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Politics

Far-right MP defends Tommy Robinson’s foreign hate speakers

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Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson, and Valentina Gomez

Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson, and Valentina Gomez

Rupert Lowe is the MP who left Reform UK following several run-ins with Nigel Farage. Lowe has since formed his own party, and because he doesn’t have much in the way of imagination, his party is called ‘Restore Britain’. The party sells itself as a further-right alternative to the already-far-right Reform. In aid of this, Lowe has come out to defend the foreign hate speakers that Britain has now banned from attending Tommy Robinson’s racism festival:

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How Lowe can he go?

The “foreign commentators” in question are those who were set to attend Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, which takes place on 16 May.

Lowe’s message reads in full:

This Government is entirely wrong to ban foreign commentators from speaking at Robinson’s rally on Saturday

I will be formally challenging the Home Office, again, on the decision to prevent these individuals from entering.

I won’t be there myself, but many patriots will be and they deserve to hear lawful views in order to decide for themselves if they agree or not.

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That is free speech.

Islamist extremists are personally welcomed by the Prime Minister, yet this group is banned.

It stinks.

Barrister Jane Heybroek responded to Lowe’s post with the following:

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So, are these people inciting racial hatred?

In our opinion, there’s an incredibly straightforward argument that: yes, they are.

Hate mongers

On 12 May, Rose Cocker reported the following for the Canary:

During a speech on 11 May, Keir Starmer (PM-for-now) boasted about blocking “far right agitators” from entering the country. Labour has in fact blocked the visas of seven individuals who were planning to attend ‘Unite the Kingdom,’ a far-right rally happening on 16 May. Among them are two prominent MAGA figures.

Cocker suggested that Starmer only made this move because his party lost so many voters to the left-wing Green Party in the local elections. Regardless, it was the right move given the actions of these people.

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Speaking on the banned Joey Mannarino, Cocker wrote:

At a Britain First ‘March for Remigration’ in 2025, Mannario gave a rambling speech in front of a backdrop image of himself and Donald Trump. When he later tweeted a recording, he urged viewers to:

“deport the parasites who are raping their way through America, Europe and the United Kingdom.”

For those who don’t know, ‘remigration‘ is the plan to deport non-white people from European countries, regardless of whether or not they were born here.

Starmer also banned Valentina Gomez, who is one of the most virulent Islamophobes in American politics:

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Gomez spoke at last year’s rally, as can be seen here:

These people want a civil war

One of the speakers at the last Unite the Kingdom rally was the Dutch racist Eva Vlaardingerbroek. Vlaardingerbroek was blocked from entering the UK earlier this year, as we reported on 15 January:

Vlaardingerbroek is part of Generation Remigration, which is a group that advocates for – you guessed it – ‘remigration’.

Additionally:

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Remigration is built on the idea that people of different ethnicities cannot live peacefully together. This is quite obviously what you would describe as ‘racist’. In years gone by, people on the far right would try to provide some sort of cover to claim ‘we’re not racist‘. Clearly, there is no such cover here.

The fact that people are happy to openly support remigration shows that racists are once more back out in the open. People with more than two brain cells, however, understand what remigration would look like in practice.

According to the last Census, the number of people who aren’t ‘white’ is over 10 million – many of whom were born here. Indeed, many may be second, third, or fourth generation. How many of those people would oppose being deported? How many white people do you think would join them? Going off the global George Floyd protests, we can assume ‘a shit tonne’.

What do you call a situation in which one section of the country goes to war with the other?

Public good

The government has blocked all these speakers because their presence isn’t “conducive to the public good”. Once you understand what remigration is, it’s hard to deny that fact.

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Remember we said that Joey Mannarino spoke at a Britain First remigration rally? Well, this is Britain First’s leader:

Rupert Lowe is a hair’s width away from this guy, and that’s concerning, because he’s an actual MP.

Featured image via The Canary

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By Willem Moore

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Cartel car bomb: the CIA is fighting Trump’s colonial shadow war in Mexico

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Cartel car bomb

Cartel car bomb

The CIA used a car bomb to kill a mid-level cartel leader in Mexico’s capital, insiders claim. The US foreign intelligence agency is pursuing clandestine operations as part of president Donald Trump’s war on so-called ‘narco-terrorists’. In reality, the operations are about extending US control over the Americas.

Cartel boss Francisco Beltran was killed by an explosion on 28 March:

Video and pictures of the attack on March 28 show a quick burst of flames with the car continuing to roll forward, drifting off the highway.

The CIA has called accusations it was involved “false and salacious reporting”, which

serves as nothing more than a PR campaign for the cartels and puts American lives at risk.

Yet two CIA officers were killed in Mexico in April 2026. They were returning from a raid on a drugs lab in Chihuahua.

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CNN said of the recent car bombing:

Mexican authorities have maintained extreme secrecy around the explosion, but multiple sources tell CNN that the attack was a targeted assassination, facilitated by CIA operations officers. An explosive device had been hidden inside the vehicle, the State of Mexico’s Attorney General told CNN.

Sowing chaos in Mexico

The US outlet quoted several figures familiar with the operation. They contradicted the official CIA response.

One said:

The lethality of their operations has been seriously ramped up. It’s a significant expansion of the kind of thing the CIA has been willing to do inside Mexico.

A former CIA officer said the US was trying to sow chaos through unattributable actions:

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They definitely wanted this incident to create the question in everyone’s mind of, ‘Who did this?’

While Mexican journalist Jose Cardenas commented:

We have been living in anarchic war for many months in Sinaloa. But attacks like this, if confirmed, in an area near the country’s capital, well, I have never heard of anything similar.

In February, the killing of a senior cartel boss Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes led to widespread fighting across several Mexican states. Mexican security forces reportedly pulled the trigger, but CIA intelligence supported the operation. Here is the Canary report on that mission.

Conflating drug trafficking and terrorism

The US has increasingly tried to frame drug trafficking in the same category as terrorism. The new US counter-terrorism strategy reaffirms this:

Last year, I rightfully designated the deadly cartels as terrorist organizations, and began using the strength and power of the U.S. military to stop and destroy their operations.

This approach was also used to justify the 3 January attack on Venezuela. That action saw president Nicolas Maduro kidnapped and taken to New York for trial. The same narrative is still being used to justify illegal drones strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. To date, 193 people have been killed at sea since September 2025.

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As the Canary reported on 6 January:

The US justice department classified the Cartel De Los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) alongside ISIS and Al-Qaeda in November. 43 days later, the US has effectively admitted the organisation does not exist – at least not as a cartel in any conventional sense.

Adding:

The fact is, Cartel De Los Soles was always shorthand for high-level government corruption in Venezuela. It’s use goes back to the 1990s. The ‘suns’ refer to a rank insignia worn by grifting senior military officials. Which means the US classified a slang term in the same category as actual terror groups.

In reality, the Trump administration is aggressively pursuing hemispheric control. One writer has described this as building a ‘homeland empire’.

Trump’s homeland empire

Trump’s plan is driven by US decline, but also the increasing synergy between law enforcement, military and intelligence aims. This process is powered by the fascistic impulses of the US war on terror.

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Historian Nikhil Pal Singh warned in a recent piece for Equator:

familiar analytical frameworks which rely on the distinction between foreign and domestic realms, normality and legality, policing and war, cannot provide the ‘world picture’ we need to grasp what’s happening here.

Instead, Trump:

conflates immigrants, drugs and free trade as sources of weakness coming from outside, “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Ultimately, Singh argued, Trump has combined:

the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors.

US operations in South America are continuing under the name ‘Operation Total Extermination’. Canada, Cuba and Greenland have all been threatened with intervention or annexation. If not for the disastrous Iran war, Trump might already have acted. US rhetoric about continental politics has centred on drugs. But scratch the surface and you’ll find the same old colonial ambitions.

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By Joe Glenton

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47% of households forced onto DWP Universal credit lost money

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DWP Managed Migration

DWP Managed Migration

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has released official figures for how many people have managed the move from legacy benefits to Universal Credit. They are, of course, trying to paint a pretty picture of the people they’ve supported. But the figures speak for themselves on how many have been left with less – or worse, with nothing.

DWP celebrates people losing money

If you were to take the media and politicians’ word for it, you’d think that welfare was ‘out of control’ and Universal Credit claimants have ‘increased significantly’ because nobody wants to work. But, as the DWP eventually had to admit, the reason for this is, of course, that over 2 million people were forced to migrate from legacy benefits to Universal Credit.

Back in February, I reported for the Canary that the DWP had celebrated stripping over 360,000 of their legacy benefits, as they announced the closure of Employment Support Allowance and Housing Benefit.

As I wrote at the time:

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They bragged:

“Over 1.9 million people now better supported to find good, secure jobs as the Government moves customers off outdated benefits and on to Universal Credit.”

Considering ESA was a benefit for disabled people who couldn’t work as much or at all, it’s absolutely gross that the focus here is on work. But it doesn’t come as a surprise from the department that wants to force disabled people into work by any means necessary.

Well, now with the updated figures for completing the move to Universal Credit, we can see just how many people have lost their benefits. Not only that, but how many are worse off after being forced to move to Universal Credit.

DWP’s own figures show how screwed vulnerable people are

The DWP’s own stats show that, between July 2022 and the end of March 2026, 2,353,319 claimants were sent migration notices, or 1,822,374 households. Of that, 1,992,161 people in 1,580,239 households made a claim for Universal Credit and 1,131 people in 1,073 households are still going through the process.

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This means that 360,030 people in 241,064 households did not manage to make a claim in the three-month period DWP imposed. That’s 15% of claimants and 13% of households that lost their vital support.

As the Canary has previously reported, making the move to Universal Credit is especially difficult for chronically ill and disabled people, who struggle with stress and lack the energy to fill in excessive forms.

An internal report also showed that some disabled claimants often had very little understanding of what they were being asked to do. As a result, many didn’t manage to claim Universal Credit and lost their legacy benefit.

The National Association of Welfare Rights Workers told Work and Pensions committee chair Debbie Abrahams that:

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These claimants will all have long-term health conditions and/or disabilities, and their legacy benefits are likely to be their only source of income. A failure to migrate to universal credit therefore carries a high risk of destitution, rapid deterioration in their health, and even death.

Those who claimed still lost

The stats also showed how many people had managed to apply for ‘transitional protection’. This is awarded to even out the fact that many may lose money when switching benefits. But not everyone managed to do this. Of the number of 1,531,860 households eligible for protection, just 814,703 were awarded it.

This means that 717,157 households did not receive transitional protection and will have lost money by moving to Universal Credit.

What’s notable is we aren’t told in the report why people didn’t get the protection. As they were already eligible, this is presumably a problem of not contacting the DWP in time. And this again shows that, by putting a strict 3-month time-limit on claimants, many did not have enough time to jump through all of the DWP’s hoops.

But what’s really interesting is that, for the rest of the stats in the report, the DWP have provided individual and household figures; for transitional protection, they’ve only provided households affected. This means we don’t know how many individual claimants were affected, which could’ve been a lot higher than 43%.

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It was previously discovered by Policy in Practice that around 200,000 households lost around £59.54 a week. That’s over £230 a month that people are just expected to do without.

DWP is a failure of an organisation

There are many things the DWP could’ve done differently here. Their system could be easier to navigate and phonelines easier to get through to. They could’ve made transitional protection a part of the main application that you didn’t have to apply separately for. But owt to save a few quid

The DWP are trying to market these stats as a good thing, but all they show, once again, is how much of a failure of an organisation they are.

Featured image via the Canary

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Thunberg and Lineker join over 245 signing open letter defending Misan Harriman

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misan harriman

misan harriman

Greta Thunberg and Gary Lineker have joined over 245 public figures in defending Misan Harriman in an open letter organised by the Good Law Project.

This follows targeted attacks from pro-Israel bad actors, with the letter calling out this:

dishonest smear campaign.

Harriman sits as chair of the Southbank Centre and has earned a significant amount of respect from the British public during his career. He earned this respect and solidarity due to his principled positions on many cultural and societal issues in the UK.

Moreover, Harriman has been outspoken against the genocide on Gaza and has regularly confronted issues of injustice.

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Now, Harriman has fallen prey to the Zionists’ well-worn tool of labelling people as antisemitic for exposing the dishonesty, cruelty, and barbarity of Israel. Subsequently, calls from right-wing, pro-Israel MPs to have him sacked from his position are facing huge, record-breaking pushback from the British public in complaints to IPSOS.

Instead, this widely supported letter and the public in general are making it clear that lessons have been learned following prior false antisemitism witch-hunts.

Misan Harriman offered valuable critique

The right-wing, billionaire-interested mainstream press and pro-Israel lobby groups have once again been hard at work. This time, their mission is to smear influential figure Misan Harriman. With shameful, defamatory pieces put out by the Telegraph, informed by Tory MPs and far-right pundits, they are making clear that they intend to destroy Harriman’s career as he has obviously, and rightfully, tweaked some Zionist nerves.

Harriman has posted criticism of mainstream media coverage after the Golders Green attacks, in which the Muslim victim has seemed to garner little attention. Following the local elections wins by Reform UK, he posted a video discussing how deadly, sinister events like the Holocaust come to pass:

Quoting the renowned Jewish human rights activist and academic Susan Sontag, Harriman’s ‘controversial’ video which irritated Reform MP Robert Jenrick said:

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She said when thinking about the Holocaust, 10% of people in any population are cruel no matter what, and 10% is merciful no matter what and the other – this is important – the other remaining 80% could be moved in either direction.

It’s such a profound way to look at us. In the context of yesterday’s election result it is something which I think is really topical.

Clearly, Harriman, and Sontag, tweaked a nerve amongst the right-wing, Zionist bought political establishment and pressure groups. With their sights now set on Harriman, they are now pursuing a typical defamatory and discriminatory agenda of labelling people as antisemitic.

Harriman’s offence: opposing genocide and mass murder and questioning why Muslim lives matter so little in the West.

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4,322 signatories: “We stand for truth and justice.”

Nevertheless, it is beautifully apparent that these allegations will not stick without a good public showdown. Celebrities, activists and the general public are making it abundantly clear that hoodwinking and witch-hunts will no longer work. After all, identifying the true enemies of the working class, civil rights, and frankly humanity itself has become pretty damn easy, given how many masks have slipped since 7 October 2023.

4,322 people, and counting, have signed this open letter confronting the smear head on, saying:

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We, the undersigned, come together in solidarity with Misan Harriman, photographer, filmmaker, and advocate. We are deeply concerned about the dishonest smear campaign orchestrated by the Telegraph and the Mail…

The purpose of the smear campaign, which we repeat is entirely without foundation in fact, is to traduce and marginalise Misan. And it is intended to send a message to others that if they speak out, they will be subject to harassment and threats.

We believe that safeguarding freedom of expression is essential to a healthy democracy. And that trying to silence responsible critics of Israel by smearing them as antisemitic does not protect Britain’s Jewish community.

They powerfully finish:

We stand against all forms of hate speech, violence and discrimination.

We stand for truth and justice.

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We stand with Misan Harriman.

Mark Ruffalo also spoke up for Harriman on his social media. The Marvel star joined his post on Instagram in which he spoke about the lack of interest from the MSM to actually recognise the huge number of principled, and devoted, anti-Zionist Jews who have joined protests against the genocide on Gaza:

The public isn’t falling for it this time

This disgusting smear campaign has only pushed solidarity with Palestinians further into the spotlight. Ironically, this gross campaign is actually reinforcing the understanding that confronting and opposing oppressive states, structures, and societies is absolutely the right thing to do.

Going further, his decision to quote a Jewish human rights activist who discussed how disastrous, sinister and hugely fatal events like the holocaust come to pass speaks volumes. It also underscores how baseless the antisemitism smears truly are.

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With many Jewish activists and public figures calling out this smear campaign against Harriman, bad actors are simply exposing their own antisemitism in the process.

Therefore, we at the Canary urge you to sign this letter from the Good Law Project and join Thunberg, Lineker and fellow British citizens in defending humanity, decency and international law.

Featured image via the Canary

By Maddison Wheeldon

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Anyone but Ed Miliband – spiked

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Anyone but Ed Miliband

The ‘chaos with Ed Miliband’ that David Cameron once warned about could soon become a political reality in Britain. As far-fetched as it sounds, the Net Zero secretary and failed Labour leader is seriously being touted as a potential successor to Keir Starmer.

The Times reported last week that Miliband would be prepared to run for leader should health secretary Wes Streeting move to trigger an imminent leadership contest. If Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester mayor and the soft left’s king over the water, cannot get himself in parliament and on the ballot in time, then Miliband might be prepared to throw his own hat in the ring. Well, Wes Streeting’s big moment now appears to be imminent. Patrick Maguire and Aubrey Allegretti report in The Times that Streeting has told his allies he is preparing to resign as soon as tomorrow.

You might still think Miliband is a long shot, given how forcefully the public rejected him in the 2015 General Election. But this is the Labour Party we’re talking about – a party that has long ceased to have any connection with the masses or feel for public opinion. And so, as incredible as it may sound to those outside the Labour tribe, polls show that Miliband is the most popular minister in the current cabinet among Labour’s rank-and-file members, the very folk who may yet have the decisive say over who to anoint as our next prime minister. The liberal-left Independent sees Miliband as the top contender for the job. The New Statesman, Labour’s in-house magazine, has urged Ed to be installed in Downing Street, at least as a caretaker leader, while Burnham plots his way back to the Commons.

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For those of us not in Labour la-la-land, a Miliband premiership is a terrifying prospect. After all, he is not merely a dreadful energy secretary. He is one of the main architects of Britain’s sky-high energy prices. And this makes him one of the leading causes of Britain’s industrial decline. Indeed, Miliband’s economic vandalism stretches right back to his time under Gordon Brown, as energy and climate change secretary between 2008 and 2010.

The Climate Change Act 2008, which Miliband stewarded through parliament, locked Britain into legally binding carbon-reduction targets with almost no democratic debate about what this would mean in practice – namely, higher energy bills for both consumers and industry, with catastrophic consequences.

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The climate agenda initiated by Miliband led to an ever-growing dependence on intermittent renewable energy, which cannot keep the lights on when the wind stops blowing or the Sun stops shining. The more renewables in the energy system, the harder and costlier it becomes to match supply with demand. When turbines sit idle on still days, gas has to be procured at short notice and at inflated prices. When the wind is too strong, operators are paid – handsomely, at the consumer’s expense – to switch off.

By the time Miliband returned to government in 2024, the link between Net Zero and rising energy costs could no longer credibly be denied. But that hasn’t stopped him or given him pause for thought. In fact, not even the war in Iran, which has prompted one of the largest energy-supply shocks in modern history, has been able to dislodge Miliband’s dogmatic pursuit of energy austerity. His response to sky-high prices has been, characteristically, to push for more of what caused them.

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Although Miliband talks a good game about ‘energy security’ and abundance through renewables, what decarbonising the grid means in practice is shrinking the supply of available energy. As one analysis by researchers at Peel Hunt found, the total electricity available in Britain has declined by roughly a fifth since the New Labour government first made climate change the organising principle of energy policy in the 2000s.

In the context of today’s Iran crisis, Miliband’s policies border on the suicidal. The North Sea still holds billions of barrels of extractable oil and gas. Lincolnshire sits atop a shale gas field large enough to supply the country for years. Yet the energy secretary has continued the punishing windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas, and – in an act of almost theatrical self-destruction – ordered concrete poured into Britain’s last fracking wells. Meanwhile, his so-called Energy Independence Bill, trailed in today’s King’s Speech, would formally ban any energy secretary from issuing new drilling licences. In other words, Miliband wants to make his energy transition – from cheap, reliable fossil fuels to expensive and unreliable renewables – permanent and irreversible.

The car industry, the steel industry, the chemicals industry – all are being crushed under the weight of Miliband’s diktats. The result is factory closures, job losses and hollowed-out communities. The green agenda is built on the suffering of the working class – the very people whom the Labour Party was set up to fight for.

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Adam Smith once memorably reassured us that there is ‘a lot of ruin in a nation’ – that a nation as resilient as Britain can withstand years of mismanagement and crisis before reaching total collapse. I dare say, he failed to anticipate the phrase, ‘Prime Minister Ed Miliband’.

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Wings Over Scotland | The Broken Rainbow

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This is a graph of how many seats each party won in last week’s supposedly “proportional” Scottish Parliament election, compared to how many they would have won if the electoral system had been actually proportional.

The SNP and Greens are now over-represented by 37% and 50% respectively, while the Unionist parties are all under-represented compared to their vote share by (left to right) 26%, 19%, 20% and 23%.

“Pro-indy” parties have 73 seats (57%) rather than the 52 seats that their 40.8% vote share should have earned, while Unionist parties have 56 seats (or 43%) when they should have 69 for their 56% of the vote.

(The other 4% of the vote was scattered among 24 other parties or independents, with 1.8% going to identifiably pro-independence candidates, increasing the total “pro-indy” vote to 42.6%, fully 10 points short of current polling for independence itself.)

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It is, therefore, a little bit of a stretch to present the refusal of the UK government to grant a second independence referendum on the basis of the results as an outrage against “democracy”. If an outrage against democracy has taken place, it happened last Thursday.

The over-representation of the indy side is a combination of the unbalanced First Past The Post system that elects more than half of MSPs, and of pro-indy voters splitting their votes, mostly between the SNP and Greens, despite the SNP urging its voters to cast both votes for the SNP.

The differences between each party’s constituency and list votes are instructive.

SNP LIST VOTE
29% lower than constituency vote

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LABOUR LIST VOTE
16% lower

REFORM LIST VOTE
6% higher

CONSERVATIVE LIST VOTE
0.001% lower

LIB DEM LIST VOTE
17% lower

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GREEN LIST VOTE
612% higher

That’s not a typo at the end – the Green list vote was more than six times their constituency vote, because they’re not really a proper party like the others and only ran in half-a-dozen constituency seats.

Had each party’s list vote share matched its constituency one, the results would have come out like this, according to the Devolved Elections seat projector.

The “pro-indy” parties would have fallen one short of a majority. The other way round (constituencies adjusted to the same as the list vote), the result would have been very different.

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Tilting in favour of the list vote would have produced 81 seats for the “pro-indy” parties, an increase of 17. Which is a stark illustration of what was already blindingly obvious to everyone even within touching distance of sanity or arithmetical competence – “both votes SNP” is an absolutely cretinous strategy if what you want is a majority of pro-indy MSPs.

The reason such a majority was achieved this year was because of the 250,000 SNP voters who didn’t also vote SNP on the list, not the 625,000 who did.

Now, that’s a purely statistical argument, not a political one, because a “pro-indy” majority of MSPs will make absolutely no difference to anything in terms of securing independence. We know that for a fact because there’s been one for every single day since the indyref, but it has achieved nothing whatsoever.

But don’t worry! The same imbeciles who came up with that plainly demonstrable proven serial failure of a plan have another one for you!

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Hooooooooo boy. Let’s just assess that one for a moment, shall we?

Firstly, as this site explained three and a half years ago, using a Westminster election rather than a Holyrood one as a plebiscite is monstrously stupid for a whole raft of reasons. The media coverage will treat Scotland as an afterthought because it’s only 8% of the country, and you’ll lose the heavily indy-favouring 16/17-year-olds and EU citizens who can vote in the latter but not the former.

(In fact, treating any single election as the plebiscite is dumb. It should simply be standing SNP policy that ANY time a majority of Scottish voters vote for parties whose manifesto says that a vote for them will be taken as a vote for independence, a clear and indisputable democratic mandate has been achieved. Of course it never will be, because the SNP is pathologically jealous of other indy parties’ votes.)

Using a UK election also prevents voters from separating the issues of the plebiscite and normal politics (because they only have one vote), whereas in a Holyrood vote you can say that the constituency vote is for independence and the list vote is for the actual election.

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But secondly, you really do have to be an Olympic-class moron to imagine that the SNP are likely to be MORE popular in 2029 than they are now.

They’ve been in power for 19 years already, have record low approval ratings and have been haemorrhaging members and voters for the last half-decade. They won because the opposition was divided four ways, not because anybody likes them. Their vote share at this election dropped from 44% in 2021 to less than 33%. They’ve just elected loads of hopelessly inexperienced new MSPs. There’s a huge budget crisis thundering down the line towards them.

We’ve just had an election in which the SNP swore blind voting SNP would lead to a “100% guaranteed” referendum, and offered the electorate all manner of ludicrous bribes, yet over a third of independence supporters still refused to vote for the party.

In three years time the SNP can only conceivably be less popular than it is now, and the Greens are a pretend party who won’t be running candidates in the vast bulk of Scottish seats. The chances of achieving 50% of the Scottish vote in that election are less than zero. (They’d be doing miraculously well to get 35%.)

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The infantile idea that the bogeyman of Nigel Farage as PM would be enough to boost that vote by half again is embarrassing. We were told the same about Boris Johnson, and about Liz Truss, and about Brexit, and about COVID and about Theresa May’s refusal to grant a Section 30 order, and etc etc etc. It never transpired. The dial never moved an inch.

The prospect of a Reform government in Westminster was baked into THIS election, Swinney never shut up about Reform, and it still only got the SNP constituency vote to 38%. There is NO chance, not a ghost of a crumb of an atom of a hope, that the SNP can secure 50% of the Scottish vote in the 2029 UK election. Even the indy movement’s very thickest dungwits know that in their hearts.

So why they’re urging us to rush headlong to what would be an utterly catastrophic defeat, well, you’d have to ask them, because we can’t unhinge our minds far enough to put ourselves in their shoes.

There is no pot of gold waiting for us in three years’ time, only the sort of pot you used to find under the bed, full of the stuff they’re talking.

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Good riddance to Jess Phillips

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Good riddance to Jess Phillips

Jess Phillips resigned yesterday from her role as the UK safeguarding minister, citing prime minister Keir Starmer’s poor leadership.

In her resignation letter, she described Starmer as a ‘good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things’, while warning that this is ‘not enough’ to get results. Ironically, that it is not simply enough to say you care about an issue is something Phillips herself could have been reminded of. Safeguarding children from sexual abuse, as well as fulfilling Labour’s promise of halving violence towards women and girls, would have required, at times, a willingness to stick one’s neck out for those at risk. Phillips repeatedly proved that she was unwilling to do this.

‘Do you think there are people in this country who have, culturally, a very, very different view of women, and therefore are more likely to be engaged in these kinds of activities?’, LBC host Tom Swarbrick asked Phillips in an interview last year, in the wake of several incidents of sexual assault perpetrated by illegal migrants. Phillips was unable to give him a straight answer. ‘Which culture doesn’t have patriarchy and misogyny in it?’, she tried. When Swarbrick brought up crime data regarding migrants from Afghanistan, indicated as 20 times more likely to be convicted of sexual assault than the average Brit, Phillips still refused to engage. ‘I’ve seen victims and perpetrators from every single walk of life’, she stressed. She skirted further questions surrounding culture and misogyny by concluding: ‘I’ll tell you the group of people who are most likely to abuse – that is men.’

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It was a disappointing show. When given the opportunity to stand in solidarity with Afghan women living under genuine patriarchal oppression, not to mention with those British women who have suffered as a result of the government importing those norms, Phillips’s self-professed ‘gobby’ feminism seemed to lose its bite. The fear of being labelled as problematic was simply too much. Hence why she, and so many others, continue to pretend that men socialised in countries where women can be legally beaten, raped and imprisoned in their own homes would never dream of doing the same things in Britain.

This is also why Phillips managed to resign from her post as safeguarding minister without a single word about the biggest safeguarding scandal in British history. For decades, grooming gangs made up predominantly of Pakistani Muslims raped thousands of vulnerable, working-class English girls as the establishment looked the other way. And yet, Phillips had been among those most resistant to holding a statutory national inquiry into these appalling crimes. When she was later made responsible for organising and overseeing such an inquiry, several survivors urged her to quit. They cited tight controls on what they could say publicly, as well as attempts to widen the topic of discussion beyond grooming gangs – a not-so-subtle attempt to dilute the inquiry’s focus. If such accusations are true, Phillips’ actions read more as narrative preservation than an attempt to seek justice for the industrial-scale rape of women she had vowed to protect.

One recalls a Question Time appearance back in 2016, when Phillips was asked about a spate of sex attacks that had taken place on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany. In a single night, there had been 509 sexual offences reported to local police, including 22 rapes, the majority of which had been committed by men who appeared ‘north African’. In true Jess fashion, she responded with evasion: ‘A very similar situation happens on Broad Street in Birmingham every week, where women are baited and heckled.’ In other words, ‘Stop looking over there, and look instead at this safer, less polarising thing that won’t get me cancelled’.

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‘Politics is as much about feelings as policy’, Phillips concluded her resignation letter. If that’s the case, then let’s hope – for the sake of thousands of vulnerable women and girls who have been thrown on the scrapheap over the past few years – that our next safeguarding minister actually ‘feels’ like doing their job this time.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.

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Diane Abbott demolishes media fear-mongering about ditching Starmer

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diane abbott

diane abbott

Diane Abbott just responded perfectly to media fear-mongering about a possible contest to replace Keir Starmer as prime minister.

Diane Abbott: The markets are no reason to keep Starmer

Speaking to Sky‘s Cathy Newman about replacing Starmer, Abbott said:

I want there to be a proper, properly organised selection process and we’ll see who emerges.

Newman then injected a hint of fear, claiming:

And that will take weeks and weeks. And meanwhile the bond markets will go into a hissy fit.

But Abbott replied that:

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British politics and British parliament can’t be run at the behest of the bond markets.

Newman, however, wasn’t going to leave it there. And she added:

We’re all going to be pretty poor if we don’t pay heed to the markets, though, aren’t we?

Abbott answered with the mic drop:

If the British government is gonna be completely dominated by the bond market, MPs might as well go home.

She also suggested that there are different ways to deal with economic change. Rather than continuing with welfare cuts, for example, she argued that Labour could always stabilise finances by putting less money into the pockets of the arms industry.

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The corporate media always backed Starmer. We need to dump both of them!

The exchange on Sky certainly looked like an attempt by a corporate media outlet to take some heat off Starmer when he’s at his weakest point. And that’s hardly surprising. Because elite propagandists in the media got firmly behind Starmer early on. Then, despite his obvious awfulness, many of them endorsed him in the 2024 election.

Starmer’s predecessor Jeremy Corbyn had been a threat to establishment interests. That’s why the corporate media waged a brutal propaganda war against Corbyn and his supporters. And it’s why Starmer – the fraud representing the millionaire-funded campaign to replace Corbyn – brought elite propagandists a sigh of relief.

Much like Newman, Starmer loyalists are now trying to convince us all to avoid ‘playing games’ by pushing for Starmer’s removal. But that is the height of hypocrisy considering all of their efforts to sabotage Labour’s electoral chances under Corbyn.

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Right-wingers in the media and Labour led a long campaign to defeat Corbyn. First, there was the 2016 chicken coup, trying to blame Corbyn for Brexit. Then, there was the sabotage (via strategic diversion of funds, for example) of the 2017 election to stop Corbyn’s Labour winning.

All throughout, meanwhile, was endless bullying from the media.

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Today, Starmer is the least popular prime minister ever, and almost no one thinks he’s been doing a good job:

And as Abbott told Newman, he’s now coming out of:

the most disastrous local authority election result in living memory

Nonetheless, some in the media still want you to think it’s best to just let Starmer continue.

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As Abbott rightly said on Sky, though, we need to ignore media fear-mongering about replacing Starmer.

If the profits of obscenely wealthy individuals are the only thing that matters, they could just openly set up a corporate dictatorship already. But that’s not yet (fully) the case. So when people like Starmer don’t serve their constituents or country, we absolutely should hold them to account. And they absolutely should lose their jobs.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

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Zarah Sultana forces apology from racist Katie Hopkins

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Katie Hopkins and Zarah Sultana

Katie Hopkins and Zarah Sultana

Well, well, well. It looks like Zarah Sultana has forced an apology out of celebrity bigmouth Katie Hopkins:

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Didn’t Hopkins once say she would never apologise for anything?

How the whitey has fallen

Hopkins apology reads in full:

On behalf of their client, Zara Sultana, Bindmans Media and Information Law Practise Group requires that I publish the following statement on X, and that such statement must be clearly visible and pinned to my profile for a continuous period of no less than 24 hours:

“On 30 March 2026, I published a post on my X account addressed to Zarah Sultana in which I stated that she encourages and incites violence and is friends with terrorists.

Those statements are false. I was wrong and offer my sincere apologies to Ms Sultana for the harm and distress caused to her.”

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It is my very great pleasure to do this, and I reiterate my sincere and repeated offer to meet with Miss Zara Sultana in person to resolve our differences.

Why did Hopkins accuse of Sultana of being “friends with terrorists”? Because Sultana is a British Muslim and supported this country’s political prisoners, whereas Hopkins has repeatedly expressed white-supremacist beliefs, including:

Apologetics

As noted, this is what Hopkins said in the past:

I have never apologised for anything I’ve said. I find it very disappointing when people apologise. You should have the positive moral attitude to stand by what you say,

We’d suggest Hopkins must be very disappointed in herself, but let’s face it, she probably doesn’t give a shit. This Z-list grifter will say and do anything to get attention, and finally that’s caught up with her.

Well done, Zarah Sultana, for not taking any shit from this pathetic racist.

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Featured image via Si Chun Lam (Wikimedia)

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The House | Two decades on from the original, can ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ still impress? Rosie Wrighting says yes

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Two decades on from the original, can 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' still impress? Rosie Wrighting says yes
Two decades on from the original, can 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' still impress? Rosie Wrighting says yes

Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly and Stanley Tucci as Nigel | Image by: FlixPix / Alamy


3 min read

Capturing an industry reshaped by AI and social media, I was wrong to doubt the wisdom of making a sequel – this love letter to fashion is as compelling as ever

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I was nine when the first The Devil Wears Prada film came out and – having spent most of my teenage years dreaming of and working towards a place in the fashion industry – to this day one of the first things people outside fashion ask me is: “Is it really like The Devil Wears Prada?” And honestly, while it’s an early 2000s film made for entertainment, parts of it do show the industry in a very real light. That real light being that the fashion industry is very tough yet brilliant.

Emily low res
Emily Blunt as Emily | Image by: TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy

It’s an industry that encapsulates you. You have to not just work in it but live it – because its consumers, readers and followers do. The people I worked alongside are some of the most resilient, commercially minded and driven people I know, and in fashion there is no path to success without teamwork, leaning on others’ talents and hard work to create an end product.

I developed a level of resilience working in fashion that I need every single day in Westminster. The first film conveyed that – yes, as an exaggerated, watchable version – but the speed at which you need to make decisions, the competitiveness and the absolute love of the art you are creating: that is real.

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Almost two decades have passed since that first film. By the time I went to study fashion, technology was already profoundly changing the industry. When I graduated during Covid, the world of the runway and the head office felt distant and uncertain. So, when I heard a sequel was coming, I was sceptical. Could it capture a fashion industry reshaped by social media, one where print media is no longer the primary source of fashion news, where AI informs buying decisions and Gen Z dictates the trends?

Andy Sachs
Anne Hathaway plays Andy Sachs | | Image by: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy

Andy has a love story in the film. But she didn’t need one

I am glad to say I was wrong to doubt it. The second film is honest about the changes the industry has faced rather than retreating into the romanticised version of fashion that exists in the public’s imagination. 

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It shows fashion as it is today and, crucially, it shows that fashion is quick to adapt. The world has changed, but the passion has not. The film carries a raw affection for the industry – an affection and protectiveness I recognise, and that I bring with me when I advocate for it in Parliament.

Devil Wears Prada 2Andy has a love story in the film, but she didn’t need one. The real love story is the relationships you build when you are working with people to create something you love, and hoping others will love it too. That is what keeps people in this industry through the hard years. That is what the sequel chooses to celebrate.

The clothes are beautiful. The characters are as compelling now as they were then. But what makes this film worth your time is that it shows the industry the way those of us inside it have always known it: demanding, commercial, creative and brilliant. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, more than anything, a love letter to fashion. And it’s one the industry deserves.

Rosie Wrighting is Labour MP for Kettering

The Devil Wears Prada 2

Directed by: David Frankel

Venue: General cinema release

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Human rights group calls out Israel: ‘if everyone’s lying, open Gaza’

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Skyline view of ruins in Gaza. Reblog from Amnesty International of Silent Traumas, Israel

Skyline view of ruins in Gaza. Reblog from Amnesty International of Silent Traumas, Israel

Human rights group Euro-Med Monitor has called Israel’s bluff on its genocide denialism. The murderous apartheid colony is again lashing out and calling the whole world liars for condemning its crimes. Euro-Med kept it simple and to the point: “if everyone’s lying, open Gaza”:

‘Every accusation is a confession’

Israel refuses to allow foreign journalists into Gaza, except for a few tame, ’embedded’ pro-Israel hacks who see and report what Israel wants. The colonisers have murdered hundreds of journalists – along with their families – for reporting on its crimes. It does the same in Lebanon. It attacks everyone who calls the genocidal spade a spade. None of that would be necessary if the accusations were lies.

No, the only lies are those Israel tells in its “every accusation is a confession” mode. Brutal murders, weaponised rape, torture, targeting of innocents. None of those are the acts of Palestinians or their supporters. All of them are documented atrocities of the apartheid occupation.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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