Politics

By Joe Mellor Deputy Editor Widespread doubts about the appointment of Butler-Sloss have forced her to step down from the inquiry, into allegations of historical child abuse. Seen as an establishment figure, the suspicious was she is too close to senior politicians, police and civil servants, who could be implicated in her findings. Her own brother was Sir Michael Havers was Attorney General in the 1980s. There were also concerns about her age (she will be 81 next month) and...

By Toby James  We need the police. They keep us safe, keep crime off our streets and bring criminals to justice. Their job is somewhat thankless, however, and they are under fire more often than not. At the time of writing, the current scandal is the inquest over the 1985 shooting of Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce, which found that a series of police failures contributed to Groce’s injury. Police officers searching for her son had entered her home and an inspector...

By Steve Taggart As ISIS gain new territory and funds with which to establish an Islamic state and ‘’Caliphate’’, they are perhaps unaware that the institution of Caliphate is already in existence here in the UK. The UK first became the home to a world-wide Caliphate in 1984 when His Holiness, Mirza Tahir Ahmad, the fourth Caliph, migrated from Pakistan to England. Today, the leafy streets of Southfields, South-West London, are home to his successor, the fifth Caliph and worldwide...

By Pieter Cranenbroek Watching David Cameron in Europe is a bit like watching a kid make a stain on his shirt and rub it, making it bigger and bigger. The British prime minister has been rubbing his European leaders up the wrong way for a while, but his diplomacy has gone from bad to worse in recent weeks. His disillusioned performance in the Juncker episode means that Cameron has struck out in Europe. Less than a month ago, Cameron was...

By Indy Hack @IndyHack July 6th will mark the 79th birthday of the most iconic religious figure in current popular culture, a figure most often associated with peace, tolerance, non-violence and religious harmony, none other than Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Behind the carefully crafted and stage managed image of the world's most popular Buddhist monk lies a story of religious persecution and political oppression inflicted on the Tibetan people, not by the Chinese, but by the Dalai Lama...

  By Luca Foschi You do not fix history with a drone. What we are witnessing today in Iraq is the slow collapse of a century-long geopolitical partition drawn up in a secret document by United Kingdom and France, in one of their last acts as imperial powers. In May 1916 diplomats Mark Sykes and François Gorges Picot signed an agreement that reshaped the Near East, previously ruled by the Ottoman Empire who were siding with Austria-Hungary and Germany during the First...

By Guy Dorrell @GuyDorrellEsq In March this year, the nation lost an iconic figure from both parliament and the wider political and protest scene with the death of Tony Benn. Once billed as the most dangerous man in Britain, he would later be feted as a national treasure. The son of a Liberal MP and later hereditary peer, Anthony Wedgewood Benn would turn his back on the system that educated him and renounce the peerage that would eventually fall to...

By Rachel Wilson Political Reporter The current cuts to the public sector look set to impact on women the hardest. Women make up the majority of public sector workers and cuts to the sector has pushed women’s unemployment up over the past few years. Women make up 65% of the public sector workforce in the UK and the latest figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility estimate that 929,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector by 2018. Over...

By Valentina Magri The decision of the European Council to propose Jean-Claude Juncker as the next President of the European Commission was “one step closer to quitting Europe” for Britain. The move made David Cameron feel very angry. Indeed, the PM has promised a referendum in 2017 over EU membership if the Conservative party win the 2015 general election. Opinion polls show that Brits are split on the issue. But what would be the economic consequences of Brexit? The five economic consequences...