Green leader Zack Polanski says a Green government would sign up to NATO’s Article 5 and go to war if necessary. A Sky News interviewer challenged Polanski in an attempted gotcha rather reminiscent of the Corbyn-era.

Polanski told interviewer Trevor Phillips that he took national security very seriously:

That’s the first job of a prime ministers, and its the first job of a party leader.

“I would absolutely commit to that.”

Green Party leader Zack Polanski tells @TrevorPTweets he would sign up to NATO’s Article 5, despite Keir Starmer’s claims that he wouldn’t.#TrevorPhillipshttps://t.co/9zBRF9VlR2

📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/yWrpCFYDox

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— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 15, 2026

The Greens are committed to NATO membership. Yet Phillips asked if Polanski would respond to Article 5 being invoked. Article 5 is a commitment to go to war if another NATO member is attacked.

The Green’s manifesto says:

The Green Party recognises that NATO has an important role in ensuring the ability of its member states to respond to threats to their security. We would work within NATO to achieve:

• A greater focus on global peacebuilding.

• A commitment to a ‘No First Use’ of nuclear weapons.

Article 5’s first point states:

that an armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against all members, and triggers an obligation for each member to come to its assistance.

Pro-NATO Greens under Polanski?

Phillips claimed Starmer had stated the Greens would not sign up to Article 5. Polanski denied this:

Well, we’ve already signed up for that. But the very obvious thing to point out is that Donald Trump – our so-called ally – who is behaving increasingly dangerously and unpredictably. Is threatening to annex Greenland – an attack on one is an attack on all.

Polanski accused Starmer of attacking him while also echoing his views:

And it just feels Keir Starmer’s speech yesterday, which by the way is not a hundred miles away from what I’ve been saying for months now. which is that we need a closer relationship with Europe. So it’s quite bizarre to hear him repeating a lot of the thing I’ve been saying and making and making an attack on me at the same time.

Asked again if he would commit to defending a NATO country against Russia, Polanski said:

Oh, I absolutely would commit to that if we’re in NATO, as we are, then it is clear we need to sign up to the articles – and Article 5 says an attack on one is an attack on all.

NATO criticism

Yet Polanski’s position on the Atlantic alliance isn’t simply unqualified support. In May 2025, he said:

Clearly NATO has got a lot more complex since Donald Trump has become President, and I don’t think anyone should consider him a reliable ally…

I think the age of NATO is now fully over.

He also said NATO was unreformable:

Donald Trump has so much domination within Nato that I don’t believe it’s possible to reform Nato from within.

While Polanski has been critical of NATO, the party position is to work with the alliance. Zarah Sultana – who takes a much firmer anti-NATO position – criticized the Greens over theirs in 2025.

Another factor is that the Green Party’s liberal base stridently supports Ukraine, as do a number of its leading lights. And the Young Greens passed a Ukraine solidarity motion by 128 to 8 on 7 February.

Russia’s 2022 assault on Ukraine re-energised the fading alliance. As the journal of the US Army war College said in 2023:

The alliance lost its original purpose from the post-Cold War era, but the second Russian invasion of Ukraine (like the Balkans crises of the 1990s) stimulated NATO into a semi-unified response.

Polanski’s position might need clarifying – and soon. Membership is popular with general UK voters according to a YouGov poll from May 2025. But NATO is a contentious issue between liberals and socialists.

One suspects many of those who have joined the Greens due to the extremely slow-motion implosion of the vocally anti-imperialist Your Party are firmly against NATO. But a large section of the party’s existing base is avidly pro-NATO. How that question is resolved – or isn’t – may become more important as the 2029 election gets closer.

Featured image via the Canary

One of the leading institutes for the training of psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors is facing a raft of claims from former members of staff. They accuse it of victimisation, whistleblowing and constructive dismissal because they stood up to racism.

The Metanoia Institute in West London has 1,500 students in its undergraduate, postgraduate, and research programmes.

It claims on its website to be:

known for delivering relational, high quality, part-time, university-validated and professionally accredited training in counselling, psychotherapy, counselling psychology, and related disciplines.

Many of its former students have gone on to work in NHS services.

Legal challenge against Metanoia Institute

Five former members of professional staff, Dr Eiman Hussein, Dr Maya Mukamel, Dr Malgorzata Milewicz, Dr Jane Hunt and Cathy Lasher, will commence their legal challenges against Metanoia Institute in a hearing at London Central Employment Tribunal on 24 February 2026, which is due to last for 18 days.

A further claim of racial discrimination was ruled out of time at a preliminary hearing, because the claimants did not originally have expert representation. But the five claimants, psychological therapists, researchers, and trainers, will give evidence that during their time at Metanoia Institute they raised serious concerns about practices that they:

believed and experienced as harmful to students and staff of colour.

Psychotherapist and claimant Dr Eiman Hussein said:

Despite our efforts to address the racism that exists in Metanoia Institute internally, the responses we received were profoundly disappointing with devastating impacts. This Employment Tribunal is our last option to ensure what happened is truly seen, heard and legally tested.

Psychologist, psychotherapist and claimant Dr Maya Mukamel said:

What we both experienced and witnessed at Metanoia Institute speaks to a broader pattern within psychotherapy training institutions, where racism is rife but where the realities and impacts of it are rarely named openly and too often denied or swept under the carpet in an attempt to isolate and silence those who speak up about it.

Psychologist, psychotherapist and claimant Dr Malgorzata Milewicz said:

Our group of claimants, which includes some of us who are white and white presenting, recognises our responsibility to challenge racism within our institutions and professional communities.

Standing alongside our Black, Brown and colleagues of colour is an ethical obligation grounded in anti-oppressive practice. We must examine power, confront our own complicity, and listen when harm is named without defensiveness or retreating into neutrality.

Zita Holbourne, chair and co-founder of Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC) UK said:

The tenacity and determination of these five courageous women in the face of the most horrific treatment by their former employer because they ‘dared’ to stand up to Metanoia Institute is to be applauded.

But this case is about more, it is about putting psychotherapy training organisations on notice that we will not allow them to create discriminatory and hostile environments for students and workers and they must be accountable and take urgent action to root out and prevent harmful discriminatory practices.

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The Metanoia Institute claimants have received support in their legal challenge from their trade union, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union, the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network and Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC) UK and have gained widespread support from others.

The union has pointed out that there is often a “structural imbalance” in such cases. Institutions tend to have the security of insurance and pre-existing legal support. However claimants face huge financial risk and emotional burden.

A crowd funder has generated over £30,000 towards legal fees to date. This is an indication of the shared concern about racism at Metanoia Institute and interest in this case.

Featured image via the Canary

Content warning: this article contains extensive discussion of suicide

The Good Law Project (GLP) have published the results of a freedom of information (FOI) request which showed that suicides among trans youth spiked massively in 2021. This was immediately after the UK government suddenly halted almost all gender-affirming care for young trans people.

This is particularly significant given that, in 2024, the government published an ‘independent’ review dismissing the increase in suicides as statistically insignificant.

The review acknowledged 5 suicides. However, thanks to the FOI, we now know that there were at least 22. 22 young people took their own lives because their healthcare was suddenly ripped away by a bigoted, ideologically driven government.

In the week following the GLP’s publication of its findings, the BBC has remained completely silent on the government’s utter betrayal of trans youth. Instead, it chose to publish an interview with Dr. Hilary Cass, the woman responsible for continuing to deny healthcare to young trans people.

She claimed that children have been “weaponised” by both sides of the trans debate. She also denied preventing kids getting the medical care they needed.

At this point, I can hardly even blame her. I’d probably try to deny everything and blame everyone else too, if I had contributed to deepening the crisis for trans youth.

Tavistock, Bell, Cass

Back in 2020, the UK High Court ruled that it was “unlikely” that trans children could give informed consent to treatment with puberty blockers. Immediately afterwards, the NHS almost completely ceased puberty-blocking treatments.

A year later, the Court of Appeal overturned that decision. However, the NHS refused to resume its previous treatments. Instead, the then-Conservative government criminalised the prescription of puberty blockers for trans healthcare.

Following a review by Dr. Hilary Cass, the new Labour government also chose to uphold the criminalisation of puberty blockers in 2024. Dr. Cass is not a gender specialist. She had absolutely no experience or publications in trans healthcare, until the government chose her to decide the fate of trans youth.

Her report ignored basic scientific principles, applied impossible evidence standards, and was underpinned by the idea that being trans was itself undesirable. Rishi Sunak appointed her to the House of Lords for her trouble.

Whistleblowers

In 2024, the GLP raised whistleblowers’ alarms that the number of suicides among patients at the Tavistock clinic – the UK’s youth gender clinic – had risen sharply following the withdrawal of care. At the time, the whistleblowers stated that:

the seven years before the High Court decision there was one death of a young person on the waiting list for Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS). In the three years afterwards, there were 16.

In response, the government commissioned yet another independent review. The reviewer, Professor Louis Appleby, acknowledged just seven deaths in the three years following 2020-2021. The Appleby Review also criticised the GLP and other reporting on the issue, stating that:

The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide.

Cover-up

However, the GLP’s recent FOI request revealed that the actual number of suicides among trans youth surged to 22 in the year 2021-2022. That’s compared to just 5 and 4 in the two years immediately prior to the Bell ruling.

The GLP’s press release explained that:

This new data was released via a freedom of information request made to the NHS-funded National Child Mortality Database (NCMD). The NCMD revealed that 46 trans children died by suicide from 2019-2025: 5 in 2019-20; 4 in 2020-21; 22 in 2021-22; and 10 in 2022-23. The NCMD adds “the numbers reported in more recent years will likely be underestimated, due to a higher proportion of child death reviews that have not yet been completed”.

It went on to state the the Appleby report’s sample size was notably small, focusing on a subset of children who were already at the Tavistock:

Forty-four of these deaths were within the time frame analysed for the government report by Professor Louis Appleby on suicides and gender dysphoria. That’s almost four times more than the number accounted for by the Appleby report, which stated that only 12 young people (over and under 18) who were current or former patients of the Tavistock took their own lives from 2018-2024.

The Appleby review chose to focus specifically on some – the review itself is not clear – patients connected to the Gender Identity Development Service service at the Tavistock, so would not have accounted for all 44 deaths recorded by the NCMD.

‘People at the extremes’

To put that another way, the government massively under-reported the suicides that resulted directly from its decisions. Then, it also blamed whistleblowers for drawing attention to the crisis.

In a normal country, such a massive betrayal of public trust and basic human decency might at least make a single headline.

Instead, the BBC chose to publish a puff-piece interview with Cass, one of the architects of the pitiful state of trans youth healthcare in the UK. In the interview, Cass repeated the spurious claim that children become trans because of gender stereotyping and homophobia:

I think what has kind of misled children is the belief that if you are not a typical girl, if you like playing with trucks, or boys who like dressing up or that you have same-sex attraction that means that you’re trans and actually it’s not like that but those are all normal variation.

And, following the Appleby report’s example, she bent over backwards to point the finger at trans-positive campaigners. The BBC reported that:

The vast majority of people in the middle of the debate were silent while the “people at the extremes” and rhetoric in the media had been “frightening for young people,” the clinician said.

She added that some activists for trans rights had been “so strident that it’s made it more difficult for trans people themselves who are just trying to live under the radar”, while equally people who had taken the view no-one should ever transition had “similarly made it difficult”.

What people like Cass will never acknowledge is that trans people shouldn’t have to live under the radar. They equate trans people advocating for ourselves with obnoxious activism because they can’t abide our speaking up. Our extremist belief is that trans kids are not an aberration, and they deserve healthcare like everyone else.

The issue is that trans adults don’t get to look away. We don’t get to turn our faces from the trans kids being treated as political punching bags. We can’t ignore the suicides within our community.

Those deaths resulted directly from the decisions of the High Court, the Tories and the NHS. Cass and the Labour government upheld those same decisions. If I believed these people had a conscience to speak of, I would hope that knowledge never let them sleep again.

We won’t roll over and be silent, because we remember what it was like to be trans kids ourselves. Cass would know that, if she ever had any intention of listening to trans people. But then, listening to us would involve acknowledging our humanity.

Featured image via the Canary

Why Is Labour Together Being Investigated?

What Has The Government Said?

What Has Josh Simons Said?

How Have Other MPs Responded?

4 min read11 min

Trade unions are at the heart of the fight for equality. It is trade unions that push employers for policies on discrimination at work, and who decades ago brought forward trans inclusive policies.

I have been campaigning for a ban on conversion practices for many years. I brought an amendment to the King’s Speech during the last government, and have for the last two years been working on legislation at the Council of Europe (CoE).

Because conversion practices don’t happen in theory. They happen in real life, to real people. To the teenager who is told their feelings are “wrong” and that love is something they must earn by becoming someone else. To the adult, pressured into silence and shame, sometimes by the very people and institutions meant to offer care. They happen in living rooms and places of worship, behind closed doors, under the guise of “therapy”, “guidance”, “deliverance”, or “counselling”.

And the message is always the same: you are broken. You are wrong. You need to be fixed.

I do not want to be part of a society that does that, or that makes parents feel they must encourage their children to change themselves just because they won’t be accepted.

The CoE is the home of human rights, which the UK helped set up before the European Union, made up of 46 different countries. The reports it passes provide frameworks for legislation for each country’s own parliament.

I am pleased to report that this month, the COE passed my report with wide support from across Europe, and across political party groupings, with backing from European conservatives, liberals, greens, and, of course, socialists like me.

This matters because it sets standards. When Europe’s leading human rights institution speaks, governments listen. Courts listen. Public bodies listen. Now is the time for the UK government to listen and to publish its own draft legislation.

I also want to recognise something that too often gets overlooked: the sheer hard work, persistence, and moral clarity of the trade union movement on this issue.

Trade unions have long campaigned against conversion practices and for the dignity, safety, and equality of LGBTQ+ workers — often when it wasn’t easy, and when it wasn’t popular. They have kept survivors’ voices in the public eye, pushed institutions to take responsibility, and reminded governments that “freedom” can never mean freedom to abuse. I am a proud trade unionist because of work like this.

Trade unions are often the ones who will bravely stand up when no one else will. I am deeply grateful to the movement for their leadership and solidarity over many years—and for standing firm on the side of people who simply want to live as themselves.

One of the cruellest realities is where conversion practices can happen. So often they are delivered in settings that should be supportive — at home, in a church, in a community space. The betrayal cuts deep when the place you seek shelter and support becomes the place you are harmed.

That’s why this is a human rights issue. History tells us of the damage that it does to people; we must not forget that harm and repackage and re-inflict it. We have an opportunity to end that cycle of abuse, now.

It’s also why equalities cannot be treated as optional extras in our workplaces or public services — they are part of the protection people need to live safely and openly.

That is why the wider context in which the Employment Rights Act matters: rights at work should go hand-in-hand with equality at work, so that people are protected not only from exploitation, but from discrimination and hostility too.

I was proud to vote for an Act that focuses on equality at work, by bringing in measures like requiring employers to produce Equality Action Plans.

When we strengthen workers’ rights with a clear commitment to equality, we are saying something simple but powerful: nobody should have to choose between having a job and being themselves; nobody should be punished, sidelined, or silenced because of who they are.

Kate Osborne is Labour MP for Jarrow and Gateshead East

Clean Up Britain have come up with a new way to make claimants’ lives hell. The national campaign announced on Twitter that they think unemployed people on Universal Credit should be forced to clean up litter – or else lose their benefit.

Litter picking MD talks utter rubbish about Universal Credit claimants

In the video, Clean Up Britain managing director, John Read, stands in a fly-tipping site. He talks the same amount of shit as he’s stood in when he says:

people who are recieving Universal Credit should be required to do at least four hours litter picking every single month.

He clarifies in the video that he just means unemployed Universal Credit claimants.

This is bad enough, but within Clean Up Britain’s 10 point action plan comes the real kicker. They think anyone who refuses to pick up rubbish should lose their benefits.

This, of course, is a vague as fuck soundbite that doesn’t contain any nuance. So it ignores many factors.

The first being that this is already (or should be) a paid job. People are paid to be litter pickers by councils. But with council budgets stretched, this would give them an excuse to cut jobs and make people do it for free. It’s a very slim possibility, but if this happened, someone could lose their job as a litter picker, have to claim Universal Credit, and then be forced to do their old job for free.

Using unemployed people as slave labour

In the video, Read says that if all the job seekers in the city did this, this city could be transformed. The important context here is that the city he’s talking about is Birmingham.  The reason those streets are full of rubbish is that the bin collectors have been on strike for the past 11 months.  They’re striking against pay cuts and for better pay progression.

So to propose that people work for free to clean up Birmingham is not only an insult to unemployed people, but to striking workers too.

Finally, unemployed people shouldn’t be expected to work for fucking free. There’s the argument from many that they’re working for free, they’re working for their benefit. But that’s not the gotcha my right-wing Twitter trolls think it is. The whole point of unemployment benefits is to support people while they’re out of work, looking for gainful employment. This could be employment, but instead it will be used to punish poor people.

And that’s the biggest problem with this: many of the British public would see this as something unemployed people deserve. And the government, which is already using the media to turn the public against claimants, would run with it. This would be used as a threat and punishment to further shame people who can’t find work.

Punishing the wrong people

Missing from this is, of course, disabled people. Would those who struggle in cold temperatures, can’t do physical tasks or have neurodivergent and mental health issues be forced to make their conditions worse? There’d probably be some clause in about “severe disabilities”, but this would miss out many disabled people. Especially if the way they’re trying prove many conditions aren’t real is anything to go by.

Litter picking has long traditionally been a part of community service sentenced after someone has committed crimes. So this would put unemployed people in the same category as literal criminals. Which isn’t that much of a stretch considering the DWP already treats claimants worse than criminals.

There’s also the fact that once again, we are blaming the wrong people for the destruction of the country and making them suffer the consequences. As well as their bullshit plan, Clean Up Britain also tweeted some stats about the national debt

BRITAIN is a three-quarters bankrupt country (at least). We can’t afford to be spending £1 BILLION a year on cleaning up litter.
We owe £2.9 TRILLION
We pay £275 million a day just in interest repayments
EVERY person in Britain owes £42,000 as their share of the national debt

Whilst we do have a huge national debt, it’s completely untrue that we all owe the same amount. The rich undoubtedly owe much more than a minimum wage worker. When the average minimum wage worker earns around £23,000 a year, and CEOs are on around £97,000 a year, how is this possibly fair?

Nobody deserves to work for free

More than anything, this is showing what the rich really think of unemployed people. That they don’t deserve real opportunities, so they should be forced to clean up the trash like them.

At the end of the day, people on Universal Credit are already made to feel shit about themselves at a time when they’re at their most vulnerable. Nobody should be forced into unpaid work all because they’re struggling to survive. And nobody should be made to feel that this is all they’re worthy of.

Featured image via the Canary