News and Views 28th November 2025 

The Budget

• Budget means ‘highest tax burden in history’. Some Christian charities have applauded aspects of this week's budget, saying that scrapping two-child benefit cap will help lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. Yet Rachel Reeves breached Labour’s election manifesto pledge as she raised taxes by £29.8 billion. Business owners, working single mothers, professionals and farmers are among those who will feel hardest hit by the new taxes. In a blistering response, Kemi Badenoch – “fizzing and fearless” - branded the Chancellor's statement 'a Budget for Benefits Street, paid for by working people', while Nigel Farage condemned it as 'an assault on aspiration and saving'. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) warned that none of the 88 measures unveiled by Ms Reeves on Wednesday would have a 'material impact' on boosting GDP. Read also here.
• Budget aids welfare payment splurge. Of great concern to many was Reeves’ bowing to Left-wing demands to boost benefit handouts. Official figures show the Chancellor's plan to scrap the two-child benefit cap will be worth more than £14,000 a year each to 18,000 low-income families with six or more children. The OBR suggests that British taxpayers will spend over £2 trillion on welfare payments over the next six years. Former Reform chairman Zia Yusuf has warned that working Brits will have to “pay record amounts in tax, accept appalling public services and pay for a record number of people to not work. The tax burden is set to rise to a staggering 38% of GDP by 2030 – a post-war high.” Spiked Editor, Fraser Myers called it a “Budget from hell”, while The Spectator branded it “Reeves’s road to ruin.”

Antisemitism

• Anti-Israel website issues kill-list. An anti-Zionist group, The Punishment for Justice Movement, is offering bounties for the murder of Israeli academics  on its website. The site offers $50,000 for murdering a targeted Israeli academic and $100,000 for the murder of “special targets.” Additionally, $1,000 is offered to install notices in front of the targets’ houses and $20,000 for the arson of their vehicles or houses. Their “crime” is supposedly the performing of research that supports the IDF. The group lists the alleged home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, social media accounts, and even identification numbers of hundreds of academics from universities across Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom. Israel suspects Iran is behind the operation of the group, and Mossad, the Shin Bet security agency, and the National Cyber Directorate, are currently probing its activities.

Islam

• Muslim women and the burka. An Australian senator controversially wore a burka in parliament last week - covering her entire face and body - in protest at the senate rejecting her bill to ban the garment. She was swiftly suspended from parliament for a week and labelled a ‘racist’ by opponents. Noting the story, Khadija Khan, Politics and Culture Editor at A Further Inquiry magazine, and one who grew up in a Muslim family in Pakistan, is clear that the burqa exists to force women into hiding. “It proclaims that their very existence is sinful and that any woman who does not conceal herself entirely in a bag is sexually immoral – a wh*re and a harlot.” It also, she states, “encourages Muslim men to assume that women from other cultures are sexually available.
• Beaten for not wearing burka. "When I was growing up in Pakistan", Khan continued, "I was told innumerable times that white women in Europe were all essentially prostitutes, in part because they dressed ‘without modesty.” Liberals claim that wearing a burqa is a matter of choice for Muslim women. Khan knows that to be a lie, because her mother “confronted the lie and paid a hideous price for her courage” – being beaten, slapped and punched for refusing to let her daughter wear it.
• Research from the School of Economics in Paris in 2022 showed that banning the burqa and the hijab headscarf (as well as the niqab, a full-length covering that does not mask the eyes) has had positive effects on education. Freed of this restrictive clothing, girls are getting better grades. Most tellingly, many countries where Muslims are the majority, such as Uzbekistan and Morocco, have also outlawed the full burqa with face coverings. In part this is a security measure but it is also done to discourage Islamist extremism.

Justice 

• Lammy wants most jury trials scrapped. Plans by Justice Secretary David Lammy to overhaul the justice system have been leaked.  Measures include scrapping the right to trial by jury for all but the most serious of cases (e.g. murder or rape). This could impact 95% percent of court cases, analysis suggests. CBA Chair Riel Karmy-Jones, KC, said the reforms will “destroy justice as we know it… they will affect tens of thousands of people, whose fate will fall to be decided by a single judge, without the check and balance that a jury of 12 provides.”
• Opposition to the centuries-long system. A letter from 56 MPs, including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick sets out concerns, stating that “Since Magna Carta the promise has been constant: that no free person will lose his liberty except by the ‘lawful judgment of his equals’”. They call instead for court-sitting days to be increased. As Daniel Jupp points out in The Conservative Woman, the right to trial by jury enshrined in the Magna Carta is vital because it “limits the power of the State to persecute enemies or deny basic freedoms. Second, it inherently limits the power of the judiciary.”

Immigration

• Brits leaving the UK in droves. The number of asylum seekers coming to Britain has surged to a record high, now making up 44% of total net migration, according to the Office for National Statistics. Further, the number of asylum seekers living in hotels at the taxpayers’ expense has jumped to more than 36,000, the highest level for nearly two years. Yet other figures show that net migration plummeted to 204,000 last year - though this was largely because young Britons are leaving the country in higher than usual numbers. 693,000 people left the UK last year, with the rate particularly high among young people.
• Illegal migrants absconding reaches record high. The Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that net migration will hit 340,000 by 2030 because of ‘Boriswave’ migrants remaining in the UK rather than returning to their home countries. Meanwhile, internal Home Office figures reveal that more than 53,000 illegal migrants have absconded and are missing after they breached their immigration bail or escaped detention. A further 736 foreign offenders have also absconded and gone missing after being released from prison or from detention, with most facing deportation.

World Issues

• Islamist networks dominating French life. A damning new report published by France’s former interior minister, Bruno Retailleau along with 29 Republican senators, has warned that Islamist networks have taken hold of entire swathes of French public life – from schools and sports clubs to student housing, neighbourhoods and councils. The report, almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media, describes a coordinated effort by Islamist networks to impose parallel norms and bypass republican authority. Stating plainly that France is confronted by a strategic adversary and that whole swathes of French life have fallen under the influence of an ideology that recognises no authority but its own, the group argues that only urgent, hard-hitting measures can halt the advance, and calls for enforcing strict neutrality in sport and local government, cutting foreign funding to mosques and associations, and giving the state far broader powers to track and dismantle Islamist networks wherever they operate.

Persecution of Christians

• Yet another mass kidnapping of Christians in Nigeria. Over 300 schoolchildren and a dozen teachers were kidnapped from a Catholic boarding school in Niger state, Nigeria last week, in one of the worst mass abductions the country has ever witnessed. The suspected Islamic gunmen stormed the school complex at about 3 am on Friday, breaking into dormitories before marching the captives into the surrounding bushland. At least 50 of the 303 children subsequently escaped and have been reunited with their families. Just a few days previously,  5 schoolgirls were kidnapped from a boarding school in neighbouring Kebbi state. As northern Nigeria’s Christians and schoolchildren live in a state of fear, the country’s government continues to play down the problem – as does the BBC and much of the western world. Read also here.

Climate Change

• Bovaer-bovine-stupidity. It was proudly asserted that the additive Bovaer in animal-feed could reduce methane emissions from cows by 30-45%. Bovaer was mandated to use across Denmark in October but already there have been many reports that the additive is damaging to livestock, and that it reduces milk yields almost as much as emissions - prompting an investigation by the Danish government. Bovaer also causes serious eye damage, skin irritation and is suspected of damaging fertility. A report on its mal effects concludes: “Bovaer is a dangerous solution that cuts yields as well as emissions from a non-existent problem of cow flatulence. It is hardly surprising that tampering with the digestive processes of cows would harm their health.“ Perhaps aware of the dangers, a major UK trial of Bovaer has subsequently been stopped, as scientists evaluate the results.