Politics
DWP admits Youth Job Grant is actually nonsense
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) announced its flagship new “Youth Jobs Grant” scheme in March. It did so alongside a package of new policies to tackle the so-called rise in young people “not in education, employment, or training” (NEET). But now, it has admitted that all is not what it seems.
DWP Youth Jobs Grant
The grant scheme offers employers £3,000 for every young person aged 18-24 they hire who has been claiming universal credit for over six months.
The DWP will issue the grant irrespective of the claimant’s conditionality regime. It means that this could also apply to young disabled people claiming limited capability for work-related activity (LCWRA), who the DWP has assessed as not fit for work.
Alongside its new Youth Jobs Grant, the DWP is also introducing a £2,000 “Apprenticeship Incentive” to encourage small and medium-sized businesses to employ 16-24 year-olds into new apprenticeship roles.
It also announced an expansion to its so-called “Jobs Guarantee“. This will now make the fully funded six-month wage subsidy available to employers hiring young people aged 18 to 24.
However, the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey has highlighted how the government’s raft of youth employment policies risks coercing young chronically ill and disabled claimants into low-waged and unsuitable work.
Cat out of the bag
Now, in response to a series of parliamentary written questions, the DWP has admitted that the Youth Jobs Grant will “not require employers to demonstrate” that they have hired young people into any roles that wouldn’t have already existed without the new incentive funding.
Independent MP James McMurdock asked “what steps” the DWP “plans to take to help ensure that jobs created through the Youth Jobs Grant are additional to existing positions”.
The answer came amid a lengthy response addressing 14 separate written questions McMurdock had tabled probing the government’s youth employment plans.
On 27 March, DWP minister Andrew Western wrote:
The scheme will not require employers to demonstrate that roles are additional.
Meanwhile, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has separately said:
Offering £3,000 to all employers without checking for additionality would result in substantial dead weight.
In particular, it has highlighted how “DWP statistics from 2022–25 show that only 19% of 16- to 24-year-olds on UC who have been unemployed for 6 months are still on the benefit 18 months later”.
It said this “implies that the majority are likely to find work even in the absence of wage subsidies”.
Barriers to employment
Disabled young people face significantly greater barriers to employment, so the grant’s lack of an additionality requirement could fail to ensure employers offer accessible roles for 18-24 year-olds well enough to work and/or not in the LCWRA group.
Western told McMurdock that the DWP would pay the grant in “staged instalments”. The department has yet to specify what these will be. It also hasn’t confirmed the length of time these instalments will span in total.
But Western admitted that the government isn’t planning to place any minimum retention requirements on employers for the grant.
He said that the staged instalments would “encourage sustained employment during the early months without requiring a formal retention period”.
Elsewhere in the response, he stated that the scheme’s “purpose is to reduce the barriers young people face when entering the labour market”.
According to Western, the grant aims to do that “by helping employers with the early costs of recruitment and training, rather than placing conditions on wider staffing decisions and how long an employer must retain someone”.
The revelations call into question the government’s claims that its new package of employment policies will create 200,000 new jobs for young people.
More DWP nonsense?
The DWP anticipates that the Jobs Guarantee and the Youth Jobs Grant will create 30,000 and 20,000 new job roles for young people respectively. However, the IFS has said that in tandem, even if these are additional, the policies will “directly benefit a small percentage of the almost 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds who are NEET”.
Now, Western’s response has confirmed that the DWP can’t guarantee these will be genuinely additional.
The government has been citing its programme of employment support, including these employer incentives, to justify widespread cuts to welfare.
From 6 April, DWP will slash the universal credit health element in half for new claimants.
The cut exempts existing claimants, those who meet the department’s “severe conditions criteria”, and those who are terminally ill.
In its Pathways to Work green paper, the government also floated plans to restrict the health element of universal credit to over 22s. It has yet to make a decision on the proposal.
However, in November work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden referred to former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn’s “independent” investigation into Young People and Work.
He said that he did not “want to make a decision” on the minimum age requirement proposal until Milburn had looked at “the whole issue of young people, sickness, unemployment and work”.
The inquiry’s terms of reference show that it will solely target chronically ill and disabled claimants.
The home secretary has apparently expanded the list of people she’d like to deport to include her rivals from each main political party.
Shabana Mahmood was being interviewed by comedian Matt Forde in London’s West End when she said it but that hasn’t stopped the criticism.
Asked by the Telegraph who out of Polanski, Farage, Badenoch or Davey she would taser or deport, she said: “I want to taser and then deport … all of them"
(Via Telegraph) pic.twitter.com/Q6l2d1hBeh
— Stats for Lefties
BREAKING: Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood threatens to deport Green leader Zack Polanski.
(@LeftieStats) April 21, 2026
Shabana Mahmood is spitting mad
If you’re unfamiliar with Forde, he’s the man who wrote what may be the worst comedy sketch of all time mocking Jess Phillips, who was then shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding.
The fact that Labour MPs still talk to this guy is surprising, but here we are.
Matt forde being horny for Jess Phillips is not what I needed to see before midday on a Monday https://t.co/CTb2R3N1EL
— R (@rjb_1998) October 4, 2021
Mahmood was also asked which of the opposition leaders – Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, Zack Polanski or Sir Ed Davey – she would either deport or taser. She replied: “You are talking to me so I want to taser and then deport… all of them.”
What does “You are talking to me” mean? Is she implying she has some sort of violent and uncontrollable condition? This is the sort of response the Joker would give, not a government minister.
If @Nigel_Farage said he’d ‘taser and deport’ a political opponent we’d have a week long media feeding frenzy – led by the Labour Party.
But @ShabanaMahmood can say that about political opponents and it’s….fine? Why the double standard? pic.twitter.com/CgLnfJQJwj
— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) April 21, 2026
Do we want a home secretary to be making jokes about deporting people? The obvious answer is no. It makes her seem like an inhumane monster who doesn’t care about human suffering. That or she’s someone who enjoys inflicting it.
I do not think there is any context in which it is acceptable for the Home Secretary to threaten to inflict violent attacks on the persons of opposition leaders and suggest she intends to strip them of their citizenship and deport them.
This is a very, very grim moment.
— Stats for Lefties
(@LeftieStats) April 21, 2026
Home secretary tells hecklers to ‘fuck right off’
Mahmood also got upset because hecklers accused her of copying Reform. The home secretary then responded by saying the hecklers could “fuck right off”.
She said:
I’m not going to let a tinpot racist or some random heckler, or anybody else claw away at the foundations of who I am as a person.
I’m a proud English woman. I’m a proud Brit. I’m a hugely proud Muslim. That is the absolute core of my life.
Then added:
I do think there is that element of it which is: ‘How dare you, a brown woman, say a thing that we white liberals think you’re not allowed to say?’ Well, I’m saying it.
This is the Labour of today in a nutshell, isn’t it?
On the policy front, they want to enact the cruel right-wing proposals of Reform; on the rhetoric front, they want to deploy 2010s-style identity politics.
You can’t do the ‘I’m a proud, Brown woman with multitudes‘ shtick when you’re defending a wretched system that dehumanises Brown women.
Having their cake and deporting it
Voters have seen through Labour at this point. Many ex-voters think the party is unnecessarily cruel now while others don’t believe they’re cruel enough.
Lab is now losing far more votes to Greens (7.4pts) than to Reform (3.6pts).
Overall, a majority of 2024 Lab voters are now backing other parties, and a whopping 70% of those are fleeing leftward.
Lab’s collapse is not the result of a right-wing surge, but of left-wing dissent. pic.twitter.com/OpdGfeLzw2
— Stats for Lefties
Mahmood can crack wise with pervert comedians all she likes, but the real joke is Labour’s polling.
Featured image via X/ Barold
By Willem Moore
Scotland’s nature agency, NatureScot, has spent more than £72,000 of public funds in just the first three months of 2026 on matters relating to the controversial guga hunt. This is according to new figures that advocacy group Protect the Wild has obtained.
The documents reveal that NatureScot has already spent nearly £30,000 this year on research it’ll use to assess how many birds the hunters can kill. This is alongside further spending on legal advice connected to the licensing of the hunt.
Tens of thousands more has gone on hiring additional security and repair costs associated with protests and growing public opposition.
Crucially, these figures do not include staff time, which NatureScot admits is not recorded separately. So the true cost to the public purse is likely to be significantly higher.
Campaigners say the spending raises serious questions about priorities. Public money is being directed towards maintaining and managing a controversial activity, rather than invested in nature restoration and biodiversity recovery.
Devon Docherty, Scottish campaigns manager at Protect the Wild, said:
The licence for this hunt is entirely discretionary, and the Scottish government has confirmed this. That means continuing to license the guga hunt is an active choice by NatureScot, and one that is becoming increasingly costly not only to the taxpayer, but to our already struggling wildlife.
There is a clear expectation that public funds allocated to a nature agency are used to restore and protect nature, not to sustain an outdated and cruel tradition. The guga hunt benefits a very small number of people, at the expense of wildlife and the wider public interest.
NatureScot’s responsibility for protected species
NatureScot is Scotland’s public nature authority, responsible for protecting and enhancing Scotland’s natural environment. As part of this role, it decides whether to grant licences allowing the killing of otherwise protected species, such as gannets, which the guga hunt targets.
The guga hunt is the UK’s last remaining seabird hunt. It involves a group of hunters traveling to the remote island of Sula Sgeir to slaughter gannet seabird chicks. Their flesh is taken back to the Isle of Lewis where it is sold and consumed as a local delicacy.
In 2025, the birds reportedly sold for £35 each. If all 485 birds taken were sold, this would equate to a potential value of around £17,000.
Docherty added:
Nobody should be making money off the killing of a protected native species. And our public money should certainly not be spent on aiding it.
Over a quarter of a million signatures have now been gathered on petitions to end the guga hunt. NatureScot must listen to the clear mandate for change, and use its discretionary power to stop the slaughter of seabirds on Sula Sgeir.
NatureScot has said if a licence application comes in for 2026, it will go before its board for decision.
Featured image via John Ranson for the Canary
By The Canary
Former Israeli intelligence officer Ella Kenan’s boast to a pro-Israel conference has exposed the occupation’s massive digital propaganda operation. Kenan’s 60,000-strong ‘army’ is focused entirely on undermining global support for the Palestinian people.
Israeli arrogance
With typical Israeli arrogance, she claims that her organisation’s reach is ‘completely organic’. Then, in the next sentence, she boasts that its propaganda goes ‘viral’ because of coordinated ‘communities’ of 60,000 – and the help of ‘non-Jewish influencers’ that ‘collaborate’.
‘Organic’ is doing some heavy lifting in Kenan’s brain.
Kenan then boasts of whitewashing Israel’s genocide and apartheid and of making up slogans that reach the speeches of US presidents. And she adds that her ‘communities’ run ‘take-down’ campaigns to remove news they don’t like from social media platforms.
But all ‘completely organic’, of course:
Every accusation is a confession
Her unironic claim of coming up with ‘Hamas is Isis’ is, as usual, a case of ‘every accusation is a confession’. The ISIS-linked organisation in Gaza works for Israel. As author Susan Abulhawa rightly pointed out:
Actually, Israel is ISIS, but 10x worse.
Kenan has also boasted of ‘beating Greta Thunberg’ after Thunberg called for the freedom of Gaza as Israel began its genocide there.
Israel is a terror state that is allowed to throw huge resources at spreading the lies it tells to excuse its crimes. And its professional propagandists are not even shy about admitting it.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
The BBC has once again attracted criticism for its handling of Reform UK, this time for using its logo and branding in a TV news report.
This is shocking https://t.co/p6IQickZtz
— Mr Ethical
(@nw_nicholas) April 21, 2026
We should note that the big red arrows were added by the person drawing attention to the Reform branding. Still, though, that’s most definitely the Reform logo and that’s most definitely Reform’s trademark turquoise.
BBC or the British Reformcasting Corporation?
In the above clip, the journalist is explaining how Reform’s asylum policy will work. Presumably, the BBC would say that this is why it has Reform’s logo and colours on screen.
However, the reason it isn’t clear is because the logo and text bar are placed where you would normally see the BBC’s logo and text bar. As such, it looks less like the BBC is explaining Reform policy and more like it’s rebranded as the British Reformcasting Corporation (BRC).
If the BBC would be so kind as to pull the Reform Party’s trousers back up when it’s finished round there, that’d be just swell
Giving Farage’s party its own own logo in its own colours for its own segment Seriously?
— Stuzi
(@stuzi_pants) April 21, 2026
Of course, the BRC accusations go much deeper than the above. For a start, the BBC has a tendency to come running every time a Reform politician clears their throat.
Reform UK has now announced this unworkable, monumentally expensive ‘policy’ three times in the last year.
Yet the BBC still rush breathlessly to report every word they say.
It’s just madness. — Don McGowan (@donmcgowan) April 20, 2026
https://t.co/h6RLUaOApn
As the Canary wrote last December:
A research group has brought out a new study on the political biases behind broadcast news. The results are truly damning – shining a light on the disproportionate coverage of far-right Reform UK on the BBC and ITV.
The BBC also has a mysterious fascination with Nigel Farage, which has seen him land more Question Time bookings than anyone else this century.
Nigel Farage’s 38 Question Time appearances are among the highest ever, Compared to main political leaders such as Cameron, Clegg, Miliband, Sturgeon, or Starmer, Farage has appeared more frequently, This is the BBC’s booking choices,
— Chris Harrop OBE (@ChrisHarropOBE) September 9, 2025
The BBC loves inviting Nigel Farage. They might aswell give him his own show.
— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) December 6, 2024
Comparisons
The BBC is treating Farage and Reform like a government-in-waiting. This is far from normal in terms of how they usually behave.
As an example, we don’t have to go back far to see how the BBC treated another insurgent politician who was shaking up the system. (Jeremy Corbyn.)
I don't know why people are surprised. The BBC literally photoshopped a russian hat onto Corbyn and got away with it.
However, the model is right and needs protecting. The rot lies with the Tory Exec who have politicised the BBC.
The BBC leadership should be politically… pic.twitter.com/B2dsuIJ28V
— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) November 11, 2025
It might be worth getting used to the BBC being turquoise, anyway, because if Farage forms the next government, it will be permanent.
Featured image via BBC
By Willem Moore
Hackney Greens will launch a “buddy” scheme to promote access to gardening. This is just one among dozens of environmental plans in the party’s local election manifesto, titled Hope for Hackney.
Hackney Greens have promised to work to match up people who have green space that they are unable to look after with a “buddy” who can tend to it instead.
Green candidate for mayor, Zoë Garbett, says:
The evidence shows that gardening is good for exercise and mental health – plus together we can protect and grow our natural environment. We also hope that the buddy programme will help tackle loneliness and build strong friendships.
The Green manifesto Hope for Hackney states:
We believe everyone should have the opportunity to be involved in stewarding the natural spaces around them and building a connection with the ecosystem on which we depend and are a part of.
When our natural environment is controlled from the top down, local people are deprived of agency in their green spaces, creating a disconnect with where they live. This affects feelings of community and has detrimental impacts on mental and physical health.
We want residents to be involved in decisions that shape their local environment.
The Hackney Greens manifesto includes dozens of specific and practical plans in Chapter 6: Caring for our Environment:
- To help repair the borough’s fragile ecosystem.
- Support community food growing and innovative use of land.
- Keep our streets clean.
- Protect our planet and prepare for the future.
- Adapt to our changing climate.
Residents that Green Party volunteers are meeting at the doorstep have responded especially well to the Hackney Greens pledge to establish a community skip. This would move around the borough, allowing residents to dispose of bulky items conveniently and for free.
A Green council would also support and empower local community energy projects. These can help lower energy bills for residents and businesses, as well as reducing carbon emissions.
The Hackney Greens manifesto pledges support for existing local community groups, biodiversity champions, Tenants and Residents Associations and schools with training. And there’s a commitment to working with the Rights of the River Lea campaign.
A Green Council would mark International Mother Earth Day ‘Pachamama’ (22 April) as a borough-wide week of climate action and learning. This would highlight global majority and Indigenous perspectives on environmental stewardship.
You can read the full manifesto here.
Featured image via Hackney Green Party
By The Canary
Politics
From the Coalition of the Willing to the Bayeux Tapestry: how France and the UK renewed their vows
Helen Drake and Pauline Schnapper argue that the rebuilding of interpersonal ties has been integral to the recent improvement in Franco-British relations.
The resilience of the Franco-British couple is quite something to behold. In 2026, one long decade on from the UK’s referendum decision to leave the European Union, France and the United Kingdom are drawing ever closer. Already in May 2025, France and the UK had finalised plans to exchange priceless, historical artefacts: the Bayeux Tapestry would come to the British Museum, which would lend its own Sutton Hoo Treasures to museums in Normandy. The British Museum’s exhibition is expected to draw record numbers of visitors, such is the appeal of the tale it has to tell of the centuries of entwined Franco-British history.
Yet Brexit had pulled at the fabric of that relationship, unravelling diplomatic certainties and routines and fraying interpersonal trust. Indeed, during those Brexit years, Franco-British bilateral relations were variously strained, fractured and frozen, and cross-Channel contacts dwindled. No summits were held in the five years between 2018-2023, and not only because of Covid restrictions; diplomats were barred from speaking to each other following the crisis over AUKUS, and the people-to-people and trade links that had for so long characterised the bilateral relationship were now hindered by Brexit constraints on the free movement of goods, services and people. The cordial personal connections typical of diplomatic exchange between heads of state and government gave way to bad-tempered if not downright rude personal exchanges, reaching their nadir during the Covid pandemic when UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s puerile humour landed very badly with his French counterpart President Emmanuel Macron, and when vaccine nationalism stoked mutual hostility and derision.
In 2026, the picture could not look more different. Barely a week goes past, it seems, without a decision or development drawing the two countries into a closer and tighter embrace. Already in 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a hasty assembly of a ‘coalition of the willing’, where Paris and London jointly led 34 countries to prepare for a possible deployment of troops on the ground in the case of a ceasefire. Following the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 and the chaos this unleashed, France and the UK have not only initiated new forms of collaboration but have also carefully unpicked some particularly knotty obstacles in the path towards closer bilateral cooperation, including at UK-EU level. This is the context, for example, of the UK’s grudging willingness to rejoin the EU’s Erasmus scheme (previously popular with French students) and, most recently, to expedite legislation allowing for dynamic alignment with certain EU trading standards.
Work to repair and celebrate the fabric of Franco-British ties had in fact started to take shape before the international environment imploded. In 2022, ephemeral UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s decision to attend the first meeting of the European Political Community (EPC) in October 2022 in Prague, an initiative of French President Macron, was a first step. Following her departure from office, Rishi Sunak cleared the ground for the signature, in 2023, of the Windsor Framework on Northern Ireland by the UK and the European Commission, a development which itself explicitly paved the way for the first Franco-British summit since 2018, held in Paris on 10 March 2023 (at which, amongst many other things, the two sides reached an agreement to revert to pre-Brexit immigration controls on school visits from France).
In September of that same year, France hosted a state visit by King Charles III to France and, in the following April, the two countries ceremoniously celebrated the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, a set of agreements first concluded in colonial times. Keeping up the pace, in July 2024, the freshly-elected Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his French counterpart President Emmanuel Macron agreed to hold a summit in July 2025 to be preceded by a state visit to the UK by President Macron, hosted in Windsor Castle by King Charles III. In the Joint Declarations of that 37th UK-France Summit, held on 10 July 2025, the French and British leaders committed themselves to the ‘delivery’ of significant initiatives in the fields of ‘defence, energy, industrial cooperation’, including a refresh of the 2010 defence agreements to cover nuclear and conventional fields, especially cyber and hybrid warfare. Challenges inevitably remain, notably in the context of tightening immigration law on both sides of the Channel, but the capacity and willingness to address them is tangible.
What accounted for the speed and depth of repair to the Franco-British relationship? Shared interests were clearly substantial and pressing, but left gaps in the overall picture. With reference to 14 high-level interviews conducted with diplomats and officials close to the relationship between 2020 and 2025, we propose a number of supplementary observations. We saw that both the practice and the culture of the relationship were disrupted, first by the shock result of the Brexit referendum itself; then by the tenor of the negotiations on the Withdrawal Agreement and TCA, which led to a breakdown in trust and diplomatic normality between the two governments; and of course, in time, by the phasing out of the intra-EU diplomacy that had involved routines of regular diplomatic interactions at different levels, alongside agreed procedures and means of communication.
We observed that the restoration of the relationship occurred not only as a result of shared interests (especially security of all kinds) and the continuity of institutions (especially in intelligence and defence) but via the creation of opportunities – these partly due to the passing of time, and also to the changing of personnel at various levels – for interpersonal contact, the refraining from incendiary language, the creation of friendly gestures and the recognition and repairing of the deep historical, sentimental fabric of the relationship. These viewpoints offer a more complex understanding of post-Brexit bilateral relations, and point to the possibility that the Franco-British relationship has every opportunity to thrive along as-yet uncharted lines, with signs of both sides having learned the lessons of the importance, to diplomacy, of the humanity of international society.
By Professor Helen Drake, Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs, Loughborough University London and Pauline Schnapper, Professor of Contemporary British Civilisation at the University of Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle.
For a longer discussion of the themes in this blog, see Drake, H. and Schnapper, P. (2026) ‘Franco-British Bilateral Diplomacy After Brexit, 2020–2025: Mending the Ties That Bind’. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.70113. Selected wording in this blog is duplicated from that article.
According to Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf, “failed Tories” are trying to “infiltrate” the party. While no one is disagreeing with this sentiment, the problem is these failed Tories are walking in through the front door:
"Failed Tories are trying to infiltrate us."
Suella Braverman — Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) April 21, 2026
Lee Anderson
Robert Jenrick
Andrew Rosindell
Danny Kruger
Nadhim Zahawi
Nadine Dorris
Andrea Jenkyns
Jonathan Gullis
Jake Berry pic.twitter.com/12DwdTyPBa
Reform UK aka The Tories 2.0
As a startup party, we have already made history and smashed the two-party system.
To be fair, this is accurate, as the Canary reported.
Labour/Tory support has dropped 37 points since last elections
Following years of failed neoliberal guff from the duopoly, it's clear to see why Labour and Tories' polling is in the toilethttps://t.co/tBSDC2yQs8https://t.co/tBSDC2yQs8
— Canary (@TheCanaryUK) April 21, 2026
However, Reform isn’t solely responsible for this because the Green Party has also taken votes away from the duopoly. The difference is the Greens actually offer some sort of alternative to the dead end neoliberal failures of the past few decades by:
- Seeking to minimise the gap between the billionaires and the rest of us.
- Targeting the issues driving the Affordability Crisis.
- Identifying solutions to the problems faced by renters and homeowners.
- Opposing cruel immigration and policing policies
- Listening to experts on how to solve the ‘War on Drugs’.
- Supporting its candidates when they’re smeared by the media and Zionists (finally).
Meanwhile, Reform looks to:
- Double down on failed immigration policies at the expense of the economy.
- Prevent the UK achieving energy security by blocking cheap renewable energy projects.
- Promote crypto (a technology many have compared to a pyramid scheme).
- Produce an endless supply of candidates who praise Hitler and British fascists.
Yusuf is correct that they’re outside the two-party system, but Reform isn’t an alternative; it’s just the Tories on steroids.
Yusuf: ‘We will not back down’
Reform’s spokesperson for home affairs continued:
We will not back down.
We will defeat the uniparty and break the establishment that has failed and betrayed the British people.
Clearly, Yusuf is thinking: ‘To beat the uniparty we must think like the uniparty. We must accept all of their worst MPs and copy their worst policies’.
It’s obvious why Yusuf would think this because Yusuf is himself a failed Tory.
It’s hilarious that people don’t realise Zia Yusuf was a Tory less than 2 years ago.
Being he’s never been elected to anything, you might say he’s a #FailedTory. https://t.co/1Sf51t6yK3
— Reform Party UK Exposed
(@reformexposed) April 22, 2026
Yusuf is far from the only failed Tory to join up, and Farage and co often weren’t kind about their new friends.
Jenrick is a fraud. I’ve alway thought so, this quote proves it. pic.twitter.com/pMcuhe88mw
— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) August 18, 2025
Nigel Farage appears to have changed his mind… pic.twitter.com/IUfhE388vN
— Pippa Crerar (@PippaCrerar) January 26, 2026
Oh, and as the Canary reported on 20 April, many of these ex-Tories are currently predicted to lose their seats to their old party come 2029.
Chicken Run Alert — Kevin Hollinrake MP (@kevinhollinrake) April 19, 2026
https://t.co/H9YAaH9K71
Turquoise takeover
Yusuf finished his post by claiming:
Nigel Farage will be our Prime Minister, supported by a majority of turquoise-blooded Reform MPs.
A brighter future awaits Britain.
‘Turquoise-blooded’ doesn’t have the same ring to it as ‘red-blooded’ or ‘blue-blooded’, does it?
The colour is fitting, however, because Reform’s turquoise is really just a louder version of Tory blue. We can see it, and so can all these Tories who keep ‘infiltrating’ the party at the invitation of Nigel Farage.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/ Chris McAndrew/ David Woolfall
By Willem Moore
An Israel-based AI firm, Generative AI for Good, claims to be using deepfake technologies for positive ends. ‘Positive’ appears to mean creating deepfake videos to help the illegal US-Israel war on Iran.
Like this clip that the company showed recently at an UN event in New York. The film is intended to show women who claim to have been raped by Iranian security forces during the CIA/Mossad-coordinated riots in Iran in January 2026.
Generative AI for Good claims that it uses AI to “help survivors testify safely — in their real voice, without revealing their identity”. But Israel and its mouthpieces have been shown to have used false allegations of rapes and other atrocities on 7 October 2023 to justify its genocide in Gaza.
The claims have been repeatedly exposed as fiction, yet continue to be quoted by politicians and media as grounds for supporting Israel’s crimes.
One of the firm’s handful of employees, ‘creative director’ Tal Harari, still has a post on her Instagram profile repeating those claims of rape and beheaded babies which are complete fiction.
View this post on Instagram
‘AI impact leader’ Mlamdovsky Somech founded the tech company
The post mentions Noa Argamani. Israel has attempted to use Argamani as a poster child for its genocide propaganda, but she has refuted the occupation’s claims of her supposed mistreatment in Gaza. Likewise, she debunked its claims that Palestinians had killed one of her friends, when in fact the IOF killed him.
Harari does not list her military service on her LinkedIn profile though like any Israeli, she will almost certainly have been in the IOF. However, her colleague, marketing manager Noa Rosenberg, speaks on hers.
Rosenberg talks about her pride in leading an event for military veterans and includes in her list of jobs her service in the IOF’s ‘Psychotechnical Headquarter’. No doubt useful in her current company.
The firm’s founder, Shiran Mlamdovsky Somech, doesn’t list her military record either. But she did tell the Jewish Post and News in early 2024 that “Artificial intelligence is a secret weapon of ours” in what the paper described as “using the revolutionary technology to bolster [the military’s] efforts both online and on the ground” in the “information war being waged alongside the military battlefields in Gaza”.
More links with Israeli military
In 2023 — before 7 October — Mlamdovsky Somech also claimed that Jews are pitted against “two billion Muslims”.
We are only 15 million Jews around the world, versus 2 billion Muslims…Our slingshot is technology.
Mlamdovsky Somech made that comment at an event she organised in cooperation with the IOF’s notorious Unit 8200. Unit 8200 is the cyberspy outfit whose operatives mark their headsets for each Palestinian they help kill and which played a key role in the murder of Iran’s leader in its war of aggression.
Nonetheless, just as with Israel’s atrocity propaganda against the Palestinians and its denials of its own atrocities, we’re supposed to believe that its AI videos of ‘Iranian women’ depict reality. That AI is only being used to protect identities and not because, yet again, it’s all made up and Israel is trying to bolster support for its crimes.
If you’re even tempted to believe that, there might be a bridge or two for sale.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
Politics
The House | Cut pensions to fund defence? That’d be electorally unwise and socially irresponsible
(Alamy)
3 min read
The call from a handful of Labour ministers, peers and backbenchers to fund higher defence spending via welfare cuts ignores the purpose of our social security system.
Most welfare spending goes to pensioners, largely through the state pension. And much of the attention has focused on the triple lock that uprates payments according to wages, inflation or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest. But even after years of this mechanism being in place, 1.9m older people still live in poverty, with millions more just about managing. In fact, when the Chancellor announced the disastrous decision to means-test the winter fuel allowance in 2024, it exposed just how many pensioners have incomes too low to pay any tax at all.
Triple lock critics often miss that the state pension is our clearest expression of intergenerational solidarity. Every working generation pays national insurance, which funds the state pensions of their predecessors. Today’s retirees aren’t getting something for nothing – it’s just their turn to have their pensions funded by today’s workers. To argue that this should be taken away is to misunderstand the case for the welfare state.
Any functioning society needs state intervention to ensure that everyone is able to thrive. Welfare also mitigates the effects of deep inequality, which otherwise risks social division and weakened cohesion. To treat it as a cash cow for the latest spending spree overlooks its core purpose.
And despite what the Conservatives and Reform might claim, our welfare system is far from generous. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculates that Universal Credit falls short of covering essential living costs by at least £22 per week for single adults and £51 per week for couples. Local Housing Allowance remains frozen, falling far short of the actual cost of rent in many parts of the country. Millions, including people in work, rely on the support of food banks.
Cutting the state pension would be short-sighted. Future generations of retirees will likely be even more reliant on the state pension for the bulk of their income after a lifetime of work than today’s pensioners. That is because the era of decent, final salary occupational pensions is long past its high watermark. Making the state pension less generous would inevitably push more pensioners into poverty, only adding pressure on future governments to intervene. Such short-termism is not what’s needed, especially when there are other ways that the government could raise money.
We could properly tax income from wealth, for example by applying National Insurance to investment income, raising up to £10.2bn a year. Reforming the Capital Gains Tax system, by increasing rates and closing loopholes, could raise around £12bn a year. And a two per cent tax on assets above £10m could raise up to £24bn a year.
It is a shame that the current fervour to divert money from welfare to defence in some quarters of the Labour Party has not matched by an enthusiasm for taxing the wealthiest. Such measures could allow us to build the council houses we need, fix our broken social care system or bring water back into public ownership.
Government isn’t just about deciding how to spend the money you raise – it’s also about whether enough is raised in the first place. If it isn’t enough, the answer lies in raising more, rather than simply moving money from one department to another. Asking pensioners, including those in poverty, to give up the triple lock so that we can spend more on defence is yet another electorally foolhardy and socially irresponsible suggestion. Let’s hope someone sees sense.
Neil Duncan-Jordan is Labour MP for Poole
Jonathan Portes reflects on the language used in political discourse following a debate he partook in to debunk the notion that the UK could be heading towards a civil war.
Is civil war coming to the UK? My King’s College London colleague David Betz has suggested that it might. In a recent debate at the Oxford Literary Festival, I set out why this claim is not only unconvincing, but potentially harmful.
There is no credible evidence that the UK is anywhere close to civil war, defined in the political science literature as sustained, organised violence between a state and non-state actors. Could it happen? Nothing is impossible, but Professor Betz’s estimate of a ‘18.5% chance over five years’ is the sort of speculative extrapolation of invented numbers that brings serious quantitative social science into disrepute.
More broadly, the UK remains a stable, high-income democracy, with functioning institutions, competitive elections and peaceful transfers of power. Comparative research shows that civil wars are strongly associated with weak state capacity and low levels of democratic accountability, rather than with established democracies like the UK. While trust in institutions has declined, this is neither new nor unique to the UK – and long-term data from the British Social Attitudes Survey shows it remains far from collapse. Protest is not insurgency, and polarisation is not civil war.
Professor Betz’s thesis became even more absurd when he tried to explain to a bemused audience the “sides” in this civil war, which will apparently be a three-way contest between the non-white population and their allies in the metropolitan elite, the “white British” outside the cities, and the remains of the state. My family, like millions of others, contains representatives of all three factions. While of course there are occasional tensions, I find it difficult to picture us “drilling out each others’ kneecaps” in Professor Betz’s lurid language.
More broadly, the idea that the UK is dividing into coherent blocs along racial or geographic lines does not withstand scrutiny. Social and political identities in the UK are overlapping and complex. Most families and communities span multiple such categories. This is not a society organising itself for violent internal conflict. Indeed, where civil wars do emerge, the actors and cleavages are typically visible well in advance, with organised groups, territorial control and escalating violence. There is no evidence of such dynamics in the UK,
The more relevant question is why this language is being used at all. References to ‘civil war’ are no longer confined to fringe spaces; they increasingly appear in parts of mainstream commentary. But this is not a neutral description of political conditions. It is a framing – one that shapes how those conditions are understood.
That framing matters. Language influences how people interpret politics. Repeated claims that institutions are illegitimate, that democratic outcomes cannot be trusted, or that the state no longer represents “people like you” do not simply reflect dissatisfaction. They help construct a narrative in which democratic processes are seen as fundamentally compromised. The claim by Reform that they lost the recent Gorton and Denham byelection because of “foreign” voters is just one example. A substantial body of research suggests that democratic institutions reduce the likelihood of political violence by providing channels for the peaceful resolution of differences. Framing politics in terms of impending civil war implies that these mechanisms have already failed.
This rhetoric is also rarely confined to abstract concerns about governance. It is frequently tied to arguments about identity – about who belongs, and who does not. Claims of crisis are often linked to the idea that “ordinary” Britons are under threat, whether from immigration, from ethnic or religious minorities, or from broader social and cultural change. The structure of the argument is familiar: an “us” that is being displaced, and a “them” that is being privileged.
There is nothing new about this as a political strategy. What is different is the escalation in language. Talking about “civil war” suggests that social and cultural divisions are not only a matter of concern but fundamental – and potentially irreconcilable except through violence.
This has several consequences.
First, it makes serious policy debate more difficult. Take immigration. It is entirely legitimate to disagree about its economic and social impacts, or about the appropriate policy response. But if immigration is framed primarily as a threat to national or ethnic survival, those debates become harder to conduct in a meaningful way.
Second, it risks weakening social cohesion. Democratic politics depends on a basic level of mutual recognition: that even where we disagree, we accept one another as legitimate participants in a shared political community. Evidence from UK-focused research highlights both the extent of perceived polarisation and the risks of misperceiving divisions.
Third, while the UK is not remotely close to civil war, such rhetoric may have effects at the margins. A small number of individuals may take it literally, or use it to justify confrontational or even violent behaviour. Studies of political violence in democratic contexts suggest that inflammatory narratives can play a role in legitimising such actions.
None of this is to suggest that the UK does not face serious economic and social challenges. Weak productivity growth, pressure on public services, regional inequalities and political dysfunction are all real issues. Analysing these problems – and proposing workable solutions – should be the focus of serious debate.
Framing the situation as one of impending civil war does the opposite. It distracts from underlying issues, while contributing to a more polarised and less constructive political environment.
So the answer to the original question is straightforward. No, the UK is not heading towards civil war. But the increasing use of that language is not a harmless exaggeration. It reflects – and reinforces – a way of thinking about politics that is more polarised, more exclusionary, and ultimately less helpful for understanding the challenges the UK actually faces.
By Professor Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London.
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