The UK government reportedly will “encourage” Apple and Google to prevent phones from displaying nude images except when users verify that they are adults.

The forthcoming push for nudity-blocking systems was reported by the Financial Times today. The report said the UK won’t institute a legal requirement “for now.” But asking companies to block nude images could be the first step toward making it mandatory if the government doesn’t get what it wants.

“The UK government wants technology companies to block explicit images on phones and computers by default to protect children, with adults having to verify their age to create and access such content,” the FT report said. “Ministers want the likes of Apple and Google to incorporate nudity-detection algorithms into their device operating systems to prevent users taking photos or sharing images of genitalia unless they are verified as adults.”

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Kruger rejected the suggestion and said ‘polling remains very, very positive for Reform’

In his Q&A, Danny Kruger was also asked whether he was concerned whether the Guardian reports about people at school with Nigel Farage saying they recall him being racist as a pupil, which have been widely followed up, and the party’s response to them, which has alternated between outright denial and suggestions that any comments were banter, or taken out of context, or misremembered, have damaged the party’s poll ratings. Support for the party has flatlined, or fallen, since the stories started appearing.

In response, Kruger rejected suggestions this was a problem. He explained:

The polling remains very, very positive for Reform. We are clearly well ahead of every other party. And that is sustained and consistent in every single poll that you see.

And I’m confident that that will continue.

Reform % was down across most polls last week. What is driving it? Farage school comments, Gill & Russia, Mahmood asylum reform? I suspect answer is simpler: Reform do best when its issues are in focus (migration,crime,lack of faith in politics) & less so when it’s the economy

After weeks of allegations of schoolboy racism, the Reform leader is doubling down. And our political establishment is allowing it

Just as I was starting to write this column, an email alert popped up on my screen. “Punters back Nigel for prime minister after Keir Starmer,” it read, placing the Reform leader second in the odds market after Wes Streeting. What a weird, dissonant duality this is. Nigel Farage is in his fourth week of revelations about alleged racist behaviour at school, and yet, here we are. This is one of those twilight-zone moments in British politics, where it seems something is going to “cut through” any minute now. For a moment it seems as if it absolutely will. And then, there’s a loss of momentum and a return to the status quo. In my mind it manifests like a battle of physical forces, acting on one another. Journalistic investigations, testimonies, whistleblowers, all as a sort of storm that blows on a political actor who may be knocked off his feet, but still manages to cling on by his fingernails, until the gale blows over.

Up scrambles Farage, a few pieces and more than a few polling points knocked off him, but still in place. This is, so far, what he is managing to survive – the testimonies of some 28 of Farage’s contemporaries at Dulwich college who have told the Guardian that they experienced or witnessed racist or antisemitic behaviour when he was a teenager. Jewish students were taunted; “gas them,” Farage said, “Hitler was right”. A black student, much younger than the then 17-year-old Farage, was told: “That’s the way back to Africa.” The allegations amount, in my reading, to a sort of obsessive campaign against minority students, pursued with the kind of bewildering commitment that anyone who has ever been bullied will feel in their bones.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Rachel Reeves wants to protect consumers by bringing digital money and assets into the ‘regulatory perimeter’

Cryptocurrencies will be regulated in a similar way to other financial products under legislation coming into force in 2027.

The Treasury is drawing up rules that will require crypto companies to meet a set of standards overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

The Reform leader bit back over allegations of racial abuse and revealed his strategy: the best form of defence is dragging everyone else into the mire

As the allegations of Nigel Farage’s racist and antisemitic school bullying multiplied, it was hard to keep up with his shifting array of responses. At times, in his evasiveness and discomfort, he has looked like that most un-Farage of things: a nervous politician, anxious not to say the wrong word.

Last week, however, he angrily returned to his preferred posture: brimming with indignation at the moral hypocrisy of elites. He lashed out at the BBC’s “double standards” for indulging the allegations, when the broadcaster itself showed racist jokes and skits back in those days. Farage announced it was not he who should apologise, but apparently the BBC that should say sorry “for virtually everything you did throughout the 1970s and 1980s”.

Nigel Farage’s party is gunning for power – so what is it like in the places where they’ve already got it? We embedded with Lancashire county council to find out what happens when rhetoric meets reality

22 May 2025: a new dawn for Lancashire. Outside Preston’s grand old county hall, 53 brand new Reform UK councillors in turquoise ties – and one petite woman with an enormous turquoise hair bow – are hot-footing it past a gaggle of protesters for their first full council meeting. Most keep their heads down and get into the building as quickly as possible. But Joel Tetlow, a first-time politician who has made a few unfortunate headlines before even taking his seat, is intrigued. He stands in the doorway, vaping, as a demonstrator bellows: “Reform is a far right party and Nigel Farage is a racist and a fascist!”

Tetlow – late 40s with a full head of vertiginous hair, wearing a powder-blue three-piece suit – insists he isn’t bothered. “They don’t know us as people,” he shrugs. “It’s a word that’s slung around now so much, to be a racist. You know, what is it to be a racist? All we want to do is stand for our country, look after the people within it. So we’re not racist. None of us are racist.” (Farage, too, has denied accusations of racism, and Reform dispute that they are a far right party.)

Nigel Farage’s party says it has more than 268,000 members amid reports Labour membership has fallen below 250,000

Reform UK says it is now the largest political party in Britain and has overtaken Labour, which has reportedly seen its membership fall below 250,000.

Nigel Farage’s party says it has more than 268,000 members on the live tracker displayed on its website.

With the US threatening to support ‘patriotic’ parties here, we need better defences, starting with tough new rules about political donations

The new threat is so dizzyingly bizarre that Europe, and especially Britain, is slow to believe it. The US declares itself our enemy. Europe emerges as its main adversary in the US national security strategy. Russia is its friend, not us. Everything that looked solid since the second world war is turned upside down; the land of the free becomes the destroyer of democratic values. Appeasement fails.

He may ramble, but Donald Trump speaks plainly. He means what he says, and he hates everything European. Except its emerging “patriotic” parties, which he wants to support. His strategy warns of “civilizational erasure”, claiming Europe will soon “become majority non-European” and parroting the racist conspiracy known as the great replacement theory. Describing Europeans as “weak”, “decaying” and “destroying their countries”, with “real stupid” leaders, Trump responded to the question of whether they would still be allies, in a Politico interview, with a hint of threat: “It depends.”

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Incident One: Corporate Laptop Compromised

Incident Two: Personal Device Targeted

ICO’s Findings and Fine on LastPass UK

Lessons for Businesses

Warwickshire board says maximum 5% tax rise needed for financial viability despite election promise to cut costs

Reform UK council leaders have been accused of making “rash promises” after a local authority led by the party has been told it will have to increase council tax by the maximum amount, despite its election promises to cut costs.

Warwickshire county council has been warned by its executives that anything less than a 5% maximum council tax increase will put its financial viability at risk.

Robert Milne says he fully recognises the ‘seriousness of the behaviours described in the media’

Dulwich college’s headteacher has responded to allegations of teenage racism by Nigel Farage by saying he recognised the “seriousness of the behaviours described in the media”.

Robert Milne, who joined the school as its “master” this summer, said the alleged behaviour was “at odds” with the modern-day school in a letter in which he said he understood why 28 former pupils had felt compelled to speak out.

You’d think MPs would be lining up to decry the US president’s support for far-right nationalists. Instead, only backbenchers and a few junior ministers bothered to turn up

’Twas the fortnight before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Apart from a few exceptions. The Labour backbencher Matt Western had managed to secure an urgent question on President Trump’s new national security strategy and the Commons itself was remarkable for its absences. A roll-call of dishonour.

Take Nigel Farage. You would have thought he would have had a lot to say on the subject. After all, when Barack Obama had intervened in the Brexit referendum campaign to say the UK would be at the back of the queue for any trade deal with the US, Nige had been outraged. How dare the president try to interfere with the democratic processes of another sovereign country? So now that Donald Trump was threatening to do much the same thing in countries all across Europe, surely this was the time for Nige to make a stand. This was surely a point of principle for him. Were he to have any.

Tory leader says head of Reform should ‘put on his big boy pants’ and apologise over allegations from ex-schoolmates

• UK politics live – latest updates

Kemi Badenoch has questioned why Nigel Farage has not apologised for alleged racist and antisemitic comments while at school, saying the weight of the evidence of more than 20 former schoolmates is significant.

In her strongest comments yet on the issue, the Conservative leader said she was struck that Farage had not admitted any fault or apologised, saying it would have been her first instinct as a politician.

Across western democracies, established conservatives are yielding to radical nationalism. There’s no sign that Britain will be the exception

In free societies, when you don’t like the government, you support the opposition. In dictatorships, or under military occupation, you join the resistance. The distinction isn’t precise but it matters.

All European democracies have radical anti-immigration parties, some on the fringes of opposition, some that have crossed into the mainstream. None qualify as heroic resistance movements, except in the minds of white supremacists who see liberal institutions as part of a conspiracy to ruin Europe by filling it with foreigners. That is also the view taken in the new White House national security strategy, published last week.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Worcestershire council leader Jo Monk sent city councillor Ed Kimberley a cease and desist letter over his criticism of her

The leader of a Reform UK-run local authority has been criticised for an “authoritarian” attempt to silence opposition after sending a legal threat to a Labour councillor, demanding he stops mentioning her name in public.

Ed Kimberley, a Worcester city councillor, said he received the cease and desist letter from the leader of Worcestershire county council, Jo Monk, in late November.

Defeated Tory and Labour rivals describe force of Reform ‘machine’ as police assess claims of overspending

The Tory and Labour candidates who Nigel Farage beat to win his Westminster seat of Clacton have described a Reform campaign that felt like a “juggernaut”, as police began assessing claims of overspending by the Reform UK leader.

The candidates spoke after a former aide alleged that Reform UK falsely reported election expenses in Clacton, where Farage won in last year’s general election. On Monday, Essex police said they were assessing a report of “alleged misreported expenditure by a political party” after a referral from the Metropolitan police.

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Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK Afghan Data Leak Exposed 87% to Risk and Threats

UK Advice Deemed Inadequate

The US Director of National Intelligence is reporting that the UK government is dropping its backdoor mandate against the Apple iPhone. For now, at least, assuming that Tulsi Gabbard is reporting this accurately.