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In a 3 February debate, nationalist and unaligned Northern Ireland Assembly members (MLAs) pilloried the selective education system used on 11 year olds in the region. MLAs described their own experiences of feeling “like a failure” after not passing the test, which determines whether pupils will go on to a selective grammar school via success in the test. Those who get a lower one of the six bands in the Schools’ Entrance Assessment Group (SEAG) exam will typically attend a non-selective school.

Cara Hunter, Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) MLA for East Derry, described the stress young children are subjected to. She recalled from her childhood:

…breathing exercises in a circle [and] relaxing music before going to sit the exam.

If schools are deploying on 11 year olds techniques more common to a trauma counselling session, it’s fair to say you’ve failed to produce a humane education system. Danny Baker of Sinn Féin recalled speaking to parents of a child who didn’t leave his room for three days after failing the test.

The politicians made their points during a debate on a motion that called on:

…the Minister of Education to produce a time-bound plan to end academic selection and transfer tests in post-primary admissions and to develop and implement a fair, inclusive and non-selective system of primary education that ensures equality of opportunity for all children…

Northern Ireland unusually focused on tormenting 11 year olds with academic selection

The non-binding motion passed by a margin of 48-30. Voting was split between nationalist and unionist camps, with all ‘no’ votes coming from the latter bloc. No unionist MLA voted for the motion. Nowhere in Britain maintains a system where academic selection features to such an extent. In England, only around 5% of state secondary are grammars. In the North of Ireland, that figure is over 40%. Scotland and Wales have entirely comprehensive (i.e. non-selective) systems.

Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MLA David Brooks was the most staunch defender of the current approach. He declared that he “absolutely believes in academic selection”. Describing his own upwards trajectory as a working class pupil who passed the old ’11 plus’ test and went to a grammar school he said:

…a generation of children from working class families – many without an academic tradition at home – have used grammar school as a ladder of opportunity.

This is a little like the fobbing-off exercise deployed by private schools when they grant scholarships to a handful of less affluent students. ‘Ignore all those people drowning,’ they effectively say. ‘Just keep focusing on the few we’ve granted a lifeboat.’

The man at the centre of the debate, education minister and rabid Zionist Paul Givan, said MLAs were failing children by labelling them failures for children not passing the selection process. This dishonestly misrepresented what was actually being said – that children were made to feel like failures by a system that pressured and graded them at such an early stage in life.

Nick Mathison from Alliance criticised the test itself, saying it doesn’t offer any “objective measures of ability”. The current format focuses on evaluating ability in English and Maths, which is indeed a limited spectrum of human capacities. It ignores social, musical, physical and empathic qualities, along with many others, in favour of a narrow definition of what we ought to value.

He also decried the missed opportunity for “deep learning”, saying:

From P5 [around age 9], certainly from P6-7, almost all focus is on exclusively teaching to the SEAG test, an exclusive focus on numeracy and literacy.

Only ending inequality can fix education gap

Baker denounced the pressure the transfer test puts on the “same schools doing all the heavy lifting”. These schools take on a disproportionate number of children with additional support needs and those from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, leaving fewer resources to dedicate to teaching. Qualifying for free school meals is a strong indicator of poverty. Around 16% of children at selective schools have this entitlement, against roughly 39% in non-selective ones.

In what was a largely intelligent and civilised debate, only leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the insufferable Jon Burrows, sought to inject inanity into proceedings. He made a nonsensical point about selection providing choice, and followed up with a smear on how this preference would be “ideologically inconsistent” for Sinn Féin MLAs to back, given their apparent support for Marxism.

A) A society drawing on the best of Marx’s thought would likely be considerably more democratic and choice-rich than our current system of fake free markets; and B) It’ll be a fine day when the targets of his ire are even one quarter as Marxist as his fevered imaginings.

His unionist fellows Brooks and Givan did make one valid point – the observation that no school system, be it selective or otherwise, can ever be truly free from existing inequalities. Affluent parents will always have the option of buying tuition for their children, or moving house to within the catchment area of the best schools.

Like so many societal ills, the underlying cause is an economic system – capitalism – that distributes resources so unequally and gives some children unfair advantages from the moment of birth. The true solution is to fix this shoddy foundation which everything else is built upon.

Featured image via the Canary

Keir Starmer is perhaps the most unpopular prime minister we’ve ever had, and he’s embroiled himself in what may be the most disgusting scandal. Can this loathed public figure survive this self-inflicted catastrophe?

Almost certainly not.

And one person who’s ahead of the curve on this is Zack Polanski:

Important discussion this evening on Palantir.

Keir Starmer having meetings in Washington – and then the US spy tech company receive £260m.

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The largest defence contract in British history – through Peter Mandelsons lobbying company. https://t.co/i9lDjfEx22

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) February 4, 2026

Time to go

As we’ve reported, Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson to be ambassador to the US despite knowing he maintained a friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein after his conviction. The media presented it as some great revelation when Starmer admitted to this in parliament yesterday, but it was never a secret; the media just failed to interrogate Starmer when he returned Mandelson to public office.

We reported on Mandelson maintaining his ties with Epstein way back in 2023.

It wasn’t a secret.

Starmer knew.

The media knew.

This is all just a grim pantomime.

In the clip above, Polanski describes hiring Mandelson as “the most catastrophic lapse in judgement you can imagine”. In our opinion, the “lapse of judgement” is that Starmer thought the media would ignore this obvious scandal forever. It’s not that he hired a notorious sleazeball, because he clearly doesn’t care about that; after all, he’s part of a movement which is entirely comprised of such people:

Peter Mandelson is not some random outlier.

He was one of the founders and central pillars of the New Labour project.

He was a central player in the Starmer project – including as mentor to the chief of staff.

He is the very core of the Labour Right! https://t.co/lypJOfU8hz

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— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) February 4, 2026

Polanski also said:

I think it’s clear the Prime Minister should do the right thing and step down, because actually the rut runs right throughout the Labour government.

This is a man in Keir Starmer who knew that Peter Mandelson was friends with one of the most known paedophiles in the world, was still staying in his apartment, and he brought him into the heart of government solely because, I imagine, he thought he could whisper in Trump’s ear.

Step down

Polanski is absolutely correct that the “right thing” for Starmer to do would be to “step down”. Given that this is the guy who hired Mandelson, however, there’s no reason to expect him to do the right thing.

Featured image via Zack Polanski

Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch holds press conference after forcing the Government to release the files regarding the Prime Minister’s appointment of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the UK.

https://www.conservatives.com/news/madelson-files-press-conference

Full text of speech here:

Britain is not being governed.

Last night in Downing Street, what were Keir Starmer and his team doing?

They were not thinking about the future of NATO…
They were not up late talking about sorting out the cost of living …

They were not planning to reindustrialise Britain with cheaper energy.

They were… yet again… desperately ringing round Labour MPs trying to save his job.

The Labour Party came into government just 18 months ago but with no plan for this country.

And in the last 18 months, we have seen exactlywhat happens when a government has no ideawhat it is doing in power…and no idea what it stands for….

They have made a series of random decisions.

Not a single one of which was in their manifesto.

Snatching Winter Fuel Payments. Taxing Family farms. Mandatory digital ID.

Surrendering the Chagos Islands.

A disastrous Budget….for Benefits Street.
Taxing jobs, pubs and businesses – and making this country poorer.

Every. single. one of these decisions… they have got wrong.

It is bad enough to have a government preoccupied with cleaning up its own messes.

But what’s worse… is the reason these mistakes keep happening.

Because every single one of them… comes back to the judgement of one man.

Keir Starmer.

At a time when Britain needs a leader, we have a Prime Minister who makes the wrong decision again…and again.

For months….I have been pressing the Prime Minister about his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador.

And Yesterday in Parliament, I finally forced him to admit the shocking truth.

HE KNEW.

He knew that Mandelson had a continuing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

He knew Mandelson had stayed in his house while Epstein was in jail for child prostitution.

The Prime Minister knew all this and appointed Peter Mandelson anyway to the most prestigious job in the diplomatic service.

The Prime Minister brushed aside the security warnings.

He turned a blind eye…to what he knew….about Mandelson’s association…..with one of the world’s most notorious paedophiles.

And instead of standing up and taking full responsibility for this disastrous appointment,

The Prime Minister is trying to make himself out to be the victim.

Nobody is buying it.

This morning Cabinet ministers are out there defending the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson – still claiming that it was a rational appointment.

They should be ashamed.

And it’s not just Peter Mandelson.

The Prime Minister has surrounded himself with people who do not have Britain’s best interests at heart.

Like Jonathan Powell.
Like Lord Hermer.

People advising him to surrender the Chagos Islands…simply to impress lawyers at North London dinner parties….

People advising him to let the Chinese build an enormous Spy Hub in the centre of London.

People advising him to drag our brave veterans through the courts while terrorists walk free.

Keir Starmer is either too weak, or too foolish, to see the folly of what he is agreeing to.

Even the Health Secretary has said there’s a toxic culture in Number 10.

Cabinet Ministers briefing against each other…not focused on their jobs…

We have constant u-turns

This is not just a Westminster bubble story.

Britain is not being governed.

And this is having an impact on the lives and the livelihoods of people across the country.

Britain is getting poorer….and Britain is getting weaker.

Because of Keir Starmer’s bad judgement.

It can’t go on.

It is now up to Labour MPs to do the right thing.

I know there are many who are horrified by what has happened.

We saw that in the House of Commons yesterday.

They might now expect the Prime Minister to take responsibility…

…but we know he won’t.

He will have to be dragged out of No10.

So I am making them an offer.

If they want the change they know the country needs, come and speak to my whips…and let’s talk seriously about a vote of no confidence, to force the moment.

Keir Starmer’s position is clearly untenable.

It is for Labour MPs to decide when he goes.

It’s a question of when not if he goes.

Just now Keir Starmer has given a speech supposedly about local funding. 

No doubt another mission, or pledge, or milestone – made up by an aide yesterday afternoon….yet another relaunch that in a week’s time no one will remember.

He apologised for believing Mandelson’s lies. That’s not good enough.

What he should apologise for…is ignoring security advice and vetting that showed him Mandelson should never have been appointed in the first place.

He cannot bring himself to do that because his self-righteousness is his greatest weakness.

And what else have the British public got on offer?

Fresh from announcing a pubs policy this week with a £10 billion black hole in it.

Nigel Farage is in now Wales….announcing his new Welsh leader… after the last one was sent to prison in November for taking bribes from Russia.

We all know a Reform government would just be more of the same.

More incompetence. More dodgy appointments. More drama… when what this country needs is some serious government.

There is only one party in Britain today that is actually serious.

One that is doing the deep thinking and the hard work…to fix our country’s problems.

And be ready to deliver the second we come into office.

That is my Conservative Party.

Yes we made mistakes but we acknowledge them and we have learned from them.

We are on the side of hard-working people.

People who do the right thing… and are fed up with a Government that isn’t working for them.

We are on the side of those who play by the rules. We are not on the side of people claiming benefits when they could and should be working.

We are not on the side of spivs and scammers who think the rules don’t apply to them.

Britain is not being governed.

We need to show that we can do better.

That a government with a plan can fix the things going wrong in our country.

That is our alternative.

Our strong borders plan.

Our cheap power plan.

Our £47 billion savings plan.

Our plan to abolish stamp duty

Our plan to fix the high street.

Our plan to Get Britain Working again.

This is what we believe in.

This is the change WE WILL DELIVER.”

Rabid media coverage of the Epstein files has breathlessly focused on political gossip at the expense of centring victims and survivors. As such, public discussion of elite sexual abuse often gravitates towards spectacle: powerful men, hidden networks and institutional failure. Of course, coverage from mainstream media is complicit in upholding power structures that decide who counts as a victim – and who doesn’t.

Instead, the newly released Epstein files point to an uncomfortable reality. It has been noted from FBI interview records and grand jury testimony that Epstein’s “preference was short, little, white girls.” Crucially, Epstein’s operation did not rely on chance or opportunism. Instead, Epstein paid girls to recruit other minors and enforced his preferences through discipline and reward. When recruiters failed to comply, the system reprimanded them. In practice, race did not sit in the background. Rather, it structured how the trafficking itself operated.

When recruiters violated those expectations, Epstein reprimanded them. In one instance, he refused to allow a Black girl to massage him, telling the recruiter that he “was not interested in black girls.” As a result, racial selection operated not as personal taste but as an enforced rule within the trafficking system.

This is not simply evidence of personal bias. It is evidence of racialised trafficking.

Epstein files: trafficking as selection, not chaos

A 2019 prosecution memorandum from the Southern District of New York reinforces this pattern. Drawing on multiple victims’ accounts, the memo describes how Epstein’s operation recruited, paid, recycled, and excluded girls. Epstein “expressed displeasure” when certain girls were brought to him and “did not like dark-skinned girls”.

This language confirms that race operated as a selection criterion within the abuse economy. The operation expected recruiters to internalise Epstein’s preferences and adjust their behaviour accordingly. When recruiters failed, the system punished them through loss of payment, emotional reprimand, or exclusion from favour. Trafficking here did not operate opportunistically or chaotically. It functioned as a regulated system, with whiteness operating as currency and Blackness marking disposability.

Black women-led anti-trafficking advocates have long warned that sexual exploitation cannot be understood outside race. As survivor-leader Vednita Carter, founder of Breaking Free, has stated:

Prostitution is a racial justice issue..you can’t just take race out of it.

The Epstein files bear this out.

Institutions frame misogynoir solely as hypersexualisation, with Black women and girls rendered excessively visible and exposed to violence. The Epstein material reveals a quieter but equally damaging mechanism. Black girls were not hypervisible. Institutions filtered them out. Their exclusion did not signal safety. It signalled erasure.

Exclusion from the pipeline meant exclusion from testimony, from media coverage, and from public memory. It also reinforced a persistent myth: that elite sexual exploitation primarily harms white girls.

Who counts as the “real” victim?

This is how racialised sexual violence hides. Black girls are routinely denied access to the category of the “ideal victim”: young, innocent, credible and deserving of sympathy. Research on adultification bias shows that Black girls are routinely denied the presumption of innocence and vulnerability afforded to white girls.

That category was never built to include them. When Black girls are missing from abuse narratives, it is not because they were protected, but because institutions are structured to look past them.

This omission is not politically neutral. Silence here is not an oversight. It is an organising strategy. When Black girls are written out of sexual abuse narratives, institutions are spared the obligation to protect them, fund services for them or confront the racialised nature of exploitation.

How institutions fail Black survivors

The National Black Women’s Justice Institute has noted that Black women and girls face “intersecting challenges rooted in racism, sexism and systemic oppression”, which not only heighten vulnerability to trafficking but also create barriers to recognition, justice, and healing once harm occurs.

Elite abuse narratives often rely on a narrow feminist crime that centres white girlhood as the default site of innocence. This framing does not merely overlook Black girls. It depends on their absence. It allows institutions to perform concern while leaving intact the racial hierarchies that decide whose suffering is legible.

Eugenics as context, not spectacle

It is within this framework that Epstein’s documented interests in eugenics becomes relevant. As the Canary has previously reported, Epstein repeatedly expressed “Nazi-like” eugenic obsessions around intelligence, breeding, and hierarchy. These views are disturbing, but they are not the story on their own.

What matters is how this ideology aligns with the trafficking practices documented in the files.

Eugenics did not create Epstein’s abuse, but it helped rationalise the sorting, ranking, and exclusion that defined it. Belief systems rooted in hierarchy sustain racialised trafficking by framing inequality as natural and exclusion as reasonable.

In that sense, Epstein’s eugenic thinking functions as context rather than cause. It helps explain how institutions normalised racial selection, enforced it through practice, and largely refused to interrogate it.

Misogynoir as subtraction

Understanding misogynoir only through sexualisation misses how it operates in elite abuse systems. Here, misogynoir functions through subtraction. Black girls disappear twice: first from protection, then memory -trafficking organisations working with Black survivors have warned that this has material consequences. This leads to gaps in accountability, long-term support, and prevention. Absence from the record becomes absence from remedy.

When abuse narratives centre those only deemed recognisable victims, accountability remains partial. Power survives by narrowing the field of concern.

The Epstein files show how institutions produce that acknowledgement: through recruitment rules, racialised preferences, reprimand, reward, and silence.

Why this matters now

Public outrage around sexual exploitation often peaks around individual villains, then dissipates. Structural analysis demands more and offers less comfort. Without it, the same hierarchies persist.

Institutions continue to under-identify Black girls as victims of sexual violence, under-protect them, and write them out of high-profile cases. When commentators read that absence as evidence of safety rather than exclusion, misogynoir does its quiet work.

The Epstein files do not simply expose an individual abuser. They show how systems of power decide whose suffering they record in the first place. As long as racialised trafficking remains peripheral to how institutions understand sexual exploitation, they will continue to frame abuse as exceptional rather than structural.

This is not a failure of evidence. It is a failure of political will.

Featured image via the Canary

An air fryer gave me much better results

Are air fryers always a better choice?

3 min read20 min

“I am sorry,” the Prime Minister said at a press conference on Thursday morning.

Starmer is under severe political pressure over his decision to bring Mandelson into government despite being made aware of his links to the paedophile financier.

There was widespread anger and dismay over the scandal among Labour MPs on Wednesday night, with many calling on Starmer to remove his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who was instrumental in the decision to appoint Mandelson as the UK ambassador in Washington.

The Prime Minister has said that Mandelson, who was a key figure in the New Labour administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and has remained influential in the Labour Party ever since, lied to his team about the extent of his relationship with Epstein.

Speaking in Hastings, Starmer said he wanted to address Epstein’s victims.

“I am sorry,” he said.

“Sorry for what was done to you. Sorry that so many people with power failed you. Sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointed him. And sorry that even now, you’re forced to watch this story unfold in public once again.”

He added: “But I also want to say this: in this country, we will not look away.

“We will not shrug our shoulders, and we will not allow the powerful to treat justice as optional. We will pursue the truth. We will uphold the integrity of public life. And we will do everything within our power, and in the interests of justice, to ensure accountability is delivered.

“That is what the public expects. That is what the victims deserve. And it is what I will do.”

The Prime Minister said he was personally frustrated that he is not able to immediately publish all material related to Mandelson’s appointment after the Metropolitan Police asked the government to withold information that could undermine its own criminal investigation.

However, he stressed that he would not do anything that risked collapsing that police investigation because justice for the victims must take priority.

Mandelson, a former cabinet minister, resigned from the House of Lords earlier this week amid growing outrage over his links to Epstein. 

It came after millions of court documents relating to Epstein were published by the US Department of Justice, revealing that Mandelson had shared confidential and high-level UK government information with him, including that the euro bailout was coming.

He was sacked as UK ambassador to the US in September after more details about his relationship with Epstein emerged.