Politics
Migrant and disabled people are targets of the same hostile politics
Disability welfare cuts and immigration pledges are part of the same odious project — two sides of the same coin — weaponised by the by the Labour-led government to oppress migrant and disabled communities.
The problem is that disability rights arguments are failing to recognise shared experiences of oppression for the disabled and migrant community. This plays right into the hands of the government.
This under the radar benefits cut reminds us why disability justice must centre migrants’ rights
Labour’s racist, ableist anti-immigration ‘compromise’
With the government now under the steer of former Manchester Mayor and Blairite Andy Burnham, the new prime minister has wasted little time signalling that his premiership will not break from some of the party’s most performatively cruel policy plans.
Some of the cabinet hanger-ons, like home secretary Shabana Mahmood and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) boss Pat McFadden, already show the new head of government gearing up to deliver on more of the same. Only now, it’s under the veneer of his artfully constructed ‘progressive’ persona.
The public already got a hint of what this might look like for Mahmood’s hostile immigration reforms. Notably, the government could exempt migrant care workers and those who arrived since 2021 from its plans to double the time it takes to obtain indefinite leave to remain.
For the xenophobic fascists to the right of the party, these plans were of course not racist enough. For the liberal fascists (marginally) more left inside the party, these might just hit the goldilocks zone of ‘not too racist’. And as such, they’ll vote it through the Commons.
What’s clear is that its immigration reforms will immiserate the lives of migrant communities across the UK. Disabled migrants particularly will face the desolate and deplorable reality that the state safety net will not support them.
These are racist hostile environment policies – and at the same time – these are also ableist and disablist welfare cuts.
Migrant and disabled communities are fighting the same war
The system vilifies and excludes disabled people and migrants using much of the same necrocapitalist rhetoric. Therefore, for disabled migrants at the dual end of this, and subject to further marginalisations. The state works overtime to mark them as expendable.
What Labour’s compromise options — and its vicious anti-immigration reforms more broadly — boil down to is that migrant belonging is conditional on their utility to capitalist production. In other words; their citizenship, security, and permanence in the UK.
It’s evident in every reference Labour’s proposals make to economic ‘contribution’. Incidentally, there are no fewer than 72 references to that in its earned settlement plans. Each ‘deserving’ category of migrant it singles out for its racist, classist conception of the ‘good immigrant’, namely, those with higher English proficiency, higher earners, and those in senior positions of public service, makes this abundantly clear. It’s apparent in the way it’s now also considering exempting migrant care workers from its doubling of ILR.
And this economic contribution refrain is one disabled people in the UK will be painfully familiar with. Labour has constructed its whole programme of sweeping disability benefit cuts around the idea of economic contribution and support only for ‘deserving’ disabled claimants. Of course, it’s the DWP that gets to define what that ‘deserving’ looks like. And with its grim history of benefit cut deaths, austerity and profitability will trump disabled people’s lives and dignity.
Unsurprisingly, this rhetoric is emerging from all the same establishment circles that close ranks around profit. It’s a back scratching ecosystem of DWP policy advisors, right-wing think tanks, and the cesspit corporate media.
The point being, disabled people and migrants are fighting the same oppressors. They’re battling the same capitalist system and the same weapons they use to marginalise and disenfranchise.
Falling into the contribution trap
But while it might be the right-wing, this Labour government, that are punching down on both communities, the disability rights movement (and the left more broadly) must also be careful not to unintentionally capitulate to its framing around migrant rights issues.
Take Labour’s potential ‘compromise’ around care workers. Notably, Mahmood has reportedly weighed up exempting over 600,000 migrant care workers from its ten-year ILR wait.
It’s common for people on the left to cite care workers and NHS workers to rebut right-wing anti-migrant bigotry. But in doing so, it ties migrant worthiness to economic value and usefulness to capitalist production. It justifies the political class exploiting certain categories of migrants that ‘contribute’ economically through tax or otherwise in capital-enabling socially reproductive work.
And social care can be one area disabled people’s rights and migrants’ rights can intersect. Closures or restrictions on visas for care workers have been an instance where successive governments’ attempts to restrict freedom of movement have had repercussions for both communities.
Enhancing the credibility of the system
However, when disabled people push back against these, it must not be in a way that subordinates migrants’ rights to disabled people’s needs. Articulating migrant care workers’ necessity for disabled care users must include challenging the systems that devalue and exploit migrants. Otherwise, it puts migrant rights and personhood second to disabled people’s.
Without calling for migrant rights above and beyond what exists, it merely advocates for maintaining visa schemes that commodify Black and brown bodies in a racialised hierarchy of labour that mirrors colonial systems and racist colonial stereotypes of labour.
These permit entry to the UK on precarious migration statuses. In particular, these are statuses that exploit Global South and Eastern European workers. It pushes them to do the undervalued, low-paid, gruelling physical labour and socially reproductive work. And at the same time, these visa arrangements deny them full access to the colonial ‘core’. Or, in other words, ILR and citizenship.
Disability rights scholars Rebecca Yeo and Robel Afeworki Abay have described how, often, the purpose of Home Office “action to reduce restrictions” in the asylum system is to:
enhance the credibility of the system.
So as the Labour government float these possible exemptions, the disability rights community must not lend it any legitimacy. It’s not enough alone to advocate for migrant care worker visas that plug the gaps in a broken care system. Because meeting disabled people’s care needs cannot come at the cost of marginalised migrant lives.
Entertaining anything less than a full dismantling of the disabling, extractive, and deadly hostile environment would betray everything the disability rights movement is meant to stand for.
Featured image via the Canary
Actor and abuser Johnny Depp is attempting to ‘return to Hollywood’ with a terrible-looking remake of A Christmas Carol.
It was announced at San Diego Comic-Con that Ebenezer, a new film based on Dickens’ Christmas cautionary tale, would be coming to theatres on 13 November. In the starring role is the aforementioned abuser.
And it’s truly all about him and his valiant return to Hollywood, but let’s not talk about why he’s been missing for so long.
First trailer for ‘EBENEZER’, a new film based on ‘A Christmas Carol’ starring Johnny Depp.
In theaters on November 13. pic.twitter.com/9MrsOuxoBX
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) July 24, 2026
Amidst sprawling shots of an American’s vision of Victorian London, the trailer announces:
He brought us Jack Sparrow, Edward Scissorhands and The Mad Hatter.
This Thanksgiving the Master of Misfits returns
Master of Misfits is a funny way to say ‘man who raped and fantasised about setting his wife on fire’, but okay.
https://t.co/bjyzjFckEo pic.twitter.com/5OM49cA88u
— kenzie xcx
(@kenzie__xcx) July 23, 2026
Johnny Depp is a wifebeater
In 2020, a British judge ruled that The Sun newspaper’s assessment of Depp as a wifebeater was ‘substantially true’. The washed-up abuser sued the paper for a 2018 headline that read:
Gone Potty: How can JK Rowling be ‘genuinely happy’ casting wife beater Johnny Depp in the new Fantastic Beasts film?
During the trial, Depp’s ex-partner Amber Heard and her lawyer presented 14 incidents of domestic violence between 2013 and 2016. These included incidents of rape, physical and psychological abuse. The judge drew particular attention to three incidents in which he said Depp had put Heard ‘in fear for her life’.
As part of the trial, reams of evidence was read aloud, Such as text messages exchanged between Depp and actor Paul Bettany where they discussed burning, drowning and having sex with Heard’s corpse.
In one incident highlighted by the judge, Depp was physically and verbally abusive towards Heard. During this incident, he injured his finger and admitted to scrawling messages in blood. During the trial, Depp accused Heard of injuring his finger, but the judge did not accept this.
The judge said:
It is a sign of the depth of his rage that he admitted scrawling graffiti in blood from his injured finger and then, when that was insufficient, dipping his badly injured finger in paint and continuing to write messages and other things
I accept her evidence of the nature of the assaults he committed against her. They must have been terrifying.
Depp then sued Heard for defamation in 2022 after a 2018 op-ed published in the Washington Post detailed Depp’s abuse against her. The article was about how the entertainment industry protects famous abusers. She did not mention Depp by name.
She wrote:
I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out. […] I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.
What was clear from this case was how off the unanimous online support for Depp and vicious hatred for Heard was. It’s no secret that male famous abusers are always protected and believed. but this was off the charts.
An engineered hate campaign against Heard
On the podcast Who Trolled Amber Heard, Alexi Mostrous uncovered how fake pro-Depp accounts flooded social media ahead of the defamation trial.
The podcast analysed over a million pro-Depp tweets and found that over 50% of them were either from bots or paid trolls. They then found a small network which prior to the campaign, posted hundreds of now-deleted tweets in Arabic praising the Saudi regime.
Depp has visited Saudi on several occasions and is a personal friend of Mohammed Bin Salman, the country’s ruler. Saudi has also financed the actor’s two most recent films – Jeanne du Barry and Modi. And Saudi Arabia has a long history of using bots to manipulate social discourse.
There is, of course, no evidence that Depp and his team were involved in any of this and they denied any connection. Though the number of Saudi accounts was small, they could’ve had a big impact as part of a wider campaign.
While we don’t know if any of the social media activity affected the US Depp vs Heard trial, we do know that the jury wasn’t sequestered, meaning they could technically read what was being said about the case on the internet.
The trial itself was treated more like a Johnny Depp fan event than a serious legal trial. Fans showed up with posters and the trial was even live-streamed.
Depp was eventually awarded $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages from Heard. However, the punitive damages charges were reduced to $350,000 due to a limit imposed by Virginia state law. Heard was awarded $2 million in compensatory damages after countersuing Depp, however, the media and social trolls against Heard meant the case was seen as a win for Depp.
This all added up to Depp still being a beloved actor instead of a wifebeater (which he is(.
Depp is attempting to rehab his career, but he’s still an abuser
Alongside the trailer dropping, SDCC held a pop-up Scrooge and Marley shop where Depp appeared in costume. Instead of being pelted with tomatoes and booed, he was welcomed like a hero with crowds of cheering fans.
Following the announcement, fans flooded social media with support for Depp and abusing Heard again, which is undoubtedly what Depp and his team wanted. This film and the marketing around it is so obviously a desperate attempt to bring Depp back into the public’s adoration.
But they’re going to have to work harder than a shitty remake of a film we’ve seen a million times to undo what this vile man did.
Featured image via the Canary
On 29 July 2026, the High Court will decide whether to grant permission for a judicial review of Bexley Council’s decision to approve Peabody’s plans to redevelop the Lesnes Estate. The brutalist development is better known as the ‘Clockwork Orange’ estate, and sits in Thamesmead, south-east London.
Adam Turk is a Lesnes resident and social tenant of Peabody Housing Association. He has brought the legal challenge with support from the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC). The estate gained recognition after appearing in the cult 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.
Turk has campaigned for tenants’ rights on the estate for several years and continues to oppose the proposed demolition. The PILC has supported tenants in resisting the demolition for several years. Preserving the estate is not only essential to protecting residents’ homes but also to reducing avoidable environmental harm.
The planning application fails to account adequately for the greenhouse gas emissions that would result from demolition and redevelopment. This is despite the availability of lower-carbon alternatives such as refurbishment or retrofitting. In light of the government’s plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, retrofitting or refurbishment should be the first port of call over demolition.
The Lesnes legal challenge
Bexley Council’s planning officers resolved to grant Peabody’s planning application in October 2022. And they granted permission on 23 December 2025.
The proposed judicial review focuses on how Bexley Council assessed Peabody’s planning application.
The planning application required an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), supported by an Environmental Statement. Under established planning practice, known as the Rochdale envelope, an EIA must assess the likely environmental impacts across the full range of development that could be built under the planning permission. This must include assessing the worst-case scenario within the maximum development parameters.
Turk argues that Peabody failed to assess the realistic worst-case greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, it calculated emissions based on a single illustrative masterplan submitted with the outline application, rather than the maximum development parameters permitted.
Legal grounds
The challenge is based on two grounds:
- First, Turk argues that the council failed to apply the Rochdale approach because it didn’t assess greenhouse gas emissions using the full Rochdale envelope.
- Second, he argues that the officer’s report materially misled the planning committee. It gave little attention to greenhouse gas emissions and did not explain that it hadn’t assessed them using the required Rochdale approach.
Turk argues that the council could have reached a materially different outcome, had it assessed the greenhouse gas impacts correctly using the Rochdale envelope.
If the High Court grants permission for the judicial review to proceed, the case could have significant implications for the future of the Lesnes Estate redevelopment. And it could affect how local authorities assess the environmental impacts of major developments more generally.
Campaigners hope that less environmentally harmful measures, such as refurbishment or retrofitting, will be considered more thoroughly in estate redevelopments.
Too often, people’s homes are treated as expendable in the pursuit of profit. The PILC stands alongside tenants on estates like Lesnes, supporting communities as they challenge major developers.
Featured image via the Canary
By The Canary
On Saturday 25 July, a far-right ‘Unite the Clans’ rally saw masked, violent fascists attacking people of colour on the streets of Glasgow. However, Reform MSP Thomas Kerr has since taken to social media to complain about the racist thugs being called Nazis — because obviously that’s the most important issue at hand.
Glasgow police force has reported 15 arrests so far. The charges included hate crimes, assault, carrying an offensive weapon, and breaching the peace. The BBC also reported that the police expected to make more arrests in the coming days:
Ch Supt Emma Croft said the suspects, many of whom were masked, had targeted people for the colour of their skin as a peaceful anti-racism demonstration was held on Glasgow Green.
She said a dedicated team was assessing CCTV, as well as footage and stills from the public, in a bid to identify those responsible for the violence.
If they look like Nazis, and they salute like Nazis…
Kerr’s attempt to deny that the mob were neo-Nazis is obviously pointless, given that they were throwing Nazi salutes throughout. The Scottish branch of Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) posted the pictures to prove it:
Multiple Nazi salutes at the ‘Unite the Clans’ racist & fascist rally in Glasgow yesterday. They deny they are racist as majority of society abhors it. They masquerade as ‘protectors of women’, but only use concerns over women’s safety to scapegoat& build their fascist movement. pic.twitter.com/mUhNHLWP30
— Stand Up to Racism – Scotland (@SUTRScotland) July 26, 2026
The National also quoted attendees stating “I’m a Nazi and I love it”, “it’s wonderful being white” and “I love being white”. SUTR also took the opportunity to remind the public that Unite the Clans has previously admitted to sheltering a suspected child-groomer within its ranks.
Of course, Reform have a vested interest in denying that the marchers were neo-Nazis, given that the far-right party was attending right alongside them. Again, on 27 July, SUTR had the photographic evidence:
Reform UK Scotland have a lot to answer for over the violence in the streets of Glasgow on Sat. — Stand Up to Racism – Scotland (@SUTRScotland) July 27, 2026
We will not hold our breath waiting for the Reform leaders to take any sort of action over the latest example of an elected representative of the party mingling with violent fascist. pic.twitter.com/6NvwkXEibL
Reform councillor Audrey Dempsey is the elected representative of Springburn and Robroyston ward. She was also a speaker at the rally, pictured above in front of a sign for neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative. Dempsey addressed the crowd, asking for votes and pushing her party’s political agenda:
I am begging you all now, we are very close to the point of no return. So I’m asking you… you see what this city is becoming, and you vote for the people who are going to push to stop that.
The National has since confirmed that Reform has not taken action over Dempsey’s attendance or speech at the rally.
‘Scotland is lawless’
On the day of the riot, Scottish Greens co-leader Ross Greer posted to social media, stating that:
For the second time in as many months, Nazis have rioted in Glasgow. They targeted anyone who isn’t white, as well as those daring to stand up to them.
Greer then turned his criticism to Reform MSP Thomas Kerr:
Thomas Kerr claims ‘Scotland is lawless’. Will he condemn the Reform politician who spoke at this ‘rally’ with violent Nazis?
That “Scotland is lawless” comment is a reference to Kerr’s ridiculous video post from 16 July. The far-right politician filmed himself walking around Glasgow, interspersed with footage of groups of young people – many of them brown – standing around. In the accompanying caption, he called the area “lawless Glasgow city centre”.
In response, Kerr posted a statement to social media on 27 July:
The Nazis murdered six million Jews. Politicians who casually label their opponents as Nazis cheapen the Holocaust and undermine the promise of “never again”. Extremist Ross Greer and his fellow Green MSPs should be ashamed of using such disgraceful language.
So it’s unacceptable to call self-identified Nazis ‘Nazis’, but calling a Green MSP an ‘extremist is fine – got it. Kerr continued:
Yesterday’s scenes in Glasgow by a small minority on both sides were absolutely unacceptable. There is no excuse for violence, criminal damage or attacks on Police Scotland officers. They win when you act like that.
Those responsible should face the full force of the law.
Given that people very much did act “like that”, “they” presumably did win. However, we’re not expecting rhetorical brilliance from Reform here. Kerr finished off:
But let’s stop pretending peaceful protest is the problem. It isn’t. Peaceful protest is a fundamental democratic right, especially when governments repeatedly ignore legitimate public concerns and dismiss those raising them. People have every right to stand up, speak out and make their voices heard. Peacefully.
Instead of smearing political opponents with lazy slurs, the political establishment should start listening to the people they were elected to serve.
Work with us, not against us.
Nazis and their Reform-aligned friends
Again, this was a violent riot, not a peaceful protest. The rioters specifically targeted Black and brown people in the street.
Likewise, ‘Nazi’ isn’t a lazy slur. Kerr could have found this out quite easily by “listening to the people [he] was elected to serve” when they called themselves Nazis. Alternatively, if the speakers happened to be out of earshot, he could have just watched the Nazi salutes.
As SUTR so kindly demonstrated, the people that Reform are working with, not against, are bigots and white supremacists. Far from condemning councillor Audrey Dempsey for speaking at the rally, Reform chose to quibble over whether it’s OK to call the rioters ‘Nazis’.
Reform are showing us, quite plainly, who they are, and who their friends are.
Featured image via Billy Knox / X / Stand Up to Racism – Scotland
By Grace
Picture a professor at the University of Cambridge, and an august scholar who has spent decades in a library or a laboratory comes to mind. To achieve this feat aged just 37 would be remarkable. To do so despite being born to immigrant parents and having grown up on a council estate, being diagnosed with autism and unable to speak until the age of 11, and unable to read or write until the age of 18, would be incredible. Yet this is the story of Jason Arday.
Arday was awarded a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University in 2015. This set him up for a stellar academic career. He became senior lecturer at Roehampton in 2018, associate professor at Durham the following year, professor at Glasgow University in 2021 and, just two years later, professor of sociology in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge – making him the university’s youngest-ever black professor. Alongside his phenomenal academic success, Arday also claims to be a world-class long-distance runner who once ran 30 marathons in 35 days, 300 miles in three days and 600 miles in six days.
Arday’s accomplishments are now being called into question. Specifically, he stands accused of plagiarising his PhD thesis, which seems to contain significant overlaps with a dissertation submitted to Brunel University by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. Whole passages appear to be reproduced with only minimal editing. Arday’s subsequent journal articles follow a similar pattern and publishers have been forced to add numerous ‘corrections to clarify citation sources’. Meanwhile, his feats of athletic prowess have also been removed or amended from the websites of two universities where he has been awarded honorary doctorates.
Yet, as well as Arday being in the firing line, his challengers are also under attack and accused of racism. When questions first began to be asked of Arday’s work, Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of Cambridge’s autism research centre, called on colleagues to sign an ‘anti-racism letter’ in his defence. More recently, a spokesman for the university said Arday had been the victim of a ‘vile campaign to undermine his credibility’.
But this is not the only problem with Arday’s work. As philosopher Nathan Cofnas notes on his Substack, even those of Arday’s papers that have no hint of plagiarism are hardly substantial. Most are either autobiographical or based on ‘semi-structured’ interviews generated from ‘convenience sampling’ and analysed through personal reflection. In other words, Arday writes about his own experiences of racism and microaggressions, and chats to his friends and colleagues who arrive at similar conclusions. And as the Telegraph reveals, even the title of Arday’s thesis contains a punctuation error.
There’s an irony here. Arday’s work aims to expose racism within the academy. Yet at every turn, he has been flattered, published and promoted, less because of his intellectual output and more for the colour of his skin. He has been consistently held to low standards. This is not to say there is no racism within higher education, but it is these lower expectations – not inadvertent microaggressions – that expose the racial thinking of those running today’s universities.
It seems that Arday is a plaything of the woke managerial class who run Britain’s universities. His professorship enabled Cambridge to proclaim its anti-racist credentials just months after the Black Lives Matter protests swept the globe. His use to Cambridge was made explicit in a statement issued by the university at the time of his appointment. Arday will ‘contribute significantly’, staff and students were told, ‘to addressing the under-representation of people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds: especially those from black, Asian, and other minority-ethnic communities’. In other words, his skin colour was more important than his research.
Now that Arday is under fire, no one is prepared to admit they might have made a mistake. People so wanted to believe they had found a poster boy for the Black Lives Matter-era anti-racist university that they refused to ask even the most basic questions. The same holds true in the publishing industry. Arday’s autobiography, Great and Unfortunate Things, is set to be published next month. Whether it hints at his apparent debt to the work of others remains to be seen.
Challenging Arday’s story casts doubt on the diversity, equity and inclusion practices that now lie at the heart of our institutions. Many people have a vested interest in slandering his critics as racist, but, for them, Arday is merely a vessel for signalling their own virtue.
Although he has gained from the system, it is worth remembering that Arday did not invent diversity-centred hiring practices – he did not determine the philistine nature of what passes for educational research, and neither did he single-handedly shift the focus of entire institutions away from teaching, research or publishing high-quality books towards promoting woke ideology.
Arday needs to be held to account should the plagiarism allegations be proven true. But he is also a victim of his own story. He has spent much of his adult life being told that society is racist and that, within academia in particular, the odds are stacked against him – and that he is a supremely talented individual who deserves to be celebrated. The fawning over Jason Arday reveals the extent to which woke thinking has destroyed our institutions from within.
AI minister Kanishka Narayan is sitting alongside secretaries of state Jonathan Reynolds and Alex Norris in Andy Burnham’s new Cabinet (Alamy)
4 min read
Britain has spent the past two years positioning itself as a global leader in AI safety, but it must now prepare for the possibility that even the creators of the most advanced AI systems cannot reliably control them.
For decades, screenwriters and authors have spun tales of uncontrollable AI let loose upon the world to wreak havoc. For decades, audiences have taken comfort that it was fiction. Unfortunately, we are entering an era where science fiction meets science fact, and the Andy Burnham government must face this new reality.
ChatGPT creator OpenAI recently admitted that their AI systems autonomously hacked a different company – the first known instance of an AI system doing so. The AI systems in question were being tested and looked for ways to cheat. They escaped the test environment, reached the open internet, then hacked into the AI startup Hugging Face to steal the information they needed. OpenAI described this as an “unprecedented cyber incident”, and it is a stark reminder of the threats posed by AI systems. But without action this will just be the first of many incidents, and AI will learn and become even more dangerous.
To protect our critical national infrastructure from the threats posed by autonomous AI, I proposed a ‘kill-switch’ amendment to the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill, which I would encourage the House of Lords to take forward this autumn.
I was pleased to see that US lawmakers are considering similar powers to proactively shut down dangerous AI following this autonomous hack. This kill switch power is necessary in an evolving threat landscape, but it is not without its limits. We must address the deeper problem: What do we do about superintelligent AI systems that would be, by their developers’ own admission, smarter and more capable than our top safety engineers and national security apparatus?
Mitigating the threat from superintelligence must be treated as a national security priority
Superintelligent AI systems would pose a serious national security threat owing to their capacity to evade human oversight and control. Nobel Prize winners, leading AI scientists, and even the CEOs of AI companies have repeatedly warned that this technology represents an extinction risk, yet companies are recklessly racing to develop superintelligence.
If a superintelligent AI is built using anything resembling today’s technical methods, nobody will control it once it exists. It will resist shutdown, self-improve, and self-replicate. Such a system would not be a weapon a country could possess and wield, but a threat actor in its own right: a danger to the country that built it, as much as to the rest of the world. This is an international security problem demanding an international solution.
This is why in September, I am tabling a bill to prohibit the development of superintelligent AI on UK soil and pursue an international agreement to prohibit its development globally.
Britain is well-positioned to lead this effort. We hosted the first global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, and built the world’s first AI Security Institute. Even Geoffrey Irving, who until recently served as Chief Scientific Officer at AISI, has said that the best plan is not to build superintelligent AI yet, and “the world should try hard to realise that plan”. My bill gives legs to this plan.
I am aware this may not, on its own, deliver an international agreement. But it will compel the government to reckon with the threats on our doorstep. With AI policy now elevated to the Cabinet table under the new government, mitigating the threat from superintelligence must be treated as a national security priority. Next year, the United Kingdom will chair the G20, and AI safety and regulation must form part of our presidency. The more we delay international talks, the greater the threat that we can’t control AI will grow.
I have joined a coalition of over 125 parliamentarians recognising superintelligence as a global and national security threat and supporting ControlAI’s call for binding regulations on the most powerful AI. It is time to recognise superintelligent AI as the national security threat that it is while we still have time to act. This is an early warning shot; we may not get many more.
Alex Sobel is the Labour/Co-operative MP for Leeds Central and Headingley
While Britain’s school children are currently in the midst of their six-week summer holiday, you won’t hear many politicians or educationalists revive an idea that was fashionable only a decade ago – shortening the summer break and extending the school day.
Back in 2013, then education secretary Michael Gove argued that pupils in England spent too little time in school compared with our international competitors. Successive governments proceeded to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in breakfast clubs, after-school provision and extended school hours, allowing them to remain open until 6pm. The assumption was simple – more time in school was better for children.
Today, the mood could hardly be more different. During the recent heatwave, more than 1,000 schools closed fully or partially. Whatever the practical justification in individual cases, the scale of the closures illustrates how far attitudes towards attendance have shifted. We have travelled from a demand for more school to calls for less school or even no school at all.
The drive to extend the school day was never simply about raising academic standards. It also reflected a belief that schools should play an ever larger role in children’s lives, often at the expense of parents’ influence and authority. Yet, for all its flaws, that agenda rested on one important assumption: regular school attendance was intrinsically beneficial and should be expected of almost every child.
That confidence has weakened. The legacy of the Covid lockdowns, combined with a growing emphasis on wellbeing and special educational needs, has reshaped cultural and political attitudes towards attendance. The lockdowns during the pandemic did more than interrupt schooling – they also changed the way many parents thought about the necessity of school attendance itself.
Before the pandemic, attending school every day was widely regarded as a non-negotiable civic expectation. During lockdowns, however, millions of children were forced to spend months learning from home. And they did so with the full encouragement of the government. Although few would argue that remote education was an adequate substitute for classroom teaching, the experience demonstrated that schooling could, at least temporarily, take place outside the school gates. In doing so, it weakened the assumption that physical attendance was always essential. Some parents began questioning whether daily attendance was really all that important. That change in mindset has proved remarkably durable.
Indeed, before the pandemic, 11 per cent of pupils in England were persistently absent from school. In the immediate post-lockdown years, the proportion persistently absent rose dramatically. According to the most recent figures (from the 2024-25 school year), 18.1 per cent of pupils are now persistently absent – or around 1.34million children.
Of course, no policymaker or politician would argue that schools are undesirable places for children. Yet there is increasing acceptance that, for some pupils, attendance should be flexible. Aspects of school life – crowded corridors, sensory overload, bullying, anxiety, examination pressure or unmet special-education needs – are said to make being in school more harmful than beneficial for certain pupils. This represents a significant shift in thinking. Attendance is no longer treated primarily as a universal expectation but increasingly as something that can be negotiated. The debate is no longer about how to keep children in school for longer, but under what circumstances it is acceptable for them not to be there at all.
Schools inspectorate Ofsted still expects schools to promote good attendance, but it has increasingly emphasised how schools support those struggling to attend. The result is a subtle but significant shift: attendance is no longer presented simply as an obligation but as something that may need to be balanced against a child’s emotional or psychological needs.
There is also an inconsistency in official policy. Parents are repeatedly warned that every day of absence harms children’s education, yet there is no comprehensive national record of the occasions when schools themselves close or send pupils home. Closures caused by genuinely dangerous weather or major infrastructure failures are entirely understandable. The question is whether there is enough transparency, consistent national thresholds and accountability when schools close for reasons that are less clear cut.
The journey from extending the school day to accepting widespread school closures is profoundly significant. It reflects a loss of confidence in the idea that school attendance is, in itself, a public good. It is a sign of a society that no longer seems certain that children should be in the classroom in the first place.
Neil Davenport is a writer based in London.
Every incoming British prime minister in recent years has inherited similar challenges: economic stagnation, high immigration, a struggling NHS and an increasingly volatile international scene. But Andy Burnham will also inherit a less familiar problem – namely, the British state’s growing intolerance of ordinary Christian life.
The new PM takes office at a moment when Christians are increasingly finding themselves on the wrong side of existing or proposed laws that threaten the public expression of their beliefs. Just this month, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) issued new guidance on its version of the ‘buffer zone’ laws. Having been rolled out across the UK on the back of the Public Order Act 2023, buffer-zone laws prohibit anti-abortion ‘protests’ within certain perimeters around clinics and hospitals that provide abortion services.
The PSNI suggests that under these rules, Christian visitors or hospital chaplains could actually be committing a crime by carrying a Bible through a public area of a hospital or praying with patients on request, if it is perceived to ‘influence’ an onlooker about a decision to have an abortion. There are no exemptions for clergy. Even where a patient explicitly requests prayer, officers are instructed to consider whether someone else accessing abortion services nearby could reasonably be ‘influenced or distressed’.
In other words, a hospital chaplain comforting grieving parents with scriptural verses after the loss of a child could find himself subject to police scrutiny. That is an astonishing position for any liberal democracy to find itself in.
The PSNI insists it is not ‘banning’ Bibles or prayer, and police stress that each case will be judged individually. Yet that reassurance misses the point. The fact that carrying a Bible through a hospital corridor has become something requiring police guidance at all tells us how dramatically the legal landscape has shifted. This will have a chilling effect on free speech and religious liberty. After all, who wants to take legal advice before making a hospital visit?
Buffer-zone laws are said to tackle already criminal behaviour, like harassment and violence, outside abortion facilities. In truth they seek to prohibit all forms of ‘influence’ within around 150 metres or so of anywhere an abortion may take place. What counts as ‘influence’ has been left so nebulous that peaceful Christians practising their faith risk being turned into criminals.
In July 2024, a then 76-year-old pastor Clive Johnston was preaching the Bible verse, John 3:16, as part of an outdoor Sunday service near Causeway Hospital in Coleraine. His sermon made no mention of abortion. There was no placard, no shouting, no hostility. Yet because it took place within a designated buffer zone, Johnston was convicted in May and given a fine. His appeal is now pending.
Johnston’s case has attracted international attention. The US State Department described the prosecution as an ‘egregious violation’ of freedom of expression and religious liberty. Would our own government take a similar view?
Other Christians have been prosecuted under anti-social-behaviour laws. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested in November 2022 after violating a ‘public space protection order’ (PSPO), by praying outside a closed clinic in Worcestershire. This shows how an ever-expanding legal framework has led to the regulation of peaceful religious expression. That should concern everyone, irrespective of where they stand on abortion.
What is perhaps most striking is how often the public was assured none of this would happen. And yet here we are, with the PSNI contemplating whether hospital chaplains carrying Bibles might constitute an illegal act.
Other legal threats are coming down the track, too. The government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill has been presented as targeting coercive and abusive attempts to ‘convert’ gay and lesbian people – activity already prohibited under existing criminal law. But this poorly drafted bill goes considerably further. Lawyers, parents, clinicians and church leaders are worried that ordinary pastoral ministry and parental guidance will fall under prohibited ‘conversion practices’. It could mean the criminalisation of parents advising their gender-confused teenager against irreversible and damaging medical interventions, or the criminalisation of pastors for advising people on the traditional Christian teaching on sexuality.
The concern with this growing legal edifice is not what parliament intends today, but how these laws are interpreted tomorrow. It certainly seems that with each new measure, justified by reference to genuinely harmful (and often already illegal) conduct, the space in which Christianity can be expressed publicly gets that bit smaller.
This is the Britain Andy Burnham has inherited. His government will face many defining tests. But one of the most important may be whether it is content to allow this attack on religious freedom to continue.
Green leader Zack Polanski has been reported to the police over a social-media post. On Monday, Polanski shared a photograph on his Instagram page. It featured a bearded oddball at a Green Party event, wearing a t-shirt depicting a guillotine, above which are the words: ‘We’re only making plans for Nigel.’
Soon after, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage tweeted a screenshot of Polanski’s post. ‘If I was to post anything as inciteful’, he wrote on X, ‘then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski’. Zia Yusuf, Reform’s spokesman for home affairs, claimed that by sharing the image with his 713,000 Instagram followers, ‘Polanski is inciting murder. It must be treated as such by the police.’
It now seems as if the police are doing just that. The Metropolitan Police confirmed last night that they had received a ‘third-party report’ relating to an ‘image shared on social media’ and that officers have been ‘conducting enquiries into the matter’. Polanski’s post has since been deleted, and the Green Party has said that he ‘unequivocally does not support this dangerous message’.
There is no doubt that the t-shirt and the Instagram post were in the worst possible taste – especially so soon after the appalling murder of Reform member Ann Widdecombe. But does that mean Polanski’s post was – or should be – a crime?
The UK has strict laws against incitement to violence. But prosecution on these grounds normally requires that the person making a remark genuinely believes that his or her words will result in immediate violence. A tasteless t-shirt would not normally meet the criminal threshold, and nor should it.
What’s more, Polanski did not take the photograph himself – he was tagged as a collaborator in a post containing 20 images. He appears to have shared this without noticing the offending picture. That a Green supporter would proudly pose in such a t-shirt certainly says a lot about the rot in the heart of Polanski’s party. But again, this is no reason to treat this as a criminal matter.
Where Farage is on more solid ground is his complaint about the media’s response to Polanski’s post. As he stated, if he had posted a similar image about, well, anyone, the mainstream media would go bananas. His political career would be over. He would probably be arrested, too. After all, Farage was effectively accused of incitement for saying we should feel ‘pure cold rage’ about the killing of Henry Nowak. The BBC even misquoted him as saying we should feel ‘pure white rage’ about the killing.
When it comes to Farage, Britain’s political and media elites will try to crucify him for things he hasn’t even said. Yet they remain very quiet when someone like Polanski, wittingly or otherwise, shares an image of someone wishing for the decapitation of a fellow politician.
Still, none of this can justify calling for the police to investigate a party leader’s social-media posts. The principle of free speech is simply too important.
Reform should know this. At its party conference last year, it platformed Lucy Connolly, the former childminder who was jailed over a social-media post published in the immediate aftermath of the Southport murders. Reform representatives rightly argued that she should not have gone to prison for her tweet, no matter how offensive it was. Reform also supported Graham Linehan when he was arrested by armed police at Heathrow Airport over gender-critical social-media posts.
In these cases, Reform was demonstrating a much-needed willingness to stand up to the policing of speech online. It needs to do so again when it comes to its political opponents.
Zack Polanski’s post was not incitement. The Green leader should not be arrested. And the police should find something better to do than poring through a party leader’s social-media accounts.
Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. He is the author of Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.
As a result of a legal loophole, AI companies have taken to sourcing rare books which they are subsequently scanning and destroying. And as people have highlighted, it could mean many texts are being lost to us forever:
So AI labs are buying old books by the pallet, slicing them apart, scanning the pages, and pulping what's left. The orders are keyed to ISBNs and blind to scarcity. Nobody in the pipeline checks whether the book being shredded is one of the last copies on earth. Some of them… https://t.co/3WECoCQ7wG
— Brad Carson (@bradrcarson) July 27, 2026
AI companies carry out the modern book burning
In the past, tech companies attracted criticism for scanning other people’s work and using it to train their AI models. There are multiple ongoing legal cases regarding the legality of this practice. And it was actually a legal ruling which led to this current issue.
As the Hedgie account explained:
AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they’re free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain “all the books in the world.”
Once again, we’re seeing AI companies behaving in a fashion which is directly at odds with human morality. And they’re doing it solely for their own benefit.
The AI companies claim they’re working towards super computers which will take over the labour that’s currently undertaken by people. The reality is generative AI isn’t on a path towards super intelligence, and while it has some uses, it costs so much to run that the expenses far outweigh the benefits (something we saw recently when AI companies stopped subsidising their products with ridiculously low subscription prices).
Irreversible
Hedgie added:
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb’s website literally says “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy,” and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it “digital preservation.”
I’ve covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it’s irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can’t replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it’s legal. So it’s going to accelerate.
“We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out” is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie is far from the only one reacting with disgust:
Some things are just wrong. Some acts carry an inherent evil that makes any soulful creature recoil with disgust. https://t.co/WFx5QWEBBP
— Bad Writing Takes
(@BadWritingTakes) July 27, 2026
Generative AI isn’t just destroying our past; it’s also risking our future. Growing up with technology that thinks for them isn’t doing children any favours, and we’re yet to see what this will mean for them as adults.
Tech that acts as a surrogate brain sounds nice, but without intelligence – without history – we’re really not much more than meat.
Featured image via the Canary
By Willem Moore
The rapid expansion of generative AI technology has been tremendously worrying for many. There are good reasons for this too, whether it be the threat to jobs, the environmental impact of data centres, or the fact that AI barons keep suggesting their technology may one day kill us all.
In response to this, the Greens’ Greater Manchester mayor candidate Geraldine Coggins is calling for “an end to the folly of rushing headlong into AI development without public debate and environmental protections”.
Environmental impacts
Coggins said:
The world is on fire. A quarter of a million people have been evacuated from the paths of wildfires in Spain and France, and a major incident was declared in the Cairngorms as flames threatened Aviemore.
In my own front room in Trafford, I can smell the acrid smoke from wildfires on the moors.
The UK has experienced a significant number of wildfires in recent weeks, with Greens leader Zack Polanski also commenting on the issue:
The climate crisis is not a distant threat.
It's here. And it's happening now.
And our Fire Brigade on the frontline of it are asking for help. https://t.co/Nl8GV79S1k — Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) July 14, 2026
Coggins continued:
On the doorstep, I am being told that people worry about AI and the consequences for their jobs, while musicians and creative artists warn of having their work stolen. People fear AI’s impact on the environment and the threat it brings of ‘going rogue’ and starting wars.
On the jobs front, there is less reason to be worried than there was a few years ago. This is because companies which have invested in AI have struggled to show any Return on Investment (RoI) from the technology.
This situation was worsened when the AI companies dramatically increased their prices earlier this year because they could no longer afford to subsidise the expensive tech with artificially low subscription offers.
People are certainly using AI to replace creative work, whether it be uploading soulless AI music to Spotify or authorless AI literature to Amazon. As comedian Stavros Halkias said:
How did f*cking computers become the thing… that does art? And humans are the ones in f*cking Amazon warehouses? Like, shouldn’t the robots be working so we can paint?
Coggins is also correct to highlight that unpredictable AI tech is being used by global militaries and defence contractors. This is despite AI companies making claims like the following:
JUST IN: OpenAI reportedly caught an AI agent leaving “notes” to future versions of itself on how to escape internal constraints.
— Polymarket (@Polymarket) July 25, 2026
There’s every chance OpenAI made the above up to make their tech seem more dangerous – and therefore more valuable – than it actually is (the claim they’re making was a plotline in the sci-fi drama Person of Interest, after all). Regardless of whether it’s true, however, it seems like we’d be prudent to assume it might be, and to take these companies’ toys away from them.
AI: who benefits?
Coggins continued:
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has brought AI around the Cabinet table with a dedicated Minister to promote its use. They need to focus on how AI is regulated and who benefits from it.
As the region’s first Green Mayor, I will work to end to the folly of rushing headlong into AI development without public debate and environmental protections.
I will not allow our water-deprived peat moors or people’s drinking water to be threatened by AI’s rapacious drive for profits. This is what I mean by my campaign pledge to take back Greater Manchester from Big Money.
We’ve reported on the threat to the British water supply before, notably here:
Starmer’s ‘systemic planning failure’ on AI data centres puts UK water reserves at dire risk
The Government Digital Sustainability Alliance (GDSA) was established to provide guidance on how we can achieve “digital transformation” without putting sustainability targets at risk. In aid of this, they published a report titled Water use in AI and Data Centres.
As the report highlights, we were already facing significant water scarcity, and AI data centres will only worsen this issue. What we don’t know is how much worse they’ll make it, because tech companies don’t have to report, monitor, or estimate how much water they use.
We’ll repeat this, because it’s actually a little difficult to believe when you first hear it: AI data centres do not have to report, monitor, or estimate how much water they use.
Determining the future
Coggins concluded:
I will establish a Mayor’s Commission made up of the public, business and wildlife and nature organisations to determine the future of AI in Greater Manchester. It will examine the evidence and make recommendations on how we protect people and plant from the excesses of AI, including its threatening over use of water.
Coggins is absolutely right to be raising these issues. And while she can’t make national decisions, the local campaigns against data centres in the US have proven to be a significant factor in the evolving debate on AI:
The backlash to artificial intelligence and its infrastructure will only grow in the coming months and years. Coggins is ahead of the curve on this front, and we hope more politicians to take this issue to heart.
Featured image via the Canary
By Willem Moore
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