Strikes by more than 200 Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) workers have ended with a pay victory, trade union Unite has announced.

The workers, who undertake vital roles including ticketing, passenger assistance and information services for the bus network, voted to accept the deal following intensive negotiations.

Pay rises across the board

The deal includes a pay uplift of at least 3.2 per cent backdated to April 2025 for all staff, plus a non-consolidated payment of up to £1,000. Workers on lower bands will see pay rise to at least £15.10 an hour. This will result in wage increases of between 6.4 and 11.1 per cent.

Pay for all staff will increase again from April 2026 by at least three per cent.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said:

A huge well done to Unite’s members at TfGM. They know that collective action works and by standing together and taking strike action they achieved this excellent pay deal.

This is yet another example of Unite’s unrelenting focus on improving jobs, pay and conditions paying dividends for our members.

The deal also sees increases in standby payments, shift pattern improvements and new union recognition and facility time agreements. ‘Facility time’ is where staff get paid time away from their normal role to carry out union work.

The workers began striking in October 2025 and took 18 days of industrial action in total.

Unite regional officer Samantha Marshall said:

This deal could not have been achieved without the hard work and dedication of our reps and members. As this result shows, those wanting better wages and working conditions should join Unite and get their colleagues to join as well.

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Nigel Farage announced the Reform UK shadow cabinet today, with former Tories taking front and centre. This is despite the fact that Reform UK has just eight MPs, so is in no need of a shadow cabinet.

As the racist party are not the official opposition, so they don’t get to name a shadow cabinet. But, why would the facts stop Farage? At a flashy event reminiscent of an American election campaign, Farage announced the first members of his “shadow cabinet”.

New Tory cabinet for Reform

And surprise, surprise, it’s full of Tories

Robert Jenrick has been named as their shadow chancellor. Jenrick defected from the Tory party last month and has stolen the role from both Richard Tice and Zia Yusuf.

Jenrick, who lost the Tory leadership to its current leader, Kemi Badenoch, is expected to give a speech outlining his economic plan sometime this week. By that point, he might’ve actually come up with one.

The most recent Tory defector, Suella Braverman, will take on more than one role. As well as education and skills, she will also handle equalities. Though this is Reform, so that means she’ll be hellbent on destroying any sort of equality. Namely, she wants to get rid of the Equality Act.

Richard Tice isn’t too glum about being sidelined as Chancellor. As well as deputy leader, he’ll now be ‘in charge of’ (and we use that term loosely) business, trade, and energy. His biggest focus is on getting rid of net-zero targets to focus on oil and gas.

And then finally, we have Zia Yusuf as Reform’s ‘home secretary’. Again, there’s a heavy use of quotation marks here, because they aren’t the shadow cabinet or opposition.

Definitely not a one-man band

One person noticeably missing was Reform laughing stock Lee Anderson. Ol’ 30p will apparently remain as “chief whip”, but it’s interesting he wasn’t announced for a welfare role when he’s apparently been their “welfare spokesperson” for months now.

Presumably it’s because he can’t so much as move without making a fool of himself. Most recently, he was mocked for campaigning in the wrong place,

As well as no DWP “shadow” minister, there was no health secretary announced. This surely shows what Reform’s priorities are. You can only assume this is because Reform are so snugly in private healthcare’s pockets.

Farage said a big reason for naming a “cabinet” was so the world didn’t see Reform as a “one man band”. Which would be more believable if he wasn’t constantly fucking everywhere. But then it’s not like he’s got many people to sub in is it?

Despite apparently not wanting to be the star of the show, Farage announced each member of his cabinet in the centre of a big stand at a podium. Instead of letting them speak at his podium, they all had their own smaller podiums. These were also, naturally, slightly further back.

Reform are not to be taken seriously

The naming of Reform’s shadow cabinet confused a lot of people, but probably none more so than 30p Lee Anderson. Just three weeks ago, Anderson rebuffed rumours of an almost correctly predicted shadow cabinet.

When a Tory, Luke Robert Black, remarked that this was “savage” towards Anderson, he replied

Thicko alert. We cannot possibly have a shadow cabinet, we have spokespersons. I was made DWP Spokesperson last year. Carry on being a useful idiot for the Tory party, but you won’t get that safe seat you want. They’re laughing at you.

This tweet is currently still up, but let’s see how long it lasts. Instead of addressing this, Anderson tweeted this afternoon that the new cabinet was “the Beginnings of a World Class Team.”

This latest announcement from Reform UK is just the latest in the long line of them assuming they have any sort of authority or power in Westminster.

More than anything, it shows how entitled they all are. But to the country it’s just another silly stunt by Farage, and even more reason to not take Reform seriously.

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Crisis-hit UK PM Keir Starmer is fast-tracking gigantic spikes in war spending. He says it is to defend the country. In reality, Starmer is yet again sucking up to US president Donald Trump. The UK government needs to get its head out of 1997 for all our sakes.

Starmer wants £14bn a year spent on war and the military. That is to say, £14bn more going into the pockets of arms firms and their fellow travelers.

The Guardian reported:

At the Munich Security Conference at the weekend, Starmer argued for higher and more sustained defence spending to meet the threat from Russia. “We must build our hard power because that is the currency of our age,” he said. “We must spend more, deliver more and coordinate more.”

Currently the UK spends 2.3% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defence. The increase would take that figure up to 2.6%.

But it could go higher still:

The BBC said No 10 was considering an increase to 3% of GDP by the end of this parliament in 2029 to meet Starmer’s ambition, although it is unclear if this will turn into a concrete plan given the many obstacles.

Politico explained the rate of acceleration:

Featured image via the Canary

What is box breathing?

Love box breathing? Try the ‘5,4,3,2,1 method’

Workers at a Cumbria packaging firm will vote on strike action after rejecting an ‘insulting’ pay offer.

Pay offer = pay cut

More than 100 workers at Futamura, in Wigton, turned down the company’s 1.2 per cent pay offer by a majority of 94 per cent. Trade union GMB is demanding a 3.8 per cent pay increase, in line with inflation. This is to ensure members do not suffer yet another real-terms pay cut.

The union has engaged with the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) to help bring the company back to the table.

Futamura makes cellulose film for packaging.

The dispute mirrors other situations where pay has failed to keep pace with inflation. And it comes against a backdrop of long-term “pay depression” going back 20 years.

Michael Hall, GMB Regional Organiser, said:

This 1.2 per cent offer is nothing short of an insult. GMB members have spoken loudly and clearly. Enough is enough. Futamura workers deserve a fair pay rise that simply keeps up with the cost of living.

The company should be listening, not digging in. GMB has been patient and our members have been patient. But Futamura has refused to make a fair and reasonable pay offer.

Featured image via the Canary

Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy has announced her withdrawal from the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) because of filmmaker Wim Wenders’ “jaw-dropping” comments on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Roy described Wenders’ comments as “a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time”. Wenders said at a press conference on 12 February 2026 that the art world should “stay out of politics“:

We have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics. [Filmmakers should be] the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.

Arundhati Roy speaks out

The “shocked and disgusted” Roy was unequivocal in her opposition to Wenders’s nonsense:

To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping,” said Roy in a statement announcing she would be exiting the Berlinale jury. “It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and film makers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.

It is, of course, inherently political to say that art should not be political, because silence aids the oppressor. The Israel lobby always attempts to cow politicians, news media, and artists into either silence or active collaboration. All too often it succeeds.

The festival previously marketed itself as the most political major film festival, but capitulated to the Israel lobby after the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Humanitarian campaigners called for a boycott of the 2024 festival for its refusal to denounce the genocide and Israel’s other crimes against the Palestinian people.

Roy’s full statement reads:

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, a whimsical film that I wrote 38 years ago, was selected to be screened under the Classics section at the Berlinale 2026. There was something sweet and wonderful about this for me.

Although I have been profoundly disturbed by the positions taken by the German government and various German cultural institutions on Palestine, I have always received political solidarity when I have spoken to German audiences about my views on the genocide in Gaza. This is what made it possible for me to think of attending the screening of Annie at the Berlinale.

This morning, like millions of people across the world, I heard the unconscionable statements made by members of the jury of the Berlin film festival when they were asked to comment about the genocide in Gaza. To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and film makers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.

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Let me say this clearly: what has happened in Gaza, what continues to happen, is a genocide of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel. It is supported and funded by the governments of the United States and Germany, as well as several other countries in Europe, which makes them complicit in the crime.

If the greatest film makers and artists of our time cannot stand up and say so, they should know that history will judge them. I am shocked and disgusted.

With deep regret, I must say that I will not be attending the Berlinale.

Arundhati Roy

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Thomas Teevan speaks at the opening of Largy Hall

10 min read23 min

Reverend James Godfrey MacManaway, a clergyman soldier turned parliamentarian, and his political heir Thomas Leslie Teevan, a brilliant young lawyer and public servant, are barely Westminster footnotes. Both served as Belfast West MP for less than a year.

And yet their story embodies a sense of promise broken by legal anomaly, electoral mischance, and personal tragedy.

James Godfrey MacManaway was born into an ecclesiastical family as the son of Rt Rev Dr James MacManaway, Bishop of Clogher. He was educated at Campbell College and Trinity College Dublin. Aged just 16, while still at Campbell College, he enlisted to fight in the First World War, seeing action at the Battle of Loos and later joining the Royal Flying Corps. In 1923, he was ordained by the archbishop of Armagh and served a curacy at Drumachose, Limavady, before moving to Christ Church, where he became rector in 1930 and remained for 17 years; in 1926, he married Catherine Anne Trench.

During the Second World War, MacManaway again “took the King’s shilling”, serving as senior chaplain to the forces. He experienced the evacuation of Dunkirk with the 12th Royal Lancers, later serving in the Middle East with the First Armoured Division and returning in 1945 to the Italian Front as senior chaplain to the 10th Armoured Division, a service for which he was awarded the MBE.

Contemporaries remembered him as one of the most colourful figures in the Church of Ireland, a gifted storyteller who could hold an audience spellbound, sometimes allowing his imagination to outrun accuracy. A favourite anecdote described him swimming for two hours after his Dunkirk vessel was hit, only for his wife to puncture the tale by reminding everyone that he could not swim at all – a story that captured both his flair and the affectionate tolerance of those around him.

By 1947, MacManaway resigned his Church of Ireland post and turned to politics, successfully contesting the city of Londonderry seat at Stormont as a Unionist, winning by a majority of 4,028 and again taking over 60 per cent of the vote in 1949. His oratorical gifts and colourful personality quickly established him as a notable figure at the parliament of Northern Ireland.

His ambitions soon extended to Westminster. As an ordained clergyman, doubts arose over his eligibility, but he sought legal advice from Edmund Warnock, attorney general of Northern Ireland, who advised that the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 meant earlier statutory bars on clergy sitting in the House of Commons did not apply.

On this advice, MacManaway resigned his remaining Church offices, relinquished his clerical rights and sought and obtained Ulster Unionist selection for Belfast West, a difficult marginal seat held by Labour’s Jack Beattie. After a vigorous campaign in the 1950 general election, assisted by activists including a young Ian Paisley, he defeated Beattie by 3,378 votes, becoming the first clergyman in 150 years to sit in the House of Commons.

His election caused a stir in Westminster, where few had anticipated that a disestablished Irish clergyman would gain a seat. The challenge came from Labour backbencher Maj Geoffrey Bing, and the issue was referred to a select committee, prompting strong Unionist defences of MacManaway, including from Winston Churchill, yet the committee declined to reach a decisive conclusion and recommended urgent legislation instead.

The matter went to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council which identified a lacuna in the law: although the Irish Church Act 1869 disestablished the Church of Ireland, it did not expressly permit its clergy to sit as MPs, leaving in force the House of Commons (Clergy Disqualification) Act 1801, which barred any person ordained priest or deacon from sitting or voting.

The Privy Council held that the 1801 act applied not only to clergy of the established churches of England and Scotland but to anyone ordained by a bishop according to episcopal forms, which included the Church of Ireland. In contrast, ministers not episcopally ordained, such as those who would later include Rev Martin Smyth, Rev Robert Bradford and Rev Ian Paisley, were not similarly disqualified.

The House of Commons accepted the Privy Council’s view and, on 19 October 1950, resolved that MacManaway was disqualified, though it waived any financial penalties for the five divisions in which he had voted while ineligible. He protested bitterly against what he saw as an unjust anachronism and the ignoring of later legislation that allowed priests to sit if they renounced benefice, emoluments, and pension, but his Westminster career had lasted just 238 days.

The judgment also compelled him to resign his Stormont seat, as the same legal principle applied in Belfast. Personal tragedy followed swiftly: his wife died in January 1951; his health, never robust, declined sharply; his eyesight deteriorated so that he virtually lost one eye and was threatened with blindness in the other, and he could walk only with great difficulty and the aid of a stick.

MacManaway remained politically active despite infirmity and was severely injured when he tripped on the staircase of the Ulster Club in Belfast while on his way to address a meeting for his political heir, Thomas Leslie Teevan, the Unionist candidate for Belfast West. 

He died shortly after in the Royal Victoria Hospital, aged 53, the coroner finding that meningitis following a skull fracture from the fall was the cause of death, and remarking that he scarcely knew when to stop in service to causes such as that of Ulster.

Even before his death, MacManaway had recognised a successor. He did not contest the by-election triggered by his disqualification; instead, the Ulster Unionist Party selected 23-year-old Limavady Urban Council chairman Thomas Teevan, MacManaway’s godson, of whom he said he was glad that “the people chosen to take up the torch which he had not been allowed to continue to hold was another Limavady man”.

Thomas Leslie Teevan was born in Limavady in July 1927 into a family with deep roots in the town and a wider Cavan lineage marked by public service. Family tradition recounted ancestors who served as army medics and doctors, tended the wounded in turbulent times, and even survived the Charge of the Light Brigade, stories that underlined a long-standing engagement with Irish and British military history.

Educated at Limavady Academy, where he served as head boy, Teevan went on to study law at Queen’s University Belfast. After graduation, he became a lecturer in law, remembered for his vibrant personality, fellowship and capacity for friendship across social and sectarian boundaries.

Academically, Teevan was highly regarded. He combined intellectual rigour with a flair for exposition. Little wonder he quickly made his mark at the Bar. Belfast’s senior magistrate JH Campbell QC believed that, but for his early death, Teevan would have left an indelible imprint on the Northern Ireland legal profession – a view echoed by Charles Stewart QC, who described him simply as a “great lawyer” despite his short practising career.

Teevan’s public service began early. He became the youngest urban district councillor in Northern Ireland and rose to be chairman of Limavady urban district council. Wherever he entered an institution, be it Queen’s University, the council chamber, or later Parliament, he swiftly assumed responsibility and won trust. His warmth, wit and optimism enabled him to bridge divides and “love his fellow men regardless of creed”, an attribute widely remarked upon in later tributes.

The disqualification of MacManaway in 1950 created the opening that propelled Teevan onto the Westminster stage. Selected as Ulster Unionist candidate for the Belfast West by-election, he framed his campaign as the continuation of his godfather’s cause, calling on the “Loyalist community” to rally behind him as they had rallied behind MacManaway.

The by-election of 29 November 1950 proved a hard-fought contest. Teevan secured 31,796 votes (50.8 per cent) to Jack Beattie’s 30,833 (49.2 per cent), a majority of 913 on a turnout of 79.8 per cent, thereby becoming the ‘Baby of the House’, the youngest MP at that time. 

He entered Parliament on 5 December 1950 and, in 1951, spoke six times, including a maiden speech on 11 April during the budget and economic survey debates, concentrating particularly on the economic and social needs of Belfast West.

Teevan’s parliamentary tenure was brief, lasting 330 days. In the 1951 general election, he again faced Beattie in what became the narrowest result in the United Kingdom that year: both candidates secured 50.0 per cent of the vote, but Beattie polled 33,174 to Teevan’s 33,149, a margin of just 25 votes out of more than 66,000 cast.

This wafer-thin loss made Teevan not only one of the youngest MPs ever elected but also one of the youngest to lose his seat. The result underscored both his appeal and the volatility of Belfast West, where demographic and political shifts rendered Unionist representation precarious despite his personal popularity.

Defeat did not end Teevan’s public engagement. Called to the Bar in 1952, he continued to lecture in law at Queen’s University while maintaining his leadership role as chairman of Limavady urban district council, embodying a rare combination of academic, professional and civic commitments.

Across these spheres, he retained the same qualities admired in his student days: exuberance, loyalty to family and community, and an infectious optimism that could lift the burdens of those around him. Colleagues from different backgrounds acclaimed his capacity for friendship and his refusal to be constrained by the sectarian lines that shaped much of public life.

In October 1954, at just 27, Teevan died suddenly from severe pneumonia, prompting widespread grief in Limavady, at Queen’s and within the legal and political worlds of Northern Ireland. He was buried at Christ Church, Limavady, the same parish in which MacManaway was also buried and where their intertwined stories found a poignant convergence.

The sense of loss was captured in John Irvine’s poem ‘Ave Atque Vale’, which depicted neighbours and friends mourning a young man whose promise had been cut short, yet whose memory remained cherished. The verses, steeped in the imagery of rural funerals and quiet roads, framed Teevan’s passing as not only a private sorrow but a communal bereavement.

Following his death, friends and admirers from both sides of the Irish border contributed to memorials in Teevan’s honour. At Queen’s University Belfast, the faculty of law dedicated an oak chair and inscription in Celtic script, with senior members of the judiciary, local government and his family in attendance, a reflection of the breadth of his influence.

The fates of MacManaway and Teevan also raised broader questions about law, representation, and Unionism’s generational leadership. 

A House of Commons select committee in 1951 acknowledged the anomalies of the clergy disqualification laws exposed by the MacManaway case but recommended no immediate change, leaving the issue unresolved for half a century.

Only in 2001, amid the candidacy of former Roman Catholic priest David Cairns, did Parliament finally enact the Removal of Clergy Disqualification Act, lifting most remaining bars on ordained ministers sitting at Westminster – a relief that could have saved MacManaway. Differently, demographic change and the knife-edge defeat of 1951 ensured that Teevan’s promise as a Unionist standard-bearer for Belfast West would also remain unfulfilled.

Seen together, the stories of James Godfrey MacManaway and Thomas Leslie Teevan trace a distinct Limavady thread through church, war, law and politics in mid-20th-century Northern Ireland. 

Both were men of faith, intellect and service, shaped by family traditions that valued public duty and by a town that produced leaders capable of commanding respect across communities.

Their intertwined careers – rector and godson, MP and Baby of the House, both cut down in their prime – embody a sense of promise broken by legal anomaly, electoral mischance and personal tragedy. 

Yet in church records, university memorials, legal recollections and the collective memory of Limavady, the clergyman soldier and the lost leader remain enduring figures.

They are reminders of what Northern Ireland gained for a time, and what it lost too soon. 

Aaron Callan is senior parliamentary researcher for Gregory Campbell MP

The following is a repost of a piece by Areej Alghazzawi which Amnesty International published on 16 February.

Silent Traumas

Trauma follows us like our shadows during daylight. At night, trauma envelopes us until we feel like we are drowning.

Trauma also lives inside us like a disease. Good people in Geneva, New York, and The Hague say there is a cure, but we can’t inject their statements.

14-year-old Shorouq Thabet is the only survivor of her immediate family, who were all killed during Israel’s genocide. When I first asked her how she was, she simply responded with “nightmare”.

Adulthood is being forced on Shorouq, and she fights it by fantasising about being a young child again, when her only worry was wondering where her doll had wandered off to.

She longs to hear her parents’ voices; even their arguments could bring some comfort. They were killed in Deir Al-Balah following an Israeli attack on 17 March 2024. It was the last time she would sleep beside her mother and feel that special warmth. It was the last time she’d play with her younger sister, Shahed.

Destruction everywhere and in everyone in Gaza

Shorouq has been in therapy for some time now in the hope of learning to resist the darkness. Until now, there has been no relief. The smell and sight of destruction that is everywhere, and in everyone, in Gaza, open up the wounds again within seconds of leaving her therapy sessions.

On the night of the Israeli strike, she told me she had a strange feeling – that danger was in the room with them. She asked her mother to turn on a flashlight and hold her closely.

At some point, she said she managed to sleep, but when she woke, she was in a hospital. Her mother had survived the attack and was covered in blood:

She was frantically checking on me, my sister, and two brothers, Mohammed and Ahmad. I could see her but not feel her. I was going in and out of the darkness.

It was the first time she had seen her mother in such pain. Her mother’s face, covered in blood, is the last memory she has of her.

Her mother didn’t survive, nor did her father, little sister, or older brothers. The full details of her family massacre were only told to her when she was out of the hospital after seven days of urgent medical attention.

Everybody was crying. Nobody was talking.

Now she lives with her uncle Wael and his wife. I saw many people gathered at their home when Shorouq arrived. Everybody was crying. Nobody was talking.

A few days later, Shorouq told me:

At that moment, surrounded by so many unhappy people, I felt a change. I felt myself turning into an adult, with responsibilities. Now is not the time of dolls and dreams.

Try as she did to resist the pain, it was clear that young Shorouq just wanted to say a last goodbye to her sister and play together one more time.

Her lack of closure has been explored in her therapy sessions. The therapist asks her to draw what she feels. Sometimes, an empty paper expresses everything she feels.

She told me:

I used to love playing with dolls with Shahed. After the massacre, I lost my interest in everything. I actually still have a small piece of my doll that I found under the rubble.

In her free time, when she is not in school, she feels the pressure, and the flashbacks come back. She tells me she is consumed with uncontrollable thoughts. Now she is enrolled in an additional school. The time spent studying is an attempt to escape from her memories.

The detachment may be helping. Recently, Shorouq told me:

I hung a drawing on the door in my room. It’s a drawing of a warm home with open windows. Each morning, I look at that because it looks like peace.

Areej Alghazzawi is a junior accountancy student at the Islamic University of Gaza. She hopes to become a teacher and an accountant. She had one year left of her studies before Israel’s attack put her hopes on hold.

Alghazzawi is currently displaced but still in Gaza and, along with her family members, struggling every day to survive.

Featured image via the Canary