The 2026 local election in the Merseyside borough of Sefton saw a left-wing surge against Labour. And the positive relationship between community independents and the Green Party made a meaningful difference, with both increasing their voice on the council as a result.

Community independents went from one councillor to five, and the Greens from one to three. And the Canary spoke to Lydiate and Maghull Community Independents to hear more about how they became the third biggest political grouping on Sefton Council.

Common-sense relationships on the left can make a big difference

There are places in the UK where local independents are more likely to win than the Greens, and vice versa. But in some places, vote splitting between them has allowed Labour to keep a hold.

Sefton, however, largely bucked that trend. Because while some polls predicted Reform would make big advances in Sefton, it didn’t. And one reason for that was coordination between left-wing independents and Greens.

New Lydiate and Maghull Community Independents councillor Joanne McCall described how the local Greens “stepped aside for us”. She said she has “a lot of respect” for Neil Doolin, previously Sefton’s lone Green councillor and now its group leader on the council. And she explained that, following conversations between the parties:

They stepped aside for community independents in three wards, which was ours [Maghull East], Lydiate and Maghull West, and Aintree and Maghull South.

Both McCall and current group leader David Leatherbarrow won in Maghull East. In a close race, Labour won the other seat.

In Lydiate and Maghull West, meanwhile, all three independents won fairly comfortably.

The three candidates for Aintree and Maghull South Community Independents didn’t win, but were serious challengers to second-place Reform.

McCall said she felt “eternally grateful” for the Green decision to step aside, as it avoided any potential vote splitting between Lydiate and Maghull Community Independents and the Greens. This decision, she suggested, was a sensible acknowledgement that:

the two-party system, I think, is well and truly out the window now

She added:

I’m truly pleased that they recognised our potential

Leatherbarrow agreed, telling us:

For them to step aside was unbelievable – to see that they did run in every single area, and then when there was a community-independent group they stepped aside. It just showed that it was more important for grassroots activists to get into power, rather than to allow Reform to get in or to stick with the same old from Labour.

With trust in Labour collapsing, accountable community power is a real alternative

McCall described how politics has changed locally in recent years, saying:

I’ve been involved for the last three years with the Lydiate and Maghull Community Independents, and this is the third election that I’ve run in… There has been a real shift in the support for independents, and I think that there’s a few factors that contribute to that. The first one would be loss of faith in Labour nationally… Also, obviously, the surge of Reform… You’ve got that portion of the community who absolutely does not want Reform to get in, because they don’t agree with their policies.

But also the fact that we’ve worked for the last three years, locally. Everybody knows us because we’re visible. We’re invested in the community, so we do a lot of volunteering work. We’ve done a lot of initiatives to bring things to the area.

Leatherbarrow, meanwhile, captured the essence of the community independent message, explaining how local interactions work. He said:

We’ve tried to bring the residents with us – to say ‘right, we live here. This is what we think. What do you think?’

We put on a few community meetings… We just asked people, ‘what do you think, and how would you solve the problem?’ And the community came up with the solutions. It wasn’t us. It was the community that came up with the solutions. It’s then our job to go away and solve the problems.

McCall summed the message up as:

Local people know what local people want.

And these people have “had enough” of representatives of mainstream parties either ignoring them or just disappearing when they win:

It just seems to be a recurring pattern right across the country that candidates go into these elections and then literally just disappear once they’ve got in. We will never do that. We’re active and visible in the community.

It’s important that people can see what you’re doing.

People have actually realised that they prefer a local person to represent them rather than the line of a national party.

The pledges that seemed to resonate most with people locally were:

Visibility, transparency, protecting our green spaces, and accountability.

Leatherbarrow also mentioned the key issue of unfair planning, asserting that:

Overdevelopment in the area has outpaced the infrastructure. So the infrastructure’s been the same for about 30-40 years, but the number of houses being built is just exponential.

Not just in Sefton — We need to see more of this nationally

In the Waterloo ward of Sefton, meanwhile, the Green Party had a comfortable clean sweep (at least 500 votes ahead of Labour). That’s where their first councillor, Doolin, had won previously. And they built on his record there. Upon winning, the new Green group promised to be “community-led”, with Doolin insisting:

We’re determined to be visible, hardworking councillors who listen to residents

No community independents challenged the Greens in Waterloo.

Overall, Sefton’s local election offered some hope. It showed that, where community independents, Greens, and other left-wingers can get along and coordinate, they can organise more efficiently to defeat national right-wing parties like Labour and Reform. And they can make real advances.

We need to see a lot more of this across the whole country.

Featured image viaTheGuideLiverpool

By Ed Sykes

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Midterm primary elections rarely receive much attention. But in a year when control of the congress hangs in the balance, California’s primaries have raised a lot of eyebrows. As one of the few states with open run-off primaries — where only the top two winners, regardless of party, are allowed to advance to the general election — its elections have become a barometer for national politics.

And if Tuesday’s results are any indication of the sentiment of the rest of the electorate, the Democrats could be in trouble come November.

Though the party establishment seems to have fended off several challenges from both the Right and the Left, including a progressive challenge for Nancy Pelosi’s house seat in District 11, the results reveal that when given a choice, many voters are opting for candidates to the Left of the Democrats. In Los Angeles, in particular, progressive challengers performed well and candidates associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won several elections and will advance in many others.

The Establishment Underdog and the Billionaire Progressive

The most closely watched race in Tuesday’s primaries was by far the shambolic election for governor, in which so-called “progressive” billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer spent more than $130 million to challenge the establishment Democrat and former United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra.

From the very beginning, the race to replace California Governor Gavin Newsom was a disaster for the Democrats. After the clear Democratic Party frontrunner Eric Swalwell was forced to drop out due to sexual assault allegations, the party had to scramble to find a replacement, even as several other challengers stepped in to fill the gap. While Steyer was talking about Medicare for All and abolishing ICE, establishment democrats seized on Becerra as a safer bet. This seems to have paid off on election day —currently Becerra has 25 percent of the vote compared to Steyer’s 20 percent — but Steyer remains a very close third, and there are still a lot of ballots left to count.

It is likely that Becerra will advance to challenge the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Steve Hilton, who is currently leading with 27 percent of the vote, but the results are hardly a ringing endorsement for establishment politics. In fact, this is the only time a Republican candidate has finished first in the primary for governor since California adopted open primaries in 2012.

While Steyer is certainly no friend of the working class, his stated policy positions were nonetheless far to the left of Becerra and the vast majority of the Democratic Party. So much so, in fact, that the California DSA wrote favorably about his candidacy in their voter guide, calling him “the most progressive of the current viable candidates” — a rather passive non-endorsement, which many on the Left saw as a betrayal of socialist values. In the end, more than a million people voted for the candidate who called ICE a “violent extremist group” and promised to significantly raise taxes on billionaires and corporations. Clearly there is an appetite for those ideas among huge portions of the population, even if they were put forward by a billionaire trying to buy his way into the governor’s mansion.

All of this points to an acceleration of the crisis facing the Democratic Party, which is as unpopular as ever and struggling to win back sectors of its traditional working-class base or to find a way to channel working-class anger against Trump into the party. To see the difference a few years makes, one need only look at the results of the 2022 California gubernatorial primaries, during the middle of Biden’s presidency, where former governor Gavin Newsom easily finished first with almost 40 percent more of the total vote than his closest competitor, who finished with less than 18 percent.

DSA Does Well in LA

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass, who has earned strong criticism from the Left for increasing the LAPD budget and the police crackdown on anti-ICE protesters last year, faced a strong challenge from progressive City Council member Nithya Raman. A late addition to the race, Raman, who is a DSA member, failed to win the official endorsement of her own organization largely due to internal divisions about process. Once again, as with the DSA’s non-endorsement of Steyer, this resulted in a kind of passive support for Bass.

Nonetheless, despite receiving no assistance from the DSA, the city council member performed surprisingly well, taking a large portion of the vote against the incumbent mayor, who is now facing the first run-off election for LA Mayor since 2005. Currently Raman is in third place behind the Republican candidate and reality TV star Spencer Pratt by about five percentage points. However, like the governor’s race, there are still a lot of ballots left, and Raman seems to be outperforming Pratt in late vote counts. Though a long shot, some are speculating that she could still win.

Though Raman ran on a platform that was only slightly to the left of Bass, her strong performance, considering she entered the race so late, shows the discontent with the mayor and is yet another example of the general desire for alternatives to the Democratic Party establishment.

This rising distrust of the Democrats was also on full display in the Los Angeles city elections, where several DSA candidates placed first and others did well enough to advance to the general election against more establishment Democrats. DSA incumbents Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martínez both won their districts by more than 50 percent. Votes are still coming in, but it is likely that both will retain their seats and neither will have to face a challenge in November. DSA members also qualified for the general election for Attorney General and City Council district 9.

While establishment Democrats managed to eke out several wins leading into November, the results show clearly that discontent with the party remains high and that there is a strong desire for alternatives. The poor performance of Democratic Party candidates shows that the party’s toxic brand may be a problem in the midterms, despite widespread hatred of Trump and the Republicans.

Meanwhile, the DSA’s success in the Los Angeles City Council elections and Ramen’s strong showing in the Mayoral race, are evidence of the growing interest in socialist politics as an alternative.

Of course working class power cannot rely on elections alone; but all of this indicates that there is room for a mass working class party for socialism that is entirely independent of the Democrats. The sooner we build that party the better.

The post California Primaries: Cracks in the Democratic Coalition and Promising Results for Socialists appeared first on Left Voice.

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The fire, which started Thursday in Ambler’s landfill, had burned around 500 acres by Friday.

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Regulators also decided to close the harvest for non-local hunters.

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THE 2026 HAMILTON ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR thecollective Fri, 06/05/2026 - 16:06

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“I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream, I see an American nightmare.” These words spoken by comrade Malcolm X 63 years ago sum up the entire history of what is now known as the United States. From the moment the first colonizers . . .

Continue reading For 250 years: U.S. racism has never ended:  WW commentary at Workers.org

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Anarchism: A Social Movement and Way of Life thecollective Fri, 06/05/2026 - 15:53

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Hamas vehemently condemns Israeli forces' murder of a seven-month-old Palestinian infant in the occupied West Bank.

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The US National Security Agency (NSA) is allegedly using Anthropic software to wage cyberwar against Iran and China. The AI war firm is currently locked in a legal battle with the Trump administration to stop certain military uses. Anthropic bosses previously complained when their tech was used in the 3 January Venezuela raid.

The NSA is the US equivalent of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Its remit includes surveillance and cyberwarfare.

The Financial Times (FT) reported on 4 June:

Anthropic is helping the US National Security Agency deploy its powerful Mythos AI model for offensive cyber operations, embedding engineers inside the agency despite an ongoing legal battle with the Pentagon.

Adding:

The San Francisco-based company had installed about half a dozen staff within the NSA as so-called forward-deployed engineers to guide the use of the technology and customise models for specific applications, two people familiar with the arrangement said.

But the embedding suggests that Anthropic is contravening its own rules. As the Canary reported in February 2026:

Anthropic has strict rules on military usage… usage guidelines prohibit Claude [an Anthropic software] from being used to facilitate violence, develop weapons or conduct surveillance.

Mythos is Anthropic’s most advanced AI system. The firm has said:

Mythos is too dangerous to release publicly.

The FT said:

It remains unclear whether Anthropic’s engineers are assisting the NSA in active operations. However, one person close to the situation said Mythos would be useful for infiltrating the networks of nations such as China or Iran.

A source close to the firm said:

The best way to build a good defence is to build a good attack.

If [Mythos] is not used to build attack agents, adversaries will find a way to do it.

Anthropic’s row with Trump and Hegseth

The row between Anthropic and the Trump administration has been so intense that defence secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to take over the technology by diktat. He even pledged to designate the firm as a ‘supply chain risk’ in February 2026 if bosses did not comply with a demand to:

give the military unfettered access to its Claude AI model by Friday evening or else have the government label it a “risk” to the supply chain.

The designation is:

typically reserved for foreign firms with ties to U.S. adversaries, could ban companies that work with the government from partnering with Anthropic.

Anthropic responded:

No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.

Beijing is clearly a target for US AI operations. The FT said that in February 2026:

the Pentagon was seeking to create AI-powered cyber tools to identify infrastructure targets in China as part of an effort to improve US capabilities in any future military conflict with Beijing.

And on 2 June:

President Donald Trump signed an executive order outlining a voluntary framework in which AI companies can submit their new models for security reviews before they are publicly released.

Anthropic software also meshes with Palantir technology in some US uses. The Canary reported with regard to the January 2026 US attack on Venezuela:

The deployment of Claude occurred through Anthropic’s partnership with data company Palantir Technologies, whose tools are commonly used by the Defense Department and federal law enforcement.

Anthropic’s programs can be used:

for everything from summarizing documents to controlling autonomous drones.

The UK is deeply and dangerously enmeshed with Palantir. The Commons technology committee warned on 3 June that the UK should divest from Palantir, which has taken over swathes of British national infrastructure.

Anthropic (at least rhetorically) subscribes to a form of corporate ethics. Palantir’s vision is openly far-right. That said, there should be no place for AI firms in intelligence, warfare, surveillance or policing — whatever the ideology their CEO claims to follow.

Featured image via Chance Yeh/Getty Images for HubSpot

By Joe Glenton

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Campaign groups have voiced shock and outrage at the “biggest rollback of disability rights in a generation” following a Supreme Court ruling concerning individuals who lack the capacity to consent to their living arrangements.

In a joint statement, the charities Mencap, Mind, and the National Autistic Society warned that the regressive ruling could see hundreds of thousands of severely disabled people lose fundamental human rights protections. They added that:

By removing independent checks, advocacy, and automatic access to legal aid, the Court has closed the gateway to justice and support for many who need it most. Stripping away these safeguards makes it easier for abuse and neglect to go unnoticed behind closed doors.

A litany of previous wrongdoings demonstrates how closed cultures, lack of independent oversight and restrictive care can lead to abuse scandals and decisions like this fly in the face of everything we’ve learnt.

Supreme Court — Dismantling Cheshire West

The court’s verdict, delivered on 2 June, dismantles a landmark legal framework known as ‘Cheshire West’. The framework was established by another legal ruling back in 2014. The common understanding of Cheshire West held that:

an individual without such mental capacity is treated as unable to give valid consent to confinement.

As such, community care confinement would only be legal with a court protection order. Alternatively, the state could provide permission under the ‘Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards’ (DoLS) scheme. This necessitated a special “acid test” which, as the Mencap statement explained, meant that:

if someone lacks the mental capacity to consent to their care and living arrangements, is under continuous supervision and control, and is not free to leave, they were legally ‘deprived of their liberty’.

This triggered vital legal safeguards requiring an independent assessor to regularly inspect care homes, supported living arrangements, and locked units to ensure the placement is safe, justified, and in the person’s best interests.

Those vital legal guardrails were known as ‘Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards’ (DoLS). However, Tuesday’s decision “tears up those protections”.

Northern Ireland’s case

The attorney general for Northern Ireland, Tony McGleenan KC, brought the case which triggered the new UK-wide ruling.

Led byMinister of Health Mike Nesbitt, the NI government questioned the definition of “deprivation of liberty” under article 5(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) for adults lacking the capacity to consent to their living situation.

The attorney general submitted arguments claiming both that the original Cheshire West decision was incorrect, and that it created an undue administrative burden. That is to say, the NI government argued, successfully, that ensuring the liberty of the severely disabled cost too much.

The 2014 ruling meant that DoLS referrals rose from 13,700 to 322,455 in the decade leading up to 2024. In turn, this led to a 123,790-case backlog. As the Disability News Service (DNS) reported, this week’s ruling will likely see those referrals fall dramatically. Writing for *DNS,*John Pring added that:

Cheshire West led to the drawing-up of the Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS) system, based on a report by the Law Commission.

The last government had originally planned to bring in LPS in October 2020, but its implementation was repeatedly delayed by Conservative ministers.

Care minister Stephen Kinnock announced last October that there would be a new consultation on the new LPS system “in the first half of next year”.

It is not yet clear where this week’s judgement leaves this consultation.

Supreme Court — Devaluing fundamental rights

The new ruling establishes that, for the purposes of the ECHR, a lack of legal capacity is not synonymous with a lack of valid consent. Instead, as the Mencap joint statement put it:

The Court implies that individuals with profound cognitive disabilities cannot be “deprived” of liberty because their condition limits their ability to experience it—a view that devalues their fundamental rights.

Meanwhile, in borderline cases, the Supreme Court would only consider a care facility to deprive an individual of their liberty if it closely resembled a prison.

Likewise, if the individual appears passive and unprotesting, the law will treat this as consent. This aspect of the ruling would apply even in situations where they are routinely restrained or sedated, whether physically or chemically.

In practice, this is likely to mean that the overwhelming majority of current independent DoLS inspections will be cancelled. As the three charities explained, the human impacts will be vast, across both the healthcare and social care settings. They gave practical examples, including:

If an autistic person with high support needs, someone with a serious mental illness, or a person with a severe learning disability is locked in a care setting and sedated, but does not actively protest, they will no longer be considered “confined” by the state. They will lose their automatic right to independent reviews, a legal advocate, and protection from closed care cultures.

For example, in psychiatric and crisis wards, if an individual experiencing a severe psychiatric crisis, acute psychosis, or clinical depression is admitted to a mental health hospital ward as an “informal patient,” they frequently lack the mental capacity to consent to their stay and therefore do not have any of the protections of independent reviews.

A plea to government

Mencap, Mind and the National Autistic Society also issued a plea directly the UK government. They called upon it to “act with urgency”:

to issue interim guidance to local authorities and health and care providers to prevent them being plunged into chaos by this ruling. It should urgently bring in new laws and guidance that strengthens protections for some of the people who are most at risk. This should include clearly explaining how disabled people and their families can challenge breaches of their rights and get the advocacy and support they need.

As always, as human rights continue to erode across the UK, it is the most vulnerable, those who can’t defend themselves, who become the first targets.

However, when a government — without any apparent show of remorse — can make an argument that ensuring liberty costs too much, we are all very much in danger.

However, the three charities ended their missive with a show of solidarity:

To the many people that will be affected by this ruling now and in the future, we stand with you and you are not alone. This decision devalues the rights and dignity of disabled people in this country.

Featured image via Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

By Alex/Rose Cocker

From Canary via This RSS Feed.

"We are seeing a pro-Israel crash-out of EPIC proportions" Ryan Grim of Drop Site News breaks down what the June 2 primary results mean for the future of AIPAC in politics and how support for genocide has become a litmus test of whether politicians will stand up for their constituents.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren suggested President Donald Trump is running a "pay-to-play loyalty program for wealthy donors" after a report on Thursday revealed that more than half the companies that contributed to his White House ballroom project have been awarded government contracts over the last six months, totaling over $50 billion.

Examining the 27 publicly known corporate donors to the president’s $400 million gold-plated vanity project, the watchdog group Public Citizen found that 14 of them—more than half—had received either new or expanded contracts over the past six months after donating millions to the ballroom and appearing at a lavish White House banquet in October as Trump prepared to demolish the building's East Wing.

Over two-thirds, 19 of the 27 companies, received government contracts since fiscal year 2021, totaling over $338 billion. At least 16 out of 27 are also either facing federal enforcement actions and/or have had them suspended by the Trump administration.

“These giant corporations aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts. They have massive interests before the federal government, and they hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration,” said Public Citizen democracy advocate Jon Golinger, an author of the report.

By far the biggest monetary beneficiary has been the military contractor Lockheed Martin, which received a $43.8 billion in new or expanded contract funding over the past six months after it pledged $10 million to fund the dance hall last fall.

Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting company that serves military and intelligence agencies and pledged at least $5 million to the project, received $4 billion in contracts over the same period.

Meanwhile, Palantir—the data-mining surveillance giant with deep ties to the Trump administration—reaped over $1 billion in contracts after giving its own $5 million donation.

"Millions to fund Trump’s bizarre fever dreams are nothing compared to the billions they’re getting back in contracts and favorable government enforcement decisions," Golinger said. "The American people are paying the price.”

Other ballroom benefactors that have brought in more than $100 million worth of contracts over the past six months include Microsoft, Amazon, HP, and Caterpillar, while T-Mobile, Google, NextEra Energy, and Comcast have all brought in more than $10 million.

Public Citizen noted that while the White House has publicized some of the ballroom donors and others have been revealed by news organizations, not all of the companies that have contributed to the project are publicly known, since the secret funding agreement obtained by the group through a Freedom of Information Act request allows their identities to remain private.

In a statement to The Washington Post, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle suggested that critics should be grateful that Trump was soliciting donations from the wealthy for this very important undertaking.

“The same critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interest would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill for these long-overdue renovations,” he said, ignoring the fact that Trump has previously pressured Republicans in Congress to appropriate hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding to secure the ballroom.

Ingle added that “the donors for the White House ballroom project represent a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for generations to come.”

But several Democratic members of Congress have pointed to it as evidence of Trump selling out the government "to the highest bidder."

“Corporations wrote big checks to build Trump’s golden ballroom,” said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Col.). “Now they’re receiving billions of dollars in kickbacks—paid for by your tax dollars.”

“Wild coincidence or taxpayer-funded corruption?” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). “You be the judge.”

Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) said that “the part that should make your blood boil” is the fact that many of the companies identified in the report “were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, [or] securities charges.”

"Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear," Levin said. "That’s not a coincidence."

“You cannot afford to donate to Trump’s ballroom, so he does nothing to improve the quality of your life,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “But for those who can, there are billions in government contracts.”

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