Britain is in the grip of a drug crisis. We have one of the highest drug death rates in Europe. More people are being prescribed antidepressants than ever before. Drugs, whether legal or illegal, medical or recreational, are big business. And only getting bigger, as cannabis and psychedelics move rapidly toward commercialisation.

But who actually owns this drug economy? What would really happen if we legalised drugs? What would happen to our economy, to public health, to our highstreets and our nightlife?

Drawing on his new book The Next Fix, Kojo Koram joins Dr Sarah Stein Lubrano to ask who wins and who loses as Britain's relationship with drugs is remade and whether this country's seemingly insatiable appetite for psychoactive substances could ever be shaped to have the interests of society, rather than shareholders, at its heart.

Event Details:

Wednesday 16th September 7-8pm at The October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester St, London WC1N 3AL

Further Details and Registration:

Please RSVP in advance here.

Speakers:

Kojo Koram is an author and Professor, teaching at the School of Law at Loughborough University. Born in Accra, Ghana and raised on Merseyside, he is now based in London. In addition to his academic writing, he has written for the New Statesman, the Guardian and the New York Times. He is the author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray 2022), which won the English PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing and was chosen as a Guardian book of the year. His latest book is called The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs (John Murray 2026)

​Sarah Stein Lubrano has a background in feminist, mutual aid, and other local organising as well as teaching in prisons. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford and a Master’s degree from the University of Cambridge. Her thinking often reaches the public through the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab. She was previously the Head of Content at The School of Life. She regularly appears on public radio and a variety of podcasts. Her first book, Don’t Talk About Politics: Changing 21st Century Minds, is out now with Bloomsbury.

2027 will mark the tenth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire. After nearly a decade, the company whose cladding covered the building, Arconic, has yet to face any meaningful accountability.

Last week, we published a report on Arconic, corporate malpractice and the role of the law. In 2023, Arconic settled two claims linked to the fire — a shareholder case over misleading safety statements ($74 million) and a civil case with victims and survivors ($43 million). The vast majority of the compensation was paid out by insurers, with Arconic only compensating $2 million from its own finances.

The Reynobond PE used on Grenfell Tower was sold globally for at least 20 years prior to the fire and made up less than one per cent of Arconic’s annual sales at the time. Arconic hasn’t disclosed where the remaining 99 per cent of Reynobond is. Key individuals remain in senior positions at Arconic and in 2023, while settlements were being finalised, Arconic was acquired by Apollo Global Management for $5.2 billion.

“Most of all, it is a story of how those with power possess the authority to avoid accountability while those without power lack the leverage to make the unaccountable accountable”

The Observer Column

This is not a single story of corporate negligence, but rather one about the structural failures and what our legal system allows to be swept away. The Grenfell Tower disaster exposed how the structures that are meant to keep corporate power in check, can instead shield firms from facing true accountability and transparency demands.

Visit our website to read the full report including our recommendations.

Watch coverage of the report in ITV News and read in The Guardian and The Observer.

Leeds, like many cities in the UK, is being transformed by the sale of public land. Local authorities are caught in a double-ended squeeze — on one side, central government grand cuts and higher debt repayments restrict fiscal headroom. On the other, rising costs of privately-run essential services such as temporary accommodation and social care swallow a growing share of council budgets. The squeeze has been taking place since the onset of austerity in 2010 and our recent report, “Everything Must Go”, uses Leeds City Council as a case study to examine the role asset sales play in attempting to resolve the local government funding crisis.

The sale of public land — libraries, leisure centres, offices and nurseries — is one of the remaining methods local authorities have used to bolster income from central government grant cuts. Leeds City Council experienced a 19 per cent real terms reduction in central government grants, equivalent to £280 million a year, since 2010. At the same time, repayments on Private Finance Initiative projects, of which Leeds holds more than any other local authority in England, are approaching their peak. Under this pressure, the council has raised £739 million in real terms from asset sales since 2010, more than half of it in the last six years.

Central government has actively encouraged asset sales as a solution to local government funding pressures. Since 2016, central government has relaxed the rules on asset sales, allowing the proceeds to fund “transformation” programmes, such as mass staff redundancies, on top of capital investment.

From 2020/21, councils under extreme financial pressure have been permitted to use asset sales to fund day-to-day services. Since its introduction, 42 councils, roughly one in seven, have been granted these powers.

Asset sales are one-off injections of cash, not a reliable long-term income stream. The approach itself is unsustainable, and the loss of public land hinders councils’ ability to build social housing at scale.

See below our map from the report to find details on the seven most expensive asset sales by Leeds City Council since 2009/10.

Visit our website to read the full report.

See coverage of “Everything Must Go” in The Yorkshire Post.

The UK faces a time-critical energy supply shock, being highly exposed to global fossil fuel markets, leaving households vulnerable to price spikes. To continue our energy series, Common Wealth has launched two new reports: “From Price Taker to Price Setter” and “Fixing the Price”. Each addresses different ways in which marginal price setting amplify the downstream impact of global shocks — first by expensive and carbon intensive LNG setting the overall price in natural gas and then by gas turbines doing the same in electricity — compounding each other’s effects. Unlike the £23 billion Energy Price Guarantee, which compensated consumers after prices had risen, the reports’ proposals are designed to directly tackle the causes of price volatility.

Patricia Pino argues that Britain’s vulnerability is structural — gas storage capacity is among the lowest in Europe, domestic production is declining and current pricing mechanisms transmit global gas price shocks directly into both gas and electricity bills. To address this, Pino proposes measures to untether the domestic price of gas from global prices during these crises, develop a strategic gas reserve centred around renationalising Centrica’s Rough storage facility and manage an orderly decline in domestic production alongside a demand reduction programme.

“Fixing the Price” by Donal Brown argues that Britain’s electricity market was designed for a fossil fuel age and is now preventing consumers from benefiting fully from cheap renewable power. Although they account for barely a quarter of electricity generation, gas power stations continue to set electricity prices more than three quarters of the time — inflating costs across the system. The report proposes that the National Energy System Operator act as a single buyer, moving existing low-carbon generation onto stable contracts while placing gas plants into a strategic reserve.

Brown also argues for greater public coordination of storage and demand-side flexibility to reduce system costs. Our preliminary estimates suggest the reforms could save between £10 billion and £16 billion annually by 2030, equivalent to a reduction of £125-£200 on household energy bills.

Together, these reports set out a coordinated strategy for reducing Britain’s exposure to fossil fuel price shocks protecting households from volatility and reducing energy bills while ultimately renewing public consent for clean power.

See coverage of our energy series in The Guardian, Energy Live and Business Green.

Read the full reports on our website.

Event: Securing The Future? War and Peace in a Warming World:

Join us at London Climate Week with Samar Al-Bulushi, Adrienne Buller, Adam Hanieh, Guillaume Long and Lorah Steichen — in partnership with The BREAK—DOWN and King’s College London. 

On Friday 26 June, Transition Security Project, The BREAK—DOWN and King’s College London are co-hosting a public panel “Securing The Future? War and Peace in a Warming World” as part of London Climate Week.

Adrienne Buller (Founding Editor of the BREAK—DOWN) will be joined by Samar Al-Bulushi (UC Irvine and Quincy Institute), Adam Hanieh (Director of SOAS Middle East Institute and author of Crude Capitalism), Guillaume Long (former Foreign Minister of Ecuador and diplomatic adviser to the Hague Group) and Lorah Steichen (Transition Security Project) to unpack the relationship between fossil fuels and war, the question of oil wars and the geopolitical alignments produced by the energy transition. 

The discussion will be recorded live and be broadcasted as a podcast from The BREAK—DOWN.

Key Information:

• Date: 26 June 2026, 6:30 - 8:30 pm

• Location: Science Gallery, London, SE1 9GU

• Register Online

On Friday 26 June, Transition Security Project, The BREAK—DOWN and King’s College London are co-hosting a public panel “Securing The Future? War and Peace in a Warming World” as part of London Climate Week.

Adrienne Buller (Founding Editor of the BREAK—DOWN) will be joined by Samar Al-Bulushi (UC Irvine and Quincy Institute), Adam Hanieh (Director of SOAS Middle East Institute and author of Crude Capitalism), Guillaume Long (former Foreign Minister of Ecuador and diplomatic adviser to the Hague Group) and Lorah Steichen (Transition Security Project) to unpack the relationship between fossil fuels and war, the question of oil wars and the geopolitical alignments produced by the energy transition.

The discussion will be recorded live and be broadcasted as a podcast from The BREAK—DOWN.

Adrienne Buller is the Founding Editor of The BREAK—DOWN, a new media initiative focused on the political economy of climate and ecological crisis. She is the author of The Value of a Whale, which won the 2024 Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics.

Adam Hanieh is the Director of the SOAS Middle East Institute and the author of several books on Middle East politics, oil and capitalism, including Crude Capitalism and (with Rafeef Ziadah and Robert Knox) Resisting Erasure.

Guillaume Long is the former Foreign Minister of Ecuador and the Senior Diplomatic Adviser to the Hague Group. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Lorah Steichen researches climate, militarism and global political economy. She is the Research Manager at Transition Security Project and the Global Systems and Policy Manager at Climate and Community Institute.

Samar Al-Bulushi is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine and the author of War-Making as Worldmaking. She researches militarism in Africa, the politics of non-alignment and the future of global order.

Register here.

Securing The Future? War and Peace in a Warming World:

• Date: 26 June 2026, 6:30 - 8:30 pm

• Location: Science Gallery, London, SE1 9GU

In the recent local council elections, Reform made headway in post-industrial towns, which have often been described as increasingly right-wing. Therefore, progressive politics is often assumed dead. Our new report says the opposite.

Over the last year, Common Wealth’s Sacha Hilhorst spoke to over fifty people from three Midlands Towns — Corby, Mansfield and Coalville — to bring deeper insights about the lives and politics of Labour-held, Reform-leaning towns. Progressive ideas such as workers’ rights, public ownership and price controls were found to be incredibly popular.

Take back ownership – just all go Game of Thrones, pitchforks.” Sinead is the first to admit that her views and approach to life are different from those of many of her neighbours, but she feels very connected to her community. “I have never felt like escaping this town.” And the town has been there for her, too. “People love me for who I am. I am different and I am out there a bit they would say. But I am going to keep that hope that it can be …” She stops herself before she finishes her sentence. “It is a hard time, it is.”

So why are progressives struggling? Our report’s in-depth portraits of seven residents show the three central dynamics shaping politics in post-industrial England:

• Scepticism: low faith in politics and political institutions. 

• Salience: while people have progressive instructs in many areas, the workplace is under-politicised and folk devils such as undocumented migrants loom large. 

• Structure: although there is an appetite for popular radicalism in favour of e.g. public ownership or price controls. However, often these objects of public anger don’t match up with sites of excess profit-making, such as in the case of supermarkets.

Drawing on the in-depth interviews and identifying these key challenges, this report sets out a political strategy and policy recommendations for progressives. This includes cleaning up politics, building institutions in under-invested towns and foregrounding workplace conditions.

As Sacha Hilhorst writes in a recent op-ed for The Guardian:

The local people who can be won over to progressive politics will only be convinced by being less like Reform, not more. Winning in post-industrial England requires connecting with its popular radicalism.

Read the full report on our website.

Read media coverage of the report in The Guardian, Politico, New Statesman.

Unelected financiers quietly buy up public assets, from hospitals to housing, and turn them into wealth-generating capital. They get away with this because of the law, which provides the material to advance their interests against society and evade public control. How could we move beyond this unequal system and create one that’s more just — before it’s too late?

​Join Katharina Pistor, Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia University and author of The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform it, and Hettie O’Brien, First Edition writer at the Guardian and author of The Asset Class, in conversation with Mathew Lawrence, founder and director of Common Wealth.

Event Details:

Tuesday 2nd June, 7-8pm at The October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester St, London WC1N 3AL

Further Details and Registration:

Please RSVP in advance here.

Millions of households across Britain are living in cold, damp homes that are expensive to heat. Addressing this crisis is essential not only for the green transition, but also for tackling the cost of living. As part of a new energy series, Common Wealth has launched two reports: “A Plan for Places” and “Retail Reimagined”. Together, they set out how upgrading homes and transforming the retail energy market can deliver lower bills, better housing and a fairer energy system.

“A Plan for Places” argues current retrofit programmes are fragmented and often fail to address poor housing conditions. Around 3.5 million homes in England fall below basic standards, and nearly 12 million need energy efficiency upgrades. This report proposes a “whole neighbourhoods” approach, upgrading homes area by area — starting with the most deprived communities. This would deliver improvements at scale while building trust and reducing costs.

“Retail Reimagined” argues the current retail market has failed to deliver lower bills or effective competition, instead creating complexity and instability. Common Wealth’s Chris Hayes explained the report’s proposal in Politics Home arguing regional energy boards “could harness ‘economics of scope’ — the efficiency savings gained from producing a range of products or services — and reduce transaction costs”.

Together, these reports set out a coordinated strategy: upgrading homes at scale while reforming the energy market to ensure households see the benefits.

Future publications in this series will explore how a rooftop “solar gilt” could permanently address the cost of living crisis and how a single buyer model could slash British electricity prices.

See coverage of the energy series in The Guardian, The Week and LBC News.

Visit our website to read both briefings in full.

Earlier this month, Andy Burnham rightly argued that the loss of public control of essential services worsens the cost-of-living crisis. This is the “privatisation premium” explained in our new briefing.

The premium is a structural, compulsory transfer from bill payers to shareholders and debt holders. In essential sectors, consumers now pay more — relative to historic norms and peer countries — for necessities such as housing energy, water and transport. The privatisation premium has two drivers. First, the elevated cost of capital to finance essential infrastructure and goods relative to public investment, and second, the coordination frictions involved in unbundling hitherto integrated sectors. Public ownership offers a direct alternative to this premium: lowering financial costs, restoring coordination and delivering services closer to cost.

Our second briefing, “Crude Awakening”, shows how Britain’s electricity market compounds the problem. Although gas accounts for a minority of generation, it sets the electricity price most of the time — inflating bills and exposing households to global shocks. In a speech last week to the New Economics Foundation, Zack Polanski agreed — arguing in the short term “we should stop the price of gas inflating the price of electricity” to “increase our resilience as a country” in the longer term. Today, the government are said to be looking at the decoupling of electricity prices from gas, our briefing — the single buyer model — sets out how.

Both briefings show us the government has the tools to protect households, crucial as geopolitical conflicts make fuel prices soar. As argued in a recent Guardian op-ed by Common Wealth Director Mathew Lawrence, Britain’s system is “more effective at extracting profits than delivering security”.

Visit our website to read both briefings in full.

Read coverage of both briefings in The Guardian, The New Statesman and Bloomberg.

The Break—Down and Planet B are hiring a Digital Content Lead who will play a central, hands-on role in expanding the reach and impact of Planet B’s work. They will be responsible for the production, publishing, distribution and optimisation of digital content across platforms, with a focus on flagship projects including The Break—Down  and  Macrodose.

• Location: London-based (minimum 2 days in office)

• Reporting to: Executive Director & Founding Editor of The Break—Down

• Term: 4 days (32 hours) per week. Fixed for two years, with likelihood of renewal. 

• Pay: £36,000 per annum (pro rata of £45,000 full-time equivalent)

• Deadline: 9am 9th March 2026

• Application info:

To apply for this role please see the full job description and apply through this link:

Apply Here

If you have any questions regarding the application, or need support in completing the form, please get in touch with us at info [at] planetbproductions.co.uk 

Common Wealth is hiring a Production Officer to support our digital communications and research publication schedule.

We’re looking for someone with a keen attention to detail and experience in a digital, editorial or creative support role. The successful candidate will become a key member of our production team.

• The Production Officer role at Common Wealth provides essential support to the organisation’s production, outputs and overall mission.

• The role sits within our broader production team and is focused on supporting digital communications, design, editorial, and press functions.

• The role holder will play a key part in helping us work effectively and creatively to deliver high-impact work.

Application deadline: Monday, 2 February (10 AM GMT).

Apply here

If you have any questions about the role, please feel free to contact us (email: jobs@common-wealth.org).

As 2025 draws to a close, we are proud of what we have achieved this year towards that better future, and we affirm our commitment to the bold, radical and rigorous research that will be needed in the years to come.

Thank you for your support and solidarity. We are excited to share some of our highlights from 2025 and hope that you will continue to follow our work in 2026.

During 2025, we published 23 reports and briefings, along with three interactive digital projects, on topics including:

• The afterlives of Right to Buy

• AI and global power competition

• Green planning for a just transition

• Corporate accountability

• Gentrification in Greater Manchester.

Our work was covered 111 times in the press, with stories in:

• The Times on under-investment by energy networks (paywalled)

• The Guardian on public ownership of water

• Financial Times on the limits of Bidenomics (paywalled)

• Sky News on rising military spending.

In September, we launched Who Owns Britain? — a landmark new project investigating our private island.

The privatisation of essential services has stopped us from acting with ambition and at scale. It has incentivised asset sweating over asset building, financial engineering over real engineering, extracting over investing, private profits over public needs.

We examine this failed model by identifying who profits from ownership of our energy and water systems, from transport and housing to care and mail services, and analyse how privatisation shapes the country and our lives.

Explore Who Owns Britain?

Dig into our interactive Data Dashboard and trace how essential services that once belonged to us are in the hands of a new cast of owners: international asset managers, foreign governments and private equity giants.

Read our Visual Essay and follow the Williams family in Manchester from cradle to grave, revealing the invisible web of ownership and profit — the hidden pattern of our lives.

The project was covered as a mini-series in The Guardian, starting here.

Last week, we published our final report of the year — on the case for reparations for Caribbean countries, including Barbados.

Explore the visual project

Four hundred years ago, in 1625, the English imperial claim to Barbados set in motion centuries of rapacious economic extraction across the Caribbean. From the formation of the plantation slave economy to the modern-day climate crisis, we map how empire shaped Barbados, Britain and the wider world.

Read coverage in The Guardian here.

In partnership with Climate and Community Institute, we launched a new research centre, Transition Security Project.

Listen to the recording of the launch for the Project here:

Two Transitions is Transition Security Project’s essay series on the transformation of US empire, its implications for the climate and strategies for collective safety in a warming world.

Read the introductory essay, “Two Transitions”, by Khem Rogaly, Patrick Bigger and Lorah Steichen.

Read the first essay in the series, “The Middle East and Fossil Capitalism”, by Adam Hanieh.

Read the full essay series

More from Transition Security Project:

• Explore our interactive project on military conversion on the Clyde here.

• Read our briefing on the Pentagon’s stockpiling of transition minerals here, which was covered in The Guardian.

• Find more of Transition Security Project’s work on our website and follow them on Twitter, Bluesky and Instagram.

This year also saw the launch of the Green Planning Commission, our latest transatlantic project.

Composed of experts from business, trade unions, and academia, it aims to rethink the role and remake the case for green planning to get the climate transition back on track and address the crisis of affordability, which is worsening living standards.

Commissioners include world-leading experts in economics, climate and progressive politics, including  Richard Kozul-Wright, Mika Minio-Paluella, Ha-Joon Chang and Isabella Weber.

The Commission will formulate an agenda that decarbonises and makes the economy fairer by developing solutions adequate to the scale of the transformation that these crises demand.

More from our US Programme:

• Visit our website  to find out more about the Green Planning Commission.

• Read an introduction to our US Programme here.

• Watch our launch video on  Instagram, Twitter/X, BlueSky and LinkedIn.

The BREAK—DOWN published two issues: Right Turn and Frontiers. You can read them online or buy copies of the journal through their website.

Best wishes for the festive season and the new year.

Warmly,
Common Wealth

Our new project — Visualising Extractive Capitalism in the Caribbean — visualises the political economy of the Caribbean from early sugar plantations to modern-day cruise ships, with an interactive map and timeline exploring how wealth has been extracted and people exploited in Barbados. We also explore how movements from slave rebellions to reparations activists have pushed for justice.

Labelled “the birthplace of British slave society” by historian Hilary Beckles, Barbados’s history is, in microcosm, that of all European imperialism: systems designed to generate incredible wealth for a few through extraordinary suffering for many. High levels of sovereign debt — Barbados’s is the third-highest per capita in the world1 — are a legacy of this systematic immiseration of the Black working class.

By refusing to grant a transfer of economic wealth alongside political freedom, Britain left newly independent states such as Barbados responsible for improving the nutrition, housing, education, sanitation and health of their people, contributing to this day to a spiralling cost of debt servicing that prevents Caribbean countries on the front line of the climate crisis from funding adaptation and resilience.

Slavery and colonialism are not things that happened far away and long ago. We continue to live with their consequences.

Across the Caribbean and the UK, demands for reparations go back centuries. Caricom’s Ten Point Plan and calls for a UK Truth & Reparatory Justice Commission reflect a growing consensus: reparations must address land, culture, finance, climate and, crucially, self-determination.

Common Wealth argues that reparative justice is possible and necessary, and that it must be grounded in history, led by affected communities and oriented toward building real sovereignty and flourishing.

Visit our website to experience the interactive map.

Read our piece for The Guardian.

The Government’s Local Power Plan (LPP) aims to create thousands of community, council-led and shared ownership projects. Our new report, A Local Power Plan that Works for Communities, sets out a policy blueprint to make the clean energy transition a reality on the ground.

The work was produced in partnership with the Energy Learning Network (a collaboration between Ashden and the Centre for Sustainable Energy) and leading community energy bodies across the UK: Community Energy England, Community Energy Scotland, Community Energy Wales and Northern Ireland’s Action Renewables.

With the Government’s clean power by 2030 target at risk, community energy represents a unique opportunity to strengthen support for the transition. To do this, the report argues, the LPP must not only deliver on its promise of eight gigawatts of local and community power by 2030 but also incubate visible and successful projects up and down the country.

Visit our website  to read the report.

Read coverage of the report in The New Statesman and Sustainable Views (paywalled).

Medicaid and How to Build a Movement for Universal Healthcare

Health care provision in the United States stands at a crossroads. Our latest US programme briefing, Medicaid and the Struggle for Universal Health Care in the Trump Aftermath, was published earlier this month as the Trump administration launched an unprecedented assault on key public health insurance programmes which will result in the loss of coverage for as many as 17 million people. The bulk of the coverage loss will come in the form of the biggest cuts in history to Medicaid, biggest in the joint federal-state program that covers one in five Americans.

In the face of such challenges, the shared struggle for advancing the cause of universal health care is more relevant than ever.

This briefing paper argues that defence and expansion of Medicaid is the most promising focal point around which to coordinate working-class political mobilisation towards delivering universal coverage.

Visit our website to read the briefing.

Jointly founded by Common Wealth and Climate and Community Institute, Transition Security Project is a centre for research and policy that investigates the US and UK military industrial complexes as economic, climate and geopolitical threats.

Working alongside trade unions, grassroots movements and policymakers, we design alternatives from place-based proposals for military industrial conversion to security strategies that prioritise everyday, universal safety over the profits of military contractors.

Transition Security Project’s new researcher will be part of a four-person transatlantic team working to analyse the economic, climate and geopolitical impacts of militarisation. The precise research focus of the role will depend on the experience and background of the successful candidate.

This role is at the core of our research team, offering the opportunity to help shape Transition Security Project’s agenda and contribute to real-world change.

Please refer to the Job Pack for further information on Common Wealth, Transition Security Project and the Researcher role.

Location: UK. Our preference is for a candidate based in London or near to key areas of Transition Security Project’s research — Manchester, the Scottish central belt and Belfast.

Contract type: Permanent.

Hours: Full time (37.5 hours per week). We are open to discussion on total hours.

Responsible to: Co-Director of Transition Security Project.

Salary: £38,068 rising to £41,712 in automatic annual increments.

Start date: As soon as feasible following appointment.

Application deadline: 5pm GMT on Friday 28^th November.

First interviews: Week beginning 8^th December.

Application info:

To apply for this role, please do the following:

• Send your CV (no more than two pages) and a brief cover letter outlining your motivations for the role and how your skills and experience align with the position to jobs@common-wealth.org, by 5pm GMT on Friday 28^th November. All applications will be acknowledged within two working days. If you are disabled, please inform us and you will be offered an interview if you meet the essential criteria of the role.

• Complete our short survey for diversity monitoring. This is separate to the applications and anonymous. The survey is entirely optional.

Interviews will take place w/c 8^th December, with questions sent to candidates in advance. A second interview may be required for final selection at the end of the week.

We are particularly keen to receive applications from people in groups underrepresented in our sector.

If you have any questions about the role, please feel free to contact us.

We are excited to launch our new transatlantic project, the Green Planning Commission.

Composed of experts from business, trade unions, academia and sector experts, it aims to rethink the role and remake the case for green planning to get the climate transition back on track and address the crisis of affordability worsening living standards.

Commissioners include world-leading experts in economics, climate and progressive politics, including Richard Kozul-Wright (the former head of the UN Conference on Trade and Development), Mika Minio-Paluella (Head of Industry, Energy and Climate at the Trades Union Congress), Ha-Joon Chang (Research Professor of Economics at SOAS University of London) and Isabella Weber (Associate Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst).

As part of the launch, the Commission is publishing new analysis which finds that the share of global investment directed at climate must rise to 20 per cent by 2030 — almost triple the current share — for the transition to succeed.

Our analysis of Bloomberg NEF’s “New Energy Outlook” found that investment needs to rise from its current level of $2.1 trillion to $5.6 trillion by 2030 within the nearly $28 trillion annual global investment spend.

Rich economies currently face two era-defining challenges: environmental breakdown and the growing unaffordability of life’s essentials. Housing, energy, transport, and food are all becoming inaccessible, destabilising living standards and eroding democratic consent.

This set of issues will become increasingly salient. Climate breakdown drives costs higher through rising insurance costs and supply chain disruptions, while extreme weather destroys infrastructure.

Without intervention things will only get worse.

But reversing the cycle creates positive momentum: decarbonisation lowers energy costs and climate stabilisation reduces disruption, leading to increased economic stability for ordinary households.

The Green Planning Commission will develop a framework and policy programme of green and democratic planning based around the systemic imperative for decarbonisation and people’s needs for affordable essentials.

To develop a programme for system-level decarbonisation, the Commission will deliver:

• Sector-level strategies across energy, housing, transport, food and industry.

• Macroeconomic frameworks for decarbonisation and economic security.

• Macrofinancial reform to steward investment toward greening the future.

• Corporate governance that can green and democratise enterprise.

• Frameworks for green and cooperative international development, and much more.

How states and democracies face up to these crises will define our era.

The Commission will formulate an agenda that decarbonises and makes the economy fairer, by developing solutions adequate to the scale of the transformation that these crises demand.

Visit our website to find out more about the Green Planning Commission.

Watch our launch video on Instagram, Twitter/X, BlueSky and LinkedIn.

Mathew Lawrence

Director, Common Wealth

Join Us in London for the Launch of the Green Planning Commission

Join us in London this evening to discuss the state of decarbonisation in domestic and global context, the changing frontiers of climate action, and how green democratic planning can underpin a decisive progressive consensus, programme and winning coalition.

Chaired by Sarah Nankivell, Deputy Director at Common Wealth

Featuring:

• Carolina Alves, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

• Melanie Brusseler, Common Wealth

• Richard Kozul-Wright, SOAS

• Mathew Lawrence, Common Wealth

There will be a drinks reception following the panel discussion.

Location:

The October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester St, London WC1N 3AL

Schedule:

19:00-20:00: Panel Discussion

20:00-21:30: Drinks Reception

Attendance:

Free Attendance, please RSVP in advance here.

Politicians across the North Atlantic have announced a historic programme of investment to address what they claim is an epochal threat. Despite the hopes of several generations, this is not a coordinated response to the climate crisis. European and North American governments are not mobilising their financial resources to transform the energetic basis of the economy, but towards the expansion of military and surveillance infrastructure.

As the planet burns, economic transformation is needed to avoid the destabilisation of life on earth. Rather than develop a green economy, European governments are expanding their war machines — a decision forecast to add 12 per cent to the continent’s emissions. In the UK, Keir Starmer has declared a “generational investment” in the military and its associated industries, delivered through a “whole of society mobilisation”. This process is best understood as militarisation — a surge in military spending to consolidate geopolitical strength and to make military contracting central to the growth model of Western economies. The choice to pursue militarisation carries economic, environmental and geopolitical costs, each posing grave threats to human security.

The Atlantic Garrison

Leading the way, the US has funded the world’s first trillion-dollar war machine and coerced European allies to divert resources towards their militaries. With the UK jockeying to guide the process, almost all European NATO countries have adopted a target of spending 3.5 per cent of GDP on their militaries, plus another 1.5 per cent on undefined security investments, with the aim of developing a European military industrial complex that matches the US in scale.

European politicians justify this spending as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For Keir Starmer, the front line of this war is at home and an “armour-clad nation” must be built in response. Setting aside this dubious geography, military aid to Ukraine since 2022 has been worth less than five per cent of the UK’s military budget.1 This is just one indication that militarisation has other motivations.

Contrary to claims that the UK must rearm to reverse underinvestment in its military, Starmer’s iron kingdom already has strong foundations. Britain has sustained a military budget in the world’s top seven since at least 1949; this supports a global network of bases from Oman to the Chagos Islands. The collective military budget of European NATO powers is more than triple Russia’s, with central and western European budgets having grown by nearly two thirds over the past decade. Despite invoking the supposedly imminent threat of Russian attacks, European leaders rarely explain what new investments are needed for. This is because the surge in military spending is not a defensive one. The 3.5 per cent NATO target is not based on an assessment of defensive needs, but crudely designed to match the Pentagon budget in size.

The arbitrary nature of the target indicates a strategy defined by geopolitics rather than defence. In March, JD Vance and Pete Hegseth sneered that Europeans were “freeloading” by not paying for a round of US airstrikes on Yemen. This was despite Britain providing refuelling aircraft for the attack and bombing Yemen for nearly a year in partnership with the US and Israel. In Washington, the objective is not to increase the capacity of European states to defend their territory, but for them to pay more to deliver American strategic objectives and to buy more weapons from US firms. Informing President Trump of new spending commitments, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte congratulated him on bombing Iran’s nuclear programme, claiming that the attack “makes us all safer”. Attacks on Yemen and Iran are not defensive moves for Europe, but assaults on other continents defined by the foreign policies of the US and Israel.

The consequences of Europe’s acquiescence to these US demands are severe, with budget cuts to foreign aid, climate investments and social protections already attempted to fund militarisation. The language of security used by Western politicians reflects their ambition to dominate an unstable world, but the maintenance and ongoing expansion of global military infrastructure will not bring everyday security to citizens. This would instead require investment in health, care, housing, climate adaptation and the energy transition while rebalancing military capacity towards domestic defence. As explored in detail below, the generational decisions being made in North American and European capitals will bring economic, climate and geopolitical turbulence to the lives of their citizens instead of much-needed security.

Military Largesse, Civilian Austerity

Militarisation at the scale pursued by North Atlantic elites limits the capacity of the state to meet the social needs of citizens. While governments on both sides of the Atlantic face differing constraints, they are united in offering fiscal largesse to their military industrial complexes and austerity to their populations. Devoting such a large share of GDP to military budgets — in the US more than half of the federal government’s discretionary spending — structures the economy around a sector that provides little economic value to working class people. The main beneficiaries of large military budgets are the private investors that own military contractors.

In July 2025, the Big Beautiful Bill added $150 billion to the Pentagon budget while cutting food assistance for 22.3 million families, health insurance for 4.8 million people and funding for clean energy. Meanwhile, the UK’s Labour Government has committed to a series of hikes in the military budget, which leave it forecast to double by 2035. The Government launched the first part of its military spending spree through direct cuts to foreign aid. Given the Government’s fiscal rules, further cuts to fund growing military spending are likely. On the European continent, only ten of twenty seven EU states are able to meet the new NATO target without making cuts, raising tax or abandoning fiscal rules.

Far from providing wide public benefits, or the “defence dividend” Keir Starmer has promised to voters, investment in military contracts is an economic risk. There is a gulf between the economic benefits of military spending and investment in public services or civilian industries: Transport for London procurement supports nearly three times as many jobs per pound as spending planned by the Ministry of Defence. There is also huge waste in military contracts. Military equipment is often delayed by years and faulty once delivered. In the United States, local policing agencies regularly acquire surplus equipment from the Pentagon free of charge. Devoting public investment to military contractors concentrates government resources in a sector that provides little to the economy at a national scale.

Most of all, public funding that could otherwise be a source of everyday security — supporting health, housing, care and environment — is granted to private contractors owned by global asset management firms, fuelling executive pay and shareholder payouts. Between 2020 and 2024, more than half of discretionary Pentagon spending went to contractors — $771 billion to just five companies. In 2021 alone, these five companies paid their top twenty four executives $287 million. Rewarded above all are their shareholders: according to the Pentagon’s analysis, military contractors distribute cash to their shareholders at a much higher rate than the stock index average. Military contracting involves the direct transfer of public money to shareholders at an immense scale.

When military budgets are made central to a country’s economic model, shareholders are rewarded while the funding available to provide citizens with cheaper energy and affordable housing or food is constrained.

Existential Threat

Militarisation does not just pose an economic challenge. It is a fundamental risk to climate safety. The diversion of public resources towards warmaking is more than a case of misaligned priorities in the face of the climate crisis, but a climate threat in its own terms. Long ignored as a result of Pentagon lobbying, military emissions pose a barrier to global decarbonisation, while the resource demands of military manufacturing put unnecessary constraint on the supply of materials otherwise needed for green transformation.

Militaries are responsible for around 5.5 per cent of global emissions, a greater share than shipping and aviation combined. NATO countries are responsible for more than half of this even without accounting for the coming boom in military spending, which will have the same impact over the next decade as the annual carbon footprint of Brazil. These emissions are a source of planetary instability, adding to escalating wildfires, floods and storms and contributing to the long-term breakdown of climate patterns that have existed for all of human civilization.

As global forces stationed across the world, the US and UK militaries also pose a localised ecological threat. British and American military bases have left a trail of “forever chemicals” in the drinking water of communities from Afghanistan to Okinawa. While the ecological scars of occupation may not have the same immediacy as the social destruction of war, they risk the long-term future of communities on their land and, as in Gaza, they can form part of attempts at genocide and ethnic cleansing. In Iraq, the US military’s frequent use of open-air burn pits has poisoned soil and water, leading to persistent spikes in cancers, birth defects and respiratory illness among local communities.

Beyond the ecological devastation that results from military operations, military hardware requires many of the same resources and minerals essential to the climate transition. These materials are not only needed for conventional weapons systems, but also increasingly critical to meet the Pentagon’s growing data centre demands. Using these minerals for war worsens existing constraints on essential inputs for green transport and energy while also creating unnecessary demand for mining that damages adjacent lands and the communities, often Indigenous, that live on them.

Talk of greening the war machine is dangerous and misleading. Electrifying the Pentagon’s non-tactical vehicles alone would require enough transition minerals to decarbonise all US Postal Service trucks, all National Park Service vehicles and provide battery-powered backup electricity to nearly 8000 federal buildings. The Pentagon is already seizing resources needed for the climate transition, taking equity stakes in the only rare earth mine in the US. This scramble for resources should not be taken as an indication that the Pentagon can be decarbonised. The most significant sources of military emissions such as fighter jets, tanks and warships do not have zero carbon alternatives. Military emissions cannot be meaningfully reduced without a drawdown in military infrastructure.

As North Atlantic states make militaries and military industries central to their economic models, they constrain their ability to adapt effectively to the climate crisis. In the US and UK, public capital expenditure has flowed towards the military, dwarfing capital spending for the net zero and environment budgets. This failure to adapt risks both safety and economic stability: as the climate crisis mounts, so too will its inflationary impacts. Just as military emissions worsen environmental breakdown, a failure to adapt to a world transformed will worsen the instability of everyday life. Food and energy prices will increase while disasters, and their economic impacts, intensify.

Global Insecurity

Fundamentally, Western militarisation is an attempt to impose dominance by force on a changing world order. The US is escalating its Cold War with China, foreclosing the industrial collaboration that is needed to address the climate crisis while heightening the potential of military confrontation between major powers. Meanwhile, Western powers have removed any performative constraint on the use of armed force, particularly through their support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The assault on Gaza and Western backing for Israeli attacks on Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Qatar and Tunisia since 2023 heighten reliance on violence as a political tool and increase global instability.

To wage Cold War, the US is using trade and military policy to force allies into economic blocs. Militarisation, and attempts to coerce European states to buy US-made weapons, are just one process through which Washington is shaping the decisions of allied governments. The second Trump administration has escalated efforts to reduce the trade deficit and reinvigorate US industry, with money and loyalty demanded from allies to support the process.

Following the announcement of a new investment vehicle through which Japan has promised to invest $550 billion in US industry — with the US pocketing 90 per cent of the profits — the Treasury Secretary suggested creating an American sovereign wealth fund that invests domestically using allies’ wealth. The economic coercion of allies and the formation of rival economic blocs is a risk to the climate given that Chinese technology and raw materials are essential to the global process of decarbonisation. As the UK signed a trade deal this year to secure its “special relationship” with Washington, it accepted restrictions on Chinese investments in strategic sectors. This Cold War era makes the future of the climate a vector of interstate competition and potentially conflict.

More urgent than the new Cold War in the immediate term is the removal of any constraint on the use of violence by the US and its military allies. The genocide overseen by the US, supported by Europe, and undertaken by the Israeli military in Palestine is the primary example of this. Even symbolic attachment to the legal architecture previously used to justify military violence has been abandoned. For instance, while collaborating in the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the US has deployed private mercenaries from a far-right biker gang to kill starving Palestinians through a perverse “humanitarian aid” mechanism, openly committing several war crimes at once.

The joint policy of the US, Israel and European powers to pursue military dominance in the Middle East has forced the West to abandon multilateral institutions that it once dominated. In September 2025, a UN commission finally concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Throughout the twenty three months it took the UN to reach this finding, three of its five permanent security council members actively participated in the genocide. Three months earlier, the US and Europe supported strikes by Israel, a nuclear power, on Iran, a non-nuclear power involved in negotiations over its enrichment capacity; a direct attack on the non-proliferation regime overseen by the West. The same military establishments that demand support on the grounds of security are producing instability across the world in a quest for dominance.

Against Militarisation

Amid the economic, environmental and geopolitical instability wrought by militarisation, there is an urgent need for political alternatives. These must address the destabilising role played by Western military dominance and articulate routes towards collective safety and universal flourishing. This means defining where military capabilities and industries are necessary for defensive purposes and otherwise diverting military spending to the everyday security of the working class — from affordable housing, healthcare and food to a safe climate. These political alternatives can be developed at different levels, from plans by workers in military industries to convert production to national economic policy and multilateral security architectures.

For much of the twentieth century, labour leaders, economists and politicians developed alternative economic plans that demonstrated how public investment can direct manufacturing away from superfluous military demands and towards the security of working class people. This was famously the project of the Lucas Aerospace trade unionists in the 1970s, but it had broader and deeper foundations. The Lucas Aerospace stewards built on economic conversion organising in the US that developed out of resistance to the American war in Vietnam. These efforts, spanning from DC politics and Ivy League offices to the International Association of Machinists inspired a UN report in 1973 that found no technical constraints to using sections of the military industry to develop products needed by civilians. While over the subsequent decades a host of worker and state-led projects demonstrated the conversion potential of military industrial workplaces, companies like Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems also used military sites to develop civilian products when it suited them financially to do so.

The 2020s offers a distinct context. The labour movement is much weaker in the North Atlantic than in the postwar era and projects as ambitious as the Lucas Plan remain distant. Nonetheless, the political organisation of those working in weapons production and its wider infrastructures is still needed to challenge militarisation and to demonstrate that it is not in the interests of the working class. Just as in the 1960s and 70s, this must form part of a wider coalition with politicians and movements that understand the threat posed by militarisation to planetary safety, everyday economic security and geopolitical stability. Finally, new international coalitions must foster climate collaboration instead of Cold War competition, drawing on the principles of non-alignment and reparation which are fundamental to building a more equal world order.

To face this moment, we are launching the Transition Security Project as a research centre which will support efforts to challenge militarisation through trade union organising, national politics and multilateral collaboration. We seek to support climate and labour movements, as well as media and politicians, by analysing the economic, climate and geopolitical risks of militarisation and developing industrial and political alternatives to militarised security.

We will work across three programmes of research, policy development and coalition building:

• Economy will analyse the economic harms produced by militarisation in the US and UK. It will also develop alternatives to military production in partnership with workers and trade unions.

• Climate will investigate the environmental and ecological damage produced by the US and UK war machines, from emissions to their demand for transition minerals.

• Geopolitics will commission new research on the global instability produced by US and UK militarisation. It will also explore alternative models of security and multilateral collaboration.

This autumn, we will launch a set of publications that outline the damage produced by militarisation and start to envision alternatives:

• A visual model of military industrial conversion at a UK naval shipyard, developed through interviews with workers, presented after an interactive timeline of past examples of conversion.

• A series of ten essays by leading scholars on two interconnected transitions — from US hegemony to a multipolar world and the uneven, halting energy transition. The essays examine the closures and openings this moment presents for climate collaboration.

• A briefing on the Pentagon’s stockpiling of transition minerals and the threats posed to the climate transition.

• A report on the future of the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast and how offshore renewables production has been challenged by rearmament.

Through collaboration and coordination with movements, politicians and journalists, this new research centre aims to help secure a safe global climate transition by paving the way towards new priorities for security.

The authors would like to thank Amelia Horgan, Mathew Lawrence, Sarah Nankivell and Rithika Ramamurthy for their editorial work and feedback on this essay. They would also like to thank Rectangle — as well as the Common Wealth and Climate and Community Institute teams — for their essential work on the launch of Transition Security Project.

Common Wealth is launching a transatlantic Green Planning Commission to rethink the politics and practice of planning to recover a democratic and decarbonised future from the crises of our age.

Join us in London on Thursday 30th October to discuss the state of decarbonisation in domestic and global context, the changing frontiers of climate action, and how green democratic planning can underpin a decisive progressive consensus, programme and winning coalition.

Chaired by Sarah Nankivell, Deputy Director at Common Wealth

Featuring:

• Carolina Alves, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

• Melanie Brusseler, Common Wealth

• Richard Kozul-Wright, SOAS

• Mathew Lawrence, Common Wealth

There will be a drinks reception following the panel discussion.

Location:

The October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester St, London WC1N 3AL

Schedule:

19:00-20:00: Panel Discussion

20:00-21:30: Drinks Reception

Attendance:

Free Attendance, please RSVP in advance here.

On 16th October at 6 pm BST, join our all-star panel — Laleh Khalili (chair), Stephen Semler, Thea Riofrancos and Ilias Alami — for the free online launch of Transition Security Project: a forthcoming collaboration between Common Wealth and Climate and Community Institute.

With 400 tickets already sold, make sure to sign up so you don’t miss out!

Register for the launch here.

Last week, we launched our new project — Who Owns Britain?

Who Owns Britain? breaks down how Britain was remade by a radical experiment: the unprecedented privatisation of our essential services and infrastructure.

Our research reveals that the public has paid almost £200bn out to shareholders of key British industries — including water, rail, bus, energy and mail — since privatisation.

Dig into our interactive Data Dashboard and trace how essential services that once belonged to us are in the hands of a new cast of owners: international asset managers, foreign governments and private equity giants.

Explore our Visual Essay and follow the Williams family in Manchester from cradle to grave, revealing the invisible web of ownership and profit — the hidden pattern of our lives.

Read coverage of the report across four articles in The Guardian, including Zack Polanski and Paul Nowak’s response.

Watch our launch video here.

Follow our Instagram, Twitter/X, BlueSky and LinkedIn for more on who owns Britain and how we can end the privatisation rip-off.

Who Owns Britain? A Public Discussion.

Join us in Liverpool this Tuesday at the Labour Party Conference for a panel discussion unpacking fresh insights from our new project, Who Owns Britain?

Chaired by Mathew Lawrence, Director at Common Wealth

Featuring:

• Cat Hobbs, We Own It

• Dr. Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, NEF

• Mika Minio-Palluelo, TUC

There will be a drinks reception following the panel discussion.

Location:

Gallery 1, RIBA North, 21 Mann Island, Liverpool, L3 1BP

Schedule:

19:00-20:00: Panel Discussion

20:00-21:00: Drinks Reception

Attendance:

Free Attendance, please RSVP in advance here.

War, Climate Crisis and the Economy: Transition Security Project Launch

On 16th October 6 pm BST, join our all-star panel — Laleh Khalili (chair), Stephen Semler, Thea Riofrancos and Ilias Alami — for the free online launch of Transition Security Project: a forthcoming collaboration between Common Wealth and Climate and Community Institute.

Register for the launch here.