“Trump Time” has transformed warfare. In just two sets of days, in June 2025 then again in February 2026, Iran’s core military infrastructure was almost totally obliterated, allowing the focus to shift to sustained economic pressure. Trump’s “little excursion” has been one of the fastest, most effective, least costly military operations in modern history.

“Trump Time” also brought negotiation techniques that departed from past practice. Historically, diplomatic engagements with Iran have been lengthy, baroque, often stretching over years to provide Iran with opportunities for delay and recalibration. Trump instituted shorter timelines sown with threats of escalation, evidently to prevent Tehran from using its favorite stalling tactic: forever-talks.

Through his unconventional statecraft, and his breaking from a long run of US failures, Trump – in a blend of military assertiveness, economic pressure and strategic unpredictability – decided to win.

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Image: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

“For far too long - all the way back to 1979 to be exact - nations have tolerated Iran’s destructive and destabilizing behavior in the Middle East and beyond. Those days are over. Iran has been the leading sponsor of terrorism, and their pursuit of nuclear weapons threatens the civilized world. We will never let that happen.”

~ Donald J. Trump (quote from 2020) ~

Afc Newsletter April 25, 2026

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Friendship is fine, love is divine and liquor is quicker, but there is nothing like a feud, especially when it’s between writers, who habitually hurl around words like nunchucks. Gore Vidal wrote that, ‘The three saddest words in the English language are Joyce Carol Oates’ and ‘My first impression – as I wasn’t wearing my glasses – was that it was a colourful ottoman. When I sat down on it, it squealed. It was Truman Capote.’ Truman Capote wrote that Jacqueline Susann looked like ‘a truck driver in drag’. ‘Every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”’, said Mary McCarthy of Lillian Hellman. Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand: ‘She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.’ I’ve had some lovely feuds with fellow writers. I called Martin Amis ‘A small man in every way it is possible for a man to be small’, and told Camille Paglia to ‘Fuck off, you crazy old dyke!’.

But the trouble – and the real fun, the sadistic rather than the sporting kind – happens when a bad writer thinks they can ‘take on’ a good writer. It makes it especially entertaining if the first is a man and the latter a woman, due to the element of ‘mansplaining’, which we will see magnificently quashed. Even better if the woman is beautiful and the man unattractive, giving it a feeling of a troll trying to capture a warrior queen.

I’m describing, of course, the current ‘feud’ between JK Rowling – Saint Joanne, protector of tomboys and benefactor of homeless women – and Alastair Campbell, most famous as Tony Blair’s Groom of the Stool. Campbell, I’d wager, wanted to be known as a writer for a very long time, all those years when he was a liar-for-hire; his 2015 publication, Winners and How They Succeed, was swiftly available on Amazon for the poignant sum of 98p. Then, in 2024, after becoming a successful podcaster, he published his 18th book, But What Can I Do? Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong and How You Can Help Fix It, ‘A call to arms to people to get more engaged in politics and to fight back against the wave of populism, polarisation and post-truth’. Campbell is obviously blissfully unaware that he is part of the disease rather than the cure. Populism exists purely because elitists like him believe that they know better than the rest of us, and have been shoving their cock-eyed fantasies down our throats since the turn of the century. Still, the book became a Sunday Times No1 bestseller, which obviously convinced the man who started out his scribbling career as a grubby pornographer that he was up there with the best of them. And now he has picked a quarrel with the most successful writer of our time.

There’s been back and forth on X this week, but it seems increasingly likely at the time of writing that Campbell has retired to lick his wounds. He is humourless, like most dry drunks and all on the ‘progressive’ side (just listen to any Radio 4 ‘comedy’ show), whereas Rowling – who once seemed something of a po-faced swot – has become funnier the more successful she is. An early sign that she was determined to enjoy herself – and hopefully offend haters into the bargain – was when she pictured herself in April last year, drinking a cocktail and smoking a cigar on a yacht with the words, ‘I love it when a plan comes together #SupremeCourt #WomensRights’. She writes a cracking social-media post, too. She responded to the proposed book-burning of her Harry Potter bestsellers with ‘Whenever somebody burns a Potter book the royalties vanish from my bank account – and if the book’s signed, one of my teeth falls out’.

The social-media spat with Campbell is more serious – if one can apply that word to this man. After years of refusing to interact with any of us ‘unkind’ types on the gender-realist team, as is characteristic of people who know that they are doomed to lose any sensible argument, Campbell recently indicated that he and Rory Stewart would be ‘happy’ to welcome JKR to their podcast, The Rest Is Politics, just in case she could use the publicity, one supposes. This was after years of putting misters before sisters in the debate about whether transvestites should be given extra human rights to other men, and of only having transvestite-friendly guests on their show. More in sorrow than in anger (the same way he must have punched that journalist who dared to mock Robert Maxwell, his former employer), he added that ‘previous attempts’ to get her on the pod ‘have been rebuffed’.

A million memes bloomed showing unattractive men pressing their clammy attentions on attractive women who wanted none of it. And then JKR herself landed a sucker-punch: ‘That’s because I wasn’t interested in being used to boost the viewing figures of a pair of exceptionally arrogant men whose understanding of this issue drips with classism and misogyny.’ The three women known as For Women Scotland, who were in London last week marking the anniversary of their legal triumph at the Supreme Court, offered themselves up for a ‘grilling’ on The Rest Is Politics instead. ‘We are still in London’, they said on their X account. ‘He can ask us on the podcast and call us toxic to our faces. If he has the guts.’ Answer came there none. The groom was only interested in non-Transmaids if they brought the spotlight with them.

As an embarrassing addendum to this story, it also came to note this week that Campbell has raised a Groom of the Stool in his own image, when podcast footage emerged of his daughter, Grace, sucking up to a transvestite by calling the FWS gals ‘old’ and ‘ugly’. I say this in a caring way, as Dame Edna would put it, but could it be that poor Grace owns a Magic Mirror? Or is it that she herself looks so much like a bloke in a wig and falsies that she wants a world populated with such men, so she doesn’t feel left out? That she is seriously wanting in judgement is reflected in the way she talks about her ghastly father: ‘I desperately wanted his approval’, she once told the Standard. ‘I was obsessed with him and impressed by him.’

Which brings us back to her dear old dad’s weird would-be spat with JKR. Whatever one thinks of adults reading Harry Potter books (I believe that they should have their voting rights removed, but I understand that I’m an outlier here), there can be no doubt that it’s pointless to take their creator on – she will run rings around you. Which makes me wonder whether some fellows want something… weirder from their interactions with her than to come out on top. (Especially when taking into consideration that she’s also been the subject of weird online stalking this week by another transvestite fan, the lawyer Jolyon Maugham, who claimed a friendship with her which she understandably denied.) It’s a cliché that the kind of men who seek out a damn good thrashing from Miss Whiplash in a Bayswater basement are, in everyday life, arrogant types – judges and the like – but there’s definitely something to it. Do the men who seek to provoke her simply want to be put in their place by her?

I suppose we’ll never know, but one thing is sure: JKR keeps Campbell awake at night, whereas not a minute of her slumber is troubled by him. The words of Diana Vreeland – ‘Elegance is refusal’ – have never been more appropriate than they are when applied to this latest social-media spat between the queen of all she surveys and a man who will – no matter how many times he sells out the Albert Hall ‘faster than the Foo Fighters’ and mouths ‘Rock Star!’ to himself in the mirror of a morning – always have the tell-tale whiff of Groom of the Stool about him.

Written by: Julie Burchill

Spiked-on-line/April 24, 2026

They’re laughing at us. That’s what I thought when I saw that rictus, gap-toothed smirk on the face of one of the illegal immigrants who’d just been found guilty in a most abominable case of rape. There he was leaving court, having been convicted of assisting in the savage sexual assault of a woman on a public beach, and he was grinning. If I had to translate his leer, I’d say he was saying that our women, our courts and our country don’t count for shit. ‘You’re worthless’ was the subtext of his diabolical sneer.

His name is Karin Al-Danasurt. He is 20 years old and from Egypt. He was found guilty yesterday at Hove Crown Court in the south of England for his part in what the prosecution described as a ‘cynical, predatory and callous attack’ on a young woman in Brighton in October last year. Al-Danasurt filmed the misogynistic atrocity. Two other men – Abdulla Ahmadi and Ibrahim Alshafe – did the raping. Ahmadi is from Iran, Alshafe is from Egypt.

Your blood runs cold reading the details of their barbarous assault. The victim had become separated from her friends on a night out. The three men, who were on the lookout for a woman to use as a ‘sexual plaything’, led her into ‘the darkness’ of Brighton beach. Ahmadi and Alshafe repeatedly raped her. Al-Danasurt caught it all on his phone. The victim later described ‘drifting in and out of consciousness’ and ‘hearing the men laughing’ as they used her inert body for sick gratification. They spat on her, kicked her, grabbed her by the throat and called her a ‘dirty bitch’. It’s cases like these that test my opposition to the death penalty.

After their crime against womankind, they chilled out. They went back to the Cisswood House Hotel in Horsham, the migrant hotel they were staying at, where their food and lodgings were paid for by you and me, and snuggled into their state-provided beds. The next day they filmed themselves having a barbecue in the hotel grounds, treating themselves to delicious meat paid for by the British government not 24 hours after they had treated a young British woman as if she were meat: worthless flesh for men like them to do with as they please.

Convictions may have been secured but this case is far from over. It’s not even close to being over. For the barbarism in Brighton raises searing questions not only about the moral depravity of three men but also about the moral corrosion of Britain itself. About our broken borders, our feeble institutions, and our bloated, egotistical activist class that welcomes with open arms every unvetted man who arrives on our shores, and damns as ‘racist filth’ any member of the lower orders who dares to ask questions. We know the names and deeds of those three pieces of shit – when will we know the names and deeds of those who assisted their arrival into Britain?

Let’s speak plainly: if Britain were a properly functioning nation, that young woman in Brighton would not have been raped. She would not now be ‘too scared to go out’. The men were here primarily because our elites long ago sacrificed Britain’s sovereign integrity at the altar of the globalist delusion that nations are little more than glorified hotels for the wretched of the Earth. All three came on small boats. Ahmadi and Alshafe met on a small boat. They sailed unimpeded to England in June 2025. Four months later, they were gang-raping one of our citizens on a beach.

The case of gurning Karin Al-Danasurt is even more outrageous. The prosecution says he was convicted of murder in Egypt before sailing to the UK, though his defence barrister disputes this. If it’s true, then let it be a eulogy for the post-sovereign hellscape our useless, snivelling elites have erected on what was once a proud, independent nation – that our state became so derelict in its fundamental duties that it permitted the arrival of a foreign murderer, put him up in a hotel, fed him and gave him an allowance that he later used to get a bus to the city in order to take part in the rape of a ‘dirty bitch’. No wonder he’s laughing at us – we have made ourselves despicable.

It’s not good enough to say only the three men are responsible for what happened on Brighton beach that night. In fact, it’s not true. Their presence in Britain, their means for staying here, their means for getting to Brighton that night, were all gifts of our state. It was courtesy of Britain’s withered sovereignty and the faux-virtuous posturing of our fractured institutions that those men were able to rape a Briton. The activist class provides moral cover to these illegal arrivals, falsely calling them ‘refugees’. And the state gives them financial cover, dishing out the means for them to stay and virtually never asking them to leave. That heinous crime was carried out under a cover fashioned by the establishment itself.

It seems undeniable now that there is a pattern of abuse emanating from our failure to police our borders. Hundreds of sexual assaults and other crimes have been committed by the young men who arrive on our shores every week. ‘But most of them are not rapists’, say the silver-spoon activists who rarely live near migrant hotels. Stop it. That truism doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone now knows that a not insignificant number of these men have committed serious offences here. If you know this and you still demonise the working-class protesters against migrant hotels, if you know this and you still campaign for the right of these ‘refugees’ to come and stay, then, yes, we will say it: you are complicit in their crimes.

Why should women pay the price of the reckless ‘virtue’ of our preening, post-borders elite? Why should they have to run the gauntlet of encountering men from avowedly misogynistic nations just so well-fed activists in the leafier suburbs can feel the warm moral glow of ‘helping the helpless’? Why should their bodies and lives be broken on the wheel of globalism? Enough is enough. A grown-up nation enforces its sovereignty, guards its borders and defends its people from harm as far as is humanly possible. Britain is failing at all three right now.

Writer: Brendan O’Neill

From Spiked-on-line/April 24, 2026

Image: Sussex Police

The Colombian-born content creator, who called the British home secretary a ‘dirty Muslim,’ claims she will reach London by boat to take part in a Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” on May 16.

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Valentina Gomez @ValentinaForUSA

I’m coming to England on a boat. They can try to ban me, but they cannot ban the TRUTH. See you on May 16^th.

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Ms. Kay, an award-winning columnist and writer for the National Post, Epoch Times, and Post Millennial, has received two individual complaints and one retaliation complaint arising from her social media posts and public commentary. The complaints allege discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression and sex.

Ms. Kay defended her position, stating, “I would never give credence to something as a reality when it is not a reality.”

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Whether it is sending human beings farther into space than any civilization ever has, or confronting regimes that spread violence across continents, the United States continues to occupy a role no other country can fill.

And Americans should feel proud of that — not in a shallow, flag-waving way but in the serious way that comes from recognizing what we are watching unfold.

The world is watching.

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Writer: Ben Shapiro

Image: David Plunkert

The case of Matt Taylor and #Shirtstorm was the last straw for me. In 2014, a chorus of angry women and their male enablers roasted British astrophysicist Matt Taylor for wearing an “inappropriate” shirt for a historic occasion. Taylor was part of a European Space Agency team, the Rosetta Mission, that sent a probe four billion miles through space to land on a comet, a journey of ten years. But that achievement was overshadowed by Taylor’s alleged masculine insensitivity. The outrage grew until the comet was essentially forgotten amidst the frenzy of hysteria and grandstanding.

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Image: APTV, via Associated Press

Kathy Gyngell — founder and editor of The Conservative Woman — delivers a powerful critique of how the West is destroying itself through both suicide (declining birth rates, broken families, radical feminism) and murder (uncontrolled mass migration, especially from incompatible cultures, and elite-driven multiculturalism).

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I came to Kennington Park, in south London, on a mild April morning, which was appropriate, since it was April that made the place. The plane trees are just coming into leaf, that tentative, almost apologetic green that English spring offers before committing to anything. Dog-walkers moved across the grass with the practised indifference of Londoners in a shared space. Children shrieked on the climbing frames. A man ate a Greggs sausage roll on a bench with the philosophical resignation of a man eating a Greggs sausage roll on a bench. Ordinary life, entirely ordinary. And yet.

Stand here on 10 April and you stand where – 175 years ago this year – somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000 people once gathered to demand something that no Englishman or woman should ever have had to demand: the right to vote. To have their voice count. To be, in the elementary constitutional sense, a person, a citizen and not a subject.

The Chartists came to Kennington Common – as it then was, an open heath rather than an enclosed park – to present their third and final great petition: a document of nearly two million signatures asking parliament to implement the six points of the People’s Charter. Parliament, needless to say, declined. But something happened that day that could not be undeclined, something that resonates in ways that our current political class would find distinctly uncomfortable if they ever paused long enough from their consultations and reviews to notice.

We know what that April morning looked like. This is what makes that day in 1848 at Kennington so peculiarly haunting: we have photographs. Not paintings. Not woodcuts derived from artists’ impressions. But two daguerreotypes. These were two silver-salt emulsions on copper plate, made by William Edward Kilburn, a Regent Street photographer who had, the previous year, made the first daguerreotype portraits of the royal family.

Kilburn set up, probably on the first floor of the Horns Tavern, now a bleak concrete jobcentre, occupied that day by police authorities and military officers carefully monitoring the proceedings. He proceeded to capture the crowd below him in the clear morning light before the rain broke and dispersed the crowd in the afternoon. The images are laterally inverted, mirror images of the actual scene, as daguerreotypes always are. In the background looms a factory chimney belonging to Farmer’s vitriol works. In the foreground, men on horseback. Across the common, a sea of hats and upturned faces. A platform for speakers. Banners.

These two small plates, 107 by 147 millimetres each, are among the earliest photographs ever taken of a crowd. They are the only images we have of any Chartist meeting, from a movement that held thousands. They show us, with the eerie directness of early photography, the faces of the London working class at the precise moment of their greatest constitutional agitation. And then they disappear from history.

The purchaser of the two photographs was Prince Albert. On the back of one daguerreotype, in Queen Victoria’s own handwriting, it reads: ‘Great Chartist Meeting at Kennington. April 10 1848. Taken from nature.’ Albert bought them from Kilburn, filed them in the Royal Collection, and there they remained, lost from public view until rediscovered in 1977, mislaid in plain sight, a movement’s finest hour preserved by the very class it was petitioning. There is a woodcut too, made for the Illustrated London News, derived from a third daguerreotype that has since vanished. It is thought to be the first wood engraving ever made from a photograph and published in a newspaper. History’s first photojournalism, and its subject was ordinary working people demanding ordinary democratic rights.

The Great Chartist Meeting held on Kennington Common in April 1848 as published in the Illustrated London News.

Why did Albert buy them? He was, by all accounts, a man who felt genuinely and rather unfashionably for the condition of the labouring poor. He was president of the Society for Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes, and he commissioned the architect Henry Roberts to build model homes for working families, exhibited outside the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Exhibition commissioners had declined to host anything so pointed, and those homes, dismantled after the exhibition, were brought south of the river and rebuilt on the edge of the very common where the Chartists had gathered. Kennington Common had by then been fenced off and made into Kennington Park, south London’s first public park. Prince Albert’s model cottage stands there still, on the Kennington Park Road side, with the letters V and A intertwined in mosaic tile on its walls and the inscription reading ‘Model houses for families. Erected by HRH Prince Albert.’ The establishment’s answer to democratic demands: not the vote, but better drainage. Not power, but improved ventilation.

It is almost too neat. Almost too English. The crowd gathers, the petition is refused, and three years later, the same ground is enclosed, the people’s common made a park, and on its edge a model cottage built to show the poor how nicely they might live if only they were contented with niceness.

The establishment fears that attended the Kennington rally might seem, to the modern reader, somewhat theatrical. The Duke of Wellington stationed troops at bridges across London. The royal family was evacuated to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Special constables were sworn in by the tens of thousands. And the home secretary worried about revolution, as well he might given the genuinely convulsive events of 1848 on the continent. France had just had its February Revolution, leading to the collapse of the July Monarchy; the Habsburg Empire was shaking and Metternich had fled Vienna.

But England was not Vienna. The Chartist leadership knew it was not Vienna and, crucially, had no desire for it to be. This is the point that the establishment consistently missed and that posterity has tended to underplay.

Chartism was a constitutional movement. It operated through petition, through the discipline of the mass meeting, through the moral pressure of demonstrated popular will. The General Convention of the Industrious Classes, called regularly from 1839 onwards, styled itself a parliament of the people, not to overthrow parliament but to remind it of its obligation to the people. When three petitions, each signed by millions, were presented and each contemptuously refused, the movement’s response was not insurrection but reorganisation, continued agitation, education and, eventually, decades later, the slow grinding of history through the machinery of genuine reform. Five of the six Chartist demands are now simply the unremarkable fabric of democratic life: universal suffrage, secret ballot, payment of MPs, no property qualification for membership of parliament and equal electoral districts. We have them all. The sixth, annual parliaments, we decided against, and probably wisely so.

The movement’s slogans carried on banners at Kennington had the quality of things stated by people who have thought very hard about what they believe and why. ‘Vote by Ballot.’ ‘Universal Suffrage.’ Plain and specific. But there were others that resounded with deeper sentiments: ‘Who would be a slave that could be free?’, ‘Liberty is worth living for, and worth dying for’, ‘The people are the only legitimate source of power’, ‘We are millions, and demand our rights’, and ‘The voice of knowledge will silence the cannon’s roar’.

That last one is extraordinary. Not the voice of the mob, not the voice of grievance, but the voice of knowledge, disciplined, educated, constitutionally expressed popular sovereignty, claiming the moral advantage over state force. These were not revolutionaries. They were people who believed, with a faith that looks almost touching from this distance, that if they made their case with sufficient clarity and in sufficient numbers, the democratic logic of the thing would eventually prevail.

They were right. It just took the rest of the century.

The English have always done this, which is the thing about Chartism that its chroniclers tend to understate. The great popular revolts of English history are not, on inspection, particularly revolutionary in character. They are small-c conservative movements of people who feel that something has been taken from them and who want it back. They clothe their demands in the language of restoration, of ancient right, of the constitution betrayed. They are not storming the Bastille. They are petitioning, in very firm terms, to have their Magna Carta actually honoured.

Wat Tyler’s men in 1381 marched on London to demand the abolition of serfdom and the repeal of the poll tax. They did not want revolution; they wanted the king to be good. The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was 30,000 northerners marching under the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ to protest Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries – it was not a rebellion against the Crown but a petition to it, in arms, to reconsider. The Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 involved Cornish and Devon men refusing the new Protestant liturgy, and dying in considerable numbers for the right to pray as their fathers had. The Covenanters of Scotland fought not for novelty but for a particular understanding of the proper ordering of church and state. The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685 was a Protestant constitutional protest dressed as a dynastic claim. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, that driest and most English of upheavals, resulted not in a republic but in a constitutional settlement – William III was invited in from the Netherlands not to overthrow the monarchy but to regularise it, to make parliament sovereign without making it supreme over everything that mattered to ordinary people. Each of these movements sought not the destruction of the existing order but its correction, its return to a lost and better version of itself.

The Chartists sit squarely in this tradition. What they wanted was not new. The rights they demanded had a genealogy that stretched back through Thomas Paine to the Levellers to the barons at Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was sealed. Each generation of the English popular movement has had to rediscover that the constitutional ground gained by one era tends, mysteriously, to be lost by the next, that the establishment has an almost geological patience in the slow work of reclaiming power from the people who briefly forced it to concede.

Which brings us, by a route that should by now feel inevitable, to the present.

It would be too easy, and probably too glib, to nominate a single villain for the story of contemporary democratic erosion. But if we are looking for the moment when the current settlement was deliberately constructed, the New Labour government of Tony Blair is the obvious place to start. This is not a partisan point, the transformation was enthusiastically continued by Gordon Brown, adopted with modifications by the Tory governments of David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and entrenched by Rishi Sunak. Democratic erosion is now being expanded, with something that looks remarkably like ideological commitment, by Keir Starmer.

Blair’s project, something that political scientist Peter Burnham called the ‘politics of depoliticisation’ way back in 2001, was the deliberate placement of decision-making at one remove from democratic accountability. The theory sounded respectable enough: ‘evidence-based policymaking’ should be insulated from the crude pressures of electoral politics. And so the Bank of England was made independent in 1997, the Supreme Court was created in 2009 and quango after quango was established to manage everything from the environment to equalities to infrastructure. Each new body had its board of appointed experts. Each operated at what officials lovingly called ‘arm’s length’ from government. And each commanded portions of the huge (now £353million) budget that the quango sector disposes of annually.

All of this is, crucially, beyond the reach of the voter. You cannot elect a quango. You cannot dismiss one at the ballot box. You can elect a government that promises to reform them, but successive governments of all colours have discovered that the institutional inertia of the quangocracy is approximately equal to the force of a General Election mandate. Cameron promised a bonfire of bureaucracy in the early 2010s, yet five in six quangocrats kept their positions. Starmer has, since taking office, established approximately 30 new quangos while abolishing one large one.

What this produces, in the aggregate, is a democratic system in which the act of voting changes less and less of what actually governs your life. The decisions about planning, about energy, about immigration, about the standards by which public life is conducted, about the allocation of resources between regions and classes – all of these have been progressively moved into bodies that elected politicians can, in theory, direct but in practice rarely control, and that citizens cannot touch at all. The constitutional entrenchment of this settlement, through statutory duties, through international treaty obligations, through the creation of bodies whose independence is legally guaranteed, means that even a government with a clear mandate finds itself hedged about by structures that no majority voted for and no majority can dismantle in the course of a single parliament.

The Chartists would have found this familiar, with one important difference. The exclusion they faced was open: property qualifications for the vote, no secret ballot and rotten boroughs. Everyone could see the mechanism of exclusion. The contemporary version is more sophisticated and correspondingly harder to fight. It presents itself as neutral, expert, rational. It dresses the democratic deficit as institutional wisdom. It calls the removal of power from the people ‘good governance’. The establishment has learned, in the 175 years since Kennington, that it is far easier to drain democracy of content while preserving its form than it is to deny the vote outright.

And yet, and yet. The Chartist spirit persists. It persisted through Kennington and through the refusals and through the years when the movement seemed spent. It persisted into the franchise reforms of 1867 and 1884, into the great suffragette mobilisations of the early 20th century, into the postwar settlement that briefly seemed to redeem the promise of popular sovereignty. It persisted, most recently and in ways that confounded every comfortable analysis, in the Brexit referendum of 2016.

Whatever one thinks of Brexit as policy, its sociology is unmistakeable. The Leave vote was disproportionately the vote of the working class, of post-industrial towns, of people whose lives had been managed and mismanaged for 30 years by institutions they had never chosen and could not remove. The slogan ‘Take Back Control’ did not mean, to most of the people who responded to it, a position paper on parliamentary sovereignty. It meant what it said: a demand for the restoration of democratic grip, the return of decisions to a place where the vote could reach them. It was, in every essential particular, a Chartist demand. It was, in the tradition, running back through Monmouth and the Prayer Book rebels and Wat Tyler, a conservative revolt, people asking not for revolution but for their liberties back.

The current establishment has not absorbed this lesson. It has, rather, concluded that the problem is too much democracy – which is historically the establishment’s standard conclusion whenever it has been briefly inconvenienced by the popular will. The response is more quangos, more arm’s length bodies, more constitutional entrenchment, more insulation of policy from electoral accountability. More, in short, of the conditions that produced the revolt in the first place.

I left Kennington Park in the mid-morning, the dog-walkers still at their circuits, the sausage-roll man gone. The Prince Consort’s model cottage stood on its corner as it always stands, small and oddly touching, its Victorian and Albert tiles still intertwined, still readable. Built on the ground where the people gathered. Built to show them, in the establishment’s infinite paternalistic benevolence, how to live better, just not how to govern.

Somewhere in the Royal Collection are those two small copper plates bearing the silver traces of a crowd that came here to ask for something simple and were refused. The back of one plate carries the queen’s inscription: ‘taken from nature’. The crowd in the image is blurred slightly, they were alive, they moved during the exposure, they could not quite hold still. Which seems right. The living are never quite still. The demand they carried is not still either.

Vote by Ballot. Universal Suffrage. The voice of knowledge will silence the cannon’s roar.

They were right, in the end. They are still right. The cannon, these days, wears a quango badge and a lanyard, sits on an advisory board, and publishes its findings in a consultation document. But it is still a cannon. And the voice of knowledge, constitutionally applied, by people who abide by the rule of law and who want not revolution but their liberties back, is still the thing most likely to silence it.

One hundred and seventy-five years is a long time to keep making the same argument. But then, the other side has been making the same counter-argument for considerably longer.

Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK. Follow his Substack here.

Spiked/April 19, 2026

Image: Public domain - Chartist meeting on Kennington Common on 10 April 1848, by William Edward Kilburn

“This is a major attack, if it is an attack. But we don’t know yet, and there’s so little curiosity. If this were a mosque, would the prime minister be on the ground here? Would he be making a statement? Would there be a task force to find out who did it?” he said.

“I don’t know if a synagogue was burned to the ground if the prime minister would give a damn, he doesn’t seem to care when they’re shot up by guns, but Christians seem to be one of the last groups that you can burn the churches down and people just shrug,” Ezra continued.

God bless Ezra Levant - the only one who seems to care. Please support him.

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Iran’s ruling clerics believe the ayatollah serves as the earthly deputy of the Hidden Imam, tasked with preparing the world for the return of the messianic figure of prophecy, Muhammad al-Mahdi, through the expansion of an Islamic state. In this framework, political power and conflict are religious obligations tied to triggering an apocalyptic end-times event.

The most recent Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei (killed by a joint U.S.-Israeli bombing on February 28, 2026) nonetheless developed the Mahdist doctrine further after assuming leadership in 1989, outlining five revolutionary stages required before the Mahdi’s return: an Islamic Revolution, an Islamic regime, an Islamic government, an Islamic society, and an Islamic civilization. By his own assessment, Iran had completed only the first two. This means the regime believes it is executing a divinely mandated sequence of steps whose endpoint is a cosmic event, the return of the Hidden Imam and the apocalyptic defeat of evil.

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We stand at a fork in the national road. The choice isn’t right or left, but life or death. Save your country or watch it die. Import the third world and become it, or deport the third world -in their millions- and restore sanity. Now or never. For bandits, cheats and nomad chancers, Britain is a free-to-enter all-inclusive resort where the holiday never ends. The state has gone out of control, gifting homes, cars and cash to aliens and non-participants. Built a parasite paradise for the sly; bribes galore: just vote for the system.

Rupert Lowe MP understands this system -a system that accepted but failed to corrupt him- and he wants it decimated. His aim is political heresy in Westminster: destroy the beast hidden below the surface. If he fails to torpedo the globalist submarine then our way of life -the best on earth- will die with us. If enough millions will join with Lowe to destroy the monstrosity of Britain’s rogue-state, the madness can -just maybe-be ended and civilsation returned to our streets.

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“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

~ William Butler Yeats ~

Afc Newsletter April 17 2026

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I’m an atheist. I had a year or two of Sunday School when I was a kid because they used to let us play British Bulldog and football and some other kids from my school went. We never had a Bible in the house. I read it at university mainly out of a feeling that I should know the references. I have only attended churches for weddings and funerals.

And yet somehow I know more about Christianity than the Pope or any US Bishop or Cardinal does.

I know that for 2,000 years Christians have actually been prepared to fight sometimes.

I know that the Bible is full of instances of God asking people to fight or supporting and even demanding wars.

I know that every traditional Christian teaching on just war would include fighting against those who have slaughtered innocents as a just war.

I know that Christendom only survived and Christianity only exists today because some Christians were prepared to fight.

I know that Popes blessed armies and campaigns and kings who went to battle.

I know that Popes called for Crusades.

I know that Popes personally led armies.

I know a few specific Bible verses and a few specific statements from Jesus that make it very clear that Christianity has never been a faith of absolute pacifism.

I know that on multiple occasions when Islam tried to conquer the western world it was the most sincere and committed Christians who stopped it.

I know that Christians in Spain spent some 800 years fighting against Muslim invasion and then to free themselves from Muslim rule, that other Christians in Greece and the Balkans spent even longer doing the same.

I even know a little about Pope Leo himself and that he never said a single word about Peace or about leaders who go to war not being Christians when Obama dropped 92,000 bombs on 7 different countries.

I also know, as the Pope and Catholic bishops and cardinals apparently do not, that the Bible has several passages which approve of borders, suggest God’s approval of national boundaries, and that Heaven has its own rules regarding entry.

How is it that I know the Bible is full of warriors, and that Christian civilisation was built, survived and was protected by people prepared to fight and whose fighting efforts were blessed by the Catholic Church, and the Pope doesn’t?

Could it be that other considerations than Biblical instruction, Christian ethics, and the life of Jesus strongly influence the Chicago born Pope, and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy?

“The Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), commonly known as the Vatican Bank, manages approximately $6.5 billion in total assets (as of June 2025).

Catholic charities and churches in the United States have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for refugee and asylum-related programs.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which directs much of this work, received $129.6 million in federal grants in 2023 and $123 million in 2022 for migration and refugee services.

This funding supports a network of over 65 Catholic Charities affiliates nationwide, which provide services like housing, employment assistance, legal aid, and language classes to refugees and unaccompanied minors.

The amount fluctuates yearly; funding was lower during the Trump administration (e.g., $48.5 million in 2018) and increased under President Biden.

A 2018 report noted that Catholic Charities and its affiliates received $742.6 million in federal funding for refugee programs since 2008.

Here are the federal funding figures for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and its affiliated Catholic Charities for refugee and asylum-related programs from 2018 onwards:

2018: $48.5 million
2019: $52.7 million
2020: $47.8 million
2021: $67.5 million
2022: $122.6 million
2023: $129.6 million

Funding decreased during the Trump administration and then increased significantly under the Biden administration, particularly from 2021 onward.

Catholic organizations receive substantial U.S. government funding. Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the official international humanitarian agency of the U.S. Catholic Church, received $4.6 billion from USAID between fiscal years 2013 and 2022 for humanitarian programs abroad.”

4.6 BILLION from USAID in just 9 years.

“Funding was lower during the Trump administration…..and then increased significantly under the Biden administration…..”

Why IS the Catholic Church so in favour of mass migration and open borders and against fighting Islamic terrorist regimes these days?

Because one thing is very clear to even an atheist like me: the Bible does not say nation states should not have borders, and the Bible does not say that Christians should never go to war.

Indeed by the current Pope’s commentary, virtually every other Pope in history wasn’t a Christian.

Purely statistically of course, it’s more likely that ONE Pope is a heretic, rather than NEARLY ALL of them before him.

Daniel Jupp

Facebook/April 16, 2026

Image by artist Emanuele Del Ross

Explain this to me. Why is it that a gathering of mostly white working-class men protesting about a rape is met by a line of menacing riot cops, and yet a gathering of primarily non-white youths running riot on a high street is given the kid-glove treatment? Following the events in Epsom last night, this query should be on everyone’s lips.

Tooled-up riot officers formed a battleline against the angry men

The scenes in Epsom, Surrey were extraordinary. In response to reports of a rape, a large crowd gathered to express their fury. A local woman reported being stalked by several men after leaving a nightclub before being subjected to a sickening assault outside Epsom Methodist Church. Surrey Police say they do not have “sufficient information” to release a description of the suspects.

It was this that piqued the anger of locals. Many fear information is being withheld. Some no doubt suspect it was migrants who carried out the attack and the cops are being cagey. Of course we have no idea as to the identity of the suspects. They may well be local men. Yet the suspicions of the crowd are understandable, given officialdom’s lethargy these past few years when it comes to revealing the immigration status and ethnic origins of perpetrators of sexual crimes.

The police response to the agitation in Epsom was swift and unforgiving. Tooled-up riot officers formed a battleline against the angry men. The high street was a sea of navy helmets. Their shields raised, their visors down, the police seemed to view the Epsom locals as the enemy within – a lowly mob that might explode with frenzied rage at any minute.

Contrast this with the scenes in Clapham just two weeks ago. Gangs of masked teens swarmed the high street there. They menaced shoppers. They nicked stuff. There were reports of emergency workers being assaulted. And as some observers noted, the riotous juveniles were mostly non-white. The police’s response to that mayhem? Well, they issued a dispersal order. And that was about it.

There were no riot cops. There were no lines of officers slowly impelling the delinquents off the streets. The approach seemed to be: “They’re just letting off steam. They’ll tire soon enough.” We need to talk about this, no? About these strikingly different police tactics where the chief consideration seems to be less what the crowd is doing than who they are.

People use the term “two-tier policing”. I’m starting to wonder if that’s a little too soft. It seems to me we face an even more troubling prospect: a new kind of political policing, the slow transformation of the police from a body charged with keeping the peace into a body whose prime role is to enforce the diktats of identity politics. Have our police forces become the armed wing of chattering-class ideology, the truncheon-wielding implementers of “progressive” moralism?

It feels undeniable now that the identity of protesters – and even more strikingly their class – impacts on how the police decide to deal with them. So white working-class men in Epsom are treated to a mini Battle of Orgreave, while the swarms of affluent socialists and cranky Islamists who spent nigh-on three years marching for the destruction of the Jewish state were given free rein.

Think about the oddness of this disparity. Sure, the men in Epsom got a little rowdy, but their demands were pretty reasonable: give us information. Meanwhile, on those soulless trudges against Israel there were frequent cries for violence against the Jewish nation and instances of vile racism in which Jews were likened to Nazis or branded “baby killers”. Yet Epsom gets truncheons, while the Israelophobes get kid gloves.

People use the term “two-tier policing”. I wonder if that’s a little too soft

How do we explain this other than as a reflection of ideological prejudice within the police? Drunk on identitarianism – like so much of the establishment – perhaps they have come to see “rough” working-class men who are worried about immigration as Bad and keffiyeh-sporting leafy leftists and their Muslim comrades as Good.

There are numerous examples of cops enforcing correct-think. Think of those people who feared a knock on the door from the boys in blue over their scandalous belief that men cannot become women. Or the dystopic vision of officers dancing like loons at Pride festivals. Or the truly chilling events in Birmingham last year, where police barred Israeli football fans from an Aston Villa game pretty much at the behest of mobs of “anti-Zionists”, some of whom were threatening to take to the streets in blind rage if those dastardly Jews turned up. It was the clearest example yet of a police force willingly making itself into a weapon of fashionable bigotry.

This is not to diss all police. Many do a fine job, and a thankless one. Personally I would like to see more of them on the beat. But, institutionally, something feels off. We live in an era of asymmetrical multiculturalism, where minority groups are encouraged to take pride in their history and culture, while the majority is urged to feel uneasy about its own. That even the police seem to have imbibed this baleful and hypocritical ideology is not surprising, but it’s shocking. It will sow injustice.

Written by Brendan O’Neill

The Spectator/April 16, 2026

Image by Getty

I disagree with Sam Leith’s recent piece entitled ‘London hasn’t fallen’. He took at face value Sadiq Khan’s claim in a recent speech at a ‘disinformation summit’ that social media posts drawing attention to London’s rising crime rate – particularly knife crime, shoplifting, mobile phone theft and violence against women and girls – were either mis- or disinformation and were probably posted by bots, presumably based abroad. But is that true?

What the mayor and his researchers fail to acknowledge is that some of the anxiety about crime in London reflects things that are actually happening

Khan himself is guilty of spreading misinformation about knife crime. In 2024, his claim that ‘knife and gun crime, homicides and burglary have all fallen since 2016’ was challenged by the ONS, which pointed out that while knife crime with injury involving victims under 25 had fallen, total knife crime had increased significantly since 2016.

Khan’s most recent speech relied on data supplied by research he’d commissioned himself and which was carried out by a research unit in City Hall. This purported to show that ‘London in decline’ narratives on X have grown by 150 to 200 per cent in the past two years, while migration-related narratives are up by over 350 per cent. The culprits include ‘extreme right-wing groups’, pro-Kremlin or pro-Beijing agents of influence and MAGA-aligned keyboard warriors. Khan demanded that Ofcom take enforcement action to protect Londoners from these bad actors.

But the methodology Khan’s research unit used is a little suspect. The headline figures are based on what the document itself describes as ‘keyword-defined samples of X posts over two time periods’ that ‘should be interpreted as indicative, as results are sensitive to query design, time windows and event-related activity’. That’s some caveat. Change the keywords slightly, or pick a different time period, and the numbers change significantly, as do the whereabouts of the posters. This is not rigorous

In addition, the authors of the report confess that access to platform data ‘has become more restricted’, meaning they couldn’t get a reliable sample of what people are posting. And since overall London-related posting on X increased by only 7 per cent over the same period, the obvious alternative explanation – that real events, such as the Southport attack, the riots that took place in several major cities in the summer of 2024 and high-profile victims of violent crime drove organic interest in London’s crime problem – goes unexamined.

The annex to the report claims that ‘UK extreme right-wing ecosystems’ accounted for around 39 per cent of phone snatching and knife-crime content. But the authors don‘t say how ‘extreme right-wing’ is defined and in my experience it’s often too broadly. For instance, gender critical feminists posting about child sexual offences committed by transwomen are frequently dismissed as ‘far right’, when they would describe themselves as left-wing.

What the mayor and his researchers fail to acknowledge is that some of the anxiety about crime in London reflects things that are actually happening. Between 2016 and 2023, knife crime rose 54 per cent in London. Robbery rose 57 per cent over the same period. Mobile phone thefts rose from 91,481 in 2019 to 117,211 in 2024. These are not fabrications by Vietnamese bot farms. They’re official figures.

Then there are the concerns about violence against women and girls committed by people who have entered the country illegally. When this issue has been raised by London Assembly members, Khan’s stock answer is that there’s no data to suggest this is a growing problem in the capital. That’s true, but only because the police only seem to include information about the immigration status of criminals on a case-by-case basis.

Based on the data that is recorded elsewhere, the picture suggests these concerns may be well-founded. Foreign nationals make up 10.9 per cent of the population but accounted for a quarter of sexual assault convictions and more than a fifth of rape convictions in in 2024. The Baroness Casey audit confirmed that in Greater Manchester, 52 per cent of suspects in multi-victim, multi-offender grooming cases were of Asian ethnicity, against a local population that is 21 per cent Asian.

By commissioning research that reframes public anxiety about crime in London as mis- and disinformation, Khan is gaslighting his critics. It’s not hard to work out why: if he can persuade Londoners that rising crime is a false narrative put about by ‘extreme right wing’ groups and Sri Lankan-based trolls, he will have a greater chance of being re-elected in 2028. His recent speech might also help some of Labour’s beleaguered candidates in the upcoming local elections, where Labour is expected to lose control of several London councils, including Camden, Wandsworth and Westminster.

As a free speech campaigner, I find Khan’s call for Ofcom to do more to censor his critics particularly troubling. As Louis Brandeis, the famous Supreme Court justice observed, the remedy for speech you think is harmful is more speech, not enforced silence. If Khan believes he’s done a good job of protecting Londoners from crime, he has a very large platform on which to make that case. Troll farms aside, the people he’s really trying to silence are ordinary Londoners concerned about crime they can see every day with their own eyes.

Written by Toby Young

The Spectator/April 17, 2026

Image by Getty

The Vatican’s throne has become a pulpit for globalism. What the media calls “compassion,” the rest of the world is beginning to see for what it is — a calculated open-border migration scheme designed to destabilize Western nations under the guise of humanitarianism.

In 2023, the Biden State Department had formally installed Amy Pope — a loyal Obama-Biden insider — as head of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), effectively merging Washington’s open-border agenda with the UN’s migration apparatus. Amy Pope is no neutral bureaucrat. She is a career political operative and globalist insider who has spent years engineering policies that erased borders in the name of “humanitarianism.”

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(Photo credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

The bombing of the Revolutionary government in Iran is drawing comparisons with the war in Iraq. But the comparisons are with the wrong war.

In 1981 there was an attack on Iraq which much more closely resembles what Donald Trump is trying to achieve in Iran. The story goes back to 1976, when the government of Jacques Chirac in France sold a nuclear reactor to the Iraqis – a deal for which the French have always managed to avoid much criticism. The French charged the Iraqi government twice the going rate. But as one of the Iraqi nuclear team later recalled: ‘We were happy to pay. After all, who else was going to sell us a nuclear reactor?’ Who indeed.

The Iranian side boasted to the US negotiating team that they were weeks away from nuclear breakout

Once Saddam Hussein was in power, he poured resources into the nuclear site at Osirak in his race to be the first holder of an ‘Arab bomb’. He surrounded the nuclear site with anti-aircraft batteries and by 1981 was close to his dream. That was why, on 7 June 1981, the government of Menachem Begin in Israel deployed jets to destroy the reactor. The Israeli air force’s eight F-16s struck during a mealtime, when the anti-aircraft positions were unmanned. They hit their target and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in under two minutes.

Naturally the international backlash was immediate. Foreign governments and press condemned the Israeli action as ‘unprovoked’ and sneaky. The United Nations convened for a number of sessions to condemn the Israelis for depriving Saddam of his shiny nuclear reactor. Even the American government of the day condemned the Israelis. But there was a satisfying coda to the mission after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Had he had a nuclear weapon then, not only would the Iran-Iraq war of that decade have gone very differently, but it is highly unlikely that an international force would have dared to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. As the American defence secretary said to the Israelis with some understatement after the liberation of Kuwait, by taking out the Osirak reactor nine years earlier: ‘You made our job easier in Desert Storm.’

I mention this bit of history because there is a lot of chatter at the moment about America getting bogged down in Iran in the same way it got bogged down in Iraq after 2003. It is hard to overstate the extent to which parts of America are pushing this narrative, cynical as they remain about all foreign military interventions after Afghanistan and Iraq. There was a period where this sentiment dominated only on the American left. In Barack Obama’s time the Democrats were so worried about getting into a ‘boots on the ground’ situation – to use the avoidable cliché – in Syria and elsewhere that they decided most of their problems could be solved by simply sending drones to kill their enemies.

With Trump’s rise to office, it was clear that a similar wariness had emerged on the American right. From the moment he started running for president, he realised that his own political side was equally tired of foreign interventions, especially ones that were lengthy, costly in every way and widely deemed to be a failure. It was Trump who broke the Republican respect for the interventionists – often in the most personal ways, as with his attacks on George W. Bush and John McCain.

Each time Trump ran for the presidency, a large part of his platform was that he would stop America getting involved in ‘stupid’ wars in the Middle East. Just as Obama had upped America’s drone programme, so Trump developed his own doctrine. The killing of the Iranian terror chief Qasem Soleimani in 2020 was perhaps the first time that Trump showed he could effectively take out an enemy of the United States and deter his opponent from any significant retaliatory strikes. Then earlier this year the US military on his orders carried out the daring raid on Caracas which brought the corrupt Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to face justice in New York. Trump’s critics complain that the success of that mission has led him to the hubris of Iran.

But if you listen to what the President, his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and others have said since the start of this mission, the confusion is on the part of his listeners, not of the administration. From the beginning Trump has made a number of justifications for the action. But the one non-negotiable has been that Iran must not be allowed nuclear weapons. Given that the Iranian side actually boasted to the US negotiating team that they were weeks away from nuclear breakout, it isn’t hard to understand why the US chose this moment to strike. The fact that the Iranians learned from Osirak and spread out their nuclear sites is why this intervention has taken longer than two minutes.

Nevertheless there is chaff being thrown in the air from all sides. Yes at the start Trump suggested to the Iranian people that they rise up and overthrow the regime of the mullahs if they could. But the killing of tens of thousands of people by the religious militias in January has obviously had an effect. ‘Ha ha,’ say Trump’s critics. ‘You see – you tried regime change and failed. Now you will have to – once again – “put boots on the ground”.’ But the President is committed to doing no such thing.

Doubtless he would have liked to have seen the regime receive more opposition internally. But the hope that the Islamic Revolutionary government falls is the maximalist policy. The minimalist one is simply to ensure that for the foreseeable future Iran does not have any capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

I’m slightly surprised by some of the obfuscation and pretence of befuddlement that many national and international observers seem to be displaying in the face of this objective. ‘He hasn’t made it clear,’ they say again and again. But he has. The aim of Trump’s war in Iran is indeed to replay the Iraq intervention. But it is the intervention of 1981, not 2003.

Written by Douglas Murray

The Spectator/April 16, 2026

Getty Images

Congratulations. Not for winning Canadians over. That part is still very much in dispute. No, congratulations on finding a way around them.

Canadians voted. They chose parties, platforms, and direction. They sent MPs to Ottawa to carry that forward. That was the deal. And then you broke it.

Five MPs, elected under one banner, crossed the floor and handed you the seats you could not win. Not after a new vote. Not after asking their constituents.

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(Photo: Adrian Wyld, The Canadian Press, 2026)

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