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In the last month, Ukraine has set its sights on a new target in Russia, a business by the name of Wildberries. This company is an e-commerce giant, the largest of its kind in Russia, with a market share of almost half of all online retail. At the heart of its business is a network of massive warehouse facilities. When the warehouses burn in the aftermath of Ukrainian drone strikes the footage shows smoke plumes that billow for miles.

There are many valid reasons behind why Wildberries became a focus of Ukraine long-range drone warfare, alongside the continuing attacks on oil and gas infrastructure and strikes to military facilities manufacturing parts for Russia's deadly ballistic missiles. As the sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska recently said, "the old maxim is that if you owe the bank a million, that's your problem. If you owe the bank a billion, that's their problem." Wildberries has borrowed heavily to build its business, it owes not a billion, but lots of billions. $18.4 billion, more or less.

Put simply, the intent of Ukraine's Wildberries strategy is to ratchet up pressure on the banking sphere. Much of the lending to Wildberries has come from VTB Bank, a state-owned bank, indicating the strategic importance of this company to the Kremlin.

If a business is strategically important to the Kremlin, it is strategically important to Ukraine too.

EXCLUSIVE

The accountancy firm that administers George Cottrell's Montenegro company, has invested in a property development with the alleged ringleader of the country's largest money laundering cartel

Nafeez Ahmed

So far, the attacks on the warehouse network have destroyed 10 of the 15 largest warehouses that the group operates, another 3 in the top 15 have also been severely damaged and are offline. With such a significant impact on its operations (another 5 of the next tier of 15 warehouses by size have also been destroyed) there's no doubt that this company will be facing difficulty servicing its mountain of debt. This, and a combination of other factors, are leading towards a crisis in the wider banking sector.

While the main business cannot repay its debts, Wildberries acted as an incubator for many small and medium-sized businesses. Approximately 500,000 individual traders use the services (storage, delivery, hosting of their stores, payment processing, etc.) of Wildberries, and many of them face bankruptcy with their goods having gone up in smoke.

Interestingly, a week before the Ukrainian strike campaign began, the company changed their Terms & Conditions to state that they would not be liable for losses caused by drone damage. Maybe they'd been tipped off. But entrepreneurs across Russia have lost their incomes. Those potential new bankruptcies will likely all have bank exposure too. They'll certainly not be contributing to the tax revenue that the state depends on.

Bankruptcies in Russia were already up 30% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, a sign of the pressures Vladimir Putin's "Special Military Operation" is putting on the economy as a whole. In fact, the only part of the Russian economy that has shown any sign of growth over the last few years has been the war economy. Wars are expensive things, but where does the money come from for the war economy? Well, again, the answer is the banks.

At the beginning of the war, Putin signed an order instructing banks to extend loans to defence contractors on preferential terms established by the Government. As a result, the war-linked loan book amounted to 58% of all commercial lending in 2025. While financing of consumer-related businesses fell from 31% pre-war to 20% of the loan portfolio in 2025. At some point those loans are going to mature, or will require refinancing. How much – considering the high probability of the contractors themselves being picked clean of anything of value by their owne...

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Artemon, the accountancy firm that administers George Cottrell's Tivat company, co-invested in a property development with a company owned by an indicted drug-trafficker. The trafficker, Mileta Ojdanić, is a former police officer indicted by state authorities in 2024 for organising an alleged cocaine-trafficking and money-laundering operation called the "police cartel".

Cottrell is a convicted fraudster, who has personally funded Nigel Farage's travel, security and staff costs. His mother's donations to Reform UK are now under criminal investigation. It has also been confirmed that he transferred £2 million to Fiona Cottrell days before her donations to Reform UK.

Artemon is the corporate service provider that administers Cottrell's Montenegro company, registered as Private Family Office. But it simultaneously administers companies owned by Mileta Ojdanić, who appears to have used bank accounts being scrutined for links to Russian money.

Montenegro's High Court confirmed an indictment against Ojdanić in 2024: prosecutors accuse him of organising a criminal network that trafficked some 4.3 tonnes of cocaine from South America into Europe and laundered around €7 million. In December 2024, Montenegro's Special Police Department seized documentation from Adriatic Bank in an investigation into clients' prior business ties to Russia.

Private Family Office's own accounts show an accumulated deficit that grew from roughly €79,000 in 2020 to €465,638 in 2025, on near-zero revenue and a single employee, kept afloat by more than €400,000 in loans from unidentifiable sources, first reported by Byline Times. Cottrell's lawyers have said only that the loans and the company's lack of revenue are unsurprising, since it was established for "administrative functions."

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Byline Times previously revealed that Cottrell entered the corporate finance world under a false Swiss identity, hired by the same City network that later produced Reform UK's own treasurer, Mehrtash A'zami. Byline Times has since confirmed that this identity was stolen from a real person – Cottrell's old school friend – and that the senior accountant who had hired Cottrell years later under that false identity had no way of knowing about the past friend.

The second traced how the accountancy network tied to both Cottrell and former Reform UK treasurer Mehrtash A'zami has a Moscow partner tied to sanctioned Russian oligarchs. It also revealed that Artemon, and a sister Tivat firm, Vegaplus, serve clients that include a Belgrade arms dealer marketing Russian-designed weapons, and individuals linked to Russian state enterprises.

Artemon is the registered corporate contact for two of Ojdanić's companies, Ruža Co and his gambling firm, Džoker – pointing to the company's corporate administration of both.

On 22 September 2021, a government filing seen by Byline Times confirms that Artemon became a joint investor in Ruža Co, whose ownership is split 51% to Mileta Ojdanić and 49% to Milica Ojdanić.

The joint-investor role was confirmed again a year later. Artemon is also the corporate service provider for Ojdanic's gambling company Džoker, a betting venue and lounge in Kotor, Montenegro.

EXCLUSIVE

Why did Reform UK change from being a privately-owned company to a non-profit company limited by guarantee in 2025? Nafeez Ahmed investigates a fraudulent identity used by George Cottrell – and how his former boss in the City became the party's treasurer vetting donations

Nafeez Ahmed

Montenegrins call it the "police cartel" because prosecutors allege s...

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With luminaries from Erasmus and Isaac Newton to Alan Turing to Stephen Hawking, Cambridge University has always framed itself as a centre of scientific advance, progress, and the Enlightenment.

It was famed for its rationalism and Puritanism, putting principle above power, compared to its great rival, Oxford, which became the royalist capital during the English Civil War.

Since then, Oxford has been the traditional pipeline to national politics. Thirteen of the UK's 18 post-war prime ministers were educated there, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson, contemporaries at the infamous hard-drinking Bullingdon Club.

Cambridge has preferred to boast of its intellectual and cultural achievements: the number of Trinity College Fellows who are Nobel Prize winners; Footlights, the comedy revue that powered Monty Python and the careers of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Emma Thompson; Mathematical Bridge in Queens' College, mythically built by Newton; and the Eagle Pub where Crick and Watson announced that they had discovered the structure of DNA.

Now, a very different type of 'dark enlightenment' has descended on the world-renowned university. Powered by US money and far-right European think tanks, Cambridge has recently become an outpost of a peculiar blend of national conservatism and apocalyptic Christianity, through the figure of James Orr – Head of Policy at Reform UK described as Nigel Farage's "Kingmaker".

A six-month investigation by Byline Times can now exclusively reveal that with the behind-the-scenes support of Peter Thiel — Trump backer and co-founder of the controversial data-mining and surveillance giant Palantir Technologies — Orr has used Cambridge University as a recruitment ground to bring students into a hard-right, theocratic political project aimed at bolstering talent in Farage's party.

Sources across the university have raised urgent concerns about the safeguarding risks to students in Orr's orbit.

James Orr has housed students at his 'right-wing mecca' alongside race science advocates and hard-right political figures, in clear breach of Cambridge University's safeguarding rules.

Orr's appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion in Cambridge University's Faculty of Divinity in 2019 was accompanied by a clandestine financial donation from the pro-Trump Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.

Thiel went on to offer 'life-changing' sums of money to Cambridge University scholars in Orr's network.

Academics and students have consistently raised concerns about Orr's conflicts of interest over funding, and dangers of breaching 'foreign influence' legislation.

Orr's lawyers threatened to injunct Byline Times over any mention in this investigation of the name of his "Conservative Kibbutz"– the premises where he houses students and which has already been named in the public domain.

Cambridge University has consistently ignored Byline Times' confidential queries about the concerns raised by James Orr's activities. Instead, its press office has passed them on directly to Orr's lawyers. The University has offered no explanation of, or comment on, the extensive findings of this investigation – including, extraordinarily, concerns of safeguarding in relation to its students.

A quiet, narrow suburban road runs along the river Cam on the northern edge of Cambridge, where the city thins into ice cream shops and laundromats, and then water and trees.

Along a row of unremarkable English houses, behind a nondescript corner, stands a building easily mistaken for one of them.

From the front, the property looks faintly run-down. One window carries an anti-abortion slogan. Another displays an English flag. Painted across the wall of the front porch, in plain script, is a verse from the Book of Revelation: "And the leaves of the trees were for the healing of the nations."

Behind this plain-looking building lies an...

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Upon taking office in 2025, US President Donald Trump set out to dismantle America's counter-disinformation capabilities, claiming that trying to mitigate disinformation is a threat to free speech. However, newly leaked documents suggest that at the same time, Trump and his allies were shutting down initiatives aimed at combatting malign foreign influence, defunding research on disinformation and hate, and using the full force of the Government to go after individual researchers, the White House was quietly working with one or more private organisations to build parallel capabilities, except this time they would be designed to be used offensively and turned inward at American citizens.

The leaked documents, some of which were shared on X by Gabrielle Cuccia — a former pro-Trump influencer who claims she was fired from her job at One America News Network (OANN) last year for criticising US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — reveal what looks like an expansive covert domestic influence campaign orchestrated by the White House and laundered through an organisation called Vine and Fig Tree (VFT). According to information contained in the documents, VFT has been working on behalf of the White House to monitor certain right-wing influencers, study their online networks, and identify vulnerabilities that could later be used to "go after" them with smear campaigns. The documents also reveal discussions about using burner accounts and AI-generated media, testing different types of messaging and engagement tactics, and laundering the administration's talking points through influencers to obscure the Government's role.

According to Cuccia, she got access to the documents when VFT reached out to her to ask for her help writing a script that would be used to produce an "AI-generated video on behalf of the White House…" She says VFT told her that they had been brought in to work on this project because White House officials "don't want it to look like it's actually coming from the WH [White House]."

This strategy appears to have already been deployed successfully at least once in recent months. According to Cuccia, VFT told her that "it worked out for them and Nick Shirley," implying that the White House may have been involved in coordinating with right-wing content creator Nick Shirley, whose selectively-edited viral video claiming to show fraud in Minnesota's Somali community attracted the attention of the White House and allowed Trump to justify ordering a surge of federal resources into the state, ultimately resulting in protests and the shooting deaths of two Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.

The allegations stemming from the leaked documents have not yet been independently verified, but the tactics described in the files align closely with the administration's approach to information competition and confrontation. For example, the State Department's new counter-disinformation framework includes directives to partner with local influencers and media personalities to spread pro-administration messaging in a way that looks authentic. The framework further emphasises X as the major platform on which to deploy influence operations, with instructions to use the Community Notes feature to challenge unfavourable messaging. Additionally, according to court documents, the administration has also quietly used publicly-funded news outlets like Voice of America to launder its talking points.

Bev Turner told her viewers that the Belfast violence amounted to mere 'skirmishes' despite hundreds of masked men terrorising migrants and ethnic minority people in the city

Josiah Mortimer

For years, Trump and his allies have argued that Government involvement in counter-disinformation work posed an existential threat to free speech. After his 2020 election loss, Trump was quick to blame the people in this line of work, which was...

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In February 2020, far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon ('Tommy Robinson') travelled to Moscow and St Petersburg, giving interviews to Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT and meeting figures linked to Russian nationalist movements. Since then, questions have long swirled about his Russian connections and the sources of his funding amid mounting legal debts.

Byline Times can now reveal that years before that trip to Russia, Robinson was hired as a "goodwill ambassador" for an unregistered charity fronting a secretive Russian propaganda network that worked directly for President Vladimir Putin's administration, and has ties to a sanctioned Russian state-linked oil giant.

The unregistered charity – the MMBF Trust – is part of a network centred around the London Post.

At first glance, the London Post resembles a local news website covering UK gambling regulations and London restaurant reviews. It has featured articles about Borough Market's grocery ordering service, and good spots for ramen.

But sources who spoke to Byline Times described it as part of what intelligence analysts call a 'black PR' operation: coordinated disinformation campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion while concealing their true sponsors.

Robinson's appointment to the unregistered charity was first reported by anti-extremism organisation Hope Not Hate in 2017.

Last year, Press Gazette revealed that the London Post – which had announced the appointment – had surprising Russia links.

Byline Times can now reveal further details about the suspected funding behind the website, including cryptocurrency payment trails to Russian 'black PR' agents, and ties to major Russian state enterprises.

The site's Russian backers operate through a company called Moscow Media Group.

Its subsidiary, MMG Brainstorming, has publicly advertised its work for Putin's presidential office, the State Duma, the Federation Council, and various Russian Government ministries and agencies.

Moscow Media Group also has ties to a wide range of Russian state-backed energy and infrastructure enterprises, including to the sanctioned Russian oil company Gazprom Neft.

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The Unregistered Charity

The public face behind the London Post is a Zimbabwean-English film producer named Matthew C Martino (also known as Mathetes Chihwai).

Martino runs a UK-based entity called the Matthew Martino Benevolent Fund (MMBF Trust), the website of which states that it is a charity supporting filmmakers and others who wish to study or work in the performing arts.

However, the organisation neither registered with the UK's Charity Commission nor provided any notable support to filmmakers.

In 2017, the MMBF Trust made waves on social media when the London Post announced Tommy Robinson as its new goodwill ambassador.

Robinson, the co-founder of the English Defence League, is a convicted fraudster whose disinformation helped fuel the 2024 Southport riots which involved unprecedented racist violence.

According to the London Post's announcement, Robinson was hired by the MMBF Trust to help oversee a £100,000 arts grant programme that would launch in February 2018.

The nature of the work Robinson undertook for the MMBF Trust is unclear. But the charity appears to have been a front to provide legitimacy to a Russian-backed propaganda operation.

The 2Trom Network

The London Post is part of a media consortium of ostensibly British news organisations, operating under an entity called 2Trom News Group.

Although inco...

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"The enemy has only images and illusions… behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you will break the enemy."

— Shaolin Master to Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon

That line appears at the very start of Enter the Dragon, delivered before a punch is thrown. It frames the entire film. The struggle it describes is not one of brute force, but of credibility. Power, Bruce Lee's Shaolin master suggests, rarely confronts you directly. It shelters behind images. Strip those away, and what remains is exposed.

It is difficult for me not to think about that line when looking at what has just happened inside the Labour Party.

For years, the Labour right under Sir Keir Starmer's leadership has carefully cultivated an image. The staging is familiar: the Union Jack backdrop, the language of seriousness, duty, restraint and responsibility. Even the careful emphasis on titles and institutional roles plays its part. The claim is not merely of competence, but of public duty. That power is exercised reluctantly. That decisions are taken in the national interest, not out of factional advantage. That this is public service, not politics as usual.

That image has mattered because it has functioned as legitimacy. It reassured voters, quietened dissent and disarmed critics. It suggested that whatever internal disagreements existed, those in charge were acting from a higher sense of responsibility.

But images only work if behaviour sustains them.

Freebiegate and repeated policy U-turns have already eroded that credibility. But the decision to block Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from the Gorton and Denton by-election did something more profound. It did not simply remove a political obstacle. It punctured the image itself, publicly and unmistakably.

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This was not persuasion. It was not democratic judgement. It was not even subtle strategy. It was the open deployment of bureaucratic power to neutralise a figure whose authority rests on precisely the things the leadership claims to value: electoral success, public trust and a strong local mandate.

In that moment, the illusion failed.

When power reaches for administrative force rather than argument or consent, it reveals its true priorities. What was exposed here was not country before party, but self-preservation. Not public service, but control. Not national interest, but institutional self-interest.

Once that becomes visible, the language no longer works. The symbolism no longer covers the act. Claims of seriousness and duty ring hollow when set against naked factional enforcement.

This is not simply about Andy Burnham as an individual. It is about what happens when a political leadership becomes more invested in managing threats to itself than in advancing a project rooted in democratic confidence. When maintaining control becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to serve a wider purpose.

MPs may spend much of their lives inside the Westminster bubble, but we are never fully enclosed by it. We return each week to our constituencies. We sit in surgeries. We hear frustration, anger and disillusionment unfiltered. We see how political decisions land beyond the chamber and the lobby briefings.

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Adam Bienkov

It is in that space, between Westminster and the country, that legitimacy is tested.

When MPs themselves begin to conclude, alongside the public, that th...

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Reform councillors Joseph Boam and Michael Squires faced a wave of backlash on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, this week for posting favourably about ICE, the US immigration enforcement agency which is accused of operating like a paramilitary force, following the killing of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

The footage of Pretti's death showed him intervening to help a protester being assaulted by an ICE agent, before being pinned to the floor by several agents who then realised he had a holstered gun (for which he had a license) on his hip. Pretti's hands were pinned to the ground, with one agent shown reaching for the holstered weapon, then another pushing that agent away and firing his own gun into Pretti's prone body. The killing occurred just two weeks after ICE agents in Minneapolis shot Renee Good dead as she drove away from them.

The posts from Boam and Squires appeared in immediate reaction to Pretti's shooting, with Boam reposting an image from the US Department of Homeland Security bearing the slogan "I stand with ICE". Squires then shared the image and added his approval: "100% chance of ICE forecast. Well done and huge congratulations to ICE for their heroic work saving the United States of America". The men were accused of endorsing the killing.

Squires has since deleted his post, and Boam hurriedly clarified that it was not the killing that he stood by, saying: "When I said I support ICE's work, I mean that I support the enforcement of immigration law, which is the task of Immigration Control and Enforcement, aka ICE. That is what I stand by".

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Nafeez Ahmed

Boam has got form. According to the anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate, he used to endorse Andrew Tate on Twitter. However, it would be wrong to dismiss support for the agency as merely the outbursts of two renegade provocateur councillors. Indeed, support for ICE, and the desire to create a British equivalent, runs deep in the Reform UK project.

At Reform UK's conference last September, Professor James Orr, a senior advisor to Farage, said on a panel about preparing Reform for government: "We know what needs to be done, we know what needs to be repealed. We need a new borders taskforce, a British ICE and so on".

Orr is a key player in Reform, acting as a trans-Atlantic bridge to the Trump administration. He is a mentor to Vice President JD Vance, who memorably described the Cambridge don as his "British sherpa".

In the same speech, Orr argued that the party should hold its cards close to its chest before entering government, keeping certain operational decisions under wraps before governing, to prevent a backlash from political opponents.

Other prominent figures in Reform are also signalling their approval for the creation of a British version of ICE, even if concrete policy proposals have not yet been published. In an interview on GB News, Reform rising star and candidate for London Mayor, Laila Cunningham, was asked if she thought there needed to be a British equivalent to ICE.

She replied: " I think we need a deterrent and we need law and order and we need to protect our borders", before adding that the men of ICE "are just enforcing" deportation orders and that the UK needs a "strong border force, like ICE, to be a deterrent [to irregular migration]".

Trump's Violent Assault on Minnesota Is an Operation in 'Reflexive Control'

The President is using Soviet-style redirection to wage an information war across America,...

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The Trump administration's immigration and customs enforcement agency, ICE – which sparked outrage after killing US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on the grounds of them being "domestic terrorists" – is using digital surveillance for its mass deportation scheme built by the data firm Palantir, which previously developed tools to track protestors for the US Army, Byline Times can reveal.

Palantir, the giant US analytics firm co-founded by pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, has major contracts with the UK's Department of Health and Social Care, and the Ministry of Defence.

The company has a £330 million contract as the lead supplier of the NHS' federated data programme, and a £240 million contract to provide analytics for the MoD. London is home to the company's biggest office outside of the United States.

In the US, the company's contracts with ICE stretch across a number of years, with obligations already exceeding $139 million and procurement documents describing future work worth hundreds of millions more in its mission to track down illegal migrants as part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation policy.

Both killings in the past month have been of protestors against ICE activity.

Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and mother of three, was fatally shot three times by ICE agent Jonathan Ross after she monitored his activities. Witnesses reported that agents gave conflicting commands – one told her to move her vehicle, while another shouted for her to exit.

Pretti, also 37, an intensive care unit nurse at a specialised medical centre operated by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, was holding his phone to film the activities of ICE officers and was trying to protect a woman who had been pepper-sprayed when he was shot on his knees in the back of the head.

It has since emerged that ICE agents reportedly had prior contact with Pretti a week earlier when he was protesting against ICE efforts to detain others. On that occasion, ICE attacked him and broke his ribs.

Sources told CNN that ICE officers have been collecting private information about protestors in Minneapolis and that the agency had "documented details" about Pretti before he was shot to death – raising the question of what information ICE is compiling about protestors.

The US Department of Homeland Security – of which ICE is the largest investigative arm – has denied creating a "database" of "domestic terrorists" or of having any record of the previous incident involving Pretti.

But analysis by Byline Times of official ICE procurement documents shows it has the capability to move from immigration enforcement to the suppression of protest – with Palantir first developing such technology for the Pentagon.

Domestic Surveillance

Two years into the first Trump administration, the Pentagon was revealed to be funding research to predict where anti-Trump protests would occur.

This work, led by the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), involved scraping social media, tracking geolocation data, mapping social networks to identify influencers and organisers, crowd dynamics modelling, and building AI models to forecast dissent before it emerged.

One of the scientists behind the research, Lance Kaplan, working at the ARL, also published papers on the use of sensor fusion and network science to predict human behaviour from data streams. Another, Claire Bonial, listed research interests including "predicting social unrest using social media", "event detection", and "modelling emergent behaviour".

In 2018, Palantir began working directly with the US Army Research Laboratory.

In 2020, the company was awarded a $91 million contract for "artificial intelligence and machine learning development".

In 2021, the US Army claimed that ARL scientists had built models to "detect events from open-source information" a...

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The most striking aspect of Keir Starmer's Government has been the disconnect between its actions on policy and it's standing in the polls.

The Government has received far too little credit for much of these. Both its child poverty strategy, a centrepiece of which is the scrapping of the two-child cap on universal credit, and its national youth strategy, including young futures hubs, signify its willingness to tackle inter-generational fairness. The same applies to rolling out Best Start family centres. Even its means-testing of winter fuel allowance can be justified on the same basis, albeit with a qualifying threshold that was initially drawn far too tightly.

Major changes to employment law begin a redress of the imbalance between capital and labour so entrenched since the 1980s. Likewise, advances in renters' rights rebalance landlord-tenant relations. These reforms are complemented by increases in taxation on capital gains, inheritance, high-value properties and non-domiciled status. They are all significant redistributive measures, whether of power or wealth.

Similarly, changes to the formulae used for local government funding geared to relative need, providing latitude too on how resources are deployed, a harbinger of whole place strategies as opposed to funding silos. A new violence against women and girls' strategy also placed gender vulnerabilities at the heart of public policy, in circumstances where domestic and online abuse has reached epidemic proportions.

Then there was the Government's industrial strategy designed to enhance the competitiveness, resilience and security of the UK economy, with associated sectoral plans. Complementary is its upgrading of public infrastructure, including transition towards low-carbon energy, with fiscal rules adjusted accordingly.

Admittedly, not all these policy initiatives will be game-changers. Rachel Reeves' tax reforms have been piecemeal rather than systematic in aligning levies on different revenue streams. Stretched funding for the most deprived areas and extent of deep poverty remain scourges on the country's conscience. Nonetheless, the directions of travel is clear. So, why the poor popularity ratings?

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Dan Clayton

Polls Apart

The first thing to acknowledge is that the Government faces a deeply hostile media. This hostility is arguably worse than ever given the character of those owning and controlling legacy media, combined with the algorithmic biases built into the main digital platforms that so readily accommodate far-right disinformation and imagery.

The Government's dire inheritance of a lethal cocktail of taxes at relatively high levels for the post-1945 era; deteriorating public services; depleted civic assets; atrophying high streets; and cumulatively high levels of public borrowing leaving the UK economy seriously exposed in international markets, have also contributed.

However, such a defence inevitably wears thin with the passing of time.

Another explanation for the lack of popularity centres on its failures of political leadership in developing a compelling over-arching narrative for how its policy will change the country for the better. This has led to calls for an overhaul of the Government's whole communication strategy.

However, much of Starmer's time and energy as Prime Minister has had to be devoted, in co-ordination with other European and Commonwealth leaders, to managing the security threats posed not only by Vladimir Putin's state terrorism, but also from a rogue President in the White House susceptible to Russian propaganda and impulsive actions on the global stage.

A Populist Revolt

Polit...

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If you – like me – have spent far too much time recently looking at a phone screen, replaying from different angles and from multiple different sources the last moments of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, as their lives were snuffed out by masked ICE agents in Minneapolis, then you probably already have a clear idea about what you saw. So, when such murders, or summary executions, as many might see them, are referred to as 'officer-involved shootings' in media reports, it certainly feels that the language being used is not doing justice to the events we see unfolding in front of our very eyes.

And when Greg Bovino, the US Border Force Commander whose sartorial choices are not the only thing that have a whiff of Gestapo about them, says that the shooting of Alex Pretti was "a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement", it feels like a moment of jaw-dropping mendacity. Let's remember what the multiple videos of Pretti's shooting show: a man using his phone to film an ICE action on a street, stepping between the masked ICE agents to shield another observer who had been pushed over and then being pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground by several agents, apparently having his (legally owned and licensed) handgun removed from his belt while on the ground before being shot multiple times and killed.

Any attempt to retell or write an account of an event will by its very nature encode a version of events that reflect different perspectives – both literal and ideological – and while I have tried to be as neutral as possible in my account above, I have made several significant vocabulary, syntax and punctuation choices, because I cannot attempt to mask my revulsion for the actions that I've seen, nor shake the sickening feeling that this is part of a wider authoritarian crackdown that is being sanctioned, encouraged and celebrated by those at the very top. We are all entitled to recast events in a way that reflects our own take on what happens, but what – I hope – most of us agree on is that we have to convey the events, actions and participants in a way that is at least truthful to a shared grasp of reality.

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The growing backlash against ICE's killing of Alex Pretti will be a turning point in public opinion towards the President, predicts Alexandra Hall Hall

Alexandra Hall Hall

Orwellian Language

In a press conference shortly after Pretti's killing, Kristi Noem, Trump's Homeland Security Secretary claimed that "an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a nine millimetre semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm the suspect, but the armed suspect reacted violently". Meanwhile, White House adviser Stephen Miller posted on X that Pretti was a "would-be assassin" who "tried to murder federal law enforcement", a claim retweeted by Vice President JD Vance.

Orwell gets overquoted all the time, but if you can't quote "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears" now, then when can you quote it?

None of the videos show Pretti holding, let alone 'brandishing' a handgun (as Noem also claimed). In fact, the only people holding guns are the ICE agents, one of whom appeared to take Pretti's own handgun from his belt or holster shortly before the fatal shots, using it later in a picture shared by Government social media accounts to present evidence of the victim being armed and dangerous.

As we know, Pretti's was not the first death in this current ICE crackdown, nor even the first in Minneapolis this month. Two weeks before, Renee Nicole Good, a woman involved in observing and attempting to head-off ICE snatch squads, was shot at almost point-blank range by another ICE agent. She died only a couple of blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered by the police in ...