The United Kingdom is slowly sliding off a fiscal cliff edge. Absent major spending cuts, the U.K. will suffer a systemic crisis like the one afflicting France. Beholden to socialism, the U.K.’s Labour Party government seems determined to bury its head in the sand.
That’s the takeaway from Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey’s budget, which was released Wednesday.
The clocks have gone back, Britons are preparing for the darkest time of the year, and the King has just started his tour of the Caribbean. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) will take place in Antigua and Barbuda in early November, and Charles is visiting the Bahamas and Guyana beforehand.
It is still just about possible, even this deep into the seemingly never-ending silly season that’s been running since about 2014, for a news story to take your breath away. Last week it was revealed that the curators of Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum have removed from display the mummified remains of the Egyptian priest Nekht, among other bits and bobs, because of an ‘absence of consent’. Presumably they are waiting for time travel to be invented, so that somebody can nip back 4,000 years and get Nekht to fill out the appropriate forms.
Two men have been charged over the suspected RAF Fairford terror plot.
Mohmed Abdulkarim, 24, and Nouman Essghir, 24, have been charged under the National Security Act following an investigation, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said.
Mr Abdulkarim, of London, has been charged with assisting a foreign intelligence service, while Mr Essghir, also from the capital, has been charged with entering a prohibited place for a purpose prejudicial to the UK.
France is ablaze and we could be next, say the gloomsters; and they may be right. Unrest seems to be spreading across Europe with riots in Milan, Albania, Spain and Portugal in recent weeks.
This may all be coincidental or a sign of a deeper political malaise that is expressing itself in violent behaviour. If the politicians won’t listen, the French protesters say, what choice do we have? It is also the reason given by masked men who have turned up at south-coast ports when asylum seekers arrive.
The Liberal Left:-
“The riots in France are nothing to do with Muslims or immigrants”
Also Muslim Immigrant Youth:-
“WE PLUNDERED EVERYTHING IN THE NAME ALLAH” https://t.co/kOWP3hsail— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) October 19, 2026
Professor David Betz of King’s College London has done something few academics ever manage: he has got a good part of the country talking seriously about civil war in Britain. His case is about the body politic, a fragmenting society, collapsing trust in the state, and the point at which organised groups start using violence to settle what politics no longer can.
Two men who were arrested over a suspected terror plot near RAF Fairford have been rearrested on suspicion of assisting Iran’s intelligence service.
Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) said it was ‘highly likely that there is Iranian state involvement’ in the activity that took place close to the airbase in Gloucestershire on September 27.
A 24-year-old UK national and a 25-year-old dual UK-Iranian national, both from the borough of Westminster, London, were rearrested today on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service under Section 3 of the National Security Act 2023.
Far-left and pro-Palestinian activist groups are calling on British students and workers to stage mass demonstrations and classroom walkouts next month, raising fears that the violent unrest engulfing France and spreading across Europe could be replicated in the United Kingdom.
A British student group called “Youth Strike” is planning a Day of Action on November 20th and they posted a promotional video for it filmed at the France riots. He tells the youth to “fight back” while smoke billows behind him. They want a riot here too. https://t.co/7OWAvK3xiy
— Heidi Bachram (@HeidiBachram) October 20, 2026
Adozen local people and a uniformed military police officer (“Do you mind if I sit in?”) took their seats at the back of the handsome wood-panelled courtroom that doubles as the Falkland Islands’ legislative assembly. Outside, it was a typically blowy early evening. It may nominally be spring in the south Atlantic, but Stanley harbour, with its dark grey water speckled with historical shipwrecks, was a cauldron of swells and churn.
Six of the assembly’s eight members – five men, one woman – waited patiently at a row of desks and microphones. The heating had been turned up to just short of uncomfortable. Behind them, a portrait of King Charles. From the other walls, dusty photographs of governors, of varying popularity, gazed disinterestedly at the scene.
A failed asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a small boat faces deportation after he was jailed for six years for trying to rape a woman in a terrifying late-night attack.
Mehmet Bulut, 31, was captured on CCTV following the woman into a dark subway in Hereford in the West Midlands at about 4am on Sunday, August 2.
Worcester Crown Court heard Bulut had been lurking near the subway before he launched a violent and sustained assault on the woman.
The chief adviser to Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has cited the election of Sagal Abdi-Wali to the UK parliament as evidence of the Islamisation of Britain and further reason for Argentina to take sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.
In a post on social media, Santiago Caputo, who is reportedly taking a key role in Argentina’s strategy over the Falklands, suggested that the taking of the south Atlantic islands was necessary to prevent the “interference of an Islamic state” in the region.
Milei shared Caputo’s post on the social media platform X.
The mother of Henry Nowak’s killer, who was jailed for removing the murder weapon from the scene, is to be freed after serving just one-third of her sentence thanks to Labour’s early release scheme.
Kiran Kaur, 53, is due to be let out of jail early in December under a controversial programme that plans to free up to 50,000 offenders a year.
Four in five jobs created over the past decade have been taken by migrants.
Of the 3.7million new roles recorded under the PAYE system since 2014, just 734,000 were taken by UK nationals, a think-tank has found.
EU citizens accounted for 408,000 jobs, while the vast majority – 2.5million – went to migrants from the rest of the world, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) said, with most of the surge coming since the pandemic.
And Canada? h/t kiki9
Britain’s benefits dependency is so embarrassingly bad it is starting to attract global derision. The Wall Street Journal has just published a piece explaining how claimants with disabilities in the UK can give up part of their welfare cash for a new car every three years. “Among those who got cars last year: 40 people whose primary medical condition was tennis elbow, 50 with wheat intolerance and 320 with dyslexia, according to government figures,” gasped the WSJ.
MI5 is devoting more resource to countering state threats than during the Cold War, the head of the intelligence service has said, as he labelled Russia “aggressor number one”.
Sir Ken McCallum warned MI5 was now facing a situation in which “our terrorism and state threats operational missions are pretty much of equal scale” as threats from foreign adversaries have quadrupled over the last decade.
He used an annual speech at the domestic intelligence service’s headquarters in London to also warn of rising threats from Iran and “extreme right-wing terrorism”.
