1.
Hizb ut-Tahrir
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Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international, pan-Islamic political organization, which describes its ideology as Islam, and its aim as the re-establishment of the Islamic Khilafah or Islamic state. The new caliphate would unify the Muslim community in a unitary superstate of unified Muslim-majority countries spanning from Morocco in North Africa to the southern Philippines in South East Asia. The proposed state would enforce Islamic Shariah law, return to its place as the first state in the world. The organization was founded in 1953 as a Sunni Muslim organization in Jerusalem by Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, since then Hizb ut-Tahrir has spread to more than 50 countries, and grown to a membership estimated to be between tens of thousands to about one million. Hizb ut-Tahrir is very active in Western countries, particularly in the United Kingdom, members typically meet in small private study circles, but in countries where the group is not illegal it also engages with the media and organizes rallies and conferences. The party itself claims its ideology and its method of work has been thought out. Al-Nabhani also developed a program and draft constitution for the caliphate, anti-Zionism and the belief that the State of Israel is an illegal entity to be dismantled or destroyed without compromise, is an important element of party doctrine. Hizb ut-Tahrir has been described as controversial, and as of mid 2015 it was banned in Germany, Russia, China, Egypt, Turkey, and all but 3 Arab countries. In March 2017, at a forum in Sydney Australia. In response, he said, Islam is clear that apostates do attract capital punishment, Hizb ut-Tahrir states its aim as unification of all Muslim countries over time in a unitary Islamic state or caliphate, headed by a caliph elected by Muslims. This, it holds, is an obligation decreed by God, once established, the caliphate will expand into non-Muslim areas, through invitation and through military jihad, so as to expand Dar al-Islam and diminish Dar al-Kufr. Forbidden by the constitution are such things as copyrights on educational materials, military treaties, in addition to the constitution, many detailed books expand on the HT ideology and method of work, according to its 2010 Information pack. Hizb ut-Tahrir put forward candidates for office in Jordan in the 1950s when it was first formed and before it was banned, the party plans its political progress in three stages, taking after the process by which the Prophet Muhammad established the Caliphate in thirteen years. According to an analyst of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Kazakhstan, where the group is outlawed, secondly, they establish a network of secret cells, and finally, they try to infiltrate the government to work to legalize their party and its aims. Members should accept the goals and methods of the organization as their own, build public opinion among the Muslim masses for the caliphate and the other Islamic concepts that will lead to a revival of Islamic thought. Stage two involves penetration into government positions and military forces, according to HT critic Zeyno Baran. For some members this will involve drink alcohol and chang their behavior in ways to blend in with secular elites. The government would be replaced by one that implements Islam generally and comprehensively, HT has for many years made use of the internet to propagate its message
2.
Islamism
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Islamism is a concept whose meaning has been debated in both public and academic contexts. It is commonly used interchangeably with the terms political Islam or Islamic fundamentalism and these movements have arguably altered the Middle East more than any trend since the modern states gained independence, redefining politics and even borders according to Robin Wright. Some authors hold the term Islamic activism to be synonymous and preferable to Islamism, Central and prominent figures of modern Islamism include Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Abul Ala Maududi, and Ruhollah Khomeini. Some Islamist thinkers emphasize peaceful political processes, whereas Sayyid Qutb in particular called for violence, however, Qutb, unlike modern extremists, denounced the killing of innocents. Following the Arab Spring, some Islamist currents became heavily involved in politics, while others spawned the most aggressive and ambitious Islamist militia to date. A theocratic ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society by law, subsequently, clarified to be, the desire to impose any given interpretation of Islam on society. A movement so broad and flexible it reaches out to everything to everyone in Islam, making it unsustainable. and at the extremes, a violent vehicle for rejectionists and radicals. All who seek to Islamize their environment, whether in relation to their lives in society, their circumstances, or the workplace. Moderate and reformist Islamists who accept and work within the process include parties like the Tunisian Ennahda Movement. Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan is basically a socio-political and democratic Vanguard party but has gained political influence through military coup détats in the past. The Islamist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine participate in the democratic, following the Arab Spring, Roy has described Islamism as increasingly interdependent with democracy in much of the Arab Muslim world, such that neither can now survive without the other. While Islamist political culture itself may not be democratic, Islamists need democratic elections to maintain their legitimacy, at the same time, their popularity is such that no government can call itself democratic that excludes mainstream Islamist groups. The term, which denoted the religion of Islam, first appeared in English as Islamismus in 1696. The term appears in the U. S. Supreme Court decision in In Re Ross, the term Islamism acquired its contemporary connotations in French academia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From French, it began to migrate to the English language in the mid-1980s, a 2003 article in Middle East Quarterly states, In summation, the term Islamism enjoyed its first run, lasting from Voltaire to the First World War, as a synonym for Islam. Enlightened scholars and writers generally preferred it to Mohammedanism, eventually both terms yielded to Islam, the Arabic name of the faith, and a word free of either pejorative or comparative associations. To all intents and purposes, Islamic fundamentalism and Islamism have become synonyms in contemporary American usage, the AP Stylebook entry for Islamist now reads as follows, An advocate or supporter of a political movement that favors reordering government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam. Do not use as a synonym for Islamic fighters, militants, extremists or radicals, where possible, be specific and use the name of militant affiliations, al-Qaida-linked, Hezbollah, Taliban, etc
3.
Caliphate
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A caliphate is an area containing an Islamic steward known as a caliph —a person considered a religious successor to the Islamic prophet, Muhammad, and a leader of the entire Muslim community. During the history of Islam after the Rashidun period, many Muslim states, the Sunni branch of Islam stipulates that, as a head of state, a caliph should be elected by Muslims or their representatives. Followers of Shia Islam, however, believe a caliph should be an Imam chosen by God from the Ahl al-Bayt, before the advent of Islam, Arabian monarchs traditionally used the title malik, or another from the same root. The term caliph, derives from the Arabic word khalīfah, which means successor, steward, however, studies of pre-Islamic texts suggest that the original meaning of the phrase was successor selected by God. There was no specified procedure for this shura or consultation, candidates were usually, but not necessarily, from the same lineage as the deceased leader. Capable men who would lead well were preferred over an ineffectual heir, Sunni Muslims believe that Abu Bakr was chosen by the community and that this was the proper procedure. Sunnis further argue that a caliph should ideally be chosen by election or community consensus, the Shia believe that Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of Muhammad, was chosen by Muhammad as his spiritual and temporal successor as the Mawla of all Muslims in the event of Ghadir Khumm. The caliph was often known as Amir al-Muminin, Muhammad established his capital in Medina, after he died, it remained the capital during the Rashidun Caliphate, before Kufa was reportedly made the capital by Caliph Ali. At times there have been rival claimant caliphs in different parts of the Islamic world, according to Sunni Muslims, the first caliph to be called Amir al-Muminin was Abu Bakr, followed by Umar, the second of the Rashidun. Uthman and Ali also were called by the title, while the Shia consider Ali to have been the only truly legitimate caliph. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk officially abolished the system of Caliphate in Islam as part of his secular reforms, the Kings of Morocco still label themselves with the title Amir al-Muminin for the Moroccans, but lay no claim to the Caliphate. Some Muslim countries, including Somalia, Indonesia and Malaysia, were never subject to the authority of a Caliphate, with the exception of Aceh, consequently, these countries had their own, local, sultans or rulers who did not fully accept the authority of the Caliph. Abu Bakr, the first successor of Muhammad, nominated Umar as his successor on his deathbed, Umar, the second caliph, was killed by a Persian named Piruz Nahavandi. His successor, Uthman, was elected by a council of electors, Uthman was killed by members of a disaffected group. Ali then took control but was not universally accepted as caliph by the governors of Egypt and he faced two major rebellions and was assassinated by Abd-al-Rahman ibn Muljam, a Khawarij. Alis tumultuous rule lasted only five years and this period is known as the Fitna, or the first Islamic civil war. The followers of Ali later became the Shia minority sect of Islam, the followers of all four Rashidun Caliphs became the majority Sunni sect. Under the Rashidun each region of the Caliphate had its own governor, Muawiyah, a relative of Uthman and governor of Syria, succeeded Ali as Caliph
4.
Sharia
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Sharia, Sharia law, or Islamic law is the religious law forming part of the Islamic tradition. It is derived from the precepts of Islam, particularly the Quran. In Arabic, the term refers to Gods divine law and is contrasted with fiqh. The manner of its application in modern times has been a subject of dispute between Muslim traditionalists and reformists, traditional theory of Islamic jurisprudence recognizes four sources of sharia, the Quran, sunnah, qiyas, and ijma. Traditional jurisprudence distinguishes two branches of law, ʿibādāt and muʿāmalāt, which together comprise a wide range of topics. Its rulings assign actions to one of five categories, mandatory, recommended, permitted, abhorred, thus, some areas of sharia overlap with the Western notion of law while others correspond more broadly to living life in accordance with God’s will. Historically, sharia was interpreted by independent jurists, ottoman rulers achieved additional control over the legal system by promulgating their own legal code and turning muftis into state employees. Non-Muslim communities had legal autonomy, except in cases of interconfessional disputes, in the modern era, sharia-based criminal laws were widely replaced by statutes inspired by European models. Judicial procedures and legal education in the Muslim world were brought in line with European practice. While the constitutions of most Muslim-majority states contain references to sharia, legislative bodies which codified these laws sought to modernize them without abandoning their foundations in traditional jurisprudence. The Islamic revival of the late 20th century brought along calls by Islamist movements for full implementation of sharia, including reinstatement of hudud corporal punishments, in some cases, this resulted in traditionalist legal reform, while other countries witnessed juridical reinterpretation of sharia advocated by progressive reformers. The role of sharia has become a contested topic around the world, attempts to impose it on non-Muslims have caused intercommunal violence in Nigeria and may have contributed to the breakup of Sudan. Some Muslim-minority countries in Asia, Africa and Europe recognize the use of sharia-based family laws for their Muslim populations, there are ongoing debates as to whether sharia is compatible with secular forms of government, human rights, freedom of thought, and womens rights. The word sharīʿah is used by Arabic-speaking peoples of the Middle East to designate a prophetic religion in its totality, for example, sharīʿat Mūsā means law or religion of Moses and sharīʿatu-nā can mean our religion in reference to any monotheistic faith. Within Islamic discourse, šarīʿah refers to regulations governing the lives of Muslims. For many Muslims, the word means simply justice, and they will consider any law that promotes justice, Muslims of different perspectives agree in their respect for the abstract notion of sharia, but they differ in how they understand the practical implications of the term. Classical sharia, the body of rules and principles elaborated by Islamic jurists during the first centuries of Islam, historical sharia, the body of rules and interpretations developed throughout Islamic history, ranging from personal beliefs to state legislation and varying across an ideological spectrum. Classical sharia has often served as a point of reference for these variants, Contemporary sharia, the full spectrum of rules and interpretations that are developed and practiced at present
5.
Home Office
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The Home Office is a ministerial department of the Her Majestys Government of the United Kingdom, responsible for immigration, security and law and order. As such it is responsible for the police, fire and rescue services, visas and immigration and it is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs, counter-terrorism and ID cards. It was formerly responsible for Her Majestys Prison Service and the National Probation Service, the Cabinet minister responsible for the department is the Home Secretary. The Home Office continues to be known, especially in official papers, the Home Office is headed by the Home Secretary, a Cabinet minister supported by the departments senior civil servant, the Permanent Secretary. The plan said the department will,1, simplify national institutional structures and establish a National Crime Agency to strengthen the fight against organised crime 3. Create a more integrated criminal justice system Help the police and other public services work together across the criminal justice system 4, secure our borders and reduce immigration Deliver an improved migration system that commands public confidence and serves our economic interests. Limit non-EU economic migrants, and introduce new measures to reduce inflow and minimise abuse of all migration routes, process asylum applications more quickly, and end the detention of children for immigration purposes 5. Protect peoples freedoms and civil liberties Reverse state interference to ensure there is not disproportionate intrusion into people‟s lives 6, protect our citizens from terrorism Keep people safe through the Government‟s approach to counter-terrorism 7. Build a fairer and more equal society Help create a fair, on 27 March 1782, the Home Office was formed by renaming the existing Southern Department, with all existing staff transferring. On the same day, the Northern Department was renamed the Foreign Office, to match the new names, there was a transferring of responsibilities between the two Departments of State. All domestic responsibilities were moved to the Home Office, and all foreign matters became the concern of the Foreign Office, most subsequently created domestic departments have been formed by splitting responsibilities away from the Home Office. On 7 April 2012, hacktivist group Anonymous temporarily took down the UK Home Office website, the group took responsibility for the attack, which was part of ongoing Anonymous activity in protest against the deportation of hackers as part of Operation TrialAtHome. One Anonymous source claimed in their tweet it was launched in retaliation for draconian surveillance proposals. On 18 July 2012, the Public and Commercial Services Union announced that thousands of Home Office employees would go on strike over jobs, pay and other issues. However, the PCSU called off the strike before it was planned it claimed the department had, subsequent to the threat of actions, announced 1,100 new border jobs. From 1978 to 2004, the Home Office was located at 50 Queen Annes Gate, many functions, however, were devolved to offices in other parts of London and the country, notably the headquarters of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in Croydon. g. Wales Under the Welsh devolution settlement, specific areas are transferred to the National Assembly for Wales rather than reserved to Westminster
6.
Democracy
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Democracy, in modern usage, is a system of government in which the citizens exercise power directly or elect representatives from among themselves to form a governing body, such as a parliament. Democracy is sometimes referred to as rule of the majority, Democracy was originally conceived in Classical Greece, where political representatives were chosen by a jury from amongst the male citizens, rich and poor. The English word dates to the 16th century, from the older Middle French, in the 5th century BC, to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Athens, the term is an antonym to aristocracy, meaning rule of an elite. While theoretically these definitions are in opposition, in practice the distinction has been blurred historically, the political system of Classical Athens, for example, granted democratic citizenship to free men and excluded slaves and women from political participation. In 1906, Finland became the first government to harald a more inclusive democracy at the national level. Democracy contrasts with forms of government where power is held by an individual, as in an absolute monarchy, or where power is held by a small number of individuals. Nevertheless, these oppositions, inherited from Greek philosophy, are now ambiguous because contemporary governments have mixed democratic, oligarchic, and monarchic elements. Karl Popper defined democracy in contrast to dictatorship or tyranny, thus focusing on opportunities for the people to control their leaders, No consensus exists on how to define democracy, but legal equality, political freedom and rule of law have been identified as important characteristics. These principles are reflected in all eligible citizens being equal before the law, other uses of democracy include that of direct democracy. In some countries, notably in the United Kingdom which originated the Westminster system, in the United States, separation of powers is often cited as a central attribute. In India, parliamentary sovereignty is subject to the Constitution of India which includes judicial review, though the term democracy is typically used in the context of a political state, the principles also are applicable to private organisations. Majority rule is listed as a characteristic of democracy. Hence, democracy allows for political minorities to be oppressed by the tyranny of the majority in the absence of legal protections of individual or group rights. An essential part of a representative democracy is competitive elections that are substantively and procedurally fair, i. e. just. It has also suggested that a basic feature of democracy is the capacity of all voters to participate freely and fully in the life of their society. While representative democracy is sometimes equated with the form of government. Many democracies are constitutional monarchies, such as the United Kingdom, the term democracy first appeared in ancient Greek political and philosophical thought in the city-state of Athens during classical antiquity. The word comes from demos, common people and kratos, strength, led by Cleisthenes, Athenians established what is generally held as the first democracy in 508–507 BC
7.
Proscription
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Proscription is, in current usage, a decree of condemnation to death or banishment and can be used in a political context to refer to state-approved murder or banishment. The term originated in Ancient Rome, where it included public identification, during the dictatorial reign of Sulla, the word took on a more sinister meaning. In 82 or 81 BC, Sulla instituted the process of proscription in order to avenge the massacres of Gaius Marius and Gaius Marius’ son. He instituted a notice for the sale of confiscated property belonging to those declared public enemies of the state, there were multiple reasons why the ancient Roman government may have desired to proscribe or attribute multiple other forms of pain. One of the most prevalent reasons for punishment are treason crimes, treason crimes consisted of a very broad and large number of regulations, and such crimes had a negative effect on the government. Overall, crimes in which the state, emperor, the tranquility, or offenses against the good of the people would be considered treason. Punishments for treason were quite harsh for today’s standards and were meant to highlight the seriousness and shamefulness of the crimes committed. There were a variety of punishments for crimes, including death, loss of a freedman’s status, loss of citizenship with a loss of family rights. Death was a common punishment and was referred to as summum supplicium. The death sentence was often the punishment for all but the mildest forms of treason, Julius Caesar was an influential framer on the law on treason. The Interdiction from Water and Fire was a civil excommunication resulting in ultimate exile and those who were condemned would be deported to an island. Emperor Augustus frequently utilized this method of exile, as he desired to keep banished men from banding together in large groups, such punishment was only given for the mildest forms of treason, in comparison to the death penalty served for most other treason crimes. Augustus also created the prefect, whose powers included the ability to banish, deport, an early instance of mass proscription took place in 82 BC, when Lucius Cornelius Sulla was appointed dictator rei publicae constituendae. Sulla proceeded to have the Senate draw up a list of those he considered enemies of the state, no person could inherit money or property from proscribed men, nor could any woman married to a proscribed man remarry after his death. Many victims of proscription were decapitated and their heads were displayed on spears in the Forum and this gave rise to a general fear of being taken from ones home at night as a consequence of any outwardly seditious behaviour. Sullas proscription was bureaucratically overseen, and the names of informers, because Roman law could criminalise acts ex post facto, many informers and profiteers were later prosecuted. The proscription of 82 BC was overseen by Sullas freedman steward Lucius Cornelius Chrysogonus, the proscription lists created by Sulla led to mass terror in Rome. During this time, the cities of Italy became theaters of execution, citizens were terrified to find their names on the lists
8.
Home Secretary
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The office is a British Cabinet level position. The Home Secretary is responsible for the affairs of England and Wales. The remit of the Home Office also includes policing in England and Wales and matters of security, as the Security Service. The current Home Secretary is Amber Rudd, appointed formally by Queen Elizabeth II on the advice of her Prime Minister Theresa May on 13 July 2016. Mrs. May had been the incumbent, appointed on 12 May 2010 by Prime Minister, David Cameron. May was reappointed by Cameron on 8 May 2015 to serve as Home Secretary in the Conservative government and she stood down from this role on 13 July 2016 upon assuming the office of Prime Minister, succeeding Cameron
9.
Chris Grayling
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Christopher Stephen Grayling PC is a British Conservative Party politician and former author who has been the Secretary of State for Transport since July 2016. Grayling was born in London and studied History at Cambridge University and he published a number of books as well as working for the BBC and Channel 4 before going into politics. First elected to Parliament in the 2001 general election for Epsom and Ewell, from 2007 he became the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and in 2009 he was appointed Shadow Home Secretary. Following the 2010 general election and the formation of the Coalition Government, in September 2012, he was appointed to the UK Cabinet in a reshuffle, replacing Kenneth Clarke as the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice from 2012 to 2015. He was the first non-lawyer to have served as Lord Chancellor for at least 440 years and he was the Leader of the House of Commons and the Lord President of the Council between 2015 and 2016. Grayling was appointed as Transport Secretary in July 2016, when Theresa May became Prime Minister, Grayling was born in London and grew up in Buckinghamshire, where he was educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. He then went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he graduated with an upper-second class Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1984, Grayling joined BBC News in 1985 as a trainee, becoming a producer in 1986. He left the BBC in 1988 to join Channel 4 as an editor on its Business Daily television programme and he rejoined the BBC in 1991 as a business development manager on BBC Select. He became a management consultant in 1997 with Burson Marsteller, where he remained until his election to Parliament, prior to joining the Conservative Party, Grayling was a member of the Social Democratic Party. Grayling was selected to contest the Labour-held marginal seat of Warrington South at the 1997 general election and he was elected as a councillor for the Hillside ward in the London Borough of Merton in 1998 and remained on the council until 2002. Grayling was elected to the House of Commons to represent the Surrey seat of Epsom, Grayling held the seat with a majority of 10,080 and has been returned as MP there since. He made his speech on 25 June 2001. He became a Spokesman for Education and Skills by Michael Howard in 2003, in June 2007, he was made Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, a post he held until January 2009 when he became Shadow Home Secretary. Grayling became known as a national politician through his attack dog pressure on leading Labour politicians and he was heavily involved in the questioning of David Blunkett, the then Work and Pensions Secretary, over his business affairs which led to Blunketts resignation in 2005. Grayling also challenged Tony Blair and his wife Cherie over the money made from lectures while Blair was Prime Minister. He also challenged minister Stephen Byers over his handling of the Railtrack collapse, between 2001 and 2009, Grayling claimed expenses for his flat in Pimlico, close to the Houses of Parliament, despite having a constituency home no further than 17 miles away. Grayling says he uses the flat when working very late because he needs to work very erratic, during the Parliamentary expenses scandal, The Daily Telegraph reported that Grayling refitted and redecorated the flat in 2005 costing over £5,000. Graylings expenses issue was seen as embarrassing for the Conservative Party as he had previously criticised Labour ministers for being implicated in sleaze scandals, as Shadow Home Secretary, Grayling provoked controversy in August 2009 when he compared Manchesters Moss Side area to the American TV crime drama The Wire
10.
Ed Husain
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Mohamed Ed Husain is a writer, adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and senior advisor at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Husain is the author of The Islamist, a book about political Islamism, Husain cofounded, with Maajid Nawaz, the counter-extremism organization the Quilliam Foundation. He has also worked for HSBC Private Bank and the British Council, in 2014, he was appointed to the Freedom of Religion or Belief Advisory Group of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He is also a member of the Independent Review Panel for the Global Community Engagement, Husain was born and brought up in the East End of London, in a Bangladeshi Muslim family. Husains father was born in British India and his mother in East Pakistan and his father arrived in the United Kingdom in 1961, and started a small Indian takeaway business in Limehouse. Husains parents followed a form of Islam based on Sufi traditions. During his years in secondary school Husain was an outsider and he rejected the Bengali gang culture present in the school, and was sometimes oppressed by other students. Husain attended the Brick Lane Mosque in his early years, a few months later he was influenced to join a circle of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group which called for a Caliphate, in whose activities he participated for around five years. Husain attended Tower Hamlets College in Poplar, and was president of the popular student Islamic society. It was during his studies at Newham College in 1995 that he decided to leave the group, later he joined the Islamic Society of Britain and attended a family camp in Worcester in 1996. It was there that he was influenced by the side of Islam. He was further influenced by Sufism while visiting mosques in Turkey, after returning to London, he spent much of his time learning and memorizing the Quran. Husain now strongly criticizes these groups, although Hizb ut-Tahrir categorically denied that he was given membership in the party. The aim of this organisation is to confront groups which promote what is alleged to be dangerous and extremist interpretations of Islam, and in particular to confront Hizb ut-Tahrir. The Quilliam Foundation describes itself as the worlds first counter-extremism think tank set up to address the challenges of citizenship, identity. Quilliam stands for freedom, equality, human rights. He was also a fellow at the think-tank Civitas. Husain studied at the SOAS, University of London, where he completed an MA in Middle Eastern Studies and he later joined the Labour Party
11.
Kufr
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Kafir is an Arabic term meaning unbeliever, or disbeliever. It is used as a derogatory term, Kafir is sometimes used interchangeably with mushrik, another type of religious wrongdoer mentioned frequently in the Quran and Islamic works. The practice of declaring another self-professed Muslim a kafir is known as takfir, the word kāfir is the active participle of the root K-F-R. As a pre-Islamic term it described farmers burying seeds in the ground, one of its applications in the Quran is also the same meaning as farmer. Since farmers cover the seeds with soil while planting, the word implies a person who hides or covers. Ideologically, it implies a person who hides or covers the truth, poets personify the darkness of night as kâfir, perhaps as a survival of pre-Islamic religious or mythological usage. The noun for disbelief, blasphemy, impiety rather than the person who disbelieves, is kufr, the Hebrew words kipper and kofer share the same root as kafir כִּפֵּר, or K-F-R. Kipper has many meanings including, to deny, atone for, cover, purge, represent, the last two meanings involve kofer that mean ransom. Kipper and kofer are mostly likely used together in the Jewish faith to indicate Gods transfer of guilt from innocent parties using guilty parties as ransom, the practice of declaring another Muslim as a kafir is takfir. Kufr unbelief and shirk are used throughout the Quran and sometimes used interchangeably by Muslims, according to Salafist scholars, Kufr is the denial of the Truth, and shirk means devoting acts of worship to anything beside Allah or the worship of idols and other created beings. So a mushrik may worship other things while also acknowledging Allah, the distinction between those who believe in Islam and those who do not is an essential one in the Quran, the book of Islam. Kafir, and its plural kafirun, is used directly 134 times in Quran, its verbal noun kufr is used 37 times, and the verbal cognates of kafir are used about 250 times. By extension of the meaning of the root, to cover. The meaning of disbelief, which has come to be regarded as primary, in the Quranic discourse, the term typifies all things that are unacceptable and offensive to God. According to the E. J. Brills First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913-1936, Volume 4, the term first applied in the Quran to unbelieving Meccans, who endeavoured to refute and revile the Prophet. Most passages in the Quran referring to unbelievers in general talk about their fate on the day of judgement, according to scholar Marilyn Waldman, as the Quran progresses, the meaning behind the term kafir doesnt change but progresses, i. e. accumulates meaning over time. As the Islamic Prophet Muhammads views of his opponents change, his use of kafir undergoes a development, Kafir moves from being one description of Muhammads opponents to the primary one. Later in the Quran, kafir becomes more and more connected with shirk, finally, towards the end of the Quran, kafir begins to also signify the group of people to be fought by the muminīn
12.
Liberty
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Liberty, in philosophy, involves free will as contrasted with determinism. In politics, liberty consists of the social and political freedoms to all community members are entitled. In theology, liberty is freedom from the effects of sin, spiritual servitude, as such, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others. Philosophers from earliest times have considered the question of liberty, according to Thomas Hobbes, a free man is he that in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do. John Locke rejected that definition of liberty, while not specifically mentioning Hobbes, he attacks Sir Robert Filmer who had the same definition. According to Locke, In the state of nature, liberty consists of being free from any power on Earth. People are not under the will or lawmaking authority of others but have only the law of nature for their rule, in political society, liberty consists of being under no other lawmaking power except that established by consent in the commonwealth. People are free from the dominion of any will or legal restraint apart from that enacted by their own constituted lawmaking power according to the trust put in it. Thus, freedom is not as Sir Robert Filmer defines it, A liberty for everyone to do what he likes, to live as he pleases, freedom is constrained by laws in both the state of nature and political society. Freedom of nature is to be no other restraint but the law of nature. Freedom of people under government is to be under no restraint apart from standing rules to live by that are common to everyone in the society and made by the lawmaking power established in it. Persons have a right or liberty to follow their own will in all things that the law has not prohibited and not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others. John Stuart Mill, in his work, On Liberty, was the first to recognize the difference between liberty as the freedom to act and liberty as the absence of coercion, the modern concept of political liberty has its origins in the Greek concepts of freedom and slavery. To be free, to the Greeks, was to not have a master and that was the original Greek concept of freedom. It is closely linked with the concept of democracy, as Aristotle put it, This, another is that a man should live as he likes. This, they say, is the privilege of a freeman, since, on the other hand and this applied only to free men. In Athens, for instance, women could not vote or hold office and were legally and socially dependent on a male relative, the populations of the Persian Empire enjoyed some degree of freedom. Citizens of all religions and ethnic groups were given the rights and had the same freedom of religion, women had the same rights as men
13.
Capitalism
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Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, economists, political economists, and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free market capitalism, welfare capitalism, different forms of capitalism feature varying degrees of free markets, public ownership, obstacles to free competition, and state-sanctioned social policies. Most existing capitalist economies are mixed economies, which elements of free markets with state intervention. Capitalism has existed under many forms of government, in different times, places. Following the decline of mercantilism, mixed capitalist systems became dominant in the Western world, Capitalism has been criticized for prioritizing profit over social good, natural resources, and the environment, and that is a cause of inequality and economic instabilities. Supporters believe that it provides better products through competition, and creates strong economic growth, the term capitalist, meaning an owner of capital, appears earlier than the term capitalism. It dates back to the mid-17th century, capitalist is derived from capital, which evolved from capitale, a late Latin word based on caput, meaning head – also the origin of chattel and cattle in the sense of movable property. Capitale emerged in the 12th to 13th centuries in the sense of referring to funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money, by 1283 it was used in the sense of the capital assets of a trading firm. It was frequently interchanged with a number of other words – wealth, money, funds, goods, assets, property, the Hollandische Mercurius uses capitalists in 1633 and 1654 to refer to owners of capital. In French, Étienne Clavier referred to capitalistes in 1788, six years before its first recorded English usage by Arthur Young in his work Travels in France, David Ricardo, in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, referred to the capitalist many times. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet, used capitalist in his work Table Talk, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used the term capitalist in his first work, What is Property. To refer to the owners of capital, benjamin Disraeli used the term capitalist in his 1845 work Sybil. The initial usage of the term capitalism in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to the capitalistic system. And to the capitalist mode of production in Das Kapital, the use of the word capitalism in reference to an economic system appears twice in Volume I of Das Kapital, p.124, and in Theories of Surplus Value, tome II, p.493. Marx did not extensively use the form capitalism but instead those of capitalist, and capitalist mode of production, also according to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German-American socialist and abolitionist, used the phrase private capitalism in 1863. Capital has existed incipiently on a scale for centuries, in the form of merchant, renting and lending activities. Simple commodity exchange, and consequently simple commodity production, which are the basis for the growth of capital from trade, have a very long history
14.
Kafir
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Kafir is an Arabic term meaning unbeliever, or disbeliever. The word is derived from the Arabic term kafir, which originally had the one without religion. Arab Traders adopted the term to refer to non-Muslim people, variations of the word were used in English, Dutch, and, later, in Afrikaans. In Portuguese, in French and in Spanish, the equivalent cafre was used and it is used as a derogatory term. Kafir is sometimes used interchangeably with mushrik, another type of religious wrongdoer mentioned frequently in the Quran, the practice of declaring another self-professed Muslim a kafir is known as takfir. The word kāfir is the active participle of the root K-F-R, as a pre-Islamic term it described farmers burying seeds in the ground. One of its applications in the Quran is also the meaning as farmer. Since farmers cover the seeds with soil while planting, the word implies a person who hides or covers. Ideologically, it implies a person who hides or covers the truth, poets personify the darkness of night as kâfir, perhaps as a survival of pre-Islamic religious or mythological usage. The noun for disbelief, blasphemy, impiety rather than the person who disbelieves, is kufr, the Hebrew words kipper and kofer share the same root as kafir כִּפֵּר, or K-F-R. Kipper has many meanings including, to deny, atone for, cover, purge, represent, the last two meanings involve kofer that mean ransom. Kipper and kofer are mostly likely used together in the Jewish faith to indicate Gods transfer of guilt from innocent parties using guilty parties as ransom, the practice of declaring another Muslim as a kafir is takfir. Kufr unbelief and shirk are used throughout the Quran and sometimes used interchangeably by Muslims, according to Salafist scholars, Kufr is the denial of the Truth, and shirk means devoting acts of worship to anything beside Allah or the worship of idols and other created beings. So a mushrik may worship other things while also acknowledging Allah, the distinction between those who believe in Islam and those who do not is an essential one in the Quran, the book of Islam. Kafir, and its plural kafirun, is used directly 134 times in Quran, its verbal noun kufr is used 37 times, and the verbal cognates of kafir are used about 250 times. By extension of the meaning of the root, to cover. The meaning of disbelief, which has come to be regarded as primary, in the Quranic discourse, the term typifies all things that are unacceptable and offensive to God. According to the E. J. Brills First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913-1936, Volume 4, the term first applied in the Quran to unbelieving Meccans, who endeavoured to refute and revile the Prophet
15.
Manchester
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Manchester is a major city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England, with a population of 514,414 as of 2013. It lies within the United Kingdoms second-most populous urban area, with a population of 2.55 million, Manchester is fringed by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east and an arc of towns with which it forms a continuous conurbation. The local authority is Manchester City Council and it was historically a part of Lancashire, although areas of Cheshire south of the River Mersey were incorporated during the 20th century. Throughout the Middle Ages Manchester remained a township but began to expand at an astonishing rate around the turn of the 19th century. Manchesters unplanned urbanisation was brought on by a boom in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution, Manchester achieved city status in 1853. The Manchester Ship Canal opened in 1894, creating the Port of Manchester and its fortunes declined after the Second World War, owing to deindustrialisation. The city centre was devastated in a bombing in 1996, but it led to extensive investment, in 2014, the Globalization and World Cities Research Network ranked Manchester as a beta world city, the highest-ranked British city apart from London. Manchester is the third-most visited city in the UK and it is notable for its architecture, culture, musical exports, media links, scientific and engineering output, social impact, sports clubs and transport connections. Manchester Liverpool Road railway station was the worlds first inter-city passenger railway station and in the city scientists first split the atom, the name Manchester originates from the Latin name Mamucium or its variant Mancunium and the citizens are still referred to as Mancunians. These are generally thought to represent a Latinisation of an original Brittonic name, both meanings are preserved in languages derived from Common Brittonic, mam meaning breast in Irish and mother in Welsh. The suffix -chester is a survival of Old English ceaster and their territory extended across the fertile lowland of what is now Salford and Stretford. Central Manchester has been settled since this time. A stabilised fragment of foundations of the version of the Roman fort is visible in Castlefield. After the Roman withdrawal and Saxon conquest, the focus of settlement shifted to the confluence of the Irwell, much of the wider area was laid waste in the subsequent Harrying of the North. Thomas de la Warre, lord of the manor, founded and constructed a church for the parish in 1421. The church is now Manchester Cathedral, the premises of the college house Chethams School of Music. The library, which opened in 1653 and is open to the public today, is the oldest free public reference library in the United Kingdom. Manchester is mentioned as having a market in 1282, around the 14th century, Manchester received an influx of Flemish weavers, sometimes credited as the foundation of the regions textile industry
16.
Mike's Place suicide bombing
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The Mikes Place suicide bombing was a Palestinian suicide attack, perpetrated by British Muslims, at Mikes Place, a bar in Tel Aviv, Israel, on April 30,2003, killing three civilians and wounding 50. The two assailants entered Israel from Jordan, via the Allenby Bridge and they reached the scene of the attack from a nearby hotel where they had rented a room. At 12,45 am on April 30,2003, the bomber approached Mikes Place. The force of the blast killed three people and injured over 50 people, one of the wounded was security guard Avi Tabib, who managed to block the suicide bomber, preventing him from entering the bar and causing further fatalities. In addition, Hamas spokesman identified the perpetrators as British Muslims Asif Muhammad Hanif,22, from London and Omar Khan Sharif,27, from Derby. Immediately after the first attack the other suicide bomber who was carrying an explosive belt, was supposed to carry out another attack. This second suicide bomber, who may have been injured at that point from the explosion, threw away his explosive belt, the body of the second suicide bomber was washed ashore on the Tel Aviv beachfront on May 12 and was eventually identified on May 19,2003. Forensic experts said he had drowned, an examination of the unexploded bomb discarded by Omar Khan Sharif showed that it had been hidden in a book and contained standard explosives. Despite the events of that day, the bar reopened on Yom Haatzmaut, ISM said activists Hanif and Sharif appeared to be typical Brits. The Jerusalem branch appears in the film The Holy Land, about a wayward Yeshiva student, the director, Eitan Gorlin, worked as one of the bars first bartenders in 1994
17.
Abu Hamza al-Masri
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In 2004, Hamza was arrested by British police after the United States requested he be extradited to face charges. He was later charged by British authorities with sixteen offences for inciting violence, in 2006, a British court found him guilty of inciting violence, and sentenced him to seven years imprisonment. On 5 October 2012, after a legal battle, he was extradited from the UK to the United States to face terrorism charges. On 19 May 2014, Hamza was found guilty of terrorism charges by a federal jury in Manhattan. On 9 January 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Hamza was born in Alexandria, Egypt, as Mustafa Kamel Mustafa in 1958, the son of a middle-class army officer. In 1979, he entered Britain on a student visa and his initial reaction to life in Britain was to describe it as a paradise, where you could do anything you wanted. He studied civil engineering at Brighton Polytechnic College, in the early 1990s, Hamza lived in Bosnia under another name, and fought alongside Bosniaks against Serbs and Croats during the Bosnian War. Hamza, who has one eye and no hands, once claimed he lost them fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan, CNN reported they were injuries he says he sustained while tackling a landmine in Afghanistan. During his trial in the United States, Hamza stated that his injuries occurred whilst working with explosives with the Pakistani military in Lahore, the UK tabloid press have nicknamed him Hook in allusion to the fictional pirate Captain Hook. On 16 May 1980, Hamza married British citizen Valerie Fleming, a Roman Catholic convert to Islam, in 1984, they divorced and he married a woman with whom he has seven children. In 1999 Hamzas son Kamel, then 17 years old, was arrested in Yemen with Hamzas stepson Mohsin Ghalain, all were tried and convicted of planning a terrorist bombing campaign that the prosecution alleged Hamza had sent the men to carry out. Kamel and Ghalain received prison sentences of three and seven years respectively, Kamel, Ghalain, and Hamzas son Mohamed Mostafa were convicted of fraud by a London court in 2009, and sentenced to prison terms. Another son, Yasser Kamel, was sentenced to detention in 2010. In 2012, Hamzas son Imran Mostafa was convicted of armed robbery, Hamza was the imam of Finsbury Park Mosque from 1997, and a leader of the Supporters of Sharia, a group that believed in a strict interpretation of Islamic law. On 4 February 2003, Hamza was dismissed from his position at the Finsbury Park mosque by the Charity Commission, after his exclusion from the mosque, he preached outside the gates until May 2004, when he was arrested at the start of US extradition proceedings against him. Hamza publicly expressed support for Islamist goals such as creating a caliphate and he wrote a paper entitled El Ansar in which he expressed support for the actions of the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, but he later rejected them when they started killing civilians. In one sermon relating to the necessity of Jihad, he said, so if you Muslims don’t like that because you hate the blood, there is something wrong with you. On 26 August 2004, Hamza was arrested by British police under section 41 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which covers the instigation of acts of terrorism
18.
Richard Reid
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Born to a father who was a career criminal, Reid converted to Islam as a young man in prison after years as a petty criminal. Later he became radicalised and went to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he trained, on 22 December 2001, he boarded American Airlines Flight 63 between Paris and Miami, wearing shoes packed with explosives, which he unsuccessfully tried to detonate. Passengers subdued him on the plane, which landed at Logan International Airport in Boston, Massachusetts and he was subsequently arrested and indicted. In 2002, Reid pleaded guilty in U. S. federal court to eight counts of terrorism. He was sentenced to 3 life terms plus 110 years in prison without parole and is held in a maximum security prison in the United States. Reid was born in Bromley, Kent, to Lesley Hughes, who was of white English descent, and Colvin Robin Reid, when Reid was born, his father, a career criminal, was in prison for stealing a car. Reid left school at age 16, becoming a petty crook who was in and out of jail and he began writing graffiti under the name Enrol with FRF crew, and ultimately accumulated more than 10 convictions for crimes against persons and property. He served sentences at the Feltham Young Offenders Institution and at the Blundeston Prison and his father advised him to convert to Islam, telling him that Muslims were more egalitarian and they got better food in prison. The next time Reid was incarcerated, he converted, upon his release from prison in 1996, he joined the Brixton Mosque. By 1998 Reid was voicing extremist views, and may have fallen under the sway of terrorist talent spotters and handlers allied with Al Qaeda and he spent 1999 and 2000 in Pakistan and trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan, according to several informants. He may also have attended a religious training centre in Lahore as a follower of Mubarak Ali Gilani. After his return to Britain, Reid worked to obtain passports from British government consulates abroad. He lived and travelled in several places in Europe, communicating via an address in Peshawar, Pakistan, in July 2001, Reid and Saajid Badat, another British man preparing as a terrorist, returned to Pakistan in November 2001, and reportedly travelled overland to Afghanistan. They were given shoe bombs, casual footwear adapted to be covertly smuggled onto aircraft before being used to destroy them, the pair returned separately to the United Kingdom in early December 2001. Reid went to Belgium for 10 days before catching a train to Paris on 16 December, on 21 December 2001, Reid attempted to board a flight from Paris to Miami, Florida. His boarding was delayed because his physical appearance aroused the suspicions of the airline passenger screeners. In addition, Reid did not answer all of their questions, additional screening by the French National Police resulted in Reids being re-issued a ticket for a flight on the following day. On 22 December 2001, a passenger on Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, one flight attendant, Hermis Moutardier, thinking she smelled a burnt match, walked along the aisles of the plane, trying to assess the source
19.
Finsbury Park Mosque
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The Finsbury Park Mosque is a mosque located in Finsbury Park, London, London Borough of Islington, England. Fisbury Park Mosque is registered in the UK, serving the community in Islington. The mosque has risen to notoriety since allowing extremist Islamist preachers to take it over, in 1996 they installed Abu Hamza al-Masri as imam of the mosque, and later, Abu Qatada which subsequently developed a reputation as a centre of radical Islamism in London. In 2014, HSBC bank closed North London Central Mosques bank account and this was due to reported links to terrorism, based on information provided by the Thomson Reuters news agency. However the mosque then filed a case against Reuters and won in 2017. The main building was opened in 1994 in a ceremony attended by Prince Charles, the mosque is located opposite Finsbury Park station, close to Arsenal Football Clubs Emirates Stadium, in the London Borough of Islington. Al Qaeda operatives including shoebomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui attended the mosque, in 2002, The Guardian reported that weapons training had taken place inside the building. In 2003, over one hundred armed police raided the building as part of the investigation into the alleged Wood Green ricin plot, Abu Hamza al-Masri was eventually jailed for seven years in 2006 after being convicted of inciting murder and race hate. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison, individuals involved in the Beslan school siege were linked to the mosque. Two English/Algerians are among the rebels who actively participated in the attack, Osman Larussi. Another UK citizen named Kamel Rabat Bouralha, arrested while trying to leave Russia immediately following the attack, was suspected to be a key organizer, all three were linked to the Finsbury Park Mosque. Following the 2003 raid, the mosque was reclaimed by those including representatives of the Muslim Association of Britain, at Mosque That Recruited Radicals, New Imam Calls for Help in Catching Bombers. Weapons discovered during London mosque raid, aK-47 training held at London mosque. Official website North London Central Mosque Trust
20.
7 July 2005 London bombings
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The explosions were caused by homemade organic peroxide-based devices packed into backpacks. The bombings were followed two weeks later by a series of attempted attacks that failed to cause injury or damage, the 7 July attacks occurred the day after London had won its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, which had highlighted the citys multicultural reputation. The train had left Kings Cross St. Pancras about eight minutes earlier, at the time of the explosion, the trains third car was approximately 100 yards along the tunnel from Liverpool Street. The parallel track of the Hammersmith & City line between Liverpool Street and Aldgate East was also damaged in the blast, the train had left Kings Cross St. Pancras about eight minutes previously. There were several other nearby at the time of the explosion. Two other trains were at Edgware Road, a train on platform 2. A third bomb was detonated on a 6-car London Underground 1973 Stock Piccadilly line deep-level Underground train, number 311, the device exploded approximately one minute after the service departed Kings Cross, by which time it had travelled about 500 yards. The explosion occurred at the rear of the first car of the train—number 166—causing severe damage to the rear of car as well as the front of the second one. The surrounding tunnel also sustained damage and it was originally thought that there had been six, rather than three, explosions on the Underground network. The bus bombing brought the total to seven, this was clarified later in the day. Police also revised the timings of the blasts, initial reports had indicated that they occurred during a period of almost half an hour. This was due to initial confusion at London Underground, where the explosions were believed to have been caused by power surges. An early report, made in the minutes after the explosions, involved a person under a train, while another described a derailment. A code amber alert was declared by LU at 09,19, as the tunnel contains two parallel tracks, it is relatively wide. The two explosions on the Circle line were able to vent their force into the tunnel. The Piccadilly line is a tunnel, up to 30 m below the surface and with narrow single-track tubes. This confined space reflected the blast force, concentrating its effect, earlier, the bus had passed through the Kings Cross area as it travelled from Hackney Wick to Marble Arch. At its final destination, the bus turned around and started the route to Hackney Wick
21.
Government of the United Kingdom
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Her Majestys Government, commonly referred to as the UK government or British government, is the central government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The government is led by the Prime Minister, who all the remaining ministers. The prime minister and the other most senior ministers belong to the supreme decision-making committee, the government ministers all sit in Parliament, and are accountable to it. After an election, the monarch selects as prime minister the leader of the party most likely to command a majority of MPs in the House of Commons. Under the uncodified British constitution, executive authority lies with the monarch, although this authority is exercised only by, or on the advice of, the prime minister, the Cabinet members advise the monarch as members of the Privy Council. They also exercise power directly as leaders of the Government Departments, the current prime minister is Theresa May, who took office on 13 July 2016. She is the leader of the Conservative Party, which won a majority of seats in the House of Commons in the election on 7 May 2015. Prior to this, Cameron and the Conservatives led a government from 2010 to 2015 with the Liberal Democrats. A key principle of the British Constitution is that the government is responsible to Parliament, Britain is a constitutional monarchy in which the reigning monarch does not make any open political decisions. All political decisions are taken by the government and Parliament and this constitutional state of affairs is the result of a long history of constraining and reducing the political power of the monarch, beginning with the Magna Carta in 1215. Parliament is split into two houses, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, the House of Commons is the lower house and is the more powerful. The House of Lords is the house and although it can vote to amend proposed laws. Parliamentary time is essential for bills to be passed into law, Ministers of the Crown are responsible to the House in which they sit, they make statements in that House and take questions from members of that House. For most senior ministers this is usually the elected House of Commons rather than the House of Lords, since the start of Edward VIIs reign, in 1901, the prime minister has always been an elected member of Parliament and therefore directly accountable to the House of Commons. Under the British system the government is required by convention and for reasons to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons. It requires the support of the House of Commons for the maintenance of supply, by convention if a government loses the confidence of the House of Commons it must either resign or a General Election is held. The support of the Lords, while useful to the government in getting its legislation passed without delay, is not vital, a government is not required to resign even if it loses the confidence of the Lords and is defeated in key votes in that House. The House of Commons is thus the Responsible house, the prime minister is held to account during Prime Ministers Question Time which provides an opportunity for MPs from all parties to question the PM on any subject
22.
The Independent
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The Independent is a British online newspaper. The printed edition of the paper ceased in March 2016, nicknamed the Indy, it began as a broadsheet newspaper, but changed to tabloid format in 2003. Until September 2011, the paper described itself on the banner at the top of every newspaper as free from party political bias and it tends to take a pro-market stance on economic issues. The daily edition was named National Newspaper of the Year at the 2004 British Press Awards. In June 2015, it had a daily circulation of just below 58,000,85 per cent down from its 1990 peak. On 12 February 2016, it was announced that The Independent, the last print edition of The Independent on Sunday was published on 20 March 2016, with the main paper ceasing print publication the following Saturday. Launched in 1986, the first issue of The Independent was published on 7 October in broadsheet format and it was produced by Newspaper Publishing plc and created by Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds. All three partners were former journalists at The Daily Telegraph who had left the paper towards the end of Lord Hartwells ownership, marcus Sieff was the first chairman of Newspaper Publishing, and Whittam Smith took control of the paper. The paper was created at a time of a change in British newspaper publishing. Rupert Murdoch was challenging long-accepted practices of the print unions and ultimately defeated them in the Wapping dispute, consequently, production costs could be reduced which, it was said at the time, created openings for more competition. As a result of controversy around Murdochs move to Wapping, the plant was effectively having to function under siege from sacked print workers picketing outside, the Independent attracted some of the staff from the two Murdoch broadsheets who had chosen not to move to his companys new headquarters. Launched with the advertising slogan It is, and challenging both The Guardian for centre-left readers and The Times as the newspaper of record, The Independent reached a circulation of over 400,000 by 1989. Competing in a market, The Independent sparked a general freshening of newspaper design as well as, within a few years. Some aspects of production merged with the paper, although the Sunday paper retained a largely distinct editorial staff. It featured spoofs of the other papers mastheads with the words The Rupert Murdoch or The Conrad Black, a number of other media companies were interested in the paper. Tony OReillys media group and Mirror Group Newspapers had bought a stake of about a third each by mid-1994, in March 1995, Newspaper Publishing was restructured with a rights issue, splitting the shareholding into OReillys Independent News & Media, MGN, and Prisa. In April 1996, there was another refinancing, and in March 1998, OReilly bought the other 54% of the company for £30 million, brendan Hopkins headed Independent News, Andrew Marr was appointed editor of The Independent, and Rosie Boycott became editor of The Independent on Sunday. Marr introduced a dramatic if short-lived redesign which won critical favour but was a commercial failure, Marr admitted his changes had been a mistake in his book, My Trade
23.
The Observer
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The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. First published in 1791, it is the worlds oldest Sunday newspaper, the first issue, published on 4 December 1791 by W. S. Bourne, was the worlds first Sunday newspaper. Believing that the paper would be a means of wealth, Bourne instead soon found himself facing debts of nearly £1,600, though early editions purported editorial independence, Bourne attempted to cut his losses and sell the title to the government. When this failed, Bournes brother made an offer to the government, as a result, the paper soon took a strong line against radicals such as Thomas Paine, Francis Burdett and Joseph Priestley. In 1807, the decided to relinquish editorial control, naming Lewis Doxat as the new editor. Seven years later, the brothers sold The Observer to William Innell Clement, the woodcut pictures published of the stable and hayloft where the conspirators were arrested reflected a new stage of illustrated journalism that the newspaper pioneered during this time. Clement maintained ownership of The Observer until his death in 1852, during that time, the paper supported parliamentary reform, but opposed a broader franchise and the Chartist leadership. After Doxat retired in 1857, Clements heirs sold the paper to Joseph Snowe, under Snowe, the paper adopted a more liberal political stance, supporting the North during the American Civil War and endorsing universal manhood suffrage in 1866. These positions contributed to a decline in circulation during this time, in 1870, wealthy businessman Julius Beer bought the paper and appointed Edward Dicey as editor, whose efforts succeeded in reviving circulation. Though Beers son Frederick became the owner upon Juliuss death in 1880, henry Duff Traill took over the editorship after Diceys departure, only to be replaced in 1891 by Fredericks wife, Rachel Beer, of the Sassoon family. Though circulation declined during her tenure, she remained as editor for thirteen years, combining it in 1893 with the editorship of The Sunday Times, upon Fredericks death in 1901, the paper was purchased by the newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe. After maintaining the editorial leadership for a couple of years. Garvin quickly turned the paper into an organ of political influence, yet the revival in the papers fortunes masked growing political disagreements between Garvin and Northcliffe. These disagreements ultimately led Northcliffe to sell the paper to William Waldorf Astor in 1911, during this period, the Astors were content to leave the control of the paper in Garvins hands. Under his editorship circulation reached 200,000 during the interwar years, politically the paper pursued an independent Tory stance, which eventually brought Garvin into conflict with Waldorfs more liberal son, David. Their conflict contributed to Garvins departure as editor in 1942, after which the paper took the step of declaring itself non-partisan. Ownership passed to Waldorfs sons in 1948, with David taking over as editor and he remained in the position for 27 years, during which time he turned it into a trust-owned newspaper employing, among others, George Orwell, Paul Jennings and C. A. Lejeune. Under Astors editorship The Observer became the first national newspaper to oppose the governments 1956 invasion of Suez, in 1977, the Astors sold the ailing newspaper to US oil giant Atlantic Richfield who sold it to Lonrho plc in 1981
24.
Leader of the Opposition (United Kingdom)
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The Leader of Her Majestys Most Loyal Opposition is the politician who leads the official opposition in the United Kingdom. The current Leader of the Opposition is Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, the Leader of the Opposition is normally viewed as an alternative prime minister, and is appointed to the Privy Council. They lead an Official Opposition Shadow Cabinet which scrutinises the actions of the Cabinet led by the prime minister, There is also a Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords. In the nineteenth century party affiliations were generally fixed and leaders in the two Houses were often of equal status. A single, clear Leader of the Opposition was only definitively settled if the leader in Commons or Lords was the outgoing prime minister. However, since the Parliament Act 1911 there has been no dispute that the leader in the House of Commons is pre-eminent, the Leader of the Opposition is entitled to a salary in addition to their salary as a Member of Parliament. In 2010, this additional entitlement was available up to £73,617, the first modern Leader of the Opposition was Charles James Fox, who led the Whigs as such for a generation, except during the Fox–North Coalition in 1783. He finally rejoined the government in 1806, and died later that year, for there to be a recognised Leader of the Opposition, it is necessary for there to be a sufficiently cohesive opposition to need a formal leader. The emergence of the office coincided with the period when wholly united parties became the norm. This situation was normalised in the Parliament of 1807–1812, when the members of the Grenvillite and Foxite Whig factions resolved to maintain a joint, dual-house leadership for the whole party. The Ministry of all the Talents, in which both Whig factions participated fell at the 1807 general election, during which the Whigs had re-adopted traditional factions, the prime minister of the Talents ministry, Lord Grenville had led his eponymous faction from the House of Lords. Meanwhile, the government leader of the House of Commons, Viscount Howick, led his faction, howicks father, the 1st Earl Grey died on 14 November 1807. As such the new Earl Grey vacated his seat in the House of Commons and this left no obvious Whig leader in the House of Commons. Grenvilles article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography confirms that he was considered the Whig leader in the House of Lords between 1807 and 1817, despite Grey leading the larger faction. Grenville and Grey, political historian Archibald Foord describes as being duumvirs of the party from 1807 to 1817, Grenville was at first reluctant to name a Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, commenting. All the elections in the world would not have made Windham or Sheridan leaders of the old Opposition while Fox was alive, eventually they jointly recommended George Ponsonby to the Whig MPs, whom they accepted as the first Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. Ponsonby proved a leader but as he could not be persuaded to resign. Lord Grenville retired from politics in 1817, leaving Grey as the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords
25.
David Cameron
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David William Donald Cameron is a British politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016. He served as the Leader of the Conservative Party from 2005 to 2016 and was Member of Parliament for Witney from 2001 to 2016, Cameron identifies as a One-Nation Conservative, and has been associated with both economically liberal and socially liberal policies. Born in London to wealthy upper middle-class parents, Cameron was educated at Heatherdown School, Eton College, from 1988 to 1993 he worked at the Conservative Research Department, assisting the Conservative Prime Minister John Major, before leaving politics to work for Carlton Communications in 1994. Becoming an MP in 2001, he served in the shadow cabinet under Conservative leader Michael Howard. Cameron sought to rebrand the Conservatives, embracing an increasingly liberal position. The 2010 general election led to Cameron becoming Prime Minister as the head of a government with the Liberal Democrats. His administration introduced large-scale changes to welfare, immigration policy, education and it privatised the Royal Mail and some other state assets, and legalised same-sex marriage. When the Conservatives secured a majority in the 2015 general election he remained as Prime Minister. To fulfil a manifesto pledge, he introduced a referendum on the UKs continuing membership of the EU, Cameron supported continued membership, following the success of the Leave vote, he resigned to make way for a new Prime Minister and was succeeded by Theresa May. Cameron has been praised for modernising the Conservative Party and for decreasing the United Kingdoms national deficit, conversely, he has been criticised by figures on both the left and right, and has been accused of political opportunism and elitism. Cameron is the son of Ian Donald Cameron a stockbroker, and his wife Mary Fleur, a retired Justice of the Peace. Camerons parents were married on 20 October 1962, the journalist Toby Young has described Camerons background as being upper-upper-middle class. Cameron was born in Marylebone, London, and raised in Peasemore, Berkshire and he has a brother, Alexander Cameron, QC, a barrister, and two sisters, Tania Rachel and Clare Louise. Blairmore was built by Camerons great-great-grandfather, Alexander Geddes, who had made a fortune in the trade in Chicago, Illinois. Blairmore was sold soon after Ians birth, Cameron has said, On my mothers side of the family, her mother was a Llewellyn, so Welsh. Im a real mixture of Scottish, Welsh, and English and he has also referenced the German Jewish ancestry of one of his great-grandfathers, Arthur Levita, a descendant of the Yiddish author Elia Levita. From the age of seven, Cameron was educated at two independent schools, at Heatherdown School in Winkfield in Berkshire, which counts Prince Andrew, owing to good grades, Cameron entered its top academic class almost two years early. At the age of thirteen, he went on to Eton College in Berkshire and his early interest was in art
26.
Labour Party (UK)
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The Labour Party is a centre-left political party in the United Kingdom. Labour later served in the coalition from 1940 to 1945. Labour was also in government from 1964 to 1970 under Harold Wilson and from 1974 to 1979, first under Wilson and then James Callaghan. The Labour Party was last in government from 1997 to 2010 under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, beginning with a majority of 179. Having won 232 seats in the 2015 general election, the party is the Official Opposition in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, the party also organises in Northern Ireland, but does not contest elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Labour Party is a member of the Party of European Socialists and Progressive Alliance. In September 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was elected Leader of the Labour Party, the first Lib–Lab candidate to stand was George Odger in the Southwark by-election of 1870. In addition, several small socialist groups had formed around this time, among these were the Independent Labour Party, the intellectual and largely middle-class Fabian Society, the Marxist Social Democratic Federation and the Scottish Labour Party. In the 1895 general election, the Independent Labour Party put up 28 candidates, Keir Hardie, the leader of the party, believed that to obtain success in parliamentary elections, it would be necessary to join with other left-wing groups. Hardies roots as a lay preacher contributed to an ethos in the party led to the comment by 1950s General Secretary Morgan Phillips that Socialism in Britain owed more to Methodism than Marx. The motion was passed at all stages by the TUC, the meeting was attended by a broad spectrum of working-class and left-wing organisations—trades unions represented about one third of the membership of the TUC delegates. This created an association called the Labour Representation Committee, meant to coordinate attempts to support MPs sponsored by trade unions and it had no single leader, and in the absence of one, the Independent Labour Party nominee Ramsay MacDonald was elected as Secretary. He had the task of keeping the various strands of opinions in the LRC united. The October 1900 Khaki election came too soon for the new party to campaign effectively, only 15 candidatures were sponsored, but two were successful, Keir Hardie in Merthyr Tydfil and Richard Bell in Derby. Support for the LRC was boosted by the 1901 Taff Vale Case, the judgement effectively made strikes illegal since employers could recoup the cost of lost business from the unions. In their first meeting after the election the groups Members of Parliament decided to adopt the name The Labour Party formally, the Fabian Society provided much of the intellectual stimulus for the party. One of the first acts of the new Liberal Government was to reverse the Taff Vale judgement, the Peoples History Museum in Manchester holds the minutes of the first Labour Party meeting in 1906 and has them on display in the Main Galleries. Also within the museum is the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, the governing Liberals were unwilling to repeal this judicial decision with primary legislation
27.
Gordon Brown
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James Gordon Brown is a British politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Blair Government from 1997 to 2007, Brown was a Member of Parliament from 1983 to 2015, first for Dunfermline East and later for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. A doctoral graduate of the University of Edinburgh, Brown spent his career working as both a lecturer at a further education college and a television journalist. He entered Parliament in 1983 as the MP for Dunfermline East and he joined the Shadow Cabinet in 1989 as Shadow Secretary of State for Trade, and was later promoted to become Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1992. After Labours victory in 1997, he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 2007, Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister and Labour Leader and Brown was chosen to replace him in an uncontested election. Brown remained in office as Labour negotiated to form a government with the Liberal Democrats. On 10 May 2010, Brown announced he would stand down as leader of the Labour Party, Labours attempts to retain power failed and on 11 May, he officially resigned as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party. He was succeeded as Prime Minister by David Cameron, and as Leader of the Labour Party by Ed Miliband, later, Brown played a prominent role in the campaign surrounding the Scottish independence referendum of 2014, galvanising support behind maintaining the union. Brown was born at the Orchard Maternity Nursing Home in Giffnock, Renfrewshire and his father was John Ebenezer Brown, a minister of the Church of Scotland and a strong influence on Brown. He died in December 1998, aged 84 and his mother, Jessie Elizabeth Brown, known as Bunty, died on 19 September 2004, aged 86. She was the daughter of John Souter, a timber merchant, the family moved to Kirkcaldy – then the largest town in Fife, across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh – when Gordon was three. Brown was brought up there with his elder brother John and younger brother Andrew Brown in a manse, in common with many other notable Scots, he is therefore often referred to as a son of the manse. At age sixteen he wrote that he loathed and resented this ludicrous experiment on young lives and he was accepted by the University of Edinburgh to study history at the same early age of sixteen. During an end-of-term rugby union match at his old school, he received a kick to the head and this left him blind in his left eye, despite treatment including several operations and weeks spent lying in a darkened room. Later at Edinburgh, while playing tennis, he noticed the symptoms in his right eye. Brown underwent experimental surgery at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and his eye was saved. In his youth at the University of Edinburgh, Brown was involved in a relationship with Margarita. Margarita said about it, It was a solid and romantic story
28.
John Reid, Baron Reid of Cardowan
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John Reid, Baron Reid of Cardowan PC is a British Labour Party politician. He was a Member of Parliament from 1987 to 2010, and he was Health Secretary from 2003 to 2005, Defence Secretary from 2005 to 2006, and Home Secretary from 2006 to 2007. Born in Bellshill to working class, Roman Catholic parents, Reid first became involved in politics when he joined the Young Communist League in 1972. He later joined the Labour Party, working for them as a researcher before being elected to the House of Commons in 1987 as the MP for Motherwell North. He retired from politics in 2007 following Gordon Browns appointment as Prime Minister. He later stepped down as an MP in 2010, and was elevated to the House of Lords. Reid also took a role in the campaign for a No vote in the 2011 AV referendum. Reid was born in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, Scotland, to working class Roman Catholic parents and his grandfather was a staunch Church of Scotland Presbyterian and his grandmother a poor and illiterate Irish peasant. His mother, Mary, was a worker and father. Reid attributes his success to hard work and a good education, like his successor as Scottish Secretary, Helen Liddell he attended St Patricks Secondary School, Coatbridge. The headmaster of St Patricks, James Breen, was described as being driven by the belief that working class children could make good in their lives provided there was discipline. If we werent allowed in before 9 oclock, we werent going in after 9 oclock Reid is quoted as saying, eventually the Headmaster conceded and the strike ended. Leaving school at 16, Reid decided not to go to university but instead took a series of jobs, including work on an oil pipeline. It is this latter job that Reid quotes as opening his eyes politically, soon after this he joined the Labour Party. It was also around this time that Reids lifelong passion for history was kindled when his girlfriend, Cathie McGowan, bought him a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. From 1979 to 1983 he was an officer for the Labour Party in Scotland. From 1986 to 1987, he was Scottish Organiser of Trade Unionists for Labour and he entered parliament at the 1987 general election as MP for the Motherwell North constituency. Reid was married to Cathie McGowan from 1969 until her death from a heart attack in 1998
29.
Jeremy Corbyn
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Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is a British politician who was elected Leader of the Labour Party in 2015, thus becoming Leader of the Opposition. He has been Member of Parliament for Islington North since 1983, born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, Corbyn attended Adams Grammar School and later North London Polytechnic, leaving without a degree. Before entering politics he worked as a representative for trade unions. As a backbench MP he was known for activism and rebelliousness, frequently voting against the Labour whip, including when the party was in government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. As Labour leader, Corbyn advocates reversing austerity cuts to services and welfare funding made since 2010, and proposes renationalisation of public utilities. A longstanding anti-war and anti-nuclear activist, Corbyn supports a policy of military non-interventionism. He was the chair of the Stop the War Coalition. After Labours defeat in the 2015 general election and the resignation of Ed Miliband and he was elected leader of the Labour Party on 12 September 2015, with a vote of 59. 5% in the first round of the ballot. In June 2016, Labour MPs passed a vote of no confidence in Corbyn by 172 votes to 40 following the resignation of around two-thirds of Corbyns Shadow Cabinet. On 24 September 2016, following a leadership contest, Corbyn retained leadership of the party with a vote share of 61. 8%. Corbyn was born in Chippenham and brought up in nearby Kington St Michael in Wiltshire and he is the youngest of the four sons of Naomi, a maths teacher, and David Benjamin Corbyn, an electrical engineer and expert in power rectifiers. His brother Piers Corbyn is a weather forecaster and his parents were peace campaigners who met in the 1930s at a committee meeting in support of the Spanish Republic at Conway Hall during the Spanish Civil War. When Corbyn was seven years old, the moved to Pave Lane in Shropshire. Corbyn was educated at Castle House Preparatory School, an independent school near Newport, while still at school, he became active in The Wrekin constituency Young Socialists, his local Labour Party, and the League Against Cruel Sports. He achieved two E-grade A-Levels before leaving school at 18, Corbyn joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1966 whilst at school and later became one of its three vice-chairs. After school, Corbyn worked briefly as a reporter for a local newspaper, at around the age of 19 he spent two years doing Voluntary Service Overseas in Jamaica. Returning to the UK in 1971, he worked as an official for the National Union of Tailors, Corbyn began a course in Trade Union Studies at North London Polytechnic but left after a series of arguments with his tutors over the curriculum. He worked as a union organiser for the National Union of Public Employees and Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union
30.
Conservative Party (UK)
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The Conservative Party, officially the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a political party in the United Kingdom. It is currently the party, having won a majority of seats in the House of Commons at the 2015 general election. The partys leader, Theresa May, is serving as Prime Minister. It is the largest party in government with 8,702 councillors. The Conservative Party is one of the two major political parties in the United Kingdom, the other being its modern rival. The Conservative Partys platform involves support for market capitalism, free enterprise, fiscal conservatism, a strong national defence, deregulation. In the 1920s, the Liberal vote greatly diminished and the Labour Party became the Conservatives main rivals, Conservative Prime Ministers led governments for 57 years of the twentieth century, including Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Thatchers tenure led to wide-ranging economic liberalisation, the Conservative Partys domination of British politics throughout the twentieth century has led to them being referred to as one of the most successful political parties in the Western world. The Conservatives are the joint-second largest British party in the European Parliament, with twenty MEPs, the party is a member of the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe Europarty and the International Democrat Union. The party is the second-largest in the Scottish Parliament and the second-largest in the Welsh Assembly, the party is also organised in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. The Conservative Party traces its origins to a faction, rooted in the 18th century Whig Party and they were known as Independent Whigs, Friends of Mr Pitt, or Pittites. After Pitts death the term Tory came into use and this was an allusion to the Tories, a political grouping that had existed from 1678, but which had no organisational continuity with the Pittite party. From about 1812 on the name Tory was commonly used for the newer party, the term Conservative was suggested as a title for the party by a magazine article by J. Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review in 1830. The name immediately caught on and was adopted under the aegis of Sir Robert Peel around 1834. Peel is acknowledged as the founder of the Conservative Party, which he created with the announcement of the Tamworth Manifesto, the term Conservative Party rather than Tory was the dominant usage by 1845. In 1912, the Liberal Unionists merged with the Conservative Party, in Ireland, the Irish Unionist Alliance had been formed in 1891 which merged anti-Home Rule Unionists into one political movement. Its MPs took the Conservative whip at Westminster, and in essence formed the Irish wing of the party until 1922. The Conservatives served with the Liberals in an all-party coalition government during World War I, keohane finds that the Conservatives were bitterly divided before 1914, especially on the issue of Irish Unionism and the experience of three consecutive election losses
31.
Toby Perkins
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Matthew Toby Perkins is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Chesterfield since 2010 general election, gaining the seat from Liberal Democrat Paul Holmes. Upon the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party in 2015 and he also campaigned for the UK to remain a member of the European Union ahead of the EU Referendum on 23 June 2016. Perkins is son of V. F. Perkins and his wife Teresa and he has a sister, Polly and is the great-grandson of A. P. Herbert, Independent Member of Parliament for Oxford University. He attended Trinity Catholic School, Leamington Spa and Silverdale Comprehensive School in Sheffield, Perkins worked in the private sector from 1987 until he was elected to Parliament in 2010. He was in IT Sales, consultant and then Regional Manager for the Prime Time Recruitment organisation and he then set up a rugby product business. Perkins was a councillor for Rother Ward on Chesterfield Borough Council from 2003–2011 and he was a Director of Families First Co-operative, a social enterprise that ran an early years nursery in Chesterfield, and set up the Chesterfield Flood Victims Appeal. Perkins defeat of Chesterfields sitting Liberal Democrat MP, Paul Holmes, following Perkins election to Parliament in 2010, he asked a question in David Camerons first post-election Prime Ministers Questions in the 2010 session. He backed David Miliband for the Labour leadership and was named by the Financial Times as one of the best six newcomers of the first 100 days of the 2010 parliament. Under Ed Miliband, he became the first of the 2010 intake of new members to speak from the front bench when becoming a Shadow Education Minister in September 2010 under Andy Burnham. He was moved into the Shadow Business team as Shadow Minister for Enterprise and Small Business in 2011, as Shadow Business Minister he was responsible for Labours policies on Access to Finance, Small Businesses, Regulation/ de-regulation, Insolvency, Procurement, Pubs and the High Street. He was elected to the Communities and Local Government Select Committee, douglas Alexander appointed him one of three Labour Party Deputy Chairs in July 2014 for the 2015 General Election campaign alongside Gloria De Piero and Jonathan Ashworth. He had previously run Labours by election campaign in Wythenshawe and Sale East and he also worked on by election campaigns in Corby, Bradford West and Eastleigh. In parliament he has led Opposition Day debates for Labour on pub company regulation, Sunday trading laws for the Olympics, on the Deregulation Bill alongside Chi Onwurah. He has secured adjournment debates against Derbyshire Fire Station closures, that led to a u-turn on plans to close 18 Derbyshire fire stations, and against the sale of legal highs. Perkins proposed in 2016, via a 10-minute private members bill, the second reading was due for 4 March, but has been delayed. Perkins was Shadow Minister for the Armed Forces in the Shadow Cabinet of Jeremy Corbyn and he follows Sheffield United, Chesterfield FC and British Tennis. He is a friend of Jonny Marray, the British Tennis player who won the Wimbledon Mens Doubles title in 2012
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The Guardian
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The Guardian is a British daily newspaper, known from 1821 until 1959 as the Manchester Guardian. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, the Scott Trust became a limited company in 2008, with a constitution to maintain the same protections for The Guardian. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than to the benefit of an owner or shareholders, the Guardian is edited by Katharine Viner, who succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. In 2016, The Guardians print edition had a daily circulation of roughly 162,000 copies in the country, behind The Daily Telegraph. The newspaper has an online UK edition as well as two international websites, Guardian Australia and Guardian US, the newspapers online edition was the fifth most widely read in the world in October 2014, with over 42.6 million readers. Its combined print and online editions reach nearly 9 million British readers, notable scoops include the 2011 News International phone hacking scandal, in particular the hacking of murdered English teenager Milly Dowlers phone. The investigation led to the closure of the UKs biggest selling Sunday newspaper, and one of the highest circulation newspapers in the world, in 2016, it led the investigation into the Panama Papers, exposing the then British Prime Minister David Camerons links to offshore bank accounts. The Guardian has been named Newspaper of the Year four times at the annual British Press Awards, the paper is still occasionally referred to by its nickname of The Grauniad, given originally for the purported frequency of its typographical errors. The Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by cotton merchant John Edward Taylor with backing from the Little Circle and they launched their paper after the police closure of the more radical Manchester Observer, a paper that had championed the cause of the Peterloo Massacre protesters. They do not toil, neither do they spin, but they better than those that do. When the government closed down the Manchester Observer, the champions had the upper hand. The influential journalist Jeremiah Garnett joined Taylor during the establishment of the paper, the prospectus announcing the new publication proclaimed that it would zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty. Warmly advocate the cause of Reform, endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy and. Support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, in 1825 the paper merged with the British Volunteer and was known as The Manchester Guardian and British Volunteer until 1828. The working-class Manchester and Salford Advertiser called the Manchester Guardian the foul prostitute, the Manchester Guardian was generally hostile to labours claims. The Manchester Guardian dismissed strikes as the work of outside agitators –, if an accommodation can be effected, the occupation of the agents of the Union is gone. CP Scott made the newspaper nationally recognised and he was editor for 57 years from 1872, and became its owner when he bought the paper from the estate of Taylors son in 1907. Under Scott, the moderate editorial line became more radical, supporting William Gladstone when the Liberals split in 1886
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Maajid Nawaz
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Maajid Usman Nawaz is a British activist, author, columnist, radio host and politician. He was the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Londons Hampstead and Kilburn constituency in the 2015 general election and he is also the founding chairman of Quilliam, a counter-extremism think tank that seeks to challenge the narratives of Islamist extremists. Born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex to a British Pakistani family, Nawaz is a member of the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. This association led to his arrest in Egypt in December 2001, reading books on human rights and interacting with Amnesty International, which adopted him as a prisoner of conscience, resulted in a change of heart. This led Nawaz to leave Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 2007, renounce his Islamist past, after his turnaround, Nawaz co-founded Quilliam with former Islamists, including Ed Husain. He wrote an autobiography, Radical, which was published in 2012, since then, he has become a prominent critic of Islamism in the United Kingdom. He is a regular op-ed contributor, debater and public commenter and he presented his views on radicalisation in front of US Senate Committee and UK Home Affairs Committee in their respective inquiries on the roots of radical extremism. He is a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast, and hosts his LBC radio show every weekend 12–3 pm and his writings have been published in various international newspapers including The New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Mail and The Wall Street Journal. He has made appearances on programmes including Larry King Live, BBC Hard Talk, Charlie Rose,60 Minutes, Newsnight and he has delivered lectures at LSE and University of Liverpool, and has given talks at UK Defence Academy and Marshall Center for Security Studies. In June 2014, Nawaz became an associate of the National Secular Society. His second book Islam and the Future of Tolerance, co-authored with American neuroscientist Sam Harris, was published in October 2015, Nawaz was born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England to parents of Pakistani origin. His mother, Abi, is described as a liberal woman whose family moved to Southend when she was nine. His father, Mo, is an engineer who had worked for the Pakistan Navy but had to leave on medical grounds after he contracted tuberculosis. Mo later worked for the Dewan Group in Islamabad, Pakistan where he won a case against his employer which had banned trade unions. After moving to UK, Mo worked at an oil company in Libya, Maajid has an elder brother and a younger sister. In his memoir, Radical, he uses the pseudonym Osman to denote his brother, Nawaz was educated at Westcliff High School for Boys, a grammar school in Westcliff-on-Sea, a suburb of Southend. Later, he studied Law and Arabic at the SOAS, University of London, at the age of 21, he married Rabia Ahmed, then a fellow Hizb ut-Tahrir activist and a biology student, they have a son named Ammar, named after Muhammads companion Ammar ibn Yasir. On Nawazs decision to leave Hizb ut-Tahrir, they separated and divorced, in 2014, he married Rachel Maggart, an artist and writer originally from the United States who runs an art gallery in London
34.
National Union of Students (United Kingdom)
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The National Union of Students of the United Kingdom is a confederation of students unions in the United Kingdom. Around 600 students unions are affiliated, accounting for more than 95% of all higher and further education unions in the UK, there is also an NUS Area for London, called NUS London. NUS is a member of the European Students Union, constituent members and associate members are required to pay a subscription fee as a condition of their membership. The NUS was formed on 10 February 1922 at a meeting held at the University of London, at this meeting, the Inter-Varsity Association and the International Students Bureau agreed to merge. Founding members included the unions of University of Birmingham, Birkbeck College, London, LSE, Imperial College London, Kings College London, during the 1950s it had thus concerned itself with collective bargaining over student grants, teaching salaries and education. This apolitical consensus was challenged in concert with the protests of 1968. At the 1969 NUS conference, then president Trevor Fisk came up against Jack Straw over the issue, Straw supported student protests against US military involvement in the Vietnam War, while Fisk advocated neutrality, Straws side won and the no politics clause was removed. A new-era began for the NUS, where agitation and protest became institutionalized. Straw was followed up as president by Digby Jacks, also representing the Radical Student Alliance, according to contemporary British government reports, the RSA was connected to the Trotskyite-led Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and had close links with the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund. The government report stated If they have an ideological bible it consists of the work of Professor Herbert Marcuse, at the time this was aimed at the National Front and the Monday Club. Indeed, two presidents of the NUS earlier on in the 1960s were from Queens University, Belfast, T. William Savage, the 1968-69 unrest in Northern Ireland saw the onset of The Troubles and a sectarian divisiveness come to the fore. Following a meeting in Galway in 1972, to combat divisions it was agreed that a called the NUS-USI would be founded with dual-membership to cover Northern Ireland. In 1970, NUS vice president Tony Klug visited South Africa, members also attempted to disrupt South African rugby and cricket matches in the United Kingdom during the 1970s. In the 1980s, the NUS played a significant role in getting Barclays Bank to divest from South Africa and they did so to work as a voting bloc against both the Conservatives and Militant. The first of these Broad Left presidents was Charles Clarke who as a member of the Clause Four Group, other presidents included Sue Slipman, Trevor Phillips and David Aaronovitch. The Fairtrade NUS Campaign was started by students at the University of Edinburgh in autumn 2005, the campaign is supported by a number of NGOs and charities, including Oxfam, Trade Justice Movement, People & Planet and CAFOD. Before the 2010 General Election, the NUS invited candidates sign a pledge not to raise tuition fees, the NUS, under new leader Aaron Porter, organised a national protest attended by thousands in November 2010, demanding an end to education cuts. The march route passed Whitehall and the Conservative Party headquarters at Millbank Tower, as they marched past the building, some protesters diverted in to the courtyard of Millbank Tower and began an occupation of the building
35.
Clash of Civilizations
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The Clash of Civilizations is a hypothesis that peoples cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations, the phrase itself was earlier used by Albert Camus in 1946, and by Bernard Lewis in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled The Roots of Muslim Rage. Even earlier, the phrase appears in a 1926 book regarding the Middle East by Basil Mathews, Young Islam on Trek and this expression derives from clash of cultures, already used during the colonial period and the Belle Époque. Huntington began his thinking by surveying the diverse theories about the nature of politics in the post-Cold War period. Specifically, Francis Fukuyama argued that the world had reached the end of history in a Hegelian sense, Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict. In his thesis, he argued that the axis of conflict in the future will be along cultural lines. As an extension, he posits that the concept of different civilizations, as the highest rank of cultural identity, in the 1993 Foreign Affairs article, Huntington writes The Clash of Civilizations. At the end of the article, he writes, This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between civilizations and it is to set forth descriptive hypothesis as to what the future may be like. In addition, the clash of civilizations, for Huntington, represents a development of history, in the past, world history was mainly about the struggles between monarchs, nations and ideologies, such as seen within Western civilization. Huntington divided the world into the major civilizations in his thesis as such, Western civilization, comprising the United States and Canada, Western and Central Europe, the traditional Western viewpoint identified Western Civilization with the Western Christian countries and culture. Includes Central America, South America, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, may be considered a part of Western civilization. Many people of the Southern Cone and Mexico regard themselves as members of the Western civilization. The Orthodox world of the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, countries with a non-Orthodox majority are usually excluded. The Eastern world is the mix of the Buddhist, Chinese, Hindu, the Confucian civilization of China, the Koreas, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam. This group also includes the Chinese diaspora, especially in relation to Southeast Asia, Hindu civilization, located chiefly in India, Bhutan and Nepal, and culturally adhered to by the global Indian diaspora. Japan, considered as a society and civilization unique to itself, the Muslim world of the Greater Middle East, northern West Africa, Albania, Bangladesh, parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brunei, Comoros, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Maldives. The civilization of Sub-Saharan Africa located in Southern Africa, Middle Africa, East Africa, Cape Verde, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, considered as a possible 8th civilization by Huntington. Instead of belonging to one of the civilizations, Ethiopia
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September 11 attacks
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The September 11 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda on the United States on the morning of Tuesday, September 11,2001. The attacks killed 2,996 people, injured over 6,000 others, two of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were crashed into the North and South towers, respectively, of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, was crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia and it was the deadliest incident for firefighters and law enforcement officers in the history of the United States, with 343 and 72 killed respectively. Suspicion for the attack fell on al-Qaeda. The United States responded to the attacks by launching the War on Terror and invading Afghanistan to depose the Taliban, many countries strengthened their anti-terrorism legislation and expanded the powers of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to prevent terrorist attacks. Although al-Qaedas leader, Osama bin Laden, initially denied any involvement, al-Qaeda and bin Laden cited U. S. support of Israel, the presence of U. S. troops in Saudi Arabia, and sanctions against Iraq as motives. Having evaded capture for almost a decade, bin Laden was located and killed by SEAL Team Six of the U. S. Navy in May 2011. S. many closings, evacuations, and cancellations followed, out of respect or fear of further attacks. Cleanup of the World Trade Center site was completed in May 2002, on November 18,2006, construction of One World Trade Center began at the World Trade Center site. The building was opened on November 3,2014. The origins of al-Qaeda can be traced to 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden traveled to Afghanistan and helped organize Arab mujahideen to resist the Soviets. Under the guidance of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden became more radical, in 1996, bin Laden issued his first fatwā, calling for American soldiers to leave Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden used Islamic texts to exhort Muslims to attack Americans until the stated grievances are reversed, Muslim legal scholars have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries, according to bin Laden. Bin Laden, who orchestrated the attacks, initially denied but later admitted involvement, in November 2001, U. S. forces recovered a videotape from a destroyed house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. In the video, bin Laden is seen talking to Khaled al-Harbi, on December 27,2001, a second bin Laden video was released. In the video, he said, It has become clear that the West in general and it is the hatred of crusaders. Terrorism against America deserves to be praised because it was a response to injustice, aimed at forcing America to stop its support for Israel, the transcript refers several times to the United States specifically targeting Muslims. He said that the attacks were carried out because, we are free, and want to regain freedom for our nation. As you undermine our security we undermine yours, Bin Laden said he had personally directed his followers to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
37.
Ofcom
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Ofcom has wide-ranging powers across the television, radio, telecoms and postal sectors. It has a duty to represent the interests of citizens and consumers by promoting competition. Some of the main areas Ofcom presides over are licensing, research, codes and policies, complaints, competition, the regulator was initially established by the Office of Communications Act 2002 and received its full authority from the Communications Act 2003. The creation of Ofcom was announced in the Queens Speech to the UK Parliament, the new body, which would replace several existing authorities, was conceived as a super-regulator to oversee media channels that were rapidly converging through digital transmission. It will no longer play a role in making policy, and the policy-making functions it has today will be transferred back fully to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. On 1 October 2011, Ofcom took over responsibility for regulating the postal services industry from the Postal Services Commission. In April 2015, Ofcom announced that as of 1 July, the streamlining of these charges must be printed in each customers contract and monthly bills. The change will affect over 175 million phone numbers making it the biggest overhaul of telephoning in over a decade, on 1 January 2016, the regulation of video on demand was transferred to Ofcom from ATVOD, the Authority for Television On Demand. On 13 July former Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged Ofcom to launch an investigation, on 22 July it was reported that Ofcom had begun an investigation into whether the phone-hacking scandal may have changed BSkyBs status as the fit and proper holder of a UK broadcasting licence. In the letter Richards confirmed that Ofcom considers that News Corporations current shareholding of 39, in April 2012, Ofcoms probe moved from a monitoring phase to a evidence gathering phase. Ofcom licenses all UK commercial television and radio services in the UK, broadcasters must comply by the terms of their licence, or risk having it revoked. Ofcom also publishes the Broadcasting Code, a series of rules which all broadcast content on television, the broadcasting of pornography with a BBFC R18 certificate is not permitted. In 2010 Ofcom revoked the licences of four television channels for promoting adult chat services during daytime hours. The companies involved were fined £157,250, Ofcoms jurisdiction does not cover television and radio channels which are broadcast in the UK but licensed abroad. In 2012 Ofcom lodged a complaint with the Dutch media regulator regarding the content of adult television channels which are broadcast in the UK. As the regulatory body for media broadcasts, part of Ofcoms duties are to examine specific complaints by viewers or listeners about programmes broadcast on channels that it has licensed and it does not oversee unlicensed channels broadcast to UK viewers. When Ofcom receives a complaint, it asks the broadcaster for a copy of the programme, Ofcom requests response from the broadcaster to the complaint. On the basis of response, Ofcom will mark the complaint as either upheld or not upheld
38.
Birmingham Post
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For the newspaper of the same name formerly published in Birmingham, Alabama, see Birmingham Post-Herald. The Birmingham Post is a printed newspaper based in Birmingham, England, with a circulation of 6,667. First published under the name the Birmingham Daily Post in 1857, it has had a succession of distinguished editors and has played a role in the life. It is currently owned by Trinity Mirror, in June 2013, it launched a daily tablet edition called Birmingham Post Business Daily. The Birmingham Journal was a newspaper published between 1825 and 1869. A nationally influential voice in the Chartist movement in the 1830s, the 1855 Stamp Act removed the tax on newspapers and transformed the news trade. The price of the Journal was reduced from seven pence to four pence, untaxed, it became possible to sell a newspaper for a penny, and the advantage lay with smaller, more frequent publications that could keep their readers more up to date. Historical copies of the Birmingham Daily Post, dating back to 1857, are available to search, from the outset the Post became closely associated with radical politics and intellectual movements. The newspaper played an important role in the calls for political and social reform in the rapidly expanding industrial town. In 1869 Birmingham Daily Post editor John Thackray Bunce was instrumental in getting Joseph Chamberlain elected to the Town Council for the first time, the newspaper remained a staunch supporter of Chamberlain helping to take the town with him as he pushed for municipal reform. It printed informed articles on the ideals of the Civic Gospel, and gave a platform to radical figures such as John Bright, George Dawson, Robert William Dale, John Frederick Feeney died in 1869, and was succeeded by his son John. He inherited his fathers passion the city and built on his success, by the 1870s, the Birmingham Daily Post was the largest circulating daily newspaper in the Midlands. Following the death of John Feeney in 1905, ownership of the Post passed to his nephew, Hyde was instrumental in urging middle class recruits to volunteer for the Birmingham Pals battalions at the outbreak of the First World War. In an editorial of August 1914 he wrote, At all costs Germany must be restrained, Birmingham can and ought to do much more. we should raise a battalion of non-manual workers. The word Daily was dropped from the title in 1918, Hyde remained the proprietor of the Birmingham Post and Mail until his death in 1942. The papers were bought by a newspaper proprietor Sir Edward Iliffe, a former Conservative MP. It became part of a company, the Birmingham Post & Mail Limited. The Birmingham Post, Evening Mail, Sports Argus and Sunday Mercury moved into the purpose built Post and Mail building in the city centre in 1965
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Newsnight
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Newsnight is a weekday BBC Television current affairs programme which specialises in analysis and often robust cross-examination of senior politicians. Jeremy Paxman was its main presenter for 25 years, until announcing in April 2014 that he was stepping down, several of the programmes editors over the years have gone on to senior positions within the BBC and elsewhere. The programmes regular presenters are currently Kirsty Wark, Emily Maitlis, Newsnight has been broadcast on BBC2 since 1980. It goes out on weekday evenings between 10, 30pm and 11, 20pm, recent editions are available to view and download for a limited time through the BBC iPlayer. A weekly 26-minute digest edition of Newsnight is screened on the international channel. Newsnight began on 28 January 1980 at 10. 45pm, although a news bulletin using the same title had run on BBC2 during the 1970s. Its launch was delayed for four months by the Association of Broadcasting Staff, the newscast also served as a replacement for the current affairs programme Tonight. Former presenters include Peter Snow, a regular for 17 years, Donald MacCormick, Charles Wheeler, Adam Raphael and John Tusa, in the early days each edition had an auxiliary presenter, a phenomenon pejoratively known at the time as the Newsnights wife syndrome. Usually a woman, it was her job to read the news headlines, olivia OLeary in 1985 became the first principal female presenter, the programme has had a single presenter since 1987. Newsnight is now managed by BBC News. Until 1988, the time of Newsnight was flexible, so BBC2 could screen a movie at 9. The fixed time slot of 10, 30pm was established in the face of objections from the then managing director of BBC TV, Bill Cotton. The very announcement was made without his even being informed, the affair sparked a widely reported row within the corporation. One protagonist said it would destroy the BBC, Newsnight moved to new facilities at Broadcasting House on 15 October 2012. Between 1999 and 2014 on BBC Two Scotland the offshoot, Newsnight Scotland, presented by Gordon Brewer, from May 2014, Newsnight is again shown in full in Scotland, but delayed by half an hour to accommodate Newsnight Scotlands replacement, Scotland 2014. Newsnights signature tune was composed by George Fenton, various arrangements have been used over the years. On 30 April 2014, main presenter Jeremy Paxman announced that he would be leaving his role on Newsnight later in the year, in July 2014, Evan Davis was announced as Paxmans replacement. On 13 May 1997 Paxman pressed Michael Howard, former Home Secretary, about a meeting with Derek Lewis, head of the Prison Service, faced with what he considered evasive answers, Paxman put the same question– Did you threaten to overrule him
