BRITAIN NEWS AND ALERT's

https://go.citizengo.org/LP2-Share-en-gb.html?
Elaine,

The problem with the pro-euthanasia lobby is that they just cannot take no for an answer. The Scottish parliament has debated whether or not to legalise assisted suicide twice since 2010 and on both occasions voted conclusively against it and now, once again, an MSP is trying to introduce a bill to legalise the practice and putting pressure on the Scottish National Party.

I don’t know what these campaigners think has changed between now and then?! If anything, the pandemic was a reminder that it is the elderly and the most physically vulnerable who require the greatest protection. It was because this demographic was at the greatest risk of death that they were rightly first in line to receive the vaccine. Imagine the outcry if it had been suggested that their lives were less worthy of being saved?!
Join the campaign asking the SNP leadership candidates to reject any attempts to introduce assisted suicide into Scotland.

The Scottish National Party claim to be progressive, but there is absolutely nothing progressive or humane about the assumption that the lives of the chronically sick or the elderly are of lesser value.

Voting opens on Monday. There is still time for the candidates to make this pledge.
Many thanks

Caroline Farrow and the entire CitizenGO Team

P.S. If you have already signed, please share the petition with your friends.

Here's the email we sent you earlier on this:

Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation gives Scotland the chance for a fresh start.

Gender ideology has for now, been kicked into touch, but the shadow of legalised assisted suicide still lurks over the country via the introduction of a private member’s bill at Holyrood.

Ask the SNP leadership candidates to pledge to reject any moves to introduce legalised suicide in the Scotland.

UK

Survey: Britons Would Prefer Muslim Over Evangelical Christian For Leadership

When asked about specific religious beliefs, evangelical Christians are the faith group less tolerated when it comes to political leadership in Great Britain.

read more
https://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=5932

Rishi Sunak's Brexit travesty
No wonder a doe-eyed EU Commission president swooned over him
MELANIE PHILLIPS
MAR 1
UK says Sunak, von der Leyen seal deal to fix EU trade spat
European Commission president Ursula van der Leyen and UK prime minister Rishi Sunak
Did anyone really imagine, on that glorious June morning in 2016 when we woke up to find that the people of the United Kingdom had voted to gain independence from European control over the laws passed by their democratically elected parliament, that they would actually be allowed to do so?

Did anyone really believe, in the unbelievable war of attrition that followed in which virtually the entire British establishment — the civil service, financiers, big business, most members of Parliament, the BBC and much of the media, the higher judiciary and legal world, in fact virtually the whole of the university-educated nomenklatura that had voted Remain and then worked hand-in-glove with the European Union to subvert that 2016 referendum vote and keep the UK trapped under EU control — that they wouldn’t win in the end?

If anyone did believe that, they now should be sadder and wiser. The so-called “Windsor Framework”, which Britain’s prime minister Rishi Sunak has agreed with the EU Commission president Ursula van der Leyen, is being hailed as a near-miraculous resolution of the dangerously destabilising problem created by the anomalous position of Northern Ireland within the UK.

Sunak is being extolled as a quiet genius for having untied the Gordian knot created by the 2020 Brexit deal negotiated by Boris Johnson, which left Northern Ireland inside the EU’s single market.

This Northern Ireland “Protocol” was included to avoid destabilising the fragile 1998 “Good Friday Agreement” which has brought peace between Ireland, which is a member of the EU, and Northern Ireland. But this Protocol created in effect a border between Britain and Northern Ireland down the middle of the Irish Sea, thus dismembering the United Kingdom.

The Protocol was a bad mistake, as I wrote here at the time. Boris Johnson’s subsequent attempt to resile from his own agreement was viewed as an unconscionable breach of international law. The EU refused to bend. The impasse seemed insoluble.

Now, though, the Windsor Framework consists of a number of concessions made by the EU. Who would have thought, people are marvelling, that the EU would ever make such concessions?

But although these will certainly ease a number of logistical difficulties and practical log-jams that have arisen in Northern Ireland as a result of the Protocol, they amount to minor window-dressing to conceal a far deeper EU victory.

For as a number of commentators have immediately realised, the UK has certainly not “taken back control” as Sunak has been boasting. On the contrary, Northern Ireland will remain under EU control. The de-facto border will still remain down the middle of the Irish Sea.

Sunak is obscuring this unpalatable fact. Differences between the UK’s version of the agreement, which it calls The Windsor Framework: A New Way Forward,” and the EU’s version, which it calls the Windsor Political Declaration, are instructive in this regard.

For example, the EU states:

The envisaged amendment does not amount to a change of the essential elements of the Withdrawal Agreement.

The UK fails to acknowledge this fact.

EU laws will continue to apply in Northern Ireland under the Protocol.

The UK fails to acknowledge this fact. It says instead: “EU laws will apply only where strictly necessary to provide privileged access to the whole of the EU market”.

Northern Ireland will still be ultimately accountable to the European Court of Justice.

The UK fails to acknowledge this fact. Its says instead that the new framework will address the Protocol’s “democratic deficit” by “changing and rewriting the core dynamic alignment legal text as it stood in the old Protocol” and “entrenching democratic oversight and ending the prospect of damaging new goods rules being imposed on Northern Ireland”.

Really? Just look at this. There will be an expanded “Trusted Trader” scheme with “ dramatically simplified procedures” related to the movement of goods. Controls will only be performed “if a risk is assessed or abuse detected”.

But the Trusted Trader scheme can be suspended unilaterally by the EU (or the UK). This, says the EU,

will allow the EU to react quickly to protect the integrity of the EU Single Market. If the trusted trader scheme is suspended, goods cannot be moved between Great Britain and Northern Ireland based on the customs facilitations granted to operators under the scheme. Consequently, all the movements of goods will be subject to the same requirements as those for goods at risk of entering the EU.

The UK will still be tied by the Northern Ireland Protocol. The Prime Minister declared, “We have changed the original Protocol”. But the EU’s explanatory note says:

The Windsor Framework has been fully carried out within the framework of the [2020] Withdrawal Agreement, of which the Protocol is an integral part… All new arrangements fall within this pre-established framework.

The framework supposedly provides Northern Ireland with a “Stormont Brake” which purports to allow Northern Ireland to say no to a specific EU law. Yet in practice this safeguard will be non-existent. As the EU admits:

That mechanism could be triggered in the most exceptional circumstances and as a last resort.

Moreover, if Northern Ireland were to exercise such a veto the EU could retaliate with sanctions in other areas. And if the Northern Ireland Executive at Stormont — currently suspended because it is being boycotted by the Democratic Unionist Party —isn’t resurrected, the brake won’t exist at all.

Most important of all from the perspective of UK sovereignty, Northern Ireland will still be under the ultimate jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. The EU rejected UK calls to replace the ECJ with an independent arbitration panel to rule on disputes. As Von der Leyen said when the deal was announced yesterday, the ECJ will remain the “sole and final arbiter of EU law”.

As the UK’s chief Brexit negotiator Lord Frost writes:

So the changes talked up by the Government aren’t always quite what they seem because they have to take place within this existing framework. For example, we are told that 1,700 pages of EU law have been “disapplied” in Northern Ireland. In fact, what has happened is that the EU says it will pass a law itself (it hasn’t yet) setting the conditions under which UK-standard food and drink may move from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. In this Kafka-esque world, “disapplication” of EU law is actually a new EU law — one which the EU can change or suspend unilaterally if it wishes…

The deal leaves a slightly amended Protocol and EU law in place in Northern Ireland and the EU has agreed to change its own laws so that they bite less tightly. That is worth having, but it isn’t taking back control. Indeed, it may entrench the Protocol superstructure rather than weaken it.

Worse still are the implications of this deal for the rest of the UK.

A key advantage of Brexit was that that the UK would be free to pursue its own policies that would give it a competitive edge over the EU. The EU, however, exists to negate other countries’ competitive advantage over itself. Sunak has agreed to destroy that advantage in Northern Ireland. We can now see very clearly that he intends this to be the same direction of travel for the rest of the UK.

Indeed, paragraph 52 of the UK text states specifically:

We also recognise, as we have done since 2020, that the Government needs to ensure that we monitor and tackle risks of regulatory divergence within the UK internal market.

So the British government believes that “regulatory divergence” — which would give it a competitive edge over the EU through promoting its own independent policies in the interests of the UK — is a risk?

Sunak inadvertently revealed his mindset by remarks he made on a visit yesterday to the Coca-Cola factory in Lisburn, near Belfast. He said:

If we get this right, if we get this framework implemented, if we get the Executive back up and running here, Northern Ireland is in the unbelievably special position — unique position in the entire world, European continent — in having privileged access, not just to the UK home market, which is enormous... but also the European Union single market.

Not surprisingly, this led a number of people to conclude that he wanted the same combination — Brexit and access to the EU’s single market — for the whole of the UK. Any such access inescapably entails EU control. This blunder forced Downing Street to deny that Sunak was endorsing EU single market benefits for the whole of the UK, claiming he had only meant to say that Northern Ireland

needed access to both markets because of its unique situation.

Given the details of his Windsor Framework deal, that really doesn’t wash.

So now we can see how the Brexit adventure is likely to end. The UK is to use its freedom from EU membership to sidle back under EU control. It is to use its so-bitterly regained sovereign independence from vassalage to tie its own hands to its former overlords. Even now, it still finds itself in the EU’s version of Hotel California —

You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

No wonder a doe-eyed van der Leyen has swooned over Britain’s prime minister as “dear Rishi”.

At time of writing, the possible opposition to this fresh Brexit travesty appears to have collapsed. Nigel Farage, the individual who galvanised the British people to fight to restore their sovereign democratic independence, has left the battlefield. Northern Ireland’s Unionist politicians are split. Steve Baker, the former leader of the most implacable Brexiteers in Parliament but who has signalled he won’t oppose the Windsor Framework, is a beaten man, telling the BBC that seven years of the Brexit battle destroyed his mental health.

That battle took a toll on everyone. It destroyed friendships and families. No-one wants to go through all that again.

Brexit gave the UK a chance — very slim, but it was its one chance — that it could realise its potential and prosper in the world once again. It has so far failed to use this chance, not just because of Covid and Ukraine but also because of its profound, long-lasting structural problems — the collapse of education standards, the related decline of the civil service into mediocrity and outright incompetence, inept politicians who are followers rather than leaders, and the sapping effects of half a century of a culture of entitlement.

The public is deeply disappointed and discouraged that the benefits of Brexit have not yet been realised.

Now they never will be.

UK plans to grant asylum to 12,000 illegal migrants without screening them at all
Public fury over the gross negligence of Britain’s leadership means little to its leaders. See more about the UK’s self-made immigration crisis HERE. Unvetted illegal migrants, mostly from Africa and the Middle East (Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Yemen), are being fast-tracked to receive full asylum, and thus to be allowed to settle permanently in […]

Read more https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/02/uk-plans-to-grant-asylum-to-12000-illegal-migrants-without-screening-them-at-all
Christine Douglass-Williams

UK: Four teenage Afghan Muslim migrants arrested on suspicion of rape of 15-year-old girl at school
Why does this keep happening? Yes, sexual molestation happens all over. But we see Muslim migrants involved in this kind of story is seen on a not infrequent basis. Why? One reason may be because such treatment of infidel women is sanctioned in the Qur’an. In France, a Muslim quoted Qur’an while raping his victim. A survivor […]

Read more https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/02/uk-four-teenage-afghan-muslim-migrants-arrested-on-suspicion-of-rape-of-15-year-old-girl-at-school
Robert Spencer

https://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/news/23346732.south-wales-earthquake-man-says-enormous-thud/
South Wales earthquake: Man says it was an "enormous thud"
25th February
By Harry Jamshidian
@HarryJam88 Senior reporter
Jon Powell was just seven miles away from the quake when it hit (Image: Newsquest)

“AN ENORMOUS thud” - that’s the description of what the earth tremor that hit South Wales last night felt like.

A tremor occurred at 11.59 pm on Friday, February 24, with a magnitude of 3.8 magnitude about eight miles north of the Rhondda Valley, with the exact location being Llangenny - small village on the slopes of the Sugar Loaf Mountain.

Argus columnist Jon Powell, 55, was seven miles away from the epicentre of the tremor when it hit, in Gilwern, between Abergavenny and Brymawr.
He said it was like a train coming through, but was very short-lived.

“There was an enormous thud of about two to three seconds, a rumbling like a train going through all of a sudden we had security lights going off,” said Mr Powell. “I thought someone had fallen in the house. It was very quick, pretty weird and pretty intense.”

Incredibly, it’s not the first earthquake Mr Powell has experienced in Wales. He described how ten years ago he remembered a similar event in the same house, in the room next door to the one he was in for last night’s tremor.

Mr Powell, who is a bit of an authority on geology and astronomy, said the tremor – which he insisted should be termed a tremor rather than a quake – was nothing to worry about.

“To come up in Quake Feed and register, that is a decent tremor,” said Mr Powell. “It’s nothing to worry about though. It’s just a nudge from mother nature. These things can happen.”

South Wales Argus:
(The village of Llangenny - the epicentre of the tremor)

In a statement released on Saturday morning, the UK's main provider of earthquake data, the British Geological Survey wrote: "BGS has received reports from residents throughout the region, mainly from within around 40km of the epicentre.”

The last earthquake recorded in the UK was apparently in Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire in September 22, 2020, with tremors of 3.0 and 2.1 magnitude.

The largest known earthquake in the UK was in the North Sea in June 7, 1931, according to the BGS, recording a magnitude of 6.1. Its epicentre was located offshore in the Dogger Bank area, approximately 120 km northeast of Great Yarmouth.
Jon Powell writes the Night Sky column every first Thursday of the month. See it in the Argus.

https://www.cufi.org.uk/news/uk-government-confirms-iran-is-mapping-british-jews-in-preparation-for-attacks/
UK government confirms Iran is ‘mapping’ British Jews in preparation for attacks
Feb 24, 2023 | News, Operation Mordecai

UK government confirms Iran is ‘mapping’ British Jews in preparation for attacks
The UK government has now confirmed reports from last week that the Iranian regime is planning to attack Jews and Israelis in the UK if Israel carries out a military attack on Iran.

This is a deeply troubling story. We have long spoken about the dangers of the Iranian regime in regards to Israel and to Western security, including threats to UK citizens, however, we hoped they would stoop to planning on carrying out targeted attacks on British civilians in this manner. This should be a wake up call to the British government regarding how it deals with Iran.

Last week the Jewish Chronicle broke the story that Iran was mapping out the locations of Jews in the UK, as well as Israelis and Iranian anti-regime activists who live in the UK, after covering the storage of a Jewish woman who infiltrated the Iranian regime.

Shockingly, the UK government has now confirmed to the newspaper that the reports are true and that the Iranian regime is paying criminals in the UK to spy for them.

The UK’s Security Minister Tom Tugendhat, who is responsible for MI5, said: “You were right. We have very clear intelligence about the activities of hostile regimes in the UK and we keep a very close eye on what their agents and those close to them are doing.

“We know that the Iranians are using non-traditional sources to carry out these operations, including organised criminal gangs.

“They are paying criminal gangs to conduct surveillance.

“Basically, the Iranians are using crooks based in Britain to spy for them.”

He added: “You can be very clear that I wouldn’t have mentioned Jewish and Israeli targets unless I had good reason to do so.

“I take all threats against anyone in the UK very seriously and the reason I highlighted Israelis and the Jewish community is that we have been seeing threats and Iranian operational activity directed against them. I do not issue these warnings lightly,” said Tugendhat.

The Security Minister also confirmed that the UK was not the only target. “We can connect this to the threat of lethal operations, and this is one of the things I have been discussing in conversations with the French, the Germans, the Americans and others,” Tugendhat said.

The interview with Tugendhat came after he spoke in the House of Commons earlier in the week. A video of which can be seen here:

VIDEO

Last week, the threat from Iran was raised by a Jewish woman who had gone undercover to Tehran and met key figures within the Iranian regime. French-born Catherine Perez-Shakdam, who lives in the UK, told the Jewish Chronicle how she was told of the plan to map high-profile Jews to “make the diaspora pay a price” for any Israeli attack.

“The idea was to identify all the prominent NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) run by Jews, who was doing what in each business sector, the important rabbis,” Perez-Shakdam, 41, said.

“They wanted to figure out their influence and where they lived with their families in order to target them.

“They wanted to have a better understanding so they would know how to strike and where, so that if Israel ever dared to attack Iran, the diaspora would have a very nasty surprise,” she said.

Catherine Pere-Shakdam said that Iran’s leadership is only scared of one thing, that is an Israeli attack upon them. They know that Israel is currently a superior military force. Iranian leaders will do everything possible to protect themselves and their interests, including terrorism against Jews in the UK, Europe and America.

We must pray for the protection of the Jewish community in the UK. The tyrants of Tehran have no right in threatening innocent civilians, and their targeting of the Jewish people in this manner highlights their antisemitism. Likewise, this news is going to impact and frighten a number of British people who may feel they are being targeted. We must pray for protection over our land, over the Jewish community of Britain and for all those who stand up for Israel and against the Iranian regime. We pray that the British security forces will be able to stop any plans of the enemy and that the people of Britain and Israel will be protected from all acts of Iranian terror. May God protect His people.

The Newswashing of ISIS Bride Shamima Begum
by Uzay Bulut • February 20, 2023 at 6:30 am
ISIS brides were complicit in ISIS's genocide and crimes against humanity. Never mind that hostages were hung upside down and then burned alive, or locked in cages then lowered into water to drown, or crucified for hours "like Jesus;" or that children were crucified or sold as sex slaves; or that countless others were tortured, raped or lined up to have their throats slit.

The Free Yezidi Foundation recently wrote of ISIS and Begum: "Not only terror death cult, but mass-rape genocidal organization. The decision to join was hers. Her actions contributed to unspeakable acts of brutality, which she would have continued had ISIS, Daesh not been militarily defeated."

"Ms. Begum, for example, claimed that she was only a housewife and did not participate in any heinous crimes or violation of human rights as an ISIS member. Some portrayed her as an innocent schoolgirl who was brainwashed, uninformed, and simply wanted to return home to Britain.... evidence now suggests that she was in fact a member of the ISIS 'morality police, a group of ISIS women which was an integral part of ISIS' terror and atrocity apparatus, and was armed with an automatic weapon on her patrols. The crimes allegedly committed by the morality police include major human rights offenses, including support to ISIS' slave trade of Yezidis." — Free Yezidi Foundation, September 19, 2019.

"'Why are the BBC giving Shamima Begum more airtime?': 'Sickened' viewers slam broadcaster for airing 90-minute documentary that 'parades ISIS bride as a celebrity' just weeks after it launched 10-part podcast 'retracing her steps'. — The Daily Mail, February 18, 2023.

"What we Yazidis expect from the international community is support and solidarity, not digging into our wounds. ISIS criminals must face justice for what they have done and practiced. We expect the West to hold ISIS accountable in court rather than putting them on the cover of their magazine. Such stories are particularly difficult for us as Yazidis because these ISIS women tortured and abused Yazidi women while they were in ISIS's captivity." — Activist for Yazidi rights who lives in Iraq, to Gatestone, February 2023.

The question is: Why are some big Western media corporations obviously siding with a genocidal terror group and not with its innocent victims?

"I think this is a slap in the face of all those who suffered in the hands of terrorism, not just ISIS but other death cults such as Boko Haram. This is a spit in the face of all those whose loved ones were murdered, and I do not mean only Yazidis, Assyrians or Nigerians, but all the innocent Westerners who perished to Islamic terrorism such as in France, the UK, the US and elsewhere. Media has utterly lost its moral values." — Juliana Taimoorazy, founding president, Iraqi Christian Relief Council, to Gatestone, February 2023.


Many in the Western media are portraying Shamima Begum, a former "ISIS bride," not only as a victim but as a celebrity. ISIS brides were complicit in ISIS's genocide and crimes against humanity. ISIS murdered thousands of people, and forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands, especially from non-Muslim communities, including Yazidis and Christians. Pictured: Yazidis in a camp for internally displaced persons (IDP) in the Sharya area of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region, on January 17, 2023. (Photo by Safin Hamed/AFP via Getty Images)
While around 3,000 Yazidi children and women are still being held captive at the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization, many in the Western media are portraying a former "ISIS bride" not only as a victim but as a celebrity.

The ISIS bride in question Shamima Begum, a British citizen who left the UK to join ISIS in Syria in 2015, and was later stripped of her British citizenship. Begum was chosen by The Times Magazine in the UK to lionize on February 4, both on its cover and in an eight-page feature. She is now part of a glamorized "newswashing" campaign to help get her British citizenship back.

The UK's Special Immigration Appeals Tribunal is scheduled to rule this week on Begum's appeal against being stripped of her citizenship.

Continue Reading Article https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19428/shamima-begum

"And I will place salvation in Zion,
For Israel My glory."
Isaiah 46:13b
In this CUFI Weekly Review
Turkish people thank Israel for help || Israeli FM visits Ukraine || UK, US, EU condemn Israel || CUFI Prayer

Turkish people pour out thanks for Israel’s help in rescue effort
An outpouring of thanks has been given by the Turkish people to Israel following the IDF’s return to Israel from their search and rescue mission.

Turkey’s Ambassador to Israel welcomed Israeli teams returning to Ben Gurion Airport after the aptly named ‘Operation Olives Branches’. Meanwhile online, hundreds of Turkish social media users flooded platforms with appreciation.

Click here to read https://www.cufi.org.uk/news/turkish-people-pour-out-thanks-for-israels-help-in-rescue-effort/

UK: Senior Rotherham councillors ‘knew and stayed silent’ about town’s Muslim rape gangs scandal
“At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013,” and British officials did nothing; they “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.” Britain is desperately ill, so deeply diseased […]

Read more https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/02/uk-senior-rotherham-councillors-knew-and-stayed-silent-about-towns-muslim-rape-gangs-scandal
Robert Spencer

UK: Senior Rotherham councillors ‘knew and stayed silent’ about town’s Muslim rape gangs scandal
FEB 11, 2023 12:00 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER6 COMMENTS
“At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013,” and British officials did nothing; they “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

Britain is desperately ill, so deeply diseased in its political culture that it is extremely unlikely that it will recover.



“Revealed: Senior Rotherham councillors ‘knew and stayed silent’ about town’s grooming gangs scandal – Exclusive in depth investigation,” by Charlie Peters, GB News, February 9, 2023:

After a series of GB News exclusives forced Cllr. Dominic Beck to stand down as the Labour Party’s parliamentary candidate for Rother Valley in December, questions have been raised about how the local Labour Party came to select him.

This broadcaster revealed that Cllr. Emma Hoddinott, who was deputy leader of the council when it was found to be “in denial” about the extent of the town’s child sexual exploitation scandal, was on the constituency’s selection committee that put Beck forward for the seat.

But GB News now has evidence that the rot goes deeper, exposing that four serving Councillors from Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council (RMBC) attended a seminar outlining in “explicit detail” the town’s sex-grooming gangs scandal in 2005, but failed to speak up, citing police pressure.

The silence of the councillors and others in positions of authority allowed the sex-grooming gangs epidemic to continue in Rotherham without sufficient council or police action. The Alexis Jay report into Rotherham in August 2014 discovered that, at a “conservative estimate,” some 1,400 girls had been abused from 1997 to 2013.

But they were not abused in total secrecy away from the knowledge of local politicians and council officials. On April 5, 2005, local youth project Risky Business delivered a seminar on the child sexual exploitation crisis in the town. It invited all serving RMBC councillors to attend.

Thirty serving councillors attended, including Council Leader Roger Stone, who would later resign in disgrace after failures in responding to the scandal were exposed in 2014.

Of the 30 councillors, four still remain in office for the Labour Party in RMBC. They are: Ken Wyatt, Rose McNeely, Sue Ellis and Alan Atkin. All hold positions of responsibility in the council.

Cllrs Wyatt and McNeely were both in the council cabinet that was forced to resign en-masse after the publication of the Jay report in August 2014, which uncovered one of the modern world’s most extensive and heinous child sexual exploitation scandals. Jay uncovered a raft of instances of council failures to intervene with the grooming gangs, with the RMBC response mired by political correctness, a nervousness about race and a denigrating perspective towards victims.

The report named councillors Jahangir Akhtar and Mahroof Hussain as it criticised Pakistani politicians for wielding disproportionate influence.

Last month, GB News revealed that Hussain was now working as an NHS diversity and inclusion manager despite his Rotherham failures.

But none of the councillors can claim that they did not know about the abuse that was rife in the town, because the 2005 seminar that they attended presented significant evidence about the scandal.

The Jay report confirmed that the seminar contained “explicit content” about child sex abuse, adding that it meant attendees then couldn’t say “we didn’t know”.

Jay said: “Seminars for elected members and senior officers in 2004-05 presented the abuse in the most explicit terms. After these events, nobody could say ‘we didn’t know’. In 2005, the present Council Leader [Roger Stone] chaired a group to take forward the issues, but there is no record of its meetings or conclusions, apart from one minute.”

GB News recently tracked down the youth worker who delivered the 2005 seminar. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they detailed the “horrifying abuse” that the councillors were briefed on.

GB News has also seen a copy of a case study shown to councillors at the meeting, disclosed to this channel by an anonymous source in RMBC.

The file outlines the experiences faced by “Julie”, not her real name, who was groomed and sexually exploited by gangs of men of Pakistani descent in Rotherham.

The case study, delivered to the councillors in April 2005, said: “‘Julie’ first became known to the project [Risky Business] when she was 12 years old due to her ‘friendship’ with other vulnerable young women known to the project. At this time her ‘boyfriend’ was a 24 year old male who was known along with his brother for the grooming and violence towards young women in Rotherham.”

It detailed poor attendance at school, adding: “Julie has attended hospital on numerous occasions often unaccompanied by an appropriate adult and has reported that she has been raped twice.

“On one occasion that Julie was missing from home she was found by the local police in the car of one of the perpetrators at the back of an unused building, no arrests were made. When speaking to her worker the following day Julie disclosed she had been sexually assaulted by two of his friends and there were drugs in the boot of the vehicle.”

Julie’s suffering was explained in “explicit detail” at the meeting….

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-monumental-error?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
A monumental error
The government's Holocaust centre obsession rides roughshod over memory and law

Melanie Phillips
9 hr ago

The proposed Holocaust memorial centre in Westminster
It’s groundhog day all over again for the long-planned Holocaust memorial and learning centre in Westminster’s Victoria Tower Gardens.

This huge, brutalist construction would destroy a quiet green oasis valued by local residents. Last July, the Court of Appeal upheld a ruling that the structure was prohibited by a 1900 Act of Parliament, passed to protect the park from such developments.

Yet now the government — which previously overrode Westminster council’s objections — has declared it will legislate to cancel out that 1900 law.

It will thus ride roughshod over a historic legal protection for the local community. Is this really a desirable context for a project supposedly devoted to memory and law as a defence against oppressive and arbitrary power?

There are more fundamental objections to the memorial’s supposed message.

Although the Nazis murdered many types of people in the Holocaust, their principal driver was the intention to wipe the Jews alone off the face of the earth. Yet much Holocaust memorialising denies the unique characteristics of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jews.

A graphic example was provided by the UK Online Commemoration for Holocaust Memorial Day last month. Its 23 sections referred to “genocides” in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Darfur, to “the Nazi persecution of gay people” and to “people being persecuted simply because they were Ordinary People who belonged to a particular group”.

But there was no mention of the genocide of the Jews other than two fleeting references in personal messages from Michael Gove and Sir Keir Starmer. The chief executive and chair of trustees of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust didn’t mention it, urging reflection instead on “the Holocaust, the Nazi persecution of other groups and more recent genocides”.

In evidence to the planning inquiry, the memorial’s architect said he envisaged a place to mark the murder of six million Jews, Roma and “all victims of Nazi persecution”; and to reflect on “the murder of the millions of Cambodians by the Pol Pot regime, the million Rwandans murdered by the Interahamwe and the thousands of Muslim men and boys murdered in Bosnia”.

In its 1939 white paper, the British government tore up its legal obligation to settle the Jews in Palestine. Instead, it barred entry to those desperate to flee Nazi Europe, causing untold numbers to be murdered and making Britain an accessory to the Holocaust.

Will the memorial really deal with this? The Holocaust Memorial Trust claims it will provide “an honest reflection of Britain’s role”. Yet the project’s supporters simultaneously claim that situating it next to Parliament demonstrates that democratic “British values” will prevent such horrors happening again. Well, which is it? It can’t be both.

If it were really to address Jew-hatred, it would show that the Nazi period wasn’t an aberration but on a continuum stretching back to earliest times — and encompassing the war waged against Israel today.

It would accordingly highlight the Nazi-themed incitement against Jews incessantly pumped out by the Palestinian Authority, whose leader is a self-professed disciple of Haj Amin al Husseini — the Nazis’ ally in Palestine, who promised Hitler he would annihilate every Jew in the Middle East.

There’s no indication it will focus on any of these things. As the leading protester Baroness Deech wrote in a letter to The Times this week, the promoters “envisage visitors leaving the learning centre, seeing the Palace of Westminster and realising that British democracy prevents genocide and antisemitism. History has shown no such thing. It will engender complacency and a sense of ‘job done’”.

Today’s epidemic of antisemitism is perpetrated mainly by Palestinian Arab supporters, Muslims and communities radicalised by Black Power.

Jewish grandees say the Westminster memorial is essential to help protect the community against antisemitism. Yet these establishment figures are silent about the Muslim or black antisemitism driving the Jew-hatred in Britain, America and Europe. They are silent about the tsunami of incitement against Jews from the Palestinian Authority.

Instead, these Jewish leaders label those who do speak about these sources of Jew-hatred as Islamophobes, racists and extremists, and treat them as pariahs.

The Jewish dignitaries promoting the Westminster memorial are establishment toadies and Tory party donors. Government ministers, who very decently want to do the right thing by the Jews, may think the community is united in support. Not so.

Last October, a debate about it hosted by the National Jewish Assembly was attended on Zoom by more than 100 members of the Jewish community. Digital polls recorded 62 per cent opposed at the start of the debate and 82 per cent opposed at the end.

The memorial’s backers refuse to discuss the project with its opponents. The Board of Deputies has never debated it.

Instead, various politicians, officials and Jewish community bigwigs have attacked both Jewish and non-Jewish opponents with emotional blackmail, bullying and character assassination, including spurious accusations of antisemitism.

The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, has referred to this project as a “sacred task”. It is not. It threatens to be a desecration of memory, an abuse of civic engagement and a shameful betrayal of the slaughtered Jewish millions.

Jewish Chronicle

Recent posts

My most recent exclusive post for my premium subscribers asks why Britain’s smart, technocratic prime minister is promoting Net Zero lunacy. This is how the piece begins:
Melanie Phillips

The dangerous perversity of counter-extremism
How Britain has failed to prevent Islamist radicalisation and protect its Jews
https://www.jns.org/opinion/how-britain-has-failed-to-prevent-islamist-extremism-and-to-protect-jews/
While events in Israel continue to attract disproportionate and distorted global attention, Islamic extremism remains a threat inside western society. It’s accompanied by the parallel failure of the west even to face up honestly to the true nature of this problem, let alone deal with it adequately.

This week, a review was published in Britain of the government’s anti-extremism programme, Prevent. This was set up in the wake of the 2007 Islamist terrorist atrocity in London, when more than 50 people were murdered and hundreds more injured in a series of four bomb attacks.

While the Prevent programme itself is obviously particular to Britain, the findings of the independent review, commissioned by the Home Office and headed by the writer William Shawcross, should also strike discomfiting chords in America and among Jewish diaspora communities in the West.

The message it hammers home is that the government has failed to protect the country in general, and the Jewish community in particular, from Islamism, or Islamic extremism and supremacism.

Shawcross found that Islamist ideology had been “misinterpreted, misunderstood or even overlooked” by officials through a combination of ignorance and terror of being damned as “Islamophobic”.

This failure had produced the perverse result that some organisations in receipt of government funding to fight extremism had actually been promoting antisemitism. Even more astonishingly, the founding chairman of the Muslim police officers’ association, who had worked with government departments on counter-terrorism, shared content which called for the destruction of Israel and described Jews as “filth”.

The programme’s officials also applied a troubling double standard. While 80 per cent of counter-terrorism dealt with Islamism and a mere 10 per cent with extreme right-wing threats, only 22 per cent of cases referred to in Prevent involved Islamist extremism.

The officials chose to focus instead on what they decided was far-right extremism. However, they defined this so broadly that it included centre-right or “mildly controversial” discourse unrelated to terrorism or radicalisation.

At the same time, they narrowed their definition of Islamist extremism so that they failed to recognise the all-important continuum between non-violent Islamist narratives and terrorist networks.

More disturbingly still, the Home Office failed to counter the influence in Britain of the Islamist terrorist movements Hamas and Hezbollah. Although both of these are fully proscribed by the government, companies and charities associated with a support network for Hamas in the UK — described by Shawcross as having a “pernicious impact” — had been allowed to operate with impunity.

In addition, a body funding the activities of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, an Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime and with a history of “extremist links and terrorist sympathies,” received thousands of pounds from the government’s program of support for local businesses during the pandemic.

In short, these counter-extremism officials were not so much asleep at the wheel as in denial of the situation they were tasked with addressing. This was despite the fact that, as Shawcross notes, there was an alarming prevalence of extreme antisemitism among the people referred to in the Prevent program.

He says he saw examples of “individuals expressing the intent to kill, assault or harm Jewish people or a particular Jewish individual, threats to burn, desecrate or blow up a synagogue…claiming religious or political justification for the murder of Jewish people…and adherence to extreme antisemitic conspiracies”.

Terrorism, he writes, is only one manifestation of Islamist ideology. “The Islamist worldview is by nature supremacist,” he writes. “Islamists have encouraged the hatred of Jews, homosexuals, minority Muslim sects, Muslim liberals and human rights advocates, and the harassment and abuse of Muslim women and girls.”

There’s been similar tunnel vision over Islamism in America. Over the past few years, officials have repeatedly said that, while Islamist terrorist plots have decreased, white supremacy and far-right extremism are now among the greatest domestic security threats facing the US.

But just as in Britain, these American officials have failed to grasp that the threat from extremism doesn’t just manifest itself in terror attacks. Enormous harm can be done along the continuum that runs between prejudice at one end and terrorist atrocities at the other.

Antisemitism in America has reached record levels. According to the FBI director Christopher Wray, around 63 per cent of religious hate crimes are directed at Jews who make up a mere 2.4 per cent of the population.

These attacks on Jews are coming from four groups: the far left, the far right, the Muslim community and African-Americans. But while the far-right attracts most attention, Muslims and African-Americans are disproportionately involved in this tsunami of Jew-hatred.

In New York City, where around seven per cent are Jews, nearly half of all hate-crime victims are Jewish. In cases where the attacker’s race is known, 42 per cent of them are black.

This is largely due to the influence in the black community of the Black Hebrew Israelites and the Nation of Islam’s virulently antisemitic founder, Louis Farrakhan, who remarkably continues to be tolerated and indulged by progressive circles.

Similarly tolerated is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the head of whose San Francisco branch, Zahra Billoo, said last May that the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Federations and Hillel chapters were the “enemies” of her community; that the Israeli military trained American police officers to “kill unarmed black men, women and children;” and that the technology used at the US-Mexico border “is the same technology used at the apartheid wall”.

The extreme reluctance to acknowledge Muslim antisemitism is true also of the Jewish communities in both Britain and America, which focus their alarm instead on the far right.

Those who do call out Muslim antisemitism find themselves attacked by Jewish community leaders as Islamophobes, racists and extremists. Diaspora Jews repeatedly equate Islamophobia with antisemitism as mirror images of the same kind of prejudice.

But this is a false equivalence. While some people are truly prejudiced against Muslims, Islamophobia was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood as a way of silencing legitimate discussion of any fault in the Islamic world.

Few appreciate that the concept of Islamophobia is itself fundamentally anti-Jewish. The Islamists invented it because they wanted to gain for themselves what they believed was the benefit the Jews gained when they claimed antisemitism —protection from criticism. They thus assumed that the Jews are actually guilty of what antisemites accuse them of doing.

It’s tragic that so many Jews mindlessly go along with this equation. As so often, this comes from a deep reluctance to identify the Jewish people as unique. They connive at a form of intimidation designed to close down any adverse comment about the Islamic world — and thus they help silence acknowledgement of a major source of anti-Jewish poison.

Shawcross’s report is of exceptional importance. Its robust and unflinching analysis is a devastating condemnation of government failure to protect the safety of the community. As a result, attempts by officials to obstruct, neuter or even dump the report held up its publication for a year.

Left-wing commentators and so-called “human rights” groups, who use anti-Zionism as way of laundering Jew-hatred, have unsurprisingly denounced the report as “deeply prejudiced” and “anti-Muslim”. This is clearly nonsense, since Shawcross clearly distinguishes between Islamist extremists and Islam, expresses concern for Muslims targeted by Islamists and observes that anti-Muslim hatred is “intolerable”.

The Jewish community owes him a debt in so clearly identifying Jew-hatred as a principal driver of Islamist extremism. Strikingly, however, media reporting of this review made virtually no mention of this finding at all.

That’s because Muslim Jew-hatred doesn’t fit the western liberal narrative. Muslims are seen as a victimised minority; Jews are seen as having power, both in the diaspora and in Israel, and so cannot be victims.

That’s how antisemitism and tunnel vision over Islamism are joined at the hip.

Jewish News Syndicate

https://www.israelunwired.com/the-entrenchment-of-western-jew-hatred/
THE ENTRENCHMENT OF WESTERN JEW-HATRED
written by Melanie Phillips February 6, 2023 654 views
As the culture hurtles towards the precipice, Diaspora Jews are like rabbits caught in the headlights.

(JNS) In Britain’s House of Commons this week, MP Kim Johnson launched an attack on the “fascist Israeli government” and its “apartheid” policies.

Johnson is a Labour Party MP. You know, the same Labour Party whose current moderate leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has reputedly cleansed it of the Jew-hatred that exploded under its previous hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Following Johnson’s remarks, the Labour leadership leapt into immediate action. Within hours, Johnson was ordered to make a groveling apology.


This is supposed to reassure us. True, Starmer now takes action against any expression of Jew-hatred. This includes the pathological demonization of Israel that singles it out for lies designed to delegitimize and destroy it—an agenda applied to no other people or state in the world.

Any such eruption threatens Starmer’s strategy of suppressing the bigotry that previously threatened to destroy the party as the self-professed standard-bearer of conscience, enlightenment and all good things. So, he stamps down on it hard whenever it appears.

But Starmer is playing a game of whack-a-mole. Anti-Jewish bigotry still courses through the party. Anyone who thinks Labour’s antisemitism has gone away or is restricted to a tiny unrepresentative fringe is a fool.

The demonization of Israel is the defining cause of the progressive left. As such, it has become the default narrative in all higher reaches of the culture.


In America, where there is still a bedrock of public support for Israel, this poison has spread through the universities into the schools and infiltrated the Democratic Party. Unlike in Britain, however, the Democrats haven’t even gotten to the Labour Party’s stage of seeking to rid themselves publicly of this moral stain.

The ousting of the Jew-bashing Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee was organized by the Republicans. The Democrats, who refused to take action against her when they governed the House, opposed the ouster, complaining that it was “revenge” for the Democrats’ removal of two GOP representatives from committees during the previous session of Congress.

Accordingly, the Democrats continue to sanitize Omar’s egregious Jew-hatred. In 2019, she tweeted that U.S. support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins”—that is, hundred-dollar bills. In 2012, before she arrived in Congress, she claimed that “Israel has hypnotized the world” and added, “May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

Last weekend, Omar claimed on CNN that she was unaware that the word “hypnotized” and conspiracy theories about Jews and money are anti-Jewish tropes.
“I might have used words at the time that I didn’t understand were trafficking in antisemitism,” she said.

Her protestations of ignorance have drawn widespread incredulity and scorn. In fact, they imply something more unpalatable than being disingenuous.

Omar knows that there’s a prejudice called antisemitism. However, she self-evidently believed that Jews do use their money to exercise covert and harmful power and that they do hypnotize the world.

In other words, Omar thought that what others know to be Jew-hating tropes couldn’t be prejudice because they’re true. So, when she says she didn’t think these tropes constituted antisemitism, she reveals just how antisemitic she actually is.


Yet even now, the supposedly anti-racist Democrats refuse to condemn her. This is because Western progressives either support or refuse to condemn “intersectional” Critical Race Theory.

Emanating from Marxist propaganda that damns as oppressive all who have political, economic or military power, this dogma identifies Jews as oppressors—because it itself draws upon the antisemitic tropes of Jewish power and money.

This ideology of Western oppression turned the left into the useful idiots of the former Soviet Union, which allied with the PLO’s terrorist leader Yasser Arafat in the 1960s to fuse Marxism with the fabrication of Palestinian identity and victimization by Israel.

This both fueled and provided cover for overt Jew-hatred. While Western liberals have normalized this through their support for the Palestinian Arabs, it has been promoted disproportionately by black people and Muslims under the influence of Black Power, Critical Race Theory and the laundering of the global Islamic jihad through the Palestinian cause.


Black people and Muslims are involved in attacks on Jews in America, Britain and elsewhere in numbers significantly disproportionate to their presence in the population as a whole.

Such attacks are now being normalized in the wider culture. The Netflix movie “You People”—which premiered on International Holocaust Remembrance Day last week—depicts Jews in hateful terms. They are presented as rich people who profited from the slave trade and now leech off the poor, or degenerate and lying low-lifes who earn deserved humiliation over their attempts to whitewash their racism.

On the Jew in the City website, Allison Josephs observed how this production repeats and normalizes the Jew-hating tropes of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

“The erasure of past and current Jewish persecution, while pitting Jews against black people, is absolutely vile,” she wrote.


Where are the other Jewish voices raised in protest over this production?

The Jewish Diaspora leadership may complain about antisemitism on campus or some of the most egregious lies about Israel’s supposed oppression and “war crimes.” But in general, it refuses to call out Muslim or black antisemitism.

With very few exceptions, it refuses to tell the truth that the Jews are the only people with a legal, historical and moral claim to the entire Holy Land and thus lance the boil that produces this poison—the lie that the Jews stole the land from its indigenous inhabitants.

It refuses to call out the West’s political and cultural leaders for telling the lie that Israel illegally occupies “Palestinian” land. This is not just because of the fear of challenging people in power. Far worse, many Jewish Diaspora leaders themselves believe this lie because they are ignorant of Jewish and Middle East history.


In America, “progressive” Jewish groups that regularly demonize Israel actually defended Ilhan Omar. A number of them published a statement claiming that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was acting “based on false accusations that [Omar] is antisemitic or anti-Israel.”

In Britain, The Jewish Chronicle reported that the United Synagogue—analogous to America’s Orthodox Union—actually sold the now-defunct Wembley synagogue in London to an extremist Islamic group, the U.K. branch of the Pakistan-based Dawat-e-Islami.

In raising funds to buy this synagogue, the group described it in its publicity materials as “a former place of worship of non-believers.”

Dawat-e-Islami’s Midlands branch hosted an extremist preacher, Shaykh Asrar Rashid, who once claimed Hitler did Jews “a favor.” The group’s founder, Muhammad Ilyas Attar Qadri, wrote that boycotting Jewish products wasn’t enough for Muslims, who must make sure not to behave as “imitations of the Jews.”


Yet the clueless United Synagogue claims that it activated its “robust due diligence processes” to conduct the sale. Like the rest of Britain’s Jewish leadership, it seems neither to understand Islamic extremism nor to recognize the severity of the threat it poses to Britain’s Jews.

While failing to call out systemic Muslim, black or Palestinian Arab antisemitism, Britain’s Jewish leaders instead demonize as Islamophobic, racist or extremist anyone who does.

Meanwhile, Jewish voters and donors are flocking back to the supposedly safe-again Labour Party; while in both Britain and America, Jewish communities internalize the hysteria and distortions about both the new Israeli government and the Palestinian Arabs that flow unremittingly from outlets such as the BBC, Haaretz and The New York Times.

As the West careens off the moral and political road and hurtles towards the precipice, Diaspora Jews are like rabbits caught in the headlights, unable to move.

 · This special picture of the Queen has just been published to mark a monumental day.
The smiling 95-year-old has today passed the historic milestone of 70 years on the throne.
She is sat with her papers of state in front of her and poignantly nearby is an image of her father King George VI.
Seventy years ago on February 6 the king died and his daughter, aged just 25, became Queen of a nation still recovering from the upheavals of the Second World War.

National Library of Israel

"Our sympathy goes out to the Queen Mother and all members of the Royal Family, including our new Queen Elizabeth…"
Queen Elizabeth II acceded to the throne of the United Kingdom 70 years ago today, with the death of her father, King George VI, who was only 56 at the time of his passing.
The Australian Jewish News reported the following Friday, February 8th, 1952:
"Jewish communities everywhere have on every Sabbath and Holy Day offered up their prayers for His late Majesty, as they will now offer their heartfelt prayers for Her Majesty the Queen as she assumes the heavy burden of rule of the British Commonwealth countries."
Elizabeth II assumed the crown at the young age of 25. The British Prime Minister at the time was Sir Winston Churchill, with whom the Queen would form a special bond.
No less than fourteen Prime Ministers have served under Elizabeth II, who has since become the longest serving British monarch in history!
This issue of the Australian Jewish News is part of the Historical Jewish Press Collection at the National Library of Israel.
View the entire historic issue in detail, here: tinyurl.com/2s38zr25

Elaine,



Did you see what happened in Parliament? Labour MPs voted to keep public services shut during strikes.



That means ambulances off the roads, fire stations shut, NHS appointments postponed and trains cancelled.



More of the same pain for the public that we are seeing today.



Whilst we're backing new laws requiring minimum public service levels during strikes - Keir Starmer refuses to.



But are we surprised? Labour have received £125 million in donations from the unions causing strike chaos.
How much did your MP get from Unions
Labour won't stand up to their union paymasters. Under Keir Starmer, Labour are a party of protest.

Send them a message that you want your public services safe during strikes.

Yours sincerely,

Matt Vickers

Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party

https://www.faithwire.com/2023/01/30/virtue-signaling-nonsense-london-school-of-economics-cancels-christian-holidays-lent-easter-from-academic-calendar/
‘Virtue-Signaling Nonsense’: London School of Economics Cancels Christian Holidays Lent, Easter From Academic Calendar

By Tré Goins-Phillips
Editor

4 hours ago
Administrators at the London School of Economics have stripped Lent and Easter — as well as Christmas — from the academic calendar in an attempt to become more “international.”

The move has been decried by critics as “ludicrous” and “virtue-signaling nonsense.”

Listen to the latest episode of CBN’s Quick Start podcast


Beginning next year, the Michaelmas term — a reference to the feast of Michael the Archangel — will be renamed “autumn term,” Christmas to “winter break,” Lent to “winter term,” and Easter to “spring break,” according to LBC.

The LSE, founded in 1895, has been an academic stalwart for centuries. In a statement, a spokesperson said the university’s revamped calendar is intended to align with its “broader global engagement.”

“These new names use more accessible and widely recognized terminology, and better reflect the international nature of our community and our broader global engagement,” said the representative.

Some fear this shift is nothing more than an attempt to appease the political and cultural left.

Toby Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, said the move “reflects the fact that the LSE, like most British universities, is in thrall to a new religious cult — the church of woke — that is far more dogmatic than Christianity.”

Anglican Deacon Calvin Robinson called the rebranding “whitewashing Christ from the calendar.”

“[Pop singer] Sam Smith is trending for normalizing debauchery and degeneracy,” he tweeted. “Police officers are prancing around with rainbow flags and glitter again. We truly live in a post-Christian Britain and it is ugly.”

Simon Calvert, deputy director of The Christian Institute, told The Telegraph, “We have been warning for years that Christians are being pushed from the public square, yet the problem is getting worse.”

“Christians and those with traditional views often find themselves silenced or bullied,” he said. “It’s particularly ironic when this happens at institutions that were originally founded on Christian principles and with endowments from Christian benefactors.”

“So this ludicrous decision by the LSE to rebrand traditional academic terms, by scrapping references to the calendar of the established church, is more virtue-signaling nonsense that creates exclusion in the name of inclusivity,” added Calvert.

The LSE’s announcement comes on the heels of a new report about the decrease in Christianity in Europe.

A census from 2021 found that — for the first time — less than half of England and Wales (46.2%) describe themselves as Christian, the BBC reported. In 2011, 59.3% called themselves Christian.

***As the number of voices facing big-tech censorship continues to grow, please sign up for Faithwire’s daily newsletter and download the CBN News app, developed by our parent company, to stay up-to-date with the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***

UK: Despite government promises to control border, a record 65,000 more migrants are expected in 2023
Everyone should realize by now that the UK government is playing its own citizens for fools while mishandling their tax dollars. The government intends to do nothing about mass migration into the country, as it deceptively adheres to globalist open-door immigration policies. As each week goes by, the British taxpayers are footing the bill, thus […]

Read more https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/01/uk-despite-government-promises-to-control-border-a-record-65000-more-migrants-are-expected-in-2023

Why Jack blocked bill
And what happens to Scotland’s gender recognition law in the meantime
JOSHUA ROZENBERG
JAN 18
 
The secretary of state for Scotland Alister Jack has made an order blocking the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which was passed by the Scottish Parliament on 22 December.

As I explained in a piece last month, he has the power to intervene under section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998.

If he reasonably believes a bill “would have an adverse effect on the operation of the law as it applies to reserved matters”, he can make an order prohibiting the Scottish parliament’s presiding officer from submitting the bill for royal assent.

Jack might also have been able to refer the bill to the Supreme Court under section 33 of the Scotland Act but he received legal advice that this route was “not appropriate”.


Alister Jack
Under the bill, applications for a gender recognition certificate would go to Scottish registrars rather than to a UK panel. Applicants would no longer need to obtain a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

The bill would also reduce the length of time applicants would need to have lived in their acquired gender from two years to less than 12 months and allow applications from those aged 16 or 17.

A detailed paper published by the think-tank Policy Exchange analyses the bill’s effects. The author, Michael Foran, argued in favour of an order under section 35 of the act.

Jack said he was concerned that the legislation would have an adverse impact on the operation of equalities legislation across Scotland, England and Wales.

He and Kemi Badenoch, the minister for women and equalities, had concluded that the bill would have a serious adverse impact on, among other things, the operation of the Equality Act 2010.

He told MPs:

Those adverse effects include impacts on the operation of single-sex clubs, associations and schools, and on protections such as equal pay. The government share the concerns of many members of the public and civic society groups about the potential impact of the bill on women and girls.

The bill also risks creating significant complications through the existence of two different gender recognition regimes in the UK, and allowing more fraudulent or bad-faith applications.

The order
Jack made the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill (Prohibition on Submission for Royal Assent) Order 2023 yesterday. There was no objection when it was laid before parliament and it came into force earlier today. A schedule to the order summarises reasons for the order that he published separately.

Statement of reasons
The Scottish secretary said his statement of reasons had been produced by the UK government’s legal advisers. It begins by making the necessary link between the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill and “reserved matters”.

These are matters that were reserved to the UK parliament at Westminster when legislative powers were devolved to the Scottish parliament. They are listed in schedule 5 of the Scotland Act 1998. Part II of schedule 5 sets out specific reservations. Section L2 of part II refers to “equal opportunities”.

In the UK government’s view, the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which would be modified by the new Scottish legislation, applies to equal opportunities through its inter-relationship with the Equality Act 2010.

The Equality Act makes “sex” a protected characteristic and makes provisions about when conduct relating to that protected characteristic is unlawful.

That act was “carefully drafted” in the light of the Gender Recognition Act and the conditions it requires to be satisfied before a person can legally change sex for all purposes. According to the UK government, the new Scottish bill “alters that careful balance”.

Jack’s statement of reasons says he believes that modifications to the Gender Recognition Act would have an adverse effect on the operation of the law as it applies to reserved matters.

These adverse effects can be grouped into three “overall areas of concern”:

The impacts of the creation of two parallel and very different regimes for issuing and interpreting gender recognition certificates within the UK.

The impacts that removing safeguards could have on safety, in particular that of women and girls, given the significantly increased potential for fraudulent applications to be successful.

The impacts on the operation of the Equality Act 2010 that result from the fact that a gender recognition certificate changes a person’s protected characteristic of sex for the purposes of the Equality Act; and the expansion of the cohort of people able to obtain a certificate.

These areas of concern are then explored in some detail.

Yesterday in parliament
Opposition MPs were annoyed to find that Jack’s statement of reasons had not been published when the Scottish secretary made his initial statement and took questions. Arrangements were made to rush it out before MPs held a further two-hour emergency debate on the topic.

What happens next?
Jack said he hoped the Scottish government would “bring back an amended bill for reconsideration in the Scottish parliament”. That seems unlikely, at least for now.

Shona Robison, the Scottish government’s justice secretary, told The Herald:

My initial look at the statement of reasons doesn't give me any particular concern that there's something that we had missed or was it was a showstopper.

I thought it was very telling that Alister Jack was unable to answer I think essentially, most of the questions put to him by Westminster colleagues of all parties.

He also held out this idea of amendments being able to be brought to the bill but then in the next breath said that there could never be two different systems of gender recognition within the UK, which completely contradicts the idea of being able to amend our legislation. So I think he really needs to get his story straight.

Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon told the BBC that the issue would “inevitably end up in court” and that the Scottish government would “vigorously defend this legislation”.

Which court? Given that the order being challenged was made in London by a minister of the UK government, you might have thought the case would be heard in England. But in 1998 the then secretary of state for Scotland Donald Dewar promised that if a challenge was brought in these circumstances

the judicial review would be taken in the Court of Session in Scotland. It would be a challenge from Scotland and would be dealt with by the Scottish courts.

I am no expert on the Scottish courts but I would expect the proceedings to begin in the Outer House, which hears civil cases at first instance. An appeal from a single judge would presumably go to a panel of judges sitting in the Inner House. There might then be a further appeal to the UK Supreme Court in London. That process could take the rest of this year.

In the meantime, the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill will remain just that — a bill, with no legal effect.

Comment
Jack’s 13-page statement of reasons was drafted by lawyers for the benefit of other lawyers. It’s not particularly easy to follow.

Perhaps the secretary of state thought he was making life easier for himself by postponing its publication until after he had finished responding to questions yesterday. If so, his tactic backfired.

He deserves some credit for publishing what amounts to legal advice. But he would have had a much easier time if the document had been published at the same time as his statement and shared with opposition leaders, as statements normally are.

We can now expect the Scottish government to begin drafting its legal challenge. Once we see that, we shall have a better idea of the legal issues that the courts will be asked to resolve.

This analysis reached you free of charge. To add a comment — and receive exclusive posts —  please consider becoming a paying subscriber to A Lawyer Writes.

https://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=5837
Thought Crimes Are Now A Reality As Woman Arrested For Praying Silently
News Image BY ARIELLE DEL TURCO/THE WASHINGTON STAND JANUARY 13, 2023
Share this article:
facebook sharing button Sharetwitter sharing button Tweetemail sharing button Emailsms sharing button Shareprint sharing button Print
Just before Christmas, a stunning video showing the arrest of one U.K. citizen who was silently praying near an abortion facility in Birmingham, England went viral on social media.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce is a committed Christian, and for years she has made it a habit to pray for the protection of innocent human life in the womb as she walked past, or stood outside, abortion facilities. 

In November, police received a complaint about Vaughan-Spruce and arrived on the scene to question her. Though Vaughan-Spruce and the police officers involved were calm and respectful, the video of their conversation depicts a chilling violation of free speech and religious freedom.

A police officer asks Vaughan-Spruce, who is standing quietly on the sidewalk, "What are you here for today?"

Vaughan-Spruce: "Physically, I'm just standing here."

Police officer: "Okay. Why here of all places? I know you don't live nearby."

Vaughan-Spruce: "This is an abortion center."

Police officer: "Okay. That's why you're standing here?"

Vaughan-Spruce nodded.

Police officer: "Is you standing here part of a protest?"

Vaughan-Spruce: "No, I'm not protesting."

Police officer: "Are you praying?"

Vaughan-Spruce: "I might be praying in my head, but not out loud."

It is after this admission -- the admission that she was silently praying in her head -- that Vaughan-Spruce was asked to go to the police station for questioning. When she declined, she was arrested. 

The incident took place outside of BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham, and Vaughan-Spruce was accused of violating a local "public space protection order" (PSPO). Free speech advocates have rightly labeled such PSPOs "censorship zones."

Birmingham's PSPO expressly prohibits various free speech activities within a certain restricted area around the abortion facility, including peaceful assembly and giving women information on alternatives to abortion. Among the activities prohibited are, "Protesting, namely engaging in any act of approval or disapproval or attempted act of approval or disapproval, with respect to issues related to abortion services, by any means. This includes but is not limited to graphic, verbal or written means, prayer or counselling ..."

This measure, like others implemented or being considered as legislation across the U.K., is a grotesque violation of basic rights that we expect to be protected in any Western country. Free speech on public sidewalks, including prayer, should have no geographical restrictions. The purported purpose of these measures is to prevent harassment for women seeking abortions. 

Of course, harassment is always wrong and should be illegal, but of course harassment already is illegal in the U.K. Make no mistake, the goal here is not to end harassment -- it is to marginalize (in this case literally) any speech or religious belief that might disapprove of abortion or offer hurting women an alternative to abortion.

Censorship zones around abortion facilities have been hotly debated across the U.K. in recent months. The threats to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion from censorship zones are already evident in Vaughan-Spruce's case.

ADF International, a religious freedom legal advocacy group, is representing Vaughan-Spruce. ADF's Lois McLatchie told Nigel Farage on GB News that, "whether this PSPO itself is lawful under international human rights law which protects freedom of religion, freedom of thought, conscience, and belief, and freedom of speech, is another really important question in this case." 

It is disturbing that the insistence of some U.K. politicians on making sure women do not see or hear the thoughts or prayers of pro-lifers and Christians is leading them to potentially violate international human rights law.

Pro-abortion activists have claimed that it is not Vaughan-Spruce's silent prayer that provoked her arrest, but rather her violation of the PSPO. Yet, merely standing in the PSPO area is allowed. It was specifically the act of prayer that was not allowed under the PSPO, and that resulted in Vaughan-Spruce's arrest. This is without question a religious freedom case.

At its core, religious freedom encompasses the ability to hold and live out your faith. That naturally includes praying in public -- especially when your public prayer is done in the privacy of your own head. Free countries must diligently avoid the business of punishing Orwellian thoughtcrimes. 

After her arrest, Vaughan-Spruce stated, "Nobody should be criminalized for thinking and for praying, in a public space in the U.K." Quite right.

Originally published at The Washington Stand - reposted with permission.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-64208406?
A man has appeared at the magistrates’ court in Luton accused of throwing an egg towards King Charles during a walkabout.

Harry May, 21, of Moreton Road South, Luton, is charged with a public order offence relating to the King’s visit to the town on 6 December.


Luton Magistrates’ Court
Matthew Taylor, for the prosecution, said this was a “special jurisdiction case” that could be heard only by the chief magistrate.

He was referring to the Criminal Practice Directions 2015, as amended. Directions as to the practice and procedure of the criminal courts are made by the lord chief justice under section 74 of the Courts Act 2003 and part 1 of schedule 2 to the Constitutional Reform Act 2005.

Direction 13, known as CPD XIII, deals with listing of cases.

Annex 1 is headed general principles for the deployment of the judiciary in the magistrates’ court.

Paragraph 5 says:
The next paragraph says

The defendant was granted bail and must appear on Friday at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, where Paul Goldspring, the Senior District Judge (chief magistrate), normally sits.

Magistrates were told that May had expected his case to be dealt with in Luton today.

To be fair, not many lawyers would be familiar with the court deployment principles in paragraph 5(v) of annex 1 to CDP XIII. They’re not something you come across every day.

This analysis reached you free of charge. To add a comment — and receive exclusive posts —  please consider becoming a paying subscriber to A Lawyer Writes.

The cost is £4.99 a month or £50 a year. You can unsubscribe at any time and receive a refund of your unused subscription.

10 January 2023
Image result for harry spare release date
Spare is a memoir by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex which was released on 10 January 2023. It was ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer and published by Penguin Random House. The book was highly anticipated and was accompanied by several major broadcast interviews.

See more Spare (memoir) - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Spare_(memoir)

Spare is a memoir by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex which was released on 10 January 2023. It was ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer and published by Penguin Random House. The book was highly anticipated and was accompanied by several major broadcast interviews.

See more Spare (memoir) - Wikipedia  Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Spare_(memoir)
Spare is a memoir by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex which was released on 10 January 2023. It was ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer and published by Penguin Random House.

The book was highly anticipated and was accompanied by several major broadcast interviews. Harry details his childhood and the profound effect of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales's death as well as his troubled teenage years, and subsequent deployment to Afghanistan with the British Army. Harry writes about his relationship with his brother, Prince William and his father, King Charles III and his father's marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles. Harry writes of his courtship and marriage to the American actress Meghan Markle and the couple's subsequent stepping back from their royal roles.


Contents
1 Background and writing
2 Release
3 Synopsis
3.1 Early life and Diana's death
3.2 Teenage years, drug use, and deployment to Afghanistan
3.3 Relationship with Charles and Camilla, William's wedding, and Caroline Flack
3.4 Relationship with Meghan and fatherhood
3.5 Stepping back from royal role
4 Reception
4.1 Critical response
4.2 Afghanistan comments
4.3 Discussions on mental health
4.4 Political response
4.5 Public opinion
5 Veracity of claims
6 References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spare_(memoir)#:~:text=Spare%20is%20a%20memoir%20by,published%20by%20Penguin%20Random%20House.&text=The%20book%20was%20highly%20anticipated,by%20several%20major%20broadcast%20interviews.

UK Home Office gave $238,000 to group led by imam who voiced support for Taliban, then engaged in coverup
Meanwhile, numerous foes of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women are barred from entering the UK. Britain, as is increasingly obvious, is finished. “Home Office ‘Blob’ embroiled in cover up plot as bungling civil servants ‘gave £200k to group led by imam who once voiced his support for the Taliban,'” by Abdul Taher, Mail […]
Read more https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/01/uk-home-office-gave-238000-to-group-led-by-imam-who-voiced-support-for-taliban-then-engaged-in-coverup
2023-01-06  •  Robert Spencer

In this CUFI Weekly Review
UK expected to ban IRGC || Israel's Christian population grows 2% in one year || Pool of Siloam to open to the public this year || CUFI Prayer

Hopes build that UK will ban Iran’s Revolutionary Guards
The UK is on the verge of formally proscribing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation, according to reports this week.

CUFI has been calling for the UK to ban IRGC as part of its long-term Operation Mordecai campaign, exposing the threat of Iran to Israel and the West.

Click here to read https://www.cufi.org.uk/news/hopes-that-uk-will-ban-irans-revolutionary-guards-reports/

UK: Scotland police slammed for referring to pedophiles as ‘minor attracted people’
In any state, the level of corruption of the government, media and police are the three biggest indicators of how deeply a country is in trouble. Western society is in deep, deep trouble. This article “China May Be Too Right-Wing for American Leftists” highlights how low the West has sunk. Amid trans activist attempts at […]

Read more https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/01/uk-scotland-police-slammed-for-referring-to-pedophiles-as-minor-attracted-people
2023-01-05  •  Christine Douglass-Williams