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Big Oil, Big Banks and arms companies are profiting massively from the war on Iran.

Iran War — Oil

While most people face higher bills, oil giants are making a lot of money. Shell has reported its first quarterly profits. They are up £982 million on the year before. That’s after BP, which actually doubled its profit for the same period. Further, the French giant TotalEnergies had its profits increase by almost a third.

The price of oil has jumped partly because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet the UK only gets around 2% of its oil via that route. It’s the market that is raising the price due to companies selling it at the highest price they can, which is very high because of the disruption.

Big oil profits underscore the need to move away from fossil fuels and volatile international markets. Instead, the UK should bring in a publicly owned Green New Deal.

Banks

Big Banks are also profiteering from the war. The Big Six banks — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and JP Morgan — all saw huge profits in the first quarter, at around £36 billion. That’s up £12 billion on the average from the year before.

In the UK, Lloyds Bank has increased profits by more than 30% over the same period. Barclays also saw increased profit before tax.

Arms

As well as big banks and oil, arms companies are expecting to cash it in. BAE systems expects increased profits this year and Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman had their highest orders as of the first quarter.

Function of war on Iran

War has long been profitable for the ruling class. Indeed, the US DOJ is investigating £1.9 billion in insider trading from the Trump regime over the war on Iran, Forbes reports.

The oligarchy use war to justify their position in power, because they aren’t actually improving people’s lives.

Featured image via FreePress

By James Wright

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Labour has lost Bradford District Council to no overall control, as no party secured a majority.

Reform won 29 seats, up from zero at the last election, but fell shy of the 44 seats needed for a majority. The party won 26% of the vote.

Labour only won 15 seats, meaning it lost a shocking 27.

One of the people to lose her seat was Bradford council leader, Susan Hinchcliffe. She lost her seat in the Windhill and Wrose ward. She had been the leader of the council for a decade.

Reform UK councillors Sally Jane Birch, Stephen Broadbent and Chris Howlett won the ward. This means the ward went from three Labour councillors to three Reform councillors overnight.

The Tories won 18 seats, which is three more than in the previous election, and the Greens won seven, meaning the party lost three. Finally, ‘Independents and others’ lost two seats compared to the previous election.

All three results are in for the Little Horton Ward

Talat Sajawal (Your Bradford Independent Group)
Taj Salam (Your Bradford Independent Group)
Noor Elahi (Your Bradford Independent Group) pic.twitter.com/Yq3C7Frr5M

— Bradford Council (@bradfordmdc) May 9, 2026

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Labour’s controversial candidates

Daniel Devaney was the party’s candidate for the Clayton and Fairweather Green ward in Bradford. Before the election, he said he was stepping down, wasn’t “really bothered” and was going on holiday. He was upset about public outrage over social media posts.

He claimed he was standing down as a candidate. However, he was one of three councillors whom voters elected for Reform UK in that ward.

This lines up with stories from up and down the country, where Reform has fielded abusive, racist, and completely innapropriate candidates for public office.

Demographic differences

However, Bradford was one of the places where we expected the Green Party to be more successful.

In other constituencies, we have seen a higher proportion of Green Party and Independent votes in areas with a higher proportion of voters who are Muslim and not white, due to the Greens’ stance on Palestine.

Around 61.1%% of people in Bradford are white, whereas 32.1% are Asian, Asian British or Asian Welsh. Similarly, 30.5% described themselves as Muslim.

These demographics are similar to those in Blackburn, where Reform also made huge gains.

Luckily for Reform, Bradford has plenty of bins to collect and potholes to fill. Did they really think they’d be stopping the boats?

Feature image via Michael Broomhead/X

By HG

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Liverpool West Derby MP Ian Byrne has become the latest to join a growing chorus of Labour politicians to demand the resignation of Keir Starmer over the party’s appalling performance in the 2026 local elections.

Labour collapsed, losing — so far — almost 60% of the seats it was defending: 1443 lost out of 2484. Three areas have yet to declare. It has also lost a number of mayoral positions. It was too much for Byrne, a Hillsborough survivor who held onto his selection for the 2024 general election only after defeating the party machine’s attempt to remove him.

He said:

Statement re: local election results

The election results across the country make this a truly existential moment for Labour. They cannot be dismissed as a bad night or a messaging problem. This is a political crisis.

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Councillors in Knowsley and across the country who have lost their seats will rightly be furious with the Prime Minister and the national leadership, who must be held accountable for this electoral disaster.

Like them, I do not believe this will be fixed by another speech, another reset, or another reshuffle. The problem runs far deeper. Labour has lost touch with the working class people and communities it was created to represent.

Our natural voting base has turned away because we have failed to address the deep-seated decline they see in their public services and communities. This sense of anger is being intensified by the Government’s failure to tackle the cost of living crisis, rooted first in Tory austerity and sustained by an economic system that allows the wealth of this country to flow upwards, instead of being shared fairly across it.

Across towns and cities that should be Labour heartlands, our base has collapsed. We cannot brush this off as a bad night or a messaging issue. This is a political crisis for the entire Labour movement. How we respond now will determine whether the Labour Party remains a relevant political force for years, and decades, to come.

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The Prime Minister has reached the point where the question is no longer whether he can recover, but whether staying on causes lasting damage to Labour’s ability to rebuild trust and stop the advance of the right.

The longer this drags on, the greater the damage to the party and the country. The Prime Minister must now set out a clear timetable for his departure, and restore our party’s democratic processes for selecting candidates, which have been shamefully eroded in recent years.

Only then can we use every asset this party still has to deliver the change we promised this country.

Byrne doesn’t go far enough, though. Labour is beyond saving. Keir Starmer is clinging on, but his response to the collapse has been to appoint disliked former PM Gordon Brown and a(nother) paedophile-linked adviser, Harriet Harman. Harman wrote an argument in the 1970s against prosecuting paedophiles who sexually exploit children on film.

There could hardly be a clearer demonstration of Starmer’s utter moral and political bankruptcy — and the rotting corpse he has made what was once the Labour party that Byrne loved.

Featured image via the NewWorld

By Skwawkbox

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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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