Flood waters surrounding houses in Wraysbury, Berkshire in January 2024. Greater London and Yorkshire and the Humber are two regions at particular risk in the coming years. Photograph: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images
Every constituency projected to be at greater risk, with many areas likely to be uninsurable, Guardian investigation finds
Millions more homes in England, Scotland and Wales face devastating floods, and some towns may have to be abandoned as climate breakdown makes many areas uninsurable, a Guardian investigation has found.
New analysis from the insurance industry, seen by the Guardian, reveals the extent of concern in the sector, with bosses warning that large swathes of housing and commercial property in densely populated areas will be at greater risk.
Separately, experts have said that some towns may need to be abandoned as homes and businesses struggle to get insurance in areas repeatedly battered by storms and rising sea levels.
Densely populated areas including London, Manchester and parts of north-east England, are likely to be worst hit. Experts also say London’s flood defences need to be updated urgently to protect the capital from devastating floods.
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Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Police arrest supporters of Palestine Action taking take part in a civil disobedience protest in Trafalgar Square, London, 4 October 2025. Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/EPA
The rights we enjoy in the UK, and the movement the PM purports to lead, were built on protest. Those rights are in dire peril
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The Labour party arose from a long wave of protests by workers against capital, calling for workers’ rights and for sweeping democratic reforms. These protests and their organisers came to be known as the labour movement. Its early actions included the radical war in Scotland, the Merthyrand Newport risings in south Wales, the Swing riots in England and the General Strike of 1842. No such protests would have meant no such movement. No such movement would have meant no such party.
Yet somehow, the party that arose from protest has formed, in terms of our rights to free expression and democratic challenge, the most illiberal government the UK has suffered since the second word war. This Labour government would have banned the labour movement.
Any government that fails to contest and reverse this trend, even if it did nothing to add to this bleak legacy, sides with illiberalism. Far from doing so, Starmer’s has already gone further than the Conservatives dared, by classifying a civil disobedience group – Palestine Action – as a terrorist organisation and banning it. It has also (so far with remarkably little resistance) inserted a clause into its crime and policing bill enabling the police to stop demonstrations “in the vicinity of a place of worship”. As our towns and cities are so richly endowed with religious buildings, that means almost any urban area.
But its latest proposal is even worse. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced that the police should be able to stop protests that have a “cumulative impact”, by recurring in the same place. She will also consider “powers to ban protests outright”.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.Palestine Action joke that appeared in the UK satirical magazine ‘Private Eye’.
The influx of members points to Polanski’s apparent ability to galvanise attention and enthusiasm for a party that has often struggled to get its message across. Photograph: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images
Green party in England and Wales has had near-50% rise in membership since Zack Polanski took over last month
The Greens in England and Wales have more than 100,000 members for the first time, the party has announced, a near-50% rise since Zack Polanski took over as leader last month.
It puts them on a potential course to overtake the Conservatives and comes little more than a week after the Greens announced they had moved past the Liberal Democrats in membership numbers, getting to 83,500.
If the same momentum continues, party officials say, they could be on course to become bigger than the Conservatives. Tory party membership figures are not made public, but recent reports say the total is slightly above 120,000.
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The Greens’ surge has caused worries among some senior Labour figures, who believe it could take votes and seats from the party in next May’s local elections in England, particularly in some London boroughs.
Polanski has repeatedly set out what he sees as the Greens’ ambition to supplant Labour. In a speech this month to the party’s annual conference, he said that without action Keir Starmer would “hand this country on a plate” to Reform UK.
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.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
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President Donald Trump gives opening remarks during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC on September 29, 2025. [Stringer – Anadolu Agency]
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he was unsure whether former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would join the new “Peace Council” planned to oversee the governance of the Gaza Strip, amid ongoing criticism of Blair’s role in the Iraq war.
“I’ve always liked Tony, but I want to find out that he’s an acceptable choice to everybody,” Trump told reporters, without naming specific leaders who might have a say in Blair’s appointment.
The Gaza peace plan, announced by the White House last month, listed Blair as a proposed member of the new council.
Trump made his remarks to journalists aboard Air Force One during his flight to Israel, where he is scheduled to deliver a speech to the Knesset on Monday.
He also plans to attend a world leaders’ summit in Egypt aimed at formally ending the war in Gaza, as the ceasefire enters its fourth day.
Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
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US President Donald Trump disembarks from Air Force One upon arrival at Ben Gurion Airport on the outskirts of Lod near Tel Aviv on October 13, 2025, as he travels to Israel and Egypt. [Jack GUEZ / AFP/ Getty Images]
In a move dense with symbolism and political calculation, President Donald Trump is in Egypt to celebrate the handover of Israeli hostages by Hamas. What is cast as a diplomatic triumph is, in reality, a performance piece designed to salvage reputations rather than achieve peace.
For two brutal years, Israel—with full US backing—pounded Gaza. Despite superior firepower, advanced surveillance, and staunch diplomatic protection, it failed to crush Hamas. The war left thousands dead and Gaza flattened. The final bargain: not conquest, but concession. Hamas is still upright and resilient.
Trump was never a neutral mediator. From weapons to intelligence-sharing to U.N. veto cover, his administration served as Israel’s war partner. His “peace rhetoric” often concealed complicity in Netanyahu’s war logic. He wasn’t brokering peace; he was underwriting Israel’s campaign.
Rebranding defeat as victory
With global attention focused on him, Trump makes his entrance to recast the story. He wants to turn an inconclusive war into a story of triumph. But battlefield assessments suggest otherwise: Hamas, while wounded, remains a wild card.
“Israel misjudged the resilience of the resistance,” recounts Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, noting how the campaign strengthened Hamas’s political identity even as it devastated Gaza. In Israel itself, Haaretz lambastes what it calls Netanyahu’s “strategic blindness,” warning that his military-first obsession has isolated Israel and left it less secure. The critique is no longer fringe; it’s becoming mainstream in Israeli discourse. Netanyahu’s boastful and unachievable goals may ultimately lead to his downfall. He never listened to Machiavelli: “The tongue has destroyed more men than the sword, for words once released can never be recalled”.
A Washington Post analysis frames Trump’s Gaza gambit as risk-laden: he may have coerced a settlement, but sustaining it demands pressure he may lack. The war may be paused, but the contradictions are unresolved.
Trump’s optics of redemption
This Egyptian excursion is more about spectacle than diplomacy. The stage is set; hostages are reunited, arms clasped, a president framed as a peacemaker. Yet touch the surface and you find the fissures.
An article by David Ignatius in The Washington Post praises Trump’s coalition-building but also notes his modus operandi: declare victory first, work out the details later. The inversion of selling the banner of peace before securing the foundation is the key to understanding this visit.
Former CIA analyst Graham E. Fuller warns: “Washington has burned moral capital defending Israel’s conduct—only to offer a ceasefire that everyone expects will collapse.” The optics may dazzle. The substance, however, is brittle.
For Netanyahu, Trump’s arrival is a lifeline. His coalition teeters, public weariness grows, and international patience wanes. With Trump’s arrival, a deadlocked war becomes a shared pageant. A faltering gambit can be reframed as a shared triumph. If loyalty turns to envy, friends can become rivals.
But elites in Israel are whispering about failure. In TheTimes of Israel, a civil commission’s scathing report laments Netanyahu’s “arrogance and inherent blindness” in failing to prepare the country for the 7 October assault. He’s accused of undermining decision-making, sidelining security organs, and overcentralizing power. If very senior officials were barred from dissent, the political house was built on fear, not strategy.
Netanyahu needs Trump to save his skin and help reignite the narrative from gridlock to breakthrough, from defeat to deliverance. However, the miracle is contingent upon the illusions remaining solid. Netanyahu kept Trump in the dark during the war. He knows knowledge is a blade, and when you hand it freely, you place the weapon in your enemy’s hand.
Trump and Netanyahu are inevitably poised to exchange barbed accusations over Gaza’s unresolved chaos. That verbal exchange of blaming each other for Hamas’s survival, strategic missteps, and ignored counsel is looming on the horizon. Beneath the rhetoric simmers a quiet charge of betrayal, as both leaders subtly imply perfidy and failed promises, their alliance fraying under the weight of unmet expectations and diverging ambitions. Throughout the war, Netanyahu underestimated Presidents Biden and Trump, believing he could manipulate them as well as the US. Now he discovers that being underestimated is far safer than being fully known.
The pivot to Iran
The Gaza theatre will soon be over, and both men will pretend it never happened the way it did. Both men share the instinct to pivot—and nothing is more convenient than Iran. With Gaza’s devastation already disputed, Netanyahu is already telegraphing a shift to Tehran as the new existential rival. The script is familiar: rally behind a new threat, reset internal consensus.
Within US defense circles, pressure is mounting for a tougher stance on Iran. Israeli officials reportedly press Trump to re-impose sanctions, reassert deterrence, and prepare renewed confrontation. “Gaza needs to be forgotten. Iran must be next,” said an anonymous defense analyst quoted in strategic coverage. This is not a war of necessity, but a war of distraction: personal survival masquerading as a national imperative. Trump, ever the opportunist, may again be lured into conflict he helped mismanage, chasing legacy on borrowed time.
Conclusion: The mirage of victory
No statue in Cairo will change Gaza’s rubble. No press conference will erase the war’s toll. History judges more slowly than headlines. It is Trump’s turn to quote the author of The Prince: “Power does not belong to the one who speaks loudly, but to the one who withholds”.
Trump may strut down a tarmac, declare peace, and bask in the global applause. However, the pieces left behind—displacement, devastation, silent tunnels, and the political phoenix of resistance—testify to a war that remains unresolved. Until genuine leadership replaces spectacle, peace will remain a prop rather than a policy.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
