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Yesterday the Green Party announced that Zack Polanski (who used to say he could enlarge women’s breasts by the power of his mind) had been elected as its new leader. The party also announced that “two high-profile local councillors had been elected as co-deputy leaders. One of these deputies is Mr Mothin Ali, formerly a local councillor in Leeds. If he is a dab hand at the mental embiggening of ladies’ boobs, he has not mentioned it, but he has said other things that might prove equally controversial.
The video to which I link was posted by “Howli! Now” in May 2024, with the title “Leeds city council member Mothin Ali shares thoughts on events of October 7th” and the caption, “Mothin Ali is the Green Party councilor who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’ as he was elected to the Leeds city council. This is what he had to say on October 7th:”
The video includes an automatically generated transcript. I “cleaned up” some obvious errors in that transcript to produce what follows:
So, right at this very minute Israel has launched one of the biggest attacks against the civilian population that we’ve seen for many years. Now they’re going to use the pretext of the fightback by Hamas fighters – or supposedly Hamas fighters – this morning.
Now, remember the situation in Palestine and especially the situation in Gaza: it’s an open-air prison, it’s the biggest concentration camp the world has ever seen, millions of people have been rounded up into a tiny area. They’re living on top of each other, they’ve been – they’ve been forced to live off scraps that the international community sometimes donates to them.
Now, the dignity of a indigenous population we haven’t seen being stripped away in this way, just like the Europeans did to the Native Americans, or, um, how the Europeans did throughout the colonies. Remember Israel is a colonial, settler-colonial, occupier. It’s been trying to erase the history and trying to erase the legitimacy of a native population – every single person, every single people have a right to fight back, every single people have a right to live free of occupiers.
That includes people who are brown, that includes people who are Muslim, that includes people who are Arab. Just because they’re brown and Arab doesn’t mean that they don’t have a right to fight back. You saw the Western support for Ukraine when they fought back against Russia. Palestinians have equal right if not more. They’ve been under occupation for over 70 years, they’ve literally been wiped off the map. They talk about wiping Israel off the map, they’ve wiped Palestine off the map, they’ve put millions of people into refugee camps. They use the pretext of rockets and they use the pretext of people resisting an occupier to further destroy a civilian population and any prospect of a Palestinian home state. They talk about a land free for the Israelis – what about the land for the Palestinians? You’ve taken it all. You’ll see the Western media support Israel, you’ll see Western propagandists on the media presenting some kind of victim narrative. They’re not victims they’re occupiers, the colonialists, they’re European colonialists, it’s one of the last European colonies in the world and that’s why they, the European people, don’t want to let it go.
They use the weapon of anti-Semitism so effectively that anyone who criticizes Israel is labelled an anti-semitic. We see through those lies, we see through that propaganda. People of the world stay strong: support Palestine, support the right of indigenous people to have freedom and to fight back against occupiers.
Edit: I got so involved in doing the transcript that I forgot the whole point of the post. It is this: I support Mr Ali’s right to justify terrorism, not least because I want to know what people like him are saying. But given that Hamas was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in 2021, meaning that, in the words of the gov.uk website, “members of Hamas or those who invite support for the group could be jailed for up to 14 years”, when can we expect Mothin Ali to be treated as Graham Linehan was?
Second edit: On a different tack, these lines from Mothin Ali’s speech jumped out at me this morning:
It’s been trying to erase the history and trying to erase the legitimacy of a native population – every single person, every single people have a right to fight back, every single people have a right to live free of occupiers.
Leaving aside the question of whether Jews or Arabs have the better claim to be regarded as “the native population” of Israel, has it never occurred to Mothin Ali that the arguments he uses above to justify Palestinians violently attacking Israelis could also be used to justify White British people violently attacking British Muslims?
Five, apparently. That’s five armed police officers, of course. Heaven knows how many unarmed officers it would take to bring down a mighty warrior like Graham Linehan.
is all the terrorism carried out by Muslims. The London bombings of twenty years ago are but one entry in a long, long list. Muslims are much more prone to commit acts of terrorism than any other group in the world. This has been true for forty years.
No, this does not mean that all or most Muslims are terrorists. As I have often said, some of the bravest people in the world are Muslims who know that the terrorists can find them and their families and fight them anyway.
No, this does not mean it is decent behaviour to buttonhole your Muslim work colleague and harangue him or her for the crimes of their co-religionists.
It does mean that unless and until the Muslim world confronts the fact that most terrorism is Islamic terrorism, the non-Muslim world is rational to view Muslims with extra suspicion and to discriminate against them in matters of security. The idealistic refusal of the Western part of the non-Islamic world (or rather its political class) to do this is folly, a folly that will eventually backfire on Muslims living in the West.
Remember that photo of Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement? Leaving aside the question of whether George Floyd’s death was murder – the late Niall Kilmartin thought it was not – it was inevitable that people would eventually ask why, if the then Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was obliged to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness because the police in a foreign country had killed one man, should not Muslim leaders and opinion-formers make some similar acknowledgement that all these thousands upon thousands of murders preceded by a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” had something to do with Islam? Why can’t there be – why is there not – a “Kafir Lives Matter” movement?
Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs with the Irish rap trio Kneecap, has been charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a gig in London, police said.
The 27-year-old, of Belfast, was charged after an investigation by the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism command and is scheduled to appear at Westminster magistrates court on 18 June.
The late Niall Kilmartin examined this dilemma in this post, “The equal oppression of the laws”. He gave a characteristically fair hearing to both sides, but concluded:
We will not lack for mind-broadening frenemies to defend even after tolerating ‘equality before the law’ arguments against the loudest “I can say it but you can’t” enforcers of the double-standard. The woker-than-thou of today love purging the woke of yesterday – they will supply.
Equality before the law is good in itself. Demanding equality of oppression before the law is a way to expose a dishonest process. Think carefully before judging it a betrayal of our war against the hate speech laws’ evil goal, rather than a way – that can be both honest in itself and effective – of waging it.
No one with a shred of humanity could fail to sympathise with Leanne Lucas. On 29th July 2024, she was hosting a Taylor Swift-themed children’s dance and bracelet-making workshop in Southport when Axel Rudakubana walked in and started attacking the children, killing three of them. In trying to protect the children Ms Lucas herself was stabbed five times.
When people suffer terrible things, they often throw themselves into searching for a means to help others avoid the same fate. Ms Lucas thinks she has found her cause. The Daily Mail reports:
After her horrific experiences, the teacher had assumed there would be tighter controls around kitchen knives and was shocked to find there weren’t.
She said: ‘Every time I learnt something new, I’d think, “That doesn’t sound right. Surely there are laws in place so that couldn’t have happened.” The more my eyes have been opened, the more I’ve been able to formulate an idea.’
She does not seem to be entirely clear in her mind whether that idea is a cultural change or a legal one. If my only source had been the BBC’s article on the same topic, I would have thought she was only advocating that people voluntarily adopt a different style of cooking that employs knifes with rounded tips rather than traditional knives with sharp tips.
This idea will not work. The sort of person who would take her proposed pledge to commit to exchanging their pointed knives for round-tipped ones could have a nuclear weapon in their cutlery drawer and still be no threat to anyone. But I have no objection to her proposing it as a desirable cultural change. I do have an objection to her proposing to ban pointy kitchen knives, as if the existing ban on murder lacked only this finishing touch to be effective.
As I said in an article for the Libertarian Alliance written five years after another massacre of children:
When the parents of the Dunblane children spoke there was every reason for the world to hear about their terrible experience. There was never any particular reason to suppose that their opinions were right. In fact their opinions should carry less weight than almost anyone else’s should. This point is well understood when it comes to juries. It goes without saying, or, at least, it once did, that guilt or innocence must be decided by impartial people. Decisions of policy require the same cast of mind as decisions of guilt and innocence.
We want to comfort those who have suffered unfairly. One way you comfort someone is by agreeing with them, by allowing them emotional license for any outburst. In the ordinary course of life and death, though, even as we say, “yes, yes” to a distraught person we discount – not ignore, but discount – the content of what they say. Phrases such as “He didn’t know what he was saying” or “She was mad with grief” illustrate this. Then, after a while, they are expected to get back to something like normal.
[…]
However it came about, nowadays we give the bereaved parents at Dunblane, the survivors of rail crashes, and similar groups both the license to say anything due to the distraught and the intellectual consideration due to experts. They can’t have both. Not because I’m too mean to give it to them, but because the two are logically incompatible. The press and public have handed power to those least able to exercise it well.
“Donald Trump will not “break” Canada, Mark Carney promised during his election victory speech on Monday evening. The Liberal leader secured a remarkable comeback victory for the party, which had been set for an electoral wipeout under Justin Trudeau. In a speech to supporters in Ottawa, Mr Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, said Mr Trump’s repeated description of Canada as the 51 state was not an “idle threat”.
It was an idle threat, as Carney knows perfectly well. I would ask “What was Trump thinking?”, except I already know that the answer was “This will make my supporters laugh and annoy people I enjoy seeing annoyed.”
I remain glad that Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. election. I have several reasons for this view, but perhaps the biggest one was that for at least half Joe Biden’s term of office a cabal of his “advisers” operated his poor senile body like a puppet. They were preparing to continue their unelected rule for four more years when his visible confusion in the debate against Trump made the pretence no longer supportable, so they replaced him with Kamala Harris, who was deeply complicit in this fraud against the American people. While this was happening, tyrants and terrorists made hay worldwide.
Trump has other virtues besides not being senile. He is brave and determined. Rather than being apologetic at having something as primitive as a nationality, as people like Mark Carney and Sir Keir Starmer are when among their own class, Trump actually loves his country. Unfortunately his ideas on how to advance its interests are often simplistic and counterproductive (e.g. tariffs) and his behaviour is often childish (e.g. pointlessly goading Canada and Greenland).
The very shallowness of Trump’s economic thought may help America avoid the harm tariffs would do it. One of the world’s great tragedies is that very intelligent men remain attached to the bad ideas that appealed to them in youth, and employ their intellect in devising ever more ingenious explanations for why said bad ideas failed this time but will work next time. In contrast, Trump was not argued into supporting tariffs, and probably does not need to be argued out of it. I am reasonably hopeful that when he sees prices go up and his poll numbers slide he will row back on the policy, stopping only to claim it was all a negotiating ploy. (Hell, maybe it was all a negotiating ploy.) J.D. Vance, a genuine intellectual, may be harder to convince.
Alas for Canada, Mark Carney has all of Vance’s intellectualism without his unconventionality. He will continue the policies of his predecessor Justin Trudeau and his explanations of why they are not working will be most eloquent.
In my day job, I have to keep an eye on financial regulations and the compliance regimes such as those of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Switzerland’s FINMA, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, and more.
A few years ago, regulators such as the SEC dropped the hammer on bankers and other financial sector folk for using private chat apps such as WhatsApp in ways deemed unacceptable: “The Securities and Exchange Commission has punished some of the biggest names in banking including Citi, Bank of America and JPMorgan with fines totalling more than $2bn since 2021, amid concerns that a boom in services such as WhatsApp, iMessage and WeChat could be letting market abuse go unchecked.”
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this – this ought to be a matter between the staff of these firms and their employers, in my view – the regulatory authorities come down hard on people using these apps in ways that are seen, however mistakenly, to put certain things (such as record-keeping of important conversations) at risk.
And yet as you know, dear reader, we have seen examples in recent days from US government figures communicating via Apps such as Signal to discuss the pros and cons of military action. It has caused a stink for various reasons, but for me, I am struck by how few people have commented on the very different treatment of those who work in finance, and those who hold positions of power and where lives are at stake. In the UK, a while back, it turned out the government of Boris Johnson was using WhatsApp extensively, with inevitably poor results. This has led to extensive commentary.
I think this gets me to a wider point. Wherever I look, I see a breakdown in trust in our institutions, public and private. The extent to which this is deserved is contested, but at the root of much of it is that those who set the rules and call for them appear not to abide by them: Political and NGO big cheeses flying in private jets to discuss catastrophic global warming, for example, or the cases of alleged two-tier justice that have been such a mark of the UK government in recent months.
“I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America…As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies—to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never!”
There are some things about the views of supporters of President Trump, and of Americans in general, about the situation in Ukraine that I understand very well. Consider this Bloomberg clip from the President’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 25th September 2018. The caption to the video says gleefully, “Watch the German delegation’s response at UNGA when Trump says “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.” The German delegation had a good laugh at the American rube and his silly ideas about not being dependent on Vladimir Putin, and all the sophisticated people on both sides of the Atlantic laughed with them.
They are not laughing now. They are still asking for money, though. In the face of such arrogance, it is no surprise that President Trump and a great many of his countrymen are saying, “We tried to warn you about Russia but you laughed. It’s nice that you ‘stand with Ukraine’ now, but you can do it with your own money. Bye.”
That, I get. I don’t agree with the view that the conquest of a country in Europe by Russia can safely be ignored by the US, but I can understand it.
What I do not get is how many Americans whose views I normally admire have moved from saying, “This war is sad, but it’s none of our business” to speaking as if Ukraine were morally in the wrong for continuing to fight. To take one example, here is a recent tweet from Elon Musk:
What I am sickened by is years of slaughter in a stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose.
Anyone who really cares, really thinks and really understands wants the meat grinder to stop.
PEACE NOW!!
Similar impassioned pleas for “peace” are being made by many accounts that I follow on X that belong to Americans who are proud supporters of the right to bear arms, people who would until recently have considered themselves spiritual descendants of those unconquerable Americans praised by Pitt. It seems to me that the position of the Ukrainians now is very like that of the Americans then, right down to the invaders of their country being reinforced by wretched hirelings from far away who have been sold by their leaders and sent to die in a the shambles of a foreign war of which they know nothing.
The article starts by repeating a familiar refrain about the unprecedented loss of civil liberties during the pandemic.
As we approach the fifth anniversary, we don’t like to admit that we destroyed our economy, took away part of our kids’ childhoods, permanently aggrandised the state and indebted ourselves for a generation – all for nothing.
All true, but the real meat is here:
Five years ago this Tuesday, Jenny Harries, then the deputy chief medical officer, gave an illuminating, though now neglected, interview. It was not neglected at the time. On the contrary, it took place in No 10, and the interviewer was the prime minister himself, Boris Johnson.
Dr Harries – who has since become Dame Jenny, and been put in charge of the UK Health Security Agency – was impressively level-headed. She explained that, “for most people, it really is going to be quite a mild disease”.
She advised against wearing facemasks unless told otherwise by your doctor. She explained why Britain, unlike many countries in Europe, was not banning large meetings or sporting events. There was, she reminded us, a plan in place, and it provided for the gradual spread of the disease through the population in a way that would not overwhelm hospitals. Try to suppress the spread too vigorously, she said, and there would be a peak later on (which, indeed, is exactly what happened).
Dr Harries was absolutely right, but she was only repeating the global consensus. A little earlier, the WHO had looked at lockdowns and concluded that they were “not demonstrably effective in urban areas”. Its researchers had carried out a study of 120 US military camps during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and found “no statistical difference” between the 99 camps that had confined men to quarters and the 21 that had not.
As recently as 2019, the WHO had declared that lockdowns as a response to respiratory diseases were “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be considerable difficulties in implementing it”.
Dr Harries knew all this. And so did Boris, who spoke what was, in retrospect, the most telling line of the entire interview: “Politicians and governments around the world are under a lot of pressure to be seen to act, so they may do things that are not necessarily dictated by the science,” he said.
If was capable of having that thought, he was capable of acting on it, or rather of continuing to act on it. He was not, as I once thought, a man in a panic who, pathetically but understandably, followed the the united voice of “the experts” because he could not imagine doing anything else. As a successful politician he knew the political nature of the pressure he was under and chose to give into it. He switched which expert to follow – switched from the expert who was right to the “expert” who was wrong – on political grounds. Oh, no doubt his decision was influenced by which expert shouted the loudest (it was not Jenny Harries) and said the scariest things, but a refusal to be moved from a rationally-decided course by emotional displays is the very definition of a leader. I wonder, does he ever think now about how near he came to being the second Churchill he dreamed of being? All he had to do was stay firm.
Dr Harries responded that she was proud that Britain’s response had remained scientific.
Five days later, Boris took to the airwaves to tell people “to stop non-essential contact and travel”. A week after that, we were in lockdown (a term borrowed from prison, which I held out against using for as long as I could). What changed? Well, on March 16, Neil Ferguson and the team at Imperial College published an apocalyptic report based on modelling that estimated that if no measures were put in place deaths over the following two years could reach more than half a million.
And it was popular. Very popular.
Although we sometimes now imagine that Boris wrenched our freedoms from our unwilling hands, it was the other way around. We have forgotten the “Go Home Covidiots” banners, the terrified phone-ins, the YouGov poll showing that 93 per cent of voters wanted a lockdown.
Persuading people that they have been badly treated is easy. Persuading them that they themselves have behaved badly and stupidly is not easy at all. How do we do it? A cynic would say there is no need to try. Just publicly blame everything on “the politicians” (in this case Boris Johnson, who certainly deserves plenty of blame but not all of it) in the same way that the Greens publicly blame all the environmental damage they believe comes from humanity’s reliance on oil on “the oil companies” rather than the people who use the oil, namely all of us. But I do not believe that any strategy of persuasion that relies on a conscious lie can succeed in the long run.
Violent offenders face being banned from owning knives under plans to be considered by the Home Secretary.
Something tells me that the violent offenders will face this prospect with the equanimity that comes from already having faced a ban on being violent criminals.
Offenders with a propensity for knife possession or violence would be designated a “prohibited” person under the proposed crackdown drawn up by police.
They would be banned by law from buying certain types of knives or applying to be a registered knife seller.
In my 20 years of being a reporter, I have rarely come across anything that feels so important – and yet so widely unnoticed. I’ve been following the attempt to create a Europe-wide apparatus that could lead to mass surveillance. The idea is for every digital platform – from Facebook to Signal, Snapchat and WhatsApp, to cloud and online gaming websites – to scan users’ communications.
This involves the use of technology that will essentially render the idea of encryption meaningless. The stated reason is to detect and report the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on digital platforms and in their users’ private chats. But the implications for our privacy and security are staggering.
Since 2022, EU policymakers have attempted to push the legislation, called the regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse (better known as the CSAM regulation proposal), through. Similar attempts to introduce the tech in Britain via the online safety bill were abandoned at the 11th hour, with the UK government admitting it is not possible to scan users’ messages in this way without compromising their privacy.
Cybersecurity experts have already made their opinions clear. Rolling out the technology will introduce flaws that could undermine digital security. Researchers based at Imperial College London have shown systems that scan images en masse could be quietly tweaked to perform facial recognition on user devices without the user’s knowledge. They have warned there are probably more vulnerabilities in such technologies that have yet to be identified.
The song, which was written by Sting and released in 1983, is considered by some to be a stalkers’ anthem.
Sting has admitted that the words – “Every breath you take/ And every move you make/ Every bond you break/ Every step you take/ I’ll be watching you” – have “sinister” overtones.
I have been predicting this day would come for decades. It is still chilling to see it arrive.
Both today’s Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday carry the story of an ordinary woman whose life was nearly ruined by an AI-edited version of some doorbell footage that falsely showed her uttering racist abuse. The Mail’s story is here. It has the original video without a paywall, but I had started writing this post using the Sunday Times version before I was made aware by commenter JuliaM that the Mail had the same story, so in what follows I will mostly quote the Sunday Times story, ‘I doorknocked for Labour then racist deepfake ruined my life’. An archived version can be found here.
It started harmlessly enough. A PE teacher called Cheryl Bennett said that she would help deliver leaflets for her colleague, Quasim Mughal, who was standing as a Labour candidate in the local elections in May last year.
For that display of friendship, she has paid a heavy penalty. What happened that morning — or, rather, did not happen — has changed her life forever. For a time, it cost Bennett her reputation and her career. She was at risk of a criminal conviction too, and police visited her home to arrest her.
As she approached the door of a household in nearby Dudley, she was accompanied by two people: Mughal, the candidate who is of south Asian heritage, and her previous head teacher, who is not. At first, the owner did not answer.
By the time the door was opened, both colleagues had moved on to the next property, leaving Bennett to ask the person whether they intended to vote. Unbeknown to her, a CCTV camera perched above the door was filming.
Within days, a short segment of the footage had been leaked, edited to remove Mughal, and given subtitles. The resulting video falsely depicted Bennett launching into a racist tirade against the homeowner, with subtitles declaring: “F***ing p*kis. P*kis,” as she walked away from the front door.
Nobody has been able to establish who maliciously doctored the footage, but it was given to Akhmed Yakoob, a Lamborghini-owning criminal solicitor, nicknamed the “TikTok lawyer”, who was an independent pro-Gaza candidate for West Midlands mayor and had close links with George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain.
Yakoob posted a narrated version of the fake video on TikTok. He also posted Bennett’s name and place of work.
The video caused a sensation. Within days, it had received 2.1 million views across TikTok, Facebook and X, and prompted hundreds of people, including dozens of parents at her school, which has a large British-Pakistani community, to demand she be sacked. Yakoob and his followers cited Bennett as an example of Labour and Sir Keir Starmer’s lack of interest in Muslim and minority ethnic voters in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war. She was forced into hiding.
Yakoob has since paid substantial damages for his publication of the video.
For a time, however, it looked as though vindication might never come. Within a short time of Yakoob’s TikTok post at 7.30pm, her phone started to vibrate while she was at a friend’s house.
“My phone just started going off like I’d just stepped out of Love Island or I’d just become famous. It was going absolutely berserk on the table. So I picked it up thinking: ‘Family, is there something going on?’ So I looked at my phone and I had loads of work emails going through.”
Most of them contained abuse. Some were written by children at her own school. “Appalling,” one pupil said. “Being racist is harmful because it disregards the inherent worth and dignity of individuals solely based on their race.” Another wrote: “I didn’t expect a teacher of your standard to be discriminative of races.” Bennett, confused, protested that she had said no such thing, but the messages kept on coming through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. “Stop lying.” “Ur not getting away with this.” “Racist little bitch.”
Then came the formal complaints, as well-meaning parents wrote to the head teacher demanding an investigation and threatening to contact the board of governors. The secondary school received 800 complaints in a short time, some from parents at her school, others from her previous school.
Within hours, the head teacher had told Bennett not to return to work for her own safety. She was not safe at home either, where she lived alone. Strangers arrived at the homes of her parents and her grandmother demanding information as to her whereabouts. Even her car number plate was circulating online.
She stayed at a friend’s home that night. At about 2.30am, West Midlands police went to her home to arrest her, putting a postcard through her door asking her to call them.
The Mail’sversion of the story makes it clearer that Ms Bennett having fled to a friend’s house was the reason that she was not present when the police arrived at her home to arrest her at 2.30am. Even if she had been guilty, I do not see why the police thought it was necessary to turn up at that hour to arrest a woman for a non-violent crime.
The Sunday Times account continues:
“I was just constantly in survival mode. I was just trying to get through every single day. And it’s only because I’ve been raised by a very strong family, by very strong women, in terms of you keep fighting and pushing through. Because there was days where I just thought: ‘Would it be easier if I was to just end my life?’ Just because I felt like my career would never be same.”
Before long, police discovered the video was a hoax. They obtained the original doorbell footage, which specialist officers could see bore no resemblance to the subtitles in the video. On May 8, a spokesman for the force said they had found “no evidence of any racist slurs or language used”.
Lucky for her the original footage was still available. How long do they keep it on file? Round here we tend to assume surveillance is bad in itself, but we may soon end up being grateful for it more often than not.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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