Thank you for subscribing to Zeteo UK. We are still in soft-launch mode till September as we finish recruiting our team, but given the craziness of the British news cycle right now, we will be publishing stories and op-eds, like this one from John McTernan, on a semi-regular basis between now and then. Please do become a paid subscriber today so you can read and watch all of our Zeteo UK original content without hitting a paywall – and also so you can help fund independent journalism in Britain. - Mehdi Hasan

The “Keminaissance” is over, before it had even really begun. That portmanteau term was used by some UK political commentators to describe what they saw as a strengthening of support for the Conservative party under the leadership of Kemi Badenoch. As so often with political illusions, it was shattered by the encounter with real voters. In all the elections for the Greater Manchester mayoralty the Conservative candidate had been second-placed. In this by-election, caused by the election of Andy Burnham as MP for Makerfield, the Tories came fifth.

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It was a humiliation in so many dimensions for Badenoch. Reform, who were well beaten, were the right-wing party in the run-off against Labour’s victorious Bev Craig. Even in Labour’s landslide of 2024, the Tories were the second most popular party in the north-west region with a share of around 20% of the vote. If they are to have any chance of forming a government, they need to increase that share to at least a third of voters. Yet, this time their vote was halved to under 10% – and they were behind not only Reform, who came second, but also the Greens and the new far-right party Restore Britain. This latter party is so far from the centre-right mainstream that its leader, Rupert Lowe, tolerates neo-Nazis as members.

The result draws attention to the fact that there is not a single opinion poll which shows the Conservatives back to the 24% they gained at the last general election which, remember, they lost by a landslide. So what is the basis for the legacy media’s assessment that Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is doing well if it isn’t the polls?

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Every week, Zeteo rounds up the stories from Palestine that you may have missed, as Israel continues its genocidal war in Gaza and settler violence escalates in the occupied West Bank. We’re now bringing that round-up exclusively to paid Zeteo UK subscribers each week. If you’re not already one, become a paid subscriber today to get access to ‘This Week in Palestine’ and all of Zeteo UK’s content.

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In the week after four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed during an Israeli settler attack in the occupied West Bank village of Tal, settler violence and Israel’s crackdown on Palestinians have only escalated.

Settlers stole and vandalized Palestinian property, including a cemetery, set fire to mosques, marched through Palestinian villages, and continued to threaten and attack Palestinians, often while the Israeli military watched on. Instead of holding settlers accountable, Israeli forces raided villages, detained scores of Palestinians, shot and wounded at least one person, and held up an ambulance carrying a bleeding pregnant woman at a checkpoint (the woman ended up suffering a miscarriage).

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Meanwhile, strikes continued in Gaza, even as Donald Trump touted a breakthrough in talks between the so-called “Board of Peace” and Hamas on a disarmament plan that appears to hinge on Israel, which has routinely violated the supposed “ceasefire” for months, actually fulfilling its obligations under the agreement.

Read about all that and more from another troubling week in Palestine:

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Christmas came early for the global far right, as images showed tens of thousands of migrants from Morocco breaching the borders of the Spanish enclave Ceuta. From Donald Trump to Nigel Farage, the far right reacted exactly how you would think – by stirring up fear about a fake “invasion” and weaponising the so-called crisis to rally their bases. Trump said the surge should be used as a “talking point” in the midterm elections, while Farage used it to promote his Reform UK party.

There’s a lot of misinformation, racism and xenophobia driving the hysterical response from the right in the U.S., UK and European Union. So, what really happened? Here are nine things you should know about the fake “invasion” of Spain:

1. Ceuta Is Not in Europe

Although the six-mile-long peninsula is a Spanish enclave, Ceuta isn’t in mainland Spain. The city lies on Morocco’s northern coast. It has been under Spanish control since 1580 and is one of two Spanish cities that form the European Union’s only land borders with Africa, the other being Melilla. While Ceuta is part of the EU and the Schengen Area, it operates under special rules that restrict people from entering mainland Spain and the rest of the EU.

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2. At Least 80% of the Migrants Have Already Returned to Morocco Voluntarily

More than 48,000 people of the estimated 60,000 who breached Ceuta’s border have now returned to Morocco voluntarily, a clear contradiction of the claims of many right-wingers who called it an ‘invasion.’ At least 57 people died during the journey.

3. Trump and Israel Are Not Fans of the Spanish Government

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Thank you for subscribing to Zeteo UK. We are still in soft-launch mode till September as we finish recruiting our team, but given the craziness of the British news cycle right now, we will be publishing stories and op-eds on a semi-regular basis between now and then. Please do become a paid subscriber today so you can read and watch all of our Zeteo UK original content without hitting a paywall – and also so you can help fund independent journalism in Britain. - Mehdi Hasan

In England, two people can be diagnosed on the same afternoon, on the same ward, by doctors paid out of the same budget. One has cancer. The state meets the cost of all treatment that follows. The other has dementia. That person, in most cases, will pay for their care until their savings have been ground down to £23,250, at which point the state finally decides they qualify for limited help towards costs. Care won’t be provided free until their savings fall below £14,250 – and even then, if they need to move into a care home, they will have to sell their home to pay for it. The thresholds have not moved since 2010 despite the fact that a place in a care home now costs significantly more per year than the average salary. It is, quite frankly, a disgrace.

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Back in 2010, when Andy Burnham was Gordon Brown’s health secretary, he proposed paying for universal old-age care through a levy on estates. He watched as the Conservatives christened it a death tax before an election buried the whole thing. Sixteen years and seven prime ministers later, Burnham was standing in a care home in London, once again talking about the need for a universal care system. He was speaking passionately without notes, becoming emotional when mentioning his father’s Alzheimer’s care. He called the failure of successive governments to deal with this issue a “major dereliction of public duty”.

He is right, but he is about to run into the same constraints that defeated every previous attempt: money, labour and political consent.

Any serious argument for reform has to begin with how badly the existing system is failing. Around 2 million people aged 65 and over in England are not getting the care they need; among working-age adults, the estimate is another 1.5 million. Roughly one in seven older people will face care costs of more than £100,000. Social care is less a safety net than a gamble. Develop the wrong illness, and a lifetime’s savings, including the family home, can disappear into care fees. Hugh Alderwick of the Health Foundation calls it a “threadbare safety-net system” and notes that the absence of any meaningful state protection against care costs makes England an international outlier (social care policy and funding are devolved in Scotland and Wales).

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Burnham’s own formulation is as blunt: “I think social care in England is as unfair as American healthcare. The vulnerable pay with everything and it can completely leave them with nothing.”

The most immediate obstacle is cost. A full NHS-style National Care Service has been costed at something in the order of an extra £18.5 billion a year by the mid-2030s. Even a more modest plan – a cap on lifetime costs, a serious uprating of the means test, a fair pay agreement for care workers due in 2028/29 – runs to billions of pounds of recurring spending, the kind you cannot fund from efficiencies. Burnham’s answer was that the first task is “to do more with what you’ve got”, that the immediate workforce commitments “will be fully funded”, and that anything fuller “will require difficult decisions, but we will be honest with people about those”. In practice, that means higher taxes, more borrowing or cuts elsewhere. That moment of honesty has been scheduled for after the publication of Baroness Casey’s report next summer, which is to say comfortably distant from a general election.

Money, however, is only part of the problem. The sector also needs workers. In February 2022, Boris Johnson’s government made care workers eligible for the Health and Care Worker visa. Care homes could not fill their rotas, so ministers opened an overseas route into work paying barely above the minimum wage and, at first, allowed applicants to bring dependants. Between March 2022 and March 2025, about 230,000 recent overseas arrivals entered care roles in the independent sector. As Alan Manning of the LSE has argued, this was close to a textbook example of how not to design a visa. Employers wanted migrant workers because pay and conditions were too poor to recruit and retain enough people domestically. Importing labour filled vacancies, but it did not fix the wages or conditions that created them.

Workers with a non-British nationality account for about 32 per cent of a workforce of roughly 1.6 million people. In its drive to cut net migration, the government closed overseas applications for new care-worker roles in July 2025; most new care-worker applicants had already been barred from bringing dependants from March 2024; and the government is now proposing to extend the route to settlement from five years to 15 for most care workers.

The stated rationale for the 15-year route is partly fiscal: ministers want to limit the number of lower-paid workers becoming eligible for state support after settlement. But it would also leave workers dependent on sponsored employment for longer and make it even harder to change jobs. The effect is to make Britain less attractive to people considering this work, at exactly the moment the prime minister wants to expand the service. There are already nearly 96,000 vacancies in social care, and the vacancy rate remains roughly three times that of the wider economy.

Angela Rayner, the current housing secretary, who was once a care worker, has already said the objection to these policies out loud: “If we’ve asked someone to come to this country to contribute and we set down those rules, I don’t think we should be retrospectively changing them.”

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Ministers can promise no tax rises, lower migration and better social care. They cannot deliver all three without large cuts elsewhere.

Even if the money and workers can be found, reform still needs political consent. It is why the cross-party talks Burnham has initiated matter more than they first appear to. He has brought Casey’s final recommendations forward from 2028 to summer 2027, launched a national consultation, sat down with the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and chosen the point furthest from an election he is likely to get. The purpose is to find common ground. Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, who cared for his terminally ill mother as a teenager and now cares for his disabled son, came out of the call sounding genuinely hopeful and genuinely realistic. “We’re a long way off a plan,” he said, before stating what consensus actually requires: “Everyone will have to accept things we might not like in order to work together.” The Conservatives welcomed the cross-party talks, but their position is that while much more needs to be done to fix social care in England, there cannot be tax rises or increased borrowing. They agree they need to find common ground and argue it is a huge issue, but they are giving red lines without concrete alternatives.

The stalemate is already clear. Everyone agrees the system is broken. Everyone agrees on consensus in principle. No party has yet accepted the full cost of a viable solution.

Burnham is still right to try, but what is unusual is not that he has identified the failure, but that he has chosen to spend political capital on it early enough that he will have to defend the answer for years rather than weeks. He has also chosen an issue that has already burned him once, but says he is doing it for “my dad and the millions like him”.

But sincerity is not a funding model. Turning an emotional speech into legislation means confronting choices politicians have spent years avoiding: reform will require higher taxes, more borrowing or cuts elsewhere. It will also require an immigration policy that reflects the sector’s dependence on overseas workers, alongside better pay and conditions. Above all, opposition parties will have to stop pretending that reform can be free.

Britain may now accept that the social care system must be better. The unresolved question is who will pay, and whether politicians will tell them plainly.

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has held public office for nearly a quarter of a century, has been humbled by a band of protesters, most of whom have not even spent that much time on the planet yet. For the first time in almost eight years, public pressure has forced a powerful minister in his cabinet to step down.

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The development assumes greater significance because the social group that managed to pull this off has never possessed bargaining power of this sort in Indian history. A ragtag coalition of young Indians – under the banner of the “Cockroach Janta Party” – that somehow stuck together and stayed on the streets of Delhi for five weeks through the scorching summer heat to demand accountability for corruption in India’s public examination system has made Modi blink.

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Wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Yalla Intifada”, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg joined a protest in Berlin’s Wedding district earlier this month. The peace activists marched towards a Rheinmetall facility, protesting its conversion from an automotive-parts plant to one manufacturing parts for artillery shells. Thunberg accused Germany of supporting Israel through continued arms transfers, explaining that “We are doing this because it is our duty to protest against injustice and to stand up against genocide.”

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When images of the protest emerged on social media, the Combat Antisemitism Movement complained that the slogan on Thunberg’s shirt, which combines the Arabic word for “let’s go” and intifada, invokes “terror campaigns that killed thousands of people”.

But what does the word “intifada” actually mean?

Is it, as the Combat Antisemitism Movement claims, a rallying call to carry out violence against “Jews everywhere”? Or has the pro-Israel lobby ascribed a specific meaning to the term in an effort to criminalise protests and speech criticising Israel’s mass displacement, mass killing and mass destruction in Gaza and elsewhere?

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British politics is entering a new era, and Zeteo UK is here to meet the moment.

Now, more than ever before, we need a new kind of media. One that’s independent, fearless and willing to speak truth to power.

After a successful soft launch, Zeteo UK is ready to step out on the scene. And what better way to celebrate our launch in September than by inviting YOU, our Zeteo community, to join Mehdi LIVE for a Q&A with Green Party leader Zack Polanski.

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Since launching Zeteo UK, Britain’s political landscape has been turned upside down. So, what’s next? Are voters still looking beyond traditional parties for answers? Will Burnham revive the hopes of the Labour Party? Will Reform UK continue its rise? What kind of change can the Greens bring about?

To find out more and get the opportunity to ask YOUR questions LIVE, join Mehdi Hasan, Shehab Khan and Zeteo UK for a fascinating discussion and Q&A with Zack Polanski on September 14, 2026, at the Barbican Centre.

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Whether you’re passionate about climate action, social justice, human rights or simply the future of UK politics, this is your opportunity to hear directly from one of the country’s leading new voices. Plus, you’ll get the chance to meet Mehdi and the brand-new Zeteo UK team who have been working tirelessly to bring you the reporting you deserve.

So join us for a night of lively discussion and another special guest still to be announced.

As a subscriber to Zeteo UK, we’re excited to offer early access to tickets, so be sure to secure yours before they become available to the general public.

Founding Members and paid subscribers received early access to tickets AND an EXCLUSIVE 20% discount (check your email on July 7). Consider upgrading your subscription to never miss out on discounts to Zeteo’s live events.

We’ll see you there!

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Founded in July 1828 The Spectator is the oldest surviving magazine, not just in Britain but the world. During the course of its magnificent history many British prime ministers have written for it: Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Macmillan.

Another PM, Boris Johnson, edited it. Great writers from Rudyard Kipling and Evelyn Waugh to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from TS Eliot and Philip Larkin to Ted Hughes, have been published in its pages. Literary editors have included Graham Greene and Peter Ackroyd. It has given space to public intellectuals, including Bertrand Russell and Noel Malcolm, Ferdinand Mount and William Dalrymple.

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The magazine has generally been on the right side of history. Under its founding editor Robert Rintoul, it helped drive through the Great Reform Act of 1832. It supported Robert Peel over the Corn Laws. It was clear-sighted and moral over the First Opium War, one of the most squalid episodes in British imperial history for which Britain is paying a price today. After some dithering, The Spectator backed Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War when most British papers supported the slave-owning confederate states.

David Butterfield, the magazine’s historian, records the heavy cost: “subscribers fell below a thousand for the first time since the paper’s very early years and the title almost collapsed.” Butterfield also records that The Spectator stood out from much of the British press by seeing straight through Oswald Mosley and calling for a ban on the Blackshirt or any political uniform: “the Blackshirts, like the Daily Mail, appeal to people unaccustomed to thinking. The average Daily Mail reader is a potential Blackshirt ready made.”

Though a Conservative title, The Spectator opposed the Suez invasion, and backed the Wolfenden report, condemning Britain’s “utterly irrational and illogical” laws on homosexuality. The Spectator was one of the leaders of the campaign to end capital punishment.

In the 1960s, under the editorship of Iain Macleod (a future Chancellor of the Exchequer), The Spectator exploded the anti-democratic rules and secret procedures that governed Tory leadership battles. Under the editorship of Nigel Lawson (another future Chancellor) The Spectator opposed the Vietnam War. It immediately condemned the “dangerous nonsense” of Enoch Powell’s 1968 “rivers of blood” speech, saying that it played into the “politics of hatred”.

Out of this history, a coherent picture emerges. For the bulk of the last 200 years The Spectator, a profoundly important voice in British politics, articulated decent and civilised values.

In recent years something has changed, as a new thorough and scrupulous report from the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) demonstrates. Today’s Spectator obsessively mocks Britain’s minority Muslim population. The attacks come week after week, sometimes several in the same edition. The magazine detects the malign influence of Muslims in the most unexpected places. Almost anything, however random or innocent, can trigger The Spectator. Here are a few examples.

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Sadiq Khan, London’s Muslim mayor, commissions a study of London landmarks. The Spectator evokes comparisons with ISIS and the Taliban.

The prime minister acknowledges an important Islamic festival. The Spectator is reduced to fury.

“Why is Keir Starmer wishing us Eid Mubarak?” demands the magazine, accusing the prime minister of “unmerited deference” and “asymmetrical multi-culturalism”.

Westminster Council approves a mosque in the former Trocadero building in Piccadilly Circus. The Spectator frames this within a narrative of “creeping desolation”, “lost opportunities”, and “moral and cultural collapse.”

One Spectator journalist reports that “pandering to the growing Muslim vote is cringy and occasionally downright dangerous.”

Another Spectator journalist goes for a country walk. He notes with pleasure that some old gates have been replaced. Then his mood darkens. Attached to the new gates are official injunctions to abide by the Countryside Code illustrated by pictures of a woman wearing a burka.

Aah! A burka!

The image arouses his rage and drives him into an agony of introspection. These pictures, he reports, are:

“a coded message saying, essentially, this: ‘You think this is your country, you sap? It is not. It is not even your country up here among the beech hangers and the silver birch and the purple ragwort and the fluttering brimstones. Even up here, it is not yours. Not any more. Get used to this new reality, quickly.”

The writer muses that the “enormous gains” made by Reform UK are “a reaction to the way in which the history, culture, lifestyle and aspirations of the indigenous population have been repeatedly bludgeoned this past quarter of a century. It is notice being given that the public has had enough: that a line in the sand must be drawn.”

The same Spectator writer, Rod Liddle, dismisses the London borough of Tower Hamlets, home to a substantial Bangladeshi Muslim community, as a “fly-blown satrapy” and “suburb of Sylhet”.

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Mr Liddle writes a Spectator article carrying the sub-headline “There’s not enough Islamophobia in the Conservative Party.” After an outcry The Spectator changes the headline.

One only has to imagine the career-ending consequences, not just for the writer but also the editor, and indeed the magazine itself, that would (rightly) have followed had a Labour magazine asserted that “there’s not enough anti-semitism in the Labour Party.”

Not just Muslims get trashed. Anyone who dares to speak up in their defence places themselves in the line of fire. (During a witch-hunt, you become a witch yourself if you protect them.)

Church of England bishops criticise Tommy Robinson’s racist “Unite the Kingdom” march, with its virulent anti-Muslim message. The Spectator lacerates them for “an epic disregard for the people in this country who would call themselves Christian and wish for the United Kingdom to remain a Christian country and a concomitant preference for the belief systems of anybody who actually isn’t Christian.”

Manchester Cathedral opens its doors to Muslims for an iftar, the ceremonial breaking of the religious fast during Ramadan. A generous ecumenical gesture if ever there was one. The Spectator grants space to a writer who denounces this gesture of friendship as an “extraordinary act of negligence” and “cultural cringe.”

Another writer tells Spectator readers that the ideology of the ISIS terror group “emerged wholesale from the deserts of 7th century Arabia.” As any serious scholar will tell you, ISIS is a grotesque mutation of Islam.

“If international law says Khamenei should still be in place,” muses a Spectator writer in the wake of the US/Israeli assault on Iran, “maybe international law deserves to be detonated along with him.”

The magazine’s extensive output about Islam emerges from a coherent ideological viewpoint. Muslims are invaders. They don’t belong in this country. They don’t share our values and they threaten our public spaces. Any civic engagement by Muslims in Britain is suspect and should be resisted.

The Centre for Media Monitoring’s report documents how Spectator writers demonstrate or fill out this thesis through misrepresentation, fabrication, vulgar abuse and conspiracy theories

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Many observers would regard such coverage as Islamophobic. Not The Spectator, which refuses to frame Islamophobia in its accepted sense as an irrational fear, hatred or prejudice directed at Muslims for being Muslim. Instead, it turns the concept on its head. The Spectator argues that Islamophobia is a weapon cynically deployed by “Islamists” (and their allies within the progressive establishment) to silence legitimate criticism and to curtail free speech. This argument serves a dual purpose.

First, it insulates The Spectator (and other anti-Muslim outlets) from charges of bigotry, hate speech and discrimination against a minority. Second, it repositions Muslims who experience prejudice or hatred as bad faith actors rather than victims.

Finally, it presents Spectator writers (and anyone else who derides Islam) as the wronged party.

One Spectator columnist mocks Muslims who complain about prejudice for their “dainty sensibilities.” Another puts complaints of Islamophobia down to attention seeking: “there are incentives for Muslim commentators to complain about persecution, because it gets the hits and will be tweeted by MPs keen to be taking this problem seriously.” This tactic will not work, he warns, because it “feeds popular resentment towards the Muslim minority” who are “seen as ungrateful.”

It’s tempting to link the magazine’s obsessive hostility towards Islam to the change of ownership which resulted from the collapse of the Barclay Brothers newspaper empire in 2024. The new proprietor, Paul Marshall, controls an array of media outlets. All of them attack, misrepresent and promote conspiracy theories about Islam. His television channel GB News is the worst culprit.

Last year a CFMM study found that GB News mentioned Muslims or Islam 17,000 times, accounting for almost 50% of all mentions on UK news channels (by contrast BBC and Sky accounted for 32% and 21% respectively.) According to CFMM, GB News presented Muslims and Islamic beliefs as part of a conspiracy to undermine the British way of life. As with The Spectator, GB News regularly ridiculed (and denied) the concept of Islamophobia. Recently the third leg of Paul Marshall’s media empire, the Unherd website, dedicated thousands of words to an article headlined “The Plot for a British Caliphate.”

The anti-racist campaign group Hope Not Hate explored Mr Marshall’s private X account. It revealed that he had “liked” posts promoting anti-Muslim sentiments and far-right conspiracy theories. One of them read “It is just a matter of time before civil war starts in Europe. The native European population is losing patience with the fake refugee invaders.” Another was found to have said: “If we want European civilization to survive we need to not just close the borders but start mass expulsions immediately.”

Marshall insisted that these posts did not represent his views. Spectator columnist Douglas Murray denounced Hope Not Hate as a “hate group” while Fraser Nelson (then Spectator editor) accused the anti-racist organisation of running a “smear campaign.”

To be fair, the new CFMM study shows that Paul Marshall cannot be held responsible for The Spectator’s unhinged fixation on Islam: this dates back long before he bought the paper. It’s impossible to identify the exact moment the magazine changed into an obsessive anti-Muslim crusader.

When I first wrote for The Spectator in the 1990s there were certain columnists, notably the Greek millionaire “Taki” Theodoracopulos, who made racist and other types of offensive remarks. They might be directed at West Indians, Jews, Arabs, women, gays and for that matter any minority. Taki even praised Greece’s fascist Golden Dawn as “good old-fashioned patriotic Greeks.” The magazine defended Taki on the grounds that “Our readers like diversity and well-written pieces that they disagree with. We have no party line.”

The Spectator was saying that there was no problem with running an article in support of a political party which copied the Nazis (Holocaust denial, blood and soil rhetoric, Nazi salutes etc) and celebrated Adolph Hitler. The magazine got away with it in part because Taki (later to be jailed for drug use and recently given a 12-month suspended sentence for attempted rape) was seen as a court jester rather than a serious political writer who represented the views of the paper.

The Spectator may even have benefitted from such outbursts. They provided free publicity for the magazine and made it feel provocative and interesting. Looking back on it, however, the Golden Dawn moment, and other episodes like it, feel a great deal more sinister than they looked at the time. (I have to declare that I continued to write for the magazine as an occasional contributor after that episode.)

Five years ago, academic and media analyst Brian Cathcart wrote this: “today’s Spectator is a far-right organ of intolerance.”

He added: “Letting The Spectator into your home, in other words, is for me pretty much like decorating your coffee table with a book about race by Oswald Mosley.”

CFMM’s study of the magazine proves, in grim detail, that Cathcart was right. In recent years, Muslims have become the primary (though certainly not the only) target of Spectator bigotry. Three recent examples demonstrate how far the paper has moved from the tolerant liberal conservatism which characterised the first 150 years of the magazine’s history.

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Shortly after October 7, Spectator columnist Douglas Murray toyed with the idea of Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza: “Maybe they will finally put an end to this insoluble nightmare, raze Hamas to the ground, or clear all Palestinians from that benighted strip,” he mused, “it could be a good time to do it.”

Mass forcible population transfer is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. It was shocking to find such an article in a respectable British publication. At the very least, The Spectator could have made an editorial intervention, clarifying that it considered ethnic cleansing of the kind described by Murray to be wrong. I can find no evidence that it did so.

A similar proposition was put forward at roughly the same time in an article for Fathom, house journal of the pro-Israel lobby group Bicom. The editors of Fathom, however, made it clear they disagreed with the author, a retired Israeli general called Giora Eiland.

This is the territory The Spectator has chosen to occupy, as became clear when the Tory MP Katie Lam was awarded “Newcomer of the Year” at last year’s Spectator “Parliamentarian of the Year” awards. Lam had made modest headway in Parliament since winning the Weald of Kent in the 2024 general election. Shortly before the awards, however, she made headlines by calling for large numbers of legally settled families to be deported from Britain. Such a move, she claimed, would help to ensure that the UK is “culturally coherent”.

Lam’s comment would have gone down well with the Monday Club, a Tory pressure group founded to give support to white Rhodesia after Harold Macmillan turned against it in the 1960s. It is an ominous portent that the Tory house magazine should have awarded her a gong in the wake of remarks in which she advocated even more extreme policies than Enoch Powell had done in 1968.

The Spectator, which half a century ago accused Enoch Powell of toying with the “politics of hatred”, has been steadily rebuilding his reputation. Last October Douglas Murray praised what he saw as Powell’s prophetic vision. In May this year, The Spectator ran the headline “It’s time to uncancel Enoch Powell” above an article which announced that Powell “had a view of the British polity, values and way of life with which many Britons to this day feel they identify, and that is not least what establishes him as one of the country’s greatest conservative influences.” The author, Enoch Powell’s biographer Simon Heffer, predicted that “The attempt to vilify and to cancel him, coming in a dangerous period where freedom of speech and expression seemed more under threat in Great Britain than at any time since the 17th century, will prove temporary. His true importance will survive.”

This case that freedom of speech and expression is under attack is made frequently by Spectator writers. It’s true that the magazine (with revealing exceptions such as Mosley’s Blackshirts) has traditionally valued freedom of speech and expression. This is no surprise. The great liberal philosopher and free speech theorist John Stuart Mill was a Spectator contributor.

Mill wrote: “there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.” This does not mean that Mill thought the expression of all opinions should be free from censure. That includes the freedom to censure the publication for its preoccupation with Muslims. It includes the freedom to regard Spectator articles as Islamophobic, stupid, bigoted, racist, ignorant and irrational.

Besides, it is nonsense to say that writers in The Spectator are in any danger of losing their free speech. Their opinions on Islam are the opinions of at least half of the British ruling elite, as represented by the Conservative Party and Reform UK, along with a mass of right-wing media outlets: The Telegraph, The Times, The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express – or GB News, where Tory and Reform politicians are paid large sums to broadcast their opinions to the nation.

The Spectator has a tradition of support for more often than not, unfashionable or minority causes. When it comes to British Muslims, The Spectator mobilises free speech in favour of the majority against a beleaguered minority. This would have troubled Mill, who was careful to warn against the stifling effect on free speech resulting from what he called the “unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of prevailing opinion.”

More than that, Mill stressed that “opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act.”

There is a provable link between Islamophobia and violent assaults on Muslims. Try reading Anders Breivik’s manifesto before he massacred 77 Norwegians in a crazed assault, motivated by white supremacist ideologies and the great replacement theory.

Three British Muslims have been murdered, on account of being Muslim, in the last 15 years. Others get abused, targeted, beaten up. They fear going out at night. Last April a man was jailed for 13 years after raping a Sikh woman because he believed she was Muslim. At least 28 British mosques were attacked in the first four months of 2026. In June this year, there were an average of four to five Islamophobic attacks a week, and over 40% of these were arson or firebombing attacks. As this article was being prepared five people were injured during an attack on a mosque near Edinburgh. Meanwhile the home of Salma Yaqoob, a prominent local politician and NHS worker, was subject of what appears to have been a targeted arson attack.

I don’t think The Spectator can be accused of directly provoking violence against Muslims. Its genteel and middle-class readers might be further enraged by the inflammatory rhetoric of Spectator writers, but they are not usually street-fighting thugs. Instead, the magazine has played a role in making racism and bigotry permissible across much mainstream British media and wider public and political discourse. This means that The Spectator plays a particularly significant – and pernicious – role in fermenting Islamophobia. The magazine lies at the heart of Britain’s media/political nexus. Its parliamentarian awards and summer party are the Cheltenham Festival and Royal Ascot of the Westminster social season. Its stature confers respectability and helps regularise what can, and what cannot, be said. Its example liberates more demotic publications to publish their own fabrications and dangerous lies about British Muslims.

For almost 200 years The Spectator stood for a tradition of good writing and civilised and often bravely heretical discourse. It used its voice to articulate, and sometimes to lead, our national struggle for tolerance. Today, as it approaches the 200th anniversary of its foundation by Robert Rintoul, The Spectator has become one of the most influential British media apologists for bigotry, hatred and racism: an upmarket version of GB News. For those of us who loved, revered and were guided by the old Spectator this is a national tragedy. British Muslims have every reason to feel threatened and intimidated by such rancid, repetitive, irrational and apparently uncontrollable hostility from a hugely respected magazine at the heart of the British establishment.

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Peter Oborne is a former Political Editor of The Spectator, and will be a regular contributor to Zeteo UK from September.

This piece was first published as the forward to the report by the Centre for Media Monitoring’s report, ‘No mere Spectator: Anti-Muslim Hostility in Britain’s Oldest Political Magazine’.

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Elyas Abu Safiya hasn’t seen his father in person in 19 months. The last time he did, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was doing what he had done for most of his life: taking care of other people, saving lives.

On Dec. 27, 2024, the Israeli army abducted Dr. Abu Safiya from the Kamal Adwan Hospital – the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza. His son, Ibrahim, was killed in an Israeli bombing in October 2024.

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For a week, Israeli authorities denied that they had abducted him. When they finally admitted they were holding him, Israel didn’t disclose his whereabouts for more than a month. He has since been moved around to different prisons, but Israel has shared little other information. We know he’s being held under Israel’s “Unlawful Combatants” Law – a fictitious legal classification (it does not exist in international law) that Israel uses to indefinitely imprison Palestinians without charge or trial. We know he’s been tortured, and has lost an extreme amount of weight – so weak, he is unable to sit upright. During one of his last visits with his lawyer, he said: “They brought me here to kill me. I don’t see myself surviving. This is the end.”

Elyas, helpless, has had to wait for updates from afar – first from Gaza, and now from Kazakhstan, where his family moved late last year. I recently spoke to him about the campaign to release his father, his message to Donald Trump and new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, and what his dad taught him about loving Palestine. His answers have been translated from Arabic to English and edited for length and clarity below:

What is the latest information that you have on your father?

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The first call Andy Burnham made as prime minister was not to a mayor, a council leader or a northern business group. It was to Donald Trump. At the new administration’s first briefing for journalists in Downing Street, which I attended for Zeteo UK, we were told the conversation lasted around 20 minutes, was warm in tone and mentioned the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz.

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For a politician who has signalled that his premiership will be defined by domestic renewal rather than foreign affairs, he ended up spending part of his first day discussing a shipping lane thousands of miles away. Everything you need to know about the gap between the premiership Burnham wants and the one he is likely to inherit is contained in that phone call.

The domestic pitch is clear enough. In his opening days Burnham has moved to cut VAT on energy bills, cap bus fares in England and slash business rates for pubs, clubs and grassroots music venues – Manchesterism arriving in Whitehall more or less intact. On foreign policy there is, formally at least, little that is new. His government has continued Keir Starmer’s policy of allowing U.S. aircraft to operate from British bases for defensive strikes on Iran, but even this – the sin of continuity rather than commission – is not cost-free. A YouGov poll this week found that 58% of Britons oppose the use of British bases for strikes on Iran, with that figure rising to 72% for Labour voters. The move also opens the UK up to potential retaliatory strikes, with Iran publicly saying they believe this makes British bases a legitimate target – if the Iranians were to strike a British base, the new prime minister would immediately have a huge decision to make on how to respond. Burnham’s instinct appears to be to say as little as possible about the wider world, but on the defining security question of the summer it is one many of his own supporters reject. How long can it really hold?

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You would think Andy Burnham had appointed a disgraced criminal to high office.

Making Ed Miliband foreign secretary was “the most nauseating political appointment of my lifetime,” declared Stephen Pollard, the former editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Apparently deciding that even this did not sufficiently convey his anguish, Pollard produced an article denouncing Miliband as “the most destructive politician of my lifetime, a man who has had a calamitous impact not just on Britain but globally”.

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The Telegraph’s David Blair was scarcely less fevered. “If Ed Miliband possessed an ounce of humility or self-knowledge,” he wrote, “he would have searched his conscience and ruled himself out of becoming foreign secretary.” His colleague Jake Wallis Simons warned that “the sinister, Israelophobic Left stands to benefit” from Miliband’s appointment, describing the new foreign secretary as “banal and lily-livered”. Boris Johnson, the former Conservative prime minister, even suggested that Miliband was partly responsible for Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

A particular nadir came from the Jewish Chronicle, which published an article under the headline: “So just how Jewish is Ed Miliband?” Once again, a Jewish public figure who dissents from the political demands made of him finds his Jewishness placed on trial.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s administration has shamelessly intervened in British democracy. Senior officials had already briefed that they didn’t want Miliband as chancellor of the Exchequer, declaring that making Miliband chancellor would be a “mistake”; after he became foreign secretary, the White House was reported to be “deeply concerned”. “There’s genuine anger about his appointment,” one presidential source reportedly said.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, claimed that Washington had warned Britain that appointing Miliband would be “very injurious to the ‘special relationship’”. Burnham, he spat, “appointed this twit anyway.”

What, exactly, has Miliband done to provoke this foaming rage?

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Last month, Britain stewed in a deadly heatwave. A southerly flow drew hot Saharan air over Western Europe, where it was trapped in an “omega block” – a bulge of high pressure parked between colder fronts. The air stagnated and heat accumulated, raising maximum temperatures to 37.7 degrees. Fifty years ago, temperatures of that magnitude in June would have been impossible. Climate change added 3-4 degrees to the maximum.

Our lives are planetary, but our experience is parochial. Abstracted from climate change, a crushing heat dome is just bad weather. And that is just how recent record temperatures were reported, with almost three quarters of articles making no mention of climate change. We get the bleak facts, stripped of their meaning.

Westminster, too, demonstrated this schizoid split. As the country sweltered, causing a surge in cardiac arrests and thousands of heat deaths among the most vulnerable, a strange coalition formed. City investors, the Daily Mail and the Economist allied with two of Britain’s biggest unions, Unite and the GMB, to block the appointment of Ed Miliband as chancellor in a new government led by Andy Burnham. Their joint issue: Miliband’s support for “net zero” carbon emissions.

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Imagine if a 14-year-old Muslim boy had allegedly plotted to attack two synagogues in London.

It would have dominated the headlines in the UK.

Newspaper front pages would have asked how a mere child had become so radicalised. An outraged prime minister would have issued an immediate statement. Government ministers would have been dispatched to television studios to denounce, decry and condemn. Security at synagogues would have been promptly reviewed. There would have been endless – and completely justifiable – discussions about rising antisemitism and the deadly consequences of demonising Britain’s Jews.

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Instead, last week, a 14-year-old boy was charged with an offence linked to “extreme right-wing terrorism” after police uncovered an alleged plot to target two mosques in London.

And the response from our political and media elites?

Deafening silence.

It gets worse.

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Donald Trump’s war in Iran was supposed to be winding down. It is not – and things could get much worse soon, with news that Iran’s allies are planning to close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait to the Saudis.

In recent days, Trump has expanded strikes to target civilian infrastructure inside Iran. Iran has answered by targeting Gulf infrastructure and formally exiting the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, a development that Trump said he “couldn’t care less” about.

Now, Tehran’s allies in Yemen have opened a second front at sea on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula. On Monday, the Houthis – the Iran-backed rebel group that controls northern Yemen, including its coastline above the Bab al-Mandeb Strait – declared a maritime embargo against U.S. ally Saudi Arabia “effective immediately,” asserting that the Bab al-Mandeb is now closed to Saudi maritime traffic.

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If the Houthis close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait to the Saudis, and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, it could send oil prices soaring to new levels.

Here are 7 things you really should know about the Bab al-Mandeb Strait that could dominate our headlines in the coming days…

1. Say Hello to the ‘Gate of Tears’

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To mark the occasion, Zeteo Editor-in-Chief Mehdi Hasan and Zeteo UK Political Editor Shehab Khan unpacked what a Burnham government could look like, what his cabinet picks tell us about the road ahead, and how developments in the Middle East - from Gaza to the conflict with Iran - could shape his agenda.

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They took audience questions, and there was even time to mention arguably the most talked-about British politician of recent weeks: Count Binface.

Watch the full discussion and do stay tuned to Zeteo UK for continuing coverage on the new Burnham administration.

This video is being shared without a paywall. If you believe in the work we do and want to see more of it, do consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Dear Prime Minister,

On your first day, I want to give you some advice.

(And Andy, though we’ve been friends for 30 years, I need to call you PM because that’s who you are now, and you need to get used to the title, the status and the power.)

1. You start with a full tank of authority. Use it!

I have seen prime ministers up close. I worked for Tony Blair in his final years in office as his political secretary. There’s nothing like the end of an era to teach you everything you need to know about political management. Every reshuffle meant a further depletion of the store of political currency. All those former ministers who had relied on the backbenchers to loyally vote through their policies, suddenly found their precious political consciences when they left the front bench. I ran a group of those who stayed loyal – “The Non-Embittered Former Ministers”.

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But you start with a full tank of authority. Use it! Quickly and decisively! The cruellest judgment on Donald Dewar after the first 100 days of running the newly devolved Scottish Parliament was that he “hit the ground dawdling”.

2. Be decisive – and get into the detail

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It was one of the first broadcast pool interviews Keir Starmer gave as prime minister. He was in Wales, touring the United Kingdom after Labour’s landslide victory, and I asked him about Labour’s collapse in support among Muslim voters. It was not a question Downing Street was expecting. Starmer didn’t answer it.

In the reply he gave – a clip that would go on to be watched more than 2.2 million times on X – the word “Muslim” never appeared once. What he offered instead was arithmetic. Labour had won a majority. He had a mandate. The country, he seemed to be saying, had already settled the matter, and losing safe Labour seats to independents who had campaigned on a Gaza ticket was not a significant political problem.

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The exchange was symbolic of a wider approach to Gaza that would shape much of Starmer’s premiership. The calculation appeared to be that Labour’s electoral coalition was broad enough to withstand losing part of its progressive base.

Days after Hamas’s attacks in October 2023, Starmer told LBC that Israel had the right to cut off power and water to Gaza. It took him more than a week to clarify his remarks, and he never apologised. By then, the political consequences had taken on a life of their own. Councillors resigned. Independents stood and, in some places, won. The Greens attracted disillusioned progressive voters. More recently, an Opinium poll commissioned by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Friends of the Earth found that more than half of Labour voters who defected to other progressive parties cited Labour’s position on Gaza as a key reason for leaving.

That political inheritance now belongs to the incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham.

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In the space of a single week I have been told, by people who had every reason to know, that the next chancellor will be Ed Miliband. Also Shabana Mahmood. Also Yvette Cooper. Also Wes Streeting.

Four names. Four confident briefers. One job.

The only honest conclusion is the one nobody in Westminster wants to admit: with days to go before Andy Burnham enters Downing Street, nobody knows for sure who will run the economy, and there is a real chance that includes Burnham himself.

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He officially becomes Labour leader on Friday, and prime minister on Monday, when he will announce his cabinet. Between now and then Westminster will play the game it always plays: who is up, who is out, who gets which red box. Most of that is noise as there is one appointment that matters more than any other – his pick for chancellor is the clearest statement of what his government believes, and who Burnham chooses will tell us what kind of prime minister he intends to be.

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In a video on social media, Andy Burnham has admitted that the party “didn’t get it right” on Gaza. His apology has been rightly criticised for failing to offer concrete action to end complicity with the genocide in Gaza and the violent occupation in the West Bank. But one question is missing from the commentary: If Labour “got it wrong” over Palestine, is it not time for a reset in the treatment of those who got it right?

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While the government has been unwilling to condemn the genocide, the British public have not. There have been 35 national marches, which we have helped organise, many of them numbering hundreds of thousands. November 2023’s Remembrance Day demo saw close to one million turn out. In May this year, despite a virtual news blackout of Gaza and the threat of a big far right demo, a quarter of a million marched. This is almost certainly the greatest cycle of protests on any subject in British history.

Perhaps this is why, since October 2023, the Palestine solidarity movement has experienced a level of repression not seen in this country since the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85. It amounts to an alarming escalation of already mounting attacks on civil liberties.

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Nigel Farage has built his political brand on portraying himself as an anti-establishment outsider taking on Britain’s political elite. But alongside that image, questions about his financial arrangements, wealthy backers, gifts and lack of transparency have surfaced repeatedly over the course of his career.

The latest controversy is the most significant yet. Farage is under investigation by Parliament’s standards watchdog over an alleged failure to declare a £5 million gift from a crypto billionaire, as well as an alleged failure to declare support he received from convicted felon George Cottrell.

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With the investigations ongoing, Farage resigned his Clacton seat to fight a fresh by-election. While he denies any wrongdoing, the current investigations are the culmination of years of recurring questions about his financial affairs.

From relatively minor disputes over declarations to investigations into multimillion-pound gifts and support from close associates, this timeline shows how the controversies surrounding Farage’s finances have become progressively more serious over time.

1. Fails to declare donated office space – fined £200

A relatively minor breach, in 2014 the Electoral Commission fined Farage £200 after he failed to declare office space that had been donated to him.

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