Andrew Gilligan

Andrew Gilligan is an award-winning journalist and former No.10 advisor

Meet the Green candidate who thinks Zionists killed 20 million Christians

From our UK edition

A Green Party council candidate in Bournemouth says “the Zionists killed 20 million Christians” and are “trying to control the world.” Feda Shahin, who is standing for the Central ward on Bournemouth town council, leads a group which caused significant national controversy by picketing the family home of the town’s then Tory MP, Tobias Ellwood, in February 2024. This

Why is this Green candidate sharing an anti-semitic post?

From our UK edition

A terror attack on a synagogue was “not anti-semitism” but was “revenge” for Israel “murdering people,” according to a video promoted by a Green Party council candidate. Sabine Mairey, a Green candidate for Clapham Town ward in Lambeth, south London, posted the video, by David Spevak, an American Jewish anti-Zionist, on her Facebook page last month. It’s still there

The hateful posts of yet another Green party candidate

From our UK edition

The extremism of some in the Green party is increasingly being compared to Labour in Jeremy Corbyn’s time. But there is a critical difference. Most of the haters in Corbyn Labour were ordinary activists. In the Greens, they are likely to become holders of public office with real power. Earlier this week, we brought you Ifhat

The trouble with the Green party’s Ifhat Shaheen

From our UK edition

The Green party’s embrace of extremists is gathering pace. Let me introduce you to Ifhat Shaheen (also known as Ifhat Shaheen-Smith or Ifhat Smith), who is likely to become a Green councillor in Hackney next month. Shaheen has been selected in Stoke Newington ward, possibly the wokest place in Britain. It already has one Green councillor, who’s

What we get wrong about extremism

From our UK edition

Last year I obtained a leaked copy of the new government’s ‘counter-extremism sprint’. It caused a huge political backlash – and was disowned by ministers within hours – for saying the UK’s approach to extremism should no longer be based on ‘ideologies of concern’, such as Islamism, but on a very wide range of ‘behaviours’,

What Hope not Hate doesn’t understand about liberal values

From our UK edition

Even by its own recent standards, the latest investigation from the anti-extremism group Hope not Hate was fabulously, joyously, Rizla Micron-thin. People with “a broad opposition to liberal orthodoxies,” Hope not Hate “can reveal,” meet in rooms in Westminster. It’s not quite clear what Hope not Hate sees as the actual problem here That’s it.

All the worst people like the ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ definition

From our UK edition

Not worried enough yet by the government’s new definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’? Here’s another red flag: the mild, nuanced, or downright supportive responses it’s received from some of the worst people in Britain. In the week or so since the definition was published, I’ve been tracking reactions across British Islam’s vast cosmos of professional offence-takers

This ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ definition is truly sinister

From our UK edition

The government’s new official definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ is 144 words long. But in a sign that even ministers now realise what a mess they have made, it is followed by a further tortuously pleading 1,400 words which ‘must be read together’ with it. You will be relieved to hear, according to this ‘accompanying text,’

The good and bad news about Labour’s leaked social cohesion strategy

From our UK edition

Some things in the government’s leaked social cohesion strategy will be deeply neuralgic to many. There is the creation of a “special representative on anti-Muslim hostility,” which will almost certainly hand an official bully pulpit to an activist such as Baroness Gohir, who has attacked media coverage of the grooming scandal as “disproportionate” and being

The real Alaa Abd el-Fattah scandal

From our UK edition

The real scandal of Alaa Abd el-Fattah is that it is nothing new, and that not enough has changed. For decades, in dozens and dozens of cases, the British state has legitimised, worked with, empowered or funded extremists and bigots; people with values deeply opposed to Western democracy; people who sometimes literally seek our destruction.

It’s time to admit that high-speed rail is a dead end

From our UK edition

For those who think there could never be a worse disaster than HS2, or hope that governments can learn from their mistakes, I have disappointing news. Later this month, ministers will unveil a future platinum medallist in the Fiasco Olympics: a project which even their own infrastructure watchdog calls ‘unachievable’. A new, high-speed line between

Miqdaad Versi and the troubling war on ‘Islamophobia’

From our UK edition

Readers of progressive newspapers have occasionally been invited to admire a man called Miqdaad Versi. He was the subject of a respectful 2018 profile in the Guardian for his ‘personal mission to confront…the Islamophobia of the British press’ one complaint at a time. Versi’s ‘spreadsheet of shame’ showed ‘how flagrantly British papers get their news

Why won’t TfL staff stop fare dodgers?

From our UK edition

In Robert Jenrick’s fare-dodging video, it felt a little unfair for the Tories’ checked-shirt crusader to include that shot of the Tube station assistant with his feet up. The guy was probably just on his break, and you don’t blame the infantry for the failings of the generals. But on a wider level, the mayor,

Define ‘Islamophobia’

From our UK edition

Sadiq Khan is an Islamophobe. Not just any old Islamophobe, and not just in the woollier parts of the web. According to a group part-funded by the EU called the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), the mayor of London, a practising Muslim, is one of the four ‘politicians and figures of note in the UK

City slacker

From our UK edition

According to people at City Hall, Sadiq Khan writes some of his own press releases. I can believe it: they’ve certainly become a lot more excitable since he took over. I like to imagine the Mayor of London, late at night, combing the thesaurus for fresh superlatives to bugle his ‘unprecedented programme of far-reaching improvements’

No Khan do

From our UK edition

Let’s try a thought experiment, shall we? If a senior adviser to my old boss, Boris Johnson, had celebrated John Smith’s heart attack, mocked Gordon Brown for talking about his dead son and referred to senior members of the Labour party as ‘scum’, how long do you think that person would have kept their job?

How the British bobby turned into Robocop

From our UK edition

To the casual glance it looks like a normal police car — same markings, same lights, same faces at the wheel. Only the two small yellow circles, one at each of the top corners of the windscreen, tell you that this is a mobile armoury. It will often be a BMW X5: a SUV’s suspension

Robocop returns

From our UK edition

To the casual glance it looks like a normal police car — same markings, same lights, same faces at the wheel. Only the two small yellow circles, one at each of the top corners of the windscreen, tell you that this is a mobile armoury. It will often be a BMW X5: a SUV’s suspension