Clive Simpson

BREAKING: Sadiq Khan is set to be made a Lord by Keir Starmer, elevating him to the House of Lords. This is the second honour Starmer has given to Khan, following his Knighthood in the 2025 new years honours list.

Amnesty International’s comedy line up for Edinburgh Festival looks soooo good… Nish Kumar Rosie Jones Grace Campbell the nepobaby Deborah Frances-White More to be announced! Perhaps Jen Brister next?

am i allowed to say i've always hated when people refer to trans women as "dolls" ?? idk it's always felt really dehumanizing to me

Pakistan Says Britain "Spoiled" Shabir Ahmed. Its Own Figures Say Otherwise Tahir Andrabi, Pakistan's foreign office spokesman, had a striking choice of words this week. Asked why his government will not take back Shabir Ahmed, he said the child rapist had been "raised, groomed and, unfortunately, spoiled" by Britain. Read that sentence again. A man who spent years grooming children himself is described, by his own country's government, as someone who was groomed. The word is repurposed to make the perpetrator sound like a product of circumstance rather than a man who chose, repeatedly and deliberately, to abuse. Andrabi's underlying claim is that whatever produced Ahmed is a peculiarly British failure, something this country manufactured and must now clean up alone. Pakistan's own child protection statistics make that claim difficult to sustain. Sahil, an Islamabad-based charity that has tracked child abuse in Pakistan since 1996, recorded 3,364 cases of child abuse nationwide in 2024, an average of nine children a day. Its most recent count, covering the first half of 2025, found reported child sexual abuse cases had risen twenty per cent on the same period the year before. Punjab, the province of Ahmed's own birth, accounts for roughly three-quarters of all reported cases in the country. Sahil's researchers describe offenders acting "with near impunity," protection laws that exist on paper but go largely unenforced, and families choosing silence because they know reporting abuse may retraumatise their children rather than protect them. None of this proves Ahmed's specific crimes were shaped by Pakistan rather than Britain. He arrived here as a child and built his network of abuse decades later, in Rochdale, using takeaway shops and taxis he came to control as an adult in this country. That part of Andrabi's statement, that the offences themselves were committed on British soil under British law, is simply true, and nobody disputes it. What Pakistan's figures do undercut is the framing built around that fact, the suggestion that grooming and abusing children is something Britain instils and Pakistan does not. A country recording nine child abuse cases a day, with a justice system its own leading child protection charity describes as failing, is not well placed to suggest such crimes are foreign to its own society and native only to its former citizens' adopted homes. There is a harder problem sitting underneath the rhetoric too. Pakistan disputes Ahmed ever properly renounced his citizenship, while simultaneously refusing to accept him back, a position that only holds together if nobody examines both halves at once. Britain disagrees with Islamabad's account of the paperwork. That dispute, not moral philosophy about who "raised" whom, is what will actually determine whether Ahmed leaves this country. Britain's own failures in this case remain real and unresolved. Police missed warnings about Ahmed in 2005. A prosecutor's decision let him walk free after an arrest in 2008. A fifty-year-old immigration law sheltered him for weeks after his release, and Parliament is only now scrambling to close it. None of that disappears because Pakistan's spokesman reached for an ugly rhetorical device instead of a straight answer. But Andrabi didn't just decline to help. He offered a moral argument, and that argument invites scrutiny of the country making it. By its own charities' account, Pakistan is not a nation where child abuse is rare and imported. It is one struggling, by its own reckoning, with an entrenched problem of its own. "Tahir Andrabi, Pakistan's foreign office spokesman, suggested that Shabir Ahmed, had been "raised, groomed and, unfortunately, spoiled" by Britain."

🚨 WATCH: Andy Burnham reveals he puts milk in his tea before water "It softens the tea bag a bit and makes it stronger"

“People have to take clear positions quickly.” It’s incredible that Burnham is giving an interview to Gary Lineker while refusing to answer questions in the Commons. It’s also becoming increasingly obvious that he’s going to capitulate to the pro-Pal mob. It won’t win back the Muslim vote.