Archie Bland
speaker
226 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Archie Bland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We should say that the case has not been declared a terrorist incident at this point, but that it is only under investigation as such.
But at the same time as you have all of that going on, you also have the complicated situation of politicians talking about the case and making...
On the one hand, I think quite reasonable general observations about the dangers that politicians face as part of their public-facing role and how seriously we should take that.
And on the other hand, as with Nigel Farage and others, lines that were, at the very least at that point,
unproven and um were viewed by the police and by other politicians as perhaps being premature to start putting out publicly and unhelpful to the process of the investigation so it is one of these things where this crime story which needs to be reported very responsibly and straightforwardly comes into collision with a very opinion driven news and political cycle
No, it's been a pretty broad range of politicians and figures in policing who have warned that it's not responsible to take that kind of approach to a case like this.
And Farage
If you look at his quotes, one part of what he does here is he says, one thing I wouldn't speculate about is the thing which he then goes on to speculate about, which is a way of kind of having it both ways in the handling of a case this sensitive.
And, you know, contempt laws are there for a reason.
And the way that the police and politicians tend to think about these cases is that you should err on the side of caution to prevent the risk of derailing any possible prosecution, but also because you may not have access to all of the facts.
And the facts on this case have certainly been evolving quickly.
Yeah, and I think she's somebody who, because of her post-political life, ended up having much wider recognition and probably wider kind of sympathy and affection among the public than she might have done on the basis of her political career alone.
And that will inevitably increase the kind of sense of shock at her death in this way.
And whether or not it turns out to have been politically motivated, I think it's something that will alarm a lot of people.
In this case, we don't yet know the motivation and we can't speak to that.
But I think what you can point to is a couple of things that have happened in recent years.
One is an increase in direct political violence and violence carried out for political ends across the spectrum, particularly at the extremes.
But you also have an increase in a kind of an ideology-free range of violence when you look at something like the Southport attack, where the ideology is very hazy and it's not clear that there was a specific political ideology linked to this, but it was also an offence designed to cause terror.
That is a growing kind of feature of the mix of cases that are investigated by police.
And either way, it's really alarming for anybody in public life and for politicians, for sure.
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