People take part in a Stand Up to Racism protest in Epping, Essex, entitled Defend Refugees – Stop the Far Right – No to Fascist Tommy Robinson, following protests outside the former Bell Hotel in Epping, July 27, 2025
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The far right will not be beaten unless its racism is challenged: Labour echoes it.
It will not be beaten either unless we offer different answers to people’s accurate perception that Britain is becoming a run-down, ramshackle country of enfeebled services, collapsing infrastructure and falling living standards. Labour clings to Thatcherite orthodoxies on privatisation, unfettered banks and all-powerful markets long after the public have seen through the rip-off.
The right have the wind in their sails because their narrative, that immigration is the main cause of this country’s ills, has been allowed to crowd out others. We need public campaigning on the real issues: the cost of living, the council cuts. The NHS: where a Trump trade deal forcing up medicine prices is ideal ground to battle a far right that idolises him.
As these arguments are not being made by Labour, they need to be made by others.
Climate science denier Nigel Farage explains that it’s simple to blame asylum-seekers or Muslims for everything.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
People take part in a Stand Up to Racism protest in Epping, Essex, July 27, 2025
LEFT MPs Zarah Sultana and Diane Abbott and senior trade unionists will lead thousands of counterprotesters’s “far-right festival of hate” in London on Saturday.
A thousand people attended an online event to launch the Women Against the Far Right campaign on Thursday night, in the run-up to the march organised by Stand Up To Racism, with hundreds from the campaign set to join the march.
Ms Abbott, who is currently suspended from the Labour Party, said: “The far right are a menace to the whole of society.
“Their first targets, asylum-seekers and Muslims, are broadening to all migrants, black people and on to trade unionists, all religious minorities and anti-racists. They must be stopped.”
Ms Sultana said: “The far right are not welcome on our streets. We see through their lies.
“Their politics of hate and division make our communities weaker and women less safe.
“That’s why thousands of us are marching on Saturday — to show that fascists will be met with resistance wherever they spread their poison.”
Climate science denier Nigel Farage explains that it’s simple to blame asylum-seekers or Muslims for everything.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Global warming linked to the world’s biggest oil and gas companies made all “major” 21st century heatwaves more intense and frequent.
This is according to new research, published in Nature, which uses “extreme event attribution” to assess the impact of climate change on all 21st-century heatwaves that were classified as “major disasters”.
The authors find one-quarter of the 213 heatwaves would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused global warming.
They add that the effect of climate change on heatwave frequency and intensity is becoming more pronounced as the planet warms.
The study estimates the emissions stemming from the operations and production of more than 100 “carbon majors”, such as ExxonMobil, BP, Saudi Aramco and Shell.
The fossil fuels produced by these companies account for 60% of all human-caused CO2 emissions over 1850-2023, the study says.
The authors find that heatwaves recorded over 2000-23 were made, on average, 1.7C hotter due to climate change, with half of this increase due to the emissions originating from carbon majors.
This study “could be used to support future climate lawsuits and aid diplomatic negotiation”, according to a scientist not involved in the research.
The EM-DAT database catalogues all “major disasters” that have been reported since the year 1900 – defined as events that cause at least 10 fatalities, affect at least 100 people, or result in the declaration of state of emergency or a call for international assistance.
Between 2000 and 2023, the database lists more than 200 heatwaves. These are shown on the map below, where darker pink indicates a greater number of heatwaves. Countries with no reported heatwaves are shown in grey.
The map below shows the number of heatwaves per country recorded over 2000-23 on the EM-DAT database. Data: Quilcaille et al (2025).
The study authors acknowledge that heatwave reporting is “highly uneven”, with only nine of the heatwaves reported in the database since the year 2000 in Africa, Latin America or the Caribbean. (This is largely because extreme heat events in these regions are not routinely monitored.)
They then carried an attribution analysis on each heatwave to identify whether it was made more likely or intense due to human-caused climate change.
The chart below shows how climate changes increased the intensity and frequency of the 78 heatwaves assessed over 2000-09 (left), 54 heatwaves assessed over 2010-19 (middle) and 81 heatwaves assessed over 2020-23 (right).
The authors find that climate change increased the intensity and probability of all 213 heatwaves in the study. They add that the influence of climate change on heatwaves is strengthening over time.
In each panel, the bars show the percentage of heatwaves in that time period that were made 0.25-1.0C (yellow), 1.0-2.0C (orange) or 2.0-3.0C (red) hotter due to climate change.
The position of bars indicate the change in likelihood of the heatwaves. This ranges from those made 1-10 times more likely due to climate change (left-most bar in each panel) to those made more than 11,000 times more likely (right-most bar in each panel).
The extent to which climate changes increased the intensity and frequency of the 78 heatwaves assessed over 2000-09 (left), 54 heatwaves assessed over 2010-19 (middle) and 81 heatwaves assessed over 2020-23 (right). These are shown by colours and bar heights respectively. Source: Quilcaille et al (2025).
Heatwaves recorded over 2000-09 were, on average, 20 times more likely due to climate change, according to the authors. Meanwhile, those recorded over 2010-19 were about 200 times more likely.
Similarly, 2000-09 heatwaves were 1.4C hotter due to human-caused climate change on average, according to the study, while 2010-19 heatwaves were made 1.7C hotter.
The study finds that human-caused climate change made 55 heatwaves at least 10,000 times more likely. According to the authors, this is “equivalent to saying that they would have been virtually impossible” without the influence of human activity.
Carbon majors
To assess the contribution to heatwaves by oil and gas companies’ products, the authors use a database of carbon dioxide and methane emissions from 180 carbon majors over 1854-2023. This includes direct emissions from the companies, as well as the emissions released when the oil and gas they produced is used by others.
The 180 carbon majors in the database represent 60% of all human-caused CO2 emissions, including land use, over 1850-2023, according to the study. The paper adds that 14 companies, including ExxonMobil, BP, Saudi Aramco and Shell, are responsible for almost half of these emissions.
Using the Earth system model OSCAR, the authors estimate that global average surface temperatures increased by 1.3C between the 1850-1900 average and the year 2023.
They find that 0.7C of this increase was linked to the carbon majors, with 0.3C due to the emissions of the 14 largest.
The chart below, taken from an accompanying Nature “news and views” article, shows the contribution of oil and gas companies’ products to increasing global average surface temperatures over 1950-2023, compared to the 1850-1900 average.
Each colour indicates a carbon major, while grey indicates other sources of temperature increase, such as land-use change.
The contribution of oil and gas companies to increasing global average surface temperatures over 1950-2023, compared to the 1850-1900 average. Each colour indicates a company, while grey indicates other sources of temperature increase. Source: Haustein (2025).
Heatwaves recorded over 2000-23 were, on average, 1.7C hotter due to climate change, according to the study. The authors find that emissions originating from carbon majors and their products contributed about half of the increase in intensity of heatwaves seen since pre-industrial times.
The authors then break down the contribution of emissions from each carbon major on each heatwave in their analysis.
For example, they find that the emissions linked to Saudi Aramco made 51 heatwaves at least 10,000 times more likely. They add that on average, emissions tied to the company made the 213 heatwaves 0.04C hotter.
Legal action
Attribution studies already play an important role in courts by providing evidence that helps judges to determine liability.
Dr Rupert Stuart-Smith is a research associate in climate science and the law at the University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme. He was not involved in the study, but has published separate work showing that the emissions linked to each of the six largest corporate emitters cause one heat-related death in Zurich alone, every summer.
Stuart-Smith tells Carbon Brief that the new paper is a “high-quality analysis and a meaningful step forward for the field of climate change attribution”. He adds:
“With more and more lawsuits aiming to hold high-emitting companies responsible for their contributions to climate change impacts or compel state and corporate actors to reduce their emissions and prevent rising climate harms, work like this provides the basis for well-informed judicial decision-making.”
Dr Yann Quilcaille is a researcher at ETH Zürich and lead author of the study. He stresses the importance of attribution research for court cases, telling Carbon Brief that he hopes his work “can be used by legal practitioners”.
However, he also says that his role as a scientist is not to assign “responsibility” for climate change, but to “provide information to governments for decision making and to courts for litigation”.
Mankin tells Carbon Brief that the new paper is “very closely” linked to his research.
Callahan says the new paper is “an important contribution to an emerging literature that illustrates how individual emitters can be linked to the change risk of extreme climate conditions and human impacts”.
He explains that “this kind of evidence will be important in courtrooms – holding emitters legally accountable requires demonstrating a causal nexus between that emitter and a particularised harm suffered by a plaintiff”.
Attribution
The cutting-edge field of extreme weather attribution seeks to establish the role that human-caused warming played in these events. Attribution studies have been carried out on hundreds of heatwaves all around the world, as shown in Carbon Brief’s interactive map.
The new paper uses one of the earliest and most commonly used methods of attribution, called “probabilistic attribution”.
The authors first chose a temperature “threshold” to define their heatwave.
They then used a global climate model to simulate two worlds – one mirroring the world as it was during the heatwave and the other using the climate of 1850-1900. This second scenario is used to represent the climate in a world without human-caused climate change.
The authors run their models thousands of times in each scenario. As the world’s climate is inherently chaotic, each model “run” – individual simulations of how the climate progresses over many years – produces a slightly different progression of temperatures. This means that some runs simulate the heatwave, while others do not.
The authors count how many times the threshold temperature was in each model run. They then compared the likelihood of crossing the threshold temperature in the world with – and a world without – climate change.
For example, they find that the 2021 Pacific north-west heatwave was made 3.1C hotter due to human caused climate change and more than 10,000 times more likely.
(A study by the WWA at the time of the heatwave found that the heatwave was made 150 times more likely. The discrepancy is due to differences in the definition of the event, as well as its “very unlikely nature” according to the study authors.)
Dr Frederieke Otto is a professor at Imperial College London and founder of the WWA initiative. She tells Carbon Brief that the new study is “very similar to some other recent studies on impacts, based on the hazard attribution method used by WWA”, but says that “this is the most high profile and wide-reaching one”.
Otto adds:
“I do hope that many more impact attribution studies will follow, based on our or other extreme event attribution studies. We need more research on this.”
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at the party’s 2024 annual conference in Birmingham. Credit: Reform UK / YouTube
DeSmog and the New World have been blacklisted by Nigel Farage’s party.
A leading press freedom group has accused Reform UK of drawing from the “authoritarian playbook” by blocking media outlets from attending its annual conference this weekend.
The party informed DeSmog and the New World yesterday that its journalists would not be accredited for this year’s event. It did not offer an explanation.
The New World (formerly the New European) is a weekly newspaper with 35,000 subscribers whose contributors and editors include former New Labour communications chief Alastair Campbell, former global editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism James Ball, and former Spectator editor Matthew d’Ancona.
DeSmog is one of the UK’s leading climate investigations platforms. This year alone it has published stories in partnership with the likes of the BBC, The Guardian, the Financial Times, Private Eye, and The Mirror.
“It is shocking to see UK political parties seeking to pick and choose who can report on them,” said Fiona O’Brien, UK director of Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
“For democracy to work, journalists must be free to cover political events like party conferences and hold those in power to account, on behalf of the public.
“Reform UK’s actions in recent weeks – which include banning councillors from speaking to local journalists and falsely accusing journalists of activism – are straight out of the authoritarian playbook and should immediately be reversed.”
Reform’s leader of Nottinghamshire County Council, Mick Barton, has banned his councillors from speaking to local press outlet the Nottinghamshire Post and its online arm Nottinghamshire Live. The ban followed critical coverage of Reform by the publication, whose journalists were accused of acting “as activists” by the party’s deputy leader Richard Tice.
Reform’s leader Nigel Farage is paid more than £300,000 a year as a presenter on the anti-climate media outlet GB News, while Tice was formerly employed by GB News and its Murdoch-owned rival TalkTV.
Farage sported a GB News badge in Congress yesterday as he testified to U.S. lawmakers about supposed “free speech” issues in the UK.
The Reform leader used the session to compare Britain to North Korea, and to urge the U.S. to punish the UK for its alleged free speech infringements.
However, Farage was also held to account for his own questionable free speech record. Democrat Jamie Raskin asked the Reform leader: “Why do you ban journalists who oppose your views from coming to your events?”
“I don’t,” Farage responded. “I can’t think, if I go back over the past 25 years, of banning anybody.”
That statement is contradicted by Reform’s decision to ban DeSmog and the New World from this year’s conference.
Byline Times also announced today that it has been banned from attending this year’s Conservative Party conference. DeSmog and a number of other independent outlets were banned from last year’s Tory conference.
Reform Conference 2025
As reported by DeSmog yesterday, Reform’s conference in Birmingham will feature climate science deniers, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, and dark money campaign groups.
They include the Heartland Institute, a group close to Donald Trump’s administration that has called human-induced climate change a “delusion”, and Net Zero Watch – the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which has claimed that carbon dioxide has been “mercilessly demonised”.
By giving them a platform, Reform is “showing open contempt for the British public already living with the realities of climate breakdown,” said Tessa Khan, executive director of the research and campaign group Uplift.
A recent report by the New Economics Foundation found that Reform’s climate policies – which include scrapping clean energy investment and drilling for more fossil fuels – would cost more than 60,000 jobs and wipe £92 billion off the UK economy.
DeSmog previously revealed that Reform is offering access to Farage during the conference in exchange for hefty donations. A sum of £250,000 buys 10 seats at a champagne breakfast with the Reform leader during the two-day event, as well as “chauffeur-driven travel”, a personal assistant, and the sponsor’s logo on the main conference stage and battle bus.
DeSmog asked Reform to explain why it had been banned from the event, but did not receive a response.
Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
A “rogue” government could seize sensitive information on UK residents, data privacy experts fear.
Labour’s new data access law would allow the UK government to replicate an Elon Musk-style DOGE data-grab, experts and campaigners have warned.
They believe the new law is “ripe for abuse” and could be weaponised by a future Reform UK administration to further its anti-climate, anti-asylum, anti-government agenda.
The Data (Use and Access) Act, which will come into effect next year, empowers ministers to use ‘Henry VIII powers’ – named after the instruments the medieval King used in 1539 to bypass Parliament and rule by decree – to legally access massive quantities of government data with little parliamentary scrutiny.
“The bill has provided any government from this time onward with powers which are ripe for abuse. It gives any future government a blank cheque they can use to legalise the use, sharing and reuse of personal data for whatever purpose they see fit,” Mariano delli Santi, legal and policy officer at the data privacy campaign Open Rights Group, told DeSmog.
The passing of the act comes amid a flurry of concern over Labour’s growing ties to big tech companies, including recent deals with OpenAI and Google to provide artificial intelligence support for UK government initiatives.
“The Labour government has purposefully chosen to ignore risks and prioritise the commercial interests of U.S. and Chinese tech giants over the protection of UK residents’ data and their rights,” said delli Santi.
Technology Secretary Peter Kyle says the new law will “finally unleash” a “goldmine of data” to “help families juggle food costs, slash tedious life admin, and make our NHS and police work smarter”. The government claims it will “inject” the economy with £10 billion in the next 10 years.
The U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), originally led by tech mogul Elon Musk and established by President Donald Trump, has sent teams of engineers into federal government departments to access vast amounts of highly sensitive personal data on U.S. residents in what has been widely dubbed a “digital coup”.
U.S. DOGE is now using those datasets, which include information on immigration status, healthcare, and social services, to collate a “master database” to surveil and track immigrants. The department has also overseen extreme cuts to vital, life-saving services, with a recent study by the Lancet medical journal estimating that Musk’s cuts to the U.S. international aid budget could lead to 14 million deaths by 2030.
Critics fear that Labour’s new data bill will make this sort of data-gathering legal in the UK.
Imitating Trump’s administration, Reform leader Nigel Farage has already established a secretive ‘UK DOGE’ unit intent on gaining access to council data in Reform-led areas.
Reform’s DOGE unit is led by former party chairman Zia Yusuf, a multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur who has not been shy about his desire to emulate Musk’s ideas in the UK.
The party is currently polling to win the next UK general election with 28 percent of the vote – seven points ahead of Labour.
If Reform gains power in 2029, campaigners say it could use Labour’s data access law to carry out its policies, which include a crackdown on immigration, the radical downsizing of the civil service, eliminating “government waste”, and decimating the UK’s net zero projects.
“Labour is handing over the means for a future Reform government to legalise DOGE-style data grabs. In as little as 28 days, a future Reform government could make it legal for a local council or any other public body to share personal data about you with their DOGE consultants,” delli Santi told DeSmog.
A Data Grab?
The Data (Use and Access) Act, which amends existing General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws, expands the government’s ability to use personal data.
Currently, the UK’s GDPR laws require a risk assessment to establish a “balance” between the value of accessing data against the rights of those whose data is accessed.
However, under the new law, the secretary of state can dodge this process by declaring that the data is needed for a “recognised legitimate interest”, which the law says can include “crime prevention”, “safeguarding vulnerable people”, “responding to emergencies”, and “safeguarding national security”.
The categories are vague, and they could feasibly include controlling immigration or making cuts to the administrative state.
Data privacy experts have also expressed concerns – disputed by the government – that the new law provides a loophole allowing ministers to water down protection for “special categories” of data, which are designed to guard against intrusion in relation to the likes of religious beliefs, political opinions, and sexual orientation.
“Ultimately I remain worried that a bad faith actor could come in and abuse the Henry VIII powers – which were intended to make it easier to add protections to GDPR – to undermine the special category data protections,” Duncan McCann, the technology and data lead at the Good Law Project campaign group, told DeSmog. “The importance of special category data means that it should only be amended by Parliament”.
However, even if a government was successful in watering down special category protections, campaigners have warned that diverging from the status quo would seriously compromise the UK’s ability to transfer data with other countries, including the EU, and would have negative economic consequences.
McCann believes this would stop most governments from taking action. “This cost has ensured that governments don’t drastically alter the fundamentals of data protection legislation,” he said.
Despite this, McCann added that “a potential Reform government may be less interested or susceptible to rational economic arguments, making radical divergence from GDPR, if they won, more likely”.
Moreover, even if a Reform government maintained protections against sharing special category data, personal information including tax details, criminal convictions, and immigration status data are not protected in the same way and could be harvested by a Farage government.
Reform’s Council Crusade
Battles have ensued since Reform won control of 10 councils in May’s local elections, with Farage’s party attempting to wrest control of potentially sensitive data for its DOGE operation.
Kent County Council, the first to receive a visit from Yusuf’s unit and a letter from Reform demanding “all council-held documents, reports, and records”, has so far resisted the efforts, hiring external lawyers to challenge the plan.
West Northamptonshire Council agreed in July to allow Yusuf’s largely anonymous team of analysts to access council data and ostensibly reduce local “fraud and waste” – a move that has been labelled an “assault on local democracy” by critics.
Reform claims that it has already saved £100 million since May, although many of the projects cut by the party would have involved introducing clean heating technology that would have saved councils money.
Reform UK chair Zia Yusuf and leader Nigel Farage. Credit: Imageplotter / Alamy Stock Photo
‘Project Chainsaw’
Labour has also used utopian language about the benefits of deploying data analysis and artificial intelligence to cut the size of the state.
“If we push forward with digital reform of government – and we are going to do that, we can make massive savings, £45 billion savings in efficiency. AI is a golden opportunity,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in March.
Starmer promised to “send teams into every government department with a clear mission from me to make the state more innovative and efficient”.
The initiative – which The Guardian reported was at one time referred to as “Project Chainsaw” – was seemingly influenced by a proposal from the Labour Together think tank. The name references Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, who gifted Elon Musk a chainsaw as a symbol for dismantling the U.S. state.
Milei has cut 50,000 public sector jobs and slashed Argentina’s health care budget by 48 percent in real terms since he took office in December 2023.
Labour Together told The Guardian that its initiative would have “’Milei’s energy but with a radical centre-left purpose”.
Data privacy experts have also cautioned that the data access law could “threaten democracy” by potentially compromising the integrity of elections. Campaigners warn the act will allow governments, including the current Labour government, to alter rules about how a political party can use data in the months leading up to an election, which could be used in a ruling party’s favour.
The government told DeSmog that “the Data (Use and Access) Act will not only allow us to harness the power of data to improve public services as part of our Plan for Change, but to do so in a way which also maintains our world-leading data protection standards.”
Despite these reassurances, delli Santi of Open Rights Group remains concerned. This law, he said, “lacks meaningful safeguards that would prevent it being used to enable disproportionate surveillance, discrimination, and creepy invasions into our private life”.
Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
People take part in a Stand Up to Racism protest in Epping, Essex, entitled Defend Refugees – Stop the Far Right – No to Fascist Tommy Robinson, following protests outside the former Bell Hotel in Epping, July 27, 2025
