Gosh. So much money needing to be spent training staff, changing signs and amending policies.
If only organisations had complied with the law, and respected women’s and girls’ rights. Just imagine how much money they’d have saved!
Instead they allowed themselves to be led by the ideological nose by pressure groups.
https://t.co/TSOay0zezq
@WomensRightsNet@AmnestyUK 'No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism' --Sir Winston Churchill. And I suspect Amnesty International which once campaigned for the freedom of conscience is about to discover this.
The advocacy below to hand the IRGC administrative control and tolling rights over the Strait of Hormuz is not some fresh, innovative idea in conflict resolution; it’s the latest iteration of a very familiar pattern. It comes from the same policy ecosystem that:
•Spent two decades insisting the Islamic Republic must be recognized as having a “right to enrich” uranium, despite its record of concealment and non-compliance.
•Fought to keep Iran’s ballistic and cruise missile programs permanently “off the table,” even as those missiles became the regime’s primary tools of regional coercion.
•Engineered sunset clauses into the nuclear deal so that the most sensitive restrictions would automatically lapse just as the regime’s advanced centrifuge and missile work matured.
•Opposed terrorism designations for the IRGC and its proxies on the grounds that “engagement” would moderate them, while they were busy hardwiring themselves into every major regional conflict, while slaughtering Iranians in streets.
•Framed every round of sanctions relief as a humanitarian necessity, then shrugged when billions in relief were funneled to the IRGC, Quds Force, and state-sponsored militias instead of ordinary Iranians.
•Treated repeated hostage-taking, tanker seizures, and nuclear escalations as “understandable responses to pressure” rather than deliberate leverage-building by a regime that lives off manufactured crises.
The “Hormuz fee” proposal is simply the maritime extension of that same strategy: normalize the regime’s most coercive tools by selling them as technocratic arrangements and regional “institutionalization.” Once you recognize that lineage, the idea stops looking like bold conflict resolution and starts looking like another attempt to launder extortion into policy.
Very pleased for @Glinner here - absolutely deserved, and on a wider point, individuals in public bodies really need to be held responsible for wasting taxpayers time and money.
https://t.co/v1leTUFfkM
Hooray for @Glinner getting an unreserved apology and a £25k settlement from the Met Pol. Hooray for @SpeechUnion for fighting this case. https://t.co/FjsXlPKAfR
📣🚨 METROPOLITAN POLICE OFFER UNRESERVED APOLOGY TO GRAHAM LINEHAN AND PAY HIM £25,000
The Metropolitan Police have at long last offered an unreserved apology to Graham Linehan and paid him £25,000.
Last September, the Irish comedian and co-creator of Father Ted was arrested by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow Airport.
His crime? Three gender-critical posts on X.
He was arrested, taken to a police station and questioned for several hours. In the early hours of the following morning, he was rushed to hospital after his blood pressure rose to dangerously high levels.
The Free Speech Union is proud to have supported Graham in taking legal action against the Metropolitan Police for wrongful arrest and breaches of his free speech rights.
General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young, has said: “I’m beginning to lose count of the number of cases we’ve fought in which the police have arrested someone for a tweet, decided to take no further action and then had to pay them substantial compensation for wrongful arrest.
“At some point you’d think the penny would drop: police our streets, not our tweets.”
While we welcome the Metropolitan Police’s apology and compensation payout to @Glinner, this should never have happened in the first place.
It is high time the police focused on our streets, not our tweets.
Watch Graham’s reaction below 👇
⚓🇬🇧🇳🇱
For 300 years, corsairs came to enslave Europeans.
Not from a colony. From Europe's own coasts.🏴☠️
Spain, Italy, France, even Ireland and Iceland felt their reach.
One historian's estimate puts the number enslaved above a million across the centuries.
That figure is disputed. In both directions. What is not disputed: every government paid ransom, and paid again, and the raids never stopped.
🕊️ In 1816 Britain tried one more time, through words alone. The Dey of Algiers agreed to stop. For a while, it held.
⚡ Then in May 1816, around 200 fishermen under British protection were massacred at Bona. Britain had run out of patience.
Admiral Lord Exmouth was given a fleet. And Britain did not sail alone: a Dutch squadron joined him, under Vice-Admiral van Capellen. British and Dutch, sailing as one force.
💥 August 1816. The combined fleet stood off the walls of Algiers. Exmouth sent his terms in. The Dey refused. At half past two, the guns opened fire.
For nine hours, British and Dutch guns hammered the harbour defences. The corsair fleet in harbour was destroyed at anchor. Allied casualties, British and Dutch together, passed 900 killed and wounded. It was a hard fight, not an easy one.
By morning the defences lay silent. Exmouth demanded surrender. The Dey accepted.
🔓 1,083 slaves were freed at Algiers itself. Men and women of many nations and many faiths. The Dey repaid around 80,000 pounds sterling in ransom money.
Counting earlier releases that year, around 3,000 people walked free across all of 1816. Not walking free in a single day. Freed across the whole of that year.
The treaty broke the back of a 300-year system. It did not end the raids overnight. Raiding returned in the years after, on a smaller scale. It was the French conquest of Algiers, from 1830, that finally ended it for good.
Britain and the Netherlands had broken a system three centuries old. Not for empire. For people who had no one else to answer for them.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
British and Dutch sailors stood against a system nobody else had stopped.
Knowing their story, you stand a little taller.
We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you with us. 👇🙏
👉 https://t.co/wN9S2gRmFj 👈
Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧
Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Truth. There will likely never be a durable and comprehensive diplomatic settlement between the U.S. and #Iran's regime as long as the regime is in power. This is something that many in the U.S. and Europe can't or won't accept.
President Trump demonstrated with the MOU that he's prepared to go big on sanctions relief with #Iran's regime. But what did Tehran do? It chose to respond with aggression instead. An American outstretched hand met an Islamic Republic clenched fist once again.
If you want an evidence based argument against the Conversion Practices Bill; one explaining why, rather than halting conversion practices, this Bill will end up enabling and embedding them in families and child facing institutions and practice, this is the article for you.
https://t.co/H3zGjdUBTC
Following on from Through the Looking Glass an in depth look at a 2026 picture book (aimed at readers 3 -7 years) which promotes total social transition aka living in stealth including playing on an opposite sex team. https://t.co/OO4Bl8zdgI
@Nonphenomenally@suzanne_moore Trust me, plenty who went along with the craziness have always believed exactly what I do. They were just too pusillanimous to say it out loud and happy to let regular women risk everything while fighting the war on their behalf.