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Reform's flagship 'cost-cutting' Kent County Council leadership has started approaching opposition parties for help finding extra cash, after struggling to identify the tens of millions of pounds in budget savings they promised, Byline Times can reveal.

The newly-won Council was heralded by Nigel Farage as a symbol of what the party could achieve nationally by cutting local government "waste".

The party went on to appoint Reform councillor Matthew Fraser-Moat as a £36,000 cabinet member for what the party calls DOLGE - the Department for Local Government Efficiency, mimicking Elon Musk's aborted efforts under President Trump in the US.

However, the administration has since descended into chaos, with four councillors suspended last week following leaked footage exposing major divisions within the council leadership.

As a result Kent is now reportedly among a series of Reform-led authorities set to break the party's pledge not to raise local taxes.

Opposition councillors have told Byline Times that the party is now so "desperate" for ideas on what to cut to make the upcoming budget add up that it is now arranging brain-storming sessions with opposition parties.

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An opposition councillor told Byline Times: "DOLGE is arranging meetings with all political groups because they have run out of ideas. They will not be able to find service delivery efficiencies which do not impact the most vulnerable in society.

"So far they have just been looking to see what can make the best headlines without anything to back it up."

It comes as Zia Yusuf stepped down on Wednesday as head of the national Reform "DOGE" unit that has been "struggling to find council waste to cut," according to Politico. He was just four months into the role and had already resigned once and returned to it.

The outlet reports that Reform second-in-command Richard Tice will take over instead. Yusuf will remain the party's head of policy.

Another opposition councillor, from a different party, told this outlet: "The most painless saving the council can make is to cut the DOLGE charade, because it costs the council about £70,000 a year, and they have failed to come up with any economies."

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They claimed that when Kent DOLGE lead councillor Matthew Fraser-Moat presented to the scrutiny committee recently about what the team has done, "the paper presented was basically a rehash of all the claims made by Zia Yusuf and co when they rolled up at County Hall and started lying about our finances."

Asked why they thought DOLGE was asking opposition parties for things to cut, they replied: "I think they're desperate for ideas. We're on the other side of 14 years of austerity and because the fair funding review isn't going to be favourable to Kent County Council that will continue.

"We're not expecting the Government to be more generous than the Conservatives, and Reform have come in expecting to find profligacy in the council which hasn't been the case."

Every directorate of the council has trimmed their budget every year over more than a decade.

"There's no budget to cut at the moment. [Nearly all] the money that we spend is on statutory services that we cannot avoid", they said.

"The scope for reducing the rest of the budget is very small but the valued additional discretionary services include subsidised school bus passes, community wardens, librarie...

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Michael Gove personally lobbied Government officials to ensure that the award of a multimillion pound Covid testing contract to a Conservative donor and Brexit supporter was "unblocked".

On March 31 2020, one week after the UK entered into the first national lockdown, the then Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove received an email from Toby Baxendale - Director of the covid testing firm Ciga Healthcare.

Baxendale previously donated over £50,000 to the Conservative party, with his wife Catherine donating a further £50,000 and he was also a founding member of the right leaning think-tank the Cobden Centre.

In the email, which was disclosed to Byline Times following a freedom of Information request, Baxendale urged Gove to take action regarding his company's bid to supply antibody tests.

The pro-Brexit businessman was highly critical of the Government's Chief Medical Office, Chris Whitty and Chief Scientist Patrick Vallance, who he described in the email as being like "hardened Remainers" who were "closed to any alternative views".

Baxendale pushed for Gove to "act with [his] instincts and take control" of the process, against the perceived wishes of the Government's senior health officials, claiming that by doing so the Conservative minister would "save the nation".

The message appears to have had an effect, given just 48 hours later, Gove then emailed the former Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill and other top civil servants working within No.10 on behalf of Baxendale, urging for any delays in the contract award to Ciga to be "unblocked".

Gove's email to Sedwill stated that: "I was contacted by Toby Baxendale, who was encouraged personally by the PM and Matt Hancock to help, and who has sourced 1 million antibody tests from China (with a possible further 1 million in the pipeline).

"He claims to have received resistance from PHE in getting them green lighted. Have all the problems been unblocked? Are we sure we are pursuing every angle on this simultaneously?"

Within a week of Gove's intervention Ciga Healthcare were selected by the UK Government to form a consortium of British based companies contracted by the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) to manufacture and develop "a home-grown [antibody] test".

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The UK Rapid Test Consortium (UK-RTC) was established around April 8 2020, and comprised Abingdon Health, Oxford University, BBI Solutions, CIGA Healthcare and Omega Diagnostics.

On April 11 the consortium signed an initial six-month Memorandum of Understanding. Not long after the MOU was signed, contract awards began to flow to the group. On the June 1 the UK-RTC landed it's first £10million deal to develop an new anti-body test. This was followed by a much larger £75m deal in August 2025.

The contracts awarded to the consortium were highly controversial, and subject to a legal challenge by the Good Law Project.

During the course of the high court case 'explosive' emails were disclosed that revealed the contracts awarded to the consortium appear to have been funnelled through the fast track "VIP Route". Civil servants were recorded describing the Covid testing programme as "unlegit" and "no way to do business".

Gove is no stranger to the VIP Lane scandal. In March this year, Byline Times revealed how the Cabinet Office misled the public over Michael Gove's involvement with the PPE VIP Lane's biggest winner.

Unispace Global were awa...

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Three former MPs are stepping up their claim that the UK Government is failing in its duty to protect elections from foreign interference, in a new case lodged today with the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights.

The legal challenge from former MPs Caroline Lucas, Ben Bradshaw and Alyn Smith calls for "clear, positive duties to investigate and safeguard foreign influence".

In a statement on the court appeal, non-profit group The Citizens notes the recent conviction of former Wales Reform leader Nathan Gill.

In September, Gill pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery following a Met Counter Terrorism Command investigation into payments for pro-Russia statements when he was a member of the European Parliament. Reform insiders told Byline Times it is 'inconceivable' that Reform leader Nigel Farage did not know about his close aide's pro-Russian statements.

Last week, Byline Times and The Nerve revealed that in 2021, after leaving Reform, Gill was preparing to give a presentation about the potential role of cryptocurrencies in political funding, for his Russian sponsors.

The appeal to the European Court of Human Rights points out that electoral interference from hostile states threatens member nations as we speak.

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Interference across Europe

The filing from Caroline Lucas and others states: "There is credible evidence that the Russian Federation interfered in Moldova's elections of 28 September 2025. Alleged Russian interference prompted Romania's Constitutional Court to annul the first round of its presidential election in December 2024, undermining public confidence in democracy and the rule of law."

And it points out that the European Union (separate to the ECHR) has identified that the Russian Federation "has engaged in a systematic, international campaign of media manipulation and distortion of facts…especially during election periods."

It also comes amid allegations of Brits spying for China, with the Prime Minister confirming his intent to publish witness statements from the recent collapsed espionage case (the two individuals deny lawbreaking).

The Grand Chamber is the equivalent of the ECHR's 'Supreme Court' and only hears cases of 'exceptional importance or complexity' and the claim is the final stage of a five-year legal battle that was first launched in 2020.

The Citizens and the MPs are represented by law firm Leigh Day. In 2020, the crowdfunded case was the first time a group of sitting MPs had sued the Government over matters of national security.

Even though all three MPs have now left parliament, they have persevered with the claim and are now appealing to Europe's top human rights court.

The claims asks the court to confirm "a clear, enforceable duty on the UK to investigate credible foreign interference in elections and to adopt proactive safeguards," under Article 3 of Protocol 1 to the European convention on Human Rights - the right to free and fair elections.

The group first challenged the Government in the UK High Court after parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee published the Russia Report citing "credible evidence" of Russian interference. Following that report, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused the demands of MPs on the committee to launch an inquiry.

Among those who provided evidence and urged action was Lord Peter Ricketts, the UK's first ever national security advisor. He said he was "very surprised" the Government had not sought evidence over Russi...

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Many British people will be completely unaware of the fact that the UK's national electricity grid was privatised by the Conservatives back in 1990.

Nor are they aware of the scandalous fact that, just like the water industry, the privatised industry has pocketed huge profits, while failing to fulfil its core mission - to build a national grid fit for purpose.

More importantly, they will have no idea how much this is adding to their energy bills.

Last week I was able to highlight this scandal when asked to do so during a combative interview on Talk TV with Ian Collins, about an article in the Telegraph wrongly blaming wind-energy for the high cost of UK electricity, along with the energy analyst Andy Meyer from the Tufton Street-based think-tank, the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) who produced the research the article was based on.

To the casual viewer, I was on a British TV station, discussing an article in a British newspaper, about a report by a British think-tank about the cost impacts of Britain's wind industry on Britain's national grid.

The reality was somewhat different, however.

In truth I was being interviewed on a US-Australian billionaire owned TALK TV station. whose owner, Rupert Murdoch, has been accused of using his global media empire to oppose climate action.

The news report itself was in The Telegraph, which is set to be soon jointly owned by US billionaire hedge funds and the Abu-Dhabi petro-dictatorship. It too is also notorious for endlessly attacking every aspect of climate and nature protection.

The IEA "think tank" under discussion has also previously been exposed as having received donations from multi-billion-dollar global oil corporations, while constantly producing "reports" attacking climate action.

Meanwhile, the National Grid itself is a privatised corporation partly-owned also by the Abu Dhabi petro-dictatorship and US billionaire owned hedge funds.

Thus while it may have looked like I was doing a simple interview, I was in reality wading through layer upon layer of a billionaire owned industrial-media complex whose own interests align with sabotaging Britain's transition to the clean energy economy.

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However, despite this, I was still able to highlight the above-mentioned national grid scandal.

In 2025 the annual Underlying Operating Profit for the National Grid plc was £5.36 billion. This was paid for by consumers energy bills, costing each household £187.

It could therefore add up to a staggering £53.6 billion over a decade. Yet despite pocketing these huge profits, it has failed in its core mission: building and maintaining a fully functioning grid.

In 2023 the BBC estimated that there was about £200 billion in clean energy projects awaiting connection to the national grid, with the longest waiting times in Europe to be connected.

Some projects were listed as taking up to 15 years to get connected, as the grid did not have the capacity for them.

And in addition to lack of capacity for new projects, the national grid also cannot cope with current levels of cheap green energy output when it is abundant on especially windy days.

These failures by the national grid add another two layers of costs onto bills.

As new renewables have for a number of years now, been far cheaper than fossil fuels, it means that the grid had to pay out billions of pounds more for expensive gas electricity, when it could have been taking advantage of the cheaper green electricity projects waiting for connection.

Secondly, consumers are having to pay for constraint payments to wind-ene...

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Russian forces renewed their campaign to knock Ukraine's interior lights out on Monday, striking at the heart of civilian life in the northern city of Chernihiv and the eastern hub of Kharkiv with guided aerial bombs aimed at combined heat and power (CHP) plants.

The blasts caused partial power outages in both cities, underscoring Moscow's evolving strategy of crippling the country's energy grid as temperatures across Ukraine begin to drop.

In Chernihiv, a northern region already reeling from months of intermittent strikes and shelling, power was lost completely in the early hours of the morning, causing a city-wide blackout. According to the Ministry of Energy of Ukraine, it has been unable to carry out necessary repairs on Tuesday morning as Russian long-range loitering drones "continuously circle over the damaged facilities, making repair work impossible and deliberately prolonging the humanitarian crisis."

City officials have urged residents to stock up on water while critical infrastructure has been switched to generator power. Officials in Kyiv have reported that Slavutych, a Chernihiv region city built to house workers after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, also suffered power outages as a result of the strike.

Earlier this month, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced an energy blackout lasting several hours after a power substation in Slavutych was hit in a Russian attack, leaving the New Safe Confinement facility, which isolates the destroyed fourth power unit of the decommissioned plant, without power. At the time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Moscow of attempting to create the risk of a nuclear incident, writing on Telegram: "The Russians could not have been unaware that a strike on facilities in Slavutych would have such consequences for Chornobyl."

'A Serious Escalation': Putin Launches Russia's Largest Aerial Assault on Ukraine Since 2022

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Zarina Zabrisky

Meanwhile, in the northeast of Ukraine, the city administration of Kharkiv announced emergency power outages will come into effect after Russian forces launched six guided aerial bombs at the city, primarily targeting an industrial region of the city. Local officials in Kharkiv reported that the most recent attack used updated guided aerial bombs, capable of longer glide ranges, while last week the city of Lozova in the Kharkiv region was hit with a new rocket-powered guided aerial bomb.

What distinguishes this cycle of attacks from previous winter campaigns is the precision, persistence, and focus. Earlier in the war, Russia's air campaigns often struck multiple sectors simultaneously; energy, transport, military targets, and civilian zones in broad-brush assaults. This year, as the cold season begins in Ukraine, analysts say Moscow's tactics show a sharp evolution. Instead of broad waves of simultaneous attacks on many targets across the country, Moscow appears to be concentrating its firepower on critical facilities, repeating strikes until a target is destroyed. In doing so, it exploits the strain on Ukraine's air-defence umbrella, which, after more than three years of war, is stretched thinner and struggling to keep up.

The result is fewer dispersion opportunities for Ukraine's air-defence forces, who are already managing rising demands on radar, missiles, and interceptor assets. Technological advancements like ballistic missiles that can shift from their expected trajectory or cruise missiles which can release flares shortly before impact are also making strikes more difficult to prevent. For Ukraine, this presents a difficult challenge. With air-defence resources stretched, each guided aerial bomb, each hit on a CHP plant or sub-station, has long-last...

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When the TV presenter Eden Blackman died in June at the age of 57, after a long illness, the emotion some women felt was not sadness, but something closer to relief.

Byline Times can reveal that the late television personality, who co-presented Channel 4's (E4) Celebs Go Dating from 2016 to 2018, had been accused by multiple women of violent abuse both prior to and during his time on the show.

One woman, 'Sophia', knew of Blackman through two friends who, she said, he had previously dated and allegedly violently assaulted. Based on their warnings, she spent nearly a decade refusing his attempts to book her for modelling work.

Then, in March 2016, an email arrived from a modelling agent named 'Christian Buckley', looking to book her for an audition for what was claimed to be a talent show. This happened prior to the first series of Celebs Go Dating and before Blackman was involved in the show.

With just her and 'Buckley' in the studio, Sophia alleged that he became violent.

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"It was about an hour [to the meeting] when he asked me to start modelling, to show what I could do. I did, and then he took his belt and started beating me. Then he got other implements and hit me with those…When he started hitting me, I realised who he was."

The supposed booking agent, she said, was Blackman - the man she had spent years avoiding. She believes it was retribution for avoiding his advances for so long.

"He ended up beating me very badly," she told Byline Times. "It's a situation where you don't know what to do. I remember this weird thing about being called 'Uncle' - he said 'call me uncle' or it would get worse…You do what you're told in that situation because it's a matter of survival, isn't it?"

After escaping, she called an ex of Blackman's who confirmed from her detailed description that it was him. They recognised the pseudonym too: 'Christian' referred to Christian Grey, the protagonist of Fifty Shades of Grey; while 'Buckley' referred to Jeff Buckley, Blackman's favourite musician.

Blackman later told a mutual acquaintance that the encounter was "all consensual" and that "she wanted it".

Nadia Essex, who co-presented Celebs Go Dating alongside Blackman, said that she became aware of concerns about his behaviour towards women during their time working together on the show.

Essex told Byline Times that she raised concerns about Blackman's alleged inappropriate behaviour towards women with Lime Pictures in October 2017. Lime Pictures investigated Essex's concerns, speaking to individuals who might have more information.

Following this investigation, both presenters entered mediation and agreed to continue working together. Essex's contract was renewed for Series 4 in November 2017, and subsequently for Series 5.

Lawyers for Lime Pictures emphasised that it takes all complaints seriously and investigated Essex's allegations, and a separate complaint that was also brought to its attention (not Sophia's) as thoroughly as it could, within the constraints of what complainants were willing to do.

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The production company's lawyers said that, in 2018, Essex provided the production firm with written assurances that she was not linked to anonymous Twitter (now X) accounts "trolling" Blackman. She later admitted that she was responsible for those accounts. Essex was suspended and she resigned shortly afterwards.

Tw...

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New evidence suggests Jeffrey Epstein channelled millions of dollars through Russian-linked banks - as Byline Times reveals fresh details of the Kremlin-connected tech figures at the heart of his circle.

Three women close to Epstein - Masha Bucher, her sister Victoria Drokova, and model-turned-entrepreneur Lana Pozhidaeva - built venture-capital empires in Silicon Valley while maintaining hidden financial ties to Russian oligarchs, documents obtained by Byline Times show.

Together the three of them have continued to grow their interests in Silicon Valley, even as many of their former business associates have come under increasing scrutiny since the Kremlin's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Wyden has intensified his push, introducing legislation to compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to release Epstein-related banking records. In a July letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, he wrote that Epstein moved 'hundreds of millions of dollars' through Russian banks now under US sanctions. Wyden in particular has continued to press for answers regarding Epstein's business life, particularly his transactions with Russian banks.

Epstein's PR agent

Before she rebranded herself as a Silicon Valley investor, Masha Bucher had grown up in Russia and became a teenage star of Nashi, President Vladimir Putin's nationalist youth organisation. She was featured in the 2012 documentary Putin's Kiss. Yet within a decade, she was running an American PR firm whose client list included Jeffrey Epstein.

In 2014, Bucher launched M&A PR Studio - later MA Family - whose clients included Jeffrey Epstein, though the nature of its work for the disgraced financier remains unclear. Bucher did not respond to questions about her agency's PR work on behalf of the billionaire who had previously pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from underage girls, or to questions about her travels to Russia.

At the same time, she also became an angel investor. It has now rebranded as MA Family, and its clients include Runa Capital, Cointelegraph and the Czech software company JetBrains.

Bucher's first notable angel bet was NTech Lab, the Russian facial-recognition developer behind the FindFace app and other state surveillance projects. Corporate records show she held 200 shares at end-2016 before exiting the following year.

She then launched Day One Ventures, rebranding herself as a Silicon Valley fund manager. In public, Bucher framed a clean break with Moscow: "It is toxic money since 2014, after Crimea," she told the Washington Post in April 2022.

Documents obtained by Byline Times contradict that clean break. Leaked Russian border-crossing records show at least 22 trips to Russia between August 2014 and August 2021. On 24 August 2021 she was issued a new Russian driving licence after reporting the previous one stolen.

Her appearances also underscore proximity to the Russian state. On 6 June 2019, one day after flying from Switzerland to Russia, Bucher spoke at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum panel "The Power of Youth and the Next Generation of Global Business" alongside Runa Capital associate Konstantin Vinogradov.

Later that year, she met with Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov alongside Russian businessman Dmitry Eremeev, whom Bucher has said was the first investor in Day One Ventures. In 2023, the US sanctioned Minnikhanov for corruption and his position on the board of a company producing fighter aircraft for the Russian military.

While little is known about the money behind Day One Ventures, despite Bucher's claim that Russian money was toxic since 2014, leaked documents from two Cypriot accounting firms show that at least one of the fund's investors is Russian businessman Sergey Dashkov, who owns an investment fund called Joint Journey Ltd. One document from November 2021 sh...

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When police stopped Nathan Gill at Manchester Airport on 13 September 2021, they did so under Schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 - a power designed to detect hostile-state activity and foreign interference at UK borders.

Byline Times and The Nerve can now reveal that, when Gill was arrested, the former MEP had been invited to spend four days in Moscow at a major gathering of 'political technologists' from across the world, under the auspices of the Kremlin.

According to the Crown Prosecution Service indictment and Gill's own pleas, he accepted bribes from December 2018 to July 2019 from Oleh Voloshyn - a pro-Russian Ukrainian MP with longstanding ties to Viktor Medvedchuk, Vladimir Putin's closest political ally in Ukraine.

This new revelation ties Farage's closest aide even more directly to Russia and its state influence operations.

And, in a week when Reform UK celebrated becoming the first ever political party in the UK to receive cryptocurrency donations, we can also reveal that Gill had prepared a presentation about the electoral role of cryptocurrencies for his Russian sponsors.

EXCLUSIVE

'Thick as Thieves': Nathan Gill and Nigel Farage's Putin Problem

Far from being distant from the Reform UK Leader, insiders told Byline Times that the former MEP convicted of bribery was one of Farage's closest aides, while we reveal how Gill worked on the Kremlin's strategic plan to crush Ukrainian independence with 'Moscow's Man in Ukraine'

Peter Jukes

From Ukraine to Russia with Love

When Nathan Gill pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery at the Old Bailey, for taking money to issue statements favourable to Russia while he was a UKIP and Brexit Party MEP, it was the first case under the Bribery Act for foreign political interference.

And it provided further proof that Nigel Farage's parties - like many other right-wing Eurosceptic groups across the continent - were consistently targeted by Putin's intelligence services and their proxies.

Five days after the first payment was made in December 2018, Gill - then a UKIP MEP - made a statement in the European Parliament to protest the planned closure of Medvedchuk's TV stations 112 Ukraine and News24. He was interviewed by the TV station's presenter and the wife of the man who had bribed him, Nadia Borodi (also known as Nadia Sass).

Borodi was also pictured with then UKIP Leader Nigel Farage - who sat as an MEP alongside Gill - outside the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, and then apparently inside Gill's parliamentary office.

The bribes from Voloshyn continued until July 2019, when Gill was one of the few UKIP MEPs to join Nigel Farage's new Brexit Party.

According to his then fellow MEP Rupert Lowe - who now sits as an independent MP in the UK Parliament after being suspended by Reform UK - Gill acted as the whip for Brexit Party MEPs. In a recent statement, Lowe described being called to a meeting by Gill at the European Parliament, where those in attendance claimed to be "very close to Putin".

This coincided with a roundtable event Gill hosted for Viktor Medvedchuk, during which 'Moscow's man in Ukraine' announced a new 'peace plan' for the country, which he then celebrated with President Putin the next day in the Kremlin, boasting of the support of British and other MEPs.

According to sources Byline Times has spoken to, Farage and Gill were "as thick as thieves" during this period, and it would have been "inconceivable" that Farage could not have known about Gill's Ukrainian connections and statements.

Farage himself has admitted that he knew Gill for some years and warned him about going to Ukraine - because it is "one of the most corrupt countries in the world", as he recently described it to the BBC.

But what about Russia, deeply entwined in its post-Soviet corruption through t...

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The young woman who attended the interview had brown hair, her face permanently anxious. Her name was Petra, and she came from the Czech Republic, in the hope of working for me. This was in the early 2000s, some four years after the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act came into effect and meant that disabled people were able to opt for receiving funds directly.

It was a novel, and at times unsettling, experience - the autonomy bringing responsibility - and I found myself learning fast about the process of recruitment and interviewing.

This was pre-Brexit, four years after freedom of movement became enshrined in EU law, and supported the influx of many young women who applied for work within the broadest context of the care industry. It was an eye-opener.

Within the first months of my recruitment process for two personal assistants, the majority of applicants were not 'native' to the UK. The first 10 to apply included three 'natives' across a broad age spectrum (21-69), who came with a standard agency mentality. The remaining seven were from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Zimbabwe.

To my mind, these seven were by far the better applicants. Some had a certain quality of pragmatism which I appreciated, and others an incredible work ethic. All of them were eager.

Unlike the 'natives', none of them had a patronising attitude, but were open to learning from me, and appreciated that I did indeed know my own needs (the primary focus of independent living).

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Their experiences of working in the UK varied - with many sharing, as trust grew between us, horrific experiences of exploitation and abuse.

Darling Petra, so keen to do her best, was also working as a cleaner for several non-disabled clients - probably not all 'on the books', but that was hardly her fault, and certainly not my business. But it became so when I detected abuse that rose to what I knew was criminal behaviour and urged her to report incidents to the police, which she did not do out of fear of her abuser, and of losing her right to stay in the UK. She eventually decided to move back to the Czech Republic.

Precious, from Zimbabwe, was a giggler. I was in awe of how far she had travelled. She bathed and dressed me with care and laughter, which lessened the white person guilt I felt very aware of. We had a lot in common, including a love of knitting. When I went out with Precious, I noticed a sickening difference in how others interacted with her compared to Petra - it was clearly racially motivated.

Then there was Gergana, a striking young woman from Bulgaria interested in social work and excited by the growing activism coming from the UK's disabled community.

There are numerous factors that make the type of work I offer appealing to these young women who are prepared to travel so far - and, in many cases, keep stoical in the face of the abuse and outright racism that coming to the UK sadly entails.

Still, the reality is that there remains the chance of a higher standard of living here, with a number of my PAs pointing out that to work in the UK care industry means better earnings, while the home-grown 'natives' balk at pay that scarcely scrapes above national minimum wage. Many of my own PAs also feel they gain insight and particular skills from working in the UK, despite evidence of exploitation within the more traditional agency work structures.

These young women can be emotionally scarred, with stories that remain shocking, if familiar. Foreign workers being lured into modern slavery traps - passports 'kept safe', meaning withheld; 'guaranteed accommodation' turning out to be...

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The same digital infrastructure used by Israel's military in Gaza has been quietly coded into the design of Gaza's proposed post-war administration, Byline Times can reveal. Poised to profit are the very American tech giants backing President Donald Trump, who plans to send US troops to Israel to monitor the new Gaza ceasefire.

A Byline Times review of the leaked Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA) framework, procurement guidance documents, and FEC filings shows that its digital-governance backbone - covering identity, border control, aid logistics and donor coordination - matches the Oracle-Palantir technology 'stack' of digital technologies currently used in Israel's defence network. They further suggest that the GITA board structure is planned to allow this stack an easy entry-point into reconstruction contracts.

The plan was drafted by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), whose biggest financial backer is Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and executive chairman of tech giant Oracle Corporation. Since 2021, the institute received donations or pledges of at least £257 million from the Larry Ellison Foundation, an amount that dwarfs all other donors combined.

The funding has enabled TBI to expand across Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, embedding consultants in government ministries.

TBI insists that Ellison's money is "ring-fenced" for social and climate programmes. Yet Ellison's dominance in TBI's revenue stream makes such separation largely theoretical.

Ellison himself is a Trump supporter and Republican Party megadonor, who has given tens of millions of dollars to the party and embedded Oracle across the American federal government following extensive lobbying. Oracle is also poised to oversee TikTok's US algorithm after the completion of its US sale, under Trump's deal with China.

Ellison has close ties to fellow pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, through a little-known partnership between Oracle and Palantir, the surveillance and defence-analytics firm co-founded by Thiel.

Both companies have directly supported Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip. But the same companies are also in prime position to profit from the technocratic management of Gaza after the war.

The leaked draft first obtained by Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz outlines a sweeping post-war system: a unified civil registry and digital identity platform; centralised border and customs management; data-driven humanitarian logistics for aid and reconstruction; and an interoperable digital-governance backbone connecting donor agencies and local authorities.

These mirror the operational domains of the Palantir-Oracle technology stack.

The Ellison-Thiel Technological Axis

In April 2024 Oracle and Palantir announced a deep "strategic partnership" to deliver "mission-critical AI solutions to governments and businesses." It was a relationship nearly a decade in the making - back in 2017 Ellison had held exploratory talks with Peter Thiel about acquiring Palantir outright.

By July, Palantir and Oracle jointly unveiled deployment guides showing its Foundry and AI platforms running on Oracle's sovereign, government and "air-gapped" clouds, tailored for national security clients. In June 2025 Oracle launched its Defence Ecosystem including "Palantir for Builders."

Palantir has long become a cornerstone of Western military data infrastructure, and in January 2024 the company had announced its own "strategic partnership with Israel's Ministry of Defense" to supply operational software for the Gaza campaign. Palantir technology has also been instrumental in Israel Defence Force (IDF) AI targeting in Gaza.

Ellison's Oracle had made parallel moves. Through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's (OCI) Jerusalem Region launched in 2021 - a sovereign data centre built "to ser...