January 2025: Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signs the executive order withdrawing from the WHO | Image by: Associated Press / Alamy

5 min read23 min

The removal of the stars and stripes from outside of the World Health Organization’s headquarters in January was an emblematic start to the year – but it may not be the last member flag to be lowered at the WHO’s Geneva base.

For although the USA finally completed its withdrawal from the WHO on 22 January – after Donald Trump signed an executive order to leave at the start of his second presidency in January 2025 – Maga is not the only movement hostile to the WHO.

An international campaign-group co-founded and chaired by Nigel Farage, Action on World Health (AWH), is due to report in late spring on its core mission of “reforming or replacing the WHO” – and its findings could be influential in shaping Reform UK health policy.

Writing in The Telegraph back in May 2024, the same month he launched AWH, Farage threatened to leave the WHO if it did not reform, describing comparisons between the EU and the organisation as “stark”: “The WHO is a failing, expensive, unelected, unaccountable, supranational body that wants more and more powers to run roughshod over nation state democracies and free citizens.”

A particular point of contention for critics of the WHO in recent years has been the process of drafting the Pandemic Agreement (formally adopted by WHO in May last year), the original version of which Farage condemned as “signing away our sovereignty”.

There has also been ideological resistance among the WHO’s opponents to any moves that advocate ‘nanny-state’ regulations on food, alcohol and tobacco – and also to programmes that support the provision of abortion. Like Trump, the AWH has also accused the WHO of “supporting the Chinese Communist Party cover up of Covid-19”.

Farage is not alone in his party in his view of the organisation. Speaking to The House, Reform UK MP and the party’s head of preparing for government Danny Kruger agrees with his party leader, stating that there is a “fundamental problem” with the WHO, “in the degree to which it is in the thrall not just to big pharma but to the countries with some very bad records on health, with China being the main one”.

Referring to the pandemic treaty, Kruger adds: “I was very opposed to the new regulations that were passed last year… The treaty that was agreed gave much greater power to the WHO to impose responses to major outbreaks, pandemics, and such like, onto countries.”

The original draft, he says, was “horrendous” – particularly the “proposals to mandate all sorts of particular responses, from lockdowns to masks and vaccinations and everything, all from the WHO, rather than member state governments”.

The treaty that was agreed gave much greater power to the WHO to impose responses to major outbreaks

Advertisement

The Department of Health and Social Care counters that the organisation plays a “crucial” role in the global health system, with a spokesperson saying: “The UK is committed to working with the WHO to tackle the world’s health issues, and to ensure it is equipped to meet today’s global health challenges.

“Our membership of the WHO helps to protect the UK’s heath security by sharing crucial information and acting on all health-related threats and emergencies, as well as by supporting other countries in improving their health systems.”

Although Kruger concedes that “there were some improvements” to the treaty in response to “pushback”, the MP says he remains anxious about the WHO’s agenda.

“I worry about the whole trend of a global health agency. Yes, we need global data and collaboration, but fundamentally it must be governments that take responsibility for introducing major interventions,” he says. “So, I’d rather the WHO got back to fighting malaria, rather than bossing everyone around when there’s a pandemic.”

Labour member of the Health Select Committee and public health doctor Beccy Cooper argues that “a Reform-led government would be a risk to the public health of this country, just as their views on vaccinations have shown”.

“Taking us out of the WHO would be catastrophic because we need to be able to identify emerging threats before they become the next pandemic,” she says. “We need the WHO to collect, analyse and disseminate data to all countries in real time. Similarly, the threat of antimicrobial resistance is a biosecurity issue that no amount of investment in guns and tanks will prevent from reaching our shores.”

Since Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO, China has only strengthened its influence within the 194-member-state organisation, with it now set to replace the USA as the largest member state contributor. (The UK was the fourth largest member contributor in the WHO’s accounts for 2024 and 2025.)

But Cooper contends a “properly resourced, right-sized” WHO that leads on key issues and brings together health leaders to shape global responses to the emerging health threats of the day is a “valuable resource” that the UK should not leave: “The UK should now show leadership in this space and support the WHO to transition into an organisation fit for the 21st century.”

Meanwhile, whether Farage will still support remaining within a reformed WHO now that the USA has left – or advocate following Trump in exiting the organisation – may become clearer once the AWH report is published.

If Farage remains unconvinced of the WHO’s will to change direction, and his party wins a majority at the next general election, then, in the words of the Reform leader, “a second Brexit will be on the cards”. 

Additional reporting by Sienna Rodgers

Donald Trump raised eyebrows for the way in which he boasted about US forces wiping out Iranian ships.

Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Sunday:

“I have just been informed that we have destroyed and sunk 9 Iranian Naval Ships, some of them relatively large and important. We are going after the rest — They will soon be floating at the bottom of the sea, also!”

Critics quickly seized on the phrasing, noting how sunken vessels generally don’t float.

The boast came as the US military continued to escalate its major combat operations in the country, which began on Saturday.

Three US troops have been killed and five others seriously wounded in the operation. Trump has acknowledged that there could be further casualties in the conflict, which he has suggested may last up to a month.

This is sadly barely scratching the surface of women’s healthcare downfalls

It’s worse for women who aren’t white

Help and support:

Credit: DGL Images

During the darkest days of the pandemic, the publishing industry was quick to come together with the government and the teaching profession to find a way to ensure learning could continue online. Supported by then Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, Oak’s job was to provide an online classroom with free online lessons and resources for teachers struggling to manage their remote cohorts.

Starting off as a charitable initiative, the then government decided in 2022 to take Oak into public ownership and create a new public body for curriculum. That quango has been backed to the tune of £53m in the last three years, public money that could have been diverted back to teachers and schools, and has become an agent of DfE state publishing, providing full sets of resources in a way that is directly replacing commercial provision.

So why does that matter?

It matters for publishers (and I declare an interest, of course) because it drives away investment. The government has set out plans for a new national curriculum by 2028. Typically, publishers would invest around £100 million in making resources for such radical change and bringing it to life for teachers and children around the country. But the industry cannot do that in a market where a public intervention like Oak is allowed to spiral in scope and delivery. Oak has caused education publishers’ investment footprint in the UK to shrink significantly – the latest Publishers Association statistics show an 11% drop in take-up year-on-year – and against the backdrop of the creative industries being a core pillar for growth in the UK’s Industrial Strategy.

It also matters for teachers. Teachers don’t want a single set of curriculum resources and to be boxed into one version of the curriculum. To quote Daniel Kebede (General Secretary of the National Education Union) last week: “The government must listen to educators and urgently review its support for Oak, which runs counter to its ambitions to address the recruitment and retention crisis and build a broader, richer and more inclusive curriculum for all.”

It matters for students up and down the country. Oak is providing a free offer, which is great in theory, but cannot possibly compete with the investment footprint of a properly competitive market for resources delivery. So the market is depressed, schools lose out on choice and quality, and a two-tier system is created: the well-off schools can afford a range of resources and the less well-off need to put up with the government’s free offer.

And, finally, it matters for society. Do we want to be in a situation where all of our children are taught from a government prescribed curriculum delivery body? One of the ways in which publishers can help in a world which is increasingly polarised on cultural issues is to provide choice and plurality of approaches away from direct government control.    

So, what do we need?

1. We need Oak’s funding and scope sensibly curtailed in FY 2026-27. Parliamentary questions and direct approaches to officials have not yielded any transparency on funding plans for the public body this coming year.
2. The DfE has so far refused not only to limit the delivery of Oak resources in the UK, but to take any responsible steps to “geo-block” the content internationally. This directly harms international markets and flies in the face of the government’s own international education strategy, published last month. Ministers need to act on this to stop UK taxpayers funding international education provision.
3. The Schools White Paper, published last week, compounded the role of Oak in positioning the Arm’s Length Body as both advising on and hosting the new national curriculum in the latest of a number of conflicts of interest inherent in its birth and development. The DfE’s relationships with Oak were cosy from its beginning and ministers need to make sure that those conflicts of interest are addressed urgently.

Fundamentally, it’s high time for ministers to get a grip on the quango’s role in UK education before it’s too late.

It’s beginning to harm the department and the government’s reputation. Last week the Publishers Association, among other claimants, defeated the DfE in the High Court in adding an additional ground to the live Judicial Review taken following the 2022 decision to take Oak into public ownership. A loss in the High Court on a decision taken by the previous government that’s driving a wedge between industry and the teaching profession on one side, and the government on the other? You have to ask why ministers have not taken action to resolve the issue.

Oak itself has some brilliant people with great intentions in its ranks. They are trying to do their jobs and serve the sector. But the government has systemically failed to properly address the true implications of an unrestricted Oak on education resource provision in this country. Teachers don’t want it, classrooms don’t need it, and the money would be better spent elsewhere.

This year is the National Year of Reading and the government and the publishing industry are coming together to try and tackle the reading crisis in the UK. Perhaps this year of all years, we can find a compromise and a sensible way forward on Oak.

James Ford is a columnist for City AM and is a former adviser to Boris Johnson during his tenure as Mayor of London.

The Mayor of London’s dreaded Night Czar is no more. The post has been deleted. Permanently. This should come as no great surprise. The role was an unmitigated failure when occupied by Sadiq’s hapless appointee, Amy Lamé, and the post has sat vacant for more than a year following her resignation. We would probably raise a glass to celebrate this news, but sadly, all the clubs have closed down. (Thanks, Amy!)

Indeed, rejoicing that the Night Czar has gone the way of the Romanovs may be premature. On the recommendation of the Mayor’s Nightlife Taskforce (a committee of industry experts from across the nighttime economy) it is being replaced by a Nightlife Commission (a committee of…wait for it…industry experts from across the nighttime economy). Although the input of genuine business people with real frontline experience must surely be welcomed, it is not clear that City Hall is really taking the Commission, or the nighttime economy, seriously. The Commission has been allocated the rather miserly sum of £300,000 for its initial work, with the intention that it will ultimately become self-funded.

For comparison, £300,000 is what City Hall spent last year promoting al fresco dining. It is equivalent to the combined salary of just two of Sadiq’s nine deputy mayors. It is significantly less than the £958,000 that City Hall spent on providing stewards for the Notting Hill Carnival in 2025. Even more tellingly, £300,000 is slightly less than the total increase in business rates that would have been paid by the three London boozers (the Spread Eagle in Wandsworth, the Beaten Docket in Cricklewood, and the Dog & Bell in Deptford) worst hit by the government’s botched business rates hike prior to the recent screeching U-turn.

Given that the Nightlife Taskforce’s own report found that one in four working Londoners work in the evenings or at night and that the capital’s nighttime economy was worth more than £139bn in 2024, £300,000 now, and an uncertain future funded via GoFundMe and corporate sponsorship, does not really sound like it is going to move the dial much.

Whilst the capital’s overburdened boozers, bars and nightclubs should be concerned (and arguably insulted) that their future has been entrusted to an underfunded, underwhelming City Hall quango with a possibly short lifespan, this is sadly just one example of the indifference that Sadiq Khan’s City Hall has for the hospitality sector.

The sector has faced a torrid time during Khan’s tenure as Mayor. Data from the Night Time Industries Association found that more than 3,000 pubs, bars and nightclubs have closed in London since 2020. In 2024, research by Bonus Finder saw London ranked as the worst city in the UK for a night out because of the prohibitive cost of pints and hotel rooms and the dwindling number of licensed premises per 100,000 population. A further study found that just 24 per cent of all London bars, pubs and clubs were open past midnight on a Saturday night (compared to 44 per cent in Edinburgh and 38 per cent in Manchester). No surprise then that #LameLondon became a popular hashtag prior to Lamé’s departure because of public anger over the lack of late-night options in the capital. Even popular brewing brand Brewdog closed three of its London bars – in Camden, Shepherd’s Bush and Shoreditch – in July 2025. (And you know things must be bad if landlords even struggle to sell overpriced, trendy craft beers to hipsters in Shoreditch of all places).

What has London’s Mayor actually done to help the capital’s struggling hospitality sector during a decade at City Hall? He created the post of Night Czar…but gave it to a Labour Party crony. When clubs and venues continued to close at an accelerated rate, he gave that Night Czar a 40 per cent pay rise. It has taken him nearly a decade in office to get to the point where he has sourced industry recommendations on what the hospitality sector needs.

Was the Mayor one of the many voices that lobbied the Chancellor hard to reverse the business rates rise that licensed premises faced? Nope. Has he spoken out against the national insurance rises that are thought to have destroyed 100,000 jobs in the hospitality sector? Of course not. Is he a critic of the Employment Rights Act or the ‘banter ban’ contained within it? No, in fact he welcomed the legislation.

And it is not like Sadiq to stay quiet on issues of even peripheral relevance to Londoners. He was happy to fly to Los Angeles in 2022 to visit a cannabis farm to make the case for decriminalisation. He never shuts up about Brexit, even though it has been a decade since the referendum. He chose to use his annual keynote address to the City of London (arguably the biggest ‘state of the nation’ moment in the Mayor’s year) recently to warn of the possible dangers posed by AI in the future. But, on the fate of the capital’s historic pubs and the vital jobs they support, our mayor has been conspicuously silent. Other senior Labour figures have had the courage to speak out about the crisis engulfing licensed venues and directly challenge government policy – most notably Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham. But not London’s Mayor.

Where the Mayor has been busy on this issue it is to weaponise the crisis to his own advantage. He has been eager to use the travails of the hospitality sector to acquire new powers for himself. The devolution bill currently meandering its way through Parliament is set to grant City Hall sweeping new powers to call in strategic licensing applications and overrule decisions made by the boroughs. Worse still, he is one of many mayors set to impose a tourism tax on visitors to his city. This is set to clobber tourists visiting the capital to the tune of £350m a year.

All this is despite a lack of evidence that giving Sadiq Khan extra powers will make a positive difference. Afterall, City Hall was granted significant additional planning powers in 2010 but it has not prevented the collapse of housebuilding in London on the current mayor’s watch. And Sadiq Khan has not indicated that he will reinvest any of his tourism tax windfall in initiatives that will boost profits or ease burdens for tourism businesses.

When it comes to taking credit for the achievements of others when things are going well or grabbing additional powers to intervene, Sadiq Khan is always at the front of the queue, enthusiastically shouting “me, me, me”. But, when times are hard and his intervention could make a real difference to Londoner’s livelihoods or quality of life, the mayor is nowhere to be seen or heard. His much-trumpeted existing powers go unused, his high public profile remains unleveraged, and his lack of influence within his own party is vividly exposed. The crisis engulfing the capital’s hospitality industry and destroying essential jobs is not easing up or going away. If anything, it is accelerating. London needs a mayor that will roll his sleeves up and get stuck in or is at least willing to speak out on Londoners’ behalf. It’s a pity that we don’t have one.