Let’s start with Newsnight. Since the rebranding that stripped the programme of its once-signature in-depth reporting, Victoria Derbyshire and the presenters who fill in for her have defied expectations, and delivered some good discussion and challenging interviews.

Sadly, the programme let itself down earlier this week by booking the former Russian MP and unofficial Kremlin propagandist Sergei Markov to talk about Russia’s role in the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum campaign.

It was apparently an attempt to balance Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s confirmation to The Rest is Politics podcast, that there had been Russian “interference in the 2016 referendum.”

I have written before about this concept of balance pursued by the BBC. It is based on the mistaken idea that there are two sides to every argument, and that the truth can somehow be established by presenting both sides, and letting the audience decide for themselves.

At its heart is an idea that the truth must lie somewhere in between.

It is a lazy strategy at the best of times, but it is a dangerous and foolish one in a world where misinformation, disinformation and propaganda – in other words, lies – are weaponised and ruthlessly deployed to achieve strategic geopolitical goals. Where you have one side lying and the other trying to be honest, the approach favours the liar, because the truth is not the midpoint between a fact and a lie.

When I saw that Newsnight had interviewed Markov my initial reaction was to compare the grotesque balancing of Burnham with Markov to interviewing Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels to get the “other side” to Churchill’s speeches in 1940. On reflection, it was even worse than that: Markov is such a low-level figure that it was more like bidding for Goebbels, being told he was unavailable, and settling for Lord Haw Haw.

All the interview delivered were accusations that either Burnham was lying, or that he was repeating a lie told to him by British intelligence. No evidence, no insight, just more muddying of the waters by a man trusted by the Kremlin to spread disinformation.

This problem with balance found its way in another form onto the BBC website later in the week.

Related reading: ‘A Clear Answer’: Russia Intervened in the Brexit Vote

ITV broke a story, based on under-cover reporting, showing some Reform councillors and candidates using racist, violent and sexist language.

Firstly, it’s worth noting this was an ITV report; exposing Reform in this way would not be on the BBC’s agenda. The website, though, thought the story was important enough to cover with a write-up jointly written by political editor Chris Mason. Clearly, the story needed to include the Reform reaction, but the idea of balance meant the reaction became the story.

The piece began: “Reform UK has said ‘there is no room for racism’ in its party…”

The normal way to write this story would be to outline the case against Reform, rather than bypassing that stage and going straight into Reform’s attempted rebuttal.

While there is a natural journalistic instinct to move a story on, leading with the denial the first time it was reported by the BBC puts Reform on the front foot. It suggests action being taken to protect a reputation tarnished by a few outlying individuals. Leading with the (new for the BBC) evidence of racism and sexism in Reform would have painted a different picture.

When I was writing for the BBC website a dozen-or-so years ago, pieces were structured to tell the whole story fairly in the first four paragraphs. It was thought that most readers would not read further than that, so it was important to make the top of the story a coherent summary. The typical way of doing that would be to use the fourth paragraph to state the other side’s view of the issue at stake.

The piece on Reform published on 15th October leads with Reform’s answer, then goes into the allegations, then also fills the fourth paragraph with a lengthy quote from a Reform spokesman. In other words, it tells the story in a way that helps Reform get the retaliation in first.

These decisions were taken in a context of turmoil within the BBC, which is mired in a process of inflicting deep cuts across its output to address its falling licence fee revenue (which itself has not kept up with inflation for many years).

Director General Matt Brittin, who has spent the past 18 years of his career rising through the ranks at Google, has yet to demonstrate he understands how central public service broadcasting and authoritative journalism are to the BBC’s existence.

So far, those cuts seem to be bypassing ossified layers of management, and are instead aimed at front line journalism and public service radio programmes. Put bluntly, if the BBC stops providing public service content, what is it for?

There is no one (with the possible exception of David Attenborough) who cares more about the BBC and its values than John Simpson, its world affairs editor. This month he celebrated sixty years with the corporation, and told The Radio Times “I think the licence fee has had it.”

The fact that even he acknowledges the precariousness of the BBC’s future funding should sound alarms among its top management, and in government, which have both yet to show any leadership on this issue.

The BBC is immeasurably important to British cultural life and to Britain’s influence around the world. It needs secure funding, leadership that understands its role, governance that maintains its independence and reform of its editorial guidelines to re-establish impartiality and coherent decision-making.

At the moment, they are all lacking.

Richard Tice owns, both directly and through interests connected to him, around 91% of commercial property firm Quidnet REIT. The company’s accounts make clear Tice is “the ultimate controlling party of the company by virtue of combined majority control of the ordinary share capital.”

The corporate landlord’s board paid out more than £800,000 in 2025, a year when Quidnet made a pre-tax loss of £698,710. The loss was driven by a £1.05m fall in the value of its properties.

Before that write-down, the company made about £347,000 after interest. Cash generated from operations, £557,088, was dwarfed by the dividend payout. Income from operations was also less than the interest it paid on its debt (£719,205).

Quidnet’s 2025 dividend payout was about 3.5 times its adjusted earnings of £231,076, a measure that strips out changes in the value of property and financial instruments. The company sold a property for £3.96m during 2025, which buffered some of the headline figures.

The payouts came as occupancy across Quidnet’s properties fell from 61.5% to 52.2% in a year, suggesting major headwinds for the firm.

MPs do not have to declare dividends from companies they own in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, so Byline Times has assessed the company’s accounts.

Based on 2021 shareholding figures, Byline Times estimates that around £103,000 of last year’s dividends went to Tice personally, and around £730,000 in total to Tice and interests connected to him. That far outstrips the roughly £41,000 in director’s fees Quidnet paid him in 2025, as declared in the parliamentary register.

There is no suggestion that any rules were broken, but the findings put Tice’s earnings as a commercial landlord, and the limits of the MPs’ register of interests, under the spotlight.

Tice’s team did not respond to questions about the dividends or Quidnet’s financial performance, but provided a statement on solar power.

Selling Solar

Quidnet’s latest annual report says it “continues to realise income from resale of generated energy to existing tenants and/or the grid supplier.”

The Boston and Skegness MP has been vociferous in his opposition to ground-mounted solar, opposing a raft of renewable energy projects in recent months, including in his own constituency. But Quidnet, which he controls, makes money selling electricity generated from solar at its own properties.

A spokesperson for Tice said: “Solar panels on roofs make sense. Covering productive farmland with huge solar farms does not.

“We should be making much better use of rooftops, warehouses and brownfield land before sacrificing agricultural land.

“Food security matters. Energy security matters. We should not cover Britain’s best farmland in solar panels simply to satisfy arbitrary net stupid zero targets. That distinction is perfectly clear.”

Quidnet’s 2021 accounts said it had ordered some 550 solar panels for the roof of its property in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, with the electricity to be sold to the occupiers, saving a forecast 70 tonnes of CO2 a year.

Most solar farms are on land leased from farmers, who receive rent from the developers. In a 2022 submission to Parliament, the National Farmers’ Union said: “Renewable energy production is a core part of the NFU’s net zero plan, and solar projects often offer a good diversification option for farmers.” The farming body called for “a balance between food security and climate ambitions”, and encouraged large-scale solar farms to be located on “lower quality agricultural land”.

Reform and Renewables

Nigel Farage's party has declared war on renewable energy firms. At a press conference earlier this month, Reform UK announced it would try to prevent solar farms from connecting to the national grid. The party has previously written to energy bosses effectively trying to deter them from investing in the UK.

According to the BBC, Tice said at the 2 October event: “My message to these overseas investors, caveat emptor [buyer beware]: you might lose all your dough, think very seriously about this.”

The news outlet DeSmog has previously reported that Reform took over £2.3 million in donations from fossil fuel interests, polluters and climate deniers between 2019 and 2024, amounting to 92% of their funding during this period.

Richard Tice has also argued that it is “absolute garbage” to claim that human activity is the main cause of climate change. A 2021 Cornell study found that more than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans.

The Reform deputy leader’s own constituency is one of the most climate-vulnerable areas in the UK.

Tice wrote in a 2022 report for Quidnet that the firm’s investments in rooftop solar provide “an attractive return for shareholders” and “will save hundreds of tonnes of CO2 every year.”

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

Until August, Oldspeak Bookshop had a physical presence in the leafy and affluent Suffolk village of Long Melford, which has a trade in quirky independent shops.

Oldspeak became a darling of the far-right, stocking white nationalist and Nazi literature before the store said it had been hounded out by “constant hostility” in the area.

Its name is taken from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which “Oldspeak” is the ordinary English that the regime’s engineered language, “Newspeak”, is designed to replace.

Before its closure, the shop displayed a Union flag in its window bearing the words ‘Remigration Now’ – the term typically used to demand the forced expulsion of significant numbers of people, including those here legally, who are not deemed to be ‘British’.

The store’s account on Elon Musk’s social media platform X has frequently endorsed far-right material, including:

• Posting a photograph of the shop front in June with the caption “Mood #millionsmustgo”.
• Replying to GB News’ Tom Harwood, saying that the black England footballer Marcus Rashford’s parents’ nationalities mean “he cannot be English”.
• Quote-tweeting a clip of commentator Connor Tomlinson – a Restore Britain-linked activist and backer of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory – arguing that entire communities four generations deep should be stripped of citizenship, detained, and deported and posting: “Not sure what the problem is here.”
• Replying to a social media user who noted that people dislike a business that backs the disappearance of millions of foreign nationals with: “I don’t think they should simply disappear. Plenty of them should be hanged too.”
• Replying “not yet” with a laughing emoji, when asked whether Nazi flags (including a British Union of Fascists lightning bolt, and Swastika-emblazoned Union flags) are among the ones “these people are terrified about”.

Oldspeak Bookshop continues its trade via its website, where its list of independent publishers includes Antelope Hill Publishing – which the US-based Southern Poverty Law Centre has described as a white nationalist publisher.

Alongside some critical histories of Nazism, titles available through the website include Adolf Hitler’s collected speeches (a blurb states “he may have been Man of the Century”); The Rise of the Reich written by the SS itself (with a description praising its 'mythic grandeur and martial clarity'); British Union of Fascists Leader Sir Oswald Mosley’s My Life; Joseph Goebbels’ Battle for Berlin; and publications on ‘anti-white racism’ and demands for ‘remigration’. The shop has run a promotion with the discount code “RemigrationNow”.

Despite losing its physical presence, Oldspeak’s owner, Joanne May – who is not from Long Melford and has previously run businesses in Essex – said she is “honoured to return” to the Battle of Ideas festival in London later this month, with a stall selling books by speakers.

It is organised and hosted by the Academy of Ideas think tank – the founder and director of which is Baroness Claire Fox, an independent peer in the House of Lords. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Prominent Backers, and a Police Report

In September, May – who runs Oldspeak’s X account – posted a photograph of two young Muslim men waiting at a bus stop in Long Melford, one dressed in prayer clothes, with the caption: “It’s started." (Their faces were not blurred in the original).

Responses to the post included “doesn’t look good there. Remigration solves this” and “nowhere is safe I’m afraid!”. One user posted an image of a flamethrower being used with the words “don’t mind me. Just watering my Muslims”.

Suffolk Constabulary told Byline Times that a member of the public had contacted the police “after a reportedly offensive photo was posted on social media that showed two individuals, believed to have been taken from within Long Melford”.

“Enquiries currently remain ongoing, while the two people pictured have been spoken to by officers,” the police spokesperson said. “Anyone with information is asked to contact Suffolk police quoting reference 37/57288/26.”

Local resident and writer Simon Edge told Byline Times he believed May expressed “racist” views which she “flaunted by flying far-right flags outside her shop”.

“What made matters much worse was the public praise she received from some very senior politicians, including members of the House of Lords,” he said.

Edge argues that, if politicians had endorsed a bookshop expressing antisemitism “as opposed to Islamophobia, the media would have been all over it”.

Related reading: Reform’s ‘Independent’ Donations Inquiry Was Led By The Lawyer Who Defended Donald Trump Over Russian Collusion

Oldspeak has a number of endorsements on its website, including one apparently by former Conservative and now non-affiliated House of Lords peer, and director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Lord David Frost, in which he praised meeting “Jo” on the shop’s opening day, urging readers to visit and buy. This came before much of the far-right material associated with Oldspeak surfaced online. Lord Frost did not respond to a request for comment.

Another endorsement on social media came from Boris Johnson’s former spokesman Lord Ross Kempsell in July – shortly after Oldspeak posted a photograph of its ‘Remigration Now’ flag.

On X, he tweeted a photograph of a copy of 75 Brexit Benefits by Gully Foyle, captioned “Only 75?” and “with thanks to the great @oldspeak_books”.

Lord Kempsell, publisher of the Guido Fawkes blog, told Byline Times: “I obviously had no knowledge of these posts as I just bought a book from a book stall at a conference and, it goes without saying, I don’t agree with the content.” The post now appears to have been deleted.

Another testimonial is from the criminally convicted far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), which states “support this brave lady,” seemingly referring to owner Joanne May.

There is also a video of James Orr – the recently suspended former Reform UK policy chief and Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University – on the BBC podcast Radical with Amol Rajan in an episode first broadcast in July 2025, 10 months before the shop’s ‘Remigration Now’ posts.

On the programme, Orr describes visiting what he calls “the country’s first conservative bookshop”, followed by a shout-out to owner “Jo”. He did not respond to requests for comment.

The Backlash

Announcing the bookshop’s physical closure, in a statement published by GB News on 10 August, Joanne May described the “constant hostility” towards Oldspeak, uncertainty over which customers were genuine, and her decision to go fully online, while also searching for premises “in a friendlier location”.

Long Melford’s local newspaper, the East Anglian Daily Times, called Oldspeak a “right-wing bookshop” and prominently featured claims it had been hounded out of the village over its politics.

Oldspeak Limited applied to be struck off the Companies House register on 18 August, with a first Gazette notice published on 25 August. The website currently has a £5 sale on all items.

In response to Byline Times, Oldspeak Bookshop’s X account said: “It isn’t illegal to close a limited company and run as a sole trader instead.”

A planning application for a bookshop and café went to Babergh District Council in February 2025, according to GB News, and Oldspeak opened shortly after approval. It regularly held talks by far-right authors.

Resident Simon Edge described its positioning on its launch as respectably conservative, heavy on conservative philosopher Roger Scruton – who still has a dedicated section on the website – plus the (often co-opted) socialist writer George Orwell, and right-wing historian David Starkey.

Oldspeak’s social media presence, however, soon became more extreme – building an audience by amplifying harder-right accounts, as well as Islamophobic and ‘Great Replacement’ material, both in its stock and in its social media posts.

Its website describes it as “Britain’s ONLY dissident bookshop” – having previously been billed as “a home for conservative thought”.

In February, Oldspeak’s account posted: “Arm your mind. Restore Britain,” an apparent nod to Rupert Lowe MP’s far-right party.

In March, owner May posted on it: “I remember me and my mum talking over 20 years ago about not voting for the BNP because the powers that be might find out our names and pass them to Muslims when they get in power and hang us. And then we laughed thinking we’d gone over the top.”

In May, the account hit out at “certain Tory/Reform types” being “sneering and dismissive” towards Restore Leader Rupert Lowe. “Why the hostility towards an Englishman who’s actually willing to stick his head above the parapet and fight for his fellow Englishmen?” it posted.

In response to Byline Times’ questions about the bookshop and the photograph of two Muslim men she posted on X, Joanne May said: “Haven’t you got anything better to do?”

Related reading: Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and the ‘Pure Cold Rage’ Used to Trigger a Racist Pogrom in Belfast

May then blocked the author’s account on X, with some of her followers directing abuse at this reporter, including racist language. One account – registered as having been set up in Croatia – sought to identify “the Jew” behind this publication’s right of reply requests.

May shared this reporter’s Byline Times email in full to her X followers, saying: “Oh no. @josiahmortimer thinks I’m going to be sitting at home worried that he's spending his time writing about me.”

“They also think I might believe they will print any answers I give in good faith. They have also never heard of sarcasm. @BylineTimes” – appearing to refer to some of Oldspeak’s social media posts that this publication put to her.

On 9 October, the bookshop’s X account posted a video of a visit from police about its post photographing the two Muslim men in the village, and responses featuring racist comments. In it, a police officer says: “I would advise that you be very aware of what you are posting.”

Joanne May’s video of the interaction has received more than 2,000 shares. May falsely named Simon Edge as responsible for the police visit.

He told Byline Times he received a “deluge of poisonous verbal abuse and physical threats” from people in the aftermath. Edge has passed full details of those messages to the police.

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

Adam Richardson has also acted personally for the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, and worked with Dan Jukes, a subject of the Reform inquiry, on selecting candidates for the party.

The dossier, produced by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, had collated information suggesting that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign secretly colluded with Russian officials. It was not meant for public consumption, but was leaked to the press in 2017.

Richardson, conducted the internal review along with Reform’s general secretary, Tom Waterhouse. Their 27-page report was published weeks after an undercover investigation into James Orr and Dan Jukes, two of Farage’s closest aides, seemed to show the two soliciting unlawful foreign donations. 

In response to Byline Times, Reform UK confirmed that Richardson acts as legal advisor to the party and has an "existing client-barrister relationship with Reform UK", but denied that this "compromises the independence of his assessment of electoral law in the internal report."

As the party’s secretary, Richardson is one of a small group of Reform UK officials with final approval over its parliamentary candidates, alongside Dan Jukes. Years earlier, he had acted for Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm which harvested personal Facebook data for micro-targeting voters during major US electoral campaigns, and which had providing preliminary support for the campaign to leave the European Union.

His brother, Matthew Richardson, was involved in 2015 discussions over a proposed arrangement between UKIP, Cambridge Analytica and the campaign group Leave.EU. Parliamentary testimony identifies Matthew as the lawyer of Robert Mercer, the Trump megadonor behind Trump’s first presidency, who also invested in Cambridge Analytica.

The undercover investigation into Reform UK by the non-profit reporting project Verbatim was broadcast by Channel 4 News in September. Reporters posing as a US financier and his UK-based son discussed a possible £500,000 donation to Reform and separately paid £32,500 for three opinion polls. Orr and Jukes denied wrongdoing and stepped back from their roles. 

Reform UK is currently the subject of a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police due to the allegations. 

The Trump-Russia Dossier

Adam Richardson previously represented Donald Trump in appeal proceedings against Orbis Business Intelligence, founded by Christopher Steele, the former head of MI6’s Russia desk.  Steele had compiled a dossier of raw intelligence alleging links between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian Government. The dossier had originally been commissioned as ‘opposition research’ by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and was meant for further investigation rather than public consumption.

Denying the allegations in the Steele dossier, Trump sued under data-protection law, but the High Court dismissed his claim in February 2024, and permission to appeal was refused. Trump subsequently failed to pay an interim £290,000 costs bill before being ordered to pay Orbis more than £626,000 in legal costs, which remains unpaid. Adam Richardson later also acted for Donald Trump in related professional-negligence proceedings against Trump’s former law firm, Level Law.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the podcast The Rest Is Politics that when he asked Downing Street officials about Russian interference in the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union: “I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.” The Government has since said that though the interference occurred, it was “not successful”.

Related reading: ‘A Clear Answer’: Russia Intervened in the Brexit Vote

Richardson’s Ties to Farage and Reform

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was himself Adam Richardson’s client in respect of unpaid election expenses. 

That personal instruction raises a question about how the Richardson inquiry established what Farage knew about the donations arranged by Jukes and Orr. The report by Richardson and Waterson identified no interview with Farage, nor any account obtained from him, despite reaching conclusions about his lack of knowledge of the payments.

Farage had met the reporters posing as donors over oysters and wine in Clacton. During the recorded meeting, he praised the polling: “It worked. Boom.” After the Channel 4 broadcast, he denied that Reform UK had taken illegal money and said the polls had benefited the party, but had not been commissioned by it.

While Reform UK had said its internal inquiry would proceed “independently and without prejudice”, Adam Richardson’s involvement with the party has extended to helping select its parliamentary candidates alongside Dan Jukes, one of the two aides whose conduct he later reviewed.

In May 2026, The Spectator had identified Adam Richardson and Dan Jukes among a small group authorised to give prospective candidates final approval, describing Richardson as Reform UK’s party secretary and Jukes as Farage’s chief of staff. The account placed both men in the party’s candidate-approval machinery months before the donations inquiry.

Years earlier, Richardson stood for UKIP in the North West at the 2019 European elections. His candidate biography described several years as a senior party official.

A number of other senior Reform UK figures have been his clients, including Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the party’s Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire; Sarah Pochin, the party’s MP for Runcorn and Helsby; and parliamentary candidate Matthew Goodwin (over campaign leaflets missing legally required printer and promoter details). 

Richardson also represented Reform 2025 Ltd in a case to determine whether a parliamentary candidate qualified as an employee. 

The Richardson Brothers and Cambridge Analytica

The Richardson brothers’ connections to Farage’s political world extend back to Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting company financed by Trump megadonor Robert Mercer.

Before the Brexit referendum, Matthew Richardson, a former senior UKIP official, helped develop proposed arrangements between Cambridge Analytica, UKIP and the Leave.EU campaign. Emails published by Parliament show that, in November 2015, Cambridge Analytica executive Julian Wheatland told colleagues Matthew was working out the contractual structure between the three organisations.

Wheatland had asked whether Cambridge Analytica could disclose that it had analysed UKIP membership and survey data. “I would rather we didn’t, to be honest,” Matthew replied, saying he would discuss the matter with Leave.EU communications director Andy Wigmore.

Matthew also had professional and personal connections to the family financing the company. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie identified him as “Robert Mercer’s lawyer” in parliamentary testimony in March 2018.

A 2024 High Court judgment records that Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, relied on “her friend” Matthew’s account of the Channel 4 News broadcast exposing Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix. 

Related reading: Why Is the Government Really Refusing to Investigate Russian Interference in Brexit?

Adam Richardson’s involvement concerned the subsequent regulatory scrutiny and the company’s collapse. As UKIP’s party secretary, he answered questions from the Information Commissioner investigating political data practices, including services provided to UKIP by Leave.EU. The judge later described one of his answers as “curt and unhelpful”.

Adam then represented UKIP in its unsuccessful 2019 appeal against the regulator’s formal demand for information. Separately, he obtained an administration order for companies within the Cambridge Analytica group following its collapse.

Matthew’s relationship with Rebekah Mercer subsequently extended to Parler, the far-right social media platform she backed. Its former chief executive, John Matze, alleged in a court complaint that she appointed Matthew as one of her designated managers for the platform in July 2020. 

Byline Times has previously documented Matthew Richardson’s role as executive director of the Young Britons’ Foundation, a conservative activist training organisation, before his move into UKIP. Both brothers were later advertised as speakers alongside Robert Jenrick, now a Reform MP and the party’s shadow chancellor, at a June 2025 conference organised by the Margaret Thatcher Centre.

The Dispute Over the Polling Payments

The review conducted by Adam Richardson with the party’s general secretary concluded that Dan Jukes had commissioned the polls personally as a contractor and that the party incurred no liability. It criticised the statements by Jukes and James Orr, and recommended changes to party procedures, but found that the proposed £500,000 donation had not been agreed or accepted.

Yet one passage in the report describes James Orr’s involvement in securing payment. The report reproduces a message in which Orr told the purported donor: “Your financial backing of that poll was a huge part of our campaign, so thank you.” 

A Labour Party briefing seen by Byline Times has questioned how that account, relating the polls to Reform UK campaigning, could be reconciled with the finding that the polls were Jukes’s personal commissions.

“As a barrister with a specialism in election law, I value my professional relationships with clients from across the political spectrum and approach all instructions with the same independence required”, Adam Richardson told Byline Times. His brother Matthew did not respond to request for comment. 

A spokesperson for Reform UK said: "Reform UK instructs Mr Richardson as a self-employed barrister in independent practice. The position of Party Secretary reflects his role as legal adviser to the Party.

"As with all practising barristers, Mr Richardson is subject to professional obligations requiring him to exercise independent judgment, irrespective of the identity of his client.

"We do not accept that his existing client-barrister relationship with Reform UK compromises the independence of his assessment of electoral law in the internal report."

In a backbench debate on Monday evening in Parliament, Labour MPs responded to the shift by calling for Britain’s return to the EU.

So many Labour MPs turned up to call for more integration that the chair imposed a four-minute limit on speeches. Usually these Westminster Hall debates struggle to attract more than a handful of speakers.

Just three MPs defended the status quo: Sir Bernard Jenkin (Con), Danny Kruger (Reform) and the shadow Conservative minister Mike Wood.

And while the minister present did not go further than the PM, Labour backbenchers went considerably beyond the Government line. The Prime Minister has said all options are on the table for the UK’s future relationship with Europe – after the next election – and pro-EU MPs have seized on the momentum.

The debate followed an official petition to rejoin the EU with 111,687 signatures.

Tony Vaughan (Lab, Folkestone and Hythe) told the hall that the terms of Brexit were "never defined" and served the interests of countries like Russia that want "Britain's influence weakened and Europe fractured".

It follows the Prime Minister raising concerns about Russian interference in the 2016 referendum, with Andy Burnham saying it was “inconceivable” that President Putin had not sought to meddle in the campaign.

Vaughan described post-Brexit trade bureaucracy as "nail after nail being hammered into a coffin" for Britain’s economy.

Fellow Labour backbencher Deirdre Costigan said Leave voters were "bombarded with lies" during the referendum, as she welcomed the PM's new national centre for information defence.

Afzal Khan MP, a former member of the European Parliament, said Brexit "has been a disaster for young people".

And Labour’s Tulip Siddiq said her local flower seller’s tulip prices have been forced up 50% since 2020, apparently due to Brexit. Tulip’s tulip concerns were picked up on with some amusement.

Another Labour MP, Rachael Maskell, called for a deliberative citizens' process to shape "the next manifesto commitment", though minister Mark Ferguson would not commit to it.

While Ben Coleman (Lab) welcomed the PM's readiness to look at "a customs union, a single market and full membership" of the EU, he called for a manifesto pledge to negotiate joining, followed by a referendum on the deal: "In 2016, people voted on an idea… Next time, they would vote on a deal."

Stella Creasy MP, who is strongly pro-EU, did call for some realism, noting that 21 accession countries took an average of nine years to join the bloc.

But Daniel Zeichner MP argued that EU ministers "want us back", adding: "We are Europeans, and we should be in."

Meanwhile Dr Scott Arthur issued a pointed jab that "politicians who take bribes from Russia" may have benefited from Brexit, adding "that person is in jail" – a reference to former Wales Reform leader Nathan Gill, currently serving prison time over bribery offences relating to his time as an MEP.

Peter Swallow summed up the mood – that Parliament is "catching up to the conversations" that never went away in the country.

Related reading: ‘A Clear Answer’: Russia Intervened in the Brexit Vote

Pro-Europe opposition parties agreed. Lib Dem Paul Kohler said Brexit was backed by "Putin, Trump and the Member for Mar-a-Lago and Moscow" but criticised the PM for being “wedded to his predecessor's red lines” on not joining the customs union or single market in this Parliament.

Commenting on troubles faced by businesses in his seat due to Brexit bureaucracy, he said "stale bread and dead flowers” were “a fitting epitaph to Brexit."

The Scottish National Party’s Pete Wishart offered a critical note on the Government, noting the PM's statement "did not talk about rejoining".

But Carla Denyer of the Greens welcomed that "we have now heard the PM confirm that there was Russian interference in the referendum."

And independent MP Iqbal Mohamed called Brexit “the biggest fraud in the history of Britain."

Brexit's Few Defenders

Reform’s Danny Kruger was one of the few pro-Brexit voices, claiming that goods exports have suffered not due to Brexit but energy policy and remaining alignment with the EU.

He blamed "poor Government choices, made under the Conservatives and Labour" for Brexit’s failures. Kruger left before the end of the debate.

Cornish Labour MP Perran Moon called Conservative MP Jenkin and Reform’s Kruger "two King Cnuts shouting at the sea". The minister later joked about the need to enunciate that one carefully.

For the Conservatives, shadow minister Mike Wood MP said the petition asks MPs to "casually" overturn "the largest democratic vote in British history on a Monday afternoon".

Related reading: ‘Why Andy Burnham Will Ultimately Back Rejoining the EU’

He claimed rejoining was not like renewing "an expired gym membership", and that "Brussels does not accept refunds".

And he argued the UK would join as a candidate alongside Albania and North Macedonia, with a binding obligation to adopt the euro and join Schengen. These points would be negotiated during talks on rejoining. There is no deadline for new EU member states to join the euro, and Ireland has an opt-out of Schengen due to the Common Travel Area with the UK, so it is likely the UK would also have an opt-out.

Wood pledged Kemi Badenoch’s party would "fiercely resist" a return "through the front door or the back".

The Government Line

Responding to the petition, minister Mark Ferguson said Brexit "has not given us control" and "has done more harm than good". He quoted the PM, saying: "Sticking with the status quo is not good enough for Britain."

The PM will set out long-term options on Britain’s relationship with the EU around the 20 November summit, at which a deal for closer integration is expected to be announced between the UK and the bloc. Ferguson called these measures, including an Erasmus+ youth experience scheme, "the floor, not the ceiling" of the Government’s ambitions.

Speaker after speaker referenced Russia’s role in Brexit, long covered by Byline Times. Labour’s Tony Vaughan MP said: “In whose interest was Brexit? It was certainly in the interest of countries such as Russia that want to see Britain’s influence weakened and Europe fractured. With Brexit, that is what they got.”

And Lib Dem Caroline Voaden said: “Ten years ago, the British public voted to leave the EU by a wafer-thin margin in a referendum marred by mistruths, deception and Russian interference. Our exit was then badly planned, badly executed and damaged the UK’s economic prospects and political reputation.”

The campaign has well and truly begun.

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

US President Donald Trump has one main focus, and fear, right now. The midterm elections are looming fast and so he’s focused on anything that he might be able to do to arrest the slide of his Republican Party. Without getting into too much detail, students of US politics know that flipping control of Congress is going to be accompanied by accountability. Something Trump is desperate to avoid, and he doesn’t care who he’s throwing under the bus.

The Non-Starting Diesel Deal

Let’s start with the news that came in on Saturday morning, when Trump announced that after a “highly successful discussion” with the lifelong dictator of Russia, he had secured lots of diesel that the US can start to import immediately, thus heralding in a new dawn of low low low prices for US consumers, farmers, ranchers, and truckers.

There are a few problems that Trump had not considered in his calculation, his only goal being to save his own ass (and the asses of/in his Cabinet and family too) from impeachment.

The first problem is that it’s literally illegal.

According to the 2022 Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act, passed 100-0 in the Senate and 413-9 in the House, the United States may not import such products from Russia unless and until the President certifies to Congress that Russia has ceased all hostilities against Ukraine, that Russia poses no threat to NATO members, and that Russia respects Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Maybe Trump’s attention from these details was distracted due to the fact that he was, once again, not the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and he was busy composing his very sane 600-word rebuttal of the Committee’s decision when he claimed that he should have actually (while coming to the aid of warmonger Vladimir Putin) won eight Nobel Prizes.

The next problem with the Trump/Putin diesel deal, aside from the complete lack of morality behind the decision, is that it’s very likely impossible for Russia to meet the agreed delivery volumes and timelines. This is due to the fact that much of their refining capacity is incapacitated due to Ukraine’s long range drone strikes.

Even though Moscow gets special treatment to shield residents there from any effects of the war against Ukraine, fuel shortages are even common there. If Putin can’t satisfy domestic needs, he can’t fulfill international orders.

And then we have the problems with the volumes of deliveries from Russia to the US being, for various reasons, almost irrelevant when compared to US domestic consumption, production, and exports.

If Trump had anyone competent in his administration, he would know that the initial delivery of 2.25 million barrels is the equivalent of about 14 hours of demand. If Trump had anyone competent in his administration, he would know that the US is exporting 13.6 million barrels of petroleum products per day. If Trump hadn’t decided that Canada was “one of the worst countries in the entire world” to deal with, he might have tapped into their long history of supplying petroleum products to the US, particularly the northern US states they are literally touching, with no pan-continental shipping therefore needed.

And, lastly, not to put too fine a point on it, if the US pays Russia for the import of anything of any description, they’re funding the war machine that kills Ukrainian civilians every day.

One of the things we always see in the way the Trump cult operates is how everyone falls into line with what Trump is attempting to pull, regardless of how crazy it is or his record of one abject failure after another.

So cue Fox News spouting utter nonsense in defence of the deal, and Elon Musk claiming that “Zelenskyy has gone too far” [in the defence of his people] and calling for Zelenskyy to be replaced with a new President.

In the aforementioned three-minute exchange on Fox News it was refreshing to see pushback from Brian Kilmeade on a firehose of falsehoods from across the sofa where even Boris Johnson was being blamed, 49 months after he left Downing Street, for the ongoing war. This trope is common, it makes sense only in one context, to direct blame way from where it truly lies – Russia. As Kilmeade said, “it would be the biggest mistake of his administration, to work with Russia. That is the modern Hitler of our generation.”

Related reading: ‘A Clear Answer’: Russia Intervened in the Brexit Vote

The Ceasefire That Wasn't

The anger and disbelief over the events of Saturday were then overshadowed by the bombshell Sunday announcement that Trump made via his Truth Social platform regarding an agreement over an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. It was a surprise to the Ukrainian Government, which quickly made clear that it was not aware of any such deal, but, if true, would welcome it.

In fact, Ukraine has been pushing for an energy ceasefire for quite some time, only to find that Russia would prefer to watch their own economy burn rather than lighten up on attempting to kill millions of Ukrainians by denying them heat and power during yet another winter of war.

To be clear, Ukraine would be setting aside a significant element of their overall war aims in agreeing to this ceasefire. It does so as a necessary protection of Ukrainian citizens, rather than from a position of weakness.

Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure became possible thanks to investments in long-range drone capabilities that had been envisaged as a way to end the war by stopping the revenues that finance it. Those investments and the innovations they led to began to make an impact on the battlefield in 2024, when the first such strikes disabled about 15-20% of all Russian refining capacity.

The damage done in those attacks was significant but not critical because Russia had the means to repair the affected sites, but as Mikhail Khodorkovsky (once the largest oil man in Russia before he spent a decade in prison for thinking his wealth could translate into political activity) has pointed out, there are only so many times you can patch up destruction on this scale.

By the second half of 2025, Ukraine had honed their tactics and improved the accuracy of their drones. Rather than a facility being the general target of an attack, specific parts of the facility, such as the distillation units, were being blown up by Ukraine’s Top Gun drone pilots. Distillation units are particularly hard to repair and even harder to replace.

Throughout 2026 Ukraine’s ability to project strength into Russia itself has expanded in terms of the number and frequency of the attacks and in terms of their geographical reach also. Rather than a few drones being launched on a weekly basis at targets hundreds of miles inside Russia, those drones are now launched every single night. The attacks consist of hundreds of unmanned arial vehicles every day. And incredibly they now reach beyond the Ural Mountains and into Siberia. That is a range of up to 3,000 Km.

The Omsk refinery, the largest oil refining facility in Russia, was hit just this last week. It sits 2,500 KM from the Ukrainian border, and it sits seemingly as a duck as Ukraine’s drones have evaded the air defences protecting the facility twice now and can do so again.

According to analysts, more than half of Russia’s refining capacity has now been taken offline. Ukraine does not have to stop hitting this lifeblood of the Russian economy, and Ukraine is not obliged to do Donald Trump any favours whatsoever regarding the midterms, but it is willing to do so. It has offered to do so.

The other side of the coin is that Russia must not spend the winter attacking civilian power infrastructure in Ukraine, which is anyway a war crime and, at scale, constitutes as crimes against humanity.

Ukraine has offered the truce. Putin would be best served by taking it. Trump has announced the truce. Yet, so far, in the second humiliation of Trump in the space of a weekend, there is silence from Moscow. There has been no acceptance from Russia of the deal Trump announced, Putin has not commented at all.

And six years since the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report – which revealed Russian financial-influence operations in UK political parties – was suppressed by Boris Johnson.

Speaking on the Rest Is Politics podcast, Prime Minister Andy Burnham confirmed what many journalists, lawmakers and campaigners have said for years:

“There is certainly misinformation, disinformation that is emanating from Russia into German politics… But I asked the question coming to Downing Street: was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? And I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.”

This is the first time the British state has openly recognised something accepted by other intelligence agencies in the US and Europe, that Brexit was a target of Putin’s disinformation warfare.

Theresa May, while warning Russia that it was being closely watched after the Novichok attack in Salisbury, and expelling an unprecedented number of Russian diplomats, never tasked her intelligence agencies to investigate further.

Her Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, told Parliament that he had seen “nyet… not a sausage” of Russian interference.

However, addressing the UN in late September, Burnham did not shy away from calling out the Kremlin’s attack on democracy: “We have evidence that they tried to interfere with the 2019 general election. We also know that they have tried to stoke tensions and unrest in the wake of horrific events,” he said.

Talking to Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, he went further, acknowledging that the interference went back to the crucial EU referendum vote, and saying that voters had not been informed “sufficiently about the extent to which people are seeking to disrupt the political process from overseas”.

It is an overdue acknowledgement that one of the most momentous constitutional decisions in post-war Britain – decided by a narrow two per cent swing in the referendum vote – might not have been fairly and transparently conducted.

The key figures in the two Leave campaigns – Nigel Farage, for Leave.EU, and Boris Johnson, for Vote Leave – were repeatedly connected to Russian influence networks.

The close proximity of Nigel Farage and Russian officialdom has long been documented. Not only did he deny a documented 2013 meeting with the Russian Ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, and subsequently receive payment for regular appearances on the Kremlin-backed channel RT (formerly Russia Today); he also told GQ that Putin was the leader he “most admired”.

As Carole Cadwalladr and I revealed in 2018 in The Observer, Arron Banks – the major funder of Farage’s Leave.EU campaign, whose £8 million donation set a record at the time as the biggest ever in a British political campaign – made multiple undisclosed visits, along with other officials, to the Russian Embassy in the lead-up to the EU referendum.

During those undisclosed meetings, emails obtained by us revealed discussions of potentially beneficial arrangements over the privatisation of Russian gold and diamond interests.

Banks denied that any Russian money figured in his donations to Leave.EU. But the mere fact of Kremlin interest in Brexit, and in its outcome, is undeniable.

As the DCMS Select Committee reported later in 2018, analysis of social-media accounts suspected of being Russian proxies – and later involved in the well-documented Russian interference in Donald Trump’s 2016 election – played a role in pushing for Brexit.

Related reading: The Five Questions Nigel Farage is Never Asked About Brexit, Trump and Russia

Meanwhile, as Carole Cadwalladr and I subsequently detailed in our award-winning podcast Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, the Kremlin’s interest in Farage’s party – which was mainly run by the expelled spy Alexander Udod – was channelled through another Russian Embassy operative, Sergei Nalobin, who helped establish Conservative Friends of Russia in 2012.

Beyond Johnson’s links with Nalobin, and with another suspected Russian agent, Joseph Mifsud, the former mayor of London also had a deep connection with the former KGB section chief Alexander Lebedev.

Along with his son Evgeny, Lebedev took over The Independent and the Evening Standard in 2008. For the next ten years, Johnson was a regular attendee at the often wild Lebedev parties in London and Umbria – even when Alexander Lebedev was working closely with the Kremlin in Crimea following its annexation by Putin in 2014.

Related reading: The Johnson-Lebedev Letters: A Back-Channel to Vladimir Putin?

During the EU referendum, Johnson blamed the first war in eastern Ukraine on the EU rather than Russia. One of his first actions on becoming prime minister in late 2019 was to ennoble Evgeny Lebedev as a member of the House of Lords, against the advice of the security services. .

From the beginning of his premiership, Johnson sought to suppress the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report on the Kremlin’s financial and political influence operations in the UK.

The report was eventually published in 2020, with some elements redacted for security reasons. As we reported at the time the report found the Government had “actively avoided” looking for Russian interference during the 2016 EU referendum.

Christopher Steele, the former head of the security services’ Russia desk, revealed on Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, that some of those redacted annexes are likely based on his findings that Russian money was channelled into the Brexit campaign.

Following Burnham's comments, Steele told Byline Times: "We have known that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 Brexit referendum since at least 2017 and whilst it is difficult to quantify exactly what impact this may have had on the vote, the fact that it has never been properly investigated by the British Government is both regrettable and irresponsible.

"Regrettable because the British people have the right to know what role a hostile foreign power, in this case Russia, played in arguably the most consequential democratic decision in modern peacetime and irresponsible because their failure to do so will have encouraged the Kremlin in its efforts to interfere in UK elections and politics subsequently. There needs to be a full inquiry on Russian interference now, with its suitably sanitised (to protect sources and operational methods) results made public.”

What Happened When Labour Were Elected

While Johnson’s self-interested reasons for not seeing a “sausage” of Russian interference are clear enough, more mysterious has been the inactivity of the Labour Party – especially given the key roles played in investigating this issue by Labour MPs Ian Lucas and Ben Bradshaw.

The revelations in the release of the Epstein files concerning former Labour lord Peter Mandelson’s close connections with the disgraced paedophile billionaire may offer some clues.

Emails released by the US Department of Justice earlier this year confirm the proximity between the former peer and one of Putin’s favoured oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska.

Related reading: Revealed: Peter Mandelson’s Russian Connections and Palantir Lobbying Links

Mandelson was sacked by then-prime minister Keir Starmer because of his undisclosed continuing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, even after Epstein had been sentenced and imprisoned for sex offences involving a minor. He is currently under investigation by the Metropolitan Police for misconduct in public office.

Epstein himself had multiple connections with Russia. The released emails indicate that he was in regular contact with Kremlin officials, introducing them to Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.

In an email to Thiel after the EU referendum result, Epstein claimed: “Brexit is just the beginning”, and celebrated the opportunities of a “return to tribalism”.

More examples of Russian interference are bound to emerge. Only last year, Nigel Farage’s close aide Nathan Gill was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for receiving bribes, via proxies, from Putin’s “man in Ukraine”, Viktor Medvedchuk. Police inquiries are still ongoing.

After the Gill affair, the Government announced the Rycroft Review to assess the dangers of foreign interference – but Matthew Rycroft was given a remit extending back only as far as 2019.

Related reading: On the Frontline of Exposing the Truth About Russia and Brexit 

For too long, and for political reasons, Brexit has been kept off the agenda in terms of Kremlin meddling.

The extensive nature of Russian influence operations over the past 15 years has compromised the British state and senior politicians to such an extent that they have felt too embarrassed – or too compromised – to investigate fully how extensive it has been.

Burnham’s honest approach offers the possibility of finally coming to terms with the nature of modern hybrid warfare, and with the extent to which British politics has been vitiated by foreign interests and foreign cash.

As Burnham explained in his reference to Germany and France, the point is not to relitigate the EU referendum – although, given the level of interference, there is scope for that.

For the sake of our cognitive security and democratic resilience, it is important to expose the various alternative measures – fake-news sites, online bots, direct social interference, financial inducements, blackmail and assassinations – that Putin has clearly deployed in elections in Moldova, Czechia, Bulgaria and Romania, and is now crucially turning on the looming elections in Germany and France.

The fifth battlespace – information war – was long Putin’s special weapon. On this hidden front, denied cover by the mainstream media, many of us have been fighting for years like partisans in the mountains. And finally, the countries and democracies we tried to protect have recognised that reality, and have no excuse not to arm themselves for the next onslaught by investigating the past.

Watch Peter Jukes Talk to the Byline Podcast

Orr’s fellow director at the Edmund Burke Foundation, and its founding chairman, is Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American Bible scholar who previously praised Rabbi Meir Kahane - the late creator of the Kach movement that was banned by Israel as a terrorist organisation.

The foundation's latest National Conservatism conference known as “NatCon” took place in Jerusalem earlier in the first week of October and was sponsored by an Israeli NGO sanctioned by both the EU and Canada due to lobbying for the demolition of Palestinian property. 

The event has fast become an alliance between the Israeli extreme right and established right-wing forces in the US, Britain and Europe, from President Donald Trump’s administration to Reform and the Conservatives. 

Previous NatCon events have been addressed by JD Vance (just before he was appointed Trump’s Vice President), Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and three Conservative MPs who have since joined his party. Vance has also credited NatCon founder Hazony’s work with influencing his politics.

The conference programme for NatCon’s Jerusalem event also advertised Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, who publicly defended Lehava, a group Britain has sanctioned and whose leader, Ben-Zion Gopstein, is a disciple of Meir Kahane.

Smotrich, Orr and the Edmund Burke Foundation

At the NatCon event in Jerusalem, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Yoel Smotrich called for permanent Israeli sovereignty over territory held in Gaza and Lebanon, and urged Muslim countries to receive Gazans wishing to leave, presenting the proposal as voluntary rather than forced removal. Britain sanctioned him in June 2025 over his role in inciting violence against Palestinian civilians, imposing an asset freeze and travel ban.

Orr, an Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge, is UK Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and a director of its British company, alongside the foundation’s founder, Yoram Hazony. Hazony is also chairman and a director of the US foundation, which organised the Jerusalem event.

Orr stepped aside as Reform UK’s head of policy on 4 September, after a Channel 4 News undercover report on foreign donations filmed him apparently soliciting illegal donations. An internal investigation by Reform UK this week concluded there was no wrongdoing.

However, a spokesperson for Reform UK told Byline Times that “James Orr stepped down from his role in September and his status hasn’t changed.”

Orr is a prominent intellectual architect of the National Conservatism movement and has been a primary organiser for major NatCon events in Europe and the UK. He did not respond to requests for comment regarding his role in the NatCon event in Jerusalem and his continued role as UK chairman of the host foundation.

Related reading: ‘If Anyone Can Become an Englishman, What is an Englishman?’: Reform UK’s James Orr on the ‘Great Replacement’

The Kahane Connection

Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed, spoke on the Jewish character of the Israeli state at the NatCon event in Jerusalem. In September 2021, he had joined senior rabbis in a public letter opposing moves in Israel to outlaw Lehava as a terrorist organisation. Lehava campaigns against relationships between Jews and non-Jews. 

The UK Government sanctioned Lehava in May 2024, citing its role in facilitating, inciting and promoting violence against Arab and Palestinian communities. On 8 September this year, Britain also sanctioned the group’s leader, Ben-Zion Gopstein, for supporting and inciting violence against Palestinians.

Gopstein is a disciple of Meir Kahane, founder of the racist, ultra-nationalist Kach party, which called for the forced segregation of Jews and non-Jews, and advocated the forced removal of Arabs who refused to accept non-citizen status from Israel. Prior to that, Kahane had founded the Jewish Defense League, classified by the FBI as a right-wing terror group for bombings and shootings against Soviet, Arab, and diplomatic targets. Israel itself would ban Kahane’s Kach party as a terrorist organisation in 1994. 

NatCon founder Yarom Hazony, who directs the Edmund Burke Foundation’s UK company with James Orr, praised Meir Kahane in a 1990 Jerusalem Post obituary. He recalled hearing Kahane at Princeton, writing of the racist terrorist that he “thrilled and enchanted us”.

Hazony credited that encounter with religious changes among his circle, while explicitly rejecting Kahane’s politics and violent methods. He wrote: “Neither I nor any of my friends from college ever adopted Kahane’s political views.”

The Sanctioned Sponsor

Byline Times can also confirm that one of the conference’s organisational sponsors included Regavim, an Israeli NGO that the EU says lobbied for the demolition of Palestinian property. The EU sanctioned Regavim in May 2026, and Canada listed it the following month.

The Edmund Burke Foundation’s role in receiving sponsorship from a EU and Canada sanctioned organisation raises questions about the legitimacy of EU nationals participating in the NatCon event. The EU sanctioned the group on 28 May, freezing its assets and barring EU persons from making funds available to it.

The programme listed speakers from at least six EU member states, including Austria’s Harald Vilimsky, who leads the Freedom Party of Austria’s delegation in the European Parliament and is a vice-chair of the Patriots for Europe group; Spain’s Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz of the far-right Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences (ISSEP); Poland’s former president Andrzej Duda; Germany’s Hans-Georg Maaßen, of the Values Union; Hungary’s Balázs Orbán, an MP and former political director to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán; and Swedish former diplomat Henrik Schildt.

The foundation’s hosting of UK sanctioned individuals also raises questions about its compliance with UK financial sanctions laws, which prohibit making funds or economic resources available, directly or indirectly, to or for the benefit of a sanctioned person. UK businesses are also expected to comply with all applicable UK sanctions regulations. Failing to do so can incur fines or criminal prosecution.

Neither the foundation nor its founder Hazony responded to request for comment. The UK Foreign Office told Byline Times that “this matter is for the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI).” The OFSI, however, declined to comment. 

Related reading: Palantir Co-Founder Peter Thiel and Reform UK’s Cambridge University Recruitment Pipeline Project Revealed

NatCon’s International Reach

NatCon has become a fulcrum of the international far right. In an interview with the late Charlie Kirk, reported by Byline Times in April, Orr named Germany’s Alternative for Germany, France’s National Rally and other far-right parties across Europe as groups National Conservatism was “helping to” coordinate.

This week’s programme put that ambition into practice. It billed Trump’s counterterrorism official Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the President and one of six featured speakers, in the same plenary as Harald Vilimsky of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party. It also listed the former Conservative MP Miriam Cates and Paul Coleman, chief executive of the Prosperity Institute, which is operated by Paul Marshall’s Legatum partners, with whom he owns GB News. 

NatCon’s British reach extends to serving and former ministers. At the 2023 London conference, Suella Braverman, now a Reform MP, addressed delegates as Home Secretary. Michael Gove, now editor of The Spectator, also owned by Marshall, spoke as Levelling Up Secretary, and Sir John Hayes, who remains a Conservative MP, was another speaker.

Danny Kruger and Lee Anderson, both now Reform MPs, attended; as did Matthew Goodwin, Reform’s failed candidate in February’s Gorton and Denton by-election.

NatCon’s American reach includes some of the most influential organisations in US conservatism. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts spoke at the Jerusalem event’s opening plenary alongside Smotrich and Hazony. Heritage convened Project 2025, the authoritarian plan for reshaping the US Government for Trump's second presidency. 

The Silicon Valley billionaire and pro-Trump mega-donor Peter Thiel has also spoken at NatCon and signed its statement of principles, alongside Orr and Hazony.

The New York Times is reporting that Russia will focus on destroying Ukraine’s energy and water infrastructure over the winter using long-range strikes with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way jet-powered attack drones. Attacking electrical infrastructure over the winter is nothing new: Russia has done it every winter since the conflict started. Targeting water infrastructure, however, is new. Crossing that line represents an escalation that could have broader global implications.

How the Strike War has Evolved

Over the past year Russia and Ukraine have increasingly attacked each other’s infrastructure. Ukraine has targeted the Russian petroleum industry and commercial equivalents to Amazon with massive numbers of propeller-driven drones. By spring of 2026, Ukraine was producing enough of these drones that it could send more to Russia per month than Russia was able to send into Ukraine.

Ukraine has also become highly proficient at shooting down similar Russian-made drones, defeating roughly 90% of them. Ukraine is doing it cheaply too, using electronic warfare and a wide variety of small interceptor drones.

Russia responded by moving away from slower propeller-powered drones to slightly more expensive jet-powered drones (e.g. Geran 4, Geran 5, Banderol), along with very expensive ballistic missiles (e.g. Iskander-M), and expensive supersonic cruise missiles such as the Oniks and Zircon.

Despite Russia firing a smaller number of munitions, more of them are getting through. Ukraine has mostly been cut off from the Patriot missiles needed to deal with ballistic and supersonic targets, and has been scrambling to develop cheap, fast interceptor drones to counter Russian jet-powered drones. As a result, up to 45% of the jet-powered drones are hitting their targets, along with most of the ballistic and supersonic munitions.

There are signs that Ukrainian efforts to counter jet-powered drones are bringing the success rate up. Ukraine is developing its own system (called Freyja) to counter ballistic missiles and supersonic cruise missiles, and getting a licence to build Patriot PAC-3s, but mass production of both is likely years away.

As a result, Ukraine is successfully overwhelming Russian air defence systems with cheap drones. It has put 51% of Russia’s oil refining capacity out of commission and effectively driven Russia’s equivalents of Amazon (Wildberries and Ozon) into deep financial distress.

Similarly, Russia is able to strike high-value static targets in Ukraine with relative ease for the foreseeable future using supersonic and ballistic missiles. It is also increasingly able to hit moving targets, such as trains and trucks, deep inside Ukraine.

Related reading: Ukraine Comes Under Assault From Putin’s Terror and Trump’s Delusions

Ahead of Winter

Ukraine has been trying to prepare its infrastructure for the upcoming winter war, but it will be difficult in an environment where Russia can strike at will. Russia has had this advantage to some extent in years past; its efforts to leave Ukrainians cold and in the dark without electricity during the winter were often successful. It managed to cut Ukrainian electrical capacity in half compared to pre-war output.

However, Russia’s calculation that heaping misery on Ukrainian civilians would compel the country to capitulate to Russia’s extreme demands was wrong. Russian efforts to force an unfair peace, supported by US President Donald Trump, remain unsuccessful. Ukraine is making some territorial gains in Donetsk and Luhansk, thus thwarting the Russian plan to encircle Ukrainian strongholds.

Perhaps the worst part for Russia is that winters are typically when front-line casualties are at their highest. As trees lose their leaves, soldiers on the ground lose their cover from the omnipresent Ukrainian drones.

Russian casualties have risen steadily through the summer, reaching an estimated 46,320 casualties in September. This is on par with the two worst months of the war for Russia, November and December of 2024. Ukraine has previously estimated that if it can impose more than 50,000 casualties per month, Russia will not be able to recruit enough people to replace them.

At the same time, Ukraine has been keeping front-line positions lightly manned and relying on drones to detect and neutralise Russian infiltrators. As a result, and despite offensive operations around Lyman, Ukraine has managed a loss ratio between 3.3:1 and 8:1 in its favour.

Why Russia May Target Water

Russian President Vladimir Putin may be looking to break the stalemate, or even reverse his fortunes. His gamble that the election of Trump would doom Ukraine did not pay off, and even the elections of far-right candidates in France and Germany in the next year, might not be enough to help him. This may be why Russia is potentially willing to deliberately target water infrastructure.

Humans can avoid freezing to death by putting on more clothes, burning things, insulating small areas, and huddling for warmth. They can live for weeks without food. But lack of water kills within three days or so. Similarly, waterborne illnesses brought about by exposure to sewage (such as dysentery and cholera) also kill within days.

Russia may focus on targeting water infrastructure to make the country unliveable, pressure civilians to evacuate major urban centres such as Kyiv, and break the strategic deadlock of the war.

Ukrainians have shown great resilience, and will likely try to find ways to mitigate a lack of even vaguely potable water coming from the taps. This could include drinking melted snow water, burying or burning human waste, recycling water with filters or distillation, and Ukrainian Government programmes to distribute food and water. Russia’s attempt to win through misery and death may be more likely to produce a collective determination to resist and fight back, than a willingness to capitulate.

The International Response

If Russia does target Ukrainian water infrastructure, what happens afterwards may depend on how willing countries are to punish Russia, and how severely. If these attacks suddenly loosen the purse strings on $300 billion of seized Russian assets to be released to Ukraine, increase international support for Ukraine, and lead to Russian sanctions being expanded and tightened, the effort could backfire spectacularly. If little or nothing is done to Russia, the situation becomes far more dangerous.

If nothing meaningful happens to Russia as a consequence, and Ukraine feels its survival is at stake, suddenly the water, sewage, dams, and reservoirs around Moscow and Saint Petersburg are no longer off limits. The same miseries inflicted on Kyiv could be brought home to Russians, many of whom have so far been largely spared the consequences of Putin’s ambitions.

There is also another thing to consider: if there is little or no outrage at Russia’s actions, and it looks like it is having a measurable effect on Ukraine’s ability to keep fighting, Trump may believe he can use the same strategy to break the stalemate with Iran.

Iran and the US

As previously reported by Byline Times, Iran appears critically vulnerable to strikes on its water infrastructure. In a worst-case scenario there could be millions of dead, or millions of refugees.

The average Ukrainian in winter might be able to go outside, collect snow, and melt it for water; the average Iranian cannot. The survival of Iranians will depend entirely on the Iranian Government’s ability to deliver water in sufficient quantities. This could be hampered by US airstrikes on bridges, rail, and petroleum distribution networks.

The ruling party in the US very likely thinks that it is doomed in 2028 if it does not bring the war to a satisfactory close. Former US President Joe Biden never recovered from the withdrawal in Afghanistan and the inflation that struck in 2022. Trump is in a similar position of losing a war amidst rising inflation, while being even more despised by the public than Biden was.

The Executive Branch in the US has become a largely imperial office, holding nearly all the power. The Republican Party will do everything it can to hold onto power, including taking cues from Russia and the rest of the world as to how far it can go in order to win a frozen conflict.

The party's previous policy committed the Green Party to "campaign to restrict ownership so that no individual or company owns more than 20% of a media market".

However, the new policy drops this wording, instead "limiting ownership of the press to 20% maximum for any one company and requiring divestment for companies with larger market shares".

Owners of more than 10% of the market would also need "a licence to operate in the UK granted by the regulator", with further obligations "such as the use of profits to fund local media, or introducing a public service media element to operations". That could see the likes of the Daily Mail's owner DMGT and Murdoch's News UK forced to fund smaller, rival publishers.

DMGT held 50.6% of daily national print circulation, according to the Government's January 2026 letter on its bid to buy the Telegraph. Under a 20% cap it could have to shed well over half its share. It is not clear whether domination of 'the market' in the Green plans means revenue or, for print outlets, newspaper circulation.

The old cap applied to any "media market", print or broadcast. The new one applies to "the press", with broadcasters facing only a "presumption against aggregation of ownership both within and across media types", likely protecting public service broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4.

The chapter also says co-operative and other democratic ownership models "may be mandatory for larger (financial/employment) platforms and organisations", raising the prospect of enforced co-operative ownership of titles such as The Sun.

Media organisations would only be allowed to platform the work of think tanks that are "transparent about their funding", in a move that could hit the think tanks rated least transparent, which are largely on the right.

The old policy committed the party to extending broadcast regulator Ofcom's powers to "take on statutory responsibility and regulation for matters relating to print media". The new text does not mention Ofcom, but goes further: "The Green Party will seek for independent, statutory regulation of all Cultural, Sporting and Media activity."

The policy defines culture as including everything from poetry to digital gaming, music, theatre and dance, adding that "this is not an exhaustive list".

Currently the press is 'self-regulated', mostly through Ipso and the smaller rival regulator Impress (of which Byline Times is a member). Publishers do not have to belong to any regulator, and the main incentive to join one proposed after the Leveson inquiry – costs penalties for publishers outside a recognised regulator – was repealed in 2024 without ever coming into force.

Regulators would have to "ensure their members and chairs are democratically, inclusively and fairly elected, and independent from industry and Government". The old text named trade unions and NGOs among those who would nominate members. The new text sets out no electorate.

Regulators must now give social and cultural concerns "greater weight than commercial factors", up from "equal weight". Money from penalties would go to "the most local endeavours possible" in each industry, such as hyper-local news outlets.

The party would also introduce "a levy on large international social media corporations operating in the UK" to fund local and independent journalism, including new 'local news forums'. These forums would hold the BBC-funded Local Democracy Reporting Service "democratically accountable".

The policy pledges to "ensure a public service element in all areas of the press", though the details are thin. The old text's warning that a free press "should not be constrained by spurious definitions of the public interest" has gone.

On Censorship

The party's previous policy document on the media stated: "The Green Party is opposed to all forms of censorship in the media and cultural activities for adults."

That language has now been ditched and replaced with: "The Green Party respects the right to freedom of expression where that right does not impinge on other people's rights and freedoms or the rights of nature."

The new policy also says media organisations have "a duty to prevent racist or other discriminatory content, and incitement to violence", adding: "Failure to live up to these expectations should include being forced to cease operations."

There is no definition of "discriminatory content" in the policy, though the party's adoption of a 'Zionism is Racism' motion at the same conference – treating support for a Jewish state as a form of racism – raises the prospect that it could include Zionism.

Where free speech conflicted with offence, the previous text said this "should be dealt with by allowing the offended person equal right of reply". That has been dropped.

The new policy pledges that the state "shall not censor freedom of artistic expression, journalism or freedom of speech, for example by applying economic or legal pressure". That is likely to sit uneasily with the power to close down media outlets.

However, the party commits to "protect individual journalists from regulatory sanctions, ensuring publishers and organisations are held accountable for content published". Regulatory frameworks would also have to include "conscience clauses in employees' contracts", which could protect staff from producing content they morally object to.

Related reading: Rupert Murdoch Flew Kemi Badenoch and Her Deputy to Mediterranean for Summer Trips Worth £12,000

The BBC, AI and Advertising

Perhaps most significant is the plan to "mutualise the BBC" so that "all citizens have the opportunity to participate actively and directly in the operations and governance of the BBC".

"Democratic and representative forums of BBC members" would be given "guaranteed powers to oversee and shape BBC operations in key areas, such as editorial strategy, governance, and individual national and regional panels across the UK". Charter reviews would be shaped by citizens' assemblies.

The party has backed scrapping the licence fee since 2007, when it promised a "guaranteed inflation linked payment from general taxation", with funding set at arm's length by a Public Service Media Council. The new policy drops both safeguards, promising instead "direct government investment that does not allow for government interference in the BBC's independence".

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told MPs in July that general taxation had been ruled out for the BBC because of the risk of political interference. The current Charter expires on 31 December 2027, and the BBC faces huge cuts after years of licence fee freezes and falling numbers of payers.

Little is said about social media, which has been left for a future conference. There is, however, a new commitment that "digital and physical media should be held to the same standards".

Related reading: The Parliamentary Funding Loophole Allowing Murdoch To Dodge Scrutiny

On artificial intelligence, there would be "restrictions on the data mining of music/words/performance (and any other human produced cultural products) for training AI / machine learning models".

The policy also states: "We will only allow informational advertising in public spaces." Advertising and sponsorship by high-carbon products, tobacco and alcohol, gambling, "products that promote unsustainable consumption" and "products found to be harmful to individual or public health" would be banned outright. Those industries would also be barred from "lobbying in any form", including "giving money, gifts or hospitality to political representatives", which would hit the many MPs who have received hospitality from gambling firms in recent years.

Reaction to the Policy

Dr Tom Chivers of the Media Reform Coalition told this outlet: "The Green Party's new culture, media and sport policy paper features some of the most ambitious media reform proposals of any party in British political history.

"Our national news media and digital platforms are dominated by a tiny handful of billionaire media moguls and unaccountable tech barons."

He added: "For too long political parties have either been too scared to challenge the power of the media, or too eager to wine and dine media moguls to secure their own careers."

"This radical media reform agenda will almost certainly attract extreme opposition from Britain's media elite, because it threatens to take away their power to decide our national conversation and who can take part in it," Dr Chivers said.

Donnachadh McCarthy, director of the Media Freedom Act campaign (the new name for the Media Sovereignty Act proposal), added: "Britain will not have a free and fair democracy until we end its capture by a tiny 0.0001% billionaire media ownership class."

A Green Party spokesperson called the new policy a "landmark" move to "shift media away from corporate control towards public participation".

On the BBC, the party's deputy leader Rachel Millward said: "This landmark motion puts forward bold and necessary steps to ensure the BBC remains what it is when it's at its best. A strong, impartial, public service broadcaster free from private interest and shielded from the whims of politicians benefits us all."

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

And in the hour before the first strikes, something unusual happened.

Between 05:00 and 06:00 UTC, large volumes of money flowed into bets predicting imminent US and Israeli attacks on Iran. The strikes began at 06:15 UTC, just 15 minutes after that trading window ended.

Polymarket is a cryptocurrency-based prediction market in which users buy and sell shares tied to the outcome of future events, ranging from elections and interest rates to sporting results and military action. 

All markets are framed as binary questions, with “Yes” and “No” shares trading between $0 and $1. 

That price is meant to reflect the market’s estimate of the probability of an outcome. So, a “Yes” share trading at $0.20, for example, means the better believes there is roughly a 20% chance of the event occurring. Traders deal with one another rather than betting against a bookmaker, and they can sell their positions before the event is decided. Once a market is resolved, winning shares pay out $1 while losing shares become worthless. Trading is conducted using the dollar-pegged cryptocurrency USDC.

It can make people small fortunes. Some traders who prematurely backed the likelihood of a US or Israeli attack on Iran went on to make tens of thousands of dollars. Across the markets examined by the London-based charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), positions taken around this period generated potential returns running into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The trading itself does not prove that the betters possessed advanced knowledge of the military operation. But the timing, scale and concentration of bets among some newly created or lightly used accounts raise significant questions about what certain traders knew before the attacks began.

The US-Iran war has since claimed at least 268 civilian lives.

The attacks marked a major escalation in the US-Israel confrontation with Iran. American and Israeli forces struck targets across Iran, including Tehran, with Washington saying the operation was aimed at Iran’s nuclear, ballistic-missile and military capabilities. Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks against Israel and US-linked targets across the region. It followed the 12-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025 and has since developed into a prolonged regional confrontation.

In total, the US-Iran bombing war reportedly claimed at least 268 civilian lives, according to the NGO monitoring body Airwars.

A Surge Before the Strikes

The pattern of betting on military action that was as-yet-unkown to the public can be seen across several Polymarket contracts linked to military action against Iran.

In the market ‘US Strikes Iran by 28 February, 2026?’, the number of ‘yes’ shares bought between 05:00 and 06:00 UTC, the hour before the bombing started, shot up by some 313% compared to the previous hour.

The movement in the bets on Israel bombing Iran was considerably larger.

In ‘Israel Strikes Iran by 28 February’, those purchases of ‘yes’ shares increased by almost 1,600% (from 2,626 shares to 44,411) in the hour slot preceding the attacks.

Fifteen minutes later, the bombs began to fall.

Across the two markets, the average price of ‘yes’ shares during the surge was between $0.19 and $0.21. Each winning share was subsequently redeemed for $1.

The shares bought during that pre-strike period would ultimately be worth about $799,420.

At prevailing prices, some positions taken during the surge stood to return as much as 500% of the bet if the bet was held until the markets resolved, which was when Polymarket deemed the US and Israel had launched an attack on Iran at UTC 9:30:47 and UTC 9:14:55 UTC respectively.

For individual traders, the profits were substantial.

One account, known by part of its blockchain address as ‘0x4564’, bought 109,512 ‘yes’ shares in ‘US Strikes Iran by February 28, 2026’ between 03:11 and 05:20 UTC. They earned some $90,771.  It was no small risk - they would have lost $18,737 had an attack not happened.

At 19:22 UTC that evening, the trader cashed out the winnings. The Polymarket account was subsequently deleted, leaving only the placeholder username ‘Anon’.

The account’s previous betting history was limited. Their only earlier wager was a $952 bet that Kamala Harris would win the US presidential election. They lost that one.

Related reading: Trump Went to War In Order to Break Iran and Left It More Powerful Than Before – US Defence Analyst

Two Accounts, One Prediction?

Betting by other accounts suggests a co-ordination.

Two Polymarket accounts, Aaamsaasa and SemiconductorIT, both bought large numbers of ‘yes’ shares between 05:18 and 05:30 UTC.

After making a combined $59,567, the accounts cashed out within minutes of one another, between 16:17 and 16:20 UTC later that day. 

Their proceeds went to the same destination: a Solana wallet with the address 4dLZQynk9SZJf6PC. That wallet had been created at 14:37 UTC that same day.

Research by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective in Washington suggests that ‘long bets’ in geopolitical prediction markets, wagers on outcomes considered comparatively unlikely, have an unusually high success rate compared with equivalent bets on sport or celebrities.

Between 05:00 and 06:00 UTC on February 28th, the proportion of long bets was more than twice the average. In other words, traders were not simply betting more heavily on an attack. An unusually large proportion were backing outcomes that the wider market considered less likely.

Some of the largest holders were also newcomers. According to data from Polymarket's API, nearly 50% of the biggest holders of ‘yes’ shares in ‘US Strikes Iran by 28 February’ had joined the platform during February.

None of this proves insider trading. Prediction markets exist because participants disagree about the likelihood of future events, and traders can make large profits simply by analysing public information more accurately than everybody else.

But there is reason to scrutinise trading around secret military operations. Recent criminal cases suggest that people with access to sensitive information have already tried to turn that knowledge into prediction-market profits.

In February, Israeli authorities charged an IDF reservist and a civilian with serious security offences after alleging that classified information about forthcoming military operations had been used to place bets on Polymarket. 

In May, an Israeli Air Force officer was charged over allegations that he used sensitive information to bet on military operations. During proceedings, the officer claimed that ‘the entire Israel Air Force is involved in gambling’. Prosecutors accused him of being willing to provide information for financial gain.

In August, another Israeli Air Force officer was arrested on suspicion of breach of trust after allegedly placing Polymarket bets on attacks in Iran and Yemen.

The problem is not confined to Israel. 

In April, US prosecutors charged Special Forces soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke with allegedly using classified information about an operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to place prediction-market bets. Prosecutors allege that he made roughly $400,000 from wagers placed before the operation became public. Van Dyke has pleaded not guilty.

A Bet or a Financial Instrument?

In the US, prediction markets can be regulated as financial derivatives. Polymarket has previously faced enforcement by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. That debate is moving to Europe. The Financial Times reports that Polymarket is lobbying regulators to treat its contracts as financial products rather than gambling. Gambling regulators in Britain, France, Germany and Italy disagree.

There is growing concern. Around 52% of prediction-market trading volume comes from sport, yet ESMA has warned that prediction markets are ‘rife with insider trading’.

Professor John Cheney-Lippold, who researches sports betting and digital futurity at the University of Michigan, is sceptical that markets covering such a vast range of events can effectively be regulated at scale.

‘The regulations that enable you to go after it are impossible. If you financialize everything, then you have to regulate everything, and it's really hard to regulate everything,’ he said.

Prediction markets are often promoted as machines for aggregating information. By forcing people to put money behind their forecasts, the argument goes, they can reveal what a crowd collectively knows more effectively than opinion polls or pundits. But that premise becomes more troubling when the event being predicted is a war.

If a market suddenly becomes much more confident that an attack is imminent, it may be because traders have interpreted public evidence better than everyone else. It may be a coincidence. Or it may be because somebody knows something the public does not.

Polymarket was contacted for comment but had received no response at the time of publication.

On Friday, a lab worker in a region of Siberia called Irkutsk was confirmed to have died of pneumonia after reportedly telling medical staff at the hospital that she had inadvertently broken a test tube containing plague bacteria while working at an anti-plague institute. She was hospitalised last Tuesday and died on Thursday, according to The Moscow Times.

The hospital where she died was placed under quarantine, and nearly 200 people with whom she had contact were reportedly placed in medical isolation to be monitored for signs of the disease. Moscow has also reportedly been put on “plague alert” and is following protocols for an “emergency sanitary regime.”

The plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, which circulates among some wild mammals and their fleas. People can become infected through contact with fleas or infected tissue, or in this case, through direct exposure to the live bacteria.

Once a person contracts the disease, it can spread to others through exposure to respiratory particles. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 3,860 suspected cases of plague and 423 deaths worldwide from 2019 through 2025, most of which came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar.

A Kremlin Cover-Up?

Both pro-Kremlin and opposition media in Russia have reported that the lab worker, a 28-year-old woman named Darya Shipilova, died from pneumonic plague following exposure to the bacteria in a research institute. Local government officials have also confirmed parts of the story.

Related reading: Tulsi Gabbard Revives Russian Disinformation Campaign About Ukraine Biolabs

Despite these reports, Russian authorities are denying that there was a lab accident and say the woman died of “pneumonia of unknown aetiology.” But given Russia’s history of engaging in cover-ups and secrecy, there is reason to doubt the government's story.

Furthermore, some Russian media outlets and Russian officials are deleting earlier reports about a potential plague outbreak, raising even more questions about a possible cover-up by the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov is demanding that the public “ignore different rumours” and that journalists stick to official statements.

Locals who live near the location of the laboratory are reportedly “outraged” by the lack of information they're receiving from the government and have begun to panic. 

Even though the Kremlin is trying to downplay the incident, the situation on the ground suggests something far more serious is going on, with lab employees and contacts of Shipilova placed under mandatory quarantine and some even reportedly escorted by the FSB to isolation centres.

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on Russia to be more “transparent” about the lab worker’s death and any potential risks associated with the reported lab accident. 

"I think it's incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world," Rubio added.

Russia has good reason to be sensitive about this topic, though. When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, it justified its military aggression by claiming that Ukrainian biolabs near the border posed an existential threat to Russia and needed to be destroyed.

The Kremlin spent the next several years spreading conspiracy theories about the biological laboratories, saying that Ukraine was weaponising deadly pathogens and preparing for a biological attack on Russia. 

Acknowledging that a deadly bacterium like the plague had escaped from one of its own laboratories would expose the hypocrisy underlying Russia’s years-long propaganda campaign — so instead of doing that, it appears they’re hoping that they can spin another disinformation campaign to make it all go away.

Cofnas, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, published a Substack article in July 2026 that accused Professor Jason Arday of plagiarism and “academic fraud” and implied that Arday had invented aspects of his personal biography. The piece set off weeks of media coverage of Arday, Cambridge University’s youngest black professor, who resigned on 5 August and was found dead on 14 August.

Cofnas’ posts on Facebook and X could undercut his claims to be engaged in academic inquiry into the role of race and IQ in society. They also raise serious questions about why the media took their cues and framing on Arday from Cofnas despite his objectionable views.

In one post about Jewish IQ in August 2024, Cofnas approvingly cited the work of “Nazi psychologists” who “acknowledged Jewish intelligence”. In other posts, Cofnas complained about how “sh*tlibs” in Israel were facilitating “nonwhite immigration” into the country. He also dismissed a “huge %... of US Jews” as Mischlings, a derogatory German term meaning ‘mixling’ or half-breed that was adopted as a legal term by the Nazis to describe individuals with mixed Jewish and Aryan ancestry. Cofnas is Jewish.

Cofnas Saved by Trump

Cofnas was suspended by Ghent University on 20 August, six days after Arday’s death. In a post to X, Cofnas said the university was investigating him “for discriminating against Arday”.

However, Ghent lifted the suspension after the Trump administration intervened publicly on Cofnas’ behalf.

The day after the suspension, the US Ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, publicly condemned it in a lengthy post on X. White said it was an exercise in “scapegoating” and “punish[ed]” Cofnas’ “accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty”. “Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behaviour are not desirable partners for us,” White said.

White announced that the US Government would be “reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University”. Public records show that the US Department of Defense funded research projects at Ghent valued at $869,000. His post was shared by Elon Musk, who responded with an American flag emoji.

On 27 August, Cofnas posted to X that Ghent’s rector, Petra De Sutter, had allowed him to “stay”. He said he wished to “personally thank” White, citing White’s “great support which helped bring about a just outcome. I am proud of my country.” The university also clarified that Cofnas’ case remained under disciplinary investigation, and that he would be barred from teaching and required to work remotely for three months.

Byline Times has discovered that Cofnas’ claims against Arday were either flatly incorrect or seriously dubious. Cofnas, for instance, questioned Arday’s claim to have run 30 marathons in 30 days, but evidence from the time, since unearthed, suggest that Arday did.

Byline Times has also shown how media coverage of allegations of plagiarism were heavily skewed and ignored the possibility raised by several academic observers that they may have resulted from unintentional errors.

Cofnas was dismissed from Emmanuel College at Cambridge in July 2024 after he published a blog post, ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’, that argued for “anti-woke” politics and said “there must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius”. Cofnas has denied advocating racial segregation.

Posts on Jewish IQ and racial purity

Cofnas is a prolific poster online, including on X and Facebook. A review of his Facebook, in particular, reveals that Cofnas has posted inflammatory and bizarre commentary about Jewish IQ, racial purity and other matters.

In August 2024, Cofnas posted a rebuttal to an article and video made by the influencers Simone and Malcolm Collins, in which they argued that it was a “myth” that Jewish people had higher than average IQs. “If you think Jews don’t have higher average IQ, what planet are you living on?” Cofnas asked. “Even Nazi psychologists acknowledged Jewish intelligence.”

In November 2023, Cofnas posted a lengthy thread about the IQ scores of Ashkenazi Jews and “Jewish success”. Cofnas argued that the stereotype of Jews as “shrewd”, long treated as an antisemitic trope, was proof that there are genuine “obvious personality differences” between Jews and non-Jews. “We know that stereotypes generally have a basis in reality,” Cofnas wrote.

In a post in June 2024, Cofnas argued that the “reported intermarriage rate among non-Orthodox Jews is 72%, and it’s been that level for two generations. Huge % of US ‘Jews’ are 1st or 2nd degree Mischlings who identify as Jewish for oppression points (e.g. Tim Wise), fake Reform converts, or Kanye-style Israelites.” He later identified Tom Steyer, the businessman and failed California gubernatorial candidate, as a “Mischling Democrat”.

Related reading: Jason Arday: We Must Rage – Rage Against the Journalism of Cruelty

Mischling was adopted as a legal category by the Nazis for people with mixed Jewish and “German-blooded” or Aryan ancestry under the Nuremberg Race Laws. The German word can mean ‘mongrel’ or ‘half-breed’.

In a post from November 2023, Cofnas dismissed Tim Wise, an anti-racist and anti-Zionist campaigner with Russian Jewish heritage, as “one quarter Jew Tim Wise”. Cofnas compared Wise (and other liberal Jews) to “full-blooded Jews” who were “increasingly likely to be orthodox or Stephen Miller-type Trump voters”.

Cofnas also posted about the share of recent immigrants to Israel who are “halachically” Jewish, meaning recognised as Jewish under traditional religious law.

“Sh*tlibs in Israel want to do to Jews and Israel what their ideological counterparts in America and Europe want to do to whites and the West,” he wrote in February 2026. “Left-wing politicians like [Ehud] Barak constructed an immigration policy under which the majority (according to one report, 86%) of recent immigrants to Israel are not halachically Jewish.” Later in the thread, Cofnas wrote that “its the same philosophy as ‘anyone can be an Englishman, let’s bring in 20 million Pakistanis because they’ll become English.’”

Posts on Gaza and Zohran Mamdani

In late November 2023, Cofnas shared an essay by the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania titled ‘Israel must crush Palestinian hopes’. Cofnas highlighted a passage claiming that the “international community cares more about the sins of Israel than everyone else in the world combined”. Hanania ended his essay by writing that “eventually I think we can get to a place where emptying Gaza becomes seen as a realistic option both within and outside the region”.

In November 2025 Cofnas responded to a post featuring an Associated Press photo showing destruction in Gaza City from Israeli bombardment. Cofnas wrote that “for the first time in 2000 years, there are consequences for killing Jews. With that image in their brains, people will think twice before they try to do it again.”

In June 2025, Cofnas wrote about Zohran Mamdani, now Mayor of New York: “Mamdani just won the Dem mayoral primary in NYC on the promise to be more anti-white/Jewish and to nationalize grocery stores and housing.”

Related reading: Jason Arday: The Story Behind the Story of The Times’ ‘Impossible Data’

Interviews with Noah Carl and Amy Wax

In 2024, Cofnas interviewed the British academic Noah Carl on his podcast, The Cofnas Podcast. Carl lost a fellowship at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, in 2019 following widespread outcry from academics who accused him of publishing “ethically suspect and methodologically flawed” studies that amounted to “racist pseudoscience”.

In October 2024, Cofnas said on social media that YouTube had removed all episodes of The Cofnas Podcast for violating its “hate speech policy”.

Cofnas filmed two interviews with Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, in 2024. In October 2025, he posted a photo of himself with his arm around Wax, with the comment “Jewish race realist singularity”.

The university sanctioned Wax in September 2024, stripping her of her named chair and halving her salary for a year, after a faculty hearing board found that she had engaged in “flagrant unprofessional conduct” including a “history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalisations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status”.

On a podcast in 2021, Wax said that “as long as most Asians support Democrats and help advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration”.

The Prime Minister announced the plans – which are set to endorse a new voting system for Westminster elections – in his Labour conference speech in Liverpool last week.

Now backers of compulsory voting say it is an opportunity to end low turnout in Britain. In doing so, they say he could drastically close the gap between the power of the high-turnout wealthiest voters, and the poorest who stay at home in disproportionate numbers.

It would also, a new report argues, help end the imbalance in voter power between generations, as older voters turn out in high numbers and younger voters sit out elections in far larger numbers.

Andrew Blick, Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at King’s College London, believes any reform to the system Brits use to vote “must include measures aimed at increasing electoral turnout”.

“If we simply change how voters cast their ballot instead of who casts their ballot, we risk failing to maximise the possible gains for a fairer society,” Professor Blick said.

Will Snell, chief executive of the Fairness Foundation, agrees, arguing the Prime Minister is right to “acknowledge that there is a fundamental issue of inequality in our electoral system”.

“If you are poor, you’re less likely to vote and less likely to be the focus of politicians' concerns.

“That’s why any major review of our electoral system cannot be limited to discussions around systems and processes, but must be about the importance of who votes.”

Charles White, from the Campaign for Compulsory Voting, said the National Commission “cannot just be about how people vote, but who votes”.

“We need to address our country's woeful turnout, and the only tried-and-tested solution in a democracy is the Australian model of compulsory voting.”

And Dr Nick Garland from the progressive think tank IPPR also joined the calls, saying democratic change is “essential”: “The national commission is an opportunity for a debate about our democracy more widely.” He believes it could also be an “opportunity to tackle our low and unequal turnout through an Australian-style compulsory voting system”.

The Triple Lock Question

This week a report added extra weight to their calls – and it may be read with interest in Labour HQ.

Adopting compulsory voting would, according to new Fairness Foundation analysis, sidestep some of the political costs of amending the pensions triple lock. Pensioners are now less likely to be in poverty than the rest of the population, and half as likely as children. Pensioners are also far more likely to vote than younger people.

While pensions rise by the highest of average earnings, inflation or 2.5% every year – there is no annual uplift at all for Local Housing Allowance or the benefit cap. Universal Credit elements like child, carer and work allowances are reviewed annually at ministers’ discretion, alongside Jobseeker’s Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance, income support and housing benefit personal allowances. In effect, they have a weak ‘single lock’, in pension terms.

Writing in the report, crossbench peer Baroness Polly Neate, former CEO of Shelter, says compulsory voting “would give Burnham the political cover and popular support to deliver” the changes he announced in his speech.

“The people most likely to back reform, including younger voters, would be at the ballot box to reward a government that took on intergenerational inequality. Compulsory voting brings everyone into the decision, those directly affected and those who aren't, encouraging a more considered response to major policy choices,” Baroness Neate says.

The Prime Minister’s rallying cry to ensure “everyone’s vote counts and everyone’s voice is heard” pricked the ears of those battling against low turnout in UK elections.

The Fairness Foundation, an independent think tank, says a “distorted” electorate through low turnout has a major impact on the political incentives politicians face.

Charles White, who wrote the report for the group, said: “Our democracy suffers from a profound conflict of interest: leaders are discouraged from building a more equal society because the half of the population who vote profits from the current imbalance.

“How else to explain the survival of the pension triple lock, a policy dismissed by Conservatives as a Ponzi scheme, yet preserved by successive Prime Ministers to appease the groups which vote?”

The Missing Half

In the report, The Missing Half, the Fairness Foundation finds that those who do not vote are disproportionately poorer and more housing insecure.

The report calls for compulsory voting to be introduced alongside a ‘None of the Above’ option added to ballot papers, to tackle both rising inequality across the country but also the threat posed by “extremist politics on the left and the right”.

Labour MPs including Chris Curtis have recently backed the ‘None of the Above’ proposal. Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock and former Home Secretary David Blunkett have also urged Burnham to introduce compulsory voting to slash political inequality. Testing by Convergent Opinion earlier this year found that the presence of a “None of the Above” option shifted support away from ‘non-traditional’ parties, while coming at the expense of Reform in particular, by as much as four percentage points.

Related reading: Andy Burnham’s Pledge for Electoral Reform: What We Know So Far

According to the Institute for Government, the average turnout in Mayoral elections in 2024 and 2025 was 31%, and the figures for local council elections are similar.

Polly Neate writes in the new Fairness Foundation report: “The pensions triple lock is protected by voter power. That's how politics works, but it isn't how democracy should work, and it certainly doesn't give fairness a chance.”

Baroness Neate also backs making General Election days public holidays: “The Australians hold a barbie to entice voters in. That’s a bit weather-dependent for us lot. Scones anyone? Jam? Cream? A nice hot cuppa? Actual democratic accountability? Yes please.”

Growing Momentum

Momentum appears to be growing. ThinkLabour and the IPPR both published reports calling for compulsory voting in the first half of 2026, and were backed by the chief executive of the left-leaning think tank Demos.

In 2022, the Fraser of Allander Institute found that “health and income inequality are consistent predictors of voter turnout in Scotland”.

“In the 1987 UK general election, the turnout recorded for the poorest income group was 4% lower than for the wealthiest. By 2010, the gap had grown to a sobering 23 points,” said political thinker Jonathon Shafi of the report.

Child poverty rates statistically account for roughly 61% of the variation in turnout between constituencies, according to evidence cited in the new Fairness Foundation paper. Meanwhile, analysis of House of Commons library data found there was a 17.1 percentage point turnout gap between the least and most deprived fifth of English seats (67.8% against 50.7%).

Australians do not have to actually vote – they just have to put a ballot paper in the box. It can be blank, or spoiled. Australia reliably has turnout rates at elections of more than 90%.

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

Israeli language that was soon catalogued by South Africa’s lawyers in their case in the International Court of Justice and was quoted by the Court itself in January 2024, when it found a ‘plausible risk’ of genocide and warned Israel not to commit it. This effectively triggered the duty on all signatory states of the Genocide Convention to 'prevent and punish' the crime.

Yet despite this, denial remained pervasive. It took two years for ‘genocide’ to become the consensus verdict of informed and public opinion, and even longer for policymakers to catch up.

Related reading: Israel, Gaza and the Spectre of Genocide

Today, some of them — especially in the UK’s new Government — are acknowledging Israel’s crimes, but they still deny genocide. This article examines this journey and argues that the new mix of recognition and denial still protects Israel and blocks radical action to end the genocide.

Suppression and Confusion

Few Governments — certainly, not the UK’s — responded to the ICJ’s 2024 judgement. Nor did many media and cultural institutions take it as a signal to take genocide seriously. Most politicians and media not only denied that Israel was committing it, but actively suppressed any mention of the word, cancelled those who used it and accused them of antisemitism.

In the UK, 'genocide' was largely banned, not only by the BBC — which has interviewed me once in these three years, on Radio Ulster, even as I have fielded queries from the world’s press — but also in 2023-24 by the Guardian, where the word was confined to rare opinion pieces by people who could boast impeccable Jewish credentials.

Many who were horrified by Israel’s actions were confused in this period. They had not thought much of the definition of genocide, wrongly identifying it with the mass extermination of the Holocaust — which according to the Genocide Convention (as well as experts) is only one of numerous forms that genocide may take. Many also felt that to accuse the state which claims to represent the archetypal victims of itself committing genocide was a step not to be taken lightly.

A Genocide Consensus Emerges

Yet beneath this suppression and confusion, a genuine debate bubbled up. Israel’s obviously deliberate destruction of civilian lives and Palestinian society could not be dismissed as 'collateral damage' from urban warfare — in 2026, the Israeli military’s abbreviation for this, 'Naza', has become notorious as the title of a devastating new film.

Related reading: Carnage in Gaza: What Really Happened at the Al-Ahli Hospital?

As 2024 wore on, most experts came round to the genocide verdict. The Israeli-American Holocaust historian, Omer Bartov, symbolised this movement. 'I resisted the conclusion for as long as possible', he later wrote, but by June he was convinced. A similar shift took place in the human rights world. That November, Amnesty International published what is still one of the best evidenced, legally argued, and most accessible statements of the genocide case.

Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court indicted Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Although it did not bring genocide charges, it accused Israel of a 'wholesale attack' on the Palestinian civilian population — language that evoked genocide. It was enough for the US right wing to try to destroy the ICC.

In mid-2025, the floodgates opened for genocide recognition, after an emboldened Netanyahu abandoned a major ceasefire, re-escalated Israel’s killing and reimposed its starvation policy. It was this last which finally pushed Western observers over the edge: 'genocide' became the consensus of informed opinion, liberal outlets published genocide articles, and majorities started to be recorded for a genocide verdict in the polls.

The New Wave of Denial

By the end of 2025, those who were left denying genocide were mostly people who also denied that Israel had committed large-scale war crimes and crimes against humanity as well as genocide. Yet with Israel on the ideological back foot, 2026 has seen one of the most relentless propaganda campaigns ever, as an army of publicists, activists and bots has engaged in a dual enterprise to kill the rapidly expanding genocide consciousness.

On the one hand, they have still promoted what the denial sociologist Stanley Cohen — who evolved his categories while researching earlier Israeli crimes — called 'literal' denial, the basic suppression of the facts of Israel’s atrocities. They work to discredit even the best documentation and too many media still report their lies.

Related reading: Famine on the Gaza Strip: ‘We See Children So Weak and Hungry They Cannot Even Cry’

However, Israeli propagandists now put most effort into what Cohen called 'interpretive' denial, where some of the facts are admitted but they are explained away. There has been a new focus on discrediting the genocide case. Even as they ignore legal definitions, they aim to use supposed definitional issues to excuse Israel’s atrocities.

A recent appeal involved intellectuals like Steven Pinker and Niall Ferguson and was headed by disgraced prime minister Boris Johnson. It smears genocide allegations as a 'blood libel', evoking the medieval Christian portrayal of the Jews as murdering children for ritual purposes — as though the use of the word ‘genocide’, rather than the destruction of Gaza, is discrediting Israel and the diaspora organisations that support it.

Interpretive Denial in Labour Political Discourse

While Israeli propagandists have been doubling down on suppressing the facts of the genocide and the use of the term, some European centrist politicians who largely agreed with them until 2025 have been shifting their ground.

In the UK, Keir Starmer and other Labour figures proclaimed themselves ‘Zionists’, blamed Israel’s critics for 'antisemitism' and called protests 'hate marches'. Starmer’s Government even doubled down on repression, criminalising repeat protests and banning direct action protesters as ‘terrorists’, as recently as 2025.

Yet when even Donald Trump recognised Israeli overkill, Labour saw the need to distance itself. Now, Andy Burnham has followed Starmer’s recognition of the state of Palestine in 2025 by proposing new sanctions against Israel’s settlement enterprise in the West Bank. In radical discursive moves, Burnham has said that Labour "got Gaza wrong", and Ed Miliband that "protesters were right, not wrong", for "calling out" the suffering in Gaza when the Government didn’t.

Miliband has also used strong language to describe Israeli violence, calling settlers "terrorists" and their evictions of Palestinians "ethnic cleansing". Yet in another way, Miliband’s and Burnham’s language has been heavily constrained, referring only to 'evidence of war crimes', not actual crimes, and wholly avoiding the legal terminology of 'crimes against humanity' as well as ‘genocide’.

Thus an old form of interpretive denial is accompanying the welcome — if still often implicit — condemnations of some Israeli actions. Burnham does not directly deny that Israel has committed genocide; but neither did Starmer. Rather, Burnham has revived his predecessor’s convoluted formula that the British Government 'has not yet determined' whether genocide has been committed.

Related reading: UK Government Flouted Own Rules Designed to Stop Gaza Intelligence Harming Palestinian Civilians

Starmer and his attorney-general Richard Hermer concocted this as a way for people who know that Israel is probably guilty of genocide to avoid answering the question. They knew it, of course, not least because as a lawyer Starmer had actually prosecuted a genocide case at The Hague.

It is depressing that Burnham has now trotted out this same tired idea. After three years of deliberate mass atrocities and with scores of international lawyers at its disposal, the UK Government obviously could ‘determine' the question — as academic lawyers, NGOs and a UN commission with a fraction of their resources have done. The idea that they cannot is preposterous. Evidently, the policy remains that the government will not determine the genocide question.

Denying the Implications of Genocide

The Burnham Government’s denial is not limited to this interpretive form. Even more important is a third type that Cohen identified, ‘implicatory’ denial, where people recognise atrocity and suffering but fail to act on the manifest implications of this recognition. Miliband himself alluded to this issue at the Labour Party conference, when he said, "We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. And we match words with actions."

The problem is that Miliband’s sanctions did not match his words. They targeted the new E-1 settlement plans, settler producers and companies that deal with them, and possibly further ministers. But they failed to address the illegal occupation itself or Israel as the occupier—they did not follow through on the recognition of the occupation’s illegality.

Moreover, since it was Gaza that Labour "got wrong", a reset focused mainly on the West Bank seemed almost like displacement activity. It did not (apart from some mooted humanitarian improvements) address Israel’s new occupation of Gaza, which is forcing the survivors into a tent city and rubble homes in a quarter of the territory.

What the Mixture of Recognition and Denial Protects

The Burnham Government’s combination of partial recognition of Israel’s crimes and praise for protesters with interpretive and implicatory denial is deliberate. Miliband acknowledges "ethnic cleansing" as an excuse for not recognising genocide, because it not a legal term and implies no specific obligations.

Miliband’s reset is carefully crafted to provide political ballast against the insurgent Greens and enough offence to Israel to provoke rhetorical blowback (which in turn helps Labour politically), but no fundamental breach in relations.

Indeed, this mixed recognition-cum-denial is designed to protect the UK’s partnership with Israel, which Miliband himself insisted he wanted to keep when he made his announcements. In case anyone was in any doubt, Burnham sent out Starmer’s old fixer Pat McFadden to assure everyone that the ‘strategic relationship’ with Israel remained intact.

Under the radar, little has changed. There is no question of suspending the UK-Israel military alliance. The changes announced to arms sales have resulted in no extra export licences being revoked. Arms purchases from Israel, which help underwrite its military industry, are untouched. Meanwhile, the Tory appointee Ian Austin, ennobled by Johnson and kept on by Starmer, remains the UK trade envoy.

Related reading: ‘Why Andy Burnham Must Break With Israel’

The amalgam also protects the US alliance. While Mark Carney and Emmanuel Macron have at times openly questioned this, Burnham is following Starmer in keeping close to Trump, and Israel remains a sacred interest for his regime, for which it is attempting to cripple the International Criminal Court.

A deeper breach with Israel therefore appears a provocation too far for Burnham, who has also continued Starmer’s enabling of Trump’s illegal war on Iran. No wonder that beneath the bluster, pro-Israeli forces, from the USA to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, are remarkably relaxed about Miliband’s policies.

Finally, mixing recognition and denial protects Labour ministers who oversaw the UK’s support for Israel’s genocide. The Government as a whole was complicit — no one, not even Miliband, protested. But those who continued to supply the RAF’s surveillance of Gaza to Israel in 2024-25 could also be liable for ‘conspiracy’ to enable genocide, a separate charge from ‘complicity’ under Article III of the Genocide Convention.

This protection is crucial to key members of Burnham’s Government, like John Healey, Yvette Cooper and Shabana Mahmood, as well as ensuring that Labour’s pro-Israel majority goes along with Miliband’s shifts.

Conclusions

As Israel’s genocide enters its fourth year, denial is changing. The Labour Government, like some others in Europe, is no longer in the camp of total pro-Israeli denial. Its messaging clearly deviates from the blind protection of genocide advocated by Israel’s trolls and bots, the right-wing press and Boris Johnson’s collection of influencers.

Yet for all its linguistic shifts, Labour continues to deny ‘genocide’, and this is not just a terminological denial. It protects the UK’s relationship with Israel and the USA, as well as Labour ministers responsible for its previous pro-genocide policies. 

It is also a sign that the UK is not prepared to follow through on its new rhetoric with a genuinely radical policy shift sufficient to challenge the crippling of Gaza and the wider Israeli occupation, which previous British policies have enabled.