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Political Editor of Byline Times and Online Editor of BylineTimes.com. Lobby journalist in the House of Commons. đŠAdam@bylinetimes.com Subscribe to my Substack âŹď¸ https://www.adambienkov.co.uk
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Sanctioned six times by the Kremlin, banned from both Reform and Conservative Party Conferences⌠what better time to support @bylinetimes.bsky.social by subscribing to our monthly newspaper đ subscribe.bylinetimes.com/editions/
I see all the media organisations endlessly parroting the "free speech under threat" rhetoric of the right are now staying completely silent as Reform and the Conservatives openly ban news outlets that criticise them from covering their events bylinetimes.com/2025/09/04/k...
Concerning news that the Conservatives led by Kemi Badenoch have banned @bylinetimes.bsky.social from attending their annual conference - ironically amid the party's claim to uphold free speech: bylinetimes.com/2025/09/04/k...
I see all the media organisations endlessly parroting the "free speech under threat" rhetoric of the right are now staying completely silent as Reform and the Conservatives openly ban news outlets that criticise them from covering their events bylinetimes.com/2025/09/04/k...
So Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives, who have repeatedly pledged to fight for "free speech" and a free press have just banned me and Byline Times from attending their conference. Has never happened before under any previous leader bylinetimes.com/2025/09/04/k...
Frightening to see both Reform and now the Conservatives taking a page out of the Trump playbook by banning press access to publications they see as critical to their political positioning.
'The Conservative party, whose leader Kemi Badenoch has repeatedly pledged to fight for âfree speechâ, has banned Byline Times from attending her partyâs annual conference' bylinetimes.com/2025/09/04/k...
Kemi Badenoch said earlier this year that âsilencing free speech harms democracy and âwe must fight for itâ. Unless of course its the free speech of a news organisation she happens to disagree with bylinetimes.com/2025/09/04/k...
So Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives, who have repeatedly pledged to fight for "free speech" and a free press have just banned me and Byline Times from attending their conference. Has never happened before under any previous leader bylinetimes.com/2025/09/04/k...
This is an argument for falling population, falling GDP, and an employment crisis.
You said "I don't think its at all unreasonable to think bringing that number down closer to the old 200-300k historic highs is a necessary condition for success". That's exactly what's happened. It's made no difference
Keir Starmer asked by Ed Davey to rule out ever withdrawing from or suspending application of the ECHR in the UK. He rules out the former, but not the latter
Every week you go into PMQs thinking Kemi Badenoch surely can't miss the mile-wide open goal presented in front of her and yet somehow she manages it
net immigration fell by more than half last year and the politics has gone in the complete opposite direction. It's not really about the numbers
Indeed. Far too much worrying about Polanski, about Farage, about the Ipsos' issues index, about individual polling, and not enough on 'how can we deliver election-winning budgets and spending rounds in 2027-8 and 2028-9'.
But arresting pensioners for protesting against a genocide is still fine
Masked men putting up flags and demanding that passers by who challenge them tell them where they come from is not something to be celebrated. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Remember that what they are actually saying is that people should be removed to face torture and persecution
2025: Yvette Cooper suspends the rights of child refugees to come to the UK, effectively rejecting Article 8 of the ECHR 2016: Yvette Cooper making a passionate plea for child refugees to come to the UK Cooper spent over a decade speaking up for child refugees, now she rejects Article 8 of ECHR
Today Nick Ferrari asked if treaties like the ECHR & the Refugee Convention that were drawn up in the wake of WWII are still relevant to modern Britain. I said the context of racial hatred towards Muslim immigrants now echoes the hatred of Jewish immigrants in the 20th century. We need these laws.
These are the exact same papers that spent years cheering on the Conservative party's big new restrictions on the right to protest, the right to strike and the blacklisting from official events of anyone who publicly criticised them
As Yvette Cooper pushes forward new laws to make it harder for child refugees to get safe passage to join their parents in the UK, here's a picture of her from 2020 campaigning for the complete opposite.
Thanks everyone who has helped us raise over ÂŁ21,000 just ÂŁ4000 to go to our new target to uncover the truth about Reform Please support the most important investigation of our time.. subscribe.bylinetimes.com/reform-uncov...
you do realise their poll ratings have gone through the floor since they started down this track post US-elections?
Telling that you only get questions like this from regional BBC journalists, as opposed to the "are you also frightened asylum seekers will assault your daughters, PM?" questions now levelled by their national colleagues
When parties with mainstream, liberal, or progressive identities try to stanch support for far-right parties by adopting conservative or authoritarian policies, it almost always fails. From @adambienkov.bsky.social bylinetimes.com/2025/09/02/r...
When Nigel Farage said he'd feel uncomfortable living next door to Romanian migrants, his comments were widely condemned, with then Labour leader Ed Miliband calling them a "racial slur". Now 11 years later, such sentiments are not just condoned, but actively encouraged by our Labour Prime Minister
As Yvette Cooper pushes forward new laws to make it harder for child refugees to get safe passage to join their parents in the UK, here's a picture of her from 2020 campaigning for the complete opposite.
Whatever happened to the anti-racist, pro-migrant, campaigner and human rights lawyer Keir Starmer and why has he vanished just as the far-right return to our streets? bylinetimes.com/2025/09/02/r...
When centrists adopt far-right rhetoric, they donât make themselves stronger. They make themselves look inauthentic, legitimise the far right, and shift the political debate onto terrain defined by their opponents. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...
Keir Starmer told his Cabinet today that tackling small boats is "central" to his administration and he will now "go further and faster" to "detain and remove" people, including potentially requiring them to have digital ID cards
Sickening footage from Nuneaton tonight, where a Sky News interview with a local businessman was disrupted by racists hurling abuse. Another local said, "Warwickshire Council Council has gone to Reform... It's given certain people a licence to be aggressive and racist."
BREAKING: Zack Polanski elected as the Green Party's new leader by votes 20,411 votes to 3,705 for Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns. A landslide
đ´Red Flags: The Far-Right Warning Signs Keir Starmer Is Refusing to See The Prime Minister must wake up and stop trying to appease the very forces trying to exploit anti-migrant hate in order to destroy his Government, argues @adambienkov.bsky.social bylinetimes.com/2025/09/02/r...
When Nigel Farage said he'd feel uncomfortable living next door to Romanian migrants, his comments were widely condemned, with then Labour leader Ed Miliband calling them a "racial slur". Now 11 years later, such sentiments are not just condoned, but actively encouraged by our Labour Prime Minister
Are you young, highly educated and driven, and want to contribute to our stagnant economy with its aging population and low productivity? Well out you go
Emily Thornberry tweeting a picture of someone's flag-adorned house was less condescending than this
Are you young, highly educated and driven, and want to contribute to our stagnant economy with its aging population and low productivity? Well out you go
Honestly surprised that Cooper hasn't dug May's "Go Home Vans" out of storage at this point. www.bbc.com/news/article...
Asked by the BBC how he would feel if "your daughter was having to walk past one of these [asylum] hotels every day?" Keir Starmer replies that "I completely get it". "I understand why people want the hotels closed. I want them closed".
Asked about people vandalising roundabouts with painted St Georges and Union Jack flags, Keir Starmer replies that "I always sit in front of a union jack and I've been doing it for years" âIâm very encouraging of flagsâ
Asked by the BBC how he would feel if "your daughter was having to walk past one of these [asylum] hotels every day?" Keir Starmer replies that "I completely get it". "I understand why people want the hotels closed. I want them closed".
Of course, this is about making it much more difficult for them to do so
They are trying to get their child to safety via a previously approved and safe route. That's literally what they're doing. This new rule stops them from doing that
to secure a safer life for themselves and their families, without forcing your child to take a perilous journey to the UK. It's not difficult to understand
Obviously with the expectation that their family can then safely come to the UK once their asylum claim has been approved, as was the case until now
Of course, with the expectation that their family can safely come here once their own asylum claim has been approved. Now they won't be able to
"Sorry small child fleeing a war zone. I'm afraid you can't join your parent here in safety because your English grammar isn't up to scratch."
If I were trying to win elections and arguments, I simply would be doing everything I could to move UK political conversation away from a website run by an avowed enemy who believes and writes this stuff about me:
Appeals to tactical voting only work if enough people can be convinced that there is enough of a difference in order to vote tactically. Everything they're doing at the moment undermines that
Elon Musk is a radicalised extremist openly championing the most racist faction who would deport the Foreign Secretary, the Leader of the Opposition, the Justice Secretary and the last Prime Minister The govt silence about such a level of extremism is craven: infinite tolerance of racial hatred
How many people voted for a Labour Government last year in order to keep torture survivors separated from their families?
At what point is the Government going to stop saying it "understands the frustrations" of people actively trying to destroy them?
How the Prime Minister's growing moral cowardice in taking on the politics of Nigel Farage is setting his own Government up for a historic defeat www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/whos-afrai...
How the Prime Minister's growing moral cowardice in taking on the politics of Nigel Farage is setting his own Government up for a historic defeat www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/whos-afrai...
Labour's 'Farage is right, just don't vote for him' strategy is going about as well as expected
And this is supposed to be an argument in favour of the strategy that has led to this situation?
The lack of short term memory in British politics at the moment is quite something. Was everyone in Number 10 in a coma for the last five years or have they genuinely forgotten how this exact same strategy worked out for the last Government?
practical ideas for what?
It's hard to understand what Starmer was apologising for on his 'island of strangers' comments when he's now apparently perfectly happy putting out obvious racist bait like this
No 10's use of Keir Starmerâs Twitter feed is not something Keir Starmer could credibly defend. What is he doing with the imagery here & why? x.com/Keir_Starmer...
I don't think we realise just how bad this ratchet effect could get. Last year Farage was saying mass deportations weren't practical, now he's been bounced into promising them, and his press allies are cheering him on. The fanatics on X are leading the discourse, and it's only getting more extreme.
Pretty amazing that Labour canât find it in them to aggressively attack a barmy Reform proposal which is opposed by *a majority of Reform voters*
I've written about the concerted effort by the combined forces of the right to turn convicted race hate monger Lucy Connolly into a victim, a saint and a martyr. @bylinetimes.bsky.social bylinetimes.com/2025/08/27/l...
đ´The Martyrdom of Saint Lucy The right is desperately seeking to make a martyr out of Lucy Connolly in order to distract from the real victims of the hate she helped to spread, argues @ottoenglish.bsky.social bylinetimes.com/2025/08/27/l...
Once hundreds of schools start closing across the country and the retirement age rises to 75, the current period of moral panic over immigration is going to look utterly ridiculous
The Times editorial line: "sieve" the entire population so we can put 100s of thousands of people into camps. "Removing a cityâs worth of people would be an extended exercise. Identity cards would be a must if the population was to be sieved into legitimate and illegitimate camps" archive.ph/78dcP
đ´Concierge Nationalism: How the Far-Right Is Selling Extremism as a Lifestyle Service Vigilantes with links to Neo-Nazi groups are whipping up fear about migrants while soliciting donations for accompanying children to supposed safety bylinetimes.com/2025/08/27/c...
"The numbers arriving so far this month have been the lowest in August since 2021" - The Times mentions in the 24th paragraph of its front-page splash something which few people in the print, broadcast and online newsrooms of the UK are aware of www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...
Public opinion on the ECHR is fairly inchoate and figures would change in a campaign/depending on framing. But support for remaining in the convention has tended to be around 50%. Support for leaving around 30%. When we asked in July there was an uptick in support for reamining.
đ´âNotting Hill Carnivalâs Success Shows That Hate and Division Will Never Winâ Labourâs Mayor of London @sadiqkhanlondon.bsky.social writes for Byline Times on why the cityâs haters need to admit that âdiversity is a strength to be celebrated, not a weakness to be hiddenâ
Just spotted here in South East London. Funny how all these growing acts of vandalism are never included in Nigel Farage's condemnations of "lawless Britain"
The real problem with Nigel Farage's plan for mass deportations is that he hasn't planned it out properly, suggests Labour
Reform UK, which has a grand total of four MPs, was just given an uninterrupted platform for an hour and a half on the BBC and Sky News channels, in order to talk about its plans for mass deportations When was the last time the Greens (with four MPs) or the Lib Dems (with 72) were given the same?
Just imagine the reaction if the leader of any other political party claimed to know more about what Christian values are than the Archbishop of Canterbury
Reform UK, which has a grand total of four MPs, was just given an uninterrupted platform for an hour and a half on the BBC and Sky News channels, in order to talk about its plans for mass deportations When was the last time the Greens (with four MPs) or the Lib Dems (with 72) were given the same?
Nigel Farage says he would renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement in order to take the UK out of the ECHR. What could possibly go wrong?
"We are not very far away from major civil disorder" over migration, says Nigel Farage for the umpteenth time. So far this "major civil disorder" has involved a handful of protests outside some hotels with around a hundred protesters at each
The fact that an anti-migrant politician, who tells us every single day that he doesn't like immigration, is saying it once again, is not in any way news
Reform Zia's Yusuf says a Farage Government would rip up protections against human rights abuses, torture and trafficking, in order to deport more migrants. Remember that these protections apply to everyone living in the UK. Once they're gone, they're gone for all of us
Nigel Farage tells his press conference that his deportations will save the UK "hundreds of billions" of pounds. He knows he can make literally anything up at this point and not be called out for it
Nigel Farage, who repeatedly campaigned for Donald Trump to be elected and called alleged serial rapist Andrew Tate an "important voice" for men, says he wants mass deportations of migrants in order to make women safe
âI donât remember anyone ever saying to us âOh I just don't think we're properly reflecting the Green Party view, or the liberal-left view on this storyâ,â one former BBC journalist told me. âIt was always just slanted in one direction â which was basically the nativist, authoritarian direction.â
That's a quote from Caroline about Nicola's book
This by @nicolakellywrites.bsky.social is essential for anyone wanting the real story of Britain's asylum system and the shameful way the UK now treats the desperate people seeking refuge here. I'll be talking to Nicola about her book on Sept 16. Subscribe here for an invite www.adambienkov.co.uk
âI donât remember anyone ever saying to us âOh I just don't think we're properly reflecting the Green Party view, or the liberal-left view on this storyâ,â one former BBC journalist told me. âIt was always just slanted in one direction â which was basically the nativist, authoritarian direction.â
www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/the-bbcs-p...
The fact that an anti-migrant politician, who tells us every single day that he doesn't like immigration, is saying it once again, is not in any way news
'Immigration doesn't bother me but it seems to bother everyone else' â Everyone. This is what happens when the media runs away with Hard Right narratives.
'Is it time for the Government to drown innocent human beings for political advantage?' and other questions now apparently deemed acceptable in the British media
The Express is taking a Waiting for Godot approach to the much anticipated mass protests today
'Is it time for the Government to drown innocent human beings for political advantage?' and other questions now apparently deemed acceptable in the British media
Chuffed to see @adambienkov.bsky.social recommending my book, âAnywhere But Here' in his post this weekend. You can buy a discounted copy here: share.google/6xBW1rUYveHg... And weâll be doing Substack live soon, so subscribe to my newsletter and we'll keep you updated on when to join. See you then!
This is what Ken Clarke used to refer to as the 'feeding buns to crocodiles' strategy. Eventually you run out of buns and the crocodile eats you instead
Funnily enough I don't remember reading similar front pages when Jeremy Hunt bought *seven* luxury seaside apartments from a Conservative donor, in breach of his government's own money laundering rules
Adam makes a good point. I'll add that it's worth noting this isn't just right wing press and Labour amplifying their cause. It's the left wing press, and all the left wing people online saying "we're a racist far right country". It's all part of building up this myth.
While relatively small gatherings of far-right protesters are reported as the start of some kind of national civil revolt, much larger protests on other issues are routinely ignored at best, and openly demonised at worst www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/anywhere-b...
While relatively small gatherings of far-right protesters are reported as the start of some kind of national civil revolt, much larger protests on other issues are routinely ignored at best, and openly demonised at worst www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/anywhere-b...