Reform UK’s Gorton and Denton byelection candidate, Matt Goodwin, attends a campaign event in Manchester with Nigel Farage, 5 February 2026. Photograph: Adam Vaughan/EPA
This byelection should have been a stroll for Keir Starmer’s party. Instead, all hope of defeating Matt Goodwin now seems to lie with the Greens
Every barb Labour has directed at the Greens can now be returned with interest. “It’s a wasted vote.” “Do you want to see Reform in power?” New polling ahead of the crucial Gorton and Denton byelection this week, while by no means decisive, puts the Greens first on 22%, followed by Reform UK (20%), then Labour (18%), with 31% undecided. But still Keir Starmer falsely claims that “only Labour can beat Reform”. Does he want to see Reform in power?
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A survey of 6,000 people by the group Persuasion UK found that by far the most effective message of five options was focused on corporate interests and went as follows: “Nigel Farage says he’s on people’s side – but when you take a closer look it’s pretty clear who he’s really fighting for, isn’t it? It’s the rich, the powerful, his mates in big business.” It explained that Reform UK has taken vast donations from fossil fuel investors and climate science deniers. This, Persuasion UK said, is why Farage wants to cut public services, workers’ rights and taxes for the richest. “He’s not smashing the system. He and his rich friends basically are the system.”
None of the other attack lines came anywhere near this for efficacy. So why doesn’t Labour use it? Because that might alienate the people Starmer seems keenest to appease: Labour’s own corporate backers and the billionaire proprietors of the rightwing press. The leadership’s key objective is not stopping Farage, but frightening people into voting Labour. Quite frankly, it has nothing else left.
One by one, it has destroyed the hopes that people vested in it, alienating potential voters on everything from Gaza to benefits to its self-destructive apeing of Reform’s rhetoric on immigration; from its vicious factional warfare against leftwingers in the party to its tearing up of environmental protections and attacks on wildlife, which, in a country of nature lovers, is utter, self-defeating madness. Disgust and disillusionment among former supporters is everywhere palpable.
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.Keir Starmer refuses to be outcnuted by Nigel Farage’s chasing the racist bigot vote.Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.
Protesters rally outside Pentonville Prison in London on January 11, 2026 in support of hunger-striking members of the banned anti-genocide group Palestine Action. (Photo by Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images)
Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, Sally Rooney, Tariq Ali, and George Monbiot are among the signers of a statement of support for the proscribed anti-genocide protesters, who have refused food for over two months.
More than 50 international authors and academics signed a declaration published Monday in support of hunger-striking activists allegedly linked to the banned Palestine Action movement, who are at imminent risk of death after refusing to eat for more than two months.
The brief statement—“We oppose genocide, we support the Palestine Action prisoners”—was signed by prominent figures including historian Tariq Ali; novelist Sally Rooney; former Guantánamo Bay prisoner Moazzam Begg; journalists Owen Jones and George Monbiot; and professors Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Naomi Klein, and Ilan Pappé.
The declaration echoes the message on a placard held by Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg when she was arrested last month in London protesting the imprisonment of people accused of being part of Palestine Action after the nonviolent direct action group was officially declared a terrorist organization in July by the UK government.
Since then, more than 2,000 people have been arrested for supporting Palestine Action, often while simply holding signs. Eight accused Palestine Action activists are awaiting trial for allegedly breaking into and damaging a British military base and a facility run by Israeli arms maker Elbit Systems. The defendants are facing at least 18 months behind bars before trial.
On November 2, a small group of imprisoned activists launched a hunger strike. Three people—Heba Muraisi, Kamran Ahmed, and Lewie Chiaramello—are still striking, despite imminent danger of death.
“She’s dying. She said it: ‘I’m dying,’” Francesca Nadin said of her friend Muraisi—who is on the 71st day of her strike—during a Monday interview with the Guardian.
Nadin said that the 31-year-old’s body is “shutting down.”
“I know mentally she’ll remain strong right to the last moment but she is dying,” she added. “The government, by putting her in prison and denying her all her rights, they’re not just letting her die, they’re actively killing her.”
Ahmed, 28, has been refusing food for 64 days. Doctors have informed him that his heart muscles are shrinking and he is at risk of sudden cardiac arrest.
“He’s skinny. I describe him a bit like a piece of paper,” Shahmina Alam, Ahmed’s sister, toldAl Jazeera last week. “It feels like now every time you see him, it could be the last.”
Chiaramello, 22, has Type 1 diabetes and has been fasting every other day for 44 days.
A fourth person, Umar Khalid, has reportedly resumed his strike following a 13-day pause.
Despite her dire condition, Muraisi is “intent on carrying on until the demands are met,” according to friend Amareen Afzal.
The strikers are demanding immediate bail, an end to censorship of their communications, a fair trial, lifting of the ban on Palestine Action, and closure of Elbit Systems’ UK facilities.
“The hunger strikers’ demands seem reasonable to me,” Monbiot wrote last week. “All these things, I believe, should be happening anyway. And they are of course negotiating positions. Whether all would need to be met for the strike to end cannot be known until the government engages. Its refusal to talk could condemn the strikers to death.”
Standing in stark contrast with the US military’s torturous force-feeding of hunger striking Guantánamo Bay prisoners during the Obama administration, the UK follows recommendations in the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Malta, which advises doctors not to force-feed prisoners who choose to hunger strike and understand the consequences of their actions.
“Forcible feeding is never ethically acceptable,” the declaration states.
In 1981, UK authorities allowed 10 imprisoned Irish Republican Army members, including former Member of Parliament Bobby Sands, to starve themselves to death in Northern Ireland. Their deaths occurred after between 46 and 73 days of refusing food.
A group of former hunger strikers from Palestine, Ireland, and Guantánamo on Sunday issued an urgent appeal to the UK government to save the Palestine Action strikers’ lives, and condemning the terrorist designation.
Critics said that the government would be to blame should any of the hunger strikers die.
“The UK is now perilously close to full descent into authoritarian rule,” said professor Peter Hallward, who signed the intellectuals’ declaration. “Ministers won’t even meet with hunger strikers, who are now at death’s door.”
Hallward added that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood “seem perfectly ready to let this country’s most committed and courageous opponents of an ongoing genocide waste away and die.”
Israel’s US-backed war and siege on Gaza following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing in Gaza and most of the coastal strip in ruins. Around 2 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the current cease-fire took effect three months ago. Israeli authorities are still blocking or strictly limiting the entry of critical supplies into Gaza, where 2-month-old infant Mohammed Abu Harbid over the weekend became at least the fourth Palestinian baby to freeze to death since November.
More than a dozen Palestinians—including at least five children—have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza in recent days.
On Monday, a court in Edinburgh held a hearing on a petition filed by human rights campaigner and former diplomat Craig Murray seeking to lift the ban on Palestine Action in Scotland, whose judiciary is independent from the rest of the UK.
“The impact of proscription of Palestine Action has been appalling,” attorney Joanna Cherry told the court. “Scores of peaceful people of entirely good character have been arrested under the absurd pretence of terrorism.”
“We are dealing with human rights and liberties—some of the most fundamental in our society,” Cherry added. “If people don’t have the right to express their views and assemble to express their views, they can’t really take part in civil society properly and adequately. It’s hard to imagine a more urgent situation.”
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/O74hZCKKdpAKeir 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.
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’.
I was lucky. Last week, I was cycling downhill when I hit a pothole. The front wheel folded into an infinity symbol. I went over the handlebars and, with no time to put my hands out, landed on my face. My helmet and glasses took most of the impact. I emerged, remarkably, with just a few cuts and bruises.
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Austerity – which leaves our potholes, alongside many other gaps in public provision, unfilled – does not save money. On the contrary, it costs us a fortune. What the rich might save in taxes, the rest must pay over and over again.
False economies abound. For example, the government may at last be persuaded to remove the Tories’ vicious, Malthusian two-child benefit cap. But what many people have failed to grasp is that behind it stands another brick wall: the household benefits cap. If families now receive money for a third child, it could push them past the household limit, and they’ll be scarcely better off than before. This household cap has extreme and perverse consequences. It ensures that rents, even in the social sector, are almost everywhere unaffordable to the families affected, most of which are headed by lone parents. The result is that they are thrown into temporary accommodation, which local authorities must provide at far greater expense: roughly £2.3bn a year. Being forced into temporary accommodation also curtails adults’ employment opportunities and children’s performance at school, and generates great suffering, which can translate into physical and mental health problems, which of course means further economic impacts.
In 2019, a parliamentary committee called on the government to “conduct a full cost benefit analysis of the benefit cap”. The government rejected the call, but said it would explore the possibility in future. I checked with the Department for Work and Pensions – it still hasn’t happened.
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Keir Starmer confirms that he’s proud to be a red Tory continuing austerity and targeting poor and disabled scum.Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.
