Keith Jebb

🚨 Basil the Great: Fact Check A million views for this divisive, misleading crap. We’ll look back on this time and ask why the fuck we allowed anonymous, cowardly bigots like Basil the Great to help radicalise ordinary people with their vile disinformation, without consequence, and why we let the richest man in the world reward and amplify them for doing it. Let’s start with the post itself. It gets the date right and little else. It isn’t a “porn ban”. Three specific categories became offences on 6 November: material depicting strangulation or suffocation, certain incestuous sexual activity, and adults role-playing as under-16s. He mentions just one. He gets the penalties wrong. Possession carries up to two years for the incest material he’s describing, or three years for the separate under-16 role-playing offence. Publication carries up to five years. He misdescribes the step-family element. It only applies where one person is, or is pretending to be, under 18. And it wasn’t even Labour’s idea. A Conservative peer, Baroness Bertin, pushed it through the Lords by a single vote, 144 to 143. He says cousin sex is legal while “pretend” incest porn is banned, and calls that hypocrisy. But the new law broadly follows existing incest law, and cousins aren’t covered by either. There’s no contradiction. And then the payload: cousin marriage remains legal “because Labour don’t want to upset Muslims”. There is no evidence for that. The government’s stated position was that it would review marriage law, including the Law Commission’s 2022 report, before deciding. Even Richard Holden, the Tory MP behind the ban bill, told MPs the practice is particularly prominent among Irish Travellers as well as British Pakistanis. The video attached is Holden at #PMQs on 5 March 2025, twenty months ago. Basil has posted this same clip at least ten times, starting on the day itself, when he called it “More pandering to the Islamic vote” and signed off “MAKE BRITAIN BRITISH AGAIN”. The target was clear from the first post. On 4 October 2025: “the UK Government is actively promoting incest.” 1.8 million views. Are they fuck. Starmer hadn’t blocked a ban: there was no ban to block, only a Tory backbencher’s Ten Minute Rule Bill that never got debating time. Declining to give time to a private member’s bill isn’t “promoting” anything. On 10 March 2026: “THE UK GOVERNMENT ARE IN FAVOUR OF INCEST.” 406,000 views. Seven weeks later, the same government’s Crime and Policing Act became law, creating the new offences against incest pornography that came into force this month. And now this, approaching a million. Along the way, Starmer has “defended INCEST”, the government is “pro incest”, and there is “an incest fan in Downing Street”. Across ten posts in twenty months, one clip of a backbench question has drawn more than FIVE MILLION views. Nobody in government is promoting incest. Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, sex with a parent, child, grandparent, grandchild, sibling, half-sibling, aunt, uncle, niece or nephew remains a crime, even between consenting adults, and no one has proposed changing that. First cousins aren’t on that list, and the Marriage Act allows them to marry. Calling cousin marriage incest is Basil’s invention, not the law’s. The day after Basil’s October post, the same footage appeared on a US-based conspiracy account (bio: “5D New Earth Rising! Great Awakening”) with more than 800,000 views, claiming Starmer had legalised marriage between siblings and between parents and children “at the request of the Muslim lobby”. @FullFact found the exchange was invented. Different accounts, same destination: a debate about first cousins, recast as a story about Muslims. For the record, here are the facts Basil’s followers never get: There are real health risks. In the Born in Bradford study, about 3 in 100 children of unrelated parents had a congenital anomaly, against about 6 in 100 born to blood-related parents. But most children of cousins are born healthy, and the same study found a similar increase in risk among white British mothers over 34 who weren’t related to their partners. The practice is declining fast without a ban. Among UK-born Pakistani-heritage mothers in three inner-city Bradford wards, the share in first-cousin unions fell from 36.2% in 2007–2010 to 19.8% in 2016–2019. The British Society for Genetic Medicine opposed a ban, warning it misreads the risks and stigmatises the communities involved. And Britain isn’t an outlier. Only around eight of the world’s 193 UN member states ban first-cousin marriage outright, by my count: China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ukraine, Norway and Sweden. The USA has no national ban; about 24 states prohibit it. France, Germany, Spain and Italy all allow it. In a YouGov poll in April 2025, 47% of British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis said marrying a first cousin should not be legal; 39% said it should. This was never a Muslims-versus-everyone-else issue. And speaking of cousin marriage, here are some notable non-Muslim cousin marriages, which no doubt involved, as Basil puts it, “cousin f*cking”: Charles Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood. Queen Victoria married her first cousin Prince Albert. Edgar Allan Poe married his first cousin Virginia Clemm. H.G. Wells married his first cousin Isabel Mary Wells. Rudy Giuliani married his second cousin Regina Peruggi. Johann Sebastian Bach married his second cousin Maria Barbara Bach. The 6th Duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill’s great-grandfather, married his first cousin Lady Jane Stewart. Friedrich Hayek, the free-market economist Elon Musk calls the “best economist ever”, married his cousin Helene Bitterlich. David Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia and Brief Encounter, married his cousin Isabel Lean. Christopher Robin Milne, the real Christopher Robin, married his first cousin Lesley de Sélincourt. Wernher von Braun, Nazi Party member and V-2 engineer turned NASA rocket designer, married his first cousin Maria von Quistorp. Carlo Gambino, Mafia boss, married his first cousin Catherine Castellano. Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong billionaire, married his cousin Chong Yuet-ming. Princess Maud of Wales, later Queen of Norway, married her first cousin Prince Carl of Denmark. Funny how none of them ever gets mentioned. Because for Basil, this was never about cousin marriage. Look at his timeline. “Are you Islamophobic yet?” “Are you Islamophobic? ✋” “Islam cannot be allowed to take over the UK.” When a Reform councillor called Islam an “evil criminal cartel”, Basil’s verdict was: “Sounds like a patriot to me.” 515,000 views. A Muslim family pantomime sold out: “The Islamification of Britain continues.” “There should be no Muslim Council of Britain.” And on Saturday, “day 8 of Islamophobia awareness month”, he posted an image of police restraining a man, claiming an officer had pulled someone off “a violent Muslim” because he was “being ‘Islamophobic’”, was then stabbed and killed, and concluding: “A reminder that being Islamophobic can save your life.” That image is from Mannheim, Germany, on 31 May 2024. An Afghan Islamist attacked an anti-Islam rally. In about 25 seconds of chaos, police officer Rouven Laur turned to restrain another man, and the attacker stabbed him in the neck. Laur died two days later, and his killer was jailed for life. It was a real terror attack and a real tragedy. But there is no evidence the officer acted because anyone was “being Islamophobic”. Basil invented that motive, stripped out the date and the country, and used a dead police officer to tell his followers that Islamophobia saves lives. He tells you exactly where his politics lie: “RESTORE BRITAIN SAYS IT WILL STOP THE ISLAMIFICATION OF THE UK. This is the way.” (March 2026). A month earlier, in a separate post, he shared talkSPORT presenter Simon Jordan, partner of GB News presenter Michelle Dewberry, defending Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s claim that Britain had been “colonised by immigrants”. Basil’s caption: a “PARTICULAR COMMUNITY” wants “SHARIA LAW, NO JEWS AND COUSIN MARRIAGE”, and “That looks like a form of colonisation!” 1.8 million views. Jordan had said such communities wanted Sharia law “in part”; Basil dropped the qualifier. And Jordan’s complaint that some want cousin marriage “ceded into law” ignores the fact that it already is the law, for everyone. There is no evidence that British Muslims as a community want any of that. In fact, on the one claim that can be checked, the evidence runs the other way: fewer than four in ten British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis told YouGov cousin marriage should be legal, and cousin unions are falling fast. The rest is a smear on millions of people. That’s where cousin marriage fits: one more exhibit in a story about invasion. Now, here’s why all this it matters. Basil isn’t shouting into the void. The owner of the platform keeps handing him a megaphone. Musk has replied to or quoted Basil’s posts again and again, each time on a different post: “Unbelievable” (January 2025), on an attack on Labour MP Naz Shah over an old retweet about grooming gang victims. “Reform is weak sauce” (August 2025), in a thread with Basil about Reform UK. “She is France’s last hope” (July 2026), on Basil’s post about Marine Le Pen’s poll ratings. “Suicidal empathy” (August 2026), on Basil’s post about Elizabeth Ross, a British woman allegedly killed by an Afghan man she met while helping migrants in Greece. And “Terrible”, on a post about the murder of 12-year-old Lola Daviet in Paris, in which Basil asked “How do you not hate the politicians who let these people in?”, seen 45.8 million times. Concerning Elizabeth Ross, she had gone to Athens to do refugee support work; Basil recast her as someone helping “illegal migrants cross into Europe”, declared her alleged killer guilty, and Musk’s verdict on her compassion was “suicidal empathy”. When Basil posted about a reported attempted abduction in South Yorkshire, his own post said police had asked residents not to “take their own action”. He told followers anyway: “We all know who did it.” Musk replied: “This is insane.” 20.8 million views. In January Basil posted a chart claiming “The UK arrests more people for social media posts than any other country on Earth.” 9.7 million views. Musk quoted it: “Real fascism is arresting thousands of people for social media posts.” Another 9.6 million. The chart was yet more bullshit. The UK figure counts arrests, not convictions; only 1,119 people were sentenced. The laws involved cover threatening and grossly offensive messages sent by any means, including stalking, harassment and sending unsolicited indecent images. The other countries’ figures had no credible source. Within a day, users wrote Community Notes saying so. Ten months later, those notes are still marked “Not shown on @X”. The falsehood reached millions; the correction reached almost nobody. Musk has also reposted Basil directly: a post calling an Afghan man accused of murder “the savage that he is”, stating as fact what the Daily Mail screenshot in the same post called an accusation (2.6 million views). A post asking where white Britons’ slavery “reparations” are (1.3 million). And Basil returns the favour, posting Musk’s July declaration that “anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor” under a heroic black-and-white portrait of Musk. Nobody who opposes remigration is a “traitor”. Remigration Now, a British group campaigning for it, defines it as returning “immigrants and their descendants” to their “country of origin”, through mandatory measures if need be. That would include millions of British citizens born here. Opposing it is basic decency. And the man calling its opponents traitors is himself an immigrant, born in South Africa. The posts I’ve collected in which Musk quotes or replies to Basil have accumulated more than 93 MILLION views between them (45.8 million, 20.8 million, 9.6 million, and 8.5 million twice). And on X, views can translate into money. For most of the period covered here, X’s Revenue Sharing scheme paid eligible verified accounts according to how many Premium subscribers saw their posts, a system X itself admitted in August had “misaligned” incentives. Its replacement, Original Content Rewards, is designed to reward original content, so in principle recycled clips with a caption shouldn’t qualify. Whether that changes anything remains to be seen. In April, X cut payouts to aggregator accounts and promised a permanent deduction for “habitual bait posters who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ on every post” (Basil’s house style). But its payout rules have lurched before: a month earlier, Musk backed away from a planned change to the formula after a backlash from creators. Musk’s interventions can and frequently do multiply the audience for Basil’s posts. If Basil has been enrolled, the platform’s owner has in effect been helping to pay an anonymous account to spread falsehoods and anti-Muslim hate. Even if he hasn’t, Musk is handing him an audience no money could buy. We know where this leads. After the #Southport murders in 2024, @Ofcom found “a clear connection between online activity and violent disorder seen on UK streets”. Accounts with more than 100,000 followers falsely claimed the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker, and posts from high-profile accounts “reached millions of users, demonstrating the role that virality and algorithmic recommendations can play in driving divisive narratives in a crisis period.” Anti-Muslim slurs on X more than doubled in the ten days after the attack. Amnesty later concluded X played a central role in fuelling the violence. Mosques and asylum hotels were attacked. While Basil wasn’t named in those reports, he works the same machine: false or misleading claims, a religious target, a platform that rewards reach, and an owner who amplifies him. And we have no idea who “Basil” is. X says the account is based in the UK, and that it has changed its username twice, most recently in November 2025. Beyond that, we don’t know who runs Basil the Great, who else he works with, or how much he earns. We can’t check his history or his connections. His divisive politics, though, he posts every day. Millions of people are being fed this material by someone who faces little scrutiny and hides behind an anonymous handle: someone the public cannot hold to account. The response has been pitiful, at every level. X lets Community Notes sit unseen while the lie travels, and its owner amplifies the liars. Ofcom can act on illegal content, but the Online Safety Act was never designed as a tool for correcting political disinformation. And the government, which writes the laws Ofcom enforces, has known since Southport exactly how this machine works, and has yet to close the gap. Why? Just look at what happened the last time Britain pushed back. In January, when Keir Starmer, then prime minister, said all options were on the table over Grok producing sexualised images, a senior US State Department official went on GB News to warn that “nothing is off the table” in return. That same week, Musk was boosting Basil’s chart as “real fascism”, and Basil was recycling the cousin clip to claim Starmer “would rather you fuck your cousin than log in to a social media platform”. A month earlier, Washington had barred five Europeans it accused of censorship, including two British campaigners against online hate and disinformation. Confronting Musk now means confronting the @WhiteHouse. On the evidence so far, no British government has had the stomach for it. The midterms may change the calculation. Democrats won the House and the Senate last week, and take control in January. But Trump’s answer to that defeat was to make Stephen Miller, the architect of his mass deportation programme and a man the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an extremist, his chief of staff from today, in a move widely read as a plan to govern around Congress. Washington’s pressure on anyone who tries to regulate American platforms is unlikely to ease. Britain can keep waiting for permission, or it can grow a spine and act. And it wouldn’t be acting alone. Last December, the EU fined X €120 million, partly because its paid blue tick, the one beside Basil’s name, deceives users. Musk and Vance raged, X appealed, and the US government has even asked to join the case on Musk’s side. The EU is defending its decision in court. And the moment is there. @AndyBurnham says it’s “better to be closer” to Europe, and heads into the UK-EU summit this month seeking exactly that. A global problem needs a co-ordinated answer. Platform accountability belongs on that agenda, alongside trade and climate change. Free speech is one thing, and worth defending fiercely. Giving anonymous accounts a financial incentive to spread dangerously irresponsible falsehoods, and then having the richest man in the world amplify them to millions, is another.

We all know which political figures, parties, and "news" organisations are responsible for this. The police know, Mi5 knows, the government knows, and the public know. Four doctors have accused police of failing to properly investigate a racist attack in Chichester which saw them being called rapists and paedophiles in the street. Effective action is long overdue. Sussex Police confirmed that they are reviewing their response to the incident in Southgate shortly before 11.20pm on October 20. The doctors, who work at St Richard's Hospital, had just left The Foundry pub when they claimed two teenage girls started verbally attacking them out of the blue. Among the disgusting slurs they were alleged to use were “you immigrants, go back to your own country", "get back in your dinghies", "you Pakis, “you’re all rapists” and “you rape children”. "When we attempted to leave, we were followed and physically assaulted, being repeatedly punched, kicked and struck across the face with a handbag." A Sussex Police spokesperson said: "The incident is being treated as a racist hate crime and officers are investigating." The suspects, a young woman aged 18 and a 17-year-old girl, were initially detained and spoken to by officers in connection with the investigation. According to Sussex Police, arrangements are being made for them to be interviewed in relation to this matter. The doctors, who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons, have since written an open letter to Chichester MP Jess Brown-Fuller, where they recounted the harrowing incident and raised concerns about the police response. The doctors said they called police because they feared for their safety. But they claimed officers spoke to the alleged attackers before taking accounts from the victims, despite the group having made the emergency call. "In fear for our safety following escalating aggression, we sought the help of the police," the letter states. They added: "To say we felt neglected and unsupported in that moment would be quite an understatement." The group also questioned why officers initially only took the details of one person despite all four being involved in the incident. According to the group, officers initially indicated that formal statements would be taken on the night - but 15 days later, no statements had been taken. The doctors say they were contacted by Victim Support around a week after the incident and were told the organisation had only recently been notified. They have also questioned whether the alleged racial aspect of the attack has been properly recognised and investigated as a hate crime. The group said: "To our knowledge, no arrests have been made, and we have received no reassurance regarding the progress of the investigation or the steps being taken to hold those responsible accountable." The doctors said the incident had a significant impact on their wellbeing, with some requiring time away from work at St Richard's Hospital. This comes after actor Munya Chawawa said he had witnessed more racism and xenophobia in Chichester during his recent stint performing at the Chichester Festival Theatre than he had in his entire life. This has led to a march against racism being organised in the city and has brought Chichester's attitude to race into sharp relief. The doctors also expressed concern about what the incident could mean for other ethnic minority healthcare workers and residents in the city. The group said the experience had left them questioning whether they could feel safe living and working in the area because of their ethnicity and background. They wrote: "Our intention in raising these concerns is not simply to seek answers for ourselves, but to ensure that victims of racially motivated violence are treated with dignity, taken seriously and provided with appropriate support." The group added that they hope their experience will lead to "meaningful accountability and change". theargus.co.uk/news/26706832…

Like many left-leaning accounts I follow, I’ve spent years identifying, critiquing and contextualising divisive, inflammatory and misleading claims from political and media figures, mostly on the right. Looking back, though, my own output, in print and occasionally on TV, has been heavily reactive. It keeps returning to the same small, influential cast. While that gives it depth and continuity, it also lets them set much of the agenda, which usually suits them fine. A lot of what I respond to is outrage, deliberately manufactured by politicians and media, and not only on the right. Every angry rebuttal delivers the reaction it was designed to get. Stuart Hall and colleagues noted back in 1978 that arguments against a primary interpretation are “forced to insert themselves into its definition of ‘what is at issue’”. George Lakoff later made a similar point: when you repeat your opponent’s frame in order to rebut it, you can end up reinforcing it. His answer was to build and repeat your own. So I’m going to try to recalibrate. I’ll still call out what needs calling out, but I want to spend more time making the case for what we’re for, on our own terms. If you write or post in this space too, it might be worth asking yourself: who’s really setting your agenda? Professor Ruth Wodak, one of the leading scholars of far-right discourse, puts the wider political point well: