As we’ve reported, the Reform candidate in Gorton & Denton is the academic and establishment-insider Matt Goodwin. Goodwin is now attracting controversy because he wants to tell young women when to breed:

Reform by-election candidate calls for ‘young girls’ to be given ‘biological reality’ check

Matt Goodwin argued ‘young girls’ should be explained ‘the biological reality’ that ‘many women in Britain are having children much too late in life’https://t.co/bz0y5apGEA

— Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 (@reformexposed) February 12, 2026

Lets be honest, this is creepy af from Matt Goodwin

Last week, Matt Goodwin stuck his foot in it when he suggested people who don’t have kids should be taxed more. As you can imagine, that went down like a lead balloon with infertile women. As Rachel Charlton-Dailey reported for the Canary:

I can’t imagine the pain that this would cause to those who are struggling with fertility. On top of the emotional and physical toll this puts on you will be financial pressures. For those of us who are infertile, it sends one message. You are not good enough and deserve to be punished for failing as a woman.

I had an elective hysterectomy in 2017 after over a decade of pain. I chose my own health over a condition that was making me want to die, for the sake of one day having a baby. Many would call my decision selfish, but I frankly don’t give a fuck what people who would rather I were in pain think of me.

As much as I loathe a Handmaid’s Tale comparison, this is very apt here. In the novel, working-class women who are infertile are cast out of society. As they have no purpose in a society that values families over all else.

Goodwin was also criticised for the following:

Reform’s by-election candidate suggested people who don’t have children should pay more tax.

He wants the govt to “remove personal income tax for women who have two or more children”.

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Do they think women are baby producing machines?

Insane policies.https://t.co/KWmx5xfuXh

— Prem Sikka (@premnsikka) February 7, 2026

Fertility

Matt Goodwin has looked at the birth rate problem and decided that the solution is to lecture young girls on when to breed.

I myself have chosen not to have kids because of the absolute state of everything. I know for a fact I cannot afford a child, and even if I could, what fucking world would I be bringing them into?

And that’s the issue.

Reform’s policies will do nothing to improve affordability, and without that change, people won’t be able to afford to have children.

Reform also want to reintroduce the two child benefit cap to save people 4p per pint. Nothing screams stimulating breeding in the UK more than a policy that caps state support.

Nigel Farage has done a U-turn. He and reform will vote against the bill to lift the two-child cap.

In May 2025, he was calling for the lifting of the two-child benefit cap. pic.twitter.com/pAVcqmgoBu

— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) January 7, 2026

Reform leader Nigel Farage has also voiced creepy opinions on this topic. Back in 2014, when Farage was ranting about how women who take maternity leave are less valuable, he commented:

Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten so many women pregnant over the years that I have a different view.

That gives this new push by Matt Goodwin an even creepier spin.

Support women, get more babies

It’s becoming very clear that Reform have no policies in place to actually stimulate population growth.

Rather than weirdly going into schools and telling young girls to procreate, why don’t they actually give them a reason to? Stop supporting the two child benefit cap – which is keeping so many kids in poverty – sort out public services, and fix the fucking education system.

But no, just creepy platitudes and uninformed comments from another Reform misogynist, Matt Goodwin.

Featured image via StockVault

Since the latest release of the Epstein files, a media circus has ensued over the political and business figures connected to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The giddy fervour from some corners has been evident as people work their way through a huge number of files featuring the most powerful and elite people we know.

In a world where sexual violence is much more commonplace than we might like to admit, it is unsurprising that Epstein and his cabal of violent predators are the focus, and not the people they tortured and abused. Academic Harsha Walia had a stark and insightful summary of the situation:

Sexual violence, especially of children, is not an otherwise perverse symptom of elite rule or empire – it is literally at the CENTER of how violence and domination is structured around the world. We cannot keep treating sexual violence as a “private” issue, or as “divisive” to movements, or weaponize it to settle other political scores.

It is how power reverberates and is reproduced.

Sexual violence – especially against children – is not an aberration in our societies. It is not exclusively the preserve of the elite or powerful. It is a function at the very core of neoliberal racial capitalism. Epstein was a well-documented white supremacist and Zionist, and that is at the heart of how he and his fellow paedophiles operated.

So why is it that leftists have spent considerable time and energy since the latest release of the files defending prominent fellow leftists who allied themselves with Epstein?

Epstein files show the misogynist rot within the left

One of the most prominent leftist names mentioned in the files is that of the revered Noam Chomsky. His work has been crucial for leftists, but the academic has long known to have been friends with Epstein. Fellow academic Chris Knight has had pieces claiming to explain the reasons behind the friendship published in both CounterPunch and Novara Media.

The latter publication ran the story with the headline:

There Are Two Noam Chomskys. The One You Love, and the One That Was Friends With Jeffrey Epstein

Along with the tagline:

Not a straightforward guy.

The CounterPunch article and the one posted on Novara are similar versions of effectively the same piece.

In the version published a few days later on Novara, Knight admits:

Emails released last month by the US Department of Justice, however, now make it difficult to respect Chomsky’s views on anything at all.

How generous. By Knight’s own admission:

The emails even reveal that shortly before Epstein’s arrest and death, in July and August 2019, Chomsky was still intending to be interviewed for a documentary that Epstein was making. It seems Chomsky remained loyal to his cherished “friend” right until the end.

Chomsky was a loyal and steadfast friend of Epstein. Epstein was a known serial child rapist, child trafficker, and overseer of one of the most brutal and extensive grooming gangs in modern times. The details of such horrific crimes were an open secret even before the release of the files. Now that the files have been released, Chomsky’s wife has described their close friendship with the dead paedophile as part of “serious errors in judgement.”

Bizarre response

In both pieces, Knight muses on why Chomsky would have associated with Epstein. He makes it clear that Chomsky has a reputation for associating with people he should ostensibly have opposed – CIA directors, war hawks, and other reprehensible people. Knight maintains that:

Chomsky was at no point the perfectly principled radical intellectual admired by so many of his followers. If he had been, he would have resigned from MIT long ago. Yet, had he done so, he would never have come to know the US military establishment from the inside in a way that enabled him to become that establishment’s most knowledgeable and assured critic.

Who needs Chomsky to be perfect? Perfection is a far cry from a close personal friendship with a notorious paedophile and sex trafficker. Chomsky didn’t step down from MIT, or stop associating with rabid Zionists not as some kind of intellectual checkmate, but because he didn’t want to.

Society is far too willing to dismiss the experiences of those living at the sharp end of racial capitalism as ‘identity politics.’ But, we’re supposed to believe Chomsky needed to pal around with some of the most morally bankrupt people for research purposes? Please.

He knew exactly what he was doing. There is no duality or cognitive dissonance in Chomsky’s behaviour. He knew exactly what was doing, and he did it for decades. How could one of the most pre-eminent researchers not know the extent of Epstein’s crimes? Are we supposed to accept that he’s a genius researcher who can’t operate a simple Google search on the background of one of his best friends?

Business as usual

Knight’s passionate defence of Epstein is an obscene rehabilitation, a loving re-casting of Chomsky as somehow duped, tricked, or seduced. Knight concludes that:

It would be foolish to stop learning from his writings. It would be equally foolish to gloss over his mistakes. Instead of deciding whether to cancel or exalt him as an individual, I suggest we prioritise developing what he advocates, however hypocritically: a revolutionary politics for our times.

Since the latest release of the Epstein files, who exactly has demanded we “stop learning” from Chomsky? In fact, what is actually happening is that people are parsing through a release of files that deliberately exposes and intimidates victims and survivors of Epstein.

The choice is not whether to accept or reject Chomsky, whether to rehabilitate or castigate him. Instead, the choice facing us is a moral one: do we infantilise and clean up Chomsky’s actions, or do we accept that he repeatedly and knowingly chose to not only associate with, but loved a renowned pedophile and sex trafficker?

It is no choice at all.

I was raped as a child. Like many others who have been sexually abused, every time rape is discussed in the media, there are many all too willing to degrade the horror of abuse and defend those around the abusers. As such, the many attempts at rehabilitation of those implicated alongside Epstein in any way, whether Chomsky or anyone else, feel like an attempt to defend the rape that so many of us have had to come to terms with.

Knight – or someone from his team – offered a version of his above articles to the Canary. We immediately recognised that to publish such a thing would not only violate all of our values, it would also denigrate the experiences of victims and survivors. Shame on CounterPunch and Novara for giving a platform to the reprehensible attempt to clean up Chomsky’s image or work.

Featured image via the Canary

Israel’s genocidal occupation military used thermal and thermobaric weapons on civilians in Gaza that ‘evaporated’ thousands of people, according to analysis by Al Jazeera.

Israel evaporated thousands of people

The broadcaster’s investigation, ‘The Rest of the Story’, based on forensic data analysis rather than estimates, found that 2,842 Palestinians were “evaporated” by the mostly US-made weapons. Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal described the “method of elimination” used by rescuers at strike sites. This compared known numbers of people inside a targeted building with their remains recovered afterwards:

If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we only classify the remaining two as ‘evaporated’ after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces, citing blood spray or small fragments such as skull fragments.

Basal emphasised that classification occurs only after thorough searches of rubble, hospitals, and morgues produce no identifiable remains. Given Israel’s blockade of bulldozers and other clearance equipment, it is likely that many more such deaths remain unclassified.

Military experts interviewed by Al Jazeera said that the occupation uses thermobaric and thermal weapons to obliterate the population across a wide area. These “vacuum” or “aerosol” bombs disperse a cloud of flammable vapour that is then ignited into an enormous explosion that produces extreme heat and a massive blast wave. Horrifying footage of Israel using such a weapon was captured in 2025:

Shocking

The experts told the station that Israel modifies the bombs it uses to make them even more devastating:

To prolong the burning time, powders of aluminum, magnesium and titanium are added to the chemical mixture…this raises explosion temperatures to between 2,500 and 3,000 degrees Celsius.

Crematoria typically use temperatures of 850-1150 Celsius to incinerate bodies.

Israel has murdered around 700,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This figure has been disputed by Israeli propagandists, but tallies with US president Donald Trump’s statement that around 1.5 million people remain in Gaza that must be removed for his notorious ‘peace’ plan. Gaza’s pre-genocide population was around 2.2-2.3m.

Featured image via the Canary

According to whistleblowers who spoke to Electronic Intifada (EI), press freedom organisation the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) binned its latest ‘Impunity Index’ because Israel was going to top the rankings.

On its ‘About us’ page, the CPJ says that it exists to:

defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal… reports on violations in repressive countries, conflict zones, and established democracies alike… [and] works with other organizations to ensure that justice prevails when journalists are imprisoned or killed.

Or maybe not, in this case.

Press freedom, except when we say

The CPJ Impunity Index has been published annually since 2008 and is a tool regularly used by the United Nations and human rights groups. It assesses the deliberate killing of journalists in which the killers are not punished. Israel already ranked second in the 2024 index, which measured killings in 2023 and covered only three months of its Gaza genocide.

The 2025 Index would have put Israel way ahead of any other nation – and, as The Electronic Intifada notes, it would have stayed there for years, spooking CPJ boss Jodie Ginsberg:

Since the Impunity Index usually covers a timeframe of 10 years, Israel would have been ranked near the top, if not number one, for many years to come,” the whistleblowers argue.

They allege that Ginsberg “simply couldn’t afford the heat she would get every year from the board, the pro-Israel donors and from Israel itself and its allies.”

CPJ have denied that pressure from donors and board members played a role in the decision.

Israel has murdered hundreds of journalists in Gaza since the beginning of the genocide, along with – intentionally – more than 700 of their family members. It has also started targeting journalists in Lebanon. This is surely a reason to trumpet its impunity more loudly than ever.

Instead, Israel even gets impunity for its impunity.

Featured image via the Canary