Nick Burdett

SHE REPORTED 1,400 CHILDREN BEING RAPED. THEY INVESTIGATED HER. Jayne Senior @Jes123tia456 spent 14 years as manager of Risky Business, a Rotherham Council project for vulnerable young women. For 14 years she handed evidence of systematic child sexual exploitation to police and social services. Names. Dates. Patterns. A 42-page intelligence report. She built the jigsaw piece by piece. They shut down her programme. They told her the records were rubbish. They told her she was rocking the multicultural boat. They told her the children were consenting. Children. Ten years old. She risked prosecution to become the source for Times journalist Andrew Norfolk, whose 2012 investigations finally broke the story open to the nation. The Jay Report in 2014 confirmed what she had been screaming into the void since the late 1990s: at least 1,400 children had been abused in Rotherham. Jayne got an MBE in 2016. The council got reputational damage it spent years managing. The officers got their pensions. When she filed complaints with the IOPC about senior police officers who had done nothing, the watchdog warned her that if she kept going, she would be labelled a vexatious complainant and could face imprisonment. She kept going. Her complaint was eventually upheld in 2021. The report naming the officers was never published. South Yorkshire Police @SYPTweet rejected the watchdog's findings. No officers were named. No further action was taken. Someone did warn her the officers might sue her personally if she spoke about it publicly. She spoke about it publicly. This is what accountability looks like in Britain. A youth worker risks prison to protect children. The institutions that failed those children close ranks, bury the reports, and threaten the one person who kept records. The children were the problem, apparently. Not the men. Not the police. Not the council. The woman with the filing cabinet. Source: The Times @thetimes, @BBC, @guardian , @yorkshirepost, Jay Report 2014, IOPC Operation Amazon 2022

How dare you. I grew up in Telford and was sexually abused for over a decade under a Labour council. Countless little girls like me were failed by Labour politicians like you. If you want to know how Labour REALLY treats abuse survivors, here’s my story: As many other girls in Telford have also testified, I was made to feel as though I was to blame. The system criminalised the victims, rather than going after the perpetrators. I remember being asked by a detective whether I “consented” at any point to sexual activity, and told by a social worker that “my actions had led me to where I was today”. All the while, the Labour-led council tried to block an independent inquiry into CSE for years and their Council Leader (now the MP for Telford), along with 10 other powerful local men, even wrote a letter to the Home Secretary saying they felt an inquiry would unnecessary. Little girls in Telford were branded child prostitutes and p*ki shaggers… …by West Mercia Police and local Labour councillors, no less. In Rotherham, Rochdale, Banbury and elsewhere — all Labour-led areas — victims were continually swept aside by those in positions of power, as if they chose this lifestyle. The attitudes that social workers, local services, authorities had towards children was so skewed, and so deeply unprofessional. My abuse continued for years, at the hands of multiple different men throughout my childhood and teen years. Eventually, I confided in a social worker and filed a police report detailing the years of abuse that I had experienced. And my case, like 96.5 per cent of all sex crime cases in the UK, never resulted in prosecution. I was told that there was an unrealistic prospect of conviction against any of my abusers, due to the historic nature of my case. I spent years in silence because I thought I would somehow be judged or penalised for the abuse I had suffered. Because I had been conditioned to feel like I was somehow responsible for my own victimisation. The Telford scandal made headlines when it broke in 2015, then again when the Crowther Report was released in 2022. Yet, the news cycle moved on. And Labour tried their best to ignore it. You voted against a national enquiry into CSE. You gutted the local enquires model. You promoted key figures in the scandal to MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT. You called victims “far-Right bandwagon jumpers” and grooming gangs a “dog whistle.” You failed. Deliberately. On every level. These are not crimes of the past. Kids are still being exploited, groomed, raped and even murdered in Labour-led areas like mine. It isn’t enough to have empty words and hollow promises. I even went on national TV to discuss Pakistani grooming gangs in Telford and the continued risk of abuse faced by little girls in my hometown. The next day, officers banged on my door, demanding I speak to them about my interview. They ignored victims for decades, but tried to intimidate me for speaking about their failings on live TV. CSE is a national epidemic. But Labour continues to treat it like a localised issue, choosing to believe that the extent of the abuse is contained to a few bad towns and pockets of bad apples. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Politicians like you, Bridget, refuse to address that fact for fear of being forced to confront your decades-long failure to protect young girls from abuse. It’s easier to ignore victims, especially when they come from communities, social classes or demographics that are already disenfranchised in Britain. And for those who do speak out, it feels like you are screaming at a brick wall that would rather label you as the problem than take you seriously. It was Labour councils. Labour politicians. Labour police forces. Labour MPs. You all knew. You were all complicit. How DARE you pretend to care about us now. You are a disgrace, Bridget.

A magnificent Red Kite perched on the top of our Cedar this morning, here in Northants. Would never have believed it back in the 1980s it when we travelled to remote locations in mid Wales to see them when there were only around 25 pairs left. Now breed next door!

The Golders Green suspect was previously sentenced to 9 years in prison for stabbing a police officer and his dog. Reform UK would strip Essa Suleiman of his citizenship and deport him from the country.

Yes, antisemitism it out of control in the UK. And it is linked to Islam because Islam is antisemitic. But no one is saying this.

There's something deeply disturbing about the closure of one of the oldest schools in England, which goes back to AD 631, its roll of headmasters to 1114, and numbers Thomas Paine among its former pupils. Our national educational heritage, sacrificed for an ideological tax grab.

The English Inn in the 1940s. “Walk through any English market town and you'll find the Inn at the centre of its life.”

🚨 Another day of shame for Scottish Labour MPs. Every single one of them has just failed to stop the prosecution of our brave, elderly veterans. Every single @ScotTories MP voted to stop it. This is a disgraceful way to treat those who served our country.

“Without perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use.” John Ruskin, at the annual meeting of the RSPCA [1877]

Yesterday's edition of the Financial Times carried a lengthy interview with Lord Hermer KC, the present Attorney General of the United Kingdom. If you haven't seen it: oh, boy. The interview was part of the FT's fluffy "Lunch With" feature, a sympathetic profile format whose previous subjects have included most of the 'grown ups in the room' of the British establishment over the last 40 years. The Hermer instalment was, by the FT's own pitch, an opportunity for the Attorney General to "open up about the Keir Starmer people don't see," and to explain the merits of the Chagos deal. The piece appeared. The comments section opened. And in those comments, you could see a country on the precipice of major change. The Financial Times's readership is not, to put it as politely as the situation will allow, known for its raucous lower-class anger. It is the readership of senior partners at City firms, central bankers, retired civil servants, retired ambassadors, and the broader metropolitan managerial caste of Britain at the fatter end. It is, on almost every available political question, the most reliably establishment-tarian readership of any newspaper in the United Kingdom. The comments, before they were closed, were so brutal that readers were openly asking for the article to be withdrawn and threatening to cancel their subscriptions in numbers the FT had not seen before. When the FT readership turns on a Labour Attorney General, the Labour Attorney General has a problem. If you were wondering what caused such an outbreak of fury from the terribly polite class, here's a summary of the last three decades of Lord Hermer's career. Lord Hermer, before he became Attorney General, made his name and his living as a human-rights barrister whose principal practice, for a meaningful slice of the relevant period, was the prosecution of civil claims against the British state. Suing his own country. He got particular mileage out of pursuing claims against the British armed forces, on behalf of foreign nationals alleging mistreatment by British servicemen and women in the field. The most notorious of these matters is the Al-Sweady litigation. Lord Hermer was lead counsel for eight Iraqi claimants who alleged that British soldiers had murdered, mutilated, and tortured Iraqi prisoners after the Battle of Danny Boy in May 2004. The claims occupied the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Military Police, and a public inquiry for the better part of a decade. The inquiry, at its conclusion, found the claims to be "wholly without foundation," and the result of "deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hostility." On 22 April this year, the Daily Telegraph published more than 25,000 pages of contemporaneous emails and legal documents from Lord Hermer's chambers' handling of the Al-Sweady litigation. Among the documents was an internal communication in his own writing, advising on how to "get the big story out there" and noting the need for "wriggle room if the killings did not in fact happen." Today's edition of the same paper carries further documents from the same info dump showing Hermer privately criticising serving British soldiers, in correspondence with his legal team, while praising publicly the Iraqi lawyers whose own clients the inquiry had found to be lying. Hermer has, rightfully, been formally referred Lord Hermer to the Bar Standards Board for serious professional misconduct. Lord Glasman, a Labour peer who knows him personally, has called him "an arrogant...fool." Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, has said directly that Hermer "aided false war crimes claims against British troops." (Fancy losing a moral high-ground to Boris Johnson...) This is the Attorney General. He is the chief legal officer of the Crown. The man whose entire constitutional function is to ensure that the legal interests of the British state are properly defended in the highest forums is a man who, before assuming the post, made his career attacking the British state on behalf of liars, liars whose lies were specifically calibrated to destroy the reputations of British servicemen and women. There is a word for this kind of legal practice when it is done at scale and in a particular direction. The word is "lawfare." The deployment of judicial mechanisms as a substitute for politics by other means. The systematic use of human-rights frameworks, judicial review, and aggressive litigation to constrain the actions of one's own state, to attack one's own armed forces, and to advance a worldview that the elected institutions of one's country have repeatedly declined to advance through the ballot box. It is, at its outer edge, a form of treason that wears a wig. And Hermer, who practices it, is an enemy of our state.

So the Ecologist for the consultancy company greenwashing the development plans for penrhos said, “no nature will be harmed,””rare plants will be dug up and moved” ( it doesn’t work ) so explain how bulldozing 27 acres of land like this “doesn’t harm nature”! Leaving Penrhos be won’t harm nature! plonking 500 chalets oh sorry 497 chalets,and 1000 space tarmac car park will cause so much damage to this unique site,once they destroy it ,you can’t replace it ! #SavePenrhos #AchubPenrhos 📸Roger Blease & Heather Parsons

Every other government: “You don’t want us to pay to educate your children? You’re offering to do it yourself? Thank you. How can we make it easier?” UK Labour: “Evil toffs! Count yourselves lucky we don’t close you down altogether!”

“The love of country is a deep and universal instinct... Men who deny their national spiritual heritage in exchange for a vague and watery cosmopolitanism become less than men; they starve and dwarf their personalities; they turn into a sort of political eunuch.” Stanley Baldwin

The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill is a betrayal of British soldiers past and present.

York Minster was built over 500 years ago. Its Gothic heart rose over more than 250 years from the early 13th century through to 1472 crafted by generations of medieval masons and carpenters working with hand tools, ropes, and sheer vision. Yet, today, with every advantage imaginable we rarely create anything that comes close in scale, beauty or enduring spirit.

Hermer said British troops never “made a real difference to people’s lives” when the difference his lawyer friend made was suing innocent British soldiers on behalf of Britain’s enemies. Let me tell you a story. In a lay-up in Musa Qaleh, northern Helmand in 2008, this small girl came up to our RWMIK Land Rover. She asked for food and we gave her some of our rations and something to drink. We also gave her our “how to speak Pashto” picture book. She was fascinated. I'm not sure she had seen a book before. We went through some of the little cartoon pictures with her and she pronounced the words for us. We never saw her again. If she survived the war, she would be maybe in her late twenties. She's almost certainly in oppressive hell, trapped in a burqa, essentially a slave to the men in her family. Denied an education, denied contact with the outside world, and denied freedom. I hope she remembers that brief hour of time when men treated her with kindness, dignity and compassion. It was only making a small difference, but it was a difference. That's far more of a difference than Hermer and his ambulance-chasing cronies ever made.

“It was not for them to heed the cries of anguish from those of their own people who already saw their towns being changed, their native places turned into foreign lands, and themselves displaced as if by a systematic colonisation...” Enoch Powell

If you want to know why the @UKHouseofLords should have hereditary peers sitting listen to Charles Courtney batting off channel 4’s latest diversity hire. Graceful and reasonable versus jealousy and envy. Britain existed long before these insurgents. And will do again.

What is being billed as the UK's biggest ever pollution case is being brought at the High Court in London by more than 4,500 people living or working along the River Wye. The case against chicken producers Avara Foods, Freemans of Newent Limited and Welsh Water is based on claims also involving the Lugg and Usk rivers that involve accusations that chicken manure and sewage polluted the waterways and turned them green and slimy. All three companies have denied the allegations.

Last year nearly 11,000 Pakistanis were refused asylum in the UK, but only 445 were sent back to Pakistan. Britain and Pakistan agreed an asylum returns deal in 2022. So why are they still here? thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…