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Julian Assange will reportedly seek a pardon after pleading guilty to violating US espionage law in a deal that has seen him released from a British prison and will allow him to return to his native Australia. The 52-year-old, until Monday, had been held, without trial, at London's Belmarsh prison while he awaited his next court date having, in May, won the right to appeal against an extradition to America. He had been at the prison for more than five years following his arrest at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in 2019 for skipping bail. The WikiLeaks founder had been staying there since 2012, having sought asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden on a rape allegation - announced in August 2010 - that was later dropped. Assange's wife, Stella Assange, posted on X (formerly Twitter) shortly before 10.30am on Tuesday that her husband had landed in Bangkok and was soon to depart for the US where he will appear before a judge in the Northern Mariana Islands - a US commonwealth in the Pacific Ocean. Any pardon would later be granted by the US President. She urged people to "please follow #AssangeJet, we need all eyes on his flight in case something goes wrong", and shared a link to flight tracker, Flight Aware. She also thanked his supporters, saying "words cannot express our immense gratitude". Assange was granted bail by a High Court in London on Monday and taken to Stansted Airport, where he boarded a plane in the afternoon. WikiLeaks posted footage on X of him travelling to the airport and boarding the plane. It noted that Assange had spent 1901 days in a 2x3 metre cells, isolated 23 hours a day, but would soon "reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars". Stella told the Press Association news agency that Assange's trip would cost $500,000 (£393,715), which was covered by the Australian Government. The Assange campaign, she told the BBC, will pay the amount back. Assange agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to filings in the US district court for the Northern Mariana Islands. He is expected to appear at a hearing on the island of Saipan and be sentenced at 9am local time on Wednesday (11pm GMT on Tuesday). According to the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, Assange is being accompanied on his flight by Australia's high commissioner to the UK, Stephen Smith. "Regardless of the views that people have about Julian Assange and his activities, the case has dragged on for too long, there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia," Albanese said on Tuesday, according to media reports. Under the deal, yet to be approved by a judge, Assange is likely to be credited for the time he has already served in prison and face no further jail time. The Guardian reported, citing a letter to a federal judge for the Northern Mariana Islands, that Assange was being sent to there due to its "proximity to the defendant's country of citizenship". He is then expected to travel to Australia. The plea agreement comes months after US President, Joe Biden, said he was considering a request from Australia to drop the US push to prosecute Assange. In 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history - along with a cache of diplomatic cables. In a court document filed with the US district court for the Northern Mariana Islands ahead of sentencing, the US Government accused Assange of "knowingly and unlawfully" conspiring with the US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to "receive and obtain documents, writings, and notes connected with the national defence… up to the SECRET level". While Assange's supporters and press freedom groups shared their delight over the decision, former ...

The Times of London recently carried a comment article by Gerard Baker about events at The Washington Post, where the new publisher, Sir Will Lewis, is at war with his journalists. Headlined 'If sanctimonious staff have a veto, the game's up for Washington Post', it opened a window into the festering soul of Murdoch journalism. Baker's high-octane contempt for the Post - with its "left-wing, woke, progressive ideology" and its "preening sanctimony" - is matched only by his apparent determination to distract the readers of The Times from the realities of a dispute that is deeply shaming for the Murdoch organisation. Lewis plans to introduce big changes at the loss-making American title, but his past in UK journalism has been catching up with him, with The New York Times and the Post's own staff raising questions about what he did as a senior Murdoch executive during the phone-hacking scandal. He is accused, notably, of participating in the attempted cover-up of hacking and bribery and of helping or permitting the destruction of evidence. Other evidence links him with a plot by the Murdoch company to discredit political opponents of its ambitious television projects. He denies wrongdoing, just as he denies further accusations that he tried to quash reporting on the allegations. Lewis appointed a new Executive Editor for the Post, Robert Winnett, who is currently Deputy Editor of the Telegraph in the UK. But, after claims that Winnett had published articles based on phone-hacking, he withdrew from the role. Winnett also denies wrongdoing. Gerard Baker, whose chief take on all this, overtly at least, is that it is both pious and suicidal for journalists to concern themselves with such matters when the newspaper is losing $77 million a year. "If you can't sell your product," he writes, "you are doomed." This is not what the article is really about, but let's engage with it for a moment. Though Baker may not like it, what may be true of shoes and chocolate bars is not necessarily true of journalism - and he need look no further for proof than the record of The Times itself, which though it happens to have turned a profit in recent years, lost money every year for the best part of a century before that - including 30 years under Murdoch ownership. Something similar is true of the Guardian. Murdoch's The Sun also loses a lot of money. It is true that money usually matters (although it would take a century for the Post's losses to make a noticeable hole in the $200 billion fortune of its owner Jeff Bezos), but here is a second point. If you go to market, you have to have a product to sell - and the Post's product is ethical journalism. The proposition that Baker is making, without of course expressing it, is that the Post should ditch its ethics to make money. Which, of course, is pure Murdoch. But, in reality, this money argument is just a distraction - it is where Baker wants you to look. What is most revealing about Baker's case is that he fails entirely to consider the accusations against Lewis and the entire business of UK press criminality. While he tells the Post's staff to forget about all of this, in other words, he makes no attempt to show that it can reasonably be forgotten. The reason is simple: with the relevant details attached, his argument becomes obviously and grotesquely self-serving. In fact this is not about the Post at all, but about the Murdoch empire, and to a degree about The Times of London itself. What Baker really seems to be telling his readers - as a Murdoch employee writing in a Murdoch publication - is that the crimes and wrongdoings of the Murdoch press in the UK do not matter and ought to be be forgotten. Murdoch, he is implying, should be allowed to get on unhindered with the business of making money from doing news his way. But Baker's readers would undoubtedly have seen his argument differently if he had come clean with them, for example, about the position of the editor of The Times, Tony Gallagh...

The next Parliament is set to have multiple MPs with backgrounds as staffers, consultants or lobbyists for the country's under-fire privatised water industry, Byline Times can reveal. This newspaper has investigated the backgrounds of prospective parliamentary candidates (PPCs) from both Labour and the Conservatives and identified at least half a dozen candidates who have a background in the water sector, with a good chance of winning their seats in next week's General Election. A leading UK water charity has called on both parties to ensure that none of their candidates have "a whiff of sewage about them". Sewage spills into England's rivers and seas by water companies more than doubled in 2023, with 3.6 million hours of spills recorded, compared to 1.75 million hours in 2022, the BBC reported earlier this month, citing Environment Agency (EA) figures. Water UK, the industry body for sewerage companies, said the record discharges were "unacceptable", but claimed they were due to heavy rain and increased data collection. The EA said that increased rainfall does not override water companies' responsibility "to manage storm overflows in line with legal requirements". There is a long history of industry leaders and lobbyists becoming politicians. In principle, this can be beneficial - but rarely is. James Wallace, chief executive of River Action UK Lee Pitcher, who is standing as Labour's candidate for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme, has spent most of his career in the water industry. He worked for Yorkshire Water until recently, before becoming the head of the water sector advisory at consultancy firm Jacobs, which promises to help address the "unprecedented challenges" facing the sector "from climate change to emerging contaminants". In the nearby Yorkshire constituency of Ossett and Denby Dale, the Labour PPC is Jade Botterill. After being announced as the candidate last September, she started in a new job as a director of lobbying firm Portland. Among Portland's clients are not only major oil giants like BP, but water company Southern Water, which received a record £90 million fine in 2021 for deliberately dumping billions of litres of raw sewage into protected seas. Labour candidate for Livingstone, Gregor Poynton, is a partner at Headland Consultancy, which represents Anglian Water. Meanwhile, Conservative candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, Alex Deane, works as a senior managing director in the "strategic communications" arm of FTI Consulting, which includes industry trade group Water UK among its clients. Criticism of the UK's privatised water industry has intensified in recent years as the scale of untreated sewage spills into UK waterways has become increasingly public. The nine chief executives of UK water companies have recevied more than £25 million in bonuses and incentives since the 2019 General Election, as the companies have faced accusations of prioritising profits and shareholder pay-outs above investing in infrastructure and protecting waterways. Every major party has announced plans to try and crack down on the sector if it wins the election. But the existence of multiple likely MPs with backgrounds in the sector has sparked concerns that the next government may be at risk of having, or being seen to have, bias towards the water sector. James Wallace, chief executive of River Action UK, told Byline Times: "We are staring down the barrel of wildlife collapse and a freshwater emergency. Nothing short of a complete and immediate overhaul of how we value and manage water - our life support system - will do. "There is a long history of industry leaders and lobbyists becoming politicians. In principle, this can be beneficial - but rarely is - if the person concerned has integrity and severs all ties, bringing insider knowledge to solve the problems in hand. "But, as we have seen with the current Environment Secretary's partner being a water company director, accusations of bias in favour of the pol...

On Saturday, I stood in Parliament Square in the shadow of the House of Commons, listening to speeches from the great and the good in British conservation, while two peregrine falcons frolicked in the skies above. Behind me, the estimated 80,000 to 100,000 participants of the 'Restore Nature Now' march stretched up Whitehall, halfway to Trafalgar Square. Members of the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), and 350 other conservation charities and environmental campaign groups, they had come to London to give a voice to the voiceless and stand up for the natural world. And they did so by stepping onto the street and standing shoulder to shoulder with Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. The National Trust and Extinction Rebellion? It was an event as significant as that sounds - marking a historic shift in the way our nature conservation sector seeks to bring about change. Alongside their core work of protecting precious places and managing threatened species, the country's conservation charities have spent decades trying to influence policy in order to slow - if not end and reverse - our centuries long assault on the living world. They have conducted research and made sure their reports and policy briefs have made it onto ministerial desks, engaged in advocacy, and between them launched endless petitions and letter-writing campaigns. But none of it has worked. Populations of birds, insects, and other wildlife are in freefall. Our rivers swim with sewage, slurry and other pollution. And most of the protected areas we have set aside for nature are in poor ecological condition. Worryingly, many of the environmental movement's previous successes - the establishment of a legal framework to protect nature and regulatory bodies to enforce it - have been undone or weakened by the Government: environmental legislation has been undermined; the Environment Agency had been rendered toothless by budget cuts; and our system of legal protections for the most special, biodiverse places has come under political attack. The gains of the past are being wiped out and, despite the desire of the British public for the Government to do more for nature and set us on the path to sustainability, we are being led rapidly in the opposite direction. It is perhaps not surprising that this relentless assault on the natural world - which the RSPB has branded an "attack on nature" - has brought about such a shift in tactics. For decades, the conservation charities have been trying to bring about change through 'appropriate channels', trusting that, if they supplied the evidence and made the will of their membership clear, governments would simply do the right thing, act in the public interest, and act to protect nature. But policy-making isn't about evidence or doing the right thing. It is about power and influence - and the influence of wildlife charities has been insignificant in the face of the financial and lobbying might of the vested interests profiting from nature destruction. From the agribusiness and construction industries, to water companies and the owners of grouse-shooting estates - private interests have been fighting against environmental protections and they have done so not with petitions and scientific data, but with political donations and intense lobbying. By mobilising their vast membership onto the streets, the conservation charities now seem to recognise the primacy of power in policy-making. While they may not have the financial clout or political influence of the corporate lobbies, their combined membership of millions of people is a huge potential source of political power - should that power be united, mobilised and manifested. By taking to the streets in protest, by escalating from politely requesting change within the halls of power to standing outside them and loudly demanding it, these organisations have sent future governments a warning shot. They have understood that their power lies not in...

The top banker who acted as lead advisor to officials deciding the destination of Britain's biggest ever public procurement contract was helping the winner of the multi-billion-pound takeover just two weeks prior to his appointment, Byline Times can reveal. Ed Duckett, a senior banker at Rothschild & Co, advised the Gambling Commission on the competition for the National Lottery licence, worth £6.5 billon over 10 years to the winner. The hiring of Rothschild with an accompanying quote from Duckett was announced on 22 July 2019. On 8 July 2019, Czech company Sazka had launched a successful €2.1 billon bid for the majority shares of Greek betting firm, OPAP. In Greece and Cyprus, OPAP holds exclusive lottery licences for jackpot draws and scratch-card games. According to the authoritative MergerLinks website, which publishes details of those involved in mergers and takeovers, Sazka was advised by Rothschild, and the bank's team was led by Duckett. Owned by Czech billionaire, Karel Komarek, via his KKCG holding company, Sazka in late 2021 rebranded as Allwyn. In March 2022, Allwyn was declared the victor in the competition for the UK Lottery licence, seeing off other bidders, including Camelot, the incumbent. Camelot subsequently launched legal action against the Gambling Commission, only to drop it when Allwyn swooped to buy out Camelot. The Gambling Commission is currently investigating suspicious betting activities ahead of Rishi Sunak calling the 2024 General Election, but the watchdog might want to scrutinise itself in relation to this much bigger matter. Duckett, managing director of Rothschild & Co, said: "The National Lottery is one of the largest and most successful lotteries globally and is of significant national importance. "The competition for the fourth National Lottery licence is one which has the potential to generate interest from a wide range of national and international operators. We are delighted to have been entrusted by the Gambling Commission as their lead advisor to assist in delivering a successful competition for the fourth licence." No mention was made of the fact that Duckett had just put the finishing touches on the successful €2.1 billon bid by Sazka for the majority shares of Greek betting firm, OPAP, it did not own. Byline Times can also disclose that the links between the lead advisor on the UK National Lottery licensing contest and the eventual winner run much deeper. Rothschild's website lists the bank's four business divisions: global advisory; wealth management; merchant banking; and asset management. The latter is split in two, for North America and Europe. The European asset management practice, states the bank's website, is based in Paris and has a presence in 10 countries. It manages more than €22 billion and has 150 employees. The website lists its funds. One is the 'R-Co Target 2024 High Yield'. Previous filings for that fund show that, in the year ending 31 December 2021, it held a stake in a Sazka Group bond, which yielded a coupon of 4.125% and was due to mature in November 2024. The Financial Times, on 14 March 2023, carried a detailed breakdown of the Rothschild fund's investments. The Allwyn/Sazka debt was included among the fund's top 10 holdings, at just over 2% of the fund's net asset value. The R-Co Target 2024 High Yield webpage no longer shows the Allwyn/Sazka stake - suggesting that after the March FT article it was sold. It's not known if the Gambling Commission did any due diligence on Rothschild before appointing the bank lead advisor. Banks are hugely complex businesses, often employing thousands of people across the world. Rothschild operates in 40 countries and has a staff of 4,200. One link with Allwyn, Sazka's purchase of OPAP, could be explained away on the basis it was a Czech business buying a Greek one. Except not only was it the same bank but the same banker working for both clients - two weeks after advising on the takeover, Duckett was appointed lead advis...

Andrew Tate needs no introduction. The perma-sunglasses-sporting, walking-talking walnut-in-a-condom has grown rich and influential by preaching a liturgy of misogyny and toxic masculinity to a willing audience of teenage boys and lost little men. Former kickboxer Tate's online ventures, which have included 'Hustler's University' and a webcam business have, he claims, made himself and his brother Tristan multi-millionaires despite the latter business, in his own words, being "a total scam". Ever since Tate first rose to prominence, as a contestant on Big Brother in 2016, accusations have dogged him. As of June 2024, there are three legal cases against him pending: two in Romania and a civil case in the UK. They all involve accusations of abusive behaviour towards women and include human trafficking and sexual assault. Tate's creed is best summed up in his own observations: "Humanity cannot survive with female empowerment." "You can't be responsible for something that doesn't listen to you. You can't be responsible for a dog if it doesn't obey you, or a child if it doesn't obey you, or a woman that doesn't obey you." Tate has expressed even more disturbing and violent opinions on how women should be treated - including, notoriously, suggesting that if a woman accuses her male partner of cheating on her: "It's bang out the machete, boom in her face, you grip her up by the neck, 'WHAT'S UP BITCH'... you go f**k her. That's how it goes, you go slap, slap, grab, choke, 'shut up bitch', sex." And now we learn that this is an influencer who Nigel Farage, Leader of the Reform party and prospective parliamentary candidate for Clacton, thinks is an "important voice" for young men. On an appearance on the Strike It Big podcast, aired in February more than a year after Tate was first arrested, Farage - while agreeing that the self-styled king of the manosphere had uttered some "pretty horrible things", also suggested that he was a role model for teenage boys as he would give them "perhaps a bit of confidence at school". In another interview on the Disruptors podcast in August 2023, while making it clear that he preferred Jordan Peterson's ideas to Tate's, he nonetheless described the former kick-boxer as a "fascinating figure" and placed himself firmly in the Tate-Jordan camp: "There's an awakening in a younger generation who have had enough of being dictated to, have had enough of being lectured to... they're seeing through the rubbish they're getting taught in schools and universities. If no other politician is willing to reach out to this group of people, then I will." This is dangerous and patronising stuff. So what does a 19-year-old boy make of it? Otto English Ultimately Unappealing Firstly, it's important to understand why some teenage boys of my generation - I am 19 - might be drawn to Andrew Tate. To some extent - and I hate to admit it - Farage does have a point. Whether rational or not, many young men at school and college feel marginalised and angry. At an age when many are seeking to understand their sexuality, Tate - with his confident air, Fast and Furious vibe, and brash unabashed masculinity - sits in stark contrast to the 'woke agenda' he has set himself against. Many teenage boys, and even some of those in my circle at school, can be a bit insular and think that they are experiencing things worse than those in society who are really suffering. Tate appeals to this group. He makes them feel empowered and acknowledged. And so, those who have struggled through the pandemic, or who might feel insecure or unheard, and even those who might have wrestled with their mental health, see him as a sort of answer to their inner woes. Many of these young men who hero-worship him do not (at least they say this) buy wholesale into the misogyny he spouts, and will frequently dismiss his more 'out there' statements as 'ironic' or 'humorous'. They will also tone it down in front of women and girls in their circle. Meanwhile, his entry...

Claims by the Conservatives that a website design service handed £100,000 in taxpayer money by the party's MPs is "independent" have been called into question, after records seen by this paper show it listed at an address owned by a Conservative Party employee. The Guardian reported on Sunday that Bluetree Website Services had received the money to design constituency websites for Conservative MPs, the cost of which was then claimed back in expenses. The revelation prompted a complaint by the Labour councillor James Walsh to Parliament's expenses watchdog, in relation to rules stating that expenses should not be used for party political purposes. Responding to the story, a Conservative spokesman claimed that Bluetree was "independent" from the party. However, Bluetree is not listed on Companies House as an independent entity and there is no address for the organisation listed on their website, which does, however, contain the imprint: "Promoted by Alan Mabbutt on behalf of the Conservative party". Asked about the status of Blueetree, The Guardian reported that CCHQ had claimed it was "part of a registered company separate from the Conservative party" but would not say what that company was. However, an invoice seen by Byline Times, which was sent by Bluetree to a former Conservative MP, shows its address as being a residential property in South West England. Land Registry records suggest that this property is owned by Graham Godwin-Pearson. Godwin-Pearson, is a former Conservative councillor who is listed as working for a current Conservative peer and was listed online as a CCHQ staffer under the party's former chairman Greg Hands. He is also the owner of a separate limited company which is listed on Companies House as offering "Information technology consultancy activities" and whose latest accounts show more than £200,000 in capital and reserves. The Conservatives and Godwin-Pearson had not responded to requests by this paper to explain his relationship to Bluetree and the party by the time of publication. However, a Conservative Party spokesperson told The Guardian that "Bluetree is an independent organisation but is a preferred supplier of the Conservative party. "MPs using Ipsa money for a website to promote constituency activity is compliant with Ipsa rules. Bluetree works closely with Ipsa to ensure guidelines are followed. "Bluetree and the Conservative party have made it clear to candidates who were MPs that they should not be using any Ipsa-funded website during the election." Tom Brake, the director of campaign group Unlock Democracy, suggested rules would have been broken if any of the money given to Bluetree was used for campaigning purposes. "The rules are clear. Taxpayers' money cannot be used by MPs for party political campaign purposes. Yet Bluetree's promotional material about their websites makes it clear that that is their intended purpose", Brake told The Guardian. "Running surveys on a website, paid for with public money, which elicit information about likely voting intention constitutes a breach of the expenses rules. Unless these activities have been separately funded by the MP, any MP using taxpayer's funds in this way should be required to reimburse them immediately."

From the inception of White's in the 1600s - considered to be the oldest gentleman's clubs in London - the exclusive clubland circuit has for centuries acted as a refuge for the wealthy and powerful. From celebrities and royals looking to escape paparazzi, to politicians who'd prefer to conduct business outside of the Commons and away from the scrutiny of prying journalists, these venues have been instrumental in providing a refuge for the elite. Some within this network - such as the Carlton Club or the United and Cecil - have explicit political goals, and are a key part of the Conservative fundraising ecosystem, in which donors can buy access to politicians for the price of a membership fee or where young hopeful MPs can network with party bigwigs. Many of these donating dining clubs - registered as 'unincorporated associations' - give exclusively to the Conservatives, and are often linked to individuals who oversee the internal fundraising efforts of the party's campaigning machine. They give generously to marginal seats with the express intention of boosting party prospects in specific areas, in a relationship that dates back, in some instances, more than 100 years. One such entity, The 1900 Club, has emerged as a significant force over the past year, after a period of inactivity since 2017. It donated £77,000 to the Conservatives, £25,000 of which was given since 2023, divided amongst nine 'battleground' seats. While very little information on The 1900 Club exists, a recently unearthed booklet, seen by Byline Times, sheds some light on the history of this opaque organisation, its purpose, and its longstanding relationship with the Conservatives. The 1986 document was written by club deputy chair and member of 54 years, Ronald Warlow (who stood as a Conservative against Labour MP Henry White in the 1945 General Election in North East Derbyshire), in response to the as then 'rising Tory generation' lacking a clear understanding of the club's purpose. It is an instructional brief history for up-and-coming young Conservatives. The document describes the club as a successor to previous members' collectives born out of shared goals: the October Club, the Halsbury Club, and the Carlton. The 1900 Club is described cryptically by Warlow as the "dining club that does more than dine". The booklet details how, just before the close of the last session of Parliament in 1906, a group of Conservatives decided to meet and dine together periodically, among friends, with the condition that they were either sitting Conservative MPs or peers in the Parliament of 1900, or Conservative 1906 prospective parliamentary candidates. The inaugural dinner was held at London's Savoy Hotel on 25 June 1906. The pamphlet outlines early efforts to influence the outcome of elections in certain seats, explaining that "at the first two by-elections, Cockermouth and Bodmin, the Unionist candidate proved successful and the club's assistance certainly played some part in these and latter successes". It goes on to say the club "soon established itself as a political force of considerable influence". "From the beginning of its existence," Warlow went on to state, "the club received much friendliness from the Committee of the Carlton Club". The booklet describes dinners between the two memberships and how, at its lavish biennial get-togethers, 1900 Club members would mingle with important guests and ring up an exorbitant bill - one such bash cost £4,000 - in 1907 (according to Officialdata.org, that would be worth more than £616,000 today). After a time, the overlap in members between The Carlton and The 1900 Club meant that monthly dinners started being held at The Carlton for the newer club's membership. It was around this period that the club began establishing connections with the larger network of institutions through which easy routes to power were created. Warlow explained: "Sometime around 1908, the Club removed its premises to 5 Pickering Place (a quie...

Last weekend, Aleksey (not his real name) celebrated turning 33 in Moscow's Hermitage Garden - a small and cosy city park in the centre of the Russian capital. During the picnic-style gathering, he finally met the friends he hadn't seen for almost two years. Since September 2022, when Russia announced mobilisation for its war in Ukraine, Aleksey and his girlfriend Sasha (not her real name) - until recently - had been living in Argentina. The couple, both in film production, had plans to relocate from Argentina to the US, where Sasha's mother has lived for almost 15 years, but couldn't find a legal way to obtain an American visa. The US Embassy in Buenos Aires declined the application due to a lack of necessary material assets and travel experience. So, eventually, the pair returned to Moscow. Before the Ukraine war, life was good for the couple. Aleksey had years of industry experience and, while work consumed all of his time, it paid well, and he enjoyed it. In Argentina, he struggled to get jobs - the market was smaller, there were fewer opportunities, and he spoke limited Spanish. The pay was also barely enough to support him, let alone Sasha, and within months he'd spent nearly all of his savings. The couple also faced problems with their paperwork and starting over soon felt insurmountable. Back in Russia, all of Aleksey's ex-colleagues were continuing to work, evolve, and undertake new projects. So, after losing their last hope of starting a new chapter in America, the couple decided to return home to Russia in May - just short of 18 months after they left. Securing a one-way ticket to Moscow gave Aleksey a feeling of relief and happiness. Even though it meant going back to the country he had fled, there was comfort in the familiar and the ability to make a proper living. "A friend of mine in Argentina kept warning me that, as soon as I arrived in Russia, I would be immediately handcuffed," Aleksey told Byline Times. "So, you arrive at the airport after hearing all these stories, and what happens? A smiling border guard routinely checks passports. A security officer practically escorts us to the car-sharing parking lot. What I'm trying to say is that the media really exaggerates and stirs up the situation." Vladimir Putin's full invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 upended the lives of millions of people - in both countries - and further isolated Russia from the West, presenting new economic and political challenges, and promoting a cultural revolution. The last vestiges of freedom have been sealed off for good in Russia, with all mainstream narratives shifting to a conservative, nationalistic agenda. The way people publicly express themselves, the way they talk, and even the way they dress - everything must conform to the new war-torn Russian reality. The Almost Naked Party is a prime example of this shift. The already sceptical attitude towards Western countries has become openly hostile. Sociologist Elena Koneva, who has been tracking public sentiment in Russia since the onset of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, categorises the returnees as "opponents of the war", but notes that they are also likely to belong to the group of "silent" individuals - those who conceal their stance on the conflict, avoid questions, and refrain from active participation in public life, openDemocracy reported last July. According to Koneva, there has been an "adaptation to personal risks", with people beginning to hope that the war will not affect them personally. Putin Called on the Public - And the Public Fled Russia's failed invasion of Ukraine prompted the announcement of a mobilisation some seven months later, igniting one of the largest waves of emigration from Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In October 2022, Forbes reported that approximately 700,000 people fled in the wake of Putin's rallying call, with many enduring lengthy waits at airports and border crossings. Determining the exact number of permanent dep...

In May, the 73-year-old father of former Tbilisi Pride director Ana Subeliani was assaulted outside his home. What marked the attack out as different from the wave of state violence that has gripped the Georgian capital in recent months, over the passing of the 'foreign agents' law, however, was that it was carried out not by police or masked assailants, but by a neighbour. "It's a sign of the hatred and polarisation that [the ruling] Georgian Dream [party] want to create within society," Tamar Jakeli, one of Tbilisi Pride's current co-directors, told Byline Times. "Members of the LGBT community no longer feel safe. A lot of queer people are thinking of leaving to seek asylum in other countries, because staying here has become an act of everyday bravery on our part." Two weeks after the attack on Subeliani's father, the Georgian Government passed its controversial Russian-style law. Decried by critics as an analogue of measures used by the Kremlin to crush dissent amid war in Ukraine, it marked perhaps the most spectacular episode in Georgia's authoritarian slide away from its historic partners in the West, whom officials demonise as a conspiratorial 'global party of war' hell bent on dragging the country into the ongoing conflict. Widely received as a bare-faced bid to sabotage the overwhelming majority of the Georgian public's hopes of one day joining the European Union, the move has brought Georgia's relations with the Euro-Atlantic community to their lowest point since the South Caucasian country's independence from the Soviet Union. Citing efforts to "derail Georgia's European future", the United States has already imposed travel bans for "a few dozen" unidentified Government officials, with further sanctions expected in the coming weeks. "This proposed initiative is a blatant attack on human rights in Georgia and on the rights of LGBTI people in particular," Amnesty International has said. "It is distressing to see the governing party pursue such a detrimental initiative in a country that is pursuing membership of the European Union, which is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom and equality for all." We're the first targets, but this is bigger than the LGBT community. This is about censorship and repression, about taking Georgia back to our Soviet past. Tamar Jakeli, Tbilisi Pride Tamar Jakeli, of Tbilisi Pride, told Byline Times: "These narratives about the global war party, about LGBT propaganda, about a second front [in Georgia] - they're aimed at making regular people believe the West wants to drag them into a war and spread corrupt values. It's all very Putinist rhetoric." What has received significantly less attention in the aftermath of that law's passing is a new and wide-ranging bill "On Family Values and Protection of Minors", initiated by Georgian Dream at the beginning of June. If passed, the measures will build on a pre-existing ban on same-sex marriages, to outlaw adoption by queer parents, as well as gender-affirming surgery and treatments, according to a Government summary. Also prohibited would be the inclusion of "pseudo-liberal LGBT propaganda" in the country's education system, any "gatherings aimed at popularising same-sex families] or intimate relationships", and the publication and broadcast of scenes featuring queer sex and intimacy on television. There can be little denying the parallels between this new bill and the track lately assumed by Moscow. Last November, the Kremlin designated the "international LGBT public movement" an extremist organisation. Vladimir Putin has previously accused Western countries of "moving toward open Satanism" for their promotion of LGBTQ+ rights. "Sadly, this is another indication that the ruling party [in Georgia] has chosen to move toward regimes that stress intolerance and one-party rule," Ian Kelly, a former US ambassador to Georgia, told Byline Times. "Friends of Georgia in the West will continue to support those who want to return to...

One of Rishi Sunak's frequent talking points during this general election campaign is his boast about how, as Chancellor, he supported struggling families and businesses through the worst years of the Coronavirus pandemic. For many British taxpayers, the Government's furlough and other support schemes were an absolute lifeline. Though many still suffered grievous losses and mental stress as a result of the crisis, and some still suffer from the lingering symptoms of Long COVID, for most people, hopefully, the worst effects are now in the rear-view mirror. For one unlucky group, however, the impact has been severe and persistent, to this day. These are members of the approximately 3.8 million British taxpayers who failed to qualify for parity of COVID financial support under the main schemes set up by the then Chancellor to support employers and workers during the pandemic. These included people who had recently changed jobs, were newly self-employed, who had only recently started a new business, who earned less than 50% of their income from self-employment, or were on maternity/paternity or adoption leave. It also included zero-hour contract workers, and limited company directors who were paid in dividends, or through an annual, as opposed to monthly, PAYE. According to the Campaign Group ExcludedUK, which has been lobbying the Government for years to rectify the disparity in treatment meted out to its members, the impact on them has been devastating. Many of the 'excluded' were forced to take out bounce back loans, or incur credit card debt, to stay afloat, which they are still struggling to pay back. Many sold their houses, cars, or family heirlooms; relocated to live in caravans, tents or even in their cars; and became reliant on food banks. More than 37 of those affected died by suicide. Hundreds more attempted to kill themselves, including a nine-year-old boy, who tried to take his life twice, but was denied support by the cash-strapped local NHS child mental health agency, on the grounds that his mother waited more than a week to refer him. Moreover, it said he would only be eligible if he had tried to kill himself at least three times. In December 2020, Conservative MP Michael Fabricant dismissed such suicides as nothing to do with the lack of financial support, but related to pre-existing mental health conditions. ExcludedUK emerged out of an earlier campaign group, Forgotten Ltd, which was formed in April 2020 by four limited company directors, who came together when it became apparent that the Government's furlough scheme excluded people like them. They later realised that many other categories of workers were also excluded, such as those cited above, adding up to approximately 10% of the British working population, or 3.8 million people - more than the population of Wales - and decided to form a bigger organisation to represent everyone who was affected. Initially, the campaign group trusted that its exclusion was an unintended oversight, which the Treasury would seek to rectify once the scale of the problem became clear. A cross-party All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) of more than 260 MPs, called Gaps in Support, even came together in May 2020 to back the group's cause. But, it gradually became apparent that the Treasury would not change its approach. In March 2021, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Jessie Norman, wrote to members of the APPG and ExcludedUK to explain that the Government had already provided an "unprecedented package of measures to protect people's jobs and livelihoods" and extended various schemes to support more individuals, but the criteria would not be amended to include those who had relatively low-income from self-employment or no trading profits. It also wanted to guard against fraud and abuse. The aim of guarding against fraud is somewhat rich, when more than £4.5 billion of taxpayer money was lost through error and fraud during the pandemic. In 2020, pay-outs under the furloug...

Veterans' ID cards will not be accepted as a valid form of voter identification in the General Election, Byline Times can reveal - just weeks after Rishi Sunak left the 80th anniversary commemorations of D-Day early and then repeatedly claimed he is "proud of our record in supporting veterans here in the UK". Despite promises from both Downing Street and the Minister for Veterans' Affairs, veterans will not be able to use their cards at polling stations on 4 July. An Electoral Commission spokesperson confirmed to Byline Times that "the list of accepted ID is set in law and has not changed since the May elections". During the local elections last month, decorated former Army officer Adam Diver was turned away at the polls in Lancashire because his veteran ID card was deemed "unacceptable". Mr Diver posted about his experience on X (formerly Twitter), which then went viral. Veterans' Affairs Minister Johnny Mercer responded and gave assurances that plans were in place to add veterans ID cards to the list, and that they would be accepted at the UK's next election. A Number 10 spokeswoman reportedly echoed Mercer's promise, stating that "it is our intention for the new Veteran Card, which was rolled out in January, to be added to the official list". But, just under three weeks later, the General Election was called - now rendering that promise void. Byline Times confirmed Mr Diver's veteran status and discovered that he had served as a non-commissioned Sergeant Major in Afghanistan alongside Mercer himself. Shortly after the local elections in May, The Times revealed that Mercer had lobbied Downing Street for adding veterans' ID cards to the list of valid voter ID for elections. But, in a leaked memo written by Mercer, he claimed that Rishi Sunak's circle denied his requests over fears that it would "open the floodgates" to student ID cards being accepted as well. Byline Times understands that the necessary secondary legislation required to include veterans' cards was drafted in May and making its way through the parliamentary pipeline. But Sunak's abrupt decision to dissolve Parliament cut that legislation short, breaking Mercer's - and the Prime Minister's own - promise to veterans. Mr Diver said it was "very disappointing" and told this newspaper that "maybe we need a person with no affiliations or allegiances to any political party for an unbiased approach to this issue". Ted Arnold, senior public affairs and policy manager at Help for Heroes, added: "As a charity, we have produced guidance to ensure veterans are aware of the changes in law and can access support to get the required ID so they can cast their vote. "Since January, the Veteran ID card has become more widely distributed, and we share the frustrations of many that it cannot yet be used as a valid form of voter identification. "Along with others in the veteran community, we have repeatedly raised this issue and welcome that commitments have been made to address this in future elections. "The Veteran ID card came to fruition as a result of the formation of the Office for Veterans' Affairs, which we hope to see the next government commit to keeping. This, along with a review of the medical discharge process, and fair access to benefits and compensations for veterans, form our 'Veterans Pledge', which we are urging all party leaders to sign." Commentator, author and presenter Carol Vorderman told Byline Times that it was "yet another broken promise from the Tories and Johnny Mercer". Johnny Mercer did not respond to a request for comment. The Labour Party has claimed in its 2024 Manifesto that it would seek to "address the inconsistencies in voter ID rules that prevent legitimate voters from voting" - specifically mentioning "the case of HM Armed Forces Veteran Cards". For now, veterans will have to use one of the other accepted forms of voter identification on 4 July, or they can apply for a Voter Authority Certificate (the Government's free voter ID pass) before ...

A quarter of those voters who still intend to vote for the Conservatives, actually believe the party should lose to Labour, with one-in four saying a wipeout for Rishi Sunak's party would in reality be a "positive" result for the country, according to exclusive new polling for Byline Times. Senior Conservatives have spent the past week warning voters that Labour are on course for a "supermajority" in an attempt to scare conservative-leaning voters back into the fold. However, new polling conducted this week by pollsters We Think for this paper suggests this is unlikely to gain much traction. According to the poll, voters are actually more likely to say the Conservatives losing most of their MPs would be a "positive" outcome for the UK rather than a negative one. Even among those voters still planning to back the Conservatives, there seems little real fear of the party losing most of its MPs, with 20% saying they actually think it would be a positive result, compared to 58% who disagree and 22% who are neutral, or unsure. Even the prospect of the Conservatives being replaced as one of the two major parties in British politics does not appear to scare most voters. Asked whether the Conservatives coming in third place behind the Liberal Democrats would be a good or bad outcome, almost half (47%) of those voters surveyed said it would be positive, compared to just 27% who disagreed. Even among current Conservative voters, a significant minority of 15% said such a result would be a positive outcome from the election. A similar number (14%) of current Conservative voters also admitted that the Labour Party now "deserves" to win the general election, compared to 74% who disagreed and 11% who are still unsure. Among the population as a whole, just 35% said Labour don't deserve to win, compared to 47% who believe they do. The findings offer little hope to Conservative strategists hoping for a squeeze of conservative-leaning voters in the final two weeks of the campaign, and suggests that the party's vote share could even decrease further, due to some of those currently sticking with them apparently having little fear of a wipeout for the party. A Breach of Trust In a week in which it was revealed that senior Conservative officials and candidates had bet on the date of the general election, shortly before it was announced by Sunak, the poll also found widespread distrust of the Prime Minister. Asked whether they viewed Sunak as being "more honest" or "more dishonest" 51% of all those surveyed put him in the latter category, compared to just 21% who put him in the former category. Even among current Conservative voters 13% described Sunak as being more dishonest than honest, with 62% disagreeing. The poll also found that, despite portrayals of Nigel Farage as being a politician who "says it like it is" voters are more likely to say that Nigel Farage is dishonest than honest, by 36% to 27% in this poll. Voters were also narrowly more likely to say the opposite of Labour leader Keir Starmer. The Labour leader was described as being more honest than dishonest by 33% of those voters surveyed, compared to 28% who said the opposite.

This week saw World Refugee Day, designated by the United Nations to honour people who have been forced to flee around the globe. The day was first held globally in 2001 to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, which defines the term 'refugee' and sets international standards for their protection. On the latter, it's easy to see the ways in which the Government has failed (see: the Rwanda deportation bill). On the former, it is the media that fails, time and time again. The Convention's definition of a refugee is "someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion". But this is not the definition used by media outlets, who reserve the term 'refugee' for people whose request for asylum has been approved by a host country. Instead, the media bandies around terms such as 'migrant', 'asylum seeker', or 'illegal immigrant'. The least used term? People. "There is no 'illegal migration', because people are forced to flee. They don't choose to come for a better life. They come for safety." Zahra Shaheer, a prominent Afghan journalist and newsreader, fled to the UK following the Taliban's rise to power in August 2021. She told the latest episode of the Media Storm podcast about the huge gap in empathy in the reporting on those who have been forced out of their homelands. "A person… lost everything," she said. "And we call it illegal migration? It's not fair." Indeed, the rampant dehumanisation of refugees in our media has led to desensitisation so extensive that a story about a Greek coastguard deliberately throwing people seeking asylum into the Mediterranean Sea - to their deaths - barely makes a sound. A cow hit by a police car generates more concern. What is behind this? A potent cocktail of scapegoating and racism underpins dehumanisation. "When Russia invaded Ukraine, I didn't remember any mainstream media, or any outlet, even with the tabloid or other, labelling Ukrainians as 'illegal immigrants' or asylum seekers," Osama Gaweesh, a former dentist and political activist who fled Egypt after a military coup in 2013, and is now editor-in-chief of EgyptWatch in the UK, told Media Storm. He pointed to the word that so often follows 'refugee' or 'migrant' in UK media - 'crisis': "Describing people as a 'crisis' is not fair. We can talk about economic crisis, we can talk about border crisis, we can talk about inflation crisis, but we can't label people as a crisis. I describe this as a racist label." A humanitarian crisis is typically defined as an event that "critically threatens the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community". It is telling that, in most cases when our media describes the 'refugee crisis', the crisis it seems to be referring to is not the millions of people being forced out of their homes, but the tens of thousands trying to come to ours. As Shaheer pointed out, the term 'crisis' should "highlight the need, that refugees need help, they need support". Instead, the creation of the 'crisis' is placed solely on the people trying to cross borders, with responsibility lifted off the creators of the border policies. This is summed up in Gaweesh's impassioned plea to listeners on this week's Media Storm: "A refugee is not your enemy. Your enemy is the regime that made this refugee. The mainstream media here need to understand this: refugees didn't cause the inflation to increase. Refugees didn't make the NHS salary low. Refugees didn't force Britain to leave the European Union. The Government here in this country and some political parties, with their pathetic policies and their support and backing of authoritarian leaders in the Middle East, they are the problem." The mass scapegoating of refugees and the mass gaslighting of the public is to be expected, when there are vastly more negative than posi...

"Elections are a chance for people to make money", the Conservative peer and former Minister Ed Vaizey told Times Radio on Thursday, in the wake of news that multiple senior Conservative officials and candidates laid bets on the date of the election, shortly before it was announced by their boss. "These endless polls… are all being crunched in the hedge funds in the City of London," Vaizey explained, adding that those with access to "privileged information" were "taking spread bets" on the outcome of the election. The Prime Minister has since sought to portray the scandal as an aberration. However, the truth is that elections have always been an opportunity for those with cash to burn, to make more of it. The most famous example of this came during the 2016 EU referendum, when hedge funds spent huge amounts commissioning private exit polls which showed that Leave had narrowly won the election. Under UK law it is illegal to publicise such information while polls remain open. However, among those with early access to it was the former commodity trader, turned anti-EU politician, Nigel Farage. Despite reportedly having prior knowledge that Leave had likely won, Farage told journalists after polls closed that he believed Remain had clinched it instead. The comments, which sent the value of the pound soaring, allowed those in the know to make millions from 'shorting' its value, prior to Leave's victory ultimately being confirmed. Farage's comments led to allegations that he too had profited from the result and his own premature 'concession' - something he strongly denied. However, such practices are commonplace within the grey area between politics and big finance, with those in the know able to make far more than the hundreds, or thousands of pounds likely to have been made by those Conservative officials who cashed in on the date of the general election. In fact the connections between hedge funds, spread betting, and conservative politicians are well established. Leading hedge-funders have handed millions of pounds to the Conservative Party over the past ten years, with senior figures from the industry continuing to have close ties to the party. Rishi Sunak himself is a former hedge funder and has faced multiple questions over the personal fortune he made as part of a company which bet against British banks during the financial crisis. Such gambles are something Sunak has previously admitted to enjoying, telling the BBC last year that he enjoyed taking part in "quite dangerous" sporting spread bets while working for an American hedge fund. Given this political and financial culture, it is perhaps not surprising that those around the Prime Minister decided that having prior access to the date of the general election was a money-making opportunity that was simply too great to pass up. The Spivocracy Despite Sunak's claim this week to have been furious about the actions of his own staff, it merely confirms a growing sense among voters that this Conservative Government has repeatedly prioritised its own interests over those of the country. This is not a sense that has emerged overnight. Doing the broadcast rounds to defend his party during this election campaign has been the Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, who first rose to public prominence after it was revealed that he had used multiple fake names in order to run a get-rich-quick scheme, before lying about it for three years. Alongside him has been the Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister, David Cameron, who also made millions of pounds after leaving office, while secretly lobbying his former colleagues in Government on behalf of an investment firm Cameron's successor Boris Johnson, who has spent this campaign on multiple holidays, while promoting his half a million pound tell-all book about his time in Government, has also cashed in, disregarding post-government corruption rules, in order to meet the Venezuelan president on behalf of another hedge fund. And while Liz Tr...

Will Lewis may not be a well-known name in the UK, but he is getting to be quite famous in the United States, if not in a good way. He is a journalist and, in fact, he is really Sir Will Lewis, since he received a knighthood last year in Boris Johnson's resignation honours list. You can tell a lot from that. Lewis was once Editor of the Telegraph but shifted into management in the Murdoch empire when the phone-hacking scandal was erupting there. He now works for Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos as publisher of the venerable Washington Post. Whatever Bezos might say publicly, he must in retrospect be regretting the appointment. Thanks to that Murdoch connection, Lewis is now turning into an ethical test case for American journalism. And not only is the Post's big rival, The New York Times, making hay with stories about his past, but the Post itself is also publishing investigative work. While this is reminding Americans just what an ethical sewer the UK national press is, there is also a lesson in it for the British media: real journalists report on scandals in their own industry - even their own publications - because failure to do so harms everyone. At its briefest, what Lewis is accused of is that: (a) he played a leading role in the attempted cover-up of phone-hacking in the Murdoch papers. (b) he paid money for a scoop. And (c) that he has now appointed as Executive Editor of the Post another British journalist who himself is accused of past involvement in hacking. As if that was not bad enough (at least in the eyes of many American journalists), he is also now charged with: (d) doing his best to suppress, in very questionable ways, the reporting of these accusations in the US media. Lewis and his appointee as Executive Editor, Robert Winnett, both deny wrongdoing. Five Editors and a Blind Eye If you wanted to see proof of the ethical gulf that separates US newspaper culture from UK newspaper culture you could not ask for better than this story, because consider this: the current editors of no fewer than five UK national newspapers either stand accused of having employed unlawful methods to gather information; or have been found by judges to have done so. This roll of honour includes the Editors of The Times, Tony Gallagher; and of its sister paper The Sunday Times, Ben Taylor. And it is not just anyone who has made the accusations against Gallagher and Taylor. They form part of a huge breach of privacy case brought against the Mail newspapers by, among others, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, former Liberal Democrat MP and minister Sir Simon Hughes, Prince Harry, and Elton John. Also accused are Victoria Newton, Editor of The Sun; and David Dillon, Editor of the Mail on Sunday. All four deny the accusations, or at least they are denied on their behalf by the Mail group. As for the fifth, Gary Jones, Editor-in-Chief of the Express newspapers, he has been found by not one but two High Court judges to have been very deeply engaged in law-breaking. Whereas in the United States Will Lewis is challenged about his past, even on the front of his own newspaper, nothing comparable is happening to these five editors in the UK. Neither their own newspapers nor their supposed rivals in the press report these issues - and nobody else in the mainstream news media seems to care. Indeed, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are both happy to meet and deal with them. While the owners of the Mirror, Reach, continue employing Jones as if nothing was wrong. When I describe the UK national press as an ethical sewer, this is what I mean. This is not a case of 'dog doesn't eat dog' - it is dog covering up for dog. Hacking was a 20-year spree of law-breaking involving hundreds of journalists and spreading across lots of titles. The failure to address it is a conspiracy of journalists against the public. It should not be necessary to explain why it is important for journalists to report on things that go wrong in their own industry. And yet, it obviously is...

The Association of Electoral Administrators (AEA) released a post-polls report last June in which the membership body for election officials issued a bleak warning about the "fragility" of the UK electoral system. The 2023 local elections, it said, brought administrators "the biggest challenge in a generation". Long-standing vulnerabilities in the electoral system, compounded by the implementation of new voter ID laws, are posing a growing risk of "delivery failure". The AEA expressed concerns that only a "major electoral failure" event would wake the country up to the severe pressure imposed on election staff in Britain today. According to its chief executive Peter Stanyon, the warnings and recommendations issued in the report still stand just weeks away from the 2024 General Election. "There's nothing new in terms of the challenges being faced," he said. The vote on 4 July, expected to see a higher nation-wide turnout than the previous local elections in May 2023 and 2024, will be an even greater "stress-test" of the system. The short and abrupt time-frame of the election will not help matters, according to Stanyon: "Six months of work have been crammed into six weeks," he told Byline Times, putting significant pressure on returning officers (ROs, who run the election) and electoral registration officers (EROs, who oversee the data of registrants). In addition, the drawing of new constituency boundaries at this election, combined with the short time-frame, "will require significant adjustments in a short period, especially for local authority areas with cross-boundaries or those taking on responsibility for additional constituencies". The problems facing administrators are deep-rooted, going back to the byzantine nature of electoral law itself. The Law Commission has repeatedly called to "streamline the rules governing the conduct of elections and challenges to them, removing inefficiencies and saving costs". It argues that our election system is out of date, overly complicated, porous with loopholes, and confusingly fragmented. The Parliamentary and Constitutional Affairs Committee has also argued that "the updating and simplification of electoral law must be seen as a pressing priority for the Government". The Committee on Standards in Public Life backed up those calls as well. On top of those complexities, the electoral administration system incurs risks in a few key areas. One in particular, highlighted by Stanyon, is that imposed by the limited number and limited capacity of electoral suppliers: "The UK's 650 constituencies rely on just four software systems, and there's around 12 to 15 'main' printing suppliers across the country." Royal Mail, printing companies, and Electoral Management Systems (EMS) providers all have key delegated responsibilities, and form a bottleneck in the election delivery process. "Commercial sensitivities" can make it difficult for administrators to analyse their "resilience and capacity". The pressures placed on all of these different suppliers could, according to the AEA, "put elections at risk", with electoral staff liable for suppliers' failures. Royal Mail in particular has come under fire recently for the late delivery of 1,423 postal votes (4.6% of all cast) in Brighton and Hove in this year's local elections. Those votes went uncounted, and electoral staff were the ones ultimately held responsible. Registration surges present another challenge. Polling stations have been struggling in recent years with recruitment and retention generally, due a mix of electoral complexity, pay rates, and a reduction in local authority resources overall. The 2022 Elections Act made matters worse. Already struggling to manage the volume of registration applications, EROs now additionally manage identity checks of registrants, administer new online absent vote applications, and contend with applications for the Voter Authority Certificate (the Government's free voter ID card) as well. Especially given...

For the first time, British citizens living abroad are eligible to vote in the general election regardless of how long they have been living outside the UK. Around 3.5 million Brits living abroad are now thought to be eligible to vote, though only a fraction of that number are likely to have registered for a postal or proxy vote. Since 16 January 2024, when the 15-year limit was abolished for living abroad and still having a vote, more than 170,000 British citizens living overseas have registered to vote, according to the Electoral Commission. The most up to date data the watchdog has on this is from December 2023, and predates the 15-year rule being scrapped. In total there were 61,683 overseas electors registered in Great Britian at the end of 2023. That means there are now likely to be around a quarter of a million people able to vote from overseas in the 4 July General Election. "It would seem likely that the local authorities below will now be dealing with a large number of applications from UK citizens living overseas. We will be collecting data from Electoral Registration Officers after the 4 July about the total number of overseas voters registered for this poll," a spokesperson for the Electoral Commission told Byline Times. As of December 2023, 46 of the 49 areas with the highest number of overseas voters registered to vote from abroad are in England, and three in Scotland. Nineteen of the 49 areas with the highest number of overseas voters registered are in London, while eight are in the South West and six in the South East. Groups like Unlock Democracy and the Liberal Democrats are pushing for new 'overseas constituencies', so that Brits living overseas do not vote for representatives of seats they have not lived in for decades but instead have a number of regional representatives dotted around the world. France uses this system for its overseas electors. The London boroughs of Wandsworth and Camden top the list, alongside three other council areas where more than 1,000 Brits living abroad were registered to vote as of last year. The numbers may have tripled since then following the abolition of the 15-year-rule in January this year. While most of the London boroughs are safe Labour strongholds, Cornwall, which ranks highly on the least, sees a fierce fight for the Conservatives to hold on to their six seats this election. Two of Cornwall's six seats could go to the Lib Dems, while the others are potential Labour gains, though areas like North Cornwall and South East Cornwall require large swings. While the voter registration and postal vote registration deadlines have now passed, overseas voters are still able to able for a proxy vote, where a resident voter casts a ballot on their behalf. Council Area Overseas Electors on the Register as of Dec 2023 Region Country Wandsworth 1324 London England Camden 1261 London England Buckinghamshire 1062 South East England Lothian VJB 1053 Scotland Scotland Islington 1013 London England Southwark 936 London England Westminster 916 London England Hammersmith and Fulham 884 London England Lambeth 875 London England Salford 826 North West England Sefton 808 North West England Tower Hamlets 800 London England Cornwall 746 South West England Bristol 722 South West England Richmond Upon Thames 705 London England Hackney 678 London England North Yorkshire 652 Yorkshire and The Humber England Kensington and Chelsea 640 London England Manchester 611 North West England Brighton and Hove 601 South East England Lewisham 566 London England Leeds 553 Yorkshire and The Humber England Ealing 531 London England Haringey 518 London England Greenwich 517 London England Oxford 513 South East England Wiltshire 482 South West England Bromley 478 London England Somerset 458 South West England Glasgow 445 Scotland Scotland Kingston Upon Thames 441 London England Cambridge 426 East of England England Wakefield 412 Yorkshire and The Humber England Bath & North East Somerset 405 South West England G...

Hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of being turned away from polling stations over issues with voter ID on July 4th, a human rights organisation has warned. This General Election is the first to require voter ID, introduced in 2022 under the Conservatives' Elections Act. Neither the Conservatives or Labour have pledged to repeal the voter ID law - though the Conservatives have promised to allow former servicemen and women to use their veterans ID cards, following revelations first published in Byline Times about a decorated army veteran being denied a vote. Labour has promised to review the policy, and is likely to add more acceptable IDs to the list. Sam Grant, advocacy director for the renowned human rights organisation Liberty, told a press conference on Tuesday that due to changes passed in recent years: "We have less of a right to protest, we have less of a right to vote, and it's harder to take public institutions to court. "There's a huge risk of disenfranchisement through this policy. In last year's local elections, four percent of the people who said that they didn't vote, didn't vote because of voter ID rules. "If you extrapolate that up, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people not being able to vote at this general election. And the stories that we saw coming out from the local elections - of older people being turned away, veterans being turned away, Boris Johnson forgetting his ID: these are all things that are going to be very common stories that we see on Election Day," Grant said. The four percent figure is from detailed Electoral Commission surveys of voters and non-voters in the 2023 local elections. There were 47.6 million registrations on the electoral roll in 2020, according to the latest Government figures. Four percent would equate to around 1.9 million people not voting due to the ID rules, and this does not include those turned away at the polling station for a lack of the "right" photo ID. "Our firm belief is that voter ID is an unnecessary barrier and it's solving a problem that doesn't exist. We'll be pushing parties to reverse this policy," Grant added. The Answer, Not the Problem The warning comes as Liberty, Amnesty International UK, Human Rights Watch, Freedom From Torture and Inclusion London, addressed journalists in Westminster this morning. The UK's leading human rights organisations have said human rights provide the solutions to "some of the biggest problems" facing the UK, and should not be viewed as a problem, but the answer to issues like poverty and the cost of living crisis, through guaranteed rights to things like housing and food. The organisations have called for greater scrutiny of human rights policy in the election campaign period - and politicians pledging to "crack down" on British liberties protected through the Human Rights Act. The Labour manifesto commits to staying in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which has faced relentless attack from the right of the Conservative party, and parts of the press. Rishi Sunak has branded the European Court of Human Rights a "foreign court", despite British judges sitting on it and the UK being a driving force behind the organisation after the horrors of World War II. The Conservative manifesto says the party would prioritise "security" over ECHR membership if "forced to choose". Nigel Farage's Reform Party pledges to leave the ECHR altogether, which would throw Britain's trade deal with the EU, the Good Friday Agreement - and many other treaties which rely on Britain adhering to human rights standards - into chaos The human rights groups warn that politicians are not being challenged enough on the implications, from trade agreements to the UK's international standing, and the rights of UK residents. Attendees heard that the UK has been "turning away" from its traditional role as a global leader on human rights and refugee protection. The Rwanda refugee deportation scheme and other anti-refugee polic...

With his insurgent role leading the Reform Party in the current General Election campaign, its suddenly reinstated figurehead, Nigel Farage, is receiving even more publicity and air time. There are some journalists who are using the occasion to finally submit the former MEP and Leader of UKIP to some more intense questioning about his policies and his track record of success - with the UK's hard Brexit one of the most disastrous. But though Farage has been forced to justify his past praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, there are much deeper questions beyond ideological support that he has to answer about his Kremlin connections, especially given the current war in Ukraine. Question One: Why Did Farage Lie About Meeting the Russian Ambassador? We now know that the former Russian Ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, was part of a strategic plan to disrupt Western Alliances in the run-up to the invasion of eastern Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. In the UK, Yakovenko tasked two spies to target Eurosceptics and Conservatives. Sergei Nalobin infiltrated the Conservative Party with his Conservative Friends of Russia organisation, launched in the Russian Embassy in 2012. Another official, Alexander Udod, targeted UKIP and was introduced to Farage's confidant Andy Wigmore at its Doncaster convention in 2015. (For more on what happened with Wigmore, see question two). During this time, Farage regularly appeared on the state-controlled TV service, RT (Russia Today), which apparently paid him for his services and boosted every speech he made as an MEP in the European Parliament. It also offered him his own TV show following the EU Referendum. Given these connections, why did Farage protest in June 2018 that "I've never met the Russian Ambassador"? The Russian embassy website hosted a picture of Yakovenko greeting Farage in May 2013 - the moment that Russian policy pivoted over to its plan to disrupt the EU, before invading Ukraine. In 2019, Yakovenko was recalled to Moscow, awarded the prestigious Alexander Nevsky medal by Putin, and appointed head of the diplomatic school. At a celebration dinner, Yakovenko is reported by a foreign diplomat present to have said: "We have crushed the British to the ground. They are on their knees, and they will not rise for a very long time." What is it about meeting the Russian Ambassador that caused Farage to lie? Two: How Could Farage Not Have Known About Arron Banks' Multiple Visits to the Russian Embassy During the Brexit Campaign? Once the EU Referendum was announced by David Cameron in 2015, severing the UK from the European Union became a key strategic goal of Russian foreign policy. Ukraine had ousted its Kremlin-backed President, Viktor Yanukovych, in the Maidan 'Glorious Revolution' the year before over this issue of EU membership, and Putin saw himself at war with the West. As a former KGB agent, he deployed an array of covert 'alternative measures' beyond the military interventions in Crimea and the Donbas. Ten days after meeting Andy Wigmore at the Doncaster conference in late September 2015, Alexander Udod invited UKIP's biggest backer, Arron Banks, to meet the Russian Ambassador at his London residence. Udod was later expelled along with 23 other Russian officials after the Skripal poisonings. Though Banks later admitted to "one boozy lunch" in Isabel Oakeshott's book The Bad Boys of Brexit, this first meeting in November was followed by many more in which deals involving the privatisation of Russian gold and diamond state companies were discussed. Thanks to emails obtained by Carole Cadwalladr and me, we know now that there were many such meetings throughout 2016. As Mrs Justice Steyn wrote in her judgment on the Banks v Cadwalladr case in June 2022: The four meetings on 6 November 2015, 17 November 2015, 19 August 2016 and 18 November 2016 were probably not the full extent of Mr Banks's meetings with Russian officials. This could be surmised from th...