Donations not Discounts

2025 has felt like a particularly brutal year for everyone.

But especially for charities, who across the board have faced reduced or 0% funding.

Putting doubt over jobs and even greater concern for the welfare and provision of the people and communities they serve.

With a backdrop of seemingly too many worthy causes to choose from, there has been an anti-immigrant rhetoric in the UK we want to stand united against.

So, we’re chuffed to say this year we will be donating 20% of our Black Friday weekend revenue to The Bike Project.

The Bike Project’s mission is simple: get refugees cycling!

They take secondhand bikes, fix them up and donate them to refugees and people seeking asylum in London and Birmingham.

A bike helps their users get access to food banks, legal advice, healthcare, education and much more.

If they’re lucky enough to receive official refugee status, a bike can help find employment.

This is cost effective, physically active transport that gives freedom and independence to day to day living!

But why support The Bike Project now?

Our green and unpleasant land.

There is something horrible going on in the UK.

What once seemed the obsession of a few loons in the weirder parts of the web has become a full blown crisis of morality.

This is the horrible trifecta of the rise of the Far Right, anti-refugee rhetoric and racism.

Last week I was driving to Wrexham for a work event, and as I made my way North I drove through Kidderminister and its surrounding suburbs & villages, to be confronted by hundreds of flags on lampposts.

The Union Jack and St George's Cross are seemingly parts of the furniture in the UK today.

Flags flying in weird places.

Red crosses painted on roundabouts.

Self-identifying ‘patriots’ claiming foul if these are taken down or painted over by councils.

For me, this has embodied a bit of an existential crisis of my own ‘Britishness’.

Never really being a proud ‘Brit’, it’s always been a little contentious this weird ‘feeling’ you should have towards the place you were born.

But broadly speaking I was able to point to being part of a nation that stood for a good education system, same-sex marriage, tolerance, music, art, incredible urban, global cities.

I know all of that still exists, somewhere.

It’s just hard to see or hear as it's being drowned out by a media narrative shaped by Reform, The Telegraph, GB News, X, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage…

An unwelcome barrage sucking the oxygen out of anything and everything that they believe can be firmly blamed on immigration.

Now, I’m not here to say that everyone ‘flying the flag’ is a racist.

I’m sure that for many this is out of desperation and frustration.

The social contract between State and Population broken by years of under-funding and systematic dismantling through austerity and Conservative governments.

We live in a world where exceptionally complex systems and structures are being boiled down to soundbite politics.

The job market sucks.

Blame migrants.

You can’t get a doctor's appointment.

It's those pesky migrants again!

Your house has damp and you can’t afford to move, while migrants get to stay in a hotel.

Is it really now unreasonable to suggest that the job market sucks because there has been so little investment and growth in the economy since the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit and COVID?

Might not being able to see a Doctor have something to do with the lack of doctors being trained in the UK.

Years of stagnant NHS salaries making it much more appealing to emigrate to Australia than sink on HMS Burnout.

How about a housing crisis built by inept government policy?

Virtually non-existent construction of social housing and vast swathes of housing being snapped up by landlords and investors.

Millions of folk trapped in long-term renting while 1,000,000 privately owned homes are left unoccupied.

It doesn’t feel like a migrant really is to blame for any of that.

But that doesn’t fuel clicks.

Doesn’t sell papers.

Doesn’t make pernicious personalities rich.

I caught 15 minutes of Question Time last week, and Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP and Care Minister in the Government, said this:

“There are forces of darkness and division at the gates, and I think we’re genuinely in a battle for the soul of our nation, and if we don’t get this right, we will let those forces in.”

Now, I don’t agree with Labour’s proposed immigration policy, but when put in such stark terms, it's hard not to agree with the sentiment of what’s ahead.

That, if it all goes to shit, at the next election we really could see the whole of the UK becoming a dark, aggressive place.

A reality none of us ever thought could exist.

A version of the UK that has never truly existed at scale in the post-industrial age.