Byline Times Audio Articles

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

Europe is watching a perfect storm unfold on its doorstep. Ukraine's fertile black earth, enriched by centuries of manure, is teeming with microbes. To add to this, drones hover above the trenches, preventing swift evacuation of the wounded. This causes wounded soldiers to lie longer in dirt, suffering multiple infections that antibiotics can no longer banish. The result amongst Ukrainian troops is more than troublesome: a surge in amputations, sepsis and deaths.

What is emerging is being described as nothing less than trench warfare in a post-antibiotic era, where hygiene practices are forced back to those of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War.

This was the warning sounded in London this week at the Lessons From the Frontline conference, held at the Sir Michael Uren Hub, Imperial College's White City campus. Doctors, historians and policymakers spoke of Ukraine as the world's first "post-antibiotic war".

Russia Sanctions Byline Times Journalists and Contributors for Exposing Putin's War Crimes

The Russian foreign ministry added multiple Byline Times and Byline TV contributors to its "stop list" following our award-winning investigations into the Putin regime

Adam Bienkov

Scientific data is offering up little in the way of comfort. Ukraine was already battling high antimicrobial resistance (AMR) before 2022. The full scale invasion multiplied the scourge.

And now, with soldiers falling wounded on soil alive with bacteria, their injuries pressed into fields fertilised for centuries, the subsequent infections are proving impossible to treat.

"Ukraine is farmland that has had manure dug into it for hundreds of years," says Emily Mayhew, a medical historian at Imperial College.

It is highly bacterially active, and people fall onto the ground, much as they did on the Western Front. Infected wounds now resemble those of a pre-antibiotic era. I look at Ukraine and I see a post-antibiotic war

Emily Mayhew, medical historian at Imperial College.

Hygiene has also, in parts, collapsed as Ukraine's medical infrastructure has buckled. Hospitals are overcrowded, nurses overstretched, sterilisation crippled by bombardment and power cuts. Transfers of patients scatter microbes across the country.

"The war has amplified this exponentially," says Hailie Uren, an Australian-born consultant for the Ukrainian Ministry of Health. "By the time they reach western Ukraine, many carry six completely resistant bacteria. Around 30% cannot be treated with antibiotics at all."

The pathogens are formidable. Klebsiella pneumoniae, responsible for one in five AMR deaths worldwide, has in Ukraine mutated into strains impervious to every drug.

Eight in ten wounded soldiers now carry the NDM-1 resistance gene, ten times Europe's average. Acinetobacter baumannii, once nicknamed "Iraqibacter," has resurfaced, unbowed even by carbapenems, the last line of defence. Together with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, these form the dreaded "extensively drug-resistant" category.

For patients, the consequences are long-lasting.

Oleksander Bezverkhny, a soldier, lost both legs and endured five bouts of sepsis after treatment in three hospitals. His survival required 100 operations and rare imported drugs. Many others are not so fortunate: mortality rates for such infections can exceed 50%.

Singurgeons are increasingly turning to amputation as the only viable option, with as many as 100,000 amputations estimated amongst the war wounded.

As Dr Danylo Turkevych, a Ukrainian trauma surgeon who works at the Superhumans rehabilitation center in Lviv, Ukraine, says: "If you have a patient treated for six or twelve months and you still have continuous infectious complications, often the only solution is amputation. People get tired, the risk of sepsis grows, and sometimes it is simply easier for the patient to lose the limb an...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

For years, the political centre has comforted itself with a story: that public mistrust is irrational. It is the product, we are told, of populism, social media echo chambers, bad-faith actors on the far right.

But look more closely and you will find a different story. This mistrust is not irrational at all. It is rooted in the lived experience of a public that has seen too much, been told too many half-truths, and been left to bear the cost when the promises of government have failed to materialise.

In my recent Robin Cook Memorial Lecture, I called this the "integrity gap" - the widening gulf between what governments say and what people believe. Cook's resignation over Iraq was one of those moments when the gap became undeniable. Two decades later, it has become the defining feature of British political life.

The public see a political class whose proximity to wealth has corroded its independence and whose language of public service has become a hollowed-out ritual. It is the same political culture which, now dominates No 10, which insisted Peter Mandelson's 'qualities' outweighed the risks.

This is not paranoia. It is the reality of a system where the dividing line between the state and wealth, oligarchs and corporate power has been systematically erased.

Consider the boards of government departments under this Labour government - the very bodies responsible for setting strategy across Whitehall. Two-thirds of their "non-executive directors" or NEDs, are drawn from corporate backgrounds. A third come from finance and professional services - including senior figures from Barclays, Europe's most fossil-fuel-invested bank, and PwC, the consultancy caught passing secret government documents to clients to help them avoid tax.

The lead NED at the Department for Transport is the former CEO of BAE Systems. The chairman of Ineos sits on the Ministry of Defence board. The lobbying director of British Airways - Britain's biggest polluter - sits at the heart of the Cabinet Office even as his company leads efforts to weaken climate regulations. Across the Department of Health, not one NED is a medic. Two are corporate lobbyists for private healthcare.

This is not a glitch. It is how the system now works.

ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE

Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.

PAY ANNUALLY - £39.50 A YEAR

PAY MONTHLY - £3.75 A MONTH

MORE OPTIONS

We're not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.

And it does not stop there. The New Statesman's recent investigation into the Tony Blair Institute shows how deep this integration now runs. Since 2021, the institute has taken hundreds of millions from Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Its staff now sit inside government. Its proposals - from a national data library to the restructuring of NHS systems - read less like disinterested advice and more like a business plan for Oracle's global health ambitions.

This is not lobbying at the edges. This is corporate power wired into the state's decision-making architecture.

Against this backdrop, the government's drive for digital ID cards is more than just another technocratic reform. It is a decision that would permanently change the relationship between citizen and state. The arguments against are well known: function creep, weak oversight, disproportionate harm to marginalised groups, and the normalisation of what Gaby Hinsliff has called a "checkpoint society." Combine an ID register with facial recognition, predictive policing and AI-driven data profiling, and you have created an infrastructure that any authoritarian successor could weaponise at the fl...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

Nigel Farage's "billions of pounds worth of unfunded spending commitments" comes out top in analysis of weak spots which could hit support for the party hardest in future elections, according to a new mega-poll of voters.

YouGov research for progressive group Best for Britain found that potential Reform backers rated a message criticising Farage's spending plans and economic credentials as the 'most convincing' almost 3-in-5 (57%) times.

Best for Britain note that Farage has "previously voiced strong support for Liz Truss' disastrous 2022 minibudget, [while] Reform UK [have] made billions in un-costed spending commitments."

In June last year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted that Reform UK's plans implied spending an extra £141 billion a year on tax cuts and other pledges, paid for by a supposed £156bn of savings in Government spending, and assuming vastly increased tax revenue from economic growth. The IFS thinktank said the party's plans were based on "extremely optimist assumptions" and the sums "do not add up".

Farage's hints about moving to a privatised health care system, and his push for a hard Brexit are also effective messages, among those considering or intending to vote Reform but who are most likely to be persuaded to vote for other parties.

EXCLUSIVE

Farage's Trillion Pound Black Hole: The Real Cost of Reform UK's Mass Deportation Plan

Exclusive: Reform's plan, which it claims would net huge savings over the coming decades, would actually cost the UK about £70-90bn over the next ten years alone, new analysis of official statistics and forecasts suggests

Nafeez Ahmed

The findings also signal a potential roadmap for the Conservatives to win back support from Reform UK, progressive group Best for Britain says.

It comes as the Labour Party and Keir Starmer appear to be taking a tougher line on Reform UK in recent weeks following discontent from members and their MPs, and as the party meets in Liverpool for its annual conference - amid rumblings of a potential leadership challenge to PM Starmer in future from Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.

Over the weekend, Keir Starmer told the BBC he believes Reform's plan to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain was "racist" and "immoral". ILR is the settled status allowing people many who have come here and already been granted permission to stay, and Reform's plans would place hundreds of thousands of those who believed their position here was secure at risk of deportation.

The YouGov polling did not test whether this was an effective line of attack for opponents of Reform.

The YouGov survey of over 3,000 people who said they were intending or considering voting for Reform UK commissioned by Best for Britain presented respondents with a random pair of messages from a selection of eight, criticising Nigel Farage and his party on separate issues.

Where Is the Opposition to Nigel Farage's Immoral Mass Deportation Plan?

Keir Starmer's Government's refusal to explicitly condemn the Reform leader's plans to tear thousands of families and communities apart is only clearing his path to Downing Street, argues Adam Bienkov

Adam Bienkov

Respondents were asked to select which of the two messages they found most convincing and presented with another randomly selected pair until they had seen all eight messages.

Among those considering or intending to vote for Reform UK, a message suggesting Reform UK would do away with employment rights was almost as effective (56%) as that of the economy, as were critiques of Reform UK's plans to cut social security and public spending by £140 billion (55%), and highlighting Farage's previous comments on moving the NHS to a US-style insurance-based system (54%).

The findings are the latest from a major ongoing study into people who are considering voting for Reform UK at the next general el...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

Some £200 billion of major Government infrastructure projects left by the Conservatives are classified as "unachievable" and need to be scrapped or reconsidered, a Whitehall report has revealed in advance of the spending review.

Altogether, the Government inherited £996 billion of major projects, but a record proportion - £198 billion - are now given a red classification by a new quango set up by the Labour Government, the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, which reports to the Treasury.

In the past 12 months, the value of unachievable projects nearly doubled - rising by £101 billion to £198 billion. This is the highest figure and proportion of projects since annual monitoring by Whitehall of progress on infrastructure schemes began in 2013.

The disclosures in the authority's first annual report may well explain why the Government has delayed developing the Northern Powerhouse rail project - a fast rail line linking Liverpool with Hull - which is estimated in the report to cost £30.9 billion and has been classified as a "red" project this year. It had been proposed by the Conservatives since 2015.

A red project "means successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed."

It is the same rating that has been given to the stub of HS2 from London to Birmingham, which is also seen as poor value for money.

'There Is Still Time to Save the Labour Party From Itself and Forge a New Political Mainstream'

Keir Starmer is presiding over the decline of social democracy in Britain, but an alternative path is still possible, argues Neal Lawson

Neal Lawson

Altogether, 31 out of 213 schemes, are classified as "red". Three of them, including the Northern Powerhouse project, are new this year. The other two are plans for Sellafield to build a deep level underground nuclear waste facility in Lincolnshire which could cost anything between £20.3 billion and £53.3 billion because of technical and geological problems. Since Reform UK won control of the county council it has said it would block the scheme and refuse planning permission.

The third programme in trouble is one by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs which costs £24.875 billion. This is the Farming and Countryside Programme which aims to deliver by 2028 "a renewed agricultural sector, producing healthy food for consumption at home and abroad, where farms can be profitable and economically sustainable without subsidy and Farming and the countryside contributing significantly to environmental goals including addressing climate change".

Other programmes that are classified as red are Defra's tree planting and peat restoration programme; plans for a computerised national police database and a £2 billion redevelopment of Devonport naval base to maintain Astute submarines.

A substantial number of Ministry of Defence projects also overrun but Darren Jones, now chief secretary to the Prime Minister in the cabinet, says in the foreword to the report:

It is important to recognise that not every project in the portfolio is measured by direct monetary benefits - particularly those led by the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice. We are living in an increasingly volatile world, facing new and complex threats that require a robust and modern response. MoD projects alone account for £327 billion of the Government Major Projects Portfolio and, ultimately, the safety and security of the nation are beyond price

He has also promised that the new Labour Government will do things differently from the Conservatives and "learn lessons from past mistakes".

"...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

A key part of the successful scapegoating of an entire group is to create fear. Nigel Farage and his Reform party supporters have been following the scapegoat playbook by pointing the finger at immigrants, and blaming them for the very real crisis of women's unsafety.

It's a path well-trodden: point to a group, say they're a threat, and present yourself as the defender of the threat. But if this path is so well-trodden, why can't our media seem to see it?

At a press conference in August, Reform MP Sarah Pochin suggested that migrants and refugees have a "warped view of their right to sexually assault women". She claimed that men from "predominantly Muslim countries like Afghanistan" hold a "medieval view of women's rights" and that "women are at risk of sexual assault and rape from these men".

There is no evidence to suggest that asylum seekers are more likely to harm women and girls than British citizens. Most studies find they are not overrepresented among perpetrators.

But facts and stats rarely break through in a news cycle of manufactured outrage. Unless, of course, the stats come from the Centre for Migration Control, a think tank run by the Reform UK activist Robert Bates, which successfully managed to get their muddled figures onto BBC Radio 4's Today programme, parroted by the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick (no, 40% of sexual crimes in London last year were not committed by foreign nationals).

These long-held myths are of course, racist, and harm communities of colour - especially Muslim communities. But these myths also actively harm women and girls, by perpetuating the 'stranger danger' narrative of sexual violence.

The idea that sexual violence is only committed by scary, foreign, evil men who jump out of bushes and attack women is a convenient narrative to believe in. But the truth is much darker, one that many people struggle to rectify internally.

The Media Distortion Warping Britain's Views on Immigration

Unbalanced coverage of migration is twisting the public's perspective, argues Christian Christensen

Christian Christensen

In reality, most rapes are carried out by former or current partners, and 90% of femicide killers are known to the victim. And children? The vast majority of children who experience contact sexual abuse are abused by someone they know.

When Farage and his MPs use attacks on women to stoke an anti-migrant agenda, they are ignoring, and actively diverting away from, the real crisis of violence against women in the UK. It is the media's job to recognise this and call it out - but our ingrained societal views of gender-based violence are stopping this from happening.

"As a society, we fail to understand that domestic abuse is a public health problem," says Janey Starling, co-founder of gender justice organisation, Level Up, on Media Storm. "So much of domestic abuse is about power and control, and that's psychological. These things are less easy to put in a picture. You can't take photos of someone constantly belittling their partner, somebody checking their partner's phone, having access to their emails. And the end goal, ultimately, is to have total control over another person".

Level Up created the Dignity for Dead Women campaign, which aims to change the way the press reports on fatal domestic abuse. They developed media guidelines, backed by press regulators, for newsrooms to follow when reporting on gender-based violence. Because the way news organisations report on the deaths of women directly influences public understandings of domestic abuse - and how we can prevent it.

"There are very strict media regulations on the reporting of suicide, because the media knows that it has a preventive duty when it comes to suicide", Starling explains.

The press understands that if they report on, for example, a celebrity death, the...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

The Government is being urged to urgently 'close the loopholes' which could allow hostile states and malicious actors to donate to political parties via untraceable cryptocurrencies.

Reform UK became the first party earlier this year to allow donations via cryptocurrencies, despite anti-corruption campaigners fearing they leave the door open to anonymous donations from criminals and Britain's adversaries.

Nigel Farage and Reform deputy Richard Tice MP met the Governor of the Bank of England on Thursday and reportedly lobbied for looser regulations on crypto while branding the Bank a "dinosaur" when it came to rules on the largely unregulated financial assets.

EXCLUSIVE

Farage's Trillion Pound Black Hole: The Real Cost of Reform UK's Mass Deportation Plan

Exclusive: Reform's plan, which it claims would net huge savings over the coming decades, would actually cost the UK about £70-90bn over the next ten years alone, new analysis of official statistics and forecasts suggests

Nafeez Ahmed

While donors have to go through a portal and submit an official ID to donate using cryptocurrencies, the ultimate source of the funds remains difficult to trace. There is no suggestion that Reform UK has broken any rules.

Last weekend, a Lib Dem MP condemned the gaps in UK election law and the fact that cryptocurrency was barely mentioned in the recent Government's elections strategy, which is set to lead to a new Elections and Democracy Bill in the coming months.

The comments came in a session organised by the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition titled 'Brave New World: Fighting Corruption and Oligarchs in an era of Trump'.

Mike Martin MP explained crypto vulnerabilities in UK electoral finance, saying: "The way thresholds are set, you can break big donations down into small ones and then give them and they fall below the thresholds and don't get registered.

And that is now being driven using crypto and crypto wallets. So you break down huge amounts of money into tiny donations - micro donations …You can inject huge amounts of finance into political parties without them appearing on any return, without anyone knowing what's going on

Mike Martin, Lib Dem MP

In July, senior Labour MP Liam Byrne said a "better solution" than tightening up existing rules "would be banning crypto donations outright". He noted that Ireland and Brazil had already done so due to the perceived risks of foreign interference.

The Electoral Commission has told Byline Times that no donations via crypto have yet been registered with the Commission, which is likely to add to concerns donations are going unreported or split into smaller batches to dip below the reporting thresholds. The current rules are meant to guard against this, but the origin of cryptocurrencies are much harder to trace than bank transactions.

Martin noted the potential sophistication of rule-evading methods, saying cryptocurrencies have a "ledger that is perfectly traceable - however, if you move stuff into crypto out of crypto, into this coin, into that coin, into that wallet…and then you split it into micro-donations…It's perfectly [possible] to effectively disappear money and then reappear it again in the bank accounts [of] political parties, and it's impossible to tell where it's coming from."

The Lib Dem MP pointed to other gaps in the law, claiming that Farage's GB News salary while still a serving MP should be understood as a political "donation".

"[You have a media organisation that happens to pay a prominent politician £900,000 a year…That's effectively a donation for work in return. It's declared, it looks like a job.

Where Is the Opposition to Nigel Farage's Immoral Mass Deportation Plan?

Keir Starmer's Government's refusal to explicitly condemn the Reform leader's plans to tear thousands of families and communities apart is only clearing hi...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

Following the disturbing pictures of Indian Prime Minister Modi, leader of the world's biggest democracy, chumming it up with authoritarian leaders, Chinese Premier Xi and Russian President Putin, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in Tianjin, China, in late August, one political wag in the US joked that it could have been worse: "Donald Trump could have been there as well!"

More serious commentators worried that the gathering of the trio, representing three of the world's nuclear powers, and almost half the world's population, was deliberately intended as a message - that the US-led world order was no longer the only show in town, and that they were determined not to be pushed around by the West.

In the US, national security experts interpreted Modi's warm embrace of Xi and Putin as a deliberate display of displeasure over Trump's decision to impose hefty tariffs on India over its continued purchase of Russian oil, and Trump's clumsy handling of the military flare-up in May between India and Pakistan.

India has always resented outside efforts to mediate in its longstanding conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir, and rejected Trump's claims that he had ended the latest clashes by threatening to cut off trade with either party if they continued fighting.

They also took great offence at Trump's decision to invite Pakistani army Chief of Staff, Field Marshall Asim Munir, to the White House in June.

According to former National Security advisor John Bolton, this was the first time a Pakistani military leader has been hosted at the White House with no civilian leaders present.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bolton described how Trump's approach outraged India, because it harked back to the era of a "hyphenated" US India-Pakistan policy, rather than each country being treated on its merits, without reference to the other.

US foreign policy experts worry that Trump's continued efforts to pressure India to stop buying Russian oil and gas, most recently by lobbying European countries to impose up to 100% tariffs on trade with India, will push India away from the US, into the arms of China, undermining Washington's biggest strategic goal, which is to contain rising China.

EXCLUSIVE

'Blue Labour' and the Thiel Effect: How MAGA Is Making In-Roads Into British Politics

The ideology of the 'Make America Great Again' movement, which has transformed politics in the United States, is having an impact in the UK. But how is this influence being transmitted?

Nafeez Ahmed and Peter Jukes

Another example of Indian defiance of Washington came last week, when India decided to send 65 soldiers to take part in the quadrennial Russian-led military exercises with Belarus, known as ZAPAD, in mid-September.

I recently spoke to two national security analysts living in Asia to get their perspective on events. How serious was the rift between the US and India? What was driving US policy in Asia? Following the recent declaration by Trump on a Truth Social post that he would meet Xi at a regional summit in Korea in October, followed by a visit to each other's country next year, could there even be a bait and switch, whereby the US would abandon its traditional allies, and forge a separate "G2" partnership with China?

Indrani Bagchi, CEO of the Ananta Aspen Centre in India, and former Associate editor of the Times of India, said Indians viewed the second Trump administration with deep dismay.

In his first term, Trump had taken several welcome steps from their perspective, including raising the level of the Quad (a strategic partnership between the US, India, Japan and Australia) to leader level, imposing tariffs on China, and calling out China's unfair trading practices. They knew there was a risk of tougher US policies on tariffs and immigration, but all had still seemed well when Modi ...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

Nigel Farage's Reform UK are now a significantly bigger far-right threat to the UK than previous generations of explicitly racist parties like the British National Party, the leader of Britain's foremost anti-racism campaign group Hope not Hate, has told Byline Times.

Nick Lowles, whose new book How to Defeat the Far Right is published on Thursday, told a live Byline Supplement event that Reform was helping to mainstream political ideas that were previously deemed unacceptable, even on parts of the far right.

"Back in 1999 the British National Party, led by a man who was a Holocaust denier, thought that Britain shouldn't have gone to war with Germany and believed that black people were genetically inferior to whites… dropped their repatriation policy because they felt they couldn't even sell it to their own supporters anymore," Lowles points out.

"And now we're facing a situation where a party that is leading in the polls can literally in the space of two weeks, have two policies that could be deporting a million people from this country, and there's very little pushback in the media or in political circles".

Lowles said that in some respects Farage's party were even more extreme than what had come before them.

ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE

Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.

PAY ANNUALLY - £39.50 A YEAR

PAY MONTHLY - £3.75 A MONTH

MORE OPTIONS

We're not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.

"The policies that they put out in the last few weeks on immigration, would be the most extreme policies that we've had from any political party, and I would say, was probably more extreme than the public positions of the BNP in its heyday" he said.

"The demonisation of minorities, the use of conspiracy theories, the support for autocratic regimes around the world.

"And while they're not anti-democratic in the sense of a group that wants to overthrow the system, they are certainly wanting to subvert the system and dismantle some of the pillars of what we would see as liberal democracy."

Reform's acceptance by the political mainstream is also making their ideas much harder to combat for anti-racism groups than previous far-right movements, Lowles said.

"Even though the BNP were winning support in certain working class communities and sometimes winning 30-40% of the vote [in those areas], they were still quite a marginal force, and they were outside of the political mainstream," he told Byline Times.

"But what we're facing now are far right and radical right ideas, which are firmly in the political mainstream, which it makes it makes it much harder to to take on."

Whereas in the past there was a "social cost" to supporting groups like the BNP and their calls for ideas like mass deportations, Reform could now push a similar agenda with ease across both new and more traditional media platforms, Lowles said.

"There was a social cost of being involved with the BNP… and they were shunned by the media… Whereas we're in a situation now where this kind of right wing discourse dominates social media and there's a ecosystem whether it's from magazines, newspapers, Substacks, YouTubes, podcasts, X, there's a plethora of platforms that are just pushing out this sort of content."

holding farage to account #reformUNCOVERED

While most the rest of the media seems to happy to give the handful of Reform MPs undue prominence, Byline Times is committed to tracking the activities of Nigel Farage's party when actually in power

EXCLUSIVE

Nigel Farage's Reform a Bigger Far-Right Threat Than the BNP, Says UK's Leading Anti-Racism Campaigner

25 September 20...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

'Making Friends with MAGA'

Lord Maurice Glasman likes to visit what he calls a 'bike shed' round the back of the upper chamber where he sits smoking roll-ups and shooting the political breeze.

With his East End accent and affable manner, he is happy to engage. Ordering burgers and chips in the House of Lords canteen, he seems to know all the staff by name, whom he treats like peers rather than peers of the realm.

And so Lord Glasman may - or may not - appear to be an unusual candidate to enter the eye of the storm since Donald Trump's re-election in the United States.

Recently referred to as Number 10's "MAGA whisperer" by The Times, he was the only British lawmaker invited to Trump's second presidential inauguration, on a freezing January day in Washington, DC, earlier this year.

Glasman was invited there by a long-term contact - now the US Vice President - JD Vance, who admired his writing about class and had first approached him some years earlier, exploring whether the US Democrats could provide a new deal for workers. In DC, Glasman was overawed by the scale of the celebrations and the energy around Trump's 'Make America Great Again' movement.

He sought out, and was sought after, by some of the most important Trumpworld movers and shakers: Steve Bannon, former Trump campaign manager and co-founder of Cambridge Analytica; the influential 'Dark Enlightenment' thinker Curtis Yarvin, and - as Byline Times can reveal - the tech baron and Palantir data firm founder, Peter Thiel.

This would be an impressive list of American contacts to make in less than a year, but more unusual still - given Trump's well-known connections with Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage (who Glasman regularly debates on GB News) or the long-established links between the US Republican Party and the British Conservatives - is that Lord Glasman has been a left-wing Labour peer for 14 years.

As a founder of the 'Blue Labour' strategy - which promotes the blue-collar union origins of the Labour movement - Glasman has often swum against the New Labour mainstream.

An early critic of globalisation, he dislikes the term 'diversity' and rails against the way what he calls 'progressivism' has replaced working-class 'solidarity' with rules and regulations.

Glasman voted and campaigned to leave the EU in 2016, and decries the 'lanyard class' of politicos and wonks. Though he believes in the rule of law, he condemns 'the rule of lawyers'.

He worked with Keir Starmer's Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, to see off the threat of the far-right BNP in east London in the Noughties - but does not appear concerned that a new far-right, centred around revived race science and Big Tech, could be using him to add an air of respectability around their access to the governing Labour Party.

Previous reports have detailed Glasman's appearance at Trump's second inauguration, having his portrait painted alongside Curtis Yarvin, and his appearances on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast. But, for the first time, Byline Times can reveal that he was tasked by Morgan McSweeney to make contacts and connections in the Trump administration. And, at first, he reported back almost daily to Number 10.

This newspaper can also reveal that, at the inauguration, Glasman met Peter Thiel - whose company, Palantir, was recently awarded a £1.5 billion contract with the Ministry of Defence as part of the US-UK 'Tech Prosperity Deal' announced by Donald Trump and Prime Minister at the recent state visit.

Glasman shared a cup of tea with Thiel while talking about AI, an area he has an avid interest in.

'Bloody Big AI Everything'

Peter Thiel is no ordinary tech billionaire.

One of the founders, along with X owner Elon Musk, of the payment system PayPal, he has become one of the most powerful Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have supported and benefi...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

A TalkTV presenter has denied assaulting a climate protester at a Republican dinner during Donald Trump's visit last week, after being filmed dragging him from the room.

During a Republicans Overseas dinner organised by TalkTV host André Walker last Tuesday (16th September) in Windsor - the night President Trump arrived in the UK - Fossil Free London interrupted the event with founder Robin Wells attempting to give a speech about the climate crisis and Donald Trump's threats to the environment.

She was joined by campaigner and doctor Kush Naker. Both unfurled a banner, and began chanting: "If you drill baby drill, how many will you kill?" The pair had infiltrated the event with valid tickets.

Video taken by other protesters present shows several attendees approaching the two activists, and one appears to pull a banner from Naker's hand.

TalkTV host André Walker is then shown approaching Naker, grabbing him by the arm. Naker drops to the floor.

With another attendee, Walker is shown dragging Naker from the main dining hall, with Naker lying on his back, through a lobby into a separate room on the other side. When Naker has been dragged into the room, the door is closed.

Naker alleges that while he was on the floor Walker got on his knees on top of him and reached for his neck, as if trying to strangle him.

He further alleges that Walker tried to swing several punches at him whilst he was on the ground, which he claims he prevented by grabbing Walker's wrists.

And Naker claims the host then moved his knee towards Kush's groin, in what Naker took to be an attempt to knee him in the genitals. Naker says he responded by trapping Walker's leg between his own.

According to Naker, the altercation lasted for about a minute until, he says, Walker became exhausted from their struggle.

Separately, footage filmed by a journalist present shows Fossil Free London's director Robin Wells being slapped twice by an unknown attendee. Wells repeats the phrase: "That's assault" afterwards as the woman walks away.

ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE

Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.

PAY ANNUALLY - £39.50 A YEAR

PAY MONTHLY - £3.75 A MONTH

MORE OPTIONS

We're not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.

Naker says he asked a venue staff member to call the police. The venue has confirmed that a member of staff did call the police. Thames Valley Police has been contacted for comment.

Walker denies any allegations of assault. In a call with Byline Times, he said: "The quote I would always give is always the same: I strongly believe in free speech, and when somebody attempts to subvert that by shouting people down, I would stop it."

He added: "There are no criminal allegations. They haven't made any. The only people they've phoned are you. Always remember something - if you start printing a load of allegations against me in the absence of any evidence, you'll just look like a dickhead. And also, how would you feel if it happened to you?"

A source close to Walker said: "The claim that André 'assaulted' (a criminal offence) or that he attempted to 'punch', 'kick', or 'strangle' anyone is defamatory and untrue. There is video evidence that proves that it cannot be so [it is not clear what evidence they are referring to]. We do not consider that reporting the allegation and denial would be lawful."

Walker is understood to argue that nobody stopped the activist "until he started shouting." In video footage after the altercation Walker repeats "I'm nearly 50" and that he is "absolutely knackered."

Don't miss a story

SIGN UP TO EMAIL UPDATES

Naker says he sus...