Bartholomew's Notes

A new “free speech outrage” front-page splash from the Sunday Telegraph:

Retired police officer arrested over ‘thought crime’ tweet

Pensioner held after Palestinian march post on social media, with ‘Brexity’ books in his home scrutinised

A retired special constable was arrested and detained over a social media post warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain, The Telegraph can reveal.

Julian Foulkes, from Gillingham in Kent, was handcuffed at his home by six officers from Kent Police – the force he had served for a decade – after challenging a supporter of pro-Palestinian marches on X.

As expected, the headline and lead-in have provoked much condemnatory comment on social media, although, also as usual, there has been little attention to detail.  What is not made clear until some way into the article is that the “social media post warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain” was misinterpreted by police as being itself an antisemitic threat.

Here’s what happened. At the end of October 2023, Home Secretary Suella Braverman expressed the view that marches in London against Israel’s actions in Gaza were “hate marches“. Nicholas Wilson – aka “Mr Ethical”, and known on Twitter/X for his campaigning against HSBC – fired a post in Braverman’s direction in response:

Dear @SuellaBraverman – as someone who was on one of the “hate marches”, if you call me an antisemite I will sue you. (1)

Foulkes replied with the following proposition (since deleted):

One step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals…

This was an allusion to an incident on the same day in Dagestan, when a mob shouting antisemitic slogans rampaged through a local airport. However, it seems that Inspector Knacker thought that Foulkes’ intended meaning was “I’m one step away from…”. As he now tells the Telegraph:

In hindsight, he said, the tweet would have been clearer had it begun with the words: “What next? You are…”

But he said that even without the extra wording, it should have been clear to anyone reading it in context that his post was a warning about where anti-Semitic hate could lead.

In other words, he was not arrested for “warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain”; rather, it was for botching a supposed “warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain” in such a way that the police got the wrong end of the stick and acted against a perceived antisemitic threat. The “thought crime” framing thus collapses, and given that Foulkes’ extrapolation seems to have been made in support of Braverman’s call for a crackdown on protests (“We get our laws under review, and if there is a need to change the law … I will not hesitate to act”) the free-speech pose is less than convincing.

However, as with other recent cases where media framing has been misleading, the full context does not get the police off the hook: Foulkes was issued with a caution which has since been rescinded following a legal challenge, so clearly they got it wrong. According to the paper:

On Nov 1, without Mr Foulkes’s knowledge, the Metropolitan Police Intelligence Command referred his post to Kent Police, citing “concerns around online content”… The X post had not been reported by the public, and why a specialist Met unit – usually focused on terrorism and extremism – flagged such an innocuous tweet remains unclear.

“Metropolitan Police Intelligence Command” here means “Met Intelligence”, known as MO2 and part of Met Operations. Were Kent Police in awe of a specialist Met unit, or under pressure to get a result? And what does it say about police methodology that the context and Foulkes’ explanation were disregarded in the push to build a case and issue a caution?

Note

1. Wilson posts as @nw_nicholas, although a screenshot published by the Telegraph which also appears in a derivative Mail write-up unaccountably has doctored his handle to @nw_nicols. He has complained about it. Might this odd change have something to do with the Telegraph‘s commercial interests as regards HSBC?

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From Mail Online:

Christian protesters have gathered outside a school which recently scrapped Easter celebrations in order to ‘respect diverse religious beliefs’.

The faithful gathered outside Norwood Primary School in Eastleigh, Hampshire with banners reading ‘Headteacher Stephanie Mander wants to cancel Easter – let’s cancel her!’ after the announcement.

…The group of Christian protesters from the Living Word Church, based in Fareham, Hampshire, held England flags with the words ‘Jesus: the way the truth the life’ and ‘Jesus is kin’ [sic – should be “Jesus is King”] printed on them outside the school.

Reverend Chris Wickland said the protest was against the school cancelling the Easter service and what he called the exclusion of Christianity in schools.

Nick Tenconi, the leader of UKIP, attended the Christians’ protest as a member of the Disciples of Christ…

The Mail write-up, like a live blog published by the Southern Daily Echo, downplays the protest’s personalised and literally demonising attacks on the headteacher, expressed by posters produced by the Disciples of Christ in which her face was disfigured with Satanic horns or by the word “JUDAS” superimposed across her forehead (see below).

The protest went ahead despite the school responding to complaints about its decision. As described by BBC News:

The school has said the changes were made in consultation with parents and that Easter would still be celebrated at the school with various activities and events.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the school said: “To be clear, we are marking Easter in school and as with other religious festivals, children continue to learn about and celebrate Easter both educationally in our RE lessons and in our assemblies across the whole half term.”

They said the school, which has no religious affiliations, had decided not to visit the local church and instead celebrate the holiday “where all children are able to take part and benefit”.

“Changes were made in consultation with our parent forum, and we have received many positive messages regarding these,” the spokesperson added.

The Mail Online refers to the Disciples of Christ as “a protestant denomination popular in the United States”, but this is obviously confused: the phrase “Disciples of Christ” is fairly generic as a Christian formulation, and there is no connection with the American group. The UK Disciples of Christ first appeared in London last year, and Tenconi’s invariable presence indicates an overlap with UKIP. The phrase “Jesus is King” is also associated with the group, and one of their banners with the same slogan appeared on-stage at a Tommy Robinson rally last summer (the variant “Christ is King” has also become a regular chant at such rallies). Wickland attended one such pro-Robinson rally in London last autumn.

Wickland wore black clerical garb and a white clerical collar at the protest, but although in some contexts he describes himself as “Rev. Chris Wickland”, in others his preferred ministerial title is “Pastor Chris Wickland”. He has provided his backstory in a video available on YouTube – by his own account, he was formerly an occultist and Rosicrucian (“the worst kind of Freemasonry”) and had numerous encounters with the demonic. However, after converting to Christianity he was recognised by other Christians as a “prophet to the nations” in the “end times”, and he claims to have received visions of disasters that have then come to pass (in particular, he cites an eruption of Mount Merapi in Indonesia). As well as heading a network of two churches, he is a senior pastor at the Gravesend-based LCBN UK television network.

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In the Radio Times, Stephen Graham talks about writing the much-discussed Netflix television drama Adolescence:

“Where it came from, for me,” explains Graham, who co-created and wrote Adolescence with Jack Thorne (The Virtues, Toxic Town), “is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why?

“Then there was another young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop. And there was this thing up North, where that young girl Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two teenagers, and they stabbed her. I just thought, what’s going on? What is this that’s happening?”

Graham here alludes to the killing of Ava White by the unnamed “Boy A” in Liverpool in 2022, and to the killing of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu in Croydon in 2023. In both cases, an altercation with a girl in a public place escalated to the girl being murdered by a boy. The Brianna Ghey case involved a different dynamic, in which a boy and a girl in a Leopold and Loeb-type relationship pre-planned the murder of a transgirl as a way to satisfy sadistic impulses. Clearly, Graham was speaking very generally about some high-profile cases of youth knife crime in which the victim was not targeted as a boy (in GQ, Graham makes a distinction with “gang-on-gang violence”, although that shouldn’t be assumed as the context when the victim of a gang member is a teenage boy).

Graham’s reference to south London got picked up by Surrey Live, which published the headline “Netflix’s Adolescence inspired by true story of Croydon girl’s horrific murder”. This overstated Graham’s comment, giving the false impression that Adolescence was an adaptation of the Sentamu case. Bad actors on social media seized their chance: Sentamu was black, yet the killer in Adolescence is white. Was the drama therefore not an attempt to obscure black crime while vilifying the white working-class? (1) The false complaint that the show “race swapped the actual killer” was amplified in particular by Ian Miles Cheong, even though his assertion was made incoherent by his reference to “real life cases” in the plural (2).

Cheong also complained that the protagonist was portrayed as having been “radicalized online by the red pill movement”. Graham’s co-author Jack Thorne has discussed this in an article published in the Guardian:

At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn’t a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: “I think you should look into ‘incel’ culture.”

I expected to be confronted by anger and aggression; what I didn’t expect was to quickly grasp the attraction of the so-called “manosphere”. I knew almost immediately that if I was an isolated kid, I would find answers as to why I felt a bit lost. One of the central ideas – that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men – would have made adolescent me sit up and, frankly, nod. The path then becomes: what do you do to upset that equation? How do you manipulate and harm in order to reset a female-dominated world that works against you? If you believe one part of the logic, the other half becomes conducive.

This, then, provides the context for the drama, rather than the specifics of the three cases cited by Graham.

Although not mentioned in Thorne’s article, the drama includes a passing reference to Andrew Tate, who has complained in a statement to Newsweek about being linked to the story. Some online comments about Tate were gathered by GB News under the headline “Andrew Tate fans flood Netflix Adolescence with backlash as they claim influencer is victim of ‘woke agenda'”; however, their round-up ignores aspects of this “backlash” aimed at Thorne in particular personally. On Newsnight, he noted that some online posters are falsely claiming that he is Jewish, or making comments about this appearance – it is claimed that he objects to masculinity due to being slightly built (something that can hardly be said of Stephen Graham).

Notes

1. Both authors of the drama are from working-class backgrounds. Graham refers to class in his Radio Times interview:

“I wanted him to be a kid from a working-class background whose parents were hard-working. You know, his mum wasn’t an alcoholic, his dad wasn’t violent, and he hadn’t been molested by his uncle. I didn’t want there to be a reason we can go, ‘Oh, well, we blame it on this.’ I think we’re all accountable in some way. We just wanted to throw it out there, ask the question why, and see where it lands. And if it can create debate within living rooms with people watching it with their families, our objective is completed.”

2. Cheong refers to “the Southport murderer” as one such case, even though the authors haven’t mentioned Southport or Axel Rudakubana anywhere (as far as I know). However, the parents of one of the children who survived being stabbed multiple times by Rudakubana recently referred to the drama in a statement that was read out in the House of Commons by Paul Foster MP:

“…We must support parents, caregivers and schools better, not only in how they identify and support young people who may be at risk to themselves or others—we can all agree that these pathways need overhauls, and the Southport inquiry will serve this purpose—but, before that, working with all children, establishing the fundamentals of healthy relationships, friendships, and girls and boys being equal.

Our young people must be exposed to counter-messaging from what they may be consuming online, or at home. The work required is vast and complex but the long-term reduction in knife crime will only be seen if we go back to the start and raise our children better.

In the context of violence towards women and girls, current topics are important. Netflix’s show ‘Adolescence’ has opened a conversation about our children’s exposure to harmful messaging and themes about women and girls. We are grateful for the coverage happening this week, which is further highlighting the terrifying impact of Andrew Tate and others on vulnerable young boys.”

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(Updated post after more sources became available)

From the New York Post:

New York Post columnist Douglas Murray won a libel claim Tuesday over an article that falsely accused him of “supporting violent racist attacks” during anti-immigration protests in the UK last year.

Murray — a conservative author, journalist and commentator — clinched the victory against the Guardian Media Group over an Aug. 11, 2024 column by Kenan Malik in The Observer which mistakenly attributed Murray’s comments from months prior to the widespread unrest surrounding immigration in the UK last summer, Murray announced on X Tuesday.

In Malik’s piece, he used Murray’s interview with former Deputy Australian Prime Minister John Anderson about Israel and Islam — from six months earlier — claiming that Murray made the comments about migrants during the UK’s protests that erupted after the stabbing of three young girls.

Similar coverage of the outcome has appeared in the Spectator and the Jewish Chronicle. However, none of the reports explain why Malik’s mistake occurred, despite a detail on this point appearing in the joint statement that was read out in court as part of the settlement. According to Murray’s legal representative:

8. On 6 August 2024, in the immediate aftermath of the riots, an edited version of the interview was, for a short period, uploaded on Mr Anderson’s website and YouTube, which gave the misleading impression that Mr Murray was encouraging the riots.

This video has been removed, and Anderson has also deleted a post on Twitter/X that referred to it. However, it can still be accessed via the Internet Archive. Titled ” ‘They’ve Lost Control Of The Streets’ | Douglas Murray on Illegal Immigration’, it begins with Murray in full flow:

But clearly they’ve lost control of the streets. Now, is it time to send in the army? At some point probably yes, but if the Army will not be sent in then the public will have to go in and the public will have to sort this out themselves and it’ll be very very brutal. it’ll be very brutal.

I don’t want them to live here. I don’t want them here. They came under false pretenses, many of them came illegally and continue to come illegally and we don’t want them here and I’m perfectly willing to say that because it needs to be said…

Although presented as a seamless discourse, these two statements are disparate extracts taken from the full version, which was uploaded as “Israel, Immigration & Islam | Douglas Murray” on 8 November 2023 and which can still be seen here. In the full version, the “But clearly…” statement is at 01:00:19, whereas “I don’t want them to live here” was from earlier, at 00:24:28. Later on in the short video Murray says

…They have defaced and defiled all of our holy places and I think I know that the British soul is awakening and stirring with rage at what these people are doing.

In the full video from 2023, this is at 01:00:45.

The editing of the short video meant that the original context was missing. By “lost control of the streets”, Murray was actually referring to the police allowing “Muslim groups, Palestinian groups, pro-Hamas groups” to hold marches; his comment about the “rage” of the “British soul” refers to his prediction that the protestors “will again defile the Cenotaph and the statues of our dead and our war leaders” during a planned protest on Saturday 11 November 2023 (1).

So why did Anderson upload his “edited version” when he did? After a week during which rioters had been attacking mosques and hotels hosting migrants, he apparently thought it would be a good idea to promote Murray referring to “loss of control of the streets” and to the British soul “awakening and stirring with rage”. Did he think it was pertinent to the situation? If Murray is angry with Anderson’s “misleading impression” he’s not saying so publicly, despite crowing about winning what he calls a “major libel claim” over the Guardian Media Group.

Malik’s error was corrected and acknowledged when his article went online, as was noted by Murray on Twitter/X at the time:

Dear @kenanmalik . I see your own newspaper had to correct your column because of your sloppiness. They had to correct that the interview you refer to was from last October, not recent weeks. What you all failed to realize was that I was referring to Hamas leaders in Britain. Sloppy and bigoted of you as usual.

However, despite the importance attached to a context of “Hamas leaders” here, this particular complaint does not not appear in the joint statement. Here’s the context from the full video:

[00:24:17] We have thousands, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who have no love at all for the UK but yet live here. I don’t want them to live here. I don’t want them here… [00:25:33] We stripped citizenship from Isis members… we need to start doing the same thing with Hamas we have Hamas leaders in the UK, Hamas members in the UK.

The “probably hundreds of thousands of people” that he doesn’t want here is plainly a larger set than “Hamas leaders”.

A a couple of week after Malik’s column was published, Murray wrote a piece for the Spectator in which he complained about the police investigation into Bernie Spofforth (discussed by me here). He contrasted this with lack of police interest in Nick Lowles, who had amplified a false rumour that a rioter had committed an acid attack on a Muslim woman, but also made a passing reference to Malik:

Yet so far as I know Mr Lowles has not had his collar felt, perhaps because he enjoys the government’s favour, as well as backing from prominent left-wing philanthropists such as Trevor Chinn. Kenan Malik of the Observer similarly passed around misleading reports in print and online this week, but also seems strangely immune from the law.

Murray does not clarify what “misleading reports” he means, but readers familar with his history with Malik would have interpreted this to be a reference to Malik’s column. However, the supposed comparability with Spofforth is strained, and the inclusion seems shoehorned in.

UPDATE: As part of his crowing over the libel settlement, Murray expressed the view that “I should have noted that the Guardian group (which had to apologise and retract their falsehoods in court this morning) left X last year because of alleged ‘disinformation’ on this platform”. This caught the attention of Elon Musk, who amplified the post while adding his own view that “The Guardian is pure propaganda”. This in turn was then amplified by Murray. I would not doubt Murray’s claim that he suffered “considerable distress” from Malik’s mistake, or that felt the need to take legal action as a matter of deterrence as well as compensation. However, his insistence on taking the matter to court (once again, with the help of Mark Lewis) rather than accepting the correction as an adequate remedy also served narrative-building purposes.

Note

1. In the event, the Cenotaph was not targeted; 11 November for the protest was chosen because it was a Saturday afternoon rather than because of the symbolism of the date.

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Via the Press Association:

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said on Friday: “On Thursday 6 March we received an allegation of verbal threats made by a 67-year-old man on Friday 13 December.

“Officers are carrying out an assessment of the allegations to determine what further action may be required.”

As is widely known, the “67-year-old man” is Rupert Lowe MP, and the complainant is Zia Yusuf, the Chairman of his party, Reform UK. A few days ago, Yusuf and the party’s chief whip Lee Anderson MP issued a “Statement from Reform UK” claiming that “Mr Lowe has on occasions made threats of physcial violence against our Party Chairman. Accordingly, this matter is with the Police”.

The Yusuf/Anderson statement did not explain or even acknowledge the long delay between the alleged incidents and the police complaint, which was made the day after Lowe gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which he criticised party leader Nigel Farage as “messianic” and warned that “I’m not going to be by Nigel’s side at the next election unless we have a proper plan to change the way we govern from top to bottom.” The article also referred to Elon Musk’s stated preference for Lowe over Farage.

Perhaps Yusuf had wanted to make a complaint all along but had been holding back, but it seems more reasonable to suppose that the decision to involve police at just this moment is tactical: the existence of a police complaint lends an air of substance and seriousness to an allegation even where evidence is thin or non-existent.

Farage, meanwhile, notably fails to refer to the matter in his own statement on Lowe, which has been published in the Sunday Telegraph. Perhaps he thinks it’s a bit much: back in 2016 when he was leader of UKIP he famously described one of his MEPs punching a colleague as “one of those things that happens between men”, adding that “I don’t see any need for the police to be involved” despite the victim having been hospitalised with a (temporary) brain injury.

On the other hand, though, Farage did raise the possibility of police involvement last year when alleging that a vetting company had been deliberately negligent in weeding out unsuitable election candidates: “Lawyers have been instructed. We do not rule out police action”, he declared. The matter then disappeared from view (1), although it is unknown whether he dropped it or if the police themselves “ruled out” taking action.

Note

1. Another matter from the same period that has disappeared from view is Farage’s claim that Andrew Parker, a Reform activist filmed making racist comments, had been planted by Channel 4 (discussed here). Weak evidence collapsed under scrutiny, after which it was announced via Paul Staines that an unnamed “senior barrister” was investigating the claim on behalf of a group called “Ofcom Watch”. It is reasonable to suspect here a contrivance by which Reform UK could “move on” while not appearing to back down.

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A much-discussed front-page splash from the Mail on Sunday:

In a chilling clampdown on free speech, two police officers pay a visit to a grandmother – simply for criticising Labour politicians on Facebook.

Detectives were last night accused of acting like East Germany’s feared Stasi secret police for quizzing Helen Jones over her calls for the resignation of local councillors embroiled in the WhatsApp scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday.

Police conceded that the 54-year-old had committed no crime – yet Mrs Jones says she has effectively been silenced by the officers, as she was intimidated by them calling at her door and is too terrified to post on social media again.

But not too terrified to give her account to a newspaper and make subsequent media appearances (inevitably, on GB News). The MoS framing in the above invites readers to draw broad inferences, and there has been much discussion online about how the incident is symptomatic of how “Starmer’s Britain” is comparable to East Germany. The article references “a string of incidents in which police have investigated people for social media posts, including newspaper columnist Allison Pearson, feminist writer Julie Bindel, and former policeman Harry Miller, whose name was added to a database for his ‘non-crime hate incident'”; I discussed the Pearson case here.

The police force’s own explanation doesn’t appear until late in the article, following condemnatory comments from the likes of Tony Young and Iain Duncan Smith:

Greater Manchester Police said last night: ‘We spoke to the woman for six minutes to advise she was the subject of a complaint of harassment and to answer any questions she may have.

‘No further action is necessary as no crime has been committed.

‘We are under a duty to inform her that she is the subject of a complaint. The genuine threats that have been made to local councillors recently have meant it has been more necessary to ensure all reports are looked at…’

According to Jones’s account, the officers said they were not allowed to tell her who had made the complaint, but then confirmed that her “thought process is correct” when she “asked if Cllr Sedgwick or his partner had made the complaint”. Jones had used social media to call on Councillor David Sedgwick to resign after it came out that he had shared a letter from a pensioner about bin collectons to a WhatsApp group where the local Labour MP, Andrew Gwynne, had responded with malicious and mocking comments about the sender. That story  had been broken by the same newspaper earlier this month – Sedgwick was quoted as repudiating Gwynne’s comments, but there is no evidence that he had done so before being asked about the matter by the paper.

The Mail on Sunday‘s initial framing of the police visit to Jones was clearly overwrought and misleading, and one suspects the editors were hoping to catch the eye of Elon Musk or JD Vance as grist for their polemics about free speech in Europe. There was no “investigation”; the police action was not a “clampdown” on people criticising “Labour politicians”; and disparate police decision-making is not made meaningfully comparable just because “social media posts” are a common feature.

However, that does not mean that there is “nothing to see here”, despite a tendency by some to disregard a story just because it has come via a Mail title. It is not clear why police “duty” cannot be tempered by discretion and common sense in cases where a complaint has no merit, or why such a “duty” must override other things they could be getting on with. It is also nonsensical that the “duty to inform” doesn’t extend to naming the complainant – how can someone be on their guard about how their actions or public statements might be weaponised against them if they don’t know who exactly is saying that they feel harassed?

What the incident actually shows is how easy it is for the police to be gamed by harassment complaints – but that has been the case for years. There are several reasons why police overzealousness when it comes to such complaints is undesirable: it’s a waste of time for all concerned; it may be intimidatory, especially when someone doesn’t know their rights, or senses that the police have invested in a false narrative; and malicious complainants will crow that there is no smoke without fire, and that someone being spoken to by the police about harassment is evidence of criminality rather than of mindless police box-ticking. The police may for the most part have given up their perniciously pseudo-legal “Police Information Notices”, but the underlying problem remains.

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From GB News:

‘Did nobody vet this lady? Why does she have direct access to our Prime Minister?!’

@PatrickChristys reacts to Keir Starmer meeting with “Muslim leaders” to discuss his “plans for change”, including Saima Aslam, who tweeted in 2015 that “Islamophobia is more dangerous than ISIS”

The Tweet was first noted by GB Politics, and then amplified by Nigel Farage with the added question “What on earth is @Keir_Starmer doing?”. Christys purports to be some sort of journalist, but the brief here was not to look into the matter but simply to reinforce the material handed to him on a plate – thus he lists off some ISIS terrorist atrocities, which he infers that Syima Aslam (to give her correct spelling) wants us to ignore.

Here’s her 2015 post in full:

Islamophobia is more dangerous than ISIS, ISIS will burn out but Muslims are underestimating the far right threat @hamzayusuf #ImamsOnline
1:05 PM · Mar 26, 2015

The context is not immediately obvious: at that time, Tweets could not be threaded, and anything related she may have posted just before or after does not appear. However, there are some clues, in the reference to Hamza Yusuf and the “IslamOnline” hashtag. It doesn’t take much effort to follow up these leads, and to see that Christys’ interpretation is both implausible and vicious.

The hashtag refers specifally to a launch event for a magazine called Haqiqah, which was put together by Imams Online to oppose ISIS. As was reported the day after Aslam’s post:

A new online magazine has been launched with the aim of “reclaiming the internet” from extremists.

Haqiqah, external – “the truth” or “the reality” – has been created by British Muslim scholars who say they want to do more to educate young people about the reality of extremist movements.

They say it is a direct response to the threat of radicalisation from groups such as Islamic State.

IS extremists have widely used social media to spread their message.

More than 100 imams gathered in London for the launch of the magazine, which has been started by the website Imams Online.

“Someone has to reclaim that territory from ISIS, and that can only be imams: religious leaders who guide and nourish their community,” according to Qari Asim, senior editor at imamsonline.com.

The comment from Hamza Yusuf that is quoted by Aslam (she’s since clarified that is what it was) is most sensibly interpreted as a contemptuous assessment of ISIS’s geopolitical pretensions – at the time, ISIS controlled a big chunk of the Middle East, but Yusuf correctly predicted that its supposed “caliphate” had no long-term prospects – unlike the far-right threat. Yusuf in fact has been so outspoken against ISIS that the terrorists responded by targeting him as an “apostate”. A search of Aslam’s posts further shows her own unequivocable opposition to ISIS. Christys’ inversion of all that is grotesque.

Aslam is a public figure who has been rightly commended for her contributions to civil society in the UK, most notably the Bradford Literary Festival. That goes some way to answering the question posed by Christys and Farage about why she was meeting Starmer, although I doubt they actually want to know.

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From the Evening Standard, a week ago:

Farmers will stage another tractor protest outside Parliament on Monday as they continue their campaign against changes to inheritance tax rules.

The tractor rally, organised by Save British Farming, comes as MPs debate an e-petition with more than 148,000 signatures calling to keep the current inheritance tax exemptions for working farms.

…Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is expected to address farmers making a pit stop on their way into London on Monday morning.

That “pit stop” was actually a distinct event called “Battle for Britain”; DeSmog has further details:

Monday’s event, which preceded over a thousand tractors descending on Westminster, was organised by the anti-vax campaign group Together Declaration and the protest organisation Farmers To Action.

Set up in 2021 to oppose mandatory Covid-19 protection measures, such as lockdowns and vaccines, the Together Declaration has since launched a “no to net zero” campaign that calls for the UK to scrap policies designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Together has also campaigned against London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone scheme, and low traffic neighbourhood schemes across the country designed to combat air pollution.

The group has recently partnered with Farmers To Action, which has used recent anti-inheritance tax campaigns to spread anti-climate views.

The leader of Farmers to Action, Justin Rogers, has spread conspiracy theories across his social media accounts. He has claimed that “climate change is one of the biggest scams that has ever been told”, propagated by “our governments and their puppet masters.”

Rogers has also claimed that oil and gas are renewable, and that carbon dioxide cannot be dangerous because it “feeds plants”.

On Twitter/X, Rogers is known as “The F in Farmer”, and his most recent post exhorts readers to “wake up” to what another poster describes as “hidden plans for a Govt Terror attack to intentionally release Foot & Mouth Disease once again”. He has also affirmed his “100%” “Anti-Zionism” (H/T @_johnbye) in reply to a user who denies anti-semitic intent but who posts claims such as “zionist Jews ran every aspect of the covid ‘pandemic’.”

The “Battle for Britain” event was heavily branded with black Together Declaration placards bearing the message “WITH OUR FARMERS”, flanked by two QR codes; an oversized version of the placard also formed the backdrop to the stage, from which Farage reportedly told the crowd that the government wants to take over farmland “because they’re planning for another five million people to come into the country”.

After the various speeches (1), the tractors made their way to Westminster to join the main protest – the Daily Express, slightly confused, saw this as part of the “Battle for Britain” rather than as a distinct event. However, not everyone was happy with the Together Declaration’s high visibility (although the group’s placards also appeared at earlier protests): conspiracy influencer James Melville of No Farmers No Food (noted for its own bright yellow placards) took to Twitter/X (H/T @_johnbye):

All I care about is the best interests of farmers. I will burn every fucking bridge against any manipulative fucker who seeks to manipulate this horrendous situation for farmers for their own means.

I saw first hand the horrendous difficulties that farmers face within my own family farm. For decades. It’s difficult to fully express how difficult it was. No money. No security. No time off. And all of this was done for the sole purpose of feeding a nation and a love of the land.

I will absolutely not accept have a bunch of non farming politico and campaign group grifters exploiting the perils of farmers for nefarious agendas that include slapping on QR codes at protests to drive folk to sign up as paid members

Curiously, however, Melville is also himself involved with #together, as a member of the group’s “cabinet”. When John Bye asked him whether he would be resigning he got a block, but Melville then also deleted the post.

I previously noted conspiracist involvement with farmers’ protests here.

Note

1. According to a flyer, the line-up comprised “Nigel Farage, Justin Rogers, Alan Miller, June Mummery, Liam Halligan, Fred Roberts, Adam Brooks, Phil Barnes, Tess Wheldon, Matt Hellyer, David Irwin, Rhianna Deeble, Darren Selkus, Marc Harvey”.

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From Mary Dejevsky at the Spectator:

Let me put my own cards on the table. I have no view on, or sense of, Letby’s innocence or guilt. I was not in the courtroom; I followed the case through media reports. As an ingrained sceptic and questioner of conventional wisdom, however, I am wary of the cast-iron certainties that marked this case, and the circumstantial nature of the evidence. It seemed to me that a consensus had been formed early on about Letby and her guilt that would have been very difficult for any trial to dislodge.

Most people like to regard themselves as sceptical and critically minded when it comes to “conventional wisdom”, although in some cases this is more likely to express itself as kneejerk rejectionism and conspiracism rather than genuine engagement with the details of some issue. But in the case of Lucy Letby, the “consensus” position since the trial tends more towards the view that her conviction is at the very least unsafe, as expressed in articles in sources ranging from the Guardian to the Telegraph; the Mail on Sunday even recently ran a front-page splash headlined “Police File Raises New Doubt Over Letby Guilt”.

In the past, journalists and campaigners who argued that someone convicted of some particuarly terrible crime might in fact be innocent would be met with a barrage of hostily, with accusations that they were morally defective and heedless of distress caused to the relatives of victims. Here, though, it seems more stigmatising to express confidence in the verdict, with calls for a book called Unmasking Lucy Letby to be withdrawn for sale. This reflects the general mood of Britain in 2025, not least with the Post Office scandal still very fresh in people’s minds. (1)

Meanwhile, articles supportive of the conviction can be found on the contrarian website Spiked!: there is a long article by the IEA’s Christopher Snowdon, which has been followed with a piece by Luke Gittos; both take a critical view of the recent press conference in Parliament, in which a panel of medical experts presented arguments that the conviction is unsafe (Snowden: “It is much easier to present a hypothesis at a press conference in a hotel in front of Peter Hitchens and Nadine Dorries than it is to be cross-examined in a court of law”).

Less polemical but still analytical assessments of the press conference can meanwhile be found from David James Smith the Independent and from Liz Hull in the Daily Mail (with a headline that overeggs her “DAMNING VERDICT”). On social media, the issues are being discussed critically by Dr Susan Oliver (who has also done a lot of work debunking anti-vax disinformation) and Deb Roberts.

Tortoise Media ran a piece on the case last September; on Twitter/X, Tortoise’s Ceri Thomas described the reaction to the conviction as “fascinating”, and asked whether “a trial which could have been run better (and left room for worries about its fairness) nevertheless delivered the right verdict?”

Note

1. The conspiracy milieu, of course, is certan of Letby’s innocence, but it frames itself in opposition to the media despite the slew of mainstream articles expressing doubts about the conviction. One example here is that of Dan Wootton, who writes that “If you have only followed the MSM on the case of nurse Lucy Letby and believe the narrative that somehow this beautiful blonde young woman turned into an angel of death, despite having no motive and there being no evidence of her murdering any baby, then please listen to me now”. The suggestion that Letby’s physical appearance has evidential value is probably just a troll, but it’s a particualrly grotesque and contemptible one.

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From the Daily Express:

Sky News uproar as star ‘tells producers to cut audio’ during Southport interview

Sky News’ Sarah-Jane Mee sparked outrage after she was caught ordering her producer to cut a conversation as she reported live outside Liverpool Crown Court.

Sky News presenter Sarah-Jane Mee has sparked controversy after being caught telling her producer to cut her audio as she interviewed a guest outside the Southport murder trial.

A clip is circulating on social media which shows Sarah-Jane Mee off camera, listening to a guest who blamed the police and government Prevent programme for failing to stop Axel Rudakubana before the Southport murders.

The camera then cut back to Sarah-Jane as she made a cut gesture across her neck, before rolling her eyes with exasperation as she realised she was on air.

Sky News have seen clarified that earlier in the programme, Sarah-Jane explained that her mic was live and she was signalling to the gallery to cut her audio so her mic wouldn’t interfere with the interview, before she was accidently shown on screen, rather than ordering her producer to cut the interview.

That last paragraph is poorly written, but it gets the point across and shows up the headline as misleading. “Cut audio” refers to her own mic rather than to the interviewee’s, and she did not “cut a conversation”. Here’s what she says immediately after the social media clip:

Sorry Nazir, I was just asking for my mic to be cut because I can’t actually hear what you’re saying. We’ve got a slight technical difficulty. So, I’m going to ask you another question, I know you can hear me.

The interview then continues. Don’t take my word for it: Sky News has uploaded its coverage for the entire day to YouTube here, and the relevant segment can be seen at 10.17:15 (I’ve also uploaded it here). It didn’t take long to find: one version of the social media clip included the on-screen caption for the segment (1), meaning it was easy to skim along the YouTube progress bar to find the right place without trawling through hours of material (it was also dark at the time of the interview, indicating it would be near the end). Mee had actually worked conscientiously throughout a gruelling day during which at times she became tearful due to the distressing details of the attacks on children.

We know that the Express hack didn’t bother to check the source, because she refers only to a “guest”: the short clip was heavily cropped, meaning that it wasn’t possible to see that the right side of the screen showed that she was interviewing the high-profile former CPS prosecutor Nazir Afzal. Instead, the Express focused on examples of the contrived “outrage” culled from Twitter/X, all saying much the same thing (links added):

Connor Tomlinson penned: “Sarah Jane signals to cut the feed as a guest blames the police and government Prevent programme for failing to stop Axel Rudakubana before the Southport murders. Sky News are containment agents. They silence this, to tell you ‘Diversity is our strength.'”

…Rael Braverman agreed: “Sky News’s Sarah Jane was caught signaling to cut an interview the moment it exposed the authorities’ incompetence in the Axel Rudakubana affair. It’s not surprising anymore, just another day in the life of a media that can’t handle the truth.”

Rael Braverman, of course, is the husband of the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman – he joined Nigel Farage’s Reform amid some fanfare last month. The Express also quotes Chris Rose and Matt Gubba, but there were many others promoting the same misleading clip: Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton (of course), David Atherton, Nile Gardiner and Visegrád24; and internationally the likes of Ian Miles Cheong. Between them, they have racked up millions of views.

The “censorship” interpretation of the clip never made any sense: the onscreen caption says “Why were the warnings missed?” and this was something that Keir Starmer had spoken about previously in some detail. Why have such a segment, if the subject is to be suppressed? However, a bogus “cover up” narrative about Southport has gained momentum despite the lack of any coherent case, and many people would rather look for confirmatory signs, no matter how implausible, than reconsider whether they are less clever than high-profile charlatans make them feel. And those who have responded to the posts by expressing anger against Mee (in some cases descending into crude abuse) won’t want to face what the real context means for their self-image.

More broadly, it’s not exactly news that social media is awash with false claims and misleading clips that people share in a spirit of self-righteous outrage without checking or later correcting. Social media influencers and commentators are often superspreaders: anything that might resonate with their followers is grist to the mill; their own information streams are corrupted with trash, which they pick from without discernment; and I suspect many of them primarily use phones and tablets, which are more fiddly when it comes to doing research and sifting through sources than a desktop computer, even if they were ever minded to do a bit of due diligence before sounding off.

Note

1. There are two versions of the misleading clip: one is 12 seconds long and shows half the TV screen; the other is just one second long and is a close-up that crops out the Sky News caption and which added accusatory text.

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