Sam, a 24-year-old from Odisha, sought to study abroad for better job prospects. After filling out forms, he received calls from education agents offering free services to help with university applications.
On 23 June 2016, the British voter changed. Before that day, they picked a party, usually red or blue. By that morning, only two tribes mattered: remain or leave.
The home secretary's new attack on the rights of immigrants and refugees is shocking and disorienting. Shabana Mahmood wants to raise the qualification period for immigrants to achieve indefinite leave to remain in the UK from five years to 10 (and up to 20 for refugees). It looks outlandish. So does her wider assault on asylum seekers, denying them permanent refugee status even if their claims are successful.
There are people that have lived here for 40-plus years and there's never been any issues, and it's just all of a sudden we keep hearing every day about incidents involved with these pro-monarchists and their intimidation, Naghmeh Rajabi, a British-Iranian activist, said.
Every year on Remembrance Day, the bishop of London leads a public Christian act of lamentation in the open air, accompanied by hymns, Bible readings, and prayers in the name of Jesus Christ.
From dawn to dusk Muslims fast from food and distraction, with sunset being an energy-shifting moment. Programming this pause into one of the fashion industry's most tightly scheduled weeks was deliberate. As soon as I found out that fashion week would fall [now], I had to incorporate it. This collection was built around the themes of Ramadan.
Not a day passes without some overt expression of it in our national life. A crime committed by one Muslim becomes an indictment of all Muslims. A cultural practice is wrenched from context and weaponised to provoke anxiety. A theological concept is distorted to imply threat. And on the streets, and increasingly online, it can turn into violence, intimidation or exclusion directed at anyone who looks Muslim.
It's nearly 200 years since the birth of a British aristocrat who became the first Muslim member of the House of Lords. But few have heard of Lord Henry Stanley, who "defied convention and his family's wishes" when he converted to Islam in 1859, according to historian Jamie Gilham. Little remains of Stanley's letters and diaries "which is really frustrating but adds to the idea that he was a private man," he said.
The stats speak for themselves. In 2015's 'A List', out of 418 executives, 79 (19 per cent) were women and only eight (2 per cent) were BAME. Shockingly, in the second decade of the 21st century, it is still possible to go to a leading marketing or communications industry event and only see a handful of black or Asian faces in the room.
Home Office guidance says mosques should apply for security measures provided for free by the Home Office if they have experienced or feel vulnerable to hate crime, of if there has been hate crime in the area towards other places of worship or their congregants. However, it advises applicants to provide detailed evidence of incidents, such as graffiti, or police reports, saying that applications that do not include strong evidence are unlikely to be successful.
A new campaign is aiming to collect 50 objects that sum up Englishness in an effort to move the conversation away from reductive arguments over whether to hang a St George's flag or not. Supported by the Green party politician Caroline Lucas, the musician and campaigner Billy Bragg, and Kojo Koram, a law professor, the A Very English Chat campaign hopes to tackle England's growing social divisions and political polarisation.
Police have advised a high-profile Sikh activist in the UK to install security cameras at his home and reinforce door locks because of threats from Hindu nationalist elements. Paramjeet Singh Pamma, 52, said he had been visited by police and received verbal advice to increase his security due to intelligence suggesting threats to his safety. Singh Pamma said the threats were linked to the Indian government and he accused ministers in the UK of failing to take relentless transnational repression by India seriously.
Three more men have been charged over alleged plots to attack two Pakistani dissidents at their UK homes. The trio are variously accused of conspiring assaults at an address in Cambridgeshire and another in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, on Christmas Eve 2025. Asaf Afsar, 40, Mark Regan, 53, and Liam McGarry, 25, were charged on Wednesday in relation to the incidents, the Metropolitan Police said.
Hundreds of Britain First protesters faced larger antifascist crowds in a tense Manchester city centre standoff. Manchester, United Kingdom Chants of send them back echoed through a damp underpass as hundreds of far-right anti-Islam protesters prepared to march through the streets. Union Jacks fluttered in the wind as protesters some visibly under the influence of alcohol chanted a series of anti-immigration slogans and derisive comments about British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
More than 200,000 people living legally in the UK are on the 10-year route to settled status, which requires legal migrants to renew 30-month visas four times at a cost of 3,908.50 including healthcare costs per renewal before they can apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR). Under proposals by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, if people have used public funds, even in work, the wait would double to 20 years.
Now, he's one of the 80,000 locals who have been thrust into the centre of the fight for the future of British politics as they prepare to head to the polls this month. These Manchester suburbs have become a microcosm of the wider story of modern British politics: Support for the centrist parties of Labour and the Conservatives is collapsing while emergent left- and right-wing parties are surging in the polls.
"That's not religion. There's nowhere in the Koran that says you have to cover your face or cover your hair. It says you have to be modest. "Where covering your hair and the burka comes is Wahhabism in Saudi. And these are very extreme traditions. In the Middle East, before the extreme Muslim takeover of it, people were in bikinis in Iran and Egypt. It wasn't like it is today."
