Darren Foley

Founder | FLY Brand & Design Consultancy | Unlocking the potential of ambitious brands and businesses | Co-Founder of Plymouth Design Forum @designplym

[Burnside @BurnsideWasTosh]

"Hands up if you've ever run a business."

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

She Pledged Palestinian Freedom From A West Bank Pulpit. She Has Never Made That Pledge For Nigeria's Massacred Christians.

On Sunday morning Dame Sarah Mullally, the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, stood in a church in Birzeit in the occupied West Bank and told the congregation she would use her role to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve. It was a specific, named, actionable commitment. A promise from the senior Christian voice in Britain to one community in one conflict.

Search for an equivalent promise made to Nigeria's Christians and you will not find it.

In 2024 alone, over 4,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria, the majority by Islamist Fulani militia and Boko Haram affiliates. The Open Doors World Watch List, the most comprehensive annual survey of Christian persecution globally, documents severe persecution across more than 50 countries. Iraq's Christian population has collapsed from 1.5 million before 2003 to fewer than 250,000 today, one of the most complete destructions of an ancient Christian community in recorded history. The Coptic Christians of Egypt face sustained institutional discrimination and periodic massacres. Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing what some researchers describe as a slow motion genocide of Christian communities, conducted largely by Islamist groups, largely in silence.

Dame Sarah has not made a five day pilgrimage to stand with any of them. She has not stood at a pulpit in Kaduna or Cairo or Kirkuk and pledged to use her role to seek the freedom they deserve. The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, used his Christmas Day sermon at York Minster to say that Israel had committed genocidal acts. Neither Archbishop has used that language about the groups killing Christians in their thousands across Africa and the Middle East.

That asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects the ideological framework the Church of England has absorbed so completely that it can no longer see it operating. The same progressive institutional culture documented across British policing, the NHS, the BBC and the Ministry of Justice has captured the Church of England too. Its moral grammar has been rewritten. Suffering that fits the framework gets named, visited and pledged to. Suffering that does not fit the framework gets a footnote in an inaugural address that mentions Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo alongside Ukraine and Russia, carefully balancing the optics without committing to anything specific.

This matters because the Archbishop of Canterbury is not merely a religious figure. She is in law and in cultural memory the senior Christian voice in a nation whose institutions, laws, liberties and moral inheritance were built on Christian foundations. When that voice makes its most specific and most actionable commitment, it is not to the 4,000 Nigerian Christians killed last year. It is not to the last 250,000 Christians clinging on in Iraq. It is not to the Coptic families burying their dead in Egypt. It is to the community whose cause resonates most comfortably in the progressive institutional culture the Church now inhabits.

Justin Welby resigned over catastrophic safeguarding failures. Dame Sarah was installed while live safeguarding complaints against her remained unresolved. Abuse survivors called it a galling betrayal. The Church pressed ahead. The institution that could not pause a ceremony for its own survivors has found the moral clarity to make a specific political commitment from a West Bank pulpit within weeks of taking office.

The Church of England once stood for something that transcended politics. It spoke for the persecuted, the forgotten and the voiceless regardless of whether their cause was fashionable. It does not do that now. It speaks for those whose suffering fits the approved narrative and stays carefully silent about the rest.

Nigeria's Christians are still waiting. They will keep waiting.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I've signed. This is an unethical experiment on children who can't give meaningful consent.
https://t.co/zHvzVIyq7g

[Alfie Ramshaw @33JustBrowsing]

The UK borrowed almost as much in May 2026 alone (£23.3bn), as it did during the entire 2018/19 fiscal year (£23.5bn).

This is a slow motion disaster and almost no one is talking about it.

[Geoff Norcott @GeoffNorcott]

Say what you like about the Tories, at least their coups were entertaining.

This is like a slow-motion car crash between two milk floats.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

The problem with the welfare state and its confiscatory taxation system is that there are ZERO repercussions if politicians steal your money "legally" and squander it accordingly. Any system that decouples the natural link between causes and effects will lead to disaster. This is why what starts off as a small temporary levying of taxes more than 100 years ago becomes the tax code that we see today. Politicians do not view an individual's hard-earned money as theirs to keep. Rather they view your money as something that they allow you to keep a small portion of. Accordingly, you should be "thankful" that the government allows you to keep any of your money. This "proves" that they are kind and empathetic. It is a complete moral inversion of personal agency, liberty, and freedom. No system should take so much taxes from you that it forces you to work 10 extra years to make up for what was taken from you.

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

This is a national emergency. 🚨 over 1,000 illegal migrants in 4 days..
Hardly any of these men will be refused asylum.
Even if they are turned down almost none will be deported.
It’s incredibly dangerous.

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

Louise Haigh didn’t leave Cabinet in some abstract “personal reasons” reshuffle – she resigned as transport secretary after it emerged she’d pleaded guilty to a fraud offence for falsely claiming a work mobile phone was stolen in 2013.

Court documents show she admitted making a dishonest representation to obtain a new device, triggering an investigation and costs for her employer, and received a conditional discharge – the lowest sentence, but still a criminal conviction for fraud by misrepresentation.

That only became public because Sky News and others dug it out; within 24 hours, she was out of government, conceding in her resignation letter that the episode would “inevitably be a distraction” from her brief.

Burnham’s circle now wants to spin this same figure as a potential lead minister over exactly the sectors – transport, energy, housing – where public trust and billions of pounds of contracts are on the line.

[Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy]

Starmer lied about his intentions, lacked a mandate for what he did, and was never scrutinised until he was elected.

Are we really about to go through the same thing again?

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, Britain’s biggest trade union: “It is no secret that I disagree with Ed Miliband on almost every issue relating to a workers’ transition. Ed only seems to be interested in one side of the equation, rushing Britain to net zero with almost no thought for jobs, skills and national security.”
Couldn’t put it better myself.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

You have no idea what you’re talking about.
There is no punitive interest rate. They just reflect the scale of our national debt.
Every time the Tories increased spending in a crisis — pandemic, Ukraine — Labour demanded even more.
When it took over in July 2024 it increased borrowing by tens of billions.
Stop drivelling, do your homework and get back to me. Or don’t bother.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

🚨 I do not make historical comparisons lightly.

Your government, in line with UN priorities. is moving to crush all information not sanctioned by them.

In 1933, Goebbels argued that Germans needed protection from false information and dangerous ideas.

In 2026, Starmer says that British people need protection from “disinformation” and that social media platforms should prioritise BBC and state approved broadcaster content.

The comparison is NOT that Britain is Nazi Germany. That is a lazy argument.

The comparison is that Starmer’s government is pushing for more control over what citizens read, watch and think and that they claim it’s for our own good.

You are not free if the State decided what news you are allowed to view.

This is not the work of a government supporting democracy but one that
Doesn’t trust its citizens to keep them in power.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Hungary Stopped It In Six Months. Britain's Government Chose Not To.

In May 2025, Keir Starmer stood in Downing Street and told the country, "The experiment is over." Six months earlier, he had already explained what it was. Of his predecessors, he said, "Policies were reformed deliberately to liberalise immigration. This happened by design, not accident." Both statements are true. The experiment was deliberate. But it is not over.

In the first six months of 2025, the same period Starmer declared it over, 47 people were permitted to lodge an asylum claim in Hungary, a country of 9.5 million. In the same period, Britain received roughly 50,000. Both countries answer to the same conventions and hold the same tools. The difference between 47 and 50,000 is not capacity. It is choice.

The United States made the same choice this year. Border Patrol apprehensions fell to their lowest level since 1970, down from 1.6 million in 2021 to under 240,000. Net migration to the United States turned negative for the first time in half a century. This was achieved within months of a government deciding to act. Britain's government has not made that decision.

This is not new. In 2013, Peter Mandelson admitted that in 2004, under a Labour government, "we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people." Andrew Neather, who wrote the 2000 speech opening Britain's borders, later said the policy was intended to "rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date." Six of eight references to that policy's social objectives were removed before publication.

More recently, Professor Alan Manning, former head of the government's own Migration Advisory Committee, admitted that mass migration was used to paper over economic failure. A substitute for reform. The trade-off was understood. The warnings were issued. The decision was taken anyway, by both parties, across three decades.

What is new is the second half of the choice. Having decided, repeatedly, to expand migration rather than confront the harder political work, the same state has built the machinery to manage the response.

The government's own project delivery guidance states that British equality, diversity and inclusion policy is governed by the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Prevent's training classifies "cultural nationalism," the belief that mass migration threatens Western culture, alongside extremist ideology, broad enough to capture the Prime Minister's own warning that Britain risks becoming "an island of strangers." A new definition of Islamophobia was opposed jointly by Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh leaders, by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and by the government's own former anti-extremism adviser, who warned extremists would use it to deflect scrutiny. It was announced regardless.

The pattern repeats in how dissent is handled. After the 2024 riots, people were jailed for social media posts within days, sentences in the same range as those who set buildings alight. This year, the Technology Secretary Liz Kendall announced new powers to remove "incendiary" content during "times of crisis," definitions set by ministers, the same day the government's own terror reviewer revealed his questions about migration's national security implications had gone unanswered. One question produced legislation within forty-eight hours. The other, silence.

None of this is incompetence. Incompetence does not produce a 47 person asylum total in Hungary and a fifty-year low in US border crossings within months of two governments deciding to act, while Britain, holding the same tools, produces neither.

Choosing not to close a border is one decision. Branding concern about that choice as extremism is another. The two are not separate. The second protects the first.

"In May 2025, Keir Starmer stood in Downing Street and told the country, "The experiment is over.""

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The BBC Fabricated Trump's Words. Starmer Wants It Boosted For Fighting Disinformation.

This week, the same government that announced it would ban under-16s from most social media platforms confirmed a second policy. Force Facebook, YouTube and every major platform to algorithmically boost content from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. The stated reason is fighting disinformation. The timing makes that justification impossible to take at face value.

The BBC spliced together two separate parts of a Donald Trump speech, delivered an hour apart, to make it appear he had directly told his supporters to march on the Capitol and fight, while cutting the part where he told them to protest peacefully. This was not sloppy editing. It was a constructed sequence designed to produce a false impression of what was said. Trump is now suing the BBC for ten billion dollars. The corporation's own internal memo, leaked to the Telegraph last autumn, documented the edit alongside a pattern of other failures. Extensive uncritical airtime given to Hamas on BBC Arabic. A rogue unit of activist reporters censoring coverage of the trans debate to fit a predetermined narrative. A report calling car insurers racist that was found to be, in the BBC's own words, thoroughly wrong. This week it emerged the corporation sacked a presenter for criticising its Gaza coverage while taking no action against reporters who appeared to celebrate the October 7th attacks.

This is the organisation that Starmer wants boosted in the name of trusted information. Not a minor broadcaster with an isolated error. An institution funded by £3.7 billion a year in compulsory licence fees, facing a billion dollar lawsuit for fabricating a world leader's words, accused of one sided reporting on the most contested conflicts of our time, and now positioned by law to be placed ahead of every independent voice on every major platform in the country.

Put this alongside the under-16s ban and the pattern stops looking like coincidence. One policy restricts what young people can access. The other restructures what everyone sees first, adults included, engineering visibility in favour of the state broadcaster and against the independent platforms where this government's record, on Belfast, on Makerfield, on the asylum backlog and on every other documented failure, gets challenged daily by people it cannot easily silence. Bluesky escaped the social media ban despite its own documented child safety failures. The BBC gets promoted despite a documented record of fabrication. Both decisions share the same logic. Visibility for institutions the government finds comfortable. Restriction for the platforms where it does not.

Lord Young of Acton, the human rights lawyer who founded the Free Speech Union, put it with the right amount of contempt. The Prime Minister has apparently decided that censoring social media should be his legacy, which is strange territory for a former human rights lawyer to choose. It is strange only if you assume the goal was ever free expression rather than managed expression. Nothing in this government's conduct this month supports that assumption.

A government that needs to legislate prominence for its preferred broadcaster is not protecting the public from disinformation. It is admitting that its preferred broadcaster cannot earn that prominence on the evidence of its own reporting, and has decided to mandate by law what trust no longer provides voluntarily. That is not journalism policy. It is state media privilege written into platform regulation, arriving in the same fortnight as a ban on what sixteen year olds may read, from a government that is rapidly running out of ways to disguise what it is actually doing.

"The BBC spliced together two separate parts of a Donald Trump speech, delivered an hour apart, to make it appear he had directly told his supporters to march on the Capitol and fight"

[Colin Brazier @ColinBrazierTV]

Ours is an old country, millennia in the making. And to suggest - to insist - that we would be somehow lost without the Windrush Generation is a kind of folly close to being demented.

My latest Friday monologue.

[Fiona goddard @fionagoddarduk]

And the fact the MOJ keep saying they are releasing people like my abusers to make room for keeping serious criminals in prison is actually disgusting. When did the relentless rape, trafficking and all the other things involved in my abuse while i was only 14 to 18 years old,become not a serious offence?
When did child rape become a normal, slap on the wrist crime?
These men ruined my life for years. Took my innocence. Dehumanised me and broke me to the point I repetedly tried to take my own life just to escape from the misery I was trapped in. Only 9 ever faced prison, out of somewhere between 50 to 100 men that abused me! They called men from all over england to that house to rape children. One man was a known abuser of children in care for 20 years. I saw with my own eyes other girls they abused aswell. I was also told by the police they had links to unsolved murders and gun crime, yet apparently these are not serious criminals. The government says the grooming gangs commited some of the worst crimes ever, yet apparently that was a lie aswell because now they are saying they need to release these types of people to make room for serious criminals.
I really dont even want to be in this country any more

[S A M M Y Woodhouse @officialsammyuk]

Due to the Sentencing Act 2026, Arshid Hussain – the man who abducted and raped me as a child, and who did the same to dozens of other children – is being considered for early release. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison in early 2017 and was described as one of the most dangerous men in the UK. He was later convicted of further offences.

His brother, Basharat Hussain, is also being considered for release.

I honestly can’t put into words how disgusted I am with the British government.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

A welcoming present just out this morning for a Mr A Burnham to underline just how limited his latitude as PM will be:
The UK government borrowed £23.3 billion last month, 30 per cent or £5.4 billion higher than a year earlier.
It was also more than the £18.8 billion expected by most economists and the £17.7 billion forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s independent fiscal watchdog.
 The interest payable on government debt rose to £11.7 billion, the highest ever recorded in any May.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The EU Acted. Hungary Acted. The US Acted. Britain Signed Hotel Contracts Until 2039.

Yesterday the European Parliament voted 418 to 218 to pass the strictest returns legislation in EU history. The lead negotiator described it as the final missing piece of Europe's migration system. After almost twenty years of standstill, he said, Europe finally has effective return measures. The vote followed the Chișinău Declaration of 15 May, signed by all 46 Council of Europe member states, pushing back against the European Court of Human Rights' increasingly expansive interpretation of migration law. Europe's governments, operating inside the ECHR framework, have decided they have had enough of judicial overreach. They are acting anyway.

Britain's removal rate for illegal arrivals stands at 4%. The EU's removal rate, the number so catastrophically low it triggered yesterday's emergency legislation, stands at 20%. Britain is removing at one fifth the rate of a system the EU itself just declared broken beyond tolerance. While announcing it wants to stop the boats, the Home Office has signed accommodation contracts for asylum seekers running until 2039. A government that intends to remove people does not contract for 15 years of housing them.

The standard explanation is the ECHR. Ministers have cited it for years as the primary obstacle to removal, the external constraint that ties Britain's hands regardless of political will. It is worth examining that claim against the Court's own published data. Of more than 430,000 applications processed by the ECHR in the past decade, fewer than 2% concerned immigration. Of those, over 92% were dismissed. Fewer than 450 cases, one in every thousand applications to the Court, resulted in a finding of human rights violation on immigration grounds.

The obstacle is not in Strasbourg. It is in Chancery Lane. The domestic immigration tribunal system, staffed in part by judges whose documented backgrounds lie in open-borders advocacy, produces rulings that no democratically elected parliament ever intended and that the ECHR itself would not require. And the institutional machinery surrounding it ensures that challenging any of this carries consequences. A new Islamophobia definition, opposed by the government's own former anti-extremism adviser and by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is being embedded across every school, hospital, broadcaster and public body in the country. Two-tier policing, documented in Hampshire's own Race Action Plan and in the College of Policing's guidance, conditions officers to treat a racism accusation as the primary fact requiring response. The framework does not just permit the embedding of mass migration. It is designed to make objecting to it a disciplinary matter.

The EU has now demonstrated, within the ECHR framework, that effective returns legislation is achievable. Hungary has demonstrated that a 4% removal rate is a political choice, not a legal inevitability. The United States has demonstrated that border crossings can be reduced from 1.6 million to under 240,000 within months of a government deciding to act. Every external constraint Britain's government cites as the reason it cannot act has now been dismantled by other governments operating under comparable or identical legal obligations.

Mass immigration is not an act of nature managed by people smugglers. It is a policy choice sustained by successive governments across thirty years, maintained by an institutional framework that classifies concern about it as extremism, and defended by a legal excuse that the EU just voted 418 to 218 to stop hiding behind.

The smugglers did not build this system. The government did. Yesterday, 418 members of the European Parliament decided they had had enough of pretending otherwise. Britain's government has not.

"Mass immigration is not an act of nature managed by people smugglers. It is a policy choice sustained by successive governments across thirty years"

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Just to remind these same folk:
You’ve not lifted 1/2m kids out of poverty. You’ve just moved them over a bureaucratic line on a Whitehall spreadsheet.
Your ‘workers rights’ are destroying entry-level jobs, hitting young people disproportionately, where unemployment is now over 16%.
You have not transformed the NHS. It’s still the same old wheezing leviathan, just with a lot more dosh and still dismal productivity.
And you’ve nationalised steel and rail before. It was not the prelude to an economic or industrial miracle. Plus you will now have to include their demands for capital/subsidies among all the other priorities already crowding in on the public purse.
Other than that your reminder was useful. Thank you.