A suspected white supremacist thug has tried to murder a 20-year-old Muslim woman in London. He did this by running her down as she crossed a road on 8 March. The horrifying incident was captured on what appears to be a doorbell camera. However, the ‘mainstream’ media have completely ignored it, despite the fact that during muslim hate crimes increase in the month of Ramadan, when Muslims are more visible.

No word has been released about the condition of the poor victim. The clip was shared by the Muslim Social Justice Initiative (MSJI) in an Instagram post.

Commenting on the rising tide of Islamophobia, the group notes that:

Anti-Muslim violence will escalate as long as anti-Muslim racism is denied.

This is the reality we’re navigating.

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White supremacists are emboldened by a state openly genociding Muslims abroad and criminalising us here.

We ask allies to strategise seriously, because Muslim communities are almost completely taking care of each-other alone.

The rising tide of Islamophobia

Islamophobia continues to escalate as the Starmer regime enables, emboldens, and courts the racist right and demonises Muslims to support Israel’s crimes in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon and the wider region. More to the point, the Labour right itself, which now makes-up the largest faction in the party, is deeply racist, particularly against Muslims.

Labour has shamelessly and disastrously tried to weaponise that racism in by-elections both before and after Keir Starmer was helped into Downing Street by so-called ‘Reform UK’.

It cost Labour the February 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election. And it has caused Labour to haemorrhage members and support, not only among Muslims but among all decent people.

Now, while opposition to Israel’s crimes is treated as ‘antisemitism’, real racism endangers the lives of Muslims and others who fall foul of the tricoloured monoparty’s racism.

I express my solidarity, as a white Christian journalist, with Muslims and all others who are fighting that evil.

Featured image via the Canary

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As part of a new interview with VT, the Reservoir Dogs actor sat down with co-star Rebecca Ferguson to promote the new Peaky Blinders film, when the topic of conversation somehow turned to Harry Potter.

Spurred on by Rebecca, Tim reluctantly admitted: “I was almost in it.”

“They asked me to be in it,” he elaborated, before explaining why he ultimately chose not to pursue the role. “I initially said yes and then I thought ‘No, I’ll just [always] be Snape, that’ll be it’.”

Obviously, that role very famously went to Alan Rickman who played the creepy-but-complex Hogwarts professor in all eight of the Harry Potter films between 2001 and 2011, becoming synonymous with Snape for many generations.

It was previously reported that Tim had auditioned to play Snape, but ended up choosing to star in The Planet Of The Apes instead – which was filming at the same time – after deeming it too much to appear in both.

Alan was on author JK Rowling’s original “wishlist of actors” given to the film’s producers from the off, along with Robbie Coltrane, Richard Harris and Maggie Smith, who went on to play Hagrid, Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall, respectively.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is currently in select cinemas, ahead of its release on Netflix later this month.

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Paul Johnson, a former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, said Whitehall had not carried out the necessary work to produce a more “targeted” scheme than the support made available to households in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Johnson, now a senior adviser at the consultancy Frontier Economics, said it means that if the Keir Starmer government decides to step in to protect household bills from rising energy prices, it will be “just very, very expensive”.

Speaking on The Rundown podcast from PoliticsHome, the leading economist said he had urged the previous Conservative government to invest “serious” money in data collection to develop a more targeted scheme, but that this work was not undertaken.

Johnson explained that a more “sensible” scheme would allow the government to provide support to those who need it most, rather than to all households.

Appearing alongside him on this week’s episode was Bill Esterson, Labour MP for Sefton Central and chair of the energy security and net zero committee. 

They appeared on the podcast as the US and Israel’s war with Iran continues. The conflict has had a major impact on international energy prices, largely due to disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane responsible for around 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply. 

Esterson agreed with Johnson that the “data sharing just isn’t there” to create more targeted support for energy bills, despite calls from within the industry and his committee.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) watchdog estimated that ministers spent almost £80bn on energy support for both households and businesses in the two fiscal years after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Earlier this week, Starmer warned that the UK is exposed to international price shocks, as it was at the onset of the Ukraine war, saying “the longer this [conflict] goes on, the more likely the potential for an impact on our economy, impact into the lives and households of everybody and every business”.

On Wednesday, Chancellor Rachel Reeves acknowledged the government may have to step in to protect energy bills, telling the Treasury select committee that “nothing is off the table”.

‘We are looking at a whole range of different scenarios,” she told MPs.

“One reason why any future package, if it were necessary, would be more affordable is that we are now less reliant on international energy price movements than we were before Russia invaded Ukraine, because we have invested more in homegrown, renewable energy.”

She added: “We are looking at targeted support as well as broader measures, but it is just too early to say what is needed.”

Johnson told The Rundown that lessons from the 2022 support package, which included a £400 grant for all domestic energy customers, on how to spend the money more effectively, have not been learned.

“What was announced then [in 2022] was staggeringly expensive and staggeringly generous, and it’s partly because it held everybody’s bills down,” he said.

“It was staggeringly expensive, and the reason was that the government simply didn’t have the information that allowed them to target this in a sensible way at people who had a combination of relatively low incomes and relatively high spending on energy.

“And I remember saying at the time it would be worth investing a couple of billion quid, I mean serious money, in making this information available. 

“Now, as far as I’m aware, they still don’t have anything which would allow them to target, and so, therefore, if this [Iran war] does go on a long time and the prices go up really significantly, I suspect that the political pressure to keep everyone’s bills down again will be very significant. 

“And then that does become just very, very expensive, and it’s even harder now than it was four or five years ago because debt is so high.”

Esterson added: “The data sharing just isn’t there. It’s a call that all of the major retailers have made to enable the kind of action that Paul’s been outlining there. It will be very, very important. 

“It’s one of the recommendations we’ve made as a committee. Hopefully, the government will listen to it.”

The Labour MP added that there is “going to be the need for other policy measures” if higher energy prices last beyond the start of July, when the current Ofgem price cap expires.

• Click here to listen to the full conversation on the latest episode of The Rundown, or search for ‘PoliticsHome’ wherever you get your podcasts.

Dr Daniel Pitt is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Buckingham. 

British politics lacks an informed discourse about our constitution and its traditions. This is unfortunate as we govern through discourse.

We even have Reform UK politicians calling themselves ‘Shadow Chancellor’ and ‘Shadow Home Secretary’, which is outright nonsense, and it also lacks constitutional morality.

Sadly, our constitutional edifice is strewn with New Labour’s carbuncles. We need the policies to make both precise incisions to drain the carbuncles and a course of antibiotics.

So, it was a breath of fresh air to watch Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, in a video of him visiting Runnymede during his trip to Britain. The video is simply but sublimely titled ‘Our ancient English liberty’.

Poilievre’s video is powerful with imagery of place, a story of a shared common constitutional tradition, and it also provides Canadians with a sense of self that stretches across time and an ocean. The best of all, it succeeded in showing that our constitutional tradition lives and breathes whilst embedding it within the Canadian national identity.

One can nitpick about some of the details in the video, such as the claim that the Magna Carta was ‘signed’ by King John; in fact, his seal was appended to the charter.

Indeed, the Magna Carta myth has become a fundamental part of our self-image, especially during the nineteenth century, but the myth is fading away.

But which Magna Carta? The 1215 version had a very brief lifespan indeed, as Pope Innocent III repudiated it. The 1216 version is far more conservative than its more radical 1215 counterpart, because the radical elements were removed by Henry III’s man. It was reissued again in 1217, and the provisions in relation to the forests were put in a separate charter called The Charter of the Forest. It was again reissued in 1225.

It took until 1297 to have statutory form with the title The Great Charter of The Liberties of England, and of The Liberties of The Forest.

The charter was not about universal rights or freedom but about power politics and averting a civil war. It unintentionally, through an invisible hand, created a legal order that was established by solving specific conflicts. Of course, the charter itself was just a political solution to a political struggle.

There is chaos and contingency in actual history, yet great men and women can change it. A stateman’s narrative must be and is a much simpler one than a historian’s.

Statemen can be more romantic and mythologise; they can try to shape the political culture in which they operate. Their oratory should use powerful imagery to tell a national story with a swift-moving narrative that provides an interpretation of who we are and where we are going.

Yes, myth will be part of their story, our story. The best conservative orators, from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, such as Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill, employed these skills. It is the role of the Conservative statesmen to provide good myths, as Benjamin Disraeli knew all too well.

The reason for this is that our national identity is driven by the moral imagination of great people and their interpretations of great events.

Our national story can reveal itself in the form of myth and symbols. Myths are not necessarily falsehoods; on the contrary, they are essential truths that are packaged in a story. This style of communication is impactful because human beings are narrative-driven creatures and love a good story. This is a backwards-looking process which creates our nation’s story, which we then tell ourselves and pass on to our children and grandchildren.

Our civic national identity is closely connected with our sense of sharing a common tradition and a set of manners. This involves an awareness of our common history and the great continuity of this history. Both our constitution and our culture, which are mutually reinforcing, show elements of this continuity. However, we have to treat those carbuncles.

Critical events and documents, such as Magna Carta, provide us with an opportunity to renew and reclaim our national story that has a deep meaning and which makes sense to us today. Poilievre did this as easily as eating an apple. We need to learn from it.

As George Orwell indicates, “myths which are believed in tend to become true”. Why? According to Orwell, this is because we will try to live them.

These myths facilitate a bond of sympathy between us, creating a national spirit, which is unmistakable in our constitutional traditions. New Labour’s carbuncles are a repudiation of this tradition, and the Conservatives must reaffirm our impressive constitutional tradition. This idea of belonging to a historical constitutional tradition leads us to believe that we are part of a collective national identity, and that is why constitutional reform matters.

These national myths, including the Magna Carta myth, are a powerful way of recruiting loyalty to our constitutional tradition and to our country. The stories and myths that we tell ourselves are a product of a shared loyalty. Poilievre’s video on Magna Carta is an exemplar for us to learn from.

Wrapping up policy proposals within a grand narrative of their historical importance and situating them within a long national story has powerful imagery that can move the conservative soul.