What are the benefits of incline walking?

What about running?

So, which is best for me?

Reform UK have unveiled their new multi-pronged pledge to ‘restore Britain’s Christian heritage’. The far-right party plans to introduce a ‘patriotic’ Christian curriculum, as well as attaching listed status to church buildings to prevent them being turned into mosques.

Quite apart from this pointless reactionary nostalgia, the plans would spell the death of those same churches that Reform claims to value. Which is unsurprising really, given that the pack of liars and conmen that make up the party couldn’t actually give a fig about Christianity – beyond its usefulness in stirring up Islamophobia, of course.

‘More things to take pride in’

Reform presented its plans through newly appointed home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf, as his first speech in the new role. In an interview with the Times beforehand, Yusuf – himself a Muslim born to Sri Lankan immigrants – called Christianity:

core to the history and the DNA of the country.

However, he went on to complain of the UK losing its Christian values:

What we’ve seen is that sense of high-trust society eroded quite rapidly, actually, and that’s in no small part because of the vast numbers of people who have arrived over a short period of time from low-trust societies. Some people might wince at that phrase, but it’s just obviously true.

To counter this perceived issue, Yusuf declared that his party would institute a “patriotic curriculum” centered on Christianity. This, he argued, would give children “more things to take pride in again”:

I think if politicians play their part, then I’m optimistic that over time … they will have more things to take pride in as they are made to feel proud of their history again, rather than being taught that they should be ashamed of [it].

As such, this curriculum would presumably be incredibly restricted. If children are meant to take pride in patriotic Christianity, they’ll presumably have to skip over the litany of atrocities committed by the British church.

This includes, but is by no means limited to, the witch hunts, the forced indoctrination of colonised peoples (and the legacy of homophobia it left behind), numerous pogroms against Jewish people in the UK, and, of course, all those crusades against Muslim nations in the Middle East?

Actually, who am I kidding? Reform would probably think all of that shit was something to be proud of.

Listed status

Along with this festering lump of a policy proposal, Yusuf also stated that Reform would thrust automatic listed status onto church buildings. This would both require their upkeep and prevent changes in their use.

The home affairs spokesman explained that this would prevent churches from being turned into mosques. Yusuf claimed he’d received emails from “anxious residents” complaining about this very phenomenon, and said that:

Regardless of whether somebody is of faith or not, or which faith they follow, I think the Christian heritage of this country is very important and protecting our heritage and our culture is important, otherwise the country is not a country, it’s just an economic zone.

And so, as one step in pursuit of that, we will end the incendiary practice of converting churches into mosques or any other places of worship by granting listed status automatically to all churches and prohibiting that.

The problem here (or one problem at least) is that it’s a policy designed to whip up the idea of Muslims rocking up and turfing out a bunch of active Christians from an in-use church. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

In the last decade alone, over 3500 churches have closed their doors. In turn, they’ve become pubs, clubs, gyms, apartments, and yes – other places of worship. The reasons behind the closures include declining attendance, falling income, and, in particular, the high cost of building maintenance.

In the 2021 census, the number of self-described Christians in England and Wales fell by 13% compared to the previous decade. This meant that Christians made up less than half of the population for the first time in the history of the census.

Empty, expensive and unused

However, for anyone who has attended church regularly in the last few decades, that decline has already been plainly visible. Whilst just under half of the population identify as Christian, only around 5% actually attend church.

Churches are closing, not because of Muslims immigrating to the UK, but because the buildings are old, expensive, and empty. What’s more, I think any representative of the church could have told Reform that, if they’d bothered to ask

Instead, the far-right party plans to burden an already-failing institution with the financial costs of maintaining listed churches. All the while, the buildings still sit idle, when they could instead gain new life and new use in the community – as places of worship or otherwise.

The move marks another step in Reform’s descent into a grim imitation of US-style Christofascism, nakedly motivated by Islamophobia. It’s a vain attempt to appeal to an imaginary, idealised, bygone era of a more homogeneously (white) Christian UK.

Oh, and it would be utterly ruinous to the very institution that Reform is paying lip-service to, to boot.

Featured image via the Canary

The Polanski-led Green Party will soon be voting on whether they should embed support for Palestinian resistance in their politics.

While Palestine is a distant country, it’s suffering is the direct result of actions taken by a close UK ally. Never mind Balfour, Britain’s ongoing involvement – from arms deals, bilateral trade, and media endorsements of Israel – means it’s responsible for the violence Palestinians experience daily.

Now, Israel has responded to the Green Party’s vocal opposition to its genocide in Gaza, condemning its leader. And its leader Zack Polanski has now let them know exactly what he thinks:

For years we’ve seen an ongoing genocide.

It’s been backed by right wing papers, the US President and by this Labour Government. pic.twitter.com/ESynwd21Ct

Advertisement

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) February 23, 2026

Anti-Zionism

As we reported on 28 January:

Pressure group Greens for Palestine is urging the Green Party to declare itself “an anti-Zionist party”. The group has issued a statement in support of a motion which it calls “groundbreaking”. The motion also supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and calls for the de-proscription of Palestine Action.

The Green Party motion is ‘Motion A105: Zionism is Racism’, which calls for:

– The Green Party to declare itself an Anti-Zionist Party
– The Green Party rejects attempts to normalise the racist subjugation and oppression of Palestinians; to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism; to deny or minimise Palestinian human rights; to create hierarchies of racism; and to normalise or attempt to justify apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide.
– To reject the IHRA and JDA definitions which have been weaponized to silence legitimate criticism of the state of Israel.
– Full Boycott and Divestment from Israel.
– The Green Party calls for the release of all Palestinian prisoners of conscience (including Marwan Barghouti)
– The Green Party to declare support for a single democratic Palestinian State with Jerusalem as its capital.
– The Green Party calls for the de-proscription of Palestine Action.
– The Green Party calls for the release of all political prisoners detained for non-violent direct action in support of Palestinian rights.

Independent journalist Matt Kennard has endorsed the motion:

Lubna Speitan—Palestinian Green Party member and a member of the Greens For Palestine Steering Group—has proposed this important motion for the Spring Conference.

I endorse all of it. It should all be Green Party policy. Basic stuff for a progressive party.

Motion A105:…

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) January 26, 2026

The Zionist response

As reported by the Telegraph, Israeli foreign minister Sharren Haskel described the Greens’ proposal as “horrific”. They also called the Greens “a racist and hateful political party”, stating:

This Green Party motion is one of the most hateful and racist documents I’ve ever read. It calls for the destruction of Israel and seeks to justify terrorism against Israel.

Its intent is to justify the destruction of the Jewish homeland and deny the right of Jews to a national home. The double standards are extraordinary as they demand a national home for Palestinians but not Jews.

The other way to look at this is that the Greens aren’t calling for an end to Israel; they’re calling for an end to the Israel caging the Palestinians in an open air prison.

And as Polanski himself said, it’s hard to take the Israeli government seriously when we just watched them commit a genocide.

Featured image via the Canary

Conor Boyle is a young conservative and unionist from Northern Ireland, an Oxford graduate, and now works in the financial services sector.

How many items in Britain’s current economic policy, tax system, regulatory framework, and so-on, exist almost entirely for domestic short-term political consumption?

Of that, how many items are actually harming our economic performance?

You would have to conclude that the answer to both is: a lot.

What’s worse is that the short-term popularity of certain measures is derived from a belief that we are going to make the rich and successful pay more and atone for their greed and general ‘evilness.’

Of course, this view of the world runs contrary to basic economic literacy.

Money is mobile, and it goes where it’s best treated.

The ‘tax the rich’ mentality that this failing Labour government – and I’m afraid to say the previous Conservative governments also had in large part – is based on the fallacy that we’re going to phase out excessive wealth.

A realistic government should accept that wealth – including levels of which we may find excessive or distasteful – are always going to exist, and we should play our cards better to be a welcoming destination for it.

Creating economic conditions which are hostile to investment, business, finance and the likes is just a gift to the exchequers of our competitors. Countless examples, from Ireland’s low corporation tax regime to cutting the higher rates of Income Tax here in Britain, show beyond doubt, that creating a pro-wealth environment attracts more tax revenues.

To some, it’s counter-intuitive; you increase taxes to increase your revenue. But the most basic understandings of anything to do with economics or tax shows that’s very rarely the case, especially when dealing with the most mobile demographics of people. Thus, the basic political driver inherent in so much of our political discourse; love of the NHS; is improperly framed. Public services, the National Health Service, benefit most from making Britain a place to come and part with your money. It’s not a choice between the nurses and the rich, if we punish rich, they sod off to Dubai and the nurse becomes relatively “richer” in the eyes of the taxman, expected to contribute more as a result.

It struck me a few years ago that policies like the cap on bankers’ bonuses, the high rates of Income Tax, tax on second homes and landlords, the energy windfall tax, the surcharge paid by banks on top of their Corporation Tax, Corporation Tax itself being hiked to 25 per-cent, and other measures, not only don’t serve their stated purpose of financing our beloved public services, but they could be a barrier to a well-financed exchequer.

Take that bankers’ bonuses cap.

A typically populist move enacted after the 2008 recession. The political intuition is clear; banks bad, bankers bad, be seen to “make them pay”. But, as Kwasi Kwarteng pointed out as Chancellor, the cap didn’t cap the amount that bankers were being paid. They were simply paid more in basic salary to avoid is being counted as a bonus. Useless.

Worse than useless though. It’s fair to speculate that such a measure, while totally ineffective, sends out the message to any bank or financial firm around the world that Britain is a place that begrudges your financial success, and sees wealth as a dirty concept. Faced with the choice of New York, Dubai, Frankfurt, Doha, Dublin, even Paris, and very soon potentially Riyadh, many of whom are actively trying to woo new businesses to onshore, we are chasing them away.

Every business that doesn’t move jobs or activity to Britain is lost earnings to young British graduates and school-leavers, lost revenue to our retail and hospitality sector, and of course, lost revenue to the Exchequer, and added pressure on our saintly nurses, teachers and other public servants as a result.

At some level, you can’t blame politicians for their intentions. Many, you assume, mean well. That is, however, no substitute, and no excuse for implementing, cheering on and defending policies which make Britain poorer in the long run.

The same goes for the 45p rate of Income Tax. Part of the “pay their fair share narrative”, but when both Nigel Lawson and Gordon Brown – yes him – actually cut the higher rates, rather than losing money as was predicted, the Treasury received more in tax take. The truth is that the wealthy and successful are wealthy and successful for a reason. They’re smart enough to stay wealthy even when governments are hounding them. But they can be turned-off Britain as a destination for their capital with these envy-driven policies.

And without wanting to sound like a certain former Prime Minister, much of this is based on the fundamentally flawed way that our institutions forecast tax revenue. It’s assumed – seemingly – that tax cuts cannot be revenue-raising measures. As such, Chancellors appear to be cornered by their officials into these spiteful measures designed to squeeze more out of the productive actors in the economy in order to satiate a growing public sector and welfare state. It doesn’t, as we conservatives know well, work. So, the people are not, on average becoming better-off, and those who are; they’re upping sticks and leaving.

In-turn then, with people not being able to get ahead financially, and the feeling of stagnation setting in, the public animosity towards the rich increases. Rather than a virtuous cycle, we get more anti-wealth policies which just create a circle of doom, and the nation is as far away from prosperity as ever.

The state of Britain’s economy necessitates a pro-growth mentality now from government.

It’s easy to say – and has been now by both parties for a few years now – but the action (the bit that matters) is much more difficult. It requires a political spine of lead, and a sort of immunity from immediate bad headlines and the condemnation of a Question Time audience.

The reward will be success.

Success felt in the pockets of the British worker, the tills of the British shopkeeper and restaurateur, the efficiency and improvements in the British hospital ward and classroom and increasing sense of aspiration that comes with it all. Over a four- or five-year electoral cycle, we know which is more pertinent for voters in the long-run. And politics aside, the country needs to be more prosperous. Somebody needs to have the will to stand up and deliver it.

(Alamy)

2 min read20 min

The Prime Minister is considering whether to ask Sir Laurie Magnus to assess whether rules have been breached by Cabinet Office minister Simons, who is currently the subject of an internal investigation by his department, PoliticsHome understands.

Simons, elected at the 2024 general election, is accused of asking a public affairs firm to investigate journalists writing about Labour Together while he was head of the Labour-aligned think tank.

Simons has said APCO Worldwide had “gone beyond” what it had been asked to do when it pursued “unnecessary” personal information about Sunday Times journalist Gabriel Pogrund.

The PR company had agreed to look at “the sourcing, funding and origins” of reporting by the newspaper about the think tank’s failure to declare political donations.

The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Reform UK have all called for Simons to resign from his ministerial position while he is being investigated.

Kevin Hollinrake, chair of the Tories, has said a Cabinet Office investigation into Simons is not sufficient because the department “cannot be left to mark its own homework”.

A group of Labour backbenchers had called on Downing Street to launch an independent investigation into the allegations.

When he ordered the Cabinet Office investigation, which is being led by the government’s propriety and ethics team, Starmer said he “didn’t know anything” about the APCO Worldwide report.

The Guardian later reported that Simons named Pogrund and fellow journalist Paul Holden to British security officials and falsely linked them to pro-Russia propaganda. 

More follows…

Ruth Deyermond looks at Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference and argues that the US is now an unreliable partner and that Europe must develop its own defence capabilities and architecture.

A seemingly unbridgeable gap now exists between the US and Europe on matters of security and politics; as a result, there is an urgent need to develop a European security architecture that does not depend on Washington. Ironically, what has made this gap impossible to ignore is US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s attempt at the Munich Security Conference to repair some of the damage done a year ago.

Rubio’s remarks were notably different in tone from Vice President JD Vance’s hostile and inflammatory speech in 2025. This was greeted with relief by some; and many European diplomats claimed to be reassured by it. But while the tone was clearly intended to calm tensions, the content remained largely unchanged  from Vance’s tirade.

The vision outlined in Rubio’s speech is one in which the US is not bound to NATO allies by shared liberal values like democracy and human rights or respect for the rule of law. Instead, what ties Europe and the US together is culture and heritage, Christianity, “ancestry”, and the superiority of what he calls Western civilisation, described by Rubio as “the greatest civilisation in human history”. These things, he claimed, are menaced by European weakness and by “the forces of civilisational erasure”.

European Commission Vice President Kaja Kallas was the clearest in pushing back against this vision, noting acerbically that “woke, decadent Europe is not facing civilisational erasure” and asserting that “European enlargement is vital for securing democracy and overcoming Europe’s own imperial history”.

Rubio’s speech confirmed the radical ideological gap that has now opened between the US and Europe. To a worrying extent, the US now represents precisely the things that post-1945 Europe organised to prevent: authoritarianism; aggression; might-makes-right; and the glorification of imperialism, driven by civilisational mythologising. It increasingly resembles not the ally that helped to foster liberal democracy in the aftermath of authoritarian destruction, but the dark Other of Europe’s past against which contemporary European identity has been built. In the medium- and long-term Europe – both the European Union as an institution and the democratic states inside and outside it – cannot maintain a close alliance with a state dominated by this ideology while preserving its identity and values.

The speech highlighted another point of rupture: the rejection of “the rules-based international order”. This seems to refer to what is often called “the International Liberal Order” that emerged in the moment of post-Cold War US dominance, and in which democracy, human rights, non-aggression, respect for international law, and economic liberalism were core principles (even if not always adhered to in practice). This is clearly an order that the Trump administration rejects – as does Russia.

But the term more properly describes another order, the one that is not shaped by shared values but by the rules: respect (in theory) for the primacy of state sovereignty; territorial integrity; and international law as embodied by the UN Security Council. These rules were an attempt to learn the lessons of World War Two, which made the consequences of rejecting these devastatingly clear.

Worryingly this order, too, is rejected by the Trump administration. Although Rubio advocated reform of the UN in his speech, he also criticised the “abstractions of international law” and praised lawless acts such as the targeted killings of alleged drug runners in the Caribbean. From the start, the current Trump administration has made it clear that it does not consider itself to be constrained by law or by the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. These are the building blocks of a world without major war; if the world’s most powerful state knocks them down, it is creating a world in which disputes have to be resolved by force.

This rejection of the rules-based order is being directed, among many other targets, towards the US’s supposed allies in NATO, Denmark and Canada. A collective security alliance cannot survive as a meaningful organisation when the major threat to some of those inside it comes from its most powerful member.

Attempts to paper over Trump’s determination to seize Greenland were badly damaged by the insulting public comments of Senator Lindsay Graham, who asked the audience “who gives a s**t who owns Greenland?”, and his even more insulting comments in private to the Danish and Greenland prime ministers.

A third point of rupture is Ukraine and Russia. The Trump administration has split from its former allies in Europe in abandoning support for Ukraine and pressuring Kyiv to agree to a peace settlement that would mean capitulation. That, and the desire to develop economic ties with Russia and to rehabilitate it diplomatically – clear, for example, in the late 2025 US peace plan – stand in sharp contrast to European assessments of the growing threat from Russia and the importance of Ukraine to European security. Rubio made almost no mention of this in his speech but it was central to those of key European leaders.

The consequences of this split between Europe and the US are enormous, and will only grow. Behind the diplomatic affirmations of continued alliance, and despite their own deep reluctance, many Europeans are moving to greater security independence from the US. This will carry huge economic – and therefore probably, political – costs, but there is no realistic alternative.

The Trump administration, which seems to have assumed that Europe has no choice but to bend to Washington’s will, are angry to discover that disregard for international law and untrustworthiness as an alliance partner carries penalites. They were forced into a humiliating climbdown on Greenland by European pushback, and they have been unable to successfully pressure Ukraine in part because Europe has stepped up support. They are reportedly trying to stop the EU prioritising European arms manufacturers in defence procurement. And concerns about illegality appear to have led the UK government to block the use of UK air bases in an attack on Iran. The US is losing influence and money.

Marco Rubio’s Munich speech seemed designed to reassure while reasserting an ideology and a rejection of a rules-based order that leave the US and its former European allies further apart than at any point since the 1940s. It has not been enough to reverse the move towards some form of divorce, which is now necessary for European security and its political integrity. Both Europe and the US will be poorer and more insecure as a result.

By Dr. Ruth Deyermond, Senior Lecturer in Post-Soviet Security at King’s College London.