Green MP: Labour caricatures working-class people over greyhound racing
Labour is “offensively caricaturing” working-class people by saying they do not want a greyhound racing ban in England, the Green party MP Hannah Spencer has said,The sport has traditionally been associated with working-class culture and has historically been popular in so-called red wall areas, which Labour insiders suggest is part of the reason why there are no plans for England to follow bans announced last month in Scotland and Wales,The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, said in parliament on Thursday that the gambling industry “brings joy to a lot of people”,She said: “The industry as a whole brings positive benefits to the United Kingdom,”Spencer, who won the Gorton and Denton byelection in February and has four rescue greyhounds, said: “Lisa Nandy just continuously offends people by saying that working-class people don’t care about dogs or each other.
It is a caricature and it is very offensive.”She added: “I get offended when I hear the argument made that it is working class.Working-class people are fed up with gambling companies being able to wreak havoc in people’s lives.”Sources close to Nandy rejected the notion that she believed working-class people did not care about dogs or other working-class people.Nandy recently said: “We have absolutely no plans whatsoever to ban greyhound racing.
We appreciate the joy that it brings to many, many people in our country and the economic contribution that it makes.”The sport can cause injury and death to dogs, and many survivors are passed to animal charities after their racing days are done.These charities then have the difficult task of rehoming the large, often anxious dogs, which are not used to life in a family home.Between 2018 and 2023, 2,700 greyhounds died and more than 26,500 injuries to greyhounds were recorded.Spencer’s greyhounds are why she got into politics.
She campaigned to close the Belle Vue racetrack near where she lived in Manchester, where one of her dogs, Olive, had raced.“When I got her, she was really broken,” Spencer said.“I rehomed a greyhound called Judy who is 11 and for around a decade she was kept in a kennel and just used for breeding.My first greyhound, Graham, was terrified of everything outside because he’d been kept in a shed and had never really left.He never got over his anxiety despite my best efforts over many years.
There were many things which terrified him.”Labour has close ties to the gambling industry, taking hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations during the general election campaign.Senior figures have been invited to glitzy events held by betting lobbyists.Spencer said: “That is what opened my eyes to Labour, how lobbied and biased they are.Labour MPs will frequently accept really expensive hospitality packages from gambling companies.
Why would they go for a jolly and go and see a concert at Wembley paid for by the misery of gambling addicts?”The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, was recently accused in the Sun of “extreme madness” after a tweet was unearthed in which he suggested he wanted horse racing banned.But Spencer thinks there should be a conversation about banning horse racing, particularly after the deaths of two horses after this year’s Grand National.She said: “A conversation needs to be had about horse racing.We all saw those awful pictures of a horse that had been raced to death to make money for gambling companies.That conversation is coming.
Those conversations are shifting,People are telling me they don’t think horse racing is acceptable either,”Matt Zarb-Cousin, a co-founder of Gamban, an app that helps people with gambling addictions, said: “The gambling lobby in Westminster has had successive governments believing they somehow speak for the working class while their sector exploits and extracts from it,To make the assumption ordinary working people somehow don’t care about the welfare of dogs is a form of class prejudice,”Mark Moisley, the commercial director of the Greyhound Board of Great Britain, said: “Greyhound racing is enshrined in British culture and contributes £164m a year to the economy, employs 5,400 people, and remains one of the top 10 spectator sports in the UK – and our priority is to ensure this continues, with the welfare of greyhounds at the heart of this.
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US tech firms successfully lobbied EU to keep datacentre emissions secret
Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their datacentres, an investigation has found, with demands to block a database of green metrics from public view written almost word for word into EU rules.The secrecy provision, which the European Commission added to its proposal almost verbatim after industry lobbying in 2024, hinders scrutiny of the pollution that individual datacentres emit. It leaves researchers with just national-level summaries of their energy footprints.The rise of AI chatbots has spurred a boom in the construction of chip-filled warehouses with a hunger for power that is being met, in part, by burning fossil gas. Legal scholars warn the blanket confidentiality clause may fall foul of EU transparency rules and the Aarhus convention on public access to environmental information
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The UK technology secretary has urged the country to “make AI work for Britain”, brushing off fears about its impact on jobs and cybersecurity as the government announced its first investment under a £500m sovereign AI fund. Liz Kendall said the UK had to “seize” the opportunity offered by AI despite concerns underlined this month when US startup Anthropic revealed it had developed an AI model that posed a potentially significant cyber threat. Asked how the government makes the case for embracing a technology that could disrupt jobs and now cybersecurity, Kendall said: “We have to seize this to make it work, for Britain, for our jobs, for solving the biggest challenges we face as a world.”Speaking on Thursday as the government unveiled its first investment in a UK company as part of a £500m sovereign AI fund, Kendall acknowledged “people are worried about the risks and what it means for their jobs”, but AI entrepreneurs also believed they can “make it work … they can create jobs”.In January Kendall admitted “some jobs will go” as AI automates certain tasks and roles, but it would also create new employment opportunities
‘How do I end a call?’: the elderly Japanese people determined to master smartphones
It’s not only young people whose gaze is fixed on tiny screens. But for these users in Tokyo, clicking and scrolling is anything but second nature.“I can’t deal with all of the apps that jump out at me,” says one. “How do I know if I’ve definitely ended a call?” asks another.They are common concerns among the four women and one man attending a beginner’s smartphone class at a public facility for older residents in Nerima in the Japanese capital’s north-west suburbs
Labour and Lib Dem MPs demand ‘shameful’ Palantir NHS contract be scrapped
MPs have queued up to demand the government scraps its £330m NHS contract with the spy-tech company Palantir, calling it “dreadful” and “shameful” in a debate on Thursday, after which the government said it was “no fan” of the US company’s politics.Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs led the calls for Palantir, which also works for Donald Trump’s ICE immigration crackdown and the Israeli military, to be removed as a supplier to the NHS federated data platform (FDP), with one Labour backbencher, Samantha Niblett, questioning whether it could be “trusted as a custodian of the intimate health records of tens of millions of British citizens”.The Lib Dem MP Luke Taylor, who called the deal “shameful”, said: “Palantir and Peter Thiel must have their hands ripped off of our NHS before it is too late.”Thiel, a Trump-supporting tech billionaire, founded the company and has previously said that democracy and freedom are incompatible.In response to the MPs who spoke in a Westminster Hall debate, the government confirmed it would consider whether to continue with the deal when a break clause is due in spring 2027, although £210m of the £330m has already been spent
Man used AI to make false statements to shut down London nightclub, police say
A businessman has pleaded guilty to making false statements in order to shut down a nightclub, which police believe were generated using AI.A Metropolitan police source said the use of AI to generate letters by complainants who do not exist is a growing issue.Aldo d’Aponte, 47, the CEO of Arbitrage Group Properties, pleaded guilty to writing two letters, supposedly by his neighbours, objecting to the reopening of Heaven nightclub, which temporarily closed after a rape allegation against one of its security guards.D’Aponte was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £85 costs and a £26 victim surcharge.Heaven, an LGBTQ nightclub in central London had its licence suspended in November 2024 after a 19-year-old woman accused a bouncer of rape
NAACP lawsuit accuses Elon Musk’s xAI of polluting Black neighborhoods near Memphis
A new lawsuit accuses Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company of illegally spewing toxic pollutants into residential neighborhoods on the border of Tennessee and Mississippi.The suit, filed on Tuesday in Mississippi federal court, alleges xAI is violating the Clean Air Act due to emissions from its makeshift power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, which powers its datacenter there. The NAACP, represented by the environmental groups Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, says xAI has been polluting areas with homes, schools and churches, including in historically Black communities, by using dozens of methane gas generators without permits.The organization is seeking to force the company to stop operating its unpermitted turbines in Southaven.“A data center should not be a potential death sentence for a community’s health,” Abre’ Conner, the director of environmental and climate justice for the NAACP, said in a statement
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