Outweighing The Cost?

Keir Starmer asked where he could best help Labour’s electoral campaign this week. He is now in Armenia. There, he is begging that Britain be allowed to pitch in to a £78 billion “loan” to Ukraine, over and above the three billion pounds that we had already pledged to pay it every year for the next hundred years, three hundred billion pounds in total. On the day that Starmer signed up to that, his Government’s official consultation on the predetermined conclusion of three billion pounds in cuts to disability benefits was found by the High Court to have been misleading and unlawful. This time, the context is the dismissal of the pensions triple lock as “unaffordable” by the only British member of Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace.

Ursula von der Leyen is pushing for military decisions to be made by Qualified Majority Voting, before possible election results in several countries made it possible for Péter Magyar to make good his promise that the next President of the European Commission would be Viktor Orbán. Lucky old Germany, to be losing at least some of the troops Commanded-in-Chief by Trump, and with them quite possibly the medium-range ballistic missiles with Trump’s finger on their button. But it is going to be getting this instead, and Starmer wants the same for Britain, except not instead. Starmer wants a lot of things for Britain.

The stocks are sold, the Press is squared, the middle class is quite prepared for the only thing even worse than being back in the EU, namely being bound by its rules without having so much as the tiniest say over their content. We are to be a colony, a satrapy, a vassal state, back in the Customs Union and in Margaret Thatcher’s Single Market. If Switzerland is indeed to be the model, then we are even going to be joining the Schengen Area. There will of course be no referendum. We are ruled by people to whom the vote is a nice thing to have, but who got their way by other means every day, so they did not really need it. If 60 per cent of the laws to which they were subject were made without the formal participation of their elected representatives, well, those were still going to be the laws that they themselves wanted, because that was how the world worked. We have been telling you this forever.

And what are we offered instead? Entertaining though it is that this policy has been announced on the same day as the death of Shirley Porter, what are the Greens saying when they accuse Reform UK of “threatening” to locate migrant detention centres in their constituencies and in their council areas? And what about, for example, the 10,578 Reform voters in the Green seat of Gorton and Denton? What would they have done to be so “punished”? Never having claimed to be a trade unionist, Malcolm Offord says that he would donate his Holyrood salary to something that was rather amusingly called the Badenoch Trust. But that charity has precisely two trustees, namely Lord Offord himself since its registration in 2007, and only since 2021 his PA at his private equity company. Last year, that Trust’s total income was £1252. The basic annual salary for a Member of the Scottish Parliament is £77,711. Out of the public purse, Offord’s election would increase sixty-twofold the income of a charity that he had completely controlled for the whole of its existence. And then there is the Reform candidate at East Kilbride, an anti-vax doctor called Tim Kelly, who has resigned from the party far too late to be taken off the ballot paper, and who says that he will sit as an Independent if elected.

Appreciate More Clarity

Kate Knowles writes:

Barbara Holland, 76, and Raghib Ahsan, 79, live in a neat terrace in Handsworth overlooking the park. When I visit, they are both wearing house slippers and colourfully patterned sweaters. Ahsan ushers me into the living room then briskly heads to the kitchen to make coffee while Holland joins me on the squishy sofa. She reaches for a large folder.

It is one of many that they have lugged down from the office upstairs, where they keep reams of meticulously organised paperwork. Much of it is left over from their careers — Raghib is a solicitor and Barbara is a retired teacher and play worker. But several files hold documents relating to a notorious case of vote-rigging that shook Birmingham in the summer of 2004. It is known in Birmingham as “the banana republic” trial, a reference to the memorable phrase used by the judge.

Back then, Ahsan was secretary of a small party called the People’s Justice Party (PJP). The PJP drew considerable support from the Kashmiri community in north and east inner-city Birmingham. He had served as a Labour councillor for Sparkhill in the 1990s before parting ways with the party. In 2003, an employment tribunal ruled that Labour had discriminated against him in not selecting him as a candidate from 1997-2000. Holland was, and remains, a member of the Labour Party.

When the PJP took three Labour councillors in Bordesley Green to election court in 2005, Holland’s habit of meticulous record-keeping proved crucial in securing their win. Justice Richard Mawrey KC wrote in his judgment of the case that he placed “considerable reliance” on her documentation. Mawrey found “widespread fraud” in the ward’s 2004 election and banned three Labour councillors from office for five years (as well as three from the neighbouring ward of Aston, although one was later cleared of personal guilt). Much of the case turned on voter signatures that didn’t match. Mawrey found that in Bordesley Green more than 1,600 votes had been tainted because the signature on the application to vote by post did not match the signature on the declaration of identity that each voter completed to submit their ballot.

As The Dispatch exclusively reported yesterday, evidence presented at that trial included postal-vote documentation submitted by the now-home secretary Shabana Mahmood. Two of her forms bore strikingly different signatures, but a spokesperson for Mahmood said “she signed both of these documents, which are clearly in her own handwriting.”

When we first approached Mahmood about this story on Friday, her special adviser explained the discrepancy by saying that Mahmood used to use two different signatures. We have repeatedly asked why she would have used a different signature in a situation like this, where the declaration of identity document exists to authenticate that the right voter is returning the ballot, but we haven’t received a response.

Barbara with her ‘schedule’. Photo: The Dispatch.

In her living room, Holland carefully opens the “schedule”, her comprehensive database of evidence used in the trial. At the time, she pored over the clues within to develop her hypothesis about what really happened with the mismatching Mahmood signatures. To this day, she believes she knows the truth.

“We could see that there had been a massive fraud, and the decision of the judge brought that out when it did eventually come,” she says, referring to the case as a whole. But, to her mind, there is still more to be uncovered.

The avalanche

In 2004, the drama began before anyone had voted. Labour was facing a backlash — particularly in Muslim communities — because of Tony Blair’s decision to join the US invasion of Iraq the previous year. Three years earlier, the government had introduced new legislation that made voting by post much easier with the aim of improving voter turn-out in general. Now, you didn’t need a strong reason such as being housebound to vote by post — you could simply opt in.

Thinking that more people might vote if they didn’t have to haul themselves down to their local polling station, Labour activists set about encouraging them to apply for postal ballots. Applications surged. More than 70,000 postal ballots were issued in Birmingham, compared to 28,000 the previous year. The bureaucracy, which hadn’t been designed to handle this avalanche, creaked. Two wards became the focal point of what would become a major scandal: Aston and Bordesley Green.

In Aston, the Liberal Democrats became suspicious that the Labour candidates and their agents were rigging votes, as were the PJP of Labour in Bordesley Green. Here, there had been a 900% increase in postal ballot applications — up from 900 the year before to 8,647. There were 18,000 people who were registered to vote in the ward.

The police investigated complaints by postal workers that they had been threatened and bribed to hand over their sacks of ballot papers to campaigners. The tension peaked the night before the election, when officers had to break up a colossal street fight in Small Heath between 200 supporters of Labour’s Shah Jahan and the PJP’s Shaukat Ali Khan. The PJP group accused Labour campaigners of cheating, while the Labour supporters alleged intimidation.

On election day, 10 June 2004, the PJP were watching closely for signs of tampering. “The ballots were Tipp-Exed,” says Ahsan, one of the many forms of fraud that were later exposed at trial.

When the results came in and all three Labour candidates in Bordesley Green won, he and other PJP members were convinced they were the victims of electoral theft. For weeks afterwards, they traipsed the neighbourhood knocking doors and collecting around 260 witness statements from voters.

Raghib and Barbara at home in Handsworth. Photo: The Dispatch.

“I remember people being very angry,” Ahsan recalls. The PJP workers met residents who had gone to the polling station only to be told they had already voted. Some said they had received ballot papers in the post despite not applying for them, then had strangers knock on the door to collect them. One woman found that someone else had cast a vote for her and that her signature was given as a witness for another voter in her house. Chaos reigned.

The PJP and their supporters and solicitors brought a petition — a written application requesting court action — against the victorious Labour councillors. They didn’t know then that they were initiating one of the most serious election fraud cases in Britain in a century.

Voting with the wrong ballot

When the High Court ordered a special election trial in November 2004, Birmingham city council released the Bordesley Green postal-vote documents for the petitioners to photocopy so that they could build their case. The documents included the list of the 7,000 voters in Bordesley Green who had cast their ballots by post – and next to each name was the number of the ballot the voter had used.

The council allowed the petitioners to review the actual ballots – on which voters had cast their vote – in the presence of scrutineers. They did not make them available for copying. The council did allow the petitioners to copy two other forms that each voter had to complete:

The application to vote by post: Issued by the Birmingham city council elections office, voters used this form to obtain a postal ballot. “Each person has to sign their own form,” it read. And: “It is an offence to make a false statement on this form — maximum fine £5,000.” 

The declaration of identity: After receiving and marking a postal ballot, voters used this form to submit their vote to the elections office. Each declaration and corresponding ballot paper carried the same identifying number. The declaration required two signatures: one by the voter and one by a witness.

Holland began the painstaking process of pairing up each voter’s forms. She would begin with a ballot number from the list and find the declaration bearing the same number. She then looked at the name on the declaration and found that person’s application.

When Holland examined the documents associated with ballot 554, she found two anomalies. The hand that signed “Shabana Mahmood” on the declaration of identity did not appear to be the same hand that had written “Shabana Mahmood” on the postal-ballot application. That discrepancy has been a trending topic on social media since we broke our story about it yesterday.

Shabana Mahmood’s signatures. The ballot number – 554 – appears in the lower image.

The second problem was the number. According to the list provided to the petitioners by the elections office, Shabana Mahmood had been assigned ballot number 556, not 554. But Holland held in her hands the evidence that Shabana Mahmood — then 24 years old and training in London to be a barrister — had voted using ballot 554.

Holland then found the paperwork for ballot 556. The corresponding declaration of identity had apparently been completed by Shabana’s brother (whose full name The Dispatch is withholding at the request of the Home Office on the grounds that the brother is not a public figure). He had voted using the ballot assigned to Shabana.

What accounts for this mix-up? It’s hard to say. The spokesperson for Shabana Mahmood told us: “We have been presented with no evidence of this claim. If true, it appears to be an administrative error. This kind of administrative error occurred routinely in the administration of postal votes during this period.”

Holland looked closely at the signatures on the brother’s application and his declaration and determined his was a borderline case. At the time, she erred on the side of caution and recorded them as matching. Looking at them today, Holland believes that they do not match.

Holland also reviewed the postal-vote documentation for Shabana’s sister, whom we are also not naming in full. The sister had used the ballot assigned to her – unlike Shabana and their brother – but the discrepancy in the signatures on the application and declaration was pronounced. Holland recorded them as not matching, as she had done with Shabana’s signatures.

Something else was curious about the applications, the form needed to obtain a postal ballot. The signatures of the two sisters, in particular, looked as though they had been written by the same person. Both were signed on the same date: 19 April 2003. Here they are, with the redaction of the sister’s first name:

The signature on Shabana Mahmood’s postal-vote application (top) and her sister’s (bottom).

“We think the same person in the household made all three applications on the same date,” Holland says.

Agent and witness

The most politically active member of the household was Mahmood Ahmed, Shabana’s father. When it came time for the three children to vote, Ahmed witnessed and signed each of their declarations of identity.

He was also the election agent for the three Labour councillors in Bordesley Green whom Mawrey disqualified after he found that “there were corrupt and illegal practices committed by the Labour Party Respondents and their agents” that likely affected the outcome of the election. Ahmed went on to become the chair of Birmingham Labour.

The spokesperson for Shabana Mahmood said: “False allegations that her father signed these documents were dismissed, with no adverse finding, over twenty years ago.” Mawrey’s lengthy judgment makes no mention of Mahmood Ahmed or the Mahmood family signatures, and it’s unclear what the spokesperson means when they say that the allegations were dismissed.

These aren’t the only questions that remain outstanding. Our reporting in the last few days has linked the home secretary to a major vote-rigging scandal that took place in two of the wards she now represents in parliament. Her special adviser Joshua Williams responded to our questions about the case by threatening us with lawsuits in defamation and privacy as well as a high court injunction to prevent us publishing.

Williams may have thought these threats would suppress the story, but in fact they seem to have amplified it. We would still like to know if the home secretary approved the menacing letter sent by her special adviser on Friday night, which various leading journalists have described as “extraordinary” and highly unusual.

Dispatch readers will want to know why Shabana Mahmood used two different signatures on these crucial documents, as her adviser claims, and when it was that she first became aware of the electoral scandal engulfing three local councillors for whom her father was Labour’s election agent.

Britain goes to the polls on Thursday, with local elections taking place in Birmingham and across the country. Voters might appreciate more clarity from their home secretary before that.

Pothole Pros?

Trevor Phillips thinks that he is the Conscience of the Nation, yet his best man was Peter Mandelson, whose description of Jeffrey Epstein as his own “best pal” must have cut Phillips to the bone. Still, Zack Polanski had already sold out by apologising to Mark Rowley, so that is the end of him if you ever had a beginning of him. We told you so.

But at least Polanski did not cry off interrogation by the mighty Laura Kuenssberg. That was left to a man to whom she had never directed a difficult question, but who seems to have expected one this time. First Nigel Farage’s undeclared five million pounds, and now the JCB Pothole Pro, which is clearly a topnotch product from its use by councils of all colours, but which is namechecked on the election leaflets only of the party to which JCB had given £200,000. Welcome to scrutiny. And who knew that Reform UK was such a cheap date? Christopher Harborne must be kicking himself.

Farage could kick, if he could be bothered. There is ball at his feet, and here it is, Kemi Badenoch telling LBC that she was “born in a country that was 50 per cent Muslim”, even though her British citizenship depended on her having been born in the United Kingdom before her heroine, Margaret Thatcher, had abolished birthright citizenship. Badenoch also failed to mention that her Muslim grandmother had converted to Christianity. And even as, on the other side, the granddaughter of a Methodist minister, Badenoch claims to have taken part in Islamic Friday prayers, “because that was what happened there when I was in school.” Really? Like a lot of churchgoers in this country these days, I know Nigerian Christians, and again I ask, “Really?”

Untold? More Like Unhinged

Barking mad stuff about Opus Dei from the Financial Times. People who say this sort of thing are like people who say wild things about the Jesuits. In either case, they have clearly never met them. But in both cases, take them at their word. Be the Catholic that both sides of the Epstein Class think that you already are.

Falling On Its Face

Jessica Murray and Robert Booth write:

Britain’s biometrics watchdogs have warned that national oversight of AI-powered face scanning to catch criminals is lagging far behind the technology’s rapid growth.

With the Metropolitan police almost doubling the number of faces they scan in London over the past 12 months and a rising use of the technology by retailers in the UK, Prof William Webster, the biometrics commissioner for England and Wales, said the “slow pace of legislation was trying to catch up with the real world” and “the horse had gone before the cart”.

Dr Brian Plastow, who holds the same role in Scotland, warned the technology was “nowhere near as effective as the police claim it is” and said there was a “patchwork legal framework” throughout the UK. He said in England and Wales, police were “really just marking their own homework”.

The watchdogs said new laws were needed to govern when and how police forces used live facial recognition technology, with a new regulator to clamp down on misuse.

Several bodies have oversight of the technology, including the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

The Home Office is considering a new legal framework for the technology as it also plans to introduce nationally what it calls “the biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching”.

Members of the public wrongly labelled as suspected criminals by shops using AI cameras said there was no accountability or recourse to complain. They said the system had left them feeling “guilty until proven innocent”.

They described the ICO, which is responsible for monitoring facial recognition tech and the biometric data it uses, as “toothless” and unresponsive.

British police forces and high street retailers claim the technology makes streets safer, but others criticise it as Big Brother-style mass surveillance, with risks for civil liberties and data privacy.

So far this year the Met has scanned more than 1.7 million faces in London hunting for suspects on watchlists, up 87% on the same period in 2025.

It has also emerged:

• An independent audit of the Met’s use of facial recognition technology (FRT) has been indefinitely postponed after the police requested delays.
• Polling shows 57% of people believe the systems are “another step towards turning the UK into a surveillance society”. 
• A whistleblower claimed shop-based face-scanning systems had sometimes been misused by shop or security staff “maliciously” adding members of the public to watchlists.

Webster said: “We could be talking three years, at a minimum, before regulation is in place and active. And we already have a rollout of live face recognition in a dozen different police forces.

“The technology is becoming cheaper and cheaper, and in time we will see it everywhere, including in the static surveillance camera network.”

In February, The Guardian revealed how police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face-scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.

Several other people have told The Guardian about the impact of being misidentified by face-scanning software increasingly used by retailers to fight shoplifting.

Further concern about limited scrutiny of the fast-developing technology has been caused by the postponement of the ICO’s planned audit of the Met’s use of AI-powered face scanning to find wanted criminals.

The ICO, which is the UK’s data regulator, had scheduled the investigation for October last year. But the Met asked for it to be pushed back and it is no longer certain it will go ahead, according to emails obtained by The Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

They show the Met cited as reasons for delay its need to handle a legal challenge to its face-scanning policy, about which a court ruled in its favour last week, officers taking Christmas leave and the burden of policing new year festivities.

The ICO accepted its request and the investigation is no longer certain to go ahead, prompting claims the regulator is being “insufficiently aggressive”.

David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary and a civil liberties campaigner, said: “[FRT] is a massive development with all sorts of implications. The ICO should be the defender of the ordinary citizen and should be far more aggressive in what it does.”

The ICO and the Met said the timing of the judicial review meant it was appropriate to postpone the proposed audit.

The Met said: “We have always been transparent about our use of facial recognition technology and welcome independent scrutiny.” The ICO said it was reviewing whether the audit was rescheduled.

Polling of 2,000 adults last month by Opinium found that nearly a third opposed the use of facial recognition by retailers. In addition, 62% worried about the technology getting people into trouble for things they had not done, according to the poll, commissioned by Face Int, a biometric security company.

Face-scanning software is being increasingly used by retail chains to target shoplifters and antisocial and violent behaviour in stores. Sainsbury’s, Budgens and Sports Direct are among the chains using Facewatch in some shops.

The technology analyses CCTV footage and compares faces against a private database of known offenders, alerting staff when a match is made.

Big Brother Watch, a civil liberties campaign group, said it had been contacted by 21 people during the past year who believed they had been wrongly placed on watchlists or misidentified.

Ian Clayton, a retired health and safety professional from Chester, was asked to leave Home Bargains in February after being told he had been flagged on a facial recognition system as a thief. He later found out he had been wrongly associated with a shoplifter he had happened to stand next to on a previous visit.

“It feels very Orwellian,” he said. “We’re constantly being recorded and put on these systems but should we be there? It feels like spying without cause. It left me feeling vulnerable, exposed and a little bit helpless. I’m hyper-aware of cameras now.”

The same thing happened to Warren Rajah, a data strategist in south London, on a visit to Sainsbury’s. “This is a civil rights issue that we are slow-waltzing into,” he said. “We know cameras cannot pick up features of people that have darker features with as much accuracy.”

Meanwhile, a whistleblower has claimed the systems have sometimes been misused by shop or security staff “maliciously” adding members of the public to watchlists even though they have not been caught doing anything wrong.

Paul Fyfe, a former security guard who worked using Facewatch cameras in Stockton-on-Tees until last September, said in some cases staff had tagged members of the public on watchlists even when they had not been caught shoplifting or committing violence.

“If you’ve got someone there that you’re pissed off with, that you can’t catch or you’re getting chew off [being hassled] or they are threatening you, the easiest way to harm them is to upload them on the system,” he said. “[On] 10 to 15 occasions, I know people have been tagged for malicious reasons.”

The result was that security guards in other stores with the same software would be alerted whenever they entered.

Facewatch’s CEO, Nick Fisher, said: “We do not recognise the claims that the incident reporting system is being misused, including the serious allegation that individuals are being added maliciously.

“The system has been purposely designed not to allow misuse, and we have strict rules governing how the system can be used, with safeguards and controls built in. Retailers must meet clear evidential standards before submitting a record, and every submission is subject to human review before any individual is added to the database. If a submission does not meet the required standard, it is rejected and returned to the retailer.”

And Jessica Murray also writes:

When Ian Clayton, a retired health and safety professional from Chester, popped into Home Bargains one February lunchtime, he was suddenly approached by a stern-looking member of staff.

“Excuse me, can you please put everything down and leave the shop now?” she said. Clayton recalled how he was stunned, and it was only as he was briskly walked past the tills towards the exit that he stopped to ask what he had done.

“You’ve come up on our system called Facewatch as a shoplifter,” came the reply. “There’s a poster in the window.” With that, he was left outside the shop alone, with a QR code to scan and no idea what had happened.

He is one of a number of people who have spoken to The Guardian after being falsely identified as a thief by shops using Facewatch, a live facial recognition system being rolled out across the UK to clamp down on retail crime.

The company’s website claims that its system has a 99.98% accuracy rate and that last month it sent 50,288 alerts of “known offenders” to shops including B&M, Home Bargains, Sports Direct, Farm Foods and Spar, which all now use the software.

But those who have been wrongly identified and forced to leave shops, either via the technology itself or human error, say they were given no support, and did not know how to complain about their treatment or prove their innocence.

Clayton, 67, said that after he was ejected from Home Bargains he tried calling a phone number on a Facewatch poster, and was sent through to a message saying the company did not take calls and he had to send an email instead.

He was only able to get answers after submitting a subject access request – a formal request under data protection laws for personal information – that revealed he had been incorrectly associated with a shoplifting incident on a previous visit to the shop.

“It was like I was guilty until proven innocent. It’s an awful feeling. It leaves a pit in your stomach and when I look back now I can feel it again,” he said.

“It feels very Orwellian. We’re constantly being recorded and put on these systems but should we be there? It feels like spying without cause. I’m hyper aware of cameras everywhere now, I’m so aware of them.”

Home Bargains eventually issued him an apology and a £100 voucher as a “gesture of goodwill without admission”, on the condition that the details of the incident remain confidential. Clayton declined: “I just thought: ‘Really, you’re trying to buy my silence?’”

As facial recognition spreads across police forces and retail stores, UK biometrics commissioners are warning that national oversight is lagging far behind the technology’s rapid expansion.

Last year, the Home Office admitted facial recognition cameras were more likely to incorrectly identify black and Asian people than their white counterparts, and women more than men, and there have been conflicting studies on their overall accuracy.

“For me, this is a civil rights issue that we are slow-waltzing into because if you are just removed without question, your civil rights are being impacted,” he said.

“We already live in a country that has issues with racism, it’s an unavoidable issue. And we know cameras cannot pick up features of people that have darker features with as much accuracy. And this could be happening to people who are much more vulnerable than me.” 

He said he had major concerns about this technology being rolled out in police forces, as well as in the retail sector.

“Who is regulating these companies and can they be trusted with our information? And more importantly, no one has actually defined what your recourse is when something goes wrong,” he said.

After countless emails, he eventually found out he was not on the Facewatch database system and staff members had misidentified him. He was offered a £75 voucher as an apology – when he said he did not feel comfortable returning to the store, he was told to use it online.

Jennie Sanders, 48, from Birmingham, was browsing in B&M on a Saturday afternoon last year when a security guard told her she had been flagged up on the Facewatch system and he had to escort her around the store to check she was not stealing.

“I was really upset. It was in front of loads of people, and I was really embarrassed. I said I wanted to leave and he escorted me out of the shop,” she said. 

“It was scary but what was more scary was when I got home and started looking into Facewatch, I saw they share the information between loads of retailers.

“I thought: ‘I’m going to be treated like a shoplifter in every store. I’m not going to be able to do any shopping in person ever again.’”

She was told she had to send a copy of her passport to Facewatch to prove her identity before she could find out that she was on the system for stealing a bottle of wine from B&M, which she said never happened.

B&M told her it no longer had any evidence, including CCTV footage from the day, so she was taken off the system and offered a £25 voucher.

“I took a couple of days off work, I was absolutely beside myself. Why was I on a database of criminals without my knowledge?” she said. “I’m never going into B&M again. I try to stay away from places with cameras at all – it has really affected me.”  Sanders said she complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the formal watchdog monitoring how personal information is being used in facial recognition technology, but seven months later she had yet to hear back.

She added: “We’re told to raise complaints and send all correspondence to the information commissioner, but they don’t get back to you. What the hell is happening with any sort of response to the victims of this?”

Rajah had also considered complaining to the ICO, but could find no information on how to do so.

“They are so toothless,” he said. “And this issue has been well reported, and they haven’t publicised a formal complaints process. Where’s that information? How can you complain when there are no avenues to follow?”

A Sainsbury’s spokesperson said: “We have sincerely apologised to Mr Rajah for his experience in our Elephant and Castle store. This was not an issue with the facial recognition technology in use but a case of the wrong person being approached in store.

“The Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate and all matches are reviewed by trained managers, with additional training provided after this incident to ensure our safeguards are consistently followed.”

Nick Fisher, the chief executive of Facewatch, said: “We are aware of the matters referenced and in each case, we acted promptly once they contacted the Facewatch data protection team.

“These cases relate to human error in the way processes were carried out in-store, rather than any failure of Facewatch’s technology. We are sorry these individuals experienced being challenged while shopping and understand why this would have been upsetting.

“These three errors are extremely rare cases when viewed in the context of the more than 500,000 alerts we send to retailers each year, but we recognise that any mistake is upsetting for the individual concerned. The system is designed to support, not replace, human decision-making.”

A spokesperson for the ICO said: “We recognise the harm and upset that can be caused by misidentification. For this reason, use of facial recognition technology must strictly comply with data protection law and be handled with care and transparency.

“If someone has concerns about how their data has been collected, used, or shared, and those concerns cannot be resolved with the retailer directly, they have the right to raise a complaint with us.

“We also continue to actively regulate in this area and will be publishing further retail‑focused guidance to support retailers in understanding and meeting their data protection obligations, while ensuring the public is properly protected.”

Home Bargains and B&M declined to comment.

Continuing Patterns of Trauma

Thomas Colsy writes:

A major Swedish study has found that nearly all individuals who have been filmed for commercial pornography reported severe childhood abuse, with 88 per cent experiencing sexual abuse as children, adding weight to concerns that many participants in the adult industry may be continuing patterns of trauma rather than exercising fully free choice.

The research, titled “The experience of individuals filmed for pornography production: a history of continuous polyvictimisation and ongoing mental health challenges”, was published in 2025 in the Nordic Journal of Psychiatry by Meghan Donevan, Linda S Jonsson and Carl Göran Svedin. It examined the experiences of 120 adults, the vast majority of them women, who had appeared in pornography. Nearly all participants, 95.8 per cent, had suffered at least one form of childhood abuse, including sexual abuse reported by 88.3 per cent, psychological abuse by 90 per cent and physical abuse by around 79 per cent. Roughly one-third had been placed in foster care or institutionalised during childhood.

The consequences extended into their time in pornography production itself. Participants reported high levels of further abuse, including verbal abuse in 87 per cent of cases and rape in 65 per cent of cases. Mental health outcomes were particularly stark: 84 per cent showed clinically significant symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, 60 per cent had significant dissociative symptoms, 69 per cent had attempted suicide and 80 per cent had received at least one mental health diagnosis. The authors described a pattern of continuous polyvictimisation and called for stronger mental health support and legal reforms to better protect vulnerable people in the industry.

These findings align with a broader body of research linking early trauma to later involvement in prostitution and pornography. Multiple earlier studies have documented elevated rates of childhood sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress among women in the sex trade, suggesting that what is often presented as autonomous adult choice can instead reflect the long shadow of prior victimisation.

The Swedish data has added fuel to public debate over extreme content on platforms such as OnlyFans. Performers including Tiffany Wisconsin, also known as Tiffany Goodtime, have drawn attention after participating in high-risk “challenges”. Following one widely publicised scene involving multiple men, she underwent reconstructive anal surgery and later filmed herself from her hospital bed discussing her recovery while reassuring followers she would soon return to producing content. Similarly, the British creator Bonnie Blue, whose real name is Tia Billinger, has gained a large following and significant earnings while using promotional language that invites men to “destroy” her and “rearrange my insides”, presenting such statements as part of an empowered brand.

In an April article in The Critic titled “The limits of choice”, Josephine Bartosch argued that society sometimes knows better than individuals who are harming themselves. She pointed out that government bodies and regulators continue to consult participants in the sex industry as if they were neutral stakeholders, despite evidence of widespread prior trauma and clear financial incentives to downplay harm. Bartosch contended that consent, while important, is a flimsy shield when deep psychological vulnerability, past abuse or economic pressure is involved, and that normalising extreme acts as liberation ultimately reshapes societal standards around sex and violence.

Defenders of the industry maintain that adult performers are capable of making their own decisions and that criticism or regulation does more harm by increasing stigma. Yet the Swedish study, alongside visible cases of physical injury and public affirmations of extreme practices, has intensified questions about where the boundary lies between personal autonomy and the need for societal protection against self-harm and exploitation.

The full study is publicly available through the Nordic Journal of Psychiatry.

And Clement Harrold writes:

During my first year of graduate studies at Notre Dame, the university introduced Grubhub robots to its campus. The move encapsulated so much of the moral schizophrenia that afflicts this great academic institution.

On the one hand, students are endlessly informed – in school-wide emails, in bulletin boards, in homilies – that the university cares about their physical, mental and spiritual health. Yet this messaging is belied by the fact that the administration simultaneously chooses to sully its beautiful campus with ugly bots whose sole purpose is to spare students the immense inconvenience of having to take a short walk to collect their fast food.

If the university were actually sincere about supporting the health of its students, it would recognise that it is a good thing to be forced to step away from your laptop and get some sunlight and exercise before tucking into your Chick-fil-A sandwich. This kind of logic used to be obvious to reasonable people – but no longer, apparently, at Notre Dame.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the slavish defenders of the robots attempt to justify their existence on the grounds that a student might be sick, or disabled, or… lazy and overweight. It never seems to occur to these apologists to ask themselves what it says about Notre Dame as a Catholic community if students with sickness or disability feel so isolated that their only recourse is to receive their dinner from an insentient droid.

In the absence of any plausible justification for the robots’ presence on campus, one is forced to conclude that the only reason Notre Dame permits it is so that it can benefit financially from feeding the unhealthy habits of its student body. Sure, the desperately shy and lonely freshman now has no reason to leave his dorm room for anything other than class, but apparently that is acceptable as long as the people at the Golden Dome can make a quick buck. And if you thought a $20 billion endowment would be enough to dissuade them from resorting to such crass profiteering, you would be mistaken.

This is not the only instance of Notre Dame pursuing policies that directly contradict its stated desire to care for its students. On April 14, the university finally agreed to implement a pornography filter for its campus Wi-Fi following years of lobbying from different student groups. At long last, Our Lady’s University can take pride in achieving the moral clarity of McDonald’s and Starbucks.

Except, it cannot even do that. Because whereas McDonald’s, Starbucks and countless other Fortune 500 companies have the sense to block all sexually explicit content on the simple basis that ‘this content is disgusting and you should not be consuming it in our restaurants’, for Notre Dame this was a step too far. And so the Wi-Fi filter was established on a purely optional basis, leaving students to decide for themselves whether they wish to use the university’s broadband to access the ocean of moral filth that exists online.

What could possibly justify such a spineless policy? One argument is that open access to pornography is part and parcel of academic freedom. The proponents of this view seem to purposefully ignore the fact that the kinds of ‘scholars’ who are using hardcore porn for research purposes are almost always creepy weirdos who should not be employed at a Catholic university. But even if they have good intentions, there is no reason for their research to negatively affect the entire student body.

Another argument is of the defeatist type, which says that there is no point in blocking porn because students will still access it over mobile data. The objection undermines itself: if the porn filter makes no difference, then why are you so opposed to it? But in fact, experience shows that such measures do make a difference.

A key element in overcoming an addiction is to make the drug less convenient to access. There would, moreover, be a profound pedagogical value in the university choosing to block all porn. Lex magistra vitae. The law is a teacher, and when porn is prohibited over the communal Wi-Fi students are consciously and subconsciously reminded that this content is both gravely evil and socially unacceptable.

At the end of the day, all of the attempted justifications for keeping porn accessible stem from the same place: they wilfully or naively ignore just how depraved the porn industry actually is. Abortion, divorce, child trafficking, gender dysphoria and atheism are all its hideous legacy. In a just society, the corporate bosses at PornHub would not just be ostracised; they would be rounded up and sentenced to life in jail for crimes against humanity.

Scripture tells us that God will hold teachers and priests especially accountable for how they have looked after those under their care. The president and board of trustees at Notre Dame should take this to heart when they choose to stand by the current policy. Like all of us, they will one day stand before the judgement seat of the One who said it would be better to be cast into the sea with a millstone around one’s neck than to cause one of His little ones to stumble.

On that fateful day, all those who have been complicit in the spread of pornography will be confronted with the victims whom they failed to protect. The little boy robbed of innocence in what should have been his happiest years. The actress who is exploited and abused from a young age. The husband who despairs of ever finding healing and whose marriage has fallen apart. The wife whose sense of self-worth is permanently shattered. The child in the womb who is cruelly murdered as a result of a promiscuous culture that treats persons as objects.

Internet porn has ravaged an entire generation – my generation – and I am fed up hearing effeminate boomers pretend otherwise. Never before in human history has a sector been so effective at normalising the most abhorrent violations of human dignity. This is the modern slave trade, dealing not only in bodies but in the millions of souls who have fallen into its snares.

In order to begin healing a culture that is awash with evil, we must begin by turning off the tap. Pornography is that tap, and it is high time for Notre Dame to get with the programme and start protecting its students.

Since there cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling, then there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. But unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. It was in 2000, under Tony Blair, that the introduction of the R18 rating effectively legalised hardcore pornography. As with the downgrading of cannabis to a Class C drug between 2004 and 2009, and as with the mercifully failed attempt to set up supercasinos while successfully permitting gambling companies to advertise on radio and television, that was what the replacement of Clause IV wrought.

Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today, both by means of drugs, and specifically among young males by means of pornography. In Ukraine, when they tore down statues of Alexander Pushkin and renamed streets that had been named after him, they legalised pornography to help pay for the war. Even before then, some people had already been taking payment to strip on camera via the “charity project” Teronlyfans, to fund the Armed Forces.

Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union. But post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform UK has picked its side. The same side as the Green Party.

This Deliberate Act

Elis Gjevori writes:

A Catholic charity has condemned Israel after its forces destroyed a convent in southern Lebanon, in what it said is a deliberate attack on a place of worship.

The French organisation L’Oeuvre d’Orient said Israeli troops demolished a convent belonging to the Salvatorian Sisters, a Greek Catholic religious order, in the village of Yaroun.

“L’Oeuvre d’Orient strongly condemns this deliberate act of destruction against a place of worship, as well as the systematic demolition of homes in southern Lebanon aimed at preventing the return of civilian populations,” the group said in a statement on Friday.

The charity said the attack forms part of a wider pattern of attacks on Christian heritage, noting that “Christian sanctuaries were also destroyed during the war in 2024, such as the Melkite churches in the villages of Yaroun and Derdghaya, both classified as part of Lebanon’s heritage”.

Images circulating in April showed an Israeli soldier using a jackhammer to desecrate a statue of Jesus on a cross in southern Lebanon, fuelling anger among Christian communities around the world.

Reports of violence against Christians have intensified across the region.

In occupied East Jerusalem, a nun was assaulted earlier this week near the Cenacle on Mount Zion. The 48-year-old researcher received medical treatment after sustaining facial injuries.

Restrictions have also extended to religious practices. Last month, Israeli police blocked the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, and other clergy from holding Palm Sunday Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before partially restoring access following international pressure.

A recent report by the Rossing Centre for Education and Dialogue documented a sharp rise in attacks on Christians, describing a “continued and expanding pattern of intimidation and aggression”.

It recorded 155 incidents in 2025, including 61 physical assaults, 52 attacks on church property, 28 cases of harassment and 14 instances of vandalised signage. The report said the figures represent only the “tip of the iceberg”.

Israel’s military said following the latest attack on Saturday that its forces damaged a “religious building” in Yaroun during operations targeting what it described as infrastructure in the area.

Israel has continued its attacks on Lebanon despite a ceasefire announced on April 17 to halt more than six weeks of its war on Lebanon.

Lebanon’s National News Agency reported on Saturday that at least 2,659 people have been killed and 8,183 wounded between March 2 and May 2 by Israeli forces.