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Matthew Jeffery is one of Britain’s most experienced global talent and recruitment leaders, with more than 25 years advising boards and C-suite executives on workforce strategy, skills, and productivity.

As Conservatives, we are instinctively and unapologetically on the side of law and order.

We believe in strong policing, strong courts, and meaningful punishment. We believe that when terrible crimes are committed, justice must be firm, visible, and proportionate. Public safety comes first. Victims come first.

But Conservatism is also about fairness, equality before the law, and the integrity of justice itself. The strength of our system is not only that it punishes the guilty, but that it protects the innocent. Authority must be matched by accountability. Strength must be matched by restraint.

Law and order without fairness is not justice. It is simply power.

A core principle of British justice is that doubt should always be examined seriously, because the presumption of innocence is not a slogan but a safeguard.

That principle is why the case of Lucy Letby should give many Conservatives pause for reflection.

This is not an argument that she is innocent. I am not a lawyer. I am not privy to all the evidence. Nor is this an attempt to retry the case in the court of public opinion. She was convicted by a jury after a long and complex trial. That matters. Jury verdicts matter. The rule of law matters.

None of this should ever obscure the human reality at the centre of this case. Families lost children. Lives were devastated. Nothing written here diminishes that suffering. A commitment to careful review is not in tension with compassion for victims. It is part of respecting the seriousness of what happened.

However, a growing unease has emerged. More qualified voices are now raising technical questions about aspects of the evidence, the expert testimony, and the statistical interpretation presented at trial. This unease is no longer limited to social media speculation or fringe commentary. It is increasingly being voiced by clinicians, statisticians, and legal commentators who are asking whether every element of the prosecution case was as robust as first presented.

Several technical aspects of the case are now being actively debated in professional circles. This includes named clinical experts who have publicly challenged how specific medical research findings were applied in the courtroom context.

Questions about the evidential interpretation in the case have also been raised by senior Conservative MP David Davis, who has called for additional independent scrutiny. His intervention reflects a view that where serious expert disagreement emerges, review through established legal mechanisms strengthens rather than weakens confidence in justice.

First, the role of expert medical evidence. Complex neonatal cases involve extremely fragile patients, multiple variables, and sometimes tragic outcomes even under proper care. Some experts have questioned whether alternative medical explanations were sufficiently explored or presented with enough weight. Others warn that hindsight bias can shape interpretation once suspicion has formed.

One example often cited in this debate is Dr Shoo Lee, a senior neonatologist and researcher, who has publicly questioned aspects of how certain medical indicators were interpreted in relation to air embolism and related mechanisms. He has stated that research he was associated with has been interpreted more definitively in court than he believes the underlying science supports. Other experts disagree with his assessment. That disagreement does not determine guilt or innocence, but it does illustrate that elements of the medical interpretation remain professionally contested and therefore open to structured review.

Prosecution experts, including Dr Dewi Evans, continue to defend the medical indicators and patterns as consistent with deliberate harm, views that were tested in court. More broadly, the prosecution case and supporting expert evidence continue to be defended by official authorities and were accepted by the trial court and jury after detailed adversarial testing.

Second, the use of statistical patterns. Cases that rely in part on clustering can appear compelling, but they are also controversial. Statistical reasoning in criminal trials is difficult and has contributed to past miscarriages of justice. There are ongoing questions about how such patterns should be interpreted and how confidently they can support criminal conclusions without distortion.

Third, disclosure and process questions. As with several historic wrongful convictions, debate has emerged around whether all relevant material, alternative theories, and internal hospital factors were fully examined and tested in court. That does not prove error, but it does justify scrutiny.

None of this proves innocence. It does not overturn a verdict. But it does justify careful examination of how the verdict was reached. That examination belongs properly in appellate courts, independent review bodies, and formal inquiries, not social media campaigns.

Many experienced prosecutors and clinicians remain fully confident in the convictions and the evidence presented at trial. Their confidence should also be part of any serious review conversation.

The recent Netflix documentary has brought these technical debates into the mainstream and renewed public discussion.

The debate has become increasingly polarised. Some statisticians, clinicians, and academic commentators have questioned the evidential safety of aspects of the conviction, while others, including official voices and some affected families, strongly reject miscarriage of justice claims as unfounded and distressing. That divide is precisely why a careful, evidence based, institution led review process matters.

It is also important to state the current legal position clearly. The convictions remain fully in force and whole life sentences are being served. Appeals to date have been unsuccessful, and the Crown Prosecution Service recently confirmed that no further charges will be brought after reviewing additional evidence. An application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission is ongoing and includes extensive new expert material, but the review process is complex and no referral back to the Court of Appeal has been made at this stage. The Thirlwall Inquiry report is expected after Easter 2026, and several inquests have opened and been adjourned pending its findings. None of these developments overturn the verdicts, but they do explain why continued professional scrutiny is taking place.

If confidence in a verdict is to remain strong, the evidential and procedural foundations should be able to withstand structured, transparent questioning. The following are not accusations. They are review questions. They are the kinds of questions a robust justice system should be able to answer clearly and calmly.

A large number of technical review questions have now emerged from clinicians, statisticians, and legal commentators. These cover incident selection, medical interpretation, insulin assay reliability, statistical clustering, expert methodology, disclosure, and governance.

To illustrate the nature of these concerns, a brief sample includes:
• How were charged incidents selected from the wider pool of deaths and collapses?
• How were statistical clustering risks explained to the jury?
• Were key medical interpretations independently verifiable through laboratory results, imaging, or post mortem findings?

I have put together a full structured list of over 50 review questions. These are not accusations, but the kind of evidential clarity questions a robust justice system should be able to answer calmly and transparently.

Conservatives should not be afraid of this kind of questioning. Our justice system is adversarial by design. It is meant to be tested, challenged, and reviewed. Appeals, independent reviews, and forensic re analysis are not weaknesses. They are safeguards built into the system.

Even if every conviction stands exactly as decided, institutional learning still matters. Hospitals, regulators, prosecutors, and courts should examine how evidence is gathered, interpreted, and presented in complex medical cases. Justice is strengthened when systems learn, not when they become defensive.

Questioning evidential process is not the same as disputing verdicts. It is how strong justice systems maintain legitimacy.

This is not only about one case. It connects to a wider Conservative debate about punishment, certainty, and irreversibility.

I have long believed that in the most extreme and certain cases, the death penalty can be morally justified, not as vengeance, but as ultimate justice for the most horrific crimes. But cases like this introduce a sobering counterweight. When convictions depend heavily on expert interpretation and pattern evidence, the margin for error can be difficult to measure. If even a small risk of wrongful conviction exists, the case for irreversible punishment becomes far more fragile. A system that cannot guarantee perfection must confront the consequences of finality.

The wheels of justice must move slowly and carefully. If, and it is a very big if, there has been a miscarriage of justice here, delay compounds harm. Reviews must be thorough, independent, and timely. Confidence in verdicts depends not on refusing questions, but on answering them transparently.

There is also a human dimension that should not be ignored. If someone is guilty, humane treatment remains a moral obligation of the state. If someone is innocent, the suffering imposed by wrongful conviction is almost beyond comprehension. Either way, our standards must remain civilised.

For Conservatives, supporting law and order should also mean supporting rigorous review, evidential integrity, and procedural fairness. Strength and humility can coexist. Authority and accountability must coexist. That means supporting independent expert review where appropriate, full disclosure standards, and transparent responses to credible technical criticism. Not to weaken justice, but to reinforce it.

Continued professional scrutiny does not imply error, only that in cases of exceptional complexity, justice is strengthened by openness rather than silence.

Serious questions are now being asked. Serious people are asking them. The justice system should not fear that. It should welcome the chance to answer.

I hope that the Conservative leadership, including the Shadow Justice Secretary, Nick Timothy, and the party leader, Kemi Badenoch, will review and clearly restate the party’s position on justice safeguards in complex cases.

Conservatism should stand for a justice system that is firm, accountable, open to challenge, and capable of correcting mistakes through proper legal channels, calmly, lawfully, and with dignity.

Dr Robert Seely MBE is author of ‘The New Total War’, ConservativeHome foreign affairs columnist and a former Conservative MP. 

What makes a man want to assassinate an enemy with the poison from an obscure, jungle frog – especially when your target is already rotting in one of your country’s most brutal penal colonies?

Last weekend, Britain, with four others, announced that deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had been murdered with a unique poison, extracted from the dart frog, found only in the South American jungle. Tribes from that continent use the poison in their darts to kill prey, hence the name. Only one man would have ordered this execution, Russian president Vladimir Putin, for whom Alexei Navalny had become a fixation.

State-sponsored assassination, especially from Russia and especially with poisoning, is making a comeback. What’s behind it?

First, assassination fits into Russia’s highly flexible theory of warfare, where all the tools of state power can and are used against an adversary. Putin believes he and his nation have been in conflict with Ukraine since 2005 and the West since 2007. As a former KGB – Russian secret service – operative, he was trained in political warfare: not only assassination but disinformation, subversion, blackmail, as well as terrorism, to name but a few. He knows these tools and appreciates them.

Second, if you are a dictator who cannot stand opposition and is not constrained by traditional morality, killing your enemies is, at least in the short term, an effective way of silencing them. He’s not the first, and he won’t be the last dictator to do so. The Iranian regime, for example, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, murdered many Iranian dissidents across Europe. Putin, since the early 2000s, has used assassination liberally, aided by the Russian state. In 2006, Russia’s Parliament passed Federal Law No. 35-FZ “On Counteraction Against Terrorism” legalising foreign assassination. The same year saw the dramatic killing in London of Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with a radioactive substance, polonium-210 (the 210 refers to the specific isotope).

However, there are other forms of assassination used by Russia apart from poison.

Shooting is an obvious choice. However, it is not subtle, you generally have to get close to the target to conduct the assassination, and given that CCTV is now commonplace throughout Western cities, getting away can be complex even if you can jam some cameras.

Shooting has its use. Russia’s ability to conduct complex overseas operations was thought to have suffered badly after the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats from Europe and the US after the poisoning of Russian defector Sergei Skripal in 2017. Now, Russia’s alphabet soup of secret agencies; internal spies the FSB, external spies the SVR and general dirty work providers, Russia’s GRU Military Intelligence, sometimes work through organised crime or petty criminals located through the dark web. Shooting is a relatively easy alternative for such ‘hire and burn’ assassins, a recent example being the assassination of the former speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament a few months ago. The alleged killer, whose son had died in the war, had been recruited and then cruelly blackmailed by the Russians; kill the politician and we will tell you where your deceased son’s body is.

There are other forms of murder used reasonably frequently. Death by ‘suicide’ by jumping – being thrown – from high buildings has become almost commonplace, especially amongst senior people in the Russian oil and gas industry. However, many of these deaths may be score-settling amongst the highly criminalised elites rather than state killing, a throwback to the ‘wild west’ capitalism of the 1990s. ‘Suicide by window’ has risks akin to shooting; you need to be on familiar ground, know where CCTV is, etc.

Other forms of assassination are more subtle. Since the 1960s, the KGB—now the FSB – worked on staged car crashes as forms of assassination, and rumours persist to this day that a leading Ukrainian opposition leader was killed in March 1999 in such an ‘accident’. If done well, it is almost impossible to prove. The inventor of this technique was KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who also allegedly invented aeroplane hijacking as a political weapon in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East.

But poisoning has emerged as the favoured assassination tool for Putin. Here are some possible reasons to explain the thinking.

First, poison is versatile. It can be very high profile or very low profile. It can leave no trace. There is a poison for every circumstance. Of the several dozen unexplained deaths in the UK and Europe of Putin opponents, how many were natural? We will probably never know. Sophisticated poisons are difficult to identify.

Poison can also take time to kick in. You do not need to be at the scene when it kicks in.

Poisoning can also be public and send a dramatic message, a theatrical act that grabs the imagination of the world, such as Litvinenko’s, whose body collapsed slowly and painfully over several weeks as Britain and much of the world watched.

So poison – and assassination more broadly – induces not only death but also fear and a message. It is a psychological tool aimed not only at Russian targets but also others too. Belgium’s prime minister was recently threatened with consequences that would last “for eternity” if he touched Russian state assets held in the Euroclear financial depository in Brussels. If that is not a threat to kill, I don’t know what is.

Until now, Russian poisoners – there is one FSB unit and one GRU unit that do this work – have deployed three main types: opioids, used for example in the October 2002 Dubrovka Theatre siege in Moscow where some 130 hostages died along with the hostage-takers. Second, radioactive poisons, of which Litvinenko’s murder was the most infamous, although the poison may have been tested on a live subject, imprisoned Chechen separatist leader Lecha Islamov, in 2004. Third, dioxins: for example, Viktor Yushchenko, the anti-Moscow Ukrainian presidential candidate, was poisoned using a dioxin in late 2004. He survived, but his face bears the pockmarked scars to this day.

Turning back to Navalny’s murder, it was, for Putin, highly personal. Navalny was not just a regime critic, whose corruption investigations embarrassed Putin’s inner circle. He was an emblem of a different future for Russia, more Western, more law-governed compared with Putin’s regime combining an all-powerful secret police and highly violent and ruthless organised crime. In murdering Navaly, Putin killed a man and an alternative future for Russia.

Like Ivan the Terrible or Vlad the Impaler, Putin sometimes kills his enemies in very memorable ways: a comment on his state of mind and his way of governing; murder and fear, and Navalny’s murder was an event which Putin wanted to mark.

Did Putin want the means of death advertised? Perhaps he wanted Navalny’s dart frog death to be for his private enjoyment? But if he did expect that the truth would emerge from the depths of the Polar Wolf Penal Colony, the message was similar to that sent with the killing of Litvinenko; if you oppose the Putin regime, think about every door handle you touch, every letter you pick up, and every drink you accept.

And by murdering someone already in prison, Putin added an extra twist, summed up in a Russian proverb; beat your own, so that others fear you. His message: if this is how I treat my own, just think how I will treat you.

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On 25 February 2026, the European Commission is expected to formally present the Industrial Accelerator Act, a comprehensive proposal designed to accelerate the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries, secure strategic supply chains, and rebuild manufacturing competitiveness amid mounting external challenges.

Behind the familiar language of climate transition and industrial resilience, however, lies something far more unsettling.

The Industrial Accelerator Act is not simply another technocratic adjustment within the routine choreography of Brussels policymaking, nor merely a regulatory attempt to smooth the frictions of a volatile global market.

Rather, it embodies the emerging ideological and geopolitical rupture within the European project itself, signalling that the continent has, albeit belatedly, that the post-Cold War settlement, which subordinated production to finance, economic planning to the whims of the free market, and sovereignty to supranational institutions dictated by the whims of Washington, is no longer sustainable under conditions of intensifying fissures.

The Industrial Accelerator Act: the end of financialisation?

For three decades, the European Union has determined its economic constellation on a fragile architecture of external guarantees provided by the rules-based order, with the US at its helm. Cheap energy flowed from Russia’s abundant gas reserves, manufacturing networks extended into China, and the wider Eurasian periphery and security concerns were largely outsourced to the US.

This model, often celebrated as the triumph of liberal internationalism and popularised by figures such as Francis Fukuyama as the “End of History,” was framed as the final stabilisation of the global order following the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe.

The European Union presented itself as the laboratory of a post-political future: a space in which conflicts would be neutralised through procedure, and the market would quietly perform the task once reserved for political struggle. The violence of history, we were told, had been domesticated.

This apparent stability concealed profound contradictions. Europe’s eventual transition toward a post-industrial economy was less a transcendence of its industrial preponderance than its externalisation. Manufacturing did not disappear; it was offshored.

The era of financialisation masked a structural fragility, substituting speculative expansion and asset inflation for productive renewal. Economic integration concealed asymmetries of power, while global value chains obscured the geopolitical dependencies within them. Europe increasingly occupied the position of the consumer within a system whose productive core and strategic leverage were located elsewhere.

Permacrises

The crises of the 21^st century have progressively exposed this settlement as contingent and unstable.

The financial crash of 2008 revealed the systemic risks of an economy oriented solely toward financial accumulation rather than industrial resilience.

The pandemic exposed the brittleness of global supply chains, as shortages of essential goods demonstrated the strategic costs of outsourcing critical production.

The war in Ukraine shattered longstanding assumptions about energy security and forced Europe into a rapid and costly restructuring of its economic model at the behest of US imperatives.

Simultaneously, the US returned to large-scale industrial policy, crystallised in the Inflation Reduction Act, made clear that even proponents of neoliberalism had abandoned their own orthodoxy. China’s ascent in renewable energy, battery production, advanced manufacturing, and critical mineral processing further underscores that control and guidance over production remain the decisive axis of power in the current world-system.

In this context, the Industrial Accelerator Act can be understood as the first attempt to reconstruct the material basis of European autonomy in global affairs.

Reconstructing autonomy via the Industrial Accelerator Act

Pushed forward by French Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné and supported by a broad coalition of industry leaders, the proposal deploys a suite of mechanisms: European preference in public procurement, low-carbon labelling for steel and cement, fast-track permitting for decarbonisation projects, and caps on foreign direct investment in emerging strategic sectors (notably a 49% limit on non-EU ownership in key greenfield investments) to foster a durable industrial ecosystem capable of sustaining a necessary ecological transition and geopolitical power.

While recent drafts have introduced flexibility, allowing “trusted partners” (such as the UK or Japan) to qualify under delegated acts and softening rigid origin thresholds to avoid immediate supply-chain ruptures, the core intent remains unmistakable: to create lead markets for cleaner, more resilient EU-made products and to prevent the hollowing-out of strategic industries by external actors.

If implemented with sufficient ambition, the Industrial Accelerator Act could underpin a genuine reindustrialisation: millions of skilled jobs in retrofitted steel mills, battery gigafactories, and hydrogen infrastructure; reduced exposure to geopolitical coercion; and a decarbonisation pathway that strengthens rather than undermines social models.

Yet the path is fraught. Internal divisions persist, between free-trade-oriented member states wary of Single Market fragmentation, industries concerned about cost increases, and those demanding bolder action. Compatibility with WTO rules remains contested, and the success of delegated acts that define thresholds and “trusted partners” will determine whether the policy is inclusive or exclusionary.

What is Europe to become?

Above all, the Industrial Accelerator Act signals a deeper ideological shift.

Europe is moving, however unevenly, from a post-historical illusion of triumphant liberalism, marked by an era of uncontested American hegemony, to an increasingly multipolar arrangement, though not in the way we expected. it.

The Industrial Accelerator Act reflects Europe’s attempt to navigate this contradiction. It seeks to preserve openness while constructing resilience, to maintain integration while rebuilding production. But this effort is haunted by internal tensions. The European Union is not a unified state but a heterogeneous formation. Some member states fear protectionism; others demand more radical intervention. The result is a policy that oscillates between ambition and hesitation.

This hesitation is itself revealing. Europe does not yet know what it wants to become. It oscillates between the desire to remain within the Atlanticist world-system and the necessity of sovereignty. It fears both dependency and conflict. The Act therefore embodies a form of strategic ambiguity, an attempt to act without fully acknowledging the implications of one’s actions.

The presentation on 25 February will mark not the conclusion of a legislative process, but the opening of a larger contest: whether Europe can summon the political will to reclaim the material basis of its independence, or whether it will once again defer to external forces the question of who controls its destiny. The Industrial Accelerator Act is the first gesture in that uncertain process.

Featured image via the Canary

If you lose every football match because your goalkeeper keeps booting the ball into their own net, shouting at the other team is pointless. Inventing new tactics to get past the other keeper is pointless, because the ball will always go past yours. That was true about Jeremy Corbyn. It is true about Keir Starmer. And it’s time for progressive voters to accept that it’s true about the Labour Party in general. Removing Keir Starmer as leader won’t change Labour enough to prevent Nigel Farage from becoming Reform prime minister.

A confession

Don’t get me wrong. I was still holding out hope that Labour might save us – until last month.

I even got major egg on my face, suggesting that the Greens should stand aside in the Gorton and Denton by-election. I wanted a clear path for Andy Burnham to become an MP and then replace Keir Starmer as prime minister.

Burnham has always campaigned to ensure that all votes count equally. So, if he became prime minister and gave us a proportional voting system, the UK would genuinely be saved from fascism. Reform, who are polling around 30%, therefore wouldn’t be able to gain a majority in parliament. Furthermore, parties to the left of the Tories (Labour, Lib Dems, SNP, Greens) have received more than 50% of the vote in almost every election since WW2.

So, if all votes counted equally, the future of the UK would be almost permanently progressive. But Labour blocking Andy Burnham didn’t just make me look foolish; it killed the Labour Party.

Labour is dead and buried

Why? Because Keir Starmer was already on borrowed time, even before he knowingly hired a child rape-trafficker’s fan as our US ambassador. He already had the lowest popularity rating of any prime minister in UK history. So the Labour machine knew that Starmer was on his way out. So the decision to rule out Andy Burnham as a potential challenger was about the politics he would bring to the table.

This is a long-standing problem.

In 2020, Labour kicked me out of the party for saying that I joined the Labour Party to get them to support proportional representation. Labour members have supported proportional voting for several years and made it the party’s official conference policy, yet the leadership has rejected it. Labour just published its Representation of the People Bill.

This is their flagship law to reform our democracy, yet it makes no mention of proportional representation. So Labour is committed to ensuring that most British votes don’t count, because a minority-voted party always get a majority of seats in Parliament.

Wes Streeting, Starmer’s most likely successor, even explicitly confirmed this when I interviewed him at the party conference. When I accused Labour of supporting a system where most votes don’t count, he said, “In the grand scheme of things, I’m more worried about the NHS”.

To which I replied: “So democracy doesn’t matter?”.

Streeting: “Democracy does matter”

Me: “So you want the majority of votes to count, then?”

Streeting “No. We’re focusing on our manifesto.”

No allegiance

So, we are dealing with a Labour Party that is institutionally committed to a voting system that has consistently given us governments that are more right-wing than what the majority of people voted for. Logically, our voting system is the most right-wing policy the UK has ever invented, and yet it is being supported by the party some people still call “the Left”.

If you can’t tell, I have no allegiance to any politician or any party. I backed Corbyn when he campaigned for Remain, opposed him for the three years where he backed Brexit, then campaigned for his Labour Party when he backed a 2^nd referendum in late 2019.

I backed Starmer when he called for a referendum on the Brexit deal in early 2019, then opposed him once he became a genocidal Thatcher tribute act, so I voted Green in 2024.

So, having entered politics in 2016, I’ve only ever really seen Labour copy the biggest right-wing policies of the day. Whether that’s Brexit under Corbyn, or austerity, bigotry and genocide under Starmer. As I said, if your keeper keeps booting the ball into your own net, complaining about the opposing team is pointless. And if you care about protecting people from what happens next (see America), then your allegiance shouldn’t be to any player, whether that player is in green, red or yellow. Besides, this isn’t a game.

Labour is finished

I joined the Green Party in October because they actually want to stop this car from driving to the far right, not simply say slightly nicer things from the passenger seat. Labour has become part of the problem and can’t beat Nigel Farage.

What’s tragic is… on balance, even Reform voters believe Brexit has made us poorer, and they don’t like the Tories. But the Brexit Party changed their name to Reform UK and has populated itself almost exclusively with former Tories.

Yet somehow that’s enough to convince them that they’re not voting for the same Tories who already made them poorer… If simply changing Labour’s leader is enough to convince you that it’s become a whole new party, then stop pretending you’re smarter than a Reform voter.

Featured image via the Canary

Murky think tanks lurking at Tufton Street and Westminster have begun the New Year with a shameful bang. That is to say, the usual way: by scapegoating benefit claimants.

Here are all the (largely) opaquely-funded organisations helping the corporate media manufacture consent for cruel welfare cuts. This is what they’ve been up to so far in their bid to ram forward further callous benefit ‘reforms’ and pit the public against people seeking state support.

Mealy-mouth-pieces in the media vilifying benefits

Shady benefit-slashing machinations abound across the mainstream media. Throughout January, the hate-mongers traded in a reprehensible assortment of stories maligning claimants. By our count, think tanks spawned these pieces in at least 56 instances:

The award for the most despicable attempts to vilify go to…The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) for puerile attempts to pit the public against migrants.

Notably, it tag-teamed with shadow Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) sec Helen Whately in an article for shitrag the Daily Mail. It made up more lies about the numbers claiming welfare to scapegoat refugees and asylum seekers.

So, the usual racist, xenophobic bullshit? We’re not linking to it here.

Other dishonourable mentions included:

• A Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) report triggered no fewer than 21 stories. The analysis attempted to drive a wedge between pensioners and welfare recipients on one end, and workers on the other. Multiple outlets framed it that Labour’s taxes are “hammering” working people, while pensioners and welfare claimants would be “better off”. This would be thanks to inflation-linked increases due to the triple-lock and the increase in Universal Credit’s standard allowance. Of course, every piece failed to mention that new disabled UC claimants will be thousands of pounds worse off after Labour cut the health element almost in half.
• The corporate media churned out no less than 13 articles for the Centre for Social Justice’s (CSJ) Rewiring Education report. Headlines blurted every variation under the sun on ‘700,000 graduates claiming benefits’. Put simply, the report essentially set about discouraging poor kids from going to go to uni — go figure.

And it wasn’t just the print press. Think tank spokespeople and research appeared in a number of TV and radio shows throughout January as well:

CSJ gears up for a vile propaganda drive against benefits claimants

An announcement from Iain Duncan-Smith’s diabolical brainchild drew multiple puff pieces for its latest project to smear claimants. These made the decidedly dubious (more like: utter bullshit) claim that six million Britons would be better off on benefits.

Notably, at the end of January, the think tank decided now’s a good time to amp up the antagonism on disabled welfare claimants. You know, right after a round of vicious benefit cuts that’s set to make some disabled people destitute. Not enough, says blatant misnomer the CSJ.

Now, the think tank has launched its so-called Welfare 2030 enquiry to:

diagnose the causes of escalating worklessness, its harms to struggling families and the cost to the taxpayer.

It says this will involve a “Big Listen” series with its 900+ strong “CSJ Alliance of small charities” throughout spring. Then it plans to take these ideas to the major party conferences. At them, it says it will host ‘debate’ about the so-called “welfare crisis”.

For the project, the CSJ has of course put together a dedicated webpage. There, an animated reel of right-wing foghorns screech out frontpage headlines bleating that “5 million paid not to work” and “Get a grip on welfare… or tax bomb will go off this Autumn”. Foregone conclusion much?

Introducing the enquiry, the ever-ghoulish former grim reaper of the DWP, IDS, was bandying about the establishment’s favourite trope. In particular, he was wanging on that:

The system must stop writing off thousands of people every day, and incentives to work must be restored to end this ruinous waste of human potential.

Hall of infamy (lobbyists not even being shy about it)

Think tanks rarely miss the opportunity to boast their role seeding regressive policy. Case in point:

The Canary’s formidable chief DWP botherer Rachel Charlton-Dailey recently did a scathing and on-point take-down of the government’s wilfully misleading PR about the farcical scheme. Contrary to its name, there’s actually no real evidence it’s actually ‘working well’.

Funnily enough, that’s precisely the title of its predecessor scheme, which the DWP based it on, and the Canary previously showed to be a sham. Needless to say, the CSJ has long been plugging the glorified work programme to coerce chronically ill and disabled people into work.

Weaseling into Westminster

Of course then, this nebulous back-scratching ecosystem would not be complete without Westminster. MPs and peers will regularly lean on think tank talking points that the mainstream media has propagated.

In this way, think tanks and the press are collaborators in manufacturing consent for benefit cuts and other punitive welfare policies. For instance, in January, Conservative MP Harriet Baldwin paraded the CSJ’s latest rotten report on graduates claiming benefits (mentioned above).

However, it’s not only think tank talking points getting around the Palace’s hallowed halls. It’s also the former think tank brains themselves.

As the Canary’s brilliant HG reported, the DWP has set the fox among the henhouse with the appointment of Policy Exchange senior fellow Jean Andre-Prager to the Timms Review steering group.

Meanwhile, former Labour Together bigwigs have also been sneaking their way into the department too.

Serving the interests of billionaires

Ultimately, the point is: from Westminster to the media, think tank ideologues are moving in all the right circles to spread vicious benefit claimant propaganda. The deluge of demonising stories across the pages of the mainstream rumour mill is no accident.

These elitist and covertly-funded capitalist front organisations are driving the attacks on the working class and disabled people from the shadows. All the while, the Labour Party has continued to flirt with ever-more alarming policy ideas these very shady groups have been cooking up.

It’s more than time to shine a searing spotlight on the hidden forces colluding with the billionaire press to dismantle the welfare state.

Featured image via the author

Southwark councillor James McAsh has defected to the Green Party from Labour with a blast at Starmer’s factionalism and red-Tory austerity politics. McAsh was elected as council leader in July 2025, but the central party moved to quash the result and installed a tame Starmeroid.

In his resignation from Labour, McAsh said that he can no longer ask Southwark residents to vote for Starmer’s party because the Labour-run council is:

planning for funding gaps larger than those faced in almost every year of Conservative and Liberal Democrat austerity, this time imposed by a Labour government.

Unless something changes, Labour cuts will devastate the local services that as residents of this fantastic borough, we all rely on.

McAsh added:

I grew up in a Labour household and I’ve devoted much of my adult life to the party. I’m proud of the work I’ve done in Southwark – but Labour is no longer the vehicle for social justice I once thought it was.

He is the fourth Southwark Labour councillor to join the Greens since last year’s scandal and the seventh to resign from Labour. Southwark is part of a London-wide phenomenon of Labour councillors flooding to the Greens since Zack Polanski won that party’s leadership — including at least one deputy mayor.

Featured image via SouthworkNews