Connect with us

Published

on

Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch will battle it out to be the next leader of the Conservative Party after James Cleverly was eliminated from the race.

Tory MPs held a final vote on Wednesday to reduce the field to a final two, who will then go to a ballot of Conservative members.

After picking up 42 votes in the final round of voting, Ms Badenoch re-established herself as the favourite after lagging behind in previous rounds.

Robert Jenrick, her close rival on the right, picked up one vote shy of Ms Badenoch, while Mr Cleverly – who was seen as a unifying candidate – won the backing of 37 MPs.

Follow latest: Live politics updates and reaction

The selection of Ms Badenoch and Mr Jenrick means the Conservative Party is heading towards the right and that immigration – and the UK’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – will be at the top of the agenda.

Mr Jenrick said he was “delighted to have got so much support from parliamentary colleagues today”.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

James Cleverly eliminated in Tory race

He told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge he believed his message of fixing the NHS, growing the economy and reducing immigration had struck a chord with MPs.

“On each of these areas, I’ve got a real plan,” he said.

“I don’t trade in platitudes. I have a plan as to how we provide serious, competent leadership for our party and ultimately for our country.”

This contest could become unpleasant quite quickly



Sam Coates

Deputy political editor

@SamCoatesSky

The Conservative leadership contest is no longer a battle for the direction of the party.

By picking Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, this has pivoted from a contest about the future direction of the party to one that turns on two different visions of a Tory future on the right of British politics.

The ejection of James Cleverly – who was frontrunner just yesterday – stunned the party. Nobody has yet admitted to whether his defeat took place because of a miscalculation over vote lending.

However people saw Cleverly on the terrace and later for a time at the Boris Johnson book launch – a period the other campaign were hitting the phones to firm up support.

It is still too close to call who will win between Ms Badenoch and Mr Jenrick as they go through to the final round and submit themselves to the judgement of 170,000 Tory members.

However, Ms Badenoch now appears to have the edge.

The last Tory members poll for YouGov by Sky News puts her four percentage points ahead of her rival in a head to head contest – not much more than the margin of error, but this was taken before her well-received conference speech.

In the final round of voting she was suddenly out in front amongst MPs – when the suggestion had been that they might try and keep her off the ballot.

This puts to bed the suggestion that too many MPs worry that her regular incendiary and unpredictable comments bar her from the top job.

Mr Jenrick will now want this race to turn on immigration .

Team Jenrick say he wants to leave ECHR and she “wants to remain” and that his opponent wants to leave.

Team Badenoch says that misrepresents her – her more nuanced position is that she is willing to leave if necessary, but only after a review.

Other clear dividing lines are yet to emerge, however. The risk that a contest based around personalities becomes quite personal – and unpleasant – quite quickly.

It is not a contest anyone could have predicted.

Ms Badenoch said the reason she had performed the best in the final round of voting was because “people have a lot of faith in my approach”…that you start with principles first and then policy”.

Mr Cleverly’s elimination from the race came as a surprise after he rallied in the previous round of voting following what was considered to be a strong performance at the Conservative Party conference.

Kemi Badenoch
Image:
Kemi Badenoch has established herself as the frontrunner after lagging behind in previous rounds.

Political reporter Alix Culbertson, who was in the room as the result was announced, said “disbelief resounded around the room” after it was confirmed the former home secretary would not be in the final two.

Following the result Mr Cleverly posted on X: “I’m grateful for the support I’ve received on this campaign from colleagues, party members and the public.

“Sadly it wasn’t to be. We are all Conservatives, and it’s important the Conservative Party unites to take on this catastrophic Labour government.”

It came after Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister who was running from the centrist wing of the party, was knocked out of the race after receiving the least votes from MPs on Tuesday.

Follow Sky News on WhatsApp
Follow Sky News on WhatsApp

Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News

Tap here

The result marks a comeback for Ms Badenoch, who while starting as the favourite in the early stages of the contest, was later pursued by Mr Jenrick who overtook her in the first, second and third MPs’ ballot.

Both candidates faced criticism for comments they made during the party conference.

Mr Jenrick claimed the SAS was being forced to kill rather than capture terrorists because the “European Court will set them free”, something many of his colleagues disputed.

Former business secretary Ms Badenoch was forced to backtrack over comments she made about “excessive” maternity pay and civil servants being jailed.

Britain’s membership of the ECHR is likely to be at the forefront at the debate between the two frontrunners, with Mr Jenrick – who has already challenged his rival to a debate – advocating that the UK leave the convention.

Ms Badenoch’s position is that she wants a review of the ECHR and would be willing to leave it if necessary.

Asked whether the race was likely to get “dirty” and if he could guarantee a “clean contest”, Mr Jenrick told Sophy Ridge: “That’s the way I fought this campaign now for three months.

Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick
Image:
Robert Jenrick has made leaving the ECHR central to his campaign.

“I’m a collegiate person, but I also want to provide direction for this party,” he said. “We need to be more Conservative. We need to ensure that we occupy that common ground of British politics once more.”

On the issue of the ECHR, Ms Badenoch said making it the sole focus of the debate would be a mistake.

Read more:
Labour lead over Tories falls to just one point, poll shows
Boris Johnson denies mocking public

“What I talked about in my conference speech and when I launched my campaign is we need to talk about everything,” she told reporters in Westminster.

“It can’t just be about one little part of immigration policy – we need to lower immigration, that’s part of the story, but just talking about the ECHR is going to shut down the conversation that we need to have with the entire country.”

The party membership vote will close at 5pm on Thursday 31 October. The winner, who will become leader of the party and the Opposition to the Labour government, will be announced on Saturday 2 November.

Continue Reading

Politics

Web3 has a metadata problem, and it’s not going away

Published

on

By

Web3 has a metadata problem, and it’s not going away

Web3 has a metadata problem, and it’s not going away

Opinion by: Casey Ford, PhD, researcher at Nym Technologies

Web3 rolled in on the wave of decentralization. Decentralized applications (DApps) grew by 74% in 2024 and individual wallets by 485%, with total value locked (TVL) in decentralized finance (DeFi) closing at a near-record high of $214 billion. The industry is also, however, heading straight for a state of capture if it does not wake up. 

As Elon Musk has teased of placing the US Treasury on blockchain, however poorly thought out, the tides are turning as crypto is deregulated. But when they do, is Web3 ready to “protect [user] data,” as Musk surrogates pledge? If not, we’re all on the brink of a global data security crisis.

The crisis boils down to a vulnerability at the heart of the digital world: the metadata surveillance of all existing networks, even the decentralized ones of Web3. AI technologies are now at the foundation of surveillance systems and serve as accelerants. Anonymity networks offer a way out of this state of capture. But this must begin with metadata protections across the board.

Metadata is the new frontier of surveillance

Metadata is the overlooked raw material of AI surveillance. Compared to payload data, metadata is lightweight and thus easy to process en masse. Here, AI systems excel best. Aggregated metadata can reveal much more than encrypted contents: patterns of behaviors, networks of contacts, personal desires and, ultimately, predictability. And legally, it is unprotected in the way end-to-end (E2E) encrypted communications are now in some regions. 

While metadata is a part of all digital assets, the metadata that leaks from E2E encrypted traffic exposes us and what we do: IPs, timing signatures, packet sizes, encryption formats and even wallet specifications. All of this is fully legible to adversaries surveilling a network. Blockchain transactions are no exception.

From piles of digital junk can emerge a goldmine of detailed records of everything we do. Metadata is our digital unconscious, and it is up for grabs for whatever machines can harvest it for profit.

The limits of blockchain

Protecting the metadata of transactions was an afterthought of blockchain technology. Crypto does not offer anonymity despite the reactionary association of the industry with illicit trade. It offers pseudonymity, the ability to hold tokens in a wallet with a chosen name. 

Recent: How to tokenize real-world assets on Bitcoin

Harry Halpin and Ania Piotrowska have diagnosed the situation:

“[T]he public nature of Bitcoin’s ledger of transactions […] means anyone can observe the flow of coins. [P]seudonymous addresses do not provide any meaningful level of anonymity, since anyone can harvest the counterparty addresses of any given transaction and reconstruct the chain of transactions.”

As all chain transactions are public, anyone running a full node can have a panoptic view of chain activity. Further, metadata like IP addresses attached to pseudonymous wallets can be used to identify people’s locations and identities if tracking technologies are sophisticated enough. 

This is the core problem of metadata surveillance in blockchain economics: Surveillance systems can effectively de-anonymize our financial traffic by any capable party.

Knowledge is also an insecurity

Knowledge is not just power, as the adage goes. It’s also the basis on which we are exploited and disempowered. There are at least three general metadata risks across Web3.

  • Fraud: Financial insecurity and surveillance are intrinsically linked. The most serious hacks, thefts or scams depend on accumulated knowledge about a target: their assets, transaction histories and who they are. DappRadar estimates a $1.3-billion loss due to “hacks and exploits” like phishing attacks in 2024 alone. 

  • Leaks: The wallets that permit access to decentralized tokenomics rely on leaky centralized infrastructures. Studies of DApps and wallets have shown the prevalence of IP leaks: “The existing wallet infrastructure is not in favor of users’ privacy. Websites abuse wallets to fingerprint users online, and DApps and wallets leak the user’s wallet address to third parties.” Pseudonymity is pointless if people’s identities and patterns of transactions can be easily revealed through metadata.

  • Chain consensus: Chain consensus is a potential point of attack. One example is a recent initiative by Celestia to add an anonymity layer to obscure the metadata of validators against particular attacks seeking to disrupt chain consensus in Celestia’s Data Availability Sampling (DAS) process.

Securing Web3 through anonymity

As Web3 continues to grow, so does the amount of metadata about people’s activities being offered up to newly empowered surveillance systems. 

Beyond VPNs

Virtual private network (VPN) technology is decades old at this point. The lack of advancement is shocking, with most VPNs remaining in the same centralized and proprietary infrastructures. Networks like Tor and Dandelion stepped in as decentralized solutions. Yet they are still vulnerable to surveillance by global adversaries capable of “timing analysis” via the control of entry and exit nodes. Even more advanced tools are needed.

Noise networks

All surveillance looks for patterns in a network full of noise. By further obscuring patterns of communication and de-linking metadata like IPs from metadata generated by traffic, the possible attack vectors can be significantly reduced, and metadata patterns can be scrambled into nonsense.

Anonymizing networks have emerged to anonymize sensitive traffic like communications or crypto transactions via noise: cover traffic, timing obfuscations and data mixing. In the same spirit, other VPNs like Mullvad have introduced programs like DAITA (Defense Against AI-guided Traffic Analysis), which seeks to add “distortion” to its VPN network. 

Scrambling the codes

Whether it’s defending people against the assassinations in tomorrow’s drone wars or securing their onchain transactions, new anonymity networks are needed to scramble the codes of what makes all of us targetable: the metadata our online lives leave in their wake.

The state of capture is already here. Machine learning is feeding off our data. Instead of leaving people’s data there unprotected, Web3 and anonymity systems can make sure that what ends up in the teeth of AI is effectively garbage.

Opinion by: Casey Ford, PhD, researcher at Nym Technologies.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Continue Reading

Politics

NHS ‘addicted to overspending’ and government ‘genuinely sorry’ for quango job losses, says Streeting

Published

on

By

NHS 'addicted to overspending' and government 'genuinely sorry' for quango job losses, says Streeting

Wes Streeting said the NHS is “addicted to overspending”, as he confirmed he is seeking cuts within Integrated Care Boards (ICBs).

The health secretary told Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips that ICBs – which are responsible for planning local health services – have been tasked with finding 50% savings to boost efficiency.

Politics latest: Streeting denies Labour ‘changing into Tories’

It’s part of the government’s plans to slash bureaucracy in the health service – which Mr Streeting acknowledged on Sunday would cause anxiety among administrators facing job losses.

Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting  visits a healthcare provider in Surrey.
Pic: Reuters
Image:
Sir Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting visit a healthcare provider in Surrey. Pic: Reuters

He said he was “genuinely sorry” for people worried about the future, but efficiency savings would divert money to the frontline of the NHS.

Confirming that Jim Mackey, head of the soon-to-be abolished NHS England, had written to ICBs asking them to halve their running costs, Mr Streeting said: “Financial plans to us would have involved an overspend between £5bn and £6bn before the new financial year is even begun.

“And I’m afraid this speaks to the culture that I identified before the general election, where the NHS is addicted to overspending, is addicted to running operating deficits with the assumption that someone will come along to bail them out, which local councils would never be able to do.”

More on Nhs

Reports of the cuts have sparked concerns among health leaders.

Matthew Taylor, head of the NHS Confederation, said it will require “major changes” and make the task of delivering “long term transformation of the NHS much harder”.

An NHS hospital ward. File pic: PA
Image:
An NHS hospital ward. File pic: PA

Mr Streeting denied the cut was effectively a form of austerity, saying the government is going after a culture of “waste and inefficiency” which “isn’t just frustrating patients and taxpayers” but staff working for the NHS too.

“They can see layer upon layer upon layer of bureaucracy and accountability,” he said.

“That’s not the fault of the people working in the system. They are also victims of it.

“And that’s why we’re going hard at achieving those savings in order to redeploy money into frontline services, which benefit patients.”

The government also announced this week it would be scrapping NHS England, the world’s biggest quango, saying there is too much duplication with the work that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) does.

Scrapping NHS England ‘beginning not the end’

Mr Streeting has since indicated he will look to scrap other health-related bodies, writing in The Sunday Telegraph that axing NHS England is “the beginning, not the end”.

Asked what other organisations could be for the chopping board, Mr Streeting said he did not want to “get ahead” of a review by Dr Penny Dash into the operational effectiveness of NHS regulators.

“What I will do is look at how we can reduce the number of regulators, reduce the number of regulations wherever possible… and try to reduce the amount of money we are spending,” he said.

Read More:
What does end of NHS England mean for you?
Health secretary faces questions over disability cuts

The cabinet minister defended the language being used to describe the plans, after he described the NHS as being “bloated” by bureaucracy and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer called it “flabby”.

Streeting ‘genuinely sorry’ about job losses

Mr Streeting stressed he was “talking about the system, not the people who work in it” – adding that he was “genuinely sorry” about the job losses that will come down the line.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Conservatives: Scrapping NHS England is ‘right thing’

The government has not yet said how many jobs it expects to axe under the reforms.

Mr Streeting acknowledged lots of people will be anxious about their futures, adding: “I’m genuinely sorry about that, because I don’t want them to be in that position. But I’ve got to make the changes.”

The government’s plans have generally received support from opposition parties, though there have been calls for more details.

Shadow education secretary Laura Trott said reorganisation reforms introduced by the Tories in 2013 were “well-intentioned but didn’t work” and she agrees “in principle” with what Labour has put forward.

However she said the changes aren’t a “silver bullet” and could result in further costs and disruption so “we’ll need to see a very clear plan from the government for how that won’t affect waiting lists further”.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats said the government must “take the same sense of urgency shown here to social care, and complete their review by the end of the year rather than continuing to kick the can down the road”.

Continue Reading

Politics

A Labour Party in Tory clothing? Why Starmer’s backbenchers are deeply uncomfortable

Published

on

By

A Labour Party in Tory clothing? Why Starmer's backbenchers are deeply uncomfortable

Since taking office nine months ago Sir Keir Starmer has weathered party rows about winter fuel payments, the two child benefit cap, WASPI women, airport expansion and cuts to international aid.

All of these decisions have been justified in the name of balancing the books – filling that notorious £22bn black hole, sticking to the fiscal rules, and in the pursuit of growth as the government’s number one priority.

But welfare reform feels like a far more existential row.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting argued on Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips that the current system is “unsustainable”.

Ministers have been making the point for weeks that the health benefits bill for working-age people has ballooned by £20bn since the pandemic and is set to grow by another £18bn over the next five years, to £70bn.

But the detail of where those cuts could fall is proving highly divisive.

One proposal reportedly under consideration has been to freeze personal independence payments (PIPs) next year, rather than uprating them in line with inflation.

Charities have warned this would be a catastrophic real-terms cut to 3.6 million people.

Concerned left-wing backbenchers are calling on the government to tax the rich, not take from the most vulnerable.

The Sunday Times and Observer have now reported that Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall has dropped the idea in response to the backlash.

Read more:
Streeting denies Labour ‘changing into Tories’
Planned PIP freeze set to be scrapped – reports
What cuts could be announced?

Wes Streeting denied reports of a cabinet row over the plan, insisting the final package of measures hasn’t yet been published and he and his cabinet colleagues haven’t seen it.

Not the final version perhaps – but given all backbench Labour MPs who were summoned to meetings with the Number 10 policy teams for briefings this week, that response is perhaps more than a little disingenuous.

In his interview with Sir Trevor Phillips, he went on to make the broader case for PIP reform – highlighting the thousand people who sign up to the benefit every day and arguing that the system needs to be “sustainable”, to “deliver for those that need it most” and “provide the right kind of support for the different types of need that exist”.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Streeting defends PM’s comments on ‘flabby’ public sector

To me this signals the government are preparing to unveil a tighter set of PIP eligibility criteria, with a refocus on supporting those with the greatest needs.

Changes to incapacity benefit to better incentivise working – for those who can – are also clearly on the cards.

The health secretary has been hitting out at the “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions, arguing that “going out to work is better for your mental and physical health, than being spent and being stuck at home”, and promising benefit reforms that will help support people back to work rather than “trapped in the benefits system”.

Turning Tory?

Starmer said this week the current welfare system couldn’t be defended on economic or moral grounds.

The Conservatives don’t disagree.

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Conservatives: Scrapping NHS England is ‘right thing’

Before the election, they proposed £12bn in cuts to the welfare bill, with a focus on getting people on long-term sickness back to work.

This morning, shadow education secretary Laura Trott claimed Labour denied that welfare cuts were needed during the election campaign and had wasted time in failing to include benefits reform in the King’s Speech.

“They’re coming to this chaotically, too late and without a plan,” she said.

👉 Click here to listen to Electoral Dysfunction on your podcast app 👈

Notwithstanding the obvious critique that the Tories had 14 years to get a grip on the situation – what’s most striking here is that, yet again, the Labour government seems to be borrowing Conservative clothes.

When challenged by Sir Trevor this morning, Streeting denied they were turning Tory – claiming the case for welfare reform and supporting people into work is a Labour argument.

But, from increasing defence spending and cutting the aid budget to scrapping NHS England, there’s a definite pattern emerging.

If you didn’t know a Labour administration was in charge, you might have assumed these were the policies of a Conservative government.

It’s a strategy which makes many of his own backbenchers deeply uncomfortable.

But it’s doing a good job of neutering the Tory opposition.

Continue Reading

Trending