Nigel Farage initially claimed he was given the money to cover security costs. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
Request follows claims actors linked to Moscow accessed Reform UK leader’s data and leaked information over £5m donation
Labour has reported the alleged hacking of Nigel Farage’s phone to police and government cybersecurity officials after the Reform UK leader failed to do so himself.
The Labour chair, Anna Turley, has asked the Metropolitan police and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to investigate Farage’s claims that his phone was compromised by hostile actors linked to Russia.
Reform has suggested the Guardian’s revelation that Farage was given a £5m donation from the Thailand-based cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne originated from material leaked from his phone, email and bank accounts. The party said last weekend it believed his information had been obtained by “hostile actors, almost certainly linked to Moscow”.
Reform said it had reported the matter to “the relevant authorities”, without specifying which ones. Labour challenged the party to refer the case to the NCSC, but it is understood that had not happened by Thursday afternoon.
The real ‘humanitarian threat’ isn’t Cuba but the United States, where poverty, lack of healthcare and illiteracy abound, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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President Trump has labeled Cuba a “humanitarian threat.” Perhaps he should look that word up in his untouched dictionary.
US hypocrisy was on full view again on May 20 when the Department of Justice issued an arrest warrant for former Cuban president Raul Castro for ostensibly ordering the shooting down in 1996 of two aircraft flown by a group calling itself “Brothers to the Rescue,” resulting in four American deaths.
Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group out of Miami, Florida, had already conducted multiple flights into Cuban airspace, dropping propaganda leaflets. It had been warned more than 25 times by the Cuban government to cease and desist. Even the US Federal Aviation Administration had urged the group not to “taunt” the Cuban government.
By contrast, the Trump administration has been blithely blowing small civilian craft out of the waters off Venezuela, with scant evidence that they are drug-running and with clearly no threat to US national security. Since last September, almost 200 people have been killed in these incidents, many of them likely fishermen or other civilians, according to human rights groups.
But despite the clear illegality of these actions — and so many others, equally eligible for prosecution — no-one has yet issued a warrant for Trump’s arrest. There may be some rats in Cuba. But the ones we should be worrying about are inside the White House.
Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland and the author of No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War, published by Pluto Press.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Nigel Farage has claimed that ‘foreign state actors’, most likely serving Moscow, accessed his phone. Photograph: Ryan Jenkinson/Getty Images
Anna Turley gives Reform leader 24 hours to report Russian hacking claim in ‘public and national interest’
The Labour chair has given Nigel Farage 24 hours to report to security services the claim that his phone was hacked by Russia-linked actors or the party will do it for him.
In a letter to the Reform UK leader, Anna Turley said it was “in the public and national interest” to ensure that a suspected overseas hack of a senior politician’s phone by a hostile state was properly investigated.
A Reform spokesperson said the incident had been reported to “the relevant authorities”, without saying who these were.
In her letter, Turley asked Farage, who has largely avoided media scrutiny in recent weeks, to set out why Harborne gave him the money, in the run-up to the 2024 general election. Farage initially said the sum was intended to pay for his security, but later characterised it as a reward for his campaigning on Brexit.
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On Monday, Ciaran Martin, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, called Farage’s version of events “an entirely unsubstantiated claim and one without any merit”, saying it would be difficult to conclude the involvement of Russia based on the examination of a phone.
Martin said given the seriousness of the matter, Farage should formally report what happened to the authorities.
I am republishing this article by Roger Hallam. I’ve not asked and hope that he doesn’t mind. I’ll pull it down – of course – if he objects. There is a brief comment of my own at the end.
Going to Work, L.S Lowry
The real division in western politics is between the pathological centre and challenge on the so-called “far” left and right — meaning political forces reasonably enough challenging the centre’s mass death project. Of course, the far right is based upon a con — its core spaces are dominated by the same billionaire-funded mass death agenda as the centre’s, but the sentiment on the ground is very similar to that on the left.
The point is the level of maturation — whether these forces are confident enough to separate themselves from the hegemony of the “centre” so that a credible and coherent message can be presented to the electorate that they really are “not them”. As usual, the far right has a big head start.
This requires that the leadership of Left spaces actually believe in themselves. When this happens — as in the case of Mamdani and Polanski — then the voter response is dramatic. The Green Party has risen from around 6% to nearly 20% in a year. Of course, this is helped by local factors — the collapse of Your Party and the tactical incompetence of Labour. But the structural factor is the key determinant — a political leader who directly addresses the decimation of the cultural and material means of life of the majority under monopoly finance capital. There is the conventional economic wave — the “internal contradictions of capital” — and then fusing with the new and final wave: the destruction of the biosphere.
Inadequate maturation of a Left party that promises systemic change is again catastrophically on display in the Green Party’s weak response to the Makerfield by-election. If Zack had believed in his own rhetoric — that the party is taking over from Labour — then he would have shown charismatic and strategic leadership and been out there on the streets from day one, making the self-fulfilling prophecy that Labour can never look after the interests of working people, for all the reasons everyone knows.
Instead, like docile peasants in the face of aristocratic charm (i.e. lies), the weight of tradition has again won the day. The myth held that the Left can only go through the motions of opposition to the centre, which has the divine (i.e. neo-liberal) right to rule.
Join Me
This failure is catastrophic because, as any realist worthy of the label knows, next year the world will hit 1.7°C, and this will signal the end of our civilisation, beginning with the collapse of insurance markets. Think of 2008, then multiply it by 100. Capital in the twenty-first century is the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history. It sells you prosperity while knowing it is destroying the very basis of life. This does not end well.
The far right response will be to double down on denial and ever greater psychotic short-termism, as shown by the present Trump regime. In other words, the far right has only one agenda: treason — to bring mass death down onto the British people. After all, it only took Hitler twelve years to do this to Germany. It will take about a decade to do the same this time around, but with the truly appalling outcome of the permanent desolation of our country. You cannot “rebuild” without a functioning biosphere.
Even the billionaire owned Daily Mail sees disaster ahead.
What the Green Party has to do but won’t do is tell the people of Makerfield that they will die the slow way with Burnham and the fast way with Farage. Both are happy to have AMOC collapse locked in, for example. AMOC collapse means the end of the UK — no question about it. This is a physical, not a social, situation. You cannot grow potatoes in northern Norway, as one expert put it.
Of course, telling the UK public this “blood, sweat and tears” reality is most likely to fail. Never underestimate the effects of forty years of neo-liberal programming. But that is not the point. The point is that there is an absolute time limit here. There is no more time. We are at 1.5°C and 2°C is locked in (0.5°C, for instance, will be added to global temperatures once the air pollution from stopping burning fossil fuels is removed).
This means it’s now or never. You can jump over the fence and most likely get shot, or you can wait a little longer and be guaranteed to die in the gas chamber, which is the earth’s atmosphere with over 500ppm of CO₂ in it.
Sometimes choices are limited.
Let me finish on a rather British positive note. I recently spoke to a woman who was part of one of the many trials of people who have taken part in civil disobedience with Just Stop Oil. The convention now is that the judge will not allow any evidence relating to the criminality of the elites with regard to carbon emissions. Unsurprisingly, these show trials lead to guilty outcomes from juries. In one of those trials, I was given a five-year prison sentence. For some reason, in her trial, the judge allowed the presentation of evidence, including the “agreed fact” that at 3°C there will be at least 4 billion deaths — as predicted by a recent major report by the UK insurance industry. These people, we hopefully can all agree, deal in facts.
The jury went out for less than an hour and came back with a not guilty verdict. After all, who wants their kids and grandkids subjected to the equivalent of 80 World Wars Twos in the next two generations? Maybe the good citizens of Makerfield don’t want that fate either. But first, they need Mr Polanski to tell them some of these “agreed facts”.
There is a reason the “blood, sweat and tears” speech is the best-known of the twentieth century. Could it have something to do with being told the truth?
If this political moment feels like a dead end, that’s because it is — my new book Suicide names it. From the structural failure of liberal democracy to the legal and moral case for resistance, this is the argument the mainstream won’t make.
dizzy: I have estimated for myself when the World becomes uninhabitable. I don’t have any particular insight into this – I am not a climate scientist and know much less about climate than Roger Hallam – and have instead simply decided at what temperature life is unsustainable and considered likely warming to that point. In a sense that I’m not an expert is not that important because nobody really knows what’s going to happen, there are only theories, best guesses because it is yet to happen. Anyway, I agree with Roger that it is imminent, not long at all. The date I reached is 2060. It’s the rich who are driving climate destruction, the rich who are in charge of our governments and the solution is to do away with the rich. Tax them to extinction, use the money to address the climate. If we continue with Capitalism / Neo-Liberalism we have very little time.
People arrive with the first ship of the humanitarian convoy in solidarity with Cuba, in Havana on March 24, 2026. (Photo by Angelo Mastrascusa/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“It is outrageous that the US government would target people for bringing humanitarian aid… But even more disturbing is the cruel and deeply immoral policy the United States continues to impose on Cuba.”
The antiwar group CodePink it has yet to be served with any subpoenas after it was reported over the weekend that the Trump administration has opened an investigation into a recent humanitarian trip it helped organize to Cuba, but vehemently denied wrongdoing and said any government probe, if there is one, would only show that “this administration is beyond grotesque.”
“Taking medical supplies to pediatric hospitals in Cuba is now a crime?” asked co-founder Medea Benjamin on social media on Saturday after Fox News reported that organizers had been served subpoenas. “Saving the lives of babies is a crime?”
Fox reported that Benjamin and left-wing commentator Hasan Piker had been subpoenaed by federal investigators two months after they were among 40 Americans who sailed to Havana on the Nuestra America Convoy, which carried 20 tons of humanitarian aid to the island nation.
The Fox reporting claimed the subpoenas issued to Benjamin and Piker seek to obtain financial, logistical, and communications information related to the trip, which was organized in response to the Trump administration’s decision in late January to threaten to impose tariffs on any country that provided Cuba with oil.
The administration cut off Cuba’s main source of fuel at the beginning of the year when it sent US troops into Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and took control of the country’s vast oil supply.
White House officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, have long desired regime change in the communist country, and rights advocates have warned the administration appears to be moving toward just that as it strangles the island’s oil supply—causing frequent blackouts and impacting the healthcare and food systems—and claims the Cuban government poses a threat to the US.
In organizing the Nuestra America Convoy, said Benjamin on Sunday, the advocates were acting “as moral US citizens trying to bring some relief to a population being deliberately starved by the cruel policies of our own government.”
“This policy has contributed to catastrophic shortages of medicine and electricity, massive blackouts, transportation collapse, and a public health crisis that has hurt the most vulnerable, especially children and the elderly,” said Benjamin. “It is a policy that is, literally, killing babies, as we have seen in the recent tragic doubling of the infant mortality rate. This is why we focused our donations on medical supplies for pediatric hospitals.”
The blockade is compounding the suffering caused by the trade embargo the US has imposed for decades, said Benjamin.
The Cuban Assets Control Regulations law prohibits US citizens from conducting unlicensed travel-related transations with Cuba, but the law makes exceptions for humanitarian endeavors and other activities aimed at supporting the Cuban people.
“We traveled to Cuba under the US government-authorized category of providing humanitarian aid to the Cuban people. We brought desperately needed medicines and medical supplies at a time when Cuba is suffering catastrophic shortages caused by the crippling US blockade,” said Benjamin.
Benjamin, Piker, and Drop Site News co-founder Ryan Grim emphasized that the group stayed in Spanish-owned hotels that are “explicitly permitted under” the US law—while right-wing influencer Nick Shirley allegedly stayed in a sanctioned hotel on a recent trip to Cuba.
This is amazing: “According to public statements, it's believed that delegation members stayed at a hotel the U.S. State Department has put on a "Cuba Restricted List," as businesses directly tied to the communist government of Cuba, designated a state sponsor of terrorism.”
“It is outrageous that the US government would target people for bringing humanitarian aid to suffering Cuban children,” Benjamin said. “But even more disturbing is the cruel and deeply immoral policy the United States continues to impose on Cuba—a policy designed to strangle the island economically, deprive people of food, fuel, medicine, and basic necessities, and make daily life unbearable.”
Piker said the reports of the investigation indicate that “the American government would rather try to criminalize delivering aid to a country we’ve starved, than punish the Epstein class.”
Benjamin emphasized that the reports of the probe come as the administration intensified its threats against Cuba, having indicted former President Raúl Castro last week on charges related to the shooting down of a plane operated by Cuban-American exiles in the 1990s. Trump and his allies have repeatedly mused about invading the country following his military attacks on Venezuela and Iran.
“President Trump already has his hands full trying to disentangle himself from the disastrous US war with Iran,” said Benjamin. “He should not start another one in Cuba. The American people are tired of endless wars, interventions, sanctions, and suffering imposed in our name.”
People cross a street in Havana, Cuba
