A year after I was surrounded in Birmingham, have community rifts healed?
As riots broke out across the country last summer following the Southport attack, fear spread in a majority Muslim part of Birmingham that far-right protesters were on their way.
Locals came out on to the streets, and as I was reporting live on air, I was surrounded by a small group of masked men, swearing and gesturing to the camera.
Afterwards, as we were trying to drive away from the area, a man with a knife followed us and attempted to slash a tyre on our broadcast van.
The moment Becky Johnson was confronted on camera last summer
A year on, I have returned to the area to discuss what happened with some of those who saw their city descend into chaos.
“The local community had lost faith in the local elected members as well as the local policing units,” says Naeem Yousef, 48, who lives nearby.
“They thought…the only way to protect themselves and the community was by coming out in force.”
‘You can’t control their behaviour’
Tanveer Choudhry, 56, agrees. “In every community we have our sort of, shall we call them… idiots, and you can’t control their behaviour,” he says.
“I think there was a concern that the far-right group that was coming may well be armed… so I think it was just trying to counteract what they thought was coming.”
We are sitting in a cafe, not far from where the unrest broke out last summer.
Masked men surrounded the Sky team during the unrest
‘They were looking for who they thought were the enemy’
The group I’m with were invited by community activist Naveed Sadiq, who was there that day.
As well as Naveed, there are three other local Muslim men, and two white residents, including Gerry Moynihan.
He recalls deciding to stay at home that day.
“They were looking for what they thought were the enemy – white people – and trying to find white people,” he says.
“Which is why I stayed in my house, because the intelligence I had was, don’t get involved, don’t walk around, and you know, it will pass.”
I ask the group if my team and I were targeted because we were white.
Gerry Moynihan says he decided not to leave his home
“It’s not because you’re white, it’s because they’re actually bored,” Naveed says. “They were wanting a bit of excitement.”
I ask if they think it would have happened if we were all British Asian.
“Of course,” Tanveer replies. “It wasn’t the fact that you were white… it was just the heat of the moment”.
Naeem believes it happened simply because the men involved “do not want anyone filming what they’re doing”.
“You could have been Asian… they would still try to get you out of the area,” he insists.
Tanveer believes our team would still have been targeted if we were a different ethnicity
‘Are we going to be accepted?’
I’m keen to understand how these men feel now and whether the sentiment that brought people out on to the streets to “protect” them has been reignited by the recent protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers.
The answer, from Joe Khann, a local Muslim man, would surprise many.
“I would like to go and join them,” he says, referring to the anti-immigration protesters who have gathered several times in Epping.
“We have this problem within our own communities, and people don’t talk about it. We feel exactly the same and we understand how the English feel with the immigration,” he explains.
‘We feel exactly the same’ on immigration, says Joe Khann
“We’re having people who are getting married back home, they get married for six months, get divorced…and the government gives them all their help to get accommodation, their national insurance numbers and all that,” he says.
“We’re getting fed up within our own community because we hear this constantly.”
However, he thinks if he did try to join in protests, people would “think I’m an immigrant”.
He says he is “born here, 58, and they look at me as a foreigner or a migrant”.
Naeem agrees. “The question is for us now, as people who are born and bred in this country, what is our identity? Who are we?” he asks.
“As a white person born in this country, you are automatically accepted. Are we going to be accepted? How many generations will it take for us to be accepted?”
Naeem (left) says even those born in the UK question their identity
‘You have to blame someone’
Naeem is also concerned about immigration.
“We have an influx of people that we do not know about, and they have no loyalty to the area,” he says.
“I believe that the average white guy… isn’t racist, they’re just fed up,” adds Naveed.
However, these men do have grievances, particularly with the media.
“We feel that we have a two-tier journalists system where when the colour is like mine we get different justice and when the colour is a bit paler it’s different,” Naveed says.
‘When the colour is like mine we get different justice,’ says Naveed (left)
‘We have become the bogeyman’
“When there’s criminality, and it’s on the news, a Muslim has to be identified by his religion,” Naeem says.
He believes Muslims have become the “bogeyman” in many people’s minds.
“Where you don’t have housing for example, where the crime has increased, you have to blame someone,” he says.
“Prior it was the Irish community, now it’s the Muslim community.
“It’s a distraction from the actual real issues and how you can resolve them but let’s just put it on to the Muslim community for now, let’s just distract the whole nation and say look it’s the problem with asylum, it’s a problem with Muslims,” he says.
After leaving, I head over to the spot on the roundabout where my team were targeted last year.
As I stand there, my colleague sees a man imitating pulling the trigger of a gun at me from his car.
This is Britain, in broad daylight.
The ringleader of a Romanian grooming gang was offered £1,500 by the Home Office to be deported while he was in prison awaiting trial for 10 rapes, a Sky News investigation has found.
Mircea Marian Cumpanasoiu, 38, led a network which raped, drugged and exploited vulnerable local women in Dundee.
But Sky News can exclusively reveal that in summer 2024, while in custody at HMP Perth awaiting trial for serial sex offences, officials handed him a “voluntary return” form under a government scheme paying foreign nationals to leave Britain.
The department later decided not to remove him because of the upcoming court proceedings.
Immigration status renewed during trial
In another twist, just months later – as he stood in a High Court dock facing 10 rape charges – Sky News has discovered Cumpanasoiu’s immigration status, which was due to expire, was automatically renewed under the EU settlement scheme.
Cumpanasoiu was later handed a 24-year extended sentence, with 20 years in jail and four on licence, for sexual and trafficking offences.
Cumpanasoiu winking to the camera during a video filmed near a brothel in Dundee. Pic: Crown Office
Prosecutors described him as a “winking, smirking pimp” who once filmed a victim climbing a tree to escape his anger when she “failed” to make enough money in Dundee brothels.
Following days of questions from Sky News, officials have confirmed his settled status has now been revoked.
The inside story
Sky sources say Home Office workers personally met Cumpanasoiu at Perth prison while he was on remand in August 2024.
Sources say he “expressed a desire to return home” and was handed documents to sign agreeing to a cash-assisted return, but the plan was later blocked.
But in another twist, on 2 December 2024, halfway through the grooming gang trial, his EU settled status was renewed.
A source close to proceedings told Sky News the revelations “smack of incompetence”.
The Home Office does not dispute this version of events.
Romanian grooming gang clockwise from top left: Remus Stan, Alexandra Bugonea, Mircea Marian Cumpanasoiu, Cristian Urlateanu and Catalin Dobre. Pics: Police Scotland
Rape Crisis Scotland said the case raises concerns.
A spokesperson for the charity said: “This was a horrific case, which involved numerous vulnerable survivors who showed tremendous strength and courage by coming forward to seek justice for what had happened to them.
“The severity of this case has, quite rightly, resulted in significant prison sentences for the perpetrators. However, it is not clear why the Home Office tried to intervene before a trial had begun, and any verdict had been reached.
“Survivors must have faith in the criminal justice process and its ability to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes.
“This incident raises questions about what the Home Office’s intentions were, and why it was able to insert itself into active criminal proceedings in the first place.”
Read more from Sky News:
Swinney ‘open’ to national inquiry into grooming gangs
Why are abuse survivors losing faith in grooming gang inquiry?
What is the EU Settlement Scheme?
The EU Settlement Scheme was set up after Brexit to allow citizens from the EU, and their family members, to continue living and working in the UK.
People with “settled status” can stay in the UK indefinitely.
Those with “pre-settled status”, such as Cumpanasoiu, must reapply after five years.
Since September 2023, the Home Office has introduced automatic extensions of pre-settled status which means renewals happen electronically unless officials intervene.
There are questions now about whether this automation can lead to offenders such as Cumpanasoiu being overlooked.
Home Office ‘had power to intervene’
Jen Ang, a human rights lawyer and leading expert on migrants’ rights, told Sky News the vast majority of those processed under the EU system are law-abiding citizens.
But Ms Ang, a professor at the University of Glasgow, reveals authorities did have the power to intervene in this case.
Professor Jen Ang
She said: “In this case the Home Office did have the power and the right to stop the automatic renewal. At any point where it is possible that someone is about to become unsuitable for settled status, the Home Office could have intervened.
“The optics of this in the context of such a high-profile and horrific crime are not great.”
‘The public are entitled to be concerned’
Thomas Leonard Ross KC, a leading Scottish defence lawyer, described the decision-making as “flawed”.
He said: “I mean automatically renewing pre-settled status in 99.9% of occasions can be done without any risk to the public. But clearly this particular individual has been assessed to be an extremely dangerous person.
“The public are perfectly entitled to be concerned. A decision of this type made automatically without any assessment as to the risk that he might pose is clearly a flawed decision.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “This man will serve his sentence for the abhorrent crimes he committed and will be considered for deportation at the earliest opportunity.
“A deportation order will automatically trigger the revocation of an individual’s right to be in the UK, including pre-settled status.”
The novel has survived the industrial revolution, radio, television, and the internet. Now it’s facing artificial intelligence – and novelists are worried.
Half (51%) fear that they will be replaced by AI entirely, according to a new survey, even though for the most part they don’t use the technology themselves.
More immediately, 85% say they think their future income will be negatively impacted by AI, and 39% claim their finances have already taken a hit.
Tracy Chevalier, the bestselling author of Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Glassmaker, shares that concern.
“I worry that a book industry driven mainly by profit will be tempted to use AI more and more to generate books,” she said in response to the survey.
“If it is cheaper to produce novels using AI (no advance or royalties to pay to authors, quicker production, retainment of copyright), publishers will almost inevitably choose to publish them.
“And if they are priced cheaper than ‘human made’ books, readers are likely to buy them, the way we buy machine-made jumpers rather than the more expensive hand-knitted ones.”
Chevalier, author of the book Girl With A Pearl Earring, with the painting of the same name. Pic: AP
Why authors are so worried
The University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy asked 258 published novelists and 74 industry insiders how AI is viewed and used in the world of British fiction.
Alongside existential fears about the wholesale replacement of the novel, many authors reported a loss of income from AI, which they attributed to “competition from AI-generated books and the loss of jobs which provide supplementary streams of income, such as copywriting”.
Some respondents reported finding “rip-off AI-generated imitations” of their own books, as well books “written under their name which they haven’t produced”.
Last year, the Authors Guild warned that “the growing access to AI is driving a new surge of low-quality sham ‘books’ on Amazon”, which has limited the number of publications per day on its Kindle self-publishing platform to combat the influx of AI-generated books.
The median income for a novelist is currently £7,000 and many make ends meet by doing related work, such as audiobook narration, copywriting or ghost-writing.
Read more: The author embracing AI to help write novels
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Could the AI bubble burst?
These tasks, authors feared, were already being supplanted by AI, although little evidence was provided for this claim, which was not possible to verify independently.
Copyright was also a big concern, with 59% of novelists reporting that they knew their work had been used to train AI models.
Of these, 99% said they did not give permission and 100% said they were not remunerated for this use.
Earlier this year, AI firm Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5bn (£1.2bn) to settle a lawsuit which claimed the company stole their work.
The judge in the US court case ruled that Anthropic had downloaded more than seven million digital copies of books it “knew had been pirated” and ordered the firm to pay authors compensation.
However, the judge sided with Anthropic over the question of copyright, saying that the AI model was doing something akin to when a human reads a book to inspire new work, rather than simply copying.
Read more from Sky News:
Scientists sound alarm over ultra-processed foods
‘What is it really like being a British journalist in Moscow?’
Most novelists – 67% – never used it for creative work, although a few said they found it very useful for speeding up drafting or editing.
One case study featured in the report is Lizbeth Crawford, a novelist in multiple genres, including fantasy and romance. She describes working with AI as a writing partner, using it to spot plot holes and trim adjectives.
“Lizbeth used to write about one novel per year, but now she can do three per year, and her target is five,” notes the author of the report, Dr Clementine Collett.
Is there a role for government?
Despite this, the report’s foreword urges the government to slow down the spread of AI by strengthening copyright law to protect authors and other creatives.
The government has proposed making an exception to UK copyright law for “text and data mining”, which might make authors and other copyright holders opt out to stop their work being used to train AI models.
“That approach prioritises access to data for the world’s technology companies at the cost to the UK’s own creative industries,” writes Professor Gina Neff, executive director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.
“It is both bad economics and a betrayal of the very cultural assets of British soft power.”
A government spokesperson said: “Throughout this process we have, and always will, put the interests of the UK’s citizens and businesses first.
“We’ve always been clear on the need to work with both the creative industries and AI sector to drive AI innovation and ensure robust protections for creators.
“We are bringing together both British and global companies, alongside voices beyond the AI and creative sectors, to ensure we can capture the broadest possible range of expert views as we consider next steps.”
They’ve said they are offering him an opportunity to tell them everything, once and for all.
But as we hit the two-week deadline set by the US Congress committee investigating Jeffrey Epstein for a reply from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, will he agree to their request to open up about the paedophile financier?
The letter sent by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said members wanted to talk to him because of the widely reported allegations that have been made against him, which he denies, and because of his relationship with Epstein and what he may have seen.
The committee is looking into Epstein’s crimes and his wider sex trafficking network. Andrew was given until today, 20 November, to respond.
Legally he isn’t obliged to talk to them, and to be honest it’s hard to imagine why he would.
The only time he has spoken at length about the allegations against him and his relationship with Epstein was that Newsnight interview in 2019, and we all know how much of a disaster that was.
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Releasing the Epstein files: How we got here
Yes, this could be an opportunity for him to publicly apologise for keeping up his links with Epstein, which he has never done before, or show some sympathy towards Epstein’s victims, even as he vehemently denies the allegations against him.
But while there is the moral argument that he should tell the committee everything he knows, it could also raise more uncomfortable questions for him, and that could feel like too much of a risk for Andrew and the wider Royal Family.
However, even saying no won’t draw all this to a close. There are other outstanding loose ends.
The Metropolitan Police still have to tell us if they intend to take any further action after they said they were looking into claims Andrew had asked one of his officers to dig up dirt on his accuser, Virginia Giuffre.
Read more:
King formally strips Andrew of prince title
Bill to release Epstein files gets all-clear from Congress
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The new Epstein files: The key takeaways
There could also still be a debate in parliament about the Andrew problem.
The Liberal Democrats have said they want to use their opposition debating time to bring the issue to the floor of the House of Commons, while other MPs on the Public Accounts Committee have signalled their intention to look into Andrew’s finances and housing arrangements.
And then there are the wider Epstein files over in America, and what information they may hold.
From developments this week, it seems we are edging ever closer to seeing those released.
All of this may mean Andrew in other ways is forced to say more than he wants to, even without opening up to the Congress committee.
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