As a result, we’ve been in the market for something a bit bigger; an estate or a small 5-seater van. Ideally plug-in hybrid or full electric.

Cue my predictable frustration with the choices available to me on the market.

The range of battery-powered estates1, MPVs2 and family-friendly vans has shrunk; in the UK, consumers bought 38 SUVs for every 1 MPV in 2024. Sold to us as the convenient, utility vehicle with tonnes of space, SUVs now make up half of all EU car sales. In the US, SUV production has doubled in just over a decade. Most manufacturers have chosen to either abandon estates altogether or not to electrify them.

Why are SUV’s so popular?

If you Google why there are so many SUVs, you get articles like this at the top of your search, which attributes the growth of SUVs to changing consumer trends, citing safety, ride height, space, and comfort. They claim that Ford recognised the change in consumer behaviour, and because SUVs are more profitable and in higher demand, they discontinued a popular hatchback and replaced it with an SUV.

For Carwow, the tail is wagging the dog.

As I argued here, demand and consumers more generally don’t exist as something separate from the capitalist production process. Demand doesn’t just come out of thin air. Consumers across the world aren’t simultaneously and spontaneously deciding the SUV is the car of their dreams, pushing demand into the market, which leads, in an almost Newtonian chain, to an increase in production.

Car manufacturers are being inadvertently incentivised and encouraged to build bigger cars, which, combined with the way the car industry makes its money, produces consumers who “prefer” and “choose” SUVs.

Heavy Vehicle Subsidy and Emissions Targets

In the US, SUVs can be classified as “light trucks”. Measured by a vehicle’s footprint, a light truck has less stringent fuel economy regulations. By making a car bigger, a manufacturer is able to avoid compliance with regulations intended for passenger vehicles.

In the UK and the EU, the focus is on CO2 emissions, but the target applied to each manufacturer is adjusted to the average weight of its fleet. The heavier your fleet overall, the higher your fleet-permitted CO2 target. A reference weight is used in this calculation, which in itself is based on the weight of vehicles sold across the market in previous years. This creates a feedback loop in which increasingly heavier fleets, are being regulated against a reference fleet that is also getting heavier.

Given that an SUV shares mostly the same platform as a smaller version of the same vehicle, it costs relatively little to build but can command a much higher price.

A clear example in the UK would be something like the Peugeot 308 estate vs the Peugeot 3008 SUV, same platform but the SUV is about 13% more expensive.

Combine both of these with the rise of EV’s and the additional weight of a battery and it’s a no-brainer for a car company.

Xuan-Zheng Goh, Smart Europe’s director for product says that “Making a small car is a real big challenge. You need to make some careful decisions.”

Consumer Lead Demand

As I outlined here, the car industry has found innovative ways to make expensive vehicles more accessible to consumers.

The use of lease and PCP mechanisms allow consumers to lease cars worth nearly twice as much as their monthly payments could typically allow.

This is tempting to people because SUVs are considered status symbols. Our media and marketing all extoll the virtue signalling of the bigger vehicle. We don’t see the Roy family of Succession driving around New York in hatchbacks; they’re being driven around in huge black SUV’s.

Products are often marketed in a way that speaks to who we think we are or want to be, both internally and how we present that outwardly.

Any vehicle that appears to have 4-wheel drive, was previously the domain of the landowner, the farmer, or the aristocrat. They need a 4-wheel drive to tootle about massive estates.

See this advert to see what I mean.

The SUV Epidemic

SUVs present several issues to our infrastructure. Firstly, and most obviously, they’re bigger and more dangerous. In the UK and the EU, they have grown by 0.5cm each year since 2001. A study by the Vias Institute showed that a 10cm increase in the height of vehicle fronts raises the risk of death by 30%. In the US, cars are now 10 inches longer, 8 inches taller, and 1,000 pounds heavier.

This doesn’t always translate into more usable internal space either, as much of it is taken by the chassis, the ride height, styling, and accommodating larger wheels.

This requires materials; the bodywork is often significantly bigger and bulkier, without any meaningful size increase in the underlying platform. SUVs often don’t have bigger engines than their non-SUV counterparts.

Secondly, they are less fuel efficient. An SUV can use 10-20% more fuel, which emits more carbon into the atmosphere and costs the driver up to £1,600 a year more in fuel costs.

EV’s, which require rare earth minerals to produce are contributing to an increase in mining, an industry mired in humans rights abuses and exploitation. The Transport and Environment (T&E) say “a shift away from enormous electric SUVs … could reduce critical metal demand by 19 to 23 per cent”.

Finally, they put strain on our infrastructure. T&E estimates that we are exceeding our parking bays and the impact on our roads doesn’t scale as our cars do. The “Fourth Power Law”, states that if you double the load on an axle it can cause up to 16 times more damage to a road surface.

All of these combine to make SUVs one of the biggest contributors to climate change globally. A report by the IEA states that SUVs globally produced 1 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2022, more than the emissions of the UK and Germany. The UK’s National Audit Office claims that increased SUV production and an increase in road traffic more generally have cancelled out the CO2 reductions from EVs.

The consequences of the SUV epidemic are huge.

Industry Driven Outcomes

SUVs came about, like nearly all products under capitalism, as a result of a complex web of production and market-related incentives.

Government policy incentivises production of more expensive vehicles; clever financing convinces consumers they can attain a better product for the same monthly cost; emotionally charged marketing and endless cultural references reinforce the benefit of ownership.

The SUV epidemic is a deliberate choice to sell more profitable vehicles. It originated from the industry, not the consumer, and the trend will not reverse unless there is meaningful intervention somewhere. Simply opting out of SUV consumption at the individual level, or imposing taxes here and there, isn’t enough.

These issues largely go unreported by our media and our politicians, but these are the issues that change slowly and quietly over time, shaping society in ways we don’t understand until after the fact.

Challenging the rise of the SUV means challenging the very logic of capitalism; endless growth, “innovation,” and maximising the production and capture of surplus value, or profit.

SUVs are a canary in the coal mine. They are a real world point of reference - one that nearly everyone has some form of engagement with at some point - for how capitalism’s driving forces are ultimately destroying it. I believe we need to constantly draw attention to every day examples such as these to help people join the dots and understand what is really contributing to the end of life as we know it.

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One of the guys I lived with came from serious money, had lived all over the world and gone to school with the sons of Sheikh's. He boasted about being flown out to Dubai first class and how he and his friends ragged Bugatti’s about the E11 highway in the city.

He wasn’t from generational money; his dad had become wealthy through his work, an incredibly serious man who’d done very well for himself, and his son was living in Liverpool, not taking anything seriously and living off that wealth.

This pissed me right off.

The Rich Kid

I was there by the grace of huge student debts. By this point, my parents had long split, so I was there on my mum’s income alone, which meant I got the full whack as far as loans, interest-free overdrafts, grants and bursaries were concerned.

University, as I explored in Part 2, was my “way out”. For this rich kid, it was just an excuse to doss about for 3 years, he was always going to do well for himself, he was rich, smart and good looking and most importantly, well connected.

On nights out, he’d display his wealth by buying drinks for everyone all night, he’d get the bags, the weed and the cigs in, and we didn’t have to worry about it. He would buy consoles, expensive BB guns and remote control cars on a whim; never thinking once about what things cost.

We used to get into it when we were pissed up, and one night, he was talking about how he was the poor kid at school.

As he told it, he didn’t get dropped off at school in a Bugatti, his dad worked for his living, and he couldn’t be paying first-class Emirates for his mates to come visit.

Cue the world’s smallest violin.

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The Spoilt Kid

I wore my Yorkshire working-class upbringing on my sleeve and had a huge chip on my shoulder, so I wasn’t going to sit there and listen to this spoilt rich prick go on about how he had it hard at school ‘cause he was the “poor” kid.

I felt his narrative was invalidating my personal, lived experience. How could he, the guy who never worried about money, never worried for material needs and consistently frivolously spent thousands a week while I struggled to pay for my meal deals, ever be the “poor kid”?

Sure, he didn’t get dropped off in a Bugatti; we didn’t have a car! He couldn’t fly first class; I’d never even left the country! His dad “worked” for a living; mine was doing back-breaking work 80 hours a week and getting paid by the hour. No fucking way he knew what it was like to feel “poor”.

The conversation we had that night stuck with me. I have ADHD, which means I don’t have a functioning working memory, so if I remember something, that means it really must have been important for me to log it in the moment, especially when I was pissed up.

It rattled around my head for years until I was mature enough to really understand it.

The Poor Kid

The realisation I eventually came to was this: from his perspective, he absolutely was the poor kid. He was at school with the guys that now own Man City, people who owned oil empires and could fly First Class cos they owned the Airline.

This is a level of wealth absolutely unfathomable to me; this is wealth derived from ownership. By comparison, his dad wasn’t collecting his 7-10% off his assets every year; he was actually working for a living.

Relatively speaking, his dad was working-class, same as mine.

See, his dad didn’t own the means of production; his friend’s dad did. They got dropped off by the driver in their cars that cost more money than my entire family and I will make in several lifetimes.

Here I was, not listening to his grievances and what was effectively a critique of elite schooling and the class dynamics between owners and workers, because I was too stuck in my feelings, too caught up in my own lived experience. I felt attacked because I was projecting my own victimhood outward and leading the conversation with that.

He couldn’t possibly experience any form of poverty, imagined or real, because my poverty was worse.

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Class is Relative

The post-war era and the golden age of consumerism complicated the way we perceive class. Society was no longer made up simply of factory workers and factory owners. Instead, the expansion of corporate management, professional occupations and white-collar employment created a much broader hierarchy of social positions.

Ownership of the means of production also became more opaque. Large corporations separated ownership from day-to-day control, allowing executives to earn six-figure salaries without personally owning the businesses they ran.

This created a managerial class of people who acted as the bodyguards, enforcers and stooges of capital. They get just enough scraps from the ownership table to give them a sense of importance and power that they can exert over huge numbers of people.

Home ownership, share options and pension funds gave millions of people a financial stake in companies and the wider economy without giving them meaningful control over production.

At the same time, rising living standards, the expansion of cheap consumer debt and the mass availability of goods and services meant that material lifestyles became a less reliable indicator of class.

A skilled worker could own a nice car, big television, live in the big detached house and take foreign holidays, while a salaried manager might appear outwardly similar. As these distinctions blurred, so too did public understanding of what class actually meant.

Relating Across Class

My class chip was put on my shoulder by my dad the minute I was born; as a result, I’ve looked at most of my life through this lens.

I used to make snap judgments about people as a result of what I perceived to be their class, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to try and understand the relativity of each person’s experience.

The tall, rich, spoiled Dutch kid can relate to my sense of struggle; he faced many of the same barriers I did. It turns out that as you move up through the pagoda of wealth, each new layer comes with its own floor, you’re constantly looking upwards and so how you see everyone else in the building is dependent heavily on where you’re stood.

Around us, he’s ultra-rich; around them, he’s poor. This doesn’t invalidate my experience growing up any more than mine does his. Both of our struggles are real, if not contradictory, and in turn, our perceptions of the world were shaped by those struggles.

The Wealth Trap

This realisation helped me to recognise the propaganda I’d been spoon-fed my whole life by my parents, media and teachers.

The Dutch guy isn’t my enemy, nor should I aspire to be like him.

I actually felt sympathy for him. I can only imagine the additional pressure of appearing to be poor around that level of wealth and watching passively while your peers have everything most people in society merely dream of. He was forced onto a treadmill and made to sprint while everyone else around him was walking. I can opt out of that transaction by being so poor that I can’t afford the treadmill.

He was caught in the wealth trap. Once you start playing that game, there’s no getting out of it. Each ladder of wealth only leads to another, longer ladder, with each rung becoming further and further away.

We have the world’s first trillionaire. Does Bezos feel poor around Musk? Does Bill Gates feel poor around Bezos? Does Rupert Murdoch feel poor around Bill Gates? Where does this stop?

It doesn’t stop. Like the capitalism that created this faux class system, it grows exponentially; as a result, you can never fully enjoy the destination, nor can you enjoy the journey. The destination never comes, and the journey is filled only with chasing that which you’ll never see. It’s the embodiment of the dog chasing the car.

Does Musk's looking at his mugshot on the Forbes Real Time Billionaire list bring him any sense of satisfaction? I can only speculate, but unlikely, and if it does, like everything else in our universe, that feeling will be incredibly fleeting and impermanent.

Now he’s at a trillion, onwards to 2 trillion, I guess?

Capitalism gives too much space to jealousy, resentment, dissatisfaction and shame as the primary motivators in our material lives. These feelings become barriers to solidarity and are rooted in illusion.

How can we move forward together as a united working class unless we lead with empathy, respect, and humility?

The system produces inequality in every space we occupy together, and until we recognise that how we relate to the system is more important than how we relate to each other, we’ll continue on a downward death spiral towards further atomisation and division, and we will lose.

Looking back, neither of us really understood what class actually was. We were too busy comparing ourselves with each other to notice that both of us were suffering under the same system.

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Lisdexamfetamine was hitting my bloodstream, conspiring with the endorphins from my morning walk to force salty tears down my face. My son stirred at my sharp intakes of breath and heavy sniffing.

I was overwhelmed with a full spectrum of feelings, my neurons firing in every direction to absorb the importance of this moment.

From a Broken Home

When I was around 16, my mum and sister moved out of our family home. I chose to stay with my dad for reasons that were not fully obvious to me at the time.

He was an alcoholic, beaten and broken by nearly 40 years of trying to stay afloat1. A product of society’s sense of relentless rugged individualism and his own broken childhood and traumatic upbringing.

I stayed because even though he had become unrecognisable to me in his hatred and spite, he was still a man who had tried to get the most out of the tools at his disposal, and most importantly, he was suffering, and he was suffering alone.

Moving out didn’t sit right with me at the time; it felt like abandonment, like giving up. My sense of justice, developed in my childhood, compelled me to stay and try to help him.

I would eventually move out myself nearly 18 months later, after the situation became unsafe and unsustainable for me to function in.

My parents should have gone their separate ways many years before they eventually did2. The warm, fun, safe home of my early years had been coming apart brick by brick, year on year.

When we talk about opportunities in life, we often overlook the importance of a stable home environment. We focus on the existence of two parents, income, or other technocratic metrics, but a crucial part of every child’s upbringing is their parents’ relationship with each other. The dynamic between two adults projects itself into every corner of every room, every nook and cranny.

Similarly, while I don’t believe a child’s material environment is as crucial as our society would like us to think, I do believe the community milieu plays a significant role.

On the terraces of an ex-industrial Bradford town, I felt the consequences of both. Regularly woken in the early hours to the sounds of police sirens, raids on the house at the end of the street, a drunk husband locked out and banging on the door, fighting, or the threat of domestic violence. This was mirrored in the walls of my home.

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Inspiration through Individualism

The Wolf of Wall Street, Jobs, The Founder, The Social Network, American Gangster, Blow, Breaking Bad, any music biopic - these films all tell the same story in more or less the same way.

Act 1 is usually the deprived upbringing and/or the talent; Act 2 is the opportunity taken and the material, financial success; Act 3 is the downfall and the reconciliation amongst their riches.

They are nearly always driven by a deficiency or an inability to curb their worst impulses: hedonism, control, deprivation, trauma, loss, grief, failure, shame3. Often requiring something to have “gone wrong” at some point in their lives.

They lean heavily on the ingenuity and innovation of a single individual, who built an empire from nothing with their bare hands.

This, of course, is a fallacy. Hollywood reproduces the capitalist myth of the “great man of history”. There is no such thing as starting from “nothing,”4 and no one individual ever built an empire.

Hollywood and our culture more broadly rarely, if ever, favour stories where the first act follows a young child as their parents help them to explore the world, explore their passions and creativity, seek autonomy and a strong sense of self, feel fulfilled by altruism, care, or working towards the collective good, or develop emotional maturity.

There are exceptions, of course, and Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli are the obvious yardsticks, but these are anomalies.

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Safety as Success

I never met my partner’s dad; he passed suddenly and tragically before I met her, but she said something once that really stuck with me: she said that he didn’t want for much, because he had his family and that’s all he needed.

My dad chased the rags-to-riches dream, and it eventually broke not just him but his family, and like him, this is what drove me for a long time. As I’ve gotten older, and especially since I welcomed my beautiful son into the world, I find myself relating to my partner’s dad more and more.

That Monday morning, swaying with my sleepy son in my arms, the wind blowing through the patio doors and the birds singing, I realised that I’d “made it”5.

Act 1 of my life started with the broken home in the years that culminated in my mum and sister leaving.

Act 2 took me through years of hedonism, parties, stress, trauma and broken relationships, trying my hand at the limited opportunities in front of me to achieve “success”. This act ended when I left for India for 3 months and recognised I needed to change, that I needed to start thinking about what I wanted my future to look like and what was important to me.

Instead of building material success, I spent hours in therapy, in self-help books6, in introspection and in recognising the emotional and psychological deficiencies I was trying to make up for.

I realised that in this place, in this home, in this moment, I’ve begun Act 3 and, most importantly, I was safe; this was what people mean when they say “home”.

Now I’ve arrived here, I can now work hard to provide a platform for my son to succeed in whatever way he chooses to, by whatever metric he chooses to measure that.

I will do my best to make sure he grows up able to explore his passions, his creative instincts, his interests, recognise that “opting out” is an option too, and be allowed to follow his heart wherever that takes him.

I’ll do everything I can to make sure he isn’t starting with the deficiencies we’re told are the ones that propel us to “greatness”; instead, he’ll be free to learn, grow, fail, try again, and hopefully recognise that most of the stories our culture tells us are actually traps to fall into, not targets to aim for.

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For Part 3 we go to Sub-Saharan Africa, to take a look at how Structural Adjustment Programmes affected Ghana, its working class, and in particular how Structural Adjustment Programmes reshaped Ghana’s state.

Ghana is heralded by the IMF and the World Bank as a SAP success story. On paper this is defensible, but in this success lies a crucial contradiction at the heart of SAPs as an ideology.

For the IMF, success was measured through things like stabilising the economy, bringing inflation down, improving Ghana’s ability to pay its debts and attracting foreign investment. Whether these changes actually improved the lives of ordinary Ghanaians was treated as a separate issue.

Abstract policy and technocratic number crunching make it possible to paint a positive picture while “experts” are sitting in their Washington HQ, or observing as a foreign investor, however for the working class of the country they’re discussing, these same policies are often actively harmful and regressive. Lines on a graph don’t feed children.

Two Lost Decades

Ghana’s road to SAPs began when Kwame Nkrumah was removed in a CIA-backed coup in 1966. Having been in power since independence, Nkrumah’s domestically focused industrialisation strategy was interrupted before it could mature, and the subsequent governments dismantled parts of it without creating a viable alternative, leaving Ghana trapped as a commodity exporter vulnerable to world markets.

Between 1966 and 1983 Ghana experienced a successful coup roughly every three to four years, with only two democratic elections in the 17 year period from Nkruma’s removal and the arrival of the IMF in 1983.

The working classes, such as market traders, suffered heavily under this instability. As the Ghanaian men either went into cocoa farming or became educated professionals, market traders became increasingly female.

Trade became highly regulated and increasingly favoured military personnel, the sale of cheap goods often took place in urban areas and the queues became increasingly more violent.

Price controls led to confiscations, forced sales and beatings, while farmers became disincentivised to sell food through official channels.

Eventually the private trading of many imported goods was outlawed and the military government set up their own, separate trading channels. In 1979 Makola Market was completely destroyed by the government.

This resulted in only the biggest traders being able to survive, with many of the smaller and medium traders either becoming heavily indebted, or going out of business altogether and going hungry, and in some cases, losing children to malnutrition.

Through this backdrop of national economic collapse, in 1983 under president Jerry Rawlings, Ghana turned to the IMF and the World Bank for structural adjustment.

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1983 and the Arrival of Bretton Woods

In order to access six billion dollars from the IMF and the World Bank, Ghana was subjected to the same loan conditions as many other countries during this time. For a deeper understanding of that, you can read Part 1 here.

Structural Adjustment in Ghana, also known as the Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) meant reducing government expenditures through cuts in social services and privatization of state-owned enterprises, increases in production and exportation of staple products such as cocoa and timber.

On paper, this resulted in a drastic turnaround of Ghana’s overall economic performance. From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, gross national investment rose from 3.7% to 16%, and inflation declined from an average annual rate of 73% to about 13%. Industrial capacity expanded from about 25% in the 1970s to 46% in the 1990s.

Because the country's international finances improved, it moved from a balance of payments deficit to a surplus. This allowed it to cover its international payment obligations without relying as heavily on additional borrowing and to increase the foreign currency reserves held by its central bank.

SAPs also increased international confidence in Ghana’s economy, which helped attract foreign capital, particularly in the fields of mining and infrastructure.

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The Impact of SAPs on everyday people

These headlines read well, but through a different analysis we can see that Ghana’s economy had pivoted. The economy had become increasingly outward-looking

The situation for the average Ghanaian was bleak. They faced job losses from the public sector due to shrinkage of the state and from the private sector due to trade liberalisation leading to competition from abroad.

Capital was being directed towards external markets rather than internal social good such as healthcare, public services and education. As a result, national infrastructure wasn’t being invested in for the benefit of the people.

Privatisation of key sectors reduced access to healthcare and clean drinking water for poorer households. Debts continued to grow, both personally and nationally.

During the peak of the ERP, Ghana was spending broadly 4x more on servicing its debt to the Global North than on healthcare for its own people. Ghana was caught in a debt trap.

The Programme of Action to Mitigate the Social Costs of Adjustment (PAMSCAD)

The response was the Programme of Action of Mitigate the Social Costs of Adjustments (PAMSCAD).

Reflective on an economy that doesn’t serve its people, PAMSCAD was a social safety net specifically aimed at plugging the gaps that SAPs created. The existence of PAMSCAD is implicit acknowledgement that under SAPs, the Ghanaian economy does not work for the working class.

Backed by a paltry $83million, only 1.6% of the total loans borrowed to implement SAPs, PAMSCAD was criticised for allocating funds to “high visibility” outcomes, such as hand-dug wells, feeder roads and classroom construction, rather than addressing the structural social costs created by adjustment itself.

This can be attributed to the fact that a written outcome of PAMSCAD was the “‘sustainability and acceptability of the ERP”.

Evidently, this wasn’t intended to address the wellbeing of the most needy of society. This was intended to smooth over the cracks of the World Bank and the IMF’s policies to maintain legitimacy in what was being recorded as one of their biggest successes. Africa had experienced centuries of extractive colonial subjugation and any notion that SAPs didn’t work only served to mucky the IMF and the World Banks ticket.

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Trade Unions

Globally, trade unions have been a key weapon for the working class in their fight against capitalism and in Ghana this was no different. Where Thatcher fought the unions head-on with state brutality and violence, Jerry Rawlings and the PNDC sought to legislate away and dilute union power.

Through collective bargaining, the Ghana Trade Union Congress (TUC) with its 17 constituent unions had won key benefits for workers, including minimum wages, employer-provided housing, rent controls, improvement in workplace health and safety and access to education and training, culminating in it being legally recognised in 1958 under the Industrial Relations Act.

From 1983 onwards, trade unions were being systematically retrenched. Union leaders were forcibly removed from office and it stopped holding the Tripartite Committee meetings between the TUC, business and the state, a crucial battleground for labour laws and wages. The government removed tough restrictions on layoffs and reduced, or in some cases completely eliminated a host of benefits that had been hard won since 1945.

Collective bargaining was effectively ended when they forced negotiation at the firm-level and broke the centralized power of unions by asserting that there must be a national union for all firms within a single sector, rather than across them, such as mining or construction.

There was a steady decline in strikes from 1980-1991. This table speaks for itself.

It was claimed that the reduction in strikes was a result of acceptance of SAPs and a lack of discontent, but if we understand trade unionism as a critical signal of healthy bargaining power between workers and capital, it’s clear that this was anything but a lack of discontent. It was a structured, deliberate and coordinated effort to atomise and break up union membership. By 1994, the TUC had lost 40% of its membership.

Another Victory for Neoliberalism

Through colonialism, independence, decades of instability, and then a series of policy proscriptions from two institutions that represent the most powerful states in the world, the Ghanaian working class has repeatedly borne the costs throughout it all.

SAPs didn’t improve the lives of everyday Ghanaians. The story of SAPs in Ghana was never about alleviating poverty, reducing regional and national inequality, and building a country for the working class to thrive.

In practice, SAPs functioned to reassert the imperial relationship. Once Ghana had gained independence SAPs ensured comfortable conditions for foreign multinationals to extract natural resources at low prices, give investment opportunities to foreign investors and ensure the Global North’s contractors could capture a significant amount of the original loans to Ghana.

Effectively, the Global North got Ghana’s economy back on its feet in order to assert a form of economic control and restructure the Ghanaian state once again towards servicing the Global North and the imperial core.

This is neo-colonialism in real time. The Global North are less able to extract wealth and resources directly, so now they do it through “neutral” policies aimed at “growth” in the Global South, while the impact on their working class is a fringe consideration, at best, if considered at all.

Ghana, like Mexico, sits as another example of both the non-neutrality of economic policy and how economic indicators became decoupled from the wellbeing of ordinary people.

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What I’ve noticed over the last 5-10 years is what seems like an increase in the number of newer registration plates. I’ve always assumed this must mean an overall increase in the production of new cars, with the industry finding innovative ways to sell more.

The data doesn’t support my argument. From 2010 to 2023, roughly 26 million new cars have entered the market. This is replacement production rather than excess production. 1 The folly of basing reality on your subjective pattern recognition, I guess2.

During my research, I found something that I think is much more interesting: a rabbit hole that showed me how the car industry no longer sells cars; it sells money and collects the interest.

Selling the Same Car Twice - With Interest

In 1919, GM introduced GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation), which provides structured loans, payment plans, and financing.

Over the next 100 years, this idea grew significantly, as consumer credit became more accessible and more commonplace amongst everyday people, and dealerships had normalised using debt to fund a car.

Since the 80’s, private lending has become incredibly profitable, and global competition has been squeezing profit margins on the production of the cars themselves.

This led to what is called “captive finance” - financial products being sold directly by the manufacturers.

Captive finance has grown into the profit centre of companies like Toyota, GM and Ford, rather than manufacturing.

Car manufacturers profit the most when you are kept within their ecosystem. This facilitates repeat extraction of value from the same product, which is why a car company prefers finance to purchasing outright with cash.3

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Ownership Cycles

Finance allows car manufacturers to think in terms of what are called ownership cycles. Over a car's 17-year lifetime, it may have between 4 and 6 owners, and each new owner becomes a “cycle”.

The first two are the easiest to capture and provide the most value; beyond that, the margins and the opportunities significantly decrease.

When you finance a car through something like a Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) - explained in this footnote4 - or a lease, the dealership usually gets the car back at the end of the term5. The industry now has two critical markets to operate in: new and used.

Financial contracts give them control and valuable data that can be used to control price, supply and margins of both markets.

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Controlling the Market

One of the least visible but most important mechanisms in modern car finance is their ability to engineer the residual value of their assets, which is the car’s value at the end of the agreement. Because monthly payments are calculated on the difference, the car appears significantly more affordable, leading consumers to buy more expensive cars6.

The market doesn’t determine residual value; the vendor carefully engineers it using vast amounts of data from auctions and trade-ins.

If they set them too low, the monthly payments become unattractive, so they can’t sell their higher-priced vehicles. Set them too high, and the manufacturer risks losing money when the vehicle returns.

The entire system depends on finding a sweet spot where payments remain low enough to drive new-car sales. At the same time, used-car values remain high enough to both protect resale value and maintain a high enough price to justify finance.

Manufacturers have become remarkably sophisticated at managing this balance. For new cars, more than 80%7 of which are financed by PCP in the UK, the industry can influence how many vehicles return to market through these agreements.

For the used market, a dealership can prop up used-car prices through things like approved-used schemes, which add a premium onto a used car as it comes with a few “guarantees” - extended warranties, and finance offers that may be lower than the market rate for banks or commercial lenders.

Financialisation not only allows the industry to sell more expensive cars, but it also helps insulate them from the competition. Manufacturers and dealers gain control over ownership cycles, creating predictable, steady revenue in what should otherwise be a fairly chaotic market.

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Selling Money, Not Cars

PCPs and leases are the foundation of an industry that has been forced to find new ways to make money, as the sale of the product in and of itself doesn’t generate high enough margins.

It’s incentivising debt to enable higher-value consumption within a fixed production volume. Squeezing more juice out of the same lemon.

The modern car industry increasingly resembles an asset-management business that happens to manufacture vehicles. The goal is no longer to produce and sell a car; the goal is to manufacture collateralisable assets and then control as much of that asset’s economic life as possible.

Even basic modern cars are now incredibly comfortable, powerful, and drive well by historical standards. Modern cars are what they are and really stretch the limits of incremental innovation.

Finance has become the critical lever that allows consumers to access increasingly expensive cars while keeping monthly payments within reach. As a result, our roads are seeing an increase in the average value of the cars on them, as the industry has found a way to stretch affordability through time. This allows the car industry to grow in a mature market where most production replaces old stock.

The car industry, much like the phone industry as I argued here for ’s Substack, is continuing the wider capitalist trend of extracting more value from products that are no longer delivering proportionately more value to consumers.

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This was intended as a standalone piece, but as I researched deeper, I realised there’s much more to say here. I will do a few more parts to this that will look at the increase in the number of SUVs, why all cars are getting bigger, and the impact this financialised system has on working-class, everyday people. Subscribe for more!8

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As humans, we rely on dopamine release and uptake every day to do a whole host of things, from brushing our teeth to training for a marathon.

Dopamine is a little misunderstood. Often considered just a feel-good chemical, dopamine gets you off the sofa. We are drip-fed it in small doses to keep us going with a task, and it affects our ability to forecast future dopamine release and keep long-term goals in mind.

ADHD disrupts this reward cycle. In place of a dopamine hit, I experience a sea of racing thoughts, every part of every task I’ve ever wanted to do, all at once. In superhero films, when someone develops telepathy, they can’t shut out the voices; this is how I experience ADHD.

Our ability to use information, start things, get things done, order tasks, and prioritise things is known as our executive function. ADHD wreaks havoc with this, and so you sit there, unable to start anything, until you eventually default to dopamine farming through whatever slot machine mechanism particularly works for you2.

This could be things like gaming, doom scrolling, or worse things like porn, gambling, or substance abuse. Naturally, this gets in the way of your productivity, and productivity is the aim of the game in a capitalist world built around GDP and growth.

Make the Numbers Go Up

Everything in our culture is built around productivity; without it, there can’t be economic growth, and we all kneel at the altar of economic growth. Our media, TV, film, popular stories, our work life, and personal lives are all built around the hustle.

ADHD meds are often framed in this language too, because a critical thing we struggle with is not being able to do things; meds are sold as a way to “be more productive”.

My first two weeks have had me wrestling with this quite a lot.

Am I taking meds to be more productive? Do the meds exist to make me improve my output, per capita? Or am I taking meds so I can enjoy life more?

Lisdexamfetamine is what is called a “pro-drug”. The active element of the drug needs to be “cleaved” from the main molecule before it becomes active, so it only works as fast as my body can metabolise it. This creates a smoother “come up” and “come down”, meaning the curve is more of a pointed triangle rather than a hard shelf3

As a result, I have what can be framed as a peak productivity window. This is often between 10 am and 2 pm, when it’s the strongest.

Without the meds, I feel like an F1 car that hasn’t been put on the tarmac yet with the accelerator pressed to the floor. With the meds, I can often focus on one thing at once. My mind is significantly quieter. I can just…be. Just existing isn’t as torturous an experience. This is a very new experience for me.

It’s easy for me to want to cram everything I’ve ever wanted to do in my life into this tiny window every day. It feels like trying to push a lorry through a manhole.

I experience this as a tension between chasing either productivity or joy. A dialectic between my soul and my material reality. Capitalism forces us to separate these, like oil in water.

If I have 4 good hours every day, where I can finally be free of my ADHD symptoms, who decides how they are spent and who benefits from that time?

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The Duality of Capitalism

In Buddhist traditions such as Zen and Advaita, there is the belief in ‘non-duality’. There is no space between the subject and the object, where one begins, the other ends.

Alan Watts famously Westernised this as “we are the universe experiencing itself”. He said that humans are the continuation of the Big Bang, meaning that if the Big Bang was the seed, we are a leaf on the tree that it eventually became.

Capitalism is stubbornly dualist; it needs us to separate our very beings from the universe we are an extension of, from the natural and spiritual world. Capitalism has no interest in nourishing the soul; the soul only exists as a commodity to be ground into dust until it’s just a brand name.

If we believe we are naturally non-dualistic, how can we pillage and plunder the very world that we grew from for a profit? In this context, spending time on soulless, “productive” pursuits becomes akin to chopping off our own umbilical cord.

We are forced to constantly choose between the health of our soul and the health of our material life. Only a lucky few can achieve both. We have to earn to survive, every minute of our life not spent earning isn’t contributing to our material well-being.

Now I’m unburdened from the chaos that is my ADHD, that time suddenly seems incredibly valuable, and our culture has conditioned me to believe it’s best spent on tasks that generate a return.

Experience Alone is Enough

I don’t want to finish every day feeling guilty because I wasn’t “productive enough”.

Every disability, every illness, every mental health crisis, each is just another reason why you can’t contribute to a society that only values your output rather than your existence. Our government doesn’t want you to get better so you can enjoy just being; they want you to get better so you can improve your productive output.

I’m sure I’ll continue to wrestle with this for the rest of my life, and as I move through titration, I am going to try my hardest to make sure at least some of the days are spent at “peak” Lisdex just being.

Maybe I’ll take a book out into the grass and read it in the sun, maybe I’ll take my son to see the ducks, maybe I’ll make some music I never have any intention of anyone ever hearing, or maybe I’ll write something I have no intention of anyone ever reading.

Maybe I can find some time, on some days, to remember that I exist only to exist, nothing more, nothing less. Simply by experiencing this universe, I’ve pulled a winning lottery ticket4, and the Lisdex finally slows everything down enough for me to be present in that.

Medication can either be society’s way to squeeze me tighter into its arbitrary boundaries, or it can be a way for me to experience the world in a more present, calmer, and deliberate way. Capitalism wants the former, my soul needs the latter.

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Those who seek to use this tragedy to incite violence, create division in our communities and further their own political ambitions, are deeply irresponsible and deserve no place in our public life.”

We also reject attempts to scapegoat the entire Sikh community for an act carried out by a single individual and we stand in solidarity with them.

If you truly believe the response from the Right is stoked up, then you must also know that simply saying “don’t believe what that guy says, he’s a bad dude” and we stand in “solidarity with the community some are now blaming” isn’t going to change anything in the eyes of people who are reacting to the narrative coming from Farage, Lowe, Jenrick etc.

Indulge me for a second and imagine a young lad, most of the adults in his life are now kicking off because of what happened in Southampton and the terrible way the police handled it. He probably feels a bit unsafe; everyone around him is telling him he should feel unsafe1.

What might make him feel better? Some sense of control, some sense that he can do something to change that feeling of uneasiness that he has.

Along comes Farage spouting off about “two-tier cultures” where the “rights of white people matter less than that of ethnic minorities”, likening it to “career criminal” George Floyd and the BLM movement2, and the kid nods along and thinks, okay, okay, this guy “gets it”, I feel unsafe, two-tier policing is the reason I feel unsafe.

That’s the emotional response met, immediately, with a clear villain. As I argued here, the Right are masters at speaking only to your feelings.

So what can this young lad do to resolve that feeling? Maybe he decides to vote for Reform next time things come around. Maybe he’d also like to validate his feelings some more, so he goes on YouTube - cue videos of probably Tommy Robinson or Unite the Kingdom rallies or whatever.

Fired up off the back of that, he wants to do more, he’s engaged, mobilised. There’s a march nearby, loads of the lads he knows from where he lives are going, he thinks, ‘maybe if I go to that, it can make me feel strong, and it gives me somewhere to channel my fear and display it as rage.’

This is the pipeline in real time, thundering along relentlessly up and down the country, using a flashpoint moment to calcify the message.

Blocking The Pipe

What’s going to jam a stick in that wheel? It definitely isn’t some uppity posh-sounding person from central London or Brighton saying, “yes, the police were wrong, but don’t worry about it, it’s a one-off, it doesn’t speak to the systemic issues, actually minorities, like the guys you are scared of, they have it worse, so just ignore what Farage says.”

What kind of response is that? It’s a response tainted with the stench of liberal identity politics that must always present identity as a zero-sum game at the expense of class-based analysis.

Where is the emotional resonance? Where is the acceptance of the fact that this kid may feel unsafe? Where is the call to action? Most importantly, where is the actual villain?3

We handle this better in defence of marginalised groups whenever they are targeted by the state, or by other members of society, which happens all the time - we rally around as we should. We say you are right to feel unsafe, yes there is a real, deeply systemic problem and a clear villain. Here are some YouTube videos of people like you at rallies or talking heads talking directly to your problem, and if you want, vote for us because we stand in solidarity with you.

We can do it, but we selectively choose who we do it for.

Both things are true. Events like what unfolded in Southampton happen disproportionately to minorities, and the kids in the deindustrialised towns also have feelings of abandonment, disenfranchisement, and hopelessness that are being channelled down racial lines; we choose not to speak to that.

We know how to talk to one, but we don’t know how to talk to the other.

Building A New Narrative

What is certain is that the capitalist machine needs smashing, because it’s crushing us all. What happened here will happen again because the police are tools of a corrupt and degenerate state that needs us divided so they can keep carving up the Monopoly board and robbing us in broad daylight.

We exist in a media landscape that is completely incapable of holding two competing views in the same space at once. Despite this, we have to stop only directly refuting what people like Farage, Lowe, and Robinson say; we have to build our own narrative to fill some of the space they currently dominate.

The story can’t just be - “They’re wrong, we’re right, look at this graph, trust us, bro”. That is evidently not working. We need to build our own narrative that speaks to the way people feel in any given circumstance and give them something to resonate with.

Farage stood up in the House of Commons and broke down his bullshit rhetoric for all to hear, which is now spreading like wildfire across the internet. I haven’t seen any equivalent to this from the Left - something that centres the class antagonisms and the material conditions that create outcomes like these and grotesque failures in our institutions that supposedly exist to protect us.

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Thatcher liberalised our energy so prices are dictated via an exchange platform based on supply and demand, resulting in prices changing every 30 minutes, so there are 48 different prices each day. I can now take advantage of these price changes.

There are “peak” times and “off-peak” times.

The exact price at any given time is determined by “marginal cost”. This means everyone gets paid what it costs the last producer needed to meet demand to generate 1 additional unit of power. This is usually gas, as that’s the most reliable source of energy, and the most expensive.

Understanding all this led me down the rabbit hole of our energy landscape, and why it’s up to me as the individual to manage all this.

This is because under capitalism, we are bound by extractive, highly centralised, individualistic and top-down models of production and ownership. This is at odds with a technology that can be localised and democratised.

An IPCC report in 2022 claimed that:

Greater public participation in climate policy processes and governance, by increasing the diversity of ideas and stakeholders, builds resilience and allows broader societal transformation towards systemic change, even in complex, dynamic and contested contexts.2

To transition away from fossil fuels, public participation is key. The profit motive is not sufficient in bringing about the wide-scale change we need. We have to challenge the underlying structures that reproduce capitalist modes of production and ownership. The IPCC reports continue to say:

Local initiatives … can lead to improvements in energy efficiency, ensure a decent standard of living and increase renewable energy uptake, while building on existing social trust, and, in turn, building social trust and initiating engagement, capacity building, and social capital formation.3

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Energy Democracy

Energy Democracy (ED) is described as “implementing a low-carbon transition that changes both the socio-economic and the political structures of our energy systems4”, and it emerged as a response to the dominance of large energy companies.

ED follows 4 key tenets: democratisation and participation, property, surplus value production and employment, ecology and sufficiency.

These tenets ensure that people directly affected should hold decision-making power, municipal ownership or collective private ownership/cooperatives, local value capture, local investment, decentralised jobs and energy based on local need rather than profit maximisation beyond growth imperatives.

A Tale of Two Models: Ecotricity

Ecotricity’s founder, Dale Vince, claimed on a podcast with Novara Media that Ecotricity doesn’t pay dividends and doesn’t have shareholders; he explicitly stated that he makes all the decisions and shareholders are antithetical to that. Whilst Ecotricity is privately owned rather than shareholder-owned, Vince himself has become extremely wealthy through the company’s growth.

I have entered the market as a direct competitor to Ecotricity because I produce my own energy. Of course, Ecotricity is unlikely to incentivise me; they only want consumers in order to monopolise production.

This results in a need to unilaterally protect your own material interests, or those of your company, as evidenced by the backlash against the government, of which he has donated up to £6m, in their support for heat pumps.

Having invested heavily in biogas production, Vince urged the government to roll back its BUS scheme, which is £7,500 towards a heat pump. Ecotricity is influencing the government to change the market in its favour.

Renewable technology has the potential to radically decentralise and democratise energy production. Ecotricity’s model does little to change the underlying structures that are holding us back from revolutionising our relationship with energy, and subsequently the planet. While the intention is noble, and the pioneering cannot be ignored, the mechanism through which they are delivering this is actively contributing, indirectly, to the problem Ecotricity claim to want to solve.

Of the 4 keys tenets of Energy Democracy, Ecotricity doesn’t meet any of them, but it could. Currently, democratisation is not built into Ecotricity’s ownership or governance structure; ownership remains concentrated and private, the surplus is still privately controlled, communities themselves do not directly own the assets and wealth capture is not democratically distributed.

Finally, while Ecotricity strongly aligns ecologically, it is still driven by consumption growth, commodified energy markets, and profit-led investment logic.

To meet these tenets would require a fundamental restructuring of the company and the removal of supreme control from its founder.

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A Tale of Two Models - Danish Energy Islands

Denmark has been pioneering ED for decades now. This has manifested in what are called “Danish Energy Islands”, namely Bornholm, Samsø and Ærø. For the purposes of this, we will focus on Samsø.

Samsø is home to 4,300 residents. The island was the first to declare its intent to rely on renewable energy for 100% of the island’s needs.

In 1997, roughly 2 years after Ecotricity was set up, Samsø Municipality set a goal to become Denmark’s renewable energy island in 10 years. By 2005, the island managed to become a net exporter of energy.

To do this, Samsø municipality built and owns five of the ten offshore wind turbines, external investors own three and local cooperatives own two. Local farmers own nine of the eleven onshore wind turbines, while two are owned by local cooperatives.5

One farmer explained during a study that he used to think that wind turbines were quite ugly. However, since owning one, he thinks differently because “every time it spins, I see the crowns coming to my bank account”.6

The islanders also created the Samsø Energy Academy. Financed by profits from the two offshore wind turbines the municipality owns, it provides both the social structures and the physical space for decision-making and is the hub for local deliberative democracy.

Serving as a publicly funded forum for citizens, it encourages collaboration between formal state institutions and islanders. Through it, islanders found a collective solution for internet access, which considerably lowered costs for local households.

This structure has embedded deeper community-based democratic institutions and created a culture of cooperation and problem-solving. Most importantly, the islanders are in control. This is the power of renewable technologies

Of the 4 keys tenets of Energy Democracy, Samsø meets them all.

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Community or Capitalism

In the UK, being “off grid” leaves me with few good options. I have no mechanism through which to engage in a community-driven, localised approach.

The potential to change the energy market doesn’t come from assets alone - building as many windmills as you want won’t change the structural issues. The change starts to happen when control of those assets is held democratically by consumers, such as Som Energia in Spain.

Ecotricity has shown that the upfront capital cost of building renewable infrastructure is enormous - turbines, planning permission, grid connection, land, and maintenance over decades. Samsø shows that once up and running, the cost to generate electricity is incredibly low, and the start-up costs don’t have to come from consumers who don’t have a say in production or ownership.

Ecotricity’s ownership model ultimately limits its ability to fully participate in this future, as this future relies on households, communities and regions producing their own energy locally, managed through a centrally balanced network. It starts at the household level and builds outwards. This is antithetical to Ecotricity’s model but absolutely crucial to the Samsø model.

A 2022 study of the complexities of energy transition concluded:

One-sided ways of thinking and attitudes must be overcome to meet the overall demands of energy and climate justice in terms of distribution, process and recognition. In conclusion, we therefore advocate that community energy should not be understood exclusively as bottom-up projects, but that balancing and connecting elements should be injected into communities and systems through targeted socially inclusive and exchange strategies.7

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She runs an empire built on exclusivity, aspiration, and the labour of people she neither notices nor cares about. She decides who gets to work and who doesn’t, what gets made and who gets to wear it. She is, in the most straightforward sense, a humongous capitalist.

However, there is a scene in The Devil Wears Prada - the one about the cerulean blue jumper1 - that is a brutally honest illustration of a Marxist argument that demonstrates the real-world consequences of control over the means of production2.

The content of what Miranda says demonstrates the real-world version of an argument Karl Marx made in the Grundrisse in 1857 about the relationship between production and consumption.

What she describes as a linear chain with a top and a bottom, presented as a natural order, Marx describes as the circular and misrecognised structure of capitalist production.

Watch this now iconic scene here.

From a Pile of “stuff”

Andy Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway, joins the magazine as a junior assistant to Miranda, hoping to leverage the connections for a shot at journalism. She’s made a point of not caring too much about fashion - her clothes are functional, chosen without much care.

She clearly thinks the concept of high fashion is ridiculous, and the audience is brought along on that journey with her. During a decision Miranda is making over two belts, Andy sniggers at the concept that the two belts are in any way different.

Miranda identifies the specific shade of blue of a jumper3 Andy is wearing - cerulean blue - and traces its history from its production through to its consumption on Andy’s body. That colour did not appear in the distribution network by accident.

It began in a room very similar to the one Andy is standing in during the scene, and then to a runway. It was deliberately decided upon by a small group of people in the fashion industry. It moved from there into department stores, then into high-street retail, and eventually into the discount end of the market, where Andy came across it and selected it to reflect her nonchalance of fashion.

Miranda’s conclusion is direct: Andy believes she has opted out of the system by choosing something that wasn’t trending. However, as Miranda brutally points out, she has not. She has received one of its outputs, slightly delayed, and has mistaken the distance between herself and the source of independence from it.

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What Marx Said

In the Grundrisse, Marx argues that production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are not separate, independent activities. They are moments within a single process. We tend to think of consumption as the endpoint - you buy a thing, you use it, you’re done. But Marx insists that consumption is not separate from production; it is shaped by it, often produced by it.

More specifically, Marx argues that production “creates the consumer.” It does not merely create objects for pre-existing needs; it produces the needs themselves. The system generates not just goods but desires, preferences, and the very categories through which people understand what they want. The consumer’s perception that they are at the “end” of the chain and that they arrived there freely is not accurate. They were produced by everything that came before them.

This is precisely what Miranda is demonstrating. Andy didn’t just happen to want a cerulean jumper4. The cerulean jumper exists, at that price point, in that shop, as a direct result of decisions made years earlier by people Andy has never met, working in institutions Andy has never thought about. A process formed her preference, which she was not party to and had no control over.

The specific aesthetic language Miranda is using - the idea that the runway decision determines what eventually ends up in the clearance bin - is a description of how production shapes consumption across time and down through the price hierarchy.

We can’t privilege any single node in the production chain any more than you can separate the river bank from being shaped by the river, which in turn reshapes the river.

The person who perceives themselves to be at the bottom of that chain, the one who picks things up in the discount aisle, is no freer from the system than the person who buys at full price. They are just further downstream.

Control Over the Means of Production

What makes this argument significant is not just that it applies to fashion. It applies to every domain of consumption in a capitalist economy. Miranda has laid it out in very material, relatable terms.

She delivers it almost as a smug take-down of the illusion of subcultural individuality. As someone who has always tried to live “outside” of capitalist production, I remember this scene annoying me when I first watched it. I felt it was attacking my attempt at “opting out” because she’s right. I wasn’t.

The company that makes all of my “alternative” clothes and produces my skateboards and distributes my edgy music are still a huge capitalist companies that only care about profit. I was just another consumer produced by production itself, given a range of “choices”, and I opted for the one that I felt represented opting out.

What looks like a choice is actually a product of a very specific set of industrial and political decisions, made a long time ago, way upstream of you. You are the result of that production chain, and your decision sends a signal back to the top, and round we go again.

Marx’s point, and Miranda’s point, is that the person who believes they have opted out of a system by making unconventional “choices” within it has both has failed to recognise the circular nature of production, and mistaken their direction of travel within it. Andy thinks she exists as a dam, inertly blocking the flow of water, but she is just another bend in the river.

There is no outside. The “outside” you think you’ve found is just a corner of the inside that doesn’t hold enough cultural capital to command a high enough price, or hasn’t manufactured a big enough subculture to consume it.

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How our Culture Valorises this Control

The film presents Miranda’s speech as a kind of revelation - and in terms of cinematic effect, it is. It is delivered with such precision and authority that many viewers come away feeling that Miranda is right, that Andy was naïve, and that the fashion industry is more serious than it first appeared. Meryl Streep has to take a lot of credit for that.

What Miranda has actually told us is that a small group of capital owners in a single industry decided, years in advance, what a young woman in New York would be wearing on an ordinary Tuesday. And she presents this as how things work.

Miranda is not making a critique of the system. She is asserting her position within it. The subtext of the speech is: I am one of the people in those rooms. I make these decisions. You should understand what that means and respect it.

She’s proud of this power. The film, at this moment, invites us to share in that pride - or at least to be awed by it.

The awe the scene generates is the same as the awe that the system itself generates. We are meant to feel that Miranda’s power is impressive, even as she is explaining to us, in plain terms, how that power operates to determine the choices of people who never consented to it.

This is the sleight of hand, she is saying the quietest part out loud, but we’ve become so culturally enamoured with it we can’t see it for how deeply problematic, undemocratic and authoritarian it is.

The Balance of Power and Ownership

Miranda’s power is individual and unaccountable. She decides, and the industry follows, and nobody votes on any of it or questions her. The productive resources of an entire industry - the labour, the capital, the cultural influence - flow according to the preferences of a single person operating within an ownership structure that was never democratically determined.

Andy decides by the end of the film that she doesn’t want to be like Miranda; her reasons are based on an individualistic view of the world. She concludes that Miranda has spent way too much of her moral capital to get and maintain that position, but the allure of the position is real. Andy fails to reckon with the fact that Miranda is a structural inevitability.

Miranda’s power is real. The analysis she offers is, structurally, correct. But the conclusion she draws from it - that this is how things are and should be, and that the appropriate response is deference - is wrong. This is implicit throughout the film, “where so many people would die to work, you only deign to work” a character tells Andy during a heart-to-heart, and this is the problem.

We aren’t offered an alternative; the choices we face are - be a bad person and become an authoritarian, or stick to your moral compass and…ignore it? The irony is that Andy is an aspiring journalist; she’s been in the belly of the beast and is the best placed of anyone in that film to reckon with this reality.

The fact that production shapes consumption, and that ownership of the means of production confers enormous and largely invisible power over people’s lives, is an argument for changing who controls production. Not for admiring those who currently do and deciding whether or not that’s the type of person you want to be.

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My parents’ evenings were mostly spent with teachers telling my parents that I could “really go far” if I applied myself, stopped messing about and focused1. I wasn’t “living up to my potential.”

Living up to my potential…

I didn’t really think much about what that meant when I was a kid. I spent my teenage years having run-ins with the police, watching my family break down violently, my relationship with my dad collapse into estrangement - and I spent most of my time stoned, either breaking into warehouses in Trafford to throw illegal parties or building speakers and taking them up and down the country with my friends.

What I’ve since realised the adults in my life meant by “potential” was actually their perception of my ability to escape the working-class, terraced, de-industrialised world they’d raised me in.

Education, Education, Education

I grew up at the peak of Tony Blairs “education, education, education” during the shift away from an industrial economy towards a new digital, information based economy.. University was the only meaningful exit plan on the table for the kids at my school. Do or die. We were sorted into two very clear camps - those with the “potential” to go to university, and those without.

School was divided into “sets”, top set to bottom. This was decided by your test results from your primary school during year 6, so when you’re aged 9-10. Anyone my age who was at a comprehensive school probably knows the caricature of the “bottom set” kids, they were very much defined by their behaviour.

None of my friends in primary school were in my classes at secondary school. I was an outlier in early life, an overachiever. Way above my age for reading, writing and maths. In year 6 I was the only kid to score full marks on a science test and everyone made a big deal about it. My mum used to talk about how intelligent I was, frequently2.

The point here is that intelligence very quickly became a vague metric for potential which itself became an indicator of future material success. In a de-industrialised working class town, most of the industrial work had been replaced with gig work, retail work or trades.

Being perceived as “smart” opened doors, particularly if you could go to uni. During my GCSE’s and A-levels, (aged 13-18) I spent a disproportionate amount of time listening to teachers tell me the “guaranteed” wage I’d receive with a degree vs without a degree.

This caused you to look around your school and realise you’re on a very different life path to some of your peers. You think you’re “smart” and are going to do well, and they’re “stupid” and they’re not. Off to the big city I go! Maybe I’ll wear a suit instead of overalls like my stupid dad!

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Get Them ‘Ands Black Wi’ Coal

Manual work is a dirty phrase, especially in a country that experienced rapid deindustrialisation and thrust an entire workforce into the Aspiration Trap.

Tony Blair’s New Labour saw university as the key to social mobility - they saw it as the ultimate end goal for an “aspirational” working class.

This policy played out in reality, for me, as a pressure cooker. Schools were given quotas to fill and teachers were under pressure to get a certain number of kids to uni.3

University was our “way out”. They fed us dreams of all sorts of careers, minimum starting salaries and endless graduate schemes, and framed any degree as valuable.

I distinctly remember being told by my mum not to go to Drum School - because that wasn’t any guarantee of success, she saw it as speculative and a huge risk. We couldn’t bank on a lottery ticket, we could bank on university.

So if you achieved “academically” you were pushed towards university; if you didn’t, you were discarded into the college system and left to fend for yourself. I call this the Intelligence Trap - and we were all caught in it.

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Shaping the Electorate

The kids I'd gone to primary school with, who were long absent from my life at this point, were not serenaded with tales of minimum starting salaries in white-collar working environments. Their choices were clear - college4 or work.

These kids were seen as "underachievers" and were defined solely by their behaviour, which wasn't much worse than mine, but my teachers were banking on my success, so I was worth the work.

Remember, I had potential and I was defined as such. The kids that were destined for college didn't - our ceilings set for us by a system that separated us into the haves and have-nots, by way of our academic performance.

We weren't taught how to analyse systems or to have different methods to see the world; we were taught to remember and regurgitate facts5.

I can see a straight line from this system, to the electorate now6 As I have written about here, we live in a world of facts vs feelings - which really means smart vs dumb. The uppity liberal-educated establishment with their facts and their books and their stupid academic language vs the salt of the earth with their common sense. This plays out in voting and polling.

What we’re too quick to do is attribute right-wing with stupid, immoral and mindless, and left-wing with smart, moral and superior. This is exactly what our school system did, this is exactly what New Labour’s university policy did - it set the stage for a society split down the middle.

Tony Blair’s government decided that “intelligence” means a very specific thing - remembering facts. This plays out in “debates” that dominate YouTube and Spotify. They’re not debates, they’re games of chess where every piece on the board is just a fact.

Just because you were told you were smart so your school could fill its university quota doesn’t mean you are - it also doesn’t mean you’re morally or intellectually superior to those your school system failed.

New Labour and subsequent governments disregarded the art of craft, practical skills and the ability to shape the material world. I’ve watched friends take an idea on a literal fag packet and turn it into something real, functional and beautiful. The work that defined Labours voter base became derided, looked down on and disregarded while “academia” in its most hollow sense was valorised.

It’s no wonder these same people choose to form their own opinions about the world rather than listening to a narrative crafted by university-educated liberals.

If we are to bind ourselves together in class consciousness we need to reject this separation by “intelligence” and remember that just because someone can’t successfully articulate their frustrations in a register that satisfies you, their frustrations are still valid and will be seized upon by bad actors who only seek to destroy us all.

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This plays out both online and in real life. Suddenly when a vote doesn’t go the “right way” I see people trotting out the same old tropes.

“Gullible”, “Stupid”, “Racist”, “Bigots”, “Uneducated”.

Suddenly everyone is overlaying voting pattern data on top of educational attainment to prove their point.

Every. Single. Time.

Now there is some truth to that - there are people out there who those words describe, and my position as a cisgendered heterosexual white male isn’t lost on me. I am aware that I don’t personally feel the hatred that builds when Far-Right rhetoric starts to ramp up.

My experience, however - both from canvassing for my local party, from growing up in a very working class and ethnically diverse part of Bradford, and from just talking to people out in the world - is that your average person who votes Reform isn’t any of those things.

They’re just working people struggling to get by, or frustrated with the decline of their town or their living standards, or fed up that they now have to work jobs they hate when they used to do something more meaningful.

They’re people who have experienced the cascading effects of being failed by their education system, their billionaire-owned media, their employers, and successive governments that work in the interests of capital rather than people.

Rage-baiting

I ran a little bait this morning on my Threads account.

The point I’m making here, in a deliberately crude and antagonistic way, is this: it’s all about class consciousness until the working class vote the wrong way.

For years, people who claim to be on the Left - or liberals more broadly - have spent their time after elections navel-gazing and patting themselves on the back. The Greens ran on “Hope not Hate”. Well, if I were a kid who’d just voted Reform, all I’d be seeing this morning is hate.

Pointing this contradiction out gets a similar response:

This is falling into the same old systemic traps: individualism and political tribalism. We saw it with liberal identity politics too - people divided along the things that separate them, rather than coming together behind the things that unite them.

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Northern Terrace Life

A lot of the kids I went to primary school with were discarded by the education system. Tony Blair made sure to create a very clear divide on the playground - the “academic” kids, and everyone else. We were divided into “sets”, with the “smart” kids in the “top” sets and the “stupid” kids in the “bottom” sets. Behaviour levels tended to follow this trend, as did household income levels, friendship groups and rivalries.

I was one of the few kids in the “top sets” who had grown up on the terraces, in the really ethnically diverse parts of town. As a result, my friendship group changed drastically. I found that the kids I’d been kicking about with in primary school were getting into more and more trouble around town, becoming increasingly violent and antagonistic, and that didn’t sit right with me.

This is very early social conditioning into blue collar and white collar stereotypes - those who go on to work in Leeds in the fancy office job versus those who work with their hands and stay living in the town. There is a palpable sense of class division in it. You come back from university and suddenly everyone thinks you’re up your own ass.

I don’t remember ever being asked if I wanted to go to university - it was just assumed because of the pressures of the politics at the time. My sister was the first in our family to go, and I believe - though I can’t fully verify - that we were both the only kids from our primary school class to do the same.

The funny thing is, most of those kids who were pushed into apprenticeships, college or trades because the school considered them surplus to academic requirements probably earn more than me now and do meaningful, rewarding work.

My new friends all came from middle-class households and lived in the nicer parts of town, and as you’d expect, we clashed on our cultural views for a long time.

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Caricatures of Gammons

Our view of the Reform voter is pretty well embedded. It starts from what we used to call “chavs” - people who voted Tory, voted for Brexit, maybe supported the BNP or UKIP and are now voting Reform. We associate Reform voters with people from council estates in ex-industrial, failed towns. They’re usually white, male, a little older and blue-collar.

The truth is a little different. The data suggests Reform has built a coalition, not a monolith. The “council estate voter” exists within it, but Reform is also attracting disillusioned graduates, anxious middle earners, and ideological conservatives who aren’t struggling financially at all.

What seems to be getting missed is this: if we are to stand together and fight back, we are going to have to stand alongside some of these Reform voters. The people you hate, the people you think are racist, misogynistic and bigoted because of how they vote every few years. If we truly want to take back power, that’s the only way.

If I went back to where I grew up and there was a workers’ revolution, a big chunk of the people involved would fit these stereotypes. So what do we do? We very clearly aren’t going to address their grievances by insulting them. Parties like Reform are an expression of the system’s failure. Reform are the last bloody coughs into the tissue before the patient goes to the doctor for a terminal diagnosis.

Squaring the Circle

There is a reason Reform voters don’t want immigrants, are constantly looking backwards and find political campaigning in Urdu to be reprehensible. You aren’t going to change that reason by patronising them about it. We must recognise the emotional core that is being pulled on when Reform voters walk down their high street. We have to accept its existence - we don’t have to agree with it, but we have to acknowledge it and be able to sit with it. We can’t just hope everyone will come along with us on our moral journey and expel anyone who doesn’t.

I don’t want to erase the experiences of people who are at the sharp end of that hatred, or silence their voice - and there has to be real space for that and anyone who actively incites violence of that kind has no part to play. Voting for a party like Reform does lead to more violence, more hatred and the rolling back of rights. This has to be acknowledged too.

Reform voters are, however, expressing dissatisfaction with very real material conditions - and they are still our brothers and sisters. I have more in common with the average Reform voter than I ever will with the average CEO, and that feels like something that gets forgotten too easily.

Similarly, people assume far too much of our democracy. The assumption seems to be that Reform voters are following politics closely and are engaged in the specifics of policy. Most aren’t, they’re just fed up and Reform get a free pass in the media.

Our democracy treats politics as a hobby - something you study in school or have to actively seek out. Given turnout rates over the years, most people actively don’t care, and those who do vote aren’t following politics all that closely or going out of their way to understand the systemic issues facing the country. Nor should we expect them to, when the system offers them no valid avenues to do so.

If we really want to take back power and build grassroots community movements, we have to be able to bridge this gap - and that means building those movements alongside people we disagree with.

As Lenin said: “We must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found.”

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Political Literacy

According to Local Government Information Unit (LGIU)-commissioned polling by Ipsos, around 64% say they do not understand decision-making in their council, and 63% are not following devolution or local government reforms.

Knowledge of councillors’ roles is also limited, with awareness lower than for national politicians. Only a tiny minority, around 3%, are actively involved in local decision-making, and only about 9% want to be more involved.

So naturally I go to a government website and read it as if I’m a first time user, maybe a young first time voter - who best to explain local politics than the government?

First thing it hits you with is this:

Your local government will do one of the following:

• elect all the local councillors every 4 years

• elect half the local councillors every 2 years

• elect one third of the local councillors every year for 3 years and hold no elections in the 4th year

What?

Fine, I guess, but isn’t electing half the local councillors every 2 years the same as electing them all every 4 years? Why would you only elect a third every year for 3 years? Isn’t that crazy inefficient? Why not just elect them all in 4 years? There is no way to answer the “why” of this on the website1.

The rest of the website is equally unhelpful. There is nothing here that tells me why this is important, what councillors do, or what this means for me. If the goal is to convert citizens into voters, they are doing a terrible job, so I can only assume this cannot be their goal. No wonder we are increasingly turning to social media for our political education.

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How Local Elections Actually Work

A council is a geographically defined authority covering a town, city, district, or county area. The whole area is divided into wards. Each ward elects councillors, and all councillors together form the council. The number of councillors per ward varies, but together they represent the whole population of the authority, so, in theory, each local region is represented

There are different electoral cycles. In some areas, all councillors are elected at once every four years. In others, elections are staggered, with a portion of seats contested each year.

Councils sit between national government and everyday services.

Councillors meet in committees to make decisions. The group with the majority of seats usually forms the administration and chooses a leader or executive structure. This is why voting for a particular party is important beyond the focus on the national contest for No. 10.

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Councils as Agents of Delivery

You interact with council decisions daily. Councils are responsible for a range of locally delivered services. This typically includes housing and homelessness support, local planning, waste collection and recycling, road maintenance, libraries, social care for adults and children, environmental health, and aspects of local education provision. Some pretty important stuff.

They are funded through council tax, business rates, and grants from central government. However, a large share of funding comes with conditions set nationally, meaning councils have limited fiscal autonomy, particularly since 2010, when the government began austerity policies.

Local councils should be a familiar touchpoint for everyone but instead our democracy feels passive, and this has to change if we are to make any progress towards a better world.

The makeup of your local council determines how Whitehall mandates are interpreted and by what value system they are filtered, as has been seen in Reform run councils recently where we’ve seen things like Durham council spending £3-£5million on enacting anti working from home policies to diddling expenses in Devon.

The Party of Change

Most governments do not actually want citizens to be more involved in decision-making; they want freedom to act in a top-down way. They see participation in democracy as a bureaucratic, unproductive distraction.

When voting for councillors, it is likely they all care, or claim to care, about their communities. Councillors want to see their local areas thrive, be cleaner, and their high streets revived, so try to consider the values that they hold beyond that.

Do the councillors want to involve you in achieving those goals? That either looks like literally involving you, or ensuring that you have a voice in local decision-making. Democracy is something that citizens have to learn and the easiest way to learn, is to do.

Do they value the lives of workers? Will they put ordinary, local people’s needs first before the needs of capital interests such as developers, multinational corporations, or finance? Our local politicians should - at an absolute minimum - strive to protect us from the myriad harmful effects of capitalist overreach.

Do they value the natural world? Will they fight to protect what natural life there is around your community, and do they value what makes your area unique? Local politicians should increasingly recognise the role nature plays in our lives, and they should act as guardians of the natural world.

If we are to build a better democracy together, we have to resist the form of it that is imposed upon us by the media, politicians, and the constraints of the system. I believe values need to be front and centre, in particular, values of democratic participation and I believe the Green Party are the only party doing this.

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If you want to get out camping in the UK, you have three options.

Firstly, you can wild camp, generally in a national park such as the Yorkshire Dales or the Lake District. In many parts of the country, there is an unofficial agreement that, so long as you’re above the last fell wall - that is, a physical wall - you’re good to go, and you won’t be bothered by any rangers.

This means setting off with some lightweight gear, walking until you’re high enough, close enough to water, and out of the wind, and then pitching your tent. This is technically illegal everywhere except Dartmoor - and there’s been a fierce fight from the toff that owns part of it to put a stop to that.

The other way is a bit of a hybrid, which is what we’re doing this time. A company called “Camp Wild” has set up to grant access to privately owned spaces above board, for a fee, of course. In their own words:

”CampWild opens the gate to 100,000s of acres of wild beauty across private land, making it possible for anyone to responsibly access extraordinary places to sleep under the stars. But this isn’t just about camping. It’s about community, conservation, and the belief that experiencing nature should be open to all”

The third way is the traditional campsite experience. In the UK, this can be anything from a wild patch of land behind a sheep shed to a fully irrigated field with an onsite restaurant, shop, heated floors in the toilets, and pizza night on a Friday.

Camping was originally, like most things, the game of the elites. Many of the pioneers of modern outdoor exploration and expeditions - those who pushed the boundaries -were part of the elite and were enabled by the British Empire.

Over time, camping equipment became more affordable, and as people were able to drive further, it exploded in popularity. While camping equipment became widely accessible, the land to do it on did not.

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Enclosing the Commons

England is ground zero for modern, capitalist enclosure of the commons.

Enclosure means literally taking land and putting a border around it—that’s one reason the English countryside looks like it does: a hodgepodge of fences and walls—and refers to the Enclosure Acts, a series of parliamentary laws enacted to change ownership of the land.

Starting around the 15th century and rapidly accelerating as England industrialised, people were violently forced off their land in a series of evictions, and the commons -collectively managed rivers, forests, and pastures - were fenced off and “enclosed”.

Karl Marx calls this primitive accumulation: removing people from their means of subsistence and accumulating the land that would act, in a way, almost as "start-up capital for a new economic model.

This is the original sin of political economy - enclosure contributed heavily to the shift to a capitalist mode of production. While the feudal serf has access to all the resources necessary for survival, they have no reason to toil in the factory, mine, or lumber mill, or to sell their labour to the capitalist.

Under capitalism, land became concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of individuals, who have maintained control over it for an incredibly long time, passed down through their families or trusts. Less than 1% of the population own roughly half the land in the UK1 and only 8% of that is free to roam, meaning 92% is inaccessible under law.2

In this context, the Camp Wild model seems the wrong solution to the right problem.

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Extractive Land

Campsites are privately owned land, extracting rent from you without producing any new use-value. The owner of the campsite didn’t create the land, nor did it create the tranquil setting within which it’s set.

There are lots of fields all over the country, but you wouldn’t want to camp in all of them. The conditions that make them suitable for a campsite - such as adjacency to nature, solitude, accessibility, and access to water - were not created by the landowner.

In some cases, they were maintained to a certain extent by bodies like the National Trust, but the presence of campsites has actively diminished biodiversity and ecological stability and the natural value of land. While this may generate market value, it does not add ecological value. Because access is controlled by landowners rather than users, campers are then made to pay an ever-increasing premium without having any meaningful say in how the land is used.

As a result, ownership and accessibility aren’t the only problems we face when accessing nature; it’s increasingly becoming an affordability problem as well. We’re paying more for campsites and, in doing so, are alienated further from their original purpose.

The Camp Wild model, despite its best intentions, only ends up making this problem worse. They want to “unlock the wild for everyone”, and while I’ve been to two Camp Wild sites now and will be visiting my third this weekend, the solution to land accessibility isn’t through ever-increasingly complicated commercial relationships with willing landowners; it’s by making our land a public commons once again.

Campflation and Uniformity

As the outdoor industry has grown in recent years, thanks to a mainstream focus on fitness and increasing celebrity and influencer culture, all the adjacent industries have grown with it. The Outdoor Participation Trends Report captures a year of record-breaking growth for 2025.

In 2020, Go Outdoors fell into administration. It was sold to JD Sports, and in 2025 they opened 27 new stores and made a profit of £9.7m. Campsites have benefited massively from this, able to increase their prices as they control an increasingly scarce asset in the face of increased demand.

This is what I’m calling “Campflation”. Campsites have improved, but these improvements alone do not explain their rising financial value. Campsites now offer more advanced facilities, from restaurants and shops onsite to full shower and toilet facilities with underfloor heating, radio pumped from ceiling speakers, and constant unlimited hot water.

It’s difficult to get hard figures on prices over time for campsites, especially now they have introduced dynamic pricing meaning prices rise and fall automatically with demand.

What I could find was that in 2010 UK campsites averaged ~£17.50 per night for a standard pitch; this is now ~£34, which has outpaced inflation. This doesn’t take into account costs of other camping essentials that are now often sold onsite for a premium.

Landowners putting up prices will only make what is already perceived as a mostly rural, middle-class hobby even less accessible for those on lower incomes.

The improvement in facilities has made camping more attainable for some, those that love the experience but not necessarily the inconvenience, or for large families with young children, or those that prefer a more “glamping”-like experience. However, for other people, campsites exist as the only legal way to be fully immersed in nature without the amenities.

Nature, by its very essence, isn’t convenient, and landowners are applying the same human principles to this industry as our civilisation does to every other: subsume nature to our will and remove as much of its authenticity as possible.

Because access to land in this context is driven by the profit motive, landowners are coalescing around the same profit levers. In this case, that means more complex and advanced facilities.

Commodification as Destruction

An increase in accessibility in nature, under capitalism, does come with trade-offs. The explosion in influencer-driven outdoor activity is having profound effects not just on my subjective experience of the outdoors, but on the objective burden this places on organisations like Mountain Rescue. Similarly, beauty spots are becoming overcrowded; hidden gem locations, particularly natural infinity pools, are now being promoted via Instagram by influencers.

Our relationship with nature begins to change. It becomes a transaction - an experience you pay for - rather than something you connect with.

The more we commodify these spaces, the more we become alienated from them. The sense of tranquillity, rest, and connection to nature and surrounding wildlife starts to diminish across the board.

Accessing our Natural Commons

Campsites are the bare minimum we should expect in terms of being able to access our own land. Those that own it didn’t create the land, they don’t improve upon it, and they are hoarding it for their own profit. Now they are increasing the rate by which they extract value from us for their use, locking more people out.

Camping sits at the intersection between ownership, distribution, and extraction. This is supposed to be a way for us to enjoy a cheaper holiday on our own land, to get away from the pressures of urban, atomised living, and to enjoy the sights, sounds and benefits of nature.

While access to that sits in a small number of hands, who are only incentivised to give access for profit, it will continue to be commodified, while an increasing number of the population find it harder to engage with.

I’ll leave you with the words of Nick Hayes from The Book of Trespass:

Walls look like order; but more often than not a wall stands at the precise fulcrum of an imbalance in society. Most walls are only necessary as a means of defending the resources of those that have them from those that lack them. In this way, though they present themselves as mechanisms of security, they are in fact tools of oppression.

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Unlike Halloween and Christmas, where there is a theme and an event on a given day to mark it, Easter has become little more than an opportunity to overconsume and overpay for a collection of fat and sugar.

There is a lesson here, however, in a few key economic principles that are dialled right up at Easter time, and in how firms use embedded cultural practices to rip everyone off.

The Anatomy of an Easter Egg

Easter eggs are just - for the most part - slightly worse chocolate in a different shape.

When you buy a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, you are paying for that particular formulation, industrial process, texture, and taste, but when you buy a Cadbury’s Easter egg, the process is different.

Because of their specific shape, they have to be moulded very differently; they’re also a much thinner form of chocolate. This creates a sort of uniformity across most brands, as they all adjust their industrial process to fit this arbitrary shape we’ve collectively agreed on.

Easter eggs have a different makeup of cocoa, butter, and emulsifiers. They have a different viscosity to a classic bar of chocolate so they can be poured into a mould, and because they are mass-produced months in advance, they have to sit in warehouses for longer than a confectionery product typically would.

To ensure they don’t “bloom”- that weird grey-white coating you see on old chocolate- firms like Mondelez, which owns Cadbury, tweak the ingredients and the production process slightly in favour of form and aesthetic.

When you buy a Cadbury’s Easter egg, you are essentially buying a bag of chocolate buttons and overpaying for an additional product that has been - in my opinion - made worse to fit a fairly arbitrary cultural norm.

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Jesus and the Egg

Easter eggs are tied intrinsically to the belief that Jesus died and was resurrected on Easter weekend, and Easter marks the beginning of Lent to reflect Jesus’ time in the wilderness.

Throughout history, eggs - and particularly coloured eggs - are believed to be representative of birth, and they have typically been given as gifts to mark the passing of the seasons.

Traditions have sprung up around this idea, from the belief that a Good Friday egg would turn into a diamond in a hundred years, to the idea that an egg laid on Good Friday was a particularly powerful charm against evil. People thought that it would even put out the flames in a burning house (don’t try that one).

The egg was also a crucial part of people’s diets before the invention of modern consumer foods. Eggs were given as gifts, paid as rent to social superiors in the medieval manor, and given to the church. In some farming communities, eggs even functioned as a minor currency.

The first chocolate eggs were created in Germany and France and were solid; the British hollowed them out and created the first modern variation of this in 1873. Competitors caught on, and this replaced the older traditions over time.

Like nearly everything under capitalism, they found a way to monetise a spiritual event

Hijacking our Culture for Profit

The price of an Easter egg is based on its timing and cultural coercion. It can only command that price at Easter. You can buy chocolate all year round in thousands of different varieties, shapes, and combinations, and these are subject to typical real-time price fluctuations.

The price of an Easter egg follows this pattern: it gradually increases, then massively spikes in the run-up to Easter Monday, and then immediately collapses.

My local Tesco took Lindt eggs previously on sale at £22 and were shifting them on clearance for a fiver (£5).

This is a result of artificial and socially manufactured scarcity. Because we’ve collectively agreed Easter eggs are only relevant during a small window in March and April, we can spike their price when the ensuing glut occurs.

Because the price is attached to a cultural holiday, a chocolate company cannot profit off this product at any other time of year, so they have to carefully manage that scarcity.

Easter eggs just sit in warehouses for months on end with a highly diminished value, until the time of year and cultural event arrive and they can be released from the warehouse for a high price.

Your 2027 eggs will land on warehouse shelves at the back end of this year, just waiting for their value to spike.

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Additionally, the reason you see them reduced so heavily is that the companies that produce them would prefer overproduction to maximise the small window when the price of an Easter egg has spiked, rather than underproducing and missing the hugely overinflated margins they can make on each unit.

This probably feels inefficient and wasteful, because it is.

This is called ritualised demand pricing, and it operates similarly to price gouging, only technically there isn’t a collapse in supply or a lack of substitutes, as there would be for, say, tickets to see Oasis (gross).

The economics of an Easter egg does not follow standard market logic in the conventional sense. Rather than demand dynamically setting price in real time, demand is largely anticipated in advance, and production is scheduled years ahead to align with an incredibly predictable seasonal peak.

Firms like Mars will structure production around that expected Easter demand, with output committed long before they know the real demand.

This creates exposure to price and input volatility, which is typically managed through the Intercontinental Exchange, where companies like Mondelez have the luxury of trading future contracts so that if prices rise or fall, they can buy and sell to manage the delta, insulating themselves from exogenous shock.

All that results in you spending £25 on a gift for your nephew during a cost-of-living crisis.

Despite these hugely over inflated prices and complex financial instruments that protect the big firms like Mondelez, cocoa prices are going up because of underinvestment and climate change related disruptions to the supply chain.

Additionally the use of child labour is still prevalent throughout the industry and the farmers that produce the cocoa are not receiving living wages.

Capitalism and the Egg

In 2026, Easter doesn’t mark Jesus; according to Church Times, just 6% of adults in the UK are practising Christians, and only 48% of the population now identify as Christians.

We also don’t do anything to mark the arrival of spring anymore. In a society that sees itself as separate from, rather than part of, nature, spring just means the clocks go forwards, you have to get the mower out, and you get a couple of bank holidays.

As a society, we don’t care about concepts of renewal or revival, or do anything to mark the period of nature waking back up, ready to give us its bounty.

As someone who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), I ebb and flow with the seasons; winter is a dark time for me emotionally, while spring represents more endorphins, more dopamine, and more energy.

We also use this as a time to celebrate with our children: we take them to Easter-themed events centred around rabbits, and we hide eggs for them in the garden, reminiscent of old practices.

Overwhelmingly, though, Easter is now marked by the appearance of huge chocolate eggs on your supermarket shelf.

Like the British did to the chocolate egg itself in the 19th century, capitalism has hollowed out what used to be a celebration of our spirituality and our planet, and used it to not only turn a huge profit every year, but force the suffering of everyone at the bottom of the supply chain.

We used to mark the bounty of the incoming harvest; we marked a spiritual event, and we marked longer days and the return of natural life.

Now, in 2026, customers are shelling out almost 73% more per 100g for Cadbury hollow Easter eggs. This is a result of higher prices and smaller eggs, while Mondelēz International grew Easter sales ahead of the category at +19.1% value year-on-year.

Easter accounts for somewhere between 15–25% of chocolate sales for Mondelez.

The economics of the Easter egg are important because they demonstrate both how capitalism profits from attributing excess value to crucial cultural events and how far we have become disconnected from the original idea of Easter.

We see this, of course, at Halloween, Bonfire Night, and, most crucially, Christmas.

It used to be a celebration of our spirituality and our connection to nature; now it’s just an opportunity to hike prices for inferior products and generate profits while exploiting the entire supply chain.

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The scheme combines diagnostics and specialist clinics in a retail setting, increasing footfall and spending in the high street, which officials frame as both a health and economic success.

You can read about this here.

This has been bothering me since I read it and it took me a while to properly figure out why, as on the surface, this probably sounds like a win-win, right?

I live near Barnsley and haven’t actually seen this myself, but will have a look the next time I’m nearby.

There are a few things here the more I think about this.

Firstly, the Framing

The article frames this very heavily around how the healthcare centre is supporting local business.

The article states that the town centre “needs help to survive the challenges of decay, online shopping and the cost of living crisis.”

This isn’t wrong, Barnsley definitely does need that, but should it be relying on the NHS to subsidise, support and prop this up?

We’re not talking about your nan’s little bakery or your mate’s haberdashery, the Alhambra Shopping Centre houses a Primark, Entertainer, EE, Vodafone, Three, Iceland, Pound Stretcher, CeX, Card Factory and just outside there is a Costa and a Starbucks. These are multi-billion dollar enterprises with shareholders to please.

We are in a cost of living crisis, so the solution to that isn’t to force people to consume by making their healthcare adjacent to shopping, it’s making things cheaper for everyday people, paying them living wages, bringing down their housing costs, their public transport costs, their energy bills and the cost of their weekly shop.

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Secondly, the Political Economy

What happens if and when local business interests become reliant on the NHS to provide footfall?

Let’s assume there is a miraculous revival of the local high street here, and this model is replicated throughout other cities. The article states that “Radix Big Tent…is about to launch a commission of inquiry into how healthcare…can help save ailing high streets,” and that “officials from Bradford’s NHS trust have visited to see how it works, as have delegations from five councils.”

We are now directly interlocking retail revenue with healthcare needs — the more people need healthcare, the more coffees we can sell.

What happens if the NHS decide that the town centre actually isn’t the best location? Maybe they realise their key demographic that rely on it the most are travelling the furthest and they want to relocate?

They will effectively place themselves at the behest of a lobby of business owners who will argue that by doing that, for the direct benefit of NHS patients, will cost them money, footfall and profits.

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Finally, the Metrics

This bit is gross.

“Each patient attending the CDC spends an average of £17.50 while in the town, the trust has found. Expected spend for those visiting the Alhambra is slightly less – £15 a head. But if that is borne out then the projected 100,000 appointments could yield £1.5m of extra spending”

Imagine the decision making committee when it comes to rolling out more of these – using these metrics to decide where a new centre should go or if a new centre is needed.

Patients shouldn’t be walking around with retail value above their heads. They are there to receive healthcare, not to be extracted from. These are people who aren’t visiting the high street for a myriad of reasons; one is likely that they can’t afford it. This model is now directly influencing that consumer behaviour.

Healthcare should be accessible absolutely, but that should be based on who needs it the most, not which coffee shop’s bottom line you can prop up while you’re at it.

The whole thing misses the point that the article alludes to – community-centred healthcare.

This isn’t community-centred, it’s centred around business interests. It just so happens to also be closer to people.

If this continues to roll out, it’s a window into where power lies in our society. Once you can directly bolt on profits, shareholder value and capital accumulation to a thing, anything is possible.

I can only imagine Wes Streeting frothing at the mouth at the thought of swathes of business people lining up to get involved in this.

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What Pissed Me Off This Week

The Language of Inevitability

As the fallout from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continues to reverberate globally, notice the language being used in our media and by our politicians.
This week Rachel Reeves stated that we may need to spend more on the armed forces as a result of global instability

You can read the story here: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/apr/16/rachel-reeves-warns-other-budgets-may-be-cut-to-lift-defence-spending

As usual, Reeves paints herself as merely the arbiter of the will of global and national fiscal policy, rather than a fully autonomous human person, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a majority in the House of Commons.

She talks of “difficult choices” that she is both “willing to make” and may “have to make” in the future, including cutting welfare to support defence budgets.

That’s taking money from the people who need it most, and moving it into a heavily subsidised industrial military complex that benefits shareholders and supports Donald Trump and Israel’s war in the Middle East by providing drone support and allowing them to use our air bases.

The Guardian supports this by framing what she is saying as a “warning”, once again removing Reeves from responsibility and treating her as not much more than an economic traffic warden.

She claims to “challenge the orthodoxy” yet still talks about economics as if there is a finite amount of money in the system and her job is simply moving it from one column to another.

Where she adds black on the ledger, she must add the corresponding red.

As economists The Guardian would rarely give a word count to, have noted elsewhere, challenging the orthodoxy would mean looking at economics completely differently.

As Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly shown, if you want to affect change while in power, you can. From introducing a wealth tax, to fixing 100,000 potholes, his first 100 days as Mayor of New York is proving that if you see yourself as an actor within a system that you can change, rather than merely a warden of it, you can improve peoples lives.

If you enjoyed this section, I’m considering making this a weekly occurrence. Let me know if you want to see more of these and I’ll try carve out more time to write about it, cos I’m usually always pissed off about it anyway.

In 2000 the area I lived in had a 51% child poverty rate and was ranked firmly in the bottom half of of the country for deprivation, it ranked high on the deprivation index for income, education and health.

For a long time this was all I knew, we didn’t get to travel a lot so I didn’t really get to see much of the country, I remember thinking Leeds was a super fancy place where people who had “proper jobs” lived and worked.

My view of class was shaped a lot by my dad, he was part of the cohort of men who got swept up in the idea of “aspiration” towards his material conditions.

He was constantly striving for more and yearning for a middle class lifestyle that was always out of reach, not through any fault of his.

He was a grafter, no denying that. He would regularly work 6 day, 60-80 hour weeks, often in manual physically demanding jobs. He started his own business, twice. He invested in the stock market.

He was everything Thatcher wanted him to be, resourceful, entrepreneurial, ambitious.

The Mini Capitalist

She said in the House of Commons in 1990 “We have that confidence. Confidence in freedom and confidence in enterprise. That is what divides Conservatives from socialists.”

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Mexico was perhaps the first Latin American country to get the full force of these ideas; however, as we’ll see, they didn’t become the shining example of SAPs that the IMF and World Bank had hoped.

Mexico’s economic history is one filled with the same story: a working class that has been ignored, deprioritised, and marginalised by nearly every version of development that has been applied.

In 1917, Mexico entrenched a state-led nationalist approach to development through Article 27, which provided the legal basis for state control over crucial industries such as agriculture and natural resources.

From 1940 to 1970, Mexico embarked on a journey through what is called Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) through a series of six-year plans.

This is referred to more broadly through political economy discourse as the “Mexican Miracle” and was overseen by the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

The period from 1917 to 1982 is rich with history, and there isn’t enough space here to share the whole history, but the crucial point is that the state-led development led to growth of 6% over the period 1940–1970, but with strong caveats for the working classes.

To be clear, this wasn’t socialism; this was industrial, state-led capitalism.

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This was true for the Roman Empire. Through reliance on African grain, frontier manpower or the vast trade networks they were part of, the periphery became too vital a cog to the Core and the Core grew too reliant on it.

This is something Trump either doesn’t understand or is completely ignoring.

His American Empire seems to assume the Art of the Deal is just consistently threatening others with the bigger stick.

Repeatedly Trump has requested that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz then when they don’t, he tries to reassert coercive authority relying primarily on military threats.

He believes military might is the ultimate leverage, Iran - like Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen before it, is proving that this isn’t the whole picture. Power isn’t just the size of your military industrial complex.

The Core has managed to get itself into a position where it has integrated much of the world economically and politically, by spreading varying degrees of liberal democracy and free market dogma throughout the world it has become the spider in the middle of a global economic web.

Now the spider has started to unpick some of the edges of that web, it’s realising that this is making the whole thing weaker.

There is a reason that previous administrations haven’t waged all out war with Iran and we are seeing that playing out in real time now.

Trump’s Blunder

Energy prices are spiking as nearly a fifth of the worlds oil supply can no longer pass through the Strait.

Of the limited flows of oil that remain, more than half originate in Iran, and a significant share is bound for China.

What makes Iran different to the conflicts of previous administrations is that Iran has a crucial geographical chokepoint, it has a deck of cards of its own to play.

China now exists as a counter balance in America’s hegemony and is now an economic power that can be leveraged by the periphery in a way that the USSR couldn’t quite manage. China has been able to weather the storm quite well so far, thanks to its oil reserves and access to Iranian oil, which is particularly striking since it’s the world’s second biggest consumer of it.

Economists at Goldman have said the war will negatively affect US GDP at roughly double the rate of Chinese GDP.

This is a war that damages everyone but it’s currently damaging the instigator the most.

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Regional Hegemony

Striking a country that is an anchor to the region, is rallying other states to come together in defiance of Israel. Worried about their seemingly relentless quest for regional dominance, alliances and agreements are shifting.

As the US bumble around in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Pakistan and Egypt are meeting and coordinating with Beijing on reaching alternative agreements, while hoping to mediate an end to the war with the US.

Pakistan is a nuclear power, Egypt controls the Suez Canal, Saudi Arabia is the worlds second biggest producer of oil and Türkiye are a member of NATO, these are not fringe states. They are crucial geo-political players within the semi-periphery.

The Core is increasingly becoming politically fractured, Trump’s domestic base is showing signs of weakening, he is pushing away his allies and his rhetoric now feels hollow. He is calling for a ceasefire to a war that he started since its evident he has absolutely no clue where to go from here.

The Core can no longer disrupt the periphery without feeling its consequences back home and Trump is threatening a broader strengthening of the periphery against the Core’s aims.

Trump has vastly underestimated how disruptive the Periphery can be and is seeing first hand the very real, geographical and economic limits of its military power.

The Periphery has recognised, and has become very effective at, raising the cost of waging war to unsustainable levels, both financially and politically. This is why Iran is the worst possible strategic target in the region. This outcome was surely clear to anyone in the Trump administration who has ever looked at Iran on a map.

By flipping the table on the neoliberal world order the US were so crucial in holding together, Trump has opened a Pandora’s box of events that are more and more out of his control, coupled with asymmetrical geo-political goals from Israel, this war is quickly getting out of hand for the US and doing nothing but damage. There is very little to be gained from continuing this fight.

Past administrations, through the CIA and key institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, UN and WTO had been able to exact more control over the consequences and fall out from its misguided and politically motivated military endeavours abroad.

Trump has picked the wrong battle at the wrong time and is able to rely less on less on these institutions for support.

Whether he did this to cover for domestic issues, or the Epstein files is speculation at this point, but what is clear is that Iran has proven once again that the periphery can increase the cost of coercion within the core economically and politically, and future generations of Americans are going to pay a heavy price.

In the coming decades, the geo-political power structures globally will likely look very different to what they do today and the war with Iran could be looked back on as a crucial turning point.

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Within economics and business this is nothing new, capital accumulation relies on the concept of scarcity, manufactured or otherwise.

In what economists refer to as the “market”, scarcity or abundance is a key indicator of what determines price, it also shapes our politics.

However like anything else within our society, what start as ideas to accumulate capital, permeate other spheres of life in small ways.

They start out as saplings, until eventually scarcity underpins many of the conversations we have, though we aren’t directly naming it.

In the West, we have a fundamental belief in the scarcity of things - this started as scarcity on the initial boundaries of our nations, to now scarcity on the very planet we live on, such that we talk about colonising other planets to sustain ourselves.

Scarcity is the framing for nearly every major flashpoint in our modern culture, economies or politics - employment, public finances, natural resources, time and physical space.

Lets look at each in turn.

Financial Scarcity

Lets start with the most obvious one and the one that probably makes the most headlines.

The prevailing thinking is that there is very obviously an incredibly scarce amount of money at any one time. This is reinforced in our media, in our politics and in our economics textbooks.

Numerically, this is just outright incorrect. Recent data from Oxfam on inequality shows that the top 12 people (people, not percent!) have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of people. So that’s 12 people, with as much as 4 billion people.

4 billion people is the populations of the USA, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria and most of Brazil.

I could fit 12 people in my kitchen1.

Let that sink in for a second.

That statistic alone should send alarm bells ringing and immediately put the concept of financial scarcity under scrutiny.

We don’t have a scarcity problem, we have an ownership and distribution problem.

As Oxfam’s report states “The amount of wealth gained by the world’s billionaires over the last year is enough to give every person in the world US$250 and leave the billionaires more than US$500bn richer”.

Many of these billionaires, despite hoarding half the world’s wealth, are investing in technological innovations they claim are meant to improve our lives, allow us to work less and have more leisure time.

That leads us to the next point, employment.

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Employment Scarcity

Despite the promise of innovations in efficiency leading us to nirvana and a 15 hour work week, we are finding a return to older working practices in the very tech companies that are espousing this idea.

The “work from home revolution” is being rolled back, the 996 working pattern is making waves in Silicon Valley and despite the rise of AI and its apparent impacts on our productivity, we now need two incomes to sustain a family, meaning we are working more.

This is again, framed around scarcity.

There aren’t enough jobs to go around.

You see this play out when it comes to the welfare state - the Labour government recently talked about how we need to get people back into work. How getting people into work is a huge priority.

Unemployment is currently at 5.2%, I thought AI was supposed to put us out of work? Isn’t that the whole point of technological efficiency?

Unemployment is a crucial part of neoliberal economic policy.

It could, quite easily, be reduced significantly, if not eradicated.

This could be achieved by things like job guarantees, state driven industrial policy or what Zohran Mamdani is doing in New York. If we were to end employment however, this would put paid to the power of the employment scarcity myth.

Employment scarcity is used as a “reserve army of labour” to weaken worker’s bargaining power, limit wage growth and maintain labour based coercion in the economy.

Since there is no money and now no manpower, this allows states to justify austerity, create conditions on welfare and keep bargaining power in the hands of employers.

A win-win for everyone, of course.

Resource Scarcity

What we always seem to have the money and manpower for however, is advancing the interests of neo-imperialism.

Because of a long and storied history of interventionism, meddling and policy proscription, global inequality is rife, and only getting worse.

This furthers the argument that resources are scarce, all while we dump our money into an AI tech bubble that makes particular resources very scarce, such as minerals and fossil fuels.

What do we do about this?

Well, we have to get them from someone else.

People have been doing this for thousands of years but the American war machine is one of the most veracious and the most resource and financially intensive in history.

The US war machine is bigger than the next 10 countries combined, up to $990 billion a year and accounts for nearly 40% of total global military spending.

So the imagined scarcity of resources justifies expansion abroad.

To be clear, I’m not saying the world has infinite resources, it doesn’t, but once again this is a problem of control and political will, not of scarcity in and of itself.

There are alternatives to everything, innovation is infinite according to the capitalists.

We’ve either already found them and aren’t implementing them at the necessary scale or we haven’t bothered to invest the resources to develop them yet.

Time Scarcity

Because of this, we are staring firmly down the barrel of the climate gun.

The situation is bleak, there’s no denying that.

The Paris Accords were the last time we meaningfully came together to try and solve this but the data speaks for itself, we will be 3 degrees warmer by the turn of the century if we don’t chill out.

But even something like climate change, which is arguably caused by an abundance problem, is framed in terms of scarcity, a scarcity of time.

We have to reach net zero by 2030, we have to cool down by 2100, we have to slow emissions before we break every single planetary boundary we have. We’re in a race against time.

Again though, the solutions exist, as were laid out at The Paris Accords, we actually don’t have a scarcity of time, we have a scarcity of will.

Each of these myths has directly contributed to increases in migration habits from the Global South to Global North, which leads us to the next point

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Spatial Scarcity

There isn’t enough space, enough jobs, enough resources, or enough housing, or enough NHS, or enough public transport, or enough of whatever it is immigrants are perceived to be hogging.

One way to frame the dangers of immigration is around scarcity of space.

When you believe there is limited space, it forces you to raise the drawbridge. When the lifeboat is full, you cut it from the sinking ship. This is a powerful narrative and one that isn’t grounded in empirical evidence.

Less than 1% of the UK’s population owns over 50% of our land. Our public infrastructure can’t sustain its current population because investment has collapsed, UK public investment has consistently lagged behind OECD levels.

The British state has sold 2,036,848 council homes since 1980, 41% of which now belong to private landlords. These haven’t been replaced at nearly the same rate. Developers sit on the land to control its value with planning permission gained for 1.4million homes since 2007 that have never been built. England is only 9% developed.

There’s actually plenty of space, plenty of opportunities for housing and plenty of capacity potential in our public services. But we can’t invest in them due to the “scarcity” of money or the “scarcity” of resources.

These are policy choices, not natural consequences.

Control Scarcity

Our scarcity of will is reflected in a scarcity of popular democratic control.

Control not only over our production, our institutions or our policies, but control over the dominant narrative.

Our media landscape is ruled over by a small handful of people who have no interest in everyday people recognising the abundance that’s available to us collectively.

Capitalism needs ownership over the concept of scarcity, neoliberalism is dialled into it on a policy level. If we have enough space for everyone, enough resources to solve our problems and enough money to buy everything we need then the question would become:

Why aren’t we doing it then?

This question shifts the spotlight from those that suffer under this narrative to those that control this narrative.

We actually have an abundance of all the things we think we’re lacking.

This simple truth is under lock and key. Those that seek to permeate this myth understand the overwhelming odds against them and understand that if we believe the things we need are in short supply, we’ll waste our time looking amongst ourselves for an answer as to why we don’t have them.

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But this belief functions less like economics and more like theology. Every outcome is interpreted as proof of its own correctness.

Private sector happy face

Private sector performance is a win win. Whatever happens, it’s interpreted as efficiency. Profits up? Efficient, growth!. Profits down? Even more efficient, because it shows the market correcting.

Hiring more workers? Efficient, growth!. Laying off workers? Hyper‑efficient cost saving for more growth.

A company expands? Efficiency. A company collapses under the weight of its own hype? That’s the market efficiently cleansing the ecosystem.

No matter the outcome, efficiency is assumed rather than proven.

Public sector sad face

Public sector performance is a lose-lose. Whatever happens, it’s interpreted as inefficiency.

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