Pressure group Northants Crips Against Cuts has told us of an upcoming protest against Reform-led West Northamptonshire Council. Despite promises of tax cuts, the local manifestation of Nigel Farage’s constantly chaotic outfit is planning to raise council tax and slash services.

Campaigners will protest in Northampton on Saturday 21 February from 2pm at the top of Abington Street outside BBC Northampton.

Statement from Northants campaigners

When Reform UK took control of West Northamptonshire Council (WNC) in 2025, the party promised national tax cuts worth £90bn a year. Eight months later, that pledge lies in tatters. WNC under Reform is no different from when the Tories were in charge.

WNC now plans to raise council tax by 4.95%, meaning the average Band D home will have to shell out nearly £2,000 a year. This brazen U-turn brings more financial misery to people across West Northants.

£32.1m in council cuts and new charges

WNC aims to cut £32.1m from its budget by slashing funding for services and putting up charges, including £10.9m from adult social care. Among these are £2m axed from adult services, £900,000 from learning disability, and £300,000 from temporary housing, as well as new parking charges and insufficient funds to fix the roads.

The council claims that these cuts are “efficiencies,” but we see them for what they really are. WNC is launching bare-faced attacks on vulnerable people. The council plans to bring in a handful of one-off grants to appease outraged residents, but these grants will soon run out, leaving our local services in a dire state.

Reform UK, like all the major parties, has chosen to balance the books on the backs of ill and disabled people. Under its new budget, WNC plans to rake in an extra £4.4m by raising charges for social care. People who rely on these services, shamefully referred to as “clients”, have already been squeezed to near breaking point by year after year of brutal cuts.

The council cynically claims that people:

have a choice about whether they wish to use these services or not.

More lies. For vulnerable people, these resources are not a choice, they’re a vital lifeline. For some, access to adult services is a matter of life and death.

Scapegoating ill and disabled people

WNC loves to blame disabled adults and children for its failures. This year, the council is set to go £10.5m over budget, and has been quick to point the finger at adult social care, housing, and special educational needs.

What they don’t talk about are the millions wasted on town centre vanity projects, many of which were hit by poor planning, delays, and were never needed in the first place. The council has overspent £5.1m on the market square revamp alone, and loaned £3m to H&M to move back into the Grosvenor Centre. Reports say they wasted nearly £200,000 on the ice rink, then misreported the figures. Yet somehow, their shortfall is the fault of vulnerable people.

Councillors insist government legislation blocks them from using capital from one-off projects to fund vital services. If that’s the case, why doesn’t Reform UK launch a national campaign to scrap those restrictive laws and give councils more autonomy over their finances? This is supposed to be the party’s whole argument. Reform claims it wants to get rid of excessive legislation, slash red tape, and bring in “common sense” politics.

Councils like WNC have shown that this is nothing but empty rhetoric. Reform only wants to cut red tape when it allows them and their wealthy mates to get even richer, or to launch more vile attacks against asylum seekers. But when the red tape lets them shirk their responsibility to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, suddenly it’s their new favourite excuse. Once again, this is pure hypocrisy from our Reform-run council.

We need full funding now

Local groups have proposed a brief pause to WNC’s budget cuts. Of course, none of us wants these cuts to go ahead. But a pause is not enough. After years of austerity, most local resources are severely underfunded. What good is a year or two of no cuts when so many services are already on their knees?

This plan relies on the council spending its reserves. But what happens when the money runs out? WNC will be free to pass even more severe cuts, only now we will have lost our safety net, leaving us even more vulnerable than we were before.

The only way to solve the cost-of-living crisis is to fight for full funding for all local services.

We are not asking for anything lavish. Healthcare, housing, education – these are basic human rights. We live in one of the world’s richest countries. Our council spends millions on town centre vanity projects. Our government spends billions funding wars and genocide abroad. Billions are lost to tax avoidance. So why do we have 14.3 million people living in poverty?

We call for all West Northants councillors to take urgent action. Stop the cuts. Full funding now. No more pointing fingers at sick and disabled people.

Featured image via the Canary

The Dutch farmers are still protesting. They won concessions but they still aren’t happy with the government’s zealous eco-focus. They’ve been joined by Dutch construction workers, whose building projects were also impacted by the government’s insistence on ‘nitrogen assessments’. Builders descended on parliament in the hi-vis orange vests of their industry, a nod to the yellow-vest rebels in France. The umbrella body of Dutch construction workers found that 308 projects worth three billion Euros had been affected by the government’s obsessive insistence on cutting nitrogen and other emissions. The Aztecs sacrificed human beings to Tlaloc, the god of rain and thunder. Modern-day Europe sacrifices farming, building and people’s livelihoods to Net Zero, the god of eco-dread. Different centuries, same superstition.

Farmers in other nations joined the tractor revolt. In January 2024, French farmers carried out a ‘siege of Paris’, in furious protest against a proposed rise in diesel-fuel taxes for agricultural vehicles and various other ‘green regulations’. Also in 2024 there was the ‘siege of Berlin’ by thousands of German farmers enraged by cuts to farm subsidies and a raft of green rules that make their lives that much harder. The revolt of the food-makers spread as far as Canada, where farmers gathered in July 2022 to offer solidarity to their Dutch counterparts and to protest their own government’s proposal to cut nitrogen use by 50 per cent over the next eight years. Irish farmers have likewise pushed back against their government’s insane talk of culling 200,000 cows to ensure that Ireland achieves its EU-dictated climate targets. Butchering animals to save nature: this is where we’re at.

The uprising of the farmers confirms one of the laws of the vibe shift – that there is far greater wisdom among ‘the crowd’ than there is within our post-truth elites. It is the new establishment’s chasm-sized disconnect from the reality of everyday life that leads it to pursue such lethal follies as farm destruction and even livestock sacrifice. Ensconced in their bubbles of self-reinforcing opinion, where your status is determined by the depth of your bowing to correct-think, they have become blind not only to the needs of ordinary people, but also to the very workings of the societies they rule over. They christen themselves the ‘expert’ classes, captains of the new ‘knowledge industry’, yet they can’t even figure out that a sudden and drastic cut in fertiliser use is likely to frustrate food production and hit economic output.

We have seen, so clearly, not just the folly of luxury beliefs but the danger of them, too. We live under a governing class that views food production, all production in fact, as a ‘polluting’ phenomenon. As a necessary evil at best, one whose ‘dirty’ outputs must be continually lamented and curbed. In their high church of climate hawkery, they have come to conceive of agriculture and industry as poxes that ail Mother Earth. They pay more heed to the End Times cries of fellow bubble-dwellers like George Monbiot than to the fourth-generation farmer whose hens laid the eggs they have devilled with a side of sourdough toast. ‘Farming is the most destructive human activity ever to have blighted the Earth’, says Monbiot, giving brute voice to the reactionary anti-modernism that blights the influential classes.

If you believed the liberal media, you would think ours is an era of cool-minded expertise threatened only by the gullibility and hotheadedness of the masses. As one columnist said following the votes for Trump and Brexit in 2016, it is now clear that ‘huge numbers of voters’ can be ‘horribly if temporarily misled by false prospectuses, by lies, by unreasonable hopes and by sudden fears and hatreds’. We are continually warned of the problem of ‘low-information’ voters. Yet the events of recent years confirm that the precise opposite is the case. It’s those who rule over us who are easily distracted by ‘false prospectuses’ (such as that the world is ending) and by ‘sudden fears’ (such as that floods and fires and presumably plagues of locusts will soon consume life on Earth). I would far sooner entrust a nation’s food policy to a country farmer who knows how things are made than to a Brussels-spawned expert who can only conceive of a cow as a producer of methane.

The vibe shift fundamentally represents the tempering of elite mania by the wisdom of everyday people. We so often hear that ‘checks and balances’ are necessary in a democracy to dilute ‘the passions of the mob’. In truth, we far more often require the lived, social knowledge of the public to be wielded against the closed, eccentric thinking of the remote ruling class. Show me one idea from ‘the mob’ that is as unhinged as the belief that cutting off a young lesbian’s healthy breasts will turn her into a man? Or that women should be made to live alongside rapists in places where there is no means of escape – prisons? Or that culling millions of cattle will save man from Gaia’s rage? Or that the world will end in six years’ time if you don’t stop driving to Walmart?

These ideas come not from ‘the mob’ but from the Ivy League, from over-credentialled members of the activist class, from Silicon Valley, from the political establishment, from Brussels. And it took the common sense of women, workers and farmers – people saying such basic things as ‘women are real’ and ‘food matters’ – to hold back such lunatic thinking. In the vibe shift, we see the experience of society being brought to bear against the dead dogmas of the lost elites. The truth of everyday life against the delusions of an establishment that has studied everything but knows nothing.

There was a time when such pushback was valued. The Chartists, the 19th-century British movement for the right of working-class men to have the vote, understood well that society would come a cropper without the intellectual input of people who labour. They argued that ‘ordinary people’ are often better placed to understand social problems because they live and breathe them in a way that lords and princes do not. They mocked the ‘pretend knowledge’ of the pen-pushers in power. ‘They can read books’, the Chartists said, ‘but who made the paper? Who made and set the types? Who printed, stitched and bound the books? Who made the ink, the ink bottles and the steel pens?’ To that mocking cry we might now add that it’s all well and good that a PhD climate policymaker in Brussels knows the exact amount of methane farted by a cow every year – but does he know when to milk a cow? How to milk a cow? How to calve them? How to care for them? How to collect their shit and apply it to the soil? The idea that expertise is a one-way street is surely the great lie of the 21st century.

The ‘greenlash’ has panicked the establishment. Revolting drivers in France. Angry farmers across Europe. Thousands in Poland protesting against the closure of coal power plants and other ‘EU green policies’ that ‘threaten… their livelihoods’. Polish steelworkers chanting ‘Fuck the Green Deal’. Protests against ‘low-emission zones’ in London and Oxford and then in cities across Europe. There is a growing perception, frets one green think-tank, that ‘ecological protections’ are ‘anti-working class’. But aren’t they? From the Club of Rome’s 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, to Greta Thunberg’s wail of ‘How dare you’ at the idea of ‘eternal economic growth’ to Net Zero’s dismantling and outsourcing of Western industry – it seems to many people that where the eco-cult allows our ‘betters’ to accrue ever more virtue through posing as Earth’s saviours, it steals jobs and money and hope from many working-class communities.

The working classes have been quietly bristling against climate hawkery for some time. One striking poll in the UK in 2023 found that the richer you are, the more likely you are to think about climate change. Seventy-two per cent of those in the least deprived areas of England fretted over ecological doom, compared with just 50 per cent of those in the most deprived areas. Clearly poorer people have better things to worry about than a fantasy apocalypse. Polls in the US have ‘repeatedly indicated that the climate-change issue does not have high salience [for working-class voters]’. In one poll, just one per cent of non-college-educated voters identified climate change as ‘the biggest concern facing their family’.

This underground scepticism, this lurking blasphemous doubt that the eco-apocalypse is real, found its keenest political expression in the vote for Donald Trump in 2024. As even green-leaning observers in the US were forced to admit, tens of millions of Americans clearly ‘rank climate [and] energy policy well below economic concerns and other social issues’. Hence more than 77million of them voted for the candidate who expressly campaigned on a ticket of ‘relying more on fossil fuels, not less’. Against the pleas of a doom predicting elite that insists the planet will die if we burn more fossil fuels, a vast swathe of American humanity voted for the man who says ‘Drill, baby, drill’. It was an extraordinary electoral revolt not only against the Democratic Party, but also against the bleak and fearful anti-industrialism of the entire establishment.

Then came the executive order, in January 2025. ‘Unleashing American Energy.’ We are ‘blessed with an abundance of energy and natural resources’, it said. And we will dismantle the green ‘ideology’ that has ‘impeded the development of these resources, limited the generation of reliable and affordable electricity, reduced job creation and inflicted high energy costs upon our citizens’. It is in our ‘national interest’, it said, to ‘unleash America’s… natural resources’.

There it is: vibe, shifted. Of course the digital left accused Trump of being a world-destroying polluter, but to my mind the wording of his executive order had echoes of Sylvia Pankhurst, the socialist Suffragette. ‘We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance’, she wrote: ‘We do not call for a limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self- denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.’ That modern leftists view Trump’s promise of industry as an End Times event is a testament less to Trump’s destructiveness than to their own abandonment of the old ideals of growth and plenty.

It is extraordinary what the voicing of dissent can achieve. Against a vast infrastructure of censorship – few ideas have been as ferociously ringfenced from public discussion as climate alarmism – farmers, drivers, steelmakers, artisans and voters have rattled a once unquestionable belief system. Frederick Douglass was right – free discussion is always ‘the dread of tyrants’ for ‘they know its power’.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism And Technocracy, is out now. Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.

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

Advertisement

— 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

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