3 min read21 min

The email purported to be from the ‘Mainstream’ campaign group set up last year, which is associated with Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and other figures from the Labour left and soft left.

It was sent from [email protected], which appears to deliberately approximate the real email address of the group that ends in mainstreamlabour.org.

The message noted that Labour’s ruling national executive committee (NEC) officers had, at the encouragement of Starmer, blocked Burnham from standing as the Labour candidate in the ongoing Gorton and Denton by-election.

It described this move as “not only a profound political mistake but a serious breach of the democratic principles Labour was founded to uphold”.

The email went on to accuse the government of having “lost its moral authority” and Labour of “approaching a point of no return”.

“For that reason, on 20 November, the Mainstream Coalition will be organising a coordinated parliamentary walkout in protest of Starmer’s direction. Participating MPs will resign their seats and stand again in the ensuing by-elections,” it claimed.

“The 11 sitting Mainstream MPs have already confirmed their participation. We are now extending a confidential invitation to all Labour MPs to join us.”

The communication to Labour MPs has been reported to the police by Mainstream, which suggested in a statement that it believes it was faked by people from a different wing of the Labour Party, described as “bad faith actors driven by factionalism”.

Commenting on the incident, the Mainstream group said: “This morning, a fake email was sent to Labour MPs purporting to be from Mainstream, calling for a parliamentary walkout in November.

“This has been reported to the police. The email was not sent by Mainstream, or anyone associated with Mainstream. The address it was sent from is not one owned by us.

“Clearly, bad faith actors driven by factionalism are seeking to undermine the work that Mainstream is doing with MPs and others from all across the Labour Party to build the ideas, strategy and culture to make our time in government as transformative as possible – and put us on a firm footing in 2029.”

Burnham made clear last month that he was unhappy with the decision to block his candidacy, but the mayor has since been highly visible in the by-election campaign and this week backed Starmer staying as Prime Minister while urging the government to be more ambitious on policy.

Students, staff and trade unionists will rally at King’s College London (KCL), Strand Campus, on Thursday 12 February at 2pm. It’s part of the national workplace day of action for Palestine.

Organisers say the rally comes amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank, and the:

escalating repression of Palestine solidarity activism in the UK.

Repression at KCL

The protest will demand the immediate reinstatement of Usama Ghanem. He’s an Egyptian KCL student who has been indefinitely suspended and had his student visa revoked. He now faces the threat of imminent deportation to Egypt, where his life is at risk.

Organisers say Usama’s case is part of a broader crackdown targeting pro-Palestine staff and students, including disciplinary action and intimidation. At KCL, more than twenty students – primarily students of colour – have faced disciplinary procedures linked to Palestine activism. However, far-right and Zionist groups have repeatedly targeted demonstrators on campus.

The rally is organised by KCL student societies, KCL UCU, and University and College Workers for Palestine, and endorsed by the Stop the War Coalition.

A spokesperson for University and College Workers for Palestine said:

Repression in the UK is not separate from what is happening in Palestine. It is part of the same system of dispossession, apartheid and genocide. Universities are disciplining and deporting activists while Israel destroys Gaza’s education system and annexes the West Bank.

A KCL staff member talked about the broader context of Usama’s suspension. They noted that the college:

escalated disciplinary action against pro-Palestine students, closed down hard-won fora on divestment and the reconstruction of Gaza’s education system, rejected all divestment demands, and unilaterally introduced new protest restrictions.

At the same time, it has failed to challenge Zionist and fascist groups like Stop the Hate and Betar, allowing them to intimidate and assault staff and students with impunity.

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Thursday’s rally will demand of KCL:

• Reinstate Usama Ghanem.
• Stop the repression and deportations of pro-Palestine activists.
• Fascists off campus.
• Divestment now.

London trade union branches with banners and delegations are due to attend at KCL. A major pledge campaign launched by supporters has already raised over £17,000 in under two weeks. It will support legal action connected to Usama’s case.

Featured image via the Canary

As we’ve reported, the recently released Epstein Files have shone an unflattering light on many powerful people. President Donald Trump is among those exposed, which is why it was unsurprising to see so many unnecessary (and illegal) redactions in the released documents.

Providing some additional transparency, members of congress have been given permission to view un-redacted files at a Department of Justice (DoJ) facility. Alarmingly, however, we’ve now discovered the following:

It is totally inappropriate and against the separations of powers for the DOJ to surveil us as we search the Epstein files. Bondi showed up today with a burn book that held a printed search history of exactly what emails I searched. That is outrageous and I intend to pursue this… https://t.co/nyZjmHoGUq

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) February 11, 2026

‘Burn book’

As we reported, the Epstein Files Transparency Act put it into law that the DoJ must publish all the documents related to the dead paedophile. The law allows for redactions to protect victims, but no one else. Despite this, the DoJ redacted the names of Epstein’s associates and potential co-conspirators.

As a result of members of congress having access to the un-redacted Epstein Files, we’ve learned information such as the following:

BREAKING: Congressman Jamie Raskin says Trump’s name shows up in the unredacted Epstein files 1 MILLION TIMES (it was 38,000 in the redacted files) – Axios

— Secular Talk ([email protected]) (@KyleKulinski) February 10, 2026

The above would mean we only have access to 3.8% of the times that the files mention Donald Trump. Trump was not a victim of Epstein, and so his name should not have been redacted.

More has come out too, including the names of “powerful men” linked to Epstein:

BREAKING: RO KHANNA JUST UNVEILED THE NAMES OF 6 POWERFUL MEN WHO WERE REDACTED IN THE EPSTEIN FILES

Here they are:

• Salvatore Nuara
• Zurab Mikeladze
• Leonic Leonov
• Nicola Caputo
• Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem
• Leslie Wexner

Why did the Trump DOJ cover for them? pic.twitter.com/qIh6Xtn0dC

— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) February 10, 2026

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Others highlighted the improper redactions:

Hey ⁦@DAGToddBlanche⁩, I saw the unredacted version of this email, and there is no reason it should be redacted from the public.

Unless, of course, you are trying to protect your master @realdonaldtrump. pic.twitter.com/unEuN0GGRj

— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) February 11, 2026

Yesterday @RepRoKhanna and I found a list of names and photos in the Epstein files that DOJ had improperly redacted.

DOJ promptly unredacted the men’s names as well as several women in the list that we didn’t flag. The two redacted names are victims. https://t.co/fLLzGW9rR7 pic.twitter.com/DTfK30Kppk

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— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) February 10, 2026

We also learned the identity of a the man who sent an email referencing a “torture video”:

🚨US Rep. Thomas Massie just dropped the hammer.

After viewing the unredacted DOJ files himself, he confirms the redacted sender in that sick “torture video” email chain was none other than Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the big-shot UAE billionaire and chairman of DP World. pic.twitter.com/6Ny85jqL9y

— Red Pill USA (@Red_Pill_US) February 10, 2026

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The revelation that the DoJ is spying on members of congress who view the Epstein Files came from Pam Bondi. Bondi was testifying on the Epstein Files before the Justice Department Oversight committee, which led to the following scenes:

Bondi: “There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime”

Lieu: “I believe you just lied under oath.”

Bondi: “Don’t you ever accuse me of a crime”

Lieu: “I’m showing you evidence.”

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I think Pam Bondi’s “career” has just come to an end today. pic.twitter.com/tkIiu3mQVB

— Daractenus (@Daractenus) February 11, 2026

Lieu: Pam Bondi lied under oath. She said there was no evidence of wrongdoing in the Epstein files of Donald Trump. That’s just a lie. There are multiple documents that show wrongdoing of Donald Trump. I showed one. A witness had called into the FBI National Threat Operations… pic.twitter.com/hMSllfYjBD

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) February 11, 2026

In one startling moment, Bondi pointedly ignored the Epstein survivors who courageously attended. The reason they’re raising their hands is because they were asked to indicate which of them have been ignored by Bondi’s DoJ:

An image we won’t soon forget. Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to look at Epstein survivors pictured behind her on the Hill today. pic.twitter.com/KYCBQCXz3Y

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) February 11, 2026

Several congresspeople have commented on the DoJ monitoring their activities:

As I said yesterday, the DOJ was keeping a history of all the files we were viewing.

Now we know why. https://t.co/qi5zVbZ9BO

— Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (VA-10) (@RepSuhas) February 11, 2026

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Nancy Mace began as a Trump loyalist, but has diverged from the president as a result of his handling of the Epstein case:

Yes. I will confirm. DOJ is tracking the Epstein documents Members of Congress search for, open, and review.

I was able to navigate the system today and I won’t disclose how or the nature of how; but confirmed the DOJ is tagging ALL DOCUMENTS Members of Congress search, open and…

— Rep. Nancy Mace (@RepNancyMace) February 12, 2026

For more on the Epstein Files, please read:

Featured image via MS Now

3 min read4 min

Currently in the Lords, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill will determine the funding, responsibilities, and relationships between all tiers of local government.

My county of Surrey has benefited from a successful tapestry of governance, with one county equalling eleven districts and boroughs currently reorganising into two unitary authorities. As an MP, I love working with all forms of government – each brings a different perspective to community engagement.

The Devolution Bill presents huge opportunities to reshape how public services are delivered and how local places and people are supported. However, caution is needed as there are huge potential risks from devolution if implemented poorly.

For me, the most apparent issue is the lack of clarity demonstrated so far around parish and town councils, and their place in this new system. Thankfully, a recent report has outlined how Surrey is leading the way, and how the rest of the country can follow suit.

The Surrey Association of Local Councils (SALC) has outlined how the 80+ town and parish councils in the county play a central role in governance – delivering better services, creating more vibrant places, and building stronger, more resilient communities.

The report also sets out the staggering contribution that parish and town councils make to communities. In Surrey alone, these councils have invested more than £11 million a year, directly into their communities. This has funded a variety of community-based projects. The results of these have been incredible – reducing anti-social behaviour, managing community spaces, reducing pressure on public services by supporting volunteers, befriending schemes, and community networks, as well as cutting pollution.

Taking the example of Surrey nationally, it’s clear that when it comes to English devolution, early planning and genuine collaboration with parish and town councils will be essential to sustain the community services that residents rely on every day. This is clear in the report.  

SALC noted just how beneficial parish and town councils can be for other forms of government. For example, in just one year, improving access to parks and open spaces can generate around £115,000 in health and social care savings, while investing £300,000 in youth services can return an estimated £960,000 through better health outcomes and reduced crime.

These figures show local councils are not a cost to be cut, but one of the smartest investments taxpayers can make.

With elections taking place in 2026, ahead of the unitary councils going live in 2027, SALC is calling for early, proactive partnership working between the new authorities and town and parish councils.

The report outlines practical next steps, including local “deals” to support the transfer of services to town and parish councils where appropriate, and support for communities that wish to create new town and parish councils.

By working together from the outset, SALC believes Surrey can avoid essential community services and assets being lost, and residents feeling remote from the new, much larger authorities – and instead ensure communities continue to feel heard, supported, and proud of where they live. This is also the case for the rest of the country.

As England’s governance is on the cusp of being reshaped, the report is clear: strong, vibrant communities are built from the ground up – and collaboration with town and parish councils is key to making local government reform a success.

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the British press constantly moaned about the ‘nanny state’ in the New Labour years. This is the term for when the government interferes in people’s every day business to an unhealthy degree. And as we’ve seen this week, Nigel Farage is going to be the nanny state personified if he becomes PM.

First he was going after work-from-home; now he wants to tell you what you can and can’t call oat milk:

When I first made this TikTok video in 2024 you all laughed at me.

Well, today the Supreme Court has ruled that ‘oat milk’ can no longer be called milk.

You’re not laughing now are you! pic.twitter.com/WFQaEgNulO

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— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) February 11, 2026

How about minding your business, feller?

We are laughing now, to be fair

Farage is referring to the Supreme Court ruling which decided you can’t call oat milk ‘milk’ anymore. We have two thoughts on this:

• We’re really spending time and money on this?
• We’ll continue to call it oat milk out of habit, but we don’t care either way – we have more important things to worry about.

In the video above, Farage says:

So I’m in a smart hotel in London; I’ve got a cup, I want some milk. Let’s have a look. We’ve got semi-skimmed, I don’t like that. Oat milk? What on Earth’s that when it’s at home. Almond milk. All I want’s proper bloody milk, not left-wing options – proper milk. What’s wrong with me asking for that?

You are an old man in a public breakfast room shouting at the coffee table; this isn’t normal.

We’re going to print this in big, bold letters so that it gets through:

IF THE THOUGHT OF OAT MILK UPSETS YOU, YOU ARE TOO EASILY UPSET.

This is absolute snowflake behaviour.

It’s possibly the most snowflake anyone has ever been since Lee Anderson celebrated the conviction of his heckler.

And going further, there is nothing ‘left-wing’ about oat milk. Almond milk did not feature in the Communist Manifesto. Organised labour have never gone on strike to secure the right to coconut milk. Cashew milk is not a key tenet of Xi Jinping Thought.

Farage is doing two things here:

• Thinking that anything which wasn’t common in his childhood is wrong by default because his brain is decaying.
• Thinking that anything he doesn’t personally enjoy is ‘left wing’ because he’s right wing.

As we mentioned, Mr Nanny is also telling people where they can and can’t work. HG reported for the Canary:

Nigel Farage is going after work-from-home, in a hypocritical attempt to make it look like he’s ever worked a day in his life.

Of course, Nigey isn’t telling us that he previously employed his wife to work from home.

To make matters more infuriating, Reform UK also happens to employ people who work from home.

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These people are going to be all up in your business while telling you to mind yours.

This your guy?

As is obvious from Farage’s tweet, he’s spent the past two years stewing on this. Do we really want this petty, small-minded dweeb in charge of the country?

Because let’s be real – at this point, he’s gonna want revenge for a lot more than just his opinions about milk.

Featured image via Trademark Room

‘Nandy criticises Starmer’s appointment of peer linked to paedophile’ is not, at first glance, a surprising headline in this morning’s Daily Telegraph. The Mandelson story isn’t going to go away anytime soon, after all.

And then you realise Mandie has nothing to do with it. There is another peer, and another paedophile.

I don’t know if British politics has ever had reason to exhibit this particular rule before, so maybe I’m wrong, but I posit that the number of second-degree political connexions to different paedophiles a prime minister can survive is fewer than two. It was almost certainly fewer than one, but definitely fewer than two.

Sir Keir Starmer is, politically speaking, a dead man. He may perhaps keep twitching long enough to fulfill his highest ambitions for office and give away the Chagos Islands, but that’s about it. And notwithstanding my warning from Monday, it is hard to see his downfall as unjust.

This government’s back was long broken; having stated that its top priority is ‘growth’, it has once again underperformed the OBR’s underwhelming forecasts; the best Rachel Reeves’ can manage, instead of scrapping the Employment Rights Bill or the Renters’ Rights Act or any other economically self-harming bit of her own agenda, is to bleat about closer relations with Europe. Naturally, she has taken this as an excuse to limit her ‘deregulatory drive’, whatever that was supposed to have been, even as Germany’s Olaf Scholz calls for a “regulatory clean slate”.

Again, it’s not necessarily that today’s politicians are an order of magnitude worse than their predecessors. It is simply that the forward momentum imparted to the British economy in earlier, better days, and which allowed several cohorts of the inadequate generation to convince themselves they had done a passable job of running it, has run out. When Starmer complains about pulling the levers and nothing happening, the lever in question are “taking the path of least resistance”, and the promised result “everything working out for now”.

If anything, the problem with the whole ‘Two Degrees of Humbert Humbert’ situation the Government now finds itself in is that it is so compelling an explanation for the downfall of a prime minister that Labour will convince itself that the rest of it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the anaemic growth, the soaring taxes, the many and manifest failures in office. It was Mandelson, and Doyle, and the unfortunate decision of a man with apparently no political instincts at all to elevate them to high office.

That comforting fairy story is not true, however weird it is to have to use the phrase “It wasn’t just the paedophiles” to put anyone’s problems in context. A new Labour leader would find that out soon enough, when the gulf between public expectations, the revenue expenditure accounts, and the tax base swallowed them hole. The best they could hope for is that Labour MPs decided to stick with them this time; even then, left-wing voters looking for someone to tell them what they want to hear will have the Greens.

The rest of us, meanwhile, will still have to live in the country they have proven utterly incapable of running. Do you think it haunts any of them, privately? How totally unfit they have proven for the burden of office? I don’t suppose it does – certainly, relatively few Conservatives (relative, that is, to the number who ought to) seem to harbour such doubts. The politics of “Play that same song!” remains popular on our side to have made Prosper UK happen, to whatever extent it is happening. And if the same narrow range of old ideas doesn’t deliver the goods anymore, well, you can always conclude that democracy is impossible.

Perhaps Labour will reach the same conclusion, once they try exactly the same thing without the nonces and find themselves losing anyway.

4 min read1 hr

The first (from Punch) showed a schoolteacher addressing his pupils: “Some of you students have urged me to teach that bourgeois society is corrupt, so here goes. Bourgeois society is corrupt. Returning now to the question of congruent triangles…” That one comes back to me occasionally in seminars: “Anyway, let’s get back to the subject of Early Day Motions…”

The second (by the great Tony Husband, maybe?) featured a man being questioned by a clipboard-armed pollster. “I am,” says the man, “less a don’t know, and more a couldn’t give a toss.”

That one came back to me recently while reading a fascinating new project examining the ‘Don’t Knows’. The chaff of opinion poll responses, most public polls simply discard them – along with the ‘Won’t Says’ and the ‘Couldn’t Give A Monkey’s’ – and report findings based on those who cough up a response. Yet those who don’t answer can often be considerable in number and they are not random.

It has, for example, long been known that the Don’t Knows are much more likely to be female. This new research shows just how much. In an impressive piece of work (which joins the growing list of projects I have often thought of doing, never got around to, and which are now, thankfully, being done by people much more able), researchers analysed every single question asked by the British Election Study (BES) over the last 10 years. That’s more than 2,000 questions, asked of almost 120,000 unique respondents.

In all 29 waves of the BES, women were more likely to say dunno, at roughly twice the rate of men, and around three quarters of those with a high proportion of don’t know responses were female. There were other differences too – education increases the likelihood of offering an opinion, for example – but sex appears to be the most significant factor.

Preliminary results appear to show this effect varied by both focus and format of questions. It was most pronounced when asking about people’s knowledge and/or about European politics. But although its scale varied, the effect remained, regardless of the topic, type or format being examined.

As so often with these sorts of findings, it’s important to remember the differences are probabilistic and at the margins. Women answer plenty of questions in surveys; plenty of men frequently say they don’t know. But one group is clearly more likely to do it than the other.

So, when we casually drop the Don’t Knows from a survey result, we are disproportionately dropping women. That might matter less if they genuinely don’t know – but, given that the project also found significant differences based on question formatting and wording, some of these differences aren’t genuine. Plus, there is almost no gender gap in eventual electoral turnout, so we are almost certainly dropping people who are still participating. 

Some of these gaps are already known to be caused by men’s tendency to give answers based on less certainty – and sometimes just to guess. Several years ago, there was an experiment in which respondents were set a series of unanswerable political knowledge questions – in that every one of the proffered responses was false.

Who said: “We shall fight them on the beaches?” A) John Lennon B) Boudica C) Rastamouse D) Don’t Know. (The real ones were more subtle than that, but you get the idea). The good news is that most people responded by picking option D. The less good news is that men were much more likely to give an answer regardless. Men were basically more likely to think they were right, even when they had to be wrong. Women never seem to be surprised by this finding.