“In Washington, Mandelson will do what he has always done: gossip, perform and gravitate to the centre of power. In many ways, he is a made diplomat.”

The name Jeffrey Epstein does not appear in that short and profoundly positive piece. 

In March 2025, McTague was named editor of The New Statesman and, seeking splashy articles for his first issue in charge, he approached that canny US ambassador in the hope that Mandelson might gossip and perform for the benefit of his readers. 

We now know what Mandelson thought of the invitation to write a diary piece for the magazine because his WhatsApp conversation about it with Stephanie Driver, who was Head of Communications in Number 10 at the time, has been made public. It’s part of the gargantuan drop of documents released as a result of the Humble Address process allegedly designed to get to the bottom of why Mandelson was appointed in the first place. 

On 30 May 2025, Mandelson messaged Driver: 

“Hi hope you well [sic]. My/Morgan’s friend Tom McTague is taking over the New Statesman as you know and he wants me to do diary [sic] for his first issue on what it’s like being an ambassador. Happy to let you see sight of draft of course but I think it will be good soft PR and contextualising our government’s engagement with Trump administration for sceptical Labour readership…” 

The Morgan referenced there is, of course, Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s former Chief of Staff, about whom McTague wrote a political obituary in The New Statesman upon his resignation. To be described as a pal of both Mandelson and McSweeney is not a comfortable position for him to be in. A closeness to both may have been professionally useful in the past, but it now ties him to the disgraced and the defenestrated.

Related reading: The End of Morgan McSweeney: Peter Oborne on Keir Starmer’s Departing Chief of Staff

There is, of course, also the possibility that Mandelson’s description of him as a friend is just another example of his oily tendency to exaggerate his connections. This is, after all, the man who the document releases show was desperately campaigning to be made Chancellor of Oxford. 

Driver replied to Mandelson’s message saying: 

“Hi Peter, from a beach in the Canaries! This sounds great, an opportunity. Tom is doing a profile of the PM for the first issue and I’ve arranged for some decent access to enable it. I don’t know him very well but have enjoyed his writing, and trust his intentions with the piece.” 

Mandelson then came back with another telling line: 

“He is essentially benign towards Keir but suffers a bit from Patrick Maguire syndrome.” 

Only Mandelson can definitively know what he meant by “Patrick Maguire syndrome”, but his reference to The Times’ chief political commentator, who writes frequently about the internal workings of the Labour Party and the government, suggests he found Maguire inconveniently critical. 

Driver and Mandelson’s chat on the topic ended with her sharing more details of the Starmer profile: 

“I’m due to chat with [McTague] next week when I’m back. He’s had two sessions with Keir, with at least one more to come. I need to get a sense of his take so far to enable us to shape and tweak where possible.” 

Mandelson’s diary, under the headline 'Inside Trump’s Oval Office', was published in the 12th June 2025 edition of The New Statesman. Comparing the draft released in the Humble Address documents with the published version shows that virtually nothing was changed. He got the “soft PR” he was looking for with some gentle comments about Trump mixed with a lighthearted story about the “Ambassa-dog” Jock and an unexpected encounter with Emily Thornberry. 

McTague’s profile of Starmer ('What Keir Starmer can’t say') appeared in the same issue. Unlike her chat with Mandelson, Driver’s conversations with McTague aren’t public, so there’s no way of knowing how much she was able to shape and tweak his take. It is by no means an uncritical portrait of the Prime Minister, but it concl

udes by giving him the last word: 

“‘I know what my job is,’ Keir Starmer tells me before we part. ‘To clear up the mess.’” 
In the Mandelson disclosures, we find McTague in amongst the mess.

Unsurprisingly, when The New Statesman published ‘Six things we learned from the Mandelson files’ yesterday, the fact that its editor was featured as a pal of both the man himself and Morgan McSweeney didn’t make the cut.

Tom McTague has been approached for comment. We will update this article if one is forthcoming.

Our Public House is a ‘state of the nation’ musical drama exploring the alienation people feel with politics through the lens of community, identity, change, and grief. How did this timely project come about?

JB: I wanted to do a show that explored who we are as a country. At Dash Arts, we had been thinking about what it was to be European, and then our gaze turned to Englishness and England and how to create a ‘state of the nation’ piece of theatre. In that search for a narrative and a story and an idea, I met an academic, Alan Finlayson, Professor of Political and Social Theory at the University of East Anglia, who said ‘you know, we all have this ability to articulate the things we feel passionate about but we don’t necessarily have the tools to do it’. So we conducted a workshop programme around the country helping people to talk about what they felt wasn’t working and what could change. I had this instinct that the stuff, the data, the thoughts, the reflections, the dreams, and the ambitions would be an incredible reflection of who we are as a country and who we could be. 

We heard a lot of incredibly diverse reflections because we built a research process that enabled us to go to council estates, deaf communities, women’s prisons, schools, activist groups, old age homes, working men’s groups; to Cornwall, Sheffield, Liverpool, Norwich, all over the country, bits in between and above. Then I found a wonderful playwright, Barney Norris, and we thought about what the play could be. I had a feeling it would be great to set it in a pub, that this would be the place to talk about who we are as it is quintessentially English, but also it is somewhere some people feel included and some people don’t feel it’s for them – I thought that was an interesting metaphor for where we are at [as a country] at the moment. 

I also had a feeling that it might be interesting to use The Tempest as an inspiration, as opposed to a direct adaptation of the text. Barney and I sat down and started saying ‘who are the characters in The Tempest and what is the magic that could be wrought on the place like Prospero creates the storm? What’s our storm?’. Barney had this brilliant idea that, rather than the play following a group of people who don’t want to vote, they would take an active position – so the plot developed of people in a constituency who decided to spoil their ballots because they didn’t feel the politicians [on offer] represented them. So, much like Prospero creates the storms on the seas that brings everyone onto the island, in our play we have a storm of this mass spoiling of an election ballot which brings all the attention and focus on the place, the pub, which is called ‘The Albion’. The six characters have definite connections to Shakespeare’s Miranda, Ferdinand, Prospero, Caliban… they are very much well-rounded, naturalistic characters in their own right. Barney and I explored the conversations that could happen in a pub. Then we brought in some music. 

We’ve also woven in speeches from our participants in the workshops into the play because that felt incredibly important – we didn’t just want to be inspired by these voices and then not have them have anything to do with it going forward. We met over 700 people in the workshops and every character in our play delivers a real person’s speech which I felt had some resonance with the character. Our composer, Jonathan Walton, turned those speeches into songs. 

And, really importantly, every night across the run, at the very beginning of the second act, we have two speeches [delivered by] local people who have been working with us [through the speech-making workshops]. As the world of our play expands, so does the cast.

What were the issues that people were raising as affecting their lives in the workshops again and again that you found striking?

I learned how complicated the country is and, yet, how many people still think that the issues are the same – everyone is struggling with the cost of living, with housing, with waiting lists for the NHS. 

But it’s not that I went around the country and heard everyone air their grievances – it was an incredibly productive process that was positive and inspiring. We’d go into the room and say ‘we’re here to help you make a speech about the future’ and what we could do to make things better for everyone. People would explain their life experience and what had happened to them and there was always a proposed solution. Because it was always from people’s lived experience, [there was a sense of]: this happened to me, and as a result, I feel like I’ve seen a different way of doing it. 

One of the characters in our play, Tom [who plays a special advisor to the Labour parliamentary candidate], shares a speech by an individual we met in a workshop in Norwich about how, when he was 17, he came home from school one day in the middle of his ‘A’ Levels and his mum had packed up their car [with their belongings] because the landlord had put their rent up [which she couldn’t afford to pay so] that night they moved to Luton. He believed no child should ever have that happen to them and that’s why we need rent controls. 

The speeches represent hope, a sense of possibility. We are definitely left feeling [at the end of the play] like there’s new stuff on the horizon – because we all need that.

What has it been like to craft a piece of art about politics against an ever-shifting political backdrop in which people are increasingly turning to alternatives to the main parties because they are so disillusioned with all establishment politics? 

When we started writing the play in January 2024, it was still the Tory Government, and many of the speeches people wrote were about the dying embers of 14 years of Conservative rule. There was a sense of optimism and possibility for change in that there would be a change of government which might come in and sort things out. In the play, after the ballots are spoiled, another election is held – and into the pub walks a Labour candidate, Mary, and her special advisor. Mary is a politician who might do politics differently and is played by a brilliant actor, Gabriella Lyon, who is deaf, as is her character. So there is this irony that a deaf politician is the first one to really listen to the community. Obviously now, to be playing a Labour politician in 2026, is really very different from playing a Labour politician in 2024. 

There was a moment earlier this year, around the time of the Gorton and Denton by-election [won by the now Green MP Hannah Spencer], when Barney and I sat down and asked each other ‘should Mary be standing for the Green Party?’ – because can anyone possibly imagine that Labour could win a by-election at the moment? [This interview was conducted before the Makerfield by-election was announced, after the Labour MP Josh Simons stood down in a bid for Labour’s Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, to return to Parliament].

But we decided to stick to our guns and keep Mary as Labour because, in a way, she could be any politician for any political party who wants to do politics differently – she says ‘I want to create spaces and provide a platform for you to be heard, I want you to feel represented by people like you’. She sells that as her politics and it’s on that basis that she is elected, despite the party that she represents. 

Last year, ‘Operation Raise the Flag’ saw Union and St George’s flags being put up around towns across the country –a campaign supported and organised by far-right activists such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) and Britain First. At the same time, ethno-nationalist thinking around who can be ‘English’ has been voiced by the far-right, and figures within Reform UK, positing that only ‘blood’ can make someone English or British. How does Our Public House aim to explore some of these complicated and contentious issues of political identity?

We made one of the characters in our play, Scott, Reform-leaning, and it takes a while to establish that but he outs himself as voting for Reform, because we deliberately wanted to set up a situation in the piece where he is confronted by accusations of racism because we really wanted to talk about it. 

Our English pub is run by a British Asian woman, Sanjana, and her daughter, Anika, and to have one of the regulars potentially making racist comments in that space is very powerful and shocking. We talked in the rehearsal room about the permissiveness that this man now feels he has to come out and say something problematic, and how we feel that Reform has given him permission to do it and to do it more publicly than he would have felt able to even two or three years ago. 

Since discussions in politics and the media around identity can often descend into simplistic soundbites and ‘culture wars’, it feels as if questions around difference and belonging can be explored in a more multifaceted way through art…

Despite the fact that we go to dark places, we have the space and time, and work with professional actors who have deep wells of emotional intelligence and physical experience in their bodies, to look at things in more nuanced, more interesting ways. 

On first glance, Scott may appear to make a racist comment and the other characters judge him, and we as the audience will judge him – but then we have another hour to see beyond the surface and to understand that this character, this person, is much more complicated than that and that he loves his community, that he loves these people, and that he’s deeply kind, and yet, misguided. I think theatre can give you that – through the fact that you step into the space and time stands still; you choose to spend a ‘capsule’ of your life with characters who you can fall in love with and be troubled by and get to know. We all have those uncles and aunts and grandparents who say these things – and we still love them.

Theatre is a medium that allows you to look deeper, to understand, to put yourselves in other people’s shoes, to have empathy. Literature and film is brilliant at that too.

According to the British Beer and Pub Association, 161 pubs closed in the first three months of 2026 in England, Scotland, and Wales – the equivalent of approximately two pubs closing a day. Why are these types of community spaces so important to retain?

The majority of my new theatrical pieces are based in those spaces – in places that are almost like an extension of your living room and where you feel at ease and maybe more open to being confronted by stuff that you wouldn’t otherwise necessarily be prepared to [engage with] because it’s still somewhere you are familiar with and where you know people. But there is also a tension between that and the public and the unfamiliar. So it’s this very journalistic idea of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. I think that’s what ‘third spaces’ do at their best. 

Our pub in the play swings both ways – it’s incredibly comforting and lovely and fun and the characters joke; but then it’s also a place of deep tension and the odd fight.

How does class play out in Our Public House? Is it mainly working-class voices that are showcased?

Class is very present. It’s also about ‘them and us’ – there’s a line about ‘them in Westminster’, those “wokie-cokies”, ‘who’ve come up to tell us how we should be and how we should behave, but what do they know about us?’. It’s also about ethnicity and diversity, and that sense of the ‘left behind’. The play is also about grief. And about change: how do we move on and change where we are?

Because I made sure that we worked with speech-making participants of all classes and backgrounds and ages, we wanted to build characters in the piece that would reflect that. So we have the character of Jo, a young working-class woman who has been in prison and has a daughter in foster care. We also have a young Asian woman, Anika, who is a teacher and has come from a much more stable upbringing. 

What do you hope people will take away from seeing this piece?

To feel like they have enjoyed themselves in some emotional way. I think real people sharing their speeches [as part of the performance every night] has the potential to be the most powerful part because it’s a moment of deep truth. If people leave having learned something and that inspires them, that would be success. 

‘You Can’t Kick Your Shit Out of Somebody Else’

Seamus Doherty, 68, former council customer services manager, was a real-life speech-maker during a performance of Our Public House

What did the speech you delivered as part of a performance of Our Public House at the Leeds Playhouse focus on?

SD: The thing that was uppermost in my mind was the manosphere, Andrew Tate, and all his ilk, and I wanted to express something around that – and it felt personal because of my own history. My father died when I was 11. I didn’t have that male role model, but I also then realised that, even when he was alive, he wasn’t really there emotionally. I’ve had a history of alcoholism and addiction and, through recovery, I’ve learned to deal with and come to terms with my emotions. And I just look around and see so many issues in the world that are directly or indirectly because men don’t know how to deal with their feelings – that they don’t even know what they feel, never mind how to deal with it.

How do you think that notions of masculinity have evolved since you were growing up?

From the 60s onwards, men’s roles were challenged and men kind of lost their way. It’s not because of women’s rights, but a lot of men would see it that way, and I suppose part of the thing for me is that, in many ways, men are as big a victims of the patriarchy as women are. The other thing I’ve realised through my own experiences, and I’ve done it myself, but men in general, we expect to put all the emotional burden onto women and our relationships and expect them to carry all that. But, actually, there are things that I know I can’t [do that with and] I need to talk to a man about. Men need to connect with other men to deal with all sorts of feelings and cultural expectations.

It’s getting better. Well, it was getting better, but since the internet has come along, it’s gotten worse. So I make an appeal in my speech that, as men and especially as fathers, we need to step up, we need to get off the internet ourselves and start engaging with our boys, because otherwise we’re going to lose them to guys like Andrew Tate who step in and exploit that. 

Are there any men in public life at the moment that you think are a good counterpoint to Andrew Tate?

[The actor] Pablo Pascal is quite a good example. He’s very tolerant, he’s very open, he will stand up and be honest about what he really thinks rather than like a lot of men who just keep quiet because they don’t want to put their head above the parapet in case it gets shot off. He’s not afraid to speak up [on these issues]. I think [the journalist and author] George Monbiot is another great role model. 

Our Public House is a ‘state of the nation’ play exploring national identity and Englishness. What does the term bring up for you?

For me, one of the worst things that’s happened is Brexit. I’m from Derry, Northern Ireland, and I identify as Irish. A lot of people I grew up with would identify as British and call Derry Londonderry because there was always this divide. But the thing was, when [the UK was] part of the European Union, it didn’t matter – [the right to identify as Irish, British, or both citizenships] was baked into the Good Friday Agreement. So I was really worried when Brexit happened, because if they had brought in a hard border [between the Republic of Ireland, an EU member, and Northern Ireland] as they were talking about, we could well have ended up with a lot of scraps starting again and nobody wants to see that. I mean, the peace isn’t perfect, it’s not ideal, but at least people by and large are not shooting each other anymore. And that’s got to be a good thing, you know? 

If you grew up where I grew up, people waving Union Jacks didn’t bode well for a weak Catholic boy – [those waving them] were usually the sort of people that, if they knew what my name was, would kick the shit out of me. So I don’t really identify as British. But I do identify as Yorkshire now. I love Yorkshire and I love Leeds, and I’ve lived in Leeds twice as long as I lived in Derry. So, although I have a great love for Derry and my roots are there, I know I’m going to end my days in Leeds and I’ve got really, really deep roots here. 

Growing up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles must have provided important background context about understanding your own sense of masculinity and vulnerability? 

I left Derry in 1981. Reading the memoirs of an array of men who were part of various paramilitaries and whatever, a lot of them talk about the same things that they grew up with in very deprived areas – and many of them had violent, abusive fathers. It’s not the whole story, but for a lot of them, that was part of it as well. 

I know I had a period in my own life where I nearly ended up going on a lot of anti-Nazi league [marches] because I agreed with the cause, but people were telling me ‘oh yeah, come along because we get loads of rocks and we fight with the neo-Nazis’. I remember thinking to myself, hang on, this sounds really attractive – because I was full of anger – but then I had a word with myself and said ‘Seamus, you can’t kick your shit out of somebody else’, so I stepped back.

I think where I’ve shown the most courage in my life is actually just facing up to my own fear, my own insecurity, my own anger. It’s far too easy to prop yourself up and ‘act like a man’. If you face it, you find what looks like a shadowy demon in a cave – but if you turn around, actually, there is a tiny, frightened little child, and the shadow it throws looks like a demon, but it’s not. The bravest thing you can do as a man is look after that little child. 

Take a step, and the bridge will appear. 

‘I Don’t Understand Why Community Seems to be Much Easier for Some People and Not for Others’

Kylie Tilford, 55, English teacher, was a real-life speech-maker during a performance of Our Public House

The play explores why people feel so alienated from politics. Why do you think this massive disconnect has happened?

KT: A lot of it is this concept of a ‘bubble’, particularly on social media, because a lot of us probably spend more time in our virtual lives, rather than looking at policy, and hearing the voices of those people around us – and if you’re in your little bubble, your sounding boards are coming back with the same message, and I think that’s the issue. Social media unfortunately breathes alienation. The echo chamber doesn’t allow you to develop a dialogue or understand other ideas. 

Reform run on one message and the difficulty for me that I can’t get my head around is why intelligent people that I know look at that one message and say ‘this is what we need to work towards’, but they’re not looking at what Reform [say they want to do] to the Human Rights Act and how that’s going to impact others. Or what Reform are saying about sexual health for women. Or the LGBTQ+ community. If those people could look beyond that one message that the party has, they’d start to understand but they’re in that echo chamber where that one message is repeated again and again by like-minded people. You could argue that I’m in that position where, obviously, I know I’ve got social messages coming to me as well, but I like to think I’m a little bit more open-minded.

It’s the apathy as well that really scares me. We’re looking at 2028 when 16-year-olds are going to be able to vote and, at the moment, we teach them about democracy and what elections mean – but we don’t actually teach them how to be discerning voters. 

What did the speech you delivered as part of a performance of Our Public House at the Leeds Playhouse focus on?

My speech might have been a lot different if the workshop had run after what’s just recently happened in the local elections [in which Reform UK made significant gains]. When you think about the narrative of this play, where it’s looking at a community of people who didn’t feel they had any voice and they didn’t feel that any of the politicians were actually listening to them – I think it should be looked at as a cautionary tale, because we do need to understand [who and what we are voting for] rather than just voting for a label; a party. We need to look and see who these [local] councillors are and find out more about them as individuals and what their hopes and dreams are for our community, beyond the badge that they wear.

The speech I made in the play was about the loss of green space. The fact that, in the Victorian era, all of these philanthropic men who had lots of money, they weren’t trying to put cars into space, they built wings in hospitals, they donated money for a library to be built – and many of them donated to their local communities and so there was a lot of community land they paid for to belong to the people. In today’s day and age, the upkeep for these pieces of land, these green urban spaces, where people play football and walk the dogs or take their children out to play – they cost too much and so many councils are selling them, particularly near me. 

When my boys were little we had a beautiful big field that everyone played football on and the local football team played on it as well. But then the land was sold to the football team and it put big green fences up and, unless we were prepared to pay for our kids to join the football club, they could only look on. I know from my job as a teacher that many parents can’t afford to pay for the privilege for their kids to actually have an open space to play football on. So it’s just thinking about how we as a community need to come back together again and maybe look at community asset transfers, look at ways that we can actually save this land for young people. 

We complain all the time about young people being sucked into social media, about the manosphere, and the idea of young men being disillusioned with life. And yet, I feel we’re almost driving them online because there aren’t any physical spaces, and what spaces there are we’ve given them grief for hanging out there or for being there at night because people say that they’re frightened of them. So we need these spaces to be conserved. That is what those philanthropists did, they left this land for our young people and for our communities, and we’re just losing that. 

The play explores Englishness. What does it mean to you?

As a teacher, we teach British values, but British values are a respect for justice, taking care of one another – if you look at what British values are, it’s not about putting a flag up, it’s not about saying ‘I’m British because I look like this and you’re not because you look like that’. It’s about saying ‘we’re all part of this country, of this community, and it’s about living together in a melting pot of different ideas’. Our country wouldn’t be what it is today if it wasn’t for all the immigrants – European immigrants who came over in the war, the Windrush generation… I think we’re incredibly foolish if we think that, somehow, immigration is the problem. Immigration is actually what makes Britain great, and that is something we talk about when we teach British values.

We should all celebrate this incredible melting pot that is our islands, that has invited people to live here and join us. I have white privilege. I’m a white middle-class woman so I can’t pretend to understand what I know some of my students, for example, have experienced. I have probably made mistakes and said things that are inappropriate. But, for me, I don’t see anybody from any other culture who’s telling me that I have to be like them, so why are we telling people what they have to be like? I don’t understand why community seems to be much easier for some people and not for others. 

Our Public House is touring until 4 July. For more information visit www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-house 

Hardeep Matharu is the Editor in Chief of Byline Times

Alex Sobel, Labour MP for Leeds Central and Headingley, is proposing an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill that would limit donations from UK donors to a million pounds a year, Byline Times can report. Reform's largest donor Christopher Harborne has given at least £12 million in the past year.

This would build on Labour's new £100,000 annual cap on donations for Brits living abroad. Backers say the principle of opposing wealthy individuals buying influence in politics should apply not just to those overseas.

The relatively high cap of £1m may be difficult for the Government to object to, though they have previously rejected donation caps for those living in the UK.

While the next stage of the bill is not set to be heard for several weeks, it is providing time for backbench MPs to organise and strengthen the bill to clamp down on opportunities for the wealthy to 'buy off' British elections. Unlock Democracy director Tom Brake told Byline Times: "The reason the Government has given for capping donations from overseas UK voters is because it gives them undue influence. Well, a UK resident who donates £10 million is also going to get lots of undue influence."

Campaigners are also braced for a battle over Automatic Voter Registration (AVR), something the Government has committed to previously but which has no deadline for implementation in the bill. AVR would ensure that the millions of people currently missing from the electoral roll would be automatically enrolled, but the Bill only proposes trials with no date for when it would be rolled out nationally. Unlock Democracy is among the groups pushing the Government to go further and set a clear timeline for bringing in the 'missing millions'.

Amendments Labour MPs Are Pushing

Alex Sobel — NC31 (National Commission on Electoral Reform feasibility report). This is by far the most signed amendment, with over 100 MPs – most of them Labour backbenchers – now backing it. Momentum has been growing within Labour to get behind proportional representation in recent years.

Likely leadership contender Andy Burnham has backed proposals for a national commission, meaning he'd have a ready-made mechanism for moving to PR if he became Labour leader in the coming months (Burnham has indicated he'd commit to electoral reform in Labour's next manifesto).

Within three months of the passing of the Act, it would compel the Secretary of State to publish a report on the feasibility of establishing a National Commission on Electoral Reform. This independent review would assess the operation of the voting system for elections to the House of Commons and make recommendations for reform "to ensure that the voting system is fair, representative, and capable of sustaining public confidence in democratic outcomes."

Related reading: All the Big Government Reforms the Media is Missing During Keir Starmer’s Leadership Crisis

It is seen as the most viable mechanism for Labour to back proportional representation, already in place in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland for devolved elections. It would publish its final recommendations within a year of launching.

It has become a broad cross-party amendment, with backing from Liberal Democrats, Greens and prominent Labour backbenchers including Chris Curtis, Florence Eshalomi, Helen Hayes and Luke Akehurst.

Emily Darlington — NC41 to NC47 (digital and AI amendments). These are far-reaching changes to the bill which would expand digital offences, aim to clampdown on electoral online harms, create a political advertising repository, grant the Electoral Commission powers over social media platforms, launch a Critical Election Incident Protocol and a review of regulated periods for elections, and introduce mandatory AI content labelling. It's supported by Labour's Dame Chi Onwurah, Polly Billington, Justin Madders, Jo White and Samantha Niblett as core co-signatories alongside broader support.

Jo White — Amendment 4 (candidates declare they will undergo a DBS check if elected). The reasoning is fairly simple: why should many professions including those for teachers, nurses, social workers and carers be required to undertake criminal-records checks but not MPs? Some would answer: because they work with vulnerable people as a core part of their jobs. But MPs come into regular contact with vulnerable constituents. The broader democratic question is: should MPs be able to elect former criminals if they choose to do so? This wouldn't stop it, but it might make rehabilitated ex-offenders think twice. It's supported by Jonathan Brash, Emily Darlington, Ruth Jones, Iqbal Mohamed, Jess Phillips, Peter Swallow, Tom Morrison and Adam Dance.

Cat Eccles — NC32 and NC33. This would go further and introduce mandatory enhanced DBS checks before nomination for parliamentary and local government candidates respectively. This would suggest that all those considering becoming a candidate would have to reveal information the police hold on them, as well as any spent and unspent convictions.

Liam Byrne — NC34 (ban on cryptoasset donations). Supported by the Green MPs and Hannah Spencer. This would go further than the Government's existing moratorium on crypto donations and ban donations "made from the proceeds generated by crypto-assets such as digital tokens and memecoins". Since this would be hard to determine for someone who made part of their money from crypto, it would place a high bar on donating from anyone with investments in the sector.

Richard Burgon — NC22 (ban on oil and gas company donations). This is a Labour left amendment, supported by Nadia Whittome, Jon Trickett, Apsana Begum, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Kim Johnson, Your Party-linked MP Zarah Sultana, Ian Byrne, Green MP Hannah Spencer, Diane Abbott and others.

Chris Hinchliff — NC25 (ban on property developer donations). Supported by the likes of Peter Lamb, Manuela Perteghella, Clive Lewis, Apsana Begum, Margaret Mullane and Neil Duncan-Jordan, this would do what it says on the tin. It would ban donations from a person or firm which is a "property development or construction undertaking".

Neil Duncan-Jordan — NC26 (ban on donors connected to public contracts). It would bar donations from any individual or firm which "has been awarded a public contract within the previous ten years," in an effort to clamp down on corruption. There is no minimum value for the contract – it could be £100 or £10 billion. Supported by Chris Hinchliff, Yasmin Qureshi, Apsana Begum, John McDonnell, Nadia Whittome, Rachael Maskell, Ian Lavery, Clive Lewis, Iqbal Mohamed, Paula Barker, Emma Lewell and Dr Simon Opher.

John McDonnell — NC35 and NC36. This would extend the franchise to foreign nationals with settled or indefinite status at Westminster elections, and to foreign nationals at English local elections. It would move Westminster elections closer to the situation in Scotland, where voting is based on residency rather than citizenship.

Related reading: Fake Ads and Weak Regulations Are Creating a ‘Perfect Storm’ for Election Disinformation

Non-Labour Amendments

NC19 (Lib Dem Freddie van Mierlo — overseas voting feasibility study) is the second most signed amendment after Sobel's National Commission on electoral reform, with around 40 Lib Dem and cross-party signatories. It would explore the use of UK Embassies, High Commissions or consulates being used as polling stations for Brits abroad, as well as voting by telephone, secure electronic voting and extending proxy voting arrangements for overseas voters. Turnout among overseas voters is extremely low, in part due to the unreliability of international postage and short timelines from getting a ballot abroad to ensuring it arrives back in the UK.

NC8 (Lisa Smart) — this proportional representation amendment has a substantial Lib Dem list of around 25-30 signatories, though notably this is almost entirely Lib Dems with very little Labour support. It would skip a national commission and go straight for PR: "All elections to the House of Commons and to local authorities in the United Kingdom shall be conducted using a system of proportional representation."

Other amendments include NC37 (Lib Dem Zoë Franklin) which would restore the Access to Elected Office Fund, which previously helped disabled candidates cover additional costs of standing for election, and NC9 (LD Lisa Smart) which would ban current or former individuals who've been politically appointed advisers to a foreign government from making political donations.

Another (NC11) from Lisa Smart requires candidates to declare any past or current income or gifts from foreign governments or connected entities as a condition of valid nomination, and NC12 again from Smart, requiring party treasurers to produce annual statements on steps taken to mitigate risks from foreign donations.

While the Government is proposing a range of electoral reforms, some campaigners are not convinced it is not being prioritised, citing the fact that the current Minister for Democracy is also responsible for "Building Safety and Fires".

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

The manner in which he did so - via a pre-filmed “emergency address” to camera, without any journalists presents - was particularly telling. 

As questions continue to grow about Farage’s secret £5 million bung from a crypto billionaire, and his claimed hacking by Russia, the previously publicity-hungry Reform leader has become remarkably camera shy.

Yet it was the content of Farage’s “address”, even more than the manner in which he delivered it, that was most striking.

Responding to the case of the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak, Farage declared that the case showed that “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than ethnic minorities”, adding that “white lives matter…” and there needs to be “an end to anti-white prejudice”.

Farage’s speech comes amid a deliberate ramping up of racialised language from Reform UK. In another recent post, Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf declared that "White people are now demonstrably the biggest victims of racism in Britain”.

Now I’m not sure what definition of “demonstrably” Yusuf and Reform are using here, but official figures demonstrate that black people in the UK are around 16 times more likely to be the victims of racial hate crime, per head of population, than their white counterparts, with Asian people being around nine times more likely.

Related reading: He Who Pays the Piper: The BBC, Tony Blair, Rishi Sunak and a Failure of Journalism

Of course anti-white racism does exist in the UK, but all of the evidence suggests that it is a vanishingly small problem compared to that of racism against non-white people.

And while there almost certainly will be lessons for the police and others to learn from the Nowak case, the fact that Farage and Reform are jumping on it as undeniable evidence of endemic racism against white people is both deeply irresponsible and frankly grotesque.

Yet what this ramping up of racialised rhetoric really demonstrates is quite how desperate the Reform operation is now starting to look. Faced with an upcoming by-election in Makerfield, which on paper the party should be able to win at a canter, Nigel Farage’s party is currently facing yet another humiliating loss.

According to the latest betting odds, Reform’s candidate Robert Kenyon is likely heading for defeat against Andy Burnham. Meanwhile, Kenyon’s long history of racism, sexism and homophobia, much of which was exposed by Byline Times, appears to have caused him to follow his leader into hiding during this contest.

Of course Reform's defeat in Makerfield is far from assured and the only polling of the constituency we have so far suggests that it is still a very close race, but there are increasing signs from Reform and others that what initially looked like an easy win for Farage’s party is now anything but.

The fact that things are not going to plan for Reform can be seen in the rising political and media panic about the influence of Reform’s rival far-right party Restore Britain on the contest.

A series of articles and editorials from Reform-sympathetic newspapers over the past week have urged voters in the constituency not to split the right-wing vote by backing Restore - something that has been picked up in increasingly shrill terms by a number of senior Reform figures. 

Yet with Restore securing the loud support not just of X owner Elon Musk, but much of the far-right social media sphere which first helped propel Farage’s party to prominence, there has been a noticeable panic emerging from Reform quarters.

And with that panic has come the sort of ramping up of racialised rhetoric that we saw from Farage on Tuesday morning.

Of course this ramping up should worry everyone who cares about the state of British politics. The fact that the party which is leading in all of the national opinion polls is now using the sort of rhetoric previously reserved for the very fringes of the far-right is deeply alarming - as is the fact that this rhetoric is being publicised and normalised by Reform’s media supporters.

Signs of this normalisation could be heard on the BBC's Radio 4 Today Programme this morning, where Farage's opponents were asked a series of questions by the presenters about whether the "rights and privileges" of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities.

Yet what this episode mostly demonstrates is that a party which once felt secure enough in the broad base of its support to distance itself from the far-right, is now being forced out of sheer desperation to scramble for every last vote on the furthest reaches of its electoral coalition.

This scrambling comes not just amid the rise of Restore Britain but also as Labour prepares to potentially select a new Prime Minister in Andy Burnham, who opinion polls suggest is much more popular than Farage himself.

Squeezed from both the left and right, Reform and its leader face the real possibility of losing their perch at the top of British politics.

It is this fear - rather than any confected claims about a surge in anti-white racism across the UK - which is really driving what we are now hearing from Farage and his party.

Today, the figure is close to zero. The International Energy Agency calls it the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. That's a colossal understatement: it is a mortal blow to the entire fossil fuel system.

Most coverage treats this as a crisis waiting for a fix: a deal, a change of leadership in Tehran or Washington, or military breakthrough – any of which would reopen the strait and restore the old world order.

That fix is not coming. The Strait will stay closed, or half-open on Iran’s terms, because the people who could end this war no longer have the power to do so.

Most of the main actors want it to end. Yet each is held by a structure that rewards every move except the one that would reopen the channel. They lack the capacity to end it, whatever their intentions.

Related reading: The Fossil Fuel System Is Collapsing – and Taking Civilisation’s Safety Net With It

The US Was Warned

This year, the United States and Israel chose to go to war with Iran. More than two decades ago, in the largest war game it had ever staged, the Pentagon tested a war against exactly this kind of adversary. In Millennium Challenge 2002, a Gulf force modelled on Iran, commanded by the retired US Marine Corps general Paul Van Riper, used swarms of small boats, mobile missile launchers and suicide attacks to sink 16 American warships, an aircraft carrier among them, in the opening hours – a loss that in reality would have ranked as the worst at sea since Pearl Harbour.

The commanders stopped the exercise, refloated the fleet, tied the Iranian side’s hands and ran it again to a scripted American win. The vulnerability it had exposed only grew as Iran’s arsenal of drones and missiles expanded in the ensuing years.

President Donald Trump went to war anyway. That is the typical behaviour of an empire in decline. Rome did versions of it in its last centuries, throwing legions it could no longer afford into wars against enemies it could not subdue. A power whose ruling ideology has drifted far enough from reality reaches a stage where it can no longer act on information that contradicts its carefully cultivated self-image.

Rather than adapt, it doubles down on the instrument that built it – force – and applies more of it. Each use of force exposes its own limits, and the decline accelerates. The war the US was told it could not win has left it with a strait it cannot reopen.

Related reading: Trump’s Iran War Is Pushing the Post War International Order to Breaking Point

Trump Is Stuck

Having failed to force the issue, the United States is now trying to leave it, but cannot do that credibly either. Writing in The Atlantic, the renowned American neoconservative analyst Robert Kagan reported that US President Donald Trump has been pressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a “letter of intent” with Tehran: a formal end to the war and a 30-day window for talks. Kagan reads this as Trump losing his nerve.

Washington is using both of its instruments at once, yet neither re-opens the strait. It keeps striking – US forces have hit Iranian positions overlooking Hormuz and Iran has struck back at the bases the raids came from – and it keeps announcing deals, because force cannot reopen the channel and no agreement on offer can hold.

The striking and the announcing are really two expressions of the same paralysis. On 23 May, Trump claimed a deal to reopen the strait had been “largely negotiated”; within hours Iran’s Fars news agency called the claim “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and said the strait would stay under Iranian management.

A power that can no longer win by arms and can no longer make a settlement stick has little left to offer but the announcement itself, and oil markets, easing on each rumour of a deal, keep treating these announcements as progress.

Having abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal signed by his predecessor, Trump has proven to Iran that any future president (including himself) can do the same to whatever Trump signs today. Tehran has watched this happen and drawn the obvious lesson.

Iran Will Not Let Go

Tehran reads Washington’s generous-looking offers as a trap: concessions designed to lull it into lowering its guard before America 'finishes the job'. Given Trump’s record of striking during negotiations, Tehran has concluded that the promise of diplomacy raises the risk of war rather than lowering it, so each overture hardens its determination to keep hold of the strait.

On 1 June, Tehran broke off the indirect talks altogether and vowed to close the strait completely – the deadlock resolving toward closure, not the breakthrough the announcements promised.

The Iran scholar Vali Nasr, author of Iran’s Grand Strategy, put it sharply: Tehran might eventually agree to 'open' the strait, but it will not surrender control of it.

So Iran is seeking deterrence on three fronts: the strait, its nuclear stockpile, and the price it can impose on the United States, Israel and the world economy. Control of Hormuz has proven to be its most effective strategic tool.

The standard view holds that economic pain forces flexibility and that enough pressure will make Iran fold. Four decades of sanctions have shown the opposite.

Keeping the Strait closed is cheap: drones, mines, anti-ship missiles and small fast boats cost almost nothing against the warships and tankers they threaten. The US and Israel trying to force it open is ruinously expensive, requiring a ground war against Iran’s coast with every risk of regional conflagration that implies, and little likelihood of military success.

As Iran grows poorer, the cheap weapons of closure become more attractive relative to everything it can no longer afford. The weakness that commentators read as pressure to settle is precisely what incentivises Tehran to hold the line.

Related reading: Trump Went to War With Iran to ‘Seize Oil’ as US Shale Enters Major Decline

The Great Paralysis

The same pattern recurs across complex systems – ecosystems, economies, empires – which tend to move through a long cycle regardless of who is in charge. The ecologist C.S. Holling, whose work on how natural systems collapse and recover underpins much of modern resilience science, called it the adaptive cycle.

Systems grow, accumulate and organise, becoming richer, more connected and more efficient. That success is also the source of their fragility. The more tightly a system is wired together, the more it depends on conditions staying exactly as they are, and the harder it becomes to change course when those conditions shift. Holling called this late, over-organised stage the conservation phase: the system is at its most powerful and its most brittle at the same time. A single shock can then push it into rapid breakdown, which Holling termed release.

The warning sign that a system has reached that edge is paralysis. Every actor, simply following its interests within the existing structure, can take only the actions that deepen the deadlock. The sum of all those choices is an order that can no longer move, and so can only break - the structure has turned every reasonable choice into a step further into the trap.

Related reading: Why the Iran War Could Last Far Longer Than Either Side Wants to Admit

The Draining Surplus

Beneath the politics lies a physical fact most commentary ignores: it takes energy to get energy.

Pulling oil from the ground, refining it and shipping it all consume energy. What actually powers a civilisation is the surplus – the energy left over once that cost has been paid. In the early decades of oil the surplus was vast: the effort of a single barrel could bring back a hundred. Researchers measure this with the energy return on investment (EROI) – how many units of energy come back for each one spent getting them.

That enormous early return built the modern world, and it bankrolled the American-led order at the centre of it: the carrier groups, the bases, the standing promise that the sea lanes stayed open, the spare wealth to outlast or buy off any rival.

That surplus is now physically draining away. As set out in Failing States, Collapsing Systems, this writer’s 2017 book, the energy returned by the world’s fossil fuels peaked around the 1960s and has since roughly halved, as the easy reserves run dry and drilling moves to the hard, deep and dirty deposits that take far more energy to reach.

On current trends, the global oil industry will burn around a quarter of the energy it produces simply to keep producing by 2030, and roughly half by 2050. This is a matter of geology rather than the oil price, and the wealth available to police the world drains with the surplus.

This is also why force no longer delivers. The surplus that once made American power cheap to project is the same surplus now running out, and a system with a shrinking surplus has shrinking slack: less room to absorb shocks, to make guarantees that hold for decades, to keep distant sea lanes open. As the slack disappears, the order hardens into exactly the brittle, over-stretched state that tips from conservation into collapse.

The Exits Are Blocked

A negotiated deal needs a settlement all sides prefer to war. The problem is that the machinery that once made a deal stick has disappeared: a treaty the next administration would honour, sanctions that lift and stay lifted, guarantees a rival believes.

A military solution is no better: forcing the strait open means a sustained war against Iran’s coast that no analyst believes is truly winnable without total destruction of the entire region.

A change of government is the third hope. Trump could lose the midterms, Netanyahu’s coalition might fracture, and Iran’s leadership could shift again. But successors inherit the same constraints and tend to be harder rather than softer.

And “muddling through” – the hope that the crisis fades – collides with physical reality. The Strait is closed because Iran can keep it closed at almost no cost, and time alone does not change that.

Related reading: Revealed: Tony Blair’s ‘Dodgy Iran Dossier’ Helped Shape Trump War Plan

The Toll Booth

If the closure of the Strait represents the old order breaking down, the Iran toll is the next one taking shape. Iran is not just blocking the strait, but starting to meter it. A new sovereign body, the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, now issues transit permits; vessels must declare ownership, cargo and route before passage. Tehran has had advanced talks with Oman on a permanent joint mechanism.

As Nasr has noted, the tolls do more than raise revenue. To pay Iran for passage, shipping firms and the states behind them must defy US secondary sanctions – the penalties Washington imposes on third countries and companies that trade with Iran. So the more often they do, the more the entire American sanctions architecture corrodes.

Settling those tolls in Chinese yuan, as some vessels already are, shows the dollar’s grip on the global oil trade loosening in real time. China, which sends roughly 40% of its crude through Hormuz, emerges as the principal beneficiary.

The shift from a strait policed by the US Navy as an open international waterway to a chokepoint metered by Iran, with Oman as a junior partner, is a change of order. The post-war oil system rested on an American promise that Hormuz would stay open. That promise is broken and irreparable.

A New Order No One Is Planning For

This has been arriving in stages. Yemen’s Houthi movement closed the Red Sea before Hormuz; Russia weaponised European gas supplies in 2022 before that. Each was a smaller instance of the same event: a power that could no longer be policed turning a chokepoint into leverage, and an old order finding it lacked the surplus to force it back open.

Hormuz is the largest instance so far. Iran will not surrender control at a price any attacker is willing to pay. The United States cannot offer a settlement that its own political system is able to honour. And the energy surplus that once made an open strait cheap for a superpower to guarantee is physically running down.

Access to the waterway that carried a fifth of the world’s oil is now conditional, metered, and contested, and will stay that way. This is a lasting contraction in the supply of the fuels the world still depends on, produced by the structure of a declining order rather than by any single decision within it.

Governments and markets are treating the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as an interruption to be waited out. Unfortunately, they are wrong. The longer this is mistaken for a crisis that will pass, the longer the response to it will also be wrong.

"This celebrated techie is in London til Aug 9," Lord Mandelson wrote to Morgan McSweeney, then the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, and his deputy Jill Cuthbertson. "I don't know whether you have been approached already, but would the PM like to meet him?"

Contained in the second tranche of the so-called Mandelson files laid before Parliament, this email is one of a series of moments in which Mandelson personally connected the UK government to Palantir, the data analytics and surveillance firm co-founded by Thiel, and to the wider network of investors around it – at a time when his own consultancy, Global Counsel, still counted Palantir among its clients.

Mandelson co-founded Global Counsel in 2010 and remained its President and Chair of its international advisory board. He stepped down from the firm's board in 2024 but did not divest his significant financial stake despite official advice that he do so before taking up the appointment: "the retained role and interest in Global Counsel would have to
cease if appointed HMA (His Majesty's Ambassador)."

The firm's client list included Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, a major Trump supporter and, like Mandelson himself, a close associate of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Related reading: Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney Ignored Warnings About Peter Mandelson’s Epstein and Russia links

Epstein and Thiel

Mandelson was announced as ambassador by Sir Keir Starmer in December 2024. In January 2025, UK Security Vetting recommended against granting him developed-vetting clearance; the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office overruled that recommendation, clearing the way for the appointment. 

Senior officials have since indicated the objection turned on his foreign commercial entanglements — including Global Counsel's work touching China and Russia — as much as on his links to Jeffrey Epstein. He took up the Washington post on 10 February 2025.

Mandelson's closeness to the financier after his conviction for sex trafficking is extensively documented. A 2019 internal review by JP Morgan, filed to a New York court in 2023, recorded that Epstein appeared to maintain a "particularly close relationship" with him; Epstein called him "Petie," and the two stayed in contact from at least 2005 until 2016 – long after Epstein's 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor. 

It was that correspondence, in which Mandelson offered the financier support even after his conviction, that ultimately cost him the Washington embassy.

Epstein, by Peter Mandelson's own account, was "a prolific networker" and Peter Thiel was another associate. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2023, Epstein repeatedly sought meetings with the Palantir co-founder around 2016, on one occasion inviting him to lunch with Russia's UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin; when Churkin died in 2017, Epstein emailed Thiel with the news. 

The financial ties ran deeper: as Byline Times reported, with Epstein’s investment of $40 million into Thiel’s Valar Ventures fund, he was described as a “co-owner” by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Thiel’s spokesperson says he was just a limited partner, but his stake is now worth roughly $170 million – the largest single asset of Epstein's estate.

Related reading: Thiel Spokesman Denies Former Israeli PM’s Claim Jeffrey Epstein ‘Co-Owned’ Palantir Founder’s Venture Fund – But Confirms Epstein was a Limited Partner

Meanwhile, Palantir, the tech surveillance company Thiel had also cofounded, had, by 2025, millions in UK government contracts, including the NHS, and was represented by Peter  Mandelson’s lobbying company Global Counsel.

The £750m Palantir Deal

Just over a fortnight into the job, on 27 February 2025 – the day of Starmer's White House meeting with President Trump – the Prime Minister visited Palantir's Washington office and met its co-founder and chief executive, Alex Karp. 

As Byline Times and the Good Law Project have reported, the visit was arranged by Mandelson; no minutes or transcript were kept, and Palantir was at that point still a client of his firm.

Days later, the access continued. On 5 March 2025, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture firm 137 Ventures – an investor in both Palantir and the defence company Anduril – emailed an invitation for Mandelson to attend the Hill & Valley Forum, the Washington gathering that brings together defence-technology executives and Congress. The sender's name is redacted, but the file notes Mandelson would be attending "with Louis": Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir's UK business.

According to Ethan Stone of openDemocracy, Mandelson's security 'mitigations' forbade such one-to-one meetings with former clients like Palantir: a restriction which, like divestment from Global Counsel, the former Ambassador assiduously ignored.

By the late summer, the relationship had hardened into a deal. The files show Mandelson working to land a Palantir announcement in time for President Trump's state visit, scheduled for mid-September.

On 21 August 2025, Mandelson wrote to the Prime Minister directly. The letter is headed "The State Visit: Technology Partnership." Its entire contents have been redacted, replaced with a single "***" and marked OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE. The Government's own note states that references to Palantir were withheld only where redaction was agreed with the Intelligence and Security Committee on grounds of national security or international relations.

A separate email thread from the same week captures officials scrambling over the detail. On 25 August, the Ministry of Defence's procurement directorate circulated an updated draft of the joint statement to be signed during the visit. The next day, an official whose name is redacted relayed questions from Number 10, ending: "Finally, who is the MOD lead on the potential Palantir announcement?" The exchange was forwarded "FYI" by Mark Newton, the embassy's Minister-Counsellor for Defence.

By 26 August, James Roscoe, then the embassy's Deputy Head of Mission, was chasing it: "Keen to know the answer to the final Palantir question too?" The following morning, Newton wrote that the matter "all sits with Andy Start, our National Armaments Director," noting that the Defence Secretary's office had asked for urgent advice on Palantir – the specifics redacted.

Related reading: In Putin’s Orbit: The Crypto Politics of Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Thiel 

It was at this point that Mandelson weighed in himself. In an email timed at 09:05 on 27 August, sent from his phone, the ambassador wrote four words of his own: "I am reluctant to intervene on Palantir." The same day, a further note to Mandelson headed "State Visit – Defence Update" was circulated; its body, too, is redacted in full.

Mandelson never saw the visit he had been preparing. On 11 September 2025, days before Trump's arrival, Starmer dismissed him after the publication of emails to Epstein in which Mandelson had supported the financier. The Foreign Office said the emails showed the relationship was "materially different" from what had been understood at his appointment.

In his farewell letter to embassy staff that day, Mandelson singled out one achievement. The UK leaves the relationship with the United States "in a really good condition," he wrote, "with a magnificent State Visit and the new US-UK Technology Partnership – my personal pride and joy that will help write the next chapter of the special relationship – set for next week."

It went ahead without him. On 17 September, as Trump's state visit opened, Palantir confirmed it would invest £1.5 billion in the UK and expand its Ministry of Defence contract to £750 million over five years – replacing a £75 million, three-year arrangement.

The deal was folded into the Technology Prosperity Deal that Trump and Starmer signed at Chequers the next day. Anduril, the other US defence-technology firm named in the embassy's July meeting notes, received no announcement.

Global Counsel collapsed into administration in February 2026, confirming as it did so that it had finally divested Mandelson's shares.

The pushback has been swift and, in its way, telling. The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has attacked Blair for not mentioning inequality once in 5,700 words. The Treasury minister Torsten Bell has defended the Government’s net zero plans – but defended them as a cost the country can bear, rather than as the cheapest energy strategy on offer. Senior Labour figures have dismissed the essay as “reheated Blairism with no answers”. Each lands a punch. None lands the one that matters. The whole argument is being fought on a 1990s map of Britain that no longer resembles the reality of the country.

Blair’s essay is fluent, articulate and internally coherent. It is also a Victorian document, built around a view of how technological civilisation works that belongs to the age of steam, coal and empire. A clever Victorian reformer in 1888 might have looked around and declared the railway to be the thing. He would have been right – and he would have missed that the railway was one component of a far wider transformation, and that the next century would belong to whoever understood the whole.

Blair has done the same with artificial intelligence (AI). He calls it “the thing” and says it will change everything. He is right that it will – and he has missed that AI is one of five interlocking technological revolutions reshaping the entire economy of every country on Earth. Because he cannot see the whole, his prescriptions for the parts do not add up. His “Radical Centre” turns out to be the most conservative political settlement on the table – the late reflex of an old order trying to manage a transformation it cannot perceive.

Britain cannot afford to take Blair’s path. Burnham’s offer – a redistributive 1980s Labourism – cannot get there either. The argument requires a new horizon.

The Five Revolutions

I set out this framework in detail in my 2024 Foresight paper ‘Planetary Phase Shift’. The argument, in plain English: civilisations behave like other living systems. They grow, mature, break down, and either reorganise into a new form or collapse. We are in the breakdown stage – a moment when the way societies generate energy, move people and goods, feed themselves and process information is coming apart, even as a new way of doing all of that is being born in its shadow.

Five sectors of the global economy are crossing into new configurations at the same time. Each on its own would be a generational story. Together, they reshape everything.

Energy – Solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are now the cheapest source of electricity on the planet, on a cost curve that has been stable for two decades. Since 2011, onshore wind costs have fallen 59%, offshore wind 61%, solar 89% and batteries 83%. Some 84% of new global power generation in 2023 was renewable. Two trillion dollars a year now flows into clean technology investment – double the amount going into fossil fuels.

Transport –Electric vehicles, and behind them autonomous vehicles, are following the same cost curve. The internal combustion engine is heading the way of the horse and cart.

Food –Precision fermentation and cellular agriculture – using engineered microbes to produce proteins and fats at scale – are projected to make protein production five to 10 times cheaper than industrial animal agriculture by 2035. As the think tank RethinkX has documented, industrial livestock is heading for the same collapse that wiped out the kerosene-lamp industry in a decade. Up to 2.7 billion hectares of freed land could become available for rewilding, regenerative farming and carbon drawdown.

Related reading: How to Stop Billionaires From Buying British Politics

Information – This is the part Blair has noticed. AI is following a much steeper cost curve. The cost to train a model such as GPT-3 fell from $4.6 million in 2020 to a projected $30 by 2030. What Blair has missed is what AI is connected to.

Materials –Advanced materials, 3D printing, robotics and circular-economy chemistry are converging into a different industrial base that uses far less mining, land and brute-force extraction. The Congolese cobalt mine belongs to a world on its way out.

These are five threads of a single story. Cheap clean electrons make precision fermentation viable. AI optimises the grid that carries those electrons. The grid powers the AI. Autonomous electric vehicles become moving batteries that stabilise the grid. New materials make the batteries lighter, cheaper and recyclable. The loop closes.

Together, these revolutions amount to what physicists call a phase transition – a system flipping from one form into a fundamentally different one, the way water flips into steam. The cascading crises everyone now talks about – the cost-of-living crisis, energy shocks, geopolitical fractures, the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine – are the noise of the old system coming apart. The five revolutions are the outline of what is being born in its place.

Blair sees AI. He misses the four others, and the connections between them. That single gap organises every error in the rest of his essay.

The Cheap vs Clean Fantasy

Blair’s most consequential line is rhetorical: “Does our economy need right now the goal of clean energy or cheap energy?” It is a question from 1995. Cheap and clean are now the same thing. Treating them as alternatives is akin to asking, in 1985, whether an office requires a typewriter or a word processor.

The North Sea cannot save Britain, and the numbers are devastating. Between 2010 and 2024, 14 years of Conservative drilling policy issued around 400 new exploration licences. Twenty fields were actually built. Their total lifetime production, at full exhaustion, will deliver the equivalent of six months of UK gas demand – two hours and 12 minutes per licence. The most recent renewables auction will offset 50 times that, every year, indefinitely. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has calculated a £364 billion fiscal hit from Britain’s continued reliance on global gas markets through 2050. Modelled across every realistic price scenario, the Treasury loses money on a typical new North Sea field. New licensing fails on its own chosen criteria: a wealth-transfer mechanism dressed up as energy policy.

The reason runs deeper than politics. For decades, every barrel of oil or cubic metre of gas pulled from the ground returned many times the energy it took to extract. That ratio – what researchers call the energy return on investment (EROI) – is collapsing for fossil fuels and rising for renewables. Britain’s national EROI peaked in 2000 at 9.6:1 and had fallen to 6.2:1 by 2012. An industrial economy of Britain’s complexity requires a ratio of at least 10:1 to function comfortably. Britain has been below that threshold for nearly two decades, hiding the deficit with imports that are becoming more expensive and more politically fragile – as the attack on Ras Laffan and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have just demonstrated.

Work by Paul Brockway and colleagues at the University of Leeds, published in Nature Energy, shows that fossil fuel returns globally are dropping roughly 10% every quarter-century at the point the energy is actually used – the plug, the pump, the boiler. Solar and wind at the same point of use already do better than fossil fuels, and they are getting better still. Britain has crossed the line. Almost nobody in Westminster has noticed.

The Superabundance Britain Refuses to See

The other half of the story is what becomes possible when energy stops being a scarce input and starts being an abundance to be designed. The research is now strong enough to be treated as settled.

The reframing came when researchers asked a different question. Instead of asking how much solar and wind capacity is required to meet average demand, they asked what happens if enough is built to meet demand on the worst days – the cloudiest weeks of winter when wind drops off. The result is an enormous surplus of generation for the rest of the year. RethinkX’s Adam Dorr and colleagues ran the numbers on what that surplus makes possible. The more solar and wind capacity built above existing demand, the less battery storage is required. Panels and turbines are now cheap; batteries remain expensive; supersizing generation collapses the overall system cost. Dorr calls it the Clean Energy U-Curve.

The finding is corroborated across independent research. Marc Perez at Columbia University found that building solar and wind capacity to three times peak load cuts battery requirements by 90% and electricity costs by 75%; the Finnish energy firm Wärtsilä found that overbuilding by four times peak load requires only four to 10 days of storage. The International Energy Agency’s Task 16 Firm Power report has established that this is the cheapest route to round-the-clock clean electricity at any scale.

Optimise the system properly and the result is virtually free clean energy in vast surplus, for most of the year. RethinkX calls this clean energy super power. I call it superabundance, because that is what it is.

Applied globally, the numbers are larger still. RethinkX’s 2025 Understanding Stellar Energy report modelled every region of the planet. Ethiopia – often portrayed as a byword for energy poverty – could generate up to 414 times its current output. India could produce 66,000 terawatt-hours per year, almost 10 times current US electricity generation. A team at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science, led by Hubert Desing and published in Energies, found the planet’s total physically possible renewable generation is around 71 terawatts. Current global energy consumption is about 6.7 terawatts. Humanity has 10 times more clean energy potential than it uses.

Britain’s share is exceptional. With roughly 800 GW of wind, 600 GW of solar and around three days of grid-scale storage, the country becomes a clean energy superpower in the literal sense – producing two to three times what it currently consumes, at near-zero marginal cost for most of the year and exporting the surplus into a Europe that needs it.

This is the potential suberabundance Blair refuses to see – the foundation for genuine industrial revival. Virtually free clean electricity at vast scale decarbonises existing industry and unlocks industries that were previously beyond reach: desalination on a scale that can re-green drylands; pulling carbon out of the air at industrial throughput; clean steel and cement at competitive prices; green hydrogen for heavy industry; precision fermentation that displaces industrial livestock; mining waste rather than digging new holes in the ground; AI data centres that do not have to fight farmers for water; a re-industrialised north of England powered by the wind off its own coast.

Blair’s prescription to drill the North Sea harder and slow down the clean build-out is industrially suicidal. He proposes to choke off the foundation of the next economy in order to defend the last one.

The response to Blair on energy has been revealing. When Bell pushed back, he defended net zero as something Britain can afford – a worthy cost, prudently managed – which concedes Blair’s entire framing, in which clean energy is a price the country pays and cheap energy is the thing it sacrifices. The reverse is true: clean energy, built at the right scale, is the cheap energy, and defending it as a cost is defending it on the opponent’s terms. The whole of Westminster, Blair and his critics alike, is still arguing about how much the future will cost, when the real question is how fast Britain can collect the windfall.

I have set out the alternative in detail with colleagues in the Club of Rome Earth4All paper Electrified Sovereignty as Solution to Iran War Energy Shock, co-authored with the former Shell executive Divyesh Desai, Gerard Reid of the World Economic Forum’s Future Energy Council, Sandrine Dixson-Declève of the Club of Rome, and Vicente López-Ibor Mayor, formerly of Lightsource BP. Britain and Europe can build energy systems that produce many times current output, eliminate exposure to fossil shocks, and unlock entirely new electrified industrial economies – faster, cheaper and safer than any drilling alternative on the table. This is what Blair’s “Radical Centre” wants to slow down.

AI Without Its Body

Blair calls AI “the thing” and proposes to “reorganise the whole of government” around harnessing it. He then proposes to power it with an energy system that physically cannot run it.

A standard Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours. A generative AI query uses 10 times that. The Electric Power Research Institute projects that AI-related US power demand could rise tenfold by 2030. Frontier training costs have grown 2.4 times every year since 2016. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft will spend $700 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, most of it on AI data centres – more than the GDP of all but the top 20 national economies.

Such demand cannot be met by a centralised, fossil-fuelled grid running on the dwindling energy returns described above: the cost of electricity from a degrading fossil system rises while the cost of the AI on top of it is forced to fall.

A different physical configuration works. Solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are themselves semiconductors – close cousins of the chips the AI itself runs on – and they share the same exponential learning curves. Pair the solar revolution with the AI revolution and the result is a virtuous cycle: cheap electrons train the AI, and the AI in turn coordinates a grid of millions of intermittent renewable sources – rooftop panels, wind turbines, electric-vehicle batteries, smart appliances – at a speed no human-managed grid could match.

Related reading: Fake Ads and Weak Regulations Are Creating a ‘Perfect Storm’ for Election Disinformation

A British AI strategy that does not begin with the energy question amounts to a slogan. Blair’s version is exactly that.

Whose Revolution? The Missing Rulebook

Every technological revolution comes in two parts. There is the hardware – the steam engine, the power grid, the printing press, the microchip. And there is the software: the rules, laws, institutions, ownership patterns and democratic norms that decide who the hardware actually serves. The hardware sets what is possible; the software decides who benefits, and in my work I have argued that it is the software that determines whether a transition ends in liberation or domination.

History makes the point. The printing press could have served literacy or surveillance. It did both. Electricity could have been a public utility or a private monopoly. The internet could have stayed a decentralised commons or been captured by a handful of platform companies. We know which way that one went.

The same choice now faces every one of the five revolutions at once, and the window is closing fast. Cheap clean energy can be a public abundance or a private monopoly; AI can serve citizens or surveil them; precision fermentation can break the cruelty of industrial livestock or hand it to three patent-holders; autonomous transport can free cities from the car or lock them into platform rents. The technology does not decide. The rules around it do.

Britain’s rules were written for a 20th-Century economy of stable mass employment, predictable demand and growth-as-usual. They are hopelessly miscalibrated for an economy in which energy is becoming nearly free, intelligence nearly free, and the central question is who owns the abundance.

Blair’s essay barely touches this. He offers administrative reorganisation – technocratic civil servants, ministers drafted from outside Parliament, departments run as change-management consultancies. That is fine as far as it goes, and nowhere near the scale of the task. The settlement around steam – the trade unions, the vote, mass education, the regulatory state, ultimately the welfare state – was the software of the industrial revolution, and it took a century of struggle by Chartists, suffragettes, trade unionists and reformers, and finally the post-war Labour Government that Blair himself emerged from, to write it.

Britain does not have a century. It has a decade, probably less. The new rulebook is being written right now, by default – through platform mergers nobody is policing, energy markets designed for the past century, AI contracts signed behind closed doors, planning rules that entrench the old infrastructure. If the rules are not written deliberately, the incumbents will write them. We already know what they will say.

Blair’s “Radical Centre” bolts the new technology onto the old rulebook and hopes for the best. That is the express route to the future the public says it dreads: AI surveillance without rights, energy abundance captured by monopolies, automation without redistribution, a platform economy charging rent on every interaction. The country wants a serious politics of the new rulebook. No one has offered it – not Blair’s wing, not Burnham’s, not anyone currently in the Cabinet.

Tying Britain to a Sinking Ship

The heart of Blair’s geopolitical pitch is that Britain should anchor itself to the United States – repair the alliance, stay close, bet on American power. This is the single most dangerous idea in the essay, because it misreads what the United States now is.

In the past 18 months, America has shown what it now is. In December 2025, the White House published a National Security Strategy built around a doctrine it called “Civilisational Realism” – language that echoed the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, declared Europe lost to migration, and announced that the old alliances were dead. In January 2026, US forces raided Caracas and seized Venezuela’s president; the US President Donald Trump dropped the old language of democracy and talked instead about oil: “We will run it. We will control it.” Then came 25% tariffs on America’s own NATO allies – Germany, France and the UK – open talk of annexing Greenland and Canada, and the war on Iran, launched a day after Tehran reportedly agreed to stop storing enriched uranium. The Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who lobbied for the strikes, boasted that taking Iran would hand the US and its partners control of “31% of the world’s oil reserves”, adding: “We are going to make a ton of money.”

This is the conduct of an empire that has worked out it can no longer solve its own problems and has started seizing other people’s energy instead, rather than a confident superpower offering Britain a stable berth. American shale is past its peak. The debt is unpayable. The grid is creaking. Faced with the hard work of rebuilding – the energy transition, the crumbling infrastructure – Washington has reached for the easy options: invade, annex, tariff, grab. This is what an empire does when its problem-solving capacity collapses. It stops innovating and starts preying.

The grabs are failing even on their own terms. Venezuela’s reserves are extra-heavy crude with a punishing energy return – the US spent blood and treasure to seize what is, in physical terms, closer to a liability than an asset. The Iran war spiked oil prices, shocked the world economy and lit fresh fires across the region. Each “solution” accelerates the breakdown it was meant to halt.

Blair wants to lash Britain to this. He is asking the country to tie itself to the one ship in the convoy that has started firing on the others and is taking on water. The serious move is the reverse: cut Britain’s exposure to an unstable hegemon, build its own energy base so no foreign power’s convulsions can hold it hostage, and deepen the European relationship that Blair himself admits is needed. Energy sovereignty is national security. Blair has it exactly backwards.

Why the Centre Cannot Hold

Blair’s argument is that the centre is the place where policy comes first and politics second: find the right answer and then persuade people of it. The unspoken assumption is that the right answer can be worked out from inside the existing way of looking at the world, and that it merely requires leaders brave enough to face down the politics.

That assumption fails in a phase shift. The “right answers” by the lights of the old paradigm – drill more, chase growth-as-usual, cut welfare, defer Europe, double down on Washington – are the moves a failing system reliably produces when the ground shifts beneath it. They feel sensible because the people producing them still mentally inhabit the world of 1998. Inside that bubble they feel “radical” because they require defying current left-wing pieties. They are in fact the most predictable response available.

The real radicalism the moment requires is at the level of how the world is seen, rather than where one sits on the left-right spectrum. The metrics and instincts of the long boom no longer track reality: GDP captures nothing of what is happening to the country’s energy foundations, and the welfare debate, framed as “fiscal sustainability versus generosity”, misses that rising mental-health and disability claims are symptoms of a failing economy rather than the cause of the failure.

Burnham has been right to hammer Blair on inequality. Blair’s essay treats the British economy as an engine that simply needs the brakes off, with no curiosity about why ordinary people’s lives have come apart. But Burnham’s own frame is also too small for the moment. He sees what is being taken from people, but cannot yet name what is being built that could give it back to them at scale. A redistributive Labourism without a clean energy industrial strategy is a politics of slicing a shrinking cake. The phase shift opens a different horizon – one where electrified abundance generates the surplus that funds the resilience and public services Burnham wants. Neither Blair nor Burnham has joined those dots. Whoever does will define the next decade of British politics.

What Britain Needs to Do

Treat energy as the foundation of everything else. Make electrified sovereignty the explicit organising doctrine of British economic and security policy: a Britain that produces several times its current energy consumption from its own coastline and rooftops, at near-zero marginal cost, and exports the surplus into Europe. This, rather than any drilling programme, is the actual industrial strategy.

Build the capital architecture to fund it. Establish a Green Sovereign Bond Fund – a state-backed vehicle that raises capital at sovereign rates from pension funds, insurers and household savings and channels it directly into the electrified infrastructure the private market is underfunding. The Treasury already underwrites bond issuance for fossil-era purposes; doing the same for the energy system of the next 60 years is overdue catch-up.

Pair AI with clean energy. Build compute infrastructure alongside the renewables build-out, locate data centres where the clean electrons are generated, and treat grid optimisation as one of the highest-value applications of frontier AI. Britain has world-class universities, a deep AI research base and a wind resource the rest of Europe envies – none of them deployed coherently.

Lead European clean-energy integration. The route back into a structured European relationship runs through infrastructure rather than trade talks: a North Sea super-grid, shared offshore wind, joint hydrogen corridors, integrated clean-steel and carbon-border policies, joint critical-minerals processing. The political relationship will follow the physical one.

Reframe welfare as resilience. Through a turbulent decade the priority is managing the transition safely – building shock absorbers, protecting the vulnerable, investing in the energy, food, housing and mental-health infrastructure that lets a society navigate change without fragmenting. Cutting incapacity benefits to fund defence increases is exactly the wrong move: it transfers cost from the state’s balance sheet to the body of the citizen, and the OBR picks up the bill later, with interest.

Renew the political operating system. Britain needs to use deliberative democracy as a serious governance tool – the way Ireland did to resolve its abortion deadlock, France did on climate, and Scotland and the Netherlands now do as routine; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has documented more than 600 such initiatives globally. Citizens’ assemblies on energy, on the constitution and on the welfare-resilience question can do work the existing party-political system literally cannot.

Hold the long horizon. The 2030–2032 window will be the most volatile period of this decade. The cost of getting British strategy wrong now is generational. So is the upside of getting it right.

Playing With Which Fire?

Blair titled his essay The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire. The fire Britain has been tied to for two centuries is the combustion of fossil fuels. That fire is still burning, and it is now the principal source of structural risk to the British economy. Price shocks. Imported inflation. Geopolitical exposure. Climate damage. The £364 billion fiscal hit the OBR has modelled. The country is playing with fire, and the fire is the system Blair wants to preserve.

Blair’s cure is wrong because the model is wrong. He can see the new technologies clearly enough; he simply cannot see that they belong to a different system, with different physics, politics and geopolitics from the one he is trying to preserve. He wants to bolt the data centre onto the oil rig and tie the whole thing to Washington. None of those pieces fit together any more.

What Britain needs is a serious politics of transition: one that names what is ending, builds what is beginning, and treats its citizens as adults capable of being told the truth about both. A redistributive left that refuses to engage with the structural change under way is no closer to the answer.

That conversation has not yet begun. It needs to start.

Nafeez Ahmed is Head of Investigations at Byline Times and the author of Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West From Within published by Byline Books.

This is all to say that when you step back and look at Nigel Farage’s £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne, even when you compare it to illegal donations, you can see clearly how unusual it is. There has never been anything like it in British politics, and people are right therefore to be more than usually concerned about where it came from, why it was given, and how it was spent.

But step back further still, and Farage’s gift looks as quaint as a 1960s Bond villain. All the parties’ spending in the last British general election added together came to barely one-hundred-thousandth of the total for America’s presidential and congressional races that year. Fairshake, which is just one lobbyist for crypto in the US, has $165 million to spend on this year’s midterms, enough on its own to more than double the cost of a UK-wide contest.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to think that some US billionaires might be looking across the Atlantic right now and wondering why they should bother chucking so much money at SuperPACs when they could, for the cost of a single senate seat in Texas, buy a whole G7 country. And, let’s face it, that money wouldn’t be going to the Greens, to Labour, or even to the Lib Dems.

Related reading: Rick Wilson’s Warning From America: Nigel Farage Will Be Your Donald Trump, Unless You Act Now

I know there are lots of crises clamouring for your attention right now, but the threat posed by electoral funding should trump them all because without negating it, there is no way to solve the others. Without a fair political system, we cannot elect politicians who will represent everyone, rather than just their donors; without adequate enforcement of the laws, there is nothing to stop politicians from cheating their way to victory and, once they’ve won, retrospectively approving their own triumph. 

If we don’t get big money out of democracy therefore, there will eventually be no democracy. Once a political system has started to accept the kind of money that flows into American elections, there is precious little you can do about it. If a democracy has become a plutocracy, it is well on its way to oligarchy, and oligarchs don’t give up their power without a fight.

The government has made some moves in this direction, but its efforts are inadequate and lack the urgency required. They must be strengthened, and then the rules must be robustly enforced by ambitious, independent and powerful investigative agencies. 

The first threat is from money. Billionaires are accustomed to getting their way, and are highly skilled at obscuring their wealth behind shell companies, foundations, associations, and other structures, and spreading it among multiple jurisdictions, in order to do so. But these time-honoured ways of escaping detection are a clunky old video store compared to the streaming service smorgasbord that is provided by digital currencies that can be programmed to evade detection.

It is good that the government has announced a moratorium on any donations made in cryptocurrencies, and tightened restrictions on how money can flow via companies, but that’s not enough. Only people can vote in elections, so only people should be able to fund them; and those people need to be taxpayers in the UK, on the electoral register. 

This radical but simple reform would sweep away every available loophole, and every trick, and force political donors to be open and transparent about who they are, what they’re doing, and where their money comes from.

Related reading: Nigel Farage Took £50,000 from Crypto Firms Then Said He Was ‘Not Aware’ of the Industry Funding His Party

Political donations should be made, in sterling, from a British bank account (with the sole exception, for obvious reasons, of Northern Ireland), to make sure their origins are checked as thoroughly as can be. And there should be restrictions on how much any one person can give: £100,000 seems like a good limit to me, but I don’t mind as long as it’s comfortably in the low six figures. In recent elections, British parties have become increasingly dependent on large donors to fund their operations, which is a trend we need to reverse, if we want a healthy democracy. These rules should apply not just to the period before an election, but all the time.

The second threat is from cheats. Too often in the UK, parliament has passed strict rules to protect us – against sewage in our rivers; against money laundering on our high streets; or against bias on our airwaves – but those rules have not been enforced. Regulatory bodies are underfunded, demoralised, and lack the political support they need to do the jobs they’ve been given. This legalisation by under-enforcement needs to stop.

In 2022, Boris Johnson’s Government stripped the Electoral Commission of its powers to prosecute wrong-doers and undermined its independence by forcing it to follow a government-imposed strategy, with many Conservatives at the time angry that the commission had fined Vote Leave for breaking funding limits during the Brexit referendum.

But the lesson to draw from that episode was that the commission had too few powers, not too many: what’s the point of fining a political party or campaign after it’s already won? The obvious lesson that politicians drew from such a futile punishment was to cheat. The body defending our democracy needs to be able to act quickly, decisively and robustly to keep corruption out of politics, and to make sure our politicians serve only the interests of their constituents.

In short, we need a good referee. Referees may lack the glamour of the players on the pitch but, if they’re incompetent, corrupt or unfit, no amount of skill will win a game.

Finally, we need to remove one final avenue of influence-buying, which is the media contract. Although all politicians are technically able to earn money from media companies, in reality, only those on the far right do so in large quantities. Although it is well-known that GB News likes to send its billionaire proprietor’s money overwhelmingly towards politicians on the right, there are also reasons to be concerned about payments from social media companies, like X. 

They pay politicians depending on how popular their posts are, but the posts’ popularity is determined by the companies’ own algorithms, which is to say they are deciding how much money to give politicians just like any other media firm, with a few extra steps added to give it spurious legitimacy. And this is not small change: hard right MP Rupert Lowe has recently been earning more than £3,000 a fortnight from X, which comes closer to doubling his salary.

But banning media contracts is just one way of stopping money from creeping into politicians’ pockets and, as ever with complex or incomplete prohibitions, would just create further loopholes. Politicians work for the people and, as with any other employment, should not be being paid by anyone else while on the job. Perhaps they need a payrise but, once they’ve got it, that must be MPs’ only income.

The aim is to make the laws around how politicians are paid logical, simple and easy to enforce, so voters can trust their reasons for making decisions. That would create a firm foundation on which democracy can rest long into the future, safe from the interference of billionaires, whether local or foreign, and able to respond to everyone’s needs, not just those of the deepest-pocketed.

Unrest over the Oxford Union's invite to the convicted former English Defence League leader comes as Byline Times can reveal suggestions of a deal with GB News to broadcast the event, which has been postponed by several weeks following protests.

Several sources close to the Union say the President arranged for the right-wing channel — whose presenter Jacob Rees-Mogg is a trustee of the Union's charity — to broadcast the debate nationally, beaming an otherwise fringe nationalist figure onto TV screens across the country.

However, after this story was published, and despite initially refusing to answer specific questions on the format, a spokesperson for the Oxford Union denied any deal with GB News, telling Byline Times: "GB News is not set to film the event, nor was there ever an agreement as such. Multiple news outlets, including the Middle East Eye and GB News, wished to report on the event, which is standard practice, and has been done by many news outlets for many of our most historic debates."

Former Conservative minister Rees-Mogg sits on the board of the Oxford Literary and Debating Union Charitable Trust, which exists for "the advancement of education amongst the members of the University of Oxford by the provision of debates."

As such, presenter Rees-Mogg is responsible for ensuring the charity's activities further its charitable objectives – and don't expose it to reputational, financial or legal risk.

Ex-actor turned far-right activist Laurence Fox, as well as sacked GB News host Calvin Robinson, are also speaking on the same side of the motion, titled "This house believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam."

Two sources close to the Oxford Union alleged that Rees-Mogg helped broker an arrangement whereby GB News will record and broadcast Robinson's now-delayed appearance in front of the city's 200-year-old debating society, arguably the most prominent such body in the world.

There is no allegation he broke any rules. But any deal – now denied by the Union – for Britain's right-wing broadcaster (recently dubbed 'Reform TV' by critics) to showcase a convicted criminal and anti-Islam agitator is the latest in a series of controversies surrounding the event.

As well as speaking to senior Oxford Union figures, Byline Times has seen formal questions ('rule 39 motions') put to Oxford Union president Arwa Elrayess expressing anger over the Robinson invite.

One claimed: "You have…arranged for GB News – the primary mainstream broadcaster responsible for amplifying Tommy Robinson's platform and anti-Islam narratives – to film this debate and broadcast it nationally.

"This Union's debates are for its members. They are not content for GB News. Madam President, given that GB News has agreed to film this event, can you tell this committee honestly whether this decision serves this institution's membership? And can you tell us whether it is this institution's interests you are serving, or your own personal platform?"

Another, from a separate Union member, states: "Madam President, you are happy to protect the free speech of Tommy Robinson. You are extending him an Oxford platform, arranging for GB News to broadcast him nationally and have defended him in the Telegraph and on GB News."

Arwa Elrayess is Palestinian and stood on a pro-Gaza platform, and appeared to tack to the left during her election. However, she has taken to the right-wing media in recent weeks to defend her decision to invite Robinson, in what two Union sources allege is an attempt to build her profile for a potential political career.

One union source claimed that Jacob Rees-Mogg had got "very, very close to the Union," though he has had no formal role in organising it.

"Sometimes things you do at Oxford and the Union do have a real-world impact, because they still have an outsize effect on how the rest of the world sees things politically. You tell people what's acceptable and what isn't." Another Union source said the recordings were often uploaded effectively as speeches – meaning the renowned student-led body would be effectively publicising a 12 minute speech by the far-right figure.

After this story was published, an Oxford Union spokesperson pledged that "the debate will be uploaded, in full, without the cutting up of any speeches."

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has a string of convictions including in 2005 for assaulting an off-duty police officer, leading a brawl involving more than 100 football fans in Luton (2011), head-butting a man at an EDL rally in Blackburn that same year, using someone else's passport to enter the United States in 2013, mortgage fraud in 2014, separate convictions for contempt of court in 2018 and 2024, a five-year stalking protection order in 2021, as well as being successfully sued for libelling Syrian schoolboy Jamal Hijazi that year.

Related reading: GB News Ramps Up Migrant ‘Invasion’ Rhetoric as Channel Veers Far Right

Resignations and Protests

The Chief Advisor to the President and SU Sabbatical Officer for Communities resigned their post over the actions of their former close ally.

Shermar Pryce said in a resignation letter: "After the clown show that was the performance by senior members of the committee…I cannot, in good conscience, remain on a committee with people who are so intellectually dishonest and morally corrupt.

"The blatantly deliberate decision to obfuscate and communicate with maximum opacity to members of the committee or the wider membership regarding this is indefensible.

"Facilitating [Tommy Robinson's] appearance, practically in secret, without even mentioning it in the TermCard [list of upcoming events], demonstrates a complete lack of conviction and a cowardly refusal to face the membership you claim to represent. Many members of the committee had no idea that Tommy Robinson would be coming until they saw the OxStu [Oxford Student] article."

Pryce went on: "To not rethink this invite, after members of all backgrounds and dispositions have expressed their concerns and fears, borders on malicious."

The Union's librarian, Prajwal Pandey, also made his objections clear in a speech: "I made my concern about this invitation clear from the outset. Not because I fear difficult debate, but because I care deeply about its quality, its integrity, and who it serves…

"Going forward, we must think far more carefully, about what and whom we choose to platform, and about the responsibility that comes with every invitation we extend."

After this story was published a Union spokesperson told this outlet: "The invite was shared to all members of the Governing Body, the Standing Committee, where they had the ability to object to any speakers on the termcard.

"The entire speaker list, including Tommy Robinson, passed nem con [none against]. Of those who could vote included the Librarian, who equally did not issue any objection to the invite in that meeting. Equally, the Chief Advisor was aware of the invite, and did not issue any complaints until after the termcard was released." Byline Times has not yet been able to verify this but will update if and when we do so.

Related reading: GB News Hosts Reform UK and Conservative Politicians and Activists Posing as Ordinary Voters

In another letter of protest, Alex Evans (LGBTQIA+ Officer) wrote: "The Union does not maintain a consistent policy on the matter of free speech, as I was personally prevented by an aforementioned disgraced member of committee from inviting speakers from Plaid Cymru and the SNP on the grounds they were too divisive. If Welsh and Scottish independence are beyond the pale of free speech, but calling for war against British Muslim…is not, then it is not a matter of free speech, but the desire for publicity, controversy, and shock value which is being placed above public safety and reasoned debate.

"Tommy Robinson's presence only serves to inflame and spread violent rhetoric, rather than contribute meaningfully to the discussion between religion and politics."

The event is understood to have been postponed to 17th June, which in a grim coincidence, coincides with the Islamic New Year. It is the last possible date the debate could be held before the end of term, and the end of Elrayess' term as Union president.

The Oxford Union initially failed to answer a series of specific questions and allegations raised by Byline Times. It did not deny it had a deal with GB News to broadcast the event.

Instead a spokesperson defended the event and said: "The Oxford Union exists to host conversations that would not otherwise take place; such is our commitment to freedom of speech. We do not invite speakers in order to endorse or confer legitimacy. They are invited to have their ideas scrutinised and claims challenged in open debate. We are grateful to Thames Valley Police and Oxford City Council for their support and engagement with us, ensuring the safety of our community."

After this article was published, a Union spokesperson said the Union held a debate on the motion: “This House Believes We Owe No Platform to the Extreme in the Pursuit of Free speech” on the same night as the motion to disinvite Tommy Robinson was to be brought.

"Speaking on opposition to that debate included the President, and an Ex-President who is Muslim, and the Director of Finance...The motion was defeated 104-35, and the Tommy Robinson disinvitation motion was postponed to another week as a result. This is the second time the motion to disinvite Tommy was brought. The first time, it failed to get the 30 requisite signatures it required to go to the House."

Jacob Rees-Mogg did not respond to a request for comment.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

Veteran Conservative MP Sir Roger Gale told Byline Times that Drax was engaged in “sleight of hand” by claiming the energy it generates from wood pellets shipped more than 5,000 miles across the Atlantic is clean. Labour MP Alex Sobel called the proposal “ludicrous”. Liberal Democrat MP Pippa Heylings said she would raise the issue directly with the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) was unable to explain how it would monitor the sustainability standards it has imposed on the company.

Sidestepping Sustainability

Drax’s biomass power station near Selby, North Yorkshire, produces about 13.2 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year, more than any other single site in the UK. Earlier this year DESNZ announced plans to reduce the company’s biomass subsidies from £1 billion a year to £460 million – roughly £1.2 million a day – when the new regime starts in 2027.

The reduced subsidies are tied to requirements for lower carbon emissions and a new set of sustainability standards. By imposing a 27% operating limit, the Government hopes to halve onsite carbon emissions to an estimated 6.6 million tonnes of CO₂ a year by shifting Drax away from near-continuous power generation towards a backup role used primarily when wind and solar output is low.

Yet Drax's proposed 100 MW data centre, which could become operational as early as 2027 with plans to increase capacity to 1 GW by around 2030, not only bypasses the National Grid – but would crank emissions back up to around 11 million tonnes of CO₂ per year. The AI plan also sidesteps sustainability standards entirely.

Under the new rules, Drax’s wood pellets must come from fully sustainable origins, supply-chain emissions must fall by approximately 36%, and no Government subsidies will support biomass sourced from primary or old-growth forests.

Asked how it planned to monitor those targets, a DESNZ spokesperson said only: “Drax must use 100% sustainably sourced biomass, with not a penny of subsidy paid for anything less.”

Cross-Party Opposition

Conservative MP Sir Roger Gale said he had “no objection whatsoever” to Drax expanding into AI or other emerging industries that require significant energy, provided the power being generated is “genuinely clean, not merely presented as such”.

He went on to criticise the firm for “claiming to generate clean power while producing carbon emissions from burning wood pellets that have been shipped around 5,000 miles across the Atlantic.” He added: “That is sleight of hand. It simply is not true. They have no right to make that claim, and we have a duty to ensure they are held accountable for it.”

Alex Sobel, Labour MP for Leeds Central and Headingley, said the idea that AI data centres could be powered by Drax’s wood power station was “ludicrous”.

“I think that we do need data centres, but they should be powered by proper renewable energy, through solar, wind, or other renewables. Drax is not a renewable power station,” he said.

Liberal Democrat MP Phillippa Heylings told Byline Times she was so concerned about the situation at Drax that she intended to raise the issue with Miliband.

“There is a consultation under way at the moment, but what is really needed is a coherent national strategy for AI and data centres,” she said. “We know we’re going to need them, but we also need to think about where they should be located.”

Heylings argued that, wherever possible, data centres should be co-located next to genuine clean energy generation. “In my view, they should sit alongside renewable power sources but I would not include wood burning energy plants in that category,” she said. “The danger is that projects like this could lock in demand for wood pellet power generation, such as at Drax, way into the future.”

Dr Mary Stevens, experiments programme manager at Friends of the Earth, accused Drax of “attempting to use the boom in AI infrastructure to extend a lifeline to its dirty business”.

“Data centres need to be powered by additional, new renewable energy,” Stevens told Byline Times. “Whatever it might say, Drax is not renewable energy.”

Retreat from Carbon Capture

After decades of ministerial hopes that a technology would emerge to turn biomass into the carbon neutral energy solution it was already being claimed to be, Drax announced in December 2019 proposals for Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) – a technology designed to capture the carbon from burnt wood pellets before it enters the atmosphere and store it under the North Sea. The company declared its intention to become carbon negative by 2030.

By February 2026, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the Government’s independent adviser on climate policy, appeared to have given up waiting. In its Seventh Carbon Budget, the committee stated that if the UK is to meet its net zero targets, all large-scale biomass power plants operating without BECCS should be shut down after 2027.

Yet a few months later, in its Annual Financial Report, Drax revealed it was effectively scrapping all future investment in BECCS in favour of more commercially lucrative ventures: battery energy storage systems and the construction of, and direct supply of energy to, its proposed onsite data centre.

Related reading: Drax to ‘Begin one of the Most Expensive Energy Projects in the World – And UK Public Will Pay Three Times Over’

Drax’s chief executive Will Gardiner had signalled the shift in December 2025, when he said the flagship BECCS project at Selby “requires the right support from UK Government, including the development of a business model and, importantly, a regional carbon transport and storage network to connect to”.

Translated: Drax will only build BECCS if the Government pays for it. The power station continues to pump 36,000 tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere every day.

Asked about BECCS no longer being a priority for Drax, despite the UK Government’s commitment to support the technology with up to £21.7 billion over the next 25 years, a DESNZ spokesperson said: “No final decisions around the deployment of large-scale bioenergy with carbon capture and storage projects have been made, and any support would need to provide value for money for taxpayers.”

Energy Security Tension

DESNZ faces a structural bind. The department is committed to a low-carbon future built on genuinely renewable energy, yet the Drax biomass station remains integral to UK energy security.

The Government cannot risk shutting Drax down without first replacing the power it produces with truly renewable alternatives, for fear of shortages, higher prices and greater reliance on gas imports.

But allowing the plant to keep pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere at its current rate damages the UK’s credibility as a climate change world leader and undermines its chances of reaching net zero by 2050.

At the time of writing, Drax had not replied to a request for comment. The Climate Change Committee declined to comment.

The Reform Political Advertising (RPA) campaign is calling for greater regulation to ensure transparency and factual accuracy in election ads.

While the Advertising Standards Authority does regulate advertisements made by companies and third sector bodies, it does not regulate non-broadcast electoral advertising, including online ads.

While it is a crime to 'make or publish a false statement of fact about the personal character or conduct of a candidate', electoral law doesn't require claims made in political campaigns to be truthful or factually accurate. The RPA campaigns for making electoral advertisements subject to regulation to ensure 'that fact-based claims are accurate', and regularly publishes evidence of parties having abused this loophole in and around election periods.

The report, which focuses on the May 2026 elections, highlights examples of distortions of fact and misrepresentations of data across parties. It also delves into the increasingly marginal (defined as a winning margin of five per cent or less) results of elections in recent years, using open source data compiled from local council sources by Democracy Club, and comparing it to local elections over the past four years.

The analysis shows that 2026 saw the highest rate of contests won on low margins in recent years, with 41% of wards having a winning margin of less than 5%, and 398 wards decided on a knife-edge margin of less than 1%.

Nine wards were decided on a winning margin of just one vote, in an overall picture which leaves democracy at local level 'vulnerable' to abuse, meaning that 'disinformation and misleading election advertising do not need to shift thousands of votes to have a decisive impact'.

Losing Here

A Reform UK leaflet, distributed in Chelmsford, gave no source for a bar chart that had the party polling at 34% and the Conservatives and Labour tied at 16%, and didn't even mention the Liberal Democrats. Full Fact noted that the bar chart was "completely out of proportion", and polling from JL Partners' 15th April 2026 Local Elections MRP, while putting Reform at 39% in Essex, also showed the Conservatives on 21% and the Lib Dems at 19%.

Of the eight Chelmsford wards, Reform won four of them, three went to the Lib Dems, and the Conservatives took one. One of the wards that Reform beat the Lib Dems in was decided by just 34 votes, with others in the low hundreds.

In the West Midlands, the Conservatives ran an ad template across multiple wards explicitly telling voters that "only the local Conservatives can beat Labour", downplaying the strength of the Green vote in some areas. The results showed that the Greens ended up ahead of the Conservative candidate in Harborne by 52 votes, and Labour beat the Greens by just three votes in Bournville and Cotteridge, with the Conservatives trailing much further behind.

The report adds: "The issue is not that parties cannot make the case that they are best placed to win. It is that tactical voting claims should reflect the local contest voters are actually facing. In these cases, the claim that only the Conservatives could beat Labour presented a simplified and misleading picture of local competitiveness." The data used was also from the 2022 election results.

One leaflet, delivered by the Labour Party in the Northfields Ward, Ealing, is described as containing a 'cynical manipulation of data' which was 'specifically designed to falsely imply that Reform UK might win'. The goal being to scare voters away from voting for Green Party, Ealing Community Independent, or Liberal Democrat candidates.

And a leaflet distributed by the Liberal Democrats in Blackheath stated that "only the Liberal Democrats can beat Labour here", and that "the Green Party can't win in Blackheath".

The data used to inform this messaging, however, was not from current polling but the 2022 council election results. The results of the election also proved that the claim was wrong, as two of the three seats in the ward were in fact won by the Greens, with the other being won by Labour.

Speaking to Byline Times, Lord David Puttnam, Chair of Reform Political Advertising, said: "This analysis shows that Britain's elections are entering a dangerous moment. As campaigning moves into the AI age, more and more contests are being decided by tiny margins – sometimes just a handful of votes.

"In that environment, misleading election advertising only needs to influence a very few people to distort the outcome. Voters deserve basic safeguards so that all election advertising is transparent and factually accurate."

Local elections held in 2026 have been no different than previous years in terms of parties putting out misleading information in campaign literature, with Labour, Reform UK, the Conservatives, Lib Dems, and Green Party – which supports the tightening of regulation in this area – all having released misleading materials at various points during the year.

A separate Guardian and Full Fact investigation also found a number of other instances of 'dodgy' data being shared by major parties in the locals. These included Conservative leaflets which confused some into thinking they were for the Green Party, as they were printed in Green and only included a small Conservative logo. Another Conservative campaign in Haslemere stated that "Reform can't win here", but used data for the whole of Surrey from the 2024 general election, which Full Fact described as "very unreliable evidence".

A leaflet put out by the Greens in Gateshead showed Reform in the lead beneath a headline which read "Greens are now the only alternative to Reform". The chart referenced YouGov opinion polling from March, but more recent polling from the same pollster put the party in third.

Meanwhile, in Eastgate and Moreton Hall, in Suffolk, the Lib Dems stated that the contest was between "Lib Dem or Reform here", despite using a bar chart showing the Conservatives in second and their party in third place.

A Chance to Act

The findings come with the possibility of meaningful change to 'actually do something' about lack of regulation in the electoral advertising space, with several amendments to the Representation of the People Bill being put forward by MPs at the report stage, following consultation with the RPA campaign.

These include the introduction of election advertising regulation to combat misleading factual claims, establishing an independent database of election advertising to counter "dark" election advertisements (those only visible to the recipient), making it illegal to create or distribute digital content that falsely claims to be speaking for a political candidate, and plans to strengthen 'imprint' rules to require all relevant media to display, prominently, the name of the party promoting or creating the ad.

Alex Tait, Co-Founder, Reform Political Advertising, told Byline Times: "Free and fair elections depend on voters being able to trust the information they receive during a campaign. The amendments we're putting forward are a proportionate and necessary step to protect voters from misleading claims and disinformation. No party should be able to win votes by knowingly misleading the electorate."

Green MP, Ellie Chowns said: “Political misinformation and disinformation are among the gravest threats to our democracy and to public confidence in politics. As elections become more contested and the use of AI in political materials grows, our current rules are simply not strong enough to protect voters or ensure fair competition.

“The Government must bring forward serious reforms to make our democracy more resilient, including a proper regulatory framework to prevent misinformation and disinformation in political advertising, stronger controls on political deepfakes, increased powers for the Electoral Commission, and tougher action to combat the influence of dark money and foreign interference in our politics".

The report is available here.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on tips@bylinetimes.com 

It comes as the Prime Minister insists "our plan is working", pointing out that net migration is down sharply to its lowest since 2021, inflation is down to 2.8%, and the UK was the fastest-growing economy in the G7 in the first quarter of the year.

No 10 is also keen to stress that homicides in England and Wales are at their lowest levels since the 1970s, and knife crime is down by 10% compared with the last year.

NHS waiting lists in England are also at their lowest level for three and a half years, with the "largest single month performance improvement in 17 years" in the latest figures.

That is cited as evidence by No 10 that the PM, and the country, is on the right track. They've come alongside a raft of policy measures designed to change the narrative around this Government.

Here are some you may have missed.

Economy, Tax & Cost of Living

This month the Chancellor announced the 'Great British Summer Savings' scheme: VAT will be cut from 20% to 5% on children's restaurant menus, children's cinema/theatre tickets and admission to attractions (theme parks, soft play, zoos, museums) between 25 June–1 September 2026. Its estimated cost of £300m will be funded by closing a tax loophole used by oil and gas firms with overseas operations.

As part of that scheme, free local bus travel is being rolled out for 5–15 year-olds in England throughout August (a £100m fund), on top of the existing £3 bus fare cap, which itself has now been extended to March 2027.

Following campaigning by the Unison union, claimable mileage rates for those who drive for work are being uprated by 10p for 2026-27, backdated to April – the first rise in 15 years. It should give workers an extra £120 for 6,000 business miles.

More controversial among environmentalists is the fuel/motorist support package (set against the Iran conflict): the 5p fuel duty cut has been extended to the year-end, there's a 12-month road tax holiday for hauliers (up to £912/vehicle), and tax on red diesel is down to its lowest rate in 20+ years.

Tariffs are also set to be suspended on 125 everyday food items (garlic, avocados, mangoes, nectarines, vegetable and olive oil, baked beans, chocolate, sauces, soft drinks), building on another batch of tariff suspensions in April, with a 'warning' to retailers to pass savings on.

New anti-profiteering powers will see consumer watchdogs including the CMA gain rapid investigatory powers and the ability to "name and shame" firms raising margins during economic shocks.

We're also getting a wealth tax, sort of. The consultation on implementing a High Value Council Tax Surcharge ("mansion tax") has been launched, expected to raise around £500m annually.

Trade & Business

Ministers have sealed a UK–Gulf Cooperation Council trade deal (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE): potentially worth £3.7bn a year. The UK is the first G7 nation to strike this kind of deal; removing around £580m in duties annually (including £360m from day one).

Announced in the King's Speech, but welcome for many nonetheless, the Small Business Protections (Late Payments) Bill has been introduced to bring in the "largest crackdown on late payments" in over 25 years.

And the Government has heeded union calls to support the ceramics and chemicals sectors – with £120m for the UK ceramics sector and £350m for chemicals.

Energy & Environment

The Government has given the green light for mega-wind farms Dogger Bank South (up to 3GW capacity) and North Falls (~1GW) – together capable of powering more than four million UK homes.

It brings Labour-approved offshore wind projects to 10.5GW, plus 5.4GW of solar. For offshore wind, each GW of capacity tends to create enough energy to power over a million homes, and for solar over 300,000. Offshore wind reforms have also recently been announced to further speed up delivery.

Ministers are also granting "Critical National Importance" designation for major clean energy projects, reducing their exposure to legal challenges (via judicial-review) to "all but human rights grounds".

Of course, the biggest energy news is that Ofgem has confirmed a 13% energy price cap rise from 1 July. The gas cap is up 24%, electricity up ~5%, from a £1,641 average base, driven by Middle East gas prices amid Trump's war on Iran. But the increase would likely have been far higher without Britain's renewable surge. The link between gas prices and electricity prices is getting weaker all the time, before the Government's planned reforms to the sector have kicked in.

Related reading: 14 Government Reforms the Media Has Largely Ignored Over Recent Weeks

Children, Education & Welfare

This week the childcare market was referred to the Competition and Markets Authority by the Education Secretary, in a bid to get tough on excess charges at nurseries and similar settings.

Meanwhile the plan to implement major children's social care reforms has launched, with a £2.4bn 'Families First' Partnership Programme. Every local authority in England will deliver a single Family Help service, "offering the support and interventions needed to keep families together where possible." And new multi-agency child protection teams will bring together social workers, police, health and education professionals to "strengthen safeguarding for vulnerable children." There's also £560m in capital funds – investment in the bricks and mortar – for children's homes, and £12.4m to modernise foster care in an effort to create 10,000 new foster places.

Flexible/modular student finance packages have been announced to go live from September 2026 – the first 130 institutions approved to offer short modules for those not wanting to do a full degree, or to split a degree up into stages. It's designed to help those working or caring alongside studying.

Transport & Infrastructure

The first branded train for the new publicly-owned Great British Rail has been unveiled in Brighton, Govia Thameslink comes into public ownership end of month, and a new GBR ticketing app is set to launch, eradicating booking fees and bringing the publicly-owned providers under one roof. SWR has also just marked one year in public ownership, boasting a new Arterio fleet.

A new mass transit taskforce to roll out trams, light rail and high-frequency buses has been set up alongside a consultation on devolving more transport powers to mayors.

Related reading: He Who Pays the Piper: The BBC, Tony Blair, Rishi Sunak and a Failure of Journalism

Legislation: King's Speech

Almost all of this is announced outside of the 38 new bills set out in the King's Speech earlier this month.

They include measures to further restrict the Right to Buy (exempting social homes from 'right to buy' for 35 years after construction), nationalising Britain's steel industry (it has already passed its second reading), and the (carried-over) Representation of the People Bill which will introduce votes at 16 and clamp down on foreign donations in politics.

Some announcements have been publicised more than others. The news that 26 new life peers have been appointed – every one of them ousted hereditary peers, in apparent compensation for the end of their 'bloodline' rights – was rather buried.

We've also spotted that the two-preference voting system, Supplementary Vote, is being swiftly restored for combined-authority mayors (like in Greater Manchester), via the Combined Authorities (Mayoral Elections) (Amendment) Order 2026.

It's intended to come into force by 19 June 2026. That's a day after Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is elected, or not, as MP for Makerfield, opening up a fresh mayoral contest in the city region where Reform and Labour could again go head to head. The timing is of course notable.

Ann Black of Labour's NEC ties this quick-fire reform to internal pressure for electoral reform – around 70 Labour MPs (led by Alex Sobel) have separately amended the Representation of the People Bill to push for a National Commission on Electoral Reform.

Related reading: Reform-Run Council Cuts Opposition Time to ‘Make Way’ for Lord’s Prayer and National Anthem

But it may be more to do with electoral calculus – centre and left parties tend to do better out of preferential systems than the right in the UK, as many Lib Dems and Greens would vote Labour as their second choice. Conservatives may not tactically rally around Reform on their second preference in the same way.

Keir Starmer is also taking a tougher stance on the far-right, appearing to break with last year's alleged indulgence of Tommy Robinson's Unite the Kingdom march by this time banning eleven foreign far-right agitators from coming to the UK, ahead of the "unpatriotic" repeat of the march earlier this month. Among them were US agitators, suggesting the PM is now up for a fight with the MAGA crowd. The same mood music is being played over promises to act quickly to clamp down on US tech giants getting young people hooked on social media apps.

A No 10 spokesperson says the Government is "not returning to a status quo that failed working people, but building a stronger, fairer Britain."

"From lowering costs and backing families to restoring control and driving growth, the government is delivering the security and stability people expect – and laying the foundations for long-term change."

Prime Ministers are rarely around long enough to bask in the long-term benefits of their reforms. But Keir Starmer may get less time than most. The Labour Party may soon decide if he's "moving fast and fixing things" to their satisfaction.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

Despite coming from very different political backgrounds, their prescription was strikingly similar.

“I do think artificial intelligence, is changing every aspect of our economy, our society, our lives,” former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told the show.

“And if I was back in office, if I looked at my diary and where I was going to spend my time as Prime Minister, I would be spending it on that”.

Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair said he “wholeheartedly” agreed with Sunak, telling the programme that the UK should “grasp” the “artificial intelligence revolution” and open up the NHS to the industry.

Of course what the BBC didn’t make sufficiently clear to its listeners is that there may be good reasons for them sharing such a simliar outlook. 

Because although it was not mentioned at all during his interview, a quick look at Sunak’s Parliamentary register of interests reveals that he currently receives a £373,000 a year salary from one of the biggest AI companies in the world.

He’s not the only one to benefit from the industry. The Tony Blair Institute, which was set up by the former Prime Minister, has as its main donor Larry Ellison, a Donald Trump-supporting tech billionaire with massive investments in artificial intelligence. 

In recent years Ellison has handed £257 million to Blair’s institute.

Unlike with Sunak, the BBC did point this funding out during the interview. Yet they also allowed Blair to insist, without any pushback, that this colossal sum has absolutely nothing to do with his repeated public lobbying for AI and big tech.

“The reason we are very happy to work with people like Larry is because we share the same view about the importance of this technology revolution” he told the programme.

Another area where Sunak and Blair appear to agree with each other is on Net Zero. Yet as with AI, Blair insisted that the millions of dollars his institute has received for advising Middle East petrostates, has absolutely nothing to do with his lobbying to scale back renewable energy projects in the UK.

“When I argue against Net Zero, people say, ‘Oh, well, but they do work in the Middle East, so it's all because of the, you know, the oil-producing countries. It's honestly to do with looking at the world and asking what the right answer is,” he told the BBC.

It’s not just oil and AI companies that Blair appears to have a passion for, but the US President too.

Insisting that Keir Starmer should have a closer relationship with Donald Trump, and his attack on Iran, Blair appeared to deny that this view had anything to do with his own personal involvement in the US President’s ‘Board of Peace’ initiative.

Related reading: Revealed: Tony Blair’s ‘Dodgy Iran Dossier’ Helped Shape Trump War Plan

Of course it’s entirely possible that the fact that Blair has today published a 5,700 essay demanding Keir Starmer back AI, slash Net Zero and get closer to Donald Trump has nothing to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars his institute has received from industries and individuals with exactly the same agenda.

Similarly it’s also entirely possible that Rishi Sunak’s belief that the current Prime Minister’s number one focus should be on the artificial intelligence industry, has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that this very industry is now his primary employer.

Yet when the piper keeps on playing the exact same tunes that the people who pay him want to hear, then it’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether there might be a relationship between the two.

And when a public sector broadcaster like the BBC fails to make it really clear to their listeners about the significance of these potential relationships, then they are doing all of us a serious disservice.

A Systemic Failure

This isn't even a one-off failure. Over recent years the BBC and other news organisations have regularly invited former politicians and public servants onto their shows, without making it clear about the potential conflicts of interests surrounding their post-politics roles

To give one recent example, last month the BBC led all of their news bulletins on another intervention by a former Labour defence secretary, Lord Robertson, demanding more defence spending.

Now just as with Sunak and Blair, it is perfectly possible that Robertson's intervention was completely sincere and entirely a result of beliefs forged during his former public sector roles.

However, what the BBC didn't mention at all during their coverage of Robertson's comments is that those current interests include a senior paid role for defence industry lobbyists.

Again, he who pays the piper, doesn't always call the tune.

But the job of journalists is to at least make the existence of these relationships clear to their audiences, so that we can then make our own minds up about them.

The BBC's inconsistent approach to this is a huge failure in their journalism.

Groups including the National Secular Society (NSS) and Humanists UK have expressed disappointment that a Kent council has voted to "impose" Christian prayer at meetings.

Amendments to have a moment of silent reflection instead, or for the prayers to be said prior to the official agenda beginning, were defeated last Thursday. Prayers have not been said at Kent County Council meetings since 1987, according to the NSS.

The changes were put forward by Reform UK councillor Christopher Hespe. It is the latest attempt to introduce Christian prayers into council meetings by Reform. Farage's councillors also imposed prayers on Derbyshire County Council last year after the party took control of the council.

Opposing the amendment to have a silent moment of reflection, Council Leader Linden Kemkaran said she wanted the lord's prayer to "take up the space" of that silence. She claimed the lord's prayer was a "profound unifier". And Reform councillor Spencer Dixon called the opposition to the plans "fake outrage".

Fellow Reform councillor Terry Mole said that while he does not know if he's a Christian and he doesn't go to church, he does pray to win the lottery and said that councillors who do not want to listen to the lord's prayer should just 'bow their head'.

Cllr Mole said: "We are Christians at the end of the day."

He went on: "Am I a Christian? I don't know. I don't go to church. I don't pray every morning…But when I do the lottery, I still say, well, please God, let me win, okay?...I'm sure we all do it. Where are we going to get buried when we die? We're going to be buried in a church, okay?"

In fact, 78% of people in Britain are now cremated.

The proposal was even controversial among Restore Britain councillors. One of them, Cllr Oliver Bradshaw, gave a conflicted speech noting that as a practising Anglican who supports the prayer, he was worried his own side was turning his religion into a political tool – the Lord's Prayer being an act of worship and not about signalling or drawing political lines.

Conservative councillor Bill Barret said he "wasn't elected to say prayers in this chamber", adding that as an atheist, imposing prayers made him feel "slightly uncomfortable".

And Lib Dem councillor Mike Sole pointed to the potential bureaucratic absurdities of compulsory singing of the National Anthem. "Will scrutiny committees investigate insufficient enthusiasm? Will there be an anthem KPI [key performance indicator]?"

He told fellow councillors: "The resident waiting for the pothole to be fixed is not lying awake at night thinking, 'I just wish my councillors would sing a bit more'. They are thinking, 'could someone please stop my [vehicle] crashing into a crater?

"Our meetings are already theatrical enough. When the meetings end with a member of the Royal Family present, I will gladly stand up and sing with gusto. But until then, let's finish with dignity, efficiency and the traditional British custom of quietly gathering our papers, nodding quietly to one another and muttering about the weather on the way out."

The vote at the council's annual meeting on 21 May saw 48 councillors back reciting the Lord's Prayer and 45 back singing the national anthem – while approving a cut to all opposition leaders' response time to make way for it. Opposition time will be cut by a minute each, leaving Labour's Leader with only two minutes.

Related reading: Reform Council Sacks Long-Serving Vicar as Standards Chief, in Wave of Cuts to Scrutiny

The Green Group suggested that any reduction in speaking time be reflected in the Leader's speaking time, reducing from 16 minutes to 14, but that suggestion was rejected by the administration as unreasonable.

Many councils have stopped holding prayers before meetings to make them inclusive of people of all religions and beliefs. This includes St Albans, which voted last year to end prayers because they may "exclude or alienate individuals of different faiths or those without religious beliefs". The prayers will be introduced at the next Kent council meeting on July 16th.

'A Regressive and Divisive Move'

NSS head of campaigns Megan Manson said: "This is a regressive and divisive move which sends entirely the wrong message to the people of Kent.

"It places Christianity on a pedestal above all religions and beliefs, contradicting values like tolerance, inclusion and equality.

"It also serves a Christian nationalist agenda which seeks to equate Christian identity with Britishness, and further break down the separation of religion and state. This is not the way to foster community cohesion or equal citizenship."

Karen Wright, Director of Human Rights and Advocacy at Humanists UK, told this outlet the move was a "step backwards" for inclusive local democracy.

"Council business should not exclude people on the basis of religion or belief. Kent is not a Christian county. The Council's own Census analysis shows that fewer than half of residents identify as Christian, while more than four in ten have no religion, alongside significant Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jewish, and other belief communities. That diversity should be reflected in how the Council conducts its business."

Paul Pettinger is a former councillor who never stood up for prayers when they were compulsory on Exeter City Council from 2004 to 2008. He now chairs Green Humanists, the Green Party's secularist wing.

He told Byline Times: "I was threatened with expulsion if I so much as discussed the issue at a full council meeting. It was really quite unpleasant and nasty.

"Prayers are no longer part of formal business at Exeter. That's what makes it strange that Kent County Council are now trying to reintroduce them. Most councils don't have prayers; Exeter was one of the minority that did, and even they no longer do. I do find it sinister, and I worry that it's also sectarian.

"I'd have thought Reform Party members would appreciate religious freedom. Jesus was a refugee, according to the New Testament — he fled repression from King Herod. So I see a real irony in them trying to privilege one particular religious worldview when their own views are so heretical."

Related reading: Nigel Farage Took £50,000 from Crypto Firms Then Said He Was ‘Not Aware’ of the Industry Funding His Party

Prayers Over a 'Water Catastrophe'

The meeting also saw what the Greens say was an urgent debate on water shortages in the county, delayed by two months. The Green Group's motion on Water Resilience was deferred at least until July, on a procedural technicality. Around an hour was spent debating the introduction of the Lord's Prayer to full council meetings at the Reform-controlled authority.

Kent Greens have raised repeated concerns about the "water catastrophe" at their district councils as South East Water has confirmed demand from new development will outstrip supply.

Green councillor Mark Hood (Tonbridge) said: "We are talking about full council, not the Last Night of the Proms. If people want to sing songs, then, by all means, sing the songs elsewhere. If this is going to eat into the time allocated to the democratic processes being undertaken in this room, then it's absolutely unacceptable."

Cllr Rob Yates (Green, Cliftonville) added: "This chamber is not a place of worship; we are here to serve all of our residents in Kent regardless of their beliefs.

"We are not elected to pray to God in this chamber or to sing to the King, although many of us are happy to do that, so let's keep our focus on serving residents rather than serving the political aspirations of Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe".

The Reform UK group took control of Kent County Council in May 2025, winning 57 of 81 seats. The party has since lost ten members, largely through suspensions and defections to Rupert Lowe's far-right Restore Britain party. In April 2026, Green candidate Rob Yates won the Cliftonville by-election in Thanet, taking a seat off Reform with 39 per cent of the vote.

Cllr Stuart Heaver, Green member for Whitstable West, added: "The Green Group was hoping to put forward a really pragmatic sensible action plan to sort out Kent's fragile water infrastructure, we've got a real problem with wastewater treatment and water supply and we're building more houses and the climate is changing and nobody is addressing it so we are sleep walking into this water catastrophe."

Related reading: Reform UK’s ‘Meta Glasses’ Councillor Who Was Accused of Shaming Disabled Man and Dyslexic Colleague Is Put in Charge of Special Educational Needs

'A Moment of Unity'

Cllr Linden Kemkaran, Leader of Kent County Council, defended the move, saying: "Beginning a full council meeting with the Lord's Prayer is, for me, a pause and a rare moment of unity and peace in the Council Chamber. A moment to remember that we are accountable – not just to voters at election time, but for every word we say and every vote we cast in that room.

"Whether you are a person of deep faith, a casual cultural Christian, or someone who simply respects the ancient traditions of this country, I think most people can understand the value in that kind of moment. It grounds us. It reminds us why we are there, and it reminds [us] to always try to act for the greater good."

She called the Lord's Prayer "one of the most widely known texts in the English language," "recited in councils, courts, and Parliament for centuries." The Kent Reform leader claimed that saying the Lord's Prayer at the start of meetings and the national anthem at the close are "small acts in the grand scheme of running a county council."

The Gospel is fairly clear about not being ostentatiously holy in front of others for the sake of appearances.

Matthew 6:1 states: "Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of people in order to be noticed by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven."

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

Long-range drones are already evading Russian air defence systems seemingly at will to wreak havoc with the oil and gas infrastructure that is the backbone of the Russian economy and thus the main source of their war funding. 

The other two elements, the short-range and medium-range capabilities, are no less interesting and no less devastating to the Russian war effort. In fact, the medium-range drone capability may well be the sharpest of the three elements, as they tear into Russian logistics supply routes across the occupied parts of southern Ukraine in the oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. But first, a brief look at how the short-range drones have changed the battlefield.

The Front Line Kill Zone

In the early days of the full-scale invasion, comparisons with the trench warfare of World War I were commonplace. Two enemies faced off across a no-man’s land, sometimes with only a hundred metres between their positions; sometimes the grey zone, or kill zone, between the sides was a kilometre or two. Any attempt to go “over the top” left attackers exposed and vulnerable, with catastrophic losses as a result.

With Russia possessing both a numerical advantage — its population is roughly three times Ukraine’s — and an utter indifference to the numbers it was losing (now closing in on  1.4 million dead and maimed), there was an assumption that, in a war of attrition, Russia would eventually prevail. That assumption had to be overturned.

This war forced Ukraine to innovate and adapt. The use of drones on the battlefield has allowed Ukraine to do two things in parallel that will change how wars are fought in the future: monitor the vast frontline, 1,200 km in length, for signs of Russian troop or hardware movement; and immediately launch hunter-killer drones to neutralise those threats. Before the Russians can move, they are being eliminated.

The kill zone is no longer a thin strip between two lines of trenches; it can now be up to 50 kilometres deep. As Ukraine has invested in producing these hunter-killer drones at scale and at a reasonable cost, the chances of any significant Russian advance from current positions are now close to zero.

Blunting the possibility of further Russian advances is not enough to win the war on its own. Russia could simply hold the territory it seized in the blitzkrieg of the first week of the full-scale invasion and hope the narrative of “no military victory possible for either side” hardened into permanent fatalism “no military victory possible for either side”.

To win, the other two teeth of the trident must work in concert with the short-range systems. The long-range drones are destroying the Russian economy and, with it, Russia’s ability to continue financing the war. 

Related reading: Ukraine’s ‘Frozen’ Frontlines Are Shifting Significantly

Fire Control Over Crimean Supply Routes

The medium-range drones, used from roughly 50 km to 200 km from Ukrainian positions, are rapidly establishing fire control over the highways and supply routes that run through Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and with that, they are undoing the only strategic gain Russia can boast of from this phase of the war: the land bridge to Crimea.

Step back to 2014. Russia seized the Crimean peninsula just five days after the Revolution of Dignity forced former president Viktor Yanukovych into exile in Moscow. There are many possible explanations for the Kremlin’s timing, but there is no evidence that it happened at the request of the local population. 

That rash decision and the rushed, faked referendum that followed left Russia with an acute logistical problem: how to keep Crimea supplied with water, food, fuel and ammunition.

A stopgap was the construction of a physical bridge across the Kerch Strait, connecting the illegally seized Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland; President Putin opened the bridge in 2018, and its capacity was expanded in 2019 with rail freight lines. But the literal foundations of the Kerch bridge are as unsound as Russia’s legal justifications for its seizure of Crimea.

The waters of the Kerch Strait can be violent, and the seabed does not provide a secure anchor for a hastily constructed 12-mile strip of concrete and tarmac built to Russian standards. The only sustainable way to maintain control of Crimea was to create an overland route from Russia itself — hence the occupation of a narrow coastal strip through the oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia along the Sea of Azov.

As in Crimea in 2014 and in parts of Luhansk and Donetsk the same year, there was no call from the inhabitants of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to be incorporated into the Russian Federation before or in 2022. 

In Kremlin rhetoric, these land seizures have been justified after the event by a series of referenda; any referendum organised by the Kremlin is as flawed as any election spectacle in Russia itself. Russia has taken the land and pretended that the locals wanted it, that this is not open to negotiation — none of which is remotely true.

Rhetorical Counterattacks

Another success of Russian manipulation has been to trick observers into thinking the only sticking point for a peace deal is a small part of Donetsk; that is a red herring. The February 2022 offensive was plainly a naked land grab of roughly 40,000 km2 and an attempt to colonise the people who lived there.

Short-range drones have halted any notion of further Russian advances. Long-range drones are dismantling the Russian economy and pushing it towards a tipping point. Medium-range drones are unravelling the only strategic gain from this phase of the war — the land route to Crimea — and the operational evidence is visible on the ground, unravelling the only strategic gain from this phase of the war.

The Russian investigative site Dossier Center says it has obtained what it claims to be an internal Kremlin discussion document on how to sell, or control the narrative of, an end to the war in Ukraine without having achieved its stated objectives. 

According to The Spectator, “The main achievements the Presidential Administration plans to emphasise are territorial gains, a land route to Crimea, and the acquisition of millions of new Russian-speaking citizens.”

When the land route to Crimea is essentially the only major gain Putin’s spin doctors can tout, it makes sense for Ukraine to deny them that prize. There will be no upside to trying to deceive a docile Russian population with hollow triumphalism.

The occupation of Crimea is already unsustainable. Its end will coincide with the fall of the Putin regime and the collapse of the Russian economy; those three elements — political, territorial and economic — are interlinked, and together form another facsimile of the Ukrainian trident.