Dr Debbie Weekes-Bernard is Sadiq Khan’s £151,465 per year Deputy Mayor, Communities and Social Justice (he has nine deputy mayors in total).

She is also the Chair of Praxis Community Projects, whose title is a bit ambiguous until you head to its website, which advertises “A Migrant’s Guide”:

Costing £3 per copy (or free online), the Migrant’s Guide is “interactive guide to support you through your immigration journey in the UK. For migrants, by migrants.”

It comes in different languages:

And is extremely extensive, covering:

• LGBTQI+ support

• Immigration raids

• Mindfulness activities

• Register for GP & care needs

  

• Homelessness support if you have children

• Free activities

• Universal credit

• Housing benefit & council tax

Among other areas:

You can see the whole thing here.

Like I say, £151,465 per year Weekes-Bernard is Chair of Praxis, which she describes as “a charity supporting migrants and refugees and is a Distinguished Friend of the Migration Museum.” (Which itself received £1,147,120 from taxpayers between 2021-25).

Minnie Rahman is the CEO of Praxis and another alumni of the New Economy Organisers Network (NEON)…

… which trains left-wing activists for air and otherwise, including open-border-loving Zoe Gardner.

More on NEON here:

Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that Praxis Community Projects received £4,014,260 from taxpayers between 2021-25.

It’s part of a much bigger picture, with taxpayers being charged billions for charities, many of which effectively advance open borders or other ideological positions many taxpayers disagree with.

To see more, look no further than my list of taxpayer-funded charities (asylum and migration), which comes to £261,897,909:

A video explaining my latest calculations of charity funding.

You can see my updated lists here…

… and here:

Apologies for the newsletter being a bit late today. I am trying to send them off at 4pm most days, but I have been beavering away on my charity lists.

The latest total is £2.6 BILLION. Gulp. Especially when you see how stupid some of these charities are - which is why I’ve noted them down in the first place.

Paid subscribers can access the full list, which tells you which charities are the Top 10 biggest recipients of taxpayer funding.

To add, this is a sample I’ve chosen - mostly based on what charities I’ve found out about first (or known about already) during the course of my research. There are 170,000 charities on the Commission for England and Wales alone, so the final taxpayer figure is likely to be even greater.

I’ve also updated by asylum and migration list.

As many of my readers know, I keep lists of taxpayer-funded charities (adding up the amount they had had from taxpayers over the last five tax years).

Today I have been updating my list on asylum and migration charities. You will be shocked to know that nine have had an increase in taxpayer funding totalling

£43,487,121!

The charities that have had an increase in funding are:

Read more

A round-up of my articles this week:

Yesterday I watched Channel 4 News’ joint investigation into the “secret foreign donations” of Reform, created with Verbatim, “a not-for-profit investigative journalism” organisation funded by the Centre for Climate Reporting - an outfit that ironically has no information about its funders on its website.

Raheem Kassam has done a good recce on his Substack, incidentally, showing that the CCR is funded by “the foreign groups: European Climate Foundation, KR Foundation, Meliore Foundation, Swiss Philanthropy Foundation, and a fund administered through Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors”. (More here).

That hasn’t stopped Louis Wilson, one of Verbatim’s two founders, going undercover for over a year in “the highest levels of Reform UK” (as if you might find Lex Luthor stroking a white cat several levels up into the party) to sniff out the foreign moola apparently rolling into its accounts.

With Reform constantly being accused of receiving foreign/ Russian funding, you might think a journalist would find endless material to share with the nation. However, Verbatim actually had to invent a character in order to get any sort of scoop; a “plate of cookies” character designed to financially tempt Reform and get party officials to show their true characters.

Enter “William Lockwood”, played by Wilson, “British-educated, British accent, but his father, his father’s company, and his father’s money are American”, complete with a gilet and loafers (a disguise you sense Wilson is rather chuffed with).

Read more

Meet Colette Batten-Turner, Founder and CEO of “Conversation Over Borders”.

She’s an example of what I call an “Open Border Babe” (OBB); one of numerous women who now devotes a large amount of time, professionally or otherwise, to telling us all to BE KIND and support refugees entering the UK.

OBBs and otherwise increasingly have the means to be sanctimonious. Conversation Over Borders has received over £150k from the National Lottery since 2022 - and just wait until I show you its activism!

I discovered Batten-Turner through this video below, posted in collaboration with Ben & Jerry’s UK - which also funds Conversation Over Borders.

For the video, Batten-Turner joined forces with another OBB (Open Border Babe), Mathilda Della Torre, the Activism Manager at Ben & Jerry’s UK (as well as the “Founder of Conversations From Calais, a global poster project aiming to re-humanise the refugee crisis”) to promote Ben & Jerry’s “No Escape Room” - an “installation showing what it’s really like in asylum hotels.”

Ben & Jerry’s has installed this installation before in Shoreditch, London…

… but this time it was at Forwards Festival in Bristol. Speaking about the site, Della Torre explained: “I think festivals are a really, really important place to have this conversation because people are here to take the time and are actually emotionally much more vulnerable and ready to have conversation to understand what someone else’s reality might be like.”

Conversation Over Borders, a Community Interest Company, is not only funded by the National Lottery and Ben & Jerry’s via the “UK Fund of the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation”, but also the People’s Postcode Lottery and others, such as the Sussex Community Foundation (which in turn leads to tens of “fundholders”).

The grants Conversation over Borders has received are listed on 360 Giving, which also shows the Department for Work and Pensions as a funder:

Conversation Over Borders describes itself as “a UK-based organisation that brings refugees, people seeking asylum and local communities together through conversation, learning and community action.​​”

It adds: “At a time of growing division and hostility, community matters more than ever.”

What does this look like in practice?

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Well, Conversation Over Borders produced a “festive survival manual” to help people “navigate conversations about the ‘hotel’ accommodation system with kindness, clarity and facts”…

… it posted that “Borders are man-made & so is hate” (liked by the London Green Party)…

… and claimed women’s safety “has been weaponised by anti-refugee protestors”:

It also backed the obstruction of an immigration van - and the authorities doing their job - in Glasgow…

… and criticised the “deeply hurtful” Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman being based on biological sex:

I could go on and on… Here’s its Instagram page if you want a depressing read.

Batten-Turner’s own posts aren’t much better. For instance, last year she called out an “LGBTQ+ Inclusive Language training where neither the attendees nor trainers identified their pronouns.” The horror!

Elsewhere she says “Trans women are women. This is not, and has never been, up for debate”…

… and has been photographed with Zack Polanski at The World Transformed (“an annual festival and year-round political education project” for the ultra left):

In another post, Batten-Turner said she was “burnt out” before listing how difficult it is for charities due to cuts and even Donald Trump:

What a shame.

But it still doesn’t explain how this ridiculous outfit received over £150,000 from the National Lottery Community Fund.

More:

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Have you heard of Professor Sally Hines “(she/her)”, a “Gender Studies and Sociology academic” at the University of Sheffield?

When Hines isn’t busy researching “transgender, gender and sexuality theory, gender and sexual citizenship, sociologies of the body, sociologies of intimacy, intersectionality, and theories of recognition and difference”, as well as “Pregnant Men”, she can be found on X, tweeting about anything from…

…defending the “lanyard class”…

… to saying that people “really don’t have to worry” about “the future bone density of trans people”:

… to claiming that the Gender Critical movement “is now fully associated with the extreme right”…

I think it’s fair to say Hines is not the biggest fan of (and vice versa)…

… whom she accused of “obsessively tweeting about a paper that I co-wrote on trans pregnancy.”

But why shouldn’t Linehan highlight this study - seeing that Hines’ research on “Pregnant Men” received hundreds of thousands in taxpayer funding?

And that’s just the start…

Hines has been Principal Investigator on six projects that received £1,843,715 total in taxpayer funding:

All of these were funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), a subsidiary of the UK Research and Innovation.

Hines is also listed as Co-investigator on a taxpayer-funded project titled ESRC Seminar Series: Critical Diversities@ the Intersection: Policies, Practices, Perspectives, which received £16,378 and ran from 2013-2015.

So all in all, Hines has led or worked on projects awarded £1,860,093 in taxpayer funding.

Let’s take a closer look at some of this work…

Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences and Practices of Reproduction received £668,244 in total and ran from March 2017 to April 2021 at two universities (the University of Leeds and University of Sheffield).

Part of its abstract reads: “Trans male pregnancy shows how shifts in gendered and intimate practices occur within changing social institutions, technological advances and developing cultural understandings. Vice versa, such social, technological and cultural transformations impact on how individuals live their gendered, bodily and intimate lives. Diversification of gendered, sexual and intimate practices, and advances in health care practices and reproductive technology, have significantly altered contemporary experiences of pregnancy and birth.”

Then there’s Living Gender in Diverse Times, which also took part in two phases at the University of Leeds and University of Sheffield - costing taxpayers £1,057,555.

Its abstract reads:

“From coverage of Miley Cyrus' declaration that 'You Can Just Be Whatever You Want to Be' in 'Time Magazine', the introduction of a gender fluid character into the video game 'Sims 4' and Facebook's launch of multiple gender 'options', the last year and half of media coverage lends support to the 'Financial Times' End of Year (2015) pronouncement 'Year in a word: Trans: Gender discussion becomes a nuanced, fluid , 'non-binary' affair'.While there has been significant cultural interest in the ways in which young people are moving away from the traditional binary identities of male and female and adopting gendered expressions that destabilise conventional gendered norms. Academic research has yet to explore the ways in which the meanings of gender have changed for young people or to address the implications of this on gender as a social category more broadly. The overall aim of this project is to gain in-depth evidence driven knowledge of the understandings and practices of gender in the 21st C. UK amongst young people between the ages of 15-24.”

Wow, what great value for money…

Interestingly, another person Hines has been rude about on X is yours truly.

A couple of weeks ago she appeared to imply that I am part of a “politically dangerous” trend of journalists misleading the public about social sciences and humanities:

“They care nothing about evidence and wilfully mislead the public”, Hines wrote.

But where’s her evidence for that? I hope it’s obvious by now I enjoy publicising facts - which is why I encourage readers to check out the full list of taxpayer-funded research led by Professor Sally Hines.

More:

Over the last few weeks you will have seen outfits like Hacked Off, The Good Law Project and Byline Times calling for press reform following the media coverage and death of Jason Arday. I call this lot the “Leveson Lobby” - because they are often pushing for Leveson 2, not satisfied that the Leveson Inquiry 2011–2012 was adequate.

This Lobby is far greater than you might imagine as it also includes the Far Left. Take the posts of Green Party leader Zack Polanski - who attended the vigil for Arday, organised by the socialist group Stand Up to Racism and where Jolyon Maugham, the founder and Executive Director of The Good Law Project spoke - who has called for “Media regulation. Now”…

…while criticising the “tiny number of billionaire owned firms” that “dominate our media”:

All of this is rather hypocritical when you look at the Left’s media infrastructure.

Read more

Dr Donna McCormack (they/ them) is a Senior Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, who received £196,016.22 from the taxpayer-funded British Academy for “their” project Doing Disability Futures (which links Palestine to “disability justice” among other things).

McCormack has “a strong interest in monsters” and is “a founding member of the Monster Network”, as well as "currently developing a project on Queer Fish”, making me wonder why the British Academy ever funded they/them’s work, as well as promoting McCormack on its socials:

Worse still is that McCormack has had taxpayer funding through another channel: the absolutely abysmal Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a subsidiary of the UK Research and Innovation - which spends “more than £9 billion of public money” every year:

Between 2018-20, McCormack was awarded £120,080 towards “their” research project Transplant Imaginaries: Haunted Times, Segregated Spaces and Embodied Ethics while working at the University of Surrey’s English department (hardly very useful for organ donation research).

The project analysed human organ transplantation “through the lens of contemporary novels and films”.

It explained that:

“Through the completion of a research monograph, the organisation of UK and international events, and the creation of multi-media outputs on transplantation, this project will analyse not only the impact biotechnologies have on how we understand the human body in relation to health and illness, but also how transplantation is tied to larger issues of national belonging, social justice and bodily ethics.”

In “their” academic profile, McCormack touches on the now-completed project, saying that “this intersection of visceral body and communities boundaries is at the heart of my research.”

Wow, this sounds sooooo useful to taxpayers/ the world.

I can’t wait to find out what McCormack studies after Queer Fish. Perhaps Queer Fishy Monsters?

Great use of over £315,000 (the amount spent on McCormack’s research by taxpayer-funded bodies).

More:

“I also have a strong interest in monsters and am a founding member of the Monster Network.”

“I am currently developing a project on Queer Fish.”

Can you believe these statements were written by a researcher awarded £196,016.22 by the British Academy? A supposedly prestigious organisation that received just under £340 MILLION from taxpayers between 2021-25:

Meet Dr Donna McCormack, a they/ them “Senior Lecturer English & Creative Writing” who received the grant for “their” project Doing Disability Futures at the University of Strathclyde.

The project “will use arts-based and speculative methods to engage with global and local histories of colonial violence and ongoing injustices, as well as to tell stories of alternative futures that disrupt existing knowledge and power hierarchies about marginalized communities”:

Wow, that sounds so incredibly useful to disabled people…

In a personal statement on “their” academic profile, McCormack explains: “my research is situated at the intersection of post- and anti-colonial studies, queer theory, and the medical humanities. In much of my work I formulate post- and anti-colonial, critical race and queercrip ways of analysing contemporary fiction in order to both critique systems of violence and to open up space for imagining what is possible. My focus is the body in the context of health and illness and trauma studies. I work across literatures from North Africa, the Caribbean and Canada.”

“They” also “have a strong interest in monsters and am a founding member of the Monster Network. I have written on Richard Goldschmidt’s theory of hopeful monsters, and I am interested in alternative evolution theories as forms of anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-homo- and transphobic resistance. I am currently developing a project on Queer Fish.”

You can read “their” whole profile here - as well as head to the Monster Network website…

… which also has its own Instagram page:

Doing Disability Futures, too, has its own website and Instagram page - which are as bonkers as you might imagine:

For instance, the Instagram page links Palestine to “disability justice”:

And yeah, the rest of it is just as weird…

The British Academy is not the first taxpayer-funded entity to fund McCormack.

Between Aug 18-Aug 20, McCormack received a £120,080 grant for “their” project Transplant Imaginaries: Haunted Times, Segregated Spaces and Embodied Ethics.

McCormack is one of two so-called experts in Critical Disability Studies/ Theory I have written about this week - the other being Professor Dan Goodley, who comes out with some utter crap (and has had over £2.4 million in taxpayer-funded grants):

Both can be found on the social media output of the British Academy and are clearly meant to be shining examples of academics in the humanities and social sciences:

But their work is not just nonsense but insulting to the people it purports to help. Hundreds of thousands - and potentially millions - of pounds could have been put into making a real difference to disabled people’s lives.

Instead we get a doctor who’s interested in queer fish and an indoor-hat-wearing professor of gobbledygook.

My video on Dr Donna McCormack:

A note: my writing schedule has been a bit random this week in the aftermath of a big family wedding (which was wonderful). Next week I am going back to my usual schedule of 4pm Monday-Thursday with a weekend round-up.

“Inflatables are important to the world in so many ways.”

These are the words of Dr Michael Shaw, yet another “academic” promoted by the British Academy, “the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences” - which received £339,073,050 from taxpayers between 2021-25.

The BA posted this video of Shaw (above), in which he explains the wonder of inflatables. I wonder if a fart sounds more intelligent than this:

“And the research that you can see behind us is several inflatable sculptures that become slightly site-specific by the fact that you take the air from the place that you inflate them and blow them up. They’re also site-specific because they start to draw the reflections of their surroundings of this amazing building onto their surfaces, and also when they’re suspended, they kind of move around on the convection currents that occur in most buildings.”

Shaw is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Loughborough University, whose pronouns are “He/him”:

You’ll be pleased to know that, aside from an AHRC Fellowship between 2005-2008, he doesn’t seem to have had much taxpayer-funding.

Even so, why are we are we being charged HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS for the British Academy? An organisation promoting an academic whose research profile reads:

“The giant inflatables seek to re-invigorate space by reconfiguring how the viewer moves around the gallery or building. Each response is wholly bespoke, and any inflatable can only exist thanks to its host architecture. The intent is to develop a meaningful interaction, whereby the sculpture reinvigorates viewers’ perceptions by complementing or contrasting the space’s geometry and flow. These universally accessible inflatables are immediately engaging for the young and family visitors; and intriguing to others as they nuance pathways of motion, block existing site-lines, create overhangs and continually curving forms that kiss the ground in limited contact points. In brief, they are sculpturally dynamic, animated works that enliven any space.”

Not forgetting its promotion of Professor Dan Goodley, an expert on “Critical Disability Studies”…

… who claims that “Depathologisation works in concert with disabled artists, disabled activists, and disabled intellectuals, whose politics have learned much from their own engagements with decolonising activists and postcolonial theorists, depathologising the university creates conversations with black scholars and others who have decolonised the university, and it pulls in disability politics as a key resource, depathologisation is therefore but one theory and practice-a praxis that sits with disability as the driving subject of critical inquiry and social change.”

Worse still, there are even more awful examples to come.

What a load of HOT AIR!

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“Rather than being a problem, disability is an opportunity”, claims Dan Goodley, a professor of “Critical Disability Studies” at the University of Sheffield in a video for the British Academy (BA) (a registered charity that received £339,073,050 from taxpayers between 2021-25).

I wrote a bit about Goodley a bit yesterday. He has led or worked on projects costing the taxpayer approximately £2.4 MILLION, as well as being a Fellow of the BA, “the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences”.

I only ever intended to use Goodley as one example (out of multiple) of how terrible the British Academy is.

However, I had to show you the utter drivel he comes out with in his video for the BA, an institution that claims to “mobilise” the humanities and social sciences to “shape a brighter future.”

Titled “Disability as a driver of change: depathologising the university”, the video features Goodley saying things like:

“Rarely in public discourse is disability offered as a productive expression of human intellectual, cultural, and political life, and this negligent approach to the transformative potential of disability is apparent in the university.”

“Depathologisation works in concert with disabled artists, disabled activists, and disabled intellectuals, whose politics have learned much from their own engagements with decolonising activists and postcolonial theorists, depathologising the university creates conversations with black scholars and others who have decolonised the university, and it pulls in disability politics as a key resource, depathologisation is therefore but one theory and practice-a praxis that sits with disability as the driving subject of critical inquiry and social change.”

“We must and can find support and solace with others, so that we can depathologise university together. And while a disability impairment or a neurodivergent identity is always a personal matter, we should not forget that the potential for activism community that’s opened up is always a public matter. We cannot do this alone, and we need each other to disrupt the university.”

There’s also Goodley’s claim that “disability is an opportunity”…

… certainly if you’re looking for taxpayer-funded grants!

What a load of nonsense this is (from a professor who had “Left politics” in his X bio):

It can’t be said enough: THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!

Goodley’s grants (approximately £2,443,528):

UK government/public body funding (ESRC, EPSRC, Research England, DIUS):

• ESRC — £731,114 (Humanising Healthcare, 2022–25)

• EPSRC/UKRI TAS Hub — £147,414 (2022–23)

• University of Sheffield/Research England — £17,000 (2022)

• ESRC — £443,000 (Living Life to the Fullest, 2017–20)

• ESRC — £425,000 (Big Society, 2013–15)

• ESRC — £255,000 (Does Every Child Matter, 2008–10)

• Prime Minister’s Initiative 2/DIUS — £40,000 (2008–10)

• ESRC — £300,000 (Parents, Professionals and Disabled Babies, 2003–06)

• ESRC — £85,000 (Self-advocacy, 1998–2001)

If you also count the European Social Fund grant (£425,000, “Jobs not Charity,” 2003–05) — EU public funds rather than UK taxpayer money directly, but publicly-sourced — that brings it to £2,868,528.

Then there’s:

• Leverhulme Trust — £489,867

• Wellcome Trust (WAARC) — £1,007,109

• Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award — £2.9m

• SCOPE — £51,500

• BAAF — £8,500

More:

“Embracing disability as a deeply intellectual source of authority can help us redefine and unpack how we live and work together differently in the university.”

These are the words of Dan Goodley, a professor at the University of Sheffield.

I discovered Professor Goodley while nosing through the Instagram feed of the British Academy, which received £339,073,050 from taxpayers between 2021-25.

The British Academy describes itself as “the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences.” Unsurprisingly for subjects increasingly recognised as complete nonsense, its output is gobbledygook upon gobbledygook - Goodley being a prime example. In the full clip, he adds: “Disability might feed into a wider practice of what I term ‘depathologisation’.”

In turn I will show you further terrible examples of British Academy research, but I thought you might want to know a bit more Goodley, who has been involved in numerous taxpayer-funded studies.

According to his research profile, “Dan is interested in theorising and challenging the conditions of disablism (the social, political, cultural and psycho-emotional exclusion of people with physical, sensory and/or cognitive impairments) and ableism (the contemporary ideals on which the able, autonomous, productive citizen is based).”

Currently he is working on research projects funded by the Leverhulme Trust (another rabbit hole for another time) and the Wellcome Trust, which received £105,998,100 from taxpayers between 2020-24.

Note: PI means “Principal Investigator” and CoI/ Co-Is means “Co-Investigator”:

He has also had grants from the UKRI via its subsidiaries the Economic and Social Research Council…

…Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council…

… and Research England:

According to Claude (my beautiful AI assistant), the total government funding for projects Goodley has led or worked on works out at approximately £2,443,528:

UK government/public body funding (ESRC, EPSRC, Research England, DIUS):

• ESRC — £731,114 (Humanising Healthcare, 2022–25)

• EPSRC/UKRI TAS Hub — £147,414 (2022–23)

• University of Sheffield/Research England — £17,000 (2022)

• ESRC — £443,000 (Living Life to the Fullest, 2017–20)

• ESRC — £425,000 (Big Society, 2013–15)

• ESRC — £255,000 (Does Every Child Matter, 2008–10)

• Prime Minister’s Initiative 2/DIUS — £40,000 (2008–10)

• ESRC — £300,000 (Parents, Professionals and Disabled Babies, 2003–06)

• ESRC — £85,000 (Self-advocacy, 1998–2001)

If you also count the European Social Fund grant (£425,000, “Jobs not Charity,” 2003–05) — EU public funds rather than UK taxpayer money directly, but publicly-sourced — that brings it to £2,868,528.

Then there’s:

• Leverhulme Trust — £489,867

• Wellcome Trust (WAARC) — £1,007,109

• Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award — £2.9m

• SCOPE — £51,500

• BAAF — £8,500

I wonder if Goodley’s taxpayer-funded projects make any more sense than the sentence “Embracing disability as a deeply intellectual source of authority can help us redefine and unpack how we live and work together differently in the university”.

A round-up of my articles this week:

“We’re looking for the best new original plays about the climate and nature crisis that talk about our connection to each other, to the world around us, just like Shakespeare did.”

These are the words of Guy Meirion Jones, New Work Associate at Shakespeare’s Globe:

Jones was announcing The Climate Playwriting Prize 2026, which will “uncover the most exciting new plays about the climate crisis, and support them to find their audiences.” I can’t wait…

The Globe’s website explains: “We believe that playwrights have a vital role to play in the conversation around the climate.”

It continues: “This moment is marked by rising temperatures, escalating impacts of change on communities and ecosystems, but also by the potential for us to transform society for a flourishing, equitable future for all life. The need for new stories that help audiences grapple with the realities and possibilities of this crisis has never been clearer”.

If you look closely at the image above, you’ll see Shakespeare’s Globe is running the prize alongside Fern Culture and Climate Spring, two organisations most people have never heard of, but are increasingly having an impact on our drama. Climate Spring is the more interesting of the two, as it has worked on BBC productions…

… such as the recent BBC drama The Rapture, which had storylines about climate change…

… including a scene about how a baddie organisation was “lobbying to overturn net zero” (the horror!).

Climate Spring has some big funders, including the Wellcome Trust, which received £105,998,100 from taxpayers between 2020-24(!), as well as:

Read more

With a record 230 people (mostly men) crossing the Channel in one small boat earlier this month; water supplies running short; and housing ever-more scarce, you’d think politicians might want to halt new arrivals in the UK and reduce pressure on our infrastructure (never mind preserve our civilisation).

If anything, the opposite is happening, particularly in boroughs taken over by Greens, which are only too happy to encourage the world to move here. Case in point, the newly Green-led Hackney Council has announced its first ever Migrant Champion to “ensure migrant needs are represented.”

Read more

A note to say how extremely sorry I am about the death of Jason Arday. In writing this article, I am not attempting to scrutinise Arday himself but examine networks using his case to push for press regulation.

Ever since the media first started reporting on Jason Arday, The Good Law Project (GLP) has been extremely invested and involved in his case. In July it launched a petition for people to “Stand in solidarity with Jason Arday”, as well as this video in support of him:

Last night Jolyon Maugham, the Founder and Executive Director of the GLP, spoke at a vigil in Trafalgar Square following Arday’s tragic death. Yet again the GLP put itself centre stage - literally this time - in the case.

Those of the public who’ve heard of the GLP might be rather perplexed by its deep interest in Arday, right from the outset. But now things are becoming clearer. The GLP is using Arday’s case to argue that the UK needs press reform.

Read more

The Overseas Development Institute (ODI Global), “an independent, global affairs think tank”, received £40,303,180 from taxpayers between 2021-25.

So I’m sure you will be delighted to know it held a “Wellness” session earlier this month - posting about it on Instagram stories:

Read more