With Keir Starmer in meltdown mode, Andy Burnham is being presented as Labour’s saviour. Last time he stood for leader, in 2015, Burnham promised that his first trip overseas would be to the Israeli settler-state. This would be his third attempt at securing the top job at Labour, but does Burnham really represent a change from the failings of Starmer, or simply more of the same?

Burnham’s Friends of Israel

Whilst serving in the last Labour administration, Andy Burnham’s principal adviser was Jennifer Gerber. In 2010, Gerber was appointed director of the lobby group Labour Friends of Israel, which she went on to lead for the next decade.

In 2016, then Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham was one of the Labour MPs who “flocked” to support Labour Friends of Israel under Gerber’s leadership. He was joined by then Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry; Jess Phillips, now sitting on a wafer-thin majority in Birmingham Yardley; and Dan Jarvis, amongst others.

Gerber previously led Progress, a Labour Party pressure group reportedly founded by Epstein-associate Peter Mandelson. The group received millions from David Sainsbury, a major backer of the infamous Labour Together think tank, and were also funded by pharmaceutical company Pfizer.

In 2021, Progress merged with Policy Network, another Peter Mandelson operation, and changed their name to Progressive Britain. The group is currently led by Adam Langleben, a former national secretary of the Jewish Labour Movement.

When Jennifer Gerber stepped down from Labour Friends of Israel in 2020, she praised Keir Starmer for “[committing to] fully rooting out the … Israel obsession in the party.” In his first meeting with LFI as party leader, Starmer pledged to travel to Israel with the group.

At the time, Keir Starmer thanked LFI for “the crucial role they play in the Labour Party”. Now, Andy Burnham, a parliamentary supporter of LFI who voted for Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq, seeks to depose him.

Past leadership bids

Burnham has tried to become Labour leader twice before. In 2015, his leadership bid was supported by Dan Jarvis, another parliamentary supporter of Labour Friends of Israel. Jarvis has previously been funded by Martin Taylor, a major backer of Morgan McSweeney’s Labour Together, who also gave £95,000 to Keir Starmer’s 2020 leadership bid.

Andy Burnham’s 2015 leadership campaign received over £130,000 in private donations. One of his funders was Michael Sternberg, who has also financed Labour’s current Courts Minister, Sarah Sackman. Sackman, a key supporter of David Lammy’s proposals to restrict jury trials, previously worked as a judicial clerk at the Israeli Supreme Court.

Sternberg also gave £5000 to Labour’s current Middle East Secretary, Hamish Falconer. Falconer received another £5000 from Labour Together Limited, and £13,900 from Mike Craven, a former press officer to Tony Blair and current Labour Together board member.

Falconer also received £4600 from a group called “SME 4 Labour”. In the run up to the 2024 general election, with a view to helping Keir Starmer secure a parliamentary majority, SME 4 Labour held a fundraising dinner in London with Jeffrey Epstein’s “best pal” Peter Mandelson.

For the 2024 election, SME 4 Labour had identified Scotland as a “crucial” target. Labour’s parliamentary candidate (and now MP) for Rutherglen Michael Shanks received £4000 from Sternberg. Shanks was also one of several Scottish Labour MPs who received £10,000 from Labour Together to fund their electoral campaigns.

Another funder of Burnham’s 2015 leadership campaign was Howard Borrington. For 22 years, ending with his retirement in 2024, Borrington was Director of UK Government Affairs at arms firm MBDA, the self-declared “world leader in missiles and missile systems”. Before that, he spent almost 16 years at BAE Systems.

Burnham won’t mop up the bloodbath

In 2010, Burnham stood against Ed Miliband and lost. In 2015, Burnham promised that, if he won, he “would involve Jeremy [Corbyn] in my team from the outset.” As recently as February, he was publicly backing Keir Starmer. Burnham will say anything to get into power.

After the bloodbath of last week’s council, Scottish, and Welsh elections, it is clear that Keir Starmer has lost any mandate to rule, but do not expect any stronger moral fibre from Andy Burnham.

Featured image via the Canary

By Jody McIntyre

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Keir Starmer gave a speech to try to defend his position as prime minister on Monday morning (Alamy)

5 min read1 hr

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has attempted to shore up his leadership of the Labour Party and of the country by saying Labour needs to go beyond just “incremental change” and be the party of a “stronger and fairer” Britain.

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The Prime Minister is attempting to see off potential leadership challenges following Thursday’s local election results, which saw Labour lose the Senedd in Wales for the first time, fail to make inroads against the SNP in Scotland, and lose around 1,500 seats on local councils in England.

In a speech in London on Monday morning, he admitted that “like every government, we’ve made mistakes”, but insisted “we got the big political choices right”. It was a speech that was passionate, but lacking in policy meat on the bone.

What is the Labour Party for?

Starmer attacked both Reform and the Green Party, arguing that only Labour can “face up to the big challenges” and “make the big arguments”.

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“Delivery is, of course, essential, but it’s not sufficient on its own to address the frustration that voters feel, with battling Reform and the Greens, but at a deeper level, with battling the despair on which they prey, despair that they exploit and amplify,” he said.

“And so analysis matters, but argument matters more. Evidence matters, but so too does the emotion. Stories beat spreadsheets. People need hope.”

He went on to say that the Labour Party would not be able to win going forwards as a “weaker version of Reform or the Greens”. 

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“We can only win as a stronger version of Labour… I will never stop fighting for the decent, respectful, diverse country that I love.”

The status quo is not enough

He appeared to argue for railing against the status quo in government, but did not set out any major new policies.

“Incremental change won’t cut it on growth, defence, Europe, energy,” he said.

“We need a bigger response than we anticipated in 2024 because these are not ordinary times, and this is a political challenge, just as much as it’s a party challenge.”

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By way of hard policy, however, there was very little: the one major announcement was that legislation would be brought forward this week to give the government powers to take “full ownership of British Steel”, subject to a public-interest test.

Starmer described this as an example of a policy which will “show the Labour values we will be guided from, and the lessons we will learn”.

He said the government would also go “much further on our investment” in apprenticeships in technical excellence colleges and special educational needs.

Starmer has come under criticism by his own MPs for not spearheading the change that was promised to voters in the 2024 general election. 

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Senior Labour MP Sarah Owen told The Times over the weekend: “Unless Keir Starmer delivers tangible change and truly connects with the public on a human level, he can’t lead us into another election (locally or nationally). People want politics and politicians who are upfront and true to their values.”

Closer ties with Europe at the heart of the “Labour choice”

Starmer also set out a closer relationship with Europe as being at the heart of the “Labour choice” going forward. 

“This Labour government will be defined by rebuilding our relationship with Europe, by having Britain at the heart of Europe, standing shoulder to shoulder with the countries that most share our interests, our values and our enemies,” he said.

“That is the right choice for Britain. That is the Labour choice.”

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However, asked whether the next Labour manifesto would include single market or customs union membership, Starmer simply said the UK will take a “big leap forward with the EU-UK summit this year and take us closer, both on trade and the economy, and defence and security.

“That will then be a platform on which we can build as we go forward,” he said.

Change in leadership would be too “damaging”

Addressing Thursday’s elections, the PM said Labour’s losses “hurt”: “I get it, I feel it”.

But many Labour MPs are already concerned that the speech listed the government’s achievements again and did little to shift the dial on either Starmer’s own leadership or the public perception of the Labour government.

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Backbench Labour MP and former minister Catherine West has said she could try to launch her own leadership bid if no cabinet minister steps forward to challenge Starmer.

Former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has told Starmer that “what we are doing isn’t working”, calling for Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to return to Parliament. Indeed, perhaps the most significant moment of Starmer’s speech came when he said that Burnham’s return would be a matter for the party’s National Executive Committee, rather than closing the door on him entirely.

Starmer had already insisted he will not step down as PM, and in his speech on Monday, he said he did not want to “plunge the country into chaos”.

“I’m not going to shy away from the fact that I’ve got some doubters, including in my own part,” he said. 

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“And I’m not going to shy away from the fact that I have to prove them wrong, and I will.”

In what was likely an appeal to his own MPs, he said that the government constantly changing their leadership was “damaging”.

“We tested it, we tested its destruction, and it inflicted huge damage on this country,” he said, in a reference to the changing of leaders under previous Conservative governments.

“A Labour government will never be forgiven if we repeat that and inflict that on the country.”

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Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell sat on the front row during Starmer’s speech, with one of the PM’s PPSs Jon Pearce sitting on the row behind.

Labour MP for Ossett and Denby Dale Jade Botterill introduced Starmer on the stage, saying that it was clear to her that the Labour Party “is one of the greatest vehicles for changing the lives of working people this country has ever known”

“But yet, on the doorstep, people no longer believed it.”

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Ralph Fiennes as Henry Irving and Miranda Raison as Ellen Terry | Photography by: Marc Brenner

5 min read13 min

A superbly acted contemplation on theatre and the acting profession, this play may appeal more to the cognoscenti, but the one-liners are worth the ticket price alone

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This is a play about what a play is about. It is an examination of theatre and the acting profession.

That I took an instant dislike to Teddy was a tribute to Jordan Metcalfe’s point-perfect interpretation of the arrogant Edward ‘Teddy’ Gordon Craig who opens the play recalling his mother, the superstar of Victorian drama, Ellen Terry with the question, “What is it like to be a genius?”

Not that he seems a great fan of his mother, remarking that “if one is still an actor at 40, you need to ask yourself some serious questions”. It is a line that the 78-year-old David Hare must have enjoyed writing, and one which the audience fully appreciated the nuance of.

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The play’s title, Grace Pervades, is another blague privée intended for the theatrical cognoscenti. It refers to a less than kind contemporary review, that said of her performances “Grace pervades the hussy”. Not much used in modern parlance, “hussy” is a word to which Terry’s daughter Edith, ‘Edy’, would have taken great exception. Her own dramatic productions were focused on achieving social revolution and the advancement of the suffrage movement.

In fact, living at the bottom of her mother’s garden in a lesbian ménage-à-trois with the occasional “sympathy frig” by Vita Sackville West, Edy might well have had the word applied to herself. However, it must be considered the more remarkable that in the prurient Victorian age, Ellen Terry – whose string of affairs began at the age of 14 – could be deemed such a national sweetheart.

Her amorous liaisons did not prevent her becoming the best-paid woman in England. On one of her American tours, she earned the modern equivalent of £24,000 a week – and just as well. Edy slyly tells us, when disparaging her brother’s theatrical disasters, that “Teddy’s Vikings of Helgeland lost more in a week than Ellen made in a year!”

David Hare has lost none of his powers

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Teddy believes in “a theatre without actors” and in real life became (in retrospect, it must be said) a noted theoretician of drama and performance, revered by the likes of Konstantin Stanislavski and Peter Brook. A self-righteous, arrogant womaniser who had an affair with Isadora Duncan, we are told by sister Edy that in his own short acting career, the other spear carriers in Hamlet threw him off the battlements at the end of one rehearsal!

Now, the man himself: Henry Irving. Or do I mean Ralph Fiennes? It is difficult to tell. Irving regarded the theatre with the utmost seriousness. Meticulous in his preparation, he boasts that his is “a company of equals in which I am the boss”. He admits to Ellen that he is “atrabilious” (yes, I had to look it up too) and “an evening in my company can sometimes be very grim”, yet this is the man who single-handedly transformed 19th-century theatre into a respected art form. On stage he was the charismatic epicentre from which no eye turned, except to alight on Ellen Terry.

Ellen (played by Miranda Raison) was his theatrical and life partner for 27 years. She was “the day to his night”. She it was who persuaded him to direct his gaze away from declamation at the audience and to the other actors on stage. With her, Irving ran the Lyceum Theatre, overpaying his actors, accumulating debt, but entrancing audiences.

“You see everything as tragic,” she tells his Malvolio, “but Twelfth Night is supposed to be a comedy!” For him, theatre always comes first. For her, life does. She just happens to be spectacularly good at being an actress. “We have taken this forsaken art form and taken it to a level it has never aspired to,” he tells her. “To you, the theatre is everything. I’d rather be a successful human being,” she retorts.

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In a moment of purity and tenderness, he admits, “A faltering actor until 40, you were the instrument of my transformation.” I cannot remember if it is he or she who then says, “Together we made a harmony we could not make apart.” But of course it does not matter.

And this is the heart of David Hare’s contemplation on what it is to be a player, and what this strange art form is. He gives us four very different approaches in Teddy, Edy, Ellen and Irving. The minimalist, Teddy; the purposeful utilitarian, Edy; the escapist, Ellen; and Henry Irving, for whom the theatre is inextricable from life itself.

If you love theatre, go – these are some of our finest actors paying obeisance to the nobility of their calling and the giants on whose shoulders they stand.

If you do not count yourself a thespian, still go – Hare has lost none of his powers, and some of his one-liners are worth the price of the ticket all on their own.

Barry Gardiner is Labour MP for Brent West

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Grace Pervades

Written by: David Hare

Directed by: Jeremy Herrin

Venue: Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1 – until 11 July 2026

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Labour has lost control of Lambeth council for the first time in 20 years.

The Greens are now the largest party; however, no party gained overall control of the council.

Lambeth goes from Labour -> No Overall Control (NOC).

Check out all of the election results by ward with our ward and council-level maps over at: https://t.co/QXT1tzrRXB pic.twitter.com/e8s1KiHxeW

— Election Maps UK (@ElectionMapsUK) May 9, 2026

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According to the BBC:

Labour has controlled Lambeth since 2006. After the 2022 elections, Labour had 54 seats with the Greens and Lib Dems both on four.

The Green Party gained 27 seats, taking their new total to 29. This is up from four at the last election.

The Green Party go from 2 seats to 28 in Lambeth – and Labour lose control!

This is happening in our cities and in many of our rural targets too.

People voting Green Party councillors to help end Rip Off Britain!https://t.co/0qbagSvIYp https://t.co/rymnuWMQnX pic.twitter.com/yyxpggAW2s

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— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) May 9, 2026

Hilariously, Labour lost 32 seats, leaving the party with only 26.

The Liberal Democrats won eight seats.

This is yet another example of the Labour vote collapsing in former strongholds.

The Labour leader of the council, Claire Holland, managed to keep her seat, but so many others didn’t.

It’s a shame the leader of the council managed to keep her seat but so many other cllrs didn’t.

I’ve written in about countless residents over the years in lambeth and she’d never even acknowledge the emails let alone respond

Welp.

— KWAJO- Social Issues Campaigner (@Kwajotweneboa) May 9, 2026

Labour together?

Lambeth is also where Morgan McSweeney, enemy of the Canary and Starmer’s former right-hand man, helped to run a successful Labour campaign to retake it in 2006.

McSweeney resigned as Starmer’s chief of staff in February over the shocking appointment of Lord Mandelson as US ambassador.

Similarly, it was also the training ground for now-MP Steve Reed. He was the leader of Lambeth Borough Council from 2006 to 2012. He is now the MP for Streatham and Croydon North.

Lambeth council was a training ground for both Morgcn McSweeney and Steve Reed. Two of the architects of Labour Together. https://t.co/jaBm6hEWux

— Samantha Asumadu (@SamanthaAsumadu) May 9, 2026

Both were architects of Labour Together — which seems to be falling apart.

However, this makes the loss even more symbolic and will hopefully hit Starmer right where it hurts.

Feature image via Lambeth Council/YouTube

By HG

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Reform UK councillor Francesca O’Brien posted that she’s completed her Senedd member induction. The fact that she’s taken her seat as a Reform politician shows her party really doesn’t care what its candidates say about people.

Reform UK’s new MS, the same Francesca O’Brien who defected to Reform UK from the Conservatives saying it was a ‘gamble’ (because it’s not about principles).

Oh, and she once said people on benefits should be “put down”. https://t.co/qXACxRZban

— Reform Party UK Exposed (@reformexposed) May 10, 2026

Reform councillors treat people as less than human

O’Brien is far from the only Reform member the party has turned a blind eye to, as the Canary reported:

Ben Rowe posted Islamophobic, antisemitic and racist memes. Reform said it was 'investigating', so how come he's now a sitting councillor?

Via @willem_moore_uk https://t.co/xKyGhLh6TI

— Canary (@TheCanaryUK) May 10, 2026

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Reformed Tories

As Reform Exposed highlighted, O’Brien began her political career as a Tory. She unsuccessfully ran to be the MP for Gower in 2019, before successfully becoming a councillor for Mumbles in 2022.

O’Brien would later switch to Reform in 2025, telling Wales Online:

For me it’s very much a gamble. Reform are very good at engaging with people across all ages, particularly the younger generation and I think it’s really important to get younger people into politics.

I’ve never seen a party that engages like this across generations and wherever you sit demographically. I want to be part of that, get involved and help fine-tune some of the policies.

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This is how Reform Exposed interpreted what O’Brien said:

Reform UK’s new Councillor Francesca O'Brien has described her defection as "a gamble".

It’s just a game to them, she doesn’t have principles, just a will to power, or else it wouldn’t be a gamble, it would be a principled stand…https://t.co/CSQWFn5pBh

— Reform Party UK Exposed (@reformexposed) August 19, 2025

At the same time, Wales Online reported:

And although the mother-of-two said she lived and breathed being a councillor in Mumbles, she said “speaking off the top of my head” she would be keen to stand at next year’s Senedd elections if the opportunity arose.

This year O’Brien did indeed run to join the Senedd (Welsh parliament), and she was successful. So why is this a problem?

It’s a problem because she’s previously made comments like the following:

Benefit Street..anyone else watching this?? Wow, these people are unreal!!!”

She also said:

My blood is boiling, these people need putting down.

Generally, you don’t want people in positions of power to hold opinions which can accurately be described as ‘Nazi-like’.

Benefits Street

If you’re unfamiliar with Benefits Street, this is what Canary founder, Kerry-Anne Mendoza, wrote about the show:

One of the most insidious developments during the prime ministership of David Cameron was the rise of poverty porn – television shows like Benefits Street, which turned poverty and destitution into cheap thrill entertainment.

She added:

Benefits Street was just one in a long and sad list of poverty-porn programming aired during Cameron’s tenure. Channel 4 also brought us Skint, Benefit Busters, How to Get a Council House, and Benefits Britain. The BBC even chipped in with We All Pay Your Benefits.

This list is not even exhaustive. Just some of the lowlights, if you will.

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All of these shows, intentionally or otherwise, feed into a myth that the UK is some sort of paradise for benefit cheats.

It’s a tried and tested technique to focus on the small number of ‘badly behaving’ people in a minority group to suggest that the entire group behaves like that. To their eternal shame, Channel 4 and the BBC functioned as the propaganda wing of David Cameron’s austerity-pushing coalition government on this one.

In the current day, the media and political spheres spend more energy demonising migrants than poor people (which isn’t to say they don’t demonise people on benefits). The reason for this is obvious.

Following years of austerity, more people than ever are claiming in-work benefits. As such, it’s harder to form a majority consensus around the idea that all benefit claimants are evil.

The Conservatives, Labour, and Reform do still demonise claimants, of course, but if you look at the polling, none of them are majority parties.

POLL | Reform lead by 1pt

Ref: 21% (-)
Con: 20% (-1)
Grn: 20% (-1)
Lab: 18% (+1)
Lib: 11% (+2)

{ Seats }
Ref: 170
Con: 161
Grn: 109
Lib: 73
Lab: 52
SNP: 48

Poll: @LordAshcroft, 23-27 Apr (+/- vs 30 Mar) pic.twitter.com/QjevEqb8SJ

— Stats for Lefties (@LeftieStats) May 3, 2026

Myth making

Speaking more on the myth of the greedy benefit claimant, Mendoza wrote:

In reality, according to the government’s own figures, benefit fraud amounts to just 0.7% of all claims. The total cost of benefit fraud is £1.2bn a year – this is less than half the annual cost to the Department for Work and Pensions of administrative errors.

In short, the government spends twice as much money fixing typos than it does on fraudulent benefit claims. But you wouldn’t know that from watching these shows. Far from it. You would be left with the impression that Britain was facing a benefit fraud epidemic.

To be entirely fair, a lot of people fell for the anti-benefits propaganda in the 2010s. The problem is we know O’Brien is still a believer because she’s joined Reform — a party that attempts to draw a line between ‘good workers’ and ‘bad claimants’.

My party is the party of alarm clock Britain.

— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) November 3, 2025

In line with the shifts we talk about, Reform now puts more emphasis on the people who aren’t on benefits (the ‘alarm clock’ Britons) rather than the people who are. The point is the same, though. The party wants you to think some people are ‘strivers’ and others are ‘scroungers’.

This is all very ironic when you consider that Farage has barely bothered to show up to do his job since he became an MP:

'Skive Minister' Nigel Farage is getting away with the equivalent of only working 7 days a month while earning millions from side hustles

By @willem_moore_uk https://t.co/CTE8RxUIGK

— Canary (@TheCanaryUK) May 7, 2026

Perhaps when O’Brien reads about Farage’s attendance record she’ll also call for the UK to put him down?

Featured image via the Canary

By Willem Moore

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Arsenal left the London Stadium with a 1-0 win, after a real dog fight of a match. A smash and grab if you like, but also a controversial decision that will dominate the week. Leandro Trossard’s 83rd-minute finish proved decisive, but the real drama arrived in stoppage time when Callum Wilson’s late leveller was ruled out after a VAR review for a foul on goalkeeper David Raya.

Arsenal: cometh the hour, cometh the man

Trossard’s strike came after a period of pressure and a string of near-misses from Arsenal. The goal arrived from a tidy move involving Martin Ødegaard, who created the chance for Trossard to curl the ball in at the near post and send the travelling fans into life. David Raya had earlier produced a couple of crucial saves to keep Arsenal level before the breakthrough.

Arsenal’s lead in the title race widened as a result. Had Wilson’s stoppage-time finish stood, the gap at the top would have been cut and Manchester City could have moved back above Arsenal with a game in hand. Instead, the Gunners left with a five-point cushion and two matches remaining.

VAR in the spotlight

The disallowed goal unfolded like this, a West Ham corner was spilled by Raya, Wilson reacted quickest and bundled the ball home, but VAR intervened, the video assistant flagged contact, Pablo’s arm across Raya’s neck as the goalkeeper attempted to claim the ball, and referee Chris Kavanagh was sent to the monitor. After watching multiple replays, which for the fans in attendance felt like an age, the goal was chalked off. The whole process, from ball over the line to final decision, stretched over four minutes, unusually long for a decision of this nature.

That sequence will be dissected from every angle, supporters and pundits split along familiar lines, some saw a clear foul on the keeper, others argued the contact was part of normal aerial tussle. What’s indisputable is the scale of the moment, a decision that effectively shaped the title race and left West Ham still in relegation trouble.

Tactical snapshot

Mikel Arteta’s side started strongly but were unsettled by a series of substitutions that disrupted their rhythm. Ben White’s injury forced reshuffles, and Arteta’s mid-game changes, including bringing on Martin Zubimendi and later reversing that move, made for a stop-start afternoon. Still, Arsenal created the better chances and relied on Raya’s shot-stopping and Trossard’s composure to secure three points.

Nuno Espirito Santo’s team grew into the match and had their moments, notably when Mateus Fernandes broke through only to be denied by Raya. The late corner that produced Wilson’s disallowed goal showed West Ham’s persistence, but the result leaves them perilously close to the drop zone.

Fallout

Arsenal now sit with a comfortable lead and two fixtures left to close out a first Premier League title in 22 years. The margin is not yet decisive, but momentum and the psychological lift of surviving a late scare matter. West Ham, meanwhile, must regroup quickly; their survival hopes hinge on points that have to come fast.

If the VAR decision is the lasting image from this match, it is because it encapsulates modern football’s contradictions: razor-sharp technology applied to human moments, and the uneasy mix of relief and resentment that follows. For Arsenal, huge relief, but for West Ham, raw heartbreak. For everyone else, another chapter in the VAR story.

This could become the biggest VAR decision in Premier League history. With 60,000 people inside the stadium, and millions around the world, all holding their breath at once, truly extraordinary scenes.

Featured image via the Canary

By Faz Ali

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While it’s died down a bit, a wave of ‘flag mania’ struck Great Britain in 2025. The people responsible for it operated under the name ‘Raise the Colours’, with the group being made up of notorious racists from Britain’s far right.

One of the infamous shitbags in question is Ryan Bridge, who you can see here bullying an older man.

Ryan Bridge from Raise The Colours and his goons bullied an elderly man. pic.twitter.com/FoA42dNEPZ

— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) May 10, 2026

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Full respect to him, the older man refused to back down despite Bridge having a team of goons with him.

Flag group members are disgusting

This is what Hope not Hate wrote about Operation Raise the Colours:

HOPE not hate can reveal that the co-founder and organiser of the group is longtime Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) ally Andrew Currien (AKA Andy Saxon). Formerly a key member of the English Defence League’s leadership bodyguard team, and now running security for the far-right party Britain First, Currien has previously been jailed for his part in a racist death. He was one of six men convicted in 2009 after a 59-year-old man was crushed to death by a car following a violent brawl.

Bridge is another key member of the operation and he’s also linked to a £40 million fraud scandal, the Mirror reported in 2018.

Ryan Bridge, the guy behind the Raise the Colours, faces eight years in prison if convicted. pic.twitter.com/mRmu8HwCmF

— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) November 30, 2025

Hope not Hate additionally reported:

Across the country, many of the small groups that have come together to raise the flags are being organised by well-known far-right extremists.

The group added:

Similarly, the far-right group Britain First claims to have provided many of the flags in the North West. “Britain First has, so far, donated 75% of its flag stock to local teams in Manchester and the West Midlands for ‘Operation Raise The Colours’,” tweeted leader Paul Golding.

A Bridge too far

The video at the top begins with Bridge shouting:

Do you understand?

The man, who seems to be outside his own home, answers:

No, I don’t understand.

Bridge yells in response:

Because you’re thick, that’s why.

He then says:

So let me educate you, old man.

In response, the older man says:

No, you won’t educate me.

He then puts a hand up to Bridge’s face before holding his arms up like a gorilla in front of one of the goons. After this, he pokes then goon in the chest and gives him a telling off.

While this is going on, Bridge is repeating, “Listen, listen, listen”, over and over, becoming increasingly whiny as he does so. The older man doesn’t listen, though and walks off down the driveway.

In the end, the only colours raised were the flushes of red in Bridge’s cheeks.

Intimidation tactics

It’s unclear what Bridge wanted to educate the man on, but we can guess. Given that Bridge was wearing his Raise the Colours uniform, we can assume he was out and about shagging flags. Because he doesn’t have much in the way of common sense, he didn’t realise it’s a bad look to be shouting down local residents on the street.

Accordingly, we suggest that Bridge abandons the flag stuff and gets back to his day job (if he gets off with the alleged fraud, obviously).

Featured image via X/ Mukhtar

By Willem Moore

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Imagine a photograph of your child taken on sports day. They’re laughing, probably slightly out of breath, wearing their school kit.

It’s the kind of image that ends up in the school newsletter, on the website, shared with pride by staff who want to show what school life looks like.

Now imagine that same photograph being found by a criminal who lifts the face of the child in seconds and, using freely available AI tools, turns it into something so harmful I am not going to describe it in detail here.

That image is then sent to the school with a demand: pay up, or it goes online.

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This is not a hypothetical. The scale of child abuse imagery has grown from fewer than 10,000 images 25 years ago, to tens of millions today.

This has happened to schools in the UK, and most schools have no idea it is possible.

I know that’s uncomfortable to read. Though, as the mother of two teenage daughters, I strongly believe that all parents deserve to know the internet where their children’s photographs are being uploaded is not the same internet that schools developed their safeguarding policies for.

I didn’t come to this issue as a parent whose child was affected. I came to it as someone who has run branding agencies for the last two decades, sitting in a meeting with a school I had been working with on a rebrand – a school I knew well, whose team I respected.

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It was during that work it came to light that a number of the school’s pupil photographs had been stolen, turned into deepfake abuse material, and that the school had been sent a ransom demand.

I sat there and listened to what had happened to those children. And my first thought – before anything to do with technology, platforms, or solutions – was simple: I never want this to happen to my daughters.

I have spent my entire career working in branding, working with businesses, charities and organisations, of all sizes, to tell their stories through imagery. I understand better than most what those photographs mean and why they matter, not least for schools.

The school newsletter, sports day, the nativity play – these are not trivial things, they are how schools communicate joy, build community and celebrate the children in their care.

Schools should not have to stop celebrating their pupils or sharing moments with their communities, but they do need tools designed for the internet those images now live in.

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The consent form most parents sign at the start of each school year was written for a different world. It was designed to address whether your child’s image could be used – shared in a newsletter, published on a website, posted on social media.

It was not written to address what happens once that image is publicly accessible online. Because when those consent forms were first written, what is now possible simply wasn’t.

AI tools that can take a child’s face from a school website and generate abusive content from it are not hypothetical. They are freely available, require no technical expertise, and the safeguarding gap they have created is one that almost no school in the country has a policy to address.

New research that we commissioned found that while 85% of UK teachers are aware that AI criminals are targeting school photographs, fewer than one in three have any AI or deepfake-specific policies in place, and nearly a quarter said their school has already been targeted.

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This isn’t about stopping schools from sharing images. It’s about understanding what those images are exposed to once they’re online.

Before any parents sign that consent form, they should be asking their child’s school so many more questions – from what happens to images once they are online; whether their photography policy has been updated to reflect the risks of generative AI; to what protection they have in place for pupil images shared on public-facing channels.

These are not unreasonable questions and are simply the ones that every parent of a school-age child should now be asking, and that every school should be ready to answer.

But let’s be clear, schools are not to blame for this.

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They shared those photographs in good faith, as they always have. It’s just the world those images are being shared into has changed, and the frameworks most schools rely on have not yet caught up.

Consent forms, GDPR policies, online safety training: none of these protect a child from a criminal who takes their image without asking. AI criminals don’t need permission. They take images directly from school websites and social media without ever making contact.

What’s needed now isn’t less sharing, but safer sharing. That’s the problem I set out to solve when I built Aidos – a safeguarding platform that makes every pupil in a school photograph permanently unidentifiable before the image is shared online.

Not blurring, not pixelation, but a full replacement of every child’s face with a realistic AI-generated substitute, so that the image can never be traced back to a real child.

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Schools can keep sharing everything they have always shared. The difference is that those images can no longer be used to harm the children within them.

Protecting children’s digital identities is becoming one of the defining safeguarding challenges of the AI era. Schools shouldn’t have to face it alone, but as parents we have a role too and it starts with asking the question.

So, before you sign that consent form this September, ask your school what they have in place. They may not yet have the answer, but the fact that you’re asking means they’ll need to find one.

Carole Osborne is the founder and CEO of Aidos, an AI safeguarding platform that makes pupils in school photographs permanently unidentifiable before they are shared online.

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