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Filton — The judge in a trial of anti-genocide activists this week told the jury that it was none of their business whether he would impose terrorism sentences for the criminal damage charges they faced.

Claire Hinchcliffe is the mother of ‘Filton 24’ activist Zoe Rogers – who was acquitted for the second time in May 2026. She reported that jurors had heard about the sentencing of Rogers’s co-defendants on as terrorists — subject to longer sentences and decades-long restrictions even after their release — after they were convicted of criminal damage.

The judge in that trial had ordered lawyers and press to keep silent about the likely terror sentence during the trial. So the jury in this week’s trial sent the judge a note to ask whether he was planning to do the same. The judge’s response? ‘Not your concern’:

…that this was not the jury’s concern.

(If I was a juror, I’d have been furious)

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38 hours of deliberation later… 6/

— Clare Hinchcliffe (@Subversivite) August 21, 2026

Filton — Sick farce

No doubt appalled at such a response, the jury refused to convict. The state machine is likely to demand a retrial, as they did with Zoe Rogers and her comrades.

The May trial was not the first instance of judges — some closely aligned with the intelligence services — trying to prevent jurors knowing the full facts and law applicable to the case. Peaceful demonstrators have been arrested and prosecuted simply for holding signs informing jurors — entirely correctly — that they have a legal right to acquit no matter what they judge and prosecution say.

And Filton lawyer Rajiv Menon is fighting contempt of court charges for telling jurors that point of law and the activists’ motives to resist genocide through their actions against an Israeli arms factory.

English law is a sick farce. ‘Friend of genocide’ home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s court failures in the Filton trial and the persecution of Jewish activist Tony Greenstein mean that Burnham’s supposed intention to bin his predecessor’s plan to scrap jury trials for most people is unlikely to survive. Juries are likely to have humanity and conscience — and that gets in the way of the UK state’s determination to protect genocidal Israel.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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Israeli settlers have murdered a Palestinian boy. They shot him in his chest with live ammunition, outside his home in the occupied West Bank.

IOF accompanied settlers on their killing spree

A group of around 50 illegal colonisers — some armed with military-issued assault rifles, and others riding on government supplied ATVs, attacked homes in the Hamroush area of Sa’ir, a town north of Hebron, opening fire at residents. They were accompanied by Israeli occupation forces (IOF).

The settlers shot 17-year-old Kareem Sanad Shalaldeh at close range, in the chest, according to his father Sanad.

The father of 17-year-old Palestinian Karim Sanad Shalaldeh speaks on how armed Israeli settlers killed his son this morning in the Hamroush area, east of Sa'ir, north of Hebron, in the occupied West Bank.

The settlers, more than 50 of them, were armed, and some were wearing… pic.twitter.com/jCqbCmqnZf

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) August 21, 2026

Entry of emergency vehicles blocked

An ambulance was unable to enter the area and reach the injured, so private vehicles were used to transport them to hospital instead.

Doctors were unable to save Shalaldeh’s life, and he died in hospital. Also shot by settlers was Samir Tirwah, a man in his 70s. He is currently in hospital with a life-threatening injury, and is undergoing surgery.

Israeli settlers set fire to a home while residents asleep

After shooting the two men, the illegal settlers also set fire to a house which was under construction, firing live ammunition at those Palestinians who attempted to put the fire out.

Earlier the same morning, in Sa’ir, these settlers set a home ablaze while a mother and her daughter were asleep. They are lucky to still be alive.

A Palestinian mother recounts how she and her daughter survived an Israeli settlers' arson attack on their home this morning in Sa'ir town near Hebron, occupied West Bank.

The settlers threw incendiary devices into the home as they were asleep. The mother and her daughter barely… pic.twitter.com/PZxY7fuqf6

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) August 21, 2026

Kareem Shalaldeh’s killing is the latest escalation in a long campaign of violence against Sa’ir’s residents. As settlers expand outposts on confiscated land and the army enforces “closed military zones” over olive groves, families are forced to make a choice. They can either endure the daily violence, or leave behind their homes and land, that stretch back generations — the same choice Palestinians across the occupied West Bank are increasingly being forced to make.

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By Charlie Jaay

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Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), a group organising Irish renters to fight for their rights, has laid out the disastrous effects of an Irish government housing bill, six months on from the president signing it into law.

At the time the Residential Tenancies Bill (RTB) passed, we quoted People Before Profit’s Paul Murphy saying:

This is a bill for rip-off rents. That’s the purpose of it. It’s not an accidental outcome of it, that’s the purpose. The government strategy explicitly is to get rents to rise higher in order to attract more investment.

That appears to have proven correct, with large corporate landlords being the main beneficiaries. Ires Reit, Ireland’s biggest private residential landlord, achieved:

…a tripling of pretax profits to €48 million for the six months to the end of June.

Its CEO Eddie Byrne boasted of how:

…the company’s average monthly rent in the six months to June rose by 1.7 per cent to €1,884.

Irish renters — Evictions at highest levels “since the 1850s”

This is at a time when rents were already unaffordably high. Byrne went on to say that the RTB has “unlocked renewed capital flows into the sector”. This has come as a result of large international investors entering the market, buying up properties sold off by smaller landlords.

The bill introduced stronger protections for renters, such as minimum tenancy periods of six years, and the near-total banning of no-fault evictions. This scared off many landlords with fewer properties. This shows that even policies that appear beneficial to tenants can have disastrous consequences, when housing is treated as a commodity almost entirely left to the whims of the market.

Landlords anticipating this policy change caused a major spike in evictions during 2025. RTÉ report that:

Figures from the Residential Tenancies Board show that 5,405 notices of termination were issued in the third quarter of 2025, a 35% increase year on year.

Disturbingly, current eviction rates are at the highest they’ve been since one of the darkest periods of Irish history – the famine inflicted on the country by Britain. Data from the Residential Tenancies Board shows:

…roughly one eviction notice per 100 households (and higher if we only consider rented households) in both 2023 and 2024.

Even during the Land War of 1879-1882, when landlords retaliated with mass evictions against tenant organising, the rate was much lower at 0.48 eviction notices per 100 households. That means you need to go back to the mid-1800s period of Britain’s mass forced starvation to see equivalent greed from landlords. RTÉ go on to say that:

…the scale of displacement now being recorded would not look out of place in post-Famine Ireland and arguably tenants today have less rights and customary advantages than their counterparts in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There can be little doubt but that evictions, now as then, are a destructive feature of Irish life.

1800s mass evictions came about as a result of the massive power imbalance between landlords and tenants. Yet, shockingly it seems that Ireland is recreating this inequality from one of the most notorious chapters in its history. It forms part of a general regression to the 19th century, with poverty in Britain often characterised as Dickensian, and US billionaires now hoarding wealth at a level that surpasses the infamous Gilded Age.

Irish government favouring “vulture funds” over tenants

CATU go on to cite the recent case of an approved housing body failing to acquire 140 Dublin apartments as social housing. Instead, the homes have gone up at exorbitant rental prices, ranging from €4,500 for a three-bed, to €2,400 for a one-bed. A person working full time on minimum wage earns about €29,900. Renting the lowest priced apartment would use up 96% of their income, leaving them €1,100 for all other expenses.

Housing spokesperson for the Social Democrats, Rory Hearne, agreed with CATU, saying:

Minister for Housing James Browne and his Government were warned that these rental laws would cause evictions to skyrocket, increasing homelessness and leaving our young people with little choice but to emigrate.

They rammed through these cruel and deeply flawed laws anyway, which represents a complete capitulation to large investor funds and landlords and a complete disregard for renters. It was made clear that these changes would cause not just record evictions but record rents, but the Minister paid no heed.

He continued:

Government policy prioritises institutional landlords and vulture funds at a time when there has never been more children living out their youth in homelessness. 5,620 children now comprise 32% of all homeless people. There has been a 60% increase in child homelessness since Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael formed a Government in 2020.

CATU conclude by urging Irish renters to join a tenants union, as the “strongest defence against the housing crisis”. It was only a massive collective effort of tenants that secured land reform in Ireland in the late 1800s and early part of the 20th century. As the country slides back to that period of massive entrenched power, a similar united effort will be required to bring it down.

Featured image via IrishTimes

By Robert Freeman

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Amnesty International have released a statement claiming that Italy’s agreement to detain migrants and asylum seekers in Albania is a danger to people’s “safety, liberty and human rights”. The campaign organisation also held that the pact:

continue[s] to expose the dangers of long-standing European Union (EU) migration policies that centre on exclusion and containment.

Evading responsibilities

On 23 February 2024, the Italy-Albania Agreement established two Italian-run ‘migration facilities’ in Albania. The agreement will run for 5 years, with over €670 m earmarked to fund it. After that point, it will likely be renewed automatically.

Amnesty described the conditions in the Albanian detention centres as harmful, to the point that they have “driven several individuals to self-harm or attempt suicide”. Eve Geddie, the director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office, explained that:

Offshore detention is ultimately aimed at deterrence and trying to shift and evade both the responsibilities of responding to people migrating and the obligation to provide asylum to those who need it. Italy’s deal with Albania shows yet again the unavoidable human rights costs of this approach.

Just before the deal entered into force, Amnesty International sounded the alarm on the harmful impact it would inevitably have on the rights of people in distress at sea, and of people transferred to Albania. Clearly, these concerns have now materialized.

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42 critical incidents in one month

Italy first began its use of the overseas centres by picking up 74 individuals in international waters and forcibly transferring them to Albania. However, multiple Italian court orders eventually ended the practice.

Then, in March 2025, Italy instead altered the agreement in order to permit the detention of men with expulsion orders in Albania. These individuals were already under detention in Italy, and were therefore subject to transfer across borders in a manner “outside of provisions in domestic and European law”.

The results were as rapid as they were devastating, as Amnesty explained:

As a result, hundreds (reportedly over 500) predominantly racialized men have been forcibly transferred to the Albanian detention centre in Gjadër over the past 15 months.

Between 11 April and 16 May 2025, 42 critical incidents were recorded in the Gjadër centre, including at least two attempted hangings, a protest where three people were injured from shattered glass, and various self-harm incidents.

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The men detained in Albania also struggle to access legal help. Likewise, the Italian government has restricted both parliamentary and independent oversight for monitoring purposes.

The Ministry of Interior cited security and public order concerns when it denied Amnesty’s request for entry into the Albanian centres.

As such, the human rights organisation instead had to base its research on court documents, government correspondence, and information from the Tavolo Asilo e Immigrazione civil society network.

It also conducted interviews with representatives from UN agencies, along with lawyers acting on behalf of the detained individuals. One lawyer described being given no time to meet his client or prepare a defence. He also opined that the detainees showed signs of having been intimidated.

Amnesty — ‘A wake-up call’

Amnesty’s Eve Geddie stated that:

It is abundantly clear that the Italy-Albania model is impossible to implement in line with Italy’s human rights obligations. This reality must be a wake-up call for the EU to put any future plans to expand the use of offshore detention and other externalization tools, firmly on ice.

Italian authorities must immediately end the agreement with Albania, implement alternatives to migration detention, which under international law must remain the last resort, and ensure access to effective and non-discriminatory asylum procedures and dignified reception on Italian territory to all people seeking international protection. All refugees and migrants should be able to access effective legal safeguards and benefit from independent monitoring.

In a UK context, it’s hard not to hear the echoes of the Tories’ infamous Rwanda migrant deportation plan. Earlier this month, August 2026, Kevin Hollinrake — the chair of the Conservative Party — had the nerve to call for the renewal of that failed, deeply racist scheme.

At the same time, Reform UK proposed a Trump-like scheme to transfer ‘foreign national’ prisoners to hellish jails in El Salvador. However, even ‘left-wing’ Labour’s hands are far from clean. The party reportedly considered its own Rwanda-style deportation deal with — wait for it — Albania, just last year.

These politicians, whether in Italy, the UK or the EU, know that the migrants and asylum seekers they deport will face shocking conditions and the degradation of their human rights.

For some, this cruelty is the point. Others simply don’t care, as long as they can make these fellow human beings another country’s ‘problem’.

This distinction, however, is pure semantics — the effect they have is identical, and the blood stains both hands all the same.

Featured image via HumanRightsWatch

By Grace

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Climate crisis — A new climate-focused campaign group, 4 Billion Dead, has launched in response to a buried report that its name could become reality. It urges people to wake up to our impending disaster of untold proportions.

4 Billion Dead takes its name from a 2025 report by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, in conjunction with the University of Exeter. Its superficially cheery-sounding name glosses over its worst predictions:

Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature:

Global risk management for human prosperity

The report comes from professionals whose entire careers and profits are based on being able to accurately predict and “risk price” the future. It flew almost entirely under the radar.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that the report downplays its true findings, burying the worst deep in the appendix. Ultimately, it’s not in corporations’ interests to induce panic in the world. But it is needed.

It was written for the insurance industry, the sector whose entire business depends on pricing risk accurately. At 3°C of warming by 2050, the report puts mortality risk at up to four billion people. That’s an “extreme” trajectory, albeit one that ongoing corporate and government policies globally broadly align with.

If it sounds alarming, it is. If it sounds alarmist, that doesn’t make it any less true. Burying our heads in the sand now will cost us potentially billions of lives in decades to come. We cannot afford to dither.

Climate change missing from most UK media reports on June heatwave

Climate crisis — ‘Catastrophic impacts’: we risk everything

This is a formal risk assessment from the profession that prices catastrophe for a living, and it’s had almost no public attention. (Full report is available here.) Its executive summary makes clear the risks:

Increasingly severe climate and nature driven impacts are highly likely, including fires, floods, heat and droughts. This is a national security issue as food, water and heat stresses will impact populations. If unchecked then mass mortality, involuntary mass migration events and severe GDP contraction are likely.

Planetary Solvency, the report, defines “catastrophic impacts” as:

• Economic contraction, GDP loss of over 25%;

• Mass human mortality events resulting in over 2 billion deaths;

• Warming of 2°C or more, triggering high number of climate tipping points;

• Breakdown of some critical ecosystem services and Earth Systems;

• Major Extinction Events in multiple geographies;

• Ocean circulation severely impacted;

• Severe socio-political fragmentation in many regions, low lying regions lost;

• Heat and water stress driving mass migration of billions; and

• Catastrophic mortality events from disease, nutrition, thirst and conflict.

Even in the scenario where global warming is limited to 2°C by 2050, the report still predicts “decimation.” That means 10% of humanity, or around 800 million people would be wiped out.

At this level, which we’re almost certainly on track for without major reversals in greenhouse gas emissions, the consequences are still unfathomably drastic. The report predicts that at 2°C by 2050 we’ll see:

• Severe reduction in several critical ecosystem services.
• Major extinction events in some geographies.
• Frequent global food and water crises.
• Severe socio-political fragmentation in regions exposed to climate and/or nature impacts.
• Failure of vulnerable states and mass mortality events in impacted areas.

Right-wing press blame anything but human-made climate change for deadly wildfires

Climate consciousness or mass death

Australian Senator Nick McKim referred to the four billion deaths in a speech recently. McKim called out his Government for failing in its basic duty to protect citizens by siding with fossil fuel interests.

Roger Hallam co-founded and co-ordinated campaign groups including Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain. His tireless, “revolutionary” campaigning efforts have made him globally famous and also a target of the British state. He’s been imprisoned multiple times for his peaceful activism and arrested countless more. Upon launching this newest campaign, 4 Billion Dead, Hallam said:

This is just the beginning of something that will become very big. Because, as we have been saying for years now: there comes a point when people want the truth — when people become revolted by being lied to. For years now we have been told you can only mobilise people if you tone it down, if you give hope, because otherwise people will not be able to cope. The idea is that people are actually children — they have to be protected. They have to be told fairy tales.

We are entering a time when millions of people have become sick of feeling sick. We finally realise we are going to get hurt anyway — that we are hurting so much already — that the pain of hearing the truth actually becomes a release.

This call is a moment of liberation. At points like this history is made. Regimes fall. New ways explode into being. We all sense this is going to happen. Things cannot carry on as they are. Humans are not designed to just roll over and die. We are better than that.

Hallam’s words are a reckoning and a call to action. Our governments and ‘leaders’ have let us down for far too long. It’s up to all of us to demand a better, greener, liveable future. It’s on all our heads.

Burnham’s climate COBRA meeting was a massive let down

Featured image via the Canary

By Cameron Baillie

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Zionist Nathan Cofnas, the ‘shit-flooding’ supposed academic behind the press pile-on that hounded Prof Jason Arday to death, has constantly positioned himself as ‘always the victim’. He is an Israel supporter, after all. But his ‘poor little me’ shtick fell apart after the US ambassador to Belgium threatened Ghent university for suspending the literal ethno-supremacist after the Canary revealed his colleagues’ assessment of his competence.

Bill White launched a Trumpian ad hominem rant threatening the university with defunding and other harm. He even ended it with Trump’s posturing phrase “Thank you for your attention to this matter”:

The United States Mission to Belgium condemns, in the strongest terms, Ghent University’s retaliation against an American scholar following his accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud.

The United States government regularly funds and supports research, academic exchanges, and other engagements with overseas universities. Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behavior are not desirable partners for us. This is particularly true where the purpose and effect of the scapegoating is to punish accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty. We are therefore reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University.

Bad-faith idealogues will try to make this a referendum on the content of Cofnas’s scholarship – or polemical distortions of it. That’s wrong. Free speech means that controversial views are protected. And Cofnas’s views were known to Ghent University when he was hired.

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The ultimate purpose of freedom of speech is to overturn lies, fraud, and false ideologies. This is precisely what Cofnas was doing, and precisely the reason his home institution wants to silence him.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

There was, of course, no hint of shame at accusing others of “mob behavior” after Cofnas did exactly that – and expected to be rewarded for it.

The United States Mission to Belgium condemns, in the strongest terms, Ghent University’s retaliation against an American scholar following his accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud.

The United States government regularly funds and supports research, academic…

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— U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White (@USAmbToBelgium) August 21, 2026

Ghent university — ‘The puppet is still talking but we see the hands behind the strings’

The race-war significance of this didn’t escape observers like anthropologist Diego Ballastero — nor did the US’s erasure of Cofnas’s victim, Jason Arday:

2/ So let’s drop the mythology of the lonely whistleblower. Cofnas has institutional power behind him. He has platforms, media networks, political allies—and now diplomatic pressure. The “outsider” suddenly has an empire speaking for him.

— Diego A. Ballestero (@InsurgentMemory) August 21, 2026

4/ “Bad-faith ideologues will try to make this a referendum on the content of Cofnas’s scholarship.”
Of course we will discuss the scholarship. Race science is not politically neutral because you put the words “academic freedom” around it.

— Diego A. Ballestero (@InsurgentMemory) August 21, 2026

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6/ The statement also pretends that the only issue is whether Cofnas’s views are “controversial.” The political question is not whether someone is allowed to hold an unpopular opinion. It is when institutions legitimise, fund, platform and protect racism

— Diego A. Ballestero (@InsurgentMemory) August 21, 2026

8/ States don’t suddenly become defenders of academic freedom because they discovered one controversial academic. Ask what happens to scholars who challenge state power, colonial violence, racism or militarism. Ask who gets diplomatic protection and funding. Ask who gets silenced

— Diego A. Ballestero (@InsurgentMemory) August 21, 2026

10/ And this is why the “Cofnas as powerless victim” narrative is so misleading. A university hired him, gave him a platform. Media amplified him. Political networks now defend him. And a foreign government has entered the dispute. Powerless? Please

— Diego A. Ballestero (@InsurgentMemory) August 21, 2026

12/ So yes, let’s talk about academic freedom. Freedom for whom? Protected by whom? Funded by whom? Against whom? And at whose expense?

— Diego A. Ballestero (@InsurgentMemory) August 21, 2026

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13/ For months we were told this was about one brave academic standing alone against a hostile institution.
Now the U.S. government has publicly entered the fight. The puppet is still talking. But we can finally see some of the hands behind the strings

— Diego A. Ballestero (@InsurgentMemory) August 21, 2026

And the power dynamic was further revealed when the supposedly-cancelled ‘academic’ was immediately given a platform in the Wall Street Journal to whine and raise funds:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui (@drsabreena_gs)

Cofnas already admitted targeting Jason Arday to make a point against Black academics and to get revenge on Cambridge University for dismissing him.

But Arday looks more and more transparently like a victim of the billionaire-backed US far-right network to which Cofnas is linked:

Byline Times calls it what it is: a far-right race science network.

Backed by Peter Thiel. Housed inside Cambridge University. Defended by the Free Speech Union. Connected to Reform UK’s Head of Policy.

This is the network the British media amplified 249 times. pic.twitter.com/uGGBsTMQa4

— Claudia Webbe (@ClaudiaWebbe) August 21, 2026

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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Seventies band Boney M is understood to be in talks to appear at Reform UK conference in several weeks (Alamy)

2 min read15 min

Exclusive: Disco band Boney M is in talks with Reform UK to perform at the party’s conference next month, PoliticsHome understands.

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The band, which rose to fame in the 1970s with songs like Rasputin and Daddy Cool, is being lined up to appear at the afterparty in Birmingham, set to be held on the Friday evening of the conference. 

A Reform spokesman told PoliticsHome: “Several exciting acts are under consideration for our conference after-party. This will be confirmed and announced in due course.”

Reform’s annual conference will take place in just under a fortnight from 3 September to 5 September.

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Last year, Marlon and Jackie from The Jacksons made a surprise appearance at the Reform conference, performing songs including Blame it on the Boogie and Can You Feel it for around an hour. 

At the same event, Reform supporter Andrea Jenkyns, formerly a Conservative MP, performed self-written song Insomniac.

Attendees of this year’s Reform conference can purchase a ticket to the afterparty for £25. The party is marketed on the Reform UK website as an opportunity to “join Nigel Farage and special guests for an unforgettable evening”.

Boney M, formed in what was then West Germany, still performs today with changing lineups and is set to tour the country later this year, in cities including Liverpool and London. 

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Original lead singer Liz Mitchell and dancer Maizie Williams have both taken part in recent performances. However, it is not clear what Boney M lineup is in talks to perform at Reform conference next month.

Reform figures will hope that the conference helps the party regain momentum after a tricky few months which have seen the polling of both the party and leader Farage dip. 

Last month, Farage comfortably won a by-election in his Clacton constituency, a contest he triggered after standing down as an MP amid growing pressure over a £5m donation he received from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne.

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No other major party contested the by-election, arguing that it was a waste of time and resources.

 

 

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4 min read22 min

High turnout is often seen as a sign of a healthy democracy, but it can also be a symptom of polarisation and existential threat.

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Clacton had all the ingredients for a low-turnout vote: a summer by-election, a seemingly inevitable Nigel Farage victory, and a main opponent wearing a dustbin on his head. Turnout usually falls between a general election and a by-election. But at 43 per cent, turnout was higher than expected, and on the hottest day of the year.

And it wasn’t a one-off: by-election turnout is no longer dropping as much as it used to. In Gorton and Denton, it nearly matched the general election; likewise, the Caerphilly by-election turnout beat the record for any national Senedd election. 

Makerfield saw the second-highest by-election turnout since 2000, and it was the first constituency since 1987 to surpass the previous general election in a by-election turnout. 

It’s a common, but perhaps flawed, truism that high turnout is a sign of a healthy democracy, an empowered and engaged public. Low turnouts, on the other hand, are seen as a sign of disillusionment. In 2001, Britain recorded its lowest turnout in almost a century – triggering worried speculation about the state of our democracy. Independent MP Martin Bell called the 59.4 per cent turnout “the saddest statistic of the whole election”.

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A key feature of high-stakes politics is voting against, rather than for

The positive aspect of high turnout was often on display in Makerfield, where some voters said it felt like a “privilege” to choose the next prime minister. Ed, an engineer, told us: “More people knocked on our door and more leaflets have come through our door in the last two, three weeks than in my 40 years of voting in elections.”

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But high turnout can also have a dark side. It is often a symptom of polarisation and existential fear of the other side winning: the 2020 US presidential election saw record turnout at a time of deep division, and it remained high in 2024.

Likewise in Britain, many of the by-elections with surprisingly high turnout have been examples of high-stakes, high-threat politics. In Gorton and Denton, we spoke to left-leaning voters terrified by the prospect of a Reform UK win, and willing to vote for “literally anyone” to prevent it. But with no clear safe anti-Reform choice, we heard from people trapped in a kind of tactical paralysis, combing online forums and Facebook groups for evidence of whether Labour or the Greens stood the better chance. On the day of the result, Issy, a training manager, told us she had been “pretty much up all night wondering, oh my God, did I make the right choice?”

A key feature of high-stakes politics is voting against, rather than for. Back in Clacton, Mike, a retiree, recalled meeting friends at the pub. When the by-election came up, he said: “There wasn’t one person who knew who they would vote for. They knew who they wouldn’t vote for.”

This has real consequences for Farage and his party. In Clacton, he proved he could motivate 22,000 people to show up against expectations and vote for him. But that nearly 10,000 turned up to vote for a man dressed as a bin is a sign the anti-Reform vote is mobilised too. Many voters across politics feel Reform is too great a risk, and would hold their nose and back a different candidate to keep them out of government.

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A few months ago, Labour also risked being punished by the tendency to vote against: many on the right were willing to rally behind Reform to get Starmer out of government. But with the left looking more united and the right more divided, the stakes now appear highest for Farage himself.

It seems questionable that high-stakes politics is really a sign of a healthy democracy. Perhaps the right response to 2001’s abstentionism came from the then home secretary Jack Straw, who said the low turnout reflected “the politics of contentment” – a time that seems a long way from our turbulent politics of today.

 

Luke Tryl is the Executive Director of More in Common UK

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