Maureen Carter

I'm an ex-BBC TV journalist/producer. I now write two crime series. I stand with women and believe in facts not feelings, fantasy or fairy stories.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Just before PMQs, at the despatch box, she called one of my MPs a racist. She’s just said it again on Radio 4.

The hordes of Labour MPs rushing to twitter to whine about me calling her “spiteful” are just exposing their own hypocrisy.

They love to dish it but they can’t take it.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

"I grew up on a council estate" is not an excuse for failure. You are sacrificing the future of generations of kids on the altar of your class envy -reversing even Labour's academy reforms.

0% of teachers think you're doing a great job. I'm not here to give you a pat on the back.
I speak for those people whose lives you're destroying and I'll NEVER stop speaking up for them.

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

We need to start demanding a General Election at the end of this Tory leadership election.

They were all elected on a manifesto promise to level up the North and are all abandoning it.

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

I think this hashtag needs to be trending tonight, don’t you?

#GeneralElectionNow

[Maureen Carter @getcarter4]

Nothing uncouth about stating the truth.

[Julie Burchill @BoozeAndFagz]

@MaglocL @Docstockk @ThePosieParker @spikedonline @bindelj Yes, that was quite *unsisterly* - she dismissed me as 'the ex-NME journalist' or something equally flimsy. I left the NME at 19 and I've been a published writer for 50 years. And at the risk of being uncouth about it, I'm a better bloody writer than ANY of that crew.🥳🥳🥳

[Caterina 🌈 @Caterin00138072]

Another glorious day raising awareness! Biology does matter & so do us women & our rights to have our own category free from males in it!

#savewomenssport

@mara_yamauchi @wsusportsunion @SportSEENuk @WomensRightsNet @WomenChilterns @ForWomenScot @WRNWales @NWalesReSisters

[Maureen Carter @getcarter4]

@DreyfusJames Thank you for still being able to make me laugh in dark times.

[Maureen Carter @getcarter4]

@arusbridger A remarkably stupid comment from a supposedly intelligent man.

[Maureen Carter @getcarter4]

'Starmer will never take the knee for Henry Nowak. Not because Henry was less innocent than Floyd. But because Henry's death is an indictment of everything Starmer stands for. Floyd's death was an opportunity. Henry's is a reckoning. That is the difference.'

And that is the tragic truth.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Because George Floyd's death could be made to serve the progressive narrative. It fitted the framework that the left had spent fifty years building. Institutional racism. Police brutality against Black people. White supremacy. Every element of the BLM ideological apparatus was designed for precisely that case. When Floyd died the machinery activated within hours. Starmer took the knee because the political cost of not doing so within that framework was higher than the political cost of doing so.

Henry Nowak's death cannot be made to serve that narrative. His killer used the progressive framework as the murder weapon. A racism accusation deployed against a dying white boy to manipulate the officers sent to save him. His case does not vindicate the ideology. It exposes it. Taking the knee for Henry would require Starmer to acknowledge that the training frameworks his party built, the Race Action Plans his Home Secretary advanced and the institutional capture his movement conducted over fifty years produced the officers who handcuffed an innocent boy while his killer chose his food in a police kitchen.

Starmer will never take the knee for Henry Nowak. Not because Henry was less innocent than Floyd. But because Henry's death is an indictment of everything Starmer stands for. Floyd's death was an opportunity. Henry's is a reckoning. That is the difference.

[Caterina 🌈 @Caterin00138072]

Come on @parkrunUK you know this is silly now! There’s only one type of woman but there’s an infinite abundance of personalities! Time to start making sense & being fair to 51% of the population!

#savewomenssports

@mara_yamauchi @wsusportsunion @SportSEENuk @WomensRightsNet

[Outpost Studios @OutpostStudios]

The True Story behind the Murder of Henry Nowak.

The week's Brazier, with @ColinBrazierTV.

Only on @OutpostStudios.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

We should retire the phrase "two-tier policing." Not because it's not true - as per official police materials, it pretty clearly is - but because it goes nowhere near far enough.

When you look at tragedies like the death of Henry Nowak and try to capture it with a term like "two-tier policing", you end up inadvertently masking a vast constitutional catastrophe underneath a complaint about general procedure, something a review and a reworded leaflet can put right.

What happened to Nowak is a single visible outcrop of something far larger and far worse: the capture, one institution at a time, of the British state by the belief-system of a particular class. It is something to which the public are, slowly-but-surely, awakening, but it's well short of the reckoning it requires.

After all, we have a word for people who steal from an institution. We call it corruption - it is endemic in British public life, by the way - and we know what to do about it. But we have no working word for the thing that is worse: an ideology quietly replacing an institution's reason for existing. A virus of the institutional mind, a toxin of the institutional soul.

A police force exists to protect the public. But a captured police force exists to advertise its own virtue, and will leave the public to bleed on a pavement to do it. You needn't take this on faith: they wrote it down. The police's own Race Action Plan states, in black and white, that equal treatment is the very thing it has set itself against. The institution rewrote its purpose and published the confession, though it expects your submission, rather than your forgiveness.

Nowak's death is the product of that inversion. An officer trained to treat the accusation of racism as the most urgent fact in the room met a dying boy and a lying killer and performed exactly as trained. Nothing has malfunctioned here, nothing at all. The system did precisely what it is now built to do.

And it's not one rogue patrol, either, though the truculence of the Hampshire police commissioner in the face of his officers' malfeasance might tempt you to think otherwise. The same disease runs through institutions with nothing else in common.

Consider William Shawcross' review of Prevent, which found a counter-terror system so warped by fear of the word "Islamophobia" that barely a fifth of its referrals concerned Islamism, while four-fifths of live terror investigations did: an apparatus that exists to see the threat, trained not to look at it. Closer to home, we all know how forces now log tens of thousands of "non-crime hate incidents" - speech that broke no law - while most actual thefts end without a suspect even being sought. Captured institutions keep working. They simply pour their effort into whatever the creed rewards.

None of this is mysterious. Robert Conquest's old law holds that any institution not deliberately kept to its purpose drifts, sooner or later, toward the reigning orthodoxy. Bolt onto that a personnel machine - the diversity directorate, the recruitment that quietly screens for the right opinions - that makes careers out of professing the creed and ends them for doubting it, and the capture becomes self-sealing, because the captured now do the hiring.

What turns this from a blunder into a betrayal is who holds the beliefs and who pays for them. These are what Rob Henderson calls luxury beliefs, and beneath them sits the truth Christopher Lasch named thirty years ago in The Revolt of the Elites: a credentialed class that has seceded from the common life and no longer shares the nation's fate. The beliefs are status markers, costless to the people who profess them, because that class is insulated by the good postcode and the private option from every consequence of what it believes. The bill falls entirely on the people without the buffers - the boy stabbed on a night out, the girl in a town the council won't name being pimped around a circuit of cab drivers who may well be flying their cousins in from overseas to join in their activities.

A doctrine experienced as compassion by the people who hold it that is paid for in the blood of the people who don't.

And when one of those victims dies on camera, the same class looks the country in the eye and tells you that the thing you have just watched didn't happen, and that to have noticed it is the real bigotry.

There's no point talking about reviews or inquiries. We're passed that point. If you want this to stop, you need to be thinking about institutional recapture. We need to commit people, means, and time to the task of hauling each institution back to the job it was built for:

- The police to protect
- The courts to judge on the evidence according to law delivered by a mandated parliament
- Local councils devoted to matters of local import, rather than those which spend their times siphoning away procurement funds and pontificating on matters of obscure foreign policy

...and restoring the most unfashionable principle left in British life, that the state is blind to who you are and answerable only to the truth. Equality before the law is part of the great inheritance we have bequeathed the world, and it has been taken from us on purpose, by people convinced they knew better.

It was taken from us because we were too weak. It is our disgrace and a blotch on our history. But we can return it to ourselves, and return it we must.

[Princess Pinocchio 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @PinocchPrincess]

I found this moving account of someone at the Southampton vigil for Henry Nowak on Facebook:

Last night a few people mentioned the 'Southampton Riots' and were surprised I was there. So let me clarify.

I went to Southampton to show my respect for Henry, that his death wasn't in vain, and that knife crime and two tier policing needs to stop.
I am not a 'grief tourist', a 'far right fascist' or a 'rioter'.

What the media didn't show you, was that the initial 2000 people showed absolute respect. A minutes silence, the Lords prayer, a song.

The only incitement was the police who tried to push us down the stairs twice to bait a reaction.
Then we marched. People parked their cars and joined us. People came out of flats, houses and shops and joined us. Drivers bibbed their horns showing solidarity. Sikhs shook our hands apologising. (we know it's not their fault) When we passed the Gurdwawa there was silence and no chants. The march grew to about 5,000 people. We ALL CARE. This won't be shown on social media as it doesn't fit the narrative.

The police tried to kettle us. Fire engines and ambulances sent up and down the road for no other reason than to remove us.

At Belmont Road (where Henry died) we stayed 100m away from the location. The police were protecting the Digwa house. Where the father, charged with various knife offences (not charged with perverting justice or kidnap) and the brother charged with similar knife offences (but not perverting justice, kidnap and assualt) were happily watching TV. 1000 of us all got on one knee. We asked the police to join us. At this point there was no riot gear. They refused. They were asked please join us. They refused.

I don't for one minute condone the riots or violence. I was stood on top of a high wall with two polish fellas. Out of the way. We could see from our vantage point the police donning riot gear behind the row of vehicles.

At that point I and a friend from the IOW left and walked back. Then the riots, which we never saw, must have occurred.

Please don't be blindsighted by the biased media. Please watch GB News.

This isn't black v white. Many different ethnicities joined us and as mentioned Sikhs shook our hands. I never saw any race hate whatsoever.

This isn't left v right.

It's about the unlawful killing of a white man because he was white, because of knife crime and because the police are so scared to be called racist they prioritised lies and false claims of racism instead of an obvious desperate and dying young man.

If you can't see that yet, then I really hope that that day will soon come.

Thank you to the messages of support too.

I will never ever change. I will always stand up for what I believe in. My integrity has been expensive, yet worth every penny.

For those that missed this before, here is the silence observed perfectly by the 2000 at Southampton Police Station..

Thank you.

[Cherie @MNE42CDO]

Taken from Facebook:
Kelly Hatchard

“To me, Henry wasn't a headline or a court case. He was my best friends funny, caring, cheeky son. Henry had a way of making people smile without even trying. He had so much life ahead of him, so many plans, and so much love to give. When Henry was just a baby, Lucy gave me the honour of being his godmother. Our kids, like us shared their childhood. Henry's loved ones were just normal people and we were enjoying watching our kids grow into adults, naively taking for granted that we would see all the wonderful things that life had to offer them.

On December 5th 2025, when the news broke, life as we knew it stopped.

My focus in what I want to say will always be Henry and Henry's family.

But, nothing I could ever say would come close to explaining the pain of losing Henry. But alongside the heartbreak of losing Henry has been the pain of watching one of the kindest families I have ever known have their entire world torn apart.

I was lucky enough to grow up with the family of my best friends Lucy (Henry's Mum) and Katie (Henry's aunty). The family make everyone feel welcome. Their home is filled with kindness, warmth and laughter. No matter what life throws at them they always find a way to bring light to those around them. They are generous with their time, compassionate in their hearts, and the sort of people who make others feel like family too, including me and then my children. Their laughter is infectious, their support unwavering, and their love for one another shines through in everything they do.

My heart is broken for them, a very large part of them died on the day that monster chose to rip Henry from their lives. Yet even through their darkest days they continued to be the wonderful people that they are. Their focus during these dark times was to shine a light on and raise money for the charity that has helped them.

Then, 6 months after Henry's death, the heart ache continued as they had to face the trial. Being subjected to sit in a room with the monster who brutally murdered their son and watch the lies spill so easily from his mouth. A man who has not once showed an an ounce of remorse for what he did. They endured a living nightmare.

Thinking that things could not possibly get worse, in the last few weeks they have learned that the very institution that is there to protect us not only ignored Henry's plea for help, but they sided with the monster who put him on the ground .

Henry's family learned that his last moments were not only spent so afraid of the monster who attacked him but he was then wronged and let down by the police officer who I have no doubt, Henry assumed was there to help him.

That police officer handcuffed Henry and read him his rights. The last thing my best friend's beautiful boy heard before we lost him forever.

This image, we will never ever be able to erase from our minds. Family, friends and now the world, will have seen that image and we all have to live with it forever.

Shame on the monster who took you, shame on the police officer who should have helped you and shame on the organisation that trained the police officer to side with an incorrect racist slur over a dying young man. Shame on you all!!

You treated a loving caring intelligent hardworking young man, with such disregard and disrespect. You treated Henry's family, such good people, with such dishonesty! The lies have been inforgivable !! HOW DARE YOU.

Henry deserved so much more from this life. Henry and his family have been let down so badly.

THIS COULD HAPPEN AGAIN TO ANYONE, ANYONE'S CHILD.

This has to stop now.

Henry we will fight until the end for you. The world will know your name. You changed our lives for the better for being a part of it, I believe you will now go on to change the lives of others by the legacy you will leave.

God bless you my darling 💙”

[Maureen Carter @getcarter4]

@JoPhoenix1 The self-awareness of a comatose slug.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

£700,000 for Migrants. 18,000 Homeless in Manchester. That's the Burnham Method.

Andy Burnham is asking the voters of Makerfield to send him to Westminster. Before they do, they should know what he has been doing with their money in Manchester.

This week it emerged that Burnham's Greater Manchester Combined Authority is spending £722,685 on schemes to help migrants navigate the British welfare system. The Safe Transitions programme will provide guidance in multiple languages helping refugees understand their rights, entitlements and access to housing, benefits and public services. A Refugee Lodging Scheme will match refugees with resident landlords who will support them to access housing, benefits, employment, education and community networks. Greater Manchester already hosts more than 8,500 people in asylum support accommodation. More than 18,000 people across the region have no permanent address. One in every 61 people in Manchester alone is homeless. The £700,000 is not going to them.

This is not a one-off decision. It is the visible expression of a consistent set of political instincts that Burnham has spent years developing and is now quietly concealing ahead of June 18.

Since 2019 he has repeatedly called for the abolition of the No Recourse to Public Funds policy, the rule that prevents migrants from immediately accessing Britain's welfare state and social housing. He called for it on his mayoral website in 2019. He signed a joint letter demanding it in 2023. He launched a pilot programme in Manchester called the Living Income Campaign, designed to top up the incomes of those living under NRPF conditions and build the case for scrapping the rule nationally. He has now quietly dropped that position. Not because he has changed his mind. Because he is campaigning in Makerfield.

His allies have confirmed that as Prime Minister he would tear up the multi-billion pound Home Office contracts with private asylum accommodation providers and hand responsibility to local councils. Dispersal housing rather than hotels. The saving is real. Hotel rooms cost £145 per person per night against £23.25 for dispersal housing. But dispersal housing means more migrants placed directly into communities like Makerfield, Wigan and the surrounding boroughs, without the visibility of a hotel that can be identified and closed. The cost saving comes with a community cost that nobody is discussing.

Meanwhile Makerfield itself tells a different story to the one Burnham is presenting on the doorstep. The constituency sits within a region where Reform won all eight council wards in May's local elections with around fifty percent of the vote. Around two thirds of the constituency voted Leave in 2016. The voters who went to Reform did so because they feel their communities have been transformed without consent, their housing lists lengthened, their public services stretched and their concerns dismissed. Burnham's answer to those concerns is to spend £700,000 helping more migrants access the same overstretched system.

The repositioning on NRPF is the tell. A politician who held a position for six years, built a pilot programme around it and signed letters demanding it nationally does not abandon it because he has been persuaded by the evidence. He abandons it because the polling in Makerfield made it electorally inconvenient. The same thing happened with his position on EU rejoining, held on Saturday and walked back by Sunday when his team realised around two thirds of the constituency voted Leave.

The voters of Makerfield are not being asked to elect a mayor. They are being asked to send a potential Prime Minister to Westminster. The £700,000 tells them more about what that Prime Minister would do than any doorstep conversation. It tells them what he does when nobody in Makerfield is watching.

"One in every 61 people in Manchester alone is homeless. The £700,000 is not going to them."

[Maureen Carter @getcarter4]

@DreyfusJames How to be simultaneouslypatronising and puerile.

[Maureen Carter @getcarter4]

Long overdue that you do the right - and legal - thing #parkrunUK

[Caterina 🌈 @Caterin00138072]

Wear your t shirt with pride! Shout it from the rooftops! Self id is unfair to women. Shame on you @parkrunUK

#savewomenssport

@mara_yamauchi @wsusportsunion @SportSEENuk @WomensRightsNet @ForWomenScot @WomenChilterns @Martina @FondOfBeetles

[Maureen Carter @getcarter4]

@twilygirly Fantasist.