Tribune

Jeremy Corbyn: Nuclear Disarmament Now

2025-08-06T04:26:22Z

On the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima Day, Jeremy Corbyn continues the call for nuclear disarmament and world peace in a speech at the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. We publish his remarks, edited for length and clarity, here.

The aftermath of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Americans at the end of World War II. (Credit: Keystone via Getty Images.)

Fujio Torikoshi was 14 years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, 80 years ago today. He was eating breakfast with his mother when he heard a rumbling and stepped outside into the front garden. All he could see was a black dot in the sky, when it suddenly burst outwards to fill the sky with a blinding white light. He recalls his last memory of being lifted off the ground by a hot gust of wind. He was more than two kilometres away from the blast, but he could still feel a burning sensation all over his body. That’s when he passed out on his front porch.

Eventually, he woke up in hospital. He was told by the doctors he wouldn’t live past 20. He lived to be 86 years old and died in 2018. In one of his last interviews, he said: ‘All I can do is pray — earnestly, relentlessly — for world peace.’

This week, we remember every single person who was killed by an indefensible act of inhumanity, both on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We also remember the hundreds of thousands of survivors like Fujio — known as the hibakusha. They are the ones who endured the horror of what was left behind. They are the ones who have been campaigning to ensure the horrors of Hiroshima never happen again.

Me and the CND

When I was at school, we had a book club where we could choose a book for class. We chose Brighter Than A Thousand Suns, which told the story of Hiroshima. It had a huge impact on me. Before that book, I didn’t know what a nuclear explosion was. I didn’t know the destruction it could cause. It was that book that taught me that nuclear weapons have one purpose and one purpose only: to cause death and destruction on a colossal scale.

When I was 14, in the 1960s, I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), after following and being frightened by the Cuban Missile Crisis. My first ever demonstration of any sort was with CND, and I have been a campaigner against nuclear weapons ever since. It was at CND where I met Bruce Kent, a leading figure in CND in the 1980s. It was Bruce who said, ‘I want to be optimistic because I don’t think man is intrinsically violent.’ He inspired in us a belief that peace was not just preferable, but possible.

I’ve gotten a lot of flak over the years for daring to say that I would not wish to use a nuclear bomb on human beings. For having the audacity to say that killing millions of people would make the world a safer place. For those who are in any doubt over my position: I’m not interested in bombs. I’m interested in peace.

We also should not forget the impacts of nuclear testing, which began at the end of the Second World War. These programs caused widespread radioactive contamination and generational harm to the people of the Pacific region. It is estimated that more than two million people have died from cancer as a result of these nuclear test explosions.

Joseph Rotblat was a Polish physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, before becoming a fierce critic of nuclear weaponry. I want to share two things he said. One, ‘There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war.’ Two, ‘Above all remember your humanity.’

Nuclear Disarmament

I grew up in a period where people were fearful of the possibility of global nuclear war. There was a realisation of just how dangerous nuclear weapons are.

A great achievement was the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, signed in 1970. The five declared nuclear weapons states — Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the USA, and China — agreed to ensure that there was no proliferation of their weaponry and to take steps towards their own eventual nuclear disarmament.

Since then, several countries have taken steps that have lessened nuclear tensions in certain places. The most dramatic example was when post-apartheid South Africa, led by President Mandela, announced that it would no longer develop any nuclear weapons and would completely disarm.

That in turn brought about a nuclear weapons-free continent of Africa, also known as the ‘Pelindaba Treaty’, which came into force on 15 July 2009. Those events were followed by nuclear weapons-free zones for the whole of Latin America and for central Asia.

These treaties showed that it is possible to get countries to agree in mutual co-operation, mutual disarmament, and mutual peace. We must continue to push for a renewed adherence to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which bans the development, production, possession, use, or threat of use of nuclear weapons.

The Only Path Forward Is Peace

In 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the General Assembly and announced that the symbolic Doomsday Clock — which measures humanity’s proximity to self-destruction — had moved to 90 seconds to midnight. (It has since moved to 89 seconds to midnight.) Declaring that humanity was perilously close to catastrophe, Guterres named three perilous challenges: extreme poverty, an accelerating climate crisis, and nuclear war.

Today, the global stockpile of nuclear weapons is accelerating as international relations are deteriorating. After a period of gradual decline that followed the end of the Cold War, the number of operational nuclear weapons has risen again; there are now said to be more than 12,000 warheads around the world. Ninety percent of these weapons are owned by Russia and the United States alone.

It’s been more than three years since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. I want to take a moment to reflect on the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been lost in this ghastly war.

I also want to pay tribute to the thousands of peace campaigners in Russia who opposed this invasion, and have continued to call for a ceasefire. I also want to thank those global figures who have called for de-escalation and diplomacy. That includes the UN Secretary-General, global leaders such as President Lula, President Ramaphosa, and, of course, the late Pope Francis. Three years on, and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, I renew these calls for peace.

The longer the fighting goes on, the more lives will be lost and the greater risk of nuclear escalation. Those who fuel escalation must know that in the event of a nuclear war, nobody wins.

Meanwhile, we have all watched with absolute horror at what is happening in Gaza. Over the past 21 months, human beings have endured a level of horror and inhumanity that should haunt us forever. Entire families wiped out. Limbs strewn across the street. Mothers screaming for their children torn to pieces. Doctors performing amputations without anaesthesia. Home by home, hospital by hospital, generation by generation.

We have not been witnessing a war. We have been witnessing a genocide, livestreamed before the entire world. We must remember that our governments could have stopped this genocide. Instead, they allowed Israel to act with impunity, igniting a much wider war between Israel, the United States, and Iran — and putting the world on the brink of a nuclear conflict in the process.

I echo the call made by the UN Secretary-General: ‘There is no military solution. The only path forward is diplomacy. The only hope is peace.’

Arms Race vs A Better World

The world spends $100 billion every year on nuclear weapons — imagine if we spent that money on renewable energy, social housing, public healthcare, schools, and lifting children out of poverty instead? Think of what we could achieve if the money that was spent on items that can only destroy the planet was instead directed to resources that protected it and all life on earth.

Security is not the ability to threaten and destroy your neighbour. Real security is getting on with your neighbour. It’s when our children can be confident of a habitable future. It’s when human beings are not displaced by poverty, destitution, and war. And it’s when everybody has enough resources to live a happy and healthy life. As Albert Einstein said, ‘In the shadow of the atomic bomb it has become even more apparent that all men are, indeed, brothers.’

So today, we must remember those who were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We mourn the lives that were so needlessly lost. And we must listen to the hibakusha when they say: ‘humans must survive — in peace and prosperity.’ We will only honour their words — as well as the memory of those who perished on 6 August 1945 — when we rid this planet of nuclear weapons once and for all. We are all human beings on one planet. Surely that is enough to try and bring about a world of peace.

The Church’s Suffering in Gaza

2025-08-05T04:58:34Z

As Israel continues its genocidal rampage, including the recent bombing of a church in Gaza City, the late Pope Francis’s legacy on Palestine stands in ever starker contrast to the Christians of the British cabinet.

Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Archbishop Michel Sabbah blesses members of the congregation while he leads the Sunday mass prayers at the Latin Holy Family Church in Gaza City, 2007. (Credit: Abid Katib via Getty Images.)

On 17 July 2025, three people were killed by an Israeli air strike on the Holy Family Church in Gaza City. Many others were injured, including Father Gabriel Romanelli, the parish priest. Since the start of the genocide, the Holy Family Church has been a refuge for Palestinians — even more so after Israel bombed the nearby Church of Saint Porphyrius, a Greek Orthodox parish, where Israeli forces killed and injured dozens of Palestinians. By December 2023, it was reported that up to 650 had taken shelter at the Holy Family Church, which is the only Catholic Church in Gaza.

It was during that same December that two parishioners, Nahida Khalil Anton and Samar Kamal Anton, were killed by an Israeli sniper. Nahida, who was Samar’s mother, walked out into the church’s courtyard when an Israeli sniper took her life. Attempting to save her mother, Samar was instantly killed. Seven other parishioners, including a sixteen-year-old boy, were wounded as they attempted to rescue the mother and daughter. Sister Nabila, a local nun, witnessed the catastrophe but was powerless to help. It was as if the Israelis were using the dead Palestinians to lure others out.

A few weeks later, at midnight mass in Westminster Cathedral in London, I bitterly wept as Cardinal Vincent Nichols delivered his homily in the early hours of Christmas Day. He described Bethlehem as a ‘silent city’, where all public celebrations had been cancelled. I thought of Kelly Latimore’s icon — Christ in the Rubble — depicting the Holy Family buried under broken buildings.

The parish in Gaza had a powerful advocate in the late Pope Francis. In his Angelus prayer after Nahida and Samar’s killing, Francis condemned the attack as an act of terrorism. Israel was intransigent, with some invoking the antisemitic canard of ‘blood libel’, the medieval myth that Jews deliberately murdered Christians, despite the irrefutable evidence that the Israeli army had, in fact, killed two Christian Palestinians and injured many more.

Throughout the genocide, Francis regularly rang Father Romanelli, even when he was hospitalised with pneumonia, to speak with parishioners. His calls gave them hope, and it sent a message to Israel that the church was under his protection. It is troubling, then, that Pope Francis’s successor, Pope Leo XIV, was said to have jettisoned Francis’s regular contact with the church following his election as pontiff. Even in the wake of the 17 July bombing, Leo XIV was reluctant to name Israel as perpetrators, taking several days to identify them. His timidity only empowered Israeli war criminals, and it now raises questions as to whether Israel saw an opportunity with the latest successor to Saint Peter.

It also reinforced how extraordinary Francis’s rupture with Israel was. By describing Israel’s actions as terrorism, he helped to dispel the myth that Israel is a liberal democracy, and instead, he revealed the heart of what Israel truly is: a violent, supremacist, and genocidal state. It challenged the nonsensical term of ‘Christian Zionist’, too. Palestine is the home of the oldest Christian community in the world, one that stretches back to the time of the Nazarene Himself. The fact that it’s a community on the brink of extinction should trouble the conscience of every Christian in the world.

And then there are the Christians of the British cabinet, like David Lammy, who once pompously declared that ‘his faith has been with [him] my whole life and has never left.’ Perhaps it left him in October 2023. As Foreign Secretary, he has excused war crime after war crime, deluding the majority of Labour’s obsequious backbench MPs with his honeyed words, all the while selling weapons to Israel in their genocide.

Lammy’s cabinet colleague, Jonathan Reynolds MP, chair of ‘Christians on the Left’, is responsible for the Department for Business and Trade — the ministry that oversees arms export licenses, including the components of F-35 fighter jets that Israel uses to bomb Palestinians. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, and a Roman Catholic, who once said that ‘being Catholic has always been about a wider sense of social justice, social action.’ Like Reynolds, she has no problem with Israel (or, indeed, her own government’s complicity in) destroying the ancestral homeland of her faith and the people who’ve lived there for generations. Tepid education policies must come first.

Bridging church and state, there’s the disgraced Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who refused to meet with the Reverend Doctor Munther Isaac, an outspoken Palestinian pastor in 2024. The reverend’s crime? He had planned to share a platform with Jeremy Corbyn MP. Welby apologised, but his initial reaction revealed something: the principal leader of a major Christian denomination could not stand in solidarity with a fellow Christian, one from the land where the faith emerged two thousand years ago, no less.

Of course, religious hypocrisy within the British establishment is nothing new, but in light of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, a destruction of which Christians have not been exempt, any politician who speaks of a Christian faith must be ruthlessly scrutinised if their support lays with Israel rather than with Palestine. They’re reminiscent of the hypocrites described in Matthew 6:5, ‘for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others’.

By describing Israel’s actions as terrorism, Francis manifested real solidarity — one that challenged the genocidal state of Israel and stood up for the oppressed people of Palestine. It was an inspiration to people regardless of their faith, because he stood in such contrast with the unctuous cowards of London and Washington DC. The Church’s inability to do that now would not just be its own shame but an extension of the shared failure of all institutions to adequately confront Israel’s crimes. For Christian Palestinians, they felt that Francis never forgot them. We must continue to draw on his example in every way we can.

Reclaiming the People’s War

2025-08-04T02:30:14Z

Though it has recently become a byword for reactionary nostalgia, the Second World War was in certain crucial ways an extension of the ‘Red Decade’ of the 1930s. A modern anti-fascist Left must reclaim this inheritance — and avoid its shortcomings.

The 'Artists Ambulance' on display at Palace Yard, London, before being sent to the civil war in Spain. (Photo by Reg Speller / Fox Photos / Getty Images)

In the crisis-ridden autumn of 1936, the communist poet and critic Edgell Rickword wrote an editorial for the magazine Left Review:

The sincerity of our protests at fascist brutalities can only be measured by the strength of our efforts to secure the right of the colonial peoples to govern themselves. And, as practical people, let us remember that the forces of ‘law and order’ kept in training on the bodies of the subject races, provide a rod in a pickle for any reactionary government to use on the backs of a militant democracy at home.

Rickword’s comments expressed a position shared by communist, anti-fascist, and anti-colonial thinkers in Britain and worldwide: that the struggles for socialism and against fascism and colonialism were inextricably linked. No victory over fascism would be complete without an end to colonial rule, and the persistence of colonial violence would always weaken the prospects for socialism in the metropole.

The kinship between European colonialism and fascism, and the hypocrisy of those states that claimed to oppose fascism while waging war on workers at home and abroad, would be repeatedly stressed by figures on the Left. One such was another Left Review contributor, the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand, who wrote that Indians ‘saw the ugly face of Fascism in our own country’ long before European intellectuals ranged themselves against it, since it was ‘British Imperialism which perfected the method of the concentration camp, torture and bombing for police purposes’ (Anand also drew parallels between repressive colonial policing and the suppression of the 1926 General Strike).

To Rickword, Anand, and similarly committed socialists and anti-imperialists, these linkages seemed logically, morally, and politically compelling. But while the crises of the 1930s proved fertile ground for leftist thought in Britain, these connections would be weakened as the ‘Red Decade’ turned into the ‘People’s War’.

Communists and Cocoa-Magnates

The time in which Rickword was writing was something of a high point for leftist intellectual culture in Britain. The growth of fascism, and the National Government’s appeasement policies, coupled with the socially corrosive effects of the Depression, had drawn many writers, artists, and thinkers into more radical circles, and especially into the orbit of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This was the era of the Popular or People’s Front, a new approach to anti-fascism endorsed by the Third International (Comintern) in 1935, which placed considerable value on cultural and intellectual work.

Ultimately a measure aimed at reducing the threat posed by fascism to the Soviet Union, the new line depended on a revised analysis of what fascism was. Communist thinking had generally understood fascism, since its emergence, as connected to capitalist development and crisis, and therefore as related to imperialism in the sense Lenin had theorised it: a phase of capitalist development characterised by inter-imperial rivalry and new forms of accumulation. In the early 1930s, Moscow interpreted fascism as a morbid symptom of capitalism’s terminal crisis, and communists were bidden to work alone — against both fascists and social democrats — to hasten its demise.

After 1933, however, with Nazism in power, fascism ascendant elsewhere, and workers’ movements weakened, predictions of capitalism’s imminent collapse were clearly overly optimistic — and the approach to fascism predicated on them was obviously out of step with reality. The Comintern recast fascism as an attack by the most reactionary capitalists on the masses and adopted a new approach, based on what Eric Hobsbawm described as a ‘set of concentric circles of unity’: the workers’ movement would form the core of a broad ‘front’ encompassing all groups who opposed fascism.

Communists were now instructed to form alliances with socialists, social democrats, and even sympathetic conservatives, and to defend existing democratic institutions. Special emphasis was placed on intellectual and cultural work as a means of unifying people around national and popular cultures that formed the battleground and common language of anti-fascism. George Orwell memorably denounced the entire enterprise as a ‘nauseous spectacle of bishops, Communists, cocoa-magnates, publishers, duchesses and Labour MPs marching arm in arm to the tune of “Rule Britannia”’.

Beneath the inclusive rhetoric, as Orwell no doubt recognised, was Soviet realpolitik. The aim was the defence of the Soviet Union, now set on entrenching ‘socialism in one country’ rather than world revolution, against the threat posed by Nazi Germany. Despite the pragmatism at its core, however, there were undoubtedly political and cultural effects in Britain, and what — at least at the time — could be considered successes, despite the small numerical size of the Communist Party.

At home, anti-fascist action focused on Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). While support for the BUF had declined by 1936, Mosley’s politics had become increasingly antisemitic, and BUF activity centred on agitation in Jewish areas of London and other major cities. The Battle of Cable Street is remembered as a victory for united action led by the Stepney-based Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism, as well as the Stepney branch of the Communist Party.

But this street-level struggle drew people from a wide range of backgrounds, including trade unions and the rank-and-file of the Labour Party, despite the Labour leadership discouraging its members from engaging in street confrontation. The anti-fascist ‘crusade’ of the Spanish Civil War, which drew in British writers, intellectuals, and artists, as well as thousands of working-class volunteers, and which saw an unprecedented number of public solidarity campaigns, is perhaps the most significant monument of the Popular Front moment.

For Culture Against Fascism

But it is in the field of culture that the outlines — and ambiguities — of the Popular Front are most visible. Writers and artists seeking ways to mobilise in opposition to fascism formed organisations such as the Artists’ International Association (which held several important anti-fascist exhibitions in the mid-1930s) and the British Section of the Writers’ International (which published Left Review as a forum for discussion of literature and politics). While Left Review was supported by the Communist Party, it attracted a range of contributors from a broader spectrum of the Left. In keeping with the populist, non-sectarian ethos of the Popular Front, its cultural output characteristically focused on ‘the people’ both as subject and audience.

The most distinctive aspect of Popular Front culture in Britain are the various creative experiments in radical historiography and the practice of ‘history from below’, exemplified in A. L. Morton’s A People’s History of England (1938), which aimed to narrate a history both of and for the people. Large-scale pageants of British (or, more often, English) history aimed to construct a sense of popular national history as a radical tradition leading towards the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s, and ultimately beyond that towards a horizon of (English) communism. The writer Ralph Fox — one of the highest-profile British communists to die fighting for the Spanish Republic — described such projects as an attempt to forge ‘a spiritual community with the dead’ of past radical struggles.

But these narratives tended to gloss over questions of class and empire. To put it another way, their immediate target was fascism understood in a fairly narrow way as a threat to national culture — and both fascism and culture were disentangled from their connections to global influences of empire and capitalist transformation. The people, as an idea, was necessarily both expansive and limited.

This limitation was echoed in international contexts. The Second Congress of the International Association of Writers in Defence of Culture held in Spain in the summer of 1937 featured a high-profile cast of delegates in the midst of the Civil War. But its rallying slogan ‘For Culture Against Fascism’ also reflected a defensive emphasis on ‘culture’ — understood as the bourgeois culture of European nations — and on notions of progress and democracy that supposedly inhered in that culture. Rickword was among the delegates, but the linkages between fascism, capitalism, and imperialism that he had insisted on in Left Review now seemed, at best, inconvenient, as attention turned to defending what was deemed valuable within capitalist societies.

Despite the Comintern’s claim that fascism was a class strategy, Popular Front culture in practice often subsumed class into ‘people’ and people into ‘nation state’. The willingness to defend national cultures and political traditions in the capitalist countries, and the sidelining of more radical analyses and demands, alienated anti-colonial thinkers and some communists. In 1938 George Padmore, for instance, decried the intellectual contortions necessary to accept the Comintern’s demand that communists defend the ‘good peace-loving’ imperial powers (Britain, France, the USA) against the bad ones (Germany, Italy, Japan).

Dad’s Red Army

In the summer of 1939, with war now an inevitability, British communists hoped that the war would be a war on two fronts, against both fascism abroad and the ruling class at home: a war for social revolution and not merely for the defence of imperial power. This possible line was closed off by Moscow, when it announced that it regarded the war as imperialist on both sides and signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, before another about-turn prompted by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 recast the war as a people’s war against fascism.

To an extent, the Second World War provided a context in which some of the ambitions of the Popular Front might be realised. The progressive, relatively egalitarian popular culture of wartime, ‘a kind of zenith of mass society’, as Raphael Samuel called it, owed something to Popular Front anti-fascism. Indeed, the idea of a ‘people’s war’, so central to much popular memory, emerged directly from the experience of 1930s anti-fascism.

The term originated with Tom Wintringham, an ex-communist and former Left Review editor, who had commanded the British battalion of the International Brigades in Spain. Wintringham is best known for his central role in the establishment of the Home Guard, but he imagined the war as a conflict through which the entire country could transform and remake itself along socialist lines through armed struggle. His immediate model for such a ‘people’s army’ was the International Brigades, but he also insisted that ‘arming the people’ was both revolutionary and ‘completely part of the tradition of the British’.

Recalling Popular Front historical narratives and their evocation of a ‘spiritual community of the dead’, Wintringham linked his vision of the people’s army to historical precedents, particularly the Leveller movement within Cromwell’s New Model Army, and what Wintringham took to be its emphasis on debate and democracy. Such an army of active commitment, he thought, would be inherently anti-fascist.

Many communists, ex-communists, and other leftists participated in education initiatives within the armed forces, which aimed to develop an understanding of the purpose of the war and the kind of society that was being fought for — often in ways that drew consternation and disapproval from the army establishment. There were even bold attempts at democratising the army. Such initiatives, which sound a little like attempts to foster the ‘militant democracy’ Rickword envisaged, are often credited with helping to shape the emergent social democratic consensus and to deliver the Labour landslide at the 1945 election.

Imperialism Deferred

But as in the 1930s, more far-reaching questions of fascism’s relationship to capitalism and imperial rule were deferred in the interests of securing victory — and then closed off as the Cold War took hold. In his 1942 Letters on India, written as a series of letters to a fictional British worker to emphasise their shared stakes in the anti-fascist struggle, Anand wrote:

If the present war is being fought to create a new world order based on democracy and freedom, if the Allies aim to liberate the 90 million peoples of Poland and Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, etc., at present writhing under the oppression of Hitler, then let them begin, as a token of their earnestness, by liberating the 400 million of India held under British rule.

At a moment when the British government had refused to promise India independence in exchange for support in the war, Anand asked a crucial question: for which people is the war being fought?

In a sense, this is a question that haunts all attempts to root anti-fascism in the terrain of national cultures. Looking back, we can see in the British Popular Front an effort to find a popular and national language that would draw a variety of people into the struggle against fascism — and a concept of people’s war as a war for social revolution.

But we can also see how focusing on fascism as an immediate threat to European nations and their cultures allowed for questions of its relationship to capitalism and imperialism to go unanswered (and indeed largely unasked). Today, new and revived variants of fascism inevitably recall its twentieth-century manifestations. In responding to them, we might consider some of the roads not travelled by the 1930s left.

Mosley’s Shadow

2025-08-01T05:01:00Z

Recent clampdowns on protest under Starmer and Sunak extend a long-running war on the Left waged by the British state. Meanwhile, far-right forms of extremism are scandalously deemed low-risk ‘cultural nationalism’.

BUF leader Oswald Mosley at a propaganda march in London, 7 May 1939. Key members of the British establishment took several years to acknowledge Mosley’s far-right politics as extremist. (Photo credit: Imagno / Getty Images)

In late 2008, Dr Peter Harbour, a retired physicist, found out that he’d been listed by the police as a ‘domestic extremist’. Harbour had recently been involved in a campaign to save an Oxford lake. Energy company RWE npower wanted to use the lake for fly ash disposal.

The Save Radley Lakes group marched and petitioned, and in some cases obstructed work to cut trees down. None of its members were violent. Still, npower took advantage of New Labour’s changes to the Protection from Harassment Act — a law intended to protect women from stalkers — and filed for an injunction that banned Harbour and others from the area. It was backed up with the false claim that Harbour had driven his car at security staff.

Harbour discovered his listing after this ban was defeated. The website of the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU), a police body that liaised with private companies to protect them from protest, cited the injunction as a measure that could be taken against ‘domestic extremists’, and named Harbour and others as its object. Harbour wrote to the head of NETCU to have his name removed. He had no criminal record, no arrests, no other significant history of political activism. He was refused.

The term ‘domestic extremism’ entered police vocabulary in the early 2000s. It was never defined clearly. In 2013’s Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police, journalists Paul Lewis and Rob Evans write that domestic extremists were ‘those who wanted to “prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy”, often doing so “outside of the normal democratic process”’. In practice, the label could be applied ‘to anyone police wanted to keep an eye on’.

The first targets were animal rights campaigners, some of whom did engage in behaviour more of us would recognise as threatening or violent, including arson attacks. When that movement declined, though, the units created to fight it didn’t shrink. Instead, they expanded their remit, applying the label to a growing number of generally progressive groups. Writing at the time, George Monbiot argued that this expansion sounded like the police saying: ‘Keep funding us, or civilisation collapses.’

What the police might not have planned was that the growing use of the term made it more controversial, and so more newsworthy. The ‘domestic extremism timeline’ constructed by the police monitoring organisation Netpol cites several articles published over the following years — first those in The Guardian confirming the existence of a database of surveilled ‘domestic extremists’, many without criminal records; then those revealing the listing of various peaceful activists. Among them was Green Party peer Jenny Jones. Jones was monitored even while she sat on the committee that scrutinised the Met at the London Assembly. By 2013, the database held 9,000 names.

Growing coverage of the ‘domestic extremist’ label coincided with the unmasking of the first known spy cops. When news broke that the Stephen Lawrence family campaign had been one of the infiltrated groups, Home Secretary Theresa May announced the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI). The next time Netpol entered a Freedom of Information Act request about the ‘domestic extremism’ database, in April 2014, the number of names it contained had fallen to less than 3,000. There had been a new definition of domestic extremism published and, clearly, a large-scale recalibration of records. Officers in the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit, into which NETCU had by then been collapsed, were later found to have shredded ‘a large number of documents’ that May.

After more attempts to redefine ‘domestic extremism’ throughout the 2010s, the Home Office confirmed it had dropped its use entirely in 2019. But non-violent environmentalist groups continued to turn up in materials about ‘extreme’ ideologies. In January 2020, The Guardian reported that Extinction Rebellion (XR) had appeared in a list published by Counter-Terrorism Policing South East. Officials told the paper it was a mistake and confined to that locality. The following week, it turned out that XR and Greenpeace, along with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, were in fact included on another counterterrorism document, this one used for Prevent training across England.

The anti-protest laws passed since 2021 have been justified as responses to the XR and Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the years immediately prior. What’s clear from this history is that they actually drew from a deeper well of state paranoia about — and hostility to — progressive movements, one that had long used accusations of extremity to legitimise the scale of its response. Academics at Bristol University have since found that environmental protesters in Britain face one of the highest rates of arrest worldwide. And just as worrying as this overreach is what it implies: that other, more serious, public safety risks are being underestimated.

‘Genuine if Wrong-Headed Patriotism’

The Guardian’s undercover policing database lists five officers known to have been deployed into a total of three far-right groups. All five of the deployments took place post-1990, despite the undercover Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) originating in 1968. Of those five, one officer engaged in a level of infiltration labelled ‘comparatively superficial’, and two were SDS officers who could not be ‘fully deployed’ before the unit was shut down in 2008. Infiltrations of left-wing groups, by contrast, were long and deep enough to produce close friendships, committed relationships, and, in some cases, children.

In the decade since its establishment, the UCPI has only completed two of five tranches of hearings. It’s a pace many feel is wilfully slow. But it has, at least, provided some insight into the covert surveillance approach to the far right in earlier decades — which is to say it’s exposed its absence. The one undercover officer who made it into the National Front (NF), in fact, did so in his capacity as a spy in the Socialist Workers’ Party, which then directed him to infiltrate the former.

In evidence to the inquiry in 2023, Detective Inspector Angus McIntosh, who was deputy head of the SDS from 1976 to 1979, said that a ‘high-level policy decision’ had been made not to infiltrate the NF. ‘It was a very violent section,’ he said, ‘and it was often involved in crime, so to put an undercover officer into that would have very, very difficult.’ Barry Moss, who was head of the SDS in 1980, also said the police were concerned about what officers would have had to do to prove their loyalty. Geoffrey Craft, another former SDS lead, said informants in the NF made infiltration unnecessary.

The ‘threat of criminality’ excuse is odd, given the willingness of other known spy cops to engage in and even instigate (allegedly) criminal activity. Some are also sceptical about these explanations because state permissiveness towards the far right predates 1968. Writing on this subject for Verso in 2019, Connor Woodman, a former researcher at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, points to a comparable permissiveness towards British fascism among the security forces in the early 1930s, in part because of a confluence of values.

In one text Woodman cites — 2009’s The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 — author Christopher Andrew writes that agent runner Maxwell Knight’s early reports on the British Union of Fascists (BUF) ‘were somewhat distorted by his belief in the BUF’s genuine, if wrong-headed, patriotism’. Knight refused for some time, Andrews continues, to accept that the BUF was being funded by Mussolini. Even when that was confirmed, the home secretary, John Gilmour, retained faith that the group’s leader Oswald Mosley was ‘a staunch patriot who posed no threat to national security’. Gilmour’s successor, John Simon, refused to intercept Mosley’s communications, even after Mosley married his second wife ‘in a private ceremony attended by Hitler in Goebbels’ drawing room’.

The state line on fascism became more critical as war approached and broke out, culminating in the internment of Mosley and around 750 of his supporters in 1940 (along with tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe). Until then, Woodman writes, much of the concern with far-right activity came from the fact that it fed a larger anti-fascist contingent under the banner of the Communist Party. A similarly skewed focus is evident in the police report, referenced by Paul Heron in Declassified, that followed the murder of 24-year-old Altab Ali in 1978: ‘While this death cannot be attributed to a racially motivated attack, it was exploited by the radical left to further exacerbate an already declining situation within the Bengali community.’

This kind of context is useful in understanding the police’s failure to prepare for last summer’s far-right riots. The two public order risk assessments that preceded those days both classed the threat of violent ‘cultural nationalist’ disorder as ‘low’, despite disturbances around hotels housing asylum seekers earlier in 2024, and on Armistice Day the previous year. A follow-up report by the police inspectorate also argued that a national mobilisation plan was implemented too late, over a week after the initial unrest in Southport.

Again, it’s hard not to contrast this presumption of peacefulness with the over-attentiveness to the pro-Palestine movement. The language of the spring 2024 risk assessment is enlightening: ‘It is highly likely strategic protest will continue to protect British culture and traditional values, with a focus on protecting monument[s] and memorials from Pro-Palestinian marches.’ Even factoring in the hundreds of arrests eventually made, the police and the rioters seem to have been in a kind of agreement that the real extremists were elsewhere.

Establishment Extremism

While the debate over ‘domestic extremism’ continued in the 2010s, David Cameron and Theresa May were struggling to define ‘extremism’ well enough to back up Cameron’s proposed anti-extremism legislation. Their failure meant that when Michael Gove introduced a new definition in spring 2024, he was replacing the version contained in the 2011 Prevent guidance, which centred on ‘opposition to fundamental British values’.

Gove’s new definition considered itself ‘more precise’. It refers instead to the ‘promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance’ that aims to ‘interfere’ with others’ ‘rights and freedoms’ or ‘undermine parliamentary democracy’. Organisations would be assessed by the government against those criteria, Gove explained. The government would refuse to communicate with any that qualified. No appeal process was mentioned.

Gove was criticised, including by human rights organisations and the Muslim and pro-Palestine groups who saw themselves — and were in some cases named — as the new definition’s targets; in the run-up to the announcement, Gove had been censuring ceasefire marchers for ‘lending [extremists] credence’. Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of state threat legislation, said the plans were labelling people extremist by ‘ministerial decree’. Netpol called it a return to familiar territory, since, ‘over the years, the label of “extremist” has repeatedly been deployed to justify restrictions on protests’.

To some on the Left, the periodic re-emergence of this debate is probably evidence of its uselessness. Extremity is subjective. To give governments the power to set the limits of political acceptability is to forget that they are political entities. A defined extremism can only be a political tool; those who oppose the people in power would be naive not to anticipate its use.

But there’s another way of looking at it, which is useful if you believe, as I do, that some behaviours do warrant the descriptor. This way emphasises the extremities of the mainstream. ‘Extreme’ does not necessarily mean ‘rare’. Actions with drastic implications for people’s survival are commonplace in our politics. You don’t have to travel across to Gaza, or forward in time to climate collapse, to see it, although the evidence is there too, under the rubble and the floodwater. Any bus ride through a British city today will show you people whose survival has been made precarious by ideological decisions. There are people going hungry, people sleeping on the street in the cold. Around 31 percent of children in Britain now live in poverty. A system that considers them collateral — not only believes so but makes them collateral — will never be able to make sober judgements about what is and is not extreme.

There are alternatives. In late 2023, I took a friend to a demonstration organised by the Jewish anti-occupation group Na’amod. This friend is not a regular protester or petition-signer, and as we walked to Parliament Square from the Tube, I made a joke about me radicalising him. ‘I think the point of this is actually de-radicalising,’ he said. I’ve thought a lot about that conversation since.

Only Sanctions Will Stop the Genocide

2025-07-30T18:00:32Z

After nearly two years of genocide, Keir Starmer has floated the possibility of Palestinian statehood as a bargaining chip with an out-of-control Israeli state — but the only language Netanyahu’s government understands is crippling sanctions and global isolation.

Keir Starmer speaks during an event at The Fusilier Museum in Bury in Manchester, June, 2024. (Credit: Cameron Smith via Getty Images.)

Yesterday, Keir Starmer announced that ‘unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza’, the British government will recognise the state of Palestine by September this year. While Starmer will claim that this half-commitment represents major action taken to address the horrors being faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in reality this announcement will do nothing to end Israel’s genocide or British complicity in its war crimes.

Facing increasing pressure from the public horrified by the scenes of Palestinian children being starved to death by Israel, Starmer has been forced into this position. Last week, on 48-hours’ notice, the Palestine Solidarity Campagin (PSC) mobilised over 10,000 people to Downing Street for an emergency protest, with thousands more people protesting in over 50 local actions across the country.

Together, we laid pots and pans on Starmer’s doorstep to represent the more than 1,000 Palestinians who have been killed queuing for food in the shooting galleries of the so-called ‘aid distribution centres’. Even previously silent public figures, organisations and media outlets have in recent weeks found it impossible to ignore the outpouring of disgust at Israel’s actions. And certainly, Starmer is feeling the pressure of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s nascent party, which threatens to claim hundreds of thousands of dissatisfied voters from Labour, at least in part due to his positions on Palestine.

But Starmer’s announcement promises no real action to address the scenes of forced starvation that have gripped the British public. There will be no immediate pressure on Israel to force them to allow in the aid required to end this forced starvation. There will be no end to the massacres at aid sites. The British-made F35s will continue to drop 2000-pound bombs on displaced Palestinians sheltering in tents, and the British government will continue to consider Israel an ally.

The British government currently bemoans the images of horror, but it continues to act as partner in the genocide by sustaining trade with Israel — including weapons and other munitions and by implementing limited sanctions on a few individual ministers, as though Israel’s genocide is being engineered and carried out by ‘a few bad apples’.

Last month, dozens of Palestinian civil society groups, including the Palestine New Federation of Trade Unions and the Palestinian BDS National Committee, signed a unified call to action ahead of the originally scheduled ‘High-Level International Conference on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine’. Yesterday, after conclusion of the conference, the groups reiterated their demand, stating:

This is not the time for repackaged failures. It is a long-overdue moment for concrete action: meaningful accountability, sustained international pressure, and urgent sanctions to dismantle Israel’s unlawful regime and uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people’.

This coalition has laid out, unequivocally, what is required from Britain and other states to end Israel’s genocide. That means doing everything in its power to secure an unconditional ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli military forces from Gaza, and the immediate, unrestricted provision of humanitarian assistance. It means an immediate and comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, including an end to all military cooperation. States must also cut off economic aid and cancel any cooperation or trade agreements that help sustain Israel’s occupation and apartheid regime.

The call is equally clear that sanctions must target the Israeli state as a whole, not just a handful of individuals, including measures such as expelling ambassadors, suspending all official contact, freezing assets, issuing travel bans, and pushing for Israel’s expulsion from the United Nations. Governments must back accountability efforts in international legal forums like the ICC and ICJ. And crucially, they must affirm the full rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and return — rights which cannot be replaced by a conditional or symbolic gesture of limited state recognition.

This latest announcement fails to meet any of these demands. Starmer cannot even commit to the largely symbolic gesture of recognising a Palestinian state, without using it as a bargaining chip with Israel in a futile attempt to convince them to end their genocide and kicking the can down the road to September to assess if they are meeting his, in any case inadequate, criteria. If the government is to pursue the recognition of a Palestinian state, it must be unconditional. The Palestinian people have an unalienable right to self determination and return, and the illegal occupation of their land must end immediately.

It is obvious to anyone who has followed the Israeli government’s actions and genocidal statements over the past 21 months that they have no interest in taking steps to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people. Instead, they have strengthened their blockade and starvation of Gaza, escalated murderous attacks on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and openly committed to the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It is precisely due to the impunity that has been afforded to Israel by inaction from the UK and other Western governments that they have been empowered to escalate their onslaught. How many more Palestinians need to be killed for Starmer to finally admit that Israel will not end this genocide of their own accord?

Collectively we have dragged Starmer and his government to this point. By continuing to build this mass movement we can force them to end all British complicity in Israel’s genocide.

As part of the coalition that has organised the National Demonstrations for Palestine, PSC has called a Summer of Action for Gaza. This Friday, we have also called for pots and pans protests to take place in every local community; next Saturday, we will be marching in our hundreds of thousands in London again; and on 16 August, we will be bringing supporters from across the country to RAF High Command in High Wycombe to protest our military’s complicity in Israel’s genocide. We cannot allow Starmer to claim he is taking action without doing so, and we must do everything that we can to urgently bring an end to starvation, murder, and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Britain’s Urban Working-Class Invented Metal

2025-07-29T18:31:11Z

Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath were a product of post-war Britain’s industrial heartland. But today, for Birmingham, metal, and young working-class people, those conditions could not be further away.

Ozzy Osbourne performs in Los Angeles, California, 1974. (Credit: Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images.)

In the 2020s, a cursory search about the latest hot new band which has seemingly arrived from nowhere usually uncovers a private school education or the Wikipedia entry of some parent. Ozzy Osbourne, who died on 22 July 2025 following a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease and mere weeks after Black Sabbath’s farewell concert in their native Birmingham, had an early biography that is uncommon among successful musicians in modern Britain. The self-styled Prince of Darkness, who was part of the conception of heavy metal as it became a genre, was a working-class innovator.

John Michael Osbourne was born in Aston, Birmingham, in 1948, the son of a father and mother who were both factory workers, at General Electric Company and Lucas Automotive, respectively. Growing up in relative poverty in a crowded terraced house, aged 11 the preadolescent Osbourne was repeatedly sexually abused by two boys, the emotional fallout from which led to the first of several teenage suicide attempts. Like his Black Sabbath bandmates Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, their previous work in sheet metal factories is not just biographical trivia but the key to understanding the sound they produced together, which still resonates half a century later.

At least in its early years, heavy metal was a genre of urban Britain. Black Sabbath’s most high-profile contemporaries, Deep Purple (London), Judas Priest (Birmingham), and Led Zeppelin (London), all formed in English cities under Harold Wilson’s Labour government at the height of the post-war welfare state. This was at its most stark in Black Sabbath: Iommi’s distinctive style came from losing two fingertips in a sheet metal accident. Iommi has also stated that original drummer Bill Ward — who played with the band for the first time since 2005 for their final show — would ‘pick up rhythms from the factory press’. Speaking in 2017, bassist Geezer Butler described wanting to put ‘that industrial feel’ into their music.

The working-class life of 1960s Britain was imprinted in metal’s DNA. No matter what direction Osbourne’s life may have taken him in as the decades passed — becoming, by the 2010s, a multimillionaire media figure who publicly supported Israeli apartheid, not to mention credible allegations of domestic violence — centring the innovation of metal in post-war Britain’s social democratic state should not be forgotten.

How did this happen? One explanation for this is what the late cultural critic Mark Fisher called ‘indirect funding’, meaning Britain’s post-war welfare state. Left-wing governments may not have typically funded these cultural products directly, but unemployment benefits and house prices kept low by the abundance of council housing gave individuals the space and free time in which to be creative.

By the end of the 1960s, you could reasonably expect the working-class jobs that Ozzy and his band took before their big break to pay a decent, livable wage. Sure, they would not have had much money, but it would have been more than the innings provided by a contemporary world of zero-hours contracts, gig economy labour, with unpredictable shift patterns and constant surveillance enacting a psychological as well as financial toll on employees.

The hyper-commodification of things we need to survive such as housing or water has placed a profound financial burden on working people. Instead of making strange new music — or art, or television — as they did during Britain’s post-war boom, the next generation of working-class eccentrics and would-be innovators are now spending rehearsal time working longer shifts to pay their landlord’s mortgage or contributing to the record breaking profits of energy companies.

But what now of the city that birthed Sabbath, and metal itself? After four decades of ‘unleashing the free market’, the world that Black Sabbath was born in no longer exists. The Crown, the Birmingham pub that Black Sabbath played their first ever show in, has been closed for over a decade. More than just part of the city’s music history, it is part of a wider trend — over 2,000 pubs have closed across the UK in the last five years, a rate of one a day. Music Venue Trust’s 2024 Annual Report shows similarly grim news for grassroots music venues; 40 percent of all venues operating at a loss in the last year and an average of two are closing for good every month.

There is no one reason for this. Some pubs never recovered after covid, a decade and a half without real terms wage growth for their customers as the average price of a pint of beer increases from £2.89 in 2010 to £4.83 in 2025 (significantly higher in cities) has hurt demand. Pub landlords and music venue owners have to subsidise the profits of private electricity companies just like the rest of us, paying more than double what they did a few years ago.

An individualised call to ‘support your local scene’ is insufficient, and Britain’s pubs and music venues will need to be revived by some combination of state intervention and a strategy of what Tribune’s Marcus Barnett calls ‘Rebuilding the Red Bases’ — socialists with initiative building pubs, clubs and associations outside of market forces.

For metal, innovation still takes place, but on the margins. The idea that a band as extreme as American deathcore act Lorna Shore would be playing venues as large as London’s Alexandra Palace on their upcoming tour a decade or two ago is doubtful. Blood Incantation’s 2024 album Absolute Elsewhere finding commercial and critical success with audiences outside of metal’s often tight borders is another promising sign. But there are no breaks with the old, only extrapolations and reinterpretations of things which already exist. Here, the world of metal acts arguably acts a microcosm of broader music culture.

The ecosystem is overwhelmed by its past, skint and anxious, with no grassroots venues left for musicians to play with whatever free time they can wrest back from their employers and tech platforms; we have engineered a society that makes it nearly impossible for today’s youth to forge a musical culture in the way that Black Sabbath did nearly six decades ago. To reverse this decline, we must save the pubs, rebuild grassroots music venues, build genuinely affordable council housing, and regulate the tech companies that drain so much youth attention. No, there will never be another Ozzy Osbourne. But the least we could do is build a society that tries.

To Still Speak of Freedom

2025-07-29T20:40:24Z

Seventy years ago, the Congress of the People was broken up by apartheid police while discussing the Freedom Charter, a vision for a just society. The document remains a guide for building a free South Africa today, writes Mervyn Bennun, one of the meeting’s participants.

The Freedom Charter was notable precisely for its insistence that economic and political rights were equally important. (Photo credit: Eli Weinberg / UWC Robben Island Mayibuye Archives)

On 25 and 26 June 1955, the Congress of the People was held in Kliptown, South Africa. Proposed two years previously by Z. K. Matthews, a prominent academic, it was organised by the National Action Council. This later became known as the Congress Alliance — a coalition consisting of the South African Indian Congress, the South African Congress of Trade Unions, the Coloured People’s Congress, the South African Congress of Democrats, and the African National Congress. The Congress of the People was intended to adopt the Freedom Charter.

The Freedom Charter was summarised best by Joe Slovo who, writing in 1956, said that its essence was ‘to allow each South African to say for himself what he desires of life’. Often on small scraps of paper, proposals from people across the length and breadth of South Africa were collected by thousands of volunteers, who brought these ‘freedom demands’ into the hands of the document’s organisers, with anti-apartheid figures like Ruth First and Rusty Bernstein tasked with wading through the varied, often hyper-local or sometimes abstract, demands.

Eventually, the Freedom Charter was thrashed out. Its text commences:

We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people . . .

A future non-racial, democratic South Africa was outlined, guaranteeing equal and human rights, wealth and land redistribution, education and housing, job security, culture and peace. The document was ratified by 3,000 people in Kliptown, a neighbourhood of Soweto, over those two days in June. On the second day, the proceedings were broken up by riot police, and 156 anti-apartheid militants were arrested and faced what soon became known as the Treason Trial.

Evading the ‘Bright Buttons’

I was in Kliptown that day. With several others from Cape Town, mostly students, we drove up in my father’s car. All of us were concerned that the police would follow us and perhaps frustrate our journey; in fact, years later I learned that others from Cape Town were stopped en route and never reached the meeting. We drove straight to Kliptown, arriving after dark on 24 June. While my car was parked, somebody drove into the back of it, breaking the red cover to one tail light and making the car easily detectable with one bright white tail light.

I telephoned the friends who were putting me up, Ike and Fanny Fanaroff, to tell them I was coming. I recall Ike saying to me that I should not bring ‘the bright buttons’ with me; I did not understand what he meant at first but then realised that he was referring to the police. I was concerned by the broken tail light on the car and took all sorts of precautions to make sure that I was not being followed.

I was able to replace the broken light the next morning and went on to Kliptown. It was by far the biggest political gathering I had ever been to. We sat on benches made of planks on bricks at each end. Our small Cape Town delegation sat together, and there is a well-known photograph which includes us. One member of the group is standing looked backwards into the gathering, and that person is me.

One of our group was Benny Sacks. He was a fifth, or final, year medical student and the oldest of us. We regarded him as politically more experienced, and by tacit agreement he was our unofficial leader. To the best of my recollection, others in our group, mostly students, were Joy Maraney (now Coplan), Tony Aronstam, Hymie Rochman, Yusuf Wadee, Alf Wannenburg, and Alf’s friend Nita. Someone from the organisers asked Benny to arrange for a speaker from among us to introduce the part of the Freedom Charter dealing with education, ‘The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened!’ We were asked because some of us were identified as university students.

Benny turned to me and said that as I hadn’t addressed a meeting yet, I should be the speaker. I found a piece of paper, folded it into quarters, and made some notes. When the moment came, I went up on the platform. I had barely started when I saw the police enter at the back, running in a single file down the centre aisle of the area where the audience was seated. Those were still the days when the white constables wore khaki uniforms and pith helmets, and each policeman was carrying a rifle.

The chairperson for the session was Piet Beyleveld. He snatched my notes from me and pushed me hard, face forward, off the platform. I fell at the feet of the leading policeman as he reached the platform. I noticed that he was wide-eyed with fear — I think he was as frightened as I was.

I made my way back into the audience, but I couldn’t reach my friends and sat down in the first vacant space I saw. There was then an incident which, now when I look back on it, seems like a sentimental soap opera, but it really happened. I was seated next to an old man who said to me, ‘Is this the first time you’ve met the police?’ I nodded. ‘You’re frightened?’ I admitted I was. He said, ‘I’m from the Eastern Cape. I’ve met the police before. I’m not afraid. Give me your hands.’ He took my two hands in his, and I remember his big, black, hard working-man’s palms holding my two little soft white hands. ‘Now you’re not afraid,’ he said.

Looking back on those events seventy years ago, I must confess that I had no idea at the time that I was at an historic event. It was important, yes. And I knew the buildup and preparations and collection of demands that had gone before it. But that it was a life event for me? No, the thought never entered my mind at the time. As the years went by, my understanding grew. I became very conscious that it had been a great privilege to attend the Congress of the People. I was profoundly shaped by what happened in Kliptown.

I grew to know the text of the Freedom Charter well and even contributed an article on it to Sechaba, the ANC’s journal. The Freedom Charter was referred to shortly after it was adopted at a meeting of the Modern World Society (MWS) at the University of Cape Town where I was a student. The MWS essentially being a body to bring anti-apartheid speakers to campus. I recall a student aggressively challenging the chairperson at a meeting, demanding to know what ‘freedom’ meant. I think that the chairperson was Hymie Rochman.

Hymie replied that South Africa would be free when the principles in the Freedom Charter were realised. To me, this seemed — and still does seem — an easy, reasonable description of a free South Africa. The Freedom Charter meant more and more to me as the years went by. Writing this in April 2025, I am 89 years old. My understanding of what the Freedom Charter stands for became clearer, and its importance greater to me, as the struggle against apartheid developed.

From Freedom Demands to Constitutional Rights

Every South African should measure South Africa against the Freedom Charter. Consciousness of it should start in schools, so that every South African knows about it. The demands that went into the Freedom Charter’s drafting still have huge unmet gaps.

The scale of these has often been due to corruption and incompetence, and sometimes the incompetence has itself been corrupt because it was protected. Sometimes the gaps are due to lack of resources, sometimes due to lack of political will, and sometimes the gaps are works in progress — that this is the case fills one with hope.

Our Bill of Rights was also born out of the Freedom Charter. The freedoms of conscience, religion, thought, belief, and opinion are explicitly named and protected. Our freedom of expression is limited only by prohibitions on propaganda for war; incitement to imminent violence; advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender, or religion; and anything that constitutes incitement to cause harm.

To give effect to these rights, we have the rights to assemble, picket, and petition. We can associate, form political parties, and campaign for them. We have the right to free, fair, and regular elections. The Bill of Rights also states we have rights to housing, healthcare, food, water, social security, and education. Until these unmet rights are fulfilled, we cannot say that we are really free.

Some South Africans criticise the Freedom Charter for its political content — or lack of it — or because it does not reflect their views in some way. But they miss the point of it: political doctrine was not the issue, nor was it intended to describe utopia. It was written to set out what people wanted, as stated in the demands all South Africans were asked to write down and which were collected.

The demands were simple and clear. For example, we wanted streetlights, schools and clinics, decent homes, and water and electricity. Above all, we wanted a sense that South Africa was ours; we wanted an end to the cruelties of apartheid.

Accordingly, the poetic and simple opening words of the Freedom Charter are designed to embrace all South Africans. This ensures that the Freedom Charter is not the property of any political party. In fact, the ANC had to consider and adopt it, though it helped in the processes which led to Kliptown. It can be amended only by the same process by which the Congress of the People was convened — a process which is designed to involve all South Africans.

The Freedom Charter is a truly South African document. It is the living breath of the people. It describes what South Africa should look like, and South Africans should have no difficulty in accepting the image. This is an especially important point to remember in the context of the country’s current pressures, and those who are trying to impose their wishes on South Africa must understand that our democracy has a history which cannot be brushed aside.

The Freedom Charter was created by that history and safeguards it. We have committed ourselves to a ‘fully independent state which respects the rights and sovereignty of all nations’. We refuse to be bullied; this drives our respect for international law with regard to questions such as the genocide in Gaza and our concern that others shall have the same right to self-determination as ourselves.

It’s good to be a South African!

Whipping the Party Into Shape

2025-07-28T04:57:40Z

Labour MP Rachael Maskell and her colleagues were stripped of the whip after voting against government plans to cut Personal Independence Payments. In response, she looks to the legacy of social reformers Joseph and Seebohm Rowntree.

People take part in a protest against disability welfare cuts in London, on June, 2025. (Credit: Carl Court via Getty Images.)

In politics, things just happen. I always hope those caught in the moment make the right choices, so that good might follow. That’s the optimism I hold now.

As my three colleagues and I were unexpectedly stripped of the whip last week for voting against government plans to cut Personal Independence Payments, we have to ask: why was breaking the whip met with such a punitive response? After all, we’re hardly the first to disagree. When lives are at stake and poverty is set to rip into the pockets of the poorest — leaving 700,000 sick and disabled people worse off, including an additional 150,000 pushed into poverty — Labour values should surely cry out that this cannot be right. Ours did, joined by the wider labour movement.

Our reasoned amendment consulted with Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations and charities, and it received the support of over 138 organisations. We amplified the voice of those who were not being heard. The harsh response of suspension has stripped us of the right to represent those who look to us. It is totalitarian in nature, not reflective of the purpose of our party.

It has left sick and disabled people confused and concerned. It has left them poorer. It has left me searching. So I zoom out. I look beyond this moment and reflect.

Over the next year, my city of York is focused on poverty. This year marks 100 years since the death of social industrialist Joseph Rowntree, and next year brings the 125th anniversary of Seebohm Rowntree’s landmark report Poverty, A Study of Town Life, which inspired some of the greatest social reforms in history involving: social housing, pensions, access to the arts and exercise, healthcare for all workers, and, above all, wages that kept poverty from the door.

Today, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation stands among the fiercest critics of the current Universal Credit Bill, advocating that the welfare system should have an ‘Essentials Guarantee’ built into it, to prevent cuts from driving the vulnerable into destitution and providing a level of security for all those who need it.

As I watched His Last Report at York Theatre Royal on Saturday night — a play based on Seebohm’s life — I was reminded of the suffering poverty inflicts, and how directing resources to the right place can free people from its grip. Not just to lift people above the poverty line, but to break the cycle for future generations. The tragedy, drawn out in the play, was that the Great Recession led to workers being laid off, and the poverty cycle restarted once again.

In the play’s final scene, Seebohm was a broken man. He had understood poverty and committed himself to combatting it but knew it would intensify if those in power made the wrong choices. He simply tore up his report and placed it into a brazier.

As I look across my city, I know so many are hanging on by their fingertips — and for some, holding on is already proving too difficult. In the Second Reading debate, I told the story of one of my constituents living with mental health challenges. He was on the edge of life. So why would I vote to make life harder? I am in Parliament to protect people from poverty, to act with compassion and kindness. I will therefore take the lashings from the whip if it means I can keep people safe.

Just look at our country now. Ask yourself: is this progress? We can’t afford for political orthodoxy to keep breaking our nation while others profit from the pain. We as MPs cannot walk through the voting lobbies, applauded by the elite, while others are crushed.

Politics is in existential crisis. It sustains a broken system, a reckless economy, and a violent world. It suppresses those the Labour Party was founded to protect and represent. The obvious danger is that without a plural and broad progressive voice inside Labour and the House of Commons, people will look to other actors, such as Reform, currently casting themselves as against a political elite whilst courting the Trump-playbook of slashing public spending and with it, our key public services.

As Seebohm Rowntree’s report burned in the brazier, the fire within me was lit again. The burning injustices of our time must determine how we speak and how we vote. I had the opportunity to choose whether a light would shine or be snuffed out. I chose light.

Surely this sorry episode must now whip our party back into rediscovering its purpose.

Party Poetics

2025-07-29T20:40:42Z

The new poetry collection by London writer Caleb Femi is a modern epic based on the institution of the ‘shoobs’ (or house party) and its under-explored experimental potential.

(Photo by Caleb Femi)

Review of The Wickedest by Caleb Femi (MCD, 2025)

Think of all the best parties you’ve ever been to, jumbled together and winding into one long night. Imagine running through that dreamed-up congregation hour by hour. What did it smell like? What did it feel like? Who made it possible? What, if anything, made it political? Do this, and you might have something like the framework for The Wickedest, British Nigerian writer Caleb Femi’s second poetry collection. The Wickedest is a fizzing dissection of a different kind of party politics, not concerned with SW1 policymakers, but rather with the political function of a ‘community institution’ less often taken seriously: the house party.

Named after the sprawling, semi-fictionalised event it narrates, The Wickedest is a collection that asks what it takes for a community to come together on a Friday night, and what is at stake when it does. There is less interest in the general concept of letting one’s hair down and more in the specific contours of the shoobs, an underground house party described as ‘vital within working-class communities’, particularly the black working-class community Femi comes from. Femi sketches out the politics that shape that community and — by extension — its parties. (It’s worth keeping in mind that in 2025, the house party itself is increasingly under threat, with nightlife in general subject to increasing marketisation, regulation, and even extinction.)

Throughout, Femi explicitly references a parallel-tense community history — most obviously via Form 696, the notorious Blair-era grime-quashing police initiative — alongside diverse glances at a host of material pressures, from direct debits to sleepless nights and otherwise ‘sticky days’ churning on. Yet what seems to matter more to him are the intersections between those material pressures and the resistant moves of bodies breathing, kissing, grinding.

Much of the power of The Wickedest comes from these intersections, often emerging in darkly unassuming moments, as in the uneasy realisation that ‘amapiano drum patterns sound like yassified gunshots’ and ‘what scares you makes you groove’. The mother’s heartbeat becomes the original bassline; to hear ‘ice-cream van melodies’ is to be ‘eating sound’. The collection threads together a material mythology in which a pounded front door is ‘made from centuries of our skin’; yet, for all its profundity, that mythology is robust. One poem seems to roll its own eyes: ‘[A]re you carrying soil in your Jacquemus handbag? Heirloom seeds in the heel of your sneakers?’ The Wickedest, like all the best parties, is deeply funny, too.

Parties are a conscious salve after the kind of working, waking week that is ‘greedy, fat off your misery’. Yet to position them as a pure escape from the grubby politics of the day would be reductive, a mistake this collection never makes. Instead, it captures the inseparability of day from night, and the intricate ways the body adapts to move differently through both. Femi writes that ‘dancing is your body falling from a skyscraper and suddenly learning flight’. That image is one that epitomises much of The Wickedest’s central charge, capturing the multiple things that bodies can be, even when battered by deprivation or injustice.

Bringing together poetry with photography, architectural diagrams, and screenshots, the collection can at times seem laboured, and its experiments might be read by some as gimmicks. It would be more productive, however, to read The Wickedest as a collection that dives into things unapologetically, casting out every limb in every direction, as any good kitchen dancer can. It mirrors the shoobs itself: sweaty and overinvolved.

Perhaps in tribute to the forms Femi repurposes and crafts, at the core of The Wickedest is love. This is no sentimental or naive gesture, but rather a recognition of that which most often sustains people through hardship: the meaning and solidarity we derive from other people. From school-disco shoulder touches to a couple ‘lipsing’, and late-life memories of catching a lover’s face on the stairs, it is full of intimacies, keeping in mind the fullness of ‘social politics’ and everything that term might involve.

It is not all singing and dancing. Sucker punches are delivered throughout. An imagined poetry consumer is winded: ‘reader — don’t you like us like this?’ The ‘this’ in question is ‘smelling delightful’, occupying a ‘secret city of flair’. The suggestion is that a presumed white and middle-class poetry readership might prefer to encounter a different version of Femi’s black, working-class visions.

This, for Femi, is not hypothetical, but born out of the reception to his own work. Poor, his 2020 book — a hybrid collection exploring the imaginative life of young black men in and around the North Peckham Estate — won the elite Forward Prize for best first collection and was met with broadsheet acclaim. Though Poor is a creative and formally disruptive collection, the testimony it provides inescapably feeds the appetites of those hungry for poetically rendered struggle. The Wickedest — whose sleek, minimalist cover evokes hedonistic indulgence with a dripping acid house smiley — has, however, received markedly less attention than its predecessor. This is strange, given that Femi’s style seems only to have grown in precision and confident flair.

That lack of acclaim seems to chime with a realisation that loud testimony might not be the only way. In the collection’s final lines, we find a plea:

[W]hen you leave here, do not
speak of what you saw tonight.
If the outsiders ask,
tell them you saw nothing,
no poetryor anything worth calling [art] . . .

It is a complicated ending, pointing unapologetically to the politics of gentrification, contemporary publishing, and much more. The Wickedest, in other words, not only doesn’t need the acclaim of white, middle-class tourists — it doesn’t particularly want it, either.

This isn’t to settle on exclusionism (no good party has too strict a guest list), but rather to acknowledge that the culture evoked by this collection is best left in the capable hands of those who created it. Perhaps it is best that those final lines are held in mind by largely ‘outsider’ reviewers who might too easily think that The Wickedest craves approval. In reality, our invitation was for one night only.The others will be back next week, dancing through what life throws at them, regardless.

Extremely Hot Worker Summer

2025-07-23T01:02:22Z

As Britain undergoes its third heatwave of 2025, and Labour’s partially welcome Employment Rights Bill nears legality, there has been a glaring lack of attention to worker safety in hot weather. The government needs to act now.

Quarrymen work in their vests during a heatwave in Abercarn, Monmouthshire, 23 July 1936. (Credit: Richards/Fox Photos via Getty Images.)

Labour’s flagship Employment Rights Bill is currently in the final stage of its legislative journey in the House of Lords. Peers are making a final round of amendments to the bill — hailed by the Government as the ‘biggest improvement in workers’ rights for a generation’ — in the wake of a sweltering heatwave that has scorched much of Europe.

With temperatures recently soaring past 40 °C in countries like Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, and the UK nearing 35 °C (just off the back of the second hottest June on record), many parts of the continent have issued serious weather alerts and taken measures like closing schools or winding down nuclear power operations. This extreme event — fuelled by a persistent ‘heat dome’ over the continent — is testing the resilience of public health systems, infrastructure, and adaptation strategies; all while we are warned that such conditions are set to become increasingly frequent under climate breakdown.

While it has been watered-down considerably from what many initially hoped, the Employment Rights Bill represents a rare positive intervention from this government. But, as temperatures rise, there remains a glaring gap in the legislation: provisions to ensure worker safety in very hot weather.

Recent research at the Autonomy Institute has found that, in the coming decades, millions of workers in the UK will be exposed to dangerous working temperatures. By the end of the 2020s, we found that almost two-thirds of UK workers could find themselves working in extreme heatwaves, with temperatures above 35 °C. By 2050, extreme summer heatwaves could leave 27.1 million workers exposed to dangerous temperatures.

Our findings underscore the desperate need for new legislation to ensure workers are not forced to work in unsafe conditions. We’ve set out possible measures in our recent report, Extreme Heat. Most urgent is the introduction of a statutory maximum working temperature above which work is legally categorised as unsafe. Guidance from the Trade Union Congress has suggested that normal, acceptable working temperatures range between 16 °C and 24 °C. It suggests a maximum working temperature of 27 °C be adopted for outdoor strenuous work, and 30 °C for all other work.

At the same time, employers should have a legal obligation to protect outdoor workers from the worst effects of the heat, and the hottest parts of the day. This means providing shelter from the sun and drinking water. It might also mean pausing work at the hottest times of day.

The risks of working in extreme heat are varied and become progressively severe at higher temperatures. Even in the high 20 degrees centigrade, research shows an increased risk of workplace accidents, as well as a drop in productivity, resulting from poor concentration and tiredness. What can appear like small things — such as sweaty palms — can make it more likely that workers will slip or drop things. But as temperatures become extreme we begin to see more direct risks to health: an increased risk of heatstroke or collapse, confusion and ultimately a risk of severe organ damage or even fatality.

Unsurprisingly, outdoor workers — especially construction workers and cleaners — are the most exposed to extreme heat. By 2040, more than one million of these workers are likely to be working in temperatures above 27 °C throughout the summer, not only during extreme weather events. This marks the establishment of a dangerous ‘new normal’ which will inevitably lead to deaths if measures are not taken.

While the UK continues to get hotter, our buildings remain poorly suited for these hot summers. Because of this, in addition to those directly exposed to the heat outdoors, millions of office workers are also vulnerable to the hot weather. Current legislation suggests temperatures inside buildings should be ‘reasonable’, but reasonable working temperatures are not themselves defined. Defining a legal maximum working temperature would incentivise employers to properly equip their buildings for hot weather, meanwhile extending existing domestic retrofit programmes to workplaces would help to reduce reliance on air conditioning systems to achieve this.

Defining safe working temperatures is not a particularly radical suggestion: in the UK we already have defined minimum working temperatures. While these only exist as ‘guidance’, employers are nonetheless far more likely to intervene in very cold weather than in hot weather. Similarly, defined maximum temperatures already exist elsewhere in the world. In Spain, for instance, 27°C is defined as the maximum temperature for sedentary work and 25°C for light physical work.

While the guidance approach which has been adopted for minimum working temperatures means employers do sometimes intervene, establishing a legal definition of maximum working temperatures is likely to be far more effective. It would hand trade unions the tools they need to intervene in unsafe working environments before workers are seriously harmed by unsafe conditions.

The Employment Rights Bill is not yet law, and there is still time for the Government to make a decisive move to upgrade the UK’s climate resilience and protect millions of workers. Indeed, in the past few weeks the government has confirmed that it is adding new provisions for parental bereavement leave to the legislation. With climate breakdown already here — and worse to come in the following decades — there’s no excuse to avoid decisive action.

Into the Abyss

2025-07-21T02:14:43Z

In the landscape of contemporary European politics, our rulers seem increasingly intent on walking us towards catastrophe — an ‘eyes wide shut’ approach that badly misremembers the cautionary tales of the twentieth century.

(Illustration by Ricardo Santos)

‘I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.’ While Donald Trump often reached for sleepy metaphors to make hay of his opponent’s incognition, the question of whether Joe Biden was really awake in the dwindling days of his presidency is surely a matter of medical judgement. Many of the rulers presently walking us into all manner of disasters, though, are decades removed from the onset of actual senility. Might they nevertheless be afflicted by somnambulance?

In one register, the metaphor is a pedestrian, headline-littering one. It was Christopher Clark’s 2012 study, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, which elevated the trope. For readers like Angela Merkel, Clark’s titular metaphor became a watchword. ‘Like sleepwalkers, the politicians of the time blundered into a terrible situation. Today… we need to ask ourselves if we have really learned from history or not,’ she pronounced at Davos in 2018. ‘We cannot be sleepwalkers,’ intoned Francois Hollande, a sentiment subsequently echoed by his successor, Emmanuel Macron.

Some of Clark’s critics took the title rather too literally. ‘The Society Against Historical Revisionism’ staged a pyjama-clad protest against the book in Munich soon after its publication. Rosa Luxemburg Foundation posters ‘cartoonised’ its central idea. One German historian (among many) did national-pathological violence to its argument: the Great War was the result of ‘unconscious sleepwalking’, Clark was said to have said. Such parodies were belied by the book’s opening pages, which made clear that top decision-makers in all the belligerent states had ‘walked towards danger in watchful, calculated steps’.

A more generative intervention in the metaphor wars — spotlighted by Perry Anderson in Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War, his new book on the historiography of the First World War — came from Paul Schroeder, the late conservative American scholar of international politics. Dissatisfied with the sleepwalking trope, he suggested instead a metaphor of American coinage: elites had invited disaster in 1914 with their eyes wide shut. Schroeder, per Anderson, thought Europe’s statesmen had

behaved in a way familiar to everyone in daily life: acting with eyes wide open and steadily fixed on a goal in highly purposive style, alert to the reaction of others insofar as they might affect that goal, but with eyes firmly closed to the broader consequences of such action for the wider community and general system to which it might belong.

Prefacing The Sleepwalkers, Clark suggested that the post–Cold War present, defined by a ‘complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers’, bore comparison to Europe in 1914. Another parallel might be added: the hermetic exclusion of popular forces from the arenas in which paths to catastrophe are paved (such that Clark’s commanding study of how the continent went to war was legitimately top-down, necessarily focusing solely on elite thinking and decision-making). Probing what drives our rulers in their — our — march towards disaster remains a depressingly contemporary task. Are they knowing or unknowing, awake or asleep, rational calculators or self-defeating schizophrenics — or all of the above?

Liberalism Reloaded

The embrace of The Sleepwalkers by some Western European leaders came against the backdrop of rising tensions with Russia, culminating in the latter’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Its impact has stretched into this decade. Speaking privately with journalists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reached for the book to give imprimatur to his caution in the months following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Clark himself gave an interview to The Guardian from Berlin on the back of such reports. His intervention included a valuable two-pronged corrective which showed how the European moment was not analogous to that of a century or so earlier. On the one hand, with regard to how this new invasion had occurred, Vladimir Putin was evidently the sole immediate agent, rendering the situation devoid of 1914’s multipolar complexity and multivalent culpability. On the other, the appeasement analogies so beloved of hawks across Western capitals were bunk, for Putin was clearly no Hitler.

What about the pertinence of the somnambulance metaphor for the return of tank-and-artillery warfare to the continent? Before Russia’s ‘special military operation’ to the east, Clark looked with approval on the book’s warm reception among sections of the European elite, since they had ‘tended to use its arguments, along with the term “sleepwalkers”, as a means of arguing for caution and circumspection in international relations’. But now, in Germany at least, the sleepwalker trope had become too successful. Rather than felling the barriers to a Fourth Reich by expunging the country’s residual war guilt, as critics had professed to fear, the book helped to foster an excess of restraint. ‘I don’t think there is any risk now of sleepwalking,’ Clark said. ‘Now everyone is wide awake because Putin has woken us all up.’

If generalised, would this not entail dispensing with prudence and its metaphors altogether at an hour of maximum need? Never mind that the Americans laid the ground for conflict by knowingly crossing the hard red lines of the Russian elite; their blitheness — if not blindness — in the face of escalatory risks once war had broken out hardly suggested that the risk of sleepwalking had disappeared. Last September, the then-CIA director Bill Burns told an audience in London that ‘[T]here was a moment in the fall of 2022 when I think there was a genuine risk of potential use of tactical nuclear weapons…. I never thought we should be unnecessarily intimidated by that.’ In virtually the same breath, he added that nobody should take the risks of escalation lightly.

Consider, too, Biden’s insistence, as American tanks poured into Ukraine, that there was ‘no offensive threat to Russia’. Sleepwalking? Perhaps, perhaps not. Something approximating Schroeder’s ‘eyes wide shut’ would be closer to the mark. If Burns and his peers in the American national security apparatus were indeed wide awake while pondering the prospect of nuclear escalation unperturbed, are we meant to be reassured? Back in Europe, liberal cheerleading for German rearmament — on familiar ‘preventive’ pretexts — just as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party creeps closer to power, likewise hardly suggests an outbreak of wide-awakeness.

In Disputing Disaster, Perry Anderson undertakes a rare genuine peer critique, sizing up his differences with Clark. Foremost among these is a claim that the effect of contingency’s exalted role in The Sleepwalkers ‘is to occlude the logic of empire’. In Anderson’s view, Clark sticks ‘too closely to the actions of individuals, and the train of events which ensued from them’, and so risks getting lost in the thickets of the moment, wooed by the ‘illusion of immediacy’.

In the historiographical field at hand, the disagreement of consequence is over the Great War’s inevitability. Clark finds an emphasis on contingency ‘hugely inspiring’, hinting that disaster might have been avoided. Anderson is unmoved, assured that a conflagration was preprogrammed. Yet, when boiled down, the two great historians are not wildly far apart methodologically. For Anderson, there is a freedom to act within historically conditioned structures, while for Clark short-range decisions and immediate layers of causation incarnate ‘structural features and path dependencies of various kinds’.

In the wake of 24 February 2022, we have been smothered in the West by a cynical insistence on the primacy of immediacy. If this was an illusion, it was a wilful one. All roads lead to — and from — Putin’s decision for war. Before Trump’s return, at least, any suggestion otherwise was verboten; any hint to the contrary akin to treachery. In the most pathetic proximate example, any reference to longer-term causes or shared responsibility in creating the conditions for war was ruled incompatible with membership of Keir Starmer’s parliamentary Labour Party.

In this context (which walks and talks rather like chauvinist wagon-circling, anticipating a new century of great power rivalry), insisting on the why rather than merely the how of the precipitants of war takes on a renewed importance. With Ukraine now likely to be bounced into settling on far worse terms than might have been possible three years ago, the much-maligned projection of international relations theorist John Mearsheimer is worth recalling: ‘The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.’ The Taiwanese surely stand to glean more from such warnings — reflecting on the bleak Ukrainian path from Bucharest to the Oval Office — than can be offered by the liberal public sport of Putin demonology.

Peace Through Strength

In Clark’s reckoning, ‘remote and categorial causes’ — among them nationalism, finance, and imperialism — can only ‘be made to carry real explanatory weight if they can be seen to have shaped the decisions that… made war break out’. Anderson’s retort is roughly that decision-makers are often unaware of forces governing the conditions in which they decide. He approves of the historian Keith Wilson’s judgement that there was ultimately bound to be war in Europe because ‘no Great Power, no regime, no body of ministers, was prepared to curb its imperial inclinations, tendencies or pretensions’.

This points to a crucial dimension of the character of imperialism and the logic of empire as causal factors. They bridge the why and the how of war, uniting the remote with the immediate and the structural with the contingent. In one sense, then, Clark was right to suggest — in a recent review of Disputing Disaster for the London Review of Books — that it was a mistake ‘to think of “structures” as hard and unyielding and events as soft and malleable’, and to point out that the inverse can pertain. Yet when it comes to war and peace, the hardness of events is often precisely a function of their structural lineaments. Ideologies of empire and the strategic frames of reference derived from them are not necessarily remote; they can take on immediate causal force.

Take the spectre of American war with Iran. In June 2019, a year after unilateral US withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the military had been ‘cocked and loaded’ for a major strike on the country, which the Pentagon anticipated would kill around 150 people. Trump called it off at the last minute, reportedly talked down by Tucker Carlson. In recent weeks, the US president has declared on social media that if leaders in Tehran do not agree to a deal, ‘there will be bombing… the likes of which they have never seen before’. Simultaneously, American B-2 warplanes have been relocated to Diego Garcia, poised to strike in West Asia. What drives this toying with a war which could make Iraq and Afghanistan look like minor inconveniences? Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ maxim aside, the aggressive posture towards Iran is underpinned by the same strategic conception — in which American and Israeli interests are reflexively understood to be indistinguishable — that has governed the US approach in the region for decades.

Washington’s strategy in the Middle East remains, as Anderson argued almost two decades ago, unable to be formulated ‘according to a rational calculus of national interest’. Imperialism, then, does indeed help to explain fanatical US backing for Israel, support for its genocide in Gaza, and belligerence toward its enemies — but not when understood, as so often on the Left, as a remote, automatic force, a black-box category requiring no further explanation. Rather, we have here American decision-makers following, with eyes wide open, an internally coherent (if particular and distorted) logic of empire, but with eyes firmly closed to the broader consequences: blowback and self-defeat, distraction and overstretch, perhaps even disaster. Recall Schroeder: eyes wide shut.

Actually Existing Left Liberals?

In a 2021 book of essays, Clark suggested that we begin to apply ‘to the task of avoiding war the long-term pragmatic reasoning we associate with “strategy”’. The abolition of war, he concurred with Pope Francis, remains ‘the ultimate and most deeply worthy goal of human beings’. In and amongst the scholarly stakes of the Clark–Anderson exchange there lies a question of some political import: namely what kind of relationship is possible between actually existing left liberals and socialists.

While many among the former are just as revulsed by genocide, warmongering, and ecological breakdown as their more left-wing counterparts, they tend to stop short of the anti-systemic solutions insisted upon by the latter. We surely already possess a common recognition that our rulers are walking us into catastrophe. That might be extended into a shared understanding: that the sleepiness of elites is rooted in the senility of the structures they bear. Only then, by subordinating those structures to the rationalising force of the popular will, might we produce rulers whose eyes are truly wide open.

The Labour Suspensions Are Abnormal and Immoral

2025-07-18T13:33:34Z

In suspending four MPs this week for 'persistent breaches of party discipline', the Labour government sank to new lows of incompetence and infirmity. In reality, the rebel MPs were guilty of nothing more than being too right, too soon.

Rachael Maskell MP during a debate o welfare reform in the House of Commons, June 2025. (Credit: House of Commons, Flickr.)

Between 1968 and 2024, not a single Labour MP had the whip withdrawn for voting against their own party. In the past year alone, that number has risen to eleven. After suspending seven MPs in July 2024 for voting to abolish the two-child benefit cap, Labour confirmed this week the suspension of four more: Neil Duncan-Jordan, Chris Hinchliff, Brian Leishman, and Rachael Maskell.

Though Labour made no official statement justifying the move, anonymous party sources briefed the press that the suspensions were for ‘persistent breaches of party discipline’ and ‘using their platform as Labour MPs to slag off the government’. In less diplomatic terms, sources said it was for ‘persistent knobheadry’.

More accurately, their crime was opposing and voting against cuts to Winter Fuel Payments and Personal Independence Payments. Duncan-Jordan and Maskell, in particular, were vociferous critics of the welfare cuts, which threaten to drive an additional 100,000 pensioners and 250,000 disabled people into poverty. Leishman and Hinchliff committed further sins: Leishman by opposing the closure of the Grangemouth refinery in his constituency, and Hinchliff by challenging government planning legislation on environmental grounds.

What makes these suspensions so remarkable is not only the stark departure from parliamentary norms — utilising expulsion as the default mode of party management — but the substance of the dissent itself. The Winter Fuel Payments cut was deeply unpopular and contributed to Labour’s drubbing in the May local elections, prompting a partial U-turn later that month. Faced with public opposition and a growing backbench rebellion, proposed cuts to Personal Independence Payments were similarly dropped. Just last week, Keir Starmer described the reversal as a ‘common sense’ decision after listening to the ‘concerns’ of MPs and campaigners.

The ‘persistent rebels’ have rebelled against policies that are deeply harmful, against public opinion, and were absent from Labour’s manifesto, making them not only morally indefensible but also politically disastrous — especially with Labour’s own voters — helping bring about what pollster John Curtice noted is ‘the worst start of any new prime minister, Labour or Conservative’. And on both major welfare issues, after recognising the political damage being done, the party ultimately retreated, at least in part. A wiser government might have shown gratitude to MPs who spotted the danger early and urged a change of course, rather than punishing them for the betrayal of being right too soon.

Following last year’s suspensions over the two-child cap vote, I wrote that the Starmer government, elected on a historically low turnout, had a paper-thin mandate and no popular constituency. I argued that this left it insecure and paranoid about potential challenges to its authority. What is now increasingly clear is that, as the popularity of Starmer and the government he leads craters, those despotic impulses are only intensifying.

Rather than reflect on why it is that, just a year on from a historic landslide, Labour is polling in the low twenties, with Starmer more unpopular than any previous PM at this stage, the party leadership’s instinct is to blame and punish any perceived treachery. Elected on a vague promise of change and a concrete pledge of roaring economic growth, it has delivered neither. In response to this failure, it has refocused on financial deregulation, rearmament, public spending cuts, and small boat crossings. Accordingly, its public support is sinking further, paving the way for fresh rebellions, likely to be met with yet more expulsions.

Labour MPs who turned a blind eye to the first wave of suspensions must now be questioning the value of tolerating an authoritarian campaign to crush dissent against a government with a 12 percent approval rating and no vision for reversing its decline — if not out of principle, then at least out of self-preservation.

Against this backdrop of widening purges, it is grimly amusing that Starmer’s acolytes are already blaming Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s mooted new party for selfishly threatening to split the left vote. (Polling for the hypothetical, still-unlaunched party has it drawing level with Labour.) After telling left-wing voters, members, and MPs to leave — and then expelling those who stayed — Labour’s leadership shows a staggering lack of self-reflection. They are right that splitting the left risks ushering in a Reform government. What they fail to see is that keeping Starmer in place all but guarantees it.

Is Banning Left Protest the New Normal?

2025-07-18T08:51:05Z

A few weeks before Palestine Action was proscribed in Britain, anti-fascist French organisation Jeune Garde suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Macron government. Is Europe’s extreme centre trying to eradicate left activism?

Emmanuel Macron welcomes Keir Starmer during a meeting on security issues in Europe at the Elysée Palace, February, 2025. (Credit: Tom Nicholson via Getty Images.)

Since its inception in 2018, Jeune Garde (Young Guard) has been France’s most prominent anti-fascist youth organisation. However, the group may not exist for much longer. In June 2025, the French government issued a decree dissolving the group and declaring it illegal. This decision, presented as a measure to protect public order, has ignited fierce debate in France. It follows similar moves across other European nations such as Germany, Hungary, and the UK, where activist groups have been banned and criminalised for their activities in a way that many feel is disproportionate and anti-democratic.

Jeune Garde was founded in Lyon in 2018, following a rise in far-right street violence in the city. The operation mainly consists of young working-class leftists, has divisions in the French cities of Paris, Strasbourg, Lille, and Montpellier, and operates according to a militant and confrontational ethos. Affiliates are often masked and dressed in black garb bearing the ‘three arrows’ symbol familiar to many leftists since its use by German social democrats in the 1930s. The organisation’s slogan — ‘Face a l’extrême droite: riposte immediate!’ (‘Against the far right: immediate response!’) — defines what its supporters stand for: open confrontation against France’s far right.

While such rhetoric is not always backed up by violence, Jeune Garde is well known for its street fights with far-right groups. Activists train in combat sports and conduct street patrols where they seek out fascist activists, disrupt meetings, and conceal racist graffiti. The group has shared videos of such altercations on social media, which have drawn criticism and led to French newspapers framing Jeune Garde as a far-left militia.

In July 2024, eight members were arrested for assaulting a 15-year-old who was connected to the Jewish Defence League, an ultra right-wing Zionist organisation. According to court filings, the teenager was beaten up and forced to chant ‘viva Palestine’. Jeune Garde, however, claims that the confrontation was verbal, not physical, and has accused the authorities of exaggeration and bias.

The French Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, nonetheless alleges that Jeune Garde has participated in multiple violent incidents over the years, mostly involving disrupting far-right gatherings, and has taken a hard line on this behaviour. On June 12th, Retailleau — a member of the conservative government led by President Macron — proposed to dissolve Jeune Garde and Lyon Populaire, a far-right group founded in 2019. He claimed that the state ‘cannot normalise violence, no matter who it comes from’, and that ‘those who claim to fight fascism with fascist means must be held to account’. The Council of Ministers has since approved the proposal, citing the ongoing court case relating to the June 2024 incident.

The dissolution of Jeune Garde came about as a result of a law introduced in 1936, which enables the French government to ban ‘private militias and armed groups that disturb public order’. According to the decree, the anti-fascist organisation ‘promotes a culture of physical confrontation, trains its members in hand-to-hand combat and incites hatred against opponents’.

The ban raises questions about proportionality and the selective application of state power. Jeune Garde operates publicly, its leaders are openly known, and the group holds open demonstrations (one of its founders, Raphaël Arnault, is an elected member of parliament with La France Insoumise). The scale and nature of Jeune Garde’s actions are also vastly different to that of France’s far-right extremists, who have committed murders and plotted terrorist attacks. Jeune Garde targets ideological opponents, not civilians or marginalised communities.

Jeune Garde’s leadership has argued that the use of an anti-militia law to abolish a public movement without clear evidence of lethal violence is a political manoeuvre. Arnault has publicly confirmed that the group will appeal the decision, stating in an interview: ‘If Bruno Retailleau thinks he can silence anti-fascists through bureaucratic repression, he clearly doesn’t understand our history or determination.’ Arnault has been a well-known figure on the French left since his early twenties, and is the face of a younger, more militant generation. His 2024 election campaign emphasised his work with Jeune Garde, and linked the movement to broader struggles against the far-right, racism and islamophobia.

Multiple political parties in France have denounced the dissolution, including the Greens and communist and socialist parties. Critics have emphasised that the actions of Jeune Garde must be viewed in the context of a persistent and rapidly growing far-right extremist movement in France, and Jeune Garde claims that the state is approaching this threat with increasing passivity.

The Human Rights League (LDH) and Amnesty International France have condemned the group’s ban. LDH noted that banning a political organisation — even a radical one — should always be a last resort, not a first reaction; the 1936 law was historically used against fascist paramilitaries, and only very rarely applied to loosely organised activist collectives. On the other hand, supporters of the ban argue that it is a question of methods, not ideology. ‘Violence on the street is unacceptable, whether it’s from the far right or the far left,’ a senior official at the Ministry of the Interior told Le Monde, ‘We are defending the Republic, not taking sides.’

The dissolution comes at a moment of political instability following recent escalations in Gaza and a growing wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in France, which have been met with brutal police violence. Against this backdrop, the future of Jeune Garde is uncertain. If the group loses its appeal at the high court, a precedent will have been established, and activists across France will likely feel the impact. Regardless, the French government’s treatment of the group thus far embodies a growing tendency among governments across Europe to lean towards the right and turn away from liberal democracy. As the far-right movement in France gathers strength, the government’s decision to ban its most prominent anti-fascist youth organisation may ultimately come to haunt them.

What Next for Palestine Action?

2025-07-18T15:38:51Z

Since the government’s proscription of Palestine Action earlier this month, dozens of protestors have been arrested for expressing support for the group. Will their upcoming High Court case be a victory for genuine free speech or unbending authoritarianism?

Protester demonstrates outside the High Court as Palestine Action challenges proscription on July, 2025 in London, England. (Credit: Dan Kitwood via Getty Images.)

Since Palestine Action (PA) was proscribed by the British government earlier this month, a series of protests have highlighted the injustice of that decision. In a democracy, we expect public opinion to prevail over — and shape — government policy. In Britain, 55 percent of people oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, a conflict only 15 percent of us support. Nearly half the population believes that Israel’s actions amount to genocide. Still, we supply weapons to Israel, including components for that country’s F-35 jets, a policy recently upheld by the High Court as lawful.

On 4 July, there were 29 arrests of campaigners holding placards that declared — in identical wording — their opposition to genocide and support for PA. One of those arrested was Sue Parfitt, an 83-year-old priest. Those held were then charged under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which, among other things, prohibits campaigners from ‘display[ing] an article’ that indicates their support for a proscribed group. The maximum sentence is six months in prison.

Further arrests under Section 13 were made the following weekend, as 42 people were held in London, 13 in Cardiff, 16 in Manchester, and one in Leeds. On this occasion, protestors were more eager to test the boundaries of what constitutes support under the Act: in Scotland, one campaigner was arrested for wearing a t-shirt which read, ‘Genocide in Palestine. Time to take action’, with the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Action’ in a larger-sized font.

The next PA court case is due to be heard in the High Court next week. Those who support the organisation have good reason to believe they can win — either in the High Court or at a subsequent hearing.

One reason for optimism is that senior judges have associated themselves with free speech in recent decades. Under John Major’s government, and the liberal senior judiciary at that time (Lords Bingham, Hoffman, Lord Justice Brooke), a series of decisions showed respect for free speech, which is the ‘trump card which always wins’. After Brexit was passed, attempts were made to protect the rights established in the European Convention on Human Rights by relabelling the right to a fair trial and free speech as fundamental principles of our common law. Although that move has not been sustained, it was a genuine matter of consideration in the mid-2010s. More recently, several judges have associated themselves with the push to protect racist, transphobic, and far-right forms of expression. But this requires the courts to say that all speech should be free, and it is hard to sustain that claim without also protecting PA and other forms of pro-Palestinian speech.

Furthermore, at the two hearings which have so far considered PA’s proscription, judges have conceded that the decision to ban PA crosses lines previously uncrossed. At the first round of court proceedings, in the High Court on 4 July, Mr Justice Chamberlain accepted that PA had not participated in ‘violence against any person or endanger[ed] life or create[d] a risk to health or safety’. The problem for PA, Chamberlain pointed out, was that the legislation permitting the Home Secretary to proscribe organisations as terrorists goes far beyond the popular usage of the word ‘terrorist’ in ‘colloquial’ contexts. Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000, introduced by Tony Blair’s New Labour government in the aftermath of 9/11, permits ministers to ban groups who do not cause fear but merely take part in ‘serious damage to property’.

Chamberlain’s decision to refuse an injunction at the first hearing, while accepting that there might be a case for judicial review, sets up the central issue for the next hearing. Given the court’s acceptance that PA does not cause fear to anyone, is the decision to proscribe them a ‘disproportionate’ attack on their right to freedom of expression?

I have cited some reasons for optimism, but there is also a case for caution. The senior judiciary has moved to the right since Lady Hale stood down as President of the Supreme Court in 2020. Under Lord Reed, the judges have tried to limit political challenges, and that message has been taken up enthusiastically by the High Court. There are only around 100 High Court judges, and almost all of those who hear security cases have a long history of deciding in favour of the government.

The PA litigation occurs in the context of the increasing criminalisation of environmental protestors, the jailing of people for between four and five years for blocking the M25, the denial of historic defences which used to be available to campaigners using criminal damage as form of political expression, and Labour’s Crime and Policing Bill, with its provisions to limit masking on protests, climbing on memorials, and protests near places of worship. This government hates demonstrators of all sorts, and judges have never been our allies.

When the last injunction hearing relating to PA took place at the Court of Appeal on 4 July, the judges took a hostile view of those who were likely to face criminal charges because of the PA proscription. All that will be prohibited, the judges held, is the deliberate action of criminals. ‘If the harm envisaged is to occur, the claimant or others will have deliberately chosen to express their support for a proscribed organisation.’ Should the state throw the book at protesters, in other words, they deserve it. Whatever the identity of the judges who hear the next case, they can be confident that if they decide it in favour of the government, the Court of Appeal will not overturn their decision on appeal. That said, there are appeal stages above even that Court, and routes to take the case to the House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights.

The court case is likely to involve a clash between two competing principles. One is the idea that the law should have integrity, be consistent, and protect the rights that it is supposed to guard. If those concepts are heard and engaged with, PA should win. The other perspective is that the law, as many legal academics have argued, has a sophisticated veneer and the rights of minorities are heard, but ignored. In the words of one commentator, Morton Horowitz, the law ‘creates formal equality but it promotes substantive inequality by creating a consciousness that radically separates law from politics, means from ends, processes from outcomes. By promoting procedural justice it enables the shrewd, the calculating, and the wealthy to manipulate its forms to their own advantage.’ Horowitz was portraying the law as an agent of capital, but in cases like that of PA — which are about the boundaries of state power — the courts most often protect the decisions of ministers.

Given that the state has proscribed PA by law, its members have no choice but to fight on that terrain. Whichever side wins, this will not be the end of the matter. If PA loses, as mentioned, they have the right of appeal. If the government does, it might appeal or rerun the litigation by proscribing greater authority, such as adding PA to the proscribed list through a statute rather than secondary legislation. (A model here might be the long-running refusal of the courts to accept laws preventing local government from boycotting unjust states; decisions which previous governments have accepted with singular bad grace.)

Activists would be wise to assume that the issue will not be finally resolved next week. Rather, it will be something that continues to be before the courts, in one form or another, for as long as Yvette Cooper remains Home Secretary.

The Curious Sci-Fi Beliefs of the AI Tech Elite

2025-07-18T15:45:21Z

Big Tech’s dystopian ideas about the future highlight the fundamental pessimism behind their billion-dollar businesses and peculiar lifestyles. Tom Midlane spoke with Émile P. Torres about the shortsightedness of their increasingly influential outlook.

Elon Musk speaks to delegates at the UK AI Summit at Bletchley Park, November 2023. (Credit: Marcel Grabowski via Flickr.)

It’s a basic shibboleth of the modern Left that Big Tech is deeply dystopian. In their desperation to hoover up every last drop of our data, a handful of firms have constructed a full-blown surveillance apparatus that they continue to spend billions finessing. They have built casinoified apps that have obliterated our attention spans and incentivised the spreading of misinformation at the speed of light — even allegedly helping fuel atrocities like the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

But what kind of ideas are driving these companies? While their ceaseless thirst to accumulate capital clearly plays a central role, there’s a growing sense that the more wacky beliefs of our tech elite are slowly percolating into the mainstream. In his recent New York Times interview, Palantir CEO Peter Thiel talked openly about his transhumanist beliefs and demurred when asked if the human race should endure. Meanwhile Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s recent tech billionaire satire Mountainhead featured references to lingo like p(doom) (the likelihood of AI-induced societal collapse) and decels (short for decelerationists i.e. people who think we should slow down the pace of AI due to the overwhelming risks it presents). So what do the real life titans of tech truly believe? And what kind of future are they trying to create for all of us?

My guide to this question is philosopher Émile P. Torres, a postdoctoral student at Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University and author of the book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation. Dr Torres coined the term ‘TESCREAL’ (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singulatarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism) to describe the ‘bundle’ of ‘overlapping ideologies’ that have won the hearts and minds of many of the most influential figures in the tech world by reframing them as heroic saviours of humanity.

Earlier this year Torres launched the podcast Dystopia Now with comedian Kate Willett to delve into the figures behind these belief systems. For Tribune, Tom Midlane spoke with Torres about the ironically myopic attitude of this obsession with the future, the individualism inherent to this grand philosophy, and the reason why Torres stopped believing in it.

Tom Midlane

What was the impetus behind starting your podcast? And why do you think it’s so important to talk about this set of ideas now?

Émile P. Torres

To destroy the TESCREAL movement! Okay, so that’s a bit too grandiose. But the world is full of bizarre, dangerous ideas, right? It’s full of ideologies, but we don’t waste our time talking about most of them because they’re just not that influential. They don’t have that much power. But that’s not the case with the TESCREAL bundle. Look at the US election: you had Elon Musk running DOGE, a man who some described as basically the president, and then JD Vance as well, who has extensive connections with Peter Thiel, who he described as his mentor.

Tom Midlane

Okay, let’s start with the T. What is transhumanism?

Émile P. Torres

Transhumanism goes back to the early twentieth century. It was basically eugenics on steroids, this idea that rather than just perfecting the human species or preventing us from degenerating, let’s just transcend the human species altogether. Then modern transhumanism emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

One of the main technologies that transhumanists pointed to as potentially enabling us to become posthuman or to create posthumanity was AI. If we create an AI that is superintelligent then we could delegate it the task of re-engineering humanity, because everything for transhumanists is an engineering problem. In fact, they even refer to the creation of utopia as quote unquote ‘paradise engineering’.

The idea is that the creation of AI leading to superintelligence could be a really significant event in human history.

Tom Midlane

And that’s the singularity? The S of the TESCREAL acronym?

Émile P. Torres

Right. Either this superintelligence enables us to become posthuman and then we enter into utopia as immortal beings who never experience suffering and have access to everything we want because of radical abundance, or maybe the superintelligence becomes so smart that we can’t control it. And if we can’t control it, then maybe it decides to destroy us.

Singularitarianism emerged as a cohesive doctrine in the 1990s and early 2000s. And if you fast forward to the present, those ideas that were birthed around that time are still very formative. Within the community people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will still talk about the singularity.

Tom Midlane

The first four letters of the TESCREAL acronym seem to have a lot in common. Tell us a bit about Extropianism and Cosmism, those are two that I suspect most of our readers won’t know much about — I certainly didn’t.

Émile P. Torres

Extropianism was the first organized modern transhumanist movement. It was very libertarian, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was on its official reading list. It was also very stubbornly pro-technology, so they were very accelerationist and they wanted to just build advanced technologies as quickly as possible. Although the movement itself has somewhat faded in prominence, the legacy of that movement — having established transhumanism within California tech culture — remains with us today.

Cosmism comes in an original form and then a modern form. The early version started in the latter nineteenth century, all about colonising space and bodily resurrection was a key aspect of it. Then in its modern form it was introduced and championed by Ben Goertzel [the CEO and founder of SingularityNET], who popularized the term ‘AGI’ for artificial general intelligence. So Cosmism in this modern sense is just transhumanism plus some other ideas. Goertzel said, why stop at reengineering humanity? Why not re-engineer the universe as a whole? Why not develop what he referred to as ‘scientific future magic’? Technologies that would enable us to intervene upon the fundamental fabric of space and time to re-engineer the universe as a whole in ways that we find to be desirable. So a key aspect of this, of course, is spreading beyond Earth, beyond our solar system, beyond our galaxy and so on. There are key aspects of that that were then taken up by longtermism.

Tom Midlane

It sounds like the philosophy of the settling of the West — Manifest Destiny.

Émile P. Torres

Trump himself used that term when describing space colonization.

Tom Midlane

Can you tell us a bit about the more far-flung ideas of these tech leaders, especially the ones working on AI? It seems like a lot of them have far grander and stranger ambitions than simply making money.

Émile P. Torres

I think that capitalism is a big part of the equation. People like Mark Zuckerberg, the individuals who run Google and Amazon and so on, a large part of their drive to do what they’re doing comes from their commitment to capitalist ideology. That being said, I think the tech space is really unique for exactly the reason that you were gesturing at in that there are these utopian ideologies that provide the other half of the explanatory picture. For example, if you look at why AI companies came into existence, the reason that they were founded in the first place was almost entirely because of these utopian ideologies, of which there are a number of really bizarre aspects.

Transhumanists’ ultimate goal is to explore the posthuman realm. They believe there are these modes of being, and Homo Sapiens occupies just a tiny region of this much broader territory. And so by developing what they call ‘radical enhancement technologies’, then we might be able to modify the human organism in very profound ways so that we can instantiate these posthuman modes of being.

Tom Midlane

Would that include something like Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink?

Émile P. Torres

Exactly. So that we can think thoughts that we currently cannot think — in the same way that a dog, no matter how clever or well-trained it is, it’s never going to grasp the concept of an electron. There are also transhumanists out there who are excited by the possibility of ‘expanding our sensorium’ — the collection of different senses that we have. They literally say ‘How cool would it be if we could navigate through the world with echolocation like bats or magnetoreception like homing pigeons?’ Another key aspect is life extension, which individuals like [Palantir co-founder and chairman] Peter Thiel have expressed interest in. Then there’s someone like Bryan Johnson…

Tom Midlane

He’s the founder of Kernel, who also make devices that monitor and record brain activity.

Émile P. Torres

And also a biohacker who is trying to live forever and was experimenting on himself and getting blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. He also very carefully measures the number of nighttime erections he gets. There’s also many people in the community who have signed up with cryonics companies to have their bodies or just their heads cryogenically frozen after they die. I mean, a huge number.

Tom Midlane

Wasn’t Open AI’s CEO Sam Altman one of the people who signed up for that too?

Émile P. Torres

I don’t think that Nectome, which is the company that Altman signed up for, is cryonics. I think they’re trying to develop some kind of alternative brain preservation technique so that the brain can be digitized. But it’s a similar idea.

Tom Midlane

So he thinks his brain will be uploaded to the Cloud?

Émile P. Torres

Yeah, he thinks that’ll happen within his lifetime.

Tom Midlane

So many of these Big Tech leaders seem to envisage the future as entirely digital.

Émile P. Torres

I think that there are really significant parallels between transhumanism, which is the backbone of the entire TESCREAL bundle, and Christianity. One of them is this general repugnance with the body. It’s like: ‘If we’re going to create utopia, we need to transcend our biology.’ And the ultimate way to transcend biology is not merely to merge technology with biology, organism with artefact, but to just entirely upload our minds to computers.

Tom Midlane

Tell us a bit about your links to the TESCREAL world. I don’t want to call you a TESCREAList but…

Émile P. Torres

Oh, I would definitely say I was a TESCREAList. I was a longtermist before the word longtermism was coined. I would definitely consider myself to have been a true believer in a lot of the bizarre things we were just talking about. Although I never signed up with a cryonics company… mainly because it was too expensive! But just about everybody I knew in the community wore little dog tags [to indicate that their body needed to be frozen as quickly as possible after death in the hope they could one day be reanimated].

Tom Midlane

Didn’t you work as a research assistant for Ray Kurzweil, too?

Émile P. Torres

I did, for his book The Singularity is Nearer. The title always reminded me of the sequel to Dumb and Dumber — Dumb and Dumberer.

Tom Midlane

How did you first start to become disillusioned with these beliefs? What was your exit route?

Émile P. Torres

It was the end of 2019 when I first publicly criticized longtermism. I spent three or four months at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. One might think that my faith in the TESCREAL worldview would have been reinforced due to that experience, but it was basically the opposite. I left going like, ‘Something’s not right here.’

Tom Midlane

Could you explain to us what longtermism actually is? I know Elon Musk described Scottish philosopher Will MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future as ‘a close match for my philosophy.’

Émile P. Torres

Longtermism comes in two varieties. The moderate version says that ensuring that the very long-term future of humanity goes very well, is optimised, is a key priority of our time. And the radical version says it’s the key priority, right? So the vision is that humanity, including our post-human descendants, could survive in the universe for an extremely long period of time and if we colonise space, there could be a huge number of future people. If your goal is to positively influence the greatest number of people possible, and if most people who could exist will exist in the far future, then you should be focused on them rather than current day people.

Tom Midlane

Can you tell me a bit about some of the more malign ways this philosophy has been instrumentalised?

Émile P. Torres

This ideology has a natural appeal to billionaires. Because it tells them exactly what they want to hear: ‘You don’t need to worry about poor people around the world because there’s something that matters way, way more.’ Which is getting us into space, developing technologies that can enable us to re-engineer humanity and so on. These are things that could bring so much more value into the world than saving the 700 million people who are in extreme poverty right now. It’s just a numbers game.

It tells them exactly what they want to hear and hence it has a natural appeal to these individuals because it provides this kind of superficially plausible moral excuse for what they want to do anyway, which is not care about poor people and just focus on their pet projects of colonizing space and merging our brains with AI, like Elon Musk is trying to do with Neuralink.

There’s a line in one of the founding documents of longtermism written by Nick Beckstead in which he says that given finite resources and if you assume a longtermist perspective, then saving the lives of people in rich countries should be prioritized over saving the lives of people in poor countries. Because people in rich countries are better positioned to influence the far future than people in poor countries — and so it’s just a better use of money.

Tom Midlane

As you said, it’s just so self-reinforcing isn’t it?

Émile P. Torres

It’s so convenient. I mean, white people in the Global North have always had some excuse for not helping others, right? And I think longtermism is just another example on the list of excuses for why we are justified in not caring about the plight of people in poor regions of the world. Also what longtermists mean by the term ‘future people’ is very different from what the average person and, frankly, most philosophers would interpret by that term.

For longtermists, it’s not just about ensuring that in the future people have better and less miserable lives but ensuring that they themselves exist in the future. Because if you accept the utilitarian view that the more value in the universe across space and time that exists, the better the universe becomes, then you have a moral obligation to create as many new people as possible. Right now, there could exist people in vast computer simulations throughout the entire accessible universe. But those people don’t exist. Therefore, we have this moral imperative to go out and colonize space as quickly as possible and build these vast computer simulations. That is what they mean by caring about future people.

Tom Midlane

A lot of these ideas also bake in a very specific, individualistic view of politics — the only way to alleviate global poverty is to become a hedge fund manager and donate half your salary.

Émile P. Torres

A lot of the people in the community are neoliberals. And then they develop this philosophy that provides a kind of moral excuse for perpetuating neoliberal policies. Many of the effective altruists and longtermists are capitalists themselves. They praise billionaires who donate a fraction of their wealth as some of the greatest philanthropists in all of history. There’s a 2021 article by Hilary Greaves and MacAskill in which they talk about AI safety and they say something like, given how important the development of AI could be, because our future could be so vast, that every $1,000 that is spent on AI safety is the equivalent of saving one trillion actual human beings. That’s part of the problem with their whole quantitative approach to value, you can get the numbers to support basically any conclusion.

Tom Midlane

Do you still think there’s anything valuable in any of these ideologies?

Émile P. Torres

I think one good thing that came out of longtermism getting a bit of visibility back in 2022, after MacAskill published his book What We Owe the Future, is that maybe they shifted the Overton window a little bit, towards the idea that maybe it’s okay and even good to be concerned with the longer term future of humanity. That said, what I think they get wrong is much more profound than what they get right.

Tom Midlane

In the original paper you and Dr Timnit Gebru wrote, you talk a lot about how these ideas are grounded in eugenics.

Émile P. Torres

I think the role of eugenics within the TESCREAL movement is really significant. Transhumanism is classified as a type of so-called ‘liberal eugenics,’ and all of the other ideologies and corresponding movements of the TESCREAL bundle emerged out of the transhumanist movement.

Pretty much everybody in this community are ‘IQ realists’. There are leading figures within the movement who approvingly cite Charles Murray and Richard Herdstein, the authors of The Bell Curve. Then there’s people like Nick Bostrom, who introduced this idea of existential risk — any event that prevents us from creating this spacefaring utopian civilization. In one paper, he lists a bunch of different existential risk scenarios and ‘dysgenic pressures’ is one of them. He literally says if less intellectually capable, quote unquote, people outbreed their more intellectually capable peers then there’s going to be this dysgenic scenario where the average IQ — a term that I absolutely hate — but the average IQ of humanity will drop.

He thinks that could be an existential risk because we need high intelligence to create the very technologies that are going to take us to utopia. He even says, if you look around the world you’ll find that the regions of our planet with the highest fertility rates are also marked by the lowest levels of intellectual achievement. It doesn’t take too much squinting to see what he’s talking about there.

Tom Midlane

How widespread do you think TESCREAL ideas really are within the tech world?

Émile P. Torres

One of the goals of the article that I co-authored with [former Google researcher] Dr Timnit Gebru was to convince readers that this isn’t just a fringe group. I mean maybe relative to society as a whole it’s pretty fringe. But within Silicon Valley it’s hugely influential. It is embraced by Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Jaan Tallinn, and Elon Musk. What is relevant as far as I’m concerned is not the size in absolute numbers of the community, but the political, economic and social power that they wield.

The TESCREAL ideologies aren’t just a worldview that will influence the world in the future, they constitute a worldview that has already profoundly impacted our lives. Because all of the major AI companies, with maybe the exception of Meta — but Mark Zuckerberg’s also a transhumanist — OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, xAI, all of them emerge directly out of the TESCREAL movement. Their original impetus for forming was to build artificial general intelligence, which is a key aspect of fulfilling the TESCREAL project. The systems that we have now, the large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini and so on, are seen as stepping stones along the path to AGI.

Tom Midlane

You were once a passionate TESCREAList and then lost your faith in these ideas. Is there any part of you that misses these beliefs?

Émile P. Torres

When I was leaving the community, I thought that my answer in the future to that question would be yes — but it’s not. I thought that I would think it’s a tragedy that I no longer have the same sense of purpose in life, the sense of meaning, the hope for the longer term future of humanity. Also the promise of immortality, the possibility I could live forever. But I really don’t.

I feel like having left the transhumanist and longtermist communities, I have been able to develop and foster a new appreciation and connectedness with life on this planet. I mean, Mars is a toxic wasteland. It is a horrific place. There is no planet B. You go to Mars, you step outside and open your mouth, your saliva will boil off your tongue. Earth is incredible.

What transhumanists are really all about is how shitty being human is. You know, ‘It sucks to have this meat sack. We’re so dumb. We can only move so fast. We can only process information so quickly. We only live so long. It’s just an awful situation. We need to transcend that through technology and then we’ll get to something that’s really worthwhile.’ I just reject that. I like the way things are. I want to preserve this. I care about this.

Acid Japonisme

2025-07-14T04:11:19Z

Visionary Japanese sci-fi author Izumi Suzuki anticipated our present malaise decades ago, in writing that combines melancholy for the failure of sixties radicalism with scepticism about a world of ubiquitous screens.

Students clashing with the police during a demonstration against the construction of a giant new airport at Narita, 30 miles east of Tokyo on 26 February 1968. Students claimed the new airport would be used as a US military air base. Farmers, whose land was being used for the airport, joined the students against the police.

‘You want to go ask people what’s going on, don’t you?’ a character says to another in Izumi Suzuki’s 1982 story ‘Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic!’, as time spins out of joint. ‘There’s no point. You can’t go around telling people the world isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Nobody’s gonna listen.’ A decade and a half before, that’s exactly what Japanese youth were doing. Japan had one of the biggest ‘1968’ radical movements outside of Italy. A wave of protests, strikes, and university occupations, aimed against Japanese capitalism and its support for American imperialism, convulsed the country during the sixties. The movement collapsed into ultraviolent sectarianism in the mid-seventies, its anti-capitalist ethics swamped by mass affluence and what would eventually be the world’s second most powerful and lucrative pop culture.

One has to obtain any information from elsewhere, as Verso’s three recent volumes of Izumi Suzuki’s fiction feature no introductions, notes, or explanations — they don’t even do the basic courtesy of telling you when the stories were first published — but a little searching will reveal that Suzuki was a leading figure of the Japanese counter-culture in these years.

Suzuki was born in 1949 in Shizuoka, a largely industrial prefecture between Tokyo and Nagoya. She worked as a punch-card operator before moving to the capital, where she worked as an actor (including in the 1971 experimental film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets), modelled (for the coffee-table pornographer Nobuyushi Araki, in his book Izumi: This Bad Girl), and was a ‘muse’ for musicians such as the free jazz alto saxophonist Kaoru Abe, whom she married in 1973. But in her thirties, she established herself as a gifted writer of science fiction and memoir, before taking her own life in 1986. Her later writings narrate what happens when disappointment and depression replace the dream of changing the world.

Her writing spans the two decades between the radical Japan of the sixties and the country of the boom years of the eighties. Since that decade, Japan has been incessantly imagined as the home of ‘the future’, with its advanced technologies and ultramodern cityscapes. If that’s true, then its head start also means its best writers and artists anticipated many of our present problems decades ago: the absence of alternatives to capitalism; an ever more artificial, ever more polluted environment; an ageing, shrinking population; increasing psychological dependence on pharmaceuticals; a world of ubiquitous screens. All these can be found, are anticipated, or are described in Izumi Suzuki’s science fiction stories of the seventies and eighties.

What makes Suzuki interesting to think about is not that she was a great supporter of the radical movements of her time — in fact, her frequent references to the ‘Japanese ’68’ are usually disparaging — and her stories are full of failed utopias. Rather, the interest comes in reading how, through her depressive imagination, she zeroed in on a future of nostalgia, times out of joint, disappointment, and the eternal return of the same.

Quite why Suzuki became big in the 2020s in English is easy to ascertain on reading the title story of the first of Verso’s Suzuki books, the anthology Terminal Boredom: Stories — it is set in an authoritarian, hyper-mediated future, in which people are so alienated, agoraphobic, and anomic that they spend their days watching footage of atrocities; and, if possible, they interact with each other only through screens. ‘I’m not used to scenes that aren’t in a frame,’ says its narrator. ‘Looking at a picture inside a border always calms me down.’ I first read this story during lockdown in the winter of 2020–1: it felt like a simple description of reality. One character records their entire mundane life on camera. ‘And you watch it later?’ asks the incredulous narrator. ‘Wow, must be riveting.’ As a woman writing science fiction, Suzuki has been lazily compared to Ursula Le Guin, but her pessimism and dark humour are miles away from the American writer’s optimistic anarchism. In ‘Women and Women’, included in Terminal Boredom, a matriarchal future society oppresses men in much the same manner as women are oppressed in a patriarchal one. The stories in the second anthology, Hit Parade of Tears, reveal much more of a rooting in pop culture — Suzuki was more glam than hippy. The longer tales often have an enjoyably giggly, gossip-magazine tone (in the sixties, Suzuki wrote an advice column for a women’s magazine), like ‘Trial Witch’, with its spectacular acts of revenge on awful husbands, or ‘My Guy’, in which a man from a more advanced cosmic civilisation where emotions are rather more controlled impregnates women across Tokyo.

Two stories centre on time gone haywire. In the kaleidoscopic, haunting ‘Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic!’, a hipster resembling Suzuki — with obsessive knowledge of Group Sounds, the noisy garage rock bands of mid-sixties Japan — is thrown into different historical periods, where the sequence of pop music and technology is scrambled into chaos. At first seeing the appearance of things in the wrong time periods as just a consequence of retro culture, she finally becomes aware of what is happening when somebody in the sixties plays a record by the eighties neo-fifties band Stray Cats.

The title story is set in a faintly North Korea–like Stalinist dictatorship — though one as permeated by pop culture nostalgia, fashion, and celebrity as Suzuki’s contemporary Japan — and tells the tale of an eternally youthful 180-year-old survivor of the sixties, who is helping his vastly younger girlfriend with her project on that decade, entitled ‘Fictions and Realities of Capitalist Society’. He is imprisoned after trying to create an autonomous republic in Tokyo Bay, which would ‘encapsulate Japan from 1960 to 1970 . . . violent and reckless and cruel’.

Set My Heart on Fire, a novel originally published in 1983, and newly published in English, is strikingly unlike these opiated, woozy, depressive, dryly humorous stories. Rather, it’s a visceral, alcohol-soaked memoir, very thinly disguised (The Golden Cups, a Group Sounds band, of which the young Suzuki was a self-described groupie, appear here as ‘Green Glass’). Much of it is set in Yokohama, a port city which in the sixties was multicultural by Japanese standards, with a proper Chinatown and scores of American soldiers (from whom records could be obtained), and hence an alternative to the homogenous, predictable culture of Japan’s ‘economic miracle’.

What mostly happens here, though, is grim, like a much more violent version of Jenny Fabian’s ‘swinging’ London memoir, Groupie (a Suzuki favourite, referenced in ‘Hey, it’s a Love Psychedelic!’). It is also populated by appalling men who play guitars for a living, dwells on constant but generally unenjoyable sex, and features a great deal of detail on records and clothes. You then realise that this, here, is the distant, halcyon sixties and seventies of sex and drugs and rock and roll, which the drifting sci-fi heroines of her later stories are so often longing for. In Set My Heart on Fire, the era is radically demythologised and revealed as a suffocating world of solipsism and misogyny. It seems to ask: how far gone would a society have to be for it to feel nostalgia for this?

DMG 2025: Communism in the Coalfields

2025-07-11T09:22:29Z

As socialists from all over the world prepare to attend the 139th Durham Miners’ Gala, we explore the story of the event's iconic banners, which celebrate our historic solidarity and continuing hope in the face of oppression and hatred.

Durham Miners' Gala, 2015. (Credit: Alex Niven)

Every banner flying in the wind is a silent witness to the benefits which organisation has brought. Every chord from the bands is a clarion call reminding the workers, who more than any other, gave us the Labour Movement — that the protection of the worker’s freedom needs a strong and efficient union and effective political representation.

— Socialist Digest, August 1959.

Around 200,000 people will line the streets of Durham tomorrow to celebrate the mining and trade union heritage of the North East of England and the world. Notwithstanding pauses for the outbreak of war, strike action, and the Covid pandemic, the Durham Miner’s Gala — or ‘Big Meeting’ as it is known locally — has taken place every year without fail since 1871. Ahead of Saturday’s 139th Gala, it will be helpful to consider how much has changed since that first Big Meeting at the height of the Victorian era.

At the heart of the Gala’s narrative is the story of the iconic miners’ banners that embody the symbolism and identity of this unique event — the largest trade union gathering of its kind in Europe. For nearly two centuries, these trade union banners have symbolised working-class organisation. Their mottos, images, and portraiture tell the microhistories of their time and of the wider union movement.

Rise of the Red Flags

The history of the banner begins with that of the Industrial Revolution, broadly understood. As the riches of empire made their way up canals and railways, lining the pockets of the British elite, conditions for the nation’s workers deteriorated. Steam power accelerated the aggressive expansion of industries — none more so than mining, such that pitmen were forced ever deeper underground in the search of greater coal yields. This was the era of the miners’ bond (an exploitative system whereby employers essentially ‘owned’ mining labourers on a yearly contract), child labour, and firedamp (flammable underground gases causing frequent explosions) — a time when coalmining disasters and diseases took the lives of thousands every year.

At the start of this period, fearing revolt, the British government passed the Combinations Act of 1799, which outlawed the formation of trade unions. By 1824, the act had been repealed, but establishment disdain for unionism remained strong. It wasn’t uncommon for union lists identifying perceived ‘troublemakers’ to be sold to the authorities for the price of a pint.

Despite these repressive measures, the nineteenth century was ultimately one of the most significant periods of working-class organisation, as radical groups like the Luddites and the Chartists were at the heart of various energetic pushes for reform. In the years around 1830 —the same period as the momentous Merthyr Rising in South Wales (where the totemic Red Flag was debuted), Thomas Hepburn formed the Northumberland and Durham Pitmen’s Union, which would win significant victories over the 18-hour working day and loosen the grip of the Tommy Shops (which forced workers to buy food and other provisions from their employers).

One of the first media references to union banners is from 1844, concerning a gathering of miners on Boldon Fell. ‘The roads in the vicinity presented an unusual bustle,’ the report says:

The men walked in procession from their different collieries bearing flags and banners accompanied by bands of music. The banners were numerous and of the gayest description, nearly all embellished with a motto more or less connected to the recent struggle between miners and their employers. One of these was surrounded with a deep border of black crape … with reference to the death of a person at the colliery to which it belongs.

Despite the prevalence of banners across the nineteenth century, their devices would not be reported in detail until the first Big Meeting of 1871. By now, the miners’ bond had been eradicated and the formation of the Durham Miner’s Association had created new legitimacy for unionised men — a union that by the time of the 1926 General Strike would become one of the strongest in Britain, boasting 3,000 more members than there were working miners. Those in attendance at these early meetings would have been no stranger to political agitation, most likely having relations who had taken part in previous uprisings and strikes.

Early reports of the banner highlight the presence of religious and nationalistic motifs like the Union Jack. Perhaps, this was an attempt to appeal to the patriotism of the ruling classes, but it also probably reflects the relative social conservatism of the average nineteenth-century pitman. Emotional appeals were also made to support for the union — often via pleas for donations to widows benefit funds — while other entreaties were made to causes of law and order, hard work, and arbitration (particularly between master and servant). Banners of this era often depicted handshakes between bosses and miners — the latter painted to look more presentable beside their middle-class counterparts.

The Most Revolutionary Banner in the World

The turn of the century brought new battles, however, and the birth of the Labour Party in 1900 initiated a new era for trade unionism in Britain. By 1913, coal output had reached its peak, and banners turned away from subjects like regulation, voting rights, and arbitration, and towards demands for improved wages and living conditions. Edwardian banners often centred on before-and-after motifs concerning housing and working conditions. One banner from the National Union of Railwaymen featured a sun-soaked idyll in which children were shown dancing around a maypole as miners watched on. As today, the idealisation of a mythical past England was never far away.

As the growth of the Labour Party spawned new leaders, the Edwardian banner became noteworthy for its portraiture. Images of Thomas Hepburn, Aneurin Bevin, and of the faces of local mining leaders were common. Changing social conventions also brought women to the fore (wartime nurse Edith Cavill featured on the banner of Bowburn Lodge). Meanwhile, in a parallel tradition to that of the miners, the suffragette movement was making use during this period of needlework and appliqué techniques to subvert prejudices about ‘traditional women’s skills’ and overhaul the template of the radical political banner. The WSPU Holloway Prisoners Banner of 1910 is a prime example of the collaborative nature of the suffragette banner, as compared to those of the male-dominated unions.

Mirroring the banners of the suffragette movement, the early banners of the 1900s also went through a period of experimentation, with some adopting the ornate style of socialist artist Walter Crane. Despite this, banner design was very much dominated by the oil-painted silks of one firm in particular: Tutill’s of London. Formed in 1847 by George Tutill, the firm would come to be responsible for over 75 percent of union banners, as well as the coveted production banner, awarded annually to the pit that had won the most coal that year. To combat the miners’ unfamiliarity with Tutill’s secretive methods of dying, winding, and warping, lodges would be provided with a catalogue featuring a series of templated banner designs to choose from, with more elaborate designs commanding a larger fee.

The years following the Great War were marked by grief, economic depression, pay disputes, and unemployment. In the years between the Russian Revolution and the 1926 General Strike, a growing culture of autodidacticism brought communism to the Durham coalfield. In the ‘Red Village’ of Wardley, the Follonsby Lodge banner featured the hammer and sickle, as well as portraits of Lenin, George Harvey, AJ Cook, and James Connolly, eventually gaining the reputation of being ‘the most revolutionary banner in the world’.

In a marginally less militant vein, the faces of Keir Hardie and Peter Lee were ubiquitous across the Durham Coalfield in the Long 1920s, especially in the years around their respective deaths in 1915 and 1930. Labour leader Ramsey MacDonald had been another stalwart; however his appeal diminished, to put it mildly, amid rising tensions with miners and his governments from 1929. Many lodges eventually opted to paint MacDonald out of their banners entirely, while Bewick Main went as far as to drape his face with a white sheet. To be depicted on red silk was a sign of arrival for many a politician. To be painted out was a death knell.

The Past We Inherit, The Future We Build

In the years after the Second World War, banners were increasingly influenced by classic post-war themes like nationalisation, apprentice education, and safety. In 1958, former miner and artist Norman Cornish would design a classic banner for Tudhoe Grange. However, the latter decades of the twentieth century would eventually come to be defined by the dismantling of the British coal industry. Despite formidable resistance to this throughout the seventies and eighties — climaxing with the 1984 Miners’ Strike — the closure of Monkwearmouth Colliery in 1994 would signal the end of deep coal mining in County Durham.

Today, some may view the union banner as a relic of a bygone past. But in the North East we know different. This fact is underlined by the continuingly inventive work of Durham Bannermakers — a firm responsible for the design of two new banners for this year’s Gala. Led by Emma Shankland and her husband Edgar, Durham Bannermakers was formed by Emma’s parents, Hugh and Lotte Shankland, who had previously created banners for the Anti-Apartheid and CND movements, before creating their first union banner in the 1990s.

Emma told me about the importance of adhering to traditional techniques while creating banners that have resonance today:

A double-sided hand-painted banner can take between 16 and 20 weeks to complete, and if taken care of can last for decades. Unlike times when banners were turned out at almost factory speed to support unionised booming industries, the cost of a hand-painted, high-quality, silk parade banner can be prohibitive. It’s therefore not surprising that traditional banner makers are few and far between. Good quality silks are also extremely difficult to find now, and we often have to piece panels together. We use a variety of paints, stylistically honouring the tradition and quality of the original Tutill banners but using new colour palettes to bring the art form to life.

A key part of the modernisation of the union banner lies in encouraging lodges to integrate new themes into their designs. Emma highlights the new Thornley Lodge banner — which features a group of school children who helped to drive the new banner campaign — as evidence. Similarly, Durham Bannermakers have also collaborated with artist Jamie Holman on his ‘Above, Beyond, Below’ and ‘The Politics of Cloth’ projects to create a union-style banner that memorialises Acid House.

As Reform UK takes control of Durham Council, avowing our history of radicalism and solidarity has become more important than ever. Soon a new generation with its own concerns and aspirations will come to understand the significance of the Gala and its banners. Like those on display at the first Big Meeting, the banners of 2025 continue to play a major role in highlighting the injustices of the present, while also remaining true to the memory of the past. Tomorrow, as the new Thornley Lodge banner is marched for the first time past the union dignitaries, along Durham’s cobbled streets, and on to the Gala service at the cathedral, it will briefly seem that little has changed in 150 years.

The 139th Durham Miners’ Gala will be held in the City of Durham tomorrow (12 July). After marchers representing national trade unions and the miners’ lodges of Durham have processed through the centre of town, speakers including Eddie Dempsey, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, will address a crowd of many thousands at Durham Racecourse. After that, most people will go to the pub.

DMG 2025: A New Career in a New Town

2025-07-10T02:25:10Z

It is now several decades since the collapse of the British coal industry. But in Peterlee — a ‘left behind’ former mining town in County Durham — utopian dreams are being revived through a combination of grassroots creativity and public funding.

Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion, Peterlee, circa 2012. (Anne via Flickr.)

Earlier this year, former Barbican director John Tusa claimed that art is a ‘wonderful continuum, that starts at the top and goes all the way down to the pleasant and the humdrum and the community at the bottom’. In response, Arts Council Chief Executive Darren Henley offered the following criticism: ‘We must not allow our world to be characterised as a pointy triangle with excellence on high, and access and community at the base. This framing is skewed, it’s exclusive.’

Henley went further, challenging the suggestion that excellence only lives in certain art forms or particular places. ‘Let’s be clear,’ he said, ‘excellence and access are not mutually exclusive’. As the saying goes, talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. Hierarchy and the assumption that community-based work in the arts is inherently inferior is not only patronising, it is cultural gatekeeping. The way that art and culture are defined, funded, and valued has consequences — especially for places on the economic periphery.

In somewhere like my hometown of Peterlee, in County Durham, without funded projects in the arts focused on community engagement, the community barely has the scaffolding it needs to exist. While it shouldn’t fall to something like an Arts Council funded project to bring civic life back to a town, this is the current reality and necessity. Such initiatives don’t merely support creativity — they help to build whole areas back up.

Peterlee came into being in 1948 (the same year as the foundation of the NHS) and formed part of wider post-war development plans and the creation of the welfare state, which ensured that anyone, no matter their socio-economic status, could access what they needed in order to live a full life. In the case of Peterlee, this was housing and community for a still thriving mining industry (it was to be ‘the miners’ capital of the world’). In fact, it was the only new town created in the wake of the 1946 New Towns Act that was requested specifically by local people via their MP, rather than something handed down by government planners. It was a place designed with people as well as productivity in mind.

Fast forward to today, and Peterlee is one of 225 places identified by the Local Trust as a ‘left behind place’. ‘Left behind’ status is defined in terms of economic decline, but also a lack of social infrastructure (places to meet, an active and engaged community, connection to essential services). The most prominent feature of Peterlee is Lee House, an empty building whose clock face has been stuck at ten-past-two for years — something often referenced by locals with equal parts humour and frustration. The near-deserted Castle Dene shopping centre helps to give Peterlee one of the highest vacancy rates in County Durham.

But recently these units have been reimagined as sites of possibility, as the empty shops in Castle Dene have been repurposed as arts and events spaces. One of the first such events I came across — a gig held in the old, closed-down Shoe Zone — occurred in November 2023. It was put on by experimental cassette label Industrial Coast, as part of a pilot initiative called Place Lab under the consultancy strand Building Cultures. The band I play in (Marginal Gains) had just started gigging at the time, and we were keen to put on some shows that we could put our own stamp on. Seeing the Shoe Zone event got me thinking: could we do something like that?

I reached out to Carlo Viglianisi, who directs Building Cultures, and who had run a non-profit arts project called Empty Shop for many years. Some time passed, then there was news of a second wind of funding for activities. Around that time, I had crossed paths with Thomas — now my partner — who plays in the band Vice Killer. It quickly became clear that we both cared deeply about the place we grew up and its potential. We teamed up to put on an event that would reflect that spirit. On 10 August 2024, we did just that and launched Life Just Bounces.

Meeting Carlo gave us the confidence we needed to get the idea off the ground. He was able to fund part of it, and could help with access to the empty units in the town centre. Access proved more challenging than we’d expected. Thomas went door-to-door, meeting various social club and venue owners, and eventually secured Peterlee Central Club. It wasn’t technically a vacant retail space, but it had a similar sense of lost potential; the upstairs part of The Central used to be another bar and dance hall — a popular spot on Friday and Saturday nights (our mams can vouch for this). It had been closed since the early 1980s. Faded but defiant, a sign on the wall still proudly urged: ‘COME DANCING AT PSC. DISCO NIGHTS FRI SAT.’

During the event, photographer Andy Martin set up a word-of-mouth photo studio in this closed off space, shooting portraits on a Rollie T camera, while downstairs we had put together a full day of art, poetry, more photography, music, and film. Things were kicked off by compere Alex Redman, who introduced live literary readings from Jake Trelease, Tom Pickard, and Pet Shop Mods. We screened archival BBC footage of a Peterlee drama group in 1978, and a recent video BMX compilation from Sunny Blunts. There was a raffle, and then came the music: FAWNS, Marginal Gains, Vice Killer, and a DJ set from Antony Daly of 586 Records to close off the day.

In the run up to the event, we invited photographer David Hall to help us capture the County Durham area for an exhibition. David has an infectious dedication for connecting and capturing community and place. We booked in a couple of days with David, taking him on a tour of County Durham — Seaham, Easington, Shotton, Horden, Peterlee, and Castle Eden Dene — meeting many local faces along the way. The stunning results were displayed alongside an open art submission.

We particularly wanted to hear from new and emerging local artists, especially students, those with no formal art training, and hobbyists. Featured artists included Viv Harrison (‘2pm’), Heather Moore (‘Rush’), Patina Clothing (‘Flag’), Meg McWilliam (‘Fish Finger Queen’), Ella Du Gay (‘Gropius House’), and David Scott (‘It’s Brutal Round Here’). Both exhibitions were pulled together with the amazing support — in both time and funding — from No More Nowt (one of the Arts Council’s Creative People & Places projects based in Peterlee).

Something genuinely exciting and special took place in Peterlee Central Club on that day. Tickets sold out and the age range in the room spanned decades. There were tears and laughter, shirts came off, and the incredible lineup, cheap drinks, and the sun shining all added to the magic of people simply being together.

Life Just Bounces was inspired by other creative initiatives that had taken place in closed-off spaces in the town centre. Events like Andrew Wood’s digital residency seventyfivethreads (which showcased a gameplay of Peterlee in its past, present, and all its imagined futures), Ron Lapworth’s painting exhibition ‘Full Circle’, and Deb Covell’s and Theresa Poulton’s curated exhibition revisiting Victor Pasmore’s utopian vision for Peterlee. They all took place in empty town centre units and were supported by Building Cultures and No More Nowt.

These events are a total joy, but also a testament to what has been lost and what is still missing in places like Peterlee. The buildings they take place in should still be part of the civic life of the town more permanently, rather than existing for most of the time as relics of what could have been. It is grassroots creativity that is making do in the margins, while the structures that should be supporting it sit hollowed out. Commitment to community engagement matters. Without it, connections are less likely to happen, and events like Life Just Bounces wouldn’t exist at all.

When Tusa speaks of communities at the ‘bottom’ as ‘humdrum,’ it says far more about his distance from what life is actually like on the ground than about communities and engagement work themselves. Excellence is not just confined to capital cities, and neither is it classically trained. It is also DIY, and it is collaborative. It can be a window into what arts and culture look like when people build it from the ground up. At the same time, these initiatives shouldn’t be a creative lifeline used to compensate for the failure of larger civic structures. They have to be supported by essential infrastructure, to allow the foundations of community to be rebuilt in places like County Durham — so that time can start moving again beyond ten-past-two.

DMG 2025: Birthplace of the Working Class

2025-07-09T09:35:32Z

In the first of a series of pieces leading up to Saturday’s Durham Miners’ Gala, we examine a forgotten corner of County Durham with a strong claim to be the one of the global birthplaces of the industrial proletariat.

Adolph Menzel - The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes), circa 1875. (Credit: Gandalf's Gallery via Flickr.)

There is a small sandstone building hidden behind the public library in the village of Winlaton, high on a hill across the river from Newcastle upon Tyne. This is Winlaton Forge, a 300-year-old grade II-listed building, which once glowed with the heat of a furnace and thrummed with the sound of hammer on anvil. Winlaton is an ancient place with several pubs and a large number of strange myths and legends. Perhaps most notable of these is the fact that the long-shuttered cottage forge is the last remnant of a remarkable industrial experiment, the legacy of which should be written in iron, but is barely known.

The emergence of the British (and therefore global) industrial working class has often been dated by historians to the ‘classic years’ of the Industrial Revolution (sometime between the late 1700s and early 1800s). It is typically located in leading British industrial centres such as the mills of Manchester and the manufactories of the West Midlands, and seen as the result of workers’ responses to hostile economic and political conditions. But a full century before the Industrial Revolution apparently gathered steam, Winlaton was undergoing a profound transformation overseen by an innovative young ironmonger, which as historians like Bill Lancaster have cogently argued — complicates the standard account of the birth of an industrial proletariat in the late-eighteenth century.

Ambrose Crowley III set up an ironworks in Winlaton in 1690. Located on the south bank of the Tyne, Winlaton was part of County Durham (and would remain so until 1974), and governed by the City of Durham’s ‘prince bishops’. Before Crowley, the tiny village was an agricultural outpost with a sideline in small-scale coal mining. In a model then common throughout Britain — and indeed much further afield — its inhabitants were tied to the land they lived on and obligated to work for the landowners. What Crowley established around his ironworks to change this model was genuinely revolutionary: a self-contained industrial society where work was constant, wages were regular, and social welfare was built into the fabric of life.

Crowley moved to the North East from his native Black Country in the English Midlands at the age of around twenty-six, after falling out with rival ironmongers, who he believed had treated him unfairly. Aiming to trade across the North Sea, he initially set up shop in Sunderland, before moving further north. He was attracted to Winlaton because it sat upon rich seams of coal and was located next to the River Derwent — which meant a ready supply of fuel for his iron forges and power for his water mills. The area by the Derwent, which runs into the Tyne, soon became known as Winlaton Mill.

The traditional, scattered nature of the iron industry frustrated Crowley. He envisaged a more efficient operation where raw materials were turned into finished goods ready for distribution, all in one centralised location. He wrote a bold letter to the Midlands ironmongers telling them that the low prices his large-scale works could offer would drive them out of business. And Crowley’s vision extended beyond workflow. He recognised that a stable and healthy environment would foster a more productive workforce.

Crowley referred to his workforce as ‘this society’ or ‘my people’. He adopted a paternalistic responsibility towards his workers’ well-being. As Winlaton grew, its layout — which he designed carefully — was arranged into enclosed squares of workplaces and living quarters. This concentration of spaces for labouring, living, and working together helped to create a new kind of social identity.

‘Crowley’s Crew’, as the ironworkers became known, were highly skilled specialists, producing everything from nails to weapons, always to meticulous standards. They made anchors for the Royal Navy. They made the gates for Buckingham House (the building that pre-dated Buckingham Palace). At the same time, the Crowley Ironworks also produced something much darker: chains for the slave trade.

There were other exploitative aspects to the enterprise. Although the workers had a relative amount of freedom for the time, they were still bound to Crowley’s will. The works operated under the progressive but still stringent ‘Law Book of the Crowley Ironworks’. Running to around a hundred thousand words, this document detailed everything from work schedules to personal conduct, ensuring that the works functioned to Crowley’s precise orders. Workers were registered in the book with fastidious detail — name, birthplace, height, religion, and even their smoking habits were all noted.

Time-keeping was rigorously recorded, with timesheets noting employees’ arrival (‘Come’) and departure (‘Run’). Those arriving late faced penalties, with wages docked for lost time. It was long and hard work — thirteen and a half hours a day, six days a week. Crowley—a benevolent autocrat — regarded idleness as a personal abuse, and said he felt ‘cheated’ when workers failed to meet his requirements. Monitors enforced discipline, who patrolled the squares to ensure that swearing, smoking, and apparently drunken and riotous behaviour were kept in check. Fines were imposed for infractions. The gates of the squares were locked at night, and workers couldn’t leave between 9pm and 5am. There was however some evening entertainment to lighten the mood. Each square had its own alehouses, which is one of the reasons why modern Winlaton has such a high density of pubs.

In exchange for obedience, Crowley provided stability. He paid his workers a weekly wage — a revolutionary concept, which offered the workers a degree of self-sufficiency and required Crowley to issue his own form of paper banknotes. (The Bank of England wouldn’t start issuing banknotes in set amounts for several decades.) A ‘poor’s fund’ provided various welfare allowances, including support for sick workmen and bereaved widows. The ironworks also funded a school, earning Winlaton the nickname ‘Knowledge Hill’. A doctor was appointed to tend to workers’ ailments, a rare privilege at the time. There was even a ‘Committee of Aggrievances’, which gave workers a voice in this pre-union age.

Crowley’s operation grew to become the largest iron manufactory in Europe. He set up a headquarters in London and ran the Winlaton operation from there. He was knighted by Queen Anne, and became a Sheriff of London and later an MP. He was also a founding investor in the South Sea Company (which would make copious use of his iron chains — while Crowley provided his workers with some form of escape from feudalism, he was happy to place others in subjugation). Although he died in 1713, the business continued to thrive under his son John and then, after John’s early death, John’s widow Theodisia, who ran the ironworks for more than 50 years.

Crowley’s Crew were fiercely protective of their rights, standing against rival works and government intimidation when necessary. During the 1800s, Winlaton became a hotbed of Chartism, with Crowley’s Crew taking up arms to support the reformers and protest their cause. In the 1830s, Winlatoners turned the village into an armed fortress, blocking approaches with cannons and pikes to defend themselves against government troops, then marched on Newcastle to face the local authorities. The unified spirit of Crowley’s Crew became part of the folklore of radicalism in the area.

A key member of Crowley’s Crew during this period was Joseph Cowen Snr, a former blacksmith’s apprentice at Crowley’s works who became a radical MP. His son, Joseph Cowen Jnr, was born in Winlaton and shared his father’s political ideology. Cowen Jnr succeeded his father as MP for Newcastle, and established the Newcastle Daily Chronicle newspaper. A charismatic champion for the working class, Cowen Jnr helped to found the Winlaton Literary and Mechanics’ Institution and its associated library, and brought Garibaldi to the Institution in 1854.

By then, Crowley’s ironworks had become a dwindling force, impacted by economic pressures and new technologies like machine nail-making. Its sites and stock were sold in 1863. Although Crowley’s Crew no longer existed, the people of Winlaton continued to celebrate their exploits and carry on their traditions, among them the proud institutions of the Winlaton Brass Band and the village’s ‘rapper’ sword dancing team, both regarded as being among the earliest and best examples of their kind.

Winlaton’s rebellious spirit found expression in song, most famously in ‘The Blaydon Races’, an anthem of Geordie pride that still echoes throughout the area’s pubs today. (During Crowley’s time, Blaydon was an outpost of Winlaton. Today, Winlaton is in the constituency of Blaydon.) Written by Geordie Ridley in 1862, the song immortalises the people of Winlaton and Blaydon not as faceless labourers, but as living, breathing characters, such as Coffee Johnny, a Winlaton blacksmith and bare-knuckle boxer who led the Winlaton Band. Though light-hearted, the song encapsulates the camaraderie and determination of the people shaped by Crowley’s industrial experiment.

Winlaton’s industrial heyday is now long gone. The last forge is silent, the factory squares redeveloped. Many of the pubs are shuttered. Its one surviving working men’s club is struggling to keep the lights on. In the corridors of the West End Club, a display of photos and artefacts tells the story of Winlaton, the Crowley ironworks, and its role in shaping our society. Before Manchester’s mills, Birmingham’s factories, or London’s docks became synonymous with the emergence of the world’s working class, it was here, on this hill in historic County Durham, that the foundations were laid.

McSweeney’s Death Rattle

2025-07-08T11:45:32Z

In a media landscape where nuanced political breakthroughs are often credited to ‘genius Svengalis’, spin doctor Morgan McSweeney has become the crown prince of Starmerism. But now his fragile empire is crumbling.

Red Double Decker Buses on Westminster Bridge, with Big Ben in the background. (Credit: Press release via Department for Business and Trade.)

As the fallout from Labour’s debacle of a welfare bill reverberated around Westminster last week, it wasn’t just Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves who found themselves caught in the crosshairs: the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, also became a ‘lightning rod’ for Labour MPs’ anger. ‘Everyone’, an anonymous ‘Labour veteran’ told the Financial Times, ‘is selling shares in Morgan’. Others called for ‘regime change’ in Downing Street.

This wasn’t mere scapegoating. In their well-sourced account of the Starmer Project since 2019, Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, the Times and Sunday Times journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund depict McSweeney as the driving force behind it, with Starmer largely a frontman. It was McSweeney who devised the strategy for Starmer’s successful — if disingenuous — 2020 Labour leadership campaign, and it is McSweeney who has driven the party’s political strategy since. As such, it is not so much Starmerism that is now in crisis as McSweeneyism.

‘A Political Mastermind’

Over the last few years, a cult of personality has been assiduously cultivated around McSweeney in the British media. Indeed, it is difficult to find an outlet which hasn’t published an in-depth profile stuffed with glowing praise for this ‘political mastermind’ — a man apparently in possession of — as one report put it — a ‘messianic ability to understand voters and what they want from a political party’.

McSweeney, so the story goes, is a man willing to speak hard truths to the Labour Party: to upset its progressive-metropolitan instincts, reconnect it with heartlands lost under Corbyn and — as a result — win. As a young Labour Party organiser, he ‘learned his politics street by street’ and not in ‘the corridors of power’, according to Maguire and Pogrund. By focusing on everyday issues like potholes and bin collections instead of left-wing self-indulgences, McSweeney secured impressive victories against the odds, first in Lambeth in 2006, and then, famously, in Barking in 2010, where Labour defeated a surging BNP. In the process, he drew closer to the Blue Labour tendency, which is ostensibly socially conservative and economically interventionist.

Eventually, McSweeney would apply his genius to Labour at national level. After winning Starmer the Labour leadership through a polling-driven strategy developed in secrecy behind the front of Labour Together, McSweeney masterminded Starmer’s successful journey back into government. From his laser focus on the groups Labour needed to win came the successful wooing of the ‘hero voters’, voters who had backed Brexit then the Tories in 2019, and were disproportionately based in the ‘Red Wall’.

Self-indulgent middle-class socialists and their make-believe politics, electoral ‘bribes’ like abolishing tuition fees, shibboleths like scrapping the two-child benefit cap, lily-heartedness on immigration — all were cast aside in favour of a resolutely pro-NATO, economically ‘cautious’ platform. Through a ruthlessly re-engineered electoral coalition, McSweeney secured the party’s biggest election win since 1997. With it came a clear message: Labour wins from the centre ground, ideally with a ‘genius Svengali’ like McSweeney at the helm.

What Do You Mean, ‘Normal Men’?

On closer inspection, however, this story falls apart quicker than you can say ‘ten pledges’. Far from being a ‘serial winner’, McSweeney’s record is decidedly mixed. In his early years, alongside victories in Lambeth and Barking, there were defeats too — and of course there was the humiliating defeat of Liz Kendall’s 2015 campaign for the Labour Leadership, which McSweeney ran. In Lambeth, a Labour contemporary describes McSweeney as a ‘cog in the machine rather than the engineer’. What’s more, the myth around McSweeney’s Barking campaign — breathlessly described by Pogrund and Maguire as ‘one of the most successful campaigns in British political history’ — has been effectively debunked by journalist Adam Bienkov, who pointed out both that the BNP’s vote share actually rose, and that Labour’s vote share rose less than in neighbouring boroughs.

McSweeney’s magnum opus — the 2024 general election — can be told in a different light still. It featured the lowest vote share for a majority government on record, a stumbling campaign which saw Labour’s support fall by around 10 percent, and, above all, lost votes compared to 2019 (let alone 2017). It was arguably only the split in the Right following the Tories’ implosion and the fateful decision of Nigel Farage to re-enter the political fray that secured this ‘sandcastle majority’.

As ever with McSweeney, present success incurred future cost. Just as Starmer’s mendacious ten pledges laid the groundwork for his perception as duplicitous and shifty, so too did a promise of change on a programme of none sow the seeds for disaster in government.

And yet there is a grain of truth to McSweeney’s arguments. Labour did achieve a more balanced electoral coalition, crucial to victory under First Past the Post. A minimal programme did minimise space for Tory attacks and media opposition, denying a flailing Sunak the chance to reunite an electoral coalition on a ‘stop socialism’ basis. Is McSweeneyism therefore a flawed but necessary tendency?

The Voter is Never Wrong

Thankfully not. Core to McSweeneyism is the belief that ‘The Voter is never wrong’. Yet for a man so intent on listening to the public, McSweeney in fact seems to have selective hearing. The super-majorities in the country for left-wing economic policies like renationalisation of public services and wealth taxes go unheeded by him, even though ‘hero voters’ tend to be strong supporters of such policies. Indeed, he steadfastly opposes them and characterised them as part of a left-wing fantasia. The mantra of ‘deliverism’ has been reduced to recent Starmer policies like promising to alleviate roadworks on bank holidays, rather than anything that might rein-in runaway bills. A soft-left cabinet minister who pursued a bolder path, promising to renationalise rail and democratising Britain’s buses, was quickly forced out, reportedly at McSweeney’s hands.

In reality, ‘The Voter’ is of course an ideological construction — one created by a bunch of wealthy right-wingers in London. Just as Liz Kendall claimed to embody the British people by doubling down on a neoliberal programme in 2015 — in a country already tiring of austerity — so too do McSweeney and his Blue Labour ilk (led by Maurice Glasman, an academic from Hackney) ventriloquise voters to justify their own right-wing instincts. The result is a caricature — McSweeney was reportedly a driving force behind disability cuts, which were apparently viewed as essential to chase Reform voters, yet these very same voters overwhelmingly reject the cuts as unfair.

It is unsurprising, then, that McSweeney’s targeting of ‘hero voters’ has drawn limited success at best. If a quarter of 2019 Tory voters switched to Reform last year; only 1 in 10 went to Labour. By some metrics, more died. That another path was possible is demonstrated by the 2017 election, where Labour’s vote surged across the Midlands and North on a left-populist platform, despite a vast Tory Brexit coalition.

A fetishistic view of the working class, meanwhile, leaves the Labour leadership incapable of understanding that putting forward practical and ideological arguments can actually change people’s minds — and that parties can set the political weather, rather than just following it. Where the public respect politicians with principles and authenticity, New New Labour chases the pollsters’ tail, with a leader who contorts to whatever position he thinks most advantageous. The result is, increasingly, widespread derision.

As pollster Luke Tryl has noted, voters elect Labour governments for a reason: mainly their ability to look after the working class, improve public services, and tackle poverty. The same austerity playbook that worked for the Tories won’t work for Labour. No wonder a year of cuts has gone down like a cup of cold sick with a country still struggling to make ends meet.

Nor will the favoured tactic of performative attacks on left-wing groups and causes to please Fleet Street succeed. If McSweeney’s mentor Peter Mandelson once infamously said that working-class voters have ‘nowhere else to go’, McSweeney appears to think the same for progressive-minded voters today. Not even the victory of nine Green and Independent MPs last July appears to have disabused him of the notion. As Muslim, young, and disabled voters continue to desert Labour over the party’s brutal cuts and support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Starmer and McSweeney may yet come to regret their open disdain for the party’s own base.

Back to the Old Guard

So who is the Starmer/McSweeney project really for? Follow the money. McSweeney’s original vehicle, Labour Together, was bankrolled by various multimillionaires, whose donations he largely neglected to report, leading to an Electoral Commission fine. Labour’s mass membership under Corbyn may not have been wholly representative of the country (what is?), but it was far more so than the corporate interests and Westminster hacks who now run the show, with Reeves telling big business that their fingerprints were all over the party’s policies, before a corporate freebies row engulfed the government.

Meanwhile, if McSweeney was widely alleged to have led the stitching up of Labour’s Parliamentary selections, with the help of millionaire donor ally Lord Alli, it was not ordinary folk who were elevated but an assortment of lobbyists, pollsters and professional political class hacks, including McSweeney’s wife.

The essence of McSweeneyism is about restoring Labour not to its core voters, but to elite control — and creating a ‘party of government’ that will not upset the interests of the rich and powerful. It was for them that Starmer declared war on the Left, drove out hundreds of thousands of members, and centralised power in the party. The British people, after all, care far more for the cost of living than the internal machinations of the Labour Party. McSweeneyism’s failure to tackle it has guaranteed the party’s unpopularity and laid the ground for the meteoric rise of Reform. Without a transformational social democratic programme front and centre, a Labour government will be no more than a brief detour on a longer, darker path.

In such a way, McSweeney’s promise to lead an ‘insurgent campaigning government’ was doomed from the outset. For populism is not merely an affect; rather, it represents a real challenge, from Left or Right, to an existing state order, one that a managerialist like Starmer embodies and seeks to protect.

For all its hackneyed talk of the potential of AI, McSweeneyism is largely a backward-looking, restorationist project. It seeks to recreate New Labour’s social compact, with a side order of military Keynesianism and harder borders thrown in. It is anti-Tory and anti-socialist, but it does not want fundamental change. Consequently, it has no answers to a contemporary Britain beset by crises on every front. What few commitments were made in its gestation, like the £28bn green prosperity plan, were sacrificed at the altar of Fleet Street and the bond markets. It is yesterday’s politics for yesterday’s world.

Tough on McSweeney, Tough on the Causes of McSweeney

Today, Emperor McSweeney has no clothes; Keir Starmer has been reduced to desperately pleading for the end of briefings against his right-hand man. Yet if he is maligned, it is in part for his style — his high-handed disdain for the Parliamentary Labour Party and for Westminster.

In truth, the rot runs deeper. The British media and Labour leadership have collaborated to build a cult around Morgan McSweeney because he rationalises their core beliefs into objective political wisdom. As the Telegraph’s Tom Harris helpfully put it: ‘It was McSweeney who was unafraid to tell the truth about British voters: that they will not vote for a party of the Left unless it appeals also to the centre ground.’

The centre ground has once again been blown to smithereens, and it is both incapable and unwilling to rise to the challenge of the political moment. Yet through Labour it dodders on, sustained by an anti-democratic political system. Rescuing the country from permanent decline and the spectre of Reform will require us, once more, to defeat the Labour Right. It is not just McSweeney who must go — it is all those who share his cynical, unprincipled and corrosive politics.