, is theft.
We are witnessing the largest theft of creative work in history.
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Charles Thomson retweeted
May 20
Well.
Another huge nail in the coffin for websites.
What I want to know is, once all the websites can't afford to keep the lights on, where is the information going to come from?
Google's AI summaries require the constant theft of fresh information written by human beings.
May 19
Google Search as you know it is over
"Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times."
techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/go…
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Charles Thomson retweeted
I cannot believe - in a crowded field - that the dying vapours of a Starmer leadership are going to be chanced on asking restless backbench MPs to RESTRICT JURY TRIAL for their constituents.
Will those backbench MPs be able to resist giving Lammy and Starmer their true verdict?
Lammy defiant over jury trial reform:
lawgazette.co.uk/news/lammy-…
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