Predicted.

3 of the 4 people didn’t attack the police officer and all of the 4 were cleared of violent intent. So the only disgrace here is the lie you’re telling to justify a clear miscarriage of justice & the use of anti-terror laws to justify your government’s complicity in a genocide.

With hindsight it absolutely is crackers that Starmer etc sanctioned Israel but continued to supply them with intelligence. And mostly @kennardmatt and Declassified posted about the spyflights for MONTHS and were slagged off/ridiculed relentlessly online.

My thanks to @carolecadwalla of @thenerve_news for coming in to the Double Down Newswatch studio to lift the lid on the alarming world of Alex Karp, Peter Thiel and Palantir. doubledown.news/watch/2026/j…

Absolutely gutted. Rest in power, Marjane 💔 I highly recommend watching #Persepolis tonight in her honour if you haven't already (it's a classic), I'll be rewatching my battered copy. Man, she was FUNNY. And the coolest. I was waiting for her next book/film. She'll be missed.

Reform weaponizing CANCER SCREENING has got to be a new low. Just wow.

So you know what @bbcquestiontime did with Farage? They’re now doing it with AI. This ‘expert’ panel on AI is a disgrace: not one critical voice. Gilbert works for Tony Blair to promote AI. Jones is govt chief AI booster (& Blair flunky). Riparbelli is industry. Gawdat is ex industry. And for ‘balance’? A Tory MP. 1/

Joint Statement: Paul Holden and Andrew Feinstein Regarding Labour Together, APCO and the Labour Party On Wednesday last week we received documents from Labour Together following Subject Access Requests that we submitted to Labour Together in February 2026. The documents provided by Labour Together are deeply disturbing. They show that Labour Together and APCO targeted us, our colleagues, our associates and Paul’s family with utterly false and highly defamatory allegations, and that this was done with the knowledge of the highest levels of the Labour Party. Indeed, we are now of the view that the operation to investigate us, our families and associates was effectively a joint operation run by the Labour Party, Labour Together and APCO. This highly invasive campaign was launched because of Paul’s factually accurate reporting. This reporting raised serious questions about whether Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney deliberately failed to report £730,000 in donations to the Electoral Commission in violation of the law. It is now plain that Sir Keir Starmer benefited from the work funded by these donations and that they facilitated his rise to power. We are calling for a full inquiry into Labour Together. We also call on Sir Keir Starmer to clarify his role in this scandal. Considering the documents that have been disclosed to date, we find it nearly inconceivable that Sir Keir Starmer did not know about this despicable project that included Labour Together reporting us to the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), a part of GCHQ, based on utterly false and highly defamatory allegations. These highly defamatory allegations were then shared with at least one major newspaper outlet. The newly released documents reveal six important facts. First, they show that Morgan McSweeney and Paul Ovenden were aware of the APCO and Labour Together investigation into us from at least January 2024. McSweeney was the Labour Party’s head of campaigns and subsequently Sir Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff in Number 10. Paul Ovenden was the Director of Labour Party communications and subsequently Head of Strategy in Number 10. The emails show Simons arranging a meeting between himself, Ovenden, McSweeney and Tom Harper, a senior APCO employee, to discuss the investigation into us. A third Labour employee was copied into the email, but, because of redactions, we do not know who this is. We ask the Labour Party to confirm who else was copied into this correspondence. The excellent @PeterKGeoghegan and Democracy for Sale have confirmed with a Labour Party source that the intended meeting did take place. Second, they show that APCO’s Tom Harper actively coached Josh Simons and Labour Together on how to submit a ‘crime complaint’ about us to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a part of GCHQ. Harper provided text for Simons to submit to the NCSC. The decision to complain about us to the NCSC was made only days after Simons had emailed McSweeney, Ovenden and Harper about APCO’s upcoming report into us, asking for a meeting to discuss its contents. Third, Josh Simons has repeatedly claimed in public that he appointed APCO to investigate a ‘hack’ of Labour Together materials. But the new documents show that Labour Together and Simons did not conduct any meaningful cybersecurity review to establish whether materials had been hacked from Labour Together, or where else they may have been sourced from. Labour Together did, however, appoint a cybersecurity expert to review a potential hack in late 2025. This review, a summary of which has now been disclosed to us, shows that there was no ‘hack’ of Labour Together. This is obviously true, as we have repeatedly explained that the investigation into Labour Together was based on documents legally leaked from the Labour Party by whistleblowers concerned about misconduct by the Party’s most senior officials, open-source materials, and Freedom of Information requests. Fourth, they show that Josh Simons and Labour Together told the NCSC that they were reporting us because they were concerned that Paul’s reporting ‘may be a co-ordinated effort to discredit Labour Together in order to undermine Mr McSweeney and by extension, Mr. Starmer in the run-up to next year’s general election.’ It is our view that this joint Labour Together, Labour Party and APCO operation was launched because Paul’s factually accurate reporting would have shed light on the highly problematic and unlawful aspects of Sir Keir Starmer’s rise to power. Fifth, they show that APCO had sent a ‘case summary’ to Josh Simons of Labour Together on the 20th of November 2020, on the basis of which APCO were contracted by Labour Together two days later. The ‘case summary’, setting out a proposed scope of work, clearly identified us as journalists. From the very beginning, therefore, APCO and Labour Together knew that they were looking to investigate journalists – the very journalists who were reporting accurately on Labour Together, Morgan McSweeney and undeclared donations. Sixth, they show that Simons wrote to an unknown person at the Labour Party in November 2023 asking for ‘intel’ on us. This shows that Simons’ immediate response to announcement of Paul’s book was to seek the assistance of the Labour Party. At the time, we were both Labour Party members. The reply to Simons’ request has been redacted in our documents. We call on the Labour Party to release all documents to us relevant to this scandal, and to confirm whether Josh Simons, Labour Together or APCO were provided with any of our private, personal information.

Things that shouldn’t be controversial: everyone having a safe home.

🔴 NEW: Morgan McSweeney - Keir Starmer's chief of staff until three months ago - was briefed on Labour Together's controversial investigation into journalists more than two years ago Scoop on Democracy for Sale: democracyforsale.substack.co… @StarmertheFraud

COVID-19 could have been a moment of reckoning for us with China, public health, misaligned incentives, and the institutions that failed us. Instead, the public systems were weakened, the private systems got stronger, and rare outbreaks are now arriving into an architecture already built to capture their genomes at scale. At some point, you have to ask whether the goal was ever to make us healthier, or just more measurable. My new investigation, “What We Caught in Beijing,” is now live.

NHS campaigner reveals how spy-tech giant Palantir tried to secretly hire influencers to smear Good Law Project. Listen to The Shadow Contract now: goodlaw.social/c22b7d

Dear @Meta and @instagram I would appreciate understanding why after being wrongfully detained for 2 months in Kuwait and recently acquitted and released, you permanently disabled and deleted my Instagram account without any notice or explanation.

Keir Starmer is correct about the need to heal divisions. But to equate protest of the genocide in Gaza with the hate march led by Tommy Robinson is a disgrace. If Starmer thinks this is how we heal divisions it shows he hasn't begun to understand the problem.

#DigitalID explained. Well, some of it.

So just to clarify, Wes Streeting published the #HealthBill on Wednesday and resigned? My Legalese is ok but if anyone else wants to have a go at the bill linked in the post below - there are a lot of people understandably freaking about their private medical records/privacy.

Summary of the #Southport Public Inquiry findings (Phase 1 report) regarding Axel Rudakubana that have NOT featured prominently in recent news coverage, including its criticism of @X: 1. Rudakubana’s Religion and Background British-born Rudakubana came from a Christian family with evangelical ties. Despite the tsunami of disinformation and divisive speculation that immediately followed the abhorrent attack, often claiming or strongly implying he was a Muslim and/or an asylum seeker, the inquiry explicitly found that he was NOT Muslim and was NOT motivated by any religion, racial hatred, or coherent ideology. 2. Speculative Misinformation and Disinformation The inquiry noted that the failure by authorities to release adequate and timely information in the immediate hours and days after the attack created an information vacuum. This vacuum was quickly filled by false speculation, misinformation and disinformation online (including numerous claims that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker), which fuelled the violent riots and public disorder that followed, but the Inquiry’s core focus and detailed findings remained on preventing the attack, not on the riots/disorder. While the Inquiry report does not provide a detailed analysis of how misinformation spread on X after the attack, name specific influencers, quantify impressions/views, or examine algorithmic amplification, and stopped short of recommending specific changes to X’s policies, it is worth reminding ourselves of some of the more high-profile contributors to misleading information and disinformation, all of whom used X to spread their misleading and speculative messaging: —Andrew Tate (misogynist and officially and publicly since his 2022 conversion to Islam, a Muslim) explicitly claimed the attacker was an “illegal/undocumented migrant” who had “arrived by boat” and was “straight off the boat.” He posted videos urging people to “wake up” and framed it as “invaders slaughtering British daughters.” His were among the most widely viewed claims. —Tommy Robinson (mutiply convicted violent far-right criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), strongly amplified the narrative linking the attacker to Islam and migrant violence. He stated that the riots were “justified in their anger,” claimed there was “more evidence to suggest Islam is a mental health issue than a religion of peace,” accused authorities of a cover-up, and railed against “hostile, violent, aggressive migrants.” He helped spread and endorse the false “Muslim asylum seeker” framing. —Nigel Farage (GB News presenter, Reform UK leader, and MP), who did not directly call Rudakubana a Muslim asylum seeker but questioned whether “the truth is being withheld from us” by police, implying the attack may be terror-related. Critics accused him of fuelling conspiracy theories and acting as “Tommy Robinson in a suit,” which helped legitimise the misinformation wave. —Darren Grimes (former GB News presenter) criticised calls for more refugees on the same day, strongly implying the attack was linked to migrant/refugee issues. —Laurence Fox (former GB News presenter, Reclaim Party leader), who echoed claims about biased policing and narratives surrounding the attacker’s background. —Katie Hopkins (far-right YouTuber), who amplified speculation tying the attack to immigration and Islam. These misleading and false claims (often including the fabricated name “Ali Al-Shakati”) spread rapidly and contributed to the riots. 3. Ideology and Obsession with Violence The attack was not classified as terrorism due to the absence of any ideological driver. In the UK, under the Terrorism Act 2000, an incident is only legally classified as terrorism if the violence is not only designed to influence the government or intimidate the public, but is also carried out for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial, or ideological cause. When there is no clear ideological driver (as in the Southport case), even horrific mass violence is prosecuted as murder or other non-terrorism-related offences rather than terrorism, even if the public perceives it as terror-related. With the rise of extreme violence without a clear ideological motivation, perhaps we need to revisit this definition of terrorism. Rudakubana was not motivated by a clear ideology, but had a profound “obsession with violence” and accessed vast amounts of extreme, graphic content, which included: —Nazi-related material (documents on Nazi Germany, imagery of victims and mass graves, antisemitic material, and references to Adolf Hitler); —Anti-Islamic material (voluminous and highly offensive content targeting Muslims); —An Al-Qaeda training manual (downloaded years earlier); —Documents and images relating to genocides (including the Rwandan genocide linked to his parents’ background), wars and conflicts (Chechnya, the Zulu War, Somalia, Sri Lanka, etc.), torture, slavery punishments, beheadings, and other atrocities. All of this reflected an indiscriminate fascination with killing, genocide, and extreme violence across ideologies, eras, and cultures, and NOT a coherent belief system. 4. X’s Reluctance to Cooperate Rudakubana maintained multiple accounts on X (formerly Twitter) and had a pattern of searching for and viewing graphic violent content. According to the Inquiry report, Rudakubana, then 17, was able to circumvent age restrictions on X because in mid-2024, the platform only asked users to enter a date of birth without further age checks. On X, the video was marked “sensitive”, a label that meant it should only be viewed by users who indicated they were over the age of 18. After the Wakeley attack, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner issued a takedown notice to X to remove tweets with videos of the attack. The company made the posts inaccessible in Australia, but decided to continue hosting the footage in other parts of the world. X later said it was “heartened to see that freedom of speech has prevailed”, after eSafety dropped its case over the matter in federal court about one month before the Southport attack. The Inquiry found that Rudakubana likely “viewed the actual footage of the [2024 Wakeley Sydney church] stabbing” minutes before carrying out his attack. “It is both sobering and concerning that almost the last thing that [Rudakubana] did before committing these dreadful crimes was to search for and probably view material on X in relation to a stabbing carried out by another boy aged under 18,” inquiry chair Sir Adrian Fulford wrote. The platform initially identified only a few linked accounts before later providing details on more. His broader online activity on X and other platforms fed his unhealthy fixation. Musk’s influential social media platform refused to disclose message content without a legal order and was slow to provide other data (e.g. date of birth). An executive even defended not removing the “horrific” stabbing video Rudakubana had watched, describing removal as potential “tyrannical overreach,” imho reflecting Elon Musk’s infantile and irresponsible free-speech absolutist approach. Fulford concluded that X’s unwillingness to remove posts that included video of “the most graphic part” of the 2024 stabbing, while not illegal in the UK, was “deeply regrettable”. The Inquiry report also noted that “X has shown no signs of any self-critical reflection” for how easily the perpetrator was able to bypass its age restrictions, and criticised the company for its late disclosure of data and for not showing “the same ready willingness to co-operate with the Inquiry as almost all other organisations”. 5. Overall Context The inquiry concluded that the July 2024 attack could and should have been prevented due to multiple systemic failings, including poor information-sharing, inadequate scrutiny of his online activity, and over-reliance on his autism diagnosis, as well as parental shortcomings. The family was aware of his possession of weapons, attempts to produce ricin, and violent online behaviour but failed to intervene decisively. These aspects of the report are what most mainstream news media have focused on, with varying degrees of emphasis. Rudakubana was ultimately portrayed as a “violence-obsessed” loner rather than an ideologue of any kind. 6. Conclusion The uncomfortable truth is that genuinely “protecting our children” requires more than rhetoric: it demands a coordinated, professional, and properly funded system. As the Southport Inquiry put it, a “joined-up, well-resourced” approach. That means sustained investment in essential public services: policing and security, child protection, education, mental health support, and early intervention. These systems only work when they are adequately staffed, properly connected, and consistently funded.Yet many of the same voices who shout loudest about “protecting our children” also push for significantly lower taxes, often citing the misleading claim that Britain is already a “high-tax, high-welfare” society. That claim does not hold up to scrutiny. Compared to most Western European countries, the UK has relatively lower taxes and less generous welfare provision, and it frequently underperforms on key child and family outcomes. This narrative is often used to justify cuts and resist strengthening public services. Effective child protection cannot be delivered on the cheap. Repeated inquiries, including Southport, have shown how under-resourcing and poor coordination lead to preventable failures. That said, (and I am certainly no ‘centrist dad’) the answer is not simply to spend more at any cost. Better results also require smarter priorities, less bureaucracy, a stronger focus on prevention, and economic growth that expands the tax base over time. But the core reality remains: you cannot meaningfully strengthen child protection while simultaneously demanding deep tax cuts without accepting serious trade-offs. Any honest debate about safeguarding children must confront that simple fact.

Pretty sure Starmer's government heavy handedly redacting documents to be examined by the #ISC qualifies as an attempt to cover up. Replacing him would delay the process but not stop it. Also they're all talking shop on WhatsApp despite security risk. independent.co.uk/news/uk/po…

What The UK Did is SHOCKING & no one’s allowed to talk about it @pularjs doubledown.news/watch/2026/m…