A former prison officer says he was offered no support by bosses despite witnessing a murder, suicide and being attacked by inmates five times.

Instead, he said he felt pressured to have no time off despite numerous traumatic events because staffing levels were so low.

The 21-year-old, who joined the prison service after leaving school at 18, working at jails in the West Midlands, said: “After three years I’d seen so much – the extremes of death, both self-inflicted and caused by other people. You don’t get time to process it.”

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said it inherited a prison service “in crisis” from the previous government and that it would “get a grip” on the system.

The former officer, who wants to remain anonymous, said he was attracted to a career in the prison service due to the self-discipline and integrity the role requires.

“I knew I might be assaulted by inmates and I knew I might see some horrible stuff but I expected to get some support,” he said.

Not long after he started the job, he witnessed someone die from a self-inflicted injury and another inmate murdered on the same day.

A debrief with management and a supportive check-in was supposed to happen after every serious incident but one was never arranged.

“No-one even asked if I was okay,” he said.

“It’s incompetent not to not think of the health and safety of officers.

“There are so many failures within management which put staff and prisoners at risk and it is very difficult for the MoJ to investigate.”

He claimed management went against MoJ guidance which advises officers should take time off after being assaulted multiple times in a single week.

“The MoJ said to take time off but then my manager made a comment which stuck with me,” he said.

“He told me, ‘if you have incidents like this and you can’t cope with them, don’t be in the job.

“I was a young person and I had just entered a career which I loved and I couldn’t afford to leave so I didn’t take time off to process what had happened to me.

“Eventually, I couldn’t do it anymore.”

After three years working at prisons including HMP Birmingham and Long Lartin in Worcestershire, he resigned.

He said he wanted to share his story because “officers who question the integrity of management are forced out of the service or to another prison”.

He also urged the MoJ to hire more staff because current levels were unsafe.

“Fourteen years ago you would have had at least 10-15 officers on a residential unit looking after 150 prisoners,” he said.

“During my career, I’ve worked with just one other member of staff to run a unit with more prisoners than ever before.”

Earlier this month, over 2,000 prisoners were released early to ease the prisons crisis, serving 40% of their sentence rather than 50%.

The former officer was sceptical over whether this would make any difference due to concerns over rehabilitation and chances of reoffending.

He also cited fears over the release of domestic abusers in particular.

“We see a lot of them coming back in,” he said.

“I think it’s inevitable someone will die.”

According to the Prison and Probation service, there has been an increase of 2,268 staff across the service compared to June last year.

Dominque Moran, professor of Carceral Geography at the University of Birmingham, said she was concerned by young and inexperienced staff joining the service, potentially replacing seasoned officers.

“Many people in prison have been in prison a number of times – they are very familiar with how the system operates,” she said.

“They are often more familiar with the prison than some of the new staff are.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said the loss of experienced staff had left the service with a relatively inexperienced workforce but that they were continuously improving their learning offer to staff.

“The new government inherited a prison system in crisis – putting significant pressure on the whole justice system,” they said.

“We will get a grip of the situation so we can lock up the most dangerous offenders, protect the public and make our prisons safer for hard-working staff.”

In Latino exile communities across the country, a question is being asked: is Kamala Harris really a communist?

The vice-president has been the subject of numerous misleading claims that she is a socialist or communist since becoming the Democratic candidate for president, according to the US’s largest Spanish-language fact-checker Factchequeado.

Experts say these claims capitalise on “genuine fears” held by some voters who fled repression in countries like Cuba and Venezuela.

In one viral video, Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz appear to pose for a selfie in front of a sign for Revolutionary Communists of America, a far-left group.

The video was fake. The background had been doctored by a group of Donald Trump’s supporters known as the Dilley Meme Team.

Their original post had more than 420,000 views, but it was shared by many Spanish accounts – and repeated offline.

“It’s everywhere, this doubt: ‘Is this person a communist?’” Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a cultural context strategist from south Florida, told the BBC.

She was listening to the Spanish-language radio station La Nueva Poderosa in Miami when she heard the hosts discussing the false meme.

“Did you see them standing in front of that picture? They have no shame in who they are,” the hosts said.

She contacted the station to point out it was a fake video. The hosts later said on air that they wanted to clarify the story was “not true” but that “doesn’t take away from the reality that Kamala is a Marxist”.

There are nearly 36.2 million eligible Latino voters in America, about 14.7% of the US electorate, and many live in key swing states like Nevada and Arizona, which makes them a coveted demographic for both campaigns.

They are by no means a homogeneous voting demographic, but historically, Latinos have tended to favour the Democrats. In 2020, 44% voted for Joe Biden, with only 16% voting for Trump. But polls show Republicans have gained ground this election cycle, with many factors cited including the economy, immigration, and abortion rights.

And for some immigrants, concerns about America today reflect their past experiences in their home countries.

Political messages warning about “socialism” or “communism” have been particularly prevalent in communities with large Cuban and Venezuelan populations, like in south Florida, experts noted.

These expats are especially vulnerable to misinformation about communism because of the trauma they experienced fleeing repression, said Samantha Barrios, a Venezuelan-American based in Miami, Florida who votes Democrat.

She accused right-leaning Spanish media of using these terms to “scare Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans” because of “the main reason that we left our countries, trying to leave these regimes”.

For some, their criticism of the Democrats is grounded in opinions that the US government has not provided a tough enough response to political repression in Cuba or Venezuela.

But Ms Barrio is wary of the way these legitimate concerns are being weaponised through “false claims” that Kamala Harris herself is a communist.

Ms Pérez-Verdía agrees, but she also criticised the Democrat campaign for not doing enough to address their concerns.

“Don’t laugh off people’s fears. It’s really disrespectful. People have genuine fears, they came to the United States, they left everything behind. If they have doubts you should address their doubts.”

Not all claims exclusively target Latinos, said the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), which monitors more than 1,300 WhatsApp groups and more than 200 Telegram channels in Spanish and Portuguese.

And notable right-wing and pro-Trump actors and influencers have pushed a “fear of socialism” since 2020, the organisation found.

But while Joe Biden was accused of being a communist when he ran for president, Factchequeado’s founder, Laura Zommer, said their fact checkers had “never” seen this volume of AI and doctored images before.

Some of this misinformation has been spread by Trump himself, or his high-profile supporters.

Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, posted a faked image of Kamala Harris in a red uniform emblazoned with the communist hammer and sickle, captioned “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?”

It had more than 83.9 million views. A reverse image search suggests this was the earliest posting of the image on X.

Donald Trump shared an AI image of Harris addressing a communist crowd that had at least 81.5 million views on X, but it was not the first posting of this image.

Posts linking Harris to communism really took off online after the presidential debate, according a report by the DDIA prepared for the BBC.

During the debate, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris and her father a “Marxist” and suggested she would turn the US into “Venezuela on steroids” through her immigration policies.

After the debate, “Marxista” trended on social media and searches for “Marxist” on Google in the US jumped 1000% in 17 hours.

Factchequeado said the most searched question in Spanish after the debate was: “Who is Kamala Harris’s father?”

The DDIA said two claims especially gained traction in the week after the presidential debate. In one, a fabricated document falsely claiming Kamala Harris is a member of the Russian communist party went viral, according to Meta’s own metrics. Another claim, that Harris is “Kamarada [Comrade] Kamala”, arose from a Trump speech in which he portrays her as a “communist comrade”.

BBC Verify traced the membership card image to a website which allows people to make fake communist party documents.

The membership number, stamp and other details on the card were identical to a template on the site for making a party membership card.

Posts sharing the fake image, which was first shared in August, have been viewed more than half a million times.

The Democratic Party is not a socialist party, nor does it claim to support communist regimes. But some high-profile members like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have described their political views as “democratic socialist”.

When she was a California senator, Harris co-sponsored Sanders’ Medicare for All bill, which would have brought a single-payer health care system to the US. She has since said she no longer supports a single-payer health-care system, which would have abolished private insurers.

She has never advocated for communist policies, such as the abolition or seizure of private property.

Kamala Harris’s plan to crackdown on “price gouging” at supermarkets has been cited in Spanish social media posts as “communist”. Mr Musk claimed it would mean “empty shelves, just like in Venezuela”.

Her proposal, which would involve asking the trade commission to investigate price spikes far above the increase in the cost of production, is a far cry from the widespread price controls seen in Cuba and Venezuela that were in part blamed for severe food shortages.

But for some voters who fled those countries, their fear lies in anything they feel remotely resembles policies from the countries they came from.

Duke Machado, who runs a Latino Republican Facebook page from Texas called Latino Strikeforce, said he fears that if the Democrats win, the country would be on a slippery slope to communism.

“If we’re not careful, we’ll slide into Cuba and Venezuela. Their ultimate goal is to destroy capitalism.”

When asked if it was responsible to share fears that the Democrats could turn the US into a communist country with his followers, including Latino exiles who had fled repression, he said: “It’s not irresponsible at all. I see it as a duty.”

With additional reporting by Kayleen Devlin from BBC Verify

Dozens of Tesco products price-matched to Aldi – such as chicken nuggets, cottage pie and blackcurrant squash – are not like-for-like, BBC Panorama has found.

In the case of chicken nuggets, the Tesco product contained 39% chicken compared with 60% in the Aldi one.

Of 122 Tesco products, 38 – nearly a third – had at least five percentage points less of the main ingredient than the Aldi products they had been matched to.

Twelve Tesco products were found to have more of the main ingredient.

Tesco told the BBC it constantly reviews the quality of its products and has clear processes in place to ensure its price-match products are comparable to Aldi.

It also said a higher proportion of any one ingredient does not necessarily mean it is better quality.

Consumer expert Kate Hardcastle says Panorama’s findings are an example of “value engineering” which involves changing quantities of ingredients to reduce the price.

Discount supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl have thrived as shoppers have adapted to the higher cost of living.

Aldi’s low prices have helped it overtake Morrisons as the UK’s fourth biggest supermarket.

Tesco is not the only supermarket to offer products priced to match Aldi.

Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and ASDA offer similar ranges, but Panorama found no clear evidence of a pattern of consistent differences in the proportions of main ingredients in their goods compared with the Aldi versions.

Tesco matches Aldi’s prices on about 700 items out of its 30,000 product lines. They are usually low-priced everyday goods.

Ingredients listed on 122 Tesco products price-matched to Aldi were analysed by Panorama in August.

We found that Tesco chicken kievs, part of the supermarket’s Hearty Food Co range, had 44% chicken, compared with 57% in the Aldi equivalent. In the same range, Tesco cottage pie had 18% beef, whereas Aldi Inspired Cuisine Cottage Pie had 25%.

In the case of Tesco Hearty Food Co chicken nuggets, there was 39% chicken listed on the ingredients, but in Aldi Roosters Chicken Nuggets there was 60%.

A can of Tesco Stockwell & Co Chilli Con Carne lists beef as making up 15% of its ingredients, while in Aldi Bramwells Chilli Con Carne the figure is 27%.

Meanwhile, Tesco No Added Sugar DS Apple Blackcurrant Squash had 6% fruit juices from concentrate, while Aldi Sun Quench Double Strength Apple & Blackcurrant Squash had 20%.

Reducing quantities of the most expensive element in a product – such as meat in a ready-meal lasagne – can make a significant difference to prices, says consumer expert Kate Hardcastle.

“It’s only when you [customers] flip it over and look at that tiny, tiny, font size to see you’re not getting the same deal,” she explains.

But not all of the Tesco price-match products analysed by Panorama had less of the main ingredient than Aldi equivalents.

Twelve of the 122 Tesco comparisons had at least five percentage points more than Aldi’s. These included:

• Hearty Food Co 10 Fish Fingers had 64% Alaska pollock, compared with Aldi’s Everyday Essentials Fish Fingers which had 58%

• Tesco’s Eastmans Coleslaw had 57% of cabbage, while Aldi’s The Deli Creamy Coleslaw had 47%

• Also in the Eastman range, Reduced Fat Houmous had 62% of cooked chickpeas, whereas Aldi’s The Deli Reduced Fat Houmous had 55%

Tesco said: “Since we launched our Aldi Price Match four years ago it has proved very popular with customers.”

It added that all of its products carry information about ingredients so customers can make informed choices.

Supermarket Deals: How Good Are They?

As the cost-of-living squeeze continues to affect many, supermarkets say they’re doing what they can to help us save money, offering discounts and promotions. But just how good are these deals?

Watch now on BBC iPlayer or on BBC One on Monday 23 September at 20:00 (20:30 in Northern Ireland)

Aldi’s most recent figures, published earlier this month, showed its pre-tax profits more than tripled to a record £536.7m in the year to the end of December 2023, driven by an extra £2.4bn in sales.

Price rises and new store openings drove much of the rise in earnings, but it also attracted new customers. However, the chain is now growing at a slower rate than most of its big rivals, including Lidl.

This time last year, Aldi was the fastest-growing supermarket, according to industry data, but it has since lost ground in market share as competitors have fought back.

It has more than 1,020 stores across the UK and employs 45,000 people.

The vast majority of the products Aldi and Lidl sell are own-label.

Last year, Giles Hurley, Aldi’s boss in the UK and Ireland, told the BBC products sold under a supermarket’s own name now make up more than half of everything shoppers buy, by value.

“If you look in volume terms that figure is much bigger and at the moment own-label products are growing at twice the rate of branded goods,” Mr Hurley said.

“Why would [shoppers] go back?”

Meanwhile, Tesco, the UK’s biggest supermarket chain, reported in April that its pre-tax profits hit £2.3bn, up from £882m, while sales rose by 4.4% to £68.2bn in the year to 24 February.

It has 2,800 stores and employs 330,000 staff.