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The government had originally planned to withhold documents that it said would undermine national security and international relations. Starmer set out this position in PMQs on Wednesday lunchtime.

However, a significant number of Labour MPs threatened to support a motion tabled by the Conservatives calling for the release of all material related to Mandelson’s appointment, forcing the government to agree a compromise before a planned vote in the evening.

Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, who is widely seen as a leading candidate to succeed Starmer in Downing Street, played a leading role from the Labour backbenches in forcing the government to change its position.

In frantic scenes in the House of Commons this afternoon, the government tabled a further amendment, saying that documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment that are redacted on security grounds will be referred to the intelligence and security committee.

While the government avoided a Labour rebellion, the events represent a significant blow to the authority of the Prime Minister, whose judgment is being called into question over his original decision to appoint Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US.

Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff, who played an instrumental role in the decision to bring Mandelson into government, is also facing intense Labour MP pressure.

However, a statement by the Metropolitan Police on Wednesday night further complicated the next steps, with Scotland Yard saying it has asked Downing Street not to publish documents that could undermine its own criminal investigation into the former ambassador.

Starmer sacked Mandelson in September after details about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein started to emerge.

Mandelson has resigned from the House of Lords amid the growing scandal over his links to Epstein, while the government has said it will use legislation to strip him of his peer title.

Starmer announced earlier today that he had agreed with the King to remove Mandelson from the Privy Council, accusing his former ambassador in Washington of betraying his country.

The PM admitted to MPs that he was aware of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein when he gave him the senior diplomatic role, but said that Mandelson “lied” to him about the depth and extent of that relationship. 

His admission that he was aware of the relationship at the time of the appointment caused consternation among Labour MPs.

One Labour MP described PMQs as “brutal” for Starmer, describing the mood among Labour backbenchers to PoliticsHome as: “It wasn’t pity. But there was no willing him the [PM] on.”

Speaking during a debate following PMQs, Labour MP and former police officer Matt Bishop said that the trust built by the government’s Violence Against Women and Girls strategy “risks being profoundly undermined when we appear unwilling to apply the same standards of transparency and accountability to those closest to power as we demand elsewhere”. 

He later added: “If we are not fully transparent about how we vetted the ex-US ambassador in the face of such scandal, how on earth can we expect victims to come forward in future.”

Emily Thornberry, chair of the foreign affairs committee, asked if pressure had been put on the Foreign Office to process the vetting of Mandelson quickly.

Additional reporting by Adam Payne

Israel is always the victim — in its own eyes. That applies to the groups that support it too, like the avowedly Zionist ‘Board of Deputies’ (BOD). So, naturally, as far as the BOD is concerned today’s exoneration by a jury of six anti-genocide Palestine Action activists is not justice. It’s a slight to the BOD and other Israel supporters.

It’s ‘antisemitism’, in other words.

In a statement, the BOD described the verdicts as “troubling”. It then said that “respect [for] the judicial process” is “important”. And it then made clear that it has no respect for the judicial process by implying the acquittals don’t mean, under British law, that the accused are innocent of the serious charges against them. Therefore they are still guilty and deserving of punishment they should not be “able to evade”.

Evade by means of being found not guilty. The fiends.

BOD releases a statement after Palestine Action activists’ acquittal

This was the BOD’s nonsense in full:

To be clear: none of the defendants has been found to have injured police sergeant Evans.

And, since it’s certain neither the BOD nor the UK corporate media are ever going to refer to it, video evidence proved that police and security guards lied about pretty much everything that happened. And the accusers were not even able to come up with convincing lies even though the police left the Israeli arms-maker in charge of the video evidence for a whole year.

Scandalously, despite the verdicts, the CPS has demanded that the humanitarian defendants — after a year and a half as political prisoners — must not simply walk free. Five of them have been put back on bail — and one, Sam Corner, has been denied bail and put back in prison.

Of course we must never forget that Israel and its lobby are always the victim. Even when they’re slaughtering innocent Palestinians and making up bollocks in court to imprison people trying to stop them.

Featured image via FiltonActionists

Almost 400 medicines are vulnerable to shortages in the UK, according to a new list produced by NHS England and Medicines UK. Among the drugs on the list are treatments for blood clots, stroke, and several cancers.

The medicines were identified as at-risk because they have either a single supplier, or no supplier at all. Often, drug companies stop producing specific medicines because they no longer see them as commercially viable.

Having identified this vulnerability, NHS England and its partner organisations are taking steps to mitigate the problem. They’re calling the initiative ‘Project Revive’, providing incentives for drug companies to manufacture the medicines on the list.

Whilst undoubtedly an important step towards ensuring the resilience of the medical supply system in the UK, this is a treatment for a symptom, rather than a cure.

We’re in this mess in the first place because we treat drug manufacture as a commercial market, where companies can compete, patent, price gouge, and drop drugs when they stop making money. That commercialisation of healthcare costs lives.

NHS shortage of ‘products of critical priority’

In total, NHS England identified 378 drugs on its list of vulnerable medicines. Of these, around 80 no longer have a supplier at all, meaning that the currently existing supply is all that remains.

The medicines on the list include bendamustine, a chemotherapy drug used for several cancers; flupentixol, which is used for schizophrenia; and urokinase, a treatment for pulmonary embolism. The prices that the UK pays for these drugs could soar if demand starts to outpace supply.

NHS England produced its list alongside Medicines UK, a trade body representing manufacturers of generic medicines. Mark Samuels, Medicines UK’s chief executive, said:

The list includes products of critical priority and the ambition is to target those medicines representing the most serious risk to supply resilience, which could lead to shortages affecting patient care.

Drugs which have faced shortages across the UK in recent years include estradiol, an element of hormone replacement therapy; lisdexamfetamine, an ADHD medication; and Creon, which is used to treat cystic fibrosis.

Project Revive

However, NHS England, Medicines UK, and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) plan to tackle the problem of shortages through ‘Project Revive’. This scheme will provide incentives like fast-tracked license approvals to enable manufacturers to supply the 378 drugs on the list.

The pilot of Project Revive will run for 12 months. Then, in 2027, coordinators plan to instate a long-term iteration of the same scheme. Samuels explained that:

We have long stated that medicine shortages cannot be solved in isolation, and this project shows what can be achieved by working together. By working with NHS England and MHRA, we hope that this new model provides more certainty to enable companies to produce and supply medicines for use in the NHS.

Fiona Bride, interim chief commercial officer for NHS England, echoed that sentiment:

Ensuring a resilient and stable supply of medicines is fundamental to delivering patient care, with pharmaceuticals being the most common healthcare intervention in the NHS, and this collaborative pilot initiative aims to strengthen that supply chain by incentivising more companies to become NHS suppliers, or deepen existing partnerships.

Treating the symptom

The news of Project Revive comes after medicine pricing issues hit the headlines last year. Several of the world’s biggest drug manufacturers announced that they were ditching their UK projects.

Critics from within the industry blamed uncompetitive prices for new medicines, low levels of government investment, and Trump’s tariffs adding to supply prices.

Then, in September 2025, science minister Patrick Vallance argued that the NHS would have to pay higher prices for medicines to prevent pharmaceutical investors from abandoning the UK.

This is a problem inherent to introducing a profit motive to any aspect of healthcare, all across the world. Treating medicine as a capitalist exercise creates a host of problems for patients, who should always have been the center of the issue.

Meanwhile, the global pharmaceutical industry has raked in profits at higher margins than practically any other sector.

Profit over patients

As NHS England showed in the Project Revive research, drug companies can cease supply of individual medicines if their profits aren’t high enough. This can leave patients without crucial medications that they need.

Likewise, manufacturers can also raise their prices artificially if they aren’t faced with competition from other companies, or if other countries are willing to pay higher prices. Patents and intellectual property rights for individual drugs can also allow companies to create artificial scarcity.

Even beyond this, the profit motive causes problems with the development of new medicines. Companies aim to develop medicines in profitable sectors, particularly cancer and rare diseases. This, in turn, sees less-profitable diseases neglected in terms of research and development.

Likewise, even the idea of curing a disease can be anathema to a profit motive. In a choice between being paid once to cure a patient, or being paid again and again to treat a disease without curing it, the latter is the profitable choice. For example, one damning Goldman Sachs report stated that:

The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies…. While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.

Project Revive looks like an important step towards strengthening the UK’s drug supply chain. However, it’s a band-aid on a problem which will take far more work to heal.

In the UK, we fear the loss of socialised healthcare through the NHS, but the private sector already has its hooks in the system at every level.

There’s no easy fix for the problem of private profiteering in medicine. Capitalism itself is an enemy of good healthcare. It sounds glib, we know, but it’s also true. Failing to recognise that fact will mean that we’re trapped in a cycle of treating the symptoms, whilst neglecting their cause.

Featured image via the Canary

The US left mountains of high-tech weaponry behind when it fled Afghanistan in defeat in 2021 – now, those weapons have flooded neighbouring Pakistan. And the resulting instability might be stopping the US mining the very rare Earth resources it craves.

The US has its sights on vast copper mines just ten miles inside Pakistan. CNN reported that China is already accessing the nearby Muhammad Khel Copper Mine in northern Waziristan.

For a sense of the scale of that mine, watch this:

But nearby, in south Waziristan:

lies another copper mine that Pakistan says can yield almost ten times as much, equivalent to a fifth of the copper America uses every year.

CNN said:

The prospect is so appealing to a Washington administration also hungry for resources that it has put up more than a billion dollars to get things moving.

So what is stopping them? In short, the imperial blowback of vast amounts of lost US military gear.

Billions in lost US arms

The US and her allies cut and run from Afghanistan after two decades of occupation in 2021. Today the Taliban rule the country once again. But that US chaotic exit mean up to $7bn worth of weapons and equipment were simply left behind.

Remarkable footage emerged back then of US troops trying to destroy – or ‘deny’ –  military gear ahead of the US collapse:

But later Taliban footage made clear that weaponry, vehicles, and even helicopters were left behind:

The Foundation for Economic Education broke down some of the numbers involved. They said the giant arsenal included:

includes up to 22,174 Humvee vehicles, nearly 1,000 armored vehicles, 64,363 machine guns, and 42,000 pick-up trucks and SUVs.

There were mind boggling amounts of smalls arms – and even artillery:

the list of allegedly abandoned weaponry includes up to 358,530 assault rifles, 126,295 pistols, and nearly 200 artillery units.

Since the US was forced out the abandoned arms have been sold on – potentially fueling other conflicts.

In April 2025, the BBC was told:

Half a million weapons obtained by the Taliban in Afghanistan have been lost, sold or smuggled to militant groups

A UN report also warned that group including Al Qaeda:

were accessing Taliban-captured weapons or buying them on the black market.

But what are the implication in Waziristan with its rich resources?

Blowback again

As well as copper, CNN reported there were other minerals and metal in Waziristan which the US craves:

Pakistan says there is much more wealth beneath its soil –– an estimated $8 trillion in copper, lithium, cobalt, gold, antimony and other critical minerals.

This mineral reality has:

oiled an unlikely friendship with US President Donald Trump, who has put mineral acquisition at the heart of US foreign policy.

But CNN reporters who went to the region say they were shown:

hundreds of US-made rifles, machine guns and sniper rifles –– all leftovers from Washington’s war next door, and all seized from a new breed of jihadists and insurgents.

In fact, the reporters claimed, following a recent attack on a Pakistani military college 50 miles from the Muhammad Khel Copper Mine:

a colonel laid out a blood-soaked bandana and three M-16 rifles recovered from the militants. Written on the bandana, in Urdu and English, were slogans indicating the wearer’s readiness for martyrdom.

And:

stamped on the rifles were the words: “Property of US Govt. Manufactured in Columbia, South Carolina.”

In Peshawar, CNN recorded images of dozens of American weapons captured after raids:

And US weaponry has also been found in Balochistan in the hands of local insurgents.  Defence analyst Muhammad Mubasher told the outlet American arms were now involved “in almost every encounter that happens”.

Following a recent suicide attack in Balochistan which killed 33 people provincial minister Sarfaraz Bugti said there was:

 no doubt that most of the weapons used were US made that originated from Afghanistan.

Past US imperial adventures seem to be hindering new ones…

Trump’s Pakistan charm offensive

Despite the instability in the region – instability fueled by US blowback- President Donald Trump and Pakistani leaders have been getting cozy over potential mineral deals.

CNN reported that

Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir took an unusual prop on their first joint visit to the White House in September [2025] –– a chest containing a trove of rare earths they said had been dug from Pakistan’s soil.

Adding:

Trump was charmed. The following month he praised Munir in public –– naming him: “My favorite field marshal.”

Pakistani politicians have been schmoozing ever since: they vocally supported Trump’s failed Nobel Peace Prize bid in July 2025, calling him a great peacemaker after recent India-Pakistan clashes. And their first shipment of rare earth minerals arrived in the US just a month after their September 2025 meeting.

Trump wants Pakistani resources. And the Pakistani government seem more than willing to give them up. The problem is that the war in Afghanistan has flooded the region with high tech US-made arms and equipment, fueling a new set of insurgencies. Trump proclaims himself a  ‘Peace President’, but he clearly isn’t getting off the imperialist carousel quite yet.

Featured image via the Canary