Byline Times Audio Articles

Trump's Greenland Delusion Runs Aground in Davos

Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY Trump is a narcissistic, psychopathic bully. But a weak one. I started listening to Trump's speech at Davos with anger and outrage. But as he went on and on, I slowly felt a growing sense of relief. I realised that all his bullying, taunts and threats reflected weakness. He sounded like a needy, spoilt child frustrated that he could not get his own way. His deranged tendencies were on full display with repeated hints at all the damage he could cause to those who did not bend to his will – like a mafia boss threatening to cut off a former partner's fingers if he did not cooperate. "I really like you, actually. I don't want to hurt you. It's a shame. I tried my best to be nice. But, I gotta do what I gotta do." His neediness was on full display with his repeated mentions of how much everyone loves him, and appreciates his achievements. Only someone unsure of his popularity needs to keep claiming he has lots of friends. His childishness was on full display with his petty taunts and jibes at other global figures – such as French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Premier Mark Carney, California Gavin Newsom, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell, even as he simultaneously claimed that they were "great guys, actually" and that he liked them. Mark Carney's Speech Showed America and Britain the Sort of Global Leadership They Have Now Abandoned The Canadian Prime Minister's powerful response to the growing threat from Donald Trump has put other world leaders to shame, argues Simon Nixon Simon Nixon His vanity was on full display with his repeated boasts about how brilliant he was, and how great America had become under his leadership. His insecurity was on full display with his continued need to lash out at defeated foes, such as Joe Biden. A truly self-confident person would not need to repeatedly big up his own alleged achievements in office, rather than letting them speak for themselves. His self-delusion was on full display with his claims that he really cares about Europe and NATO, respects the people of Greenland and Denmark, and is only trying to do what's best for them. A genuine friend does not bully and threaten allies. His dishonesty was on full display with his claim that he is only motivated to end the war in Ukraine because he is concerned about how many young men and women are dying there, when what he has actually been doing since returning to office is trying to extort Ukraine's natural wealth and force it into an unjust peace deal. His bullying tendency was on full display with his repeated reminders of the strength of the US military and economy. Trump is not a man to "speak softly and carry a big stick" – but a schoolyard bully who inadvertently reveals weakness by over-emphasising his physical attributes. "Yah, boo, I'm bigger than you. I could beat you up if I wanted to." His greed, and cavalier disregard for the fate of the planet, was on full display with his attacks on Europe for pursuing its "scam" green agenda, exhortations on the UK to do more more to extract oil from the North Sea, and boasts about how much oil the US was going to pick up from Venezuela. His whiny tendency was on full display with his complaints about how NATO has treated the US "unfairly" and that he personally never gets enough credit for his achievements – such as allegedly ending eight wars – an obvious reflection of his continued frustration at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His ignorance, or is it deteriorating mental health, was on full display with his repeated reference to Iceland, when he meant Greenland, and his false claims that the US "gave back" Greenland to Denmark. A Year of Living Dangerously in Trump's America I no longer feel safe to speak or act freely in a country where people are being arbitrarily detained and killed and where the truth is becoming whatever Donald Trump says it is, repor...

Mark Carney's Speech Showed America and Britain the Sort of Global Leadership They Have Now Abandoned

Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY Mark Carney's speech in Davos on the end of the world order is rightly being hailed as one of the most powerful interventions by any political leader in the year since Donald Trump returned to the White House. My social media feed and WhatsApp groups have been filled with veterans of past Davos gatherings telling me it was the most important speech they had ever heard delivered in the Swiss mountain town – or indeed expect to hear this year. The Canadian Prime Minister's argument tempered brutal realism— "we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition" —with optimism. He set out a way that middle powers such as Canada, Britain and other advanced economies can maintain some sovereignty and control over their own destinies in a new era of superpower rivalries. His speech was an eloquent call for middling powers to work together to face down the great powers whose trashing of global rules and weaponisation of dependencies had turned integration into a source of subordination. Carney was better placed than anyone in the world to have delivered such a speech. As one of the high priests of the global financial system over the last two decades – having previously served as Governor of the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England – he will have no illusions about the costs of the collapse of the old rules-based order. What's more, as Prime Minister of a country whose own territory it is the stated policy of the US president to annex- and which would be encircled by America if Trump succeeds in his ambition of seizing Greenland – he surely feels both the gravity and urgency of the moment keenly. It's Time for an Apology From the Trump Apologists The politicians and commentators who mocked those warning about the threat posed by the US President as being "hysterical" need to face up to their own role in the calamity now unfolding, argues Adam Bienkov Adam Bienkov But above all, Carney understands what is at stake with greater clarity than other world leaders because he has been thinking about these issues for longer. As Governor of the Bank of England, he watched as Britain committed what he privately considered to be a monumental act of stupidity with Brexit. He appeared to allude to the lessons he took from that experience in his speech, noting that "the cost of strategic autonomy and sovereignty can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortress. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are positive sums." What is depressing is that it is almost impossible to imagine Keir Starmer or any other British political leader delivering such a speech, even assuming they understood the arguments. Starmer himself, no doubt, is keenly aware of the dangers of this moment and the risk to Britain's national interest posed by a rogue United States. But he is incapable of articulating them, paralysed by his own timidity and buoyed by overconfidence in his capabilities as a "Trump whisperer" who can convince the capricious US President to change course. Besides, in his decade at the front rank of UK politics, Starmer has never delivered a single notable speech. Indeed, the only memorable phrase ever to pass his lips—a claim that Britain was becoming an "island of strangers"—had such obvious racist connotations that he was later obliged to disown it. As for the rest of the British political class, one detects little sign that either of the two parties currently leading in the polls – Reform and the Conservatives – have any understanding of the consequences of this moment of rupture for Britain, of the costs that Carney rightly warns countries will have to incur to boost their resilience, and of the trade-offs that will be required as the price of preserving some autonomy. This is partly a reflection of what has happened to British politics i...

Home Office Accused of Failing to Protect Vulnerable LGBT+ People in Immigration Detention

Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY The Home Office has been accused of failing to protect vulnerable LGBT+ people in immigration detention, in contravention of their own guidelines. Rainbow Migration, a charity which supports lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the asylum and immigration system, found that not one of the seven immigration removal centres across the UK had strategies in place for staff to monitor or challenge homophobic behaviour. The charity also found that the Government had not conducted any analyses of the prevalence of incidents across the detention estate. Four IRCs had failed to make any explicit reference to sexual orientation or gender identity in its anti-bullying information. Home Office guidelines state that information about bullying and harassment must be displayed in a variety of languages where staff, detainees and visitors can see it. Each IRC must also include specified content on homophobia. EXCLUSIVE How Neo-Nazis Posing as 'Ordinary Parents' Embedded Themselves in Anti-Immigrant Protests A year long investigation by Katherine Denkinson exposes the Neo-Nazi and far-right extremists operating openly inside anti-immigration protests Katherine Denkinson Around 70 countries worldwide criminalise same-sex relations, some with the death penalty, meaning that significant numbers odf asylum applications come from persecuted LGBT+ people. "We know that immigration detention is unsafe and harmful for LGBT+ people," said Ayesha Aziz, Rainbow Migration's Legal Service Manager. "These are people who have fled family members or governments because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. They may have already been detained in their home country because of who they are. Now they are in Britain to seek protection and the Home Office knows about their backgrounds because they have claimed asylum on that basis, but they are not doing anything to protect them." Aziz points to the example of a South American man she visited at Harmondsworth detention centre near Heathrow, who was too fearful of being 'outed' to leave his cell. Another man was isolated from the group by staff and told he needed to be checked for sexually-transmitted diseases. A third person reported being harassed for the way they dressed, experiencing suicidal thoughts and poor physical health due to stress and anxiety. "We are seeing a significant uptick in the number of queries from LGBT+ people at IRCs due to the failures of the Home Office," said Aziz. "In an ideal world, we would say no to all LGBT people in detention. There are alternatives which are cost-effective, safe and secure." ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account. PAY ANNUALLY – £44.75 A YEAR PAY MONTHLY – £4.50 A MONTH MORE OPTIONS We're not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe. Rainbow Migration is calling for protections offered to trans and intersex people, who have been classed as 'at risk of harm' under the 'Adults at Risk in Immigration Detention' policy since 2016 and therefore should not usually be detained, extended to lesbian, gay and bisexual people. And for guidelines to be put in place for staff to ensure that vulnerable minority individuals are protected from homophobic abuse and attacks. In June 2024, the charity, alongside Micro Rainbow, urged the Government to introduce a pilot scheme, which would allow vulnerable people in detention to be released and offered a place in Micro Rainbow's safe house, with support from legal aid lawyers. The UNHCR warns in its guidelines that special measures may be required to avoid exposing LGBTQI+ people to 'risk of violence, ill-treatmen...

'A Victim All Over Again': The Mail Trial and the Murders of Stephen Lawrence and Daniel Morgan

Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY Whatever the outcome of the civil trial between various claimants and Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the newspaper group behind the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, the legal claims shed light again on what former prime minister Gordon Brown called "the criminal media nexus" — a circle of dodgy journalists and corrupt police officers circulating around the hub of the private detective agency Southern Investigations. These horrific murders may seem like ancient history, but they are at the centre of astonishing legal claims against the UK's largest newspaper publisher and owner of one of the world's most-read online news websites, which is currently bidding to increase its hold on the British media by buying the Telegraph group. The Daniel Morgan Murder The murders of Daniel Morgan and Stephen Lawrence took place six years apart, but only a few miles away from each other in south-east London. And they are connected by more than just geographical proximity. Both murder investigations were stymied by the same cartel of corrupt police officers with gangland affiliations, and ready access to the British popular press. Anyone who saw the recent TV drama The Hack, or has followed the podcast Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder that I hosted and produced with Deeivya Meir ten years ago, will understand the centrality of Southern Investigations to the spread of the dark arts of "unlawful information gathering" (UIG) after one of its founders, Daniel Morgan, was slain with an axe in the car park of a Sydenham pub in 1987. After Daniel's murder, his co-founder Jonathan Rees, and the man who took Daniel's place, former "King of Catford" Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery, went on to turn Southern Investigations into the hub of the dark arts — bribing police officers, hacking phones and computers, blagging financial and medical records, impersonation, surveillance and intimidation. Press and Police Corruption: Mail Hearing Reveals More Connections between Murders of Daniel Morgan and Stephen Lawrence Witness statements on behalf of the claimants against Associated News plunge us straight back into what Gordon Brown once described as the 'criminal media nexus' Peter Jukes They trained some of Britain's most feted journalists, like the "Fake Sheikh" Mazher Mahmood, who was convicted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice in 2016. As well as billing for hundreds of thousands of pounds a year the now-shuttered News of the World, they worked for Piers Morgan's Mirror Group and (as laid out in my book with Alastair Morgan, Who Killed Daniel Morgan?) claimed to work for other newspapers, including the Daily Mail. Though Rees and Fillery were both arrested on suspicion of conspiracy in Daniel's murder (Rees three times and Fillery twice), the multiple investigations finally came to a close at the Old Bailey in 2011 when the prosecution collapsed due to multiple flaws in disclosure. No further investigation was possible due to a quarter of a century of police corruption that made the evidence totally unreliable. Technically, Daniel's murder remains "unsolved", but the details amassed by the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel, which reported in 2021, make it clear that the police are not looking for any further suspects. Included in the panel report is a detailed account of how the original murder inquiry was stymied by the presence in the incident room, on the night before Rees and Fillery were arrested, of a former disgraced police officer, Jonathan Ross. According to another police officer, Derek Haslam, who worked undercover for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) for nine years gathering information on Southern Investigations and its network of connections with corrupt police officers, journalists and the underworld, Ross was a "corrupt policeman" who specialised in "selling information to the Mail and othe...

How Neo-Nazis Posing as 'Ordinary Parents' Embedded Themselves in Anti-Immigrant Protests

Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system SUBSCRIBE TODAY Neo-Nazi and far-right extremist groups – including two flagged by the UK Government – have embedded themselves in anti-immigration protests across the Westcountry, operating alongside self-described "ordinary mums and dads" with little challenge from politicians, police or the local press. Over the past year, Byline Times has identified activists linked to neo-Nazi organisations including the British Movement and Blood & Honour working with members of Britain First and other far-right networks. In January 2025, the UK Government froze the assets of Blood & Honour under counter-terrorism regulations. In 2024, the UK Government flagged British Movement as "a cause for concern" in relation to domestic extremism. As their involvement has grown, protests have hardened, shifting from loosely organised gatherings into marches marked by intimidation, racist chants and hostility towards journalists. Emerging from online campaigns framed as grassroots opposition to immigration, when those efforts failed to mobilise large numbers far-right actors stepped in, reshaping the movement and giving it a new direction. In a county of 1.25 million people with fewer than 2,000 asylum seekers and only one asylum hotel, that transformation raises urgent questions about how extremist networks gain local footholds, and why their presence has been allowed to pass without challenge. Far Right Influence In the first week of December 2025, as shoppers browsed Plymouth's Christmas market, around 50 mostly male protestors marched through the city centre chanting "save the nation, deportation" and "you can shove your Palestine up your arse!" Initially met by a larger counter-protest organised by Stand Up To Racism (SUTR), police contained the counter-group in one area while allowing the march to continue for almost three hours. Their final event in a year which saw monthly protests taking place in Plymouth and weekly protests occurring in Exeter, the December march underlined how far the movement had shifted towards organised far-right activism. When asked about the presence of known extremists, police told Byline Times that provided people were protesting peacefully, officers had limited grounds to intervene. Yet this lack of intervention saw the movement become a safe-space for supporters of neo-Nazi music collective Blood & Honour, representatives of Britain First, members of the neo-Nazi British Movement, and far right members of local football firm The Central Element. Sp how did organised far-right activists gain a foothold in a protest movement that presented itself as families concerned about their children's welfare? The Beginning Plymouth is the largest city in Devon with a population of around 264,000 people, 96% of whom are white. When their version of the Great British Strike – a nationwide anti-immigration protest organised by former soldier Richard Donaldson – took place in May 2025, protesters were pre-warned about violence in the local press linking it to the 2024 riot that occurred following the Southport attack. Donaldson's plan was to force a general election by having "500,000 people [walk] out in protest". In reality, barely one hundred people turned out – waving flags and milling around in small groups – countered by a similar number from Stand Up To Racism. Visibly angered by SUTR referring to them as "Nazi scum", several protestors Byline Times encountered presented themselves as "just ordinary mums and dads" worried about their children. Reports emerged of similar scenes across the country. Two months later, Donaldson's followers began protesting outside UK hotels housing asylum seekers. Still being presented in local media reports as ordinary people "in favour of stricter immigration laws and against the placement of migrants in hotels without communities being consulted", the coverage largely ignored...