The Canary recently reported that Israeli occupation forces (IOF) tortured a young boy in al Maghazi refugee camp, in the Deir al Balah governorate of Central Gaza. This happened in front of his father, 25 year old Osama Abu Nassar, to pressure him into making a confession.

“Israel” destroyed Abu Nassar’s livelihood causing him to suffer mental health issues

But since the incident, which happened on 19 March 2026, there has been no news of Abu Nassar’s whereabouts. Concerns are growing for his safety, and are made worse by the fact that he is suffering from mental health issues. Until quite recently, he made an income by using his horse to transport people’s belongings. But the Israeli occupation killed his horse and, for the past two years, Abu Nassar has found himself unemployed, with no means of supporting his family. This has caused him a great deal of psychological trauma, and he has become mentally unstable.

Freelance video and photojournalist, Salma Kaddoumi, visited Abu Nassar’s family. She spoke with the Canary and told us:

Abu Nassar’s home is around 300 metres from the “Yellow Line”, East of al Maghazi Refugee Camp. When he and his one and a half year old son Jawad went to buy some food, Abu Nassar soon found himself trapped by the IOF.

Israeli occupation soldiers opened fire, shooting him in the shoulder, while a quadcopter drone hovered above and ordered him via loudspeaker to place his child on the ground and keep walking towards the IOF near the yellow line.

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Kaddoumi says Abu Nassar was then stripped of his clothes and the soldiers took his son and began torturing him in front of his father. The child was detained for around 10 hours, inside the yellow line. The International Committee of the Red Cross called the family to tell them they had received their son.

The baby was then taken to hospital. According to the medical reports from Dr Bissan Ahmed, of al Aqsa Hospital, in Deir al Balla, the boy had been abused, and had cigarette burns on both legs.

Concerns grow for Abu Nassar who is wounded and has been abducted by the IOF

Abu Nassar remains in detention in an unknown location. His family are extremely worried and have been searching extensively for him. Since October 7, 2023, the fate of many thousands of Palestinian political prisoners like him remain unclear. And they have no access to legal representation, or International  Committee of the Red Cross visits. They are forcibly disappeared, with “Israel” Occupation forces, the police and Prison Services all refusing to disclose any information whatsoever on their whereabouts.

Under Trump’s 20 point plan for Gaza, as part of the so called Gaza “ceasefire” agreement in October 2025,  the first stage of the IOF withdrawal from Gaza was beyond a boundary known as the ‘yellow line’. This ‘line’ demarcates the more than 58 percent of the Gaza Strip currently under Israeli occupation control, and recent reports suggest the Israeli occupationcontinues to move the line deeper into Gaza. Many Palestinian homes and 60 percent of Gaza’s fertile agricultural land are beyond the yellow line but, as Palestinians are prohibited from entering the area, are completely out of reach to them.

But instead of withdrawing further the Israeli occupation aims to ethnically cleanse the area and steal more land – just like in Lebanon. IOF chief Eyal Zamir recently said:

The yellow line is a new border line, serving as a forward defensive line for our communities and a line of operational activity.

Since the so called Gaza “ceasefire”, on 10 October, 2025, as of 25 March, more than 650 Palestinians have been killed by “Israel”. It is now thought that the number of Palestinians killed by “Israel” is far higher than previously thought. According to independent research in medical journals, there were more than 75,000 “violent deaths” in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and January 2025, and the death toll continues to rise.

Featured images via Salma Kadddoumi

Royal Mail bosses have serious questions to answer from MPs at the Business and Trade Select Committee hearing, says the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

Postal workers’ union the CWU said bosses must prioritise working conditions to deliver a quality service. And TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said Royal Mail bosses “must get their house in order” and “must answer for the chaos” in the postal service. He was speaking ahead of a Business and Trade Select Committee hearing on 24 March.

Bosses at the 500-year-old institution appeared in front of MPs to explain the crisis in the service. Problems include failures to meet delivery targets and widespread service delays.

Crisis at Royal Mail

The hearing comes after a report by the committee earlier in March highlighted the “service failures” at Royal Mail. 219 million letters arrived late in a year and the company failed to meet quality targets.

The report found just 74.9% of first-class post arrived on time between April 2025 and January 2026, well below the target of 93%.

The CWU says the company is facing a “recruitment crisis” due to its decision to impose “gig economy standards” on recruits who joined the service since 2022.

The CWU says that since 2022, 27,000 new entrants have left the Royal Mail, with 50% leaving within the first year.

The union is currently in intense negotiations with the company over the Royal Mail’s decision to introduce the Optimised Delivery Model. This moves second-class mail to alternate-weekday delivery while keeping first-class deliveries six days a week and reducing delivery route numbers in a bid to save money.

But after dozens of offices piloted the model, the CWU says members are describing it as a “car-crash” strategy. Instead of being guided by workers’ ability to deliver a quality service in their working hours, the union says work cannot be completed in time. Instead, the postal worker comes back the next day with all the work from the previous day still to complete.

TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said:

The Royal Mail is one of our most treasured national institutions. But with staff overworked and underpaid, is it any wonder the company is in crisis?

Royal Mail bosses must answer for the chaos in the postal service. They need to get their house in order. That starts with listening to the workers who know better than anyone how to get the service back on its feet.

CWU general secretary Dave Ward also referenced EP Group, the sprawling business empire that owns Royal Mail. He said:

Royal Mail and EP Group have made excuse after excuse over why Royal Mail’s service has been consistently poor over the past few years.

Now it is time for the truth. The job of a postal worker has been devalued and shareholder profit has been prioritised over service to the public – this is what is creating the crisis.

The CWU welcomes the opportunity to speak for postal workers before the Select Committee. But parliament must begin thinking seriously about the situation Royal Mail is in, and take real action to prevent this great institution from sliding even further into managed decline.

Featured image via the Canary

As part of Labour’s nakedly discriminatory immigration ‘reforms’, the government is planning to expand ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) to settled migrants. Worse still, they have no real idea of how many children this ruinous policy will plunge into poverty.

In November 2025, the UK government published “A Fairer Pathway to Settlement: A statement on earned settlement”. It lays out changes that will make the UK immigration system yet-more hostile, with proposals including:

• Making permanent residency less available to people.
• Increasing the amount of time most people spend in the immigration system before they may apply for permanent residence.
• Reducing that wait if they have a higher level of English proficiency, if they are high earners, if they hold senior positions in a public service, or if they have undertaken ‘extensive’ volunteering.
• Increasing that time for people who arrive on a visitor visa, breach immigration rules, or have ever received public funds.
• Completely removing the option of permanent residency for anyone who has ever received a criminal conviction, has outstanding litigation, or has NHS, tax, or other government debts.

It’s currently the case that most migrants who are in the UK on a limited visa are subject to a ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) condition. However, as the government revealed in the ‘Fairer Pathway’ document, it’s now looking to expand NRPF to settled migrants, too:

The government believes that the development of an earned settlement system should include a reassessment of the benefits accruing to settlement and where the accrual of those benefits might in future sit in the journey to settlement and citizenship respectively. Under this option, new migrants granted settlement would continue to be unable to access specified benefits in line with existing visa conditions. This would have the effect of shifting the default position on access to benefits to citizenship rather than settlement.

‘Earned Settlement’ consultation

On 13 March, the Home Affairs committee published a report on its ludicrously short stitch-up of a consultation into the immigration reform proposals.

The inquiry highlighted that migrants can apply for fee waivers under certain conditions, including:

• being destitute, or at imminent risk thereof,

• reasons relating to a child’s welfare, or

• if they’re facing exceptional circumstances affecting their income.

It also included summaries of some relevant responses, including Anna Skehan, a solicitor at Islington Law Centre, who:

told [the government] that circumstances that might lead to an application to access public funds might include an injury or illness, a mental health crisis, or a relationship breaking down due to domestic abuse.

That is to say, the Home Office plans to penalise migrants for needing state support for disability, poverty, domestic abuse.

Likewise, the NRPF Network — an organisation that provides advice to local authorities on NRPF – highlighted to the committee that:

applying for access to benefits through a change of conditions is typically “a last resort”. The NRPF Network argued that penalising people for accessing public funds would increase risks of poverty, abuse and exploitation.

Labour — no idea of the impact

Now, a DWP minister has essentially admitted that the government has no real clue about the number/proportion of children in poverty living in households subject to NRPF.

Crossbench peer John Bird wrote in asking the government:

what estimate they have made of the number and proportion of children in (1) poverty, and (2) deep poverty, living in households subject to no recourse to public funds; and what assessment they have made of the impact of the Child Poverty Strategy on those numbers.

In response, DWP Minister of State Maeve Sherlock listed resources available for children from NRPF families. However, she notably failed to give any figures at all. Rather, she stated that:

We are continuing our work to develop our understanding of NRPF and its impacts. This includes work with the Home Office to develop questions on NRPF for inclusion in the Family Resources survey 2026/2027, a household survey undertaken annually to explore living standards in the UK. This will provide greater insight into how families with the NRPF condition are living in the UK and will help to inform future policy-making.

Sherlock’s statement here almost directly echoed Labour’s recent policy paper ‘Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty’, published 13 March. It stated that NRPF families could access free school meals, and some free childcare schemes. Likewise, it also mentioned developing questions — and gave no figures whatsoever.

So, not only is the government planning to expand NRPF, it made its proposals and ran the consultation before gathering any formal data to understand the impact of NRPF on child poverty. Worse still, it hasn’t yet worked out how to even assess this consequence of NRPF.

Immigrant kids don’t count

In the foreword to the ‘Our Children’ policy paper, Keir Starmer boasts that:

The recent story of child poverty in Britain is simple. The last Labour Government reduced it by around 600,000 children. Yet since 2010 it has risen by 900,000 and now around 4.5 million children are in poverty. That is a staggering indictment of the previous Government’s policies. The statistics alone are shocking enough but think about the individual human cost. […]

The answer, in both first principles and evidence, is a resounding no. And so this child poverty strategy sets out a different path for Britain.

Starmer and his Labour Party talk a big game about tackling child poverty. However, they’re currently barreling towards an expansion of NRPF which will inevitably entrench poverty for the children of marginalised migrant and refugee families.

They haven’t studied the impact this will have, because they simply don’t care. Starmer’s Labour considers immigrants as collateral damage in their doomed bid to appeal to the far right. All child poverty is abhorrent, but for Labour, immigrant children clearly don’t count.

Featured image via World Vision UK

Iran’s military spokesperson has openly mocked US president Donald Trump over supposed peace talks. Lt. Col. Ebrahim Zolfaghari said Trump was negotiating with himself in a video statement published on 25 March:

The one claiming to be a global superpower would have already gotten out of this mess if it could. Don’t dress up your defeat as an agreement. Your era of empty promises has come to an end.

Have your internal conflicts reached the point where you are negotiating with yourselves?

Zolfaghari’s burn came as Iran rejected a US peace plan and published their own list of demands for any negotiations:

Per a report from the Wall Street Journal, Iran has responded to the Trump administration’s proposal for a ceasefire with demands that far surpass the characterization of maximalist. Iran has demanded the closure of all U.S. bases in the Gulf region, a new Strait of Hormuz… pic.twitter.com/XAQAzkUTsD

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) March 25, 2026

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An Iranian official said the US proposals were “extremely maximalist and unreasonable”. The country also said the fact the US was still deploying troops to the region despite making a lot of noise about diplomacy was suspicious.

Abas Aslani, a fellow at the Centre for Middle East Strategic Studies in Tehran, told Al Jazeera:

Washington’s decision to deploy additional forces to the region sends a signal that the strategy they are pursuing militarily does not align with the tone of their positions in terms of the negotiations.

The leadership of the US 82nd Airborne division have been ordered to the Middle East. The Intercept reported on 25 March:

The deployment includes the division’s “headquarters element,” support staff, and some personnel who manage logistics, planning, and command operations.

The outlet added:

Open source reporting suggests dozens of transport aircraft used to ferry troops and cargo have been flying out of airfields used by America’s most elite commandos, including the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6.

A flight-tracking account notes 35 C-17s flying out of airfields including those used by Delta Force (Bragg), SEAL Team 6 (Oceana), two of the three Ranger battalions (HAAF and JBLM), and the 160th SOAR.Looks a lot like staging JSOC in case it’s ordered to do the uranium recovery mission in Iran.

— Wesley Morgan (@wesleymorgan.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T22:58:55.943Z

Mocked by Iran

Al Jazeera reported that up to 50,000 US troops are in the Middle East already:

That includes 200 combat aircraft, as well as two aircraft carriers. In addition to that, we know the 82nd Airborne, composed of 1,000 additional troops, is the latest to supplement that.

As well, two Marine Expeditionary Units, consisting of 5,000 Marines and sailors, are also heading to the region. So again, what we see is the US speaking out of both sides of its mouth, for lack of a better comparison.

Iran’s parliamentary speaker posted on X that Iran was well aware of US plans to occupy coastal islands militarily:

Based on some data, Iran’s enemies, with the support of one of the regional countries, are preparing to occupy one of the Iranian islands. All enemy movements are under the full surveillance of our armed forces. If they step out of line, all the vital infrastructure of that regional country will, without restriction, become the target of relentless attacks.

براساس برخی داده‌ها، دشمنان ایران با پشتیبانی یکی از کشورهای منطقه، در حال تدارک عملیات اشغال یکی از جزایر ایرانی هستند.
تمام تحرکات دشمن تحت اشراف نیروهای مسلح ماست. اگر قدم از قدم بردارند، تمام زیرساخت‌های حیاتی آن کشور منطقه‌ای بدون محدودیت، هدف حملات بی‌امان قرار خواهد گرفت.

— محمدباقر قالیباف | MB Ghalibaf (@mb_ghalibaf) March 25, 2026

Trump has been mocked by Iranian-linked X accounts in recent days:

The Strait of Hormuz will be controlled by me and the Ayatollah😎😁 pic.twitter.com/IxIgo1Pn6S

— Iran Embassy SA (@IraninSA) March 23, 2026

The X posts have portrayed Trump as childish and inept:

Iran owns Trump with the latest Ai meme mocking his efforts at war @realDonaldTrump @WhiteHousepic.twitter.com/Qr5ovPSf7j

— KT “Special MI6 Operation” (@KremlinTrolls) March 23, 2026

One even portrayed America’s stalling war through the medium of Lego:

Iran propaganda slaps pic.twitter.com/qZxikP94nU

— Darth Powell (@VladTheInflator) March 24, 2026

The US-Israel attacked Iran first on 28 February without provocation. The country was offering unprecedented concessions in negotiations at the time. The Pentagon has since stated there was no imminent threat from Iran. And the UN’s atomic watchdog, the IAEA, has said there is no evidence Iran was developing a nuclear weapon.

Featured image via the Canary

The deeply pro-Israel New York Times (NYT) has a long history of appallingly biased reporting of Israel’s crimes. It continues to be called out and exposed, but the X social media platform is finally catching up.

As one of many examples of its bias, the paper carried the notorious — and completely untrue — “Screams without words” atrocity propaganda piece. The article was written by an Israeli military propagandist with “no journalism experience” and made claims of rape and mutilation on 7 October 2023. The author had even admitted to one of its interviewees that it was “for Israel advocacy”.

New York Times doesn’t care about facts

Yet despite the complete debunking of all Israel’s atrocity propaganda and the outrage of victims’ families, the piece remains online. The only ‘correction’ the NYT has ever made to it is an amendment to the age of one of the discredited ‘witnesses’. It’s now well known that there is no evidence that any rapes were perpetrated during the raid, but this goes unacknowledged by the paper.

Fast-forward to 2026 and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon as part of its non-stop war crimes. That crime has displaced more than a million people. Israel has bombed family homes and razed entire apartment buildings to the ground. But to the NYT, it’s not an invasion at all. It’s:

expend[ing] the territory it controls in Lebanon, suggesting it might remain there beyond the fighting.

Israel has violently displaced the Lebanese population up to and even beyond the Litani river and has destroyed the bridges across it, but noooo, not an invasion. But self-evidently it is – and at last the paper’s nonsense got a ‘community note’ pointing this out:

NYT finally got a community note for its whitewashing language. pic.twitter.com/cZywaw4ZVa

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) March 24, 2026

Pro-Israel bias

Of course, the NYT’s bias is not limited to one article, nor is the pro-Israel bias limited to the New York Times. UK ‘mainstream’ media is no better and the lack of proper free speech laws in the UK has seen gross misrepresentation of war crimes. Many ‘MSM’ have capitulated completely to Israel and its lobby and actively participate in Israel’s whitewashing propaganda. It has been exploited by the Starmer government to wage war on pro-Palestinian speech and objective journalism, too.

So much so that academic publisher Taylor and Francis has described this bias, higher than ever since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as an “ethical collapse”.

Nazi media bosses who promoted Germany’s Holocaust of Jews, Roma and others were tried at Nuremberg for their collusion in genocide and executed. One ‘community note’ may be a a tiny satisfaction, but trials at the Hague are the outcome demanded by justice.

Featured image via Britannica

Civil servant Philip Rycroft has put together a report “ringing the alarm bell” about “covert foreign influence campaigns” in UK politics. And the government has responded with an immediate crackdown on all cryptocurrency transactions in particular, which could cause big problems for Reform UK.

This increasing scrutiny of Reform’s dodgy finances comes just as the party has let its mask slip again by dropping its promise to part-nationalise energy and water companies.

A crackdown on Reform’s crypto shadiness

In 2025, Reform leader Nigel Farage promised a “crypto revolution”, saying the party would start to accept crypto donations. Reform has already received at least £12m from cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne alone. Harborne, who lives in Thailand, has long backed the British right, from the Tories to the Brexit Party.

Already in the pockets of shady big business interests, Farage has also been acting like a crypto lobbyist and fanatic in recent months. And as the Canary has reported, a recent investigation showed just how dangerous it was to allow Reform to keep:

exploiting a very obvious and gaping loophole in the political finance system

That’s because this situation has allowed Farage to:

hide who and where he is getting his dirty money from

Responding to Rycroft’s report, Housing, Communities and Local Government secretary Steve Reed said:

we will introduce an amendment to the representation of the people bill to place a moratorium on all political donations made through cryptocurrency… This moratorium will remain in place until the Electoral Commission and this parliament are satisfied there is sufficient regulation in place to ensure full confidence and transparency in donations being made in this way.

He also announced that overseas electors will no longer be able to donate more than £100,000 a year.

Reform deputy leader Richard Tice has predictably said his party will seek to repeal this law if it gets into government.

ALL dodgy funding in politics must stop

While the government’s decision is welcome, we all know that Keir Starmer’s Labour is also swimming in donations from lobbyists for foreign powers and shady corporate interests. Indeed, pro-Israel lobby figures even gained leading roles in the government’s ‘foreign interference’ probe in late 2025.

An important point in Rycroft’s report was that it’s not just traditional global foes pushing for influence, but also traditional “allies like the United States“.

In this context, Electoral Reform Society director Jess Garland has encouraged the government to take even stronger action by introducing:

a cap on how much all donors can give to a party, not just those based abroad

The public strongly supports this, she said, and it:

would help prevent our politics from being swamped with massive donations, which now frequently reach into the multiple millions.

This is true for Reform, Labour, the Tories, and the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, Labour Together — which Reed himself once directed — has itself received millions of pounds to exert massive influence over the Labour Party and its current cabinet.

As Unlock Democracy chief executive Tom Brake said:

Big money distorts politics regardless of its origin. A fixed cap is needed across the board to prevent large donations, whether from overseas voters or domestic sources, from buying influence.

Transparency International UK’s policy director Duncan Hames, meanwhile, stressed that:

A meaningful annual cap on donations is the most robust safeguard against both foreign interference and the outsized influence of big money in our politics.

We agree. And while we doubt Keir Starmer’s Labour will risk cutting its own funding stream off by doing so, it’s something we absolutely should be pushing for.

Featured image via the Canary

Blew up a dairy farm

In early March US officials released a video of a bombed location in Ecuador. They bragged that it showed how their strikes at sea had now shifted into strikes against cartels on land.

This is utterly extraordinary.

If Hegseth et al got this wrong, think what else is happening with the drug boat strikes and much more.

The U.S. Said It Helped Bomb a Drug Camp. It Was a Dairy Farm.

Gets worse as you read it.

1/ pic.twitter.com/BPJQXkVJNl

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) March 25, 2026

The New York Times (NYT) has since reported that the strike hit a dairy farm:

The military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound, according to interviews with the farm’s owner, four of its workers, human rights lawyers and residents and leaders in San Martín, the remote farming village in northern Ecuador where the strike took place.

The US and the Ecuadorian military are working together on ‘counter-cartel’ operations. As the Canary reported on 9 March, the country’s president is a Trump-style politician:

Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa has pushed through ‘urgent’ neoliberal reforms, cutting public spending while clamping down on civil liberties, workers’ rights, and indigenous environmental activism against mining and fossil fuel extraction.

Workers arriving at the farm on 3 March told the NYT:

Ecuadorean soldiers arrived by helicopter on March 3, doused several shelters and sheds with gasoline and ignited them after interrogating workers and beating four of them with the butts of their guns.

Workers tortured at the farm

The workers also said they were tortured:

Three of the workers, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation by the government, said the soldiers later choked and subjected them to electrical shocks before letting them go.

Three days later, on 6 March, the Ecuadorian – not US – military allegedly bombed the site from a helicopter:

Ecuadorean helicopters returned to the farm three days later, on March 6, and appeared to drop explosives on the farm’s smoldering remains.

At this point, Ecuadorian forces recorded the footage that was later shown by American officials. Other buildings, including nearby abandoned houses, were reportedly burned too.

Trump has become bogged down in a war with Iran. Yet this is a major diversion from the 2025 National Security Strategy, which had a major focus on hemispheric control. But while the news cycle focuses on the more explosive war with Iran – with its deep implications for the global energy economy – the US dirty war is still exacting a heavy toll in Latin America.

Featured image via the Canary

Deutsche Bank has warned in a new report that the rise of the petroyuan poses a clear challenge to the U.S. currency. The petrodollar system, built on a 1974 agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, faces a “perfect storm” from the ongoing war on Iran initiated by the US/UK/Israel, the bank said.

The bank said that the foundations of the “security-for-oil-pricing arrangement” between the US and the GCC states have been shaken.

The current conflict has arguably shaken some core foundations of the petrodollar regime: the security-for-oil-pricing arrangement. US military assets and bases in the Gulf have come under attack in the war.

Oil infrastructure in the Gulf has also been hit. And the US ability to provide the maritime security to ensure the global flow of oil has been challenged with the closure of Hormuz. The US security umbrella has been fundamentally tested.

The legacy of this conflict for the dollar could be the ways in which it tests the foundations of the petrodollar regime.

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The dollar has not strengthened much in this crisis because of rising US fiscal risk from military spending and the sell-off of US Treasuries by Asia and the Middle East to defend their currencies, the report said.

“The conflict could be the catalyst for erosion in petrodollar dominance and the beginnings of the petroyuan,” the bank said, pointing out reports that Iran is allowing the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz if oil payments are made in yuan. China, a long-time partner of Iran, is also the nation’s biggest oil customer.

Just as the 1973 oil embargo led to diversification away from Gulf oil and reserve-building in places like Canada and the North Sea, a similar effect may happen this time. Europe, Asia, and many parts of the Global South will be the ones this time, looking at ways to reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels.

Reduced global oil trade would also create more room for the pricing of goods and services to shift away from the dollar, the report said.

Featured image via OMFIF

MPs are considering yet another inquiry into the carers’ allowance scandal Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). This time, it’s over the fact that the department is continuing to chase unpaid carers for discredited repayment bills.

Only, there’s a glaring issue here, isn’t there? There’s not a number of inquiries we can run, or an amount of faux outrage that MPs can show that will fix this problem.

Fundamentally, the entire political machinery of the last few decades has ensured that the DWP is dedicated to treating poor and disabled people as if they’re thieves.

MPs have ensured that the department will hound recipients at every opportunity – whether or not it’s even remotely valid. And now they’re feigning shock when the DWP is… hounding carers as if they’re thieves?

Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

DWP: ‘difficult to find any justifiable reasons’

Back in November 2025, disability rights expert Liz Sayce published her damning review of carer’s allowance overpayments at the DWP. As a consequence, the government admitted that the rules it uses to average carers’ earnings failed to follow social security law. As a result, hundreds of carers had been convicted of benefit fraud.

However, Commons work and pensions select committee chair Debbie Abrahams has recently called out a “torrent of missteps” in the DWP’s actions since the review. In particular, the department has massively delayed its plans to repay the tens of thousands of carers it previously slapped with bogus overpayment bills.

Worse still, the Guardian published an investigation last week revealing that the DWP is still sending out repayment bills to carers. It knows those repayments were calculated using unlawful guidance – it simply doesn’t give a shit.

Carers Trust policy manager Ramzi Suleiman condemned the DWP’s continued use of the old guidance:

It’s difficult to find any justifiable reasons why the new guidance was not used to assess these alleged overpayments.

Likewise, Carers UK chief executive Helen Walker said that:

Carers need to see clear, proactive communication about the timeline for the reassessment process. We have heard from carers who say that they are living with significant uncertainty.

‘Not serious in its public commitment’

As such, Abrahams has fired off a letter to social security minister and all-round wet wipe Stephen Timms. She called out the DWP’s management culture, and said the failure to offer carers redress “with due care” would lead the public to:

conclude that [it] is not serious in its public commitment to do so, which is extremely damaging to the existing issues of trust with the department.

Spoiler alert: we have already concluded that the DWP is not serious about righting its injustices. Because, you know, its injustices could fill around 2,244 articles on a mid-sized indie news site.

As such, its quite unsurprising that MPs are ‘actively considering’ a fresh inquiry into the DWP’s treatment of unpaid carers. Of course, we can already tell them what they’ll find, but they won’t bloody like it.

And, speak of the devil – in reaction to the news, a DWP spokesperson said:

We’ve accepted the vast majority of the Sayce review’s recommendations and have already made changes – hiring extra staff, updating internal guidance, and making letters clearer.

Note the language they’re using here. The “making letters clearer” implies that carers are failing to understand. They’re not – they’re being slapped with illegal repayment bills.

Similarly, the ‘updating internal guidance’ clearly isn’t happening. It’s been four months since they were told their guidance was unlawful, and they’re still using it.

Repeatedly, successive governments have tasked the DWP with reducing benefits payments and rooting out largely imaginary ‘fraud’. They don’t get to feign shock that the DWP is hounding innocent people. That’s the department’s whole job – the same disgraceful job the government tasked them with.

Featured image via the Canary

Former Tory prisons minister Crispin Blunt has pleaded guilty to possessing recreational quantities of crystal meth, cannabis and the sedative GBL. The plea was entered at Westminster magistrates’ court this morning, 25 March 2026. The drugs were found during a police investigation into rape allegations in 2023, but that investigation was dropped for lack of evidence.

During a raid on his Surrey home in October 2023, Blunt pointed out the drugs to police. Meth was valued at £200-250 was on a cabinet next to his bed, a separate mix of b while £200 worth of GBL was in a laptop bag. A small amount of cannabis valued at £10 or less was also listed.

The irony of a prisons minister convicted of drugs is obvious. However, Blunt is one of the more ‘mixed bag’ Tories. Under Boris Johnson in October 2020, Blunt voted to keep poor UK children hungry by rejecting footballer Marcus Rashford’s call to extend free school meals through school holidays. But in 2019 he rebelled to help Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour humiliate Theresa May. He has also condemned Israeli interference in UK politics and serves as a director of the International Centre for Justice for Palestinians.

In 2016, Blunt admitted in a Commons speech to using amyl nitrate ‘poppers’ and opposed the government’s plan to ban them.

Featured image via the Canary