Rail union RMT has called for an end to outsourcing on Southeastern services, demanding that cleaners employed by private contractor Churchill be brought back in-house under public ownership.

The government took over running Southeastern in 2021. It’s due to be integrated into Great British Railways. However, an external company, Churchill, still employs the cleaning staff. The RMT says it offers inferior pay and conditions and little to no job security.

The union highlighted that Churchill has paid out more than £50m to shareholders in the last two years. It argues that the company is prioritising profits over the interests of frontline staff and the travelling public on Southeastern.

The RMT added that the Labour government had promised the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation but that so far it hadn’t followed through on that commitment.

Activists from the union will leaflet Ashford International station from 7am on Thursday 30 April. A short demonstration will follow from 9am, in order to highlight the campaign.

RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey said:

There is no justification for keeping cleaners outsourced to a private contractor when Southeastern is in public hands.

Churchill has paid out tens of millions to shareholders at the same time as suppressing cleaners pay, denying them sick pay and leaving them without a proper pension.

Cutting corners on staffing and conditions inevitably impacts on cleanliness and standards across the railway which negatively impacts on passengers.

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We are calling on the government to end outsourcing on rail and bring these essential workers into Great British Railways where they belong.

John Parsons, RMT regional organiser, said:

Our members are being asked to keep trains and stations clean without even the basic tools to do the job properly, with reports of bin bags being rationed, a lack of PPE and serious safety concerns ignored by Churchill.

Staff who speak up are being managed out of the business, which our union finds totally unacceptable and is yet more evidence of the contempt outsourcing companies have for railway workers.

Featured image via YouTube / RMTtelevision

By The Canary

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The barrister representing Palestine Action told the Court of Appeal today that the Starmer government didn’t want to use other laws against activists because human rights would get in the way.

Home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is appealing against the High Court’s finding that the regime’s ban on the protest group Palestine Action is unlawful.

The case is addressing Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protect rights of free speech and protest.

Barrister Owen Greenhall said the government decided to use the Terrorism Act to impose the proscription because other measures would come with procedural obligations under the Human Rights Act.

Only two forms of behavioural orders are cited [in government discussions], Criminal Behaviour Orders and Serious Crime Prevention Orders…the objection taken to the use of those orders is that it would require the court to consider Article 10 and 11 rights before imposing such orders…but clearly proscription is a far greater infringement of Article 10 and 11 rights.

Yesterday, the government’s barrister told the court that proscription does not prevent people showing support for Palestine Action. This is untrue. The Terrorism Act 2000 makes support for a proscribed organisation a criminal offence with sentences of up to 14 years.

Some 3,300 people have been arrested to-date for showing support for Palestine Action, mostly older and disabled people. The Met Police continue to arrest more.

A government run by a supposed ‘human rights lawyer’ drips with contempt for those rights when they belong to opponents of Israel’s genocide, apartheid, wars of aggression and crimes against humanity.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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Under Zack Polanski, the Green Party has nearly quadrupled its membership while simultaneously leapfrogging Labour in the polls. Regardless of what you think of him, you have to acknowledge Polanski is a savvy political operator.

To tackle this political wunderkind, the Labour Party has dispatched Steve Reed — a man who’s essentially a sentient brick with a haircut. Reed has decided to go after Polanski by repeating the same attack lines over and over; attack lines which have shown no signs of resonating with voters and probably never will.

Polanski, meanwhile, is hitting back by reminding everyone that Reed is the absolute last person to making any sort of point about anything.

pic.twitter.com/BEPVELEREU

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) April 28, 2026

The cynical accusations of antisemitism are something the Labour right began playing around with under Corbyn. As you can see, however, Reed is not best placed to make such claims.

Polanski and pointless questions

As the Canary reported this week, the issue wasn’t that Polanski ‘wouldn’t answer questions’, as Reed suggested. The problem was Polanski was doing news shows to discuss the local elections, and interviewers kept asking him about breasts and the Royal Family.

.@ZackPolanski is asked, is it official green party policy to abolish the monarchy?

Sensible answer. pic.twitter.com/QWKMK9y8wy

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) April 27, 2026

So #GMB spent their entire interview with @ZackPolanski asking him about policies that aren't Green party policy & aren't in the manifesto for Mays elections, along with a story from the scum about Zack before he was a politician

Zack: "This is why people hate the media" pic.twitter.com/nuphPCF8fY

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) April 27, 2026

Do the local elections not matter? The mainstream British media seem to think they don’t.

The Green Party could be offering real solutions to local problems, but the public will never know because nobody on the telly bothered to ask.

The British media openly disdains everyday citizens outside of London and the refusal to engage with local politics exemplifies that.

Steve Reed, the anti-Polanski minister

Now, back to Reed. Polanski isn’t the only one using his post as an opportunity to highlight how wretched this guy is.

If only @SteveReedMP would also step up and take accountability for his efforts (or lack of) to abolish leasehold. Perhaps Polanski should also hypnotise you to grow some balls, so you can stand up against vested interests and your donor buddies. https://t.co/KoKHiPD1dA

— Leasehold Hostage (@endleaseholduk) April 28, 2026

This next one is in reference to Reed being the housing minister (or was the housing minister, but anyway, he now seems to be the anti-Polanski minister?).

You have tough questions to answer regarding your lack of progress on the building safety crisis.

Less Twitter, more progress! https://t.co/PvlUx6NXe9

— Dan Bruce (@dannybster) April 29, 2026

Nothing going on

Many pointed out what we did, namely that Labour has very little substance when it comes to attacking the Greens.

The fact they have to keep repeating this same, tired old attack line only reinforces the fact that Labour MPs simply have no valid challenge against @ZackPolanski or @TheGreenParty policies.
It really is beyond pathetic…and very boring. https://t.co/9Yqt179dsS

— Anne Greensmith (@snowleopardess) April 28, 2026

It seems Labour’s attacks aren’t working. Or, to be completely fair, the Green Party is doing well despite them.

Potentially things would be even worse if Reed wasn’t banging on about ‘boob hypnotherapy’ every five minutes. Perhaps if he gave up, Labour would be set to lose all of its seats in the upcoming local elections and not just most of them:

Projected net changes for local elections:

Ref +1,437
Grn +926
Lib +327
Con -627
Lab -1,738

Median estimate via @Moreincommon_, April '26 pic.twitter.com/OFxPMxmoUV

— Stats for Lefties (@LeftieStats) April 21, 2026

Featured image via X/ Barold

By Willem Moore

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The Labour government’s ‘one in, one out’ migrant policy faces a major legal challenge in the High Court for violating human rights laws.

The court has heard that the Home Office’s decision to ban modern slavery appeals is a violation of human rights laws.

Previously, it was the case that if the Home Office rejected a migrant’s human trafficking claims, they could then ask for a review of the decision. Crucially, the appeals would typically overturn the rejection — recognising the migrant as a victim of modern slavery — in almost 80% of cases.

However, home secretary Shabana Mahmood, changed the modern slavery guidance in September 2025. She removed the right for a migrant to appeal the Home Office’s decision before they’re deported. Instead, Mahmood’s department argues that they can apply for help in France.

Should the High Court case be successful, it would massively impede the speed at which Mahmood can deport people under the ‘one in, one out’ scheme.

Asylum policy and ‘institutional disregard’ for evidence

Six migrants, all of whom have made human trafficking claims in the UK, brought the case to the High Court, the Independent reported. All six had previously arrived in the UK on small boats over the course of 2025.

The Home Office acknowledged one individual, known as AYA, as a victim of modern slavery. A last-minute court injunction blocked the deportation of another claimant, known as EXR.

However, as a result of the new asylum policy, three of the six were removed to France.

The claimants’ barrister, Sam Grodzinski KC, argued before the court that the UK system would only be lawful if it “identifies the paramount importance of identifying victims [of trafficking] correctly”.

However, Mahmood’s new policy shows an “institutional disregard of potentially relevant evidence”. As such, it fails to conform to either the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking (ECAT) or the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Claims should be ‘properly investigated’

Grodzinski highlighted that, according to 2025 government data, the overwhelming majority of appeals recognise migrants as victims of trafficking. He told the presiding judge, Justice Sheldon:

Individuals have a fundamental right under ECAT to have their claims properly investigated.

The barrister argued that the Home Office questions many migrants within hours after they arrive on small boats. Often, they’re confused and disoriented, and cannot understand the questions they’re being asked. As such, it’s unsurprising that they don’t communicate their history of human trafficking immediately.

Grodzinski added:

Victim identification is a process that takes time; it can’t be done speedily, not if it is to be done properly.

In its defence, the Home Office stated that it has made provisions for “exceptional circumstances” in which it might reconsider modern slavery rulings.

However, Grodzinski highlighted that these circumstances aren’t actually communicated to caseworkers. Likewise, such exceptional challenges usually only take place when the Home Office is threatened with significant legal action.

Age-disputed asylum seekers

The Home Office also argued that deportees can apply for support as victims of trafficking in France.

This latter point typifies the modern Labour attitude to asylum seekers in a nutshell. Figuring out whether the UK has an obligation to a trafficking victim might impede the ability to deport them. As such, the government simply chooses to ignore crucial steps in modern slavery decisions.

In a similar case, the Home Office recently landed itself in hot water over its failure to accurately determine whether migrant detainees were children.

Using freedom of information requests to local authority children’s services, the Independent Humans for Rights Network found that, in the seven months since ‘One in, one out’ began last September, the Home Office has detained 76 ‘age-disputed’ children.

The Home Office treats these individuals as adults for the purposes of detention and deportation. However, social workers later determine them to be children. Twenty-six of the ‘age-disputed’ group had either been reassessed as children by Social Services or were in the process of being, the Guardian wrote.

Meanwhile, 11 kids were waiting for an age assessment. The Home Office had already forcibly deported 13 to France. Damningly, one child was confirmed to be a minor after being forcibly deported.

Home Office closes its eyes and covers its ears

Just as in the modern slavery case, the Home Office closes its eyes and covers its ears, and pretends it heard nothing. Then, it lets France sort out its mess.

In the name of expediency, Labour has willfully ignored its duty to investigate human rights claims. However, our government doesn’t get to claim ignorance after removing a migrant’s right to appeal.

Mahmood and her cronies knew full well what they were doing. They simply thought they could get away with it.

Featured image via the Canary

By Alex/Rose Cocker

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For a third time over the last week the Met police have made arrests outside Woolwich Crown Court of people holding signs communicating the principle of jury equity. The group of six people arrested on 29 April were sitting peacefully displaying the signs:

Jurors have an absolute right to acquit according to their conscience.

And:

Even without legal defence jurors can still acquit on conscience.

Meanwhile inside Woolwich Crown Court, there has been a shocking development in the Filton case. Five of the six defence barristers have left the trial following judicial rulings which cannot be reported until the end of the trial.

A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries said today:

In recent years we have seen judicial rulings that banned climate campaigners from saying the words ‘fuel poverty’ and ‘climate change’ in their trials.

Today we understand a judicial ruling has been given that goes even further, and as a response the legal professionals representing five of the six defendants on trial in the Filton case have no choice but to leave the trial because they have been left with literally nothing they can say in closing arguments.

We should all be alarmed to hear that the legal process has been so corrupted that, today we have lawyers in the UK walking away from a trial because it is impossible for them to do their job of defending their clients.

The trial of the first six defendants from the group known as the ‘Filton24’ has reached the stage of closing arguments. Five of the six defendants will now be giving their own closing speeches as they have no legal representation.

In her closing address to the jury today, defendant Charlotte Head said:

Sadly, despite how unbelievably kind and smart and wise my barristers are, after some decisions made by the court, I no longer feel like they are permitted to represent me in a way that does us all justice. So I’ve had to represent myself.

I recently found out that it wasn’t until 1898 that a person who was charged with a crime in the UK could speak to the jury under oath during their trial…

Under those conditions, me and my co-defendants would have had to sit quietly in the dock and await our fate, unable to tell you in our own words who we were and why we were sitting before you.

I was unsurprised to learn that, in 1898, when the first person was allowed to answer the charges they faced from the witness box and testify to their own defence, many people, including prosecutors and judges, were worried about what would happen.

Not because they feared that the defendants would lie but because they feared the jury sympathising more with normal people than the elites of the legal profession.

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A long time has passed since then but it might be said that some prosecutors and judges still share that fear. A fear of the jury’s ability to be compassionate, to question the motives and integrity of the state, and to act as a barrier to the outcomes they want to achieve – namely to convict defendants…

They are frightened that you will listen to us, the defendants, when we talk to you and afraid of the power you hold as a jury. It’s entirely possible you may be one of the last juries to get to make decisions in a case like this before even that right is taken away from ordinary people.

17 arrests outside Woolwich Crown Court

Today’s arrests outside Woolwich Crown Court bring the total number of people arrested outside the court this week to 17.

Today’s arrests were made under the charge of Aggravated Trespass whereas the previous 11 arrests related to an alleged breach of Section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986.

It is understood that the change in the police’s approach to their powers of arrest may be because neither today’s, nor the two previous actions outside Woolwich Crown Court were in breach of the terms stated by the police as justification for the Section 14 being in place, namely, to prevent noisy demonstrations taking place within a one mile radius of the court.

This week’s sign-holding actions, as with all Defend Our Juries sign-holding actions, were held as a silent vigil. The grounds for arrest this week appear to be a cynical attempt to bypass the terms of the High Court ruling in Warner.

Featured image supplied

By The Canary

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The Stop EPH Network’s international action days are seeing 13 protests taking place in seven different countries against fossil fuel giant EPH. The actions aim to shine a light on one of Europe’s top three carbon emitters.

On 28 April, five young people shut down the lobby of Byron House in London’s ultra-posh St James’s. They disrupted ongoing business with placards and drew attention to the resident company EP UK Investments. It’s the UK arm of Energetický a průmyslový holding (EPH).

Security locked three of the young people, two under 18, inside the building. They used force to keep them inside, take their placards and intimidate them.

This protest was against the expansion of unsustainable energy projects, exposing Czech fossil fuel giant EPH.

One of the young people taking part said:

EPH is one of the biggest CO2 emitters in Europe, yet they plan to continue expanding their coal and gas energy facilities.

Candy, 17, said:

EPH is putting profits over the planet by finding loopholes in just transition agreements.

Megan, 24, said:

EPH is one of the top three carbon emitters in Europe, but until now has remained relatively invisible to the public due to confusing structure, creative accounting and greenwashing. We are here to change that.

Lily, 17, said:

The security used intimidation tactics, locking us inside the building and claiming to have power over us. We refused to be intimidated, and will continue to expose EPH and Daniel Krětínský for destroying our futures and communities across Europe.

EPH is one of the biggest companies in Czechia, owned by billionaire Daniel Krětínský. It owns coal fired power stations in Czechia, Slovakia, Italy, and Germany. It claims to be moving mostly away from coal.

EPH owns Kilroot, in the North of Ireland, which was the UK’s penultimate coal power station. And it has gas infrastructure in Italy, France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Slovakia, and Czechia.

Krětínský added the UK’s Royal Mail to his collection of companies in 2025. He’s also faced scrutiny for economic ties with Russia due to owning one of the main gas pipes from Russia to Europe (EUstream).

Featured image supplied

By The Canary

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Last week, Maurice Glasman – the peer who supplied Blue Labour with its intellectual architecture – told the Telegraph that Keir Starmer “cannot conceivably continue” as Prime Minister. The remark was reported as a defection. It is more accurately read as a development inside a faction that has shaped the post-Corbyn Labour Party for the better part of a decade.

As previous Canary coverage of the Mandelson scandal has shown, the moment is one in which the assumptions of the present Labour government are being re-examined across the parliamentary party. Blue Labour’s relationship to that re-examination is now central to it.

An ascendant faction

Blue Labour has been close to the Starmer project since well before the 2024 election. Around twenty MPs now sit in its loose parliamentary caucus. A wider circle of advisers, journalists, and policy figures also move within its orbit. Its arguments – on family, faith, place, immigration, and the limits of liberalism – have given the soft-left of the parliamentary party much of the language it now uses to describe its own discontent.

The wider cultural moment has helped. A prevailing zeitgeist of disillusionment with the excesses of progressive ‘woke’ politics has supplied the faction with a popular grammar for arguments it has been making, in more academic registers, since its founding.

Blue Labour presents itself as the carrier of an older Labour tradition – post-war, ethical, communitarian – that the Fabian and Marxist currents are said to have crowded out. The cultural drift it expresses is real; the disillusionment that carries it is not without cause, and the parliamentary footprint it now commands is more substantial than that of any other distinct intellectual current within the present Labour Party.

A theological refoundation

The intellectual substance sits at a deeper level than the cultural commentary suggests. In The Economics of the Common Good, Glasman reaches past the standard sources of British socialism to Catholic Social Thought, and specifically to the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. He quotes Pope Pius XI:

Capitalism violates right order whenever capital so employs the working or wage-earning classes as to divert business and economic activity entirely to its own arbitrary will and advantage without any regard to the human dignity of the workers, the social character of economic life, social justice and the common good.

From this premise, Blue Labour derives a theoretical break that distinguishes it from most of the British left. Classical social democracy and the Marxist tradition, on Glasman’s reading, share with their pro-capitalist antagonists a single underlying machinic outlook – one that denies the humanity of workers and treats them as mere factors of production.

Against that, the faction proposes labour as a moral good. Work is “received from the past and oriented towards the future”. The workplace becomes a site of meaning rather than of exchange. Labour is to be conditioned, in Glasman’s phrase, so as to “constrain capital and promote virtue”. Interconnecting systems of fealty, obligation, and mutual patronage are what make the working class.

The Labour Party itself, on this picture, is reconceived as a locus of tradition – something closer to a Church than a parliamentary vehicle. It is, by some distance, the most ambitious attempt to reconstitute British socialism on theological ground in a generation.

What it means in practice

The question that follows is what any of this means in real terms, in the real conditions of the present economic arrangement.

Here the project sits in an interesting position. Blue Labour’s public narrative locates the difficulties of contemporary British politics in moves made by other tendencies: by New Labour’s market liberalism; by the Corbyn movement’s identity politics; by the Starmer leadership’s lack of conviction.

Yet the faction has also been close to the centre of the current settlement, and supplied much of the intellectual texture for the operation that consolidated the party after 2020. The leader whose continuation Glasman now disputes is the same leader whose ascent the faction’s arguments did much to legitimise. How the project navigates that proximity is one of the open questions of its second decade.

The deeper question concerns the tradition Blue Labour claims to recover. The post-Fabian interregnum within which British politics has been suspended is not the consequence of a wrong turn taken by a single tendency. It is a longer pattern – one in which the working class has been treated, across the major currents of British socialism, as an object to be administered by an elite.

Catholic Social Thought is a serious philosophical resource, and the vocabulary it imports changes the texture of the argument. Whether it transforms the underlying relation between the party and the people it claims to represent is a separate, and considerably harder, question.

The shared inheritance

What the faction shares with its loudest critics on the parliamentary left is, on closer inspection, more substantive than what divides them.

The hostility Blue Labour generates is often presented as a quarrel about ends. It can also be read as a quarrel about idiom – about whether the same instinct toward discipline and direction should be expressed in the language of flag and faith, or in the language of progressive administration. Both inheritances belong to a tradition that has, in its various phases, treated the dignity of labour as something to be conferred from above as much as constituted from below.

Within its own terms, Blue Labour is on a marginal ascendency. Twenty-odd MPs is not nothing, and the cultural moment in which the faction’s ideas have begun to find their wider audience is unlikely to recede in the immediate future. Whether the project becomes a refoundation of British socialism – or a redecoration of it – is the question its second decade will answer, and the answer will tell us a great deal about where the British left is heading next.

Featured image via Sky News

By Rares Cocilnau

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In a horrific and seemingly deliberate attack on Monday, a car driven by an Israeli settler ran over three schoolgirls in Palestine.

The attack was perpetrated in Tarqumiya, Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, where settlers continue to rampage.

The three victims have been hospitalised with serious injuries and at least one of the girls is in critical condition, it has been reported.

Police in Palestine seized the vehicle, which crashed shortly after the crime, and arrested the driver. However, the Palestinian Authority is not allowed by the occupation to prosecute Jewish Israelis. Meanwhile, the Israeli authorities have an appalling record of impunity for criminal settlers.

Settler violence against innocent Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has been high for decades, but has escalated dramatically since the occupation regime began its genocide in Gaza. At least three other teenagers in the West Bank were murdered in the past week in separate incidents.

Featured image via WhatFingerNews

By Skwawkbox

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