Rule Britannia

Rule Britannia is our new series about the manifold wonders of Old Blighty. In the first episode Vice UK heads to the Scottish Highlands to kill one of God’s most beautiful animals.

A week in North England’s decaying fantasy island.

At just 19 Alan Belmore can make history and become the face of youth in the House of Commons.

We travel to STANTA to meet the esteemed 2 PARA, one of the British army’s most elite, and legendarily aggressive, units.

Actualising the fantasy of three generations of liberals, in November Britain’s students took over the Tory HQ.

Royal Wedding tells the story of the peripheral figures of the British landscape who are obsessed with Prince William and Kate Middleton’s upcoming marriage.

VBS travels to England’s northwest, Liverpool, Europe’s capital of beauty. There are more gyms and tanning salons per head here than anywhere else in the UK.

VBS.tv met residents of the Carpenter's Estate, who have been evicted from their homes to make way for the 2012 Olympics in East England.

In 2009, Swansea drug agencies reported a 180 percent rise in heroin use, and it’s visible on the city’s streets. Early one morning we meet a young, homeless couple named Amy and Cornelius in a city centre alley. As heroin-addicted alcoholics, they’re smack in the middle of two of South Wales’s most ever-present epidemics.

London's fraudster army spend your money on Warhammer and single mums.

VBS tag along with celebrity superfans like Harvii, who claims he has had his photo taken with over 1,000 celebrities

Learn how easy it is to make fake passports and scam the rich into trusting you with thousands of dollars. If the fraud industry were its own country, it would have the fifth strongest economy in the world, just ahead of the UK. Come and meet the fraudsters who're making a killing from the fastest growing crime on Earth.

From the debris of Britain's 1970s pantomime wrestling, the episode follows Grado, a wrestling fanboy given his own shot at stardom.

Ten years ago Shaun Smith introduced urban terrorism to the British underworld. Today he is working as a debt collector in the town of Warrington.

VICE traverses the moonlit A-roads of Britain to embed with one of the most notorious and misunderstood youth subcultures of the last 30 years: the boy racer scene.

Clive Martin embeds with the bare knuckle boxing elite, what he discovers is not dissimilar to Fight Club; IT technicians, builders, lifestyle coaches and even a solicitor, all throwing their unprotected fists into each other's faces. It is a subculture of honour, pride and violence.

Daisy-May Hudson lets a nostalgia for the moped gangs of her teenage years get the better of her and travels to industrial estates on the outskirts of London to meet with the underground stars of the UK BikeLife scene.

VICE meets "Saky's Finest"—a gang of young reoffenders based on the Saxton Road estate in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Locked into a cycle of reoffending and going to jail, some of these guys have spent so much of their childhood in Young Offenders' Institutes that they would rather be back inside than in the real world.

In a new episode of Rule Britannia, VICE joins the UK's Army Cadet Force and asks what the youth club can give British kids who may not have a lot else. The Army Cadet Force has over 46,000 cadets from the ages of 12 to 18, training in 1,700 detachments all over the country. The super low-cost club evenings and training camps equip teenagers with discipline and skills in everything from orienteering and military knowledge to weaponry, first aid, and sports. Smartly uniformed and proudly representing Queen and Country, the young cadets are taught to embody British values. The theory that cadet activities could keep youth on the right track has seen huge government funding allocated to expand the cadets by next year.

In the run up to the 2015 general election, a war is going on for the right to live in London. Rapid gentrification – praised as "regeneration" by local councils and property developers, derided as "social cleansing" by critics – is breaking up established communities. In some cases, families who've lived in London for generations are left homeless; in others, they are forced to move across the city or out of it completely. Meanwhile, the real estate opportunities are making lots of people – many of whom do not actually live in London – very rich.

VICE travels to Newcastle to document the increasing number of Britons that are becoming dependent on food stamps as a consequence of austerity and benefit sanctions.

Sally Burke is a mother from Hull. But to see her daughter – 13-year-old Maisie – she is forced to make a 118-mile roundtrip to Sheffield, where Maisie is currently sectioned under the Mental Health Act and receiving treatment for paranoid schizophrenia. A national shortage of hospital beds means people in crisis are being shunted all over the UK for hospital care. This, tragically, includes children. If troubled young people having to wait for two years for mental health treatment wasn't bad enough, that they can often only be admitted to psychiatric wards that are miles away from their homes and families is even more terrifying. The figures surrounding the mental health of young Brits are alarming. The number of children being admitted to hospital for self-harm is at a five-year high. Admissions of girls aged 10-14 have increased by 93 percent in the last four years, to 5,953, while there's been a rise of 45 percent in boys. Within this same timeframe, NHS spending on children's mental health services in England has fallen by approximately £50 million. These have left local services in a desperate position, and the human consequence of this is felt by people like Sally and Maisie. We join the former as she makes the trek to Sheffield, its emotional toll only increased by the knowledge that just a mile away from her home is a unit that could have housed Maisie had its overnight care facility not been shut two years ago.

Teenage boys, deviant acts and cold, hard cash – Spitman was a West London council estate myth until the mobile phone footage turned up.

In the 1980s, "Fast Eddie" Davenport made a name for himself as the host of hedonistic parties for teenage aristocrats. By 2011, he was better known as one of Britain's richest fraudsters.

This is the story of one of Britain's most notorious reformed criminals, Jason Coghlan, who spent 16 years behind bars before he found an even more dangerous and effective pastime: studying the law. VICE gained intimate access to Jason's life over two years, witnessing the rise of his legal firm, which explicitly caters to the gangsters of the Costa Del Sol in Spain. However, the echoes of his old life are never far away and a gang feud in Jason’s native Manchester threatens to unravel his new amicable existence.

In March 2016 the steelworks in Port Talbot, South Wales, were threatened with closure. 700 people were made immediately redundant and reports suggested another 15,000 jobs, in a town of just 45,000, could be affected. Port Talbot was set to become a ghost town. In the midst of the uncertainty and limbo, a father of four Nigel Hunt – who had already lost his steelworker job of 10 years – begins building a new future with a colourful start-up business, in the most polluted city in the UK. With no investment, or disposable income, the stakes are high but some unexpected turns lead Nigel to a new path, away from the fire and furnace, which he never could have dreamed of.

In 2015, Tony Jenkins, one half of South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty (SNARL) began noticing reports of cat mutilations in and around Croydon, London. Following the scent, he and his partner Boudicca Rising unearthed a shocking history of animals deaths which would lead to a nationwide hunt for what it thought to be the UK’s first serial animal killer. Now with over 350 victims, the killer has been given many names: the Croydon Cat Killer, the M25 Animal Killer, the UK Animal Killer. The brutal “signature” display of the dismembered pets around the homes of their owners is a chilling indication of the killer’s intention to do harm to people as much as the animals. In an unlikely union between two renegade animal rights activists and the establishment, Tony and Boudicca are joined in following the trail of bodies by the RSPCA and the MET police. Together they balance the emotional demands of the case with the need for a clear minded approach to a bewildering and unrelenting string of attacks.

Since the 2016 vote to leave the European Union with a narrow majority of 52 percent, Britain has descended into an ideological civil war between largely older Brexit voters using language often rooted in a type of xenophobia the 21st century should have left behind, and outraged younger people who want to remain in the EU. So when two teenage sisters started appearing at Brexit protests and rallies next to Nigel Farage, people began speculating who they are and why they care so much about Brexit, often wondering if they’re paid models, actresses, influencers or if they’re even real.