The centre-left Freedom Movement party led by incumbent Slovenian prime minister Robert Golob eked out marginally more votes than its main rival, the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDP), in the Sunday March 22 national election. That’s despite the apparent involvement of an Israeli spy firm attempting to undermine the government through use of secret recordings.

Figures are still shifting as votes are counted and recounted, but it appears Golob managed to secure around 28.5% of the vote, with the rival SDP leader Janez Janša getting around 28%. Golob has been leading a three party coalition since 2022.

Slovenian PM demands European action against Zionist spying

The election in the nation of two million people reached the European mainstream last week, when Golob contacted president of the European Commission (EC) Ursula von der Leyen. The senior EC figure has been dubbed ‘Ursula Fond of Lying‘ due to her contortions to back Zionist atrocities, but Golob tried his luck nonetheless, reporting the underhand manoeuvres of an Israeli surveillance company. He sought to inform the commission of:

…alarming information regarding what appears to constitute a grave instance of foreign information manipulation and interference currently unfolding in the Republic of Slovenia. Recent media reports informed the public of a private Israeli intelligence company Black Cube engaging in “mercenary surveillance” as a part of a coordinated operation to manipulate the Slovenian electoral processes by targeting political figures via illegal surveillance and so-called “smear” operations.

Such interference by a foreign private company poses a clear hybrid threat against the European Union and its Member States, which negatively impacts or potentially threatens our common values, procedures and political processes.

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He concluded:

Black Cube is known for their smear campaigns with one goal: to undermine the trust of the citizens in the democratic processes by releasing falsified corruption allegations at precisely planned times, in this case, just before the general elections. These activities pose a threat to national security and influence democratic elections.

Zionist spy called for engineering epidemics in Gaza

Golob said Black Cube operatives had been in Slovenia four times in the previous six months. Politico has an in-depth report, saying a:

…private jet that landed on a freezing December day was carrying Dan Zorella, CEO of Black Cube; Giora Eiland, former head of Israel’s National Security Council; and two other men, according to the authorities, who allege they were engaged in “covert surveillance and wiretapping.”

The reports describes the recordings made:

The tapes show prominent Slovenian figures apparently discussing corruption, illegal lobbying and the misuse of state funds.

The figures involved do not appear to have been publicly named for legal reasons. As for the Black Cube men, Eiland is a particularly vile figure. He demanded that so-called ‘Israel’ engineer disease outbreaks during the Zionist holocaust in Gaza, saying:

After all, severe epidemics in the southern Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers. This is not cruelty for cruelty’s sake, since we do not support suffering on the other side as an end, but as a means…

We must not, simply must not, adopt the American narrative that gives us ‘permission’ to fight only Hamas fighters instead of doing the right thing – fighting against the opposing system in its entirety, because it is precisely the civilian collapse that will bring the end of the war closer.

This amounts to a clear call for the war crimes of collective punishment and biological warfare.

Exports from ‘Palestine Laboratory’ cause harm globally

Golob’s government has shown clear Palestinian sympathies. The country recognised Palestinian statehood in May 2024. The government brought in a bill that banned the import of goods from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (though ‘Israel’ itself is also occupied Palestinian land, of course).

Golob’s coalition banned all arms trading with the criminal Zionist pseudo-state. They also banned the hideous war criminals Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich from entering Slovenia. It is clear there was ample reason for Black Cube to try and undermine those in power. Golob has accused opposition leader Janša of being part of the Zionist plot. He admitted meeting Eiland, though Politico state “he could not recall on which date“.

The scandal represents yet another instance of the global scourge the Zionist land theft project represents, as it undermines democracy across the globe. Politicians in Britain and the United States have been bought off with Zionist cash, with predictably pro-genocide policies emerging as a result.

It also highlights once more the Palestine Laboratory, where the Zionist entity deploys weapons and spying techniques on Palestinian test subjects to murder them and violate their privacy. The Zionist military and surveillance industrial complex then inflicts the results of these vile experiments on populations across the world, making a tidy profit as it goes.

The Slovenian population have resisted this malign influence, and it will require continued votes for pro-Palestinian parties elsewhere to permanently end the corrosive reach of ‘Israeli’ meddling.

Featured image via the Canary

Keir Starmer has betrayed the Hillsborough families and survivors again — as he was always going to do — along with all those others who lost loved ones through injustice or state mismanagement causing disasters.

Starmer has never made a promise he wasn’t ready to break and only ever used Hillsborough law for cover and misdirection. While he claimed he would pass the law, which will impose a ‘duty of candour’ on public bodies and officials, in Labour’s first session of government, he was writing for the Murdoch S*n that smeared and vilified the Hillsborough victims.

He was despised and condemned for even saying the word ‘Hillsborough’ because of it.

Yet he still continued to write for that filthy rag again and again. Not just write for it, but attend its parties, chum around with its senior staff, allow its hacks into Labour’s 2022 conference — in Liverpool, the city that lost 97 people in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster — and appointed Murdoch’s pawns as senior advisers.

So, of course, he was always going to break his promise to pass the law in this parliament, and that’s exactly what he has done. But Hillsborough campaigners and other bereaved families are not having it.

Hillsborough: Families have ‘suffered enough’

They have accused him, entirely rightly, of “insulting” their loved ones and them by refusing to introduce the law as he promised. And they are entirely unimpressed with his excuse that he had to delay the law to add an amendment to add security service operatives to those bound by the law. Horseshit.

Passing it now and then adding to it later would be just as easy, and the security services have for years had their arm deeper up Starmer’s nether regions than a vet up the horse that did the shit.

Starmer’s lackeys pulled the bill in January. He couldn’t be clearer that he doesn’t care a fig for the families of those killed at Hillsborough, in the Manchester Arena bombing, victims of the Post Office and Windrush scandals, or any others. They have all signed a letter to Starmer accusing him of protecting those involved in “denial, defensiveness and cover-ups”.

The letter goes on:

The fact that Hillsborough law has still not been reintroduced to parliament is an insult to all of us who have been working so hard to get to this point. It has undermined our trust in this government to do what they said they would and make this legacy project a reality.

We hope that, going forward, you, the prime minister, and your government will listen to the people Hillsborough law is meant to protect and not those it is meant to protect us from. We have suffered enough.

It will be a forlorn hope, unless somehow Starmer is dragged kicking and screaming into keeping that thing to which he is most allergic: a promise.

Featured image via the Canary

Joanna Byrne, chairperson at Drogheda United football club, has been dismissed by the club’s American owners, the Trivela Group over her principled opposition to Israel. The shameful decision follows remarks she made in February calling on the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) to not play their Nations League fixture against so-called ‘Israel’.

In a terse statement on Monday March 23, Trivela Group said the following on Drogheda’s website:

Trivela Group can confirm that, pursuant to its authority as sole shareholder of Drogheda United FC, Joanna Byrne has been removed by Trivela Group as a director of the Club.

At this time, the Board of Directors consists of Benjamin Boycott, Marc Koretzky, Barton Lee, and club CEO Rian Wogan. Mr. Boycott for the time being, will serve as the sole Chairperson, and the club will look to appoint a local director and Co-Chair in due course.

Once again, we thank Ms Byrne for her longstanding and ongoing dedication to the Club and its success.

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Israel defended: ‘cold, underhand move’

Byrne also serves as a Sinn Féin TD, representing Louth in the Dáil. In a statement released Monday on her Facebook page, she responded to her dismissal, describing it as a:

…cold, underhand move by Trivela, initiated in the dark of the night, which was planned and co-ordinated without any consultation with me. This is symptomatic of the way they do business.

The controversy began on 12 February 2026 when Byrne, in her role as Sinn Féin spokesperson on Culture, Communications and Sport, made a statement denouncing the appalling decision of the FAI to go ahead with the 4 October fixture against the Zionist entity’s national team. She said:

In November, the FAI voted to submit a motion to UEFA to ban Israel from its European club and international competitions. That was the correct moral and principled position to take.

Therefore, I am extremely angry and dismayed that the FAI have confirmed they will play against Israel.

It appears that their morals, and principled position, was only on paper – not in actions where it counts.

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She contrasted UEFA’s treatment of the settler-colony with the response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine, saying:

There are double standards here from UEFA. Russia was expelled from all club and international competitions by UEFA in 2022 following their brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine. The same principle should be applied to Israel.

Byrne concluded:

Israel is an apartheid state who have engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Their behaviour cannot be accepted or normalised.

They should be treated the same as Apartheid South Africa was, and be banned and boycotted by all.

Trivela Group had privately indicated to Byrne in mid-February that they expected her to resign for these entirely laudable statements. Her opinions are shared by most of the Irish public, and a majority of the nation’s professional footballers. She refused to comply, however, saying:

I stand over those comments. They were made from a deeply held belief in equality, human rights and the power of sport to take principled positions – as it has done many times in history.

Amoral profiteers running cherished sporting institutions

The Trivela Group operate a multi-club ownership (MCO) model. Apart from Drogheda, Trivela own Silkeborg in Denmark, Walsall FC in England, and Trivela FC in Togo. They have previously fallen foul of their own model, resulting in Drogheda being unable to play in the 2025/26 UEFA Conference League, as Silkeborg had also qualified for the same competition. UEFA’s rules forbid multiple clubs under the same owner from competing in the same tournament.

The American outfit appear to practice a form of football extractivism in Africa, grooming talented players there, before farming them out to European clubs they own. They can then potentially be sold on for a big fee to European giants, cutting the original African club out of any profits.

They attempt to present themselves as kindly benefactors, acting as “thoughtful stewards of talent and resources”. Given the bitter experience of profiteering US owners, it would be naive to believe this shit. Walsall supporters expressed their dissatisfaction last month, suggesting:

…the club’s immediate sporting objectives are being subordinated to wider ownership priorities.

This is a glaring reminder of how capitalism outrageously violates basic democratic principles. Football clubs are typically historic, deeply cherished centres of a community. Yet the will of tens of thousands of people can be overridden by one rich arsehole if the latter owns the club.

The disgraceful treatment of Byrne proves Trivela’s moral vacuity, as they choose to stand with an apartheid genocidal entity rather than with those who oppose it. The one useful thing they’ve done is maintain a CEO – Ben Boycott – whose name reminds us of the necessary course of action needed against loathsome corporate ghouls and the Zionist entity itself.

Featured image via the Canary

Matt Goodwin hasn’t had a great past month. In February 2026, Goodwin was trounced in the Gorton and Denton by-election by the Greens’ Hannah Spencer. Less than four weeks later, he’s now trying to defend ‘his’ awful, Islamophobic new book after parts – perhaps much – of it were found to be derived from AI chatbots.

Not only that, but his editing was so sloppy that he even left tell-tale ChatGPT indicators in links he puts in the book. What’s more, he can’t blame anyone else for the sloppiness – because he’d already boasted about having “no major publisher”, supposedly because “they would have censored me”.

Goodwin exposed

The exposure of Goodwin’s AI-dodge came in a thread from observant writer and X user Andy Twelves. Twelves found a host of false claims that he described as “AI hallucinations”. Below are a few extracts from the thread:

Claim 1: “In one year 1 classroom in Bradford, only four of twenty eight pupils spoke English as their first language. Teachers report spending large amounts of time simply mediating between dozens of languages, making normal teaching almost impossible and slowing down the rate…

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

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Some of the errors were schoolboy stuff – if an AI chatbot were a schoolboy. Like a made-up claim about languages spoken in a school – that attributes the claim to a non-existent BBC service:

Claim 2.1: “Teachers often feel they are no longer running a school but a translation service. One inspection report put it bluntly: ‘Many pupils join the school with extremely limited English. This significantly slows the pace of learning.’ This is not multicultural harmony or…

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

Goodwin wouldn’t be Goodwin if he didn’t throw in a bit of gratuitous reference to classics and academics. In this case, gratuitous also means non-existent:

Claim 8: “The academic James Burnham put it bluntly many years ago: ‘Power is exercised through organisations those who control the organisations control the instruments of power’”

Reality: Burnham said things vaguely like this, but I cannot find this quote. I believe this is…

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— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

And – of course – some trans-bashing, apparently based on equally made-up sources:

Claim 10: “‘The most dangerous experiments’ warned the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek, ‘are those conducted on entire societies.’”⁰⁰Reality: I cannot verify this quote, or anything similar to it from Hayek or any other philosopher or economist. I believe this is…

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

And some equally ill-founded migrant-bashing:

Claim 13: “‘The essence of a nation’, wrote the academic Walker Connor, ‘is not the territory occupied but the people who occupy it. To replace the people is to replace the nation.’”⁰⁰Reality: I cannot verify this quote, or anything similar to it from Walker Connor or anyone…

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

And, of course, we shouldn’t omit the AI-slop indicators:

(h/t @johnpmerrick) bossman @GoodwinMJ left the ChatGPT in the url in his references hahaha pic.twitter.com/QnL2Cgujfz

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

Even more embarrassing for Goodwin, Twelves said he had only done the first five chapters so far:

.@GoodwinMJ can you please outline the above, this is only in the first 5 chapters of the book – I’ve got the Carabao Cup to go to this afternoon, so await your response before reading on.

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

FAFO

In a long X rant about horrid left-wingers, Goodwin wrote that he sees “no issue obtaining datasets via AI so long as they are cross-checked with the original source.” Well, maybe – but it seems they weren’t ‘cross-checked’, were they?

This is not Goodwin’s first brush with, well, making stuff up. He was clinically dismantled by journalist Mehdi Hasan in 2024 for making completely false claims that more than tripled the number of immigrants in London housing and could only lamely respond that he’d need to look it up. Hasan saved him the trouble. The clip is well worth a watch:

Featured image via the Canary

UK Parliament (Alamy)

3 min read5 min

When the public needed it most, the government was visible and accountable. In return, the public was largely sympathetic and compliant.

We would later discover that key decisions were being made not in Cabinet or formal, minuted, meetings but in private chats that would be deleted in apparent defiance of preservation requests. When the Covid Inquiry pulled at those threads, a picture unravelled of a government that had mastered the performance of transparency while insulating actual decision-making from meaningful scrutiny.

Information – or lack of it – plays a significant role in shaping public trust. People want to know why decisions are being made. Too often we face an iceberg with some information voluntarily offered to the surface with the substance remaining hidden. Indeed, Westminster offers few statutory transparency requirements: the flawed 2014 Lobbying Act has damningly co-existed with some of the most significant lobbying scandals in a generation.

Labour came to power promising to clean up politics. There have been small positive steps, including creating the Ethics and Integrity Commission – albeit on a non-statutory basis – but most campaigners are underwhelmed by the gap between pre-election promises, including a long-overdue overhaul of our weak lobbying laws, and delivery.

So, it was somewhat surprising that the Committee on Standards recently published proposals that, in the words of the parliamentary commissioner for Standards, could serve to “reduce transparency and accountability”.

The committee’s report on the Register of Interests of Members’ Staff proposes to redact parliamentary staff names from the public register, removing around 2,000 individuals, including those seconded from outside organisations or employed by MPs’ families. A 2021 HuffPost analysis found nearly 90 MPs were employing family members at the time.

The committee argues that measures are needed to guarantee individuals’ safety, and nobody disputes this matters, but the register also exists for good reason. The identification of individuals alongside the Members they serve and interests they hold allows civil society, journalists and the public to scrutinise potential conflicts of interest.

Patterns of employment, repeated hospitality and broader networks of influence which have historically shaped political decision making away from public view can be traced. Removing the names removes this thread. There are sometimes concerns, legitimate and misplaced, that corporate interests, lobbying firms and think tanks attempt to exert influence by placing staff within MPs’ offices. These proposals will fan those flames by making identifying such arrangements virtually impossible. Instead, ironically, they may add further contempt towards parliamentarians.

There is also irony that the committee appeared to reach these conclusions based partly on written submissions that are not publicly available, undeclared meetings and no public consultation. A proposal reducing transparency was developed with a notable absence of it.

These proposals would also worsen our reputation internationally. Comparable legislatures all maintain registers that identify individual staff members routinely. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ No Rules Britannia? report demonstrates how the UK already scores poorly in international assessments of lobbying regulation.

The answer is not to remove names from view, but to find a proportionate solution addressing safety without sacrificing accountability. These proposals provide no accountability to those in office and entrench an exploitable gap in our ineffective lobbying framework. We risk going two steps back before making one stride forward.

If Parliament wants to increase public confidence, it must demonstrate the highest ethical standards. It cannot draw the curtain on those with whom it is seeking to build trust. 

Alastair McCapra is CEO of the CIPR