BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

A ‘Make Great Britain Christian Again’ event in August will see speakers aligned to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) and other far-right figures come together in an attempt to boost MAGA-style ‘Christian Nationalism’ on this side of the Atlantic.

At recent protests and rallies, Robinson has been flanked by pastors wearing religious collars, seemingly an attempt to boost his Christian credentials. The Southampton rally over the murder of Henry Nowak saw several fringe Christian figures speak, with the Lord’s Prayer increasingly a fixture of such gatherings.

Representatives from progressive Christian organisations from several denominations have spoken out against the two-day religious gathering.

Many of those speaking at the Make Great Britain Christian Again conference have become regular faces at far-right rallies, particularly aligning themselves with Tommy Robinson’s brand of anti-Islam and “anti-woke” politics. Some have amassed large social media followings off the back of it.

Organising the upcoming event is Reverend Brett Murphy, who attended Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally and runs the X page ‘Make Britain Christian Again’.

Murphy is well known for rhetoric seen as Islamophobic, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-migrant.

He has referred to Pride Month as “an abomination”, and the gay pride flag as the “sodomite flag”, has referred to abortion as “modern day child sacrifice”, spoken about “demographic replacement”, and appeared to refer to Green Party leader Zack Polanski as a “sodomite Jew” in a video falsely accusing the Gorton and Denton by-election of being won because of “vote rigging” by “family voting”.

Like Robinson, his brand of Christian nationalism appears to detest Islam.

In a recent post on X, he described how: “There is now an all out war against our Christian cultural heritage” and that: “The Left and Islam want to rip away our national Christian identity, they want to strip away any mention of Jesus from children in schools, replacing him with diverse teachings on pagan false religions, particularly Islam.”

After being contacted by Byline Times, Murphy posted our questions on Facebook prior to publication in an apparent attempt to get ahead of the story.

He told Byline Times that he hates “all false religions not just Islam, because the Bible says they lead people to the everlasting fire of hell”, adding: “I do not hate Muslims to he [sic] clear, I simply disagree strongly with Islamic theology and ideology.”

After Reform UK launched its ‘Christian Fellowship for Reform’ programme, Murphy seemingly cemented his alignment with the further-right fringe of politics, tweeting that the move was “likely in response to the very clear statements by Ben Habib, Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson that Britain must return to Christianity. Nonetheless it is a good thing”.

Murphy reportedly resigned from the Church of England due to its plans to introduce same-sex blessings to places of worship, and was also for a time under investigation for referring to a trans Archdeacon as “a bloke”. He later joined the ‘Free Church of England’ – affiliated with the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON), a deeply conservative US Anglican group.

He only lasted 13 months there before being stripped of his licence and the FCE stopping all services at his church. He now frequently derides the Church of England as “heretics”, something he re-iterated in his response to Byline Times.

Despite being de-licenced by the Free Church of England, he continues to preach from his one remaining base, the Emmanuel Church in Morecambe – the home of this particular gathering.

He claimed to Byline Times that he retains a licence with the ‘Confessing Anglican Church’, apparently issued a day after the FCE revoked his licence in what he referred to as a “kangaroo court.”

Other Speakers at the Conference

Another speaker, Bishop Ceirion ‘Cei’ Dewar, like Murphy, considers the Church of England to be heretical, and was also present at Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march, though this wasn’t his first outing with the far-right agitator and convicted criminal.

At another of Robinson’s events, a year prior in Whitehall, he addressed the crowd, telling them: “This nation of ours is under attack! We are at war! We are at war not just with the Muslim, not just with wokeness!”

Dewar has rejected the idea that he himself is far-right, but did not respond to Byline Times’ request for comment.

Another of the notable speakers at the event is pastor Chris Wickland of the Living Word Church network, who has spoken at anti-migrant protests and at Tommy Robinson rallies, including ‘Unite the Kingdom’, and recently addressed the crowd in Southampton in the wake of the tragic murder of Henry Nowak.

Wickland has claimed at points that preaching the Christian gospel had been made “illegal” in Bournemouth. In Southampton, he framed Islam as a “false god”, called Britain a “Christian nation”, and said that children were “being sacrificed on the altar for political correctness and multiculturalism”.

He has previously rallied against what he refers to as “hyperliberalism” and prophesied that “the agenda of the highly liberal left will collapse and fall” and that “this nation will start to turn back to her God again”. Wickland confirmed to Byline Times that the comments made by him were accurate.

Another speaker, Aaron Edwards, was recently dismissed from his position at the theological education and training institution Cliff College, after posting on X: “Homosexuality is invading the Church.”

Confirming to Byline Times that he identifies as a Christian nationalist, Edwards said that while he did make the above statement, it was “addressed to fellow evangelicals, not to homosexuals per se”, and that he had attempted to clarify that this was not meant as an attack on the gay community.

Standing by its decision, Cliff College released a statement after Edwards’ ousting, which read that “as a Methodist institution, Cliff College is committed to being a safe and hospitable place where those with differing convictions are welcomed and encouraged to live and learn together as faithful disciples of Christ.” The Methodist Conference voted to marry same-sex couples in church in 2021.

Edwards told Byline Times: “I am speaking at the conference because I believe the Church in Britain needs to stand up more courageously to call Britain back to its Christian foundations.”

Others known to be speaking include Bob of Speakers Corner, also known as ‘Bob the Bulldozer’ – affiliated with ‘Soldier of Christ Online’ (SOCO), and Dominic Leo Muir, who on his social media page has written that: “‘Christian nationalism’ has become the weaponised scare label from the secular overlord who wants a toothless church terrified of being viewed as intolerant, bigoted or ‘unspiritual’.”

A Wider Trend on the Right

Many Christians Byline Times spoke to fear their religion is being co-opted to suit the agenda of the far-right, something which is not a new phenomenon, but one which has, they say, become much more pronounced over the last year.

That’s partly due to the rise of the far right and shifting of politics towards the right in general, allowing imported US-style Christian nationalism to find more of a foothold on British soil among the far-right.

Groups like UKIP, under the leadership of Nick Tenconi, have notably drifted in their focus from Euroscepticism to overtly embracing an aggressive form of street-level Christian nationalism, recently performing a ‘Walk with Jesus’ march branded by leading faith-based publications as “the co-option of sacred symbols by a far-right movement that seeks to provide moral cover for an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim agenda by dressing it up in Christian heritage”.

Robinson himself has also ostensibly converted to Christianity during his most recent stint in prison, and radical right parties like Reform and Restore are increasingly using the language of Christianity in their messaging, often conflating a sense of religious heritage and national identity in an attempt to broaden their appeal.

Speaking to Byline Times, Tommy Sharpe, from Better Story – a multidenominational grassroots movement of Christians seeking to resist “exclusionary distortions of faith” – said: “Parties like Reform, Restore, UKIP, and Advance are reliant on ‘us’ versus ‘them’ politics. They take existing grief within the ‘us’ group about poverty, inequality, isolation, and crumbling public services, and turn this into grievance against ‘them’ groups, and Christian language and symbols can help create this perceived divide between communities.”

He added: “Certain far-right actors use ‘Christian’ as a stand-in word for ‘White’ or ‘European’, and because it allows them to draw a firm distinction between the in-group and the out-group whilst appearing less racist… we would refer to this as church-washing.”

Symon Hill, a Baptist minister, university chaplain, and author who campaigns against the far-right, told Byline Times the trend has “really increased in the last year and a half.”

“That’s partly down to the general rise of the far right and the stretching of politics to the right — anti-migrant sentiment has become more mainstream, and people like Farage have reached for language about ‘Christian Britain’ and ‘Christian heritage.’ You’ve got a lot of groups, Reform and others, talking about defending ‘Christian Britain.’”

He believes the idea of defending a “Christian Britain” is bizarre: “When do these people think Britain was Christian? Was Britain Christian when it was engaged in the slave trade? Was England Christian when Crusaders were stealing land in the Middle East, killing civilians as they went? Was it Christian when it was conducting pogroms against Jews? Christianity inspired many people to resist these things.”

As Sharpe puts it: “As Christians, we don’t believe there is such a thing as a Christian country. The Christian faith is universal by definition because no people group has privileged access to God. Jesus says ‘go and make disciples of all nations’, not ‘go and build a Christian nation’.”

In statements, high-ranking members of the church such as the Bishop of Kirkstall have already spoken out about the co-opting of Christianity, stating that the Church must “reclaim both the flag and the faith” from the far-right.

Coalitions of church leaders have also appealed to the Government to protect people against a rise in far-right nationalism, saying that “seeing the rise of the far right preach a message of Christian nationalism that is steeped in white supremacy at the behest of influential social and political leaders in the UK and the US is deeply concerning.”

Christians Push Back

Baptist Minister Symon Hill tells Byline Times: “There’s still a tendency in some places to think, ‘we’d better not mention the Christian far right, because we’re just giving them extra publicity.’ I think that ship has sailed — I think they’ve gained plenty of publicity themselves, and we need to be tackling them now. It’s now a question of what we actually do about it.”

There is an irony, Hill says, in that while many of these speakers cite certain passages from the Bible, the ones which conveniently fit their narratives, “very rarely do they actually mention the teachings of Jesus, the life of Jesus, what Jesus said or how he taught people to behave towards each other.

“People who want to worship Jesus without following Jesus tend to end up in a place where they talk about a God of power rather than a God of love.”

Also highlighted by those who spoke to this publication was the important point that, while it could be said of many members of the far-right that they are exploiting Christianity for their own ends, there are also many people of actual faith who could be easily susceptible to being drawn into this dark and isolationist brand of faith-infused radical politics, while genuinely believing in an interpretation of the Bible.

As Tommy Sharpe explains: “There are many complicated reasons that individuals become involved in far-right political movements. This is also true of Christians. For parts of the church, the ethical priority is the prevention of assisted dying and abortion and the promotion of conservative interpretations of marriage and sexuality.

“Care for the foreigner and the vulnerable, peacemaking, and anti-poverty work are seen as secondary. Because far-right parties and movements are increasingly speaking into these ethical concerns, they have become an attractive political option for a minority of Christians,” he added. He believes some Christians perceive renewed interest in Christianity as a recruiting ground, giving them “new opportunities to evangelise”, as well as a fear of Islam in general.

Hill argues it is “dangerous to just dismiss the ‘Christian far right’, and assume it’s purely performative.”

But he also notes, in contrast to what perhaps is the dominant current understanding of this melding of ideologies, that “the narrative that conservative Christianity is growing while liberal Christianity is declining is very simplistic.”

“Beyond the legal or institutional picture, there’s a more lively, radical, inclusive Christianity at the grassroots, reaching people who’ve traditionally been alienated by Christianity.”

However, he argues there’s also an upsurge of interest in “genuinely radical, progressive Christianity”, and that through his work as a chaplain, he sees many “younger, LGBTQ+ people… who are so used to homophobic, transphobic Christianity, that they’re enthusiastic when they encounter Christians supportive of LGBTQ+ inclusion.”

Hill says that he personally has seen “a revival of interest among younger LGBTQ+ people in the progressive wing” of Christianity as well – citing examples of Metropolitan Community Church in Brighton, Renew Inclusive Church in Cambridge, and St Clare’s in Coventry.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Hill says: “Jesus demonstrates that the category of ‘neighbour’ is not limited to people like us and explicitly calls his followers to love those who are different to them.”

“If we’re going to defeat the far right — if we’re going to help those taken in by far-right myths think differently — I think we need to challenge our own prejudices, learn from each other, and build an alliance of people of different faiths and of none. That means, in resisting Christian nationalism, reaching out to people of other faiths as well as Christians… so we can build better things in society and resist injustice together.”

He added: “Churches that work with people in poverty, that run food banks, have many people in poverty attending them — they’re in a position to bring together people in poverty who are white and people in poverty who are migrants, people of colour who are British and people who aren’t.”

Additional reporting by Josiah Mortimer.

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

A presenter on the Murdoch-owned Talk station is appearing in court today, after being charged with assault following an incident at a fundraiser for Donald Trump in Windsor last September.

André Walker faces a charge of assault by beating, and the trial is scheduled to take place today, 30 July, at Reading Magistrates’ Court.

It follows Fossil Free London activists interrupting the Windsor Guildhall event with a banner, chanting against the US President’s policies on the climate crisis. Byline Times exclusively reported on the incident, which was not covered elsewhere.

NHS doctor and activist Kush Naker alleged that Walker dragged him from the front to a side room, closed the door, and got on his knees on top of him, reaching for his neck.

He further alleged that Walker tried to swing several punches at him whilst he was on the ground, which he claims he prevented by grabbing Walker’s wrists. Naker claimed the Talk host then moved his knee towards Naker’s groin, in what Naker took to be an attempt to knee him in the genitals. Naker says he responded by trapping Walker’s leg between his own. At the time, Walker and his spokesman denied the claims as “nonsense”.

Still Presenting on Talk

Thames Valley Police confirmed at the time they had received a report of assault with injury at around 8.30pm on 16 September at Windsor Guildhall, at the Republicans Overseas gala dinner during Trump’s state visit.

A spokesperson for Thames Valley Police told Byline Times on Wednesday (28 July): “Following a Thames Valley Police investigation, Andre Walker, aged 47, of Hatch Lane, Windsor, was charged with assault by beating by postal requisition on 25 February…

“He is due to appear at Reading Magistrates’ Court on Thursday 30 July. Now that a charge has been made, the force will not be in a position to provide any further details as proceedings are now active.”

Another Fossil Free London activist alleged she was slapped repeatedly by a female attendee, in an incident caught on video, while being removed by security, though no charges appear to have been brought.

Walker has continued hosting weekly shows on Talk despite his assault charge, which he is understood to deny. The right-winger has presented at least eight shows for the Murdoch-owned online and radio station in July alone, along with co-host Ash Gould.

Assault by beating (common assault, contrary to s.39 Criminal Justice Act 1988) is a summary-only offence, meaning it can only be tried in the Magistrates’ Court, unless it is ‘sent up’ to a Crown Court alongside a more serious charge.

Walker has attempted to portray the case as politically motivated. In recent YouTube videos he has claimed Thames Valley Police and supposed “terrorists” have “aligned” to bring him down.

He has also sought to present the Fossil Free London demonstration as a “terrorist attack” he personally foiled during Donald Trump’s state visit. He has been soliciting donations for a “phenomenal legal team” he claims was recommended via Elon Musk’s and Trump’s lawyers.

When Byline Times reported on the incident last year, Walker said: “There are no criminal allegations. They haven’t made any. The only people they’ve phoned are you. Always remember something – if you start printing a load of allegations against me in the absence of any evidence, you’ll just look like a dickhead. And also, how would you feel if it happened to you?”

The ‘Patriot Fund’

Walker claims he has sold his car and is behind on rent, while promoting a “Patriot Club” or “Patriot Fund” for his costs, including a claim he paid three grooming-gang victims £150 each after they gave evidence in “the Rupert Lowe thing” (the far-right Restore Britain leader’s own report into grooming).

After a failed attempt to bring a private prosecution for aggravated trespass (which he says the Crown Prosecution Service blocked at Reading Magistrates’ Court), Walker says he is serving a “notice before action” and heading for judicial review at the High Court, framed as suing the Government.

He has also set out a wider ambition to privately prosecute political opponents (“lefties…we’ll start putting them in court” he says in one video).

In a monologue on his YouTube channel, he confirmed the so-called Patriot Fund is “very definitely not a charity”, and is a discretionary pot he alone directs, adding that PayPal shut him down over suspicions he was falsely presenting it as a charity.

News UK was contacted for comment.

In Court Today

Byline Times is watching the court hearing today. Walker is present.

In the opening minutes, the prosecution said: “The defendant has published various forms of media content, specifically videos on his YouTube channel, discussing the case, discussing the officer of the case, the investigations” (Walker interrupted: “That’s not true”).

The prosecution are preparing the videos to show in court and the hearing has been paused – Byline Times will update on the case when the court reconvenes

Josiah Mortimer is Byline Times’ Chief Reporter. Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

My current book, Where’s The Money Gone? was subtitled, ‘The Battle For The Soul of English Football.’ Maybe I should bring out a new edition focusing on the battle for the soul of global football, because with Gianni Infantino’s plan to sell a stake in the World Cup to venture capitalists, the sport’s integrity is now in ultimate jeopardy.

As FIFA President, Infantino has already embraced a highly Americanised, slickly over-commercialised version of the game, with matches at the most recent tournament neatly quartered for advertisers on the pretext of providing hydration breaks for players (even in games where heat was not an issue) alongside dynamic pricing which catapulted the cost of admission beyond the reach of millions of ordinary fans.

Does anyone seriously believe these trends won’t be amplified if big money becomes directly involved in running the World Cup? Expect pressure for a bi-annual tournament (instead of every four years) and an expansion of its already bloated structure to encompass 64 teams rather than the current 48, perhaps along with a permanent base in the United States.

FIFA is already projecting revenues of $13 billion from its latest jamboree – more than enough to be divvied up among its member nations; but as we often see in other arenas, ‘enough’ is never enough for the most rapacious forms of capitalism.

It’s surely no coincidence that after awarding a ‘Peace Prize’ to warmonger Donald Trump, Infantino has been plotting his internal FIFA coup with Joshua Kushner, brother of the US President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

FIFA’s member nations would apparently each benefit to the tune of $20 million if the plan goes ahead, which sounds like a tempting trade-off, but the evidence suggests that precious little of this vast wealth will trickle down to grassroots football. The football writer Simon Kuper told me recently about revisiting South Africa, the tournament host in 2010, and found scant evidence that it ever took place, barring a couple of vast and generally under-populated ‘white elephant’ stadia. At community level, Kuper observed, “it was never going to create any lasting jobs. But it also didn’t even create this very simple thing you think would be possible - football fields, places to play.”

It’s easy to forget now, but when Infantino was elected in 2016, he was seen as FIFA’s “clean-up ” candidate after years when corruption allegations has dogged the organisation. The then FA Chairman Greg Dyke hailed him as ‘a straightforward guy’. The Guardian reported recently that English football bosses were likely to maintain their support for Infantino’s candidacy for a fourth term next March, despite his unprecedent role in overturning a red card for US striker Falorin Balogun during the World Cup group matches, following a phone call from Trump. We shouldn’t be altogether surprised at the supine reaction from our own governing body; when money talks the FA usually listens, as it demonstrated in 1992 when Chief Executive Graham Kelly sanctioned the breakaway Premier League, a home-grown cash grab, every bit as cynical as Infantino’s.

Only UEFA, the European organising body, has shown any backbone; its President Aleksander Ceferin refused to attend the World Cup Final between Spain and Argentina this month in protest at FIFA, and there’s talk of a possible boycott of either the Women’s World Cup next year in Brazil, or the next men’s tournament, due to be held in Portugal, Spain and Uruguay in four years time. At stake is a vision of the sport as rooted, community experience in which match going supporters have an enduring stake; and the contrasting idea of football as a manufactured entertainment played to satisfy the whims of private equity, TV companies and major sponsors.

As Prime Minister Andy Burnham put it, “Football does not belong to investors. It belongs to the people who fill the stands and who stand on the touchline week in, week out, rain or shine.

“The World Cup is not a product. It is the greatest competition in world sport, and it was never anyone’s to sell. Dress the deal up however you like. Once you have sold a piece of it, you have sold out.”

Football is, if course, a hugely successful professional game and players deserve to enjoy the fruits of their labour, but few would argue that top players today aren’t well recompensed. Just as important as the short-term desire to make money is rest and recovery time, which helps preserve their longevity as professional athletes and keeps supporters keen. Cramming the calendar with additional fixtures in pursuit of ever greater rewards threatens more injuries, unprecedented levels of exhaustion and ultimately, a less compelling spectacle. In this scenario, football and its followers would surely be the losers.

Adrian Goldberg’s book Where’s the Money Gone? The Battle for the Soul of English Football is published by Byline Books.

Get Your Copy Here

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

France is hardly unique among developed European nations in accommodating the far-right within mainstream political thinking, but the persistence of racism and xenophobia is a strikingly persistent feature of its public life, dating back to the Dreyfus Affair in the late 19th Century. Irish journalist Enda O’ Doherty traces this troubled history in his new book, The Dark Side Of France, which arrives at a timely moment, given the recent legal appeal which cleared Marine Le Pen to stand in next year’s Presidential elections, despite being found guilty of misusing EU funds.

In an interview with the Byline Times Podcast, O’Doherty identifies a shape-shifting quality to the French far-right, saying “I wouldn’t argue that it has been the same since the 1890s. There are many strands to it. For a long time, its chief hope was to restore the monarchy, which had been toppled by the French Revolution.”

Yet through its various iterations – whether the anti-semitism which led to the wrongful conviction of former army captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason in 1894, through to the racism which resisted Algerian independence in the 1950s and 60s, and in more recent times the anti-Muslim sentiment of Le Pen’s National Rally movement – O’Doherty does detect a consistent thread. “The thing which I think unites the far right from at least the 1890s onwards is this slogan, ‘La France aux Français’ – France for the French – and that is very much what [Le Pen’s] Rassemblement Nationale stands for now.”

This definition of ‘Frenchness’, he says, is based on being white and Christian, with a Roman cultural heritage: “Anyone who didn’t fit with that – the Jews in the 19th century and throughout the 20th century until 1940; and since the 1970s and 80s, the immigrant community from North Africa who are chiefly Muslim in religion – these are both seen as extraneous elements who don’t really belong.” This othering extended to Italians who came to settle in the South East of the country, Poles who worked the coal mines of the North East, and the Spanish who fled the civil war of the 30s.

O’Doherty argues that while modern French may look integrated - with substantial numbers of non-white citizens in evidence on the streets of Paris and other major cities - “many of them, in fact, don’t feel that they’re accepted as fully French. They even use the term ‘the French’ to refer to other people.” This, he says, is particularly true amongst Muslims, whose traditional modes of dress including the hijab (head covering) and abaya (long flowing robes) have been restricted in schools.

“When the far right talks about it, every Muslim is an extreme Muslim, a radical Muslim,” O’Doherty comments. “That is very far from being the case. There are Muslims who go to the mosque every week. There are Muslims who don’t go to the mosque every week. There are Muslims who go to the mosque where the imam is a perfectly reasonable person. There are some Muslims who go to the mosque where the imam is a radical. There are some young Muslims who are more interested in football and rap music than in anything to do with the traditional tenets of their religion. There is great variety. People can’t all be tarred with the same brush.”

For decades after 1945, referencing the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazis during World War 2 was taboo, helping restrict the spread of far-right sentiment, but the movement gained fresh energy under Jean-Marie Le Pen, who downplayed The Holocaust and made derogatory statements about Muslims. He was expelled in 2015 from the National Front, the party he founded, by his daughter Marine, whose rebranded RN is in a strong position ahead of next year’s scheduled presidential election.

O’Doherty says that if she wins, “I think it won’t be good for minorities in France because she and her party make absolutely no secret that they are interested in ideas like repatriation, or confining welfare benefits to people who are ‘vrai Français’ [true French] as they define it. So it won’t be good at all, and it could possibly cause civil unrest, as there could well be pushback to measures that the far right might seek to introduce.”

He acknowledges that a republic founded on the principles of ‘Liberté, Égalité Fraternité’ has also staunchly resisted these trends in the past, citing as his one of his heroes the three-time Prime Minister Léon Blum, a socialist whose Popular Front Government denounced the appeasement of Nazi Germany and granted workers new rights to paid annual leave. “In 1936 there was a landslide for an alliance of the parties of the left and centre, which led to the Popular Front government,” O’Doherty recalls. Then there was wartime resistance leader Charles de Gaulle, later France’s President, who, “in a rather calculating, crafty way, outmanoeuvred the far right in the late 50s and early 60s. So, for a long period, [the far right] was there, and it was unpleasant, but it didn’t represent the soul of France – which I think has very, very many positive aspects to it, too. And I hope that they [the forces of resistance] will continue to prevail.”

You can watch Adrian Goldberg’s interview with Enda O’Doherty on the Byline Times Podcast here.

Subscribe now

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

HM: Your 2018 book was Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots. What is it about the subject of tech and intimacy that fascinates you, and what are some of the core strands that studying it reveals about human nature?

KD: I’m really interested in people, and how people live with each other and technology. We are all here because someone has had sex. It’s inescapable, and whether we want to or not, it affects our lives. So I was really curious about what happens when you put technology into that mix. And there’s a very, very long cultural history of it – right back to Ancient Greece, where there are stories about creating artificial companions to replace a lost loved one or building the perfect partner. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of years of being primed to want that [connection], and we have it reinforced by sci-fi films all the time.

None of the technology [that has been developed] has actually been in a place where it can deliver some of that. This is the first time in our existence that we’ve been able to talk to something [AI chatbots] that talks back to us as if it’s like us, even though it is fundamentally not [like us]: it’s not conscious in any way, it’s not sentient in any way, it mimics the way that we work. And that is likely to have profound implications on our interactions with technology.

There has been extensive media coverage in the past few years of the relationships – romantic and otherwise – that some people develop with AI companions, including problematic cases which have cost individuals their lives. As you observe, it’s interesting to remind ourselves that this tendency isn’t new even if this technology is …

There’s something in all of us that looks for connection with others and that’s because we are, by biological design, social creatures – we work well in social groups, we have to relate socially to each other. There’s a thought in cognitive science and in psychology that suggests we exist through our interactions with others; that we enact how we behave and that gives us some of our cognition and perception. So this desire to seek out something for a relationship probably is innate. We’re all on this planet and the biological urge is to reproduce your DNA, and some people choose not to, and some people aren’t able to, however, we are driven by that impetus whether we know it or like it or not.

Down the centuries, people have wondered what it would be like to have the ultimate perfect relationship, if something can be that ‘perfect match’. I started my career in archeology, and one of the things I’m really interested in is the changes in technology through time – and what doesn’t seem to change really: human nature. We can’t know for sure, but knowing the speed at which things evolve, the way humans evolved, it’s pretty likely that we are dealing with some very similar emotions over the centuries. This feeling of being human, of wanting to connect with the person that understands us most, that makes life beautiful, is going to be there. Literature focuses on this, films have it as their key concept, plays, poetry … There’s so [much in the arts] about connection. So this really speaks to the part of us that is desperate to connect with others and particularly to feel understood and to feel loved and cared for.

How has this innate desire to connect as social beings played out on social media in the past decade?

People go on social media platforms and they find their tribe. Yes, there’s lots of hate online, but there’s also lots of love online. Maybe I’m being a bit of a tech optimist here, but I genuinely think that social media has done wonderful things. We would not have gotten through that pandemic without being able to connect with people online. If you are someone who is in an environment where you are misunderstood, bullied, lonely, or isolated, to be able to go online and connect with others who understand you and make you feel welcome, is a really powerful thing.

I’ve got friends who I met online who’ve become real life friends. I’ve got friends who I’ve met online who I’ve never met in real life but I still count them as friends. I think for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, we see this blurring where online and offline life aren’t particularly distinct things, and I watch as they navigate that without the boundaries [of] ‘oh that’s someone you met online, that’s not a real friend’. I don’t think that’s the case. I think you absolutely can have genuine connections with people online, and to say that you can’t is very limiting. Of course, the flipside of social media is that it empowers people to behave at an arm’s length way so that they don’t see any of the harm they might inflict if things go wrong. But for many, it’s been a way to connect to communities that they’d never have access to in real life and that’s really good.

I grew up in a small village in Northern Ireland and life was pretty rural and isolated, and I wasn’t going online until I was at university. The friends I’ve been able to make online – I wish I’d had that growing up, I wish I’d felt more connected that way, less misunderstood perhaps. I felt very lonely at times. There’s lots of talk about how we have a loneliness epidemic and I’m curious as to how we measure that because we are told there’s a paradox: that we are the most connected ever and yet people feel the most lonely. I’m intrigued because I don’t think it always holds. The way you ask the question matters. If you’re saying ‘do you have friends in real life?’ versus ‘just talking to people online’ – and classing [the latter] as ‘lonely’ – I don’t think that’s a very fair assumption. By and large, I see the ability to connect with people online as a very profoundly important thing.

For many people, even if they don’t actively engage on social media platforms, they are able to read others’ experiences online on forums such as Reddit – which also have problematic sides – on such a diverse range of topics, providing the perspective of others who can share what you are grappling with. People now openly and casually refer to reading the replies on such forums when they are struggling, or asking ChatGPT for advice on how to navigate challenging personal situations and emotions …

We try to connect a lot, and we’ve done this for years – we’ve gone home and put on the radio or the TV so we can hear human voices. There’s a lot of comfort from knowing that other people are in similar situations. It also gives us a broadening of responses as well, so we’re not just listening to our peers in a small social group where we might not get diverse viewpoints. Again, the flipside being that, sometimes, you don’t want the other viewpoints because they are hateful. And, of course, there are algorithms which put us into an echo chamber filter bubble. But to have access to all that knowledge can be really good – we just have to learn how to filter that.

The Government has announced a social media ban for under-16s. Is this what it should be prioritising when it comes to tackling online harms, Big Tech unaccountability, and the problematic incentives and attachments created by these platforms?

I think the attempts to ban social media for under-16s is vibes-based rather than evidence-based. There have been a number of studies that have shown that children’s access to social media does not negatively impact them; that it is much more nuanced. There was a longitudinal study of 100,000 children in Australia that did not see the harms that are claimed. I feel this is being done as a bit of a vote-winner because it’s tapping into people’s fears, genuine fears in many cases, parents’ fears, because of course you’re terrified that your kid might be at risk. We know that there have been harms like Grok with its sexualised images of children, like online bullying, and the class actions against AI companies – but we have to remember, certainly with suicides through chatbot use, that those are the ‘edge’ cases; a tiny number in proportion to the millions and millions of users that those tools have. That doesn’t mean they should be dismissed, they absolutely should not, we need to find ways to do [something about that]. But a ban is not the answer and I don’t think it’s particularly workable. The Government only had to look at Australia, which is a few months ahead, to find out that it’s very easy for people to get around the ban. There are better approaches.

One might be to change the algorithmic feed so the companies are not promoting specific things. Another might be that you stop the ‘infinite scroll’ so there is a natural end to the use and you’re not going on there for ever. It might be that you stop autoplay videos so people are not getting sucked into the next thing that comes along. It means, however, working with the tech companies or putting regulation into place. I imagine the Government is quite reluctant to do that because those tech companies are US-based – there is a geopolitical angle to all of this; you don’t want to start pissing off the US, [the UK Government] is also investing in and wooing these tech companies because they want the benefits of their technology.

Clearly, we need something. My suggestion would have been to go with tackling the problems of the actual platforms. Also, when companies are fined for breaches, it’s a drop in the ocean; it’s also very slow-moving – [online safety regulator] Ofcom or the Information Commissioner’s Office move really, really slowly in comparison with the tech companies’ agility, so they’re going to be behind on that. When they do eventually fine companies, that fine is infinitesimally small compared with the amount of money that these tech firms make. So we’re not really effective in holding companies to account.

Does tackling social media harms also need to be seen more holistically – in terms of education, mental health services, online ‘influencer’ culture (which also has financial drivers) – within a sociologically informed understanding of how younger generations are growing up today?

In the same way we should be teaching media literacy in terms of how to understand the information we’re presented with, we should be doing the same with tech. We should be doing critical AI literacy, making sure people understand how these things work, how they are capable of manipulation, and how you can have a good relationship with your technology.

The other thing that worries me is that this could be a back door to the erosion of online privacy because, if you start banning under-16s, you’ve got to then prove that people are over 16 to use the platforms so, suddenly, you have age verification being rolled out everywhere – a lot of that is done by private companies, which means putting our biometric data into the hands of third parties or for the Government to impose some form of digital ID, which goes down like a lead balloon with most people who see it as overstepping.

What are we going to do at 16, hand young people the keys to the entire internet and tell them to go out there without any previous experience of it? This is what the NSPCC and the Molly Rose Foundation are worried about – that you could then push people to go into darker places. There are kids out there who don’t have anyone to turn to in real life and so are going online to look for help and an escape, and instead of finding somewhere safe to go, they are [likely to be] pushed into some really nasty corners of the internet and are more likely to be exploited. It [could be] removing an entire community of help for young people who might be vulnerable.

What, for you, is the most striking aspect about an AI chatbot that can now ‘talk back’?

AI has been around since the 1950s as a named discipline. When people talk about AI now, they’re talking about generative AI, which we’ve only had available to the wider public since November 2022. Generative AI is large language models (LLMs) – software that generates text or images, and it does this by basically looking through huge amounts of human-created data and then emulating it to produce something that sounds as if a human could have written it.

The key thing to remember is that LLMs are designed to make stuff up – and I don’t know that people do always remember that. They are designed to sound convincing; they are bullshit machines; they are there to fabricate stuff – they are saying things with the confidence of someone who believes they are truly right but are just spouting anything they want out of their head. And most of the time, they are presenting information that can be factual as, across those billions and billions and billions of sources that they use, they will hit on the right thing. But LLMs are also designed to present you with something convincing, something pleasing, something you will go ‘oh that sounds right’, so they don’t have to return something that is true – they have to return something that is plausible. And if you think ‘I’ll tell them to only return true things’, that doesn’t work. They will just lie more convincingly in another direction.

That’s not to say they’re not useful. They can be really useful for those jobs where you have to produce documents to meet certain specs. However, they are getting rolled out for everything. Now we have, just around the corner, agentic AI – where bots will be able to do tasks for you, which means relinquishing human control of these things. Sometimes, that works really well. There are also some scare-stories where it doesn’t.

These AI platforms are controlled by a tiny handful of companies, the ‘Magnificent Seven’ of Silicon Valley – China has its own versions of this tech, but the bulk of it is coming out of the west coast of the US – so there is a big geopolitical angle to this. They are controlling the AI tools, and the information that those tools ingest and put out starts getting homogenised – so we are seeing a narrowing of information. The information that goes into those tends to be English language, it tends to be Western – so it doesn’t represent everyone in the world and it’s giving out quite a narrow viewpoint at the other end.

The biggest talking points in mainstream media and politics around AI seem to be that ‘the robots are coming for all our jobs’ and that people are being harmed by getting into personal relationships with AI chatbots, with some developing ‘AI psychosis’. Should these be what the narrative focuses on about how AI is going to change how we live?

A few years ago, the main narrative was that there was going to be some kind of superintelligence or existential event that would just wipe out humanity and that we had to immediately act to shut down developments. That moved on. Now, it’s that there’s going to be job losses and that ‘you must have AI in your job or you’ll be left behind’. There is a perception among companies that have invested in this technology that, if people don’t use it, it is because they don’t have access to it or because they don’t know how to use it – and that’s not actually true. There are a number of reasons why people are moving away from AI. What we’re seeing is a very big issue for people is privacy and security.

But even the way we talk about AI … It’s not just a set of tools, it’s an ecosystem, it’s an infrastructure. Yes, there are tools, but that’s part of a much bigger picture about how this technology’s built. From the very raw materials that go into these systems – rare earth minerals that are controlled by a few countries … It’s a fight over who gets to control the supply chain. Right the way through to how you run these things – the data centres that are being built to house the computers that are needed to process all this information; the water consumption that goes into that and the effect it has on the local environment; the hidden labour in the supply chain the whole way through. But that never really comes to the forefront when people talk about it because what we’re used to is the end bit – where we type something into a chatbot and it returns an answer. It’s the same way that people say ‘my information’s in the cloud’ – it’s not that your information’s out there floating around in the ether, it’s on someone else’s computer.

Not everyone develops problematic relationships with AI, although some do. It seems right that people are being informed of what could go very wrong?

We see these edge cases where it goes really wrong, where people are vulnerable and go into a negative spiral – and this is definitely happening, and it has led to death in some cases. However, if we think about the amount of users that there are of these systems – ChatGPT and Open AI have up to a billion users regularly – and if you think about apps that are developed just for companionship, like Replika or Character.AI, which have far fewer users (they only maybe have 20-30 million) … if you think about the percentage who are using those and not having problems, that’s still millions and millions of people.

The UK’s AI Safety Institute produced a report in December which found that 4% of people in the UK are using AI chatbots for emotional purposes on a daily basis, which is millions. When people talk about emotional support and how they’re building that, we don’t know [the details of what it involves in terms of use] because we’re not getting access to the data, as it’s proprietary data from companies which is closed off to us as researchers. We have to look at discussion forums and self-reported incidents. For many people, when you start digging, they talk about positive experiences where they know the AI isn’t a real thing, but they are quite happy to live with it as if it is.

That’s been a longstanding thing in human computer interaction. For a very long time, we’ve known that people will react socially to technology because we’re social creatures but that we are suspending our disbelief. But what I’m seeing now, that I’ve never seen before, is people telling me ‘I know it’s not real, but my one is real’.

And, to be clear, why can’t it be real?

It’s not human because it is predicting ways to sound like a convincing human. There’s no sentience, no consciousness in that model – it is just spitting out words. It’s not able to understand the concepts of things, it is just emulating a human. And it’s not feeling anything. But it doesn’t need to because we act as if it does – we project [thoughts and feelings onto it], and this is very much part of human nature. We do it with fictional characters from novels and the fanfic community is a beautiful example of this – where people love characters so much they create alternative universes for them, writing their own stories around them. Or having a crush on a celebrity, or even another human who doesn’t know you exist, or someone you fancy from afar.

In this case, the AI chatbot is something that talks back – that’s the new part of this – and it talks back very convincingly. So chatbots prior to large language models weren’t as convincing. The conversation would fall over really quickly because the chatbot couldn’t hold the context. What large language models like ChatGPT did was use something called the ‘transformer architecture’ [a deep learning architecture generating human-like text by predicting the next word in a sequence, understanding context, and processing words in a fast way] which means LLMs can now hold the context of a conversation for much longer and are able to keep it going much more effectively.

What do you think we need to be prioritising when it comes to AI and its impact on society?

One of the narratives around AI is technological determinism – that we are absolutely, inescapably, going into a world where AI will dominate. I think that’s unhelpful. The future is not predetermined, and we can change it. We are not inevitably sliding towards a world where AI will be in everything. But at the moment, that’s how it’s being pushed out – it’s being baked into everything: operating systems, software, it’s being used on us without our consent. I would urge that people are given more control. We are not consenting a lot of the time to the use of this because we don’t have that option – it’s there, it’s turned on by default, we have to know how to actively switch it off – so our words are being sucked back into the machine or we are being offered AI solutions to searches that we didn’t ask for that aren’t always correct.

We are starting to witness a backlash, and I think a lot of that stems from a feeling of a lack of agency and control because people are having this pushed on them. People have actually become more negative about AI in the past two years, according to a report that we have published this month at the Digital Futures Institute at King’s College London with Responsible AI UK. [The report found that 42% of those surveyed limit the amount of AI they use due to privacy and security concerns; and that 70% of those surveyed believe it would be difficult or impossible to avoid being exposed to AI].

Companies that were heavily investing in AI are starting to see that it’s costing them too much and not delivering on what it was needed to do. The Big Tech companies also aren’t making money on it – they are losing money. They are promising this vision of the future and are literally banking on that – that is how they are getting investment – but they are not making money.

What did you make of the Pope’s intervention with his Encyclical on AI in May?

This was not the Catholic Church’s first foray into AI – [in 2020] it released the Rome Call for AI Ethics, which was specifically looking at the impact of AI and where it is going to go. So the Encyclical in May wasn’t new, but the Pope was saying a lot of things in it that people working in my area want to hear – which is that we need to preserve human values and make sure that we prioritise people. He was also saying that the tech companies have too much power and that they shouldn’t be allowed to decide [what types of AI are developed and how they are used]. But, hang on, should the Catholic Church decide? There are 1.4 billion Catholics in the world …

I see it as another form of power struggle: AI is all about power. It’s not even about the tech any more. When people use the term ‘AI’, half the time they are not referring to a specific tool, they’re referring to a wider concept that brings in things like tech companies, consumerism, capitalism, and power … I think the Encyclical was about who gets to hold that power. Should it be the Catholic Church because it’s saying it’s got people’s interests in mind? Should it be the tech companies who want to make money? How do we give power back to people in their everyday lives? And this comes back to consent – you don’t have that power unless you have consented to use of the technology in the first place.

I want to ask you about the ‘bros’ in ‘tech bros’. These men seem to have come to dominate the world in which we live. How is this reflective of the pervasive, structural forces that mean women working in tech and science, in research institutes, academia, in the corporate world, do not generally occupy positions of power – both in terms of agenda-setting and how much their voices are heard?

This started in the 1980s with the personal computer – that was the rise of the ‘tech bros’ – Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It became about the figurehead male programer who built the empire. It is very much that mentality which has persisted right through Silicon Valley. The heads of all the major AI companies are all very powerful men with an awful lot of money. Computer science as a discipline in research is also still very male-dominated. The will is there from women to change this, but we are up against this systemic issue that just won’t shift. It speaks to wider issues around patriarchal societies.

In this growing resistance to AI, a lot of the activists are women – not because they hate the technology itself, though some might, but because of the impact it has. I once was told off in a meeting for using the term ‘tech bros’ by a man who felt I was being unfair and said ‘how would you like it if we called them “tech girls”?’ – and I said you’d have to find some first because there just aren’t many, by and large.

And, of course, the tech that they build is built in their image. It’s inescapable. Anyone who tells you – and the tech bros do – that technology is ‘neutral’ has never studied technology. We know that technology is not neutral, it is built with a purpose, and set of principles and values, and the money has to come from somewhere. It serves their purpose to talk about it as if it’s ‘oh, we just build it, other people use it’ – but that’s not it. This male-dominated culture is the reason we had Apple Health released without any way of doing menstrual tracking, for example. Or phones that don’t fit in women’s hands or pockets (because we don’t always have pockets). There are so many of these examples where women miss out – and it’s not just women. It’s marginalising in terms of ethnicity, sex, ability and disability, LGBT. There are marked biases the whole way along that people are trying to solve, but it’s in the way the tech is built.

Remember how Facebook started – it was to rate women. And there’s no easy fix to it either. I know women who have been working on this for decades, and we move the needle slightly, and then Elon Musk comes along and uses Grok to generate sexualised images of women and children.

Given how far along we are with the tech revolution and the transformative impact – for good and for ill – it has had on all of our lives, what is it to be human in the age we are living through?

I still think that there is a value in human thought, in human creativity, and while these machines can emulate that, and emulate that quite convincingly, it’s very interesting that people’s attitudes shift when they find out something’s been created by AI – people don’t like being deceived by a computer. We’re seeing these reactions online to what’s termed ‘AI slop’, particularly AI images; there’s a lot of pushback when you see answers in discussion forms such as Reddit, where someone has clearly lifted a response from a large language model – you get a lot of people downvoting it and saying ‘if I wanted to ask an AI, I would have asked it myself’.

We’re seeing a move towards valuing that human connection – people want to feel connected. If they listen to a piece of music, view a piece of art, read some text – they want to feel connected to the human behind that, and there’s no human to connect with if it’s just an AI. The AI has never experienced the things that we’ve experienced, [that humans express through] music or writing, so I think there’s a value in what we produce because we feel – and an AI can’t feel. There are some historical precedents for this. We see it around craft – that when things become mass-produced, we look to craft for being the beautiful human example of [creation]. From woodwork to micro-breweries, we’re seeking out something that seems more real to us. AI presents us with this world of mimicry and we want the genuine, we want the connection.

But I don’t find anything wrong with someone who finds some genuine happiness with an AI companion. I can see how it can be problematic in a number of ways, but actually having that relationship with a piece of technology, to me, is not much different from having that relationship with a fictional character or other parasocial relationships. It becomes damaging if it’s harming their lives every day, but for many people, it’s a nice escape – that connection can feel real and, if someone gets that out of it because they’re projecting that, that’s great. But it’s quite interesting that that same connection is missing when they look at a piece of AI-generated art or music or writing because they want the ‘real’ thing.

What are your hopes around our understanding of AI and the narratives swirling around it?

My big hope is that it all calms down – that we reach an equilibrium with the technology, where we feel that it is used for the right things and we’ve rejected it where we don’t want it.

If we look at everything across a huge timespan, there’s always a bit where the technology’s new, where there’s panic – and sometimes that panic is entirely justified because people will be harmed and things will change and not always for the better. But we usually manage to incorporate it in some way that serves us overall and then move on. And I want to hold onto that with AI: that we will lose the bits that are awful and damaging and aren’t working, and that we manage to find some good use cases for it.

AI itself – if you refer to machine learning not generative AI – was doing pretty good things in a lot of fields, but very quietly behind the scenes. It’s the reason we have Google Maps working so effectively, why we get recommender systems on Netflix, it’s medical imaging and diagnostics. There are some really solid examples of where this can work. Generative AI has come along and it’s been thrown at things in search of a use case – it is a solution looking for a problem, and we’ve not yet nailed down where best to use it. That is the task – thinking: what do I actually want out of this and where can this be applied which is useful and isn’t harmful?

Kate Devlin is Professor of AI & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She is the author of Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

Disinformation is the system. And that’s the trick.

How to investigate the tropes being put out by the fascist regime in America without furthering their cause.

The latest boogeyman – the “communist” – has entered stage left, as “antifa” failed to serve the purpose of its masters.

Independent reporters worked overtime to ensure even the most MAGA-drenched brains understood that “antifa” – like Big Foot, chupacabras, and Bat Boy – simply does not exist in any substantial form in America.

So taking a page from Trump’s mentor, OG red-scare tactician Roy Cohn, the universally loathed liar-provocateurs of the Cell of Jerks in the White House are staying on message. Now, it’s all communism! All the time!

“Communist! Communist! Communist!”

Between June 23 and July 8, Trump referenced communism 81 times. In recent days, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise are behaving like burbling apparatchiks – spouting anti-communist rhetoric with such great frequency they appear to have a form of Tourette’s Syndrome.

“The United States doesn’t want to be a communist country. We’re never going to be a communist country. We’re not going to allow communist influences to undermine our politics or our society.” – Marco Rubio, 22 July 2026

“The Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November.” – Steve Scalise, 22 July 2026

It would appear they’re hoping to scare the olds at the polls in yet another front in the attack on truth.

“It’s Freudian projection,” Dr Marci Shore told Byline Times. “What was horrifying about Bolshevism was not universal health care. It was arbitrary violence and terror. This is what the Trump regime is employing.”

Shore, the chair in European Intellectual History at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, reminded us to look at the latest acts of violence executed and condoned by Trump’s brownshirts in immigration enforcement.

In the recent weeks, there were two more fatal killings. In Texas, a 52-year-old man driving to work in Houston, Texas, was murdered by an ICE agent who shot at him through his passenger side window. Just six days later, in Maine, ICE agents murdered a 26-year-old in his car. According to a database tracking these murders, the Gun Violence Data Hub, there have been 30 deaths by immigration officers since Trump returned to the White House last year. Among the murdered include Renee Good and Alex Pretti – US citizens killed by ICE agents in Minnesota — and 22 people have died in ICE custody this year.

Investigative reporter Craig Unger told Byline Times he sees another reason for the GOP’s new-old communist obsession.

“The trigger was the election of Mamdani, the mayor of New York City,” said Unger. “He is a member of the Democratic Socialist Alliance. And since his election, three people, three candidates he endorsed, won the Democratic nomination for office.”

Unger noted that out of the 48 countries in the recent World Cup competition, the US is the only high-income country without universal health care.

“That puts us in the same league as DR Congo and Haiti,” he said.

It also helps explain why the Mayor Zohran Mamdani-backed candidates swept the New York primaries – two are democratic socialists. This fact prompted Trump Inc messaging to go for the low-hanging fruit of “reds under the bed.”

I was gifted that phrase in an interview I did with Russia watcher Keir Giles in January 2023, during a podcast about his book, Russia’s War On Everybody.

What will get obscured in this new Red Scare is the fact that, yes, Russia is at war with the West, but unfortunately, the Trump regime is on Russia’s side.

In that 2023 interview with Giles, he said:

“For so long, Russia was not recognized as the problem and people like me were saying, ‘Well actually, we do have a problem. And it will bite us very hard in the tender parts before long.’ We were called the cranks, we were called the conspiracy theorists, who saw reds under the bed where there were none. That presents a very deep-seated attitude, against which you have to push back. But that’s the reason why the book is dedicated to Vladimir Putin, because he’s done more for us than anybody has in proving that actually, yes, the world really does have a Russia problem.”

Fear-baiting communist rhetoric to the contrary, I predicted five days after the 2024 election in my Byline Times report, Welcome to West Russia, that Trump 2.0 would behave very like Russia in the ‘90s – the violence, the staggering thieving, oligarchs running politicians – and tragically, I was right, as I wrote:

“Democracy was just murdered to thunderous applause, and those who saw it coming were called alarmist, but they were also the people who read history books or have lived experience — who know struggle from their unique perspectives or had fled authoritarian countries.”

And it’s that knowing of history that also gnaws at me.

Red Menace

It was fear of communism among middle-class voters and rural communities in Germany during the 1930s that led to support for the Nazi party. That fear was drilled into people by Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who consistently and with great repetition deployed aggressive rhetoric against communism. They created the anti-communist fear – the Red Menace – dressing it up with anti-semitism, to then use it to justify eliminating their political opponents, and then eliminating democracy.

And that same old fear is being ginned up by Trump’s Reality TV fascism scriptwriters, who continually use tired tropes to bang away at their deletion of democracy, now making it appear as if our only choice is fascism or communism. As if.

Situational Morality

Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn taught Trump a lot. The New York lawyer was regarded as the king of situational morality. Cohn taught Trump to never admit defeat, always counter-attack, and always claim victory.

Explaining Cohn a decade ago, investigative reporter Wayne Barrett for the Village Voice told Democracy Now!:

“Roy is incandescent evil… the Satanic feeling that he would give you… He was the weirdest guy. He was into the strangest stuff. He was a chicken hawk after little boys, and yet he was the most virulently anti-gay guy you could imagine. And so, that was Donald’s mentor and constant sidekick, who represented all five of the organized crime families in the City of New York.”

Cohn’s cousin David L. Marcus said Cohn “became chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy, who led witch hunts against people suspected of being Communists; in 1973, Cohn met Donald Trump and began grooming him to become a national figure.”

So witch-hunting communists has likely been in Trump’s bloodstream since the early days of his relationship with Cohn, who before his death in 1986 to AIDS, bragged that Trump called him 15 to 20 times a day.

Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, also appears to have received the witch-hunting memo, as he called people with left-wing beliefs “enemies of civilization,” in what can only be described as a fascist speech on July 16 in Washington, DC, that clearly mimicked Joe McCarthy’s infamous 1950 “enemies from within” speech.

State of Emergency

“That Americans would be vulnerable to the Trump administration’s attempt to conjure up a new ‘Red Scare’ reflects a lack of understanding of the whole Soviet project,” Dr Marci Shore explained. “Communism as it was carried out in the Soviet Union and the satellite states was a radical social engineering experiment, which, needless to say, involved much more than cutting the edges off of capitalism and guaranteeing healthcare, education, and housing. On the contrary: postwar West European states instituted social welfare measures precisely as a defense against communism, rightly grasping that universal healthcare and strong public education were politically stabilizing and in fact in the whole society’s interest.

“Now the Trump administration is trying to create a state of emergency around a communist menace in response to calls by people like Mamdani, AOC and Bernie Sanders for universal healthcare and affordable housing. There is more than just a little bit of Freudian projection here: as I noted, what was horrifying about Bolshevism was not universal healthcare. It was universal terror. Communist regimes created states of emergency, moments of the ‘intensification of the class struggle,’ as pretexts for the suspension of any rule of law. They made use of the politics of ‘provocation’ – provoking violence so as to justify more repression. They instituted mass surveillance and encouraged a culture of denunciations. They invoked the specter of ‘enemies of the people’ as a pretext for arbitrary violence and terror. This is increasingly how the Trump administration behaves.”

Vienna-based disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler added: “What is dangerous and wrong is a discourse that equates social policies like universal healthcare with communism. It not only distorts reality, it also downplays the totalitarian character of real communist regimes.”

Even a cursory knowledge of the writings of Vaćlav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would reveal that Soviet rule was a brutal combination of communist totalitarianism, and no Democrat on the horizon is trying to bring that back.

No Democrat is publicly doing fascist Nazi salutes. That is reserved for members of the Trump regime, with all its brutality and connivance.

Emmy award-winning investigative reporter Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly on Byline Times Substack. She is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 102 countries

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

That greatest of fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, once said that “it has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”

This may well be the case in getting a gauge on how bullish the mood is in British defence spending right now. For it wasn’t the hyper-testosterone-geek names of ‘Menace-T’, ‘Omen’ and ‘Thunder’ that had been slapped on the AI-enabled weapons of the Californian defence technology firm Anduril that caught this correspondent’s attention when visiting the Farnborough International Airshow, one of the world’s largest aerospace and defence exhibitions, earlier this week.

Instead it was the quality of the hand-soap in the toilets, the retro surfboard stickers that were being handed out to all comers and the cans of imported iced green tea bearing the slogan “Lattice for Mission Autonomy” that stood out as markers of just how much money is being spent on AI-enabled weapons right now.

For in this Hampshire village, the world’s largest arms companies have arrived with their branded gifts, their empty marketing campaigns (‘Advancing the Future Together’ or ‘We’re all on a journey’ were highlights of blandishments) and their promises of eternal safety at the right price.

Certainly they have arrived without any sense of moral doubt. Elbit UK, the British subsidiary of the Israeli arms company, offered bowls of cashew nuts beneath promotional films of its weapons systems blowing things sky high. They declined to answer questions about allegations surrounding its role in what the UN has described as genocide in Gaza.

Rafael, the Israeli state-owned defense technology company, was also there, and its taciturn minder refused this correspondent access to its pavilion. He then went behind the glass doors and took photographs of yours truly. No doubt they will be shared with Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency.

But behind all the freebies and secrecies, one thing stands clear. Farnborough has become a barometer of Britain’s strategic mood.

Organisers expect record attendance this year. The number of international pavilions have increased by a third. Across an exhibition space spanning some 78 football pitches, blue-suited white male executives, British military officers and Middle-Eastern ministers mingled beside aircraft displays and scale models of missiles and drones.

It’s all aboard the gravy train for defence, governments are arriving with increasingly large chequebooks and Britain is among those preparing to spend.

The Labour Party has committed itself to increasing defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, with serious discussion already underway about raising that figure to 3 per cent before the end of the decade (though the new Prime Minister is currently non-committal on that).

Defence, once a difficult sell in Whitehall, has become one of the few areas of public expenditure where politicians compete to promise more. The double resignations of Defence Ministers under Sir Keir Starmer will, no doubt, weigh heavy on Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s mind. Perhaps this is why he gave one of those rebels, John Healey, the keys to 11 Downing Street as our new Chancellor.

On Wednesday, the new Defence Minister Wes Streeting unveiled Brontanax – BAE Systems’ autonomous collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) wingman that aims to fly alongside RAF fighter jets – at the air show. Each is estimated to cost north of £30m. These are eye-watering amounts compared to how much, for instance, Ukraine spends on its drones.

To justify these spending commitments, Britain’s political language has become increasingly martial. The public is told that the country must “wake up” to daily threats. Russia is described as an aggressive and expansionist power. China is increasingly framed as the defining strategic challenge of the twenty-first century. Military chiefs warn that Britain faces a more dangerous world than at any point in their living memory.

Certainly, there are reasons for concern.

Over the past year, the United Kingdom has faced a succession of increasingly assertive Russian-linked military and intelligence activities, including covert submarine operations in and around British waters, repeated harassment of HMS Prince of Wales by Russian maritime patrol aircraft, the alleged use of lasers by the intelligence vessel Yantar against RAF pilots monitoring its movements, and multiple Russian strategic bombers near UK airspace.

But acknowledging those dangers is not the same as concluding that every additional billion pounds spent on defence, every overseas deployment, or every new military commitment necessarily makes Britain safer.

Indeed, before committing ever larger sums to defence, shouldn’t Britain’s buyers at Farnborough ask a more fundamental question: what exactly are they spending their money defending?

Britain is one of the most geographically secure nations on earth: an island surrounded almost entirely by allies, protected by NATO’s collective defence guarantee and armed with around 225 nuclear warheads carried aboard continuously deployed ballistic missile submarines. It possesses one of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence networks and has not faced a credible threat of invasion since 1940.

Yet Britain’s defence posture bears surprisingly little resemblance to that of a nation principally organised around territorial defence. Rather it’s as if the Empire never ended.

Why, for instance, does Britain maintain approximately 145 military sites across 42 countries? Why did we recently deploy personnel to around 171 nations around the world through exercises, training missions and operations? How does our overseas military estate, stretching from Oman to Kenya, Belize to Brunei, really protect this sceptr’d isle?

These questions are not asked. Yes, Britain increasingly describes itself as a middle power operating in an era of constrained public finances, but then it continues to maintain strategic ambitions more commonly associated with a global power.

That ambition carries costs – costs that our nation might not be able to afford.

Defence is now among the largest areas of public capital investment, second only to transport. It is broadly equivalent to the combined budgets of the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. It comfortably exceeds annual spending on housing and local government. And the bill is rising.

And, please, be in no doubt. Britain’s expanding defence budget is not simply enriching contractors; it is sustaining a system with a powerful interest in its own growth.

The chief executives of Britain’s five largest defence firms received an average of £5.2 million in 2024, some 138 times the salary of the median British worker.

The press are – some might say – useful idiots in this emboldened military industrial complex. Nearly 60% of retired senior military figures quoted in the British media on defence matters were, on at least one occasion, presented as independent experts without disclosure of their commercial ties to the defence and security industries. Invest in defence, they tell the nation, without it being made clear they are also asking the nation to invest in them.

So what really emerges here in Farnborough is that British defence has become something close to political Teflon. It shapes the national conversation on security while remaining remarkably resistant to scrutiny. Successive governments justify higher spending by invoking jobs, growth and national resilience, yet it remains very unclear how much of that prosperity extends beyond a relatively small circle of major contractors, consultants and former officials whose fortunes rise alongside the defence budget.

Polling certainly suggests the public remains unconvinced. Earlier this year, polling company Ipsos found that only 37% of Britons support increasing defence spending, while 40% believe current levels are sufficient and 15% favour reductions. Significant numbers oppose cuts to healthcare, welfare and other public services to fund military expansion.

Even people here at Farnborough remain unconvinced that any but the big defence players will benefit from the national boost in defence spending.

As Elise Littlejohn, of Bruntons Aero Products, told Byline Times, she sees promises for defence spend hikes “advertised on the news, but it’s not clear where to go to bid on these contracts. The expectation is that these big contracts won’t trickle down to companies like ours.”

In a similar vein, Andrew Mair, Chief Executive of the Midlands Aerospace Alliance, said that there is a tendency for Ministry of Defence contracts to “go back to existing suppliers, making it harder for new companies to enter. Defence is seen to be a closed shop and (for new comers) it’s very difficult for them to see how to diversify into defence.”

Reasonable people can disagree about whether Britain should spend more on defence. Russia’s aggression is real, as are cyber attacks, threats to undersea infrastructure and growing instability across Europe. Yet Britain’s greatest vulnerabilities increasingly lie in its digital networks, energy systems and supply chains. It’s less clear how postings in Kenya, Oman, Belize and Brunei protect the UK.

So, perhaps, before Britain commits itself to spending £80 billion a year on defence, it owes itself an honest answer.

Is it defending its territory, people and critical infrastructure, or is it preserving a global military posture that has been inherited from another age?

Until that question is answered, Britain risks spending more on defence than at any point since the Cold War without ever deciding what, precisely, it is trying to defend. And, judging by the expensive hand soap here at Farnborough and that sweet smell of defence profits that it imprints on your hands, few here have much interest in asking it.

Iain Overton is the executive director of the Action On Armed Violence charity

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

George Cottrell, the convicted aristocrat who has funded Nigel Farage and Reform UK, influenced the party’s finances and corporate structure through an apparent act of identity fraud, an investigation by Byline Times reveals.

Cottrell – known as ‘Posh George’ – has lurked at the heart of Farage’s political operations for a decade.

In 2016, he was Farage’s chief of staff and UKIP’s treasurer and chief fundraiser.

By 2019 – despite his criminal conviction for fraud in the United States – Cottrell became a fundraiser for Farage’s successor political outfit, the Brexit Party.

More recently, Cottrell has funded both Farage and Reform, with many of his gifts and donations going undeclared and now the subject of police and parliamentary investigations.

Byline Times’ findings can now establish further details about George Cottrell’s dealings in the world of corporate finance and Farage’s politics.

Based on analysis of hundreds of company records, official documents, archived webpages, and sources familiar with his school days and his work in the City, this investigation reveals:

● George Cottrell carried a fraudulent Swiss passport in the name of ‘Oscar Drewitt’ – the identity under which he was hired into a City corporate finance network by the future Reform UK treasurer, Mehrtash A’zami. A’zami would go on to vet Cottrell’s mother Fiona’s political donations to Nigel Farage’s party. The passport was validated by the Swiss Embassy.

● A fellow gambler, Hon Kong Yong, introduced Cottrell into this network under the false identity after meeting him at a casino – landing him his first job in the City. Yong was aware that Cottrell’s ‘Oscar Drewitt’ identity was false.

● Yong was declared bankrupt in 2015 owing to difficulties with his mortgage lender and was barred from working as an accountant. However, within a few years, he owned a Montenegro casino, a luxury flat, and a group of companies – a change in fortunes that cannot be explained by his financial history.

● When asked to explain his relationship to Hon Kong Yong, George Cottrell’s lawyers told this publication only that the two men live in the same small expatriate community in Tivat, a town in the coastal region of Montenegro. They did not mention what Byline Times has now uncovered: a professional connection between the two men stretching back more than a decade, through the same City accountancy group.

● George Cottrell persuaded his own City boss, Reform’s future treasurer, Mehrtash A’zami, to hand over approximately £60,000 borrowed from friends and family for an investment that never materialised.

● By 2019, when Mehrtash A’zami became Reform’s treasurer, he was already aware of Cottrell’s fraudulent past identity as Oscar Drewitt.

● Mehrtash A’zami’s own Montenegro company is administered from the same small Tivat office as Yong’s casino group, Reform’s largest donor Christopher Harborne, and two other former party officials. This was the case while he was vetting donations as Reform’s treasurer.

● The director of George Cottrell’s Tivat firm and his executive assistant held simultaneous roles at the neighbouring casino he says he has nothing to do with.

Donations and Restructures

The donations made by George Cottrell and his mother Fiona Cottrell have attracted significant scrutiny in recent weeks.

Reform accepted two donations of £250,000 from Fiona Cottrell, George Cottrell’s mother, in May 2024. In June, she sent a further £1 million to Britain Means Business – Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice’s private fundraising vehicle, which donated half of it to Reform.

These are now the subject of criminal investigations by the Metropolitan Police and the National Crime Agency, which has been unable to trace the money’s ultimate source. The law makes it an offence to evade political donation restrictions by concealing or disguising the true source of a donation or by giving false information about a donation.

Responsibility for screening these donations lay with Mehrtash A’zami. As Reform’s treasurer for six years, he was legally responsible for ensuring that every donation above £500 was recorded; checking within 30 days whether it came from a permissible source; returning anything impermissible or unidentifiable; and filing the party’s statutory donation reports.

That responsibility ended abruptly on 19 February 2025, during a wholesale restructuring of the party in the same month that the Electoral Commission referred Fiona Cottrell’s donations to the police.

Until then, Reform had operated through a private company owned by three named shareholders: Nigel Farage held nine of its 15 voting shares, Richard Tice held five and A’zami held one. On 19 February, all 15 shares were transferred to a newly created company limited by guarantee—the non-share structure commonly used by non-profit organisations. The old company was renamed Reform 2025 Ltd and retained as the new company’s wholly owned subsidiary.

The change removed Farage, Tice and A’zami as named owners but in reality no control was passed to Reform’s wider membership: those who now hold voting rights in the new parent company are not publicly identified. It also left the party operating through two companies able to hold and transfer money between them, making its finances harder to trace.

So how did Mehrtash A’zami become Reform’s treasurer in the first place? And why did he leave the position?

The answer requires a trip to a Reform corporate cluster in Tivat, Montenegro – and to an obscure global accountancy network headquartered in London.

Network Connections

According to George Cottrell, he obtained his first job in the City thanks to a London accountant.

Byline Times has established that this man was Mehrtash A’zami, who had hired him as a consultant more than a decade ago – under a false identity known as ‘Oscar Drewitt’.

This fraudulent relationship allowed Cottrell hidden influence over the corporate structure of Reform UK Party Ltd before its sudden reorganisation in February 2025: the man Reform UK entrusted with vetting the party’s donations, including from Cottrell himself and his own mother, had known Cottrell since he was a teenager and had once hired him. The safeguard the law relies on, that a donation’s permissibility is checked by someone independent of the donor, did not exist.

Hon Kong Yong, a British Malaysian accountant and fellow gambler Cottrell met at a casino, introduced Cottrell to the McMillan Woods corporate services network, under the alias.

A’zami was an early partner of this network. The recommendation helped Cottrell secure a consulting role under A’zami within that network.

For years, Cottrell was not known by his real name but as ‘Oscar’ – matching a Swiss passport found in his possession in 2014, two years before his arrest in the United States for money laundering and wire fraud.

Yong was himself already a fixture of the network and was personally known to its senior figures for a number of years. Today, he owns the Montenegro casino George Cottrell frequents, and the flat Cottrell lives in there – wealth that nothing in Yong’s own financial history can explain.

Though responsible for financial governance of Reform, including vetting donations, when he became the party’s treasurer in 2019, A’zami was – at the same time – a director of a Montenegrin company, which operated inside the same corporate infrastructure as the casino and crypto-gambling network surrounding George Cottrell and owned by Hon Kong Yong.

Throughout this tenure at Reform, A’zami was also a partner in the McMillan Woods accounting group, the directors of which had worked with A’zami, Cottrell, and Yong a decade earlier.

Reform UK, Mehrtash A’zami, and McMillan Woods did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

‘Private Family Office’

George Cottrell moved to Montenegro in late 2019, shortly after Mehrtash A’zami joined Reform.

Cottrell established a company, Private Family Office, and lived in a penthouse in the Regent complex above Tivat harbour, owned by Global Trust Ltd – the same company that owns the Salon Privé casino, where he gambles regularly in the VIP room, and which is controlled by Hon Kong Yong.

Registered in January 2020 with Cottrell as its sole owner, Private Family Office has seen its accumulated deficit grow from approximately €79,000 in 2020 to €465,638 by 2025 – on near-zero revenue and a single employee, and sustained by more than €400,000 in loans from unidentifiable sources.

Cottrell’s lawyers refused to explain to Byline Times the loans’ origins or the source of his wealth, saying only that it is “entirely unsurprising” that his company fails to “generate any revenue” as it is “established for administrative functions”.

They also describe him merely as a tenant of Yong’s penthouse. But two people who worked for Cottrell held official roles at Yong’s company at the same time.

Gustaf Sander ran Private Family Office between November 2020 and October 2022, while simultaneously serving as organisational director of Salon Privé – a role in which he signed a sponsorship deal with local football club FK Arsenal Tivat in June 2022.

Cottrell’s lawyers have provided shifting accounts of Sander’s position: first denying that he held any role at Salon Privé; then telling the Financial Times that the two roles were not held at the same time; before reverting to denial and claiming that the football club’s sponsorship record was “incorrect”. The sponsorship deal was, however, confirmed by the administrative body governing Tivat, which published a photo of it.

Katarina Đurović served on Private Family Office’s board from February 2024 to April 2025, while simultaneously working on her own account as Global Trust’s “treasury and payments associate” handling its crypto payment processing.

Cottrell’s lawyers described her only as “an authorised representative appointed by the professional advisors” to his company.

The Shared Tivat Accounting Network

Around the same period, a number of Reform figures began setting up shop in Tivat – using the same Tivat accountancy office, Global Financial Solutions, which also runs Yong’s entire corporate group: Global Trust and everything it owns, including Salon Privé; the Sidra 501 company that holds George Cottrell’s flat; a bar; a security company; and a restaurant company.

One of these figures was Reform’s treasurer, Mehrtash A’zami, who set up his Montenegrin company, Maxim Enterprise d.o.o.

The same address it is based at also houses companies belonging to Christopher Harborne, Reform’s largest individual donor who gave Farage a £5 million gift; Gawain Towler, its former communications chief; and Samee Bhatti, its former digital strategist, who also set up the website for George Cottrell’s unlimited company, Geostrategy.

Global Financial Solutions is owned by Nino Pantović, who also owns a separate legal-services company, MNE Law, based at the same address. His late father, Ratko Pantović, who died in December 2024, was the lawyer for both George Cottrell and Hon Kong Yong.

Nino Pantović has travelled on Cottrell’s private jet. Montenegrin company records show that he personally filed the paperwork transferring ownership of Cottrell’s firm, Private Family Office, to Gustaf Sander in October 2020 – submitting both men’s passports and Cottrell’s Montenegrin personal identification number to the state registry.

Cottrell’s lawyers told Byline Times: “Tivat is a small coastal town with a small community. It is therefore entirely unremarkable that individuals and organisations should use the same advisors.”

Hon Kong Yong’s lawyers said they “do not accept that the use of the same accounting or corporate services provider, without more, establishes any business relationship, common ownership, common control, coordination, or wrongdoing”.

One thing these companies share is losses.

Yong’s Global Trust shows a rapidly expanding asset portfolio, including the flat where George Cottrell resides, funded by nowhere near enough revenue of its own. It has accumulated €7.46 million in short-term liabilities.

Yet, Reform UK’s treasurer Mehrtash A’zami had crossed paths with George Cottrell long before A’zami established Maxim Enterprise in Montenegro – years before either had met Nigel Farage.

Gold and Oil

Contrary to the commonly cited account that George Cottrell was schooled on the private island of Mustique, he in fact attended The Elms School in Colwall, Herefordshire, before moving to Malvern College for his ‘A’ Levels.

As a student, Cottrell ran a clandestine poker ring after school and smuggled alcohol onto the premises. He had ambitions of grandeur even then, a school friend who knew him for 10 years told Byline Times.

Those around him expected “he would do something big, that it would probably be illegal, and that he would somehow talk his way into power,” the source said. Through his lawyers, Cottrell denied smuggling alcohol into the school.

From the age of 14, according to the source, Cottrell was already setting up companies in Luxembourg – inactive shells with no real business behind them. At one point, Cottrell was importing gold from China. The source recalled once seeing him at a train station with a gold bar in his pocket stamped with Chinese markings.

The former school friend also told Byline Times that, after he was expelled from Malvern College over gambling and drug use, Cottrell became friends with Arkadiy Abramovich – son of the now-sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich – and was open about the friendship at the time. This corroborates separate reporting by The Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr that a relative of Cottrell’s confirmed that he was a teenage friend of Arkadiy Abramovich.

This investigation has established that George Cottrell’s relationship with Arkadiy Abramovich blossomed in the period after Cottrell had left school and was trying to find work, some time between 2010 and 2012. It was during this time that Cottrell posted a photograph of the pair together on Facebook.

“To Mr Cottrell’s knowledge, he has never even met Arkadiy Abramovich,” Cottrell’s lawyers told Byline Times. “Our client does not have (nor has he ever had) any relationship with any member of the Abramovich family.”

Arkadiy Abramovich was, by then, starting to build his own investment empire.

As early as August 2011, aged 17, he was pursuing oil and gas acquisitions across Russia and the former Soviet Union through his investment company ARA Capital and the London-listed shell company Zoltav Resources.

Cottrell, then, already had a personal connection to a family at the centre of Russian oil money by the time Mehrtash A’zami hired him.

‘A Childhood Friend’

In 2007, Mehrtash A’zami was a partner in the McMillan Woods accounting group – a global network of accountancy firms founded in Malaysia and headquartered in London.

That year, he set up Maxim Management Consulting LLP to provide mergers and acquisitions consulting to the McMillan Woods group.

Hon Kong Yong had been known to the McMillan Woods inner circle for many years. According to a former partner of the firm, who spoke to Byline Times on the condition of anonymity and who works as a senior statutory auditor, Yong first met Cottrell at a London casino. Yong then introduced Cottrell into the network as a young businessman by the name of ‘Oscar Drewitt’.

Cottrell was known to McMillan Woods senior partners as “Yong’s friend ‘Oscar’”, due to the regularity with which they were seen together at City events.

And it was Yong’s recommendation which helped Cottrell secure his first job – with Mehrtash A’zami.

Around 2012, A’zami hired Cottrell as a consultant at his firm Maxim.

Cottrell’s other boss at Maxim was the firm’s chair, who was simultaneously a senior director of McMillan Woods and one of the latter’s original co-founders.

But what they did not know at the time was that they were hiring George Cottrell. They believed they were hiring Oscar Drewitt.

At Maxim, Cottrell began to cut his teeth on how to manage and move large sums of money for Mayfair clients, developing expertise in cross-border banking and discreet asset transfer. A’zami had lofty ambitions for his company and wanted to compete with major firms. Cottrell’s promises of contacts with big investors were highly attractive.

Under his pseudonym of Mr Drewitt, George Cottrell offered to bring in seed investment for third-party projects in exchange for a 10% fee. At one point, he persuaded A’zami to personally put up approximately £60,000, borrowed from friends and family. No investment materialised and A’zami never recovered the money. Cottrell denied that he ever took money from A’zami.

Maxim sat within the wider McMillan Woods accountancy network, and its directors set up a run of interlocking firms from shared offices, including by 2012 the offshoot firm Archer Wise Accountants and Auditors Limited, which offered auditing services for McMillan Woods clients.

Byline Times’ senior McMillan Woods source had known and worked with both George Cottrell and Hon Kong Yong. He confirmed that, during Cottrell’s consultancy at Maxim, he simultaneously joined Archer Wise as a consultant known as ‘Oscar’. Yong also joined the firm at around the same time.

Cottrell’s lawyers told Byline Times that “Cottrell knows Hon Kong Yong personally and they both live in the town of Tivat in Montenegro, which has a small expatriate community (the members of which are generally known to each other)”.

They did not mention that the two men had been connected for more than a decade earlier through the McMillan Woods network.

Yong’s lawyers told Byline Times that he “was not employed by McMillan Woods or by any entity within the McMillan Woods network” and that he “has no recollection of introducing Mr Cottrell to anyone in the McMillan Woods network, let alone doing so in circumstances where Mr Cottrell is alleged to have assumed a false identity”.

But company records confirm that, between December 2013 and March 2014, Hon Kong Yong was a director and shareholder at Archer Wise. Byline Times’ source confirmed that Yong was a consultant there for much longer, and knew him as a frequent, heavy gambler who smoked cannabis obsessively except during office hours.

According to the source, one day in 2014, staff including Hon Kong Yong had returned to the Archer Wise office to find the door damaged. It was unclear how or why, but it looked like a possible attempted break-in. Staff noticed that ‘Oscar’ had forgotten his bag inside and suspected that he had come back to retrieve it – raising suspicions of what may have been inside. So they decided to open the bag.

Inside Cottrell’s bag, they discovered two passports: a British passport in George Cottrell’s real name, and a Swiss passport under Oscar Drewitt. According to the source, Yong told those present at the discovery that he already knew of the two identities – and confirmed that George Cottrell was Cottrell’s real name.

It is already known that Cottrell has operated under at least three assumed identities.

Under the alias ‘Bill’, he advertised money-laundering services on a dark web marketplace – leading to his US conviction for wire fraud.

After his release, he registered his Montenegro company, Private Family Office, under the shortened name ‘George Co’, which has been linked to passports and bank transfers in that name.

He has also legally shortened his own surname to “Cotrel”, a change one judge has called deceptive.

Archer Wise conducted money-laundering checks on the two passport identities found in the bag, and both were cleared by the UK Home Office and Swiss Embassy as genuine.

“As both authorities verified the passports were genuine, there were no other actions to be taken as we did not know the circumstances of him obtaining either passport,” said the former McMillan Woods partner. Yong was aware the checks had been carried out. “Being Yong’s friend [George Cottrell], it was just left at that,” the source added.

Cottrell’s lawyers denied to Byline Times that he had ever used a Swiss passport. They claimed instead that he “has a childhood friend called Oscar Drewitt” whose name or passport he “has never used”.

Reform’s Treasurer and Its Structural Change

After the discovery of his Swiss passport, George Cottrell lost his consulting role at Archer Wise. But he continued to work at Maxim under Mehrtash A’zami while Hon Kong Yong continued at Archer Wise. At this time, it appears that Cottrell was still using his false identity.

That year, 2014, George Cottrell joined Nigel Farage’s UKIP as a fundraiser.

Then, in 2015 – approximately a year after his time at Archer Wise ended – his associate and gambling partner Hon Kong Yong filed for bankruptcy. Yong had been facing increasing financial difficulties. Eventually, the combination of gambling, subsidence damage to his home, and mortgage arrears meant that he could no longer pay off his debt. The bankruptcy ended his ability to work as an accountant, and he also had to leave Archer Wise.

“No one knew what happened to Hon after that,” the senior accountant who had worked with him at the time told this publication. “We lost touch with him. Some of us thought he might have died.”

But in 2018, Yong was discharged from his bankruptcy. Three years later, he surfaced in Tivat as the owner of the Salon Privé casino, a luxury apartment, and a group of companies.

The former McMillan Woods partner was shocked to learn of Yong’s current position in Tivat: “I knew Yong, and I knew of his family and background. There was no way in which Yong would have been able to generate the income by himself to purchase a luxury casino or penthouse apartment in Montenegro.”

In 2015, George Cottrell had been promoted to UKIP’s head of fundraising and deputy treasurer. In 2016, he became Nigel Farage’s chief of staff.

But Cottrell was arrested by the FBI in July at a US airport as he travelled back from a Donald Trump campaign rally with Farage. Charged with multiple counts of money laundering, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, was jailed, and released in March 2017.

Two years later, in 2019, Farage’s Brexit Party needed a new treasurer. Cottrell had already returned to the scene as a fundraiser for the party by May. His fraud conviction, however, ruled him out from taking the formal senior position. His former boss, Mehrtash A’zami, was put forward – providing Cottrell with a foothold inside the party’s corporate structure.

It is likely that Cottrell would have had to admit his real identity to A’zami. Byline Times cannot verify when or how this happened. But it is clear that Reform’s treasurer knew of Cottrell’s previous false identity.

Asked why A’zami would have accepted an invitation from Cottrell to become treasurer of Reform, the former McMillan Woods partner speculated that “Cottrell had lost all A’zami’s money. He owed him. Perhaps this was his way of paying him back”.

On 27 June 2019, Mehrtash A’zami joined Reform UK Party Ltd – then still trading as the Brexit Party – as a director, shareholder, and treasurer.

Archived webpages seen by Byline Times show that, two weeks later, he was publicly listed as a partner for corporate finance and capital markets at McMillan Woods – the group that had kickstarted Cottrell’s career as Oscar Drewitt.

Alongside A’zami were two other McMillan Woods partners – both of whom had also known Cottrell in around 2012 because they had worked with him at A’zami’s firm, Maxim.

For the next six years, Reform UK Party Ltd’s corporate governance would be managed by a man who would become embedded in a Montenegrin company infrastructure shared by a nexus of Reform figures and George Cottrell himself.

Everything changed when the Electoral Commission referred George Cottrell’s mother, Fiona Cottrell’s donations, to the police. That month, Nigel Farage announced the change in Reform’s structure.

Mehrtash A’zami disappeared from politics.

Farage and Tice remained directors of the old party private company, now renamed Reform 2025 Ltd – but it was placed beneath a new company limited by guarantee, Reform UK Party Limited.

Tice has no registered role in the new parent, whose directors are Farage, Peter Durnell (a climate science denier and anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist) and Harvey Griffiths (Reform’s new registered treasurer, a property investment mogul who champions private commercial solutions for the public sector across housing, the NHS and local authorities). But that does not reveal where ultimate corporate control can be found: the legal members who hold voting rights in the new company are not publicly identified.

Farage relinquished his personal majority shareholding, but emerged as the only director serving on both the parent and its subsidiary.

‘A Blizzard of Bluster and Obfuscation’

Phil Brickell, the Labour MP who is Chair of the APPG on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, told Byline Times that while the leader of Reform UK “may have called this sham by-election [in his Clacton-on-Sea seat] to dodge scrutiny… the questions are still mounting for Nigel Farage.”

Brickell, who recently reported Farage to the Standards Commissioner over claims he allegedly lobbied Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey to drop plans for a state-led ‘Britcoin’ cryptocurrency, told Byline Times that the allegations made in our investigation “are incredibly serious”.

“What on earth is Nigel Farage doing associating with George Cottrell, who, in his own words, is “like a son” to him? Law enforcement must now be allowed to establish who knew what, and when,” Brickell said.

“Farage talks a lot about establishment stitch-ups. But if these allegations are substantiated, then what else could he call it? Time and time again we’re faced with a blizzard of bluster and obfuscation when it comes to Reform UK’s money.”

Brickell added that the suggestion that the company behind Reform UK restructured in 2025 to conceal its real ownership “doesn’t surprise me in the slightest”.

“Having worked in financial services compliance myself, the timing of the restructure, so soon after the police got involved, looks like a desperate attempt to cover Reform UK’s tracks.”

Additional reporting by Adam Bienkov and Josiah Mortimer

Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

If Andy Burnham is serious about boosting the UK economy, he needs to take the country back into the European Union’s single market and customs union. That’s the uncompromising advice of Professor David Bailey, an expert in industrial strategy at Birmingham Business School, in an interview with the Byline Times Podcast.

Reflecting on the financial challenges facing the incoming Prime Minister, Prof Bailey said, “If we want to grow the economy, what can we do? Well, we’re going to have to look at the relationship with Europe again. There is a cognitive dissonance within the Government, ie: saying we’re going to go for growth, but we’re not going to look at the relationship with Europe. Unless we consider the single market or customs union, we aren’t going to get a boost to growth. We know that Brexit is acting as a significant drag – estimates are between a 4 and 8% hit to the economy. Unless we look at that, we’re stuck with slow growth.”

The political reality is that the EU is only likely to grant the UK frictionless trade access in return for the free movement of people across its 27 member states – a status quo that was rejected in the 2016 referendum. Bailey acknowledges that this trade-off might be unpalatable for some voters, but argues that Brussels is unlikely to cut a special deal with Britain.

“We saw that in the negotiations with various Conservative Prime Ministers who tried to cherry pick, and were told very clearly ‘no’”, he said. “If we want to be in the single market, we would have to accept free movement of labour. That’s absolutely clear. They’re not going to do us any special deals. We’re a third party. My point is, if we accept that we’re not going into the single market, we’re not going to grow and there are big implications from that. You either say we’re going to go back into a closer relationship with Europe – that means we’re going to have to accept some trade-offs which are unpopular; or we’re staying out, but actually that means low growth, and politically that’s going to be unpopular. Either way, it’s very, very difficult.”

Byline Times Political Editor Adam Bienkov told the podcast he agrees that rejoining the single market, “is the easiest win for a Labour government. It was the easiest win for a Starmer Government as well. The problem is both Starmer and Burnham are both tied into this post Brexit argument that ‘we’ve got these red lines, and we don’t want to undermine our voters and give a boost to Reform’.

“If you look back at Burnham’s own post-Brexit history, he was among the first Labour figures to come out immediately after the referendum and say ‘we need a hard Brexit. We need to leave the single market.’ I haven’t seen much indication that he’s departed from that position.”

What, then, are Burnham’s options, as he seeks to re-industrialise the nation and reclaim the ‘left behind’ towns of the Midlands and North of England for Labour? Professor Bailey argues that the UK needs to focus on highly skilled modern industries for future growth. “Let’s think about wind turbines. Let’s think about heat pumps. Let’s think about the defence sector.” But, he warns, that there will be no return to a pre-Thatcherite industrial ‘golden age’.

“We’re not going to go back to low-value manufacturing. That’s gone. It ain’t coming back,” he asserts.

There is also a risk that his new industrial strategy could backfire. “Over in the U.S. we saw the Inflation Reduction Act – a massive investment in manufacturing from Biden – but it didn’t benefit him. The votes actually went to Trump. There are some important things to do, but whether that translates into political support for Burnham is a different issue.”

In the short-term, the new PM has seized the political agenda with a series of low-risk, headline-grabbing initiatives, such as capping bus fares and slashing business rates for pubs, clubs and live music venues. But tough challenges lie ahead, not least because of the ongoing conflict between the US and Iran, which threatens to ramp up oil prices and put the brakes on global economic growth. In this context, Burnham may need more fiscal latitude than is allowed by the self-imposed fiscal rules prescribed by the previous Chancellor Rachel Reeves, and which he has promised to follow. Adam Bienkov suggests that he might go to the country as early next year, to allow himself more ‘wriggle room.’

“He’s in a very tricky position,” Bienkov observed. “He has said repeatedly that he’s going to stick to the manifesto; he’s tied into the red lines on Europe. When you look at the language about a ten-year plan [being unveiled] in the autumn, I think we are looking at a General Election prior to 2029 to give him freedom. When you look at the polls right now, Reform are down something like seven or eight points on their peak last September. Two or three polls this week showed Reform and Labour level. Things are going to get really difficult by 2029. In the Reeves plan, a lot of the cuts were backloaded to the end of the parliament. I think taking all of that together and the severe restrictions that Burnham has inherited, I think it makes a lot of sense to go earlier than 2029. I would not be surprised if we saw a general election as early as as next summer.”

Listen/Watch the Byline Times Podcast here with Adrian Goldberg, Adam Bienkov and Professor David Bailey.

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

Natalia Kogut is the living embodiment of a crisis facing thousands of Ukrainians living in the UK after fleeing Russia’s full scale invasion in 2022. The single mum-of-two has made a new life for herself and her family in Birmingham, but unlike refugees who’ve escaped war or persecution in other countries, she has no prospect of achieving permanent right to residence, and will be expected to head ‘home’ once the conflict is over.

The trouble is that Natalia’s idea of ‘home’ has now changed – as it has for many of her 200,000 plus compatriots who settled in the UK in the aftermath of Putin’s military aggression. As she told the Byline Times Podcast, “I don’t feel at home in Ukraine anymore. We are integrated. My home is here now. Home is not just your house. It’s also friends. It’s family. It’s career. It’s network. Even how the legal system works, how the banking system works, how you get employment. Everything has changed in Ukraine, so it’s a completely different country now. I’ve lost everything there. I don’t have any career, any prospects, or anything back in Ukraine.”

Natalia is grateful to the UK for providing her family with sanctuary and has secured a job as a research associate at the University of Birmingham. It’s below her previous pay grade as an associate professor of law in Kyiv, but she’s appreciative of the opportunity to work in an environment that is compatible with her skills. Others are not so lucky; there are stories of Ukrainian doctors now working as cleaners, because the UK has been slow to recognise (and where necessary upgrade) their professional qualifications.

Another stumbling block is the short-term nature of the visas under which Ukrainians are eligible to stay. The initial temporary protection schemes by which they were admitted to the UK were closed in 2024, but those already here could then apply for an 18-month extension. This was followed by a new two-year visa scheme, which started in April. The stop-start nature of these measures contributes to a sense of impermanence, making decent jobs and accommodation hard to come by, because potential employers and landlords want greater long-term security.

“This impacts every domain of of life,” Natalia said. “People are in constant stress and anxiety – and that impacts their mental health so badly. They don’t know what’s going to happen. This feels really unfair.”

Natalia has been collaborating on a research project into the plight of displaced Ukrainians with her University of Birmingham colleague Professor Sara Jones, who said that after living in the UK for four-and-a-half years, “increasingly they do not see this as temporary. This is their life now. They are working. Their children are going to school. They’re volunteering, and they’re really part of the communities in which they live, so I think the continued narrative that this is temporary really doesn’t hold up to the reality of people’s lives. As it stands, the Ukrainians could be in the country for 10 years and still not have any right to apply for settlement, and that does seem manifestly unfair.”

The Home Office told the Byline Times Podcast that “the Ukraine Schemes remain temporary in line with the Ukrainian Government’s strong desire for the future return of its citizens.” But whilst it is understandable that Kyiv might want to encourage its citizens who have left to eventually return to rebuild the country’s post-war economy, Natalia counters that she is not Ukraine’s property. “Even in an autocracy, people are not owned by their government,” she says.

Professor Jones added that “if Ukrainians in the UK are able to rebuild their lives and integrate into the workforce at the level of their skills – not doctors working as cleaners – this not only supports the UK economy, it also means that they’ll be able to send remittances to Ukraine. People will be able to start businesses in which they’ll be trading and dealing with Ukraine. And if they do decide to return, they’ll be returning with new skills, new knowledge that they can then take back with them to Ukraine.

“Having a really strong diaspora of Ukrainians in countries like the UK also supports the further European integration of Ukraine, which is, of course, the opposite of what Russia wants for the country.”

Watch and listen to the Byline Times Podcast here

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

They say empathy is killing the West. The book carrying the claim, Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy, sits at the top of the American charts with Elon Musk’s endorsement on the jacket, and its argument is brutally simple. We feel too much. Our kindness has been turned against us, and the cure is to feel less.

I have spent much of my life watching what actually kills societies, 24 years of it behind a camera, from the Gulf to Bosnia to Afghanistan. I can report that the diagnosis is back to front.

Take what the argument gets right first, because it is real and conceding it costs nothing. Empathy can be gamed. It is a spotlight, not a scale. It over-weights the sympathetic face in front of us and misses the victim we cannot see, and institutions can be captured by the performance of compassion until they reward the appearance of care over its results. All true, and none of it new. The psychologist Paul Bloom made the serious version of this case a decade ago, in his book Against Empathy.

But follow any of the disasters laid at empathy’s door back to their source and you will not find kindness holding the knife.

The day before the Rana Plaza factory complex collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013, an engineer inspected the cracks in its walls and declared the building unsafe. The bank on the ground floor sent its staff home. The garment factories above ordered their workers back in, on pain of docked wages. 1,134 people died. The men who gave that order were not overcome by fellow-feeling. They knew. They didn’t care.

That is what is missing from the whole suicidal-empathy conversation. Fellow-feeling is a dial, not a switch, and we all sit somewhere on it. At its cold end is a thin minority, of the order of one in twenty of us, who process social obligation differently from the rest. Most never make the news. They charm, they take, they rewrite what happened. You met this pattern across a kitchen table, your own or a friend's, in a parent, a partner, an uncle who nobody quite trusted, long before you ever met it in a boardroom.

The argument of the moment diagnoses the flock and never sees the wolf.

For most of human history we did see. The village watched. Proximity was the structure, reputation followed a person from birth to death, and the cold few were known and contained. Not cured, not hated. Contained.

Then industrial scale broke the proximity, deregulation stripped out the rules we had built to replace it, and the digital age dissolved the last layer, reputation, which can now be manufactured faster than it can be checked. The few did not get worse. The watching stopped.

Seen from there, the fashionable prescription to care less is exactly wrong. A society counselled to feel less does not become harder to rob. Trust withdrawn, cooperation thinned, the watch stood down: that is the ground a taker wants. The suicidal-empathy argument mistakes the immune system for the disease.

Nor is this the left-right quarrel it is being sold as. The pattern has flourished under governments of the left and the right alike, and the loudest quarrels are its best camouflage. Whilst we fight each other sideways, the taking runs vertically, through whatever institution we have stopped watching.

There is an older, better answer, and a Victorian coal merchant found it. Samuel Plimsoll spent the 1870s enraged by ‘coffin ships’, overloaded and heavily insured vessels sent to sea to drown their crews for the payout. He did not try to reform the shipowners. He did not need to know which of them were greedy. He fought for a line painted on every hull, visible from the dock, marking the point past which no ship may be loaded. The Plimsoll line did not require anyone to feel less. It required everyone to be able to see.

That is what we lost, and it is recoverable. Boundaries that are visible and enforced. Watching rebuilt for the scale we live at now. The neuroscience here is careful but hopeful: the alarm in us that falls silent in unwarranted trust appears to be tuned by circumstance, and what circumstance has switched off, circumstance can switch back on.

The trouble was never that we feel too much. It is that a few feel nothing, and that we stopped watching them. The answer is not less fellow-feeling. It is clearer sight, and the wall rebuilt.

Or, since the argument of the moment likes its animal fables: do not free the wolves, and do not hunt them either. Watch them.

Vaughan Smith is a former frontline cameraman and the founder of the Frontline Club. His new book, The Extraction Pattern, is published in paperback and on Kindle by Frontline Club Books on 22 July.

Pre-order the Kindle edition here.

There’s no way you can keep politics apart from sport; it’s just too big a part of people’s lives. And, aside from the Olympics, there’s no bigger sporting event than the World Cup. Sometimes sport shines a light on politics and reveals things that were previously obscured or hidden. The 2026 World Cup has cast a light on many things but one specific episode and one general trend stand out.

Trump Junks the Rules

Let’s begin, perhaps inevitably, with Donald Trump. Uncharacteristically quiet for much of the tournament, he burst onto the stage when he intervened after the USA centre forward Folarin Balogun was sent off in his team’s game against Bosnia-Herzegovina and hence was automatically ruled out of the USA’s next knock-out game against Belgium.

In giving an automatic one-match ban, the football authorities were applying the standard rules that the organisers had agreed on prior to the tournament. They are one small component of a rules-based order that has tried to give shape and certainty to international sporting events, multi-lateral institutions and wider diplomacy since the Second World War. It’s a framework that the current US President despises. He wanted his team’s top striker to play in the last 16 knock out game. So, he rang FIFA boss Giorgio Infantino and demanded that the red card be rescinded. In fact, he appears to have rung him three times. And miraculously, the decision was overturned and Balogun was able to play.

Until now, to many people support for a “rules-based order” has seemed a pretty abstract notion. No longer. This minor episode illustrates what happens when it is discarded. Basically, anarchy ensues and the rich and powerful get their way; they throw their weight around and the rulebook is thrown away. The little guys get trampled on. The Belgians protested; the European football federation supported them but to no avail. Fortunately, on the pitch the Belgians won decisively. Frites 4 Cheats 1.

Nation and Identity

The wider World Cup story revolves around nation and identity. Before it began, we wrote about the multi-ethnic character of the England squad and how it represents the multi-racial, mixed country that England has become. And we pointed out the contrast to the flag-waving demagogues on the populist right who call for the mass deportation – euphemistically termed ‘remigration’ – of millions living here in their quest for a return to an all-white country.

This battle over nationhood and identity permeated the tournament. As the academic specialist on superdiversity Nando Sigona noted, 289 of the tournament’s 1,248 players were born in a country different from the one they represented. The French capital, Paris, was the world’s leading exporter of football talent with more than 40 World Cup players born there although most were not playing for France. The World Cup illustrates that nationhood is no longer defined by where you were born.

Yet there remain powerful forces that resist these trends; who reject a civic sense of nationality; who want to define nationality by place of birth; and think that anyone with a migrant background cannot be a true representative of their country. Two incidents highlighted the issue. After Paraguay’s bruising loss to France in the last 16 knock out, Celeste Amarilla, a senator from Paraguay’s Liberal Radical party, posted a torrent of racial abuse against the French captain Kylian Mbappé on social media. Amarilla described Mbappé as a “colonised Cameroonian, desperately trying to ⁠pass himself off as French” and as a “brute who had not learned to write”.

This could be written off as the rantings of a junior politician. More astonishingly, a week later, the former conservative Spanish Prime Minister from 2011-2018, Mariano Rajoy, wandered into the same territory. Pondering Spain’s semi-final showdown with France in an article for the online newspaper El Debate he wrote “It’s worth remembering that France has been a two-time world champion and was a finalist in the last World Cup. They’ve won every match they’ve played in this World Cup and are currently ranked No 1 in the Fifa rankings. They also have a top-level squad. That said, they don’t have any French players. They’ll be a formidable opponent.” (our emphasis)

Rajoy’s remarks elicited a scathing response from Spain’s current prime minister Pedro Sánchez, who wrote “There are those who still measure belonging by surname, place of birth, or skin colour. Others measure it by our roots in a country and our will to contribute to it. Playing soccer. Caring for our elders. Or opening businesses. Spain belongs to those who love it and work for it.”

Rajoy seemed completely unaware of the composition of his own squad, above all with the precocious teenage talent of Lamine Yamal, the son of North African migrants. This was in stark contrast to the team’s manager. In response to a question about the composition of the Spanish team, Luis de la Fuente said “It’s globalisation. Other, new winds blow. Those processes bring different races, creeds and ideologies, an adaptation to something different. Football is a reflection of society. There’s a role for football to play in integration. Football is a powerful tool for unity, it’s a school of values. There is an ugly part to football, of course, but I prefer not to dwell on that; the true essence of football is very positive, very good for society and that’s what we have to hold on to. It is an agent for integration.”

In the Trump era, with Musk’s X dominating social media, sections of the orthodox right have joined forces with the ethno-nationalist far right in claiming that ancestry is the only passport to citizenship. As we have pointed out in Byline, this idea has been espoused by leading Tory-Reform defector Suella Braverman when she advocated that Englishness “must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity”, a view echoed by Reform UK’s Head of Policy, the Cambridge academic James Orr, when he asked “If anyone can become an Englishman, what is an Englishman?” Similarly, Gorton and Denton Reform candidate Matthew Goodwin insists that migrants who “refuse to assimilate” are “no longer part of our nation … it takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody British”. It is views like this that fuel increasingly strident calls across the right for mass deportations.

Yet the beautiful game demonstrates that such ideas are confined to a minority. The 2026 World Cup shows that national identities are not fixed or exclusive. They are shaped by family histories, colonial legacies and people moving to escape war, hunger and poverty. Far from undermining national teams, these connections have become an integral part of what many national teams are. White supremacists and the blood and soil (‘Blut und Boden’) nationalists hate it. But the World Cup shows that on the football pitch ethnic nationalists are losing out to the civic nationalists. Mbappe, Olise, Yamal and the Stourbridge-born Jude Bellingham all have roots in Africa and bring to their teams a wonderful grace and power.

As Kenan Malik pointed out in The Observer, French forward Michael Olise was born in West London to British-Nigerian and Franco-Algerian parents, making him the product of “four countries, all of which enrich me”. Worldwide, football fans embrace their multiracial teams. May their spirit spread from the playing field to the electoral arena.

Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar are authors of The Little Black Book of the Populist Right, whose revised and updated 2nd edition is published by Byline Books

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

The death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak from mould in a squalid flat in Rochdale shocked the nation, but it came as no surprise to ITV News Investigations Editor Dan Hewitt, who had already been exposing slum properties for nearly two years by the time an inquest in 2022 declared that Awaab’s death from a respiratory illness had been caused by exposure to deadly spores.

As Hewitt told the Byline Times Podcast, “I’d spent almost every week walking into tower blocks and found conditions much, much worse than those Awaab died in. I found myself looking at the awful photos inside his flat, and thinking, ‘how have I not reported on the death of a child before this?”

His reporting, chronicled in his new book, Left To Rot, began in Croydon when he was initially working on another story: “I stumbled upon this block of flats in South London, and the Awaab Ishak story had everything I’d found in that previous 18 months – the stigma, the lack of any kind of regulation to stop this happening, cuts to local government funding, lack of interest from central government, racism, class – it was all there…”

He joined forces with campaigners to highlight the need for Awaab’s Law, aimed at forcing social landlords to promptly remedy hazardous conditions. It entered the Statute Books in 2025, but Hewitt is under no illusions that years of neglect in the sector have been transformed overnight. Even now, he says, more than half a million children live in properties that don’t meet the official Decent Homes Standard. The blame, he believes, lies with Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right To Buy’ policy in the 1980s, which allowed tenants to purchase their own council homes at knockdown prices, whilst denying local authorities the opportunity to re-invest the proceeds in new builds. Councils were forced to give way as landlords to more commercially-driven housing associations which, in some cases, are backed by private equity.

As for those in the intervening years who’ve lacked the means to buy their council house – even at a reduced cost – Hewitt says, “Thatcher didn’t really have much time for them, and successive governments haven’t had much time for them. For the last 40-45 years, successive governments have written into the sky, ‘ownership good, social housing bad’. If you can’t buy your own house, if you aren’t aiming for home ownership, the state hasn’t cared about you.”

He cites the scaling back of the Social Housing Regulator’s role during the ‘Bonfire Of The Quangos’ ignited by the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government in 2010. “It sounds pretty dry”, Hewitt admits, “but it meant the Social Housing Regulator was no longer given the power to inspect properties or speak to tenants – but it was allowed to speak to the housing associations, because banks were lending them money. They wanted to keep that regulation.”

Hewitt’s passion for his subject is partly driven by his own family experience He recalls as a child visiting his grandparents cheerful council house in Walsall – where his father had grown up – which gave the family an escape route from grim private rented accommodation. “Council housing did save that generation,” he observes. “It wasn’t a handout. It was a hand up. It wasn’t seen as a safety net. It was a springboard to a better life. I think I sit here as a privileged journalist doing this job, in part because the state stepped in after the war and helped working people like my grandparents to have a better life.”

One of his interviewees in the book is incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who last month pledged to deliver the biggest council building programme since the war. Hewitt is cautiously optimistic: “I think he genuinely means it. I think a decade in local government [as Mayor of Greater Manchester] has allowed him to see the issues upfront in a way that lots of politicians don’t.

But, he admits, “We don’t know what he means by the numbers. There’s also this huge question of how he pays for it, [but] he has to do something. I don’t think this [Starmer] Government has gripped the crisis in the way that I think many hoped they would. I think there is still a hangover from Thatcher – that knee jerk instinct to talk about home ownership, which is important, of course. But it shows the success of Thatcher that ownership is just everything in the psyche of the way we view housing in this country. The stat that alarmed me most and surprised me most was that in 1980, just under a third of Britain lived in council housing. Today it’s 8% .

‘When I interviewed Steve Reed, the current Housing Secretary, he basically said people don’t want to live in council housing; they want to own their own home – but for millions of people, it’s not an option. There has to be something in between. And we can reel off the stats: 1.3 million people on waiting lists, record numbers of children living in temporary accommodation. Everyone can see the problem. It is time for solutions, and maybe we have a Prime Minister now who actually gets this and is willing to do something about it.”

Daniel Hewitt’s book, Left To Rot - How Governments Have Betrayed Us and How We Fix It’ is published by Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press.

Listen to Adrian Goldberg’s full interview with Daniel Hewitt on the Byline Times podcast here.

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” asked Johnny Rotten at the end of the Sex Pistols’ fractious final gig.

A similar question is now being asked by those on the left of the Labour party who helped to make Andy Burnham Prime Minister.

Their question was brought into focus this week by reports that Burnham has now buckled to pressure not to make Ed Miliband his Chancellor.

According to multiple reports, Burnham has been persuaded that Miliband, would not “pass the sniff test” with senior City figures, who have long opposed him being elevated to Number 11.

Instead, Burnham has reportedly been persuaded to make Morgan McSweeney ally and Blue Labour favourite, Shabana Mahmood, his Chancellor instead.

The avowedly anti-immigration Home Secretary is not a popular figure within the Labour party, to put it mildly.

A recent poll of Labour members found that she was the least popular member of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet by some distance, falling below even Rachel Reeves and Starmer himself.

Miliband, by contrast, was the most popular.

In this, Labour members are the polar opposites of the consensus view among most of the British commentariat.

Indeed I suspect if you were to poll senior editors and proprietors at major newspapers about their favourite member of Starmer’s Cabinet, Mahmood would likely come first and Miliband last.

Of course the question of who Burnham should make Chancellor isn’t purely a left vs right, Labour vs business and the media, one.

Miliband’s commitment to a green economy meant he was opposed by a series of trade unions representing oil and gas workers, whilst a few city figures had actually backed him over the alternatives.

Also while Miliband was the favoured candidate of the soft left in the Labour party, one of his biggest champions over recent weeks has been Tony Blair’s former Political Secretary John McTernan, who originates from a completely different wing of the party.

McTernan told Byline Times that he believes Miliband is the only candidate for Chancellor with a chance of getting a grip of the Treasury and delivering for working people.

“The choice for Andy Burnham is whether the Labour Government runs the Treasury or Treasury runs the Labour Government, it’s as simple as that,” McTernan said.

“We’re in the middle of the third heatwave in the UK this year and that demands a different economy… Either we stay addicted to the 20th century fossil fuel economy, or we’re led into good jobs, well-paid jobs, union jobs of the renewable economy, and that’s one which also cuts costs for households who use renewable energy, cuts costs for businesses and households that use electric vehicles or electric vans.

“The choice is so obvious. If you want to end neoliberalism, then you need to have a chancellor who knows how to switch to a different political economy.”

The fear amongst those backing Miliband is that any other candidate would simply be pushed down the same road at the Treasury that Rachel Reeves was when she was persuaded to cut the winter fuel allowance – triggering a post-election collapse in Labour support. They fear that Mahmood would be similarly malleable.

“Shabana is very able, very bright, very hardworking, very politically imaginative, but I could not tell you what hers or any other of the people who are being briefed as potential chancellors, what their approach to running the UK economy would be, or what their approach to growth would be,” says McTernan.

“The truth is if you don’t have your own political economy then you will get the Treasury’s and we know what the Treasury’s is. It is austerity. It is cuts for the most vulnerable, it is the reduction of local government to a shadow of its former self.”

Mahmood’s allies have pushed back against the characterisation of her as being right wing, saying that she is much more left wing on economics than widely assumed.

It is true that little is known about Mahmood’s own economic views given that her sole experience in this areas was as a junior shadow Treasury minister under Ed Miliband more than ten years ago.

However, what we do know from her time at the Home Office is that she is an essentially anti-liberal figure, favouring a closed immigration system, which in turn necessitates a closed economy.

She has justified this ‘Blue Labour’ approach to politics by insisting that it is the key to fending off Reform and the far-right.

Announcing what she described as “the most significant changes to our asylum system in modern times” last November, Mahmood declared that “the era of permanent protection for refugees is over”.

Justifying her decision to remove the right for refugees to remain indefinitely in the UK once their asylum application is approved, she declared that “If you don’t like this, you won’t like what follows me”.

Unfortunately this strategy of delivering right-wing policies in order to fend off Farage has been a highly unsuccessful one.

Although lauded by the press, the anti-immigration rhetoric and policy pursued by Mahmood and Starmer coincided with a collapse in support for the party amongst its more liberal and metropolitan base. And rather than try to stop that collapse, Mahmood has actively welcomed it.

One of the most revealing moments on this came in April when she boasted about how she had told “white liberals” heckling her about her immigration plans to “f*** right off”.

Two months later and many of those same liberal voters did exactly as she instructed, voting heavily for the Greens and Liberal Democrats instead, and delivering Labour one of its worst local election results in its history.

Of course Burnham was able to reverse much of that collapse during his Makerfield by-election campaign. Yet he did so, not by campaigning against immigration, whilst telling liberal voters to “f*** off”, but by being a unifying figure, who focused on issues like the cost of living, whilst offering progressive alternative to the agenda pursued by the Starmer Government.

There have been some encouraging signs since then, most recently in Burnham’s appointment of the brilliant former 38 Degrees and Hope Not Hate campaigner Matthew McGregor as his new head of Political Strategy. McGregor, unlike some in the Labour party, understands that Labour’s loss of voters to the Greens has been the biggest cause of the party’s recent collapse, rather than a simple transfer over to Reform.

Yet if Burnham does push ahead with the appointment of Mahmood, then much of the progress Burnham has made in undoing the damage caused by Starmer and McSweeney over the past two years will be undone. It would risk, as the Times’ well-connected Labour chronicler Patrick Maguire put it this week, leaving Burnham’s Government looking like “McSweeneyism in an Everton top”.

This would be good news for Zack Polanski and the Greens, but it would be bad news for those hoping for a Prime Minister who will unite the progressive vote and lock Nigel Farage out of Downing Street for good.

If that is where we’re heading then it would be the second time, following the victory of Starmer in 2020, that Labour left-wingers would feel duped by a leadership candidate promising left wing policies, only to deliver the complete opposite once in power.

Ever feel like you’ve been cheated? Some in Labour now believe that they might just have been.

Adam Bienkov is the Political Editor of Byline Times and Online Editor of BylineTimes.com. Do you have a tip or story? Get in touch with him at adam@bylinetimes.com

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

A year ago, Andy Burnham only had a rank outsider’s chance of ever becoming Labour leader – never mind Prime Minister. After two previous failed attempts, the former Blair-era Cabinet minister wasn’t even eligible for his party’s top job, having quit parliament to become Mayor of Greater Manchester. Sir Keir Starmer wasn’t exactly a popular PM, but he had the security of a massive majority after winning a landslide victory just 12 months earlier. Little did we know then that a combination of the Mandelson affair, Starmer’s own personal unpopularity and the rise of Reform UK would open the way for Burnham to secure the keys to 10 Downing Street, via the Makerfield by-election, without any formal challenge from within his own party.

This is what makes Byline Times Editor-in-Chief Hardeep Matharu’s conversation with him so valuable. Recorded after he’d given a rousing closing speech at last year’s Byline Festival at Keele University, it is now available to watch and listen via the Byline Times Podcast.

At the time, Burnham may have harboured hopes of one day returning to front bench politics, but had no reasonable expectation of doing so any time soon. He could be candid about the failures of Westminster politics without any fear of retribution, and honest about his own failures as both Health Secretary and Culture Secretary. There was freedom to set out an agenda which challenged the Treasury’s London-centric spending rules and scope to explain why – as a working class kid who made it to Cambridge University – he always felt like an outsider among the green benches of the Commons.

Matharu established a rapport with Burnham, who made the startling admission that Parliament’s ‘whip’ system, which has underpinned all governments from time immemorial, stifles free and honest debate in the one place where it matters most.

He said, “The whip system, in my view, is corrosive of people’s independence and, indeed, of their authenticity. The longer you’re in Parliament, the more you are at risk of it making a fraud out of you, because it makes you vote in certain ways, say certain things, take a line in an interview where you may not 100% feel it.”

He added: “We don’t have a political system, like the US, where people are more empowered to act for their area, to act independently. I think the British political system and MPs individually would rise in the public’s esteem if they were able to act with more independence on an everyday basis and say what they really feel. Maybe we’d have a more vibrant political debate if people went into interviews and said what they were feeling, as opposed to what they’ve been told to say.”

How long these views withstand the pressures of high office remain to be seen, but the interview stands as an important document for those seeking to understand Burnham’s motivations and the route map of his government.

Watch or listen to the Byline Times podcast here.

Subscribe now

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

Walk into a Relay (the newsagent that is equivalent to WH Smith in every airport and train station) in France, and you will likely see a wall of right-wing politicians smiling back at you from the bookshelf.

You might be able to find a couple of centre-left politicians – when Byline Times checked at the Relay in Paris CDG, there was a book by former PS presidential candidate Ségolène Royal and current Place Publique presidential hopeful Raphaël Glucksmann – but the majority of portraits on the covers of the books will be those of far-right presidential candidate Jordan Bardella, the right-wing former president Nicholas Sarkozy, the leaders of far right microparties like Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, Nicholas Dupont-Aignant and Éric Zemmour and a handful of Macron’s right-wing ministers.

Far-right media mogul Vincent Bolloré bought the Lagardère group, which owns Relay, in 2023, and since then, the chain’s shopfronts have become part of his political project. They were recently described by the Observatory of Multinational Corporations as the “front line” of Bolloré’s “political crusade”, and evidence of declining pluralism recently became apparent when an order of 400 copies of a new book titled Bernard Arnault: His Ruthless World, which was critical of Bolloré’s friend and fellow media oligarch, Bernard Arnault, was cancelled by the chain without explanation.

Bolloré adheres to an identitarian Catholic worldview that understands France as experiencing a clash of civilisations as a result of Islamic immigration. According to a 2021 investigation by Le Monde, he is surrounded by “yes men”, including some who spent their youth as members of ultranationalist groupuscules and were close associates of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Relay is not the only front in the multipronged culture war being waged by Bolloré and like-minded billionaires such as Pierre-Édouard Stérin, who funds a small conservative theme park and hosts charity events that critics argue reinforce a moralistic, right-wing Catholic worldview.

Bolloré controls an empire of media outlets, including the far-right television channel CNews, and formerly moderate newspaper the Journal du Dimanche, as well as streaming services and publishers, including a publisher that produces school textbooks, which he puts in service of his worldview .

This does not always mean straightforwardly backing the National Rally; often, it means using the media to advance the preferred political themes of the far right.

Victor Mallett, a Financial Times journalist and author of Far-Right France, told Byline Times that Bolloré is engaged in a concerted move “to push the far right, though he’s not always narrowly focused on Marine Le Pen and Bardella. He’s also given time to Éric Zemmour [a far-right politician and journalist who has been convicted multiple times for racial hatred] and Sarkozy and anyone else on the hard right that he’s quite keen on. You could say that he’s hedging his bets”.

In 2023, he bought the Hachette group, including the prestigious publishing house Grasset, which sparked fears about political control among the authors. These fears came to pass earlier this year when, in April, Olivier Nora, the beloved editor of Grasset who had headed up the publishing house for 26 years, was fired without warning.

His firing ignited a wave of protest, prompting over 100 authors as diverse as the feminist author of King Kong Theory Virginie Despentes and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the philosopher with neo-conservative leanings, to quit the publishing house in solidarity with Nora.

Laurent Binet, the author of several books including HHhH, was one of the authors who quit Grasset following Nora’s exit.

He told Byline Times that there were no questions of Nora’s competence before he was fired.

“Bolloré wrote an extremely petty and small-minded article in the Journal du Dimanche, raising the question of his competence because Grasset supposedly had very poor financial results. This is false in relation to the wider world of publishing. Grasset was profitable and not loss-making, which in the current climate of publishing is a result in itself”.

“Grasset is an old publishing house with a lot of symbolic capital… Its great claim to glory is that it published Proust for the first time. For the three years after Bolloré bought Hachette, the threat was plain. We all had the impression that what protected us was Olivier Nora, and as long as he was there we felt that the publishing house continued as before. With the same editorial policy as before”.

He added that once Nora had been fired, the decision of the authors to quit was “fast and unanimous” because they knew what was coming.

“There was a precedent with Fayard [another publishing house under the Hachette umbrella]. Bolloré really decided to make that a propaganda tool, the books he publishes now are mostly by far-right or hard-right authors like Sarkozy, Zemmour, Bardella, etc.”

The process of “Bollorisation”, as the radicalisation of cultural institutions has become known, has extended well beyond the left. “What’s interesting”, Binet said, “is that neoconservative authors left with us. Even for them this was too much”.

The Grasset affair was not the only instance of cultural workers starting to push back against Bolloré’s increasing control of culture. The Bolloré family took a controlling stake in Canal+, France’s biggest sponsor of cinema, a decade ago, but it was previously understood to be insulated from the politics of its owner, until this summer at the Cannes film festival, a row broke out when Maxime Saada, the head of Canal+ threatened to blacklist over 600 artists who had signed a petition warning against French cinema’s reliance on the far-right mogul.

Canal has committed almost half a billion euros to fund films until the end of 2027; after that, filmmakers fear that Bolloré may start applying political pressure and only finance films that are ideologically aligned.

Canal has already made steps in this direction, distributing the documentary adaptation of far-right politician Éric Zemmour’s book French Suicide, which famously downplayed the role of Vichy France in the Holocaust.

Bolloré’s offensive in cinema is occurring alongside threats from the far-right party the National Rally to cut state subsidies to the art form.

Archibald, a campaigner with the Earth Uprising group against Bolloré’s media dominance, told Byline Times that the result of Bolloré’s consolidation of media is that “racist ideas are now available in every venue”, pointing to the fact that earlier this year CNews defended the right of one of its contributors to compare Bally Bagayoko, the black mayor of Saint-Denis, to a monkey.

A backlash to Bolloré is starting to emerge.

According to Archibald, Bolloré’s hostile takeover of cultural institutions has largely happened by stealth, but groups like his are banding together to raise awareness of what the billionaires Bolloré and Stérin are doing to culture, and trying to support alternative institutions.

In the political sphere, the left parties have started to hit back against the far-right billionaires.

Olivier Faure, the leader of the centre-left Socialist Party, accused Bolloré of trying to “lobotomise publishing” in response to the Grasset affair, and the populist left party France Unbowed has vowed to break up media oligopolies if leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon becomes president.

There has also been something of an institutional backlash. One of Bolloré’s channels, C8, was closed down for breaching broadcast rules. “That was pretty interesting”, Victor Mallet said: “There’s no sign of that sort of spine in the British system”.

Although CNews has been fined several times for breaching broadcast rules, including for broadcasting discriminatory outbursts, Mallet doesn’t think that Arcom, the broadcast regulator, will “dare” to act ahead of the election despite an outstanding case against CNews, because “it would be like a red rag to a bull” allowing the far right to claim political interference.

According to Laurent Binet: “The cultural battle against Bolloré taking place in France is the mirror of the global political battle. It’s important to say that Grasset was not a left-wing publishing house. We are trying to defend the very notion of pluralism”.

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

With luminaries from Erasmus and Isaac Newton to Alan Turing to Stephen Hawking as alumni, Cambridge University has always framed itself as a centre of scientific advance, progress, and the Enlightenment.

It was famed for its rationalism and Puritanism, putting principle above power, compared to its great rival, Oxford, which became the royalist capital during the English Civil War.

Since then, Oxford has been the traditional pipeline to national politics. Thirteen of the UK’s 18 post-war prime ministers were educated there, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson, contemporaries at the infamous hard-drinking Bullingdon Club.

Cambridge has preferred to boast of its intellectual and cultural achievements: the number of Trinity College Fellows who are Nobel Prize winners; Footlights, the comedy revue that powered Monty Python and the careers of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Emma Thompson; Mathematical Bridge in Queens’ College, mythically built by Newton; and the Eagle Pub where Crick and Watson announced that they had discovered the structure of DNA.

Now, a very different type of ‘dark enlightenment’ has descended on the world-renowned university. Powered by US money and far-right European think tanks, Cambridge has recently become an outpost of a peculiar blend of national conservatism and apocalyptic Christianity, through the figure of James Orr – Head of Policy at Reform UK described as Nigel Farage’s “Kingmaker“.

A six-month investigation by Byline Times can now exclusively reveal that with the behind-the-scenes support of Peter Thiel — Trump backer and co-founder of the controversial data-mining and surveillance giant Palantir Technologies — Orr has used Cambridge University as a recruitment ground to bring students into a hard-right, theocratic political project aimed at bolstering talent in Farage’s party.

Sources across the university have raised urgent concerns about the safeguarding risks to students in Orr’s orbit.

This special investigation reveals:

• James Orr has housed students at his ‘right-wing mecca’ alongside race science advocates and hard-right political figures, in clear breach of Cambridge University’s safeguarding rules.

• Orr’s appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion in Cambridge University’s Faculty of Divinity in 2019 was accompanied by a clandestine financial donation from the pro-Trump Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.

• Thiel went on to offer ‘life-changing’ sums of money to Cambridge University scholars in Orr’s network.

• Academics and students have consistently raised concerns about Orr’s conflicts of interest over funding, and dangers of breaching ‘foreign influence’ legislation.

• Orr’s lawyers threatened to injunct Byline Times over any mention in this investigation of the name of his “Conservative Kibbutz”– the premises where he houses students and which has already been named in the public domain.

• Cambridge University has consistently ignored Byline Times’ confidential queries about the concerns raised by James Orr’s activities. Instead, its press office has passed them on directly to Orr’s lawyers. The University has offered no explanation of, or comment on, the extensive findings of this investigation – including, extraordinarily, concerns of safeguarding in relation to its students.

The House That Cannot Be Named

A quiet, narrow suburban road runs along the river Cam on the northern edge of Cambridge, where the city thins into ice cream shops and laundromats, and then water and trees.

Along a row of unremarkable English houses, behind a nondescript corner, stands a building easily mistaken for one of them.

From the front, the property looks faintly run-down. One window carries an anti-abortion slogan. Another displays an English flag. Painted across the wall of the front porch, in plain script, is a verse from the Book of Revelation: “And the leaves of the trees were for the healing of the nations.”

Behind this plain-looking building lies an acre and a half of hidden compound: a manorial main house, cottages, a chapel, a swimming pool, a pavilion for seminars, a long garden running down to the water, a shiny new motorboat docked at the river. The sprawling complex regularly houses at any one time half a dozen or so postgraduate students from the University of Cambridge.

According to James Orr, the property is more than just a home, but a political and religious centre: a “right-wing Mecca” and a “Conservative Kibbutz”.

A regular resident, Rod Dreher, author of the 2017 book The Benedict Option, likens the place to “a Christian Asturias”, after the medieval Iberian kingdom that launched the Catholic Reconquista against Muslim rule. He has said it “needs to happen in as many places as it can”.

Orr’s wife, an Anglican vicar, launched an online crowdfunding campaign to raise £500,000 to turn the gateway building into “a café, gallery and Fellow’s Hub” – offering “tax-friendly options for those who would like to donate from abroad or give substantially larger amounts”.

She described her home as “a riverside community in Cambridge”, which has become “a thriving space where students, scholars, artists, and pilgrims gather to share ideas, meals, and meaningful conversations”.

Recent guests and visitors read like a Who’s Who? of political pilgrims and scholars – almost exclusively from the right.

Peter Thiel has visited; as has his protegee, Donald Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, who described Orr as his “British Sherpa“.

So too have former Dutch MP and anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali; the conservative author and advocate of white identity politics Douglas Murray; the Canadian psychologist and anti-woke activist Jordan Peterson; and the comedian and writer John Cleese.

MP Danny Kruger, now Reform’s work and pensions spokesman, reportedly stayed at the house overnight.

After Orr’s appointment as head of Reform UK’s policy think tank in September 2025, his work even attracted the attention of New Labour grandee Peter Mandelson, who was apparently planning to “hold drinks in honour” of him, according to a source – just before his sacking as UK Ambassador to the US, after the extent of his relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was revealed. (Neither Orr nor the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would confirm or deny that this event actually took place).

Indeed, Orr’s lawyers have consistently refused to go on the record in response to this publication’s queries. However, they did threaten a legal injunction to prevent publication of any article which mentioned the name of his premises – his “right-wing Mecca” – on the basis that it breached his right to privacy and family life.

When Byline Times pointed out the public interest – that the Orrs themselves had widely publicised the location in articles and podcasts, that it had been named by other media outlets, and that their son was standing as a Reform candidate in the local elections earlier this year – Addleshaw Goddard dropped the threat and asked this publication to withhold the name due to concerns about personal safety following the assassination of US conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Last year, Orr was appointed as a senior advisor to the Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage, telling the Telegraph that he had been tasked with “boosting the party’s acquisition of talent” by building “networks of elite defectors from academia, business, and law”.

Orr’s Cambridge University position, he said, was central to this. He had met “hundreds” of Cambridge students he considered suitable allies, and his job at Reform was to work out how those students could be “recruited into the party at scale”.

When Byline Times asked Cambridge University several times whether this kind of explicit recruitment for a political party was in contravention of its safeguarding rules and policies on academic conflicts of interest, it did not reply.

In the absence of any answers from the university, Byline Times has sought to ascertain: how does this recruitment work? How is it funded? And what does it promote?

The Recruitment Pipeline

Byline Times has spoken to nearly 20 former and current Cambridge University students and academics – none of whom wanted to go on the record for fear of adverse consequences. Many described an oppressive atmosphere around the modernist wedge-shaped edifice of the Faculty of Divinity.

All were concerned that James Orr’s increasing political workload leaves him little time to attend to his educational duties. As an Associate Professor, Orr holds full-time research, teaching, and pastoral obligations to students. But his Reform role is also full-time.

According to sources, Orr has “hardly ever” been present on campus since the Reform policy appointment, and is making negligible research contributions – both unheard of for such an academic role.

On at least one occasion, Orr unilaterally delegated his university lecture obligations to one of his own graduate students. The student, a foreign national, was asked to deliver material which Orr had been contracted by the university to teach. The student was unpaid and carried out the work without a contract. Although formal complaints were raised with the faculty, no disciplinary action was taken against Orr.

When Orr does attend lectures, undergraduates have characterised his style as veering between “rambling” and florid, reading long passages of text in their original Greek, Latin, French, and German without translating them for students.

Subjects such as Palestine and human rights are frowned upon; and authors on the reading list include Orr’s former colleague at Oxford University, Nigel Biggar – a Conservative peer who has sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the British Empire against the consensus among academic historians.

When, during Orr’s absence on emergency sabbatical, a female philosopher – Iris Murdoch – was added to the list of male ethicists for first-year students to read, she was promptly removed on his return.

Meanwhile, Orr’s extensive Cambridge compound provides accommodation for at least half a dozen postgraduate students, though it is not clear whether this is on a fee-paying basis. Through his lawyers, Orr has defended the practice as being common in Cambridge, though fellow academics say that it is highly unusual.

A senior Cambridge University academic in the School of Arts and Humanities, which also houses the Faculty of Divinity, said that the institution “clearly has major questions to answer about its relationship with Reform UK, and about the consequences of this relationship for students including both quality of teaching and research, and the dangers of hidden donor influence”.

“The university should, urgently, be transparent about its relationship with the party, and about Dr James Orr’s potential role in using the university as a political pipeline,” they added.

Down by the river, students find themselves mingling with a coterie of hard-right political figures, pundits, and operatives.

One of Orr’s closest colleagues and repeat residents is Rod Dreher, who, until recently, was funded by the Danube Institute, a Budapest think tank sponsored by the Viktor Orbán administration to court Western conservatives. He is also a supporter of Steve Sailer, a notorious American advocate of race science.

Orr personally invited another American race science proponent, Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, to address staff and students at Cambridge via the Trinity Forum – a US Christian non-profit unconnected to Trinity College.

Jordan Peterson finished his 2024 book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine, at the Orrs’ Cambridge base. He endorsed The Bell Curve in an interview with Douglas Murray, whom sources describe as another close friend of the Orrs and a regular guest at their compound.

One Cambridge student familiar with multiple humanities departments outside the Faculty of Divinity described a “normalisation of disparaging views of ethnic minorities” among some Cambridge academics.

In this context, it is not surprising that at least two students who passed through Orr’s Cambridge orbit have since become public voices of the hard-right.

Isaac Riley is a postgraduate student in Old Testament theology at the Faculty of Divinity who currently lives with the Orrs. He writes for The European Conservative – a Budapest-based far-right magazine previously funded by Orbán’s Government through a state-linked foundation. In November 2024, he published a “moral argument against migration”, contending that a government’s “primary obligation is to the native”. A second essay cast transgender identity as theologically “heinous”.

Charlie Bentley-Astor, a Cambridge English graduate, regularly liaised with Orr according to university sources, and by her own admission participated in several conservative “secret societies”, including to support figures such as Jordan Peterson. She moved swiftly after Cambridge to write and speak for right-wing media such as the Telegraph, The Critic, UnHerd, GB News, TalkTV, and The European Conservative, in which she recently argued that ethnicity is “as fundamental as biological sex and perhaps as immutable”.

Several academic sources at Cambridge University raised concerns that Orr’s declared aim – to recruit students – has brought individuals into the institution based less on their academic ability and more on their political affinities, and creates conflicts of interest over external funding.

One student recruited by Orr received funding for their studies from the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF), a US conservative non-profit. Orr, who chairs the UK branch of the foundation, personally facilitated the funding according to sources familiar with the arrangement. Byline Times was told that the same student, who lived with the Orrs, was also taught and supervised by Orr and assessed by his close academic associates.

The EBF is not a traditional academic funder. As Orr explained in an interview with the late Charlie Kirk, it is designed to help create a pan-European “Comintern” for nationalist populist parties, including far-right groups with direct fascist lineage or formal extremist classification, such as Germany’s AfD and the Austrian FPO.

“I’ve watched the student cohort in the faculty change over the last few years,” a member of the department told Byline Times. “We are seeing more and more young men, in particular, being recruited who undoubtedly affiliate with right-wing or even hard-right political views. And there are real questions about the quality of their work. This has never happened before.”

Beyond questions of conflict of interest, the arrangement at James Orr’s property – housing students in what he insists is his private home – appears to be a straightforward breach of university policy.

Adopted in July 2024 (and updated in October the same year), the policy sets out that staff in positions of academic authority should not enter into personal arrangements with students that could compromise the integrity of the academic relationship.

In particular, it instructs staff that they must: “Avoid inviting a student to their private home, room, or vehicle, especially if others are not present, or visiting a student in their home or room, including while at conferences, overseas trips, or on a placement.”

Students might be invited to attend “group social gatherings at an academic member of staff’s private home” only if they are “working as part of research groups”. This is distinct from housing them.

One Cambridge University graduate student source described a professor housing students at his personal residence as “deeply unusual and unacceptable”.

“Housing students at his residence is at best inappropriate and at worst a conflict of interest that could lead to serious problems for the Faculty and university,” a senior professor in the School of Arts and Humanities told Byline Times.

“Healthy boundaries are vital to good teaching and learning, and this situation clearly invokes safeguarding and student welfare issues, quite apart from the dangers of running a parallel institution to the university with clear danger of indoctrination rather than learning.”

Thiel’s Anonymous Donation

James Orr’s recruitment drive for students at Cambridge University on behalf of Reform UK has been indelibly linked to Peter Thiel’s opaque involvement in the university, which has been ongoing for more than a decade.

As Byline Times previously reported, the chief of staff at Thiel Capital began travelling to Cambridge regularly to convene a network of conservative academics across the university as early as 2016.

Three years later, in 2019, James and Helen Orr purchased their rambling riverside property when it became clear that James Orr could secure a position as Associate Professor in the Faculty of Divinity.

Byline Times can reveal that this coincided with a secret donation to Cambridge University from Peter Thiel.

University documents seen by Byline Times confirm that the Palantir co-founder made an offer of a five-figure donation to the institution through James Orr in November 2018, when he was under consideration for the role of University Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion.

In January 2019, the donation appears to have been sent from Thiel Capital to ‘Cambridge in America’ – a 501(c) US tax-exempt organisation that raises money for the university in the US. While the documents seen by Byline Times suggest that it was Orr who requested the donation be kept anonymous, it is understood from Orr’s lawyers that Peter Thiel himself requested anonymity.

Thiel’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Cambridge University subsequently commissioned an investigation, conducted by internal auditor Deloitte, into the financial issues the donation raised. It found no evidence of bribery but concluded that “weaknesses” in “internal control” were putting university objectives “at risk”.

At risk is something wider: the independence of budget-strapped academic institutions and student societies in the face of ‘big money’.

Peter Thiel is not the only tech mogul in Orr’s orbit.

His Cambridge network also intersects with British crypto-billionaire Ben Delo, a donor to Reform, and co-founder of the BitMex exchange, who pleaded guilty to wilfully violating US anti-money laundering rules before being pardoned by President Trump.

Among the groups underwritten by Delo is the ‘Cambridge Scrutonian Society’ (CSS), which hosts talks, seminars, and reading groups in both Cambridge and Westminster in the intellectual tradition of the late conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton.

The CSS was founded by two of James Orr’s own students, and sources at the university suggest that Orr played a key behind-the-scenes role in helping set up the organisation. Byline Times can confirm that the CSS’ Westminster meetings take place in ‘The Sanctuary’, a venue near Westminster Abbey financed by Delo, which also hosts groups such as Rupert Lowe’s party, Restore Britain.

This is a tight circle. Delo first attended a lecture by Peter Thiel in December 2023 at an event at Oxford University, co-organised by James Orr.

In January this year, as part of a US and European tour, Thiel delivered four private, invite-only ‘Antichrist Lectures’ in the Ramsden Room of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge University – again hosted by Orr. Previous leaks from these lectures suggest that his version of the ‘Antichrist’ ranges from the climate activist Greta Thunberg to any regulation of AI.

Sources who attended a dinner afterwards told Byline Times that Thiel – who named his surveillance company after the ‘palantír’, the “seeing stones” of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – believes that the epic’s characters, Saruman and Sauron, the two dark lords who used the stones in their struggle to dominate Middle-earth, are “deeply misunderstood”.

No doubt Thiel, who also co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, could counter that he has been misunderstood in his numerous remarks questioning women’s rights and whether “democracy is compatible with freedom”.

The tech billionaire has bankrolled key thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin, founder of the so-called ‘Dark Enlightenment’ or neo-reactionary movement which dallies with eugenic pseudoscience and calls to replace democratic governance with autocratic rule by corporate ‘CEOs’ with monarchical powers. He also spent an unprecedented $10 million on the Senate campaign of US Vice President JD Vance.

That volume of money is life-altering, and big tech has already had its impact on Cambridge.

In the past two decades, the university’s reputation for innovation in computing and genetics encouraged the growth of large, out-of-town bioscience firms and software companies. The once modest town centre has been colonised by expensive bars, shops, and private members’ clubs.

Even the idea of money matters.

At the dinner after his ‘Antichrist Lectures’, Thiel asked several people present how they would feel if they woke up the next morning with $200 million in their bank accounts. Those present were not sure if the billionaire was testing them or joking, but still felt the need to decline.

Safeguarding and Foreign Influence

There is no hiding the fact that the tech titans of Silicon Valley – and, along with them, the anti-democratic ‘Dark Enlightenment’ ideology – have been channelled through James Orr and his position.

Thiel’s ‘Antichrist Lectures’ were not formally affiliated with the university and, instead, went through an opaque private company called the Varsity Forum – which, like the Trinity Forum, sounds as if it has academic credentials and vibes off the name of Cambridge University’s highly-regarded student newspaper, Varsity.

Academics have complained that Orr and his network are “Cambridge-washing” – privately hiring university venues for reputational credibility despite no formal affiliation.

Orr’s various activities also have close institutional links to Viktor Orbán, the former authoritarian and “illiberal” Hungarian Prime Minister.

In 2023, the Edmund Burke Foundation hosted a National Conservatism conference in Brussels which was part-funded by two Hungarian state-backed institutions: the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC); and the Danube Institute, where Orr’s friend Rod Dreher was a director.

Another organisation, the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF), which, like the EBF, features Orr as a director, has received £512,500 since 2023 from the MCC and spent more than £54,000 on Cambridge programmes in 2024.

Both institutions are now implicated in a potential criminal investigation initiated by Hungary’s new Prime Minister Péter Magyar, who has accused the MCC and other organisations of misusing Hungarian public funds for “foreign influence operations in Britain”.

One Cambridge University academic told Byline Times: “I am worried that this is a case of soft foreign influence on the university.”

Another was concerned that the Hungarian funding of students and their societies could fall foul of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme – a regulatory measure introduced under the 2023 UK National Security Act, which came into force in July 2025.

Cambridge University issued its own guidance warning that academics running foreign-funded activities intended to influence UK policy may be required to register under the scheme. Non-compliance, the guidance observes, “is a criminal offence”.

Several complaints about Orr to the pro vice-chancellors and even the vice-chancellor were made by senior staff across the university. Yet, in all cases, no action was taken.

Byline Times contacted Professor Kamal Munir, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for University Community and Engagement; and Professor Bhaskar Vira, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, but did not receive replies.

A spokesperson for the Office for Students – the independent regulator for higher education in England – told Byline Times: “We generally wouldn’t comment on individual institutions, and it would be inappropriate for us to comment on individual members of staff. If students, staff, or members of the public have concerns that a university or college is not meeting our requirements, they can submit a notification to us.”

When Byline Times contacted Cambridge University’s press office with confidential enquiries relating to its own standards and policies, the queries were not merely ignored but forwarded on in full without notice to James Orr and his representatives at Addleshaw Goddard, a legal firm which also represents Ben Delo.

Extraordinarily, given the issues raised by this investigation and Cambridge University’s world-class reputation, further enquiries from this publication were met with silence.

Cambridge University issued only one response in defence of its refusal to engage with substantive queries regarding institutional failures around the safeguarding of students, conflicts of interest, and breaches of confidentiality.

It said: “In the past few weeks, Byline Times has sent the university a slew of unsubstantiated allegations, wilful mischaracterisations, and falsehoods, which we strongly reject. The volume of misleading claims and conjecture means we are unable to engage with the approach as a legitimate media enquiry.

“We would encourage Byline Times to consider its position seriously if it intends to publish misleading or unproven claims… Media enquiries are not inherently confidential, and most enquiries need to be investigated and shared with the appropriate people relevant to understanding the enquiry.”

It also asked Byline Times to treat this statement as confidential – while claiming no such confidentiality existed in this publication’s extensive questions.

As a heady cocktail of transatlantic influence, race science, and far-right politics has converged on this proud university town through the abode of Reform UK’s policy chief, the university has steadfastly refused to explain why it has allowed itself to quietly become a vehicle of Peter Thiel’s ‘Dark Enlightenment’ in Britain.

Meanwhile, with staff and students feeling abandoned by the university authorities, and with Reform’s Leader Nigel Farage facing questions about his finances and connections with billionaire donors, the reputation of one of the most revered educational institutions in the world appears to be hostage to the fortunes of one highly politicised associate professor.

The question that must be asked is: why?

Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations for Byline Times. Peter Jukes is Executive Editor and Co-Founder of Byline Times. Hardeep Matharu is Editor-in-Chief of Byline Times.

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

I thought I was only going to take photos of the exterior of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a city in the Netherlands and home to the first permanent court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.

When I went there yesterday to gather images for my personal archives, I saw a visitor entrance. I heard a voice through a speaker asking if I needed help, and I said: “I’d love to come inside.” After promising not to take any photos or video, I was invited to take a tour of the ICC – and for the next hour, I was in a fact-based world, where victims of great cruelty were honored for their bravery and truth and war criminals who committed genocide were prosecuted and punished.

At the entrance to the museum, written on a wooden wall, were the words: “Toward a More Just World.”

I paused to memorize the phrase. I believe in the promise of a just world. And I moved inside to hear first person accounts of crimes against humanity and the special tribunals formed to mete out justice.

Three years ago, following an investigation of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and members of his regime for ‘inhumane acts’, specifying the war crime of the ‘unlawful deportation and transfer of children.’

That’s the real world. And we must hang on to it, because it’s under attack.

Multiple reports indicate that Russians are advancing beyond the spreading of disinformation to methodically targeting, poisoning and subverting all trustworthy sources of truth.

I came across this next phase in the assault on truth quite accidentally. As I was preparing a report on The Gulag Archipelago, a 1973 book that documented the Soviet Union’s forced labor prison camps, I scanned its Wikipedia page and there I found a new frontline – the polluting of facts, a poisoning of truth in the form of casting doubt on its author, Nobel prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a forced labor prison camp, and whose writing was so powerful, he helped bring down the empire.

In the Wikipedia page’s telling, however, it wasn’t so bad in these camps. In reality, millions were starved and worked to death. It also suggested it was a work of fiction, citing the words of Solzhenitsyn’s first wife. No mention that she was likely turned by the KGB. But it was the nuanced way in which doubt was cast that gutted me. One of the most important works of the 20th century, trivialized.

That is when I dug in and found multiple reports that this is the new frontline – truth, research, reliable sources, all being polluted.

I began investigating Russia’s relationship to Wikipedia. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Russian state has been steadily distorting truth, exploiting the platform’s crowd-sourcing architecture to influence public knowledge.

“As AI chatbots continue to advance, Russia is infecting them with Kremlin-manipulated content tailored to influence the global internet, distorting the public’s understanding of facts and ability to make well-informed decisions,” reported the Atlantic Council in Exposing Pravda: How pro-Kremlin forces are poisoning AI models and rewriting Wikipedia.

Malign Activity

In a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue titled Identifying Sock Puppets on Wikipedia, its authors wrote:

“Malign activity has targeted a number of information environments, including every major social media platform: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, standalone websites and many others. This paper, however, is dedicated to possible platform manipulation on a venue that tends to be much less researched than mainstream social media: Wikipedia.”

As I quickly learned, multiple reports have explored “organized manipulation” on Wikipedia’s entries on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Portal Kombat

Between September and December 2023, the French defense agency Vigilance and Protection Service against Foreign Digital Interference (VIGINUM) analyzed “information portals” disseminating pro-Russian content and targeting several western countries, including France.

In the VIGINUM report, PORTAL KOMBAT: A structured and coordinated pro-Russian propaganda network, researchers investigated a network of 193 sites that initially covered news from “Russian and Ukrainian localities.”

According to the research, the coverage changed the day after Russia invaded Ukraine and began to target occupied Ukrainian territories and western countries supporting Ukraine and its population.

“The main objective seems to be to cover the Russo-Ukrainian conflict by presenting positively ‘the special military operation’ and denigrating Ukraine and its leaders. Very ideologically oriented, this content repeatedly presents inaccurate or misleading narratives. As for the portal targeting France, pravda-fr[.]com, it directly contributes to polarize the Francophone digital public debate.”

Foreign Digital Interference

Those words in bold — foreign digital interference — are very important.

The West has neglected to fight on the battlefield that has been right in front of them the entire time — the internet.

A decade after the 2016 US election, we are watching the escalation of information warfare as new tools are weaponized.

AI Models, Rewriting Wikipedia, and Laundering Content

As Atlantic Council notes in the Exposing Pravda report:

“Russia has expanded, developed, and tailored an influence campaign targeting much of the world, spreading its content in Wikipedia articles and in popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools. As election campaigns in Romania and Moldova took place, or as political discussions between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy unfolded, a network of inauthentic pro-Russian portals ramped up its activity, laundering content from sanctioned news outlets and aligning global information sources with the Kremlin narrative machine.”

The Atlantic Council report identifies this organized manipulation as global — “a Russian online influence operation that has taken root across the global internet.”

I like to think of this in terms of transnational organized crime, except instead of drugs, or human trafficking, or arms trafficking, we’re allowing unfriendly foreign powers to manipulate our collective reality — history, culture, our shared narrative.

The Atlantic Council also notes that Russia’s strategy “is now poisoning AI tools and Wikipedia. By posing as authoritative sources on Wikipedia and reliable news outlets cited by popular large language models (LLMs), Russian tropes are rewriting the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine…

“This operation opens the door to questions regarding the transparency of the training of AI models and the moderation of content emanating from known Russian-manipulated sources that have persistently divided the West on its support for Ukraine.”

It always comes back to Ukraine.

But it doesn’t stop with Ukraine.

Russia won’t stop until Russia is stopped.

Through these assaults, they are disarming what should be the only substantive resistance to their rebuilding the former Soviet bloc.

They have no right to dictate our will, and it’s pathetic that we’re letting them.

The Sum of All Human Knowledge

In a report titled Characterizing Knowledge Manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia Fork, the authors used a dataset of “1.9 million Russian Wikipedia articles and its fork,” which they call “an organized effort to manipulate knowledge.”

The report noted: “As the world’s largest encyclopedia and the ninth most visited website globally. Wikipedia holds an influential position within the web ecosystem… maintained through a collaborative community effort to become the ‘sum of all human knowledge’.”

Immediately after its debut, Elon Musk’s Grokipedia was exposed for pushing extremist ideology and publishing Russian propaganda.

Last year, Musk called for a boycott of Wikipedia and continues to call it “Wokepedia”, spreading his own propaganda. Trump’s regime has threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of the non-profit, which turned 25 years old this year.

Trump, whose alternate reality lie factory, Truth Social, is a fun-house mirror of the name Pravda, which means ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ in Russian, and was the name of the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

For someone embarking on a new Red Scare campaign, it’s uncanny how much he draws from communist totalitarianism.

Subtle Changes

New York filmmaker Jen Senko woke up on a November morning to find her Wikipedia page had been vandalized.

“It was heartbreaking, infuriating,” Senko told me. “It is happening repeatedly and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god, people are reading this and it’s wrong’.”

Her 2016 film, The Brainwashing of My Dad, describes how her father went from kind and liberal to radicalized and angry based on becoming a Fox News watcher and a Rush Limbaugh listener. Her film has a happy and poignant ending, with her mom heroically defying her father by changing his news environment. Before he passed away, he returned to his pre-radicalized self, as her mother changed the channel.

But on Wikipedia, subtle changes to wording made it look like the claims were made by Senko, and not by the facts she dug up in her investigation.

But what really gutted her were the changes to the film’s ending, where it was made to look like her de-radicalized father remained a conservative until the end – missing the entire point of her film, which is that it’s possible to bring anyone back from the brink when the outrage-farming poison is removed.

Although the page was fixed, this week it happened again, and each time the vandal covers their digital tracks.

“In a sense, it’s flattering that someone thinks my film is important enough that it’s under assault,” Senko said. “But what hurts is my mom recently passed away, and she was essentially the hero of this story and the driver of this story, and it broke my heart in a million pieces when I saw how the changes deleted her incredible work bringing my dad back.”

Toward a More Just World

In a just world, you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t take someone’s work and vandalize it without consequences. The internet is now the real world, and it needs to be regulated for its real world impacts. The burden is now on Senko to monitor attacks on her film’s page.

Truth needs protection.

At the ICC yesterday, the museum’s final exhibit concludes with these words:

“This Cause Is the Cause of All Humanity.”

If we wish to work toward a more just world – including protecting all sources of reliable truth under attack from identified criminal regimes – then this cause becomes the cause of all humanity.

Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly on Byline Times Substack. She is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, and her Bette Dangerous substack is read in 102 countries.

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

Little is known about Restore Britain’s funding. The far-right party, seen as a disrupter on Reform UK’s right flank, was only formally registered as a party in February, meaning further donations records will begin to appear in the coming months, should they cross the threshold for declaration.

The party, currently polling around 4%, was set up in February with startup cash of £2.5 million. It’s a huge amount for a party with just one sitting MP, ex-Reform politician Rupert Lowe. However, due to a gap in electoral law, Lowe does not have to declare where that money came from, because assets belonging to a party at time of registration are not subject to standard rules around donation transparency.

While there is no suggestion of any financial wrongdoing on the part of Lowe or Restore, this represents a blind spot which could allow for “dark money” to flow into British politics.

What is known so far, however, paints a picture of a party accepting membership and/or donations from a string of extreme or scandal-hit individuals, as well as from property developers, management consultants, and members of the cryptocurrency community.

The ‘Cromwell Club’ Money Men

Central to this is Restore’s exclusive donations vessel, the ‘Cromwell Club’, which people can join for an annual fee of £2,500 per year. The club appears to be named after Oliver Cromwell, the 17th century republican leader responsible for the direct killing of thousands in Ireland during his conquest there. The Restore Britain Page makes clear that “All donations will be used to support political campaigning and the operations of Restore Britain”.

The Cromwell Club page reminds potential contributors that “If you donate more than £11,180 to Restore Britain in a calendar year, we are legally required to report the donation to the Electoral Commission, which will publish the donor’s details.”

Because the membership list is not published, what is known so far about the Club’s membership is patchy, but several individuals on social media have made a point of stating that they have signed up for entry into the elite tier of Restore’s donor base.

Businessman and political activist John Mappin has said that he has joined the Club, stating on X: “We are proud to support Rupert’s vision and proud to have donated to Restore’s Cromwell Club”. Mappin, owner of the Camelot Castle Hotel in Cornwall, was an early backer of Turning Point UK, and along with his wife Irina hosted the launch event for the offshoot of the US right-wing student activist organisation.

Mappin was involved in anti-vaccine campaigning during the pandemic, and in 2022 The Times reported that the ‘leading conspiracy theorist’ was offering a discount to guests who could prove they had posted anti-vax comments.

Jonathan Wong, an organiser of “Abolish Asylum Day”, also made his donation known. An associate of the far-right UK influencer Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad), and contributor to the ‘anti-woke’ media outlet Vox Populi, Wong congratulated Mappin under his post claiming membership, writing “Welcome to the Cromwell Club” – with a saluting face and a Union Flag emoji.

Another self-described Restore donor is – or was – English far-right YouTuber Miles Routledge (AKA Lord Miles), a Restore activist and supporter who has called Steve Laws a “liberal” for wanting to deport millions of people from the UK, saying: “I have better solutions”.

In a post last July, he wrote: “What brings me joy and hope in this world is that by 2039 we’ll have another Hitler to lead another great uprising.”

In the case of Routledge/Miles, it seems he later fell out with the party over the donation, tweeting that he “donated £2.5k to Restore and was promised a simple thank you call, never happened, no email either. Was going to donate substantially more”.

Also announcing himself as a Cromwell Club member is James Holmes, a property developer from an affluent area of Sheffield behind the “Fly the Flag” campaign, who caused controversy in the local area when he draped a 100-foot-wide, £3,000 Union Flag over a large former council building he owns in the area. He announced that he had become a member of the ‘exclusive’ donors club in a post on Facebook.

One Ashton Ward, co-founder of management consultant firm Eton Bridge Partners, has also indicated that he has joined the Club.

Crypto Comrades

Finally, members of the cryptocurrency online community have also donated to join Cromwell. An account going by the name “Walshy”, reportedly belonging to the co-lead of ‘Neiro’, a cryptocurrency inspired by Elon Musk’s Dogecoin, has stated on X that he became a member of the Club. The account posted that it had donated in excess of £11,000 to Restore Britain and Rupert Lowe.

Another crypto account, ‘WhaleFUD’, likewise tweeted that “The crypto community supporting Restore Britain $BRITAIN has joined the Cromwell Club and will soon have a call with Restore Britain leader”, and another crypto-linked poster, “KROP”, posted on X that it has “just exceeded +$20,000 in donations” to Restore Britain.

However, with these crypto donations in particular, Restore recently refunded the ‘$Britain’ project, according to the party. Donations made from the cryptocurrency project, referred to as the “Britain Token”, made by these largely anonymous creators, were a “memecoin” which claimed to have donated tens of thousands to Lowe’s Party. Those involved said they were not affiliated with Restore but supported it.

Written evidence given to Parliament at the time by campaign organisation Spotlight on Corruption stated that researchers for the group had “seen evidence of at least one case so far where the creator fees paid for by investors in a $BRITAIN token affiliated to the Restore Britain Party have been donated to a political party.

“The source of these donations, ‘Britain Token’, which amount to over £35,000, is impermissible as it is an entity that has no legal standing,” a Spotlight on Corruption spokesperson said.

After concerns were raised about the project with the Electoral Commission, a Restore spokesperson said that the party had “already refunded every single penny received from this organisation, going above and beyond any necessary rules to ensure that we are fully compliant”.

It is not currently known to what extent, if at all, crypto-supporters of the Cromwell Club still retain membership, how many were deemed impermissible, or how many of those who are or were members were involved specifically in the Britain Token project.

The Labour Government recently placed a retrospective moratorium on all cryptocurrency donations to political parties, which is still in effect. It was not in place at the time of the Britain Token project, but the Electoral Commission had not published any substantial donations made in cryptocurrencies before the ban.

Lowe and the Musk Effect

Aside from membership of Cromwell, other donors have also given personally to Restore’s only MP, many of whom have done so in support of the ‘Rape Gang Inquiry’ that he initiated. This includes two donors to Reform, collectively behind £65,000 in donations to Nigel Farage’s party. Derek Holder and Margaret Hepburn have donated to the Inquiry.

Hepburn, a resident of Monaco, has donated both personally and via her company, Hepburn Bio Care UK Ltd, the vehicle she also uses to back Reform. These donations were received after Lowe’s expulsion from Reform UK. The donations for this total £33,000.

Further recorded donors to Lowe personally include Munish Sharma, whose website states: “Like many in my generation my parents immigrated to the UK, had little wealth, but worked hard, tirelessly and selflessly for me and our family.” He donated £2,000 to Lowe last June. The other is Christopher Newman, believed to be the man who represented the MP in his failed bid to block a parliamentary watchdog investigation into him. Newman gave support of £5,000 to Lowe last July, likely to be a donation-in-kind for his time.

Perhaps the most globally prominent vocal supporter of Rupert Lowe is Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who has repeatedly amplified Restore’s presence on the social media platform X, which he owns. Musk has previously posted for people to “Join Rupert Lowe in Restore Britain, because he is the only one who will actually do it!”, and has on multiple occasions posted about the party and shared content from Rupert Lowe.

Two days after Restore was launched, Musk posted on his platform that, “It will win. It must win. To Save Britain”. To date, Rupert Lowe has earned £85,534 from X Corp and his monetised presence on the platform since the 2024 election.

In terms of reach on the platform, it has previously been reported that on X, Lowe has at points been the most popular British politician in terms of post ‘likes’, far outstripping Farage and Green Party leader Zack Polanski. Ahead of the Makerfield by-election, it was reported that Lowe had 10 posts with 10 million views each on X, with Farage having none, despite having three times as many followers on the platform.

As of this week, Musk has welcomed “Britain’s last hope” to America. As part of a trip to the US, Lowe has said he would meet the world’s first trillionaire on Sunday.

There are suggestions that the Government will amend the current Representation of the People Bill to ensure the sources of donations received by a party before they are formally registered with the Electoral Commission will have to be declared on registering as a party.

Speaking to Byline Times, Naomi Smith, Chief Executive of Best for Britain, which campaigns against the radical right, said of the party:

“Restore Britain’s increasing popularity is a chilling reminder that, even if Reform UK stumbles, there is always something lurking in the wings, even further to the far-right.

“Rupert Lowe’s party, and its mysterious funding sources, make one thing clear: we urgently need PR in place ahead of the next election as a firewall to ensure populists and dangerous extremists don’t control the balance of power, and to protect our democracy and rights from those who threaten them.”

Restore Britain and Rupert Lowe were contacted for comment.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com

BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen

In the Beryslav district of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine, over the past week, Russian forces have burned about 4,000–5,000 hectares of fields, an area roughly the size of central Paris.

“Russians are now setting the harvest on fire,” said Vicki Aken, Country Director of Mercy Corps, an American NGO working in emergency response, economic recovery, energy, and agriculture, after visiting Kherson in early July. “I saw fields burning.”

Swarms of drones attack from multiple directions, dropping incendiary devices to start fires.

Farmer Victor Hordiienko, an athletic man in his thirties, spoke to Byline Times in Odesa, where he had driven the same morning from Urozhaine. The Head of the Kherson Oblast Farmers’ Association, and the son of Oleksandr Hordiienko, a farmer killed by a Russian drone in 2025, he lost 1,700 hectares of the 2026 harvest to these fires.

“You put out the fire from one direction, and it burns from another,” he said. “Everything is burning, and we can’t stop it. Firefighters cannot come here because of attacks.”

Drone attacks continue as the farmers fight fires, with explosives dropped from high altitude, beyond the range of electronic warfare (EW) units. Hordiienko’s team counted seventeen drones at one time during such swarm attacks.

Vicki Aken said to Byline Times that the risk of crop loss makes bank lending impossible, as loans cannot be repaid if harvests are destroyed. One farmer in Kherson told her he has to relocate fields every year or two as the frontline shifts.

Russian forces use the same swarm drone tactic to burn villages. In Urozhaine, Vilne, Tarasa Shevchenko, Rakivka, and Shlyakhove villages in the Kherson region, drones drop incendiary devices from multiple angles to spread fire in all directions. Dry vegetation, haystacks, and heat intensify the blaze.

“People in their 70s and 80s cannot escape,” said Hordiienko. “Some are burning alive. Others are injured or killed in my village Urozhaine.”

Urozhaine, a village of about 500–600 people before the war, now has only 50–70 residents left.

“If you stop by Urozhaine, you won’t recognize people,” said Hordiienko. “It’s the 17th Century there. People walk covered in dirt, unshaved, unwashed. They live for months without water or electricity.”

Yet the sky battle belongs to another century.

Drone Warfare

“More than 100 FPVs a day; up to 20 within an hour,” said Victor. “They fly in groups on different frequencies, making detection hard.”

Fibre-optic drones, still only about five per cent of attacks, cannot be intercepted by radio-based systems. They are increasingly able to reach up to 40 km from their operators and for Hordiienko, the risk is growing. His nearest fields lie 12 km from Russian positions, the farthest 25 km. This week, a Russian drone destroyed one of his tractors 40 km from the front line.

In the past two weeks, drones struck the homes of Hordiienko’s eight employees. One tractor driver left after his house was attacked six times and burned down. A drone hit the farm office three weeks ago, critically injuring a security guard, who remains in hospital.

FPV drones are not the only threat. Guided aerial bombs (KABs) and artillery also terrorise the village. Hordiienko’s car was hit by artillery, with a shell passing within ten centimetres of his head and leaving a hole in the vehicle.

Despite repeated attacks, Hordiienko remains in Urozhaine.

“He is incredibly brave,” said Vicki Aken. “These farmers will not be driven from their land.”

“How can I leave?” Hordiienko said. “I can’t run the farm from Odesa. I’m in the field: a psychologist supporting farm staff and a security guard protecting them with EW and an anti-drone gun.”

Hordiienko, who used to hunt with his father before the full-scale Russian invasion, can shoot down drones passing at nearly 1,000 meters, but says this has become harder as they become increasingly manoeuvrable.

“Last time, I couldn’t hit it,” he said. “Driving at 60 km per hour, I saw a dot in the rearview mirror speeding toward us. We jumped out of the car. It drove 20 meters before the drone struck the fuel tank.”

A new threat is AI-controlled FPV drones, which lie in ambush for targets. In spring, Victor’s team was hit by just such a drone hiding in the wheat. It exploded under the vehicle, destroying the engine and leaving the farmers with concussions.

Fields are also mined, with FPV drones dropping magnetic mines that explode when machinery passes.

Kherson is All Fields

“Kherson is all fields,” said Hordiienko. “About 80% of the regional budget comes from agriculture. We grow wheat, barley, vegetables, potatoes, sunflowers, flax, and peas. In recent years, rapeseed has become profitable.”

Before the full-scale invasion, the now-occupied Kakhovka district produced up to 80% of Ukraine’s vegetables, he says.

The war has added severe structural constraints. About 99% of irrigation infrastructure lies in occupied territory on the left bank of the Dnipro River. Attempts to use water from the Inhulets River have not replaced lost capacity, covering only a small share of the land. Overall, irrigation remains minimal. The state covers up to 80% of irrigation costs, but most farmers cannot access the program because equipment and infrastructure remain in occupied or inaccessible areas, under shelling and drone threat. Only a small number of farmers in Kherson are able to use it.

Hordiienko needs an electronic warfare system costing about half a million dollars to protect his land from the drones. Mercy Corps, funded by private foundations and governments, cannot fund military equipment but continues to support the Hordiienko family with cash grants. Aken said that farmers remain central to rural communities, providing jobs, equipment sharing, tax revenue, and local support. She described Victor Hordiienko as passionate, outgoing, and deeply committed to Ukraine, his community, and the memory of his father.

Yet, at the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2026 in Gdańsk last month, Aken says she saw strong interest in Ukraine’s agricultural recovery, but little will to support Kherson. She quoted one of Kherson’s farmers, “It’s not financial support: it’s survival.”

For Ukrainians, the destruction of harvests carries a historical memory. During the Holodomor, the man-made famine of 1932–1933, Stalin’s authorities confiscated grain and millions starved. As Nobel Prize-winning Ukrainian human rights lawyer and civil society leader, Oleksandra Matviichuk, said: “Not to have food is probably the worst thing imaginable for Ukrainians who survived Holodomor.”

Russia’s full-scale invasion has again disrupted Ukraine’s agricultural system, weaponising food. For farmers in the Kherson region, the war is not only territorial but existential, as it targets the land, the harvest, the family tradition, and their very identity.