Man denies amassing armoury of weapons and trying to whip up pandemic uprising
Paul Martin, 60, appeared in court on Friday charged with encouraging terrorism, possessing articles for the purposes of terrorism, and possessing a stun gun.
It is alleged that Martin, of Suffolk Road, Croydon, posted some 16,000 messages in a Telegram group called 'The Resistance UK' under the username 'Perpetual Truth'.
Between December 15 2020 and September 29 2021, he allegedly discussed gathering a militia and weapons and attacking members of government and police.
At the same time, Martin allegedly possessed a dagger, a knife, two crossbows and arrows which gave rise to a reasonable suspicion that he intended to use them for the commission, preparation or instigation of terrorist acts.
He is also charged with possessing a weapon on September 28 2021 that discharged a noxious liquid, gas or other thing, namely a stun gun.
The bearded and bespectacled defendant, who wore his long grey hair in a ponytail, confirmed his identity during the Old Bailey hearing before Judge Richard Marks KC.
He went on to plead not guilty to all three charges against him.
Martin, who is on conditional bail, faces a two-week trial from October 13 at the same court.
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Times
34 minutes ago
- Times
Yes we can! A master of political slogans reveals his secrets
There can't be many people working in politics with a CV like Chris Bruni-Lowe's. One morning in late 2018 the pollster and strategist took an unexpected phone call from his old friend Nigel Farage. Together the two men had taken Ukip from nutty obscurity to nearly four million votes in a general election and the EU referendum victory it had always dreamt of. Now, with parliament deadlocked and Ukip back beyond the fringe, a restless Farage was planning his most audacious heist on British democracy yet: the Brexit Party. Now he needed a slogan. To Bruni-Lowe, a shaven-headed thirtysomething from south London, Farage was insistent: he wanted to promise a 'political revolution'. Saying no to Farage is never easy. But Bruni-Lowe did just that. 'I pointed out to him that the politically explosive connotations of the term made it a risky choice,' he writes in Eight Words That Changed the World, a fascinating and timely history of election slogans – some of them his. Instead he settled on a gentler line with a deliberate double meaning: 'Change politics for good.' Farage won the European elections of 2019, Theresa May was ousted as prime minister, then Boris Johnson got Brexit done. 'We had succeeded,' Bruni-Lowe reflects, 'in choosing the right word for the right candidate at the right time.' A couple of pages after this story Bruni-Lowe recounts another of his professional triumphs. 'I was advising Milojko Spajic, a former finance minister in Montenegro … He had resigned from the government six months earlier to found a new political party called Europe Now! and he wanted my help to win the presidential election in March 2023.' Pardon me? What now? Europe when? We thought you were the Farage guy. But no: here is Bruni-Lowe, settling on the slogan 'It's time' to help another upstart party 'overturn some deeply entrenched attitudes' and win an election on a pro-EU platform. It worked. Just how does he do it? In an age of volatile electorates and unpredictable polls, this stuff is more important than it has ever been. At their best, slogans capture the zeitgeist and express in not even a sentence the essence of a politician's mandate. Just ask Keir Starmer. 'Change', one of Bruni-Lowe's eight words, spoke to the anti-Tory mood of 2024, but is proving rather difficult to substantiate in office. Few people know all of this better than the author, a gun for hire whose work has taken him to almost every democracy in the world. There is a little bit of memoir in this pacey, breezily written history of a much misunderstood political art — I almost wanted more — but it is short on baccy-stained anecdotes about Farage. Instead, this short book's great strength is in its breadth and depth. Those eight words are people, change, democracy, strong, together, new, time and better, with a chapter for each — and two bonus choices, great and future, as our introduction and epilogue. Some are invariably more effective, ambiguous and elastic than others, but it of course depends where you are. As the Liberal Democrats have learnt from a century of banging on about proportional representation, lecturing UK voters about 'democracy' is likely to put them to sleep. In embattled states like Taiwan and Ukraine, however, it means something real. Parties that look knackered, meanwhile, can be reinvigorated by the judicious use of a single word. Old rogues like Recep Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orban in Hungary have both used the word 'time' to present themselves afresh to exhausted electorates. Political journalists like me are constantly discovering that there's really nothing new in our line of work — and that is also the lesson here. Not least the word 'new', which turns out to belong to rather more people than Tony Blair. Vladimir Putin, Erdogan and the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko all used it to win the elections that would, in time, turn them into very old-school strongmen. The best slogans are a repository for millions of diffuse — and very different — hopes and dreams. • The 9 best politics books of the past year to read next Take Barack Obama. 'Yes we can' was his clarion call to a restive America in 2008. Even I, the sort of tragic political nerd who watches old Michael Cockerell documentaries on holiday, didn't know that Alex Salmond had used the same slogan for the SNP in the general election of 1997. As Bruni-Lowe notes, drily and wryly: 'It is plain to see that Alex Salmond and Barack Obama had different qualities.' It wasn't so much the slogan that mattered, but the time and place in which voters were reading it. 'The words can work,' he writes, 'but only if they're used by the right person at the right time.' See also: Winston Churchill. Almost absurdly, given how intimately he was then known by the British public, Churchill told voters that it was 'time for a change' in 1951. Despite knowing him only too well — just as they knew Farage by 2019 — they happened to agree. But when the Republicans ran Thomas Dewey against Franklin D Roosevelt with the same slogan in 1944, Americans laughed him out of the room. Yes, Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented and controversial fourth term — but the business end of the Second World War was not, it turned out, the ideal time for a change. Perhaps my favourite one of all is the frankly deranged slogan employed by the Japanese Social Democrats in 2021: 'Change is fun!' That may be the implicit logic of every 'change' line, but in this case the voters did not agree. They won one seat. As South Africa prepared for its first multiracial elections in 1994, Nelson Mandela — not a man we imagine as a ruthless electioneer — learnt a similar lesson. He told his American strategists, Stan Greenberg and Frank Greer, that he had come up with the ideal slogan for the African National Congress: 'Now is the time.' They duly polled it and found it resonated only with hardcore activists from the ANC. Mandela, 75 but ever conscientious, did not much like that. 'He really wanted to unite the country,' Greer, one of many gnarled veterans to speak on the record, tells Bruni-Lowe. 'I've never been a candidate,' Mandela would say. 'I want to learn how to be a candidate.' That resulted in a slogan befitting of a father of the rainbow nation: 'A better life for all.' • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List As Bruni-Lowe rightly concludes, the election slogan has never been more important. With everything up for grabs in British politics, his comrades in the polling fraternity should study his book. I bet Farage will. And if that scares you, read to the very end. The author's parting shot should terrify well-meaning liberals even more than the prospect of a Reform government. The reader we should worry about isn't an unscrupulous politician but ChatGPT. The future, Bruni-Lowe warns, is a world of 'hyper-targeted slogans', written by AI, mashing his eight words together in different orders for each individual voter and smashing our national conversation into tens of millions of pieces. That's certainly new. It will be a change too. And it's about time politics caught up with technology. But is it democracy? Eight Words That Changed the World: A Modern History of the Election Slogan by Chris Bruni-Lowe (Biteback £20 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Telegraph
39 minutes ago
- Telegraph
How dare entitled MPs say the ‘middle class' doesn't deserve financial help
This week, 11 MPs on a combined salary of £1,032,944 decided one of the only saving products to help first-time buyers should be scrapped because they fear it is used by too many middle-class people. The Treasury Committee urged Rachel Reeves to 'consider the future' of the Lifetime Isa (Lisa), a tax-free saving product that allows people under 40 to invest up to £4,000 per year, which is matched by a £1,000 contribution from the Government. They took particular aim at the 25pc bonus, suggesting this £600m outlay was not a good use of taxpayer money given the 'current strain on public finances'. Of course, these MPs, who were handed a £2,558 pay rise in April, are spot on. It has never been easier for young people to get on the housing ladder. Everywhere you look young people are buying homes like never before! Walk down a residential street in Britain, all you can see are happy young people moving into their first homes. It's about time we stopped this Lisa racket and stopped giving the bloody middle class a hand up in getting on the property ladder. Are these really the thoughts that were racing through MPs' heads? I have to confess I am one of those young people, aged 25, hopefully saving into a Lisa each year, but stuck at home with little hope of getting out. According to NatWest, I'm not alone. They found the average person now lives with their parents until the age of 28. House prices are now eight times higher than median wages – more than double what they were in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the average age of a first-time buyer is creeping ever closer to 40. It now averages 34 in England and 35 in London, according to the English Housing Survey. These figures have become almost meaningless today. They are rattled out all the time. Half of them were even in the Treasury Committee report. But clearly these MPs don't understand the significance of them. They don't understand that while they collect a salary of £93,904 per year, while also being able to expense their rent and travel, millions of young people are sitting in their parents' basement growing ever more disillusioned with their future. The lifetime Isa, launched in 2017, offered a way on to the housing ladder. It certainly isn't perfect. The purchasing cap of £450,000 has remained frozen since its inception, leaving many home buyers in the South East facing a punitive 25pc withdrawal fee if they buy a home above this price. The cap would be £600,000 if it had risen in life with inflation. But again, the Committee squirmed at the idea that the Government should support anyone but the neediest in owning a home. They said the frozen £450,000 cap was justified because it 'ensures that Government spending supports those who need financial assistance the most'. It is such an infantile argument to suggest that the Lisa should be reformed because it's not used by the poorest in society. Any form of savings account will always be disproportionately used by those who have more money because they can afford to put aside some of their salary each month. By that logic, you might as well scrap all Isas. Just scrap all savings accounts, and we can all be poor and equal. There is no doubt the 25pc bonus is generous. No other savings account will pay out such a return, but rather than this being a poorly targeted support that aids the super wealthy, it is in fact a great leveller. There are 1.4 million active Lisa holders. Since 2018-19, 228,000 people have used Lisas to buy 182,500 homes, which equates to an average of 38,000 homes purchased each year. These are not the super-rich, but the hard-working middle class. Moneybox, one of the largest providers of Lisas, said 80pc of its account holders earned £40,000 or less. Tembo Money found its Lisa customers earned £41,000 a year on average, and were able to buy a home four years earlier than those without Lisas. Be in no doubt – these people would have been less able to afford their home without the 25pc bonus. It's hard to understand what message this cross-party group of MPs therefore are trying to send to young people. Dame Meg Hillier, a Labour MP and chairman of the Committee, questioned whether it was 'the best way to spend billions of pounds over several years'. But £600m is a drop in the ocean of the £3bn about-turn Sir Keir Starmer has made on personal independence payments. And it doesn't compare to the £1.25bn winter fuel farce either. Chancellor Rachel Reeves would do well to ignore almost every one of the 64-page report put together by the Treasury Committee. There is a breaking point at which young people will stop paying for about-turn after about-turn from their parents' basement.
BBC News
44 minutes ago
- BBC News
'Tough conversations' to help Suffolk police improve diversity
Police officers from minority ethnic backgrounds have held an open community meeting to try and address under-representation in the of the Suffolk Ethnic Police Association (SEPA) spoke with a group in Ipswich at the Hive Community Centre on Norwich Road, one of the town's most diverse Police has more than 1,200 officers, of which fewer than 40 are either black, Asian or mixed entrepreneur Donovan Charles Lansiquot attended the meeting and said: "I think ethnic minority groups definitely need to touch base with the police so we can gain a stronger understanding of how we can actually develop a better community." He added: "We need to learn how to do that and have these tough conversations." Andy George, chair of the National Black Police Association, came to the meeting to support the Suffolk told BBC Radio Suffolk: "Whenever you see an officer of colour in uniform, for the community, they suddenly feel a connection to the police that maybe wasn't there before. "I have had lots of racism within policing, but it's still a career that I would do. "I joined policing to help other people, having been bullied at school, having people racially abuse me when I was younger."Unfortunately [policing] tends to attract other people that maybe the uniform amplifies some of the negative qualities that they have. "But I would certainly do it again and I think more and more people like me, like our membership, needs to be within policing and to really change the fabric and culture within policing." The group discussed issues of trust in the police, the lack of youth centres and how to show officers from minority backgrounds as role models, as well as broader challenges of funding for community work, the pressure on young people to join gangs and issues of racism within the police Thomas, chair of SEPA, said it was "really positive, with lots of inspiration from the community"."We're coming back in three months, just to have an interim talk about what's happened, then in six months time we're coming back, we'll do it again and hopefully it'll be bigger," he said."Then this will be taken across to other towns in Suffolk with SEPA continuing to bridge that gap with the community." Follow Suffolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
