In Manchester, England, Muslims were loudly blasting the Quran on loudspeakers. A British woman stepped up and said, “This is England, a Christian country! I don’t want to hear the Quran!” For just saying that, the police arrested her on charges of causing a public order offense. They handcuffed her and dragged her away.

A Bulgarian man has now been found guilty of assaulting a 12-year-old Scottish girl. @HumzaYousaf when can we expect your apology?

This broke me when i read this... New information have come to light about the past of the Belfast victim The Belfast stabbing victim was drugged and torched by gang leader at livingston flat in horrific attack Stephen Ogilvie who has learning difficulties was attacked in 2001 at a flat in livingston west lothian by drug dealer david mcleave then aged 21. Mcleave gave him the date rape drug gbh stripped him poured aftershave over him and set him on fire while he was watching television. Ogilvie woke up to find his body burning and the ordeal was captured on video by the gang. Mcleave was later jailed for 14 years at the high court in edinburgh in 2003. Ogilvie is now in hospital in belfast with life changing injuries including the loss of an eye after monday nights knife attack by sudanese national hadi alodid. This poor man has gone through so much pain and suffering in his life only to go through what he did the other night, no one deserves this.

Trans Rights: The Conjuring Trick at the Toilet Door The toilet debate is a conjuring trick. And it is time to name it as one. Scroll through social media and you would think the entire argument about the Supreme Court ruling and the EHRC Code came down to a single question: which toilet does a trans person use? That framing is not accidental. It is a strategy, chosen precisely because it makes women's objections look petty and obsessive, reduces a sweeping legal settlement about women's fundamental rights to a single emotionally charged doorway, and keeps women permanently on the defensive. Here is what the debate is actually about. The ONS Census found that 0.54 per cent of people in England and Wales report a gender identity different from their birth sex. Within that figure, fewer than half have any outward transgender appearance. No medical treatment. No social transition. Self-identification alone. Roughly one in two hundred people. These people's rights matter. The right not to be harassed, not to face discrimination, not to be subjected to violence: those are absolute. But rights are not the same thing as demands. And the demand that fifty-one per cent of the population surrender sex-based protections won through a century of organised political struggle is not a rights claim. It is a power claim. On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that "woman" and "man" in the Equality Act refer to biological sex. Unanimously. Not a narrow majority. Every justice on the bench. The ruling also confirmed that trans people retain full legal protection under the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. Both protections stand in law. What the ruling refused to do was allow one to erase the other. The EHRC Code, now laid before Parliament, covers far more than toilets. It covers domestic violence refuges. Single-sex hospital wards. Communal changing rooms. Intimate personal care. Competitive sport. Women's right to meet, organise and associate as women. It states plainly that a service for women and trans women is not a single-sex service. That a refuge admitting male-bodied people is not a refuge from male violence. These are not cruel statements. They are logical ones. Nurses have been hauled before employment tribunals for understanding this. Working class women with mortgages and families, doing physical, demanding work, punished for knowing that a female ward means what it says. Anyone who objects is branded a bigot, a transphobe, a hater. The accusation is the weapon. And like all weapons discharged without discrimination, it has destroyed its own utility: words that once carried genuine moral weight have been debased into instruments of political enforcement, fired at nurses, mothers, lesbians, gay men and scientists for the sole offence of stating material reality. This is a liberal campaign. It is not a left-wing one. The left begins with material reality. Bodies. Class. Violence. Women are not oppressed because of how they feel about being female. They are oppressed because they are female. A left politics that cannot say what a woman is has abandoned women, not theoretically, but actually: in tribunals, in refuges, on wards, on sports fields, in the silencing of anyone who says out loud what most people know to be true. Read more here labourheartlands.com/trans-r… #womensrights #womensrightsarehumanrights #transrights

Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions: - welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap - defence spending is too low - the triple lock is unsustainable - without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution - we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea - migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state - any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement - we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable - Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly Blair basically says all that. The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind: - judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast - the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement. Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others