Louise How

Antisemitism is on the rise. The Al-Quds protests and terror marches are helping fuel it. We need a shared British identity. The Conservatives are going to fight for that. We will root out the separatism tearing Britain apart.

A 19-year-old Royal Holloway student — Brodie Mitchell — was suspended after a Freshers’ Fair exchange with an anti-Zionist activist who called him a “wannabe Jew”.   He responded by asking why she was wearing a “tea towel” — referring to the keffiyeh-style head-dress she was wearing.   The university suspended Brodie, locked him out of campus and his accommodation — despite having no contractual right to do so — and launched major misconduct proceedings that could have led to his expulsion.   While Brodie faced disciplinary action and serious disruption to his studies, the other student continued attending campus as normal.   The process was deeply unfair and a blatant example of double standards for speech on campus. Royal Holloway was allowed legal representation at the hearing — but Brodie was not.   Now the university is spending vast sums on lawyers to defend its actions in the High Court — wildly disproportionate to the case and seemingly designed to bully a 19-year-old student out of the litigation. Royal Holloway’s conduct is, in our view, disgraceful and intolerable. The Free Speech Union is proud to stand by Brodie in fighting back against this attempt to bully him.   With the support of the Free Speech Union, Brodie is now back on campus — but under onerous conditions restricting who he can talk to and what he can say. Royal Holloway proposes that Brodie face expulsion for any further breach of university rules, no matter how minor.   The enactment of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 was a step-change in the protection of freedom of speech on English campuses. ‘Business as usual’ is no longer good enough – universities need to get serious about tolerating their students’ free speech. Royal Holloway, however, does not seem to have received the memo. It is time to remind them, forcibly, of their duties.   We are challenging the restrictions and asking the regulator to investigate. To help Brodie, and other FSU members in similar predicaments, please give to our legal defence fund. Any donation you make will go into a general fund which will pay for the best legal representation for members under threat.

@timothy_stanley The first time that I have disagreed with you.

The British Government's position is nuanced, clear, and correct. It's also frightfully dull, so will play badly on social media.

Britain steps up its strategic role in the Iran War by updating its travel advice.

Legality is important. But so also is morality. There is a very strong moral case for answering the call when a country's own people have been sacrificing their lives to overthrow a regime that kills, maims, tortures and rapes its own citizens, as well as fuelling acts of savage terror across the whole of the Middle East.

To know the truth about the grooming gangs, we must have access to court records, at every level. The culture of secrecy in many of our institutions helped cover up these crimes in the first place. Labour must not be allowed to do this. The public deserves to know the truth.

@RachelGur @havivrettiggur Wow. Just wow. Perfect truth, spoken well.

For all those who asked, here is a clip of @havivrettiggur responding to masked protesters interrupting his lecture at Haverford College on February 1, 2026. Enjoy and learn.

@koshercockney I’ve met Gove a few times and this does not surprise me at all.

Wow. Did not expect this amazing response from Michael Gove when confronted with a woman spewing bullshit the usual Lies and Hate about Israel. Absolutely spot on from Gove. 👏🏽

@HenMazzig Steph is clearly an imbecile.

Amazing how Western activists are experts on Gaza from day one, but when it comes to thousands of Iranians being murdered in the streets, suddenly they’re ‘not educated enough’ to have an opinion.

🚨"The BBC, on Holocaust Memorial Day, failing to mention that it was Jews who were targeted." "You DON'T hate the BBC enough. I don't even think I can morally justify paying the licence fee anymore. I think it's immoral to give these people money now." @JuliaHB1

There was so much talk about the protests in Iran – but they drowned in blood. The world has not helped enough the Iranian people, it has stood aside. What will Iran become after this bloodshed? If the regime survives, it sends a clear signal to every bully – kill enough people, and you stay in power.

I’m not afraid. I’ve been dead for 47 years this is the voice of a woman in Iran who is fed up with the Islamic republic. 47 years ago, the Islamic Republic took our rights and turned a nation into hostages. Today people have nothing left to lose, they rise. Iran is rising.

To understand how the grooming and rape gangs operated so widely across Britain for so long, you need to see this story. Last November, West Midlands Police banned Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending a football match in Birmingham. They lied repeatedly about why. The force has disgraced itself. It has surrendered the streets of Birmingham to Islamists. If the Chief Constable Craig Guildford will not resign, he must be sacked. This is what really happened. It is a remarkable story about where power lies in modern Britain. Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv are both in the Europa League, a football competition for teams across Europe (and slightly further afield too). They were due to play one another at Villa Park, Aston Villa’s grounds, which is in Aston in Birmingham. The match was scheduled for November 2025. In late October 2025, West Midlands Police announced that Israeli away fans would be banned from going, initially claiming the decision was based on the threat posed by Maccabi supporters themselves, citing “intelligence” from earlier matches abroad. We now know that claim was entirely false, and merely the first in a long chain of lies designed to conceal why this decision was really made. The original decision was taken by the Safety Advisory Group (a body bringing together the police, local representatives and stadium officials) on the 7th of October. Waseem Zaffar, who sits on Birmingham City council, is a member of the group. He had previously called for a boycott of Israel; he did not recuse himself. Thanks to outstanding investigative journalism by the Sunday Times, we have access to leaked minutes from that meeting. They show the police at the time justified their support for the ban on the basis of “personal professional judgement” and “in the absence of intelligence”. It was only after this meeting had taken place that a council staff member raised concerns that when published, their decision may be perceived as holding “anti-Jewish sentiment.” In response, the local authority convened an additional Safety Advisory Group meeting on 23rd October, where new written evidence was submitted to explain the reasoning behind the ban. Far from the decision being made in an “absence of intelligence”, there was now seemingly substantial evidence that Maccabi fans posed a real threat to the community. The only problem with this evidence is that it was completely made up. The document they created relied heavily on supposed “intelligence” from a Maccabi match in the Netherlands a year earlier, and contained a series of allegations about Israeli fans targeting “Muslim communities.” You can have a read yourself (look at the pictures grid if you can't see it here). So did Israeli fans throw civilians into a river? They did not. According to Dutch police, the opposite happened: an Israeli was thrown into the river, and witnesses reported locals would only help if he shouted “Free Palestine”. The doc says the Israelis “had received military training” - something not mentioned in the Dutch report and dismissed by Dutch police, who spoke to the Sunday Times. It includes the dubious statement that fans were linked to the IDF. A spokesman for the Amsterdam division said his force had never seen such intelligence and that the claim was ‘meaningless.’ Even the most basic facts were entirely fabricated. The West Ham match mentioned did not exist. It simply never happened. And the 5,000 police deployed in Amsterdam? More than four times as many as the real figure (1,200). Might the West Mids Police just have got that wrong? No way. Because police were already aware of the correct number at the earlier 7th October meeting. The force actively chose to fake the numbers. Possibly the most revealing discrepancy of all appears in the risk assessment for the region's ethnic minorities. Minutes from the 7 October meeting said the threat to Muslims was low, but the final document released had upgraded that to ‘high’. Meanwhile the threat to Jews, previously assessed as medium, disappeared entirely. The final report released on 23 October was clearly fabricated to retrospectively justify a decision that police themselves had earlier admitted was made “in the absence of intelligence”. It gets worse. Because actually, the earlier decision *was* made based on intelligence. But the intelligence did not say the Israeli fans were a threat to groups in Birmingham. It said the opposite. Let’s look at the community engagement programme that the police had undertaken prior to making the decision. Ahead of the ban, officers held what they described as “extensive consultations”, meeting with representatives from eight mosques to discuss the presence of Israeli supporters at the match. At least three are on record hosting Islamist extremists and antisemitic preachers. These included Jamia Mosque, which hosted a preacher that, shortly after the Hamas October 7th massacre in Israel in 2023, said, “Allah, count them all and kill them one by one, and don’t let any one of them get away”. Green Lane Mosque, another one of the eight consulted, has hosted a preacher who provided a guide on how to stone a woman to death (“There must be a hole dug in the ground, and she must be buried up to half of her body, and then she is stoned to death”). This is the same group that had its £2.2 million in Government funds suspended after one of its preachers was found stating that “homosexuality is not permissible.” Then there was Al Habib Trust, who hosted a preacher who, just days after October 7, urged followers to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous antisemitic propaganda text detailing a Jewish plot for global domination. And what did these men (for they are all men) have to say about visiting fans from the world’s only Jewish state? Well, those meetings don’t seem to have been minuted (surprise). But earlier this week, when questioned by the Home Affairs Select Committee, West Midlands Police revealed that the original reason for the ban was not based on the threat posed BY Israeli fans, but on the threat posed TO Israeli fans. They had received “high confidence intelligence” that vigilante groups within “the community” in the West Midlands wanted to “arm” themselves and attack the Israeli fans. This is exactly the opposite of the public justification given for the ban. Maccabi fans didn’t pose a unique threat to ethnic minority groups within the community, Maccabi fans were *at risk* from ethnic minority groups within the community. The Police knew this, but decided to reward the violent, punish the potential victims, and cover the whole thing up. And why did we only learn of this fact this week? Well, when asked at a public committee hearing the chief constable astonishingly said: “I think this is the first time specifically that you have asked for that detail.” The breathtaking level of dishonesty with which the force has approached the whole saga indicates that this is hardly the first time they have done this. But we have more concrete evidence than that. Back in 2024, the force decided not to engage with a mob armed with weapons after consulting “community leaders”, to allow the community to instead police “within themselves”: And why is this an insight into the grooming and rape gangs? Well, West Midlands Police are also the force who in 2010 suppressed a report detailing how Pakistani Muslim men were sexually grooming girls, apparently due to fears of inflaming racial tensions. But as we’ve seen several times now, the truth will out in the end. The Police exist to protect us. It is their responsibility to enforce the law: to protect the law-abiding and punish the lawless. We allow them, and them alone, to use violence to stop the violent. West Midlands Police have shown that they have abandoned this duty for an easy life, time and again. The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has the power to fire the Chief constable under Section 40 of the Police Act 1996. She should use it.

@Katie_Lam_MP Brilliantly explained. Thank you.

@NiohBerg Don’t fight it. Embrace it. You have every reason to be emotionally overwhelmed at the sight of something that you have hoped for your entire life.

I'm trying so hard not to be overwhelmed with emotion. I can hardly believe my eyes. 😭❤️

Remarkable by the Times Resign Chief Constable or be fired

@koshercockney And to you and yours. Thank you. 🙏

From this Jew - Wishing a very Merry Christmas To my Christian brothers and sisters and to all those that aren’t that religious but celebrate it anyway. Keeping you and your loved ones in my prayers that wish you all a blessed New Year too. Thank you for all your support lately and sending love from my family to yours.

I am reposting out of anger! Never in my wildest dream, I thought such betrayal of girls from academia. To compare mutilation like FGM with cosmetic surgery is a not just a bad call; it is indication that cultural misogyny has infiltrated the academic elite Girls are now betrayed by those who stand for them. That is appalling thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/…

All across London, menorahs were vandalized. This week, the darkness has seemed insurmountable. But remember: They may destroy our candles, but they will never extinguish our light.