Wes Streeting spoke at an event hosted by the IPPR on Monday morning (Alamy)

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The Health Secretary insisted the overhaul was necessary to cut duplication and improve accountability in the NHS, despite critics warning that the reorganisation risks being distracted from efforts to improve patient care.

His comments come after the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank published a report which found that transforming the NHS funding model to a European-style insurance system would not improve performance across the healthcare system. The report highlighted the high risks of transitioning from one system to another, which could cost billions and take decades to complete.

Speaking at the report launch on Monday morning, Streeting agreed with the findings, saying that the government’s approach would instead be to “invest in the NHS, to modernise it and transform the way it delivers healthcare”.

However, one of the biggest reforms Streeting has introduced so far has been the abolition of the arms-length body NHS England (NHSE). Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced in March 2025 that NHSE would be abolished and its responsibilities brought into the Department for Health and Social Care over a two-year transition period, as part of a wider bid to make the state more efficient and remove unnecessary red tape.

While Streeting’s allies argue the old structure was dysfunctional, with blurred accountability and internal gridlock frustrating ministers and stalling policy, NHS insiders say the transition has not been totally smooth up to now. At the same time, experts have described the move as risky.

Staff are due to reapply for roles in a merged organisation in early 2027, a timeline many insiders expect to slip, while others warn the upheaval could consume energy better spent on improving services.

Asked by PoliticsHome whether the abolition of NHSE was also proving to be a distraction from improving care for patients, Streeting said: “We’re doing the right thing for the right reason, and in process terms, I don’t see how else we could have gone about this, because there wasn’t a way of engaging with the workforce of that size…”.

“I have to say I can understand why so many of my predecessors didn’t bother and just sat there with a totally unsatisfactory bureaucracy and loads of waste and duplication,” he continued.

“The level of opposition that you get when you try and do things like this is astonishing, and the weight and volume of vested interests is just extraordinary. 

“And I’m afraid this is why you do need strong political leadership. I’m not interested as a politician in meddling in clinical decisions.”

He said that he thought it had been the right decision to keep the planning of the NHSE abolition “quite close with NHS leaders” before it was announced. 

Streeting acknowledged that the restructure was “hard on people who work in ICBs [Integrated Care Boards], and it’s hard on people who work in NHS England”: “I don’t treat that lightly or carelessly.”

However, he defended the decision and said that the idea that “democratically elected politicians shouldn’t keep an eye on how that money is spent and to make sure it’s used effectively is for the birds”.

“There are so many professional vested interests with a quiet, easy life who will always oppose these big changes, and I think ultimately, we will have done the right thing and the benefit will be to frontline patient services.”

A source close to Streeting previously told The House that the health secretary has found the “invisible barriers” to getting things done in government “harder than most”. 

“He has struggled to get his priorities through,” they said. “He’s a very sharp guy. But when he came in, after getting his own way on policy in opposition, he was shocked about needing Treasury sign-off… It was a rude awakening.”

Commenting on the IPPR report findings, head of health at IPPR and report author Sebastian Rees said: “There is no structural silver bullet for the NHS. The idea that simply switching to a European-style insurance model would fix its problems is a pointless distraction and not supported by the evidence. 

“The NHS’s challenges are real – but they are the result of a decade of chronic underinvestment and choices on how money is spent, not the funding model itself. 

“Policymakers should focus on what actually works: investing in infrastructure, strengthening primary care, and tackling the drivers of poor health.”

The leadership of Your Party Scotland (YPS) has resigned en masse, citing the consistent contempt shown towards members and the organisation north of the border.

All 12 members of the Interim Scottish Executive Committee have unanimously left their roles and pledged to help form a new party.

Your Party’s Interim Scottish Executive Committee (ISEC) was made up of volunteers who have overseen the running of the party – including the party’s Founding Conference in Dundee earlier this year – since December 2025.

But all 12 of the remaining members of the group have now resigned their posts, with their concerns about a dismissive attitude from the party’s UK leadership towards Scotland continuing to be ignored. Niall Christie, the sole Scotland rep on Your Party’s Central Executive Committee (CEC), has also resigned with immediate effect.

Watch a video message on Facebook or on the Your Party Scotland website.

The decision comes after significant work from ISEC to fulfil the decisions taken by members in Dundee, including ensuring Your Party Scotland had candidates for the upcoming Holyrood elections. Attempts to run internal elections to replace the interim group with a democratically-selected SEC were also blocked by those in control of the party.

Your Party Scotland feeling ignored

Decisions taken at the Your Party CEC – now solely controlled by those aligned to the Jeremy Corbyn-led The Many faction – also underline the disdain shown towards Your Party Scotland and its members.

Proposals tabled by Scotland’s one CEC rep – compared to the 16 allocated to English regions – have repeatedly been ignored by the party’s chair. Your Party’s leadership has also ignored repeated requests for support and discussions.

At a CEC meeting held yesterday, a proposal to provide support to YPS to hold meetings and contact its members – which they have been unable to do since the party’s creation last year – was not heard, nor was a motion affirming the party’s commitment to Scottish autonomy and respecting decisions taken in Scotland.

A proposal to remove thousands of party members due to their membership and affiliation with other socialist organisations – which contradicts the rules of Your Party Scotland – also passed at Sunday’s CEC meeting.

As a result, the ISEC has now released a statement outlining its decision, as well as its belief that the party – which has been haemorrhaging members in Scotland in recent weeks – has now collapsed.

However, the ISEC members – made up of former MSPs and prominent left-wing figures, as well as many of whom have never been involved in politics before – also underlined the need for a new party on the left in Scotland and their intention to continue working towards this.

In a statement, the ISEC said:

As a result of this consistent denial of autonomy for Scotland, and a willingness by the UK leadership to sideline an entire nation by withholding funding and mailing lists and refusing to engage, we have, after careful thought and consideration, taken the collective decision to resign our positions on ISEC, having found ourselves completely blocked when we attempted to carry out the clear mandate set for us by members from across Scotland.

No serious attempt to unite the left can be done through purges of socialists or by disregarding entire nations and their representatives. It is clear that these are fatal blows to the Your Party project from which it cannot recover.

Despite this generational fumble of the left in Britain, the need for a new party on the left in Scotland couldn’t be more urgent, and it is our clear intention to continue working towards this. We call on others who share our vision to join us in doing so over the coming weeks and months, as the reality of a rising far-right and its representatives joining our national parliament set in.

Simply put, the best time for change has passed, but the next best time is now. In Scotland, we intend to continue building that change, but to do so outwith the constraints of the deeply flawed and dying Your Party.

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The decision comes after a meeting of nearly 200 Your Party Scotland members on 12 April, which showed overwhelming support for working towards a new left project in Scotland.

Scotland representative on Your Party CEC Christie said:

It has become clear the party has run out of road. This is in no small part down to the consistent disrespect shown to Scotland and Scottish members, with decisions about us being made without our input, and on our behalf.

I’ll be continuing the essential work needed to build the party we were all promised in summer 2025, but I will be doing so outside of Your Party. With an election on the horizon, it is time to take stock of the political landscape in Scotland and work to bring the left in Scotland together – truly – and move towards something new in the not-too-distant future.

My own main takeaway having been involved in Your Party is that whatever comes next must be built in Scotland, by Scotland, for Scotland. Anything else is doomed to fail.

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Featured image via the Canary

Legal action by the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) has forced an alleged Israel war criminal to cancel a planned trip to Italy.

Former Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) commander Ofer Winter has abandoned his visit to Europe after the HRF applied for an arrest warrant for him over his alleged involvement in 2014 atrocities and his advocacy for Israel’s current and continuing genocide in Gaza.

Israel ‘Black Friday’ 2014

HRF’s application, accompanied by a “detailed investigative report”, details Winter’s in the 2014 ‘Black Friday’ massacre in Rafah on 1 August 2014. HRF says that:

Following the capture of an Israeli soldier, Winter ordered the activation of the Hannibal Directive, triggering a large-scale and indiscriminate assault on a densely populated civilian area…

…Thousands of artillery shells were fired across urban areas within hours;

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Airstrikes, drones, and tank fire targeted roads and civilian movement;

Civilians were indiscriminately—and in some cases deliberately—targeted, leading to up to 200 civilian deaths in three days;

Ambulances and medical teams were struck, preventing the evacuation of the wounded.

Ofer Winter, who was commander of the Givati Brigade and in charge of the Rafah area at the time of the attack, is specifically alleged to be responsible for the crimes committed during the attack, particularly:

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The attack on Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital on 1 August 2014;

The attack on al-Birr wa’l-Taqwa Mosque and the ambulances retrieving the wounded therefrom on 1 August 2014;

The attack on UNRWA Boys’ Prep School ‘A’ on 3 August 2014.

Genocide incitement

HRF also lists examples of Winter’s statements inciting genocide, including:

The end game needs to be no Palestinians in Gaza.

Victory will occur when there are no more Arabs in Gaza.

But the law in the State of Israel must draw its authority from the values of the Jewish people, not from the inventions and legal sophistry of the international court. The source of our values is not The Hague. (…) Likewise: ‘If someone comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.’ And yes, it is necessary to devastate Gaza because destroying houses is essential for protecting our soldiers.

HRF’s application states that in this context, Winter’s planned visit to Italy was:

part of a broader effort to legitimize and disseminate narratives that incite the commission of genocide.

The group says that forcing him to cancel his propaganda visit is a “victory” but that arrest and prosecution remains its goal:

This is a concrete win for HRF and our allies in Italy. When suspected war criminals are forced to alter their movements that is a form of accountability. Full accountability, however, must lead to arrest and prosecution. We will continue pursuing that objective.

Like his genocide-state colleagues, Winter is said to have tried threats to HRF’s top official as a means of preventing action against him. HRF general director Dyab Abou Jahjah said:

When we filed the complaint in Italy against Mr. Winter, his immediate response was to issue threats directed at my address. His subsequent decision to cancel his visit to Italy underscores the tangible impact and seriousness of this legal action. He now faces an additional case in Belgium for those threats. The era of impunity is coming to an end.

Israeli agents have previously threatened both Abou Jahjah and his family. HRF’s campaign of legal action against Israeli war criminals wherever they go continues.

Featured image via the Canary

Inspire: A Performing Arts Festival by and for the Airborne Aware, a free Zoom festival running 15–19 April 2026, will bring together music, theater and comedy made by COVID-conscious artists for COVID-conscious audiences.

It is the first known event of its kind to assemble these different genres of COVID-conscious performance into a single airborne-aware program. The five-day program includes music showcases, theater performances and comedy. All events will be presented in a virtual format.

In recent years, individual artists and groups have been producing COVID-conscious art and creating airborne-aware performance spaces. In major cities like Chicago, New York and London, live COVID safer arts events have become more numerous. Inspire festival, organized by COVID-conscious creatives, gathers these individual, local creative labors into one international event.

The COVID-conscious theater ecosystem

In theater, the early years of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic briefly opened a wide field of digital and hybrid performances. However, with the removal of clean-air measures like masks and testing in live performance venues, the scaling back of online performances, and the widespread taboo of acknowledging the reality of the ongoing pandemic, it has fallen to COVID-conscious theater-makers to create their own spaces.

Two widely documented COVID-conscious theater performances in this emerging ecosystem both took place on 24 April 2025 in New York.

Wake Up and Smell the C*VID by the anonymous collective HEPA (Holy Erotic Propaganda Arson) was a hybrid monologue performance about the impact of COVID and Long COVID on the arts.

Anna RG’s AIR CHANGE PER HOUR was a mask-required Brooklyn performance structured around airborne safety, including testimony from artists living with Long COVID and accessibility measures like rest breaks and HEPA air purifiers.

Wake Up and Smell the C*VID returns at Inspire in an encore presentation on 18 April.

Another major COVID-conscious performance was comedian Guiness Pig’s A Covid Christmas Carol, an audio play performed in December 2025, which adapted the familiar Dickens story into a COVID-conscious satire. At Inspire, Guiness Pig returns with the reader’s theater piece How the Three Little Pigs Almost Learned to Live with the Big Bad Wolf, which reimagines the fairy tale through the normalization of mass infections. The play will be performed April 17.

Most recently was Serina Estrada’s A Pan***ic Play, first staged in January 2026 at The Art School in Glasgow as part of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Emergence Festival. It was presented as a 50-minute work inspired by verbatim theatre, speaking the lived experiences of people navigating the ongoing pandemic. Inspire will feature an encore performance of the play on April 16.

Inspire’s theater program will also include scenes from The Left by Caridad Svich, a choral play about those left behind ‘when all systems and people have failed one another.’ Svich, a playwright and educator affiliated with Rutgers and the Lortel Theater, is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Drama and Performance Art and a 2012 Obie Award winner for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre. Selections from the play will be broadcast on April 19.

Inspire will also premiere the first two episodes of Wayside, an audio drama by Mo Mora and narrated by Benjamin Liberman, set in a near-future sanctuary community where people still mask.

Airborne-aware musicians and performance spaces

The festival opens on 15 April with a music showcase featuring performances by COVID-conscious musicians.

Music venues, like theaters, have largely rolled back airborne illness-prevention measures, even as the effects of the ongoing pandemic continue to devastate the industry. Within the past few weeks, Lady Gaga canceled the final Montreal date of her tour because of a respiratory infection, and the Goo Goo Dolls canceled the remaining dates of their Canadian run after frontman John Rzeznik was diagnosed with pneumonia. At the same time, musicians like Dave Navarro have spoken publicly about managing Long COVID.

Against this backdrop, Inspire’s music lineup highlights artists who have helped create COVID-conscious performance spaces of their own. Among the featured acts is phytocene, a Paris-based ambient pop and ethereal artist whose work as moves through pop, trip-hop and electronica. She has become widely known in the airborne-aware community for organizing mask-required concerts in France.

Nina Wildflower, another performer in this ecology, is both a musician and a science teacher who advocates for clean air. He also hosts a weekly online open mic for COVID conscious performers.

The final musical act will be the The Long Covid Choir, which was formed in March 2021 by people with Long COVID and designed to be accessible to people living with Long COVID, including people who are housebound or bedridden. The Long COVID Kids Choir, profiled by the World Health Organization, similarly gives children and teenagers in multiple countries an online place to sing and write songs about their own lived experience. Both choirs are under the musical direction of Dutch musician Merel van der Knoop.

A comedy counter-public

In comedy, the ongoing pandemic continues to disrupt live performance and the health of working comics. In September 2025, Steve Martin canceled two tour dates after testing positive for COVID-19. This followed earlier cancellations on the same tour when Martin Short tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. In December 2025, Chevy Chase postponed an appearance at a live screening after being diagnosed with pneumonia.

At the same time, some establishment comedians with large national audiences have used their platforms to ridicule or erase continued COVID prevention. On the 11 December 2025 episode of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, Stewart joked about people still wearing masks in workplaces. This prompted public criticism from comedian Judah Friedlander, who responded on Instagram by asking why Stewart was ‘punching down’ on disabled and immunocompromised people. The social media backlash around the exchange generated the hashtag #oneofthetwo and calls for Jon Stewart to interview a public health expert and correct the record.

In November 2025, after actor Tom Hanks was photographed wearing a mask on the New York City subway, in his appearance on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert promoted the moment in the interview and on social media as a ‘subway disguise.’ Even though Hanks himself had explained on the show that he wears a mask for ‘health reasons’ and that he had been infected with COVID multiple times and did not want to get it again.

At the same time, COVID-conscious comedians have been building accessible alternatives. Judah Friedlander performs at recurring Zoom livestream stand-up shows, including a New Year’s Eve performance at the end of 2025.

Inspire’s comedy programming features two events. The festival’s Friday Night Open Mic will take place on 17 April, inviting artists to share original five-minute sets, including stand-up, music, poetry and theater, and will be hosted by writer and comedian Lauren Flans. On 18 April, the festival will present Ron Placone’s Anti-Fascist Pasta Night, a new one-hour stand-up special performed live with ASL interpretation. Placone is a comedian, writer and filmmaker who has toured across the United States, Canada and Australia and premiered a solo show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023.

Art, advocacy and mutual aid

Inspire will run 15 April through 19 April 2016 as a free, fully virtual Zoom festival featuring music, theater and comedy and community programming by COVID-conscious artists for COVID-conscious audiences.

To attend, audience members are asked to RSVP through the festival form, selecting the events they want to join. Zoom links will be sent the day of each event. Because capacity is limited, some events may move to a waitlist if demand exceeds available space.

Attendees only need a free Zoom account. Events are scheduled at multiple times across the day to accommodate different time zones. Except for the open mic, audience cameras and microphones will remain off during performances while the chat stays open for conversation. The costs for the festival were shared amongst the organizers, including licensing and subscription fees, so a tip jar will be circulated which will help cover the costs, with the rest distributed to COVID-conscious charities and mutual aid for the wider community.

The festival marks the point at which COVID-conscious arts has matured into its own counter-public with a networked multi-genre ecosystem, as well as relationships to airborne-aware mutual aid and advocacy.

On 12 April, the people of Hungary voted out the loathsome Viktor Orbán. As we reported, the man who’s replacing him is another right-wing Zionist. What he’s not, however, is a member of the same network of would-be-despots as Nigel Farage.

Increasingly, then, it’s looking like the global right-wing uprising that Farage was relying on has stalled:

Nigel Farage, Reform UK and advisors including James Orr and Matt Goodwin are incredibly intertwined with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.@Nigel_Farage even described him as a model leader and the “future of Europe”.

After 20 years of authoritarian rule, he’s conceded… pic.twitter.com/YNnXZYJPHK

— Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 (@reformexposed) April 12, 2026

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Farage and international nationalists

Trump ally Steve Bannon made a tour of Europe in 2018 in which he sought to create a “pan-European far-right movement”. Speaking on this movement, Byline Times wrote:

Anyone who’s seen Alison Klayman’s 2019 documentary The Brink will remember the scenes where Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage sit together discussing a pan-European nationalist populist “Movement” – with Bannon calling Farage “the face” of Brexit while they talk about stitching together far-right parties across the EU. Bannon tells Farage that he’ll “fund it somehow”.

What those scenes didn’t show is that the Brussels vehicle Bannon was about to claim as his own – The Movement – had actually been created out of Farage’s network and that, in the background, Jeffrey Epstein was quietly helping Bannon plan, protect, and track his “European revolution”.

The bed @Nigel_Farage has made. pic.twitter.com/zf7viwdS1W

— Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 (@reformexposed) April 12, 2026

The far right have grown in Europe and America since then, but the cracks are starting to show. This is obvious in how these parties exist in their own countries and how they interact with their global bedfellows.

Farage himself has made a big deal of his relationship with Donald Trump – the world’s most successful right-winger. He’s made less of a big deal about it lately, of course, because the Epstein-associate Trump and his wars are incredibly unpopular in Britain:

67% of Britons describe themselves as anti-Trump, with Reform UK voters the only group more likely to be pro-Trump than anti

By 2024 vote
Lib Dem: 89% anti-Trump / 2% pro-Trump
Labour: 85% / 3%
Green: 82% / 4%
Conservative: 61% / 19%
Reform UK: 24% / 46%https://t.co/9p6MjkSVbb pic.twitter.com/2k93DnOoTN

— YouGov (@YouGov) March 9, 2026

Farage has long attached himself to Trump, hoping that the president’s success would rub off on him. It’s become increasingly difficult for Farage to ride on his coattails, however, because it’s now obvious to everyone that the Emperor has no clothes.

Farage and other European right-wingers have distanced themselves from Trump following his threats to annex Greenland, as TLDR News EU covered:

When the German and French far right turned on Trump, Hungary’s Orban did not. In fact, Orban enjoyed considerable support from the Trump regime in his election. The problem is, Trump’s support is now poison:

So after being offered an in-person appearance from JD Vance and a promise by Don Jr. for “a direct line” to his dad if they support Viktor Orban, Hungarians decided instead to vote for a possible supermajority of seats against Orban pic.twitter.com/yImHGyNwES

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) April 12, 2026

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Bringing down the Nigel project

This is what Farage said about Orban in 2011:

Just thanked Viktor Orban at the end of the Hungarian Presidency for being our secret weapon and helping us bring down the EU project.

— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) July 5, 2011

It would be interesting to get an update on how he thinks this is going.

The current situation for Farage is that:

Nigel Farage on Milei “Doing all the things he’s done, that’s leadership, he is amazing”

Kemi Badenoch “Javier Milei would be ‘template’ for my government”

He just cut holiday days to 0, employers can pay in food and 12 hour work days. The result: pic.twitter.com/WgoFxN9EX9

— Jake 🌹🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@ToryWipeout) February 14, 2026

With the next election three years out, it’s hard to see how Farage can do anything besides bleed support.

Featured image via X

Help and support:

However, it seems she may have spoken too soon.

Reacting to headlines claiming she’d “turned down” an offer to host Strictly, she told Metro: “Do you think I would turn down Strictly if Strictly came along? Who would turn down Strictly! They’d be absolutely crazy.”

She claimed: “I was trying to back them off because ultimately everyone keeps putting my name in the mix and they’re ruining my chances of even getting on to Strictly, d’you know what I mean?”

“You all need to stop talking about it because I need to get in,” Alison added, before insisting: “I’m not too busy, I’m fitter than I’ve ever been before. I can do Strictly. I can do it all.”

After confirming last week that she’d been approached about hosting Strictly, Alison explained to Radio Times: “I’m so busy, babes, that I’m not sure it’s going to happen. It’s unrealistic. I’m so happy they considered me but, like Traitors, I can’t do it because everything clashes.

“I would have loved to have done it – anybody that gets it, they’re going to land the perfect job. But I’m so happy with everything I’ve got. What would I drop, to do Strictly?”