uk politics
‘Why We Will Apply to Take Ofcom to Court Unless It Explains Its Approach to GB News’
Readers of Byline Times are likely to have been among the many who have complained to Ofcom about GB News and its partisan political stance.
Byline Times itself has repeatedly scrutinised the broadcast regulator’s unwillingness to enforce the impartiality requirements of its Broadcasting Code, other than administering a few slaps on the wrist for breaches so glaring and egregious that they could not be ignored or excused.
It has also attempted to establish the reasons for Ofcom’s forbearance.
We may be about to find out a bit more about what’s going on at Ofcom’s Riverside House HQ as I have teamed up with the Good Law Project to take the first step in a legal process, putting the regulator on notice that we intend to apply for a judicial review of its approach to GB News if Ofcom does not make it clear that it has not changed its policy in the case of smaller or non-public service broadcasters.
In particular, holding them to different standards from those governing the public service broadcasters as far as impartiality is concerned – something which the Code does not appear to permit.
What finally prompted this action were remarks by Ofcom's CEO Dame Melanie Dawes in an interview with Sky News on 13 March. In it, she stated that its requirement for due impartiality was not "an absolute test of equal balance" but has to be achieved "in a way that’s appropriate for the audience expectation, in a way that’s appropriate for the subject matter. We expect a range of views to be brought to bear, rather than just one single view or small cluster of views". This, she explained, "can be done… in lots and lots of different ways".
But, crucially, she then added: "The standard for someone like the BBC, which reaches still, 70% of the TV viewing audience for news is a different one from that of a channel that has an audience of maybe 4% or 5% of a of the viewing public. We expect different things and I think that's appropriate."
She then went on to make a distinction between different kinds of broadcasters.
On the one hand, there are the public service broadcasters and Sky News, with their "pretty scrupulous approach to impartially", their "high standards… underpinned by the Broadcasting Code", and the "high levels of trust" that people have in them.
On the other, there are now channels "that can present the news from a particular perspective. It’s not about the overall output of a channel, as long as for each programme there is a sufficient range of views brought to bear. And I think that that allows a level of diversity and plurality in provision to be brought to the viewing public".
It is our case that Dame Melanie is proposing that channels with relatively low audience figures (although it should be pointed out that GB News still reaches millions of citizens) are held to a different standard of impartiality from that applying to the public service broadcasters.
We also argue that, judging by Dame Melanie’s interview, ‘different’ here means less ‘scrupulous’ than the ‘high standards’ underpinned by the Code.
In our letter to Ofcom, we refer to this as the “lower standards for small or non-public service broadcasters approach”.
We are contending that this amounts to a revision of the due impartiality requirements of the Code, that this revision has been undertaken by Ofcom without any form of consultation, and that this runs counter to the 2003 Communications Act.
Among other things, this Act created Ofcom and required it to establish a standards code. Section 319(1) states: "It shall be the duty of Ofcom to set, and from time to time to review and revise, such standards for the content of programmes to be included in television and radio services as appear to them best calculated to secure the standards objectives."
No public consultation on the specific subject of impartiality has taken place since 2007, when Ofcom published the discussion document 'New News, Future News’, which did indeed suggest relaxing the impartiality rules for smaller channels. However, the suggestions were badly received (except, all too predictably, by newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, who at that time was itching to turn Sky News into Fox News UK) and the idea was quietly dropped.
But, as Stewart Purvis, former Ofcom content and standards partner, and Chris Banatvala, Ofcom’s founder director of standards, have pointed out: "It is not for Ofcom but Parliament to decide whether impartiality rules should be weakened, changed or abandoned. If, after public and parliamentary debate, there’s a view that perhaps impartiality should only apply to public service broadcasters, then so be it. But, at the moment, the rules are being changed by the back door."
We are also asking for clarification of the meaning (if any) of Dame Melanie’s statement that due impartiality "is not about the overall output of a channel".
As Ofcom is always at great pains to point out, the Code requires that news programmes in whatever form are presented with 'due’ impartiality – and both the Communications Act and the Code stress that "special impartiality requirements" apply to news and other programmes dealing with "matters of political or industrial controversy and matters relating to current public policy". These are, of course, GB News’ stock-in-trade.
But, although the word ‘due’ is made to do a great deal of heavy lifting in the Code and in its accompanying guidance notes – indeed, threatening to qualify the very notion of impartiality out of existence – nowhere is it suggested that due impartiality turns on the audience share that a particular channel enjoys.
When fining RT £200,000 in July 2019 for breaches of its impartiality rules, Ofcom explicitly stated that, although RT had a relatively small audience of, on average, 2,300 viewers, amounting to a share of total viewing in the UK of 0.03%, "in this context, the extent of a channel’s audience cannot sensibly dictate the gravity of the breach, not least because the due impartiality regime could easily be circumvented and undermined if smaller broadcasters were allowed an effective exemption from generally applied standards".
When RT appealed against the fine, the Court of Appeal stated that "the number of viewers affected by the partial broadcasting is not the point, because Parliament has determined that such broadcasting shall be duly impartial". It also pointed out that the harm caused by partial broadcasting "is not limited to the harm caused to viewers but extends to the harm indirectly caused to members of society generally by the provision of broadcast news and current affairs that lacks due impartiality".
When fining talkSPORT in February 2020 for impartiality breaches in three episodes of a programme presented by George Galloway, Ofcom announced that although it "recognised that the audience for the programmes in question was small when compared to some other radio services", it considered that the three repeated breaches of certain of the impartiality rules in its Code "had the potential to adversely affect those listeners who chose to listen to the relevant programmes and who were therefore presented with coverage of important policy and political matters which denied them an appropriately wide range of viewpoints".
Our case rests largely on the question of whether GB News, as a smaller broadcaster, is being held to different standards from those governing public service broadcasters as far as impartiality is concerned. However, there are also other aspects of Ofcom’s approach which are troubling and are in need of investigation.
Firstly, there is the matter of freedom of expression.
In her oral evidence to the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Committee last March, Dame Melanie stated that "the phrase 'freedom of expression’ is a very important part of this debate – one that perhaps should be a little bit more prominent".
In the wake of the furore following then Conservative Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson interviewing then Home Secretary Suella Braverman in September 2023 on GB News, in answer to a question about whether the Code was fit for purpose, she was quoted in the Guardian as stating that: "The rules are flexible, they require us to prioritise freedom of expression, which is missing a bit in this conversation, and we feel we’ve got plenty of flexibility."
The only problem here, however, is that the rules do not require Ofcom to ‘prioritise’ freedom of expression – they merely require it to take into consideration Articles 9 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights when making their judgments. In point of fact, however, they should be compliant with these articles.
In any case, the idea of freedom of expression championed by Dame Melanie, and also by Ofcom Chair Lord Michael Grade, seems to echo that of Elon Musk and his fellow ‘free speech fundamentalists’ – namely that rules governing any speech on any platform should be at the very least relaxed, regardless of its provenance and the damage it might inflict on others, or on public and democratic life in general.
Second, there is the idea that what Ofcom really wants is that viewers should be able to access views other than those that they encounter on the public service broadcasting channels. So, for example, in her appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Dame Melanie said that "we are always thinking about freedom of expression here and do not want to see just a single, monocultural – a mono-representation of views on British TV. When you compare what you get in the UK with what you see in America, which is unregulated, it is very, very different".
Similarly, in her Sky News interview, she remarked that "it’s very important that we uphold freedom of expression. And that’s the freedom of the broadcaster to broadcast and to express, if you like, their creativity in their journalistic skill in multiple different ways. But it’s also the freedom of the viewer to receive a range of different formats and opinions".
Subtextual it may be, but lurking behind these pronouncements there seems to be the highly questionable assumption that the public service broadcasters are beaming at their viewers a particular view of the world. And, in the current 'culture war’ climate, one strongly suspects that the ‘view’ that Ofcom has in its sights is that of the dread ‘metropolitan liberal elite’.
It’s almost as if the real problems are seen as lying with the allegedly out-of-touch public service broadcasters, and particularly the BBC (which Ofcom now regulates), while GB News has brought a welcome blast of fresh air to a stale and staid broadcasting environment.
Dame Melanie’s evocation of the variety of representations which are broadcast in the US is a worrying reminder that Fox News was launched there on the back of the canard that it was going to be ‘fair and balanced’ by providing an alternative to the ‘liberal bias’ of the existing news networks. But the truth of the matter is that the latter appear to display such a bias only when viewed from a vertiginously conservative perspective, whereas Fox and the various other populist channels are about as unfair and unbalanced politically and ideologically as it is possible to imagine.
Nonetheless, the Foxification of news and current affairs on British television could well be the result of Ofcom’s apparent rewriting of the impartiality regulations in its Broadcasting Code. Unless, that is, this process can be halted and then thrown into reverse.
Julian Petley is a Honorary Professor of Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University London
Revealed: Met Police ‘Exit Data’ Shows Just How Bad it is to Work there for Some Staff
Black and ethnic minority Metropolitan Police employees are four times more likely to quit due to bullying and harassment than their white colleagues, according to internal data obtained by Byline Times.
The figures, from March 2023, also show employees of colour are five times more likely to resign due to discrimination compared to white colleagues, and that females were three times more likely to resign due to bullying, harassment and discrimination than men.
One-fifth of all female leavers cited bullying and harassment as the reason for quitting, compared to 9% of men.
The findings come after Byline Times reported last month that Amina Ahmed, a senior female Asian Met employee, quit her job citing an “environment [of] discrimination, bullying and harassment”, one week after the National Black Police Association (NBPA) called for a boycott of the Met by people from ethnic minority backgrounds.
NBPA president, Andy George, said that the data on resignations "comes as no shock to our members" as their “lived experiences of working in the Met is one of hostility from colleagues and a lack of support from managers".
George believes that Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley "has tried to engage in a PR exercise" to highlight reforms being made, but "this data shows that things are not as they appear".
“The Met has also taken no action to reduce the disproportionality in the misconduct system despite Baroness Casey highlighting that black officers were 81% more likely to be disciplined," he added.
“The Met must take a step back, confront the reality of racism in the force, and bring about meaningful and impactful changes rather than engaging in a PR campaign which dismisses the experiences of black, Asian and minority ethnic officers and staff”.
Miss Ahmed told Byline Times that black, ethnic minority and female Met employees were leaving “in their droves” due to the “toxic” environment.
The Met responded by saying it was undertaking “extensive work” to “address valid concerns about disproportionality and to provide officers and staff from all backgrounds with the confidence that they will be supported to succeed and progress in their careers”.
The Met’s so-called ‘exit data’, generated during interviews with those leaving in the year ending March 2023 – the same month that Baroness Casey’s report found the force was "systematically misogynist and racist" – revealed that 13% of all leavers had reported having “experienced or witnessed bullying or harassment” in the previous 12 months. The figure rose to 27% across their career in the Met.
It suggests disproportionately high levels of staff who are leaving the Met come from black or ethnic minority backgrounds (26% compared to the 19% of the workforce who are from those communities), or are female (42% compared to the 37% of workforce who are women).
Forty per cent of black and ethnic minority leavers said they had experienced or witnessed bullying or harassment in the past 12 months, rising to 46% across their time on the force. That compares to 11% of white staff.
Almost half (49%) of female leavers said they had experienced or witnessed bullying or harassment during their employment, compared to 19% of men, with 32% having experienced it in the past year, compared to 11% of men.
The Met’s publicly available HR workforce data, published in November 2023, shows that there are no chief superintendents or commanders who are female and from an ethnic minority background. Only 7% of all chief superintendents and commanders are from ethnic minority backgrounds, despite these individuals making up 46% of London’s population.
Despite an uplift in the overall number of police officers, sergeants and inspectors between December 2022 to November 2023, the percentage drawn from ethnic minority backgrounds has remained stagnant, with the biggest uplift in sergeants being those who are white.
The percentage of detective inspectors from ethnic minority backgrounds fell by 7% (from 67 to 62) between December 2022 and November 2023. Only 6% of superintendents are from ethnic minority backgrounds, numbering six compared to 104 who are white.
‘Starmer Cosied Up to the Murdoch Press in the Same Week It Faced New Allegations of Criminality – Why?’
What is the word for a politician who will do anything to get hold of power?
The question arises thanks to the front page of Friday's Sun newspaper, on which, beneath a banner reading "Labour leader at Sun HQ", we were told that "Keir joins revolt over 3 Lions shirt – he blasts woke flag and high price".
There are only two possibilities here. Either the Leader of the Labour Party sincerely believes that the design of the England football shirt is a matter that should properly engage the attention of a leader of the Opposition. Or – surely much more likely – he just doesn’t care what he says so long as it gets him nice coverage in the Sun, in which case he provides an answer to the question above.
It is actually worse than that, because this is only the latest evidence that Starmer is selling his soul to Murdoch.
He has already attended the media baron's summer party, paying personal homage to the old man and drinking his champagne. And now he is happy to visit the Sun’s offices and play rent-a-quote in support of a vacuous anti-woke jibe.
In terms of displaying lack of principle, this obviously does not compete with refusing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and failing to acknowledge the economic disaster that is Brexit, but it is amoral in its own way.
For the Murdoch press is not only responsible, over decades, for demeaning everything that could be described as decent about Britain and for wrecking the lives of countless innocent people – it is also responsible for wholesale, proven law-breaking.
And remarkably, Starmer’s visit to ‘Sun HQ’ took place just a day after we were presented with a new and shocking picture of the scale of that criminality – some of it well established as fact, some in the form of fresh and very detailed accusations.
It comes in a series of monster documents revealed in court, some of which can be accessed here.
These latest legal claims allege that law-breaking at the Murdoch tabloids has been even more widespread and systematic, has persisted for much longer and has implicated even more staff and senior executives than previously acknowledged.
The allegations extend far beyond phone-hacking and unlawful information gathering to include, for example, perjury and the deliberate destruction of evidence of criminality – matters which, you might think, would be of concern to a former Director of Public Prosecutions such as Starmer.
And though – yes, this needs to be placed on record – the company continues to deny a good deal of it, the Labour leadership should ask itself why the company systematically chooses to avoid confronting the charges in open court and instead pays off the claimants, thus far at a cost of £1.2 billion.
Quite a few of Labour's new chums are named in the documents.
There is an awful lot, for example, about Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s longstanding CEO in the UK and a former Editor of the Sun. She knew more and earlier about criminal activities than previously admitted, the documents allege, and they suggest directly that she participated in the cover-up. Again, she has denied these things and was cleared of similar criminal charges back in 2014, but the new claims draw on a wealth of evidence not available back then, including evidence relating to the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone.
The name of the Sun’s current Editor, Victoria Newton, also keeps turning up in the court documents in very dark contexts. How, for example, will she account for the email she sent Brooks in 2006 saying "just blagged the bill from the Dorchester now – 11 grand – v expensive?"
And there is veteran Sun reporter Nick Parker who, phone records show, phoned a specialist blagger of medical records 1,763 times between 2005 and 2010 – more than once every working day.
The catalogue of names and worse-than-doubtful alleged behaviour is very long – and the allegations relate to events up to 2011, including during the Leveson Inquiry into the press, when Murdoch witnesses swore blind they had never done anything dodgy.
Ancient history, people will say. Hardly.
These are people Keir Starmer is associating himself with right now. And remember that Murdoch is also still the owner of Fox, a channel that encouraged an insurrection in the US in 2020.
People will also say there is nothing new in it all, because Tony Blair sucked up to Murdoch before the 1997 election and Gordon Brown was pally with Brooks before 2010. Well, we now know that Murdoch people hacked Labour phones behind those leaders’ backs – shouldn’t Starmer and his people see that as a warning?
And, of course, people will also say that you need to do unpleasant things to win power, which brings us back to the question we started with. Surely there is a line you don’t cross? And, surely, given all we know about his methods, Murdoch must be on the far side of that line.
Councils Could be Paying £530 Million a Year to House Vulnerable Children in Unsafe Homes
Local authorities could be paying more than £530 million a year to place vulnerable children in unsafe homes, including those that have failed to stop child sexual exploitation.
A Byline Times investigation found that a quarter of the UK’s worst children’s homes run by companies are now owned by private equity or serial investors, including the Qatari Government. They include homes found with “blood and faeces” smeared on the walls and those that have illegally used restraints.
Former Children's Commissioner Anne Longfield branded the figure "extraordinary" and told Byline Times that the system in place to care for the UK's most vulnerable children is “completely dysfunctional" and "broken".
Councils have allowed problematic homes to continue operating by handing over taxpayers’ money.
Secure homes for vulnerable children have historically been run by local councils, but an increase in demand – as well as funding cuts – means that local authorities increasingly rely on private companies.
The number of privately-owned homes has increased by 21% since 2021.
According to Ofsted, 85% of facilities are now run by profit-making companies. Almost half are run by chains, each with 10 or more separate children’s homes, and many are owned by private equity firms – including eight of the UK’s 10 biggest.
Ofsted told Byline Times that, under current legislation, it has "no powers in relation to large providers" and can only report on "individual homes, rather than larger children's home groups or owners".
Analysis by Byline Times of more than 3,000 individual Ofsted reports reveals that 588, or 19.6%, were branded as “inadequate” or “requires improvement” at their last full inspection.
Of these, 109 were run by private equity firms or serial investors.
A media report on children's homes last July suggested that providers are paid at least £200,000 a year for each youngster. Based on the national total of 13,528 children’s home places, this newspaper calculated that the average taxpayer cost for funding 2,651 failing homes is around £530 million a year – or £1.4 million daily. More than £1.1 million of that estimated daily cost would be paid to private providers.
While noting that the figures were alarming, Longfield told Byline Times that they are likely to be even higher because the £200,000 per child figure has increased, and could be “driving councils to bankruptcy, or adding to a lot of financial pressures they’re under”.
Another concern, Longfield added, was that private equity-owned chains are not often local so children are “sent far away from their support networks”.
“Some children have said to us in the past 'we actually don't know where we are on a map'," Longfield said. "And 'we're so used to being moved, we don't even unpack our bags'.
“We’re letting these investment companies get away with providing really poor quality responses to really vulnerable children while they make an eye-watering amount of money. “It’s just a completely dysfunctional, broken approach to providing specialist care for our most vulnerable children.”
The Ofsted reports on failing homes paint a disturbing picture, and tracing the ownership of the homes is complex, with huge chains of shell companies existing between the companies running them and their owners, with some subsidiaries based in tax havens such as Jersey and others mentioned in the Paradise Papers.
One of the chains analysed – the Senad Group – was owned by the Qatar Investment Authority, the global investment arm of the Gulf autocracy’s Government.
Hundreds of children’s homes have been shuttered in the past five years – many after facing enforcement action or receiving scathing Ofsted inspections.
At one private-equity owned home, inspectors found “blood and faeces smeared in the bedroom and the en-suite bathroom”, broken toilets and one room that “smelled strongly of urine”, while a lack of proper safeguarding from staff led to an increase in children “going missing, allegations of inappropriate sexualised behaviours and heightened behaviours which necessitate restraint”. Despite the findings, most of the homes remained open.
Children were “physically assaulted and threatened” by other children without staff support and were repeatedly denied food and “left hungry” by staff, another report noted.
At another home, Ofsted identified that staff , including duty managers, had subjected children to “the inappropriate use of physical restraint and single separation” – the term for isolating and locking children in rooms – when the “legal criteria” for doing so had not been met.
Inspectors at an ‘inadequate’ home in Warrington previously found that its residents were being sexually exploited by men in the local community but nothing was done by staff to support them.
A Department for Education spokesperson told Byline Times that “we recognise some of the concerns associated with profiteering, particularly with regard to large providers with complex, and sometimes opaque, ownership structures”.
The spokesperson added the department is “working with Ofsted and the sector” to establish a new oversight regime that would increase transparency on “ownership, debt structures and profit making across both independent fostering agencies and residential children’s homes”.
"Our focus remains on ensuring our most vulnerable children are receiving the excellent care and education that they deserve,” they added.
‘An Assault on Democracy’: Rishi Sunak Backs Bill to Overturn Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ Extension
Rishi Sunak is backing a bill that would overturn the expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone, in a move which sources close to the city’s mayor described as an “unprecedented assault on democracy and devolution.”
Powers over transport and air quality are currently devolved to the Mayor.
Londoners will also soon be handed the opportunity to have their own voice heard on the issue when they vote in May's London mayoral elections.
Sadiq Khan's Conservative candidate Susan Hall has made scrapping the zone's extension her central pledge, but is currently 24 points behind him, according to a Savanta poll published on Friday.
However, under the new backbench bill, which is being brought to Parliament today by the Kent-based Conservative MP Gareth Johnson, the Government would be handed the ability to unilaterally scrap the extension of the zone anyway.
The Transport Secretary Mark Harper said in a statement that the Government was "happy to support" Johnson's Bill.
“The government has been clear the Mayor of London’s decision to expand ULEZ charging area to the London borders, in breach of his own manifesto commitment, is a tax on the poorest motorists, which his own impact assessment states, in terms of air pollution, will only have a moderate impact on NOx and minor impact on particulates", Harper said.
A spokesperson for the Prime Minister added that the bill would allow "communities to have their say".
A source close to Khan hit out at the bid to overturn the zone's extension.
“This unprecedented assault on democracy and devolution is a desperate distraction by a Government in its death throes which time and again has shown its contempt for Londoners and their rights,” the source said.
“Londoners will see through this pathetic attempt to play politics with the capital.”
Downing Street had previously ruled out seeking to overturn Sadiq Khan’s decision to extend the city’s air quality zone to Outer London.
A spokesman for the Prime Minister said last month that "road user charging is a matter for the Mayor of London and for him to justify his decision to residents and businesses."
The zone, in which owners of higher-emission vehicles are compelled to pay a daily charge if they drive inside London’s boundaries, has proven controversial with some Londoners.
Labour leader Keir Starmer has also previously criticised it, telling Khan last summer that he should “reflect” on the policy. A spokesman for Starmer told Byline Times that the Labour leader's view had not changed since the scheme was brought in.
However, City Hall say the scheme has been a success, with a spokesman saying that 95% of vehicles on London’s roads were now compliant with the newly expanded zone, which was “helping clean up London’s air and protect Londoners’ health.”
While the Government's apparent support for Johnson's bill will allow it time in Parliament, it is unclear whether it will be given sufficient time to pass into law before the next general election.
Sunak's spokesperson said plans for the bill's passage would be set out by the Leader of the House in the coming weeks.
It comes as Conservative MPs also call on the Prime Minister to remove the Mayor’s powers over policing.
Asked this week about the push to reduce the Mayor’s powers, Khan told this paper that “you can tell there's a general election and a mayoral election around the corner because of these silly gimmicks and games from the Tories.
“They should get their own house in order before they start lecturing us about taking powers away.”
A spokesman for the Prime Minister did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
International War Criminals are Safe from Arrest in UK – But a Leading Lawyer Plans to Change That
A British human rights lawyer has warned international war criminals are free to visit the UK without fear of arrest as she announced plans to close the loophole.
Helena Kennedy KC, a genocide expert and Labour peer, said British authorities are powerless to arrest or prosecute visitors suspected of crimes which “outrage our common humanity”.
Anyone suspected of genocide, war crimes or torture is subject to “universal jurisdiction” under international law – meaning they can be arrested in any country which has agreed to the principle, regardless of where they are suspected of having committed those atrocities.
Domestic law limits that to people who either have British citizenship or reside here, which “really narrows it down,” Kennedy told Byline Times in an exclusive interview.
On 22 March, Kennedy will reintroduce her Genocide (Prevention and Response) Bill to the House of Lords, which aims to widen the scope of that law. “[Currently], if a general who's been involved in war crimes in Ukraine came into Heathrow Airport, we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it," she explained, noting the UK has only prosecuted three people via universal jurisdiction in the last 20 years. “You have to change that and make [the legislation] much wider. You have to say: if you've come through Britain you’ll be arrested.”
Kennedy argues it would be an “easy change” and would help deliver justice to victims across the world. “It would get you people who have run those Uyghur camps [in China]. They might come here because they want their children to go to university or they might come for a graduation, we’d be able to arrest them," she said.
Changing the law would keep the UK in step with the US which changed its rules last year under the Justice for Victims of War Crimes Act.
Kennedy’s bill also calls for the Mass Atrocity Prevention Hub - a unit in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) – to be expanded. The unit, which was established in September 2022, monitors and tracks perpetrators of serious crimes across the world, but, according to documents published in January 2023, has just three full-time staff.
The FCDO declined to provide up-to-date staff numbers or detail what funding it received. Expanding the unit, Kennedy will argue in her bill reading, would enable the UK to keep track of developments abroad and see genocidal intent before people are targeted.
Those signs, she argues, are very recognisable, and can be traced back to how the Nazis treated democratic institutions, and victims of the Holocaust, before the genocide started.
“They go after the judges, they go after the lawyers, they go after the media. Jewish people couldn't be professionals, they weren't allowed to hold down most jobs. It started with [the Nazis] stripping people of their professional qualifications," Kennedy explained.
By working alongside the War Crimes Unit inside the police, the unit could monitor developments abroad and see if someone suspected of carrying out genocide was on the way to the UK, or if a people were threatened with genocide.
Kennedy argues a better-resourced team could have seen the first signs of genocidal intent in China with the treatment of the Uyghurs, and acted.
“I think that we would have been able to say, some years back: something is going on here. They’ve started throwing folk in jail, they’ve started banning men from having beards.”
In 2022, the UK Government described the human rights abuses in Xinjiang, against the Muslim Uyghur people, as “absolutely horrific”.
At the time, estimates suggested up to one million Uyghur Muslims were being held in concentration camps in the region and subjected to “re-education programmes”.
The bill could also deliver justice to people whose cases have never been heard – such as women in the Congo who were subjected to mass-rape more than 20 years ago, and the scores of Yazidi women who were subjected to war crimes by ISIL.
“For example, Germany has prosecuted some of the [ISIL] perpetrators who have gone back to their country for genocide. We’ve not done that," Kennedy said.
She expects her Labour party, currently leading the polls by a double-digit margin – to take note, as well as the Conservatives.
The FCDO pointed Byline Times to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for comment. At the time of publication, the MoJ had not responded.
Big Oil’s Multi-Billion-Dollar Influence Exposed as Cambridge University Cuts Funding Ties
As Cambridge University this week announced it has temporarily stopped taking donations from fossil fuel companies following years of pressure, Byline Times can reveal the multi-billion-dollar influence big oil has on politics.
Academics from the university, together with others from around the world, met at Jesus College earlier this month and proposed forming an international unit to "monitor the political activities of firms and trade associations in the fossil fuel sector" amid mounting evidence of a disinformation campaign. At the workshop, it was revealed big oil had spent at least $3.3 billion trying to influence the narrative around climate change and fossil fuels over a 10-year period.
The Intellectual Forum meeting came as the university, on 18 March, halted donations from big oil due to concerns about how it may impact the institution's high research reputation and as part of its “commitment to address climate change through a transition to a zero carbon world.” It also follows a report last year by former UN climate change envoy Nigel Topping that recommended it and warned of the “high reputational risk” the university's relationship with big oil presented. The report stated that the funding amounted to £3.3 million per annum over the last six years.
While welcoming the university's funding and monitoring unit decisions, Kevin Anderson, Professor of energy and climate change at Manchester University, said he hoped it would herald a complete rethink.
“Perhaps after two decades of mitigation denial the academic and wider expert community will find the courage to call out the Emperor is naked," he told Byline Times.
Benjamin Franta, a senior research fellow on sustainability at Oxford University, added: “It’s long past time for the fossil fuel industry’s influence over academic research to be scrutinised. We need integrity in academic research to develop climate solutions we are all depending on.”
The workshop heard that researchers from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and a host of other blue-chip international universities, had found that the fossil fuel sector is engaged in major attempts to muddy the waters around climate science and undermine a transition to clean technology. It is doing this, academics argued, in a variety of different ways including funding research at respected educational establishments, through think tanks and direct political lobbying.
Christian Downie, Associate Professor at Australian National University, said that many of the “firms and industry groups that provide funding to universities do so to shape policy and public opinion in ways that are consistent with their commercial interests and not the science on climate change". He added: “We also know that some of these organisations spend tens of millions of dollars (USD) each year funding lobbying and other activities designed to delay and block action on climate policy."
The professor told the workshop that trade associations in the US had spent $3.4b between 2008 and 2018 on political activities centred on the climate crisis. This included $2.16b on advertising and promotion, $729 million on lobbying and more on grants and direct political contributions, he said, before noting, “This is just the tip of the iceberg”.
“We don’t really know how much they spend…(but we do know) that funding can produce biased research, strategy and findings," he said.
Jeremy Baumberg, a professor at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College, argued that the issue of fossil fuel funding was “really complicated” and raised “ethical, moral and personal challenges".
Cambridge, like other universities, has been under continued pressure from students, staff members, and climate activists, to sever ties with the fossil fuel industry but administrators have been reluctant.
Student newspaper Varsity revealed in February 2023 that chemistry undergraduates were still being handed BP-branded lab coats even though the annual BP Sustainability Lecture had been dropped. A few months earlier, the university announced that the BP Institute on the outskirts of the city would be renamed the Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows. Students occupied the buildings in May 2022.
At the time, Professor Andy Neely, then a senior administrator, or Pro Vice Chancellor, at Cambridge, insisted that while energy transition was urgent “it is not possible at the pace and scale required without the current (oil) industry’s involvement and willingness to transition".
The row over misinformation by oil companies has been rumbling on for decades with a report in 2015, The Climate Deception Dossiers from the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists, arguing that there was abundant evidence that corporate leaders knew their products were harmful as far back as 1981, but were still actively deceiving the public and denying this harm.
Jason Scott-Warren, a Cambridge professor of early modern literature and a leading voice in the university’s climate debate, said Cambridge's decision to stop taking funding should just be the starting point: “A growing understanding of the threat to academic integrity was a key factor in Cambridge’s decision to impose a temporary moratorium on new funded collaborations. We now need this to be followed up with a permanent ban on funds from obstructive forces.”
A ‘Damning Indictment’: Eight Million Voters May Be Disenfranchised in General Election, MPs Find
A staggering eight million people could be disenfranchised and prevented from voting at this year’s crucial general election in a "damning indictment" of the UK's democracy, a new parliamentary report has found.
The House of Commons’ Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee has found that the current electoral registration system is inefficient and ineffective, and the new requirement of having to show mandatory voter photo ID at the ballot box will make matters worse.
Labour MP Clive Betts, the committee's chair, said: “Elections are the cornerstone of our democracy and yet we are burdened by a system which is both ineffective and inefficient, where millions of people are disenfranchised because they are incorrectly registered or not on the electoral register.
“In the year of a general election, this is a damning indictment of the UK’s electoral registration arrangements and a threat to the rights of British voters.
“Our voter registration system is creaking. Recent changes such as voter ID have been tacked onto a Victorian era system which is failing voters, political parties, and election officials.
“We need a major review of our election arrangements to boost voter registration and to ensure our elections are seen as credible and legitimate. It is a major and fundamental defect in our democratic system that many millions of UK citizens face being unable to make their voice heard at election time.”
The report singles out young people, renters, ethnic minorities, and those in lower socio-economic groups as significantly less likely to be registered to vote.
The committee was also told that some disabled people do not feel supported to register to vote, and that they particularly struggle with the lack of variety in communication channels.
The report calls for a widening of acceptable forms of voter ID – including travel passes outside London, emergency services passes, and police warrant cards.
The Government did not agree to extending the list of acceptable photo voter ID passes, but research has shown that, at last year’s local elections in May, some 740,000 people – about 4% of the voters – were turned away because they did not have adequate ID.
As reported by Byline Times previously, the Government has been focusing on changing the law to allow more British citizens living abroad to vote. The move would enable an approximately 3.4 million more expatriates living overseas to participate in the next election – though secondary legislation to do this has yet to be passed by Parliament and no guidance has so far been issued.
The committee states that it is concerned about how the change would be "fully implemented by the next election" and that the "remaining provisions are more complex to introduce than voter ID, exacerbating the pressures of election time because of applications for voter authority certificates, overseas applications, and the reapplication of postal votes".
“This increases the risk of something major going wrong at a national election, including large numbers of people being turned away or voters not put on the registers in time to vote which would impact the current high level of confidence in the electoral system,” it adds.
The committee also wants to see people be encouraged to register to vote, through other bodies signposting individuals as to how they can get their names on the electoral register. It suggests that bodies such as the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue and Customs, the Driver Vehicle and Licensing Agency, and HM Passport Office could do this.
The report recommends that registering to vote also be signposted when national insurance numbers are issued to citizens, when they turn 16, as a way of ensuring that more young people are placed on the electoral register. It cites Canada, which has a similar electoral system to the UK as a good example – there provincial authorities have mandatory lessons in schools helping pupils to register to vote.
A spokesperson for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said: “We are committed to ensuring everyone can have their say in our democracy.
“Individual electoral registration has stopped fraud and ensured a more accurate register. The 2019 General Election was contested on the largest ever electoral register.
“As recommended by the independent Electoral Commission, we have introduced identification for voting in person across Great Britain, mirroring long-standing arrangements in Northern Ireland. 99.75% of English voters in the polling station cast their vote successfully at local elections in May last year and councils will provide free identification certificates to anyone who asks.”
The Government has been accused of watering-down the independence of the Electoral Commission by drawing up a "strategy and policy statement" for its work.
Since 2019, there have been just four proven cases of voter fraud, resulting in one conviction and three cautions, as shown by Electoral Commission figures.
Keir Starmer To Hand ‘New Powers’ to Mayors and Regions as He Extends Olive Branch to Sadiq Khan
The Labour party is set to unveil more details of its plans to devolve powers away from Westminster, Byline Times understands.
Some details of the proposals are expected to be outlined in a speech by the party's Deputy Leader Angela Rayner later this week.
The intervention follows notable tensions between the Labour leader and England's two most high-profile elected Mayors, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.
Khan and Starmer clashed last summer over the London mayor's plans to implement a now-enacted low emission zone in outer London, while Burnham has criticised Starmer's decision to U-turn on his plans for green investment and House of Lords reform.
Starmer's appearance earlier this week alongside Khan for the launch of the London Mayor’s re-election campaign marked an apparent attempt to heal divisions after a period of real tensions between the two politicians.
The Labour leader’s very public criticism of Khan’s flagship decision to bring in an Ultra Low Emission Zone in Outer London last summer was met with significant anger by some of those around the Mayor.
At the time, sources close to Khan expressed frustration at Starmer’s decision to attack a policy which by that point was just weeks away from being rolled out. They also warned that Starmer’s intervention risked giving oxygen to the Conservative party’s anti-ULEZ campaign in the then upcoming Uxbridge by-election.
Their warning appeared to pan out, with the Conservatives pulling off a surprise win in Uxbridge and Rishi Sunak using the result as justification to ditch much of his own Government’s green agenda. Half a year on and Khan believes his original policy has been vindicated.
“When we brought in ULEZ in central London there were people who were very hostile and anti and the truth is that the sky didn’t fall in” Khan told this paper.
“And the great news is that 19 out of 20 cars seen driving into [the new zone] now on an average day are compliant [with ULEZ]… and this has transformed the air in our city.”
Repairing Relations
The two men’s appearance at a London community centre on Monday appeared to be attempt to move on from the row.
It was particularly notable that in his speech, Starmer praised his “friend" Khan's agenda on cleaning up London’s air, saying that “I say to people who challenge me on cleaner air, I’ve got two kids. They’re 15 and 13. I wouldn’t give them dirty water to drink and I wouldn’t want them to breathe in dirty air.”
However, he failed to specifically endorse the ULEZ policy. A spokesman for Starmer later told this paper that the Labour leaders’s view on the policy “hasn't changed”.
A source close to Khan admitted that relations between City Hall and the Labour leader's office had been strained by the ULEZ row.
Other policy differences do still remain between Khan and Starmer.
An example of these came on Monday when Starmer was asked about Khan’s proposals to implement a form of rent controls in London. The Labour leader poured cold water on the idea, saying that “it’s not our policy at the moment.”
However, despite these ongoing differences, Khan’s team retain hope that a Starmer Government could prove pivotal for London.
Over the past eight years Khan has been a regular target of successive Conservative Governments, who have tightly held the purse strings on new London infrastructure projects. Khan's recent treatment by former Conservative Chairman Lee Anderson, who was accused of making a series of Islamophobic comments about the London mayor, was seen as emblematic of this.
City Hall hope that a relations with central government would be transformed if Starmer enters Downing Street.
In particular Khan's campaign pledge to build tens of thousands of new council homes is seen as lining up with the party's own national proposals to increase housebuilding.
Yet as well as being potentially more amenable to investing in London, Khan is also pinning his hopes on an incoming Labour Prime Minister handing over big new powers to the Mayor.
“I'm really optimistic about the next Labour government devolving more powers and resources to the cities and regions,” Khan told this paper.
“The key things we’re talking about are in relation to planning, skills and the economy.”
Khan pointed to proposals by the London Finance Commission to give the Mayor new powers to raise infrastructure funding as the sort of proposals he would be lobbying Starmer to adopt in office.
“We've done the heavy lifting on this so we're hoping in the first 100 days that you'll see the fruits of [those proposals].”
A spokesman for Starmer told this paper that the Labour leader accepted “the need for more powers for regional mayors” on areas including skills and welfare.
Devolution 2.0?
Labour proposals to devolve additional powers to the Mayor were set out in a report for the party by Gordon Brown two years ago, but little has been confirmed since.
However, with a general election looming later this year, Labour sources suggested that some details of these new devolution proposals would be set out by the party’s deputy leader Angela Rayner during a speech later this week.
Labour's devolution proposals are unlikely to be as impactful as anything pursued by Tony Blair during his first term as Prime Minister, however. The big wave of devolution rolled out by the then Labour Prime Minister was transformative, creating devolved government in both Scotland and Wales, as well as rolling out regional mayors and authorities across England.
Little proposed so far by Starmer appears to match that level of ambition, with previous plans for a new “senate of the regions” to replace the House of Lords, also reportedly being reconsidered by Starmer’s team.
However, with Labour dampening down expectations of big new spending proposals, the devolution agenda poses an opportunity for an incoming Starmer government to make real differences to the political landscape of the UK, at relatively little expense.
It could also help to contrast with the failure of the Government's own promise to "level up" the country. A Parliamentary report last week found that 90% of projects promised by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson remained years away from completion.
A spokesman for Starmer told journalists on Wednesday that the party would ditch the phrase "levelling up" if they form the next Government.
Reform Parliamentary Candidate Who Shared Racist Content Resigns After Questions by Byline Times
Reform UK recently gained its first MP, former Conservative Deputy Chair Lee Anderson, who defected to the party after claiming that London Mayor Sadiq Khan had handed the city to "Islamists".
Byline Times can reveal that several Reform prospective parliamentary candidates (PPC) have shared content on their social media accounts that is racialised, denies the existence of climate change, or promotes conspiracy theories.
While investigating the party, Reform confirmed to Byline Times that North Bedfordshire PPC Nick Davies had resigned as a candidate "after we spoke to him about the content of his social media".
On 4 March, Davies shared a post which featured the text “evil doesn’t die. It reinvents itself” over pictures of Sadiq Khan and Adolf Hitler. Davies also shared posts in September and October calling immigrants an “invasion” and a “silent army housed in hotels”.
In a statement to this newspaper, the party said: "Reform UK makes a distinction between malice and eccentricity in its activists and its supporters. Malice we take very seriously, harmless opinion is not a problem in a party that believes wholeheartedly in freedom of speech, nor should it be in the wider society."
The recent tweets of Andrew Husband, the Reform PPC for North Durham, on X (formerly Twitter) include an account claiming that “mRNA shots are the most dangerous product ever forced upon the public” and former Conservative (now independent) MP Andrew Bridgen's claim that the COVID vaccine will be considered “the greatest crime against humanity”.
He has also retweeted a video clip of US President Joe Biden talking about building regulations in relation to wildfire resilience and claimed that he had been referencing the roofs of houses that survived wildfires as evidence of the use of “direct energy weapons” to cause wildfires in Texas and Brazil.
The ideology of the 'freedom movement’, the post-lockdown outgrowth of the anti-lockdown movement that posits that reductions in living standards are orchestrated by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as part of a 'Great Reset’, also appeared in material shared by several Reform candidates.
The WEF is the annual gathering of politicians and the corporate executive class at Davos, which became the subject of conspiracy theories during the pandemic.
Maggie Moriondo, the Reform PPC for Bedford, retweeted a post from Wide Awake Media, a conspiracy platform, which claimed that “globalists are using the man-made climate change" lie as a pretext to deliberately collapse the food supply, so people will have no choice but to eat insects and lab-grown "meat".
She also retweeted a post from the same account claiming that broadcaster Neil Oliver “eloquently summarises the global pushback against globalist tyranny”, in relation to a speech he made in which he claimed that there is a “coordinated global conspiracy seeking domination of the world by a handful of ideologues, hellbent on a return to feudalism”.
Dave Holland, the Reform PPC for Mid-Bedfordshire, wrote on his blog that Bill Gates and the WEF “want to reduce the population via the medium of vaccines”. The blog described the movement towards a dystopian future of lockdowns, spiralling inequality and restrictions on civil liberties, and attributed the driving force behind these outcomes to a coordinated effort between governments and corporations to create a “New World Order” overseen by the WEF.
The Reform Party's manifesto rejects "the influence of the World Economic Forum” and contains a pledge to hold a public enquiry into vaccine harms and excess deaths.
Several Reform PPCs were previously Conservative Party councillors or PPCs.
Dr Annie Kelly, a postdoctoral researcher on conspiracy theories and correspondent for the podcast QAnon Anonymous, told Byline Times that, although the Tory Party "has been quite good at message discipline and keeping this stuff under wraps for the time being... I can see a weakened Conservative Party, not in power, being much more malleable to forces like Reform.”
Dr Kelly said that conspiracy theories of the kind promoted by some Reform PPCs often take “legitimate issues” and “point people past who is responsible towards much more shadowy nefarious enemies who can never be defeated”.
She said that the ideology of the 'freedom movement’ has broadened out beyond COVID denial into a “general denialism”.
Another theme across the posts of several Reform PPCs was the denial of the existence of climate change.
Several Reform PPCs have regularly referred to “the climate hoax” and shared content denying a link between human industrial activity and carbon emissions, as well as attacking American climatologist Michael Mann and the 'hockey stick’ graph, which shows a rapid increase in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.
On 6 March, Maggie Moriondo posted on X that “we are being fed BS [bullshit] on the climate hoax. We will be force fed a diet of man-made meat whilst elites enjoy the real thing" and reposted a tweet attacking the hockey stick graph as 'junk science'".
Reform PPC for Stockton North, John McDermottroe, shared posts on his Facebook page referring to the “climate hoax” and calling people who believe in climate change as being part of “a cult”. He also wrote a post claiming that the Earth’s temperature began to rise before increases in CO2, which he argued debunks climate models.
Reform PPC for Derby, Tim Prosser, also shared videos denying climate science including by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
The Intercontinental Panel on Climate Change calls for a 48% reduction in emissions by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050, a target that some scientists such as the Climate Change Advisory Group, say is “too little too late”. The Reform Party denies that climate change can be averted by reducing emissions and argues that net zero is “damaging our livelihoods and economy”.
Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, told Byline Times that “the material on the Reform UK website is demonstrably false and it’s not just the result of incompetence, it’s disinformation, it’s deliberate misinformation about climate impacts”.
He added that since the Uxbridge by-election, “British media, particularly the Telegraph, Mail and Sun titles and to some extent The Times, have all started championing misinformation about climate policy".
"They largely haven’t gone down the route of promoting outright denial of the physics of climate change, but behind their claims is an implicit denial of the risks of climate change," he added. "You can only say that delaying net zero is a desirable option if you don’t accept the scientists’ assessment of the scale of the problem."
Ward said this has “allowed those with even more whacky views on climate to rear their heads again and start making ridiculous claims about the science”.