The White House has said it is “monitoring” the case of Lucy Connolly in an escalation of free speech tensions with Sir Keir Starmer.
State department officials are examining the treatment of Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, who was jailed for 31 months over a social media post about the Southport attacks.
Judges threw out an appeal brought by the 42-year-old last week, meaning she will not be released before August.
Donald Trump sent US officials to meet British pro-life activists over concerns their freedom of speech has been threatened, The Telegraph can reveal.
A five-person team from the US state department spent days in the country and interviewed campaigners to feed back to the White House.
They met with five activists who had been arrested for silently protesting outside abortion clinics across Britain.
During the 12 months leading up to March, more than 6,000 US citizens have applied to either become British subjects or to live and work in the country indefinitely – the highest number since comparable records began in 2004, according to data released on Thursday by the UK’s Home Office.
Over the period, 6,618 Americans applied for British citizenship – with more than 1,900 of the applications received between January and March, most of which has been during the beginning of Donald Trump’s second US presidency.
The surge in applications at the start of 2025 made that the highest number for any quarter on record.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has launched a blistering attack on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the leaders of France and Canada – saying that they had “effectively said they want Hamas to remain in power”.
He also accused Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney of siding with “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers”.
Carney is probably trying to monetize Hamas support rally’s.
A convicted criminal who arrived on a small boat was given a taxpayer-funded flat — and used it to orchestrate the transport of thousands more
When officers from the National Crime Agency raided the suburban London apartment of Ahmed Ebid, they discovered two notebooks. One appeared to be a ledger of payments, while the other was stuffed with longitude and latitude co-ordinates in the Mediterranean. The discovery in June 2023 would help the NCA to unmask Ebid as one of Britain’s most prolific and ruthless people smugglers.
On Monday, he is expected to receive a long prison sentence at Southwark crown court in south London, after becoming the first person in Britain to be convicted of smuggling migrants across the Mediterranean.
Nearly two-thirds of Britons want to reduce immigration, with around half calling for it to be cut “significantly” and a majority agreeing with the prime minister’s assertion that migration damages the fabric of society, polling shows.
My parents were Anglophiles. Therefore, I was an Anglophile, gobbling up Masterpiece Theater, majoring in British history at college, and spending an utterly delightful junior year abroad in England a long, long time ago. Of late, though, I’ve come to revisit my fondness for England. That’s because England doesn’t really seem to exist anymore. Instead, it’s an increasingly Third World country, complete with blasphemy laws, and a likely collapse of its power grid.
The trigger for this, my latest in a series of essays I think of as illustrating that “there won’t always be an England,” is a article in the Daily Mail that looks at the city of Leicester.
People smugglers are laughing at the British Labour government’s pledge to ‘smash the gangs’ and are hoping for a particularly busy summer of Channel crossings thanks to special ‘season’ discounts.
Migrants will be able to pay thousands of pounds less to get from France to the UK via a small boat, reports said this week. So far this year, the number of crossings has already passed 10,000—and at the earliest point of the year since records began—which doesn’t bode well for daily figures during the summer.
The Israeli embassy was the target of a terror plot linked to Iran, The Times has learnt.
A group of Iranian men are suspected of planning an atrocity at the embassy in Kensington, west London.
Counterterrorism officers, supported by the military, swooped in to make arrests at the weekend fearing that an attack was imminent.
Trump claims UK trade deal is ‘full and comprehensive’
Donald Trump said a new trade deal between the US and the UK is “full and comprehensive”.
The US president, who will unveil the deal at a press conference in the Oval Office at the White House at 3pm UK time, also said the agreement will “cement the relationship” between the two countries “for many years to come”.
Mr Trump posted on his Truth Social website: “The agreement with the United Kingdom is a full and comprehensive one that will cement the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom for many years to come.
BUt tARriFFs DoN't woRK. pic.twitter.com/Zm8sOmMAxZ
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) May 8, 2025
The notion the United Kingdom government, its people, or way of life are something worth fighting for appears to be in decline, with a survey finding that less than half of the nation would be willing to fight and defend their country for any reason.
According to a poll from Ipsos released to coincide with Victory in Europe (VE) Day, which marks the formal surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allied nations in 1945, some 48 per cent of Britons would not fight for their country “under any circumstances.”
Not surprising, as with Canada no one wants to fight for a nation being turned into a 3rd world shithole by its elites.
It must surely rank as one of the least sincere apologies of all time. Lucy Powell, the embattled leader of the House of Commons, has claimed that her recent remarks dismissing concern about the grooming-gangs scandal as a ‘dogwhistle’ do not really ‘reflect her views on the issue’. UK prime minister Keir Starmer has accepted her apology and has resisted the growing calls for her sacking.
The boss of Southern Water has told households that they need to ration their water use because the region is “drier than Sydney, Dallas, Marrakesh and Istanbul”. Needless to say, given the appalling way most of these privatised companies have been run, Tim Mcmahon was denounced for blaming the consumer for the failings of his business. Why don’t you repair the leaks properly and invest more in infrastructure before passing the buck, was a characteristic response.
Social trust will vanish in the dark
It was around 7pm when we heard that the lights were back on in Porto, 200 miles to the north of the small Portuguese village where I was visiting friends. The blackout would only last a few hours longer. At that moment we were at the checkout of an unlit supermarket in a nearby town, having scoured the shelves by the light of our phones. Our shopping baskets revealed that we were not seasoned preppers. They contained 40 litres of bottled water, along with tins of beans, peas and tuna. We also stocked up on red wine and chocolate; morale had to be maintained, after all.
Earlier that day, a power cut originating in Spain had swept across the Iberian Peninsula and part of France. Traffic lights went down and trains stopped in their tracks, above and below ground. Given that the blackout lasted less than 12 hours, our response in hindsight appears slightly hysterical. But until that update at the supermarket, which we couldn’t verify in any case, we had no way of knowing it would be over so quickly. We had no mobile reception or Internet access of any kind, and so we couldn’t communicate with anyone outside the village.
Donald Trump’s tariffs tsar has accused Britain of being a “compliant servant of communist China” at risk of having its “blood sucked” dry by Beijing.
Peter Navarro, the president’s economic adviser, said the Government must resist “string-laden gifts” from Beijing and avoid becoming a “dumping ground” for goods that China can no longer sell to the US.
In an intervention set to complicate trade negotiations between Britain and America, he told The Telegraph: “If the Chinese vampire can’t suck the American blood, it’s going to suck the UK blood and the EU blood.”
