REFORM’S pledge to crack down on employers for hiring people without legal residence in Britain is a bid to get back on the front foot.
The scandal over Nigel Farage’s wealthy sponsors refuses to go away, and together with a fresh face at Number 10 has cost Reform its top spot in opinion polls.
Plan A, to reassert his greater popularity with the public than the mainstream parties via a staged showdown in Clacton, has gone badly wrong. Since nobody at Westminster would play ball he can triumph only over various unknowns and joke candidates, which will prove nothing.
So Zia Yusuf has been deployed to announce Plan B. It too is meant to showcase Reform’s anti-Establishment credentials. Prison sentences for corporate bosses who hire illegal labour. Crippling fines, up to 10 per cent of global turnover.
This is a sinister policy. But it isn’t stupid. The impunity of a boss class who routinely break the law is a source of genuine resentment.
It is why contracts-for-cronies and Covid lockdown breaches by the Boris Johnson gang brought down that premiership.
It is one reason the conduct of privatised water companies is so explosive.
Excrement-strewn beaches, unsafe drinking water and the discharge of huge volumes of raw sewage into rivers are outrageous enough as it is — but the knowledge that the CEOs in charge receive salaries in the millions, that the flow of dividends to shareholders is as constant as that of filth into our waterways, is incendiary.
Reform hopes to tap into hostility to corporate fat cats. It pretends to champion working-class Brits: “Corporate CEOs have been making a fortune by hiring illegal workers and undermining British youngsters. Reform will jail them and stop illegal working for good — we will stand up for British workers.”
It will not, of course. Reform would repeal the Employment Rights Act, stripping millions of rights to sick and holiday pay. Farage says the minimum wage should be cut for young workers.
Nigel Farage is scathing at the £250,000 cost to the taxpayer of his unnecessary and ridiculous Clacton-on-Sea election campaign that he caused to avoid scrutiny and acccountability for the £5MILLION ‘gift’ from his filthy rich friend that he didn’t declare.Nigel Farage explains that he’s called another byelection in Clacton-on-Sea because he should be able to secretly enrich himself without scrutiny and accountabilty and that the rules shouldn’t apply to him.Nigel Farage admits to being a whore willing to do anything for someone with a big fat wallet and asks whether drinking pints and smoking fags is not enough for the stupid plebs.
Belief Reform UK is sleazy has grown in the last two years, and is now seen as sleazier than the Labour government
Key takeaways
73% of Britons describe Nigel Farage as sleazy, including 56% thinking he is *very* sleazy
This includes 40% of Reform UK voters seeing Farage as sleazy
Belief Reform UK as a party is sleazy has increased by 18 points over the last two years, with the public now more likely to consider them to be dodgy than Labour
77% of the public feel British governments are generally sleazy
Keir Starmer is seen as sleazy by 51% of Britons, with 42% saying the same of Zack Polanski and 34-36% of Kemi Badenoch or Andy Burnham
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (3rd L) holds a meeting with security cabinet in Tel Aviv, Israel on October 07, 2023. [Haim Zach (GPO) / Handout – Anadolu Agency]
Israeli Channel 13 has reported that figures close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are working to advance political and legal measures that could lead to banning the United Arab List party from taking part in the next elections.
The channel said discussions within Netanyahu’s circle have focused on promoting action against the Islamic Movement, regarded as the parent movement of the United Arab List (Ra’am), over allegations that it transferred donations to Gaza during the war.
According to Channel 13, citing two unnamed sources close to Netanyahu, the move would require legislation in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, as well as assessments and positions from Israeli security bodies, led by the Shin Bet internal security agency.
The report added that the date of the next election remains unclear, but said the measures are being discussed as part of political preparations for the vote. The current Knesset’s term ends in October, although it voted in a preliminary reading last Wednesday in favour of dissolving itself. If the bill passes three further readings, it could pave the way for early elections.
Nigel Farage 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.Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
A view of Meta’s newly constructed data center on July 18, 2024, in Eagle Mountain, Utah. Credit: George Frey/AFP via Getty Images
Without a big increase in investment in renewable energy globally, humanity will not limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, but much of the data center boom is powered by fossil fuels.
By Jake Bolster
October 29, 2025
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Surging electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence is putting humanity’s climate goals out of reach, extending the life of fossil fuels and driving up emissions in the U.S. power sector while contributing to deadly extreme weather, according to two new reports published Wednesday.
With power- and water-hungry data centers forecasted to come online at staggering speeds to serve big tech companies’ seemingly bottomless appetite for AI infrastructure, utility companies have turned to fossil fuels to help meet the explosion in demand for power.
It’s a sharp departure from earlier forecasts of only modest, gradual growth in electricity demand, potentially threatening large countries’ commitments to transition away from fossil fuels. President Donald Trump and his administration have spoken glowingly about how AI will reinvigorate U.S. coal and other fossil fuel markets.
“Accelerating from deployment to a deeply decarbonized, resilient energy system is proving far more complex than simply adding megawatts,” said Prakash Sharma, vice president for scenarios and technologies at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm, in a press release accompanying his company’s new report.
Wood Mackenzie’s analysis concluded that almost no countries—including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—were on track to meet their 2030 emissions goals. But if countries across the globe show “extraordinary ambition,” according to the report, and make significant, rapid investments in renewable energy, humanity could limit warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by around 2060.
The 2015 Paris Agreement called for holding Earth’s temperature rise below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels, and ideally to just 1.5 degrees C in order to preserve a livable planet. To do that, scientists estimated the global economy would need by 2050 to achieve “net-zero” carbon emissions, in which human activity produces a negligible amount of greenhouse gases that could be absorbed by natural ecosystems rather than persisting in the atmosphere.
Among the world’s largest economies, the U.S. has the biggest gap between current climate transition investments and the spending necessary to reach net-zero emissions. The country would need to increase its spending on reducing emissions by 76 percent to meet the net-zero goal, more than double the increase the European Union would need to make and more than two-and-a-half times the increased spending necessary in China.
“A new climate leadership is emerging,” Sharma said. “As the U.S. doubles down on fossil fuels, pushing allies to buy its LNG, China is seizing the low-carbon mantle through EV and solar dominance, plus aggressive renewables deployment.”
The United States has signaled a willingness to offer tax breaks and open public lands to data centers—warehouses of servers whose computing power drives AI services and much of the internet, many of which will be powered by fossil fuels, according to International Energy Agency estimates.
Data center energy demand “is threatening to sabotage the country’s already faltering climate goals,” wrote John Fleming and Jean Su, with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a report published Wednesday. Fleming and Su found that, if AI data centers powered by fossil fuels grow as forecasted, all other sectors of the U.S. economy would need to cut emissions by 60 percent in order for the U.S. to meet its emissions targets.
“A gas-fed AI boom is going to hurdle us past any chance of keeping to our climate goal or maintaining a safe and healthy future for our planet,” said Fleming, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. “To the extent that data center buildout is needed at all, it should be powered only by clean, renewable energy.”
McKenna Beck, the Ralph Cavanagh climate solutions fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was not involved in either report, agreed with that conclusion, and warned that the current demand for AI runs the risk of spoiling climate pledges at the local level, too.
“The reports confirm what we’ve been seeing in states on the ground for the past year—that there’s a real risk of states with stated climate goals backsliding on those,” she said. As an example, Beck brought up North Carolina, which erased its 2030 climate goals this summer in the face of rising electricity demand.
Beck believes that, if given the right guardrails, AI electricity demand is not destined to add a ton of emissions to the U.S. economy. “With the right incentives and requirements, data centers could actually supercharge clean energy,” she said.
But with the Trump administration actively working to stifle renewable energy growth, Beck acknowledged that any good-governance AI policies would need to be implemented on a smaller scale.
“States are on the front lines right now,” she said.
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 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.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Reform Party leader Nigel Farage celebrates his party candidate Sarah Pochin winning the Runcorn and Helsby byelection by six votes Photograph: Anthony Devlin/Getty Images
The head of the UK’s biggest union has urged staff at Reform UK-controlled councils to sign up after Nigel Farage warned workers to seek “alternative careers”.
Farage said during a speech on Friday that he would advise council staff working on diversity or climate change initiatives to seek “alternative careers very, very quickly” after Reform UK took control of Durham county council.
The Clacton MP’s party made major gains in Thursday’s local elections, picking up 10 councils and more than 600 seats. The party also won two mayoral races and secured a fifth MP in Runcorn and Helsby with Sarah Pochin.
Responding to Farage’s comments, Unison general secretary Christina McAnea said: “Unions are there to ensure no one can play fast and loose with the law.
“Any staff working for councils now controlled by Reform, and who aren’t yet members, should sign up so they can be protected too.”
Farage has said he wants a British equivalent of Doge – referring to the Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, which is slashing government spending in the US, in every council.
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.
Sinister: Zia Yusuf
