Opinion

Philip Armitage of the Harrow Public Law Department of Duncan Lewis Solicitors explains the background to this decision from the High Court. Mr Justice Murray, in the High Court, has on 26 March 2019 dismissed our clients’ Judicial Review claims challenging the decision of the Secretary of State for the Home Department to pay immigration detainees £1 per hour for work carried out while in detention. Our clients are understandably very disappointed by this decision. We continue to be of...

Of all the painful pictures to have adorned the front pages of the British press since Brexit few encapsulated the unfortunate state we find ourselves in as much as 13 white, privileged males driving into Chequers to orchestrate a supposed coup of the lone woman left in charge of administering this broken mess. Far from being an admirer of the Prime Minister, it was impossible to ignore the challenge she and indeed the country face as Ian Duncan Smith revved...

In an extraordinary swipe at Britain's press, the UK's top anti-terror cop called out the British press for the hypocrisy of blaming social media for radicalising terrorists while publishing the Christchurch killer's deadly manifesto to an audience of millions. In an open letter to the mainstream media, Head of UK Counter Terrorism Policing, Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations (ACSO) Neil Basu called for "a sensible conversation about how to report terrorism in a way that doesn’t help terrorists." In a...

There are some events that traumatise a country. Some countries are unlucky enough to experience dozens of national disasters, making trauma part of their cultural make up. This true of Ireland, Hungary, Germany and Russia to mention just a few. But not Great Britain. The UK has had its fair share of crises - the Norman invasion, the Blitz, the Civil War - but the British are not a people to wallow in their failures. Even when the country’s standing...

“What connects the vile and dangerous rise of Islamophobia in Australia, America and the UK?”, James O'Brien pondered on Twitter above a 2015 post by international media oligarch Rupert Murdoch which called on “Moslems” to recognise the “growing jihadist cancer” that is supposedly rising within their ranks. Although the national media cannot be held solely responsible for attacks such as the one orchestrated in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 people in their place of worship, ignoring the role it plays...

Now people and parliament is finally waking up to the total dog’s dinner Brexit is, it’s more important than ever to march for the public to have a final say over our future. Brexit’s biggest chance of succeeding was always to bore the population into submission, and let them tell themselves that it couldn’t be stopped, that resistance was useless. That’s why in October 2017, myself and a few friends first started taking photos of dogs posing with ‘#Wooferendum –...

By Steve Tooze, member of local climate change action group Lambeth for a Cool Planet My kids and a 16-year-old girl that I’ve never met called Greta Thunberg have turned me into a climate change radical. And today it seemed like I wasn’t alone. I stood amongst dozens of friends and neighbours on an overcast, blustery March afternoon on the pavement outside of Lambeth town hall in Brixton, South London. Our council has laudably declared a Climate Emergency and we all agreed that we...

They don’t want a house, a mortgage, a car, things. All they want is their future, their planet. And all they have to offer in return? Only ideas, energy, respect, innocence, purity, originality, love and joy.

While Westminster continues to look inward, events are unfolding elsewhere along roughly the lines the remain campaign predicted over two years ago. The much maligned ‘project fear’ has been easy to discount until recently with Brexiteers pointing to the fact that economic indicators have not fallen as much as was predicted in 2016. The reality that dozens of companies have already left the UK, are planning to leave or have simply collapsed under the uncertainty of Brexit is brushed away...