Conor Boyle is a young conservative and unionist from Northern Ireland, an Oxford graduate, and now works in the financial services sector.

Civil service reform used to be a topic reserved for genuine political anoraks, and A-Level politics teachers, but if we want the country to succeed, it’s going to have to become an issue on all our lips.

The permanent system of government in the United Kingdom is often heralded as a model of good administration.

We’re told that the British model is the ‘Rolls Royce” Civil Service, capable of governing a vast global Empire and achieving some heroic feats. This is all very much in the past. And the issues with today’s civil service are the major roadblocks to a building a more successful, prosperous, efficient Britain. The are, to my mind, two serious problems. The first is the mentality and culture of our bureaucracy, and the second is the inability to do anything about it.

On the civil service themselves, without being impolite to our public servants, but I highly doubt many of the current crop would have made it in the days when Wellington or Disraeli were running the British Government. I have heard commentators from Tony Young to Dominic Cummings lay the decline in calibre of our public servants at the feet of the push to remove the aristocracy (who they argue felt a mitral burden of duty and service to the country) in favour of a merit-based system unveiled after the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms.

I’m not sure how much there is to this theory, I don’t propose to explore it further. My initial gripe is that, at the moment, we don’t have a meritocratic civil service, and culture turns away good, able, energetic young people before they reach senior positions. This is undoubtedly true. Seventy years ago, let’s say, the top graduates of our great universities would bite your hand off for a job in the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, and many more government departments and agencies alike.

While may talented youngsters are, of course, still applying to become diplomats and what-not, it is no longer the case that the civil service attracts talent on a scale even close to the private sector. Consider that, a century ago, the type of young person being recruited for the likes of Stripe or SpaceX, seen a career in the Home Civil Service as having a greater level attractiveness to a private venture.

Now, it’s not even close.

Never-mind the super and futuristic companies mentioned above, the Civil Service can’t even compete with the relatively run-of-the-mill private sector jobs in London and the South-east. Part of this is money, of course (although, not if you subscribe to the argument about aristocrats and their love of service) but it’s also something deeper; the feeling that you’ll achieve something, be part of something special or important in a fast-paced private sector role; whereas in the civil service there is a perception – borne out by reality these days – that your job would be to push the pen and watch a managed decline.

Now, there will be a sort-of chicken and egg argument here about which caused which. Did the civil service stop attracting the best and brightest because Britain is no longer a great power, or did we stop being a great power because the talent intake dried up. The answer to that question I do not have, but I’m not sure that’s even the most important point.

The point is that the current civil service cannot hold a candle to its former self, and the country is suffering as a result. Readers who are alive in modern Britain will not need a reminder of this. Infrastructure projects don’t get built, or when they do, they’re very late and more costly than ‘anticipated’, the government can’t manage large data sets without losing some of it, there’s no joined-up or long-term thinking when it comes to procurement, the services provided are inefficient and the negotiating skill leaves a lot to be desired.

The reason for all of this, in my view, is the lack of a proper incentive structure. On the one hand, it appears nearly impossible to be dismissed from the civil service for not being very good, and there appears to be no consequences for catastrophic failure. On the other, there is neither the political will nor the public appetite to provide large rewards for a job done really well.

It seems to be an unfortunate truth that civil servants can fail upwards.

Doing the job, having held the very eminent position, is an achievement in itself. It’s the sort of London dinner party mentality that says, “ooh what an impressive title he’s got”. Despite the fact that the public have been broadly unimpressed by the performance of the NHS for the last ten or fifteen years, all permanent secretaries in the Department of Health leave with not only their generous pension package, but with a knighthood.

The gong, which ought to be awarded for having done something good, worthwhile or impressive, is merely a perk of the job, regardless of how well or badly the job is actually done. This is surely bizarre.

The other big problem is the political impossibility of changing any of this.

Any notion of substantial reform to the civil service is met with the howls of derision, and firm clutching of pearls.

The high-pitched screeches of “politicization” can be heard from all directions. To me, this is a sort of luxury belief that merely exists to ensure that entrenched interests aren’t disrupted by the will of the voters if they prove too radical. Just a few years ago I might’ve called that view a conspiracy theory, but I believe it’s as clear as day now. In the early twentieth century, a Labour government would’ve complained that the Whitehall mandarin was obstructing their programme, and the civil service was broadly a soft-Tory institution.

Today, the civil service would probably be described accurately as socially liberal, fairly internationalist/multilateralist and somewhat Keynesian in their economic philosophy. Obviously, this is painting with a broad brush, and I want to avoid the claim often made some on the right that the civil service is rabidly left wing or anything of the sort. I don’t think there’s much malign intent here, just a relatively common “do-gooder” attitude to the politics. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a perfectly legislate world view.

The problem is that it stays constant in the heart of the British government even as the voters opt for a different direction of government from election to election. It is bizarre to me that “politicized” carries such weight as an insult, surely we want the officials implementing government policies to be invested in the policies’ success.

As such, I would be in favour of a new system which allowed ministers to appoint senior civil servants to oversee the implementation of the Government’s programme, including Permanent Secretaries. Minister should have trusted advisers who also believe in the mission they are carrying out. I believe there are lots of benefits that would come from this.

Firstly, I think the quality of our public discourse would be enhanced markedly because think tanks would be empowered and become a much more important institution in British politics. This is because, when a party is in opposition, the would-be political appointees in the civil service will not be employed by the state and so would take up roles in think tanked which are broadly aligned to their political masters’ tastes.

For instance, young, smart thinkers on the right would spend these years in the likes of the Institute for Economic Affairs, Adam Smith Institute, or the Centre for Policy Studies, building up the knowledge and intricate detail of policy and implementation. As the think tanks grow stronger with high calibre, passionate, intakes, their production of research, papers, memos will be strengthened. As such, on both sides, our politicians will be well-armed with the facts, arguments and intuition for all of the policy ideas that are floating around our political system.

Secondly, the state will be better run with outsiders and true believers being responsible for policy. Under this type of regime, civil servants could properly be held to account in front of Parliament, because the old rules would no longer apply. This means that those responsible for projects that go wrong can be dismissed forthwith. Most importantly, ministers will, for the first time in decades, be in control of their departments. Currently, as I see it, a Minister of the Crown is a glorified press secretary for their department who answers to the press and on the floor of the House of Commons. The tortured metaphor of “pulling the lever but nothing working” would be consigned to the dustbin of history, because ministers would be directing officials who are loyal to the Government’s policy programme. The institutional power base of the Civil Service, which is considerable to say the least, will be significantly weakened by the ability of a minister to appoint trusted confidants to positions within the command structure of a department.

It is always the political moderates in our society today – the Lib Dems, Tory wets and the New Labour crowd – who are most appalled by this idea. It’s the sort of people (and their voters) who stand to lose most from a government with a radical vision (in any ideological direction). Thus, the compliant about “politicizing” the civil service is one they make rather disingenuously. Currently, I would argue that the administrative state is akin to a Blairite think tank. The political bias of the current system suits them nicely. It’s not that they’re trying to protect a truly neutral system. What I’m proposing is to simply make the political bias more open and honest, so that no one is under any illusions or pretences.

It goes without saying that this more radical reform can only come after getting the basics right. Restore appointment and promotion based on ability alone, removing any quotas or requirement on the basis of immutable characteristics, looking beyond university graduates alone for top jobs, end promotion and pay policy based on seniority or length of service in favour of a performance-based system, and begin the long-overdue process of downsizing much of the Civil Service to reduce overmanning.

This is necessary, so that decisions taken by Governments are implemented without needless layers of bureaucracy and second-guessing by well-meaning officials. And when the policy is delivered, its success or failure can be judged, and decision-makers held to account. This is good for democracy. This is good for Britain.

David Rose is Policy and Research Director of the Free Speech Union.

 The Free Speech Union has long been concerned that the Government’s plan to issue an official definition of Islamophobia – or ‘anti-Muslim hostility’, as leaks suggest it has been re-named – will, if adopted, gravely threaten freedom of expression.

Announcing her appointment of a five person “Working Group” tasked to produce it in February last year, the then-Communities Secretary Angela Rayner insisted it would be non-statutory, and hence “compatible” with free speech rights. Our Director, Lord Young, disagreed, arguing it would lead to self-censorship and the restriction of lawful discourse by both private and public bodies. He also pointed out that discrimination and hate crimes against Muslims are already sanctioned by the civil and criminal law. Any definition would thus either be pointless, or it would threaten freedom of speech.

Such a definition is a longstanding demand made by Islamist organisations with which successive UK governments have had a policy of non-engagement, such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), thanks to the extremist views expressed by some of their leaders, such as support for Hamas and other militant groups.

However, as I point out in Anti-Free Speech Hostility: The Islamist Links of the Government’s Working Group on Islamophobia, an investigative FSU briefing published today, it turns out that all the Working Group members have had close links to Islamist individuals or organisations, including the Group’s Chair, the former Tory attorney-general Dominic Grieve KC.

In a letter to Angela Rayner in June, Young raised a further, worrisome issue: that although Rayner claimed that the Group had been chosen to reflect  “a wide range of perspectives”, four of its members had already expressed strong support for an earlier definition, that issued by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims in 2018. Its somewhat indigestible text  – that Islamophobia is “rooted in racism and a type of racism that targets expressions of  or perceived Muslimness” – was widely condemned by liberal and feminist Muslims, who said it would be weaponised by authoritarians to prevent both criticism of Islam and the highlighting of issues such as the disproportionately Muslim heritage of members of child sex grooming gangs. No one on Rayner’s Group shares that view.

Grieve, the only member of the Group who is not a Muslim, wrote a supportive Foreword to the APPG’s 2018 report. In coming to favour an official definition, he appears to have changed his views to a significant extent, although he denies this.

Yet until 2013, Grieve made a series of strong statements about Muslims’ religious and political attitudes, claiming, for example, that Muslims were trying to change society in ways that were inimical to pluralist democracy. He argued then that what he termed “political correctness” and “identity politics” arising from multiculturalism posed a serious threat to free speech and civil society. He told me he regarded his past and present views as consistent, saying the linking thread was his desire to reduce Muslims’ alienation from public life. Nevertheless, it is a matter of record that he said nothing supportive of an official  definition until 2017, when he chaired a “citizens’ commission” on British Muslims in 2017.

Its report, The Missing Muslims, thanked the then-head of the MCB as a key adviser, while its consultative “Muslim leadership group” included further MCB and MEND luminaries – including Sahar al-Faifi, MEND’s organiser in Wales, who had blamed the London Bridge terrorist attack that killed 11 people on “pro-Zionists, pro-war individuals such as Robert Rosenkranz, Lord Ashcroft and Lord Kalms the owner of Dixons”. She had also tweeted support for Hamas.

The other Working Group members also have questionable links. Asha Affi, billed by Rayner as an “independent consultant”, stood as a council candidate for the far-left, Islamist-aligned Respect Party in 2010. For the previous five years, Respect’s highest-profile figure had been an MP for the borough where Affi stood — its sometime leader George Galloway, Saddam Hussein’s erstwhile admirer and  an outspoken defender of the Iranian and former Syrian regimes. He had also praised the Hezbollah terrorist group, saying in 2009 he wanted to “glorify” because it was “right to fight Zionist terror”.

Group member Akeela Ahmed has long suggested that discourse must be regulated by the state to protect Muslims from harm. In 2018, as Young noted in his letter to Rayner, Ahmed told the APPG that the Islamophobia definition it was then considering must have “legal power”, so that it could be “implemented by the Government and the police”.

Meanwhile Ahmed has for years worked closely with Miqdaad Versi,  the head of the MCB’s media monitoring unit, trying to block “Islamophobic” journalism. Last year she set up a new body that aims to engage with government, the British Muslim Network. Working with her was its then and current co-Chair, Qari Asim, a Sunni imam who was sacked by the last Tory government for attempting to restrict free speech after supporting protests against the film Our Lady of Heaven, which takes a Shia perspective on Islam. He has also cultivated relationships with Pakistani imams who support the death penalty for blasphemy and venerate the killer of the liberal former Punjab governor Salman Taseer, and arranged speaking tours for them in England.

Ahmed is also chief executive of the British Muslim Trust, a newly-established organisation that last July was awarded government grants worth £2.65 million by Rayner’s department – to assist victims of Islamophobia. This followed a campaign against the previous recipient of such funding, Tell MAMA, which was founded and led by Fiyaz Mughal, a fierce critic of Islamists. The campaign embraced critical articles in the left-wing Byline Times by Akeela’s husband Nafeez, and speeches in the Lords by another Working Group member, Baroness Shaista Gohir, who claimed – without adducing evidence – that Tory governments had “used” Tell MAMA to monitor extremists, not support victims of hate crime.

As for Gohir, in 2014 she posted tweets supportive of Hamas, and her son, who ran her parliamentary office until last year, claimed Israel fabricated evidence of the Hamas massacre of 7th October 2023. She too supported the APPG definition, and authored a report saying that to discuss the Muslim heritage of child sex grooming gangs is Islamophobic.

The last Group member, Javed Khan, runs Equi, a think tank that published a report last year arguing that “misinformation’” about Muslims should be combatted by the state.

In September 2025, together with Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s former first minister, Khan was one of two keynote speakers at the launch of the UK branch of an international organisation based in Turkey, the Muslim Impact Forum (MIF), which has close ties to the  Islamist regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At the time Khan spoke, the MIF’s website had for months been featuring an interview with Asim Qureshi, the Policy Director of CAGE, the terrorist prisoners’ support group, who once described Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS executioner better known as “jihadi John”, as a “beautiful young man”. In his MIF interview, Qureshi said he hoped to build support for destroying the “evil” state of Israel once and for all, since it “should not be allowed to exist”.

Meanwhile, Labour continues to haemorrhage support to the electoral umbrella group known as The Muslim Vote, whose leaders include key figures from the MCB and MEND. The Government is running scared: a TMV rival slashed Wes Streeting’s once huge majority in 2024 to barely 500, and as he noted in his published texts to Peter Mandelson, it is likely that Labour will lose both its seats in his east London borough, Ilford. Meanwhile in Gorton and Denton, TMV is backing the Green candidate, and its influence may prove decisive.

The cause of free speech faces a daunting battle.

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Cllr Liam Downer-Sanderson is a councillor for Fulham Town Ward on Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

“Keeping Hammersmith Bridge closed is something we may have to look at.”

Those were the words of a Labour Hammersmith and Fulham Cabinet Member at a council committee meeting on 2 February 2026. After seven years of disruption, delay and evasion, it was a moment of rare honesty.

Labour finally said out loud what many residents have long suspected. They are comfortable with the bridge staying closed to traffic permanently.

That position is wrong for Hammersmith and Fulham, wrong for London and wrong for the country.

Hammersmith Bridge was closed in 2019 after serious cracks were discovered in its foundations. The bridge is more than a century old and decades of heavy goods vehicles had taken their toll. Closure was unavoidable to prevent the risk of collapse.

The consequences were immediate and severe. Six key bus routes were diverted overnight. Emergency vehicles were forced onto longer, slower routes. Journeys to hospitals, schools and workplaces became harder, longer and more expensive. A vital transport link between Barnes, Richmond, Wimbledon, Hammersmith, Fulham and Chiswick was severed.

At that moment, the council’s task should have been obvious. Restore public transport and emergency access across the Thames as quickly and safely as possible.

Instead, Labour chose a different path.

Rather than pursuing interim or staged solutions to reopen the bridge to traffic, several of which were put forward at the time, the Labour Administration fixated on a single option. A full, gold-plated restoration costing around £250 million, with no credible timetable for reopening.

Years passed. Progress was minimal.

Recognising the scale of the problem, the Conservative Government stepped in with a pragmatic offer. To split the cost three ways between central government, Transport for London and the council. A deal was on the table. The route to reopening was clear.

Labour walked away, claiming the council could not afford it.

That argument simply does not stand up.

Because during the same period, Labour somehow found the money for something else. A brand new Town Hall. The Civic Campus project now exceeds £200 million. It was meant to be completed in 2023. It is opening three years late. And even now, Labour has allocated a further £38.5 million of capital funding in 2025/26, on top of tens of millions committed in earlier years.

This was never about affordability. It was about priorities.

Labour chose to prioritise a prestige building over restoring public transport, emergency access and everyday vehicle crossings across the Thames.

That choice tells you everything you need to know.

But the problem goes deeper than mismanagement or poor judgement. Increasingly, Labour councillors are no longer even pretending that reopening the bridge is the goal. For some, a functioning bridge is seen as an incentive to driving and therefore something to be resisted altogether.

In other words, inconvenience is not an unfortunate side effect. It is the point.

Conservatives reject that worldview outright.

It is not progressive to slow down ambulances, lengthen school runs or force carers, tradespeople and small businesses to waste hours detouring across west London. It is not progressive to cut communities in two and call it progress.

As the Opposition, our job is to hold Labour to account for its failures. But it is also our responsibility to offer solutions. That is exactly what the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Opposition Group has done.

We have set out a clear and practical alternative. The construction of a temporary bridge just north of the existing crossing. Delivered for an estimated £10 to £20 million, it would allow buses, emergency vehicles and general traffic to cross the Thames while permanent repair work continues.

Similar structures are routinely deployed elsewhere. They can be delivered in months, not years, and at reasonable cost.

London is a global city, yet a major Thames crossing has been left closed for seven years with no clear end in sight. That failure reflects poorly on local government and undermines confidence. If we cannot reopen a bridge in west London, it raises serious questions about our capacity to deliver essential infrastructure across the country.

As the Conservative Opposition, our position is straightforward.

If elected to run the Council in May, we will invite engineers to put forward proposals for a temporary bridge and finally move from delay to delivery.

We will get Hammersmith and Fulham moving again.

A large gang of extremist Israeli colonisers has illegally crossed the ‘blue line’ dividing southern Lebanon and Israel to try to stake a claim to land that is not theirs. The far-right ‘Awaken the North’ group planted trees somewhere on the Lebanese side of the border and demanded the restart of Israeli settlement in Lebanon.

The group was then whisked back into Israel by the occupation military. Israeli authorities went through the motions of condemning the excursion, but no action against the racist group is likely.

In a deranged statement, one of the group’s leaders claimed its action was “moral” and “necessary” and that it was reclaiming “our land:”

This is right for security and it is a necessary step from a moral and historical point of view.

One of the group’s leaders said that the Israeli colonisers were “putting down roots” in “our country”, regurgitating Israeli ‘inheritance’ propaganda:

We came here today, to plant trees and put down roots in the soil of our country, regardless of the fences. The State of Israel must renew the settlement in Lebanon, this is historically correct, it is right from a security point of view, and it is right from a moral point of view. South Lebanon is a piece of the inheritance of our forefathers, where Jewish settlement existed for thousands of years. In order to ensure the security of the residents of the north, the construction of civilian settlements in southern Lebanon, near IDF posts, must be promoted.

If you look closely at the featured image, you’ll find the group has the Lebanese cedar in the centre of a Star of David as their logo. In the words of brother Omar from Four Lions: “I think you’re confused bro.”

Israel has bombed southern Lebanon daily, despite the supposed ‘ceasefire’ in place since the occupation’s 2024 terrorist attack using exploding pagers. These attacks have murdered dozens of civilians.

Featured image via the Canary

Labour MPs have complained to their boss Keir Starmer that the party and its activists are now dismissed by the public as “paedo lovers”. The complaint came during Starmer’s emergency meeting with women from the parliamentary party yesterday, 11 February 2026.

The meeting followed a further ‘Labour nonceberg’ scandal over Starmer’s peerage for former adviser Matthew Doyle despite knowing Doyle had campaigned for the election of a Scottish Labour paedophile. This in turn followed the scandal of the various appointments given to the disgraced Peter Mandelson despite his ardent fandom toward serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein — to whom he also leaked confidential state and financial information.

There is no mention in reporting that women MPs raised the issue of the victims of Epstein or Doyle’s close friend Sean Morton. Starmer has also refused to say that disgraced former royal Andrew should apologise to his victims.

To the informed, none of this is surprising, either from Starmer or from the women MPs. Labour’s ‘white feminists‘ have routinely ignored the plight of victims who are not ‘people like us’. Starmer’s record as Labour leader is an appalling continuation of the impunity of celebrity paedophiles when he ran the CPS.

Nonceberg

As well as the cases of Mandelson, Doyle/Morton and Andrew, Starmer:

The public are right

The angry public on the doorstep is not wrong: Starmer’s right-wing, pro-Israel faction is rife with paedophiles:

• ‘Friend of Israel’ Liron Velleman has just been convicted of repeated sex crimes against a 13-year-old girl.
• In January 2025, former Blair minister Ivor Caplin was arrested in a sting operation as he allegedly attempted to meet a 15-year-old boy for sex. Local police went after local left-winger Greg Hadfield for exposing the explicit content Caplin posted on his X feed — Hadfield defeated the ‘vexatious’ charge in November 2025. However, no charges have yet been brought against Caplin and a court did not impose bail conditions after his initial bail expired.
• Hackney councillor Tom Dewey, an organiser in pro-Israel group ‘Labour First’, admitted possession of the most serious category of child rape images in 2023. The party knew of his arrest when it allowed him to stand for election. After his conviction, it blocked local women members from its systems to prevent them discussing the case.
• In March 2025 Sam Gould, another JLM activist who worked for Starmer’s health secretary Wes Streeting, quit as a Redbridge councillor after being convicted on two separate counts of indecent exposure to a 13-year-old girl.
•  The following month Dan Norris MP, an ally of Keir Starmer, was arrested over allegations of rape, child sex offences and child abduction.  Avon and Somerset Police says its investigation is still ongoing.
•  The same Dan Norris was arrested again for allegations of rape and sexual assault.

And in August 2025, the US allowed Israeli cyberwar official Tom Alexandrovich to fly back to Israel after he was caught in a police paedophile sting. Starmer is fond of both countries.

Starmer’s war on Labour-left — in retrospect

And while Starmer’s senior cronies were deselecting or blocking potential left-wing parliamentary candidates on any pretext they could find, they were ignoring legal advice to let their mates stand.

Labour’s national executive ignored the advice of its barrister that it needed to thoroughly investigate allegations of ‘serious’ sexual assault against slum landlord Jas Athwal. Then-Redbridge council leader Athwal is now a right-wing Labour MP close to health secretary Wes Streeting. Instead of investigating, the NEC dropped the case and reinstated Athwal to allow his rigged selection as the party’s parliamentary candidate in Ilford South.

Starmer ignored whistleblower

Perhaps most seriously, Starmer and his then-sidekick David Evans covered up Jewish whistleblower Elaina Cohen’s allegations of serial abuse of women by a party staffer.

Cohen repeatedly warned Starmer and Evans that a staffer working for then-Perry Barr MP Khalid Mahmood — and allegedly Mahmood’s lover — was engaged in ‘sadistic’ and ‘criminal’ abuse of vulnerable Muslim women. The victims were fleeing domestic violence, through the now-defunct domestic violence ‘charity’ that she ran.

Warned time and again, Starmer and Evans did nothing. Mahmood remained on Starmer’s front bench as long as he chose to be there. Cohen was sacked from her role as a parliamentary aide.

One of the victims gave evidence, at Cohen’s successful wrongful dismissal tribunal, of the horrific abuse she and others had suffered. This included blackmail and sexual exploitation. Her evidence was not challenged by Mahmood or his lawyers. Mahmood admitted under oath to the tribunal that he had also personally made sure that Starmer was fully aware of Cohen’s allegations.

Starmer’s protection of child sex offenders is a mountain. His contempt for their victims is another. Both have been almost entirely ignored by ‘mainstream’ media.

For more on the Epstein Files, please read the Canary’s article on how the media circus around Epstein is erasing the experiences of victims and survivors.

Featured image via the Canary

The Welsh government has unanimously passed the Homelessness and Social Housing Allocation Bill into law, which experts have labelled “life-changing”

The Senedd passed the new law on February 10, 2026, and it will provide support far sooner than current legislation allows, preventing people from losing their homes and falling into homelessness.

It will also require public services to work together to prevent homelessness and to allocate social housing to those most at risk.

The bill will:

• Expand access to homelessness services and provide additional support to those who need it most.
• Widen responsibility to certain specified public authorities to identify individuals who are homeless or at risk of homelessness and respond effectively.
• Prioritise allocation of social housing to those most in need.

Homelessness — a growing crisis

From April 2024 to March 2025, 13,287 households were homeless in Wales. Local councils only secured accommodation for 25% of these.

The total number of households staying in temporary accommodation was 6,285. Of these, 2,397 (38%) were staying in unsuitable bed and breakfasts.

As it stands, local authorities can only take action 56 days before someone falls into homelessness. The new law will extend this to six months.

The bill also commits to scrapping both priority need and the intentionally homeless. However, it does not give a date for doing so.

As it stands, priority need means that certain groups, such as pregnant women, people with children, young people, care leavers, and victims of domestic abuse, are accepted as being a higher priority for homelessness assistance.

Being ‘intentionally homeless’ technically means that a person is homeless, or threatened with homelessness, due to something they deliberately did or failed to do. 

However, local authorities often use it as a guise for refusing help to people who have to leave unsafe situations, such as traumatised women having to leave mixed-sex accommodation, or young people feeling unsafe in adult hostels.

If a council deems someone intentionally homeless, it does not have to offer long-term housing. 

Social housing allocation

The bill has placed all registered social housing providers under a new legal obligation to assist people experiencing homelessness. It has also given ministers new powers to issue orders to these providers, requiring them to comply.

However, some organisations have criticised the bill for failing to outlaw the use of unsafe temporary accommodation.

According to the Bevan Foundation:

At present, local authorities only need to have “due regard” to the various legal standards on the suitability of accommodation when fulfilling their homelessness duties. This includes having “due regard” to whether the property is fit for human habitation and the presence of Category 1 hazards such as damp and mould, excessive cold, fire risk and structural issues like unstable staircases.

The organisation previously published a report on the dangers of unsuitable accommodation. It highlighted how temporary

accommodation causes physical harm to children, along with the fact that local authorities are not meeting or enforcing regulations.

Other amendments related to protecting victims of domestic violence and abuse had been put forward, but not included.

Matt Downie, Chief Executive at Crisis, said:

The new Homelessness and Social Housing Allocations Bill has the potential to be life-changing for the thousands of people across Wales that are facing the trauma that comes from living without a stable place to call home.

But the work does not end here. The Welsh Government and incoming Members of the Senedd after the elections in May 2026 must now invest in the proper implementation of these new laws. It is critical that services have the guidance, funding and resources to really deliver the ambition of the Bill and work towards ending homelessness.

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Feature image via Centre for Homelessness Impact 

Morgan McSweeney is gone, for now. But an MP who served on Labour’s frontbench has passed me details of an unknown, unelected group that “rules with a rod of iron” and is still fighting to retain control of the Labour Party.

Morgan McSweeney: still trying to control Labour

Matthew Doyle is the first link in McSweeney’s inner circle.

In December, Starmer was criticised for giving Doyle a peerage even though he had previously campaigned for Sean Morton, a Scottish Labour councillor now convicted of child sex offences. Sean Morton, councillor for Fochabers and Lhanbryde, was charged in 2016. In 2017, he stood for re-election as councillor. Doyle travelled up to Scotland, wore a t-shirt that read “Re-elect Sean Morton”, and accompanied him to the election count. Then, in 2018, Morton was convicted of a string of crimes that included possession of indecent pictures of ten year-old girls.

On 10 February, and despite originally defending the decision to nominate Doyle for a peerage, saying that his links to Morton had been “thoroughly investigated” before the decision was made, Labour was forced to suspend him.

But here lies the problem: such is the grip that the McSweeney faction has held over Labour, no misdemeanour is too big to be swept under the carpet, and it is only when scandals are picked up by investigative journalists that the Starmer regime feels forced to act.

McSweeney reportedly insisted on the appointment of Epstein-informant Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. Starmer went along with it and Labour MPs fell into line. Everyone knew, they just didn’t care.

McSweeney’s ‘tight’ crew

According to the former Labour frontbencher who contacted me:

The inner circle were tight. WhatsApp tight. They talked openly of taking over the Labour Party literally. And to get rid of every existing MP eventually. Morgan seemed to run everything.

The second link in McSweeney’s “inner circle” is Matthew Faulding. Faulding worked under McSweeney’s close supervision as Labour’s director of candidates, ensuring that only Mandelson-Starmer loyalists could be selected as candidates. He has previously been known to stalk the offices of Labour politicians, “striking the fear of death into MPs”, according to a party staffer. But Starmer’s grip on the reins of power is slipping. And now, after the events of the weekend, even McSweeney can’t save him.

The third link in McSweeney’s “inner circle” is Matt Pound. Pound was instrumental in Labour Party leadership rule changes that helped Starmer rise to power. He was previously head of the Labour First group, working to ensure the success of McSweeney-favoured candidates in “internal elections”. Pound has previously been photographed alongside Marlon Solomon and Luke Akehurst, with the three wearing matching t-shirts bearing the phrase “Zionist Shitlord”.

In 2019-20, Solomon was given £11,877 by the Pears Family Charitable Foundation to put on an Edinburgh Fringe show that would “put a comic spin on antisemitism”. In 2008, the Pears Foundation established the Britain-Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership, “a major initiative launched by the prime ministers of both countries”. In 2010, they helped establish the UK-Israel Life Sciences Council. David Chinn attended the launch.

David Chinn is the eldest son of life-long pro-Israeli lobbyist Trevor Chinn. Trevor Chinn was a co-director and major funder of McSweeney’s Labour Together Limited. When McSweeney was found to have concealed over £730,000 in donations to Labour Together, he said it was “to protect Trevor Chinn, Labour Together’s great benefactor”.

Pulling in the money

The McSweeney-Starmer takeover of the Labour Party still needed cash, and Waheed Alli was on hand to provide. Alli was Starmer’s biggest personal donor, giving over £30k for the prime minister’s clothing and glasses. Now, his name appears in the Epstein Files.

Alli’s name appears on a list of guests due to attend an Epstein-hosted dinner in February 2010 and another dinner in August of the same year. In another leaked e-mail from 2012, Epstein tells a friend that Peter Mandelson and Alli are staying at “Shelter Island”.

McSweeney enforcer Faulding was working for Alli in the run-up to the general election in 2024. According to the former Labour frontbencher who contacted me, McSweeney’s inner circle:

had lists of people approved or pressured before a selection ever began.

He believes that Faulding, however, soon fell out of favour:

his lack of charm leading to complaints about his arrogant out of control behaviour. He was becoming a liability to Morgan.

The problem is, McSweeney has himself become a liability to Supreme Leader Starmer. My source added:

The thugs beneath him are minions who any good leader would dispose of right away.

One of those who rushed to the by-then-doomed McSweeney’s defence was Adam Langleben, current head of Labour Party think tank Progress and former national secretary of the Jewish Labour Movement.

The Zionist link

Langleben has previously supported Ivor Caplin, the former Labour minister caught by “paedophile hunters” last year. He has also described ex-Labour MP Greville Janner as his “inspiration”. Back in 2021, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse said police deliberately “shut down” investigations into Janner. In 1997, just weeks after his election, Tony Blair gave Janner a peerage.

In The Lobby documentary produced by Al Jazeera, Rose, a director of the Jewish Labour Movement who previously worked at the Israeli embassy, was caught boasting about participating in IDF-developed Krav Maga training. Rose served as a Labour councillor in Barnet alongside Velleman.

In January, former Labour councillor Velleman pleaded guilty to a series of sexual offences against a police decoy he thought was a 13-year-old girl. Velleman sent naked pictures of himself to the ‘girl’ and asked whether she “was a virgin” and “at home alone”. Then, on 10 February, Velleman admitted further charges, including sending the “child” videos of his penis and asking to see her underwear.

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Unbelievably, Velleman had given evidence at the committee stage of the government’s Child Safety Bill in 2022, where he’s listed as a political organiser for Hope not Hate. Labour minister Peter Kyle, who was technology secretary when the Bill came into force, previously apologised to those:

let down by governments failing to keep them safe from toxic online content.

He also happens to be best friends with Ivor Caplin, the former Labour minister caught by “paedophile hunters” in 2025, and whose X account was still followed by Labour frontbenchers including Rachel Reeves whilst replete with a stream of explicit material. Caplin has “congratulated” Velleman online on several occasions, whilst Kyle once sent him a message of thanks at 2 o’clock in the morning!

On 9 February, Jewish News, apparently not reading the room, wrote a gushing piece extolling the virtues of political genius McSweeney, who by my research has only stood for public office himself once, receiving 149 votes in a Sutton West council election. McSweeney of course lived on an Israeli “kibbutz” shortly before joining the Labour Party and has a long history of promoting Israel lobby-backed candidates.

Langleben is quoted as saying:

No one did more to drag the Labour Party out of the darkest moment in its history than Morgan McSweeney. The Jewish community owes him a debt of gratitude.

Words of praise also effused from Michael Rubin, the director of Labour Friends of Israel, a shadowy lobby group within the party which refuses to reveal its funders. He said:

Morgan was essential in dragging Labour back to sanity after the dark Corbyn years.

The adults are not back

Some people might have an issue with the description of appointing Mandelson, the “best pal” of a notorious paedophile, to a top diplomatic role, as “sanity”. If this is “the adults back in the room”, it’s not a room I want to set foot in.

Krav Maga-trained Ella Rose opined:

A lot will be written and said about the role of Morgan McSweeney…We would not have been fit for government without him. Thank you, Morgan.

One thing is true: by accepting the resignation of McSweeney, Starmer lost the final card in his deck. On Monday, the prime minister told his fast diminishing staff at No. 10 that he is “not resigning”, but his removal is now simply a matter of time.

Featured image via the Canary

The fate of the 2,787 people arrested for terrorism offences for peacefully holding signs saying “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action” in silent vigils in towns and cities in all four nations of the UK, will be decided on Friday 13 February at 10am in Court 4 of the Royal Courts of Justice when the long-awaited Judicial Review ruling will be finally read into court.

Outside the court, supporters of the Lift The Ban campaign will again risk arrest by holding the same signs in a display of the ongoing defiance of the government’s authoritarian attempt to treat protest as terrorism. The Lift The Ban campaign – which aims to de-proscribe Palestine Action and end government complicity in genocide – has become the largest UK-wide campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience in recent history.

A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries said:

The Filton 6 verdicts show that only a Judicial Review ruling that strikes down the Palestine Action ban as unlawful will be in tune with the public’s understanding of justice. Unlike the government, the public knows the difference between protest and terrorism.

The Filton 6 verdicts have been a huge blow to government ministers who have tried to portray Palestine Action as a violent group. They have repeatedly referred to the single incidence of alleged harm to an individual in the case as justification for banning Palestine Action before the allegation was proven in court.

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Yet Palestine Action never advocated causing harm to people and never caused unlawful violence to a person in over 400 actions. Their aim was always to save lives by causing damage to companies like Elbit Systems whose made-in-Britain quadcopter drones have been killing innocent civilians in Gaza.

Our action outside the Royal Courts of Justice will create yet another dilemma for the police – will they arrest us as the result of the Judicial Review is being read out? If the appeal against the proscription is successful, their action looks ridiculous.

If it is unsuccessful, more people will be added to the queue for prosecution in the courts – and people of conscience who want to defend our fundamental rights and freedoms will have no option but to continue to resist this unjust, unnecessary and unenforceable law.

Lobbyists for proscription

As the Channel 4 documentary Palestine Action – The Truth Behind The Ban showed, home secretary Yvette Cooper held meetings with lobbyists for arms companies and Israel that were revealed by Freedom of Information requests. Even the government’s own adviser on terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, condemned Cooper’s “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” approach to justifying the ban.

We also know about pressure from arms companies and lobbyists for Israel that was put on the government, and that in March 2025 Keir Starmer took two phone calls from Donald Trump about Palestine Action after the group painted “Gaza is not for sale” on Trump’s golf course in Scotland.

The decision was made despite warnings that the move would backfire, and despite deep and widespread concerns amongst civil servants, international experts, human rights observers and civil society.

Impacts of the proscription

The decision to proscribe has not only led to 2,787 people being arrested for sitting peacefully, holding signs in front of the world’s press. It has also resulted in the the misapplication of counter-terror resources, international condemnation, the exhaustion and lowering of morale of police officers and the possibility that people might be criminalised for showing support for the Palestinian people.

But it has not stopped people taking direct action against the properties of the companies who are complicit in genocide.

The judicial review grounds

Huda Ammori was granted four grounds on which to challenge the proscription in a judicial review which was heard at the Royal Courts of Justice over three days between 26 November and 2 December 2025.

On 30 July 2025 Mr Justice Chamberlain granted two grounds: that the proscription was a disproportionate interference with Article 10 and Article 11 rights Convention Rights, namely the rights to expression and assembly; and that Palestine Action should have been consulted.

Two additional grounds were granted by the Court of Appeal on 17 October 2025: that the home secretary failed to have regard to domestic public law principles and that she did not apply her own policy including the proportionality of the proscription.

Allegations of a judicial stitch-up

Avaaz launched a petition demanding an explanation from justice secretary David Lammy MP as to why the judge overseeing the case was removed just days before it was about to begin. The lack of an explanation has meant the Judicial Review has been dogged by allegations of a ‘stitch-up’ with questions about the suitability and independence of the three replacement judges demanding to be answered. A former British ambassador suggested the result had been to “load the dice for Israel”.

The judicial review

On the opening day of the Judicial Review, Raza Husain KC, representing Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori, noted that the group was the: “first direct-action civil disobedience organisation that does not advocate for violence ever to be proscribed as terrorist.” He said the ban was an “ill-considered, discriminatory, due process-lacking, authoritarian abuse of statutory power … that is alien to the basic tradition of common law and the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Defend Our Juries’ Lift The Ban campaign was cited as evidence of mass civil society disagreement with the proscription.

Intervening in the Judicial Review, United Nations Special Rapporteur Ben Saul warned the ban makes the UK “out of step with comparable liberal democracies” and “sets a precedent” for further crackdown on other protest movements in the UK such as climate protesters.

Amnesty International UK said it represented a substantial departure from established responses to protest movements which use direct action tactics and that it breached our fundamental rights to protest and free speech.

Liberty argued the ban was disproportionate because counter-terror powers have historically been directed at groups whose modus operandi includes intentional violence against people

Best-selling author Sally Rooney told the hearing how she may no longer be able to sell or publish her books in the UK due to her support for Palestine Action.

On the final day of the Judicial Review – Tuesday 2 December 2025 –  the government presented part of its defence using the secret court system known as Closed Material Procedure. This method has come under criticism for allowing evidence to be presented without challenge and has been described by Angus McCullough KC as being a system “in meltdown”.

Government would have let hunger strikers die

During a rolling hunger and thirst strike running from November to January, Lammy refused to meet lawyers for the families and loved ones of hunger strikers, or even to reply directly to the several letters that they sent. This was despite warnings from medical professionals that participants had passed the point where there was a high risk of death and serious permanent injury.

UN experts said any death and injury would be the government’s responsibility:

The State’s duty of care toward hunger strikers is heightened, not diminished … Preventable deaths in custody are never acceptable. The State bears full responsibility for the lives and wellbeing of those it detains.

The conditions of Palestine Action-connected prisoners held without trial were earlier criticised by the UN in a letter to the UK government.

Government complicity in crimes against humanity and genocide

Evidence of UK complicity in crimes against genocide continues to mount. In October 2025 the UN issued its draft report Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime detailing the complicity of states including the UK in the destruction of Gaza. Amongst other things, the UK continued to supply arms including components for F-35 stealth bombers, undertook daily surveillance flights over Gaza for Israel, maintained normal trade relations, and allowed Israel to undertake international crimes with impunity.

In December Declassified UK released its film Britain’s Gaza Spy Flight Scandal, investigating the hundreds of RAF intelligence flights conducted on behalf of Israel.

The genocide continues but the government is silent

The genocide continues to unfold in Gaza. Since the 11 October 2025 “ceasefire”, Israel has killed at least 556 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 1,500. The total recorded death toll since 7 October 2023 is now 71,824.

In October 2025 the UN reported that 81% of buildings in Gaza had been either damaged or destroyed rendering the vast majority of the population homeless and relying on temporary shelters. Israel continues to destroy buildings in Gaza.

Israel recently banned 37 aid groups from working in Gaza. UN experts said:

Banning life-saving organisations from operating in Gaza marks a new phase in a policy that renders life unbearable for a population already devastated by genocide. This strategy will create conditions that force Palestinians into chronic deprivation, threatening their very survival as a group and further violating the Genocide Convention – it must be stopped …

We have entered a new phase in which Israel and its supporters have reached the genocide without witness stage. With journalists being killed, denied access, or forced out, humanitarian organisations paralysed or expelled, and a misleading global sense of ‘ceasefire’, atrocities are being committed without public scrutiny.

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Featured image via Defend our Juries