Martin Hayward

Strategic advice and thought leadership for the Loyalty, Retail, Insight, Financial Services, Telecoms, Media and Consumer Goods industries.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Jonathan Reynolds claims defence spending has already increased substantially under Labour. He repeated it in all his interviews on the Sunday morning round. Nobody called him out. Jon Sopel even agreed with him saying ‘I know’. Here are the facts about total defence spending in constant 2025/26 pounds:
2024/25: £62.3 billion, a figure inherited from the Tories.
2025/26: £62.0 billion — so a small real-terms fall in Labour’s first full year.
2026/27: planned and after Defence Investment Plan top up:£67.0 billion.
So a rise of under £5 billion from 24/25 despite growing international tensions/threats. And even that includes several Treasury fiddles. It’s peanuts compared with the threats/challenges.
Labour will double net zero subsidies to £40 billion between now and 2030. Giving away the Chagos Islands will cost many billions more. Both seem more of a priority than defence.

[Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy]

There’s a cover-up.

Extremists almost certainly influenced Labour's "Islamophobia" definition.

But ministers have deleted the evidence.

It’s a clear breach of their own rules on keeping important records.

And possibly the ministerial code.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

The threat level against the country continues to grow yet the Burnham government has told the British Army to cease major exercises with Challenger 2 tanks and Apache gunships to save money.
Our Bus-Conductor-in-Chief can find money for all sorts of gimmicks that allow him to play to the gallery. But not for essential defence spending. Unforgivable.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Genius. Good to see the Chancellor concentrate on the big issues. This step alone will assuage the bond markets. I expect yields on UK gilts to be tumbling by lunchtime. Job done.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Britain continues to come off badly in a second day of worldwide bond sell-off. Yield on 30-year gilts hit 5.89% = higher mortgages. As I write, 10-years are over 5.26%.
Alas the nation’s Bus-Conductor-in-Chief said nothing to calm the markets in his Commons debut yesterday.
He was too busy parking his bus in the 1970s. Such a great decade for dear old Blighty. I’m sure we all can’t wait to get back to it.
Pretty much all foretold in yesterday’s column:

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Andy Burnham is back & he sounds the same as before | Andrew Neil https://t.co/YcTT4u3rAB

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

If the migrant crime data exists it must be published.
It belongs to the British people.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

A Labour justice minister spent £34,000 of public money on a trip to the US during the World Cup.

Jake Richards, whose responsibilities include youth justice reform, said the aim of the trip was to learn from the “globally recognised system” in the US.

🔗: https://t.co/VGgTxqw5Vk

[Esther McVey @EstherMcVey1]

Completely unacceptable. Thursdays have become a ‘no-go day’ for women in the English town of Braintree the Mailonline reports.
The reason: It’s the day hundreds of young male migrants are bussed into the town from Wethersfield asylum accommodation 12 miles away.
The men, mainly African & Middle Eastern in their 20s & 30s hang around the bus depot whistling at the schoolgirls as they step out from the buses, making it a ghost town.
This summer it was announced this site will stay open beyond 2027 & the capacity will rise by more than 50% to 1,245.
Where is Andy Burnham? In his bunker? Hiding in his newly created £110m per year No 10 of the North playing his guitar?
He has an opinion on virtually everything from pork scratchings to how he has his tea, but it seems no interest in asylum seekers descending on towns and villages.

[Katharine Birbalsingh @Miss_Snuffy]

Cover of the Spectator this week! 😂

When a friend sent this to me, I thought it was a joke. But it is on the stands…

Great article in it from @michaelgove on his fight as Ed Sec to change things for the better and the various schools that came out fighting on top. 💪

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

Why doesn’t BBC Verify do some digging instead of parroting Home Office propaganda?
The asylum seekers are still here.
They’ve just put them somewhere else!

[Chris Philp MP @CPhilpOfficial]

Flagrant racism from MI5 & GCHQ

White applicants for summer 2027 internships - incl. from disadvantaged backgrounds - can’t apply

The scheme must be scrapped

Applications should be merit-based & colour blind

Working class white boys are among the most disadvantaged - yet are ignored

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

'There is no longer any room for doubt that violent and sexual attacks on British women, girls and children by illegal migrants and other men from misogynist cultures are shrugged off as collateral damage by a Government that refuses, for reasons of political expediency and ideological preference, to protect them'

@AllisonPearson asks 'why aren’t we angrier?' 👇
https://t.co/CBBZjxsnrH

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

The Government must come clean over whether extremist groups were able to influence its Islamophobia definition — now repackaged as “anti-Muslim hostility”.

A Freedom of Information (FOI) request from Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy has revealed that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government deleted all responses submitted to the consultation carried out by the Working Group tasked with drafting the definition.

As Melanie Phillips writes in The Times: “When a government department starts shredding the evidence behind its decisions, it’s a fair bet that it has something to hide from the public.”

The whole process has been shrouded in secrecy. The Free Speech Union exposed that all five members of the Working Group had previously been sympathetic to the need for a definition and had troubling links to Islamist organisations, including the Muslim Council of Britain and MEND — both of which successive governments have maintained a policy of non-engagement with.

The Working Group ditched the term “Islamophobia”, following criticism from groups including the FSU, which warned that such a definition would have a chilling effect on free speech. Accusations of Islamophobia have long been used to silence legitimate criticism of Islam, and this definition risks exacerbating that problem.

Nick Timothy himself was branded an Islamophobe, reported to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and even faced calls to resign after criticising a public Muslim prayer event in Trafalgar Square.

The Communities Department has denied that extremist groups were involved in the process and says consultation responses were deleted in line with data-protection requirements.

But that does not explain why the Government cannot disclose which organisations contributed to the consultation.

The Muslim Council of Britain and MEND have long campaigned for an Islamophobia definition. The public deserves to know whether they — or other similar organisations — were given an opportunity to influence it.

There are already laws protecting people from religious hatred and discrimination. There is no need for this definition.

If the Government is serious about tackling genuine anti-Muslim hatred, it should enforce the laws already on the statute book — not introduce what risks becoming a de facto Islamic blasphemy law.

Yet the Government is actively encouraging public bodies, private organisations and charities to adopt the definition.

The FSU has already successfully challenged South Wales Police after it attempted to implement an even more zealous version, under which officers were instructed to record comments that went beyond “legitimate” discussion of Islam.

Just 45 minutes after the then Communities Secretary, Steve Reed, unveiled the definition in the House of Commons, pro-Gaza MP Iqbal Mohamed asked whether it could be incorporated into the Nolan Principles of Public Life.

Had that happened, parliamentarians could potentially have faced sanctions for raising concerns about issues such as Islamist extremism and the grooming gangs scandal.

Phillips concludes: “Self-censorship is bad enough. But now there has been government censorship of the process by which that self-censorship is to be turned into outright submission.”

The Government must come clean about who helped shape this definition.

Read more in The Times below 👇

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

This is appalling. Any sexual or violent assault committed by male predators released after serving only half their sentence will lie at the government’s door. They are yet again sacrificing the safety of women and girls to political expediency.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

UK energy policy just got even more bonkers:
The Burnham Government is considering investing billions of pounds in new facilities to import foreign LNG, even though it refuses to issue any new licenses for North Sea gas, which emits 3/4 times less CO2 than imported LNG. Madness.

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

This is a very serious event

She deliberately destroyed evidence so that the British public would not be able to know about it.

She should be fired

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Amnesty International has truly lost the plot. It is promoting a so-called “Arday's law” which would to impose state-mandated limits on press coverage of one person. No doubt thru an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’ Truly totalitarian.
Defund @AmnestyUK.

[Lord Ashcroft @LordAshcroft]

Where do you even start to unpack this:-

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

The economic illiteracy of so many current Labour backbenchers knows no bounds.