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Tag: Reform 2025 Ltd (Reform UK)

Ben Delo: how Reform’s record donor created a ‘magnet for money laundering’
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Article by Nathaniel Peutherer , Lawrence Marzouk republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Britain’s record donor made his fortune from a crypto exchange that asked few questions of its customers
In brief
- Man who recently pledged £36m to Reform was convicted of failing to maintain proper money-laundering controls, before being pardoned by Trump
- The platform demanded little more than an email from customers for long periods and as a result became a lure for dirty money, the US government argued
- Delo pleaded guilty to one offence and other allegations, including fraud, were not tested at trial
When Ben Delo handed Reform UK £36m last week to become the biggest donor in British political history, a flurry of articles quickly followed seeking to explain exactly who this so-called “crypto billionaire” was.
Most told some version of the same story: Delo is an Oxford graduate who co-founded the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, became Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire at 34, gave millions to philanthropy and, along the way, fell foul of an obscure US financial law.
By and large, the articles did not dwell on that last part. Delo himself has described his offence under the Bank Secrecy Act as a “spurious blip”.
But US court records we have examined, building on reporting by Democracy for Sale, raise far more troubling questions about the business that made Delo his fortune. The prosecution’s wider case extended far beyond the single offence Delo admitted. Those allegations were disputed by Delo and BitMEX and were never tested at trial.
Documents filed by US prosecutors said Delo’s decisions turned BitMEX into a “magnet for money laundering and criminal activity”. They said the company processed trillions of dollars of transactions for its customers. For much of this time, they were required to provide nothing more than an email address. “No real name or other advanced verification is required,” trumpeted the website.
A document filed by US prosecutors ahead of Delo’s sentencing
The FBI said BitMEX, in which Delo owned almost a third of the shares during the period covered by the case, deliberately kept these requirements loose in order to drive up revenue. Delo personally intervened to help customers dodge restrictions on US trading, prosecutors claimed.
BitMEX generated more than $1.3bn in revenue during the five years covered by its criminal case, with prosecutors describing Delo as a “critical organiser and leader” of the “criminal decision” not to install the required safeguards.
In 2020, the US Department of Justice charged Delo and three other BitMEX executives with violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain proper anti-money-laundering controls. Meanwhile, the US derivatives regulator, CFTC, brought a civil action against the founders and five companies behind BitMEX.
https://frontend.poool.fr/engage/56TXL-DGRM7-IPY34-9YVAW/67b3726b9f79a3dc6ea9504c?theme=JTIybGlnaHQlMjI%253D&computedTheme=JTIybGlnaHQlMjI%253D
In response to the DoJ’s charges, Delo pleaded guilty to one offence as part of a pre-trial plea agreement in which the US government agreed not to prosecute him over other alleged offences it had investigated. At the sentencing, prosecutors set out this wider case against Delo, much of which was refuted by his lawyers who argued that his role was not compliance-related, but neither case was tested at trial.
Delo’s lawyers told us: “There is no truth in the serious allegation that our client was guilty of the types of improper, unlawful or criminal conduct that the DoJ crowed about but did not even try to prove.
“The prosecutors’ unproven references to money laundering, sanctions evasion and fraud were irrelevant to the charges brought against Mr Delo and were put forward purely for prejudice and no attempt was even made to evidence or otherwise substantiate them in court.”
Reform UK and BitMEX did not respond to our requests for comment. Nor did co-founder Arthur Hayes, whose own defence relied on similar arguments to Delo’s.
Delo, the “D” in BitMEX parent company HDR Global Trading, co-founded the company in Hong Kong in 2014 and, as chief operating officer, built and oversaw the exchange’s trading software. US regulators later said all three founders worked together on critical decisions.
After receiving a pardon from Donald Trump in 2025, Delo said “a legal wrong has been righted”, claiming he and his co-founders had been “sacrificed for political reasons”, referring to the Biden administration.
While Delo’s “crypto billionaire” label comes from the value of his stake in BitMEX during its height, the size of his wealth today is much less clear.
The current rules governing political donations are clearly not fit for purpose
Tim Picton, Spotlight on Corruption
But certainly the company described by prosecutors as a “platform for money-laundering” made Reform’s largest donor extremely rich. Prosecutors said he and his two co-founders each withdrew between $100m and $150m in dividends between 2014 and 2020.
Tim Picton, senior advocacy adviser at Spotlight on Corruption, told us: “Political parties should be required to check a donor’s source of funds before accepting any large sum of money.
“In the age of mega donors who have derived their wealth from loosely regulated sectors such as crypto, this is urgently needed alongside a cap on donations.”
Before BitMEX even launched, its founders were discussing how much they really needed to know about its customers. The answer, initially at least, was as little as possible.
“Basically just valid email address until we feel significant pressure to do otherwise,” said co-founder Arthur Hayes in an internal message to Delo in November 2014. And for years, that was all users needed – with BitMEX’s own website advertising this fact to prospective customers.
Prosecutors argued that without knowing who was behind an account, BitMEX was ill-equipped to check whether the bitcoin flowing through it belonged to an ordinary trader, a hacker, a darkweb marketplace or someone in a sanctioned country. Nor could it report suspicious customers to the authorities.
The upshot, prosecutors said, was that BitMEX became “in effect, a money laundering platform”.
Regulators in the US demand tighter customer ID controls than this – so BitMEX banned US customers. But it also launched what it described as a “hidden service” on Tor, a web system that obscures the user’s location.
A document filed by US prosecutors ahead of Delo’s sentencing
Delo admitted that BitMEX recorded logins from users known to be in the US and “did not immediately act to restrict [their] trading”.
In October 2018, Delo said BitMEX had frozen roughly 2,000 accounts associated with restricted jurisdictions, but not those in the US. When one valuable customer was caught logging in from a US territory, Delo instructed a colleague to “tell them to log in from Canada like they normally do”.
Delo’s lawyers said such examples gave a misleading picture of his wider conduct, producing evidence of hundreds of occasions on which he personally restricted US-linked users. Judge John Koeltl acknowledged that Delo had been “actively involved” in enforcing controls on US customers. He said BitMEX had introduced procedures over time to exclude US customers and “did screen out a considerable amount of business from United States customers”. But he said that “given the admittedly wilful nature of the violation, the crime remains a serious one”.
They said the exchange used distinctive bitcoin addresses, making funds easier to trace, and said BitMEX had an “excellent track record” of cooperating with US law enforcement.
Comprehensive identity checks for all customers were not introduced until 2020, by which point the “significant pressure” Hayes had anticipated had arrived. Prosecutors argued BitMEX had started strengthening controls only after US regulatory scrutiny in 2018; BitMEX disputed this, saying it decided to do so independently in 2019.
The US Attorney’s Office later described BitMEX’s restrictions on US customers as “toothless or easily overridden” in pursuit of its ultimate goal: US money.
At BitMEX’s corporate sentencing in January 2025, Judge Koeltl found that US users accounted for about $2bn in deposits and $155m of the exchange’s revenue.
For years, BitMEX knew remarkably little about many of its customers. It turned out that some of them had good reasons to want it that way.
FinCEN, the US Treasury’s financial crime regulator, identified at least $209m in BitMEX transactions, including from unregistered money services and so-called darknet markets, where drugs and counterfeit goods are bought and sold. BitMEX settled this case without admitting or denying the findings.
Among the criminal customers linked to the BitMEX, prosecutors cited Elliot Gunton, a hacker from Norwich who had been convicted as a teenager for accessing the personal information of thousands of people as part of the notorious 2015 TalkTalk cyberattack. Prosecutors said Gunton had an account linked to BitMEX.
There is no suggestion BitMEX was involved in Gunton’s hacking or that Delo knew who he was.
FinCen found that in October 2018, the company identified more than 40,000 accounts registered in the US; US territories; or US- or UN-sanctioned countries such as Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea or Sudan; as well as people logging in from Quebec. Delo’s lawyers told us that because he was not a US citizen and the companies were not US companies they were not “bound by US sanctions law when acting outside the US”.
Delo also had dealings with Sam Bankman-Fried, years before the entrepreneur was convicted of fraud.
Court papers describe how in December 2018, BitMEX blocked an account belonging to Bankman-Fried’s trading firm Alameda Research over US activity. By then, prosecutors said, it had traded from the US for more than six months without providing onboarding documents and deposited more than $100m into its BitMEX account.
Sam Bankman-Fried was helped by a BitMEX employee to overcome his company’s log-in banMichael M Santiago / Getty
When Bankman-Fried contacted Delo, he was put in touch with an employee who recorded that Alameda was “very appreciative we took care of their US log-in ban this week so quickly”. The employee then encouraged Bankman-Fried to move the account to a non-US entity, settling on the British Virgin Islands, despite prosecutors saying there was “no indication” Alameda stopped logging in from the US.
BitMEX maintained that Alameda supplied BVI incorporation documents and later provided evidence that its authorised traders lived outside the US. At sentencing, the Judge accepted a government calculation that counted Alameda’s deposits as coming from US customers, rejecting BitMEX’s broader challenge to the way US customers had been identified.
Prosecutors said the episode showed BitMEX knew US crypto traders could easily circumvent its restrictions.
When BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same breach of the Bank Secrecy Act in 2024, US attorney Damian Williams said the absence of meaningful anti-money laundering controls had opened the exchange up as a “vehicle for large-scale money laundering and sanctions evasion schemes”.
BitMEX’s issues with regulation were not confined to its dealings with its customers. As a crypto company, it had a banking problem.
So in 2015, the prosecution alleged, it acquired a Hong Kong company called Shine Effort before quickly transferring it to Delo for $1. Although Delo owned the company on paper, they said, he was holding it on behalf of the true owner, BitMEX.
Assisted by Hayes, Delo opened an HSBC account in Shine Effort’s name. Prosecutors alleged that he and Hayes presented Shine as an independent IT company.
Documents filed by the US attorney against BitMEX
Sentencing papers filed by prosecutors even allege that he, Hayes and another executive doctored internal BitMEX documents to present to the bank. More than $100m subsequently passed through the account.
The US Attorney’s Office later described the arrangement in starker terms. It said BitMEX, as part of its “willful evasion” of US anti-money-laundering laws, had lied to a bank so it could “pump millions of dollars through the US financial system”.
BitMEX, through its lawyers, told the court that it denied these allegations and the claims were never tested at trial. Under Delo’s plea agreement, prosecutors agreed not to bring bank- and wire-fraud charges relating to alleged misrepresentations to HSBC. Judge Koeltl said he would not consider the Hong Kong bank conduct at BitMEX’s sentencing as he believed it “too tangential” to the case; he did not rule on whether it happened.
In February 2022, Delo pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by wilfully failing to establish the required anti-money-laundering programme at BitMEX.
Delo admitted knowing Americans were trading on BitMEX, knowing this required the exchange to identify its customers and knowing its existing controls were inadequate. When asked by the judge whether he knew at the time that what he was doing was “wrong and illegal”, Delo replied: “Yes, your honour.”
He admitted that he had not acted “quickly enough or effectively enough” to stop US customers illegally using the exchange.
“It was a terrible decision, the consequences of which I have to carry the rest of my life,” he told the court.
His lawyers, however, argued that his principal role at BitMEX was technical and that he was not involved in setting compliance policies. They said he had taken “numerous steps” to deal with problematic customers, including personally restricting hundreds of accounts.
Judge Koeltl accepted that others had “more responsibility over the company’s marketing and compliance functions than Mr Delo”, BitMEX had introduced controls over time and “did screen out a considerable amount of business from United States customers”. But, he added, “given the admittedly willful nature of the violation, the crime remains a serious one”.
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Delo told the court that his guilty plea represented a “fair resolution” of the case. He was not convicted of money laundering, fraud or breaching sanctions, and was sentenced to 30 months’ probation and fined $10m.
His financial connection to BitMEX, however, did not end when he stepped down in 2020 after being charged. A 2024 court filing by BitMEX in 2024 said that he and his two co-founders still collectively owned 91% of its parent company, HDR Global Trading.
The following year, a federal judge fined HDR $100m after it pleaded guilty to the same Bank Secrecy Act offence. The money was due on 28 March 2025. On 27 March, Donald Trump pardoned the company and its founders, writing off the fine.
BitMEX settled with the CFTC and FinCEN in 2021 on a “neither admit nor deny” basis, while Delo and the other founders separately settled the CFTC case against them in 2022, each agreeing to pay $10m.
Delo neither admitted nor denied the CFTC’s allegations, except those admitted to in his guilty plea, and his $10m CFTC payment was counted as his $10m criminal fine.
What Delo has called a “blip” was also a period in which his business generated more than $1bn in revenue and paid him, according to prosecutors, more than $100m in dividends.
His fortune is now being used to boost the bank balance – and the election hopes – of Reform.
Delo’s record donation comes as parliament considers some of the biggest changes to political funding rules in years, including a £100,000 annual cap on donations from overseas voters and a ban on cryptoasset donations.
Steve Goodrich, head of research and investigations at Transparency International UK, said political parties relying on funding from a handful of individuals presents a “major corruption risk”.
“No politician or party should leave themselves so dependent on so few sources of funds, especially when one of them has been convicted for serious anti-money laundering failings,” he said, adding that a wider cap would reduce the risks surrounding the source of these donations and “what might be expected in return”.
Picton from Spotlight on Corruption said: “The current rules governing political donations are clearly not fit for purpose. The government must ensure that its new know your donor regime is tightened up to more closely mirror the customer due diligence checks as laid out by anti-money laundering regulations.”
What next?
- The Representation of the People Bill, currently making its way through Parliament, would introduce new checks on outsized political donations and a cap on donations from overseas voters
- We will continue to report on the crypto money flowing into British politics, contact us at info@thebureauinvestigates.com with your tips
Reporters: Nathaniel Peutherer and Lawrence Marzouk
Enablers editor: Lawrence Marzouk
Production editor: Alex Hess
Deputy editor: Chrissie Giles
Editor: Franz Wild
The Bureau has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.
Article by Nathaniel Peutherer , Lawrence Marzouk republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Reform UK 2025 Ltd’s Nigel Farage says it’s probably best to forget to mention that their sposor made his mega-fortune facilitating serioius crime by providing global money-laundering services.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
22 September 2026
Busting the myths: five lies you’ve been told about net zero
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Article by Grace Murray republished from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Is net zero pushing up our bills? Ruining British industry? A worthless target? We weighed these claims up against the facts
“This is what climate change looks like, here and now,” Andy Burnham said last month, reflecting on a summer of catastrophic fires, drought and heatwave after heatwave. People were left without water, crops failed and emergency services had their busiest summer ever.
And yet with disaster on our doorsteps – and the government now recommending we stockpile in preparation for future extreme weather – there remains a sustained opposition to the UK’s plan to tackle it all: net zero.
In fact, many have doubled down on “ditching net zero” this summer. And in some fringes this is accompanied by claims that our changing climate has nothing to do with human activity. Let’s be clear: this goes against the overwhelming majority of scientists and scientific study.
We’ve already reported on how this sort of straight-up climate denial is creeping back into UK politics. But what about the softer arguments against net zero, those that appeal to people’s anxieties about the cost of living, job losses and the supposed need for pragmatism?
Many of these are also based on fallacies and falsehoods – some of them warping the scientific concept of net zero into something different altogether. Let’s dig into some of the most common myths out there.
‘Net zero is a made-up term’
The UK became one of the first major economies to bring net zero into national law in 2019, under Theresa May’s Conservative government. In a nutshell it means reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 100%, from 1990 levels, by 2050. The “net” part is that some emissions may still exist but are balanced out by removing emissions through carbon sinks, such as tree planting, or technology.
It’s a legal commitment enshrined in an amendment to the 2008 Climate Change Act, and it is based on rigorous climate science.
And yet one of the more common narratives online is that net zero is some arbitrary idea, a figure plucked out of thin air to make us poorer, colder, and plunder our economy. Reform MPs regularly refer to “net stupid zero” and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has called it “political fiction”. Conservative MP Andrew Bowie, who acted as May’s parliamentary private secretary when the target was brought in said in an interview with Politico last year: “What’s quite clear is that the setting of arbitrary targets with no clear plan on how to deliver them does not work for the country.”
Professor Myles Allen from Oxford University is one of the leading scientists on net zero, and has worked on the need for a finite carbon budget for over 20 years. “When I hear politicians saying, ‘I’m not a climate denier, I’m a net zero denier’, that doesn’t make any sense,” he told us. “The implication of that, obviously, is, ‘I’m comfortable with the world warming forever.’”
Key fact: Net zero by 2050 is a legal commitment, rooted in physics and atmospheric science, based on a finite carbon budget to stay within 2 degrees of warming.
‘Net zero is sending our energy bills through the roof’
Energy bills are extremely high, and set to rise further next month when the price cap increases. We are all feeling this. And many – including Reform in its election manifesto and Restore Britain’s energy policy paper – blame net zero for pushing up prices and “crippling our economy”.
But the main culprit has nothing to do with net zero.
Wholesale gas prices – the sums paid by our suppliers when they buy gas in bulk – have skyrocketed since the Iran war. In the last year, they have more than doubled. And our bills, which include a unit cost based on that wholesale price, have risen accordingly. Depending on where you live and the tariff you’re on, you’ll be paying around 7p per kilowatt-hour this September.
But what about electricity – surely that’s unaffected by price shocks in the gas industry?
This is where a concept called “marginal pricing” comes in. It’s a principle of all commodity markets, and it’s where the last available technology sets the price for what all energy suppliers receive. So if all of the UK’s energy demand is met by renewables suppliers (the cheapest option), it’s renewables setting the price. But if renewables aren’t being offered on the markets, or if demand is high, then it’s more expensive options – like gas – that set the wholesale electricity price. (Analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit earlier this year found that wind power had reduced electricity prices by over 30%.)
The last part of the bill is the standing charge. This covers network operating costs, the maintenance of infrastructure, debt recovery and VAT. It also includes costs for some government policies such as social or environmental schemes – but this is a small percentage. So yes, our standing charges are helping pay for net zero. But they are mainly going towards upgrading pipelines and cables or claiming back unpaid bills. And they tend to make up between a fifth and a third of the total bill.
Adam Berman, policy director at Energy UK, the trade body for energy companies, explains that network costs have hugely increased because “successive governments have made the decision to finance our electricity infrastructure entirely through bills”. This is instead of “some balance between bills and general taxation which is what almost everyone else across the OECD does”. And it is this difference which makes our electricity bills more expensive than gas when you compare your two bills side by side.
However, he said: “If we hadn’t invested, in five or 10 years we would be close to the water sector, in that you’d have to be doing massive levels of investment”.
Key fact: Sky-rocketing energy bills are due to extremely high gas prices, which make both gas and electricity more expensive.
‘Net zero is destroying British industry’
Jobs are being lost in the UK’s oil and gas sector in the North Sea, and industries like steel have taken a hammering in recent decades. Reform and the Conservatives have put this down to net zero.
While it is true that the oil and gas industry reports staggering job losses – unions say 1,000 direct and indirect jobs are being lost each month – the reasons are complex. For a start, production in the North Sea has largely been in decline since 1999. Many of the wells and basins are reaching maturity, meaning that the fossil fuels are harder and more costly to extract. And as production has waned, so have jobs. (In fact, new research has shown that even in the small windows when production increased, jobs still declined.)
Losing your job can be a traumatic experience. But there is cause for hope: a recent government analysis found that oil and gas workers’ skills will be in high demand in critical sectors including clean power, construction, defence, advanced manufacturing and life sciences. It found that around 70% of oil and gas workers are already employed in occupations identified as a priority for these sectors. (For more on North Sea oil myths see Carbon Brief’s excellent analysis.)
On the other side, jobs in the UK’s renewable energy sector are growing – and have topped 145,000 for the first time according to a recent report.
Key fact: Oil and gas production in the North Sea has been in decline long before Net Zero, and jobs are declining too. However, renewables jobs are growing, and oil and gas skills are highly sought after in other industries.
‘The UK achieving net zero would make no difference anyway’
The UK’s carbon emissions have been in overall decline for decades and now account for less than 1% of the global total.
There are many variations on this myth: from “How will it make any difference?” to “Why should we make an effort when we aren’t as bad as other countries?” Rishi Sunak said it when he was prime minister in 2023. And Reform MP Lee Anderson last year asked in Parliament: “If the UK went net zero tomorrow, by how much would it reduce the Earth’s temperature by?”
Less than 1% does sound very low. However, we are also the 22nd highest emitter in the world; there are over 160 other countries with lower emissions than us.
And if you add together all the countries accounting for less than 2% of emissions, it comes to just under half the global total. If all of them took the “Why bother?” approach, it would write off our chances of a net zero world.
It’s also important to note that while China, the US and India make up the top three (with 26%, 11% and 8% respectively) this doesn’t tell the full story when it comes to emissions per person. China is the 35th highest country for emissions per capita, way behind the US and all the petrostates. The UK is 83rd, putting us roughly in the middle.
Nor does the 1% figure take into account historic emissions. England was among the first countries to industrialise. Our emissions have risen since the mid-1800s, while other countries’ did not until closer to the end of the century. When you look at historic cumulative emissions from 1750, the UK is the fifth worst offender.
A final caveat: when looking at global emissions the aviation and shipping industries are not included. They are grouped together like a separate country and according to 2024 data count for just over 3% of global emissions. So flights taken by British people don’t count towards the UK’s reported emissions. And British people take a relatively high number of flights.
If anything, the 1% figure is obscuring the fact that the UK is in fact an outsized contributor to global emissions. A net zero UK would make a huge difference to the world.
(None of this is to mention the simple argument that we have a moral duty to clean up after ourselves, regardless of the size of the mess – as summarised by this caller to LBC).
Key fact: The UK is a lower emitting country at less than 1% of global emissions. However there are over 160 low emitting countries and if everyone gave up on net zero that’s around 42% of global emissions.
‘Climate change is happening. Let’s just accept it’
Climate change is certainly happening. Forecasters warn of a “super” El Niño into 2027, with droughts, flash floods and extreme heat likely to get worse.
And yet some instruct us to simply look on the bright side and adapt to the changing world. “When it’s a bit warm, let’s enjoy it,” said Reform’s Richard Tice last month. “And if it means that English wine and sparkling wine gets better and better, fantastic.” A fortnight earlier, Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Heath had written a column titled: “Britain can’t stop climate change. Let’s just embrace a Mediterranean lifestyle.”
Pallavi Sethi, a researcher into climate misinformation at the LSE’s Grantham Institute, described the suggestion that we should simply accept climate change and scrap net zero as “dangerous and misleading”.
Reform’s Richard Tice told a press conference that there is ‘no evidence’ net zero would stop climate changeOli Scarff / AFP via Getty
At Jordan Peterson’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, and most recently Reform’s party conference in Birmingham, participants have raised the need to adopt more air conditioning, like the US.
It is true that we need more money to be spent on adaptation. The Climate Change Committee estimates that we need investments of around £11bn per year of both public and private investment to adapt homes, hospitals, infrastructure and many industries for a changing climate. A recent report states that “the UK was built for a climate that no longer exists today”.
Sethi told us: “Accepting that climate change is happening while giving up on efforts to limit further warming means accepting greater risks, more damage, as well as higher costs in the years ahead.”
However this is not an “either/or” scenario, and increasing temperatures lay bare the increased inequality in the UK. Some people can afford to adapt where they live, installing air con or heat pumps, or planting trees in their garden. Others cannot: they do not have the money, or the agency over Council property or a landlord’s private home. Enjoying England’s vineyards is not for the many.
Key fact: The fact that the climate crisis is already here doesn’t mean we can’t still mitigate it.
Reporter: Grace Murray
Deputy Editor: Chrissie Giles
Editor: Franz Wild
Production Editor: Alex Hess
Fact checker: Lydia Morrish
The Bureau has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.
Article by Grace Murray republished from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Donald Trump urges you to ignore facts and reality and 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.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham says that he’s going to permit the Jackdaw and Rosebank North Sea fossil fuel projects. He urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. The proof is in the pudding.
17 September 2026
Andy Burnham: UK must fully commit to reaching net zero by 2050
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/17/andy-burnham-uk-must-fully-commit-to-reaching-net-zero-by-2050
Burnham: ‘I want Britain to believe in itself again.’ Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
[Guardian] Exclusive: PM, who is facing pressure over whether to approve North Sea oil and gasfields, makes strongest comments yet on issue
The UK must fully commit to reaching net zero by 2050, Andy Burnham has argued in his strongest comments yet on the issue, saying it is no longer possible for Britons to believe they are not already affected by a changing climate.
Writing for the Guardian about new plans for a mass of community-led local green energy projects, the prime minister said the UK must “believe in itself”, and set out his determination to reach net zero targets, which have been rejected by the Conservatives and Reform UK.
The tone marks a contrast to the summer, when Burnham faced criticism for a seemingly muted response to the heatwaves, droughts and wildfires that affected the UK, with his main initiative being a ban on portable barbecues.
“I am determined that we meet the commitment on which Labour was elected and reach net zero by 2050,” Burnham said. “I want Britain to believe in itself again.”
Saying he wanted to connect local communities to green power projects – to reach net zero targets and make energy more affordable – Burnham said: “I am acutely aware that our changing climate is a major concern for many Britons, not least because we have just emerged from our hottest summer on record.”
…
Article continues at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/17/andy-burnham-uk-must-fully-commit-to-reaching-net-zero-by-2050
Comment by dizzy: While this is very encouraging, it is unexpected and suggests a real change in direction. Burnham’s article seems far more restrained than the Guardian’s review leads us to believe, funding of £30m is nothing and it seems devolved rather than owned by his government. There’s a saying in UK and possibly elsewhere: The proof is in the pudding. It can be interpreted to mean wait and see what comes later.
[18/9/26 I think that this is probably BS. We’ve seen Burnham & Co do it before with this
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.
where an announcement is made, it’s a delaying tactic and what happens months later falls hugely short of what we were led to believe.
Specifically, it may well be BS to mislead and misdirect for the forthcoming Holborn and St. Pancras by-election where the Green Party’s Zack Polanski is a candidate, to give the impression that he cares about the climate and may not wave through Jackdaw and Rosebank, only then to wave through Jackdaw and Rosebank. Burnham’s statement is big on talk, commitments even but the actuality is minimal.]
Andy Burnham: British people understand the climate crisis threat. Today I’m empowering them to tackle it
Donald Trump urges you to ignore facts and reality and 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.
17 September 2026
School Students Missed 15 Million Teaching Hours Due to June Heatwave
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Article by Clare Carlile and Brigitte Wear republished from DeSmog.
A photo of an empty classroom. Credit: Unsplash (CC0)
Thousands of schools closed their doors, and a third of all pupils were recorded absent in Wales as temperatures hit 37°C.
School pupils in England and Wales lost more than 15 million teaching hours during June’s heatwave, which caused a spike in absences and forced many schools to close their doors or reduce hours over safety concerns.
According to DeSmog’s analysis, at least 760,000 students in the two countries missed lesson time due to school closures. Temperatures broke previous records and parts of the UK reached over 37°C between 23 and 26 June.
Where schools remained open, absences spiked, with absence rates reaching 36.5 percent in Wales on 25 June, the hottest day ever recorded in the country during the month of June.
The heatwave – one of five to batter the UK this summer – lasted for eight days and triggered a red health alert across many parts of the UK, with hospitals forced to cancel operations, workplaces shortening hours, and people warned not to travel. There were nearly 2,900 excess deaths caused by the May and June heatwaves.
The government recommends schools close only as a last resort, when conditions are unsafe. At least 1,730 schools shut their doors or closed early, far more than previously thought, DeSmog’s new analysis showed.
In an email to parents announcing closures, one Oxford school stated: “It reached 30 degrees at 11:30 in some classrooms without children in them”. Other schools reported classroom temperatures over 40°C.
Many other parents opted to remove their children from schools over safety concerns. One parent told DeSmog that she took her five-year-old child out of school after pupils returned home with severe heat rashes.
Where schools remained open, nearly 12 percent of students were absent in England, almost 50 percent higher than the same period in the previous year.
A version of this article was published by The Guardian.
In May, the Climate Change Committee, an independent government advisory body, warned that students would lose an estimated 14 days of learning to extreme heat every year without action to avoid 4°C global warming by the end of the century.
School children in southern England could experience “severe cognitive performance loss for over 80 percent of the spring and summer months,” it said.
Experts told DeSmog that missed school days could come at high costs for school students – from lower exam results to poorer mental health.
Nicola Gray from the University of Huddersfield, who led research into the impact of closures during the Covid-19 pandemic, told DeSmog: “School provides basic social services, social connection, and nutrition [through free school meals]. It provides the qualifications needed for decent housing, a decent job. So much is rooted in the school system.
“We do not want the education and training of our students to dip precisely at the time when they’re gonna need new skills and the best possible futures in a changing climate.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Education (DfE) told DeSmog: “Hot weather can be a struggle, but schools did a fantastic job keeping children learning safely during this summer’s heatwave. Schools put measures in place, so they remained the best place for children to be, even during a heatwave – because every day in school counts.”
The DfE said that it was “investing to make schools more resilient to a changing climate – including through a £710 million Renewal and Retrofit Programme and almost £20 billion to rebuild over 750 schools.”
Spiking Absence Rates
This summer was the UK’s hottest on record, according to provisional data by the Met Office. Extreme heat across Europe and many other parts of the world caused deaths, wildfires, and widespread disruption.
DeSmog collected information on more than 1,700 affected schools based on dozens of national and local news reports, and analysed it using census data to calculate the total number of students impacted by closures.
Neither the government nor local councils currently publish official data on school closures due to extreme weather events. UK councils told DeSmog that schools made individual decisions based on their safeguarding plans.
DeSmog also analysed government data on pupil absences during the heatwave at schools that remained open, which showed a major spike in students missing school time in both England and Wales.
While closures led to over 5.9 million lost learning hours, pupils missed an estimated 9.5 million additional hours due to heat-related absence.
On the hottest day (25 June) in Wales, absence rates were four times the year’s average – and the highest recorded during the year so far – with over a third of all pupils out of school.
Total figures are likely to be a conservative estimate, due to the lack of official data on closures and given government data on absences only covers pupils at state-funded schools up to the age of 15.
Georgia Price*, a mother of two in Sussex, told DeSmog that she decided to keep her son at home rather than sending him to school.
“He spent Tuesday with 30 five-year-olds in one class, with no fan and no ventilation. On Tuesday night, parents on the WhatsApp group were saying that their kids came home with horrendous heat rashes that were remaining overnight,” she said. “He’s not going to be able to learn in an environment like that.”
Deprivation
Closures affected at least 465,000 families, with many more impacted by absences.
Nicola Gray told DeSmog that those on lower incomes would likely be the hardest hit.
“Do students have the internet connection needed for remote learning? Do they have devices? Do they have a private space to work? With the best will in the world, some people may face difficult situations for learning.”
Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Bristol were among the counties worst affected, with 65,000, 48,000, and 46,000 pupils impacted respectively.
Among schools that remained open in England, the highest rate of student absence was seen in the South East, South West, and West Midlands. All three regions saw absence rates reach above 13 percent (double the yearly average).
“School closures can put students in the most deprived areas at a disadvantage,” said Charlotte O’Regan, schools engagement lead at the Sutton Trust, a charity focused on social mobility. “While some schools or parent organisations are able to pay to ensure that their environments are suitable for study, we know that state school leaders are already having to face difficult decisions when it comes to funding.
“We saw a significant widening of the attainment gap during the pandemic, and we have to make sure that the weather doesn’t become yet another barrier holding back those worst off.”
Adaptation
Parents, academics, and campaigners all said that rapid adaptations are needed in schools to keep children safe and able to study in increasing temperatures.
“We should learn from what happened in June,” Georgia Price said. “There are quite simple changes you should make to make it more comfortable. Stagger classes, teach in smaller groups, have portable air-con units.”
Nicola Gray likewise stressed that adaptations were vital for keeping kids in school.
“The best way to have the best life outcomes for our children and young people is for them to be in school. The government could and should have a proactive approach to providing short- and medium-term support,” she said.
Solutions could include changes to school buildings like fitting shutters to keep out the heat, installation of solar panels to power air conditioning and fans, and short-term adaptations like changing school uniform rules and learning in smaller groups, she suggested.
Recent polling commissioned by Global Witness revealed widespread support for such measures. Seventy-five percent of people support the installation of solar-powered air conditioning in schools and hospitals, the polling found.
Unions are also calling for a maximum temperature limit for classrooms such as the one introduced in New York state, which has set a limit of 31°C.
“If you’re not kitted out to make a comfortable environment then you should close,” Price said.
Labour Party chair Bridget Phillipson, who was England’s education secretary during the June heatwave, told Parliament at the time: “We do recognise the need to make sure that as we refurbish and rebuild schools across our country, we make sure that they are well placed to cope with some of the fluctuations in temperature that we’re seeing.”
Phillipson said, however, that in the meantime it was “for school leaders as to how they manage that best”.
*Name changed for anonymity.
Article by Clare Carlile and Brigitte Wear republished from DeSmog.
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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.
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15 September 2026
UK aviation emissions to be 50% higher than thought by 2050, government admits
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Article by Josh Gabbatiss republished from Carbon Brief under a CC license.
Aerial view of Heathrow airport, London. Credit: Lightworks Media / Alamy Stock Photo
The UK government has slashed its hopes for electric planes and “sustainable aviation fuels” (SAFs), ahead of giving the green light to a third runway at Heathrow.
An “ambitious” rollout of new technologies and efficiency upgrades will only cut flight emissions by a quarter over the next two decades, according to forecasts quietly released in June.
This would leave aviation emissions in 2050 nearly 50% higher than expected under the “jet-zero” strategy, launched by the previous Conservative government in 2022.
The Labour government has signalled its support for a contentious third runway at Heathrow airport, with a final planning decision expected by 2029.
Ministers have justified this expansion by citing the rollout of clean-aviation technologies.
Yet, the updated forecasts suggest that rising flight numbers and a reduced role for “techno-fixes” will leave aviation emissions stubbornly high in 2050 – the UK’s legal target for net-zero.
If this is to be compatible with UK climate goals, then these higher emissions from flights in 2050 would need to be taken out of the atmosphere using costly and largely unproven “carbon dioxide removal” technologies – or by planting gigantic new forests.
Emissions up
The previous government’s “jet-zero” strategy committed the UK to a “high ambition” pathway that would have seen aviation emissions peak at 38.2m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2019 and drop to 19.3MtCO2e in 2050.
At the time, the Conservative government said this “clear goal” was achievable, alongside airport expansion and rising flight numbers.
Its strategy relied heavily on the extensive use of early-stage technologies, such as SAFs and battery-powered planes, as well as wider fuel-efficiency improvements.
In public statements, Labour has broadly continued this approach, backing new airport runways while supporting SAFs as a way to curb aviation emissions.
However, the government’s latest forecast, quietly published ahead of the formal approval of a new runway at Heathrow, sets far lower expectations for these technologies.
Its “technology development” pathway, with “ambitious carbon abatement measures”, only sees emissions drop to 28.1MtCO2e in 2050. As the chart below shows, this is around 9MtCO2e higher than the jet-zero strategy’s stated goal – a roughly 50% increase.
The shift is down to much lower expectations for SAF uptake, fuel-efficiency improvements and the roll-out of battery-powered planes, as well as lower international carbon prices.
The government now expects SAFs to make up 30% of aviation fuel by 2050, rather than 50%. It also concedes that SAFs will save less carbon over their lifecycle than previously thought.
SAFs have faced considerable criticism, due to limited supplies and uncertainty around the extent to which they cut emissions. Even meeting the UK’s relatively modest goal of 22% SAF uptake by 2040 would require enormous – potentially unattainable – volumes of waste products, which are currently the main source of the fuel.
For its new forecasts, the government commissioned a separate analysis of likely aircraft fuel-efficiency improvements over the next few decades. This analysis, from the Aviation Impact Accelerator, yielded “less optimistic” projections than earlier work.
Fuel-efficiency improvements have therefore been revised downward from 2% per year in the “jet-zero” strategy to 1.3% in the new “technology development” scenario.
There is also a reduced role for battery-powered planes, with only some of the smallest zero-emissions aircraft expected to be in use by 2035.
Crucially, even making the more limited emissions cuts in the new “technology development” pathway would require greater efforts to decarbonise the aviation sector.
If the UK fails to implement new policies or innovations, while flight numbers continue to rise, then aviation emissions would be even higher in 2050 than they are today.
This is illustrated by the pink “current trends” pathway in the chart above, in which emissions increase to 41.1MtCO2e by 2050.
This is roughly double the amount targeted by the jet-zero strategy and recommended by government climate advisors, the Climate Change Committee (CCC).
Budget ‘busting’
The new forecasts all account for the growth of several UK airports, including “planned Heathrow expansion”. Overall, passenger numbers would be at least 50% higher by 2050.
In contrast, the CCC and other experts have advised that the rise in passenger numbers may need to be limited, in order to keep emissions down.
In order to meet the UK’s net-zero target, any aviation emissions that remain in 2050 would need to be offset by planting many thousands of hectares of new forest, or by relying on costly and largely unproven CO2 removal technologies.
Tim Johnson, director at the Aviation Environment Federation (AEF), says the new forecasts present “a more honest and realistic vision of what’s possible in the next 24 years”. However, he tells Carbon Brief:
“Less reliance on cleaner technology and fuels reopens the debate about the role and scale of greenhouse gas removals and ways to tackle the projected 50% growth in demand for air travel.”
AEF calculations, based on government data and shared with Carbon Brief, suggest that emissions from the third runway at Heathrow would initially be relatively modest, reaching 3.5MtCO2e per year in 2050. Its emissions would then be expected to rise significantly beyond the legal 2050 net-zero deadline.
Previously, the Labour government has explicitly cited SAFs and other new technologies as part of its justification for expanding Heathrow airport.
Dr Lois Pennington, a research associate at the University of Manchester who has analysed Heathrow’s emissions impact, says the government’s new forecast shows “we are projected to be well over aviation’s share of the carbon budget even before a third runway is considered”.
She tells Carbon Brief:
“For Heathrow, it means expansion can no longer be waved through on the promise of technology, and any approvals will be in the full knowledge that it will bust our legally binding carbon budgets.”
Article by Josh Gabbatiss republished from Carbon Brief under a CC license.
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.
Donald Trump urges you to ignore facts and reality and 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.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
15 September 2026