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At a press conference on Thursday, Farage unveiled former Conservative councillor Dan Thomas as Reform’s new leader in Wales, making him the latest Tory to make the switch.

Fellow defectors Laura Anne Jones and James Evans were in the audience in Newport’s International Convention Centre. The recent flow of defections, which includes former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and ex-shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, is seen by Reform figures as helping maintain the party’s momentum heading into the May elections.

Reform is expected to make significant gains at the Senedd elections, with recent polling putting the party far ahead of Labour, which has dominated politics in Wales since its devolved institutions were established at the turn of the century, as well as the Tories. The contest to lead Wales is seen as a two-horse race between Reform and Plaid Cymru.

Thomas, a former council leader in north London, said he had “fond memories” of growing up in south Wales, where his grandfather and great-grandfather were miners.

It is not the first time that Farage has been on the cusp of an electoral breakthrough in Wales, though.

In 2016, his former party, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), won 13 per cent of the popular vote to return seven Senedd seats. By the end of that parliament in 2021, however, after a period of splits and infighting, just one of those seven sought re-election.

Last year, UKIP’s former leader in Wales, who went on to lead Reform in Cardiff, Nathan Gill, was sentenced to prison for taking pro-Russia bribes.

Asked by PoliticsHome how his current party would avoid the mistakes of UKIP in Wales, Farage said that candidate vetting would be “absolutely key”. The party, which continues to lead UK-wide opinion polls, though there are some signs that its support has dipped in recent weeks, is asking candidates to go through media training led by TV personality Jeremy Kyle and ex-LBC presenter Colin Brazier in Reform HQ.

“The choice of candidates in some cases that were picked to stand for UKIP at that moment in time were completely against my [vision] as leader of the party,” Farage told PoliticsHome.

Farage added: “Two or three of them were wholly unsuitable in every way. But leaders don’t always get their way… and quite shortly thereafter, after [a] quarter of a century, I left [UKIP] believing it was going in the wrong direction.”

Llyr Powell, who was the Reform candidate at last year’s Caerphilly by-election and who worked in the UKIP press team during the 2016 Senedd election, suggested that her former party was destined to fall away in Wales, having achieved its aim of successfully campaigning for Brexit.

“Nigel’s goal in UKIP was always to win an in-out referendum,” she said.

“We’re all united behind the fact we want to see Nigel Farage in Number 10 now.”

While Farage said he wants tighter control of candidate selection, he also conceded that Thomas and any newly elected Reform Senedd members must be given space by Reform’s Westminster operation to make their own decisions.

“When it comes to devolved matters, it’s up to Reform UK in Wales to make those decisions,” he told PoliticsHome.

He added: “I wouldn’t even pretend that I knew what needs to happen within the failing NHS in Wales.”

US President Donald Trump said it “bothers” him that former President Bill Clinton is facing scrutiny and an order to testify about his past ties to the late child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, who Trump infamously also had a relationship with.

“It bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton. See, I like Bill Clinton. I still like Bill Clinton,” Trump told NBC News in a White House interview Wednesday.

Asked what he likes about the former president, Trump answered: “I liked his behaviour towards me. I thought he got me, he understood me.”

This expressed support came one day after Trump called it “a shame” that Clinton and his wife, Hillary, have been subpoenaed to testify about their ties to Epstein.

Bill Clinton’s relationship with Epstein was documented in investigative files released by the Justice Department last week. The files include a shirtless photo of Clinton in a hot tub with someone that a DOJ official described as a “victim” of Epstein’s sexual abuse. He has denied wrongdoing and having any knowledge that Epstein was abusing underage girls.

Trump, who also faces unverified allegations of sexual misconduct involving minors in the documents and has denied wrongdoing, said it’s time to “move on” from the Epstein files and expressed support for the Clintons. This about-face follows Trump infamously calling for the former secretary of state to be locked up during and long after their vitriolic 2016 presidential campaign battle.

“I think it’s a shame, to be honest. I always liked him. Her? Yeah, she’s a very capable woman. She was better in debating than some of the other people, I will tell you that,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “She was smarter. She’s a smart woman. I hate to see it in many ways. I hate to see it, but then look at me, they went after me like — you know, they wanted me to go to jail for the rest of my life. Then it turned out I was innocent.”

Former MP Rory Stewart has no idea what a low income is. The posh boy podcaster beloved of centrist dads put forward a rousing defence of impoverished – checks notes – Members of Parliament in an interview during which he wore a frankly troubling polo neck jumper.

In a hand-wavey waffle about poor MPs being easily manipulated by the wealthy (what?), Stewart told LBC:

We’ve got hundred of MPs on very low incomes, some of them very insecure, struggling to get jobs when they leave, they are perfect prey for wealthy well-connected men who can offer them board positions, invite them to parties, put them on private planes.

Here’s Rory Stewart describing MPs as being on “low incomes”.

Their basic annual salary is £93,904, putting them in the top 5% of earners.

There’s a nuanced debate to be had about MPs’ pay, but describing them as “low income” is an insult to those who really are. pic.twitter.com/2qE8fYn1sJ

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— James Hanson (@jhansonradio) February 4, 2026

Okay, mate. For the record the basic MPs wage is £93,904 per year. That’s after their 2.8% pay rise from April 2025.

The average wage in the UK seems to be about £30,000. The mathematical geniuses among us will notice that that is…. quite a lot less than what MPs get paid.

It’s almost like Roderick James Nugent “Rory” Stewart – a humble Oxford educated one-time tutor to the future king of England, former army officer, and imperial governor of a province of Iraq – hasn’t got a fucking clue what he is talking about.

Roderick rides again

Stewart, born in Hong Kong to a diplomat who is said to have been a top candidate to head MI6, spent a number of years as a Tory MP.

For the 4287th time, I find myself going back to his *drum roll* voting record from those heady days.

Admittedly, I usually reach for these receipts when some centrist dad fuckwit in the pub tries to claim Stewart is a sort of sensible, moral conservative….

But any excuse to get Roderick’s voting record out is good enough for me. I have actually had it tattooed on my body so people can just read it now.

Let’s have a little look at Rory’s votes on benefits:

• Almost always voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits

• Generally voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms (which Labour describe as the “bedroom tax”)

• Consistently voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability

• Consistently voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices

Sounds like man who really understands the value of money on these benighted islands, doesn’t he?

How about tuition fees?:

• Consistently voted for university tuition fees

Oof…

Corporate tax?

• Almost always voted for reducing the rate of corporation tax

Oh Rory…

Climate change?

• Generally voted against measures to prevent climate change

Bloody hell, Roderick. If only the melts knew how to Google, you’d lose half the listenership on your shit podcast with war criminal Alastair Campbell.

Speaking of which, where are you on war – a very expensive and wasteful business that…

• Consistently voted for replacing Trident with a new nuclear weapons system

• Consistently voted for use of UK military forces in combat operations overseas

Immigration? Come on Rozzer, you can pull this back from the brink.

• Tended to vote for a stricter asylum system

• Consistently voted for stronger laws and enforcement of immigration rules

Well, shit. It turns out Rory is just a bog-standard Tory. Nothing more, nothing less. Rory is simply defending the well-off. Which includes MPs. And he isn’t convincing anybody otherwise. With the sole exception of your tedious Rest is Politics-obsessed Blairite uncle who likes to play devil’s advocate over things he knows nothing about in the pub.

Featured image via the Canary

Readers will probably be aware that literally as you read this, the Scottish Government is in court trying to defend its policy of letting male murderers be housed in women’s prisons by arguing that the Equality Act 2010 (as ruled on by the Supreme Court in the For Women Scotland case) is incompatible with the Human Rights Act 1998, implementing the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (commonly referred to as the ECHR).

But this article isn’t about that case.

Because today the Court Of Session issued an unrelated judgment that an entirely different piece of Scottish law is incompatible with the ECHR.

Wings readers have been following the deeply troubling case of Mark Hirst since 2021. Mark was arrested in 2020 on ludicrous charges involving a tweet constituting an alleged “breach of the peace” against the anonymous complainers who’d made false allegations of sexual assault against Alex Salmond, who’d been cleared on all counts at the High Court earlier the same year.

Seven months later Mark’s trial collapsed at Jedburgh Sheriff Court with the sheriff ruling there was no case to answer. Later that year he commenced proceedings to sue the Lord Advocate for malicious prosecution, and today – a disgraceful four years and seven months later – those proceedings reached their conclusion.

Put simply, judge Lord Lake concluded that Mark DID have grounds for a claim of malicious prosecution against the Lord Advocate – Scotland’s most senior law official, head of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service but controversially also a minister in the Scottish Government – but that he was obliged to dismiss the claim because the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995, (section 170) grants prosecutors total immunity, because Mark had not been imprisoned.

Lord Lake found that this conflict in law breached Mark’s right to fair treatment.

This might seem like an arcane technical point, but is in fact incredibly serious. Scots law has been ruled flatly incompatible with international human rights law, a situation which cannot possibly be allowed to continue. The CPSA will have to be changed urgently to avoid such grave injustices from happening again, yet it would take a bold gambler to bet on the Scottish Government doing so before May’s general election, or any time soon afterwards.

(It claimed to have no time to support Ash Regan’s bill on prostitution this week, despite it mirroring official SNP policy, but the Parliament did manage to debate a ban on greyhound racing despite there being absolutely no greyhound racing in existence anywhere in Scotland.)

The irony of this extremely rare legal scenario (declarations of incompatibility are vanishingly uncommon, for the obvious reason that most laws are carefully written to avoid them) coming up twice under the same administration, and in connection with the two most shameful episodes in Scottish Government history – the conspiracy, persecution and cover-up against Alex Salmond, and the imposition of violent male criminals on vulnerable women – is hard not to appreciate.

But in a country where nobody – least of all the Crown Office – is accountable for anything, irony appreciation is just about the only thing people have left to hold on to, as Scotland’s justice system dies slowly of shame.

What does “going low-contact” mean?

Why might someone go low-contact?

What should I do if someone has gone low-contact with me?

An inquiry into the deaths of at least 30 people who drowned while trying to cross the English Channel in 2021 has found that emergency services could have prevented the deaths.

On November 24, 2021, the dinghy they were travelling on started to fill with water and capsized. To date, it is the deadliest small boat disaster on record in the English Channel.

Only two of the people on board survived. Emergency services found them nearly 12 hours after they called for help.

In total, authorities found 27 bodies and confirmed another four people were missing.

Channel crossing: a damning inquiry.

The inquiry found that staff numbers across the national network at HM Coastguard were “above what was required”. However, the recommended seasonal staffing at MRCC Dover is three operational staff for search and rescue. Importantly, this number “was not satisfied”. The inquiry found:

 The only fully qualified staff member working in the search and rescue team at MRCC Dover that night was the Search and Rescue Mission Co-ordinator (SMC). The two others in the SMC’s team that night were trainees: one was partially qualified but deemed to be operational, and the other was non operational.

Shockingly, these staffing pressures meant that the SMC was unable to take a break. This:

unsurprisingly left him feeling overwhelmed and fatigued. The short staffing also resulted in an absence of appropriate supervision for the non-operational trainee, who was called on to undertake operational tasks.

Moreover, both Border Force Maritime and the RNLI lacked sufficient resources to deal with the situation.

Despite a seemingly healthy number of surface assets available on the night of 23 to 24 November 2021, HM Coastguard and Border Force were reluctant to deploy more than one, as this would have reduced the availability of an already insufficient number of assets on the following day.

A surveillance aircraft that should have provided “critical intelligence” also did not launch due to poor weather. Of course, there was no contingency plan.

Additionally, authorities missed calls and texts from the boat, or did not follow them up. This, combined with the widely held belief that the people on the boat were exaggerating their distress, meant that the coastguard underestimated the urgency of the situation.

To make matters worse, HM Coastguard did not inform the helicopter searching the area to look for people in the water. The report states:

There were problems with the search undertaken by the helicopter R163. Based on the drift analyses commissioned by the MAIB, it is likely that the area covered by R163’s search contained the swamped small boat. However, its search was not effective for locating a swamped small boat or people in the water. R163 was not tasked to incident ‘Charlie’ specifically and was not informed by HM Coastguard that it was to locate a sinking small boat or people in the water. The captain of R163 told the Inquiry that if he had been informed that there were people in the water, “that does change things”. Instead, R163 was tasked to look for the multiple small boats that were believed to be in a similar area.

Ultimately, authorities and emergency services could have prevented all of the deaths. The inquiry report concludes:

As the analysis makes clear, the flaws in HM Coastguard’s decision-making were systemic. In particular they are attributable to the inordinate pressure on HM Coastguard staff at MRCC Dover handling search and rescue for small boats, the absence of effective supervision of those staff, the limitations of the remote working model to assist them, and the belief which had developed among HM Coastguard personnel that callers from small boats regularly exaggerated their level of distress.

Featured image via Channel 4 News/ YouTube

This article contains graphic details of rape and sexual assault.

The latest tranche of Epstein documents have provided further evidence that he was not only a vile paedophile, he was also an appalling racist. We’ve previously covered Epstein’s sickening fantasies about using the supposedly “superior gene pool” of himself and the children he raped to create a “super-race”.

However, the new files provide further evidence of his eugenicist views. In an email to linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky, the now-dead former financier suggested that Black people are less intelligent than others:

The test score gap amongst African-Americans is well documented. 20 years of testing. Many countries. James Watson had some of his private views made public and hence his dismissal from society. He told me that after one sentence he became an un-person. Making things better might require accepting some uncomfortable facts. You told me that.

Epstein – racist views and racist friends

James Watson was a Nobel Prize winner alongside Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin following their discovery of DNA. He was also a horrible racist. He said:

There’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites in IQ tests. I would say the difference is genetic.

Watson described himself as “gloomy” regarding Africa’s prospects due to his claim that:

…all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.

Epstein appeared to indicate in another email that he was meeting Watson for breakfast. A white supremacist podcaster called Jean-François Gariépy also says Epstein gave him $25,000.

Epstein was of course a major backer of the world’s leading racist endeavour, the genocidal land theft project that is so-called ‘Israel’. He was a likely Mossad spy and has been pictured wearing an Israeli Genocide Forces sweatshirt. He was also a close friend of former ‘Israeli’ prime minister Ehud Barak. It is alleged Barak was the man who Virginia Giuffre alleged raped her “more savagely than anyone had before”.

Former ‘Israeli’ PM bemoans “quality” of African and Arab people

Now, in a newly released audio recording, Barak can be heard in conversation with Epstein. Adding an extra layer of racism to his already racist desire to have new arrivals to ‘Israel’ steal Palestinian land, Barak talks of controlling the “quality” of these aspiring land thieves. He says:

…we can control the quality much more effectively than our ancestors, or the founding fathers of Israel, could deal with the waves. [It] was a kind of salvation wave from North Africa, from the Arabs, from wherever.

They took whatever came, just to save people. Now we can be selective.

Note the use of “whatever”, rather than “whoever”, as if Black and Arab people are just convenient objects to pad out the settler-colony’s demographics. Rather than what he clearly sees as sub-standard material, the Nazi instead wants another “one million Russians”.

A number similar to that came to invade historic Palestine in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Given it’s a conversation with a child rapist, Barak – being the sickening creep he is – inevitably turns the conversation in a smutty direction, saying:

I think that many will prefer it to be Belorussians [who arrive]. Many young, handsome girls will come. Tall, thin.

This is the only moment Epstein can be heard in the recording, letting out a chuckle.

Zionism is a fundamentally racist ideology

Of course, this all makes sense, given Zionism is a fundamentally racist project at its core. It grants one ethnic group exclusive rights to land they have no claim on, as they exterminate the native inhabitants. The racism which Barak espouses has just been an additional stain on top of that underlying bigotry.

Historian Avi Shlaim has recounted his early experiences of racism as an Arab Jew upon his family’s arrival from Iraq. Ethiopian Jews who arrived in the Zionist pseudo-state were sterilised, so they couldn’t outnumber the preferred white population. Arab people in ‘Israel’ are denied the same provision of services as their Jewish counterparts, including access to bomb shelters.

It’s not only racism that the Zionist entity shares with Epstein. It is also a vehicle for mass sexual abuse. Paedophiles have used the apartheid colony as a means of evading justice elsewhere. The most senior figures in the Zionist government have refrained from deporting such individuals.

Palestinian children are routinely sexually assaulted in the brutal prison system run by the terrorists in West Jerusalem. Children are “hit or touched on the genitals”, with 69% being strip searched.

Palestinians have recounted systematic sexual abuse in the ‘Israeli’ system of torture camps. Those kidnapped describe being raped with dogs, iron bars and batons. Tamer Qarmut was kidnapped from Gaza in November 2023. He described his abuse:

He [the guard[ shoved a wooden stick up my anus, left it there for about a minute, and pulled it out. Then he shoved it back in, even harder, and I screamed at the top of my lungs. After a minute, he pulled the stick out again, told me to open my mouth, pushed the stick into my mouth and forced me to lick it.

Knesset members have defended the right to rape kidnapped Palestinians. They even staged a violent protest at a torture centre when it appeared rapists may be held to account for their crimes.

The Zionist entity is effectively Epstein in ‘state’ form. A project of massive racism, violence and sexual abuse, allowed to continue its crimes way beyond the time it should have been held to account.

Featured image via the Canary