David Shipley

After all the noise about Reform slipping in the polls, and a Green surge, it turns out that the British electorate really, really care about immigration. That’s the only sensible conclusion to draw from the local election results. With high turnout nationwide, including the highest ever for the Welsh Senedd (which Labour have conceded they’ve lost), Reform have surged, and Labour have collapsed. In some ways the results are even flattering Labour. In Wigan, for example, they’ve retained control of the council despite losing all 22 seats which were voted on yesterday, because two-thirds of the seats weren’t up for grabs this time. The British electorate soundly rejected the Tories two years ago, and now it is clear they’re also done with Labour.

The British asylum system is fake. It’s fake because there’s a ‘shadow industry of law firms and advisers… charging thousands of pounds’ to produce fake asylum claims – and the true scale of the problem is vast. It is also a problem which is well known to those within the system, with identical claims being submitted by hundreds of different people. Vast amounts of time and money are spent determining the asylum claims of people who, whatever happens, will be allowed to stay in Britain Another way the system is fake, we’ve learned this week, is the removals system. According to data obtained by the Daily Express, between 2018 and 2025 some 96,002 Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis and Eritreans entered the UK via small boats before claiming asylum.

This morning, the BBC of all places, is reporting it has unearthed a ‘shadow industry of law firms and advisers’ which is ‘charging thousands of pounds to help migrants pretend to be gay’ in order to be granted asylum status. In what is just ‘the first part of a major undercover investigation’, the national broadcaster has revealed an organised system in which migrants whose visas are expiring are advised to claim asylum on the basis of fake claims that they are gay.

There was once a time when we were told that migration would make us rich, ensure our pensions were paid and that diversity made us stronger. Those arguments are dying, with the fiscal case demolished by the likes of the Migration Advisory Committee. Even the government’s latest cohesion strategy, ‘Protecting What Matters’, admits that diversity is ‘a problem to be’ approached. And now the Boriswave, the low-paid millions who arrived earlier this decade, are soon to be granted Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), giving them access to benefits and housing at taxpayers’ expense forever.

The government’s new cohesion strategy, ‘Protecting What Matters: Towards a more confident, cohesive and resilient United Kingdom’, has attracted attention because of its introduction of an ‘anti Muslim hostility’ code, its erasure of the English as an ethnic identity, and its quite confused and bizarre messaging. What has so far gone unremarked is its Mussolinian energy regarding education. This goal is clear. A whole raft of new rules will apply to schools. There will be obligatory citizenship classes, including a promise to ‘raise awareness of threats to democracy’.

After Labour came third in Gorton and Denton, the government had a choice. Chase the lost Green vote by moving closer to its positions on open borders, an amnesty for all illegal migrants and an end to deportations, or follow Reform who have pledged to make deportations non-justiciable and deport ‘up to 280,000’ illegal migrants a year. Some in Labour have blamed Gorton on Shabana Mahmood’s planned changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain and asylum, with Lucy Powell, the party’s deputy leader, saying that these policies were ‘a real concern to our ethnic minority communities’, and noting that the government’s tough talk on migration ‘came up a lot’ on the doorstep during the by-election campaign.

For much of the last year, it has seemed like the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has been battling to create a de facto Islamic blasphemy law in Britain. But today, they suffered a great defeat when the Court of Appeal rejected their bid to overturn the acquittal of Hamit Coskun, whose conviction for burning a Quran was overturned in October. For now, at least, there is no blasphemy law in England. It’s worth reflecting though on how strange and sinister the CPS’s actions have been, and what they have tried to do.

After Zia Yusuf’s announcement that Reform would create a ‘UK Deportation Command’ (UKDC), much of the media leapt to make comparisons with ICE in America. The Guardian described it as an ‘ICE-style deportation plan’, the Independent an ‘ICE-style UK border agency’, and even the Mail stated that ‘Reform is planning to create a British version of Trump’s ICE unit’. I spoke to Yusuf this morning, who was quick to dismiss these comparisons, telling me that ‘I have never wanted to create a British ICE’, and that ‘the reason why the media want to immediate call it a British ICE is that they want to take advantage of the very negative headlines around the excesses of ICE in America’.

A Transport for London (TfL) advert has been banned for ‘perpetuating a negative racial stereotype about black men’. The decision, issued today by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA), relates to an advert TfL from October last year. According to the ASA it: ‘Featured a video of a black teenage boy on a bus. The teenage boy, who was turned around in his seat, said to the passenger seated behind him, “Am I not good enough for you or something? Why you not chatting to me?”.’ The next shot was of a white teenage boy sitting on the bus with text overlaid which stated, “Would you know how to defuse incidents of hate crime, sexual offences and harassment?”. That text remained overlaid as the camera showed the left hand of a white teenage girl touching her right arm.

Labour’s new Representation of the People Bill, introduced to Parliament last week, has drawn attention because it will give around 1.6 million 16- and 17-year-olds the vote. But hidden within the bill is an innocuous term – ‘automatic registration’ – that will also usher in a far more significant and controversial change. Governments should be chosen by the people they will govern, not by those with minimal ties to our nation Under the government’s plans, instead of having to register to vote, all eligible voters will be automatically added to the electoral roll, which will mean significant changes to constituency boundaries.

There’s so much bad news about our prisons that it’s easy to become fatigued by it. Another failing jail, another prison awash with drugs, another inmate released in error. As a result, often it’s only the most extreme or shocking examples which hit the headlines. But there is one particular kind of prison news story which is guaranteed coverage: a female member of staff caught having an intimate relationship with a prisoner. In many cases they’ve had sex with the prisoner inside the jail, or even in a cell. The Wandsworth officer had sex with one prisoner inside his cell while being filmed on a contraband mobile The most high-profile recent example is, of course, Linda De Sousa Abreu.

Ever since Labour was elected, every time there has been another disaster in our jails, or another set of terrible data, it has been briefed that ‘this government inherited prisons in crisis’. To be fair to the government, the Tories did leave our jails broken, overcrowded and crumbling, but this line has also been a useful shield for Labour, distracting from their own record. In this they have been helped by how long it takes for official reports and statistics to be published. There was always going to be a lag before Labour’s prison strategy could be judged. Unfortunately for them, with today’s publication of a National Audit Office report on drugs and drones, we have learned that our prisons have become even worse since the general election.

This government knows that if it doesn’t turn the tide on migration it is destined for electoral oblivion. The Home Secretary has said that ‘illegal migration has been placing immense pressure on communities’, and that ‘asylum hotels…are blighting communities’. This is why the government is determined to close the asylum hotels. But its ‘solution’ is nothing of the sort. Instead, asylum seekers living in hotels in or near British towns are being moved to former military bases near British towns. It has not been normal, in recent English history, for quiet market towns to see such protests One such place is the Sussex market town of Crowborough.

Even as he resigned, Craig Guildford couldn’t do the decent thing. Perhaps that’s no surprise. We have learned in recent weeks that the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police has been habitually obfuscating over the circumstances under which Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were banned from Birmingham, and even misled parliament when he failed to disclose that the force’s intelligence report included an entirely invented football match. This week Guildford was entirely discredited in a report by Sir Andy Cooke, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, and has lost the confidence of the Home Secretary. Despite all this, Guildford was unapologetic, claiming that his resignation was due to ‘the political and media frenzy around myself and my position’.