Laurie Wastell

On Wednesday at Liverpool Crown Court, Mohammed Fahir Amaaz, one of the two brothers accused of the Manchester Airport attack last July, was found guilty of assaulting two female police officers, as well as a member of the public. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on a charge that Amaaz and his brother, Muhammad Amaad, assaulted armed police officer PC Zachary Marsden. Both defendants will now be retried on that charge. It has been a year since the viral incident at Manchester Airport. The question for many still is why Labour figures responded in the way they did – initially seeming to sympathise with the brothers rather than the police. In the outrage, the other side of the story was scarcely acknowledged It is worth reminding ourselves of the timeline here.

The British Empire may be gone, but there is one area where the UK has not lost its global ambitions: online censorship. The latest vehicle is the Online Safety Act (OSA), a behemoth internet regulation law whose vast provisions are steadily coming into force – and increasingly drawing the ire of the Trump administration as it starts to impact US tech firms.  Under the OSA, “Britain has the power to shut down any platform” that breaks its content regulation rules, boasts secretary of state for technology Peter Kyle. The latest stage of its implementation began last week with new mandatory age-verification measures for social media platforms.  The Act is already curtailing what can be read online in the UK.

When it comes to protests against immigration and asylum hotels, accusations of two-tier policing are never far away. This week the spotlight has fallen on Essex Police, and its handling of a demonstration last week by Epping residents against an asylum hotel in the town, following an alleged sexual assault by a recently arrived Ethiopian migrant believed to be housed there. Essex Police has today tried to set the record straight Essex Police has been forced to admit that they escorted activists from the group Stand up to Racism to the Bell Hotel, the site of the protest. In video footage, police can be seen walking along an Epping street flanking a column of protesters, with two officers clearly at the head of the column and escorting it.

‘We are facing a long, hot summer’, warned a report on social cohesion on Tuesday, ‘with a powder keg of tensions left largely unaddressed from last year that could easily ignite once again’. It only took two days for the first sign of this grim prediction coming true. This time, though, the expression of public fury at migration failures was not in ‘left-behind’ northern towns like Hull or Hartlepool – or even like last month in Ballymena, where tight-knit loyalist communities have a history of kicking off to defend their interests.

It is with some measure of irritation, I must confess, that I am drawn away from this balmy weekend to discuss the idiotic antics of a so-called musical act by the name of ‘Bob Vylan’. At Glastonbury on Saturday, the frontman of the English ‘punk duo’ led the crowd in a chant. First it was just ‘Free, free Palestine’; but then it became ‘Death, death to the IDF’. They also aired the implicitly genocidal pro-Palestine slogan: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ The whole ghoulish spectacle was broadcast live on the BBC (which has subsequently apologised).

Was the prosecution of Lucy Connolly in the public interest? That is the question now being asked of the embattled Attorney General, Richard Hermer, following my story in the Sunday Telegraph that Hermer approved the charge of stirring up racial hatred against the mother and childminder last summer, over a hastily deleted tweet on the night of the Southport attack. ‘Lord Hermer of Chagos’ has faced further questions over his political judgement and yet more calls for him to be sacked.

In 2021, after the barbaric Islamist murder of Sir David Amess MP, the response of Britain’s political class was as baffling as it was shameful: it decided to ramp up censorship of the internet. Somehow, MPs’ vital personal safety came to be equated with the nebulous concept of ‘safety’ online, along with the protection of ‘democracy’ from hurty words and unapproved opinions. The Online Safety Act (OSA) was born, handing vast new powers to Ofcom to ‘regulate’ what could be said online. If Washington is now looking to apply the thumbscrews to senior British officials pushing social media censorship, it has plenty to choose from Well, that was then, and this is now.

Sir Keir Starmer, remarkably, has launched an immigration crackdown. Britain risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’ after the Tory ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’, he said on Monday. A Home Office white paper has introduced several measures which will supposedly bring the sky-high numbers down. Most interestingly, the government will extend the required qualification period for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) – which grants migrants access to the welfare state and the ability to bring dependents – from five years residency in the UK to ten. On Wednesday it confirmed that this would apply retroactively.

At yesterday Prime Minister’s Questions, for the second week running, Kemi Badenoch was savaged by Sir Keir Starmer on the key issue of immigration.  A fortnight ago, eye-watering ONS figures showed that we have added a city the size of Birmingham to our population, with most of the influx coming from outside Europe. This is down to Boris Johnson’s significant relaxation of visa requirements as part of his points-based ‘Global Britain’ immigration system. The numbers are so large they have even prompted Keir Starmer to deride the Tories for their ‘one-nation open border experiment’.  When Starmer made this barb at last week’s PMQs Badenoch lamely attempted to deflect – ‘I am not asking about immigration’.

The shocking police doorstepping of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson last week has rightly sparked grave concern about the parlous state of freedom of speech in Britain. Sir Keir Starmer has now joined the leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch in arguing that police should be concentrating on the physical crime increasingly blighting our towns rather than things that are said online. ‘Police the streets, not the tweets’, has become a popular refrain overnight. But why are the police trawling the internet for wrongthink in the first place? So far any discussion of this has been focused on non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs). Badenoch has called for the laws around NCHIs to be reviewed.

The Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch has long argued against the Labour party and the left’s ‘divisive agenda of identity politics’. Instead, she has sought to portray the Conservatives as a truly ‘colour-blind party’ and a ‘genuine meritocracy’. Speaking to the Times earlier this year, she even argued that we should not make a ‘big deal’ of her potentially becoming the first black woman to lead the party. This isn’t the first time Badenoch has failed to live up to her anti-woke credentials So it’s strange, as ballots for the leadership contest go out to Tory members, to see Badenoch suddenly emphasising her ethnicity.

Popping champagne, skulking off to smoke a spliff and pledging to become a life-long Labour voter. Anyone concerned about criminal justice in Britain will find the well-documented glee of the 1,700 prisoners given early release around the country this week galling indeed. As domestic abusers and career criminals walk free, many will have been struck by the contrast with the government’s response to last month’s riots, bringing to mind that most irresistible of epithets: ‘two-tier Keir’. In the Commons, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage duly used his first ever question at PMQs to punch this bruise. Many of those leaving prison will be effectively swapping places with those arrested last month in the disturbances following the barbaric Southport attack.

When Sir Keir Starmer faced off against Rishi Sunak at the despatch box today, in the first Prime Minister’s Questions after the parliamentary recess, he seemed to be rather unsure what his role was. Over the course of their exchanges, the ostensible leader of the country referred to his opposite number not once, not twice, but five times as ‘the prime minister’. It was bad enough when Starmer made this mistake back in July, though after four years in opposition and just weeks into the new role, we might perhaps understand it having become a habit. But to do it again? After he’s been in office for two months, attended a Nato Summit, given numerous grim-faced Downing Street speeches and announced a raft of nannying laws?