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

EDITORIAL NOTE:

This interview contains discussion of male sexual abuse and trauma

Hardeep Matharu: Where do you think society is now at with the conversation on men and masculinity – both in terms of misogyny and violence against women and girls; and understanding vulnerability and abuse as it relates to men and boys?

Duncan Craig: It feels like we are at the beginning of the end of an intense, acute, response to some horrific news reports, experiences, and events of male violence against women and girls – the acute response was ‘toxic masculinity’, and it was the wrong conversation. Now, finally, even some politicians who were using ‘toxic masculinity’ are saying ‘actually, we need to stop that’ – because it has been a baton that has been used to beat young men with. We’re now thinking more about toxic gender norms – I’ve been saying for donkey’s years that that’s where we should be at – because we have to think about the whole gender spectrum.

We’re beginning to get a better, much more nuanced, understanding. We’re beginning to understand that behaviour is toxic and that we need to put responsibility and accountability on individuals, and that ‘yes, it’s not all men’ – but it definitely has been [in the vast majority of cases] all women as victims. Even the term ‘victim’ has had an evolved understanding: that the woman who is raped has an experience, but so does the woman walking down the street who is wolf-whistled at. We have to recognise all experiences – and that has finally led us on to thinking about men as victims.

What happened at the beginning was such an important reaction to Wayne Couzens murdering Sarah Everard. It’s really important that we acknowledge that. Of course it was a tragic loss of a life, but I get a bit annoyed when I hear people talking about it as a ‘tragedy’ – only because, to be really clear, it wasn’t an accident: this was a serving police officer, a man who was toxic, and he raped and murdered a woman abusing his status as a way of getting her. That’s horrific. The conversation [following that] started off in a more 3D, 4D form when it came to understanding women as victims – but it was very two-dimensional about men as perpetrators, and it [developed into the narrative] of ‘all men’.

I understand why it happened. I’m just really glad we’re now thinking about females as victims in a really 3D, 4D way; but we’re also beginning to think about men as victims in a 3D, 4D way; and because we’re doing that, we’re beginning to think about men as perpetrators in a 3D, 4D way – rather than this binary, 2D, ‘good and bad’ [analysis]. That’s really useful because, if we can continue that, we can get a better understanding of why those selective men have caused that much harm, and maybe if we get right underneath it, we can prevent it happening again to other people.

December 2025 saw the launch of the new Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls strategy, and a strategy – although not in name – about how we think about men and boys. It has a terrible title, it’s called an ‘Explanatory Note’ – I told the Government that you might as well have written ‘afterthought’ on it – but the actual content of that document is the start of something really good.

With the success of shows like last year’s Netflix hit Adolescence, this is an issue that seems to have begun a cultural – as well as a political and criminal justice – conversation…

I do think it’s a cultural conversation. Also, the very fact that we now have community leaders from different ethnic minorities having conversations about ‘us too’ – it’s not just a ‘white man thing’, it’s the ‘black man thing’, and the ‘South Asian man thing’, it’s the ‘Buddhist man thing’, it’s the ‘gay man thing’… That’s what I mean about our understanding being ‘3D’. It feels like, because all the sub-sections of men are laying down their arms [and speaking more openly about the male experience and masculinity], it’s giving the world a little bit of a better opportunity to just talk.

There’s also the sub-section of men who are not laying down their arms, the Andrew Tates of this world, the manosphere-types, HSTikkyTokky… the harm that has been caused, particularly by those manosphere men, who have really targeted disenfranchised, vulnerable young people to say ‘this is how you are a man’. Those vulnerable young men do not understand that they’re caricatures, these people, they’re pantomime villains – and I think the rest of us who have laid down our arms are now the majority. And that’s made that tiny minority of silly manosphere men look ridiculous, which lowers the temperature for women, LGBT people, communities of identity, for ethnic minorities. I’m delighted that they’re a tiny minority that are now being seen for who they are.

I volunteer at death and grief cafes where strangers come together to speak about their feelings around death, dying, and bereavement, and it has struck me how many of the male attendees still talk about the societal expectation of ‘the British stiff upper lip’ or how they are told to ‘just man up’ and ‘be strong’. To what extent is vulnerability a part of the masculinity conversation now? It still seems to be a relatively novel concept to be talking about openly, which is strange as the human condition is essentially one of vulnerability: to hurt, to pain, to death – but also all the joys life has to offer when we can let our guard down in a safe way…

I would argue that, yes, men are still saying those things, but they don’t believe them anymore. I don’t think they do believe them – we just haven’t yet developed our conversational language to be able to talk about it [more widely]. But there’s the advent of so many more men’s talking groups. Men are really beginning to recognise the disproportionate number of men who die by suicide – 104 men die by suicide every week in the UK; a decade ago that number was 84 a week, so we’re getting worse not better. You walk past building sites now and, whilst you’ve got all the [safety regulations on display] for the brickies, electricians, and labourers, there’s also something about mental health which says ‘men that work on building sites are four times more likely to die by suicide than the national average’. It’s so much more of a conversation. I think vulnerability is a part of masculinity now.

I was watching the TheTinMen Podcast [‘Are We Living In a Patriarchy?’] recently and Jordan Stephens, one half of hip hop duo Rizzle Kicks, was on it as a guest, who has spoken a lot about masculinity. He said something which I found interesting – that we’ve had first wave, second wave, third wave, fourth wave feminism, whereas ‘masculism’ has just been flat, it’s just been ‘this is how you are as a man, and if you don’t meet that then you’re not a man’. I don’t think we have fully got there to answer that question of ‘what is a man?’ – but we know what it isn’t: it isn’t about ‘stiff upper life’, it isn’t ‘pull your socks up’, it isn’t this alpha thing. We know that it is about vulnerability, connectivity, about not having to be the binary hunter-gatherer. Thankfully, we’re into conversations now about paternity leave and paternity pay.

The actress and activist Jameela Jamil has said that we should be ‘calling men up’ instead of ‘calling them out’ to dismantle the patriarchy and toxic elements of masculinity in a more empathetic way because, ultimately, we are all victims of it. So that more nuanced, open, approach is developing…

Absolutely. Men have to be invited. One of the pieces of work I always ask my team to do is to give their clients permission to speak about the thing that they have carried for in excess, on average, of 20 years – because they might not know they can do that as we haven’t conditioned men to do that. We’re getting much better at it, but we are dealing so often in my service with men who haven’t spoken out as they just didn’t know they were able to. One of the statements that’s always stuck with me from my work with male survivors was an answer to the question: why did you stay silent for so long? One of them said: “if you don’t have the language to speak, sometimes silence seems the only option”. It is one of the most profound things anyone has ever said to me.

The danger of the blanket ‘all men are bad’ is that men haven’t necessarily – and this is a bit of a sweeping statement – in society evolved the language yet and therefore the ability to push back on that conversation and that label and that behaviour in a narrative way. So we keep pushing them into corners and I think there’s an element of that cornered animal then biting. It’s something about the human condition – if you tell someone they’re bad enough times, let’s not be surprised when they are bad. If we tell someone enough times that their behaviour is bad and we don’t help them change it, let’s not be surprised when they lash out. It’s not okay to lash out, of course it’s not, but what do we expect?

Richard Gadd, who wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed 2024 Netflix hit Baby Reindeer, is an ambassador for We Are Survivors. When we’re considering men in public life today who embody a notion of masculinity which is vulnerable, nuanced, very human and deep, and very male as well, he seems to be a striking example of it. His new series, Half Man, is very thought-provoking in a similar but different way to Baby Reindeer. It follows the trajectory of two “brothers from another lover” coming of age in 1980s Glasgow, Niall Kennedy and Ruben Pallister, in a fascinating story exploring men’s relationships with each other, and how trauma and questions of coming to terms with oneself, and the inability to do this, plays out through their unhealthy but compelling dynamic.

Richard Gadd has said previously that, for something to be toxic, it is often intoxicating – and the series explores how this difficult dependency between Niall and Ruben evolves in their younger years and as they get older. We don’t often see this on the screen – we tend to see men and masculinity explored in relation to the impact on women, and rightly so, but not in relation to what it does to men. What struck you about the series?

Richard is one of the best and beautiful examples of using your lived experience, your knowledge and awareness, what you feel, what you think, just the authenticity – not the cleaned-up version, just the messiness of authenticity – to make art that is really showing that.

Baby Reindeer is very different from Half Man, but there’s also a similarity in that it is telling these 3D, 4D stories of men and relationships. Half Man is astounding. It’s showing the relationship between these two brothers and what’s really interesting is that they’re not blood brothers, but chosen family. It’s a love story. These two men have fallen in love with each other – and, whenever I say that, people automatically jump to something sexual, but why can’t we think about this in a bigger sense? Niall and Ruben are pulled together and, like a big bang, there’s this explosion and a fusion happens, and at that point, they become inseparable. I think they are two sides of the same coin.

I saw it originally back in October 2025 in the edit suite and I remember then, as I did when I watched it on telly now, I kept flitting between Niall and Ruben – one minute I hated Niall and I loved Ruben; the next I hated Ruben and I loved Niall; the next minute I didn’t even know where I was at. That’s the messiness, and that’s what Richard does so authentically well because, in real life, sometimes I love people and sometimes I hate them, and whatever’s in between as well.

As with the character of Donny Dunn in Baby Reindeer, Half Man tells a more complex story about trauma and victimisation: that people can absolutely objectively experience this in life-altering ways, but that they can also have forces within themselves that can contribute to their situations; internalised notions and core beliefs about us that we carry around to begin with without giving voice to them. In the series, Niall is given opportunities to transform his life that he can’t step up to – he’s always doubting and questioning himself, in a way that Ruben doesn’t struggle with at all. But for Ruben, his lack of self-worth finds its form in uncontrolled violence and a simmering rage that’s ever-present.

I think what Richard is so good at is writing about shame. Presenting shame to us in all of its horribleness and impact. One of the really powerful parts of the series is the episode when Niall finds out that Ruben hasn’t got a job anymore – he doesn’t spell it out like this, but the shame that Ruben is feeling about not being able to be the provider is so toxic. Likewise, when Niall tells Ruben that he’s gay. The [covert and risky] sex that Niall is having is sex that is wrapped up in shame. The impact of shame is written all the way through it.

Another significant moment is when Ruben tells Niall that he was sexually abused by his father and says, in some ways, it’s the closest he has ever been to someone and that his body would react to it. I found the depiction of the confusing emotions of pain, connection, love, and abuse, all sitting together inside Ruben, and the effect that has on someone, to be profound. Trauma is such a complicated thing.

Whenever I’ve seen elements of the experience of confusion of the actuality of physical touch and automatic response [in one’s body] in film, it’s on the big screen – so it often feels a bit taken away from real life. [In Half Man], I’m hearing accents I’m very familiar with, I know it’s based on this island, in Scotland. It’s dirt under your fingernails, it’s not polished Hollywood manicure. It’s articulating what so many survivors have never really been able to articulate.

For the past 12 years, on a regular basis, I’ve run a training class for police officers and, as part of it, I have always done a tongue-in-cheek [depiction] of automotive responses to touch. Without a shadow of a doubt, some of them will always say, ‘I never thought about or realised that before’. It gets them thinking about how often the perpetrator of sexual abuse will tell their victim ‘see, you must like it because look’. There’s no getting away from the fact that we all have this belief, from teenage – because we don’t do sex and relationships education properly – this binary way of thinking that an erection equals pleasure, that I must like the person and that’s why it’s happened. What Ruben in Half Man articulates is just something we have never been able to articulate before.

The psychology of the impact of trauma is beginning to be more widely understood now, with more survivors coming forward in many different realms of life and society: the understanding that it really does have a long-lasting, complex impact on people’s lives and the reality of how psychologically difficult it can be to have to live, and come to terms, with such contradictory and conflicting thoughts, feelings, and behaviours…

Completely. I’ve been an out survivor for 20 years, and I remember saying back then to my therapist that it feels like these experiences have infected every cell in my body. Over the years, I’ve thought ‘that was a bit dramatic Duncan’, and actually now, in a much more mature way, and with 20 years of experience, and nearly 18 years since we founded We Are Survivors, I understand that, yes, that was true – it is the infection of every cell. But now I wouldn’t use the term ‘infection’, because it’s just presence in every cell – the impact [of abuse and trauma] is present in every cell. In some cells, it’s infected; in other cells, it’s just there; and in other cells, I am reducing the presence. ‘Infection’ feels like it has a hold over me. ‘Presence’ feels like it’s just there. ‘Infection’ gets to the harm of it. ‘Presence’ isn’t necessarily harmful, it just is.

You founded We Are Survivors – which provides therapeutic and advocacy support to male, trans, and non-binary victims of sexual abuse, rape, and sexual exploitation – in 2009. How has the organisation’s work developed?

We’re in our seventeenth year of being a registered organisation and we’re now the largest male survivors’ organisation in the UK. We see around 3,000 men every year. We are working in all 50 prisons across the north-west.

We are trying to respond to emerging threats – more people are asking for support, and people are in support for longer. On average now, the person who reports what happened to them to the police, even if it was 20 years ago, finds that the likelihood of them going to trial within the next few years is very slim – the likelihood of a trial in five years’ time is greater. The report to court has got longer, which means that people need support for longer, which means we’ve got to keep reconfiguring what we do. And that’s before we even begin to talk about new threats: online harms, sextortion, dating apps. I was reading a report by the Internet Watch Foundation, who we’re now doing some work with, which said that 98% of confirmed UK-based victims of sextortion cases seen by it involve male victims, which surprised me.

We have also got a service working with loved-ones – the mums, girlfriends, and wives of male survivors – because we’re thinking about it in a much more systemic way. It isn’t just him, it’s also who he lives with who is impacted by this, and it’s not just the direct emotional impact of you knowing as a wife that your husband’s been abused and what that must feel like, but also that might mean that he has problems with alcohol or drugs or has depression, and those things have an impact too.

The other thing we have started doing is the one that no one really wants to talk about – which is asking: what do we do about the small minority of survivors who have also sexually offended? As a society, we know what to do with sex offenders – we lock them up. We know what to do with victims – we give them support. But what about those who are the victim and perpetrator? In a criminal justice sense, what they have done is looked at, but ask victims’ services to deal with what happened to them, and often they see just what they did. I made a commitment that this organisation is going to ensure that no male survivor is left behind. Do these men forfeit their victimhood because of their perpetrator status? One of the men who I’d supported myself while he was in prison – not for sexual offences, but for serious violence – he said to me: ‘if we’re going to say no male survivor [is left behind], we’ve got to mean it’. He was right. And so the whole organisation, including our expert reference group, who are people with lived experience who advise me on thinking, we all said: we are not dealing with what he did, we are dealing with what happened to him.

For information and support about the issues raised in this interview, visit www.wearesurvivors.org.uk

‘Half Man’ is available to watch now on BBC iPlayer and HBO

Duncan Craig OBE is a survivor of sexual abuse, rape, and sexual exploitation. He is a psychotherapist, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Criminology at the University of Manchester. He has worked extensively with the Government, NHS, Crown Prosecution Service, and police forces across the UK

Hardeep Matharu is the Editor in Chief of Byline Times

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

Upon taking office in 2025, US President Donald Trump set out to dismantle America’s counter-disinformation capabilities, claiming that trying to mitigate disinformation is a threat to free speech. However, newly leaked documents suggest that at the same time, Trump and his allies were shutting down initiatives aimed at combatting malign foreign influence, defunding research on disinformation and hate, and using the full force of the Government to go after individual researchers, the White House was quietly working with one or more private organisations to build parallel capabilities, except this time they would be designed to be used offensively and turned inward at American citizens.

Information Laundering

The leaked documents, some of which were shared on X by Gabrielle Cuccia — a former pro-Trump influencer who claims she was fired from her job at One America News Network (OANN) last year for criticising US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth — reveal what looks like an expansive covert domestic influence campaign orchestrated by the White House and laundered through an organisation called Vine and Fig Tree (VFT).

According to information contained in the documents, VFT has been working on behalf of the White House to monitor certain right-wing influencers, study their online networks, and identify vulnerabilities that could later be used to “go after” them with smear campaigns. The documents also reveal discussions about using burner accounts and AI-generated media, testing different types of messaging and engagement tactics, and laundering the administration’s talking points through influencers to obscure the Government’s role.

According to Cuccia, she got access to the documents when VFT reached out to her to ask for her help writing a script that would be used to produce an “AI-generated video on behalf of the White House…” She says VFT told her that they had been brought in to work on this project because White House officials “don’t want it to look like it’s actually coming from the WH [White House].”

This strategy appears to have already been deployed successfully at least once in recent months. According to Cuccia, VFT told her that “it worked out for them and Nick Shirley,” implying that the White House may have been involved in coordinating with right-wing content creator Nick Shirley, whose selectively-edited viral video claiming to show fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community attracted the attention of the White House and allowed Trump to justify ordering a surge of federal resources into the state, ultimately resulting in protests and the shooting deaths of two Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.

The allegations stemming from the leaked documents have not yet been independently verified, but the tactics described in the files align closely with the administration’s approach to information competition and confrontation. For example, the State Department’s new counter-disinformation framework includes directives to partner with local influencers and media personalities to spread pro-administration messaging in a way that looks authentic. The framework further emphasises X as the major platform on which to deploy influence operations, with instructions to use the Community Notes feature to challenge unfavourable messaging. Additionally, according to court documents, the administration has also quietly used publicly-funded news outlets like Voice of America to launder its talking points.

Trump’s Grievance-Fuelled War On US Counter-Disinformation Capabilities

For years, Trump and his allies have argued that Government involvement in counter-disinformation work posed an existential threat to free speech. After his 2020 election loss, Trump was quick to blame the people in this line of work, which was reportedly part of what drove him to take a wrecking ball to US counter-disinformation capabilities when he took office in 2025.

On the day he was sworn in as the 47th president, Trump signed an Executive Order (EO) focused on “restoring freedom of speech” and “ending federal censorship.” The text of the EO condemns the Biden administration for using the “guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’” to infringe on Americans’ free speech rights “in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.” Similar wording was used in a White House fact sheet that personally targeted Chris Krebs, the former head of CISA, accusing him of having “recruited…major social media platforms to further [his] partisan mission” and working “covertly” to promote censorship and partisan political narratives. In the same document, the White House alleged that Krebs had “suppressed conservative viewpoints under the guise of combatting purported misinformation.”

Since then, Trump has overseen the shuttering of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) foreign influence task force, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) election security initiatives, and the Global Engagement Center’s (GEC) Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office. The Department of Justice (DOJ) similarly disbanded teams focused on investigating foreign influence campaigns. In another extraordinary move, the Trump administration levied sanctions against five Europeans involved in anti-hate and anti-disinformation work, claiming they violated Americans’ free speech rights.

Within 8 months of the start of Trump’s second term as President, the US had “ceased all Frameworks to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation and any associated instruments implemented by the former administration,” according to a Government press release.

At the same time, the White House started posting content attacking US news outlets and journalists as part of a new section of the official White House website called the “Media Bias Portal.” The portal includes things like an “Offender Hall of Shame,” an archive of media “lies” and even a tipline that encourages people to submit information about media outlets “misrepresenting the Trump administration.”

Blurred Lines

If the White House is, indeed, engaging in any of the activities described in the leaked documents, that alone would be an extraordinary abuse of power. But the even bigger scandal here is the direct contradiction between the Trump administration’s alleged involvement in offensive covert influence campaigns and the public rationale they gave for dismantling America’s counter-disinformation infrastructure.

For the past year, the administration has argued not only that Government should avoid being involved in influence operations and other interventions in the information environment, but that it should lack the capacity to monitor, attribute, and expose them. Yet as Trump and his allies systematically dismantled the country’s counter-disinformation capabilities, they appear to have been simultaneously building the scaffolding for an even more insidious, opaque, and politically-charged form of information control.

Defensive counter-disinformation initiatives are, at least in theory, observable and contestable. Government agencies publish reports, researchers describe the methods they use, journalists scrutinise the findings, and Congress can intervene if/when it becomes necessary. But the allegations stemming from the leaked documents point toward something far less visible by design.

In a democracy, Government officials and political actors are expected to advocate for their policies and candidates transparently, allowing citizens to evaluate the source and credibility of information for themselves. Covertly shaping narratives through unattributed third parties or deceptive amplification tactics (eg: bots) undermines that transparency. Citizens cannot meaningfully exercise free speech rights when they are unaware of who is attempting to influence them or whether seemingly authentic political conversations are actually being artificially engineered behind closed doors.

Ultimately, what we are left with is a troubling picture of an administration that destroyed our defences against covert influence while allegedly engaging in influence activities that became harder to detect because those defences were removed. Far from a principled defence of the First Amendment, the Trump administration’s actions seem to imply that malign influence, information manipulation, and deception only become problems when we become aware of them.

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

Twenty-four hours after I left home, I reached the historic centre of Mexico City feeling the thrill and weariness that accompanies arrival in a great and distant metropolis. The sight that greeted me as I approached my hotel on Avenida Cinco de Mayo tilted my balance toward the weariness.

It hadn’t been visible when I checked the location on Google Streetview. Tents, hundreds of them, as far as I could see, pitched so that the entire road was blocked save for a few narrow gaps through which the campers and pedestrians stooped beneath tarpaulins and high-stepped over guy ropes.

My chaperone, Alberto Tovalín, and I sought a route through this polyester labyrinth, luggage in hand, stumbling into dead ends where groups of people sat chatting and eating barbecued meat from smoking grills whose scent mingled with the odour of the drains. I’d only seen anything similar in American cities whose homeless residents exist in tent encampments; but these people looked relatively affluent.

We found an exit by my hotel and stepped with relief into the open space of the foyer. I asked the receptionist what was going on. ‘Teachers,’ she explained, looking as forlorn as anyone might whose business’ entrance has been rendered near-inaccessible on the cusp of the tourist season. ‘It is a teachers’ protest.’

The beauty and intensity of Mexico, and the gentleness, generosity and sincerity of the writers I met while publicising a Mexican edition of my last book — Armando González Torres, Elena Enríquez Fuentes, Javier García-Galiano, the translator Jorge Brash, my chaperone Alberto and interpreter Sarah Boréalis — were revitalising, even as the country’s problems were alarming.

On the second day, I explored Coyoacán, the elegant district of cobbled streets and squares where Frida Kahlo’s cobalt-blue house is preserved as a museum. The seven-mile walk back to my hotel enabled me to process the city’s sensory deluge. Nine million people live in Ciudad de México (abbreviated to CDMX), and twenty-three million in the city’s greater metropolitan area. The centre is further congested by tourists.

People, people, everywhere you look, swarming through sun-parched streets of squalor and grandeur. The air is thin – the altitude made my nose bleed and my water bottle deform – and polluted by industrial fumes, as the city sits in a basin surrounded by mountains that obstruct their dispersal.

Dogs run free, children play by the roadside calling over the roar of endless intersecting vehicles; drivers negotiate via their horns, swallows dart over their heads. Gesturing traffic directors blast their whistles every few seconds. (If motorists need guidance, perhaps that is because there is no driving test in CDMX – to gain a licence you pay a fee and sign a declaration that you can drive.) Pink taxis match the blossoms of bougainvillea bushes growing from the cracked pavements, fervent birdsong bursts from the jacarandas and bulbous palm trees. Motorcyclists accelerate at errant pedestrians while pillion passengers clutch large boxes.

Pedlars weave through slow traffic in the midday sun, selling nuts, chocolate and cold drinks to drivers who summon them to their car window. Infants wander between restaurant tables seeking to sell chocolate bars, then hand over the proceeds to exploitative adults. Mariachi tunes blast from tinny speakers on street corners. The music competes with violinists, child accordionists, old men cranking barrel organs.

A food vendor scatters jalapenos on a hotdog, another slams a machete into a watermelon. Vast neoclassical Colonial-era buildings loom over crumbling shops with sun-faded painted signs, which exude a wistful cheer countered by the spirals of barbed wire that top many of the city’s walls. Of these, some bear hyper-coloured murals – Frida Kahlo’s face stares you down from across the city – and others political graffiti: feminist resistance to violence against women, criticism of the FIFA World Cup, pleas for justice for the ‘disappeared’.

After a couple of days of murmuring ‘Hola’, ‘Gracias’ and ‘Perdón’ to the teachers as I squeezed my way through the camp on leaving or returning to the hotel, I was on nodding terms with some of them. At 10pm one night in late May, as the smell of frying beef and onions drifted from a barbecue under the adjoining tarpaulin, I spoke via Google Translate with Daniel Ángel Cortés Guadarrama. He explained that all the thousands of protestors are from the state of Oaxaca, around 300km south-east of Mexico City.

“The problems we face as education workers are not only labour-related but also economic,” he said. “Working 30 years only to not have a pension sufficient for old age, when the state does not provide the conditions for a public education that guarantees opportunities for students and instead uses those economic resources for personal matters, leaves teachers in Mexico in a position of working without the tools to create minds for the future.”

By “personal matters”, he was referring to the state’s history of ignoring the embezzlement of education funding by government-allied officials in the teaching unions. Aside from highlighting this criminality, the demonstrators – who are dissident members of the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) – are rejecting a proposed 9% pay-rise and seeking the repeal of education reforms that have depleted their pension funds. They also believe that public funding is misdirected in ways that deprive children of a decent education.

“The teachers of Oaxaca and some other states have been fighting for 46 years against Government policies that do not guarantee our children the opportunity to grow educationally and socially,” said Guadarrama. “Today we are here because we see it as an opportunity for the world to know that the Government does not protect its teachers in old age. The World Cup is an international forum to expose how a government spends economic resources on social programs that do not create social wellbeing.”

Much of the world’s gaze will rest on Mexico this month for the first time in forty years. Thirteen of the FIFA World Cup’s 103 matches are being held here, including the opening fixture on 11 June, between Mexico and South Africa, at the famous Azteca Stadium where in 1986 Argentina beat England – or rather, Diego Maradona did, first with his ‘Hand of God’, then with one of the greatest individual goals the game has seen.

My parents bought our first colour TV for that tournament, and the eight-year-old me watched aghast but transfixed as England’s midfield and defence flailed in his wake. The Mexican broadcasts’ low-definition vividity singed itself on my memory: the world brightened that summer, regardless of the football result.

On my first day in CDMX I travelled across the city in the hope of taking a stadium tour but found them suspended while it was being prepared for this summer’s tournament. I mooched around neighbouring streets decorated with murals of indigenous children playing football and satisfied myself with the purchase of a replica Mexico shirt in a shop staffed by a young woman who served me while caring for her infant daughter.

Later, I read of how street vendors have been displaced from the area while it is cleaned and homogenised into an appropriate setting for a global sporting event, how similar displacements of ‘undesirable’ citizens have occurred across the city – much as Paris bussed out its African migrant population before the 2024 Olympics – and how the pre-tournament gentrification has raised rents, such that lower-income residents can no longer afford to live there.

A report by Deloitte predicts that the tournament will bring a $2.7 billion economic benefit to Mexico, equivalent to 0.14% of national GDP. It should create 112,000 temporary jobs, largely in the food service, hospitality and transport industries. More than five million football fans from across the world will descend on Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey, and hundreds of millions more will watch at home; no wonder activists are seeking to push their cause into view before the world’s attention moves elsewhere. Besides, they act in a Mexican tradition of protesting against the backdrop of the World Cup or Olympic Games.

Forty years ago, 100,000 Mexicans booed their President on live television during the opening ceremony, and throughout the tournament demonstrators chanted ‘¡Queremos frijoles, no goles!’ (‘We want beans, not goals!’) in protest against the Government’s focus on football while its citizens were starving after the catastrophic 1985 earthquake.

The country’s expenditure on hosting the Olympics in 1968 prompted the Mexican Student Movement, in which thousands of university students protested against the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party, demanding democracy and greater political freedom. Their actions received support from across society. Government suppression of dissent culminated in the Tlatelolco massacre on 2 October 1968, when hundreds of peaceful protestors are thought to have been shot dead. During the country’s first World Cup two years later, Mexico’s rulers maintained such tight control that no one could protest.

No one expects state-sanctioned murder in 2026, but Claudia Sheinbaum’s left-leaning National Regeneration Movement Government has already begun a violent clampdown on the teachers’ movement.

Daniel Guadarrama said: ‘Today, thanks to the Government’s media policy, teachers are labelled as criminals for being the only sector that raises its voice against a corrupt Government. We believe that within a month there will be favourable responses to our demands, but the repression against teachers is something that could change our struggle.’ The day before we spoke, police in Oaxaca had fired shots at protesting teachers.

On 1 June in CDMX, hundreds of riot police used tear gas to repel the demonstrators from entering and occupying the Zócalo, the city’s main square, which is to be the site of a World Cup fan zone.

That evening, I walked there from the San Rafael district and found it barred from all sides by tall metal hoardings guarded by the riot police. Residents and shopkeepers who needed to enter were allowed in via a checkpoint if they showed ID, and I joined the scrum as policemen barked orders through megaphones. I waved my passport at them, and they nodded me through. The city-centre was like the eye of a storm. I wandered through the deserted square, where a huge Mexican flag fluttered over a battalion of officers being instructed how to respond to any further incursions.

Teachers are far from the only profession fighting for better pay and conditions, and in some cases Sheinbaum’s Government is bringing welcome change. Two years on from her landslide victory, she retains substantial support as much of the electorate welcomes her social reforms and recognises that reversing the country’s fortunes will take time. Service workers will benefit from changes to the Federal Labor Law, which include enforcement of the minimum wage without including tips, mandatory seating for retail employees, regular pay-packets and guaranteed annual leave.

My experience at the hotel on Avenida Cinco de Mayo suggests there is still some way to go. On my first morning, a waitress served me breakfast and after eating I left without paying, on the assumption that it would be charged to my room and I could settle the 190 peso (£8) cost when I checked out. I returned the next morning to be told by another waitress that her colleague had had to pay my debt and I needed to reimburse her by cash or bank transfer.

The day after I spoke with Daniel Guadarrama, I travelled on to Xalapa in Veracruz province, four hours east of Mexico City. My interpreter, Sarah Boréalis, and I were chauffeured through this unforgettable landscape by a friendly young man with the habit of driving hands-free down the motorway at 90kmph while he unscrewed his water-bottle or opened a bag of roasted almonds. The radio belted out a Mexican version of Billy Ray Cyrus’ ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ before switching to a football show. The driver pointed out the great volcano Popocatepetl with its snowy peak issuing a thick white cloud of smoke, and its dormant neighbour, La Malinche. We sped through valleys of luminous green grassland, and between arid hillsides of stratified beige rock and yucca plants.

As we entered Xalapa, we drove through a white-walled tunnel plastered with posters. Many showed women holding photos of their adult children who have been ‘disappeared’. A picture of a pensive-looking young man named Cedrik Abdiel Ramírez Aguilar caught my eye as we sat in traffic. He was one of five friends abducted by an armed group on leaving a nightclub together in 2020, whose bodies were discovered four years later in a clandestine grave. Last summer he was finally given a formal burial in Xalapa.

The next day, I walked through the university city and noticed another poster with a photograph of an electrician named Antonio de Jesús Viveros Ladrón de Guevara. He was last seen in 2014. His page on the Dignificando La Memoria website, which commemorates those who have vanished, only includes a statement from his mother: ‘Unfortunately, we know nothing about him. I’ve received calls and messages, but they’re all extortion attempts, and the authorities haven’t been able to find those people; we don’t know what really happened, what the motive was, or where my son is.’

Some of the abducted are pressed into forced labour, often in coffee and sugar plantations. Some become cartels’ hitmen in the knowledge that they will be shot if they do not comply. Some are kidnapped for a ransom, then murdered when their families cannot pay. Some women are forced into sexual exploitation; although men account for 62.5% of missing persons, girls and women aged 15 to 19 are the most vulnerable group. A poster on a lamppost in Xalapa commemorates Diana García Rivera, who was 20 when masked men abducted her from a Cancún nightclub six years ago. She has not been seen since. The conviction rate for violence against women and girls is around 2% of the cases that reach court and those imprisoned can often bribe their way out of jail.

Since Felipe Calderon’s Government deployed the military to launch its ‘war on drugs’ in 2006, the cartels have responded by abducting more than 134,000 people, often with the assistance of corrupt state officials. A Human Rights Watch report explains the typical chain of events: “Members of security forces arbitrarily detain individuals without arrest orders or probable cause. In many cases, these detentions occur in victims’ homes, in front of family members; in others, they take place at security checkpoints, at workplaces, or in public venues, such as bars. Soldiers and police who carry out these detentions almost always wear uniforms and drive official vehicles. When victims’ relatives inquire about detainees’ whereabouts at the headquarters of security forces and public prosecutors’ offices, they are told that the detentions never took place. … In cases where state agents work with organized crime in carrying out disappearances, the collaboration may take one of many different forms. Most commonly, security forces arbitrarily detain victims and then hand them over to criminal groups. Police, soldiers, and investigators may also work with criminal groups to extort the families of the victims, or tell those groups when victims’ relatives report disappearances – information that abductors then use to harass and intimidate families.”

The narcotics cartels’ grip on vast areas of Mexico is too powerful for the Government to counter, especially given that elements of the police and army are under the narcos’ control. The British Foreign Office currently advises against any non-essential travel to areas in the states of Baja California, Chihuahua, Chiapas, Colima, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas and Zacatecas. This year alone the most powerful cartel, the Jalisco New Generation (CJNG), will sell an estimated $12 billion of cocaine and crystal meth produced in a network of labs across the country, plus up to $10 billion in fentanyl largely imported from China. The CJNG is at war with other cartels and with the Mexican and US governments.

In February of this year, the Mexican military drew information from US intelligence in order to assassinate the CJNG leader, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes aka ‘El Mencho’. The CIA has lately eliminated other major figures in a significant escalation of its war on the cartels, which supply an estimated 80-90% of the fentanyl and methamphetamine consumed in the USA.

I spoke with a young woman named Johari Pedraza Ramos, a student of international relations at the University of Veracruz in Xalapa, where I had been invited to discuss my book at its annual international literary festival. The World Cup prompted conflicting feelings, she said – it is a chance to show what Mexico can do, but she was frustrated at the Mayor of Mexico City’s expenditure on fripperies that won’t benefit citizens. Clara Brugada’s administration has installed extravagant candelabras in one of CDMX’s major metro stations, covered buildings and public transport with axolotl-themed branding and painted road bridges lilac ahead of the tournament.

She also spoke of the concern that Mexico is becoming “a second Venezuela” owing to policies that are causing inflation and an over-reliance on exportation. “Prices are rising up amazingly,” she said. “A kilo of tomatoes in the old times was 20 pesos. Right now, it’s 50 pesos at least, sometimes 70 pesos or 100. So, it’s changed a lot. Things are getting more expensive.”

It is this cost-of-living crisis that has led the teachers to reject their 9% pay-rise. “And people are not investing anymore in Mexico because of all the violence. Also, right now, we are renegotiating the free trade agreement with the US and Canada. So things are not looking really good for us. In Venezuela, they have a lot of beautiful natural resources that are worth so much, but they’re not shared; they’re sucked up and exported. And there are so many riches here too, but they’re just exported. I love Mexico, but it has the potential to improve, a lot.”

Towards the end of my time in Mexico, I thought of the joy that football has given me since the 1986 World Cup, both to play and to watch, and how grotesque the game has become at elite level; how its best players could singlehandedly fund, say, housing or educational projects in developing countries without noticing the dent in their pay packets. Some do; most don’t.

I wondered how many players will think of the families of the disappeared, or of the teachers who will not be able to afford to retire, or the impoverished Mexicanos shunted out of view while the corporate behemoth swaggers into town trumpeting platitudes about uniting the world.

Keiron Pim is the author of Endless Flight: the Genius and Tragedy of Joseph Roth (Granta, 2022), now published as La Fuga Sin Fin: Genio Y Tragedia de Joseph Roth by the Universidad Veracruzana Press.

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

I apologized in advance as I sent the new White House ‘Alien’ video to a group of thinkers I’ve come to rely on as I do this work. I generally don’t spread Donald Trump’s vicious propaganda, and I view US Government websites now as I view .ru sites – with caution.

But when intellectual historian Dr Marci Shore sent the video to me, I understood the urgency to get out ahead of it and warn viewers of the dehumanizing strategy being launched by the White House in plain sight.

Here is a sampling of the horror-wording from the video, which mimics the style of vintage SciFi:

“For 60 years, the US government has kept a closely guarded secret. Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives. They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences. With one exception — they do not belong here.

“Millions arrived under the cover of darkness and embedded themselves directly into our society. Countless presidents, congressmen, and senior officials knew exactly what was happening. Instead of protecting American citizens, they chose to cover it up and even accelerate the invasion. Until one man finally had the courage to tell the truth. Bold. Unapologetic. Unafraid. President Trump was the first to call out the real danger Aliens pose to every American family, every community, and the future of our nation.”

“Trump and his lackeys have been indulging in dehumanizing rhetoric for years, but his latest atrocity takes things to a new level, one that Hitler would be immensely proud of,” wrote David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Maine.

Smith’s work focuses on dehumanization, particularly in relation to race and genocide. He told Byline Times he sees this latest push from the White House as “every bit as frightening as the propaganda that was churned out by past fascist regimes to justify and motivate genocidal violence.”

Clearly, the push by Trump’s Government to “declassify” information about UFOs and aliens is part of an operation to conflate immigrants who are being targeted by the regime with alien life forms.

“It was all to pave the way for the Trump regime’s newest and vilest dehumanization of another kind of ‘alien’—not little green men, but brown and black ones,” said Smith, who has warned of Trump using the Nazi playbook since 2015.

“It feels like the postmodern internet version of Mein Kampf: playing on Unheimlichkeit, fears of aliens slyly disguising themselves as humans, hiding among us,” Dr Marci Shore told Byline Times.

“During the Great Terror, Stalin also liked to talk about ‘enemies of the people masking themselves.’ There’s nothing subtle about the fearmongering and the dehumanization here — including the use of the impersonal pronoun ‘it.’ It’s so over-the-top as to be absurd — and yet somehow here we are, this is an official White House website.”

A prominent theme from the video — written in horror green lettering — reads: “They walk among us.”

“This immediately conjures up the prototypically dehumanizing image of dangerous subhumans disguising themselves as humans to infiltrate our world,” said Smith. “We find it in both anti-Black and Nazi antisemitic ideology. The 17th century English cleric Morgan Godwyn reported that apologists for slavery confided to him that ‘the Negros, though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men.’ Likewise, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt remarked ‘Not all of those who appear human are in fact so. Woe to him who forgets it!’”

And the dehumanizing money shot can be found in these final words from the video:

“If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed. The Alien is in good hands. We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.”

As Shore and Smith noted, the ‘alien’ is now an “it” — a subhuman.

“The tormentors of undocumented immigrants – the ICE thugs – are pictured as benign caretakers, who want only to capture and release the subhuman creature—the invasive species—back into its natural environment,” explained Smith.

Craig Unger, America’s premiere investigative reporter on all things Trump-Russia and Trump-Epstein-Russia, told Byline Tmes : “‘Dehumanizing’ is precisely the right word and that it is deliberately dehumanizing with the intention of making you see immigrants as other than human, it’s offensive on so many levels. I just watched the site after reading Paul Krugman’s column in which he reports that one of the great problems with funding social security is that the Government has kicked out so many immigrants, who were gainfully employed taxpayers, who were paying into social security but who are now gone.”

For a decade, Trump’s rise in America was often misdiagnosed as a clown show, but the cruelty of his actions and words cannot be misconstrued anymore – he is normalizing genocidal rhetoric as he ‘disappears’ our neighbors.

“There is no arguing with the fascism of the Trump regime,” political philosopher Dr Michael MacKay told Byline Times. “There’s no point in talking about how immigrants and refugees built the United States. It’s useless to demonstrate that the ‘othering’ of a group of people is inhuman and un-American… Immigrants and refugees are not alien to the American body politic – Trump and the MAGA cultists are.”

Vienna-based disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler told Byline Times that the “‘Alien’ Hollywood-style colors and fonts are intentionally deployed to conjure a sense of extraterrestrial life forms that attack Earth. The dehumanizing submessage is quite obvious.”

But he pointed out how the design reminds him “of the early Internet days, conspiracy theory websites and ‘tinfoil hat’ news pages, which were always very anti-Government.” He noted the style is commonly associated with “a small far-right populist opposition party in Europe,” and how he sees it as fundamentally designed to create further polarization in US society, with the storytelling element thwarting the ability to have “fact-based, objective discussion.”

In other words, as with the QAnon conspiracy, it’s a psychological operation designed to break reality. That the ‘Alien’ operation is being run on the American people from the highest office in the United States shows a “degraded” White House culture, according to religious scholar Dr Matthew Taylor, author of the forthcoming book Defying Tyrants.

“This reeks of the sort of casually cruel, mirthless humor that has become standard in right-wing propaganda,” he said. “Put simply, the White House is legendarily a realm of sobriety and consequential decision making. That it could be weaponized as a platform for this sort of xenophobic trolling signals just how degraded the internal culture of the second Trump presidency has become.”

David Livingstone Smith, who has written three books on dehumanization, is sounding a global alarm: “I cannot begin to convey to you how dangerous this is. It’s not just some political bad weather that future elections will dispel. We are locked into a precipitous descent into the worst kind of fascist depravity.”

Michael MacKay said the video makes clear the following mandate: “The only task of people of good conscience is to fight the evil of the Trump regime and all its nefarious works.”

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

More than 30 women and girls have died violently at the hands of men in Northern Ireland since 2020. There were no “protests” for Natalie McNally, Sarah Montgomery, or Ellie Flanagan; no “rage” at the brutality of their murders.

Northern Ireland does not have an immigration problem, it has a problem with violence.

The Shankill Butchers, the Kingsmill Massacre, Bloody Sunday – violence did not arrive in Northern Ireland on a boat of migrants from Europe or Africa or the Middle East, but through British colonialism that incited civil war and the partitioning of Ireland, leaving behind a legacy of sectarianism and a society scarred by conflict.

At the centre of the latest disorder is Stephen Ogilie, a man in his 40s who was violently assaulted by Hadi Alodid, losing an eye and sustaining serious knife wounds. Three people intervened including Maitiu Mag Tighearnan, who was seen beating the assailant with a hurling bat, most likely saving his life.

Northern Ireland has been home to many barbaric attacks; in 2017, Lurgan man David Lyness murdered Anita Downey, a mother of three – she suffered a wound to her neck so severe that it extended to the back of her spine. The difference? This week’s assault in North Belfast was perpetrated by a Sudanese migrant. Men did not take to the streets for Anita, because this isn’t about any victim or community – it is bold-faced racism.

Hate Amplified

A video of the attack against Ogilie quickly circulated on social media and was instantly exploited by far-right agitators in England and the United States who probably couldn’t point Belfast out on a map. They know absolutely nothing about Northern Ireland’s history of violence, care not for the lives and futures of the volatile young people they goad onto the streets to commit acts of hate for which they are arrested, or the innocent people whose homes and businesses have since been destroyed. Their objective is chaos. They want more clicks, more views, more money, more influence. Musk’s X feeds on negative content.

Seizing on any opportunity to further their own aims, Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson and Reform representatives amplified hateful discourse and spread disinformation in an attempt to cause civil unrest. “Prepare for War”, said messages circulating on social media and WhatsApp. Because nothing says solidarity like burning a bus or setting a family’s home on fire because of the colour of their skin.

The outside interference of bad faith actors led to the proliferation of AI-generated images of the victim, and escalated targeted attacks against minority communities by circulating lists of home addresses that racist thugs suspected were occupied by migrants. What unfolded was not a protest, it was a racist pogrom with men dressed in dark clothes, their faces covered going door-to-door to set alight family homes.

‘Recreational Rioting’

The displays of bigotry fuelling the riots that erupted on the streets of largely loyalist parts of Belfast are not novel – they are annual. Colloquially known as “recreational rioting” due to the large presence of youths who participate, throwing rocks and burning wheelie bins – not in protest to Government policy, but because they are egged-on and encouraged by self-appointed “community leaders”; paramilitaries and criminal gangs who exploit and control some of the Northern Ireland’s most deprived areas.

Referred to as sinkhole estates, defined by poverty, unemployment and lack of aspiration, these neighbourhoods have been a powder-keg for violent disorder for decades. While violence has historically been directed predominantly toward Catholics, during the intense sectarian violence of August 1969 over 1500 catholic families were forced out of their homes in Belfast, the equivalent of 1 in 20. Now, with the influence of bad faith actors, far-right agitators and paramilitaries, the criteria has broadened to include migrants.

Rather than free society from the scourge of paramilitaries, political representatives legitimise their existence. Last weekend, DUP MP Carla Lockhart was pictured standing side-by-side with masked men who sought to intimidate a peaceful pro-Gaza march outside Scarva. In 2024, DUP Education Minister Paul Givan defended meeting with loyalist paramilitaries in his official capacity. Like safe driving ads, we watch TV commercials warning of the coercive control of paramilitaries. None of this should be accepted as normal.

Young and impressionable boys are encouraged out onto the streets as fodder for narrow political agendas and community control with little understanding of the long-term consequences of a criminal record, let alone the severe impact their actions have on already-vulnerable communities.

This cycle has been in play since the collapse of key Northern Ireland industries like ship building since the 1960s. During the Troubles, bad faith actors weaponised economic deprivation and job losses to stoke division between working class Protestants and working-class Catholics. In the decades following the Good Friday Agreement, their influence has waned but for small pockets in some of the most disadvantaged areas where they maintain their position of control by perpetuating a fear of the “other”.

Exploiting the Petri Dish

The victim’s family released a statement disassociating themselves from the actions of these self-described patriots, “do not do this in the name of our loved one as we do not share the same values…We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country…we depend on them to make our country work”. Those seeking to exploit this family’s pain have paid no heed, further protests are on the horizon, public transport has been cancelled for two evenings in a row, people are scared – while keyboard warriors take glee in helping to orchestrate disorder without having to even step foot outdoors.

Despite what social media would have people believe, Northern Ireland is the least diverse part of the United Kingdom. According to the 2021 census, over 96% of our population classed themselves as ethnically white. While only 2% of asylum seekers receiving UK support reside in Northern Ireland. The overwhelming majority of violent crimes are committed by white men, not migrants.

In response to statements that I made on social media, highlighting the hypocrisy of storming the streets in response to this attack whilst saying absolutely nothing about violence against women and girls, I received a tidal wave of abhorrent, misogynistic, bigoted and violent messages. The Venn Diagram of racists and misogynists appears to be a circle. The sheer volume and prevalence of violent rhetoric being platformed on social media risks disintegrating the social fabric of democracies, but then, that is precisely the reaction populist kingmakers hope to achieve; men wrapping themselves in flags, blind to the strings. Northern Ireland is just a petri dish for what could come next.

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

It’s a commonplace of World Cup reporting that once the action starts, political controversies melt away. Concerns about the rights of migrant workers in Qatar in 2022, and Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperial ambitions when Russia hosted four years earlier were conveniently sidestepped for the duration of their respective tournaments. Nick McGeehan of advocacy group Fair Square is hoping the same doesn’t happen when the final whistle blows on the current tournament, which is just about to kick off in Mexico, Canada and – crucially – Donald Trump’s United States, which will host the majority of matches.

McGeehan told the Byline Times Podcast he’s targeting Gianni Infantino, President of football’s world governing body FIFA, who handed Trump his organisation’s newly created ‘Peace Prize’, just weeks before the US military captured Venezuela’s head of state Nicolas Maduro and attacked Iran. Infantino had previously lobbied publicly for Trump to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and accepted an invitation to the President’s inauguration in January 2025, after which he posted a video on Instagram, appearing to endorse MAGA’s political programme, saying, “Together we will make not only America great again but also the entire world.”

In McGeehan’s view, this blatant flattery was the latest betrayal of the sport in the interests of tyrants, dictators and other authoritarian leaders. He says, “It’s funny to look back four years ago when the Qatar tournament was ongoing, and the swirl of controversies around that. I remember people at the time saying, ‘are you going to say anything about the US in 2026 – and of course the response was, ‘well, let’s see how that pans out.’ I don’t think anyone could really have imagined it playing out this way – the politicisation of the event, the extent to which FIFA has hitched its wagon to the MAGA project, with all the sexism and the racism and the violence that underpins it. FIFA is an entirely dysfunctional organisation when it comes to the governance of the game but it is this politicisation, the Peace Prize being the most obvious example of that, that I think marks this out as being quite different. When Infantino gave the prize to Trump, he said this was on behalf of the entire global football community. How dare you say something like that?”

McGeehan cites FIFA’s own statutes, which require football officials to “remain politically neutral,” with those who fall foul running the risk of a two-year ban from the game and a fine of “at least” 10,000 Swiss Francs. He has now reported Infantino to the organisation’s Ethics Committee with the backing of Lisa Klaveness, President of the Norwegian Football Federation. These concerns have only been amplified by the high admission prices for the current tournament, which have priced out supporters in developed countries as well as those from less affluent nations. The strategy has backfired, with thousands of tickets now being offered via resale sites.

FIFA, says McGeehan, is “entirely a commercial operation, it’s about monetising content and product. It’s not about football as something that serves the people who play it, or the people who watch it. They’ve misappropriated it, they’ve claimed ownership of it.”

Alongside his alliance with Trump, Infantino has cultivated close ties with the Saudi Arabian Government, long criticised for its human rights abuses, but which has also continued to pump sponsorship money into FIFA via its state owned Public Investment Fund and the Aramaco oil firm. Its reward will be to host the 2034 World Cup – a goal achieved without even being put to the vote. McGeehan says that the costly realities of hosting such a large tournament are more easily negotiated in countries lacking in democratic accountability – not least because while FIFA keeps the tournament’s ticket revenues, broadcast income and the bulk of sponsorship, host nations pick up the huge infrastructure costs. “The business model works much easier in authoritarian states, where this doesn’t have to be run past voters who might object to all this money being blown on overpriced stadiums and the various [other] things that are required. I think it’s very clear Infantino is cleaving close to authoritarians. People talk about his affection for the authoritarians whose power he admires. I think it’s probably true to an extent, but I think it’s more obviously a business decision. He knows that they’ll give him what he wants.”

FIFA says that the projected $9 billion profits from the World Cup will be used to sustain and develop football globally, but McGeehan is calling for greater accountability on where it comes from – citing what he describes as “the world’s largest polluter”, Saudi Aramco – as well as greater transparency on where it is spent. “I think the danger is that what you’re seeing FIFA become is not just a dysfunctional organisation, but a profoundly dangerous one – one that is happy to play handmaid to authoritarians of whatever stripe around the world.”

FIFA has responded by saying that it, “underwent deep-rooted governance and management reforms over the last decade with a clear focus on transparency and on its mandate to develop football all around the world. This has been acknowledged by a number of international institutions, for instance by the Association of Summer Olympic Federations.

“In the last decade Fifa has distributed more than $5bn to grow the game globally in development funding. There’s been an eight-fold increase in investment in football development…a result of the new Fifa being more efficient, well-governed and fit for purpose. That is the clear evidence the organisation has been transformed and is now considered a trusted partner for international agencies, NGOs and leading global brands.”

Listen to Nick McGeehan in conversation with Adrian Goldberg on the Byline Times Podcast.

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

A network of Russian far-right extremists steeped in neo-Nazi antisemitism – created under the umbrella of a sanctioned oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and now openly promoted by Tommy Robinson – has been driving ‘White Lives Matter’ propaganda over the murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, Byline Times can reveal.

The organisation promoted by Robinson is part of a wider Russian state-linked campaign to sow division across the UK and Europe,

A Byline Times review of X and Telegram posts by the Brotherhood of Academists, a Russian ultranationalist youth movement which operates under the leadership of the US-sanctioned Tsargrad Society, reveals that the group pushed a white supremacist framing of Nowak’s killing on 20 May – the day media coverage of his killer’s trial intensified.

The material it amplified came from the “Paladins International Sovereigntist League”, a Russian-sponsored alliance of extreme-right organisations from a dozen countries, launched last September in a regional parliament building by the same Kremlin-linked oligarch.

On Tuesday night, as riots spread through Belfast hours after his call for nationwide street protests, the far-right agitator – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – promoted the movement by name to his 1.9 million followers on X, sharing its torchlit ‘Remember Henry Nowak’ ceremony with the words: “Russian nationalists @Academists1721 paying their respects to Henry Nowak and sending a message of United patriotism 🇬🇧 🤝 🇷🇺”.

Robinson posted the video from Russia, where he had spent the previous days meeting Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk, in a Moscow hotel bar – a man who has himself given an interview to the Brotherhood.

Analysis of the two organisations’ X accounts and Telegram channels by Byline Times establishes that they were promoting white supremacist propaganda over Nowak’s murder, including the ‘White Lives Matter’ slogan, almost two weeks before the Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage declared that “white lives matter too”.

The Russian Brotherhood group promoted by Robinson is also a virulently antisemitic group, frequently promoting conspiracy theories about “Jewish puppeteers” controlling the West and promoting the neo-Nazi concept of “ZOG” (‘Zionist Occupied Government’).

A Tribute from Moscow

Robinson has spent the past week urging his followers onto the streets. After graphic video of a stabbing attack in north Belfast circulated on Monday night, he shared a list of protest locations and declared: “The whole of the United Kingdom is hitting the streets tonight at 7pm following yet another invader attack on our people.” The word ‘invader’ echoed the description of Nowak’s killer the Brotherhood had amplified three weeks earlier.

By Tuesday night, masked crowds in Belfast had torched a bus and other vehicles and blocked roads while police appealed for calm. Robinson continued to post support for people “rising up” even as he simultaneously posted image upon video of burning buildings and vehicles.

At 7.23pm – 23 minutes after the protests he had called for were due to begin – Robinson posted the Academists’ tribute video: uniformed members of the movement holding flares and gold banners behind a burning sign reading ‘Remember Henry Novak’ – the surname misspelled in Russian transliteration, the Cyrillic alphabet having no ‘w’. The clip was viewed more than 243,000 times within hours.

Robinson had previously filmed his evening with Errol Musk at what Searchlight and the Guardian identified as the Shalyapin bar of Moscow’s five-star Metropol Hotel, joking that the pair were going to “cause some trouble”.

Musk, a frequent visitor to Russia, had spent the previous week at the Kremlin-backed St Petersburg International Economic Forum, known as ‘Putin’s Davos’.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has long supported Robinson, and repeatedly amplified the latter’s calls for people to take to the streets over the Belfast attack to many millions of people.

The Oligarch’s Youth Movement

In its promotional material, the Brotherhood of Academists describes itself as a youth project developing “under the leadership of the Tsargrad Society”, the political network of Konstantin Malofeev, the sanctioned oligarch known as Russia’s ‘Orthodox billionaire’.

The US Treasury designated the Society itself in April 2022, accusing it of involvement in espionage on behalf of Russia. Malofeev – first sanctioned by the US in December 2014 for financing separatism in Crimea, and since designated by the UK, the EU, Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand – was described by the Treasury as a financier of opinion-makers and institutions advancing Russia’s interests inside the European Union.

The Tsargrad Society’s founding executive director was Leonid Reshetnikov, a former general in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. The Brotherhood’s channels repeat the slogan “Be white, be Christian”, and it runs military training programmes feeding members into a reconnaissance detachment fighting in Ukraine.

The Brotherhood’s main Russian-language Telegram channel has more than 5,000 subscribers and its dedicated English-language Telegram channel has more than 1,000 subscribers.

The Paladins League

The Brotherhood effectively functions as the youth movement arm of the International Sovereigntist League of the Paladins, frequently reposting the league’s X and Telegram channel content.

On 12 September 2025, the Mariinsky Palace – seat of St Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly – hosted the launch of the Paladins’ first congress. Delegates from fascist groups worldwide joined a religious procession led by Patriarch Kirill. Malofeev opened the congress alongside the Russian ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin – commonly dubbed “Putin’s brain” – with a deputy from United Russia, Putin’s ruling party, among the Russian participants.

Fifty delegates from a dozen countries attended, including the Italian neo-fascist party Forza Nuova, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, and HVIM, the Hungarian ultranationalist ‘Sixty-Four Counties’ youth movement. The league is named after the Paladin Group, the far-right mercenary organisation founded by former Nazi SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny.

The Paladins league brought to fruition a plan Malofeev’s network had incubated for years: internal Tsargrad emails and documents reported by New Lines in 2022 showed Malofeev’s organisation covertly coordinating with Matteo Salvini’s League in Italy, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the Freedom Party of Austria and Alternative for Germany, to plan a Moscow-run network of European far-right parties dubbed ‘Altintern’ – a play on the Soviet-era Comintern.

Four years later, the league began coordinating action on European streets. On 1 December, the Paladins announced “the first joint official rally against the European Union”, timing protests for the anniversary of Kaja Kallas becoming the EU’s foreign policy chief, and declaring: “Our White Christian nations shall be free!” In April, the Academists’ X account celebrated reports that Slavic immigrants “are targeting Arabs and Africans” in Germany as “Amazing”.

The Brotherhood has other ties to the UK. One Brotherhood representative who has interviewed Errol Musk has appeared on the online show of Holocaust-denier Mark Collett, founder of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative.

Setting the Narrative

The Paladins and the Brotherhood turned their attention to Britain as the trial of Nowak’s killer drew to a close.

On 15 May, the Academists reposted a Paladins declaration that “WHITES are indigenous to Europe!” Five days later, as reporting on the trial intensified, the Paladins’ X account posted CCTV footage of the 18-year-old alongside a racialised account of his death – describing Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh, as an “Indian invader” who left Nowak “bleeding in the street” while police “handcuffed the dying victim”.

The Brotherhood reposted the Paladin’s post the same day, and published the CCTV image of Nowak under a three-word caption: “WHITE LIVES MATTER”.

Police bodycam footage of officers handcuffing the dying teenager, released at the start of June, triggered protests and a political backlash. On 2 June, Farage declared “white lives matter too”, calling Nowak’s treatment evidence of two-tier justice – a narrative Byline Times reported this week is a racist myth, with a quarter-century of policing data showing it is ethnic minority people who are disproportionately targeted by police. Farage urged the public to respond with “pure cold rage”.

That evening, hundreds protested in Southampton before marching on Digwa’s family home, where missiles were thrown at police and some demonstrators performed Nazi salutes while shouting “white power”. Tommy Robinson addressed the crowd alongside UKIP Leader Nick Tenconi and Reclaim Party founder Laurence Fox. Sections of the British Right have cast the case as the country’s ‘George Floyd moment’.

On 5 June, the Brotherhood of Academists pinned a post to its X account declaring an end to “globalist-driven immigration”: “The plague of third worlders will be purged!”

On 8 June, the same day as the Belfast stabbing attack, its Telegram channel published a post titled ‘Europe Is Bleeding’, presenting Nowak’s death – “a police officer in Britain flatly refused to help a bleeding man with a stab wound” – as proof that “globalists intentionally replace the population of Christian countries and condone the murder of white people”: the baseless far-right ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory of a deliberate plot to displace white Europeans.

The post concluded: “Tribunal – to the left traitors! Reconquista – to the foreigners! Life – to the Europeans!”

‘Jewish Puppeteers’

The group has a long history of antisemitism. On 24 February – the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – the Brotherhood’s Telegram channel published an image of armed fighters wearing its insignia, declaring the war “an existential and a spiritual war” ignited by “globalist elites”, and vowing to fight on until “every Russian person is liberated from the hands of Jewish puppeteers”.

The channel repeatedly forwards material from the Paladins built around ‘ZOG’ – the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ – a foundational neo-Nazi conspiracy theory holding that Jews secretly control Western states.

One post by both the Brotherhood and the Paladins, illustrated with an antisemitic caricature of an octopus encircling the globe beneath a Star of David, claims the Jeffrey Epstein files have turned the “decades-old ‘conspiracy theory’” into “documented reality”. A separate post by the Brotherhood on X described Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the Antichrist”.

Robinson’s promotion of the virulently antisemitic Brotherhood of Academists contradicts his stated support for Israel and opposition to antisemitism. He was hosted in October by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli on an official visit, during which he was described as “a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people”.

The Pattern

Robinson’s entanglement with Kremlin-aligned networks has a long history. In February 2020, he travelled to Moscow and St Petersburg, giving interviews to the state broadcaster RT, delivering a talk titled ‘The Rape of Britain’ and meeting Alexander Malkevich, a propagandist sanctioned by the US for election interference.

In February this year, Byline Times revealed that Robinson had years earlier been appointed ‘goodwill ambassador’ to the MMBF Trust, an unregistered charity fronting hollow British local news websites traced to Moscow Media Group – a company which worked for Putin’s presidential administration and has ties to the sanctioned oil company Gazprom Neft.

During the 2024 Southport riots, Robinson was among the most prominent figures circulating false claims about the attacker’s identity – claims pro-Kremlin Telegram channels amplified.

This year, Robinson has amplified the Kremlin’s messaging directly. In February, Kirill Dmitriev – the US-sanctioned head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and one of Putin’s most prominent envoys – posted on X that “UK Phase One colonisation is complete – immigrants are fully in control of UK leadership, state and media”. Robinson shared it, commenting: “Russia can see it.”

By April, Robinson was telling his followers: “Our enemies sit in Westminster, not Russia.” Replying to Prime Minister Keir Starmer on X on 30 May, he wrote that Russia “are not the enemy of the British people”.

Robinson was contacted for comment, but did not reply.

Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times

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

So this is what “pure cold rage” looks like.

On Tuesday, hundreds of masked men spread across Belfast, pulling migrants and non-white people onto the street and setting their homes on fire.

At one house, men were seen smashing the windows and doors of a house with an ethnic minority women looking down from upstairs.

According to the Guardian: “As [the masked men] stormed the property, some claimed to be “liberating” it. Graffiti nearby demanded “local homes for local people”. A woman in the crowd said to her friend: “There’s wee girls inside.””

They didn’t care. As the scenes spread, Belfast South MP Clare Hanna told the BBC exactly what she was seeing.

“What you’re seeing is a race-based pogrom,” she said.

“We are seeing men going door to door asking to get the foreigners out based exclusively on the colour of their skin. It’s not based on what they’re contributing to society, what their status here is and it’s terrifying for people in Belfast who want this sort of politics to be far beyond them.”

As shocking as these scenes are, we should not be surprised.

Over the past few years right wing politicians, activists and their media supporters have deliberately whipped up the hatred we are now seeing in Belfast.

Just last week, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called for “pure cold rage” in response to the death of Henry Nowak, and pure cold rage is now exactly what he has got.

He’s not the only one. As racist thugs took to the streets in Belfast yesterday, following the stabbing of a man in the city, Stephen Yaxley Lennon (otherwise known as Tommy Robinson) was actively mobilising the anti-migrant “protests”, whilst meeting in a Moscow hotel with X owner Elon Musk’s father.

A man, who for years has been defended by some right-wing politicians and commentators as a “patriot” was openly meeting with the UK’s enemies, whilst encouraging anti-migrant rage on our streets.

He has been helped in this by X owner Elon Musk, who allowed Robinson back onto his platform and shared his own series of Tweets on Tuesday calling for “anger” against migrants in the UK.

Meanwhile, the silence and inaction from our own mainstream politicians has been deafening.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who just last month praised Musk as a “goodie”, has so far said absolutely nothing about the scenes in Belfast, opting instead to further promote her own calls to undermine equality protections in the UK.

To be fair to Keir Starmer, he has criticised Musk recently. Responding to events in Belfast, the Prime Minister also insisted that “it is clear that people were targeted last night because of their background and I will not tolerate it.”

Yet the truth is that he has tolerated exactly the forces that have led to what we are now seeing.

Rather than confront the rising tide of racism that has caused these attacks, and the platforms that enable it, Starmer has spent the past two years playing exactly into the kind of anti-migrant politics that has led us to this point.

And after spending this week calling for restrictions on social media use by children, the Prime Minister continues to do absolutely nothing to tackle the major and growing national security threat posed by X, it’s owner and the figures it is funding and promoting.

That inaction is now looking increasingly untenable.

What we saw in Belfast last night, we will see again on the British mainland soon, unless the Government, police and security services act urgently to prevent it.

The truth is that the global far right have spent the past few years using a billionaire-owned social media platform to deliberately whip up racist violence on Britain’s streets and now they are finally starting to succeed.

The biggest responsibility facing our leaders is to recognise that simple fact and then to act immediately to prevent it from getting any worse.

Failure to do so will leave them just as responsible for what happens next as the racist masked thugs dragging families onto the streets and burning down their homes.

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

Immigration, the cost of living and the dire state of public services have all featured in debates about the forthcoming Makerfield by-election, but pollsters are warning that another key battleground is emerging – fear of artificial intelligence.

Despite Sir Keir Starmer’s efforts to position Labour in the vanguard of AI, four out of five voters say they don’t trust the Government to control the oligarchs developing this new technology, according to research conducted by think tank Diffusion.

Daniel Stone, Diffusion’s executive director (and a Cambridge University researcher) told the Byline Times Podcast, “People are really concerned about the direction that we’re heading in. They’re not just concerned that these technologies might cause harm on their own, they’re really concerned about the deeper power dynamics behind them. They think that AI is going to cut jobs, it’s going to disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and most people have come to the view that it’s probably not being built for their benefit.”

Stone said that suspicion of AI runs deep, with people blaming it (sometimes unfairly) for a range of ills, from rising energy prices to more expensive insurance premiums, to difficulties contacting the NHS. This all feeds a sense of powerlessness and remoteness from decision makers – and with that comes growing societal mistrust. “One thing that came up a lot was people looking at Facebook or Instagram or social media, and feeling that they couldn’t tell what was real there anymore – being worried about their grandparents or their parents falling for scams.”

This sense of unease is amplified, he says, by “this second layer of AI being used to make decisions about your life; job screening, credit screening, housing screening – tools that are totally invisible to you as a person. You can apply for a credit card and are just told ‘no’, with no explanation as to why.”

Stone admits that he was taken aback by the level of awareness of AI among voters, and their sophisticated understanding of it. “You often hear in Westminster that people just don’t really get this stuff, and that as they become more familiar with it, they’ll become a little bit more relaxed. What we found is that, firstly, across the country, a lot of people are already using these tools or playing around with AI – they’re reading a lot about it, and have started to form a pretty clear view. The other thing that’s interesting is that people who are working in and around the tech industry, the people who are using these tools every day as part of their jobs, are actually some of the most concerned. I think that tells us something quite profound, which is that the more people are exposed to these tools, the more worried about them they become.”

Diffusion polled more than 2,900 people across the UK, and found that 77% of respondents were concerned about deepfakes; 74% were worried that AI might cause unemployment; and 58% had fears about children’s safety. Stone’s research suggests that Reform UK stands to benefits most from these anxieties; disaffected Labour voters who mistrust the Government over AI are more likely to switch to Reform, whereas other Labour defectors are more likely to turn Green.

Stone says, “The people moving in both directions really want something to be done. They have similar concerns, similar motivations, similar disappointments with the current Government. The only thing that really shapes them as different is that [Green supporters] still believe that Government can deliver, and [Reform supporters] don’t.

“What we found is that across the board, people really wanted to make sure that the UK wasn’t dependent on the United States. They want to make sure that the country is able to stand on its own two feet and make decisions for its own benefit over the long term. That’s actually one of the areas where they’re most critical of the current Government – around being overly deferential – and that’s why they’re not sure whether the Government is capable of ensuring that AI delivers for normal Britons, because they’re just going with whatever these US tech titans give the UK. How does that feed into the Reform reaction? They basically want a leader who’s going to say, ‘no more, none of this. We’re going to go and do this our own way, and we’re going to make our own choices about this,’ and do it in a very demonstrative, performative, and declarative way.”

Reform voters hoping for what Stone describes as “almost Trumpian type confrontations,” and “wrestling-style theatre” against the tech bros are, however, likely to be disappointed. Nigel Farage has previously courted Elon Musk; he embraces cryptocurrencies favoured by the likes of Open AI boss Sam Altman; and previously boasted of his close links to Donald Trump, a President who, until recently, resisted attempts to regulate artificial intelligence. Trump finally signed an executive order last week, calling on tech firms to share new AI models with the US Government 30 days before release, in the interests of national security, but following pressure from the likes of Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the new framework remains voluntary.

Labour, meanwhile, is caught in a familiar bind; it wants to be seen as pro-growth and assume a place at the forefront of the AI revolution, whilst at the same time appearing tough against the tech bros who have Trump’s ear. Rather than legislate immediately against the online sharing of nude pictures by children, for example, it has given Apple and Google a three month deadline to come up with a plan to implement image blocking technology. Plans for a complete ban on social media apps by under-16s have been delayed and look like being significantly watered down. This runs counter to Stone’s research which showed that 78% of respondents favour tougher regulation of AI overall.

It’s impossible to say precisely how much any of this will influence the final outcome in Makerfield – a by-election which could see Andy Burnham return to Westminster and ultimately become Prime Minister – but it’s clear that AI is an issue which voters do care deeply about and which could swing crucial votes in what is already a tight race.

One issue which might swing floating voters is data sharing with US-based tech companies such as Palantir. Stone reports that although voters are roughly split down the middle on this issue, “the people who really don’t trust these private companies to be working on NHS data, feel it very, very strongly – and they’re also the people who are leaving Labour. They voted Labour last time and wouldn’t do so again. There is a real desire to think about how can we improve the NHS with AI, because people are open to that. The question is more about how do we ensure that the companies we’re working with to do that are consistent with UK values; and where the benefits are anchored in the UK, rather than ending up shipping money off overseas.”

Listen to Adrian Goldberg’s interview with Daniel Stone on the Byline Podcast

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

“As the old saying goes: ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.’ Shouldn’t we expect the same from those at the very top of politics?”

Reform councillor David Bowker is a frequent critic of the Labour Party on tax, with the above post being one of many targeting former deputy PM Angela Rayner, who recently settled a stamp duty bill following an investigation by HMRC.

However, Cllr Bowker, now a Reform council colleague of Makerfield candidate Robert Kenyon, ran firms that went bust owing taxpayers nearly £300,000, Byline Times can reveal – and may have left the public on the hook for what appears to have been a £50,000 Covid Bounce Back Loan.

David Bowker was elected as Reform UK councillor for Abram on Wigan Council on 7 May 2026. Reform swept all but one seat up for grabs in the local elections in Wigan, where the party now forms the principal opposition to a Labour administration and would almost certainly have taken control of the council were elections there not done in thirds.

But a Byline Times investigation into Cllr Bowker’s company affairs reveals a trail of failed companies – some at significant cost to the taxpayer – that voters in Abram were not informed about.

Bowker has been a director of four companies that entered Creditors’ Voluntary Liquidation (CVL) – voluntarily dissolving the firm, sometimes with large liabilities left unpaid.

‘The Phoenix Pattern’

In 2010, Bowker’s taxi firm Aristacars Ltd was liquidated owing HMRC nearly £98,000. The liquidator explicitly characterised another of Bowker’s companies, set up around the same time of Aristacars’ collapse, as a “phoenix company” — a term used to describe firms that quickly spring up with the same backers when another goes bust, leaving creditors with little or nothing and the new company a blank balance sheet.

Just before it was liquidated, Bowker set up another company with a near-identical name, Aristacars Wigan Ltd, appearing to offer very similar taxi services.

In March 2012, that alleged ‘phoenix’ firm was also dissolved owing £214,899 to creditors — the majority, £153,726, owed to HMRC. It also owed Wigan Council £27,833 in Business Rates, and owed Wigan and Leigh Magistrates Court £3,918. It means about £185,000 owed to taxpayers went unrecovered for that company alone.

In Aristacars Ltd’s case, the liquidator wrote: “In accordance with the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 I would confirm that I have submitted a report on the conduct of the Directors of the Company to the Department for Business Innovation & Skills. As this is a confidential report, I am not able to disclose the contents. I was not able to fully investigate the affairs of the Company prior to filing the report, as the directors failed to deliver up any Company books and records to me.”

In another filing on the firm, the liquidator added: “Time has been spent corresponding with creditors to agree claims, investigating the directors’ conduct and liaising with the debtor of the phoenix company regarding the erroneous payments and arranging for the balance to be returned to the directors.”

Another company set up by Bowker, Wigan Fast Foods, went under in 2013 owing £7,383 in unpaid redundancy claims.

‘A £50,000 Question’

But it is the collapse of a hygiene supplies firm which went under in 2022 which raises the most questions.

Bowker’s company Overall Hygiene Ltd went into liquidation in May that year, owing £50,000 to the bank RBS. This debt bears the hallmarks of a Covid Bounce Back Loan. It is the exact figure for the maximum Bounce Back loans available at the time, RBS was an approved lender for the scheme, the timeline matches, and the RBS debt recovery team was known to be involved in trying to reclaim at-risk funds. Because BBLS loans carry a 100% government guarantee, the public ultimately covers this loss. No creditor recovered a penny from the firm when it collapsed.

This outlet can also reveal that the liquidator of Overall Hygiene Ltd concluded after investigation that Bowker had taken £12,639 out of his insolvent company in a transaction that constituted an unjustified “preference” under section 239 of the Insolvency Act 1986 — in other words, a transaction that improperly disadvantaged the company’s other creditors.

Bowker settled the claim for £1,000, under 8p in the pound, because the liquidator found he could not afford to repay more.

Before the company went bust, two of Bowker’s firms lent it £100,000 in total — two lots of £50,000 each. But one of those firms never filed accounts and the other was registered as dormant. Byline Times has contacted Cllr Bowker to ask where the money came from.

The liquidator wrote: “My investigations highlighted several transactions between the company and its director which constituted a preference in the sum of £12,639.24. Following several conversations regarding the matter, the director offered £1,000 to settle the claim. After a thorough review of the director’s financial circumstances, it was concluded that this was the best settlement figure that could be reached. The offer was accepted, and the funds were received on 31 October 2023.”

Two-thirds of Overall Hygiene’s recorded debt — £100,000 across two £50,000 entries — was owed to other companies Bowker controlled, Croftmark Limited and Corebowk Ltd. That means that, if the RBS cash was a Bounce Back Loan, the taxpayer was the overwhelming loser in the hygiene firm’s collapse.

The Overall Hygiene liquidator confirms in writing that he submitted a conduct report on Bowker to the Insolvency Service. The outcome of any review is not public. There appears to have been no action to disqualify Bowker as a company director, as he went on to set up multiple firms.

Across all four liquidated companies, the cost to the public purse sits at £286,000 — encompassing the two Aristacars debts to HMRC, unpaid council rates, and the £7,383 redundancy-fund debt at Wigan Fast Foods. It rises to roughly £336,000 if Overall Hygiene Ltd’s £50,000 RBS debt was a Government-backed Bounce Back Loan.

Six of Bowker’s companies were incorporated within a ten-week window in spring and summer 2020, during the Covid Bounce Back Loan eligibility period, designed to help businesses survive during the economic downturn and lockdowns. Byline Times has not seen evidence of other potential Bounce Back Loans claimed by Cllr Bowker, though some of the firms failed to publish any accounts and were then subject to compulsory strike-off, or have gone dormant, making it nearly impossible to find out.

Of 14 company directorships disclosed on Companies House, eleven firms were dissolved, struck off or have been through liquidation, and three remain active (The Dog Outlet, Croftmark, Bowker Property Investments). He lists another firm, Feed Um Raw Ltd, on his council register of interests.

Mike Lewis, Director of the non-profit campaign group TaxWatch, told Byline Times: “Phoenixing — liquidating a company to wipe out tax and other debts, while shifting the business to a new company — is one of the most overlooked threats to the UK’s public finances. Of the £6bn of taxes owed that HMRC has to write off annually, it estimates that over a fifth is due to phoenixing. That’s roughly the cost of a face-to-face GP appointment for every child and pensioner in Britain. Small businesses and employees also typically go unpaid.

“Companies House and the Insolvency Service need to get much tougher at disqualifying serial phoenixers as directors. Changes to insolvency law could help to boost HMRC and employees’ creditor rights, preventing company owners from siphoning off remaining funds through debentures and other secured loans before workers and the tax authority get paid.”

Cllr Bowker was contacted for comment but did not respond.

The chair of Wigan Reform initially told Byline Times: “Thank you for raising this. I will investigate the matter and come back to you with an update as soon as possible.”

Upon chasing, he replied: “The vetting process is completed by HQ and not by Branches or sitting Reform UK councillors,” and failed to answer specific questions.

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

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch last week cited a new University of Aberdeen geology paper as being supposed proof that the Government’s ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences was “utter madness”.

The Daily Mail, Scotsman, GB News, Energy Voice and Aberdeen University’s press office all ran with the central claim: that the West of Shetland basin holds 4.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe), and developing it requires what the authors call a “bespoke fiscal regime” – a tax break.

“Untapped North Sea oil could keep Britain going for four years” blared one Telegraph headline.

These numbers, unfortunately, do not survive the paper’s own data.

The 4.7 Billion Barrel Figure

The 4.7 billion barrel figure mentioned in the paper represents the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) 2023 estimate of prospective ‘yet-to-find’ resources. These are not confirmed volumes that Britain can produce. This figure represents speculative geological potential that remains undiscovered, unevaluated and commercially unproven. And the total that is recoverable will, in reality, be a fraction of that number.

The Conservative leader, followed by the right-wing press, either misunderstood this very basic fact, or chose to misrepresent it.

The paper’s own data shows that across 50 years of West of Shetland exploration, 171 wells produced 47 discoveries, of which 13 are producing or imminently producing. The cumulative conversion rate from exploration well to producing field is around eight per cent.

Applying that rate to 4.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) produces a realistic geological-to-commercial production figure of around 350 to 380 million boe across several decades. For context, 380 million boe is roughly 325 days of UK gas demand. Not only is this less than a year (not The Telegraph’s “four years”), it wouldn’t all come out in a year as it is spread across decades of production decline.

The political case for reopening the basin rests on a figure that the paper’s own historical record deflates by more than 90%.

Industry Co-Authorship

The press coverage also missed three important things about the paper itself. The first concerns its authorship. The paper has 10 named authors. Lead author Professor Nick Schofield is Professor of Igneous and Petroleum Geology at the University of Aberdeen.

However, five of his co-authors work for companies with a direct commercial stake in the policy change being recommended: Ben Kilhams is employed by Shell, Lucinda Layfield by Equinor, and Douglas Watson by BP; Eric Mueller and Jens Beenfeldt work for TGS, a seismic data company whose business model depends on continued exploration activity.

All five disclosed their affiliations in the paper’s acknowledgements, noting they had contributed “in their own time” via honorary research positions at Aberdeen. This disclosure is proper, satisfies the paper’s formal requirements, and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing. But the disclosure does not change the fact that half the authorial team is employed by oil and gas firms that would be the direct beneficiaries of the fiscal regime the paper recommends.

Shell and Equinor are partners in Adura, the joint venture formed in December 2025 to consolidate their UK upstream operations, including the Rosebank field at the centre of the West of Shetland debate. BP operates Clair, Foinaven and Schiehallion in the same basin; TGS sells seismic data to all three. The paper recommends that British taxpayers underwrite an enhanced fiscal regime for the basin where these companies hold their UK assets. These affiliations went unreported in the press coverage that circulated the paper’s findings.

The Fiscal Gap

The second omission is a single sentence buried two-thirds of the way through the paper’s discussion section: “an in-depth economic benefit analysis of such a move is beyond the scope of this paper.” The paper advances a fiscal policy recommendation while explicitly forgoing the analysis that would tell taxpayers what it would cost.

An Age of Transformation report by this reporter and Divyesh Desai, formerly of Shell Asia’s liquid natural gas division, built a conservative 30-year discounted cash-flow model of what a reopened North Sea licensing programme would mean for the British Treasury under existing tax rules – precisely the fiscal calculation the Aberdeen paper deferred. The model is open for replication, with full Python code published alongside the report.

At the prices any new licence would actually face by the time it began producing in the 2030s, a decade-long programme of 500 licences converting to 20 producing fields would cost the Treasury around £298 million in today’s money — plus £2.85 billion in decommissioning refunds the state is contractually committed to pay.

West of Shetland fields cost significantly more to develop than the North Sea average. Rosebank Phase 1 alone required a $3.8 billion (around £3 billion) investment decision, and fields in the basin typically take 14 to 17 years from discovery to first production. Both factors mean the tax reliefs any new regime would trigger are substantially larger than elsewhere in the North Sea.

The paper proposes cutting the headline tax rate from 78% to between 30% and 40%. Applied to a field the size of Rosebank, that would widen the per-field Treasury loss to between £500 million and £900 million. Across the five to 10 new fields a bespoke fiscal regime might unlock over a decade, the total additional cost to the public purse runs to between £3 billion and £8 billion, plus a further £500 million to £1 billion in decommissioning refunds the state is legally committed to pay. Conveniently, no figure of any kind appears in the paper.

The Norway Comparison

The Norway comparison the paper deploys is also selectively framed. Norway refunds up to 78% of exploration costs, yes.

But here’s the third thing the paper carefully fails to mention: the Norwegian state also retains 67% ownership of Equinor and holds direct equity stakes in fields through its State’s Direct Financial Interest, managed by Petoro, ensuring the upside of production flows substantially to the state.

The proposed UK regime would replicate Norway’s exploration cost refunds. But it would jettison the equity structure that directs Norway’s production profits to the state. Under the proposed UK terms, taxpayers carry the cost while operators retain the upside. The paper Badenoch is rallying behind is advocating state socialism for Big Oil.

The Production Timeline

The fourth omission concerns timing. As the paper itself concedes: “if a field like Rosebank were discovered today, it might not come online until at least 2040.” A licence awarded in 2026 cannot produce oil and gas in any timeframe that affects the current price environment, the present energy security situation or household energy bills before the early 2040s.

By then, the energy market conditions that underpin the political case for reopening will have shifted considerably. The behaviour of the industry itself supports this reading: Shell and Equinor merged their UK upstream operations into Adura five months before the paper’s publication, explicitly to extract value from existing fields in a more difficult geological context.

The Fiscal Exposure

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has calculated, in its 2023 Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report, what continued exposure to global gas markets costs the British state: approximately £364 billion in absorbed price shocks out to 2050.

Every new field locks in another 22 years of British infrastructure and political commitment to the global gas market the OBR has identified as Britain’s largest fiscal vulnerability. A West of Shetland economic zone of the kind Schofield and his co-authors recommend would compound this exposure.

The Aberdeen study contains 176 pages of careful subsurface geology built on five decades of data. Undoubtedly, the geological synthesis is serious.

The policy recommendation attached to it is another matter. Its fiscal cost has never been calculated. Its production timeline cannot affect present-day energy prices. And the companies that would benefit from it have already concluded the same thing — choosing to consolidate existing fields rather than compete for new ones. Byline Times contacted its lead author, Professor Nick Schofield, for comment.

The closing line of the paper is, perhaps, the most honest:

“… it remains uncertain whether this paper will serve as an important reference to support future exploration activity West of Shetland or merely as an obituary.”

An obituary: Kemi Badenoch did not mention that part. Neither did the rest of the press.

Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times

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

HM: Our Public House is a ‘state of the nation’ musical drama exploring the alienation people feel with politics through the lens of community, identity, change, and grief. How did this timely project come about?

JB: I wanted to do a show that explored who we are as a country. At Dash Arts, we had been thinking about what it was to be European, and then our gaze turned to Englishness and England and how to create a ‘state of the nation’ piece of theatre. In that search for a narrative and a story and an idea, I met an academic, Alan Finlayson, Professor of Political and Social Theory at the University of East Anglia, who said ‘you know, we all have this ability to articulate the things we feel passionate about but we don’t necessarily have the tools to do it’. So we conducted a workshop programme around the country helping people to talk about what they felt wasn’t working and what could change. I had this instinct that the stuff, the data, the thoughts, the reflections, the dreams, and the ambitions would be an incredible reflection of who we are as a country and who we could be.

We heard a lot of incredibly diverse reflections because we built a research process that enabled us to go to council estates, deaf communities, women’s prisons, schools, activist groups, old age homes, working men’s groups; to Cornwall, Sheffield, Liverpool, Norwich, all over the country, bits in between and above. Then I found a wonderful playwright, Barney Norris, and we thought about what the play could be. I had a feeling it would be great to set it in a pub, that this would be the place to talk about who we are as it is quintessentially English, but also it is somewhere some people feel included and some people don’t feel it’s for them – I thought that was an interesting metaphor for where we are at [as a country] at the moment.

I also had a feeling that it might be interesting to use The Tempest as an inspiration, as opposed to a direct adaptation of the text. Barney and I sat down and started saying ‘who are the characters in The Tempest and what is the magic that could be wrought on the place like Prospero creates the storm? What’s our storm?’. Barney had this brilliant idea that, rather than the play following a group of people who don’t want to vote, they would take an active position – so the plot developed of people in a constituency who decided to spoil their ballots because they didn’t feel the politicians [on offer] represented them. So, much like Prospero creates the storms on the seas that brings everyone onto the island, in our play we have a storm of this mass spoiling of an election ballot which brings all the attention and focus on the place, the pub, which is called ‘The Albion’. The six characters have definite connections to Shakespeare’s Miranda, Ferdinand, Prospero, Caliban… they are very much well-rounded, naturalistic characters in their own right. Barney and I explored the conversations that could happen in a pub. Then we brought in some music.

We’ve also woven in speeches from our participants in the workshops into the play because that felt incredibly important – we didn’t just want to be inspired by these voices and then not have them have anything to do with it going forward. We met over 700 people in the workshops and every character in our play delivers a real person’s speech which I felt had some resonance with the character. Our composer, Jonathan Walton, turned those speeches into songs.

And, really importantly, every night across the run, at the very beginning of the second act, we have two speeches [delivered by] local people who have been working with us [through the speech-making workshops]. As the world of our play expands, so does the cast.

What were the issues that people were raising as affecting their lives in the workshops again and again that you found striking?

I learned how complicated the country is and, yet, how many people still think that the issues are the same – everyone is struggling with the cost of living, with housing, with waiting lists for the NHS.

But it’s not that I went around the country and heard everyone air their grievances – it was an incredibly productive process that was positive and inspiring. We’d go into the room and say ‘we’re here to help you make a speech about the future’ and what we could do to make things better for everyone. People would explain their life experience and what had happened to them and there was always a proposed solution. Because it was always from people’s lived experience, [there was a sense of]: this happened to me, and as a result, I feel like I’ve seen a different way of doing it.

One of the characters in our play, Tom [who plays a special advisor to the Labour parliamentary candidate], shares a speech by an individual we met in a workshop in Norwich about how, when he was 17, he came home from school one day in the middle of his ‘A’ Levels and his mum had packed up their car [with their belongings] because the landlord had put their rent up [which she couldn’t afford to pay so] that night they moved to Luton. He believed no child should ever have that happen to them and that’s why we need rent controls.

The speeches represent hope, a sense of possibility. We are definitely left feeling [at the end of the play] like there’s new stuff on the horizon – because we all need that.

What has it been like to craft a piece of art about politics against an ever-shifting political backdrop in which people are increasingly turning to alternatives to the main parties because they are so disillusioned with all establishment politics?

When we started writing the play in January 2024, it was still the Tory Government, and many of the speeches people wrote were about the dying embers of 14 years of Conservative rule. There was a sense of optimism and possibility for change in that there would be a change of government which might come in and sort things out. In the play, after the ballots are spoiled, another election is held – and into the pub walks a Labour candidate, Mary, and her special advisor. Mary is a politician who might do politics differently and is played by a brilliant actor, Gabriella Lyon, who is deaf, as is her character. So there is this irony that a deaf politician is the first one to really listen to the community. Obviously now, to be playing a Labour politician in 2026, is really very different from playing a Labour politician in 2024.

There was a moment earlier this year, around the time of the Gorton and Denton by-election [won by the now Green MP Hannah Spencer], when Barney and I sat down and asked each other ‘should Mary be standing for the Green Party?’ – because can anyone possibly imagine that Labour could win a by-election at the moment? [This interview was conducted before the Makerfield by-election was announced, after the Labour MP Josh Simons stood down in a bid for Labour’s Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, to return to Parliament].

But we decided to stick to our guns and keep Mary as Labour because, in a way, she could be any politician for any political party who wants to do politics differently – she says ‘I want to create spaces and provide a platform for you to be heard, I want you to feel represented by people like you’. She sells that as her politics and it’s on that basis that she is elected, despite the party that she represents.

Last year, ‘Operation Raise the Flag’ saw Union and St George’s flags being put up around towns across the country –a campaign supported and organised by far-right activists such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) and Britain First. At the same time, ethno-nationalist thinking around who can be ‘English’ has been voiced by the far-right, and figures within Reform UK, positing that only ‘blood’ can make someone English or British. How does Our Public House aim to explore some of these complicated and contentious issues of political identity?

We made one of the characters in our play, Scott, Reform-leaning, and it takes a while to establish that but he outs himself as voting for Reform, because we deliberately wanted to set up a situation in the piece where he is confronted by accusations of racism because we really wanted to talk about it.

Our English pub is run by a British Asian woman, Sanjana, and her daughter, Anika, and to have one of the regulars potentially making racist comments in that space is very powerful and shocking. We talked in the rehearsal room about the permissiveness that this man now feels he has to come out and say something problematic, and how we feel that Reform has given him permission to do it and to do it more publicly than he would have felt able to even two or three years ago.

Since discussions in politics and the media around identity can often descend into simplistic soundbites and ‘culture wars’, it feels as if questions around difference and belonging can be explored in a more multifaceted way through art…

Despite the fact that we go to dark places, we have the space and time, and work with professional actors who have deep wells of emotional intelligence and physical experience in their bodies, to look at things in more nuanced, more interesting ways.

On first glance, Scott may appear to make a racist comment and the other characters judge him, and we as the audience will judge him – but then we have another hour to see beyond the surface and to understand that this character, this person, is much more complicated than that and that he loves his community, that he loves these people, and that he’s deeply kind, and yet, misguided. I think theatre can give you that – through the fact that you step into the space and time stands still; you choose to spend a ‘capsule’ of your life with characters who you can fall in love with and be troubled by and get to know. We all have those uncles and aunts and grandparents who say these things – and we still love them.

Theatre is a medium that allows you to look deeper, to understand, to put yourselves in other people’s shoes, to have empathy. Literature and film is brilliant at that too.

According to the British Beer and Pub Association, 161 pubs closed in the first three months of 2026 in England, Scotland, and Wales – the equivalent of approximately two pubs closing a day. Why are these types of community spaces so important to retain?

The majority of my new theatrical pieces are based in those spaces – in places that are almost like an extension of your living room and where you feel at ease and maybe more open to being confronted by stuff that you wouldn’t otherwise necessarily be prepared to [engage with] because it’s still somewhere you are familiar with and where you know people. But there is also a tension between that and the public and the unfamiliar. So it’s this very journalistic idea of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. I think that’s what ‘third spaces’ do at their best.

Our pub in the play swings both ways – it’s incredibly comforting and lovely and fun and the characters joke; but then it’s also a place of deep tension and the odd fight.

How does class play out in Our Public House? Is it mainly working-class voices that are showcased?

Class is very present. It’s also about ‘them and us’ – there’s a line about ‘them in Westminster’, those “wokie-cokies”, ‘who’ve come up to tell us how we should be and how we should behave, but what do they know about us?’. It’s also about ethnicity and diversity, and that sense of the ‘left behind’. The play is also about grief. And about change: how do we move on and change where we are?

Because I made sure that we worked with speech-making participants of all classes and backgrounds and ages, we wanted to build characters in the piece that would reflect that. So we have the character of Jo, a young working-class woman who has been in prison and has a daughter in foster care. We also have a young Asian woman, Anika, who is a teacher and has come from a much more stable upbringing.

What do you hope people will take away from seeing this piece?

To feel like they have enjoyed themselves in some emotional way. I think real people sharing their speeches [as part of the performance every night] has the potential to be the most powerful part because it’s a moment of deep truth. If people leave having learned something and that inspires them, that would be success.

‘You Can’t Kick Your Shit Out of Somebody Else’

Seamus Doherty, 68, former council customer services manager, was a real-life speech-maker during a performance of Our Public House

What did the speech you delivered as part of a performance of Our Public House at the Leeds Playhouse focus on?

SD: The thing that was uppermost in my mind was the manosphere, Andrew Tate, and all his ilk, and I wanted to express something around that – and it felt personal because of my own history. My father died when I was 11. I didn’t have that male role model, but I also then realised that, even when he was alive, he wasn’t really there emotionally. I’ve had a history of alcoholism and addiction and, through recovery, I’ve learned to deal with and come to terms with my emotions. And I just look around and see so many issues in the world that are directly or indirectly because men don’t know how to deal with their feelings – that they don’t even know what they feel, never mind how to deal with it.

How do you think that notions of masculinity have evolved since you were growing up?

From the 60s onwards, men’s roles were challenged and men kind of lost their way. It’s not because of women’s rights, but a lot of men would see it that way, and I suppose part of the thing for me is that, in many ways, men are as big a victims of the patriarchy as women are. The other thing I’ve realised through my own experiences, and I’ve done it myself, but men in general, we expect to put all the emotional burden onto women and our relationships and expect them to carry all that. But, actually, there are things that I know I can’t [do that with and] I need to talk to a man about. Men need to connect with other men to deal with all sorts of feelings and cultural expectations.

It’s getting better. Well, it was getting better, but since the internet has come along, it’s gotten worse. So I make an appeal in my speech that, as men and especially as fathers, we need to step up, we need to get off the internet ourselves and start engaging with our boys, because otherwise we’re going to lose them to guys like Andrew Tate who step in and exploit that.

Are there any men in public life at the moment that you think are a good counterpoint to Andrew Tate?

[The actor] Pablo Pascal is quite a good example. He’s very tolerant, he’s very open, he will stand up and be honest about what he really thinks rather than like a lot of men who just keep quiet because they don’t want to put their head above the parapet in case it gets shot off. He’s not afraid to speak up [on these issues]. I think [the journalist and author] George Monbiot is another great role model.

Our Public House is a ‘state of the nation’ play exploring national identity and Englishness. What does the term bring up for you?

For me, one of the worst things that’s happened is Brexit. I’m from Derry, Northern Ireland, and I identify as Irish. A lot of people I grew up with would identify as British and call Derry Londonderry because there was always this divide. But the thing was, when [the UK was] part of the European Union, it didn’t matter – [the right to identify as Irish, British, or both citizenships] was baked into the Good Friday Agreement. So I was really worried when Brexit happened, because if they had brought in a hard border [between the Republic of Ireland, an EU member, and Northern Ireland] as they were talking about, we could well have ended up with a lot of scraps starting again and nobody wants to see that. I mean, the peace isn’t perfect, it’s not ideal, but at least people by and large are not shooting each other anymore. And that’s got to be a good thing, you know?

If you grew up where I grew up, people waving Union Jacks didn’t bode well for a weak Catholic boy – [those waving them] were usually the sort of people that, if they knew what my name was, would kick the shit out of me. So I don’t really identify as British. But I do identify as Yorkshire now. I love Yorkshire and I love Leeds, and I’ve lived in Leeds twice as long as I lived in Derry. So, although I have a great love for Derry and my roots are there, I know I’m going to end my days in Leeds and I’ve got really, really deep roots here.

Growing up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles must have provided important background context about understanding your own sense of masculinity and vulnerability?

I left Derry in 1981. Reading the memoirs of an array of men who were part of various paramilitaries and whatever, a lot of them talk about the same things that they grew up with in very deprived areas – and many of them had violent, abusive fathers. It’s not the whole story, but for a lot of them, that was part of it as well.

I know I had a period in my own life where I nearly ended up going on a lot of anti-Nazi league [marches] because I agreed with the cause, but people were telling me ‘oh yeah, come along because we get loads of rocks and we fight with the neo-Nazis’. I remember thinking to myself, hang on, this sounds really attractive – because I was full of anger – but then I had a word with myself and said ‘Seamus, you can’t kick your shit out of somebody else’, so I stepped back.

I think where I’ve shown the most courage in my life is actually just facing up to my own fear, my own insecurity, my own anger. It’s far too easy to prop yourself up and ‘act like a man’. If you face it, you find what looks like a shadowy demon in a cave – but if you turn around, actually, there is a tiny, frightened little child, and the shadow it throws looks like a demon, but it’s not. The bravest thing you can do as a man is look after that little child.

Take a step, and the bridge will appear.

‘I Don’t Understand Why Community Seems to be Much Easier for Some People and Not for Others’

Kylie Tilford, 55, English teacher, was a real-life speech-maker during a performance of Our Public House

The play explores why people feel so alienated from politics. Why do you think this massive disconnect has happened?

KT: A lot of it is this concept of a ‘bubble’, particularly on social media, because a lot of us probably spend more time in our virtual lives, rather than looking at policy, and hearing the voices of those people around us – and if you’re in your little bubble, your sounding boards are coming back with the same message, and I think that’s the issue. Social media unfortunately breathes alienation. The echo chamber doesn’t allow you to develop a dialogue or understand other ideas.

Reform run on one message and the difficulty for me that I can’t get my head around is why intelligent people that I know look at that one message and say ‘this is what we need to work towards’, but they’re not looking at what Reform [say they want to do] to the Human Rights Act and how that’s going to impact others. Or what Reform are saying about sexual health for women. Or the LGBTQ+ community. If those people could look beyond that one message that the party has, they’d start to understand but they’re in that echo chamber where that one message is repeated again and again by like-minded people. You could argue that I’m in that position where, obviously, I know I’ve got social messages coming to me as well, but I like to think I’m a little bit more open-minded.

It’s the apathy as well that really scares me. We’re looking at 2028 when 16-year-olds are going to be able to vote and, at the moment, we teach them about democracy and what elections mean – but we don’t actually teach them how to be discerning voters.

What did the speech you delivered as part of a performance of Our Public House at the Leeds Playhouse focus on?

My speech might have been a lot different if the workshop had run after what’s just recently happened in the local elections [in which Reform UK made significant gains]. When you think about the narrative of this play, where it’s looking at a community of people who didn’t feel they had any voice and they didn’t feel that any of the politicians were actually listening to them – I think it should be looked at as a cautionary tale, because we do need to understand [who and what we are voting for] rather than just voting for a label; a party. We need to look and see who these [local] councillors are and find out more about them as individuals and what their hopes and dreams are for our community, beyond the badge that they wear.

The speech I made in the play was about the loss of green space. The fact that, in the Victorian era, all of these philanthropic men who had lots of money, they weren’t trying to put cars into space, they built wings in hospitals, they donated money for a library to be built – and many of them donated to their local communities and so there was a lot of community land they paid for to belong to the people. In today’s day and age, the upkeep for these pieces of land, these green urban spaces, where people play football and walk the dogs or take their children out to play – they cost too much and so many councils are selling them, particularly near me.

When my boys were little we had a beautiful big field that everyone played football on and the local football team played on it as well. But then the land was sold to the football team and it put big green fences up and, unless we were prepared to pay for our kids to join the football club, they could only look on. I know from my job as a teacher that many parents can’t afford to pay for the privilege for their kids to actually have an open space to play football on. So it’s just thinking about how we as a community need to come back together again and maybe look at community asset transfers, look at ways that we can actually save this land for young people.

We complain all the time about young people being sucked into social media, about the manosphere, and the idea of young men being disillusioned with life. And yet, I feel we’re almost driving them online because there aren’t any physical spaces, and what spaces there are we’ve given them grief for hanging out there or for being there at night because people say that they’re frightened of them. So we need these spaces to be conserved. That is what those philanthropists did, they left this land for our young people and for our communities, and we’re just losing that.

The play explores Englishness. What does it mean to you?

As a teacher, we teach British values, but British values are a respect for justice, taking care of one another – if you look at what British values are, it’s not about putting a flag up, it’s not about saying ‘I’m British because I look like this and you’re not because you look like that’. It’s about saying ‘we’re all part of this country, of this community, and it’s about living together in a melting pot of different ideas’. Our country wouldn’t be what it is today if it wasn’t for all the immigrants – European immigrants who came over in the war, the Windrush generation… I think we’re incredibly foolish if we think that, somehow, immigration is the problem. Immigration is actually what makes Britain great, and that is something we talk about when we teach British values.

We should all celebrate this incredible melting pot that is our islands, that has invited people to live here and join us. I have white privilege. I’m a white middle-class woman so I can’t pretend to understand what I know some of my students, for example, have experienced. I have probably made mistakes and said things that are inappropriate. But, for me, I don’t see anybody from any other culture who’s telling me that I have to be like them, so why are we telling people what they have to be like? I don’t understand why community seems to be much easier for some people and not for others.

Our Public House is touring until 4 July. For more information visit www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-house

Hardeep Matharu is the Editor in Chief of Byline Times

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

For Syrians in Britain, the prospect of return suddenly feels imminent. Yet, as the philosopher Alexandre Kojève suggested, the collapse of a regime doesn’t instantly create a functioning society – it leaves us confronting freedom within a “total emptiness.”

Through a small survey I conducted in Britain, the term “Syrian refugee” was often associated with words like “pity”, “paperwork”, “war” and “suffering”. But from everyday conversations within the Syrian community here, I know the fear is more complicated: it is not only about the past, but about the uncertainty of return.

Recent Violence and Renewed Uncertainty

The emptiness left after the fall of an old system is not only philosophical. In Syria, it appears in the fragmented spaces where power is contested between state forces, former regime loyalists, local armed groups, tribal factions, and communities trying to protect themselves.

In March 2025, that fragility became visible in violence that broke out in Syria’s coastal region, including areas such as Jableh and Baniyas in Latakia and Tartous governorates. UK Government country guidance, Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch and the UN Syria Commission describe how attacks by pro-Assad loyalists against transitional security forces were followed by a response that escalated into sectarian violence against Alawite civilians, including killings, looting, displacement, and attacks on homes and religious sites. The UN Syria Commission reported around 1,400 deaths, showing how quickly collective blame can turn civilians into targets. Alawites are a religious minority in Syria, historically concentrated in the coastal region, particularly Latakia and Tartous. The Assad family comes from an Alawite background, and during decades of Assad rule, some Alawites were associated with the regime’s military and security structures. But this association is not universal: many ordinary Alawites were poor, politically powerless, or also suffered under the regime.

In my interview with an Alawite member of the Tayyar Dalil movement inside Syria – an independent Syrian civic/political movement that calls for a democratic, liberal and decentralised Syria based on equal citizenship, rule of law, pluralism and rights – they rejected that simplification. There was “no unified stance” among Alawites when the regime fell, they explained. Some feared the vacuum and collective punishment; others felt relief after years of loss, poverty and being used as a “human reservoir” for the war.

In July 2025, violence in the southern province of Suweida exposed the same instability. Crisis Group and UN reporting describe a local dispute between Druze and Bedouin groups that escalated after government intervention, drawing in wider armed actors and Israeli airstrikes. A Durzi individual from Suweida, now living in Britain, described the province as a place where “everyone carries a weapon under the slogan of resistance”, with weapons “even” reaching children.

Together, the events on the coast and in Suweida make “safe” difficult to accept as a simple word.

Is Syria Being Understood Too Simplistically?

The risk of returning to Syria is often reduced to a simple logic: if the new leadership is Sunni-led, then Sunni Syrians are safer. The UK Home Office Country Policy and Information Notes and EUAA country guidance both distinguish between groups facing different levels of risk, with Alawites and Druze identified as especially vulnerable.

But this can become misleading if it turns identity into a shortcut to safety.

Being part of a particular shared sect does not guarantee protection. The UK Home Office Country Policy and Information Note on criticism of the Syrian government shows that political dissent still carries risk, especially where speech crosses unclear “red lines”. A Sunni who criticises the current authorities, rejects their ideology, or is seen as politically unreliable, may not be protected simply because they belong to the majority.

The Tayyar Dalil member described the deeper risk as trans-sectarian: when the state becomes “ideologically biased” and cannot reassure citizens equally, fear reaches minorities, women, journalists, activists and even members of the majority who disagree with the dominant discourse.

A member of the Syrian Durzi community in the UK described their fear as not only about who holds power, but what kind of state is being formed. They warned of a move towards a “mono-colour” state, where those who differ “intellectually, religiously, or culturally” become exposed.

The New Humanitarian and the Migration Policy Centre also warn that the return of refugees can be used as evidence of safety, even when it is driven by poverty, legal pressure, or fear of deportation. A country can become quieter without becoming safe. A refugee can belong to the majority sect and still remain uncertain about what return would mean.

Beyond Sect: Why Identity Alone Cannot Guarantee Safety

Sect still matters in Syria, but it is not the final measure of risk. The UK Home Office Country Policy and Information Note suggests that political expression remains uncertain, with unclear limits around criticism of sensitive ministries, sectarian violence, and organised opposition. In that legal grey zone, accusations of threatening “national security” or disloyalty can become more dangerous than sectarian identity itself.

Safety also changes by place. EUAA country guidance describes Damascus as relatively stable, while areas such as Homs, Suweida, the coast, and parts of the north remain exposed to local armed control and insecurity. A returnee from Britain may be judged not only by sect, but by where they lived, whether they claimed asylum, what they posted online, or whether they are seen as politically or culturally changed by exile.

A Durzi individual from Suweida, currently living in Britain, said disarmament efforts appear to focus mainly on minorities, while weapons remain widespread elsewhere. They warned that “another kind of war is coming” against those who differ “intellectually, religiously, or culturally” from the ruling power.

In this sense, safety is not only about being Sunni, Alawite, or Druze. It depends on loyalty, geography, speech, and how power chooses to read you.

Subscribe now

What ‘Safe’ Really Means

If identity alone cannot ensure safety, then the next question is what safety actually means.

For a Syrian legal expert specialising in International Human Rights Law, safety is not simply the absence of hostilities but goes beyond to encompass security from any plausible act of violence, persecution, and abuse. The return of refugees must also be dignified and voluntary.

The legal expert also explained that refugee protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention is based on an individual’s well-founded fear of persecution. This means asylum and return decisions should not be reduced to sectarian identity alone. Even a Sunni Syrian may still face risk because of political views, social beliefs, gender identity, sexuality, or other personal circumstances.

Recent reporting from a range of international sources describes ongoing risks in Syria, including arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment, enforced disappearances, abductions, revenge killings, sexual and gender-based violence, and the continued presence of Islamic State. These risks show that safety cannot be measured only by whether large-scale hostilities have decreased.

The legal expert also pointed to poverty, lack of basic services, and unresolved housing, land, and property disputes as major barriers to return. Human Rights Watch’s 2026 reporting describes around 90% of Syrians as living below the poverty line, while UNHCR, EUAA, and the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre point to destroyed homes, weak infrastructure, limited healthcare, landmines, and unexploded ordnance.

Fear of Return Among Syrians in Britain

For Syrians in Britain, fear of return is now tied to legal security as much as to Syria itself. The UK Home Office announced that from 2 March 2026, refugee protection would shift to a temporary Core Protection model, with status reviewed every 30 months and return expected if the home country is later considered safe. Adam Bernard Solicitors’ legal and analysis warns that this repeated review process creates long-term uncertainty for refugees in the UK.

This turns “safe return” into a recurring threat rather than a distant possibility. Refugees may rebuild lives, work, study, and raise children, while still knowing their protection can be reassessed every two and a half years.

The paradox is clear. While the Home Office moves towards regular safety reviews, UNHCR reports that Syria still faces major gaps in basic survival needs, and Human Rights Watch’s 2026 reporting says the vast majority of Syrians remain below the poverty line.

According to the Druze individual from Suweida, “Bread now costs ten times more, and electricity has increased a hundredfold.” They warned that people returning might find their property seized by “gangs from the old regime or individuals connected to the current government”.

Returning isn’t just about crossing a border; it is about survival, reclaiming a home, and escaping fear.

The same individual, now living in Britain, asked: “Is there safety for women in general? Is there safety for a man who is different from the majority of society?“ For those abroad, safety isn’t just about government rules. It is the deep fear that the new life they built could be torn away from them again.

Who Decides What is ‘Safe’?

There is a harder question to measure: how does a society learn to live with freedom after years of war and repression? When a regime falls without stable institutions, trust, or a shared direction, the result is dangerous chaos. True stability requires more than the collapse of a government; it requires a system where people can disagree, speak out, return, and rebuild while being legally protected.

While governments like Britain evaluate whether Syria is “safe,” this assessment must not be simplified. Safety depends on specific questions: safe for whom, under whose authority, and at what cost to the individual? Kojève’s concept of a void is not just a theory. It describes exactly what happens when a government collapses, but the questions of basic security and authority remain completely unanswered. Syria is still stuck in this vacuum.

For Syrians in exile, safety is not just a word in a policy document. It is determined by whether a person can speak without social or political punishment, or whether a journalist can ask questions without being treated as a threat. This uncertainty heavily impacts children raised in exile who have formed their language, education, and identity entirely in host countries. For them, forced return is not a homecoming - it is a secondary disruption to their language, society, and sense of belonging.

Black social justice campaigners have told the Byline Times Podcast the tragic death of Henry Nowak is being weaponised by the far right to stir up hatred and roll back years of progress towards equality.

Vickrum Digwa was convicted of murdering the 18-year old university student and sentenced to life imprisonment this week at Southampton Crown Court, but bodycam footage released after the trial prompted claims of “two tier policing.” Officers attending what they were wrongly told was a racist attack, were heard to reject Henry’s claim that he had been stabbed and handcuffed him as he lay dying in the street.

The police watchdog, the IOPC, is now investigating the incident, but Reform UK leader Nigel Farage didn’t wait for their verdict before calling on the British public to react with “pure cold rage”; whilst professional rabble rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka ‘Tommy Robinson’) attended a violent protest in Southampton on Tuesday night, which led to 11 police officers being injured. This, in spite of calls for calm by Henry’s father, Mark.

Kojo Kyerewaa, national organiser for Black Lives Matter UK condemned the “far-right grifters who are trying to create grievances out of myths,” and pointed out that the manner of Henry’s death was, sadly, not one-off.

He recalled the case of Tracie Cooper, a white woman, also in Southampton, in 2020: “She was arrested in her own home by Hampshire police. She said to them that she was feeling unwell, and the officers responded by saying ‘we don’t believe you’ – and then she later died.

“Henry Nowak says nine times to the police officers, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and this is obviously a phrase that is made famous by George Floyd – but in Britain, it was said by Kevin Clark, who died in police custody in 2018 in Lewisham. We have had many other people who have died in custody saying those exact words, and the police ignoring it. This is not a race issue – as the far right would like to portray it – this is about police disregard for people in their care. It tends to be that when you are in the care of the police, you actually end up receiving very little of it.”

Whilst there are undoubtedly serious questions about the way in which the police handled Henry Nowak’s murder, the fact remains that black people (and other ethnic minorities) remain over-represented in jail and receive longer custodial sentences than their white counterparts – evidence of structural racism that the Black Lives Matter movement sets out to challenge. Nigel Farage omitted this important context, says Kyerewaa, when he responded to Henry’s death by arguing that ‘white lives matter’.

“We absolutely grieve the lives of everyone who’s died in police custody,” Kyerewaa said. “We do not believe that there is a hierarchy of grief or of pain, and we believe that everyone should get safety. That is what we organise for – but one of the barriers to safety is a hierarchy of human value, which we call racism. That is the problem that contributes to and aggravates these problems.”

“This weaponisation of a family’s grief is being used to attack anti-racist movements more broadly, and I think that tells you about the nature of the people who are claiming to be upset about what’s happened to Henry Nowak… They are using this as a stick to beat people who want more justice in this world. That is what is happening, and I think we need to be very robust in arguing against that.”

Kyerewaa’s view is supported by Tippa Naphtali, whose cousin Mikey Powell died of asphyxiation in the back of a police van in Birmingham in 2003. Naphtali observes that “Henry doesn’t seem to be at the centre of this anymore. At the heart of this is the police duty of care. They had a duty of care to this young man, and they didn’t listen…this has been hijacked by the far right”.

As a veteran of the era when he and his friends would be set upon by National Front thugs after night out, Naphtali takes pride in the progress that has been made in the decades since then. His own organisation 4WardEverUK has worked with West Midlands Police (and other forces) for two decades and says that there have been no controversial race-related deaths in custody in Birmingham for 14 years. He insists that progressive forces will not be defeated: “All these far-right groups may feel that they’re rolling back the progress that’s been made, but that will only incentivise people like me, Kojo, and others to fight even harder to restore things back to where they were – even though they weren’t perfect. Mark my words – they won’t succeed.”

Listen to Adrian Goldberg’s full interview with Kojo Kyerewaa and Tippa Naphtali on the Byline Times Podcast.

The acclaimed international festival WOMAD – at Neston Park in Wiltshire 24-26 July this summer– is rightly known as an annual hub for extraordinary global music, dance, and food.

But it’s also an independent forum for crucial ideas and debates. The World of Words stage – curated this summer by Byline Times – will bring people into an open conversation with politicians, journalists, academics, activists and authors.

Special guests announced so far include Green Party leader Zack Polanski, Lincoln Project Co-Founder Rick Wilson, and Norwich South MP Clive Lewis.

It comes at a critical juncture.

Democracy is being tested. Artificial intelligence is reshaping our economy, our communication and our minds. Billionaires are buying politics. Algorithms are determining what we see, think and feel. Perhaps worst of all, our media is incapable of facilitating the debates and discussions we desperately need.

At WOMAD, we’ll do what the Westminster political-media bubble will not. We’ll offer in person what Byline Times produces in print: a roadmap to understanding. A pluralistic and facts-based assessment with room for complexity, context, and disagreement.

Join us and have your voice heard in a pivotal dialogue about the future of democracy, the rise of populism, disinformation, political extremism, media power, climate activism, the battle for truth online and so much more.

Plus you get to enjoy a brilliant global music, dance, art and food scene on top.

Our readers get 15% with the unique check-out code: BL15

WOMAD 2026

Our full Line-Up (so far):

• ZACK POLANSKI (Green Party leader)

• CHRISTOPHER STEELE (Former British intelligence officer)

• ROSIE HOLT (Satirist)

• HARDEEP MATHARU (Editor-in-Chief, Byline Times)

• CLAIRE FARRELL (Extinction Rebellion)

• JOHN MITCHINSON (Head of Research on QI, Byline Times columnist)

• ADAM BIENKOV (Political Editor, Byline Times)

• OTTO ENGLISH (Author and Byline Times columnist)

• JOSIAH MORTIMER (Chief Reporter at Byline Times)

• PETER JUKES (Co-Founder, Byline Times)

• JAMES BLOODWORTH (Special Features Correspondent, Byline Times)

• RICK WILSON (Co-Founder, The Lincoln Project)

• CLIVE LEWIS (Labour MP for Norwich South)

• JAY GRIFFITHS (Author)

• SHAMI CHAKRABARTI (Former Minister, barrister, and human rights activist)

• SARAH CHURCHWELL (US writer and historian)

After weeks in which the Reform leader has become an increasingly lesser-spotted creature in British politics, Nigel Farage finally emerged from hiding this morning.

The manner in which he did so – via a pre-filmed “emergency address” to camera, without any journalists presents – was particularly telling.

As questions continue to grow about Farage’s secret £5 million bung from a crypto billionaire, and his claimed hacking by Russia, the previously publicity-hungry Reform leader has become remarkably camera shy.

Yet it was the content of Farage’s “address”, even more than the manner in which he delivered it, that was most striking.

Responding to the case of the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak, Farage declared that the case showed that “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than ethnic minorities”, adding that “white lives matter…” and there needs to be “an end to anti-white prejudice”.

Farage’s speech comes amid a deliberate ramping up of racialised language from Reform UK. In another recent post, Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf declared that “White people are now demonstrably the biggest victims of racism in Britain”.

Now I’m not sure what definition of “demonstrably” Yusuf and Reform are using here, but official figures demonstrate that black people in the UK are around 16 times more likely to be the victims of racial hate crime, per head of population, than their white counterparts, with Asian people being around nine times more likely.

Of course anti-white racism does exist in the UK, but all of the evidence suggests that it is a vanishingly small problem compared to that of racism against non-white people.

And while there probably will be lessons for the police and others to learn from the Nowak case, the fact that Farage and Reform are jumping on it as undeniable evidence of endemic racism against white people is both deeply irresponsible and frankly grotesque.

Yet what this ramping up of racialised rhetoric really demonstrates is quite how desperate the Reform operation is now starting to look. Faced with an upcoming by-election in Makerfield, which on paper the party should be able to win at a canter, Nigel Farage’s party is currently facing yet another humiliating loss.

According to the latest betting odds, Reform’s candidate Robert Kenyon is likely heading for defeat against Andy Burnham. Meanwhile, Kenyon’s long history of racism, sexism and homophobia, much of which was exposed by Byline Times, appears to have caused him to follow his leader into hiding during this contest.

However, Reform’s defeat in Makerfield is far from assured and the only polling of the constituency we have so far suggests that it is still a very close race, but there are increasing signs from Reform and others that what initially looked like an easy win for Farage’s party is now anything but.

The fact that things are not going to plan for Reform can be seen in the rising political and media panic about the influence of Reform’s rival far-right party Restore Britain on the contest.

A series of articles and editorials from Reform-sympathetic newspapers over the past week have urged voters in the constituency not to split the right-wing vote by backing Restore – something that has been picked up in increasingly shrill terms by a number of senior Reform figures.

Yet with Restore securing the loud support not just of X owner Elon Musk, but much of the far-right social media sphere which first helped propel Farage’s party to prominence, there has been a noticeable panic emerging from Reform quarters.

And with that panic has come the sort of ramping up of racialised rhetoric that we saw from Farage on Tuesday morning.

Of course this ramping up should worry everyone who cares about the state of British politics. The fact that the party which is leading in all of the national opinion polls is now using the sort of rhetoric previously reserved for the very fringes of the far-right is deeply alarming – as is the fact that this rhetoric is being publicised and normalised by Reform’s media supporters.

Signs of this normalisation could be heard on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today Programme this morning, where Farage’s opponents were asked a series of questions by the presenters about whether the “rights and privileges” of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities.

Subscribe now

Yet what this episode mostly demonstrates is that a party which once felt secure enough in the broad base of its support to distance itself from the far-right, is now being forced out of sheer desperation to scramble for every last vote on the furthest reaches of its electoral coalition.

This scrambling comes not just amid the rise of Restore Britain but also as Labour prepares to potentially select a new Prime Minister in Andy Burnham, who opinion polls suggest is much more popular than Farage himself.

Squeezed from both the left and right, Reform and its leader face the real possibility of losing their perch at the top of British politics.

It is this fear – rather than any confected claims about a surge in anti-white racism across the UK – which is really driving what we are now hearing from Farage and his party.

What kind of real hope can we find in an age of right-wing populism, nostalgic fantasies, and easy answers?

Ten days before the critical by-election in Makerfield – a contested race led by prospective Labour leader Andy Burnham and Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon – we’re sitting down to talk it out in the round at The Cockpit and answer your questions.

Why are so many voters turning away from traditional politics? What emotional needs are populist movements meeting? Is Britain’s political future destined to be shaped by grievance and nostalgia, or is there a more hopeful story waiting to be told?

Come along, grab a drink with us, and get involved.

Panelists:

• Neal Lawson is the founder of political pressure group Compass and one of Britain’s leading progressive thinkers. He brings decades of experience analysing Labour politics, democratic renewal, and the challenge of building a politics that offers people genuine hope, agency and belonging. The Guardian once described him as “the most optimistic commentator in western Europe.”

• Professor Ben Anderson is a professor at Durham University and co-author of The Politics of Feeling. His work explores the emotional undercurrents shaping contemporary politics, including why populist movements often succeed in creating a sense of purpose, belonging and agency where liberal politics struggles to do so.

• Hardeep Matharu is Editor-in-Chief of Byline Times. She has written extensively on the crises facing Britain’s political institutions and the rise of anti-establishment sentiment, bringing a broad perspective on how these forces are reshaping British democracy.

• Josiah Mortimer is Chief Reporter at Byline Times. He has reported extensively on communities, local politics and the social pressures driving political realignment across Britain, offering a ground-level view of the forces at work in places like Makerfield.

• Adam Bienkov is Political Editor at Byline Times. An experienced journalist with inside knowledge of the lobby, he specialises in the mechanics of party politics, electoral strategy and the shifting dynamics between Labour, Reform UK and the Conservative Party.

• Peter Jukes is co-founder of Byline Times and Executive Editor. A journalist, author and campaigner, he has spent years investigating threats to democratic accountability and examining the political and media ecosystems that fuel populist movements.

• James Bloodworth is Special Features Correspondent at Byline Times and author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. His reporting on class, work and economic insecurity offers vital insight into the lived experiences that often sit behind political discontent.

• Dr Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times. An investigative journalist specialising in systems analysis, political economy and emerging global trends, he brings a deeper perspective on the structural forces driving political instability and social change.

Get Tickets

If today’s right offers an illusory hope, what does an authentic hope look like – and does the left know how to offer it?

What specific emotions is the populist right currently weaponising in Makerfield?

And is Andy Burnham’s model of compassionate, place-based leadership a blueprint for turning back the tide – or a reminder that even popular local figures can’t always single-handedly defeat a national mood?

As always at The Cockpit, this is an open and collaborative conversation in the round. We want you there, armed with your toughest questions, sharpest observations and boldest ideas. The discussion won't end when the panel does – we'll be sticking around afterwards for drinks, debate and conversation at the bar.

Do join us at The Cockpit on 8 June at 19:30.

Claim Your Spot

He might sound like a turkey welcoming Santa Claus down the chimney, but Labour MP Alex Sobel is in no doubt – the ‘first past the post’ electoral system which delivered his party a landslide victory in 2024 needs to change.

Debates about the prospect of voting reform have been reignited by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, a potential party leader and Prime Minister, currently seeking a Westminster seat via the Makerfield by election. Sobel welcomes his support, arguing that now the traditional two party system is effectively dead, the way we choose our government has to evolve.

In an interview with the Byline Times Podcast, Sobel – Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Elections – said: “People need to have confidence that the seats allocated in Parliament follow the votes that are cast in a General Election, and that just doesn’t happen anymore. First past the post is a 19th century system based on having two large parties, but the proportion of the vote for the two leading parties has continued to decrease over time. If you look at elections in England, really it’s a five-party system; and six in Scotland and Wales.”

He points to the recent local elections, where one Labour councillor was elected with just 20% of the votes; while a fellow MP was elected at the last General Election with a modest 23% share. “That’s not legitimacy,” Sobel says.

Ironically, the fracturing of the electorate has worked to Labour’s advantage – at least in the short term. Thanks to the vagaries of first past the post, Sir Keir Starmer was the recipient of a handsome 174 seat Westminster majority two years ago, despite leading a party which polled 560,000 fewer votes than his supposedly ‘unelectable’ predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. Sobel argues that such a mismatch between votes cast and seats gained sows mistrust among the electorate, feeding a dangerous narrative that politicians are self-serving and out or touch.

Current polling suggests that if the current system was scrapped, the UK’s two traditional ruling parties would be the biggest losers, with insurgents on the left and right both enjoying considerable support. The Greens, and to a lesser extent Your Party, are eating into Labour votes; whilst the Conservatives are being outflanked by both Reform UK and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain. Suggest to Sobel that an alternative system might hand the keys of Downing Street to a far-right party, though, and he has a ready riposte: “If you look at the current polling, Reform will be a massive beneficiary of first past the post. They could form a majority on under 30% of the vote. So what may have [previously] guarded against extremes may actually usher them in; and then they may make changes to the way that democracy is, that lock everybody else out forever.”

One of the traditional arguments in favour of first past the post has been the suggestion that it provides stability and clarity across the five year span of a parliament. That’s hardly been the case in recent years, when Prime Ministers have been turfed out office with the frequency of football managers; and Sobel scoffs at the idea that the current system is inherently any more stable than the coalition governments which are usually formed by proportional representation.

“The only time recently we’ve had a five-year Government with the same Prime Minister was in a coalition – David Cameron,” he says. Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, lasted only three years, followed by the tumultuous 2019-2024 Conservative Government, when Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak all occupied the top job. “I’m not sure anybody thought that was massively stable Government,” Sobel observes drily. “The genie is out of the bottle – the extreme party could have a majority on 29% of the vote. Less than a third of the country would vote for them in the first past the post, but they could have over half the seats – that’s the way first past the post works when you have a lot of parties. But under most PR systems that would be flattened out, and maybe they would be able to be part of a coalition, but with another party that wasn’t so extreme.”

The question remains of which kind of alternative system the UK should adopt. The Scottish and Welsh Parliaments each use different proportional methods designed to better reflect the number of votes cast for each party; while Andy Burnham has said he favours a ‘Supplementary Vote,’ which allows electors to plump for a ‘second choice’ candidate. Sobel is calling for a National Commission to investigate the most appropriate method and has secured the backing of more than 100 MPs.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that the UK overwhelmingly rejected Proportional Representation in a referendum 2011, but Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, argues that we have moved into a significantly different political era. “These last 15 years feel like 50,” he said. “We’ve had Donald Trump, we’ve had Brexit, we’ve had the pandemic, we’ve had wars in Continental Europe. This has not been a regular period of time, and I think things have totally changed.”

Hughes also points out that voters are now much more willing to ‘shop around’ and switch party allegiance compared to previous generations.

“So you’ve got a massive change in political culture, and that’s come through quite heavily in recent years within the Labour Party itself. The party members have voted overwhelmingly to support proportional representation, the trade unions have made a big shift on that from where their position has been. The British Social Attitudes survey now has a majority of people wanting a change in the voting system. That hasn’t happened before. So there is a much different politics from the last time we seriously looked at the voting system issue, and that’s before you take into account just how people feel about the state of democracy right now. That means that we can’t simply carry on in the way that we’ve been going.”

Watch or listen to Adrian Goldberg’s interview with Alex Sobel MP and Darren Hughes of the Electoral Reform Society by clicking below

I grew up with stories of war, of starvation and people forced onto cattle trains, of children playing in tanks that contained the bodies of dead soldiers. The children were my parents.

My father was born in Czechoslovakia, in a German community that was a frontline in World War II. He described how the community would be left with the burden of clearing out the dead bodies after battle, and he vividly recalled climbing into tanks with the remains of the horrors of war.

He told me as soon as the town was cleaned up, which usually took about a month, the war would return. It was his job to conceal his three sisters in hay stacks, away from Russian soldiers.

Nearly a century later, as I listen to Alisa Kovalenko speak about conflict-related sexual violence, I realize for the first time that sexual assaults that occur during war are a weapon of that war.

Kovalenko, a documentary filmmaker whose new film Traces contains interviews with Ukrainian survivors of rape and torture, tells me: “Conflict-related sexual violence is not about sex, it’s really a weapon of war, and Russia is using this weapon systematically in Ukraine.”

Traces exposes how sexual violence and torture are used as tools of war from the point of view of six women survivors — a former economist and beauty salon owner; a civil servant; entrepreneurs; a farmer; and a teacher.

Kovalenko says the film offers “a collective portrait of trauma that opens a space for hope.”

She is a veteran, a mother, and herself, a survivor.

“It started with my own experience of captivity and sexual violence,” Kovalenko told Byline Times. “It was 2014 and I was still a student of film school — it was the Maidan Revolution first, we felt that it’s so important to document the events of Maidan, but at the same time, we were participants in the revolution — building barricades, making Molotov cocktails, and filming — so it was a big moment of change inside us as a civil society.”

After the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of Russian aggression in Donbas, Kovalenko, who was born in Zaporizhia in Northern Ukraine, decided to travel to Donbas to film the unrest.

“It was already quite dangerous, because there were lots of people arrested by pro-Russian combatants and Russian forces,” she said. “After two weeks of filming, I was captured at a pro-Russian checkpoint, and they brought me in for interrogation. A Russian, who said he was the head of the Counter-Intelligence Service there, interrogated me for many hours — threatening to torture me…if I do not tell them information, because I was also filming with one unit of a Ukrainian army in Donbas.”

She says she was raped by him and released after four days.

“He told me I should be thankful I was not executed.”

After her release, she didn’t talk about what happened to her, an attempt to not burden” her family or her partner with “this trauma.”

She soon learned that “you cannot just forget or put the memory in some place very deep inside yourself, or some shelf, it stays with you. For almost two years, I was silent about what happened, and then I went to an experimental documentary theater in Kyiv.”

She says it was at the theater that she was encouraged to explore her experience in captivity.

“It was an experimental documentary theater created called the Theater of Displaced People, and it was for reflecting on our reality of war,” Kovalenko said. “I decided to go there, and just to see what can happen. I started to share my experience of captivity without going into too much detail, and I also wanted to talk about other people who were in captivity and who’ve been tortured, and I wanted to find those people, and I wanted to tell their stories.”

She began to meet other survivors and was then invited to give a testimony to a 2018 Helsinki human rights organization, which was documenting war crimes. She found out she was the first woman from Ukraine to speak openly about such crimes.

Originally, survivors began meeting to help each other. The idea of a feature-length film came up.

“I was not sure if I could bear it, and if I could find enough bravery inside myself, because I realized that I have to dive into these old stories of trauma and captivity, and I realized that it can be kind of a retraumatization, full of triggers,” she said.

But as the women met and shared their stories, a movement grew, and the Ukrainian Government took notice. The women organized a conference, and the General Prosecutor’s Office attended, and 11 cases were opened.

How She Showed ‘Thanks’ to Her Tormentor

“After the full-scale invasion started, I went to fight. I became a soldier in a volunteer unit,” she said. “When I came back from the front line, together with Iryna Dovhan — a survivor-advocate, who founded Ukraine’s first survivor-led organisation SEMA Ukraine, with the support of the Dr. Denis Mukwege Foundation — we decided to make a documentary film. We had the opportunity to receive a small grant for documenting crimes against humanity, and we used this grant to start the film, because we saw this massive scale of violence, including conflict-related sexual violence, and we felt that now it’s really time to try to somehow to raise awareness more globally… I decided to sacrifice my feelings and my fears and get to work.

“We went to Kherson region, which was liberated, and started to document war crimes, and war crimes of sexual violence, because it was massive in Kherson region — it was 11 months of occupation.”

She soon learned how sexual violence was used deliberately to intimidate, destabilize, and assert control over occupied territories. She said the goal was “to break Ukrainians as a nation” – women and men, Ukrainian POWs, all targeted by Russian forces systematically. She identified how this torment leaves scars behind, visible and invisible traces, which became the working title for her film.

“When I arrived in the Kherson region, I saw these traces of occupation of war everywhere, you can see them in burning minefields,” she said. “I saw a burning tree, for me, it was the first time I saw a burning tree, and it was such a tragic picture. This tree was burning from the inside, and I had a feeling that the heart of this tree is on fire, and for me it was so strong, a metaphor about all of us inside, how we had this fire burning, and I could see so many traces – holes from bullets in the houses, but also so much invisible traces inside people – the invisible marks left on the human psyche.”

She set out on a mission to help survivors reclaim their voices.

“I felt that I couldn’t make a horror film,” Kovalenko explained. “And the more I listened to the stories and felt the strength of other survivors, I felt also this effect of healing myself.”

She recalls one very pivotal moment.

“I documented one woman who was speaking for the first time about her experience,” she said. “She was raped and beaten. She was 72 years old when it happened to her in the occupied Kherson region. Her house was bombed. She was living in a small building, in very bad conditions.”

The woman, Liudmyla Mefodivna Mymrykova, was a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature in a small village, where her school had been bombed. During the night, a Russian soldier knocked on her door.

“When she opened the door, he immediately hit her and broke all her teeth,” said Kovalenko. “They all fell on the floor, and he beat her, cut her stomach, broke her ribs, raped her, and left her a bullet from his Kalashnikov, so that she will remember what happened to her, and that she will never share this with anybody. Otherwise, he said he will come and kill her with this bullet. She was so terrified that he would come back and kill her, it took her two weeks to leave her home and escape to Ukrainian controlled territory.

“When we found her, she was in a very bad psychological state, and I was not even sure if her story will be in the film. But after one year, after we helped her with the rehabilitation process, and she arrived for the first time in Kyiv for a big conference on how to turn trauma into post-traumatic growth for survivors, she was smiling, and she was wearing a beautiful summer dress, and at that moment I realized that this smile was worth all my suffering.

“I was still in the process of editing this film, and yes, this film is about war crimes, but it’s more than that, it’s about human dignity, and it’s about how human dignity can triumph over this bottomless evil.”

She said that turning pain into power also helps change the narrative of the “mythology of victimhood”.

“There’s a sentence from the book Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag by Oksana Kis, which was very important for me to hear. ‘We survived, it means we won’. Surviving is a form of victory.”

She said the film, which was co-directed by Marysia Nikitiuk, became “about solidarity between women who are supporting each other, standing together, breaking silence, breaking stigma, fighting for justice. So, from horrors we came to the light.”

There’s a moment in the film where a survivor makes a decision to not give in emotionally to the oppression of her tormentor by continuing to have a joyful life.

The film made its world premiere in at the Berlinale, Panorama Dokumente 2026, where it won the Audience Award – Best Documentary; additional accolades include Movies that Matter Grand Jury Documentary Competition Award (Oscar-qualified award); Top 20 Audience Favourites – Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival; Millennium Docs Against Gravity: Smakjam Award for Best Production & Special Mention for Best Film in the Polish Competition.

Traces is currently in festival distribution, with national premieres taking place at international film festivals, as well as screenings organized within human rights and advocacy frameworks. It will be broadcast on ARTE in France and Germany in the fall.

Kovalenko says that the screenings have been “therapeutic for all of us, because we realize that we matter and our voices matter, and that we can really change something in this world.”

With the film becoming Oscar-qualified, Kovalenko says it gives her a unique opportunity to raise more awareness.

“It has no difference of gender, age, because there are also a lot of men who survived sexual violence. It is mainly, of course, sexualized torture by the Russians. We are now also working together with male survivors.”

On Friday, United 24 reported that the “United Nations has, for the first time, added Russian forces to its blacklist of parties suspected of committing sexual violence in armed conflicts, according to an annual report… investigators were able to verify 310 cases of conflict-related sexual violence in Russia and in occupied territories of Ukraine, involving both prisoners of war and civilians, with the vast majority of victims identified as men.”

Kovalenko wants people to know that conflict-related sexual violence is classified as a war crime, a genocidal crime, and a crime against humanity, and that there is no time limit for prosecuting perpetrators.

“The film is an act of resistance and an act of advocacy,” she said. “For us, it’s the recognition that Russia is systematically using conflict-related sexual violence as a weapon of war, and it’s super important that it will be recognized.”

View the official trailer for ‘Traces’ and help support the film’s impact campaign here.

Alisa Kovalenko is an award-winning Ukrainian documentary filmmaker, based in Kyiv. She studied documentary film directing at the Karpenko-Kary National University in Kyiv and at the Andrzej Wajda School in Warsaw. Her first two feature-length documentaries, Alisa in Warland (IDFA 2015) and Home Games (Sheffield Doc/Fest 2018) were both screened over 100 festivals, winning multiple awards. Alisa’s third film, We Will Not Fade Away, a teenage adventure documentary set in war-torn Donbas, premiered at the Berlinale 2023, won 20 international awards and was named Best Ukrainian Documentary 2023 by the Ukrainian Film Academy. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Alisa joined a volunteer combat unit associated with the Armed Forces of Ukraine and fought on the frontline for months, before returning to filmmaking. From this existential experience she has drawn a personal documentary, My Dear Theo (CPH:DOX 2025). Among the awards the film has received are: Best Human Rights Documentary (Dokufest), Audience Award (Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival), and Best Documentary in the Central and Eastern Europe Competition Section (Astra Film Festival). Alisa Kovalenko is also a former captive and survivor of CRSV in captivity in 2014 in the Donbas region controlled by Russian and pro-Russian military forces. In 2019, she became a member of SEMA Ukraine, an NGO of women survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine since 2014. Since then, she has been actively involved in human rights and advocacy activities related to CRSV in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Her personal experience and human rights activism led her to work on the documentary film Traces, which documents war crimes and amplifies the voices of survivors.

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

It may not seem like it, but British politicians are cheap dates. Nathan Gill, former leader of Reform UK in Wales, worked for Russia for just £40,000; Neil Hamilton took £2,000 per question, which wasn’t much of a price for someone’s honour, even in 1994. Sir Peter Viggers’ floating duck island, symbol of the excesses of 2009’s expenses scandal, cost a mere £1,645.

This is all to say that when you step back and look at Nigel Farage’s £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne, even when you compare it to illegal donations, you can see clearly how unusual it is. There has never been anything like it in British politics, and people are right therefore to be more than usually concerned about where it came from, why it was given, and how it was spent.

But step back further still, and Farage’s gift looks as quaint as a 1960s Bond villain. All the parties’ spending in the last British general election added together came to barely one-hundred-thousandth of the total for America’s presidential and congressional races that year. Fairshake, which is just one lobbyist for crypto in the US, has $165 million to spend on this year’s midterms, enough on its own to more than double the cost of a UK-wide contest.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that some US billionaires might be looking across the Atlantic right now and wondering why they should bother chucking so much money at SuperPACs when they could, for the cost of a single senate seat in Texas, buy a whole G7 country. And, let’s face it, that money wouldn’t be going to the Greens, to Labour, or even to the Lib Dems.

I know there are lots of crises clamouring for your attention right now, but the threat posed by electoral funding should trump them all because without negating it, there is no way to solve the others. Without a fair political system, we cannot elect politicians who will represent everyone, rather than just their donors; without adequate enforcement of the laws, there is nothing to stop politicians from cheating their way to victory and, once they’ve won, retrospectively approving their own triumph.

If we don’t get big money out of democracy therefore, there will eventually be no democracy. Once a political system has started to accept the kind of money that flows into American elections, there is precious little you can do about it. If a democracy has become a plutocracy, it is well on its way to oligarchy, and oligarchs don’t give up their power without a fight.

The Government has made some moves in this direction, but its efforts are inadequate and lack the urgency required. They must be strengthened, and then the rules must be robustly enforced by ambitious, independent and powerful investigative agencies.

The first threat is from money. Billionaires are accustomed to getting their way, and are highly skilled at obscuring their wealth behind shell companies, foundations, associations, and other structures, and spreading it among multiple jurisdictions, in order to do so. But these time-honoured ways of escaping detection are a clunky old video store compared to the streaming service smorgasbord that is provided by digital currencies that can be programmed to evade detection.

It is good that the Government has announced a moratorium on any donations made in cryptocurrencies, and tightened restrictions on how money can flow via companies, but that’s not enough. Only people can vote in elections, so only people should be able to fund them; and those people need to be taxpayers in the UK, on the electoral register.

This radical but simple reform would sweep away every available loophole, and every trick, and force political donors to be open and transparent about who they are, what they’re doing, and where their money comes from.

Political donations should be made, in sterling, from a British bank account (with the sole exception, for obvious reasons, of Northern Ireland), to make sure their origins are checked as thoroughly as can be. And there should be restrictions on how much any one person can give: £100,000 seems like a good limit to me, but I don’t mind as long as it’s comfortably in the low six figures. In recent elections, British parties have become increasingly dependent on large donors to fund their operations, which is a trend we need to reverse, if we want a healthy democracy. These rules should apply not just to the period before an election, but all the time.

The second threat is from cheats. Too often in the UK, parliament has passed strict rules to protect us – against sewage in our rivers; against money laundering on our high streets; or against bias on our airwaves – but those rules have not been enforced. Regulatory bodies are underfunded, demoralised, and lack the political support they need to do the jobs they’ve been given. This legalisation by under-enforcement needs to stop.

In 2022, Boris Johnson’s Government stripped the Electoral Commission of its powers to prosecute wrong-doers and undermined its independence by forcing it to follow a Government-imposed strategy, with many Conservatives at the time angry that the commission had fined Vote Leave for breaking funding limits during the Brexit referendum.

But the lesson to draw from that episode was that the commission had too few powers, not too many: what’s the point of fining a political party or campaign after it’s already won? The obvious lesson that politicians drew from such a futile punishment was to cheat. The body defending our democracy needs to be able to act quickly, decisively and robustly to keep corruption out of politics, and to make sure our politicians serve only the interests of their constituents.

In short, we need a good referee. Referees may lack the glamour of the players on the pitch but, if they’re incompetent, corrupt or unfit, no amount of skill will win a game.

We’re not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.

Finally, we need to remove one final avenue of influence-buying, which is the media contract. Although all politicians are technically able to earn money from media companies, in reality, only those on the far right do so in large quantities. Although it is well-known that GB News likes to send its billionaire proprietor’s money overwhelmingly towards politicians on the right, there are also reasons to be concerned about payments from social media companies, like X.

They pay politicians depending on how popular their posts are, but the posts’ popularity is determined by the companies’ own algorithms, which is to say they are deciding how much money to give politicians just like any other media firm, with a few extra steps added to give it spurious legitimacy. And this is not small change: hard right MP Rupert Lowe has recently been earning more than £3,000 a fortnight from X, which comes closer to doubling his salary.

But banning media contracts is just one way of stopping money from creeping into politicians’ pockets and, as ever with complex or incomplete prohibitions, would just create further loopholes. Politicians work for the people and, as with any other employment, should not be being paid by anyone else while on the job. Perhaps they need a pay rise but, once they’ve got it, that must be MPs’ only income.

The aim is to make the laws around how politicians are paid logical, simple and easy to enforce, so voters can trust their reasons for making decisions. That would create a firm foundation on which democracy can rest long into the future, safe from the interference of billionaires, whether local or foreign, and able to respond to everyone’s needs, not just those of the deepest-pocketed.