United Kingdom

Starmer waged war on our human rights, aided a genocide and has destroyed Labour's credibility – don't let the door hit you on the way out

It is frankly an appalling and frightening scene. Video footage has been circulating on social media of a bare-chested man with a blade on the day he allegedly attacked five people in Edinburgh. “I’m protecting the country,” he is heard shouting in the video.

It reportedly began near a mosque on Friday evening, and the video footage shows him appearing to carry a weapon and battering the door of a pizzeria. The man has been arrested and charged, and counter-terrorism officers have joined Police Scotland’s investigation. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, posted on X that it “appears to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred” but that is pretty much all he has done. In total, 53 words have gone up on X from the Prime Minister, and the story, which has left the British Muslim community in shock, is barely being covered by the media in any prominent way.

It is a stark difference to what we saw less than two months ago, on April 29, when two Jewish men were stabbed in broad daylight in Golders Green, London. An emergency Cobra meeting was convened that same day and the terror threat level was upgraded. The Prime Minister and King Charles visited the scene. The attack ran across nearly every front page in the country.

By the time Sir Keir delivered his statement from Downing Street, it was not just a tweet but an address: a list of promises — visible police presence, investment in Jewish security to the tune of £25 million — built on a passage of real moral force.

There has been no Cobra meeting. There has been a short post on X from the Prime Minister. As of this weekend, not a single newspaper outside Scotland has carried the Edinburgh attacks on its front page. The government machinery that can move within a few hours has remained largely stationary.

The info on heat stroke and sunburn may also be helpful.

Stay safe out there, everyone!

From north-east Scotland to Romford, London, what do those who spoke to the Guardian during the referendum campaign make of how it all panned out?

Alexander III discovered that pogroms were a useful tool to deflect anger away from himself and the establishment and protect the old order. Musk and his friends are doing something subtly different: channelling fear of immigrants into rage against the establishment. Unlike the tsar, Musk doesn’t want to preserve the old order. He’s part of a Silicon Valley movement that wants to replace it.

It is useful to be aware of this. But those who want to preserve our imperfect system, where power and sovereignty rest with democratic nation states, not sovereign individuals, would do well to focus less on incendiary tweets. They should look to the real causes of unrest, the gaping chasm of wealth inequality, and figure out how to fix it.

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Police Scotland said a man was charged after a series of attacks in Edinburgh on Friday night that are being treated as potential anti-Muslim hate crimes. Counter-terrorism officers were brought in to investigate the attacks in which five people were injured.

A 36-year-old white Scottish man was arrested on Friday. The force added late on Saturday night: “A 36-year-old man has been charged in connection with a number of incidents which took place in Edinburgh on Friday, 19 June, 2026. A report has been submitted to the Procurator Fiscal, and the individual will appear at court in due course."

Posts on social media appeared to show a shirtless man carrying a long weapon roaming a street and battering a restaurant door in the Scottish capital. Another video appeared to show the same man on the ground shouting about “protecting the country” while being held by a police officer.

Police said that five men, two aged 22, and others aged 24, 27 and 39, sustained a range of injuries and three needed hospital treatment though none of the injuries were life-threatening.

Archived

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Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia and Iran have all been blamed for targeting critics and dissidents living in the UK in the past decade, and linked to incidents involving physical assaults, attempted kidnap, stabbings and an acid attack.

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State-threat investigations run by MI5 jumped by 48% in a year, and there have been more than 20 threat-to-life cases relating to Iran since 2022.

This week, arson attacks on properties connected to Keir Starmer in May 2025 were linked to Russia. Two men were also jailed on Thursday for surveilling Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigners living in the UK on behalf of China through a “shadow policing” operation.

Suddenly, say parliamentarians and lawyers, the UK has become a “hunting ground for authoritarian regimes”.

From a topic consigned to spy novels, such state-targeting is becoming commonplace, leaving large numbers of individuals who had sought sanctuary in the UK in fear of their lives.

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The UK overhauled its legislation with the 2023 National Security Act, including further offences around espionage, sabotage and foreign interference, but it still lacks a clear strategy for dealing with the problem, says Lord Alton, chair of the Joint Committee of Human Rights (JCHR). There is also no accurate data on the number of attacks taking place.

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Roshaan Khattak, an exiled Pakistani activist and former researcher at Cambridge University, says he has faced intimidation and threats he believes have come from Pakistani-linked state actors as a result of his advocacy on highlighting human rights abuses in Balochistan, a region in south-west Pakistan that has sought independence for decades.

In November 2025, Khattak says he received a message on Instagram saying, “we had warned you to stop criticising us on international platforms” and “stop playing into hands of enemies or else you will be killed no matter where you are”.

The message also included details of Pakistan mobile numbers belonging to him and his father, and his Pakistan passport and ID card. “Where are you going to run?” the message on Instagram said. “Don’t forget even Cambridge and UK is not safe,” it added. “Don’t be stupid.”

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Alicia Kearns, Conservative MP and former chair of the foreign affairs committee, accuses the Labour government of “rewarding one of the states most responsible” for the issue by granting the Chinese Communist party, a new embassy in London “despite their illegal campaign of repression” on Hongkongers in the UK.

As well as this week’s China spy case, in the past Hong Kong protesters have also allegedly been attacked in the UK by Chinese activists.

“Hostile dictatorships are increasingly seeking to impose their own repression on British shores. There is no acceptable level of transnational repression. Every individual, organisation – and ultimately state – responsible, must be held to account,” says Kearns.

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Met Office Amber Extreme Heat Warnings have been issued from Monday through to Thursday with temperatures widely exceeding 35°C.