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Fake foxes covered in blood with League ‘hunter’ on the streets of London outside the National Gallery.

A huge pile of bloody foxes appeared in central London yesterday [Tuesday] to highlight the scale of illegal hunting in England and Wales that has continued since the government took power.

National animal welfare charity the League Against Cruel Sports was behind the stunt, which saw a “hunter” dump 648 foxes in Trafalgar Square – one for each report the charity has received of a fox being chased by hunts since the summer of 2024.

Meanwhile, animal welfare campaigners from the League-led Time for Change Coalition Against Hunting handed in an open letter signed by more than 36,000 people in just one month to Sir Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street.

The letter, which calls on his government to keep its promise to properly ban hunting wild animals with dogs, comes a year after a 104,000-signature petition calling for stronger hunting laws was handed in to Number 10 on the twentieth anniversary of the Hunting Act coming into force.

Emma Slawinski, League Against Cruel Sports chief executive, said: “The government isn’t keeping its promises, and the dumped bloodied foxes are there to show the scale of illegality that the government is failing to get to grips with.

“The public is repulsed by trail hunting, which is just a smokescreen for foxes and other wild animals still being chased and torn apart by hunt hounds, so we are urging the government to act immediately to end this savage blood sport once and for all.”

The government pledged to ban so-called trail hunting in its manifesto, and further promised to launch a public consultation “in the new year” when it launched its animal welfare strategy before Christmas.

This has not happened.

Emma said: “The time for change is now and the government must urgently launch its consultation, which should also include the removal of the exemptions in the Hunting Act that hunts exploit to get around the current weak law, the introduction of custodial sentences, and the outlawing of reckless, or ‘accidental’ hunting.” 

Polling commissioned by the League Against Cruel Sports and carried out independently by FindOutNow with further analysis by Electoral Calculus in March/April 2024 found that 76 per cent of the public supported stronger fox hunting laws, with only seven per cent disagreeing.

A clear majority of voters in rural as well as urban areas backed new laws to stop foxes being chased by hounds and killed, with 70 per cent of people in the countryside supporting the proposal.

More about how to take part in the consultation, and how people can make their voice heard, is available here: https://www.league.org.uk/hunting_consultation

Cynthia Erivo has insisted that she’s not letting any of the discussions online about her new play Dracula affect her performance.

However, the Oscar nominee has told BBC News that what people have to say about her performance on the internet isn’t something she’s paying all that much attention to.

Cynthia explained: “I’m not paying attention to any of them as no-one knows the experience except me. It’s not for me.

“I have a job to do and I want to do it as well as I can and I want to do it with all my heart. I don’t let the comments take the energy that I should be spending on the stage.”

The British actor conceded that she was “still learning my lines and figuring it out” during her first week of shows, and while Cynthia’s performance has been widely-praised, some reviews from press night acknowledged that there was some “stumbling over her words” and “fumbling” of lines on occasion.

While primarily known for her Oscar-nominated performances in movies like Wicked and Harriet, Cynthia got her start in live theatre, winning a Tony in 2016 for her work in the Broadway musical The Color Purple.

Her new stage venture is directed by Kip Williams, who has previously enjoyed success for his stage adaptations of Jekyll & Hyde and the Olivier-winning The Portrait Of Dorian Gray, the latter of which was also a one-person production starring Succession actor Sarah Snook.

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A Ukrainian athlete was disqualified from the Winter Olympics for a helmet which depicted fellow athletes whom Russia had murdered.

The BBC labelled it:

The Games’ biggest controversy so far.

The Ukrainian athlete, Vladyslav Heraskevych, was wearing a helmet that displayed images of more than 20 fellow Ukrainian athletes, all of whom Russia has murdered since the start of its invasion.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) made the decision due to Heraskevych’s:

refusal to comply with the IOC’s Guidelines on Athlete Expression. It was taken by the jury of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (IBSF) because the helmet he intended to wear was not compliant with the rules.

The IOC Rule 50 states:

No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.

However, nowhere on his helmet did it mention war, Russia, or how Russia killed these people.

Astounding hypocrisy over Russia

At the very same Winter Olympics, Maxim Naumov, an American figure skater, held up a photo of his dead parents as he received his final score.

His parents were world champion figure skaters – but they competed in two Olympics for Russia.

So, athletes are allowed to celebrate dead Russians, but not dead Ukrainians?

Since then, Heraskevych has accused the IOC of fuelling Russia’s propaganda. He added:

it does not look good. I believe it’s a terrible mistake that was made by the IOC.

But the IOC’s hypocrisy doesn’t end there.

Israel is allowed to compete in the event – a literal genocidal terrorist state, with team members who served in the genocidal Israeli Defence Forces who have committed atrocities against Palestinians. Meanwhile, the IOC banned a Ukrainian athlete for wearing a helmet that might upset Putin.

One Swiss commentator called out the Israeli team during a bobsled race. As the Canary previously reported:

Stefan Renna, who works for Swiss Radio and Television (RTS), pointed out that bobsled racer Adam Edelman calls himself “Zionist to the core“. Edelman has also made numerous social media posts supporting Israel’s Gaza genocide. Renna even used the g-word – genocide – that terrifies UK corporate ‘journalists’, referring to the findings of the UN International Commission of Inquiry.

The IOC has maintained that both Israel and Palestine should have equal opportunity to compete at the Games. However, Israel has a team at the Winter Olympics, whilst Palestine does not.

Whilst Palestine has never entered the Winter Olympics, only the summer games, we can put that down to the lack of infrastructure and the continued system of apartheid, which means the country lacks the funding to support its athletes’ development to an elite level. Perhaps Palestine could put a Winter Olympics team together if Israel stopped razing them to the ground every few years.

Israel has murdered over 800 athletes and sporting officials since October 2023. That figure includes more than 100 child athletes. The terrorist state has also destroyed 273 sports facilities – meaning Palestinian athletes who survived have nowhere to train.

Make your mind up

The IOC has banned both Russian and Belarusian athletes from competing under their own flags. Meanwhile, there has, of course, been no equivalent ban for Israeli athletes.

However, in September, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) lifted its ban on athletes from both countries competing at the games, which doesn’t make sense when Russia’s attacks on Ukraine are still ongoing. 

The IOC needs to make up its mind.

Either athletes cannot remember and dedicate their victories or performances to the dead, or they can. And the answer to that should not depend on where they come from.

Similarly, can murderous regimes compete under their state’s flag, or not? Of course, they unequivocally should not. But the IOC cannot have one rule for one and one rule for another.

Obviously, we know why this is. Israel is funding politicians left, right and centre who can put pressure on sporting bodies to have countries banned as and when they see fit, as Lisa Nandy did only this week.

Moreover, the West, the mainstream media, the majority of our politicians, and apparently the IOC, seem to care more about dead white people than they do about dead brown people. The hypocrisy stinks – and Israel should not be allowed to compete whilst simultaneously murdering Palestinians. The double standards are strewn everywhere.

Featured image via ABC News (Australia) & Euro Media News / YouTube

Alexandra Vivona is a family lawyer based in London. She is a grassroots activist and comments on US and British politics.

The Westminster bubble has spent their time gnawing on its own scandals, but the real story, the genuine barometer of where British campaigning is heading, lay hundreds of miles away in the rain‑soaked streets of Gorton and Denton. This is a constituency split down the middle, a place where two political climates exist side by side: Manchester’s youthful, diverse wards on one hand, and Tameside’s older, more traditional communities on the other.

Electoral Calculus claims this seat might even fall to Reform, projecting them at 32 per cent to Labour’s 22.6 per cent and the Greens not far behind on 23.3 per cent. The predicted probability of victory is Reform 61 per cent, Labour 21 per cent and Greens 18 per cent, turning what was once a Labour stronghold into a three‑cornered brawl.

The seat itself contains eight distinct wards: Burnage, Denton North East, Denton South, Denton West, Gorton and Abbey Hey, Levenshulme, Longsight and Audenshaw. Each one brings its own electoral flavour, its own backstory, its own tensions. Manchester’s wards are young, mobile and diverse, with significant population under 35, while the Tameside side skews older and more rooted. You can feel the difference physically when you cross from one into the other.

This was a by‑election I wanted to see firsthand. Not through the usual sanitised tranquilliser of party press releases, but through the raw weather of it: doorstep arguments, half‑lit streets, volunteers stomping through puddles. Politics is only ever truly understood when it’s blowing sideways in the rain.

It was raining steadily when I checked into the hotel, the sort of constant Mancunian drizzle that dulls the edges of everything except political ambition.

The Industrial Estate Odyssey

Reform HQ sits on a Denton industrial estate which has all the glamour of a tax return. The car park was alive with activists. I leaned out of my window, asked if they were Reform, and was directed toward an office thrumming with energy.

Security on the door nodded as if I were entering a private members’ club for the permanently aggrieved. Inside, it felt more like a campaign start‑up than a fringe insurgency: banners, posters, stacks of literature, a photo wall ready for digital consumption.

Matt Goodwin moved past with the steady confidence of a man who has done the work and knows it shows. Zia Yusuf watched everything with quiet precision. An ex–Mumford & Sons guitarist appeared with the kind of unexplained surrealism you eventually stop questioning in politics.

The activists were friendly, brisk, and thrust a clipboard into my hand. Paper, not apps. Ink, not pixels. The old ways. Data is king, and the disciples know it.

Before long, my London polish dissolved and the Mancunian accent came roaring back.

Into Levenshulme, the Forbidden Zone

I stared at the route sheet in disbelief when I saw our destination. Levenshulme. I asked George Hollyhead, the activist I was assigned to, whether this was a joke. He explained that Reform insisted on canvassing everywhere, arguing it was undemocratic to allow whole areas to become no‑go zones. Noble, brave or slightly naive depending on your point of view.

Rain lashed the windows as we drove. Light dimmed. The atmosphere took on the feel of a social science field trip conducted under hostile conditions.

The first door hadn’t even slammed shut behind us when a woman threw open her downstairs window and unleashed a torrent of abuse that could have stripped varnish. She kept going long after we’d moved on, screaming as if we’d stolen something from her, sanity, perhaps.

Every door on the street glowed with Green Party signage. Thousands of tiny, fluorescent reminders that this was not friendly terrain. It felt less like canvassing and more like walking through a theme park designed by George Orwell.

Then, out of the mist, a man with a camera. Eyebrows raised to the heavens. A glint of disbelief. And then the recognition hit: Aaron Bastani, co‑founder and public face of Novara Media, eyebrows raised in amused astonishment.

He looked at our group and asked, with visible disbelief, whether Reform were truly canvassing this side of the constituency. His expression suggested the answer ought to have been no.

“Reform? Here? Really?”

Yes. Really. And the astonishment on his face was the most British thing I’d seen all day.

At this point, the Reform group decided my five‑foot‑three frame and blonde bob did not make me ideally suited to the rising street hostility and ushered me back toward HQ. Chivalry is not dead in British politics; it simply wears waterproofs.

A Darkening Contest

Constituency Chairman, Rob Barrowcliffe, radiated optimism despite the political storm. Three canvassing sessions a day. Volunteers flat out. The classic battle cry of campaigners running on determination and too little sleep. If we lose, he said, there was nothing more we could have done.

If this by‑election is a preview of the general, then Britain is in for three years of political trench warfare conducted in drizzle. Hostility. Suspicion. Demographic territories defended like fiefdoms.

Electoral Calculus’ projections show why emotions here run so high. Labour may have won 50.8 per cent of the vote in 2024, but their predicted share has collapsed. And the Manchester wards, younger and more Green‑inclined, drag the race leftward while the Tameside wards pull hard in the opposite direction. A seat cracked down generational and ideological lines is now expected to produce one of the most volatile results in the country.

Hotel Bar Seminary

Later, at the hotel bar, I met the future of British politics in the form of young activists, everyone seemed to be called Adam. They were polite, Mancunian, and entirely free of the red‑pill nonsense the commentariat claims is consuming all young men.

I had a slight exchange of words with a young female councillor who complained that she wasn’t allowed to run her own TikTok account.

That’s Gen Z: Politics is increasingly just branding with a ballot box attached.

Sunday Surge

Despite my commitment to the previous night’s wine list, I arrived bright‑eyed for the 10 a.m. session, baffling the HQ lads who had assumed I was dead.

Lee Anderson appeared to declare that if Reform could win here, they could win anywhere. Gawain Towler stalked the streets in red scarf and tweed.

Residents were weary. One woman swore everyone had knocked on her door this week, and the numbers backed her up. Labour fielded around a hundred activists on Sunday, and the previous day the area had already been heaving with hundreds more.

Tactical voters spoke cryptically about “doing what’s best for the community,” which invariably means “voting against the people we dislike.”

A regional campaign manager (also named Adam) summarised the battlefield like a general marking trenches. Levenshulme is Green. Longsight is Labour-ish. Burnage, Gorton and Abbey Hey are the pivotal swing wards.

Interesting, it appears the Greens are focusing on leafleting rather than canvassing. Tameside Council candidate, Raymond Dunning, declared that the Greens “aren’t knocking because they’ve nothing to say to the people here,” He further dismissed their rhetoric as merely: “Greyhound dogs and a load of bollocks.”

What Triggered the Contest

The by‑election was precipitated not by policy failure or political fatigue, but by the fallout from a vile and deeply damaging WhatsApp scandal centred on former MP Andrew Gwynne. Messages leaked from the Labour WhatsApp group Trigger Me Timbers revealed Gwynne making offensive remarks about the very residents he was elected to represent, including saying he hoped a 72‑year‑old constituent “croaks” before the next general election, after she complained about bin collections.

The messages also showed him joining conversations laced with racist, sexist and derogatory slurs, contributing to what investigators later described as “complete disregard” for standards in public life among group participants. Gwynne was suspended from the Labour Party in 2025 and ultimately resigned in January 2026, forcing the by‑election.

His downfall has become a symbol of something larger and far more corrosive: a Labour hierarchy seen as insulated, coarse, and contemptuous of ordinary people. The revelations sparked genuine anger in Gorton and Denton, where residents already felt politically overlooked.

Seeing their own MP joking about their deaths, mocking vulnerable individuals, and disparaging local communities confirmed a suspicion long whispered on doorsteps, that the party’s local machine had grown detached from the lives and dignity of those it claimed to champion. The scandal has created a vacuum of trust, and every candidate now must contend with the shadow of a party exposed as out of touch with its own electorate.

Welcome to Gorton

I’m frustrated that this by-election hasn’t had more coverage and that the news cycle is once again dominated by scandals amongst the elite, all taking place within the Westminster village. This only feeds into the problem of an electorate increasingly suspicious and apathetic towards politicians.

Looking closer, it feels like a warning, a premonition of what the next general election will look like. Hostility, demographic silos, tactical voting dressed up as moral superiority, activists marching through hostile terrain with clipboards held like shields.

Gorton and Denton is modern Britain in miniature. Fractured. Suspicious. Bristling. And utterly unpredictable.

And if the Electoral Calculus projections are right, the chaos has only just begun.

So on the one hand there’s obviously very little point paying attention to the SNP’s regional list candidates for May’s Holyrood election, because as this website has comprehensively demonstrated over recent months, the chances of the SNP having any list MSPs elected are remote.

However, nothing is impossible, so let’s take a look at the B team, which also serves as a guide to the party’s upcoming talent taking its first steps towards the gravy bus.

Well, that was even grimmer than expected.

We should probably start at the very bottom of the barrel.

Because the SNP seem absolutely hell-bent on inflicting the utterly loathsome Fatima Joji on the people of Scotland by hook or by crook.

Not only is she the constituency candidate for Aberdeenshire West – currently held by Alexander Burnett for the Tories on a slim majority of under 3,400 and looking very vulnerable given their collapse in national polling from 22% to 11% – but she’s also been voted third on the SNP’s regional list, which sounds like no chance until you realise that the top two (Stephen Flynn and Gillian Martin) will very likely win their constituency seats, which are both currently SNP with the Tories in second.

So in the event that the SNP do fail to win a few constituency seats in the North-East, Joji will effectively be first in line to pick up a list seat even if she hasn’t won Aberdeenshire West. And even in a region currently represented by both Karen Adam and Maggie Chapman, that is a pretty catastrophic degradation in member quality.

But Joji isn’t the only one being offered a belt-and-braces double ticket. Most of the regional lists are being topped by people also standing for (and likely to win) constituency seats, so the electorate’s chances of rejecting them are almost nil. Let’s redline those and see what’s left.

An incredible 45 of the full slate of 71 list candidates (63%) are also contesting constituency seats, which means that some of the very worst of the party’s absolute dregs – including serial carpetbagger Graham Campbell, the hideous Declan Blench and his fellow “Out For Independence” stalwart Michael Gibbons – are actually in pole position to get list seats should the SNP manage to secure any, despite finishing as low as NINTH on the party’s internal ballot.

There’s also a generous smattering of FILTH – Failed In London, Try Holyrood – trying to get back to the trough after being unceremoniously binned at the 2024 UK election.

(bold entry indicates a double ticket, both constituency and list)

John Beare
Steven Bonnar 
Deidre Brock
Alan Brown
Allan Dorans
Patricia Gibson
David Linden 
Kirsten Oswald 
Tommy Sheppard
Alyn Smith
Alison Thewliss 

(You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of some of those names despite them being MPs for years, we hadn’t either. But it’s nice to see serial failure Toni “independence is off the agenda” Giugliano getting yet another swing at it. Poor old Katy Loudon must be gutted.)

Basically, as long as you really really hate women’s rights and represent no danger whatsoever of dissenting from the leadership, the SNP will bust a gut to make sure you get into Parliament somehow, no matter what the voters think.

What all that tells us, of course, is that the SNP’s talent pool has the depth of a soggy tissue, and that its next generation makes the useless current one look like a team of geniuses. Readers, if there were still any of you contemplating a list SNP vote despite everything, we simply invite you to picture Fatima Joji, Graham Campbell and Declan Blench trousering £75,000 a year for the next half-decade and shaping the laws of Scotland while they do it.

There is no rescuing the party. Only its destruction will do.