Politics
These gov candidates stood up to Trump in 2020. Now they’re betting voters have moved on.
State election officials were among the most visible defenders of American democracy after the 2020 election — standing up to President Donald Trump, rejecting false claims and, whether they wanted to or not, becoming national symbols of institutional resistance to his attempts to overturn his election loss.
But as some run for governor in 2026, they are eager to talk about anything but 2020.
More than five years after Trump’s attempt to cling to power ignited a political rallying cry on the left and a loyalty test on the right, these Republican and Democratic candidates are betting — and, in some cases, hoping — that voters have moved on.
A pair of Republican secretaries of state who rejected Trump’s false 2020 election claims and then survived MAGA-fueled 2022 primaries are running for governor. Unsurprisingly, neither is keen to relitigate the issue that linger over their hopes this year.
“2020 is very far behind us as secretaries of state,” Kansas Republican Secretary of State Scott Schwab said. “We remember it, but we’re moving on, and I think the American public is too.”
But Trump isn’t ready to move on, complicating these candidates’ hopes of putting 2020 in the rearview mirror. Speaking before an audience of global leaders and business officials in Davos last week, Trump repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” and promised that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”
Two Democratic secretaries of state are also running for the governor’s mansion. And while defending democracy and their defiance to Trump on election issues forms a defining part of their political biographies, both candidates lead with pocketbook issues rather than making protecting the vote the centerpiece.
“This election is about Michigan, and this election is about who is best positioned to lower costs for the people in our state,” Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told POLITICO.
In many ways, the shift reflects the reality of running for the governor’s mansion. The job description is much broader from the office of the secretary of state — and voters want to hear about what politicians will do for them now.
But it also underscores the political evolution of one of the most animating aspects of Trump’s first term.
For Democrats, democracy was a potent force in 2022, when candidates leaned heavily into running against election deniers. And many Democrats say it’s still effective.
“They use the issue as an illustration of character,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “It really communicates integrity, nonpartisanship, commitment to democracy and freedom, standing up for people, and courage.”
As Democratic candidates’ use of democracy messaging has evolved, strategists say the meaning of “democracy” itself has also shifted since 2020. Then, it was largely about election integrity and the transfer of power. Now, it’s increasingly tied to broader concerns about executive authority, with Democrats arguing they’ll be the ones who can stand up to a president they see as authoritarian.
“This is the moment where you need a governor who won’t bend the knee,” said Benson, who has been outspoken against the Trump administration following back-to-back killings of protestors in Minnesota by federal agents.
Jocelyn Benson
Benson was on the front lines of defending her state’s election results after 2020, facing threats and swatting attacks. That period is a part of her messaging: Her campaign launch video showed news footage of her home being surrounded by protesters, and she remains outspoken against false claims related to the 2020 election.
She has also cast that moment as proof of leadership — and a willingness to stand up to Trump. “We fought back to protect democracy itself and we showed that as state officials, that’s how we have to respond to bullies who try to rip away our rights no matter how powerful they may be,” she said.
But on the campaign trail, Benson has often focused more on bread-and-butter economic issues. Affordability, housing, health care, childcare and energy costs are listed as her top issues on her campaign website.
“What every resident, every citizen, every voter in this election knows is how important it is to have a governor who will fight for them and who will fight for them in a way that that effectively lowers their cost of living while also protecting the safety of themselves, their families and their communities,” Benson told POLITICO.
Brad Raffensperger
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was one of the most prominent Republicans to reject Trump after the president urged him to “find” more votes in his state. The incident propelled him into the national spotlight — and drew fury from the president and his MAGA base, leading to death threats. He warded off a Trump-endorsed primary challenge in 2022, in part by taking his case to conservative media. Now, he’s seeking the governor’s mansion in the state that is in many ways the epicenter of Trump’s bid to hold on to power in 2020.
Raffensperger does not directly talk about the 2020 incident in his launch video or on his campaign website. Instead, he frames his record as evidence that he is willing to make the “tough decisions.” His launch video focuses on creating jobs in Georgia, lowering property taxes and banning transgender women from women sports, among other issues — issues that are key to voters but not central to his current day job.
But Georgia’s 2020 election keeps getting pushed back into the spotlight.
On Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County elections office outside Atlanta, seizing all ballots from the 2020 election there.
“He’s trying to talk about other issues, [but] 2020 keeps coming up,” said Buzz Brockway, a former Republican state legislator who lost to Raffensperger in a 2018 primary.
Brockway said many Republicans have moved on from 2020 — but that there remains a “loud, noisy contingent who are continuing that battle” that Raffensperger will have to contend with, even if most voters’ main focus lies elsewhere.
Raffensperger has largely sidestepped questions about the 2020 election — in a November interview with the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, he said that it showed that he does the “right thing, no matter what.”
“Other people haven’t been put to that test, but we were at the end of the day,” he said.
Raffensperger’s campaign declined to comment for this story.
Still, Raffensperger’ opponents in the GOP primary, particularly Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, are eager to keep 2020 alive in the race. Jones, who was a fake elector in the state, has tried to cast his actions during that period as unflinching loyalty to the president.
“I don’t know that it brings Jones any new voters,” Brockway said, but it may be an effort to “energize his base.”
Scott Schwab
In ruby-red Kansas, Schwab defied some of the loudest voices in his party when he repeatedly rejected false claims about the 2020 election in his role as secretary of state. He has been clear that he does not see that chapter as central to his gubernatorial bid as he runs in a crowded GOP primary.
“Everybody’s concerned about taxes, especially with cost of living,” Schwab, a past chair of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said in an interview. “Property taxes are a real red-hot button in Kansas.”
His campaign launch video only briefly mentions election issues, and almost as an afterthought. “As secretary of state, I streamlined business services and cut bureaucratic red tape,” he said. “I secured our elections, too.”
There remains a segment of the GOP for whom election issues remain salient, said Bob Beatty, a political science professor at Washburn University in Kansas. But for the broader electorate — those most likely to turn out in midterm elections — these issues are still “pretty low down the list.”
In 2022, Schwab, Raffensperger and Benson all prevailed in their reelections, despite facing Trump-backed challengers or outright election deniers.
“I would say that most people really believe that we’ve moved on,” Schwab said.
Shenna Bellows
Democrat Secretary of State Shenna Bellows became Maine secretary of state in January 2021 after being chosen by the state legislature, just as Trump was in the middle of his push to overturn his election loss. In 2023, she ruled that Trump should be barred from the ballot for his conduct during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, a decision later overturned by the Supreme Court.
In the blue-leaning state, and facing a crowded primary, Bellows has been more eager to talk about the issue than some of her fellow chief election officials.
“Leadership is about doing what is right, even when it is hard,” she said in her launch video, which highlighted the threats and harassment she faced as a result of her decision.
In her bid for governor, she has emphasized that anger over Trump’s actions exists in tandem with persistent anxiety about the economy. Like Benson, she has been vocal in criticizing the killings in Minnesota.
“The economy is the number one issue for most Mainers, there’s a lot of economic concern right now, especially in the wake of the tariffs and increasing job losses that we’re about to see,” she told POLITICO.
“That being said, I also think it’s really important to tell the truth,” she said. “What the Trump decision and my work as secretary and defending democracy tells people about me is that I will do the right thing even when it’s hard.”
Norwegian state oil company Equinor has delivered its yearly profits announcement. And campaigners from Fossil Free London have been quick to respond. They’ve accused Equinor of getting “filthy rich” and say it’s “the UK public [that] foots the bill”.
Equinor and Rosebank
Equinor is the majority owner of the Rosebank oil field. Rosebank lies in UK waters and in 2023, then-PM Rishi Sunak said that developing it would help secure UK oil supplies. However, any oil or gas from the field wouldn’t go directly to UK refineries. The owners would sell it on the global markets, meaning the UK could potentially see none of the product or the profit.
Despite this, as the Canary has previously reported, UK public funds are carrying most of the development costs. So the UK is potentially taking a massive loss and creating enormous greenhouse gas emissions for negligible benefit.
Ahead of Equinor’s announcement, activists from Fossil Free London staged a striking ‘oil spill’ protest outside the company’s London HQ. Wearing rose-themed dresses and dripping in treacle, to mimic oil, they called attention to its role in Rosebank.
Commenting on Equinor’s results, Robin Wells, director of Fossil Free London, said:
Equinor are getting filthy rich from filthy fossil fuels, whilst the UK public foots the bill. And it’s never been more of a rip off. As Equinor drives Rosebank forward, they’ve newly buddied up with Shell in a new North Sea venture to dodge £1.3bn in tax.
It’s clear that we cannot afford to neglect climate action. The UK will face over a trillion pounds in costs as the result of the climate crisis in the next decade.
The UK Government must not back Big Oil’s Big Money and support climate denial. They must back people’s survival, and stop this carbon bomb. They must stop Rosebank.
Featured image by Jack Taylor
The Labour Party was established in 1900 to represent the interests of the British working class and to promote the values of the Enlightenment. Yet recent YouGov polling shows Labour has more support among people earning over £70,000 than any other party. Meanwhile, Reform UK has become the most popular party among the working class and those least well-off. How has it come to this?
We – Sir Robin Wales and Clive Furness – have over a century of experience as Labour Party members between us. The two of us have shared almost half of that time in elected office. We remain committed to the principles that brought us into politics and to the people we sought to represent.
That said, today’s Labour Party lacks vision. It is swayed by whatever political fad is in fashion and has abandoned those it was originally formed to stand for. Since taking office, the current Labour government has demonstrated, at best, ineptitude, and at worst, an outright disdain for working people.
In British towns and cities, we can observe that Labour is not building a society for all. Instead, it is engaging in transactional politics with identitarian ‘communities’, and buying off power brokers with office, honours and access to money. Genuinely liberally minded individuals from minority communities end up marginalised in favour of reactionaries who can command a ‘bloc vote’.
With anti-Semitism on the rise, it is impossible to ignore that the world’s oldest hatred has put down roots in the Labour Party. We have seen this in our local constituency parties. We have seen it on the streets and in social media. Yet the Labour leadership still pussyfoots around the issue, turning a blind eye to those among the party’s ranks who engage in such behaviour. How many Labour Party members feel there is a religious obligation to rid the world of Jews, one wonders?
Then there is the grooming-gangs scandal. The party’s reluctance to hold Labour-run councils to account over their role in the scandal has only compounded the harm suffered by thousands of girls and young women. For years, it failed to even acknowledge the gangs’ existence. Even now, following the revelations made in Louise Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Exploitation and Abuse, London mayor Sadiq Khan refuses an independent inquiry into the extent of the problem in the nation’s capital – presumably for fear of what it might find.
The failures of Labour affect virtually every corner of Britain thanks to its inability to tackle illegal immigration. Indeed, this is an issue that the party has prevaricated over for years, but on which it has managed to make almost no headway. While home secretary Shabana Mahmood is talking tough, her backbenchers and activist ‘supporters’ continue to champion open borders.
Everywhere one looks, Labour is in disarray. By all accounts, it is complicit in the systematic erosion of the key principles of the Enlightenment – liberty of person and thought, free expression, scientific enquiry, and reason as opposed to dogma. Labour’s abandonment of these values is perhaps best demonstrated by its approach to free speech – a liberty that Keir Starmer’s government has shown no interest in defending. The use of the Public Order Act to shut down speech that some unspecified person might find ‘offensive’ is an affront. Police resources have been wasted collating information on ‘non-crime hate incidents’. And endless time is being spent on discussing an official, all-encompassing definition of ‘Islamophobia’ – never mind the fact that discrimination on the grounds of faith and race is already covered by the Equality Act 2010. Meanwhile, a school teacher who did no more than show cartoons of Muhammad during a lesson on blasphemy continues to live in hiding from religious bigots who threaten his life.
Labour’s embrace of transgender ideology has been particularly dispiriting. Back in April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that the terms ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. The case, brought by For Women Scotland, clarified the law, making it clear that sex triumphs over wishful thinking. New guidelines from the Equality and Human Rights Commission followed. Nonetheless, a full nine months later, secretary of state for education Bridget Phillipson, who has the backing of unions GMB and Unison (both cheerleaders for gender self-ID), has yet to publish any updated guidance on single-sex spaces. The fact that Keir Starmer has come around to the idea that women can’t have a penis is certainly progress – but behind the words of frontbenchers lies an unreconstructed activist hinterland. Rather than confront them, party leadership quietly appeases them.
Economically, Labour seems clueless. Recent party policy is unacceptably hostile to our private-sector wealth creators. In increasing the employer national-insurance contributions, chancellor Rachel Reeves appears determined to make businesses pay (literally) for her financial mismanagement. She reserves particular contempt for publicans and farmers. Pressure from public-sector unions has resulted in an unbalanced Employment Rights Act, widely predicted to discourage new job hires. The loss of jobs, particularly for young people, seems not to matter to Labour politicians anymore.
Reeves has decided that buying popularity with free cash now is more appealing than developing a long-term strategy to increase the economic welfare of citizens who just want to take care of their families. The current government runs a massive deficit, requiring significant amounts of tax just to pay the interest. We are not blind to the fact that much of this was a bequest from previous Tory governments, but if we don’t tackle it now, our children and grandchildren will be the ones to pay the price.
We need a fundamental review of what the government spends money on, and why. When we ran Newham Council during David Cameron’s ‘austerity’ government, we froze council tax for 10 years, made no cuts to services and ran a large jobs brokerage, delivering the largest increase in employment in England. With a satisfaction rate of 80 per cent, we were the most popular council in the UK. We demonstrated that it is possible to review and improve public services without additional large dollops of cash.
As lifelong Labour Party members, our principles have not changed. We remain on the ‘left’ and believe that things can be changed for the better. But it will most certainly not be done by this government, or even a Labour government under a different leader. The rot has set in too deep. We have therefore decided to terminate our Labour Party membership. We know many people in the party will say good riddance – it is a tribal culture after all – but after a century of commitment, it is surely reasonable to ask Labour members to pause and consider why we are leaving. The repeated postponement of local and regional democratic elections may mean that, for some of us, it will be a long time before we can make our feelings known at the ballot box.
Sir Robin Wales served as Mayor of Newham from 2002 to 2018.
Clive Furness is a former Newham councillor and executive member.
On World Cancer Day, patients in Gaza face a double and merciless threat: cancer itself and a devastated healthcare system.
Thousands now face an uncertain future after hospitals were damaged and the only specialised cancer centre stopped operating. Border crossings remain closed, preventing patients from travelling for treatment.
Gaza’s health situation is no longer a temporary crisis. It has become a daily tragedy.
Patients are trapped between severe physical pain and the absence of essential medicines. Hospitals lack early-diagnosis tools and proper monitoring, turning treatable cancers into life-threatening cases.
Gaza — the grim health reality
The Palestinian Ministry of Health, in a statement seen by Kanari, says around 11,000 cancer patients in Gaza are now deprived of specialised treatment and proper diagnosis. Conditions worsened after specialised hospitals were rendered inoperable and the Gaza Cancer Center was destroyed, pushing the health system close to total collapse.
More than 4,000 patients with referrals for treatment abroad have been waiting over two years for crossings to open. Their health continues to deteriorate while they wait.
A 64% shortage of cancer medicines, alongside the absence of MRI and mammography machines, has sharply increased delayed diagnoses and mortality risks.
Humanitarian and social impact
The cancer crisis in Gaza extends far beyond physical suffering.
Patients and families live under immense psychological pressure, caught between fear of death and the inability to access or afford treatment. Harsh living conditions intensify that burden. The wider community also suffers. Cancers easily treatable elsewhere become prolonged battles in Gaza, draining families emotionally and financially.
International silence deepens patients’ sense of abandonment, worsening an already profound humanitarian trauma.
Urgent international appeal
The Palestinian Ministry of Health has called for immediate international action to allow patients to travel for treatment, ensure the entry of vital medicines, and rebuild cancer care facilities.
The ministry warned that continued inaction amounts to a slow death sentence for thousands, cautioning that Gaza faces an unprecedented health and humanitarian catastrophe unless urgent intervention occurs.
Featured image via Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Politics
Politics Home | Starmer Agrees To Give All Mandelson Material To Key Committee After Labour MPs Threaten Rebellion
3 min read
Keir Starmer has avoided a major backbench rebellion after agreeing to give all documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador to a cross-party parliamentary committee.
The government had originally planned to withhold documents that it said would undermine national security and international relations. Starmer set out this position in PMQs on Wednesday lunchtime.
However, a significant number of Labour MPs threatened to support a motion tabled by the Conservatives calling for the release of all material related to Mandelson’s appointment, forcing the government to agree a compromise before a planned vote in the evening.
Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, who is widely seen as a leading candidate to succeed Starmer in Downing Street, played a leading role from the Labour backbenches in forcing the government to change its position.
In frantic scenes in the House of Commons this afternoon, the government tabled a further amendment, saying that documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment that are redacted on security grounds will be referred to the intelligence and security committee.
While the government avoided a Labour rebellion, the events represent a significant blow to the authority of the Prime Minister, whose judgment is being called into question over his original decision to appoint Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US.
Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff, who played an instrumental role in the decision to bring Mandelson into government, is also facing intense Labour MP pressure.
However, a statement by the Metropolitan Police on Wednesday night further complicated the next steps, with Scotland Yard saying it has asked Downing Street not to publish documents that could undermine its own criminal investigation into the former ambassador.
Starmer sacked Mandelson in September after details about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein started to emerge.
Mandelson has resigned from the House of Lords amid the growing scandal over his links to Epstein, while the government has said it will use legislation to strip him of his peer title.
Starmer announced earlier today that he had agreed with the King to remove Mandelson from the Privy Council, accusing his former ambassador in Washington of betraying his country.
The PM admitted to MPs that he was aware of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein when he gave him the senior diplomatic role, but said that Mandelson “lied” to him about the depth and extent of that relationship.
His admission that he was aware of the relationship at the time of the appointment caused consternation among Labour MPs.
One Labour MP described PMQs as “brutal” for Starmer, describing the mood among Labour backbenchers to PoliticsHome as: “It wasn’t pity. But there was no willing him the [PM] on.”
Speaking during a debate following PMQs, Labour MP and former police officer Matt Bishop said that the trust built by the government’s Violence Against Women and Girls strategy “risks being profoundly undermined when we appear unwilling to apply the same standards of transparency and accountability to those closest to power as we demand elsewhere”.
He later added: “If we are not fully transparent about how we vetted the ex-US ambassador in the face of such scandal, how on earth can we expect victims to come forward in future.”
Emily Thornberry, chair of the foreign affairs committee, asked if pressure had been put on the Foreign Office to process the vetting of Mandelson quickly.
Additional reporting by Adam Payne
Israel is always the victim — in its own eyes. That applies to the groups that support it too, like the avowedly Zionist ‘Board of Deputies’ (BOD). So, naturally, as far as the BOD is concerned today’s exoneration by a jury of six anti-genocide Palestine Action activists is not justice. It’s a slight to the BOD and other Israel supporters.
It’s ‘antisemitism’, in other words.
In a statement, the BOD described the verdicts as “troubling”. It then said that “respect [for] the judicial process” is “important”. And it then made clear that it has no respect for the judicial process by implying the acquittals don’t mean, under British law, that the accused are innocent of the serious charges against them. Therefore they are still guilty and deserving of punishment they should not be “able to evade”.
Evade by means of being found not guilty. The fiends.
BOD releases a statement after Palestine Action activists’ acquittal
This was the BOD’s nonsense in full:
04.02.2026
We are concerned by the troubling verdicts acquitting members of Palestine Action, an organisation that has been proscribed as a terrorist group, and whose activities have included targeting businesses linked to the Jewish community in London and Manchester.
While it is important to respect the integrity of the judicial process, there is a serious danger of perverse justifications being used as a shield for criminality. It cannot be the case that those who commit serious criminal acts, including violent assaults, are able to evade the consequences of their actions.
We look to the Government to provide clear direction in tackling hate crime and extremist violence. This incident underlines the urgency of the Home Office’s current review into public order and hate crime legislation.
We are grateful to the officers who attended the scene and the CPS for prosecuting this case. We urge the prosecution to proceed with a retrial in respect of those charges where the jury was unable to reach a verdict, particularly given the severity of the injury suffered by Police Sergeant Evans.
To be clear: none of the defendants has been found to have injured police sergeant Evans.
And, since it’s certain neither the BOD nor the UK corporate media are ever going to refer to it, video evidence proved that police and security guards lied about pretty much everything that happened. And the accusers were not even able to come up with convincing lies even though the police left the Israeli arms-maker in charge of the video evidence for a whole year.
Scandalously, despite the verdicts, the CPS has demanded that the humanitarian defendants — after a year and a half as political prisoners — must not simply walk free. Five of them have been put back on bail — and one, Sam Corner, has been denied bail and put back in prison.
Of course we must never forget that Israel and its lobby are always the victim. Even when they’re slaughtering innocent Palestinians and making up bollocks in court to imprison people trying to stop them.
Featured image via FiltonActionists
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The new additional government amendment – on top of its original one – says: “any papers which are prejudicial to UK national security or international relations will be referred to the Intelligence and Security Committee.” Angela Rayner wins. This was rejected by Starmer at PMQs and in the original amendment. Days since last U-turn: zero……
Keir Starmer is fighting for his political life after the row over his decision to make Peter Mandelson the UK’s ambassador to Washington threatens to end his premiership.
The prime minister is facing mounting fury from Labour MPs after confirming that he knew about Mandelson’s ongoing friendship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein when he gave him the plum diplomatic job.
Starmer made the shocking admission as he endured a torrid prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons.
One Labour MP told HuffPost UK that watching Starmer’s performance was “like being present at the political death of the prime minister”.
“It’s made his position far, far worse,” the MP said. “I couldn’t believe some of his answers. We were aghast.”
In a fresh humiliation for the PM, the government was also forced to U-turn over its plans to publish the behind-the-scenes communications which took place before Mandelson was made ambassador.
Downing Street had initially said that documents relating to national security and the UK’s relations with other countries would remain under wraps.
However, after a major intervention by former deputy PM Angela Rayner, and with the government facing an embarrassing defeat in the Commons, No.10 agreed that MPs on the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) will be allowed to see those papers to decide whether they can be made public.
One MP said: “I’m relieved that we’ve got to a better place but why have we had to go through this?”
The developments left Starmer’s political authority severely damaged and led to veteran left-winger John McDonnell calling on him to think about quitting as PM.
He told ITV News: “I think he really needs to consider his position about how he goes forward on this because this is one of those issues which could not just bring down a prime minister, but bring down a government.
“I think he should consider his track record, is he performing the role responsibly, and I think the responsibility is on his shoulders to think whether he’s doing the right thing by staying on.”
Starmer’s leadership crisis has been triggered by the revelations about the extent of Mandelson’s links to Epstein, which emerged in documents released last weekend by the US Department of Justice.
Mandelson, who was sacked as US ambassador just seven months after Starmer appointed him, is facing a criminal investigation over claims he passed market sensitive information to the billionaire financier when he was business secretary in Gordon Brown’s government.
At PMQs, Starmer said Mandelson – who this week quit the House of Lords – had “betrayed” Britain by his actions.
He also said Mandelson had “lied repeatedly” when being vetted for the ambassador’s role.
“I regret appointing him,” Starmer said. “If I knew then what I know now, he wouldn’t have been anywhere near government.”
The post Andrew Lawrence: Britain’s most cancelled comedian appeared first on spiked.
Almost 400 medicines are vulnerable to shortages in the UK, according to a new list produced by NHS England and Medicines UK. Among the drugs on the list are treatments for blood clots, stroke, and several cancers.
The medicines were identified as at-risk because they have either a single supplier, or no supplier at all. Often, drug companies stop producing specific medicines because they no longer see them as commercially viable.
Having identified this vulnerability, NHS England and its partner organisations are taking steps to mitigate the problem. They’re calling the initiative ‘Project Revive’, providing incentives for drug companies to manufacture the medicines on the list.
Whilst undoubtedly an important step towards ensuring the resilience of the medical supply system in the UK, this is a treatment for a symptom, rather than a cure.
We’re in this mess in the first place because we treat drug manufacture as a commercial market, where companies can compete, patent, price gouge, and drop drugs when they stop making money. That commercialisation of healthcare costs lives.
NHS shortage of ‘products of critical priority’
In total, NHS England identified 378 drugs on its list of vulnerable medicines. Of these, around 80 no longer have a supplier at all, meaning that the currently existing supply is all that remains.
The medicines on the list include bendamustine, a chemotherapy drug used for several cancers; flupentixol, which is used for schizophrenia; and urokinase, a treatment for pulmonary embolism. The prices that the UK pays for these drugs could soar if demand starts to outpace supply.
NHS England produced its list alongside Medicines UK, a trade body representing manufacturers of generic medicines. Mark Samuels, Medicines UK’s chief executive, said:
The list includes products of critical priority and the ambition is to target those medicines representing the most serious risk to supply resilience, which could lead to shortages affecting patient care.
Drugs which have faced shortages across the UK in recent years include estradiol, an element of hormone replacement therapy; lisdexamfetamine, an ADHD medication; and Creon, which is used to treat cystic fibrosis.
Project Revive
However, NHS England, Medicines UK, and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) plan to tackle the problem of shortages through ‘Project Revive’. This scheme will provide incentives like fast-tracked license approvals to enable manufacturers to supply the 378 drugs on the list.
The pilot of Project Revive will run for 12 months. Then, in 2027, coordinators plan to instate a long-term iteration of the same scheme. Samuels explained that:
We have long stated that medicine shortages cannot be solved in isolation, and this project shows what can be achieved by working together. By working with NHS England and MHRA, we hope that this new model provides more certainty to enable companies to produce and supply medicines for use in the NHS.
Fiona Bride, interim chief commercial officer for NHS England, echoed that sentiment:
Ensuring a resilient and stable supply of medicines is fundamental to delivering patient care, with pharmaceuticals being the most common healthcare intervention in the NHS, and this collaborative pilot initiative aims to strengthen that supply chain by incentivising more companies to become NHS suppliers, or deepen existing partnerships.
Treating the symptom
The news of Project Revive comes after medicine pricing issues hit the headlines last year. Several of the world’s biggest drug manufacturers announced that they were ditching their UK projects.
Critics from within the industry blamed uncompetitive prices for new medicines, low levels of government investment, and Trump’s tariffs adding to supply prices.
Then, in September 2025, science minister Patrick Vallance argued that the NHS would have to pay higher prices for medicines to prevent pharmaceutical investors from abandoning the UK.
This is a problem inherent to introducing a profit motive to any aspect of healthcare, all across the world. Treating medicine as a capitalist exercise creates a host of problems for patients, who should always have been the center of the issue.
Meanwhile, the global pharmaceutical industry has raked in profits at higher margins than practically any other sector.
Profit over patients
As NHS England showed in the Project Revive research, drug companies can cease supply of individual medicines if their profits aren’t high enough. This can leave patients without crucial medications that they need.
Likewise, manufacturers can also raise their prices artificially if they aren’t faced with competition from other companies, or if other countries are willing to pay higher prices. Patents and intellectual property rights for individual drugs can also allow companies to create artificial scarcity.
Even beyond this, the profit motive causes problems with the development of new medicines. Companies aim to develop medicines in profitable sectors, particularly cancer and rare diseases. This, in turn, sees less-profitable diseases neglected in terms of research and development.
Likewise, even the idea of curing a disease can be anathema to a profit motive. In a choice between being paid once to cure a patient, or being paid again and again to treat a disease without curing it, the latter is the profitable choice. For example, one damning Goldman Sachs report stated that:
The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies…. While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.
Project Revive looks like an important step towards strengthening the UK’s drug supply chain. However, it’s a band-aid on a problem which will take far more work to heal.
In the UK, we fear the loss of socialised healthcare through the NHS, but the private sector already has its hooks in the system at every level.
There’s no easy fix for the problem of private profiteering in medicine. Capitalism itself is an enemy of good healthcare. It sounds glib, we know, but it’s also true. Failing to recognise that fact will mean that we’re trapped in a cycle of treating the symptoms, whilst neglecting their cause.
Featured image via the Canary
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