David Shipley

For much of the last year, it has seemed like the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has been battling to create a de facto Islamic blasphemy law in Britain. But today, they suffered a great defeat when the Court of Appeal rejected their bid to overturn the acquittal of Hamit Coskun, whose conviction for burning a Quran was overturned in October. For now, at least, there is no blasphemy law in England. It’s worth reflecting though on how strange and sinister the CPS’s actions have been, and what they have tried to do.

After Zia Yusuf’s announcement that Reform would create a ‘UK Deportation Command’ (UKDC), much of the media leapt to make comparisons with ICE in America. The Guardian described it as an ‘ICE-style deportation plan’, the Independent an ‘ICE-style UK border agency’, and even the Mail stated that ‘Reform is planning to create a British version of Trump’s ICE unit’. I spoke to Yusuf this morning, who was quick to dismiss these comparisons, telling me that ‘I have never wanted to create a British ICE’, and that ‘the reason why the media want to immediate call it a British ICE is that they want to take advantage of the very negative headlines around the excesses of ICE in America’.

A Transport for London (TfL) advert has been banned for ‘perpetuating a negative racial stereotype about black men’. The decision, issued today by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA), relates to an advert TfL from October last year. According to the ASA it: ‘Featured a video of a black teenage boy on a bus. The teenage boy, who was turned around in his seat, said to the passenger seated behind him, “Am I not good enough for you or something? Why you not chatting to me?”.’ The next shot was of a white teenage boy sitting on the bus with text overlaid which stated, “Would you know how to defuse incidents of hate crime, sexual offences and harassment?”. That text remained overlaid as the camera showed the left hand of a white teenage girl touching her right arm.

Labour’s new Representation of the People Bill, introduced to Parliament last week, has drawn attention because it will give around 1.6 million 16- and 17-year-olds the vote. But hidden within the bill is an innocuous term – ‘automatic registration’ – that will also usher in a far more significant and controversial change. Governments should be chosen by the people they will govern, not by those with minimal ties to our nation Under the government’s plans, instead of having to register to vote, all eligible voters will be automatically added to the electoral roll, which will mean significant changes to constituency boundaries.

There’s so much bad news about our prisons that it’s easy to become fatigued by it. Another failing jail, another prison awash with drugs, another inmate released in error. As a result, often it’s only the most extreme or shocking examples which hit the headlines. But there is one particular kind of prison news story which is guaranteed coverage: a female member of staff caught having an intimate relationship with a prisoner. In many cases they’ve had sex with the prisoner inside the jail, or even in a cell. The Wandsworth officer had sex with one prisoner inside his cell while being filmed on a contraband mobile The most high-profile recent example is, of course, Linda De Sousa Abreu.

Ever since Labour was elected, every time there has been another disaster in our jails, or another set of terrible data, it has been briefed that ‘this government inherited prisons in crisis’. To be fair to the government, the Tories did leave our jails broken, overcrowded and crumbling, but this line has also been a useful shield for Labour, distracting from their own record. In this they have been helped by how long it takes for official reports and statistics to be published. There was always going to be a lag before Labour’s prison strategy could be judged. Unfortunately for them, with today’s publication of a National Audit Office report on drugs and drones, we have learned that our prisons have become even worse since the general election.

This government knows that if it doesn’t turn the tide on migration it is destined for electoral oblivion. The Home Secretary has said that ‘illegal migration has been placing immense pressure on communities’, and that ‘asylum hotels…are blighting communities’. This is why the government is determined to close the asylum hotels. But its ‘solution’ is nothing of the sort. Instead, asylum seekers living in hotels in or near British towns are being moved to former military bases near British towns. It has not been normal, in recent English history, for quiet market towns to see such protests One such place is the Sussex market town of Crowborough.

Even as he resigned, Craig Guildford couldn’t do the decent thing. Perhaps that’s no surprise. We have learned in recent weeks that the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police has been habitually obfuscating over the circumstances under which Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were banned from Birmingham, and even misled parliament when he failed to disclose that the force’s intelligence report included an entirely invented football match. This week Guildford was entirely discredited in a report by Sir Andy Cooke, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, and has lost the confidence of the Home Secretary. Despite all this, Guildford was unapologetic, claiming that his resignation was due to ‘the political and media frenzy around myself and my position’.

Keir Starmer is, in many ways, a remarkable prime minister. He is remarkably uncharismatic and remarkably unable to discern the mood of the nation he governs. He is remarkable in his unpopularity, with the British public now even preferring Nicolas Maduro to Our Man From Islington. He is remarkable in his number of U-turns, digital ID being the latest. And Remarkable Starmer has even managed to unite the country with his ‘delighted’ decision to welcome Egyptian dissident, anti-white activist and recent British passport recipient Alaa Abd el-Fattah to our land. By a margin of two to one, the British public think that citizenship is a privilege which should be revocable by politicians in certain circumstances That’s what we learned from a poll by More in Common this week.

There’s a strange pattern in how the UK discusses policy, and once you notice it you realise it’s everywhere. What happens is that there’s a problem, often something which makes us less safe. The problem will be fundamentally a result of policy, and often something we’re ‘forced’ to endure because of laws we have created. No one feels able to step outside our existing legal or conceptual framework, and often they don’t even really feel able to name the problem. So they propose a weird solution which just creates more costs and burdens, often falling on law-abiding Brits. Then the entire debate will take place within this limited space, ignoring the real problem and real solutions.

It’s a difficult Monday for the Prime Minister. Shortly after Keir Starmer expressed his ‘delight’ that Egyptian dissident Alaa Abd el-Fattah had arrived in the UK, it emerged that the PM’s ‘top priority’ apparently hates Jews, white people and the English most of all, if his past tweet are anything to go by. As a result, the government is now facing demands from Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, and even senior Labour MPs to strip el-Fattah of the citizenship he was granted in 2022 while a prisoner in Egypt. How plausible is this? In fact, although such demands are very unusual in British politics, the deprivation of citizenship is a long-established ministerial power.

British civil servants have almost never faced real consequences for their failures. If Reform come to power, that might change. Nigel Farage’s party has announced yesterday that they will introduce a new criminal offence of ‘dishonestly determining an asylum claim’. They will use this law to prosecute civil servants who have knowingly put British women and girls in danger by granting asylum to foreign sex offenders. These prosecutions will be retrospective, targeting those who have already made such asylum grants. The new crime would carry a prison sentence of up to two years, and could also result in offenders’ pensions being forfeited.

Shabana Mahmood’s plans to reduce migration hit a setback yesterday. It emerged that around 2,500 foreign national prison officers who no longer qualified to remain in the UK will have their visas extended. The officers, most of whom are from West Africa, were going to have to leave their jobs because the new skilled worker scheme requires that people earn £41,700 a year, above the level which most early-career prison officers are paid. Just six weeks ago it seemed that the Home Secretary wouldn’t budge, but it seems that concerted lobbying by Justice Secretary David Lammy and prisons minister Lord Timpson, along with an intervention from the Prime Minister, has caused the rethink.

Perhaps because it’s the week before Christmas, the Migration Advisory Committee’s (MAC) latest annual report has attracted little attention. Many people can’t have read it, because it is full of incendiary details which demolish the case for mass migration. The MAC is ‘an advisory non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Home Office’. It is not a political body, and its board is comprised of sober, sensible academics, who have set out to model ‘net fiscal impact’ – the costs, or benefits to the taxpayer of different kinds of migration. It’s worth noting that they do not seek to model second- or third-order costs of migration, such as housing costs, crime or long-term suppression of wages and birth rates.