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Now we can see with the real clarity of votes at the ballot box, what the consequences are of a Labour Government that responds to the economy's deep-seated problems with yet more cuts to pensioners' winter fuel payments and attacks on disabled people.

Runcorn and Helsby was one of the most rock-solid of Labour seats. But less than a year into Keir Starmer's Government, Labour's 14,700-vote majority has been demolished, with a 17% swing to Reform and Labour's share of the vote down from 52.9% to 38.7%. Even if Labour had somehow narrowly held on, the fact that Runcorn & Helsby was even in contention is an indication that something is going very badly wrong.

The signs have been there for months. Polling heading south, Keir Starmer's satisfaction ratings at rock bottom, council by-elections with Labour's vote in freefall, even in seats the party held onto. The boost that Scottish Labour enjoyed at the prospect of a UK Labour Government has evaporated.

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Adam Bienkov

Now with a slew of elections taking place on one night there is a much clearer sense of the impact of Labour's ten months in charge. Not only has the party lost its first by-election test in Runcorn and Helsby in dramatic terms but it is in trouble on many other fronts.

The night began with Labour losing a council by-election in Hartlepool, setting the scene for some very bad results in the North. Labour's majority in the North Tyneside mayoralty was slashed, a post that was not previously considered in contention. In Northumberland the party lost twelve seats, down to eight, whilst Durham has been a bloodbath. Labour's Ros Jones held the Doncaster mayor on a sharply cut majority, prompting her to say that the winter fuel payment cuts were wrong and that Labour needed to listen to what people are saying.

However, sadly all the signs are that Labour's leadership is still not listening. Instead, their script for the broadcast rounds was to argue that Labour was taking the tough choices the country needed after years of Conservative mistakes and that the Government needs to go much further and faster with its current approach. In this, members of the Cabinet will merely compound the growing public view that they are out of touch and complacent.

It is the Government's current direction that is the problem, not its rapidity. Further and faster down the wrong path is the height of political wrong-headedness. The repeated lesson of Labour governments - and indeed left of centre governments around the world - is that voters expect them to improve their living standards and when they do not, they withdraw their support. Labour in the 2020s has not somehow magically leapt out of this political reality.

Public opinion hardened against Labour over the winter fuel payment cut, which was Rachel Reeves' emblematic first major mistake. Now Labour intends to keep going, with a spending review in June and a vote imminent on its huge programme of welfare cuts.

"On every door it was the same story - winter fuel and PIP," reported the BBC's Henry Zeffman from Runcorn, referring to the £5-6 billion planned cuts to payments to disabled people.

EXCLUSIVE

Reform UK Facebook Groups Are Full of Racist Far Right Posts and Islamophobic Conspiracy Theories

Groups set up by Reform UK officials contain posts calling for Muslims to be lynched and suggestions that ...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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Help us build the better media Britain deserves

"I'm sad to be in opposition but there's a part of me that's excited," Kemi Badenoch told the Conservative party conference last October.

"We are going to have fun."

Fast forward to this morning and there was little sign of either the "excitement", or "fun" the Conservative leader predicted last year.

Far from being unleashed from the political chains of office, Badenoch continues to be heavily tied to them.

Right across the country, in a set of local elections heavily dominated by former Conservative strongholds, the party continues to be severely punished by voters, as they switch in huge numbers to Reform and the Liberal Democrats instead.

The reasons for last year's defeat have already been well dissected. Fourteen years of low growth, public sector austerity and administrative incompetence lay the ground for a historic collapse in support for a party which had previously been the most electorally successful in Britain's history.

Yet while in the past recently ousted governing parties quickly regained support in opposition, the opposite now appears to be happening with the Conservatives. Even in the face of growing global economic uncertainty, and an unpopular new Labour government, these results show that Badenoch's party continues to go backwards.

The reasons for this go well beyond the Conservatives' recent record in office, to the much more fundamental question of who the party is now actually for.

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Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar

A Failed Realignment

Ever since Brexit, the question of who the Conservative party stands for has been one that Tory politicians have struggled with. For Boris Johnson the answer lay in uniting socially conservative non-metropolitan voters, in opposition to a coalition of Labour's socially-liberal, university-educated, metropolitan base.

This strategy, which centred around a relatively small number of constituencies in the so-called "red wall" ultimately failed once the hollowness of Johnson's promises to "level up" those parts of the country became clear. Yet while Johnson's "realignment" ultimately proved illusory, it was at least a clear electoral strategy. The same cannot be said for what followed it.

In the wake of Liz Truss' devastating kamikaze raid on the Conservative party's economic reputation, Conservative party leaders quickly switched to an equally devastating raid on their own record on immigration. Beginning with Rishi Sunak's ludicrous pledge to "stop the boats", Conservative politicians succeeded in massively raising the salience of rising immigration numbers, while doing absolutely nothing of substance to actually deal with the issue. The result was that socially conservative voters started to switch in increasing numbers to Reform UK instead, with every attempt by the Conservatives to further mimic Nigel Farage's talking points, merely convincing even more voters to switch to the real deal.

And as socially conservative Tory voters switched over to Farage, so too did the Conservatives' more socially liberal base switch over to the Liberal Democrats. Turned off by the increasingly Trumpian pro-Brexit rhetoric of the party leadership, millions of affluent life-long Conservative voters in the South increasingly fled to Ed Davey's party. The result was a two-sided bleeding of Conservative support that today's results show is now only getting worse.

Kemi Badenoch Ditches Net Zero Target After Taking Donations From Funders of Tufton Street Climate De...

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Campaigners have warned that Keir Starmer's Government's planned benefits cuts are undermining its plans to end homelessness, as new figures show the number of households in temporary accommodation continues to rise.

Ministers have committed to increase funding for homeless services by £233 million next year, which will take spending to almost £1 billion, which they argue will put the UK on the path to ending homelessness.

However, the planned increases come as the Government also slashes spending on benefits, leading to fears that any progress could be reversed.

Speaking at the London Housing Summit on Wednesday, Labour MP for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green, who chairs Parliament's housing committee, said that the most "shocking thing" about the housing crisis is that an estimated 160,000 children, 90,000 of which are in London "woke up in temporary accommodation".

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Russell Scott

"Some of those children will not sleep in the same bed tonight. Some of them will be asked to move to another B and B hostel. That 90,000 equates to one child in every single classroom here in London. And when I was elected as the Chair of the Housing Communities and Local Government select committee, I was determined to make sure we put the stories of those children and the impact on their day-to-day lives front and center of the work we are doing as a select committee".

Her speech followed the release of statutory homelessness statistics for October to December 2024, which revealed that the number of households in temporary accommodation is at record levels and continues to rise.

127,890 households were in temporary accommodation on 31 December 2024, up 1.5% from the previous quarter and up 13.6% from the same time last year.

Eshalomi pledged to work to end the crisis, saying "let it be that every single home that we are bringing forward together with the Government includes generally affordable homes and social homes, so that we get those children out of temporary accommodation into a home of their own".

Some campaigners in the housing sector worry that the Government's housebuilding program will be insufficient to tackle the scale of the crisis.

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Iain Overton and Max Colbert

Dan Wilson Craw, Deputy Chief Executive of Generation Rent said, "Behind every statistic are thousands of stories of people facing some of the most stressful, traumatic and insecure times of their lives. More and more children are spending their formative years trapped living in temporary accommodation, often in overcrowded and unsafe conditions and at huge cost to local authorities. This is a national scandal that demands government action".

He added "The Government's house building programme is welcome, but will take years to have a noticeable impact. People need change now. It must intervene to slam the brakes on soaring rents, while also unfreezing Local Housing Allowance so those on low incomes have more options in finding a home."

Others worry that progress also risks being undermined by the planned cuts to Personal Independence Payments.

Alex Bax, Chief Executive of Pathway, a charity focussing on the health of homeless people t...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

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Correspondence newly released to Byline Times reveals how former Prime Minister David Cameron helped an old Etonian school friend and former hedge funder get a fast track into the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) advisors at the start of the pandemich.

The friend was Hugh Warrender, who attended Eton with Cameron in the 1980s and who was then representing a South Korean COVID testing firm. After being contacted by Warrender, Cameron introduced him to Lord Feldman, another close friend of Cameron's, who was working as an advisor to health ministers at the time.

Knightsbridge based consultancy firm, Fin De Guerre Strategies, owned by Warrender, was ultimately unsuccessful in securing the contract for their clients from the DHSC. However, the companies "referral" from Cameron sheds new light on how businesses backed by senior Conservative Party figures were able to circumnavigate the usual procurement process.

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Russell Scott

Emails released to Byline Times via a Freedom of Information request reveal how within three days of lobbying the former PM, the Fin De Guerre's offer to supply South Korean produced COVID Tests was emailed directly to Health Minister Lord Bethell.

In the early hour of 3 April 2020, Cameron received an email from representatives of Fin De Guerre, the subject header of the email read: "Need your help - I have a supplier of COVID-19 tests but we can't contact anyone who replies to offer them."

The email included a plea to help provide contact details for somebody in government with the "wherewithal to address" their offer to supply COVID tests "seriously".

Later the same morning, Cameron obliged and forwarded the offer onto Lord Feldman - A Conservative Peer who was also working as an advisor to Matt Hancock and Lord Bethell during the early months of the pandemic.

Cameron told the supplier: "Hi there. Try Andrew Feldman - an old friend of mine and my former party chairman who runs a business but is currently working in the NHS, for Matt Hancock, sorting out various procurements". Cameron signed off the email "All good wishes. Dc."

The day after Cameron's introduction to the Conservative Peer, the supplier emailed Lord Feldman directly on what appears to be his personal email address rather than his official DHSC account to request Feldman give its submission "more prompt attention".

Remarkably, within three hours Lord Feldman replied: "Thanks for this - you are doing all of the right things. We are getting a lot of offers of tests from South Korea at the moment as well as a huge volume of other offers. My job is to triage many of these offers across testing kits, ventilators, medicines and PPE for DHSC for Matthew Hancock and James Bethell."

Feldman, described as Cameron's oldest political friend, passed Fin De Guerre's COVID testing offer onto Health Minister and fellow Conservative Peer Lord Bethell the next day on 5 April 2020.

Lord Bethell replied within fifteen minutes of receiving the email from Lord Feldman, an email which was given the subject header "referral from David Cameron".

In his response Lod Bethell complained: "I just had a shocking procurement call. We need to think of ways around procurement."

Although Fin De Guerre's attempt to supply COVID Tests to the DHSC appears to have not succeeded, the emails reveal how a supplier with a Conservative Party backed "referral" was able to go from b...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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"I am in blood stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er".

This famous quote, from Act 3, Scene 4 of Shakespeare's Macbeth reflects the moment when Macbeth realises that he has gone so far down the path of evil that there is no turning back from it.

Reflecting on the destructive and lawless nature of Donald Trump's first 100 days in office, one has to wonder whether he too, like Macbeth, will conclude that his presidency has gone too far down the path of extremism to be able to course-correct.

Instead, despite his tanking poll numbers, he may be tempted to just keep upping the ante.

Trump is already well-known for his pathological aversion to admitting mistakes. Rather than reversing course, in an effort to reassure voters and calm the markets, he could decide to accelerate the chaos in the hope of keeping his opponents off-balance.

He could also try to exploit the non-stop turmoil to justify taking even more extreme measures - such as clamping down further on free speech; tasking the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash the budgets of even more federal agencies and bodies designed to oversee the executive; and weaponising institutions of the state, such as the FBI and Department of Justice, to go after even more political opponents.

His list of perceived enemies already includes officials from his first administration, such as Chris Krebs, former Secretary of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who challenged his claims that the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged; and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who has publicly criticised him.

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Hardeep Matharu

It includes media outlets and journalists who report critically on his administration. It includes law firms that represented clients in lawsuits against him or his businesses, which have been blacklisted from government contracts or bullied into signing agreements to provide it free legal services. It includes respected academic institutions such as Harvard and Columbia Universities, which have been hit or threatened with budget cuts on the flimsy grounds that they have failed to take sufficient action against antisemitism.

This list is now widening to include judges who have issued court orders against his administration, who are now being accused of judicial overreach. Last week, the administration even arrested a judge on the grounds that she had allegedly hindered the detention of an immigrant by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

His list includes non-profit organisations, think tanks, and independent entities which advocate for causes his administration opposes such as climate change; diversity, equity or inclusion (DEI) initiatives; or democracy promotion.

The list even includes entire towns, cities and states which are accused of not cooperating with his policies. On 28 April, the President signed an executive order directing the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to identify within a month those cities and states that are not complying with federal immigration laws, and designate them as "sanctuary jurisdictions". These could face federal funding cuts and possible criminal and c...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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Donald Trump's second US presidential term has been marked by voracious, sustained assaults on democratic values and institutions as his administration continues to impose a repressive regime that strips Americans of their constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly.

Currently at the centre of Trump's crosshairs are academic institutions. Education is knowledge, and with knowledge comes the confidence to question and challenge those in power - a risk this government is unwilling to take.

Following the autocrat's playbook, Trump and his MAGA cartel are attacking alternative sources of power; universities, the media, and the judiciary - all of which pose a threat to the unchecked power Trump seeks.

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Matt Gallagher

More than 40 universities are reportedly under investigation by the Trump administration; investigation typically means that they are being targeted, threatened, and hollowed out of academic freedom and autonomy.

The first to fall was Columbia University. Facing a $400 million loss in federal funding, the university capitulated to alarming demands from the Trump administration including ceding control of the department that offers courses on the Middle East, empowering security officers to arrest students, and placing new restrictions on protest.

The symbiotic partnership between the federal government and research institutions formed a cornerstone of American innovation and academic structures since the Second World War, usually with bipartisan support.

The action is largely being carried out by the newly established multi-agency task force to combat antisemitism, which announced its priority would be to "root out antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses", using the 2023 anti-war protests as a foothold to pursue their agenda. The task force is led by the Department of Justice's Office for Civil Rights, deeply ironic considering the objective is to strip citizens of their rights.

Columbia's decision had a chilling effect on other institutions, with some seeking to evade Trump's attention by pre-emptively adopting the administrations demands.

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Iain Overton

Their efforts, however, proved ineffective, with universities like Northwestern still hit with investigations and funding freezes, as Trump's motivations were never about changing policies or antisemitism - the ghastly guise behind which the administration has shielded itself in order to stifle free speech - this, as it always has been with Trump, is about power.

I was speaking in the US at a university campus the day of the presidential election. There was an anxious electricity in the room and an expectation that a second Trump term would be worse. In the campuses I have since visited, all expectations as to how extreme the Trump agenda would be have been surpassed; "it is so much worse than anticipated" is the general sentiment I routinely hear from students and faculty alike - only the professors who teach autocratic regimes appear unsurprised.

In the weeks since Columbia's capitulation, over 1,800 international students have had their legal status changed, students and graduates have been arrested for espousing pro-Palestinian views, and academics have been denied...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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A series of Facebook groups set up and administered by Reform UK officials are full of racist and Islamophobic posts and conspiracy theories, which have been left entirely unchallenged by the party, Byline Times can reveal.

One such group for the party's Kent supporters is listed as being "promoted by Carol Comey for and on behalf of Reform UK". Comey is the Kent County Organiser for Reform.

Posts in this group included the claim that it is "hardwired into [Muslims'] belief system to kill non-believers", that Israel is made up of "people who despise us and haven't done a single thing for us apart from take our money and dilute our country with foreign invaders", an iteration of the extreme right ideology of Great Replacement Theory which blames Jews for undermining the white race through migration.

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Julian Petley

The same user posted that "Hitler was a good actor and played his part" and a post appearing to claim that Muslims "will face public lynching one day once everyone gets off the news and starts reading more books".

In the same group Byline Times also found posts claiming that "Keir Starmer has no control" over "subhuman Muslim child rapists" and the "rapid Islamisation of Britain", and that Keir Starmer does "have control over free speech and imprisoning offenders. Tommy Robinson is one of many examples".

Although Farage has ruled out any alliance between Reform UK and Tommy Robinson stating in January "I never wanted Tommy Robinson to join UKIP. I don't want him to join Reform UK", pro-Robinson sentiment is highly prevalent among Reform UK's online supporters.

Other posts in the group included claims that the pandemic and Southport murders were parts of a coordinated plot to cover up problems in the UK.

Reform UK Gloucestershire is another public Facebook group, which was established by Lee Bunker, Reform UK's Regional Coordinator for the South West. The group carries the digital imprint "promoted by Lee Bunker on behalf of Reform UK 124 City Road, London EC1V 2NX" the electoral commission confirmed to Byline Times that it appears to be in line with Electoral law as it is a public group and the presence of the party's address suggests that it is "party material".

The group contains a post shared from the page of the far-right Traditional Britain Group, of the Dutch influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek promoting the Great Replacement Theory. Vlaardingerbroek once claimed in an interview with Winston Marshall that she "would love to be the new Nigel Farage" and take the Netherlands out of the EU.

Also shared in the Reform UK Gloucestershire group was a video claiming that wherever they go Muslims "are the problem" as well as conspiracy theories claiming that fluoride in water is poisonous and that "climate change is a scam".

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Byline Times identified more than two dozen Reform UK council candidates present in groups in which racist material or conspiracy theories were shared. In the Reform UK Cornwall group several council candidates act as admins for the group.

This did not stop the sharing of racist material. Candidate for Probus and St Erme in Cornwall, ...

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To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

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Labour's key election pledge to recruit 6500 new teachers will not be enough to prevent a serious shortage in secondary schools and further education colleges by 2028, the National Audit Office (NAO) says in a report published today.

The NAO estimates that in the worst case scenario, they may need 14,000 new teachers - the greatest shortage being in further education colleges to teach new T-line courses, and where teachers are paid, on average £10,000 less a year than in secondary schools.

The aim was to reverse the record of previous Conservative and coalition Governments since 2010, who met recruitment targets only once in 14 years. The number of teachers recruited in the last year the Conservatives were in office was the lowest ever - only 8,700 newly qualified teachers started work in 2023/24, while 8,200 teachers returned to the profession.

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Neal Lawson

The previous Government saw record numbers of teachers leaving the profession with 19,000 exiting in 2022-23, higher than the pre-pandemic level of 18,500 in 2018-19. Just over a third left secondary schools after five years, citing high workloads, stress, and lack of well being. The number of teachers in schools has risen by 3% to 217,600 over the last 10 years but the number of pupils has increased by 15%.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton Brown, Conservative chair of the Commons Accounts Committee, said: "The Department of Education assesses that meeting the Government's pledge of 6,500 more teachers will be very challenging. Even if met, it is not clear that this will be enough to fix the nationwide shortage of teachers amidst growing numbers of students.

Targets for training new teachers have been repeatedly missed and over a third of teachers leave within their first five years. Teachers need to feel values and rewarded. There needs to be a new cross-sector approach to recruiting and retaining enough high-quality teachers otherwise, workforce challenges will continue to pose a real threat to young people's education and life prospects

Sir Geoffrey Clifton Brown, hair of the Commons Accounts Committee

Labour decided to tackle the shortage by investing £700 million, providing incentives to recruit teachers in shortage subjects. These include training bursaries, opportunities for career development, and retention payments of up to £6,000 to those qualified to teach secondary school maths, physics, chemistry, or computing, who choose to teach in disadvantaged schools in the first five years of their career.

But the latest figures show that many of the attempts to recruit new teachers have failed. Targets to recruit new physics teachers were missed by 69%, computing by 63% and modern languages by 57%. Recruitment of new classics, English, biology and history teachers exceeded targets.

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The Department for Education (DfE) told the NAO that Labour's target was extremely challenging and cited lack of competitive pay - despite the new Government giving teachers a 5.5% pay rise last year - as one of the reasons for the failure to recruit enough teachers in shortage subjects.

This was backed up by stakeholders who submitted evidence to the NAO, who identified competitive pay as the most effective way to i...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

In March 2024, Richard Tice, then leader of Reform UK, complained to the BBC that an article in one of its news reports had referred to his party as "far-right" and that this was "defamatory and libellous".

The BBC immediately apologised and removed the offending sentence. Tice also claimed that his lawyers had warned other media organisations from describing his party in these terms, although this has not deterred independent outlets such as HOPE not Hate and Byline Times from doing so.

Of course, Tice is a presenter on rival channel GB News and regularly rails against the BBC, while Reform itself is committed to abolishing the licence fee, so his complaint was not exactly disinterested. It does, however, furnish a useful opportunity to consider the extent to which populism can be said to have entered the bloodstream of right-wing parties in the UK and the media that vociferously support them.

Mainstreaming the Radical Right

It is now a commonplace that, in both Europe and the US, recent years have seen an influx of radical right-wing ideas into the political mainstream.

Mainstreaming takes place because traditional right-wing parties increasingly address the same issues as radical right-wing ones, and do so in a similar way.

This is particularly the case given the increasing dominance of the political agenda by socio-cultural issues - multiculturalism, identity politics and culture wars. Sentiments that used to be exclusive to radical right parties have increasingly become the "common sense" of the more mainstream right, and the boundaries between the two have become increasingly blurred and porous.

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Peter Jukes

As Cas Mudde puts it in The Far Right Today (2019), the radical right "does not stand for a fundamentally different world than the political mainstream; rather it takes mainstream ideas and values to an illiberal extreme".

Enter populism

This process is frequently described as a turn towards populism, but before going any further, it's necessary to define the sense in which the term "populism" is being used in this article.

Briefly, populism valorises "the people", which it conceives as a unified and homogenous whole (as in, for instance, the "silent majority"). A good example of this in the UK context would be Nigel Farage crowing on Brexit night that "this will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people".

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"The people" are defined in opposition to an out-of-touch, unrepresentative "Establishment", or more commonly in the UK, "liberal elite". This typically includes the mainstream media ("fake news" in Trump-speak, the BBC in the case of those vociferously lobbying against it); elected politicians (in it only for themselves); public functionaries (obstructive and unaccountable bureaucrats); intellectuals (pointy-headed inhabitants of the ivory tower); the legal profession ("lefty lawyers", judges as "enemies of the people"); a...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

Around the world, a troubling pattern seems to be emerging: governments are increasingly using immigration controls not simply to manage borders, but to suppress political dissent and freedom of expression.

From the United States to Israel, Hong Kong to Nicaragua, the use of visa denials based on political beliefs is fast becoming the favoured tool of exclusion. Politicians, journalists, and students who speak out - particularly in support of Palestinian rights - are facing revocations of status, refusals of entry, and, in some cases, deportation.

In the US, over 300 international students have reportedly had their visas revoked, many from well-known universities such as Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford. These removals are often justified under vague claims of posing a "threat to US foreign policy," a classification that increasingly appears to mean "pro-Palestinian speech".

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Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate, had his visa revoked after joining pro-Gaza protests. The revocation, and that of others, draws upon a Cold War-era statute allowing visa cancellations on foreign policy grounds, even in the absence of any criminal wrongdoing.

Another student, Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian-born co-president of Columbia's Palestinian Students Union, was arrested by ICE agents during what should have been his US citizenship interview. And then there is the case of Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor deported from the US (despite a federal judge's ruling to halt it) for attending the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, progressive Jewish groups and synagogues across the United States have rallied in support of students like Mahdawi, Khalil, and Rumeysa Ozturk - a Tufts University graduate detained after co-authoring an essay critical of Israel. They have condemned the government's actions as both unconstitutional and antithetical to Jewish values, warning of a creeping authoritarianism masked as national security.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, America's actions seemed to have emboldened others. Israel, on April 6, denied British MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang entry while they were attempting to visit the occupied West Bank. The MPs stood accused of planning to spread "hate speech".

In Hong Kong, a similar story unfolds. On 13 April 2025, Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse was detained for several hours at Hong Kong airport before being deported. Hobhouse, a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), has been an outspoken critic of China's human rights record.

'The Free Speech Debate Has a Lot to Do With Race - But the Media Won't Tell You That'

The 'sheer hypocrisy' of the UK's right-wing media in celebrating Trump's 'free speech ultimatum'

Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia

These actions, occurring across various nations and to those from the so-called 'Global North' is not - as in the past - against dispossessed and 'unwelcome poor' migrants.

This new turn represents not just the closing of borders but the deliberate exclusion of dissenting voices of power. It's a shift fuelled by counter-narratives that delegitimise truth itself ("journalists/academics can't be trusted") and signals a broader cultural and political move away from a rules-based order and open debate.

In an age where there is a veneered truth that freedom of speech is ubiquitous and ever-present on social media, the state is no lo...