News and Views 31st October 2025

Grooming gangs

• Sadiq Khan’s outrageous denial of London’s grooming gangs. The Metropolitan Police is reviewing some 9,000 grooming gang cases in a huge new investigation.  This despite London mayor Sadiq Khan previously stating there were "no reports" or "indications" of grooming gangs operating in the capital. Social workers, charities, experts and survivors have all confirmed the reality of such gangs in the city, calling Khan ‘delusional’. There is even evidence that the London Mayor has read HM Inspectorate of Constabulary reports – which include case studies of young girls being abused by groups of older men in London – whilst issuing denials in public. Retired Met detective Jon Wedger said he knew of countless young female victims of grooming gangs who he has sought to help – both during his time on the force and after. Read also this week's PT article.

World Events

• Sudan: A massacre so bloody you can see it from space. A maternity hospital massacre in the Sudanese city of El Fasher has left 460 people dead in the past two days. Rebel Sudanese paramilitary forces had overrun the last major army base inside the city, where more than a quarter of a million people have  been surrounded and starved. A 48-hour killing spree saw Rapid Support Forces militia slaughter more than 2,000 unarmed citizens on October 26 and 27, most of them women, children and the elderly. The pools of blood are so thick, the piles of bodies so exposed, that the ethnic purge is visible from space. Analysis by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab concludes that there “appears to be in a systematic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing of... indigenous non-Arab communities through forced displacement and summary execution”.
• The real genocide the West doesn’t care about. “This is what a genocide looks like”, writes Jake Wallis Simons of events in Sudan in The Telegraph. “This bloodbath dwarfs Gaza in scale and contrasts with it starkly in terms of intent. No humanitarian corridors. No leaflets to warn innocents to flee. No provision of aid. Not even the pretence of drawing a distinction between civilians and combatants. Moreover, the most cursory of glances at the UN’s flawed workings reveals that the Gaza conflict was a war, not a genocide. Yet where is the outrage? The lack of moral indignation over Sudan compared to Israel is striking.”

Society and Politics

• Not racist to note black over-representation in TV adverts. While Reform MP Sarah Pochin was quick to apologise for her clumsy language in complaining about TV adverts being 'full of black people’, the Prime Minister, the Health Secretary and parts of the British media were equally quick to accuse her of being ‘racist’. Yet Pochin was simply pointing out the anomaly highlighted in a recent diversity study by Channel 4 which found that, in the top 500 commercials across all TV stations, just over half featured black people – this despite black people only making up 4% of the population.
• Many concur with Pochin. Columnists in The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and even The New Statesman all suggest that Pochin got roasted for speaking what many quietly think. As Paul Burke stated in The Spectator at the time, “we’ve all know that for many years, there’s been an unrealistic overrepresentation of black people in TV ads.” An ad hoc poll conducted by Eric Kaufmann's Centre for Heterodox Social Science found that most Britons do not believe that criticising minority overrepresentation in ads is racist. Read also here.
• Equality watchdog warns against ‘Islamophobia’ definition. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has advised the Government to abandon plans to adopt a new definition of Islamophobia, warning that the proposal risked creating “a chilling effect” on free speech. Many other groups have issued strong warnings against the plans, Christian Concern stating that “No other group is protected from criticism or even mockery of its beliefs – Muslims should not receive special treatment that amounts to an Islamic blasphemy law.” Even Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, herself a Muslim, has warned that a definition could give Muslims “special treatment”, leading to “further conditions that increase hatred, rather than deal with it”. Others, however, such as Labour peer Lord Khan, insist the government must adopt the full new definition. The likelihood is that the government will proceed with their plans, but that they will move away from the word "Islamophobia", simply replacing it with "anti-Muslim hostility".

Immigration

We're increasingly hearing of instances of violent crime being committed by non-European migrants. Below is a brief overview of some prominent cases from just the past two weeks: 

• Three Middle Eastern migrants were charged with gang rape in Brighton.
• A Somalian migrant murdered a restaurant owner in a random stabbing attack in Derby after threatening to kill him because his asylum application was rejected.
• An Arab-speaking African migrant was charged with raping a ten-year-old girl in Dublin.
• Also in Dublin, a 17-year-old Somalian was charged with the murder of a 17-year-old Ukrainian at an asylum centre for teenagers.
• In Walsall, a Sudanese asylum seeker was convicted of murdering Rhiannon Skye White, who worked at the asylum seeker hotel where the offender was being accommodated at taxpayers’ expense. He stabbed her to death with a screwdriver - then danced as she lay dying on a deserted train platform.
• An Afghan national was arrested after murdering a dog walker in a triple stabbing in Uxbridge, having entered the UK illegally in the back of a lorry.
• Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana was "obsessed with the Taliban and risked becoming a left-wing extremist" aged just 15.
• Outside the UK, a Swedish court refused to deport an 18-year-old Eritrean rapist on the grounds that the assault was carried out quite quickly. His victim was 16 and attacked on her way home from work.

Christian Persecution

• Anti-Christian violence escalates in southern Egypt. Sectarian violence recently broke out a rural area in southern Egypt’s Minya Province following online accusations that a young Christian man was in a relationship with a Muslim girl. Outraged Muslims gathered outside Coptic Christian homes and properties, throwing stones and incendiary objects, while threats and hate speech targeting Christians were also circulated online. Sectarian violence and attacks against Christians remains common in the southern Upper Egypt region, where radical Islamic groups are active. Attacks often go unpunished, while ‘reconciliation sessions’ tend to impose unsatisfactory, and often unconstitutional conditions on victims, according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide. Egypt currently ranks 40th on the annual World Watch List of 50 nations where Christians face the most persecution for their faith.

Climate Change

• BBC misinformation about Hurricane Melissa. The BBC and other media outlets have been reporting that the frequency of very intense hurricanes such as Melissa is increasing. The evidence seems to suggest otherwise.  Climate blogger Paul Homewood notes that while it is impossible to accurately compare hurricane data today with pre-satellite events, when many mid-ocean hurricanes were missed, you can measure trends with land falling storms, which do not need satellites or hurricane hunter aircraft to record them. Including Melissa, there have been seven land-falling ‘Cat 5’ hurricanes since 1992. Since the first recorded one in 1924, there have been 20 in all. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have repeatedly maintained that there is “no strong evidence of century scale increasing trends” in the frequency of major hurricanes. Homewood finds it contemptible that the BBC should push its global warming propaganda when a hurricane is in the middle of devastating a country, but says “It is even worse when they don’t even get their facts right.”

The Bible

• Bible full of ‘sexual violence’ says UK university. Students of English literature at the University of Sheffield are being warned about violence and murder in the Bible, including Christ’s crucifixion. Guidance advises that the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John include scenes of ‘graphic bodily injury and sexual violence’ as they relate the events leading up to the death of Jesus. There is even a ‘sexual violence’ warning in regard to the Genesis story of Cain killing Abel, even though there is no mention in the Bible of how Cain kills his brother. Bible teachers and historians have said the warnings were ‘misguided’, ‘absurd’ and incompatible with discussions about morality. But read also here and here. 

Antisemitism

• Ireland’s new president Catherine Connolly, voted in last week, is known for her anti-Israel views, as indeed was her predecessor, Michael Higgins. Connoly has previously accused Israel of being a “terrorist state”, guilty of “genocide”. She also said that Hamas was “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people.”
• After stating in an interview with Tommy Robinson that he “had no issue with Israel as long as people are living in peace,” and that he recognized Israel's history in the Middle East, UK-based Imam Umayr Mulla was suspended from the Masjid Khazra institute in Nottingham, which insisted the imam’s views were “deeply offensive and wholly inconsistent with the values of our institute.”
• Jewish academics in the UK are said to be living in fear of anti-Semitic hate mobs after masked demonstrators stormed the classroom of an Israeli-born economics professor at City University of London last week, threatening to behead him and shouting accusations that he was a “war criminal” and a “Nazi.”
• It has since emerged that the same London university - City St George's - had an incident earlier this year where the university's chaplain was forced to intervene - because Hebrew words on a wall had been vandalised.
• A chain of Israeli restaurants in Washington DC – ‘Shouk, which specialised in plant-based, kosher food - has been forced to close all of its branches after an increasingly aggressive backlash from pro-Palestinian protesters, having featured on a list compiled by Palestine’s “Apartheid” campaign, aimed at “restaurants that culturally appropriate or sell Israeli settlement products”.
• An Israeli educator visiting the United States was brutally beaten in an antisemitic assault after his assailant spotted his yarmulke and asked him what his religion was.
• A newly-released video reveals the moment a Jewish solicitor is told by police that his Star of David necklace had 'antagonised' pro-Palestine protesters, causing 'offence’ to them. The Metropolitan Police has been accused of misleading the public after saying it did not arrest man for wearing Star of David. He had been acting as an independent, non-partisan legal observer, affiliated with the Society of Independent Legal Observers.