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2 min read13 July

Nuclear Waste Services (NWS) has confirmed Seth Kybird as its permanent Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Seth has led NWS as interim CEO since April 2025, and his appointment took effect from 1 July 2026.

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NWS Chair Liz Peace, said:

“I am delighted to confirm Seth as our permanent CEO. The time he has led NWS has shown exactly why he is the right person to take the organisation forward – he has brought focus, clarity, and ambitious leadership. I have every confidence in him as we pursue our vision to make nuclear waste permanently safe, sooner.”

Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) group Chief Executive David Peattie, said:

“Since stepping into the interim CEO role, Seth has provided strong leadership for NWS, further strengthening its position as the UK’s dedicated radioactive waste management and disposal organisation. He has maintained a clear focus on high performance and delivery, helping to advance the waste solutions the nation needs. I’m delighted he will continue to lead NWS and its role in the NDA group.”

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Seth Kybird, said:

“It is a privilege to continue leading NWS. For me, this has always come down to two things: the mission and the people. What NWS does matters – protecting people and the environment today and taking responsibility for the generations that come after us. This year has asked a lot of us, delivering for the country while working within real financial constraints, and it is the skill and commitment of my colleagues that has carried us through.

“And we will keep building on our progress: widening the waste solutions we provide; operating the Low Level Waste Repository safely, and making progress towards permanent disposal, especially a Geological Disposal Facility.”

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Seth has led NWS as interim CEO since April 2025. He joined from Nuclear Transport Solutions (NTS), where he was CEO from its formation in 2021, and was previously Managing Director of International Nuclear Services.

NWS is the UK’s dedicated radioactive waste management and disposal organisation and is part of the NDA group. Its work focuses on three core areas: providing sustainable waste solutions for customers; the safe, secure operation of the UK’s principal Low Level Waste Repository in Cumbria; and delivering a GDF – internationally recognised as the best solution for the most hazardous radioactive waste.

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Plans to build data centres have been controversial across the UK, but the latest example comes from Brick Lane.

Housing Secretary Angela Rayner approved a £500 million redevelopment of the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, which will include a data centre. This is despite unanimous opposition to the development from Tower Hamlets council, the local mayor and campaigners.

In a borough with over 30,000 households on the social housing waiting list, the council wanted 800 homes on the same site instead. The government’s decision letter gives that plan “no more than limited weight.” Meanwhile, it gives the data centre “significant weight” for its economic benefits in meeting “the need for data centre capacity,” but never states how many jobs it will create.

The Save Brick Lane coalition argues the site should be housing-led, warning the development could push up rents, displace long-standing residents, and hollow out Brick Lane’s community. With unanimous opposition by locals and 30,000 people waiting for homes, the government pushing ahead with this data centre shows in whose interests the government is willing to make tough decisions.

Computer says no

The late great theorist Mark Fisher might refer to the government’s behaviour in this case as “market Stalinism.” Fisher identifies a system that opposes centralized, bureaucratic and authoritarian Stalinist planning, but, in fact, reproduces it via capitalism.

Under this system, the pursuit of material progress for everyday people is overlooked in favour of hitting targets for profits or growth, standing in for Stalin’s five-year plans, so that the metrics become the ends in and of themselves. That means branding achievements become more important than achieving any sort of material benefit for ordinary people.

A Guardian investigation showed how much market Stalinism is at play in the UK’s AI strategy. CoreWeave’s announced £1 billion UK “investment” turned out to be renting space in two existing datacentres and plugging in chips it had already bought without building anything new. Nscale’s £2 billion “supercomputer” – that the government said would be completed by the end of 2026 – was still just a scaffolding yard when reporters visited in February.

Ordinarily, market Stalinism at least performs the audit; here, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology didn’t even manage that, admitting it wasn’t:

playing an active role in auditing these commitments.

Economist Cecilia Rikap speaks of ‘phantom investments’ whereby:

big tech companies artificially inflate datacentres’ job creation and economic impact to please governments [who] are desperate to claim they are making the economy grow.

Britain’s AI roadmap

Britain’s AI roadmap was supposed to have accounted responsibly for its own carbon costs, yet the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology had underestimated the emissions from AI data centres by roughly a hundredfold. A since-deleted estimate of 0.142 million tonnes a year was  revised to a range of up to 123 million tonnes over the next decade.

This estimation was only corrected after the campaign group Foxglove and the outlet Carbon Brief checked the working themselves. The correction landed a week after Kendall urged the public to “embrace AI” after announcing the first £500 million tranche of a new government AI fund. The ministries love the announcements, but how often do they check it against the world?

Brick Lane fits that pattern. A data centre approved for “significant” benefits nobody has to specify, while the quantifiable loss – more homes in an area needing homes – is overshadowed in the pursuit of growth. The case is not isolated. Data centres were designated critical national infrastructure, and planning rules were rewritten to give data centre applications more weight. Ministers even proposed folding projects into the fast-track regime for nationally significant infrastructure. That urgency might relate to the financial story behind AI.

Betting the house

AI-linked firms have climbed in value by $27 trillion in 3 years, built on what Goldman Sachs analysts called “Panglossian” profit assumptions</a. The Bank of England’s Andrew Bailey has warned that an AI bubble bursting could shrink UK GDP by 2.2%, while the IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva has compared today’s AI boom to “the bullishness about the internet 25 years ago”, which resulted in the dot-com crash.

Local opposition to data centres could play a part in bursting the AI bubble. Each local area that refuses to have a data centre, to not participate in building out AI’s physical infrastructure, contributes to a mechanism that could trigger a correction of the Panglossian profit assumptions. When national governments view local opposition to data centres, they are not just assessing local planning disputes, but deciding whether an overleveraged bet pays off.

The way in which governments make decisions is at the heart of the issue. The case of the Truman Brewery was not simply about creative differences, but also testing whether the alternative Tower Hamlets wanted – 800 homes instead of a data centre – was ever seriously weighed at all.

That phrasing of the government’s decision letter does the same work as Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”. It does not seek to defeat the opposing case, but rules it outside the range of things a government needs to weigh at all, granting it an unbearable lightness. All that is solid then melts, as the government looks at the human need for housing as an obstacle to a financial story it has already decided must come true, bending reality to the bubble.

Featured image via BBC

By Hugo Harvey

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A senior exec at the film studio Lionsgate has confirmed that the wheels are in motion on a sequel to the company’s recent controversial Michael Jackson biopic.

Upon its release in April, Michael was met with a lukewarm response from critics, many of whom took issue with the fact that the movie ended in the late 80s, meaning the allegations of child sexual abuse made against the singer in his lifetime were not addressed.

Ever since Michael’s release, there’ve been plenty of conversations about whether a follow-up could be on the cards, with Variety reporting that Lionsgate’s vice chair Adam Fogelson told employees that production on the sequel will get underway at “the end of this year or early next”.

“We do have a number of sequences, particularly some big musical sequences, that were shot previously, that are almost sure to be incorporated but we are mostly focused right now on how to make sure we can deliver, at the right price, the biggest, best sequel,” he was quoted as saying. “That is what the audience is going to want and deserve after the experience we gave them the first time.”

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As for a release date, he suggested that it could hit cinemas as early as next year, if not early 2028.

Earlier this year, he was quoted by the same outlet as saying: “We are really excited about the progress we’re making with respect to a second Michael film. All the conversations that we’ve been having with all of the appropriate parties continue to go exceptionally well.”

Director Antoine Fuqua has previously made clear that it was his intention to include the allegations made against the film’s subject in the original movie, and some scenes were even shot depicting a police raid on the Neverland ranch.

However, it was later discovered that part of the settlement between the Grammy winner and one of his accusers made it clear that neither the child’s name nor likeness could ever be used, leading to costly reshoots and major tweaks being made to the film’s plot.

It had previously been reported that a sequel to Michael could focus on the chart-topping performer’s later years, and the controversies he faced around that time, which looks increasingly likely given part one’s box office success.

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Fogelson also suggested that a Michael sequel would include some of the controversies that the musician faced in his later years, claiming: “From my perspective, it’s important to try to give the audience an authentic understanding of who Michael Jackson was.

“So I think that that can be done with or without some of what was in the third act that had to be scrapped.”

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Many Holocaust survivors and descendants have been vocally opposing the UK’s complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza since 2023. And they hope new foreign secretary Ed Miliband — himself the son of Holocaust survivors — will stop this. But as some explained to the Canary, they doubt he will.

Ed Miliband’s ‘self-serving’ careerism

Miliband doesn’t mark a meaningful change from Keir Starmer’s genocide-complicit regime. He has received money from similar sources and has a generally anti-Palestinian track record. As an uncritical supporter of Israel, he has opposed boycotts and had a “strong relationship” with Labour Friends of Israel.

As Holocaust child survivor Dr Agnes Kory told us:

Ed Miliband’s statement about his Holocaust survivor parents (after his recent appointment as Foreign Secretary) does not sit well with me. On the contrary. As we have seen over the years, Ed Miliband’s main focus is getting and keeping the top job.

She called Miliband’s reference to his parents’ stories “self-serving”, saying it:

was likely aimed at those British Jews who have been brainwashed by the Chief Rabbi, the Board of Deputies and others to be scared for their life whenever anybody is critical of Israel’s actions… If I feel charitable, I consider that Ed Miliband wanted to reassure the frightened British Jews. If I think logically, I conclude that Ed wanted the Jewish vote and no antagonism from pro-Israeli campaigners.

And she insisted that:

With his eye on his career, Miliband is unlikely to do anything meaningful to stop the genocide of Palestinians and Britain’s complicity. He knows what happened to Ken Livingstone and [Jeremy] Corbyn, what is happening to Zack Polanski and so on.

As the Lipman-Miliband Trust explains, Miliband’s father Ralph once criticised how the Labour Party’s:

dogmatic attachment to the dominant parliamentary representative system compromised its commitment to socialism and class struggle.

His mother Marion, meanwhile, was a pro-Palestinian activist.

With his parents’ views in mind, Kory said:

I can’t help thinking that Ralph and Marion Miliband would have liked son Ed to give up his political ambitions and to use his legal skills as an advocate for the persecuted Palestinians.

Miliband offers “caring words but no effective action”

Prof Haim Bresheeth-Žabner is the son of two Auschwitz survivors. And he told the Canary that:

There is nothing whatsoever to wait for from Mr. Miliband or from this government.

Despite the rise in anti-Zionist sentiment among younger Jewish people in particular in the West, he said, Ed Miliband is not a figure who is ready to break the Zionist mould in British politics. As he asserted:

Ed Miliband is a typical British politician, despite his parents being Holocaust survivors.

Mark Etkind is also the son of a Holocaust survivor. And in an attempt to explain Miliband’s apparent indifference to the suffering of Palestinians, he highlighted Ralph Miliband’s critique of Labour, insisting that:

if you choose to run the capitalist state, you’re stuck in a situation where your room for manoeuvre is very limited, especially if there is no pressure from a powerful labour movement. In practice, in today’s very difficult economic situation, all you end up doing is to maintain both austerity and the UK’s alliance with US imperialism (along with ongoing support for the Gaza genocide).

And considering that the younger Miliband has long been fully inside that state machinery, Etkind pointed out that:

Ed Miliband’s record so far suggests that he’ll use apparently caring words about the Gaza horrors but that he will take no effective action – such as ending diplomatic relations with Israel or stopping all arms sales.

This is especially the case, Etkind added, because:

our rulers are very worried – that’s why they’re introducing unprecedented repression of the right to protest and free speech across the West.

The Labour government Miliband represents, of course, has been right at the forefront of this repression.

“Never again” must also apply to Gaza

Etkind said his own father had found himself in the same HASAG concentration camp complex in Częstochowa, Poland, as Ed Miliband’s grandfather. In that city, Etkind’s father also saw Soviet prisoners (over three million of whom the Nazis killed during the Holocaust) and wrote in his autobiography, as Etkind quoted, that:

We were not alone – we were not the only Untermenschen

The point here is that fascism rarely has just one target. Its hatred is broad. And anyone who doesn’t fit into its narrow definition of whose lives matter is at risk.

Today, the genocidal criminals running Israel don’t just target Palestinians. They also target anyone who shows solidarity or tries to stop their crimes. And they don’t like experts overwhelmingly referring to their crimes as genocide. (Miliband has embarrassingly continued Labour’s avoidance of the term so far.)

As Holocaust survivors and their descendants have long insisted, however, the phrase ‘never again‘ means nothing unless it applies to everyone. The question is, does Miliband truly want to honour the memory of his parents and other Holocaust survivors by helping to stop genocide today? Or does he care more about his career?

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

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