Free Republic

Work to build eight 'sub hunter' combat ships will begin in the summer of next year, it has been announced. Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said the construction of the 'next generation' Type 26 Frigate will secure hundreds of jobs on the Clyde for two decades. They will also be armed with the Sea Ceptor anti-missile system under a £100million contract confirmed by the government. But the cutting-edge project has already been blighted by delays, with the original intention having been for work on 13 ships to start earlier this year. Speaking during a visit to the Govan area of...

(BREITBART) A Islamic preacher who has referred to non-Muslims as “kuffar” and preached on how to kill homosexuals is due to deliver a set of nightly lectures at an Iranian government-backed organisation in London, Breitbart London can reveal. Shaykh Hamza Sodagar – who gained notoriety earlier this year for his lecture on “one of five” ways to kill homosexuals – is due to speak at the Islamic Republic of Iran School in north-west London between October 4th – 12th. According to a speaker biography, Mr. Sodagar regards himself as a “role model” for “young Muslims all around the world”. A...

Hulls of the new £31billion Trident submarines will be built with steel provided by a FRENCH firm. BAe Systems, building the subs in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, opted for a French supplier after signing a contract with the UK government. The deal, which The Mirror reports will be worth tens of millions, came after a plan between two British firms to make a joint bid for the work flopped. The Defence Secretary announced work on the new nuclear deterrent will begin today as the first pictures of £31billion Trident submarines were unveiled. Sir Michael Fallon said he will officially mark the start...

According to newly released official stats, the six vessels clocked up 1,515 days in British docks in the year to this April. Four of the state-of-the-art ships remained berthed for more than 300 days each, the data obtained from a Freedom of Information request shows. Former head of the Navy Admiral Lord West said there was a "desperate need" to get the destroyers "out and doing their job". He said: "We are using Royal Fleet Auxiliary and offshore protection vessels to do jobs that historically would have been done with frigates or destroyers." The Ministry of Defence (MoD) insisted the...

Leaflets have reportedly been distributed in Manchester calling for a public ban on dogs, in order to keep the area pure for Muslims. But while some have claimed the leaflets are a hoax designed to stir up tensions, others are convinced the leaflets are being created by fundamentalist Muslims. Residents in Manchester have taken to social media to report that they have received leaflets through their letterboxes calling on them to “have respect for us and our children” by not taking dogs out in public. “This area is home to a large Muslim community,” the leaflet advises, before explaining that...

Greetings Readers, Friends, and Other Visitors: The Time Traveler appeared suddenly in my study on New Year’s Eve, 2004. He was a stolid, grizzled man in a gray tunic and looked to be in his late-sixties or older. He also appeared to be the veteran of wars or of some terrible accident since he had livid scars on his face and neck and hands, some even visible in his scalp beneath a fuzz of gray hair cropped short in a military cut. One eye was covered by a black eyepatch. Before I could finish dialing 911 he announced in a...

Britain used to boast the most powerful navy in the world. No more. That’s a serious problem for allies like the United States. Traditionally, Britain’s Royal Navy has been the U.S. Navy's closest partner. The two have fought together against most every foe. So any weakening of the Royal Navy also erodes Washington's naval power. Today, however, the Royal Navy is a shadow of its former self. Government budgeteers have repeatedly, and excessively, cut the numbers of its ships, planes and manpower. It can barely patrol the United Kingdom’s own waters, much less project British influence abroad. Though London officials...

"UNPRECEDENTED": HMS Duncan is one of the six powerful warships currently docked at Portsmouth Six £1billion Type 45 Destroyers - described as the backbone of Britain's marine defences - are not on operations, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed. One senior Navy insider told how out was "almost unprecedented" that all the vessels should be docked. And the fact all six were in port at once could suggest "a gross lack of planning" or indicate "something more serious", the source warned Sky News. An insider revealed the ships had "just got back from operations, are about to go on operations...

A new fleet of frigates, described as “global combat ships” designed to play crucial roles, has been delayed indefinitely, the Ministry of Defence has said in testy exchanges with MPs over huge financial and technical problems facing the navy’s surface vessels. Delays in building the Type 26 frigates – a project promised by David Cameron before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum – is threatening shipbuilding jobs on the Clyde in Scotland. The project’s problems come on top of serious mechanical failures in the navy’s new fleet of Type 45 destroyers. Key tasks of the navy’s frigates and destroyers include protecting...

A study released by the Pew Research Center on Monday shows a startling development in European attitudes towards Middle Eastern refugees. In eight of the ten countries surveyed, majorities of citizens polled believe incoming refugees increase the likelihood of terrorism at home. Respondents in Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Greece, and the United Kingdom all responded that they believe incoming refugees increase the risk of terrorism. Respondents in Hungary are most likely (at 76 percent) to believe incoming refugees increase the risk of terrorism, while respondents in Spain are the least likely to believe incoming refugees increase the likelihood of terrorism (at 40...

LONDON (AP) -- The Latest on Britain's vote to leave the European Union (all times local): 4:25 p.m. Conservative lawmakers have chosen Home Secretary Theresa May and Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom to fight a runoff contest for leadership of Britain's governing party. The winner will become the country's second female prime minister.

During the Bretton Woods Conference, in 1944, Lord Halifax is said to have “whispered to Lord Keynes: ‘It’s true: they have the money bags but we have all the brains.’” By “they,” Halifax meant the Americans. His frustration with the American mind—often prosaic and anti-intellectual—during the critical Bretton-Woods negotiations seems as valid today. As odious as Britain’s elites are; boy, are they cleverer than ours. Take the impromptu interview, on June 28, which Richard Quest, CNN’s imported British broadcast journalist, conducted with Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party. Farage had emerged exhilarated from the coven that is the...

CNN's Christiane Amanpour took her left-leaning, pro-European Union activism to a new level on Tuesday during an interview of pro-Brexit politician Daniel Hannan. Amanpour, who recently blasted the referendum as an example of "xenophobia", tried to implicate the British member of the European Parliament as somehow partially responsible for supposed post-vote "hate crimes." Hannan didn't take her clear bias sitting down, however: "You guys have been shouting 'racist' so long, you're not listening to what we were actually saying...if I was relying on CNN...I would think that this was nativist vote, a protectionist vote. It's the opposite." [video below] The...

BRUSSELS: EU chiefs on Friday told Britain to start negotiations to quit the bloc "as soon as possible", after outgoing Prime Minister David Cameron said he would leave the negotiations to his successor. "We now expect the United Kingdom government to give effect to this decision of the British people as soon as possible, however painful that process may be," said a joint statement after Britons voted for a Brexit . "Any delay would unnecessarily prolong uncertainty." The statement was issued by EU president Donald Tusk, European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker, EU Parliament leader Martin Schulz and Dutch premier Mark...

When standing today at Hadrian's Wall in northern England, everything appears indistinguishably affluent and serene on both sides. It was not nearly as calm some 1,900 years ago. In A.D. 122, the exasperated Roman emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of an 80-mile, 20-foot-high wall to protect Roman civilization in Britain from the Scottish tribes to the north. We moderns often laugh at walls and fortified boundaries, dismissing them as hopelessly retrograde, ineffective or unnecessary. Yet they still seem to fulfill their mission on the Israeli border, the 38th parallel in Korea and the Saudi-Iraqi boundary, separating disparate states. On the...

Longer than the Houses of Parliament and able to launch up to 108 air strike sorties per day, Britain’s new aircraft carriers will make potential enemies “think twice” about starting future wars, their senior naval officer has said. The new Queen Elizabeth Class carriers will be become Britain’s most potent conventional weapon and change the way the Royal Navy does business, Capt Simon Petitt said. The two vast 67,000 tonne vessels, which have cost £6.2bn for the pair, are the largest warships ever built in Britain. The first of the ships to be ready, HMS Queen Elizabeth, is due to...

A group of Jewish families that included elderly people, pregnant women and children were taken off an EasyJet passenger plane in Barcelona waiting to depart for Paris, according to a report on the European Jewish Press. One of the passengers, a Holocaust survivor, said the behavior of police who came to take the travelers off the flight was similar to that of the German Nazi SS police during World War II. The families were removed after the plane had been sitting on the tarmac for more than two hours, waiting for departure. Many of the Jewish men were wearing kippahs,...

The Royal Navy fired flares to warn off a Spanish patrol boat approaching an American nuclear submarine off Gibraltar. The fast patrol boat HMS Sabre fired warning shots across the bow of a Guardia Civil vessel as it twice tried to cut across the path of USS Florida during an incursion into Gibraltar’s waters. Gibraltar says Spanish vessels regularly stray deep into its territorial waters and the Foreign Office has attacked the incursions as provocative. But defence sources said it was rare for a Royal Navy vessel to fire flares and it had only happened a couple of times in...

With regard to its designs for our nation, debasement has been the name of the game for the political left for a long time. While volumes could be written on the moral debasement alone catalyzed by the left, America’s standing in the world, our economy, our educational system, our worldview and collective self-image, among many other things, have been targets for incremental debasement by the left. When liberals began targeting the sexual attitudes of our population through mass media and junk science such as Alfred Kinsey’s perverted sex studies, suddenly the worst thing one could be was a prude, and...

Phillips commissioned “the Runnymede report” into Britain and Islamophobia in 1997 which, according to both Phillips himself and academics across the country, popularised the phrase which has now become synonymous with any criticism – legitimate or not – of Islam or Muslims. “For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.” Phillips comments: “Some of my journalist friends imagine that, with time, the Muslims will grow out...