News
The Short and Tall of the New Grooming Gang Data
While the Labour government continues to stall, delay, and obfuscate on r*pe/grooming gangs, behind-the-scenes independent journalists and grassroots researchers have been putting in the hard yards.
This week, after months of silence from officials, a team of investigators led by GB News and Crime Spotlight UK released what may be the most detailed public record of grooming/r*pe gang activity ever assembled.
The release follows a government promise made back in January.
Labour ministers commissioned Baroness Louise Casey to conduct a so-called “rapid audit” of grooming gang activity. It was due to be published within three months. We’re now in May. And the public has heard little since.
Meanwhile, Crime Spotlight UK and its network of researchers spent thousands of hours combing through news archives, court records, and survivor testimony to meticulously map the scale of the scandal.
The new database confirms over 50 towns and cities with known group-based sexual exploitation cases. From 2007, there have been over 500 convictions. But, as we know, the abuse dates back nearly five decades.
From Plymouth to Carlisle, these networks trafficked and brutalised little white girls in every corner of the country. In some cases, they were transported hundreds of miles for pre-arranged exchanges.
In one notorious case, Arshid Hussain—one of the vile convicted ringleaders in Rotherham—stuffed a young girl in the boot of his car and drove her to London, where she was used to “pay off” his debts to three men.
Many of the men behind these crimes are now out of prison. Some have quietly reintegrated into the same communities where they once preyed on children.
The database includes names, convictions, maps, and patterns—a level of forensic clarity the government itself has never made available—neither under the Conservatives, nor Labour.
Grooming gang trafficking links illustrated by Crime Spotlight UK.
Catherine Blaiklock - Runcorn and Helsby
The People Didn't See!
England: Ruled By Quango?
A Critical Feature
Ineffective Use
The idea that quangos are unaccountable pits of public money is a popular political refrain, particularly at election time. Parties regularly promise ‘culls’ of quangos to bring ‘quangoland’ under control. However, quangos occupy an odd place in political consciousness. While incoming governments often seek to abolish quangos, especially those they see as being too close to particular policies, new quangos are simultaneously proposed as the solution to a variety of problems. In 2010, for example, the Coalition immediately created the Office for Budget Responsibility to increase government’s fiscal credibility.
King’s Speech Clarifies Democratic Dilution
However, if you care about democracy, there’s one aspect of Labour’s agenda that should particularly concern you: the Government’s plans to establish new groups for employment, energy, and transport. These include Skills England, Great British Energy, andGreat British Rail, along with a strengthened Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is relying on to prove her fiscal prudence. Since then, they’ve also added a new Office for Value for Money.
But what are Great British Energy, Skills England, and Great British Rail? Simply put, they’re quangos – quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations (ALB). Operating at ‘arm’s length’ from the government, quangos have become deeply interwoven with our political process. Impossible to ignore and lacking democratic accountability, they perpetually seek more influence, with politicians often granting it to them.
Labour’s barrage of announcements since taking office might give the impression that they are keen to govern and put their new found power to use. Yet they betrayed their true attitude when they announced that a ‘black hole’ had been left in the finances caused partly by the failure to budget for the independent pay review bodies’ (another ALB) recommendations for public sector pay. Rather than examine the productivity of the public sector; Labour simply met their demands.
Stakeholderism
‘Stakeholderism, as explained by the Adam Smith Institute’s Sam Bidwell, is ‘the idea that a dense concentration of power in the hands of elected politicians is inherently dangerous’. Hence, decisions usually made by politicians are delegated to so-called ‘experts’ – judges, regulators, bureaucrats, and academics – who make decisions on behalf of the elected political class. These actors, funded by taxpayers, form quangos that prescribe policy solutions to the government, often out of step with the average Briton.’
Things accelerated under Blair and Brown. The true triumph of stakeholderism was during the New Labour era when Blair and Brown ushered in a golden age of managerial elitism by creating institutions like the Supreme Court and granting the Bank of England independence, all the while stripping cabinet-level ministers of traditional powers.
Growth of the State Continues
Starmer’s new regime is expanding and entrenching this, and signals a continuation of a longstanding political culture of stakeholderism and managerial elitism – all of which will be paid for by us, English taxpayers.
Quangos are not elected officials, have very little oversight and the majority of people have no idea that they exist. Nobody has ever voted a quango into existence, so their funding does not have taxpayers’ consent. And worse still, they often end up having their own agendas and interests which are contradictory to those of the British public. It is also worth noting that quangos are a useful home for ex Labour MPs (if they don’t make it to the House of Lords).
Politicians Stripped
The result of politicians ceding power in this way is that they essentially become glorified local councillors, muttering on about potholes and bin collections rather than legislating on national policy issues. If MPs want to give away all their power, what’s the point in voting for them?
With Starmer at the helm, the quangocracy will continue its irrepressible rise. His regime has created a quango a week since they came to power.
So over the next few weeks I will start to draw attention to the various quangos that we are paying for but not electing. What I will reveal will shock and surprise you.
Asylum Tax Bill at Record High
Britain’s asylum immigration crisis continues to worsen. Figures just released show that spending on asylum rose by £1.43bn in the 2023/24 financial year to £5.38bn - 36% higher than in 2022/24 when £3.95bn was spent.
The shocking figure covers the Conservatives' final year in government and is the highest amount since comparable data began in 2010/11.
It is more than four times the equivalent figure for 2020/21 (£1.34bn) and nearly 12 times the total a decade ago in 2013/14 when it was £450m.
But if you think that’s bad, wait until we get the figures for Labour’s first year in office, because they’re going to be even worse!
Since Labour came into power, 19,988 people have crossed the Channel on small boats to get to the UK illegally. Huge numbers of those migrants arriving ‘legally’ – for example on visitors’ or student visas – also go on to claim asylum.
Home Office data has also revealed 106,181 asylum claimants were in accommodation at the end of September. That is an increase of 9,539 from May this year. New data has also found the number of asylum claimants living in hotels has increased since Labour came into power in July.
Of those 106,181 asylum seekers, 35,651 were being housed temporarily in hotels due to lack of other accommodation at the end of September, up by 6,066 from 29,585 at the end of June.
Labour promised to close asylum hotels in their manifesto, but border security minister Dame Angela Eagle last week said more asylum hotels have opened since the party came into power.
She told parliament there are currently 220 hotels in use for asylum seekers, with seven having shut since July - but 14 more have opened.
The Home Office taxpayer-funded costs cover all its spending on asylum, including direct cash support and accommodation for asylum seekers, plus wider staffing and other related migration and border activity.
But the £5.38 Billion cost does not include the price of operations responding to Channel crossings and picking migrants in the Channel to ferry them over to England.
Meanwhile, shivering pensioners and endangered farmers are only the highest profile victims of the brutal spending cuts being imposed by the Starmer regime, and Labour’s tax increases are already squeezing the life out of the economy.
How much worse will it have to get before public patience finally snaps completely? We’re going to find out, as it can only be a matter of time.
Horrifying Cost of Asylum Britain
The headline and the picture both tell us about the asylum madness that has gripped the UK political elite. The cost to taxpayers (a disproprortionate number of us English) of importing thousands of young men of military age is now well over £5 BILLION a year.
As for the picture that accompanies it, we see yet another lifeboat busy, not rescuing shipwrecked sailors or distressed swimmers, but acting as a ferry service for illegal gatecrashers.
Sign the General Election Petition!
The petition for a General Election now that the Starmer regime's real agenda is becoming clear is powering towards a staggering THREE MILLION signatures.
When Michael Westwood, landlord of the Waggon and Horses in Dudley, started the petition he had no idea it would quickly become third most popular ever on the UK Parliament petitions page.
Yes, There IS such a thing as English identity
Article by Paul Embery
In his 1941 essay ‘England, Your England’, George Orwell wrote:
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution… [A]lmost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.
I suspect that even the great man himself, a socialist and patriot to the core, would be shocked by the degree to which the anti-English sentiment he identified over 80 years ago has become even more embedded in the psyche of the nation’s political and cultural elites – and not just those who consider themselves to be on the left.
We all know the script. England has no distinct political or cultural identity – not a meaningful one, at any rate. Most of the good and revered things that are said to be ‘English’ are not English at all; they all came from elsewhere. Other than ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’, naturally. Those anodyne concepts must be cited ad nauseum in response to any enquiry of what it is that makes us proud to be English. But that’s about it. (Oh, and didn’t you know that St George was really a Palestinian?)
The bad things, on the other hand – they are all definitely English. Slavery and imperialism, for example. The English must forever be reminded of their responsibility for these evils and be expected to engage in regular bouts of self-flagellation by way of atonement.
It’s hard to believe that any other nation’s intelligentsia would be so determined to denigrate or deny its history and identity in this way. Many who demonstrate such a mindset hold the belief that any expression of Englishness can stem only from a feeling of superiority or xenophobia or pride in things about which the English should be unproud. While Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism are seen as largely benign – even admirable by those who deem these nations to have suffered historical oppression at the hands of their larger neighbour – English nationalism, even of the most innocuous, civic kind, is to be avoided at all costs. (I wonder if these people have ever troubled to learn about Scotland’s role in the Empire.)
Others are motivated by the view that, in this age of ever-deepening globalisation, national borders and identities are essentially redundant, and we are instead all now citizens-of-nowhere – part of a great global cultural blancmange. Anyone standing in the way of this phenomenon is deemed an opponent of ‘progress’ and treated as some sort of political or cultural dinosaur. This, I am sure, explains why even some politicians on the right remain nervous about promoting the politics of English identity. They know that many in the SW1 bubble, including media types, consider it all a bit uncouth and working-class – even ‘far-right’ – and would perhaps question their motivation. And, frankly, the number of MPs willing to be seen as out-of-step with the general cosmopolitan liberal worldview that dominates within the upper echelons of public life and our national institutions these days is vanishingly small.
Take a recent much-commented-upon segment of an interview of Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick on Sky News. Jenrick had argued in a newspaper article that English identity had been placed at risk by immigration, ‘non-integrating multiculturalism’ and a metropolitan establishment which ‘actively disapprove[s]’ of the nation’s history and culture. Now, one may disagree with Jenrick’s analysis. But the interviewer barely even considered the analysis on its own merits, instead pressing Jenrick repeatedly on the question of ‘What is English identity?’ – the clear implication being that there was no such thing. For that is the premise from which much of the commentariat starts: that Englishness is an illusory concept and there is nothing distinct about the country at all.
It's almost impossible to imagine a news presenter in a studio in, say, Berlin or Paris or New York or even Glasgow, when interviewing a politician who had said, rightly or wrongly, that the relevant nation’s identity was under threat, defaulting immediately to the position that that couldn’t possibly be the case as that identity didn’t really exist.
Jenrick’s intervention sparked a wider debate on social media and beyond, with the usual suspects lining up to deride the entire notion of English identity and argue that there is no such thing. When it comes to England of all nations – the birthplace of common law, a near-universal language, an unsurpassed canon of literature and poetry, the Anglican church, the Westminster system of government, the industrial revolution, and numerous popular sports – such a theory is patently ridiculous. You may not like or be interested in any of the aforementioned things. But to deny that they have over a thousand years helped to shape England into the distinct political and cultural entity it is today is to demonstrate ignorance of the highest order.
I am no jingoist. I have never displayed a national flag on my car or outside my home – I’m not sure I’ve ever even waved one – and I have no desire to see schoolchildren singing the national anthem every morning in assembly or that kind of thing. But I consider myself English (as well as British) and, like millions of my compatriots, I am irritated at attempts by the liberal-progressive elites to airbrush or traduce that identity and the history that goes with it.
These attempts have over the past couple of decades engendered a sense of national dispossession throughout many of England’s communities – especially in the provincial quarters of the country – and led to an increase in the number of voters identifying as more English than British. This development has, in turn, had a tangible impact on our politics. As former Labour cabinet minister and current director of the Centre for English Identity and Politics at the University of Southampton, John Denham, wrote earlier this year:
In the first two decades of the 21st century, the politics of England and the UK were transformed by voters who emphasised their English identity. The votes of the ‘more English than British’ took Ukip from obscurity to agenda setter, secured the fateful promise of an EU referendum, and delivered the Leave vote. In the 2019 ‘Get Brexit Done’ election, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives gained the support of 68% of the ‘More English than British’, 50% of the ‘equally English and British’, but lost narrowly to Labour amongst the ‘More British than English’.
Those bent on ridiculing the whole concept of English identity might perhaps be wise to start recognising the impact of their words and actions on the wider political landscape.
