Uncensored Free Speech Platform

Liam Downer-Sanderson: Labour don’t want to reopen Hammersmith Bridge. Local Conservatives will.
This feels like a quiet policy shift.

Cllr Liam Downer-Sanderson is a councillor for Fulham Town Ward on Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

“Keeping Hammersmith Bridge closed is something we may have to look at.”

Those were the words of a Labour Hammersmith and Fulham Cabinet Member at a council committee meeting on 2 February 2026. After seven years of disruption, delay and evasion, it was a moment of rare honesty.

Labour finally said out loud what many residents have long suspected. They are comfortable with the bridge staying closed to traffic permanently.

That position is wrong for Hammersmith and Fulham, wrong for London and wrong for the country.

Hammersmith Bridge was closed in 2019 after serious cracks were discovered in its foundations. The bridge is more than a century old and decades of heavy goods vehicles had taken their toll. Closure was unavoidable to prevent the risk of collapse.

The consequences were immediate and severe. Six key bus routes were diverted overnight. Emergency vehicles were forced onto longer, slower routes. Journeys to hospitals, schools and workplaces became harder, longer and more expensive. A vital transport link between Barnes, Richmond, Wimbledon, Hammersmith, Fulham and Chiswick was severed.

At that moment, the council’s task should have been obvious. Restore public transport and emergency access across the Thames as quickly and safely as possible.

Instead, Labour chose a different path.

Rather than pursuing interim or staged solutions to reopen the bridge to traffic, several of which were put forward at the time, the Labour Administration fixated on a single option. A full, gold-plated restoration costing around £250 million, with no credible timetable for reopening.

Years passed. Progress was minimal.

Recognising the scale of the problem, the Conservative Government stepped in with a pragmatic offer. To split the cost three ways between central government, Transport for London and the council. A deal was on the table. The route to reopening was clear.

Labour walked away, claiming the council could not afford it.

That argument simply does not stand up.

Because during the same period, Labour somehow found the money for something else. A brand new Town Hall. The Civic Campus project now exceeds £200 million. It was meant to be completed in 2023. It is opening three years late. And even now, Labour has allocated a further £38.5 million of capital funding in 2025/26, on top of tens of millions committed in earlier years.

This was never about affordability. It was about priorities.

Labour chose to prioritise a prestige building over restoring public transport, emergency access and everyday vehicle crossings across the Thames.

That choice tells you everything you need to know.

But the problem goes deeper than mismanagement or poor …

Two dead in shooting at South Carolina State University
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.

Two people were killed and one other injured in a shooting on Thursday night at South Carolina University. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division was still investigating the shooting as of early Friday morning, according to reports. No information has been provided about the victims or suspect as of yet.

The shooting happened at a student residential complex on South Carolina State University’s Orangeburg campus, reported ABC News. The school issued a lockdown around 9:15 p.m. and remained in place hours after the shooting. It was still in effect at the time of publication of this news story. 

Students received lockdown orders via text messages. A social media post appeared to show the orders given in a screenshot as the messages were sent out.

“SHELTER-IN-PLACE Move inside, lock doors and continue with class activities,” read the first message allegedly sent to students. “Monitor mobile devices for updates. If you are not on campus remain off site until the all clear is given.”

A second message sent appeared to inform students of the lockdown. 

“LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN Move inside, lock doors, lights out and remain out of sight,” read the message. “Monitor mobile devices for updates. If you are not on campus remain off site until the all clear is given.”

South Carolina State University canceled classes on Friday due to the shooting and announced it would provide counseling services to students, multiple sources confirmed. 

The Washington Examiner contacted the South Carolina State University Department of Public Safety early Friday morning seeking information about the shooting. However, the department declined to comment.

NINE PEOPLE DEAD AND 25 INJURED IN SCHOOL SHOOTING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) called for prayers on Thursday night after the shooting. 

“Stop what you’re doing and pray,” Mace posted on X.  “South Carolina State University is on lockdown tonight following reports of a possible shooting incident.”

“Join us in prayer for the students, staff and their families,” she said. “God bless our brave law enforcement responding tonight.”

Conor Boyle: If we want Britain to be better, we need a radically different Civil Service
We're watching the same failure loop.

Conor Boyle is a young conservative and unionist from Northern Ireland, an Oxford graduate, and now works in the financial services sector.

Civil service reform used to be a topic reserved for genuine political anoraks, and A-Level politics teachers, but if we want the country to succeed, it’s going to have to become an issue on all our lips.

The permanent system of government in the United Kingdom is often heralded as a model of good administration.

We’re told that the British model is the ‘Rolls Royce” Civil Service, capable of governing a vast global Empire and achieving some heroic feats. This is all very much in the past. And the issues with today’s civil service are the major roadblocks to a building a more successful, prosperous, efficient Britain. The are, to my mind, two serious problems. The first is the mentality and culture of our bureaucracy, and the second is the inability to do anything about it.

On the civil service themselves, without being impolite to our public servants, but I highly doubt many of the current crop would have made it in the days when Wellington or Disraeli were running the British Government. I have heard commentators from Tony Young to Dominic Cummings lay the decline in calibre of our public servants at the feet of the push to remove the aristocracy (who they argue felt a mitral burden of duty and service to the country) in favour of a merit-based system unveiled after the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms.

I’m not sure how much there is to this theory, I don’t propose to explore it further. My initial gripe is that, at the moment, we don’t have a meritocratic civil service, and culture turns away good, able, energetic young people before they reach senior positions. This is undoubtedly true. Seventy years ago, let’s say, the top graduates of our great universities would bite your hand off for a job in the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, and many more government departments and agencies alike.

While may talented youngsters are, of course, still applying to become diplomats and what-not, it is no longer the case that the civil service attracts talent on a scale even close to the private sector. Consider that, a century ago, the type of young person being recruited for the likes of Stripe or SpaceX, seen a career in the Home Civil Service as having a greater level attractiveness to a private venture.

Now, it’s not even close.

Never-mind the super and futuristic companies mentioned above, the Civil Service can’t even compete with the relatively run-of-the-mill private sector jobs in London and the South-east. Part of this is money, of course (although, not if you subscribe to the argument about aristocrats and their love of service) but it’s also something deeper; the feeling that you’ll achieve …

David Rose: Are those working on an Islamophobia definition too close to the subject?
Temporary powers never stay temporary.

David Rose is Policy and Research Director of the Free Speech Union.

 The Free Speech Union has long been concerned that the Government’s plan to issue an official definition of Islamophobia – or ‘anti-Muslim hostility’, as leaks suggest it has been re-named – will, if adopted, gravely threaten freedom of expression.

Announcing her appointment of a five person “Working Group” tasked to produce it in February last year, the then-Communities Secretary Angela Rayner insisted it would be non-statutory, and hence “compatible” with free speech rights. Our Director, Lord Young, disagreed, arguing it would lead to self-censorship and the restriction of lawful discourse by both private and public bodies. He also pointed out that discrimination and hate crimes against Muslims are already sanctioned by the civil and criminal law. Any definition would thus either be pointless, or it would threaten freedom of speech.

Such a definition is a longstanding demand made by Islamist organisations with which successive UK governments have had a policy of non-engagement, such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), thanks to the extremist views expressed by some of their leaders, such as support for Hamas and other militant groups.

However, as I point out in Anti-Free Speech Hostility: The Islamist Links of the Government’s Working Group on Islamophobia, an investigative FSU briefing published today, it turns out that all the Working Group members have had close links to Islamist individuals or organisations, including the Group’s Chair, the former Tory attorney-general Dominic Grieve KC.

In a letter to Angela Rayner in June, Young raised a further, worrisome issue: that although Rayner claimed that the Group had been chosen to reflect  “a wide range of perspectives”, four of its members had already expressed strong support for an earlier definition, that issued by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims in 2018. Its somewhat indigestible text  – that Islamophobia is “rooted in racism and a type of racism that targets expressions of  or perceived Muslimness” – was widely condemned by liberal and feminist Muslims, who said it would be weaponised by authoritarians to prevent both criticism of Islam and the highlighting of issues such as the disproportionately Muslim heritage of members of child sex grooming gangs. No one on Rayner’s Group shares that view.

Grieve, the only member of the Group who is not a Muslim, wrote a supportive Foreword to the APPG’s 2018 report. In coming to favour an official definition, he appears to have changed his views to a significant extent, although he denies this.

Yet until 2013, Grieve made a series of strong statements about Muslims’ religious and political attitudes, …