On January 11th, I was standing in the driveway to HMP New Hall with a small group of protesters who had walked up the drive half an hour earlier. A blue bib PLO arrived.

He ushered me over, secretively, trying to minimise the interaction. I walked over.

How did you even hear about this?

He asked me incredulously.

Barely a week prior, on the 3rd, I watched a woman with a baby stand metres away from people being pepper sprayed after more than 100 activists from across the country descended on the prison to demand the release of hunger striker Heba Muraisi and her transfer back to HMP Bronzefield.

Days later, on the 8th, when activists returned, a line of police stretched out across the bottom of the drive – no one made it any further that day; clearly, tactics would have to be re-evaluated.

For weeks prior to this, successful prison blockades had been launched in secret, catching guards, residents and staff unaware. It was quite a sight to behold – a small group of committed rabble rousers standing on the driveway while a half mile of parked cars snaked up the hill behind them, their headlights twinkling like Christmas lights through the trees, waiting for shift change. The governor thought he was in control, but suddenly it was the people who decided when their shifts started and ended. Whether people could come or go was no longer in their control. A poignant message to the government machine that was employed to stop just 24 people from being able to come and go as they pleased.

You still don’t understand this do you?

I replied…

this is just people; friends, family, colleagues – people talking round dinner tables. You can’t stand on this movement and if you try then they are just going to find new ways to do this. These people are going to keep coming back until that woman gets to walk out of those gates

Covering the hunger strike changed my life. Watching individuals be held on remand, having their rights abused in ways that I could not imagine being possible in a modern democracy in the West… I remember saying to people, I must have written it somewhere – if this was happening in any other country – imagine if this was happening in Russia…

David Lammy would have been standing on the news condemning it full-throatily, but instead, we had him running through corridors trying to pretend he didn’t know what the rest of us were standing outside shouting about. I grew up bathed in liberalism; the idea that the state, the police, the machinations of the society we lived in were made to help, guide and protect us.

It wasn’t just Gaza that got me to where I am now. It’s more complicated than that.

I care about the Palestinian cause because I remember growing up watching it. I remember adults I loved telling me that it was justified in all sorts of ways that never made sense to a child watching other children hide from tanks inside bombed-out buildings or under slabs of concrete. But I haven’t got skin in the game. I don’t have a connection to the land. Like so many people reading this, I am here because I cannot help but be. But I have the privilege of stepping back when this becomes too much. So many people are here precisely because they don’t have that privilege.

The anger that grew in me during the hunger strike wasn’t about Israel, it wasn’t about Palestine, and it wasn’t about Gaza or the West Bank for me directly. But it was about watching this country, my country, the country that told me my whole life it was something, turn around and show me that it was everything that it had ever told me that it wasn’t. The only people who had any hand whatsoever over the way this has totally transformed people politically, they are the people making these decisions in government. As Emma Kamio, mother of Ellie, said to me recently;

The government has radicalised me

I think a lot of people I have met this year feel the same way.

It’s nearly 6 months on now, and what HMP New Hall finally began to understand, the state still does not.

Of course, the hunger strike is over; they all eventually stopped – Kam, Qesser, T, Heba are on bail waiting for their trials, while Amu Gib, Lewie, Jon, and Umer Khalid remain on remand. But the government has not stopped.

Let’s seriously ask ourselves – what kind of country do we live in where a disabled man is being forced to drag himself across the floor to use a toilet? Let’s be crystal clear as well: Umer Khalid did not crawl into prison. He walked. The intentional neglect of the UK prison service has cost this man the use of his legs.

The state has refused Umer the medical care and attention that he has both desperately needed and that he has been legally entitled to receive. A wheelchair that won’t fit in the corridor or through the cell door. Unable to shower for 26 days due to no shower chair being provided. Umer has been abused by the state since the first moment he entered the prison system.

It’s not enough to beat him, to take away his Quran; no. Take away every vestige of dignity possible – it’s the only way to make him pay for having a conscience. It’s not enough to refuse urgent medical care until entire limbs are rendered useless. We must force him to drag himself with one good arm across his prison cell. And when he once again falls and injures his one good arm and shoulder – the only limb he has to navigate life with? He’s left in his cell, unable to use the toilet for over 24 hours. When a fire alarm goes off, we evacuate the entire building and leave him behind.

Now, finally in hospital, several reports state that doctors fear for his safety if he is forced to return to Wormwood Scrubs. The state treats literal paedophiles with more care and dignity than they have treated these humans.

Because showing these people humanity is beyond the state. In 2026, we can call someone a terrorist and watch their humanity wither and die in front of our eyes.

The entire saga of these prosecutions has been harrowing for those involved. Many defendants were whisked away in the middle of the night – one mother thought her child had been kidnapped by a squad of black bloc ballyed up psychopaths. They cut through the doors and they put her in an unmarked van and disappeared her. The police told the mother to ring round the hospitals and morgues.

It was two weeks before they let her know her daughter was alive and in police custody. This wasn’t an isolated case. Other defendants told of being arrested with multiple officers pointing guns at their heads. Twenty to thirty officers swarming into family homes at dawn with loaded weapons. Multiple defendants have told me how, after they were already handcuffed, officers continued to go round the house destroying possessions, smashing up homes.

How do we justify treating people this way?

There’s so much I could say or write about all this – but I know that no one individual in this case would want me to. It’s never been about them. I cannot count how many phone calls I have listened to outside prisons, how many statements I have read – how many times I have heard these voices I have come to recognise.

Every time they chose to centre the Palestinian people and their cause. 2 months without food – so long that there was no hunger, only pain left, and all they could do was think of Palestine. It’s the thing that makes me love them all so much. One recently told me that;

If you make the action about yourself then it was destined to failure from the start.

These brave humans are willing to go to prison for what they believe, and even then, that’s still not enough for this corrupt government. They want more blood from the stone.

Tomorrow, on the 12th of June, the first 4 of the Filton 25 will be sentenced. A jury already refused to convict them on certain charges. So, the state wasn’t willing to let the people on the jury make that decision again. It had to bring them back, to rig the system further, to gag them and their lawyers. To force a jury to convict without ever implicitly stating it. And now that it has managed its most recent ghastly magic trick, we are sitting, all waiting with bated breath, to see what comes next.

At the sentencing, we will find out whether this so-called terrorism link will be applied to this case. The judge argued during the trial that by dismantling Elbit machinery in the UK, the group was aiming to influence the Israeli government.

By denying them access to weaponry. During a genocide.

They weren’t even trying to challenge or influence their own government. They had already tried that;

We tried every democratic means available to us, including demonstrations, fundraisers, encampments, petitions, writing to MPs, stickers leading to Amnesty International information about the apartheid, vigils, arms factory pickets, the list goes on… none of it worked.

From Zoe Rogers’ closing arguments

This wasn’t about influencing anyone – 800,000 people marching, 3000 plus arrests at Defend our Juries protests. That was an attempt to influence. None of that definitively worked. As the wonderful Lisa Luxx from the Free The Filton 25 Defence Committee pointed out in a speech outside The Old Bailey for the, then Brize Norton 5 bail hearings;

Civil disobedience and direct action are two different things… Civil disobedience is usually a large public disruption so you can engage with decision makers. Direct action believes you are the decision maker.

This was (and remains) about making it financially unviable for these factories to operate in this country. Colonialism doesn’t just happen in Kashmir or in Sudan or in the stacks of rubble heaped up in Gaza. Imperialism doesn’t just exist in the mind’s eye in far-flung places many of us will never see. It’s happening all around us, and we are all complicit.

Elbit didn’t have to come to court to defend itself against the accusations that it produces 85% of the drones and land-based weapons that have helped level Gaza. It can’t do that in court. It’s only in the Murdoch-owned media where you can still lie with impunity and without repercussions.

It didn’t need to come to court to provide a breakdown of the weapons that these people broke down. It could account for the weight of every sledgehammer used, to the individual gram, but it couldn’t justify a penny of the damage that it was claimed was caused. It can’t come to court to explain that this research and development lab was shipping out weapons not available for sale, for testing. It doesn’t want to have to explain that the testing site is the world’s largest store of rubble, where people are still shot for crossing invisible lines that exist in the head of a soldier with a sniper rifle half a mile away. The test subjects: women and children.

The legislation being used to apply this terrorism link is based upon the notion that extreme and serious property damage can constitute terrorism. It was introduced after the IRA bombed the Arndale Centre in Manchester in 1996. It caused hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage. This is abuse of power. Plain and simple. Counter-terror legislation should not be used to terrorise traumatised communities who have reacted in the only way that was left available to them after years of resistance to a genocide being played out on their phones in real time.

You might think that, reading this, I am clearly emotionally involved. And I am. There is no denying that. One of the things I often think about in this job is impartiality – what is it? Is it about remaining steadfast in the middle of the road? Should I pretend that the government has a valid point of view in all this? Should I say that, no, it’s okay that the judge didn’t tell the jury about the plans to target these individuals with a terrorist connection? If he told the court that two and two make five, should I be reporting that now? I have gone to protests where there were no other journalists, and then gone home and seen reports the next day from three different people telling three different stories, none of them reporting the facts of what actually went down. Impartiality doesn’t exist – it’s a thin veneer that people hide behind to tell the story they want to tell.

I am not impartial; I think what is happening is wrong. It is an abuse of power so gross and so egregious that it has robbed me of the faith I once had in the system.

What is happening to these individuals is everything that is wrong with this system, packaged up into a little box and neatly wrapped in a bow. It is demonstrably wrong and I will not stop saying that over and over again until someone finally stops to listen. It doesn’t end with this sentencing. The power to create and make change lies in the hands of elected politicians in Parliament. While we sat and listened to those politicians speak to a crowd that filled Pall Mall during the Nakba commemoration march this year, someone said to me;

Imagine if all these people kept walking, all the way to the gates of those factories… imagine what they could achieve

The power to influence and coerce these politicians remains, as always, in the streets. It is in our hands and we can all choose to leverage that power whenever we decide to realise that. When we decide to organise, to mobilise and to help create a real change in this country that we can all be proud of.

I look forward to seeing many of you at Woolwich tomorrow morning where crowds will be gathering from 10am to remind the powers that be of this fact.

No matter what happens tomorrow, these people will not be forgotten. This won’t stop anything. It won’t stop the marches; it won’t stop the protests. It won’t stop me from walking up another prison drive in the dark to document people banging on the gates. It’s only going to breathe fresh life into the movement.

This will not stop people from taking direct action against Elbit, against Rafael, Leonardo or any of these companies which prop up the Israeli government and which profit from genocide on the other side of the globe.

You cannot tread on this and expect it to stop. It doesn’t work like that. I urge the government to please think twice.

Charlotte Head. Sam Corner. Ellie Kamio. Fatema Zainab Rajwani. These people are not terrorists.

Featured image via the Canary

By Barold

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John Healey has resigned as defence secretary with a leadership pitch to the far right and Labour’s war lobby. Healey has said that Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves are not ‘serious’ enough about spending huge amounts of our money on military build-up. The pitch has been praised by Tory and Reform MPs.

Not Tory enough for Healey

Healey has also gone to the Tory Spectator magazine to ‘explain’ his resignation, a clear signal that he doesn’t think red-Tory Starmer has swung hard enough to the pro-war, pro-Israel right. But the resignation appears to be preparation for him throwing his own hat into the leadership contest ring.

The Starmer regime continues Tory policies of strangling public services and parcelling off the NHS to its private health and murder-AI donors. Russia hawk and Israel fan Healey wants to blow at least 3% of our national budget on war preparation. Starmer has destroyed Labour chasing the far-right, white supremacist, friends-of-genocide vote. Healey doesn’t think Starmer’s chasing hard enough.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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On Wednesday 10 June, Andy Burnham vowed to support the Waspi women in the strongest terms possible. Now, a day later, he has made it clear his ‘support’ doesn’t amount to much:

NEW: Burnham *rules out* awarding financial compensation to Waspi women demanding billions of pounds, following an angry backlash within Labour

Greater Manchester mayor has instead floated the idea of offering early access to cheaper travel schemes as recompense…

— Lucy Fisher (@LOS_Fisher) June 11, 2026

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Waspi women

The ‘Waspi’ acronym stands for ‘Women Against State Pension Inequality’. In the group’s own words, Waspi is:

A Campaign group for 1950s* born women who saw rapid and steep increases to their State Pension age without adequate notice. In March 2024, the Ombudsman found this to be maladministration and instructed Parliament to deliver compensation as quickly as possible. WASPI continues to work cross-party to see justice delivered for the 3.6 million women affected.

Here’s what Burnham said in a Makerfield hustings event on Wednesday (emphasis added):

I stick by campaigners that I support. I stuck by the Hillsborough families, I’ll stick by the Waspi women because they deserve some recompense for the unfairness.

Burnham also said politicians who get into government but don’t “do anything” make him feel “uncomfortable”.

Although Burnham didn’t say the “recompense” would come in the form of cash, most assumed he meant that. After all, it would be a big slap in the face to hint at a financial settlement and then offer cheap bus tickets, right? And Burnham wouldn’t be foolish enough needlessly piss the group off, would he?

Well, according to his spokesperson:

Andy has always recognised the unfair way in which state pension equalisation was introduced.

“As Mayor of Greater Manchester, he supported WASPI women in the city-region with early access to concessionary travel, providing some recompense to them within affordability limits.

“He accepts the final decision has been made in relation to financial compensation but has indicated an openness to considering similar schemes on the Greater Manchester model.

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Cheap bus passes it is then.

And now, Burnham has pissed off a group which is promising to “unseat” Labour in the next election unless it gets the £10bn compensation they want.

Andy U-Turnham

As far as we can tell, Burnham backtracked because of a backlash from Labour politicians. As Lucy Fisher of the Financial Times reported:

One government figure decried Burnham’s hint about a major compensation spending pledge as “pathetic”, adding: “He can’t say no to anyone.”

A Starmer ally suggested Burnham’s move was Corbynite, adding: “Keir literally won by not being this version of the Labour party.”

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Another MP said:

I see Andy Burnham has lost the plot again.

Here’s the thing, though, the Starmer government is actually very unpopular, and it certainly didn’t win in 2024 because of its opposition to the Waspi women. As such, Burnham has every reason to go against the status quo. Yet again, though, he’s backed down because people got angry and the man has no guiding light beyond people liking him.

It’s not the first policy he’s proven to be wishy-washy on either:

• Burnham is silent on wealth taxes – not a promising sign from potential PM.
• Burnham WON’T back proportional representation this parliament.
• Shapeshifting Burnham ditches trans rights to panic-grab Reform votes.
• Burnham slammed for saying he won’t renationalise Thames Water.
• Burnham calls for ‘safe routes’ then agrees with Farage in muddled interview.
• Green candidate calls out genocide as Burnham sits on fence.

At this point, Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer are u-turning so rapidly we could wire them up to the national grid.

Featured image via Anthony Devlin (Getty Images)

By Willem Moore

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On the same day that the UK dealt with the aftermath of white riots targeting people of colour, Reform UK reinstated the councillor who suggested ‘melting Nigerians to fill potholes‘.

It’s a sign that the party doesn’t take racial justice seriously. Worse than that, it’s a sign that the party is actively pursuing an agenda of racial injustice.

Glenn Gibbins, who said Nigerians should be melted down to fill in the pot holes, has won a seat. pic.twitter.com/mJjkK3KbbN

— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) May 9, 2026

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Weasel words from Reform

In May 2025, Glenn Gibbins was elected in the Sunderland City’s Hylton Castle ward. He was immediately suspended, however, after unearthed social media comments like the above surfaced. Other comments included:

What’s obvious from these comments is that Gibbins isn’t just a hateful and bigoted little man; he’s also the sort of person who doesn’t inspire confidence in regards to his ability to think. In other words, he’s not someone you’d want holding power in your local area even if you agreed with his rancid opinions.

With the final comment, Gibbins is essentially calling for a race war against Muslims. And much like many other far-right politicians and agitators this week, he did so by pointing to the crimes of individuals to target the entire population:

It's out of control, and there's no political leadership. Why isn't the Prime Minister speaking out against the twisted logic that blames people, entirely unconnected with the crime, solely based on the colour of their skin?

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) June 10, 2026

Blaming every member of a group for the crimes of individuals is known as ‘collective punishment’. It’s prohibited under the Geneva Convention, because we saw what happens when its allowed to happen unchecked in the 20th century. And now we’re seeing it again:

“What you’re seeing is a race based pogrom, we are seeing men going door to door asking to 'get the foreigners out' based exclusively on the colour of their skin.”

SDLP leader Claire Hannah criticises the unrest taking place in Belfast.#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/jBNM7tWg7U

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) June 9, 2026

The BBC reported the following on Reform’s decision to readmit Gibbins:

Reform UK said following an internal disciplinary process the councillor had now been readmitted to the party with a final written warning.

A spokesperson said: “He has apologised for making the post and accepts that it was made in extremely poor taste showing poor judgement.” Gibbins has been approached for comment.

Has Gibbins learned his lesson, though? Or has Reform simply decided it isn’t even going to pretend to care anymore?

As I've said before, there is a calculated reason Reform have failed to clearly and specifically condemn the Southampton and Belfast violence. It's because they want to send the signal they are more hard-line on immigration than Restore. It's not accidental. It's a strategy.

— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) June 10, 2026

A pattern

It doesn’t end with Gibbins. As Reform Party UK Exposed reported (emphasis added):

Reform UK Sunderland has a problem.

Councillor David Laing

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Former BNP candidate who lied when asked about his previous politics.

No action taken.

–

Councillor Glenn Gibbons

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Said Nigerians should be melted down to fill potholes.

Reform UK have readmitted him.

–

Councillor David Barker

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Neglected his children and had them taken away by social services. Harassed social services creating a website to harass people protecting children.

No action taken.

–

Councillor Michael Quigley

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He spent Christmas Day this year proposing putting elephants on Dover beaches to shit on immigrants. Utterly deranged.

No action taken.

–

Councillor Axel Tye

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Shared anti-Semitic post on Facebook.

No action taken

And this is just one council.

As such, it seems the reason Reform isn’t binning councillors for racism is because if it did it would have no councillors left.

Featured image via Carl Court / Getty Images

By Willem Moore

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Elon Musk has once again been encouraging far-right agitators running rampant on the streets of Britain and Ireland. And in response, Green Party leader Zack Polanski has called him out:

This man is a threat to our democracy. He backs violence and extremism.

Blaming a group of people for the awful actions of an individual leads us to a very dark place.

Musk, Lowe, Farage, Robinson – these men don't give a shit about this country, they want to rip us apart. https://t.co/zbV6s42xIv

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— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) June 11, 2026

‘Threat to democracy’

Since Elon Musk bought X/Twitter, far-right accounts have made the site their home. As NBC News found in 2024:

NBC News found that at least 150 paid “Premium” subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months, often in apparent violation of X’s rules. The paid accounts posting the content all consistently posted antisemitic or pro-Nazi material. Examples included praise of Nazi soldiers, sharing of Nazi symbols and denials of the Holocaust.

These accounts aren’t simply lurking on the fringes either:

During one seven-day period in March, seven of the most widely shared pro-Nazi posts on X accrued 4.5 million views in total. One post with 1.9 million views promoted a false and long-debunked conspiracy theory that 6 million Jews did not die in the Holocaust. More than 5,300 verified and unverified accounts reshared that post, and other popular posts were reshared hundreds of times apiece.

Some of these accounts are doing well specifically because Elon Musk retweets them:

Elon Musk has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents on his platform X, spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers. https://t.co/FIeJ3NAYJA

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) September 1, 2024

As Mother Jones reported:

Musk is amplifying users who will incorporate cherry-picked data and misleading graphs into their argument as to why people of European descent are biologically superior, showing how fringe accounts, like user @eyeslasho, experience a drastic jump in followers after Musk shares their tweets. The @eyeslasho account has even thanked Musk for raising “awareness” in a thread last year.

Notoriously, Musk once did a Nazi salute in front of a roaring crowd. Because he’s a coward, however, he and his supporters have denied it was a Nazi salute ever since:

I don’t know how to explain to people how these are so clearly different

Like; the videos are side by side here and you can see how Elon’s is a deliberate Nazi salute and Zohran’s is a gentle wave https://t.co/R3sgJM511n

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— Mike (@SpideyInTARDIS) November 8, 2025

Israel critic Hasan Piker — who was banned from entering the UK — said the following about Musk:

Hasan points out that Elon Musk has literally incited a significant amount of violence within the UK and Europe overall through his tweets and influence, yet Elon hasn’t been banned from the UK. Why is that? pic.twitter.com/wOIRaYOxkg

— adri ♡ (@socialistadri) June 10, 2026

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Standards

What happened in Belfast is obviously a dark and disturbing crime. The problem is the crime of an individual is being used to justify attacks on all people of colour:

A pastor helping those in houses targeted tonight in Belfast says people were being put out of their homes “because they're black”

He says members of his church “who have been with us for 20 years..had their house attacked, windows smashed, houses beside them burned” pic.twitter.com/nYwrVPx8Aa

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— Taj Ali (@Taj_Ali1) June 9, 2026

This is the kind of thing that was said about the Jews in the 1930s.

It is not hyperbolic to say that degrading an entire culture leads us to a very dark place. Reform are playing with fire right now trying to stop themselves being outflanked by the extremists of Restore. https://t.co/4THiLmSsKb

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— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) June 10, 2026

It’s also clear that these people don’t care about the crime itself… they care about its usefulness in terms of propaganda:

If you are being told to "protest" in Belfast but you weren't in Bristol after Alina Burns tried to behead someone, ask yourself "why?" pic.twitter.com/Kn5RpCFkSX

— Socialist Opera Singer (@OperaSocialist) June 9, 2026

Given that Musk owns X, he has the ability to push propaganda like no one else. His posts show him drumming up support for racist white riots in belfast before they happened:

Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!! https://t.co/73GDcLLFwv

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2026

Oh, and this is something he’s doing with the backing of the Murdoch press, by the way. This man is the editor-at-large of the Sun:

He’s encouraging pogroms on the streets of the UK. Maybe it’s time you showed some of the patriotism you so often lecture the rest of us about.

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) June 11, 2026

If you’re wondering — yes — that is the same Harry Cole who said this (as immortalised by the WayBack Machine):

Growing resentment

To be fair to Keir Starmer, he has also been criticising Musk:

WATCH: Keir Starmer accuses Elon Musk of "whipping up division" in the UK over Henry Nowak’s murder pic.twitter.com/034ltg3TMk

— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) June 4, 2026

The problem is criticism is all he’s offering. And we’re at a point at which we can no longer pretend this man hasn’t weaponised his propaganda site to stir up violence and racial tensions in the UK.

Featured image via Benjamin Fanjoy / Leon Neal / Mario Tama (Getty Images)

By Willem Moore

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The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has released a truly mealy-mouthed statement to justify the massive role far-right AI firm Palantir has within the British war machine. Palantir has won contracts for all manner of services and infrastructure. This is despite sustained criticism and public concern.

The statement was signed by a Who’s Who of UK defence officials:

THE RT HON JOHN HEALEY MP Secretary of State for Defence

Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton KCB ADC FREng

National Armaments Director, Rupert Pearce

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Permanent Secretary, Jeremy Pocklington CB

Chief of Defence Nuclear, Maddy McTernan CB

And opened with the claim:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the modern battlefield and will profoundly transform the future of warfare. In the past few years, AI models have progressed from completing basic tasks to surpassing PhD-level intelligence.

By way of explanation, they claimed:

Defence faces a clear imperative – we must adopt and exploit AI faster than our adversaries. If we fail to do this the UK will lose its operational advantage and cede advantage to our adversaries. The stakes could not be higher.

The UK military is currently locked into a multi-billion pound contract with Palantir. The statement makes no mention of Palantir, despite the genocide-linked firm’s role being the source of most controversy.

The UK military, police, NHS and, allegedly, the Telegraph have started using Palantir technology. The firm maintains a permanent desk in southern Israel, and is deeply involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as Trump’s paramilitary immigration operations, ICE, whose officers use the firm’s gear.

On 2 June, the Canary reported that UK officials have even been using Palantir software to decide what Palantir technology to buy to fight future wars. On 4 June, we also heard how former spy chief David Omand had been promoting the idea that integrating AI into warfare is somehow be ethical.

During the same week, we reported that Palantir had won a contract to manage UK firearms, explosives, and related stockpiles.

Time to divest from Palantir

Then on 4 June, the UK technology select committee went against the tide to warn that Palantir’s takeover of key parts of the UK state was an “unacceptable weakness.” The committee also rejected the notion that the firm was the only available choice:

Palantir should not have such a significant role in the UK public sector, and that it is far from the only company capable of providing the data analysis ‘middleware’ required by public bodies.

The firm’s founders are open about their far-right politics. A 22-tweet ‘manifesto’ posted on X in April showed Palantir’s vision was exposed as a collection of right-wing tropes.

For example, point 21 reads:

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures … have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

While Point 22 is a fascist-accented lament for Western white supremacy:

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Palantir isn’t the only AI firm with military contracts. That is true. But it is one of the most prominent and dangerous. The company’s links to Israel, the CIA and Donald Trump mark it out as such. Palantir’s vision is also acutely authoritarian and fascistic and its leadership are open about this.

No milquetoast press release is going to change that reality.

Featured image via Omar Marques / Getty Images

By Joe Glenton

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A judge is expected to sentence four Palestine Action activists as ‘terrorists’ on 12 June, despite the activists not being convicted as such.

Judge Jeremy Johnson has indicated he may add a ‘terrorist connection’ to the charges of Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona (Ellie) Kamio and Fatema Rajwani under section 69 of the Sentencing Act 2020. This is despite the jury convicting the Palestine Action four of criminal damage in their retrial.

The conviction follows the four activists’ direct action to damage computers and drones, and spray red paint across the walls and floor of an Elbit Systems factory in Filton, near Bristol on 6 August 2024. Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest arms firm.

On 5 May, the jury convicted them without the knowledge that presiding judge Johnson could later impose a terror link during sentencing. This is due to a long list of reporting restrictions on the UK press, which the judge used to block coverage that he’d barred defendants from speaking about their motivations for joining Palestine Action.

Judge gags Palestine Action

The gagging orders that judge Johnson issued also prevented the defendants from providing information to the jury on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and Elbit Systems’ role in it.

Johnson also banned media from reporting that the defendants could face terrorism sentences. The restrictions only lifted on 12 May, a week after the conviction.

Should the judge sentence the ‘Filton Four’, as they’re now known, as terrorists, they could serve far longer prison sentences. They could also face severe limitations on their lives upon release.

On 5 June, Defend Our Juries (DOJ) filed a complaint against Johnson with the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office. Over 3,000 people, including lawyers, law professors, retired police officers and magistrates, have signed the complaint. It alleges that decisions taken by the judge “amount to a pattern of exceptional, biased and discriminatory conduct”. Judge Johnson has since refused to recuse himself from the case.

The DOJ complaint also cites Johnson’s decision to treat the defendants’ desire to prevent Israel’s mass killings of Palestinian civilians as an aggravating, rather than mitigating, feature.

According to the judge, the intention to prevent the deaths of Palestinian civilians is what brings their actions within the scope of the Terrorism Act. He regards it as an attempt to “influence the Israeli government”.

Additionally, the DOJ complaint accuses Johnson of acting “vindictively” in remanding Head, Kamio and Rajwani to custody after their retrial. Three of the four have served eighteen months on remand, with Corner having been inside for 21 months.

Commenting, Campaign Against Arms Trade spokesperson Kirsten Bayes said:

For generations, at Greenham Common, Aldermaston, Fairford and others, the peace movement has taken action against military logistics and supply chains, involving breaching security and causing damage.

Keir Starmer himself was part of the legal team defending the ‘Fairford Five’, who carried out direct action at RAF Fairford during the Iraq war.

The ‘Filton Four’ case bears close parallels to the ‘Raytheon Nine’, where the defendants were acquitted of criminal damage at the Raytheon factory in Derry in 2006. In this case, the activists attempted to stop weaponry being sold to Israel for use against Lebanon. Their motivations for allegedly damaging office equipment were treated as a mitigating rather than an aggravating factor, as they should be.

In the Filton raids, it was abundantly clear that neither the Israeli nor UK government were the target, as they were and remain far beyond reasonable influence. Instead, Palestine Action activists sought to disrupt the means of production.

Just as one would deny a carving knife to a murderer, these four activists sought to prevent their nation from supplying murder weapons to the genocidal Israeli government. In doing so, the Filton Four upheld an ethical duty to prevent harm, and only did so when it was clear that all ordinary options had been exhausted.

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Sentencing the Filton Four as ‘terrorists’ when they were not convicted as such, and when the evidence that might have supported that conclusion was not even allowed to be heard in court, would not only be unprecedented but grotesque and dystopian.

It will always be the case that those taking non-violent direct action to prevent complicity in genocide are acting in service of humanity.

It must be said that it is a dire reflection of the UK’s police and judiciary that the Filton Four will likely be sentenced as ‘terrorists’, weeks after the Met police refused to even investigate a single one of the 2,000+ UK nationals now known to have served in Israel’s genocidal army.

Featured image via Leon Neal / Getty Images

By The Canary

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Legal experts and social justice campaigners have hit back against Kemi Badenoch’s plan to scrap the public sector equality duty, PSED, aka ‘the duty’.

Besides the obvious dire impact that the move would have on minoritised individuals across the UK, Badenoch’s argument displayed fundamental misunderstandings of the duty itself — which requires public bodies to assess the impact of their services on people with legally protected characteristics.

Dancing to Reform’s tune

In a 9 June speech, the Tory leader announced her intention to “repeal the public sector equality duty in its entirety.” Badenoch claimed the PSED had led to a pursuit of “equality of outcome” rather than “equal treatment and equality under the law”. She added that:

There are many laws which were brought in with good intentions but are delivering perverse outcomes and unintended consequences.

The PSED requires public sector leaders to abide by equality considerations set out in the 2010 Equality Act. Principally, this means working to prevent discrimination against people with protected characteristics — race, sex, disability etc — and monitoring the outcomes of that work.

Badenoch’s speech came just a week after Nigel Farage exploited the murder of Henry Nowak to attack diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — better known as ‘EDI’ in the UK. Reform UK had also announced, several months earlier, that it plans to rip up the Equality Act completely.

Equality duty is ‘there to help’

In response to Badenoch’s announcement, a spokesperson for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) — the body responsible for overseeing the application of the Equality Act — explained that the PSED doesn’t function as the Tory leader was trying to make out. Rather, they stated:

The PSED is not a barrier to these organisations doing the job the public expects them to do.

Most take it seriously and use the requirements of the PSED to design the best possible services for everyone. It’s there to help them make good decisions, based on an understanding of the impact those decisions have on everyone that they affect.

Professor of human rights law Colm O’Cinneide, of University College London, took a similar tack:

What the duty does is to impose a positive obligation upon public bodies to engage with these issues and to do more than just to maintain basic legal compliance, but to actually take proactive steps to eliminate problems that may exist, even if they’re not triggering a specific litigation risk.

He also underlined the shoddy nature of overall argument against the PSED:

A lot of the criticism is effectively cherrypicking individual issues and saying that because these controversies are in some way tangentially related to the duty, the entire mechanism is flawed.

Wrong… or opportunistic?

However, as the Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) highlighted, Badenoch knows perfectly well how the PSED actually functions. MEND commented on the leader of the opposition’s glaring hypocrisy:

Kemi Badenoch says the Equality Act should be “a shield to protect you from discrimination, not a sword for social engineering.” But the duty she wants to scrap is precisely what makes that shield work. It requires public bodies to consider who their decisions might harm before they act. Remove the duty and you take the shield away.

This is also a remarkable reversal from Badenoch, who in December 2023 when Minister for Women and Equalities, wrote to every public authority instructing them to comply with this very duty, and stated that there is no hierarchy of rights because every person holds a protected characteristic. Either she was wrong then, or she is being opportunistic now.

You can read that letter here, complete with the call for public sector leaders to “ensure that equality issues are actively considered”. No prizes for guessing the Canary’s pick out of “wrong then” and “opportunistic now”.

‘Free hand to harm your life chances’

Meanwhile, other commentators focused on the dire impacts that scrapping the PSED would have on all minoritised communities. Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trade Union Congress, didn’t hold back:

This proposal would give a future Tory government a free hand to harm your life chances if you’re a woman, gay, black, disabled or working class.

Likewise, the Traveller Movement — a charity supporting Irish Travellers, Romani and Roma people — stated that: 

Removing the Public Sector Equality Duty risks creating a cycle in which inequalities are identified only after harm has occurred, rather than being addressed at the earliest stage. Over time, this could result in the experiences and needs of marginalised communities carrying less weight in public decision-making, making it harder to challenge disadvantage and rebuild trust in public institutions.

For Romani (Gypsy), Roma and Irish Traveller communities, which continue to face significant barriers in areas such as education, health, housing and access to public services, the potential consequences of weakening these safeguards are particularly concerning. Any proposal to remove the Public Sector Equality Duty would lead to the most marginalised communities being put most at risk.

‘Common sense’ is a call for more racism

Lastly, independent MP and career-long human rights advocate Diane Abbott commented that: 

Ending current equality rules is dangerous and divisive; a green light for all the bigots and racists. This happens when your ambition is no greater than to be the Nick Clegg in a Farage-led government

In particular, the mother of the house highlighted the Tory leader’s ridiculous appeal to ‘common sense’ to prevent discrimination. Regarding the issue of public accommodations for disabled people, Badenoch claimed that:

You don’t need a duty to tell you to take account of differences. Quite often differences are obvious.

Abbott, in return, stated that:

We live in a society where racism is commonplace. Macpherson’s call to tackle it were only ever partially taken up. ‘Common sense’ is a call for more racism not less.

The reference to Macpherson in there refers to Badenoch’s attacks on the Macpherson report. After the shamefully police handling of the racially-motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, the landmark report branded UK policing as institutionally racist.

It’s natural that Badenoch would try to critique the Macpherson report. Likewise, it’s natural that she’d fail so spectacularly. The report and its findings are the quintessential example of just how wrong the Tory leader and her ilk are.

If avoiding discrimination is simply a matter of common sense, then the police ignored it in favour of vicious  racism. Conversely, if avoiding discrimination isn’t common sense, then the duty to consider it is a helpful, legally enforceable reminder.

Unfortunately for Badenoch, she’s wrong either way you slice it.

Featured image via YouTube / the Canary

By Alex/Rose Cocker

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