In a now notorious exchange, London mayor Sadiq Khan said last year there was no ‘indication’ that grooming gangs – of the kind that have plagued towns such as Rotherham and Telford – exist in London. Evidence uncovered by the BBC last week has exposed the foolishness of this claim. It is now indisputable that vulnerable women and girls, some as young as 14, are being lured into a world of rape and exploitation by grooming gangs in London.
The public scandals and internal disagreements engulfing the Labour Party provide an all-pervasive soundtrack to life in Britain today. But it’s not just the governing party that is stuck in a quagmire of its own making. The Conservatives face an existential crisis, too. With a much-reduced presence in the House of Commons, collapsing poll ratings, and, most recently, a string of high-profile defections to Nigel Farage’s populist challenger Reform UK, the future of the “natural party of government” now seems in doubt.
Nothing but disappointment, really no different than Labour.
Five men have been convicted in connection with an attack that led to a serious house fire in which a woman and a girl were badly burned.
Five others had previously admitted offences relating to the incidents in Stoke-on-Trent in 2021.
Following an 11-week trial at Nottingham Crown Court, Det Con Howard Davies of Staffordshire Police said: “This was a horrific ordeal for a mother to be set on fire in her own home in front of her daughter by a number of men seeking revenge.”
The men have all been remanded in custody to await sentence at a date to be fixed.
In Britain, the MP Rupert Lowe, a political Independent, last year raised 600,000 pounds to crowdfund an independent investigation of the Muslim rape gang scandal. Lowe, along with MP Esther McVey, lawyer Graham Smith, and Sammy Woodhouse, a survivor of the rape gangs, heard testimony from other survivors. This was not an official inquiry. Based on the belief that British authorities have systematically tried to downplay the breadth and seriousness of the abuse, for the sake of avoiding conflict with Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities (from which the vast majority of the alleged rapists come), Lowe and his team gathered information independently. Now they are turning it over the to government in the hope that at last, the state will take it seriously. Here is their statement from yesterday.
It is very strong stuff…
British Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has been accused of overseeing a system which reportedly allowed suspected grooming gang child rapists to walk free with a warning during his time as the country’s top prosecutor.
Reform UK’s shadow home secretary, Zia Yusuf, said on Monday that the damage done by open borders policies pursued by the “cowardly” establishment parties is “profound.” But, crucially, “they are not irreversible.”
He announced a range of new measures aimed at ending “the invasion,” perhaps the most noteworthy of which is a pledge to deport “over 600,000” illegal migrants during the party’s first term in office. That would amount to 120,000 removals every year for five years.
The more excitable and less well-educated elements of the liberal left are forever apt to observe that politics today resemble those of the 1930s, being prone to denounce a development or policy they disdain as being ‘just like Nazi Germany’. To be fair, they have a point. It’s not just the street brawls we’ve seen in Manchester and Lyon over the last week, between hard left and hard right youths, that should arouse such unnerving comparisons. It’s also because we are living in an age of appeasement. And this time it’s the liberal left who are doing the appeasing.
🚨BREAKING: Muslim thugs attack patriots at the march for Remigration in Manchester 🇬🇧
They were antagonising and pulling flags off of patriots but they soon backed off when literally THOUSANDS of people were chasing them
The police were frantically trying to protect the… pic.twitter.com/JNyIq2o08z
— BRITAIN IS BROKEN 🇬🇧 (@BROKENBRITAIN0) February 21, 2026
When I published my previous essay in the Daily Sceptic on the rape-gang scandal, I attempted to describe what a serious integrity mechanism would look like in a state that wished to root out corruption rather than narrate it. Drawing on the example of Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), I set out, in practical terms, what such a body would require: independence from police and ministerial control, genuine investigative authority and a simple governing proposition: that no institution can be trusted to police itself when it is itself the problem.
My former colleague and sometime co-writer David Betz remarked on X that the piece read like a final appeal to reason – a last attempt to delineate what accountability might resemble if the contemporary administrative state in Britain still possessed the will to pursue it. We both agree that it does not have the will and have written several times to this effect.
That observation points to what the earlier essay left insufficiently examined. The pressing question is not what an integrity mechanism would look like. It is why such a mechanism has not appeared, and why, under the present dispensation, it cannot.
The redcoats of internet censorship are coming but an American midnight rider is coming to save Europeans from their own governments, the Trump White House teases, stating: “Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready.”
A growing number of websites have chosen to simply block users rather than comply with arduous censorship demands in response to Europe’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s Online Safety Act, with many more hidden behind government-mandated age-verification making linking a real-life identity to internet use a prerequisite for access.
Hamit Coskun’s conviction for a religiously aggravated offence was quashed on appeal but is back in the High Court. The United States is taking an interest
Burning books in central London is not an “intrinsic” public disorder, the High Court was told during an appeal for a man who burnt a Quran outside the Turkish embassy.
Hamit Coskun was found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence last June, after shouting “f*** Islam” and holding the flaming Islamic text aloft during a protest in Knightsbridge, on February 13 last year.
The defense chief of Germany’s Bundeswehr, General Carsten Breuer, and the United Kingdom’s chief of the defence staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, have jointly stated the case for rearming, amid the threat posed by Russia.
The top military officials penned a joint letter, published in The Guardian and German newspaper Welt, in which they said there was a “moral” case to be made for rearming.
British Jews are under threat, according to the police chief who helped foil an Islamic State-inspired massacre.
Walid Saadaoui, from Wigan, and Amar Hussein, from Bolton, planned to replicate the 2015 Paris terror attacks by targeting a Jewish community in the North West.
They bought assault rifles, handguns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in preparation for a suicide gun attack in which they wanted to “kill as many members of the Jewish community as they could” and hoped to become “martyrs” in revenge for Israel’s actions in Gaza.
A former Reform UK MP, who is now serving as an independent, has launched a new political party.
Rupert Lowe, who represents Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, launched Restore Britain, which he said would be a “national political party”, on Friday night.
He initially set up Restore Britain as a “political movement” after he was suspended from Reform UK last March.
It is now expected to act as an umbrella political party, with locally based political parties as partners.
>>>Deportation Park will be built
pic.twitter.com/dhi45HRypg— Ye Olde Holborn☣️ (@Ye_Olde_Holborn) February 14, 2026
I hope it takes off. Farage is a fraud, soft to the point of surrender on Islam.
h/t Auntie Polly
A Green Party councillor is facing a backlash after announcing she will be delivering Valentine’s Day cards to asylum seekers – and taking her grandchildren with her.
Anne Cross announced that she and her grandchildren had created cards and would take them to the controversial Crowborough Training Camp this weekend.
The East Sussex County councillor encouraged locals to participate in upcoming volunteering opportunities and hear the stories of those in the camp.
Britain has been “colonised” by immigrants who are “costing too much money”, Sir Jim Ratcliffe has said.
The billionaire co-owner of Manchester United, who also owns chemicals empire Ineos, called on the country’s politicians to “show some courage” by tackling immigration, welfare dependency and the sluggish economy.
“You can’t have an economy with nine million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in,” he told Sky News.
"Jim Ratcliffe should apologise"
This is the London Underground: pic.twitter.com/2yt0lcDj2X
— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) February 12, 2026
