The Stop EPH Network’s international action days are seeing 13 protests taking place in seven different countries against fossil fuel giant EPH. The actions aim to shine a light on one of Europe’s top three carbon emitters.

On 28 April, five young people shut down the lobby of Byron House in London’s ultra-posh St James’s. They disrupted ongoing business with placards and drew attention to the resident company EP UK Investments. It’s the UK arm of Energetický a průmyslový holding (EPH).

Security locked three of the young people, two under 18, inside the building. They used force to keep them inside, take their placards and intimidate them.

This protest was against the expansion of unsustainable energy projects, exposing Czech fossil fuel giant EPH.

One of the young people taking part said:

EPH is one of the biggest CO2 emitters in Europe, yet they plan to continue expanding their coal and gas energy facilities.

Candy, 17, said:

EPH is putting profits over the planet by finding loopholes in just transition agreements.

Megan, 24, said:

EPH is one of the top three carbon emitters in Europe, but until now has remained relatively invisible to the public due to confusing structure, creative accounting and greenwashing. We are here to change that.

Lily, 17, said:

The security used intimidation tactics, locking us inside the building and claiming to have power over us. We refused to be intimidated, and will continue to expose EPH and Daniel Krětínský for destroying our futures and communities across Europe.

EPH is one of the biggest companies in Czechia, owned by billionaire Daniel Krětínský. It owns coal fired power stations in Czechia, Slovakia, Italy, and Germany. It claims to be moving mostly away from coal.

EPH owns Kilroot, in the North of Ireland, which was the UK’s penultimate coal power station. And it has gas infrastructure in Italy, France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Slovakia, and Czechia.

Krětínský added the UK’s Royal Mail to his collection of companies in 2025. He’s also faced scrutiny for economic ties with Russia due to owning one of the main gas pipes from Russia to Europe (EUstream).

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By The Canary

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Last week, Maurice Glasman – the peer who supplied Blue Labour with its intellectual architecture – told the Telegraph that Keir Starmer “cannot conceivably continue” as Prime Minister. The remark was reported as a defection. It is more accurately read as a development inside a faction that has shaped the post-Corbyn Labour Party for the better part of a decade.

As previous Canary coverage of the Mandelson scandal has shown, the moment is one in which the assumptions of the present Labour government are being re-examined across the parliamentary party. Blue Labour’s relationship to that re-examination is now central to it.

An ascendant faction

Blue Labour has been close to the Starmer project since well before the 2024 election. Around twenty MPs now sit in its loose parliamentary caucus. A wider circle of advisers, journalists, and policy figures also move within its orbit. Its arguments – on family, faith, place, immigration, and the limits of liberalism – have given the soft-left of the parliamentary party much of the language it now uses to describe its own discontent.

The wider cultural moment has helped. A prevailing zeitgeist of disillusionment with the excesses of progressive ‘woke’ politics has supplied the faction with a popular grammar for arguments it has been making, in more academic registers, since its founding.

Blue Labour presents itself as the carrier of an older Labour tradition – post-war, ethical, communitarian – that the Fabian and Marxist currents are said to have crowded out. The cultural drift it expresses is real; the disillusionment that carries it is not without cause, and the parliamentary footprint it now commands is more substantial than that of any other distinct intellectual current within the present Labour Party.

A theological refoundation

The intellectual substance sits at a deeper level than the cultural commentary suggests. In The Economics of the Common Good, Glasman reaches past the standard sources of British socialism to Catholic Social Thought, and specifically to the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. He quotes Pope Pius XI:

Capitalism violates right order whenever capital so employs the working or wage-earning classes as to divert business and economic activity entirely to its own arbitrary will and advantage without any regard to the human dignity of the workers, the social character of economic life, social justice and the common good.

From this premise, Blue Labour derives a theoretical break that distinguishes it from most of the British left. Classical social democracy and the Marxist tradition, on Glasman’s reading, share with their pro-capitalist antagonists a single underlying machinic outlook – one that denies the humanity of workers and treats them as mere factors of production.

Against that, the faction proposes labour as a moral good. Work is “received from the past and oriented towards the future”. The workplace becomes a site of meaning rather than of exchange. Labour is to be conditioned, in Glasman’s phrase, so as to “constrain capital and promote virtue”. Interconnecting systems of fealty, obligation, and mutual patronage are what make the working class.

The Labour Party itself, on this picture, is reconceived as a locus of tradition – something closer to a Church than a parliamentary vehicle. It is, by some distance, the most ambitious attempt to reconstitute British socialism on theological ground in a generation.

What it means in practice

The question that follows is what any of this means in real terms, in the real conditions of the present economic arrangement.

Here the project sits in an interesting position. Blue Labour’s public narrative locates the difficulties of contemporary British politics in moves made by other tendencies: by New Labour’s market liberalism; by the Corbyn movement’s identity politics; by the Starmer leadership’s lack of conviction.

Yet the faction has also been close to the centre of the current settlement, and supplied much of the intellectual texture for the operation that consolidated the party after 2020. The leader whose continuation Glasman now disputes is the same leader whose ascent the faction’s arguments did much to legitimise. How the project navigates that proximity is one of the open questions of its second decade.

The deeper question concerns the tradition Blue Labour claims to recover. The post-Fabian interregnum within which British politics has been suspended is not the consequence of a wrong turn taken by a single tendency. It is a longer pattern – one in which the working class has been treated, across the major currents of British socialism, as an object to be administered by an elite.

Catholic Social Thought is a serious philosophical resource, and the vocabulary it imports changes the texture of the argument. Whether it transforms the underlying relation between the party and the people it claims to represent is a separate, and considerably harder, question.

The shared inheritance

What the faction shares with its loudest critics on the parliamentary left is, on closer inspection, more substantive than what divides them.

The hostility Blue Labour generates is often presented as a quarrel about ends. It can also be read as a quarrel about idiom – about whether the same instinct toward discipline and direction should be expressed in the language of flag and faith, or in the language of progressive administration. Both inheritances belong to a tradition that has, in its various phases, treated the dignity of labour as something to be conferred from above as much as constituted from below.

Within its own terms, Blue Labour is on a marginal ascendency. Twenty-odd MPs is not nothing, and the cultural moment in which the faction’s ideas have begun to find their wider audience is unlikely to recede in the immediate future. Whether the project becomes a refoundation of British socialism – or a redecoration of it – is the question its second decade will answer, and the answer will tell us a great deal about where the British left is heading next.

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By Rares Cocilnau

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In a horrific and seemingly deliberate attack on Monday, a car driven by an Israeli settler ran over three schoolgirls in Palestine.

The attack was perpetrated in Tarqumiya, Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, where settlers continue to rampage.

The three victims have been hospitalised with serious injuries and at least one of the girls is in critical condition, it has been reported.

Police in Palestine seized the vehicle, which crashed shortly after the crime, and arrested the driver. However, the Palestinian Authority is not allowed by the occupation to prosecute Jewish Israelis. Meanwhile, the Israeli authorities have an appalling record of impunity for criminal settlers.

Settler violence against innocent Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has been high for decades, but has escalated dramatically since the occupation regime began its genocide in Gaza. At least three other teenagers in the West Bank were murdered in the past week in separate incidents.

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By Skwawkbox

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The Department for Work and Pensions has confirmed that disabled Universal Credit claimants going back into work will still face benefit reassessments. This is despite the ‘Right to Try’ scheme promising that reentering work will not trigger reassessment.

The DWP made a huge fanfare announcing the ‘landmark legislation’ that would mean:

Entering employment will not automatically trigger benefit reassessment for claimants on new-style Employment and Support Allowance, Personal Independence Payment, and Universal Credit health element.

This is supposed to alleviate disabled people’s fear that starting work would mean they lose their benefits. While PIP is not an out-of work benefit, starting a job could count as a change of circumstance. It could essentially signal, in the DWP’s eyes at least, that your disability has miraculously gotten better.

The Right to Try policy would, they claim, mean this doesn’t happen. It would basically just be a line inserted into different change of circumstances legislation, which says:

Doing work for payment or in expectation of payment, or doing voluntary work, is not a relevant change of circumstances.

However, as Benefits and Work discovered, this isn’t true. In a memo to DWP staff, the department explained that nothing is actually changing:

Previous guidance and policy for WCA reassessment and PIP award review does not refer to work, or voluntary work, as being a reason in itself to trigger a reassessment or award review.

DWP demonising disabled people even further

So what’s the fucking point? If that rule isn’t changing, it means the reassessment policy isn’t actually changing.

The memo continued to say that while, by starting work, the claimant won’t trigger a review automatically, it will if a DWP decisionmaker decides they want to do one anyway.

It continued:

The Secretary of State retains discretion to reassess entitlement to one of these benefits for other reasons (for example, a change in condition, improvement in functional ability or suspected fraud) which could be indicated, for example, by undertaking work of a particular nature.

So basically, if the type of work a disabled person chooses to do causes a not-medically-trained assessor to question their disability, they can be reassessed.

In theory, the only reason a reassessment should be triggered under this new legislation is if the DWP suspected fraud. But when they’re the ones deciding who’s committing fraud or not, it’s hard to see how this would reassure anyone.

This is particularly troubling in the current climate where the DWP is trying to prove many conditions such as ADHD, autism and anxiety are over-diagnosed. Just this week, the shady Tony Blair Institute have got the shitrags frothing with policy that would mean those conditions would be classed as ‘non-work-limiting’.

Disabled people are damned if they do and damned if they don’t – and that’s the whole point

A further memo from the DWP to decisionmakers has fully confirmed that this will be the case.

It told Universal Credit staff:

When notified that a claimant is working, DMs [decisionmakers] should continue to consider whether the nature of the work undertaken might indicate that a change in functional ability has occurred. Where this is the case, a determination can be made that a further WCA should be carried out in order to consider whether the claimant continues to have LCW or LCWRA.

For PIP claimants, while they don’t have to report a new job to the DWP, they do technically have to report anything that could mean their entitlement changes.

The example given in the memo is someone who says they can’t travel without assistance but has gotten a job that requires frequent travel. What’s missing here is that the decisionmakers don’t know if the person will have assistance to travel – they’re just assuming they won’t.

However, with the way the DWP is also absolutely decimating Access to Work, that person may have to travel unaided. Not only is Access to Work being cut, but they also have a horrific backlog of over 66,000 people waiting. On top of that, the department confirmed there will be no extra provision for the increased demand that will come from how many more disabled people will be forced into work.

It’s absolute absurd that, whilst the DWP is trying to force so many disabled people into work, they are the ones making it harder with their actions. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the department doesn’t give a fuck about actually supporting disabled people into work. They just want the public to think they are, so it’s easier to turn the public against us and make it easier to cut benefits.

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By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

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Alliance Party member John Blair has introduced a Stormont bill to ban the “cruel and inhumane” practice of fox hunting in the Six Counties.

Alliance also announced the move on Facebook.

By Robert Freeman

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In a rare success story for Six Counties’ legislators, the Northern Ireland Assembly has passed a Sign Language Bill that in several respects goes beyond its equivalents in the Republic of Ireland and Britain.

It will be the first bill in the islands mandating the provision of sign language classes for all D/deaf children and young people up to the age of 25, along with their immediate family members.

These will be free of charge. People aged 25, or who have become deaf, will also have classes available to them, though it seems likely a small fee will be charged in these cases.

The bill is also the first to officially recognise two signed languages, British Sign Language (BSL) and Irish Sign Language (ISL).

All public bodies are required to take “all reasonable steps” to ensure D/deaf people are able to access services in their language of choice. This will include provision of interpreters or “web-based or technological means for on-site or remote interaction”.

The bill goes beyond requiring this kind of access as a “reasonable adjustment” for a disability. Instead, it is considered a linguistic right for a cultural minority.

Deaf people’s culture respected in law

The cost of fulfilling the bill’s requirements is likely to be about £3 million per year. The main justification for the bill is clearly that treating D/deaf people as equal citizens is simply the right thing to do.

However, even for those caring purely about bean counting, it’s hard to imagine the spending won’t be easily recouped by letting D/deaf communities participate fully in society.

This is the case with all similar social spending. Reactionary governments try to pinch every penny as if spending it on disabled people would be an enormous waste. In reality, enabling people to fulfil their potential more than pays for itself.

The bill’s passage was hailed by the British Deaf Association (BDA), which described the legislation as a “landmark step”.

The BDA continued:

The legislation marks a significant milestone not only for Northern Ireland, but for the wider UK and Ireland, reinforcing the importance of sign languages as living languages with their own culture, heritage and communities.

Caroline Doherty, Northern Ireland manager at the charity, said:

This is a hugely significant moment for Deaf communities in Northern Ireland. The recognition of both BSL and ISL reflects the reality of our linguistic and cultural landscape and sends a powerful message about inclusion, respect and equality.

She spoke of wanting to ensure, “Deaf people are not only included, but are actively influencing and shaping the services that affect their lives”.

This must lead to meaningful, lasting change for our community.

Chairperson of the BDA, Robert Adam, reiterated this emphasis on implementation. He said:

The hard work starts here. We need to work together to turn this legislation into meaningful change in people’s lives. The sign language community stands ready to work with government to set clear priorities and deliver real progress.

That means ensuring early access to sign language for deaf babies, children and their families; expanding the availability of public information in sign language; and empowering deaf signers to play a stronger, more visible role in shaping the decisions that affect our lives and our future.

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MLAs: Limit self-congratulation until there’s equality for all

Sinn Féin’s Colm Gildernew, chairman of the Stormont Communities Committee, spoke of the need to ensure the private sector gets on board too. He said:

The department’s future work on extending any central system outside of [the] public sector will be key to this, and something stakeholders raised consistently with the committee.

Gordon Lyons, whose Department for Communities led on the bill, said:

For generations, deaf people have built rich linguistic, cultural and social communities through sign language yet that history has too often been marked by exclusion. Legal recognition of sign language has lagged far behind lived reality.

At further consideration stage, I spoke of the Milan conference in 1880 and how its decisions led to deaf children being discouraged from learning and using their own language, and deaf people in general being marginalised in employment and civic life, often seen and treated as outsiders, as not quite belonging.

The Milan conference Lyons referred to was the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf. There it was declared that “oral education (oralism) was superior to manual education”. A resolution then banned the use of sign language in schools.

It led to schools in Europe and North America using speech therapy without sign language in education for Deaf people. UNESCO described the impact:

The resolutions of this Congress impacted negatively on deaf people’s access to language and education in many countries, excluded deaf teachers from the profession, and contributed to the widespread devaluing of signed languages.

It’s welcome that Lyons can recognise the mistreatment of a marginalised group 145 years ago. It’s always more valuable to recognise it in the here and now, at a time when his own Democratic Unionist Party scapegoats immigrants and trans people.

There was rightly a mood of self-congratulation in the Assembly chamber during the passage of the bill. However, the cheers will echo only as hypocrisy if similar legislation isn’t extended to all of today’s marginalised communities.

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By Robert Freeman

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4 min read1 min

We must give Britain’s campaigning organisations a better platform. Parliamentarians know how difficult it can be to make political change.

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They see this not only from their own perspective but from the perspective of campaigners who come to them asking for help.

These might be campaigners seeking redress after an injustice, or who are championing a proposal to improve legislation in a particular policy area.

These campaigners are often well-informed and highly motivated. They also have a genuine representative function. After all, many people are more interested in political issues than in political parties. Such people often find that their principal engagement with politics is through an issue-based campaign group. Campaigning groups are a vital part of our democracy. They want to influence parliamentary and public debate, and they want parliamentarians to assist them. MPs and peers will often do what they can. Unfortunately, however, the current system is stacked against them.

The struggles faced by the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance prove the point. The subpostmasters battled hard. They had support from various parliamentarians. Their efforts, however, only met with success after ITV1 aired Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It cannot be right that you need to get a national broadcaster on board in order to make an important political argument. We should make it easier for campaigners to influence parliamentary and public debate.

This could be done by building on the existing parliamentary e-petitions system. Current arrangements allow the subject of a popular petition to be debated in the House of Commons – but instead of having MPs debate the issue, we could allow campaigners to speak for themselves in a House of Campaigns.

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The House of Campaigns would be a new chamber in Parliament. It would have no permanent membership. Rather, it would be open to Britain’s campaigning organisations. It would meet on one Friday each month. Each day would have six half-hour sessions.

Campaigns wanting to speak in the chamber would apply online. The sessions would be allocated by a House of Campaigns committee made up of representatives from across the political spectrum. The House of Campaigns committee would have a responsibility to ensure that a wide range of campaigners was invited to speak.

Instead of having MPs debate the issue, we could allow campaigners to speak for themselves in a House of Campaigns

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A participating campaign would have 30 minutes in which to make a full and persuasive argument. It would conclude with a ‘Request for Action’ asking a government department to take a specific action. While the government would not need to comply with the Request for Action, it would be obliged to respond promptly and in detail. If the government decided not to act, it would need to engage with the arguments and explain its decision. The House of Campaigns would give campaigners direct access to ministers. Importantly, however, the new house could also put campaigns on the national news agenda.

The fact that it would meet on a Friday (when the House of Commons and the House of Lords rarely sit) would give the House of Campaigns a monopoly on parliamentary reporting. Only having six sessions a month should give them a novelty value that might enable them to win media coverage. The press attention following Mr Bates vs The Post Office was transformative for the subpostmasters. The House of Campaigns may not be able to have the same impact on every occasion – but you do not need to spend much time with Britain’s campaigners to know that many could make headlines and change minds, if only they were given the opportunity. The House of Campaigns would give them their chance.

Our campaigners deserve a better deal. It is time for a House of Campaigns. 

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Richard Ellis is the founder of Campaigners in Parliament

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Arsenal arrive in Madrid with a clear line of sight, two matches stand between them and a first Champions League final since 2006.

Manager Mikel Arteta, and captain Martin Ødegaard, have framed the tie as an opportunity rather than a threat. They insist the squad is ready to take the next step after two seasons of steady progress.

This is a team built on a plan, recruitment, coaching and a style that has matured into genuine European competitiveness.

Arteta’s side have earned their place in the last four through a mixture of tactical discipline and moments of attacking quality. The narrative now is simple: convert potential into a result over two legs.

Arsenal face Atlético Madrid tonight

There are practical reasons for measured optimism. Arsenal is in back-to-back Champions League semi-finals, a sign of consistency at the highest level that the club lacked for years.

Arsenal has also shown defensive resilience in the knockout rounds, conceding just once across ties with Bayer Leverkusen and Sporting. That defensive backbone gives them a platform to play with confidence away from home.

But optimism must be balanced with realism. Arsenal’s form in recent weeks has been patchy. They have struggled for goals, managing only five in their last seven matches across all competitions.

That lack of cutting edge is the clearest vulnerability heading into a tie with Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid, a team built on organisation, experience and the ability to make big matches ugly for opponents.

Tactically, Arteta faces a familiar test: how to impose Arsenal’s possession-based game on a team that will happily cede the ball and strike on the counter.

The Gunners’ October meeting with Atlético was a 4-0 league phase win, which showed what they can do when they find rhythm and finish chances. But one result from the league phase does not erase the tactical discipline Atletico bring to European nights.

Gunners must be clinical and patient in equal measure

The psychological side matters as much as the tactical. Players and staff have spoken openly about the weight of expectation that comes with chasing major trophies. The pressure has shaped previous campaigns and will shape this one.

The difference now though is experience. Many of the squad have been through deep runs and know how to manage the noise.

The job for Arteta and his coaching team is to keep the focus narrow — one game, one step, one moment at a time — to reach another final.

Game management will be decisive. Arsenal’s recent reliance on defensive solidity suggests Arteta values control, but the manager has also been clear he wants to attack and decide ties rather than sit back.

That balance between protecting a lead and hunting a decisive goal will define the first leg at the Metropolitano.

Expect Arsenal to try to take the initiative early, but also to be ready for Atletico’s set-piece threat and counter-attacks.

We’ll be on the edge of our seats

For supporters, the stakes are both immediate and historic. A place in the final would be a landmark for a club that has rebuilt its identity and ambitions over several seasons. For the players, it is a chance to turn progress into legacy.

For the manager, it is a test of tactical flexibility and mental management. Win or lose, the way Arsenal approach this tie will tell us a lot about where the project stands.

Arsenal has the structure, the personnel and the belief to make history, but they must solve a recent scoring slump and navigate a tactically astute opponent. The first leg will be a measuring stick, not just of quality on the pitch but of temperament off it.

If Arteta’s team can marry discipline with the attacking intent they’ve shown at their best, they will give themselves a real chance to reach a final that has eluded the club for decades.

Featured image via Arsenal

By Faz Ali

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