Right-wing and anti-war protestors clash over Gaza aid trucks
We travelled there to find protesters attempting to stop them while counter protesters, anti-Netanyahu and anti-war activists tried to help them get through.
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Can the Bitcoin Batman save Bedford? He's seen his hometown ravaged by shoplifting, drug abuse and homelessness. Now he's splashing his own cash to make the streets safe
A life-size bronze statue of Bedford's most famous son, John Bunyan, stands at the end of the high street – a stone's throw from the prison where he wrote his best known work, The Pilgrim's Progress. Today, some 360 years after he was banged up for preaching in public, the God-fearing author, whose Christian allegory was set to music in the hymn To Be A Pilgrim, is facing a tough crowd. By 4pm, the nearby park benches have been entirely taken over by alcoholics. 'Come here at the right time and there will be 20 or 30 of them,' says my guide, local businessman Peter McCormack. 'They'll be shouting or fighting or harassing people who walk past.' Another group of undesirables can be found at the bus station, where aggressive begging is the order of the day, while visitors to Bedford's pedestrianised shopping precinct have to negotiate doorways filled with the belongings of rough sleepers. Down an alley next to his town centre coffee shop, McCormack shows me a courtyard where drug addicts gather after dark. It contains small piles of rubbish and the remains of burned mattresses. 'From time to time, people leave used needles here too,' he says. 'This is the centre of town, but there's anti-social behaviour everywhere. Dealers on e-bikes. Crackheads who'll run up and shout in your face. People shooting up in stairwells. Alcoholics in the parks. 'No wonder the shops are all closing and the place looks like a s***hole. People who don't feel safe won't come and spend their money, will they?' On the basis of our tour, McCormack certainly seems to have a point. In theory, the centre of Bedford – a commuter town with 185,000 inhabitants and 20 churches, which lies just 40 minutes from London's St Pancras station, and where suburban executive homes fetch upwards of £1m – ought to be bustling and prosperous. In reality, it's a case study in modern civic decay. Dozens of stores, including an entire arcade, lie empty. Large chain stores, such as Debenhams, are long gone, along with The Body Shop and Marks & Spencer, its former premises now occupied by a B&M discount shop. Graffiti covers shuttered windows. Several bank branches have closed, together with the once-imposing police station, which has been replaced by a comically tiny 'community hub'. The only businesses which seem to be doing a decent trade are vape stores, takeaways and a large Wetherspoons pub, The Pilgrim's Progress, where you can buy a pint of Ruddles Best for the bargain price of £1.79. 'When I was a lad, I used to walk around Bedford and feel totally safe,' says McCormack. 'Now I've got a daughter who's 15 and I won't let her do the same thing. That's a problem. 'There's a plague of addiction and crime, shoplifting is a real problem, and the whole place looks a mess. 'The other day, one of the shopkeepers sent me a message saying, 'There's a guy running round off his face, exposing himself.' Who wants to come shopping in a place like that?' The same could, of course, be said for many of Britain's town centres, which have been in decline for a generation – thanks to the rise of online shopping and out-of-town retail parks and being ravaged by the pandemic, and now having to survive in a world where Chancellor Rachel Reeves is taxing shopkeepers to the hilt. The justice system has also more or less given up on enforcing laws against shoplifting, casual drug use and other petty crime. Yet McCormack, a heavily tattooed 46-year-old, who has made a small fortune in Bitcoin and for years hosted cryptocurrency's most successful podcast, is determined he will not sit back and watch his town go to the dogs. Instead, today – and every Saturday this month – he will pay for ten private security guards to patrol the streets of Bedford, armed with body cameras and radios, to help deter crime, hostile begging, drug-taking, public drunkenness and other anti-social behaviour. The £10,000 initiative, which has seen him dubbed 'Bitcoin's first Batman', is designed to entice shoppers back to the town. He also runs a variety of businesses including the Auction Room bar and Real Coffee, a cafe which doubles up as the club shop of Real Bedford, the local non-league football club which he co-owns with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the American twins who co-founded Facebook and have since made billion-dollar fortunes in crypto. 'People tell me they won't come to Bedford because the town centre looks like a s***hole and is dangerous,' he says. 'Every year, we see more crackheads, more aggressive beggars, more shoplifters. Women are being harassed, shops are closing and families no longer feel safe. McCormack, a heavily tattooed 46-year-old, who has made a small fortune in Bitcoin and for years hosted cryptocurrency's most successful podcast, is determined he will not sit back and watch his town go to the dogs 'I've been saying for ages that if the police won't fix it, then I will do it for them. They haven't, so here we are.' McCormack's patrolmen are instructed to act as the equivalent of 'scarecrows', deterring crime by their presence. They will follow known criminals, including shoplifters, report law-breaking to the police and, on occasions where they witness a potentially dangerous incident, have been instructed to intervene. 'I've travelled to a lot of failed states, places like El Salvador or Venezuela, and you get parallel institutions, where people take responsibility for their own security. You see it in South Africa, with gated communities. That's what we are doing here in Bedford. 'I am sick of the decline. I don't think the police can sort it. Too much tape and bureaucracy. So I am going to put my money where my mouth is. 'In a few years' time, Bedford is either going to look like Stoke, or like Bath, and I don't want it to be Stoke.' The project is not without controversy. Some have accused McCormack of talking Bedford down, while the county's police and crime commissioner, John Tizard, has described his project as 'political stunt'. Mr Tizard says anti-social behaviour is 'at a long-term low in Bedford town centre' and he argues that 'keeping our town centres safe is the responsibility of publicly accountable police and local authorities, not private individuals.' McCormack promptly hit back on X, where he boasts nearly 600,000 followers, telling Mr Tizard: 'You are a weak man and you should resign.' His combative way with words will be familiar to listeners of his podcast, which has seen him interview well-known figures and activists from across the political spectrum, including Liz Truss, Ann Widdecombe, George Galloway and the US military whistleblower Chelsea Manning, or those who have followed his topsy-turvy career. As his unusual life story attests, he is quite the disrupter. Raised by a nurse and an aircraft engineer, who 'worked all hours' to send him to Bedford Modern, a local private school, McCormack says that being 'a poor kid among rich kids' forced him to develop an entrepreneurial streak – selling football stickers and marbles at the school gates before setting up a heavy metal music fanzine to get free tickets to gigs. The project is not without controversy. Some have accused McCormack of talking Bedford down, while the county's police and crime commissioner, John Tizard, has described his project as 'political stunt' At Buckinghamshire New University in the late 1990s, he taught himself how to build a website for the publication. Then his landlord, who ran a window company, paid him £450 to create one for their business. A local recruitment business also offered him £2,000 to build its website. Within a few months, he'd abandoned his studies and moved to London, where a dotcom firm had offered him a £1,000-a-week job. In 2007, he started his own agency with a friend, titled McCormack & Morrison. It specialised in web design, social media and marketing and quickly grew to 35 staff, generating a turnover of about £3m a year. But in 2014, McCormack's marriage to the mother of his two children collapsed and following the divorce, his life went spectacularly off the rails. 'I basically got addicted to cocaine,' he says. 'I went hard. To the point where I was taking a gram a day and drinking heavily every night. There's doing the drug at parties or in a bar in London on Friday night, and there's doing it at 11am because your head's gone. And I was the latter.' There followed a 'Jerry Maguire' moment where he sabotaged his successful career. 'I felt like I was constantly trying to sell people shit they didn't need and lying. So I wrote this article headlined 'Online advertising doesn't work', published it and walked out.' Then, having sold the remnants of his business for £180,000, he decided to hit the cocaine even harder, sparking a downward spiral. He was eventually hospitalised, his heart beating at over 200 beats a minute, with a suspected heart attack Luckily, it turned out to be the less serious supraventricular tachycardia, an arrhythmia triggered by drug consumption. But the near-miss persuaded McCormack to clean himself up. Ignoring doctors, who had advised him to take antidepressants, he bought some running shoes, temporarily turned vegan, quit booze and began jogging every day. While pounding the streets of Bedford, McCormack began listening to podcasts by Rich Roll, an American former drug addict- turned ultra-endurance athlete and healthy living influencer. A friendship ensued and, in 2017, he asked Roll for advice on how to start a career in podcasting. 'He basically told me, 'Pick a subject and stick with it,'' McCormack says. 'I had come across Bitcoin in the past because I'd used it to buy cocaine. I thought, 'That'll do.' So I got on a plane and flew to America to interview people in the industry.' Later that year, he launched a podcast called What Bitcoin Did. In the Bitcoin boom which followed, it became the world's most successful crypto podcast, making roughly £10m in advertising revenue and turning McCormack – who invested much of the profits in the online currency – into a very wealthy man indeed. In 2021, he spent a portion of his fortune on Bedford FC, which was languishing in the tenth tier of the non-league pyramid. They were rebranded as Real Bedford, with a skull and crossbow logo, and marketed as the world's first 'Bitcoin club', where fans can pay in crypto and staff and players can take wages in it. Games were streamed online to followers of McCormack's podcast, who spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on merchandise. Consecutive promotions followed and then, in February, the Winklevoss twins came on board. The brothers, who in 2004 sued their Harvard contemporary Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for a social media website (he settled for $65m and actor Armie Hammer starred as the twins in the film The Social Network), have since made billion-dollar fortunes in crypto and had been meeting McCormack to discuss collaborations with his podcast. They were apparently fascinated by the concept – alien to American sport and which revolves around closed shop franchises – that a small local team could potentially be promoted to the Premier League. They agreed to pay £3.6m for a 45 per cent stake. Real Bedford has since been promoted and will start this season in English football's seventh tier. What is less clear, of course, is how deep someone's pockets need to be to sort out a town like Bedford. 'We need people to come to town, buy stuff and mooch around shops,' McCormack says. 'That starts by making them actually feel safe here' McCormack, meanwhile, describes himself as a 'budget Ryan Reynolds' after the Hollywood star who owns Wrexham AFC and whose story is the subject of hit Disney+ series Welcome To Wrexham. 'You can buy pretty much any league, depending on how deep your pockets are,' is how he puts it. What is less clear, of course, is how deep someone's pockets need to be to sort out a town like Bedford. 'We need people to come to town, buy stuff and mooch around shops,' he says. 'That starts by making them actually feel safe here. There are loads of rich people round here but, at the moment, they spend their money in London or Cambridge. 'I have this thing I tell people: that if half the people who live in town spent just a tenner a week more here, that would add up to £50m a year. 'Imagine what that could achieve. A few security guards might not instantly fix Bedford, or any other town for that matter. But it's got to be a start.
The Guardian
6 hours ago
- The Guardian
Ignore the bluster: as Netanyahu starves Gaza, the world is turning on him – and he knows it
'No one likes us, we don't care.' It may be rousing on the stadium terraces of south London, as the signature chant for Millwall football club, but as a national strategy it's a disaster. Even so, Israel has become a Millwall among the nations, apparently unbothered by and impervious to the condemnation of a watching world – condemnation which this week gained serious momentum. As one country after another pointed an accusing finger towards Israel, repelled by the starvation, devastation and bloodshed it has brought down on Gaza, Israeli officials offered the now-familiar middle finger in return. When Keir Starmer announced Britain's intention to recognise a state of Palestine, it was swiftly brushed aside by the deputy mayor of Jerusalem as 'much ado about nothing'. There was a similarly dismissive reaction to both France's earlier pledge to make the same diplomatic move and Canada's announcement on Wednesday that it would follow suit. Sometimes, the register is studied insouciance, a shrug of the shoulders; sometimes it's anger. But the message is consistent: we won't budge. As the Israeli ambassador to Canada put it: 'Israel will not bow to the distorted campaign of international pressure against it.' Yet for all the Shakespearean references, the 'diplomatic tsunami' which Benjamin Netanyahu's critics warned of for many years, and which now seems to have arrived, is not nothing. What's more, and underneath the Millwall bluster, there are signs that Netanyahu knows it. More than 140 of the 193 member states of the UN had already recognised Palestine, but that club will soon include major western powers: the shift by France, the UK and Canada means no fewer than three members of the G7 are now on board. This same week saw a special conference convened at the UN in New York, where 125 countries urged Netanyahu to commit to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, as they sought to resurrect the long-moribund two-state solution. All this diplomatic activity has prompted a series of objections from Israel and its defenders. First comes the claim that Israel's critics are appeasers. Witness Netanyahu's tweeted riposte to Starmer, which included the line: 'Appeasement towards jihadist terrorists always fails.' Netanyahu often likes to invoke Winston Churchill and here he is again, casting himself as the Greatest Briton with Starmer as Neville Chamberlain, while his foreign minister is full of talk of Munich and 1938. As if there is any analogy between Nazi Germany grabbing a chunk of Czechoslovakia and Palestinians seeking self-determination in their historical homeland. It's a line of argument insulting in its ignorance. Next comes the charge that the likes of Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney are 'rewarding terror', handing Hamas a prize for the murderous series of atrocities it staged on 7 October 2023. But that's an odd way to read what just happened. This week's New York declaration, which was signed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and the Arab League, explicitly condemns 'the attacks committed by Hamas against civilians' on that day, the first such official denunciation by the Arab states. Moreover, the document is unambiguous that 'Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority'. The same message comes through loud and clear in the declarations made by Starmer and his counterparts: it is the PA, currently led by Fatah, that they envisage as the recognised authority of a Palestinian state. The leaders can be faulted for failing to explain how this vision of theirs will be realised, but the vision itself is straightforward – and there is no place in it for Hamas. Hard to spin that as a 'reward'. More forceful is the objection made by those campaigning for the release of the 20 Israeli hostages still believed to be held alive in Gaza. They argue that Starmer erred badly in suggesting that the UK would not go ahead with recognition of a Palestinian state if there were soon to be a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel in Gaza. That, the campaigners argue, in effect incentivised Hamas to refuse to do any deal – which would have to include the freeing of at least some hostages – so that UK recognition goes ahead as promised. Starmer's defenders believe this line of argument rests on a misunderstanding of Hamas. That group is not interested, they say, in a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, living alongside Israel. Hamas is not in the two-state business, but rather seeks to rule over a single, jihadist state across the entire land, from the river to the sea. Indeed, given that the international community supported the principle of Palestinian independence before 7 October, to abandon it afterwards would itself be to reward Hamas, allowing that group to derail the two-state solution which it has been determined to sabotage since it first sent suicide bombers on to Israeli buses more than 30 years ago. More powerful still is the charge that these announcements and declarations are displacement activity, gestures that reveal nothing so much as the various governments' impotence. There is something to that: diplomatic recognition will not feed a single child in Gaza. When Starmer's various demands on Netanyahu are blithely ignored, it will only advertise the British PM's weakness. In a way, the move this week tacitly recognises that reality. It is predicated on the notion that Israel continues to act in ways that make a two-state solution less viable. Previously, Starmer had always said he wanted to wait until UK recognition could play a part in an unfolding, meaningful peace process. Now he has acknowledged that there is no such thing, that he risked holding on to a card that was turning to dust in his hands. Better to play it now before it becomes entirely worthless. As Wes Streeting put it, the UK should recognise Palestine 'while there is still a state of Palestine to recognise'. The hope in London, Paris and elsewhere is that, when the Gaza war eventually ends, the parameters of what should follow will already have been staked out. But, of course, Netanyahu is not listening. He made the decision long ago that Israel can ignore everybody – that the EU and the UN, along with every global institution from the World Health Organization to the BBC, can all be written off as hopelessly biased, if not bigoted – with only one exception: the US. Over the past decade or more, he has gone further, writing off half of the US too, choosing to ignore all Democrats and focus only on the Republican party. So long as Israel has the GOP's backing, it'll be fine. That has always been a reckless strategy and this week confirmed the danger of it. For one thing, Israel needs the support of more than one country. The EU and UK may not match the US as arms suppliers, but, economically, Israel needs them as trading partners, on favourable terms. Besides, the US Republican party is not a wholly reliable ally: a substantial wing of the Maga movement is hostile to Israel. (This week, Marjorie Taylor Greene became the first US lawmaker to accuse the country of genocide.) And Trump himself does not entirely share Netanyahu's sweeping disregard for international opinion. He disdains it, but he also seeks its approval: he wants that Nobel prize. Steadily, the Israeli public is coming to see the price of the pariah status that Netanyahu has all but cultivated. A small portent is contained in the trouble currently greeting Israeli tourists in Greece. That may be the best way to understand the vehemence with which Israeli officials sought to dismiss Starmer et al this week, insisting in loud, furious statements that they weren't bothered at all. Increasing numbers of Israelis know they do not have the luxury of being Millwall: maybe no one likes them – but quite a lot of them care. Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Daily Mirror
7 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Donald Trump orders nuclear submarines closer to Russia in power-play with Putin
Donald Trump has threatened higher tariffs and has vowed to use American nuclear submarines in order to protect itself following statements made by Dmitry Medvedev Donald Trump has ordered nuclear submarines to be moved closer to Russia in response to threats made by the country's former president. In a post shared to his Truth Social, Mr Trump called out ex-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev following statements that he made. The US President said in response he would move nuclear submarines "appropriate regions" closer to Russia. "Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that," Mr Trump said. It comes after Donald Trump recently reignited his feud with Sadiq Khan in front of Keir Starmer, with a savage jibe at the London "Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter!" Mr Trump and Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, traded taunts in recent days after the Republican said on Tuesday that Russia had 10 days from today" to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine or be hit, along with its oil, with higher tariffs. Medvedev accused Mr Trump of engaging in a "game of ultimatums" and said Russia still possessed Soviet-era nuclear strike capabilities after the Republican told the former president to "watch his words." The battle of words emerged after Mr Trump reportedly undid months of denying or limiting aid to Ukraine as he aimed to broker a peace between Kyiv and Moscow. Mr Trump agreed to send more lethal aid to Ukraine, sparking fury in Moscow where Putin and his allies had relished the US President's previous unwillingness to support Kyiv as much as his predecessor Joe Biden. Medvedev meanwhile has emerged as one of the Kremlin's most outspoken anti-Western hawks since Russia sent tens of thousands of its troops into Ukraine. Kremlin critics slammed him as an irresponsible loose cannon, though some Western diplomats have said his statements underscore the thinking in the Kremlin. Experts have warned Russia is pursuing its ambition to rebuild its influence and recreate a relevance not seen since its Soviet and imperial eras. Multiple foreign policy analysts have raised the alarm that Putin could pursue a war with NATO by targeting the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The countries were once member states of both the Russian Empire and, following brief inter-war periods of independence, the Soviet Union.
