In his attempt to attract back voters who had moved from Labour to the Greens, Andy Burnham has shifted his party’s position to the left on issues like housing, taxes and Gaza. But his replacement has remained conspicuously silent on the topic that dominated that Gorton and Denton by-election, which sealed Starmer’s doom: drug reform.

The UK is in the midst of an unprecedented drug deaths crisis, yet drugs remain an issue that terrifies the Labour party. The incentives for reform are clear. Legalising cannabis has been estimated to bring in £1.5 billion to Britain’s annual budget. The drug death rate in the country has not only risen to record highs but it has actually increased to a new record high every year for the past 13 years. That should be a national scandal.

Labour has not only failed to address this crisis since re-entering government in 2024; they also have doubled down on a failed approach, leaning heavily into the same War on Drugs talking points that have produced such terrible results over the past few decades. With even Donald Trump embracing drug policy reform, we are now in the bizarre world where the British Labour Party stands markedly to the right of the US Republican Party on drugs.

Prohibition and the Labour Party

In my new book, The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs, I track how the failures of the War on Drugs have pushed countries towards reform. Usually, these reforms are implemented by centre-left, social democratic governments. In 2018, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party legalised cannabis; the German Social Democrats followed in 2024. The same is happening in the USA, where the Democratic Party has moved the Overton window so far on drug policy that Republican president Donald Trump is now signing multiple executive orders in favour of cannabis and psychedelics. The same pattern can be seen everywhere from Democrats 66 in the Netherlands to the Morena party currently governing Mexico.

This shift is unsurprising when you look at the primary victims of the drug war. While the failures of the drug war impacted societies as a whole, the worst effects often fell on groups that usually vote for centre-left parties. In deindustrialised cities, a criminal rather than public health approach has resulted in escalating drug death numbers, racial minority communities who have been targeted by police, and young people for whom a moment of teenage hedonism leads to a criminal record.

And yet, there is at least one centre-left party that is refusing to pick up this low-hanging fruit: the UK Labour party. This reluctance to embrace drug policy reform, even as similar parties in the West are doing so, speaks to a deep issue within the DNA of the British Labour Party.

While Labour may appear as a single coherent parliamentary machine, it is the product of several distinct tributaries flowing into each other, with one major stream being the ‘temperance Chartism’ of the Victorian age. For the temperance Chartists, the use of alcohol, opium and other substances among working people wasn’t an outgrowth of the need to numb oneself against the alienation of capitalism. Rather, intoxication was the cause of alienation in itself – responsible for the crime, disease, and the degradation of family life that kept working people poor. They saw their rejection of intoxication as a means to prove to their social betters that they were, in fact, responsible enough to be allowed the vote.

Out of this tradition came James Keir Hardie, founder of the Labour Party and its first parliamentary leader. Hardie became strongly aligned to the temperance movement after his own childhood was brutalised by his stepfather’s alcoholism. His commitment to the prohibition of intoxication was not a quirky niche element of his politics; it was the founding grammar of his moral worldview. And it was one shared by a number of the leading figures who established the British Labour party at the turn of the twentieth century – from evangelical prohibitionists like the first Labour politician to become a cabinet minister, Arthur Henderson and the first Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden.

The deserving and undeserving poor

While these committed abstentionists were founding The British Labour Party, the international temperance movement reached its high-water mark, implementing across Europe and North America the first prohibitionist laws that developed the modern idea of ‘drug control’. These temperance activists would even succeed in implementing the prohibition of alcohol in the USA.

By the 1930s, the centrality of temperance declined as a policy priority for the British Labour party, as politicians accepted that drinking was ingrained within the leisure practices of working communities. But by then, the temperance tradition had injected into the British Labour party a quasi-religious reading of the relationship between intoxication and poverty that has never been truly upended. It is a taxonomy that divides poverty into two categories: poverty produced by capitalist exploitation, which was structural and therefore political; and poverty produced by moral weakness, which was individual and thereby punishable. Scholars like the political scientist Robbie Shilliam have framed it as a distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor.

While opposition to alcohol has disappeared in the face of America’s failed prohibition, we still see echoes of this distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor in the contemporary Labour Party position on drugs. Recent Secretary of State for Housing Steve Reed is on record saying he would like to implement a scheme for publicly “naming and shaming” those convicted of buying illegal drugs, despite no evidence that such policy has worked to reduce drug use or harms. This is a policy that carries into our contemporary age the ugliest elements of the temperance movement and its desire to not just ban intoxication but to punish, perhaps even humiliate those who are weak enough to fall victim to its temptations.

The communities with the highest rates of drug deaths are also the communities that have been failed by our crumbling economic system: crushed by deindustrialisation, austerity and the deliberate dismantling of the social fabric. A progressive approach to these issues is not to resurrect the worldview of the workhouse. A progressive approach would be to move the whole issue of drugs out of the punitive, stigmatising arena of the criminal law and instead draw on the models of evidence-based harm reduction, public health and careful, non-commercial regulation from other countries in order to create a drug policy that puts people’s welfare, rather than the policing of morality, at its heart.

This week’s guest post is from Kojo Koram, Professor of Law and Political Economy at Loughborough University and Author of The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs. He writes the SHADOW CAPITALISM Substack.

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The New Gilded Age

The US’ war on workers; the fading role of the US dollar; and how climate breakdown is supercharging El Niño.

The CCS Escape Hatch for North Sea Drilling

Supporters of CCS technology say we can mitigate the climate impact of drilling in the North Sea. The science says otherwise.

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The FT quotes an economist at JP Morgan:

“Regardless of what measure you look at, workers, in terms of employee compensation, have been receiving an increasingly small share of national income over time. And where is that income going? It’s got to go somewhere. And a good chunk of it is showing up in corporate profit margins.”

In other words, the American economy is based on a direct transfer of wealth from labour to capital. Workers create far more value for bosses than they receive in wages. Then, they’re forced to pay huge chunks of their income in exchange for the basic goods and services they need to survive – housing, energy, food. And then, the government uses their taxes to line the pockets of American capitalists – whether through corporate subsidies, tax breaks, or imperialist wars.

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As the Rosebank and Jackdaw consultations close, lobbyists promoting Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) have argued that new North Sea licences should be linked to CCS. The plan is to make North Sea polluters pay to store a rising share of the carbon dioxide (CO₂) their oil and gas would produce.

After our summer of heatwaves, drought and wildfires, the Government should follow the only principle consistent with climate science: “we will not create new sources of emissions”. This Government must reject both new North Sea drilling and this flawed “storage obligation” proposal.

False Solutions

The North Sea decision will define Labour’s climate legacy. This is the moment for the Government to show global leadership and prove the UK is matching its rhetoric on climate breakdown with action. It would be a historic move after the UK joined countries in Santa Marta earlier this year to discuss pathways away from fossil-fuel production.

The CCS proposal is a nonstarter, because only a small share of the emissions from new North Sea drilling would ever be covered by the storage obligation. The proposal only works if each tonne of CO₂ emitted by drilling is matched by a tonne permanently stored elsewhere.

But the scheme does not even attempt to achieve this goal before 2050. Until then, drilling would generate much more climate-heating CO₂ pollution than could be stored. The remaining emissions would simply fall outside the scheme’s accounting.

These issues are why countries on the front line of climate breakdown have rejected CCS and CO₂-trading approaches, such as offsetting, as “false solutions” at Santa Marta and climate COPs.

A recent article from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) puts Rosebank’s peak storage obligation at around 2.5 million tonnes (Mt) of CO₂ a year. That falls far short of Rosebank’s emissions. Even at its peak, the storage obligation (about 2.5 Mt a year) would cover only a quarter of Rosebank’s 10 Mt annual emissions. Over 25 years the field would emit roughly 250 Mt – only a fraction of which would be stored.

Most of that carbon would be stored only in later years, as the obligation gradually rises. North Sea emissions are front-loaded and storage is back-loaded. In other words, the emissions come first; the storage comes later, if at all.

The ‘hard to abate’ slight of hand

Supporters of CCS say that the obligation would pay for storage from “hard-to-abate” sectors such as cement. However, CO₂ storage facilities can take emissions from a variety of sources and cannot distinguish between them.

The IPPR article uses the example of the HyNet CCS cluster, which would store 1.18 Mt a year from Heidelberg Materials’ cement works and Encyclis’s waste incinerator. But this project also includes 3.2 Mt a year from three energy projects, which are not hard-to-abate industrial processes.

The gas power and blue-hydrogen projects also carry substantial upstream methane emissions, adding significant near-term climate heating, and together account for most of HyNet’s projected storage capacity. If the obligation paid for storage at HyNet, these wider supply-chain emissions would not count.

Storing CO₂ first requires it to be captured, compressed, transported and injected into geological formations. This process is characterised by underperformance, cost escalation and risk from start to finish. Each stage uses energy and creates emissions that are not counted in the scheme.

CCS Doesn’t Add Up

The promoters say the scheme aligns North Sea drilling “with the goals of the Paris Agreement”. But they have not shown their workings.

In 2023, the IPCC concluded that emissions from existing fossil-fuel infrastructure alone would already exceed the remaining carbon budget for the 1.5°C Paris temperature goal. As shown, the proposed obligation leaves substantial emissions outside its accounting and provides little genuine abatement before 2050. And the scheme has not been tested as a justification for new North Sea drilling against the current global 1.5°C carbon budget, which has shrunk sharply since 2023.

Andy Burnham wants “pragmatism”, but this scheme is so flawed that it cannot provide it. After what looks set to be the hottest summer on record, Burnham and Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh must show they are serious about decarbonization. They must say “no” to new drilling – with or without a carbon storage obligation.

Dr Andrew Boswell researches science-based legal strategies against fossil fuel based CCS and for stronger UK climate action, and is founder of the Carbon Reckoning Legal Project.

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What do Labour’s donors want from Andy Burnham?

Burnham has received hundreds of thousands in donations from big business - and they expect a return on their investment.

Homeless by GSA: The housing assocation bankrupting a community co-op

How a housing association left a community co-operative’s members homeless - and what it means for the future of community organising.

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Grace

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The donations that the main parties receive reflect the class interests of different sections of capital. The Conservatives (and now Reform) are closer to what might be called ‘footloose’ capital – sectors like tech, real estate, and certain parts of finance that aren’t as dependent upon state or consumer spending for their revenues. The priorities of this group include influencing regulation, shaping trade and investment policy, and extracting grants and subsidies from government.

Labour donors, meanwhile, tend to derive a significant share of their profits either from consumer spending (like Sainsbury’s), or the state itself (e.g. management consultants, outsourcing firms). This group favours maintaining decent levels of public spending – either because it benefits them directly, or because it stimulates consumer demand. They also expect to be able to extract favours from Labour governments.

This picture is somewhat simplified – a lot of capitalists will simply spend their money supporting whichever party they think is most likely to win. And we can’t completely discount the high-minded reasons that many big donors claim motivate their support – no doubt many of these are sincere. But it is nevertheless true that both Sainsbury’s the supermarket – and Lord Sainsbury himself, who was made a peer in the late 1990s – have benefitted substantially from their relationships with the Labour Party.

Naturally, this relationship was discontinued under Jeremy Corbyn. Policies like nationalising public utilities, taxing wealth, and investing in public services were clearly a step too far for Sainsbury. Labour’s big business donors want public spending that stimulates consumption – not public spending that makes it easier for people to survive without lots of consumption. And they certainly aren’t in favour of public ownership.

Capitalists like Sainsbury know that their wealth and influence are safe in the hands of someone like Burnham, who wouldn’t dare to challenge the economic status quo. His major intervention to tackle the cost-of-living crisis has been a ban on subscription traps, and his major intervention to tackle the climate crisis has been a ban on disposable barbecues.

And it’s not just Sainsbury. Burnham’s government is just as captured by vested interests as was Keir Starmer’s. The most direct example of this corporate capture comes in the form of Burnham’s stance on North Sea oil.

We know that the Labour Party has taken cash from vested interests linked to the fossil fuel sector. Now, it’s been revealed that the Housing Secretary, Angela Rayner, took £20,000 from a major oil lobbyist. Signum Global Advisors made the donation towards Rayner’s staffing costs in July. Earlier this year, Signum organised a trip for oil execs and hedge fund managers to Venezuela to discuss opportunities for exploiting the country’s oil wealth.

The sums involved are not particularly significant – but that’s not really the point. The relationships being built between the oil lobby and this Labour government are more subtle than an exchange of cash for favours. The oil lobby clearly has the ear of senior Labour politicians, giving them the chance to present their well-honed, and highly selective, arguments in favour of new North Sea drilling. These people are paid to convince politicians that their clients’ interests are completely in line with the national interest – and they’re pretty good at it.

Meanwhile, those on the other side of the argument simply don’t get a look in. Where the oil lobbyists are the same calm, reasonable men with whom these politicians attended school and university, climate activists are seen as an unhinged, idealistic rabble with no understanding of the challenges the country faces. And this image strengthens when the only opportunity the climate movement has to address politicians is by shouting at them during protests – while the oil lobbyists are invited into Parliament to calmly make their case over tea (or cheap pints).

This is a great example of what Marxists mean when they say that the state is a social relation. The people with power outside of formal state institutions are much better able to wield power within them. And those without this same influence are left shouting from the sidelines.

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Having partnered with GSA to build the premises, the co-op now faces demands from the housing association to pay an extra £2.5 million above what was initially agreed. The members can’t afford that – so they’ve been hung out to dry. Some of the people who were supposed to move into the new flats are now sleeping on sofas and in spare rooms. The bakery that was meant to serve the community has already been evicted from its old premises.

“From their perspective, we’re just an ideal cash cow,” says Sean, one of the co-operative’s founding members.

“It doesn’t matter how slowly or badly you do something – the community will pay. And if the community doesn’t pay, then hopefully the city council or the combined authority will.”

By the community, for the community

Stirchley Co-op began with three worker co-operatives on Stirchley High Street: Bike Foundry, a bike shop; Loaf, a bakery and cookery school; and Artefact, a gallery. About a decade ago, these worker co-ops came together to develop a plan to improve their local area. They identified a prominent plot on the high street and drew up plans to turn it into a block of thirty-nine flats, the three workspaces, and shared community space. The housing would be let at genuinely affordable social rent. The whole thing would be owned and run co-operatively.

The one thing they lacked was the cash to see it through. So, the fledgling co-op partnered with the local housing association, GSA. The idea was that GSA would fund the development, drawing on government grants, and the co-op would raise the cash to buy the finished building. Stirchley’s model of community ownership is radical, and – if it succeeds – could set a precedent for the cooperative movement in the UK.

“I can’t overstate how much owning our building means to movement building in Birmingham,” says Mikaela, another of the co-ops founding members.

“What we’re building here is a space akin to Pelican House [a social centre in London] - except we will actually own it (and live there)!”

After jumping through a lot of bureaucratic hoops, the building received planning permission in 2023. But just a few months later, the contractor tasked with constructing the building went bust in the wake of Liz Truss’ mini-budget. GSA’s own construction arm took over the project, promising that the building would be complete by June 2025.

In early 2025, families were told they would be able to move in within 12 months. It’s now August 2026, and the building is still nowhere near finished. Many of these families are now homeless as a result of the delays. Loaf, the bakery, handed in its notice on its old premises. Now, with nowhere to go, the company has lost at least £100,000 in revenue and burned through nearly £80,000 worth of reserves.

“If we’d just been told, ‘it’s actually going to be a year late,’ we would have made decisions differently. Now, seven of our members are homeless,” Sean says.

GSA’s conduct only deteriorated after the delays were announced. In January 2026, the company informed the co-op’s members that the price of construction was rising by £1.8 million – and that the co-op would have to cover the costs. Since then, the bill has risen by a further £700,000, so that the co-op is now expected to pay £2.5 million more than originally agreed.

“Groups like ours should be able to work with housing associations to deliver community-led housing,” Mikaela tells me.

“We’re setting a precedent for what the future of housing in this country could look like – if we’re given the chance to get off the ground.”

David and Goliath

GSA’s intransigence and mismanagement is currently the main thing standing in the co-op’s way. The power imbalance between the co-op on the one hand, and GSA on the other, is palpable. The members of the co-op have sunk about 10,000 hours of unpaid work into the project. They’re relying on its completion for their homes and their livelihoods. But for GSA, these people are just numbers on a spreadsheet.

“People on the housing register who are in really high need, who are fleeing domestic violence – they don’t really matter to GSA, because they’re just a number. GSA would only find out who they are the week before they’re supposed to move in.”

The co-operative is trying to fight back. They recently organised a protest against GSA, which was attended by over 400 people. Sean described the protest as “the biggest social mobilisation the high street had ever seen”. They have the backing of the City Council, the Combined Authority, and the local MP. And they’ve placed signs outside the development saying “homeless by GSA”. But they just don’t have the firepower to fight such a large organisation.

“They have £54 million in reserves. They have CEOs on £300,000 a year, hundreds of staff, tens of thousands of homes. And we were just trying to buy one block with 39 units. We had no employed staff. We didn’t have the capacity or capital to force contracts and the protections we’d have needed.”

When the first contractor collapsed, the co-op asked for a proper contract with GSA’s construction arm, which would have made the developer, not the co-op, liable for any delays.

“They told us, ‘that’s not the setup here. We’re both the construction company and the developer, and you’re just our partner, so it wouldn’t make sense to give you a contract.’”

The co-op realised that they would have needed to take out insurance worth around £1 million to mitigate the risk of delays with the construction process – and they didn’t have that kind of money. So, they went ahead without the insurance, or the contract, and GSA took advantage of the co-op’s weakness to force them to pay for the company’s own mismanagement.

“Our feeling has always been they’ve been trying to essentially just squeeze us, not give us any certainty until the last minute, get rid of our tenants, and then just fill the building with their own social residency tenants.”

Creative Accounting

GSA insists that it’s not trying to extract excess profits from the co-op – it’s merely trying to cover its costs. But the co-op has taken a look at how the company calculates its costs and found that GSA is using some questionable accounting techniques.

“They’ve included ‘development interest’, which is basically the opportunity cost of spending money on this site when they could have kept that money in the bank.”

Including development interest is standard practice for developers. But GSA received a capital grant worth £4.5 million from Homes England to fund the development. This money has been sitting in the bank, earning interest, since the start of the project – yet GSA hasn’t netted the interest they have received against their calculations of development interest. If they had, the costs of the project would be £550,000 lower.

“Isn’t it their job as a housing association to build housing?” Sean asks. “Or is it their job to have money in the bank and earn interest?”

Despite all these issues, the co-op has tried to find a way to meet GSA halfway. After all, the homes and livelihoods of their members depend on the project.

“We tried negotiating with them, but then in March they just cut us off, and deleted us from their website. They issued a press release saying they were going to be our landlords.”

Since negotiations broke down, GSA has continued to add money to the final bill. Sean thinks that the company is betting that, if the co-op can’t pay, Birmingham City Council or West Midlands Combined Authority will come up with the cash. GSA has already received £900,000 worth of grant money from Birmingham City Council, but Sean worries that the more the company is able to extract from local government, the more they’ll demand.

“If this building was sold on the open market, it would be sold at valuation price. They are trying to make us pay millions above the RICS valuation.”

The company is already under investigation from the social housing regulator. Last year, one of GSA’s subsidiaries – a company that produced panels for use in their buildings – went into liquidation. The subsidiary’s collapse was investigated by the regulator for cost control and governance issues – and GSA received a warning. Then, this year, the regulator opened another review into the company, which has yet to conclude. Sean thinks that the regulator hasn’t gone far enough, and now GSA thinks its untouchable.

“You have this unaccountable housing association. The regulator is a bit afraid to intervene too heavily. The council, the mayor and the MP have all come out vocally against it, but they’re like, ‘We can’t tell them what to do, because they’re a separate organisation.’”

A chilling precedent

The members of Stirchley co-op have followed all the rules. They’ve developed a plan for their local neighbourhood, consulted local residents and businesses, gained approval from all the relevant bodies, and received backing from all the important local stakeholders. They are exactly the type of project that the government should be supporting as part of its stated aim to expand the co-operative sector and build more social housing. But that support just hasn’t been there.

“Look at what Andy Burnham is saying about community wealth building, devolution, the collapse of the high street. We’re a project focused on revitalising a high street, it’s going to be co-operatively run, it’s got three local businesses in there, it’s providing affordable social rent housing.”

One of the saddest parts of this story is that it is likely to have a chilling effect on future community development projects. Members have sunk so much time and energy into getting this project over the line, only to be exploited by a powerful organisation trying to extract as much cash as possible.

“Seeing the fallout from this project, what’s the incentive for people to get involved in the future? There needs to be a backstop for supporting people in this situation – a strategic plan to support co-operatives. All of this new development that’s being proposed by Andy Burnham is just going to be corporate capture unless there’s a backstop to help community development.”

Members of the co-op had big plans for the future of their community once the building was complete. They had identified a site on the high street, which McDonald’s was attempting to secure for a drive-through. The co-op members developed an alternative community plan for the site, including new social housing and spaces for local businesses. But they’re facing so much uncertainty that they don’t think they’re going to be able to go ahead with any of their plans. Now, all they’re hoping for is for members to move into their new homes.

“Success would look like all our residents and work co-ops being able to move in. Just survival. Real long-term success would be getting an agreement to purchase and being able to mobilise the capital to do it.”

Sean is not describing some utopian fantasy. He just wants GSA to stick to the terms of the agreement it made years ago. What’s at stake isn’t just the future of one community, but the future of the co-operative movement as a whole. Because if organisations like GSA keep getting away with exploiting people just trying to make a difference in their local area, people are just going to give up trying.

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The Limits of Left Populism

Neoliberals ignored people’s policy preferences for decades. Populism promises to give people what they want again. That’s its greatest strength – and its greatest weakness.

The Dredge: The battle for the future of Falmouth Bay

The biggest seabed dredge in over 80 years is being proposed for Falmouth Bay. Campaigners claim local democracy is being overridden.

Don’t Look Up

Burnham ignores climate breakdown; the Fed flails on inflation; and China announces a new shipping route through the Arctic.

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Grace

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This is all part of Burnham’s plan to introduce “everyday fixes” to support people through the cost-of-living crisis. (The subscription traps plan was actually introduced under Starmer, but Burnham has decided to bring it forward three months.) Of course, £170 per year isn’t going to go far when the average household is £480 worse off purely as a result of the Iran war.

Why isn’t Burnham going further on the cost of living? Because doing so would require him to confront capital. He could announce increases in spending on social security to support households living in poverty, but that would either mean an increase in borrowing or raising taxes on the wealthy. Neither would go down well with the City. A more radical proposal would be to announce measures to strengthen collective bargaining, and to impose stricter regulation on utilities to keep down bills. But that would require taking on the CBI.

Burnham doesn’t have the desire – or the ability – to take on any section of British capital. The Labour Party has been thoroughly taken over by vested interests, and Burnham has absolutely no reason to rock the boat. But even if he did want to deliver a radical shake up of the UK economy, he doesn’t have a social or political base strong enough to back him in the fight that would ensue. Burnham seemed strong when he took power, but he’s really quite weak – as is every Labour leader who takes control of the hollowed-out, cartelised Labour Party.

Burnham’s radicalism isn’t confined to the economy. In the midst of a heatwave that has already killed thousands, brought a severe drought, and sparked several wildfires, his radical intervention on climate is to ban disposable barbecues. As far as I’m aware, Burnham hasn’t even mentioned climate breakdown since taking office, which is pretty astonishing given the entire country has turned from green to brown in his time as PM.

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In April 2025, Balaena (formerly A&P) - financed by the $500 billion American asset management corporation Barings - brought an application to Cornwall Council for the redevelopment of Falmouth Docks. The £150 million infrastructure project will be the biggest to affect the town in 80 years.

Environmentalists have expressed concern about the likely impact of the project. They’re not against any development of the docks - they just want the modernisation process to be undertaken in a sustainable way. The current proposal promotes overtourism - in the form of 12 extra cruise ships each year, each 350m in length and twice the size of current cruise vessels docking at Falmouth.

At least 10 major European ports have already implemented bans against these so-called ‘mega cruise ships’, which lead to overtourism without creating good, stable jobs in the affected communities. But Falmouth is moving in the opposite direction. By 2030, the town will be hosting four times the number of cruise ship tourists it currently receives every year.

At the heart of the redevelopment plans is a 10m deep dredge of the areas surrounding the docks. According to Balaena's own proposals, the dredge would mobilise 643,000m3 of sediment (equivalent in volume to 20,000 shipping containers) over 23 hectares of seabed. Researchers have found that half of this sediment has toxicity levels 17.6 times the safe threshold for ocean disposal.

These chemicals include Tributyltin (TBT), lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, nickel, zinc, chromium, copper, PCBs, PBDEs, PAHs, TPHs and pesticides. Many of these chemicals are strictly regulated in the UK, as they have been linked to fertility issues and problems with brain development in humans. To make matters worse, the sediment contains what surveys describe as ‘unknown substances’, which may be even more harmful.

Cornwall Wildlife Trust have submitted a ‘holding objection’ to the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) demanding more robust surveys, modelling and mitigations are put in place to protect marine habitats. The docks are home to precious ecosystems, including maerl bed and sea grass, and are home to a thriving wild oyster population - one of the last sustainably fished stocks in the UK. The limited surveying that has been carried out so far has shown the sediment contains highly toxic heavy metals and chemicals, which CWT claim could wipe out marine life if resuspended.

Balaena’s environmental impact assessment modelling of suspended sediment drift already suggests the contaminants will affect nearby swimming spots such as Flushing and Castle Beach, as well as rare marine habitats. But CWT claim the modelling understates the potential extent of dispersal.

“While the docks need development and modernisation, the modelling on the drift of suspended material is inadequate as it does not take into account factors such as multiple tides or storm events,” says Matt Slater from Cornwall Wildlife Trust.

The dredge will also directly destroy areas of maerl, kelp and sea grass. “We have already lost 90% of these marine habitats, and the dredging will further hamper our efforts to restore them,” says Slater.

Environmentalists note that it is far more dangerous to dredge up this toxic sediment than to leave it undisturbed. The ‘STOP THE DREDGE’ campaign group argue that there is no way for this project to be carried out without significant amounts of toxicity spilling into the wider marine environment.

“The Fal is one of the most important marine ecosystems we have in this country. Once you disturb contaminated sediment or damage a sensitive habitat, it cannot be reversed,” says Sophie Miller, who leads the campaign.

The campaigners claim they are not against the redevelopment of the docks per se, but state that a more sustainable plan is needed that does not sacrifice the environmental and socio-economic balance of the town.

“This is not about jobs versus nature. Cornwall can have both. But investment must be built on solid science and real environmental protection,” Miller said.

Balaena claim that the redevelopment will allow for Floating Offshore Wind (FLOW) platforms to be constructed at the docks. But campaigners claim that the impact of these offshore wind platforms would be ‘marginal’, and accuse Balaena of attempted ‘greenwashing’. Balaena LTD did not respond to a request for comment on the claims made by Cornwall Wildlife Trust and STOP THE DREDGE.

The dredging plans are part of the Labour government’s ‘growth agenda’. Labour has fast-tracked handpicked infrastructure projects, overseen by the newly formed ‘DEFRA infrastructure board’ to break ‘the planning system gridlock’ holding up big infrastructure projects. But local politicians - from both the Green Party and Reform UK - have raised concerns that local democracy is being overridden by corporate lobbyists in Westminster.

Approvals for the land and marine planning elements of the development have also been separated, with the MMO overseeing plans below the tide mark, and Cornwall Council holding sway over the terrestrial activities. The decision on the dredging going ahead will now fall to a Cornwall Council Strategic Planning Committee vote that is expected to come on the 20^th August 2026.

There is a public meeting being held on 17^th August, 7pm at the Cornish Bank regarding the Falmouth Docks Redevelopment. More information can be found here.

The Cornwall Councillors who sit on the Strategic Planning Committee overseeing approval of this development proposal can be found here.

Liberals detest populism. They’ll tell you that it involves the rhetorical construction of ‘the people’ in opposition to an external enemy – whether migrants, or moneyed elites. They see it as a divisive, dangerous, and fundamentally irrational form of politics to be avoided at all costs.

The issue with this definition is that all political narratives rely on creating dividing lines between the good guys and an external enemy. And liberals have their own enemy: populists.

The anti-populist attitude can be found at the origins of liberal thought, with J S Mill decrying what he called the ‘tyranny of the majority’ in his On Liberty. The liberal fear of populism has morphed in recent years with the rise of neoliberalism. Today, liberals tend to believe that most areas of social life should be governed according to the logic of the market. Technocrats are required to establish and police the rules of market competition – and popular sentiment cannot be allowed to interfere with the rules of the game.

As a result, modern liberals are highly suspicious of populist politics. On a generous reading, they believe that the rules of markets and democracy are fragile and need to be protected by people who understand their workings. Populists’ attempts to rally people against an external enemy will result in suboptimal policy decisions – whether overtaxing the rich or rigidly restricting inward migration. On a less generous reading, they simply don’t believe that the vast majority of people understand what’s good for them, and they need to be governed by an enlightened technocracy.

Rule by Nerds

Echoes of the latter view could be heard from Democratic Congresswoman Haley Stevens, when she lashed out against the “cool kids” who were “making fun” of her on the internet while campaigning against left populist candidate Abdul El Sayed. The speech presented Stevens as the smart, uncool nerd, going up against the cool, stupid bullies picking on her for getting good grades. This pretty much sums up how liberals view themselves – as the nerds doing the sensible, but uncool, thing, while the cool kids bully them.

This narrative of victimhood probably helps the liberal establishment sleep at night, but it conceals more than it reveals. The development of liberal ideology is inseparable from the development of capitalist social relations. It emerged as the ideology of a rising class of industrialists and merchants seeking to cast off the yoke of aristocratic rule. They claimed to seek individual rights, limited, representative government, and free trade. In reality, rights and votes were tied to property ownership, government was only limited when it came to protecting the poor, and free trade persisted quite happily alongside empire.

In other words, liberalism didn’t mean the end of rule by elites – it simply allowed the rising capitalist class to share power with the existing aristocratic one. And that always required strict limits to be imposed on the ability of ‘the masses’ to participate in democratic politics.

Ruling the void

At first, limiting mass political participation meant limiting suffrage and individual rights. After the Second World War, these limits were no longer viable – and we saw the rise of mass politics. Then, in the 1980s neoliberalism came along to limit mass participation in politics via technocracy. Whole areas of government – primarily those surrounding the management of the economy – were deemed to be the preserve of ‘experts’ and were insulated from democratic accountability.

Neoliberal technocracy created a void at the heart of democratic politics. Liberal technocrats were put in charge of everything from monetary policy, to financial regulation, to labour law. Unsurprisingly, their decisions favoured the best-organised and most powerful vested interests with privileged access to the halls of power.

Under neoliberalism, democratic outcomes ceased to reflect popular preferences in a lot of key areas. Popular policies were vetoed on the basis that they didn’t align with the principles of market competition. This anti-democratic turn is how we’ve ended up in a situation where 80% of people in the UK favour bringing the water companies into public ownership, yet the major political parties have utterly refused even to entertain the idea.

Those who favour populist politics – on both left and right – see it as a response to this hollowing out of democracy. Rule by allegedly neutral ‘experts’ has really meant rule by a corrupt and unaccountable elite using technocratic language to introduce policies that benefit themselves and their sponsors.

Populists reject rule by experts and instead argue that policymaking should reflect the will of the people. The ‘will of the people’ is a pretty nebulous concept, so in practice, populist politicians mobilise people by backing popular policies in a few key areas - and ignoring all the others.

Giving people what they want

I would argue that populism is on the rise again because populist politicians on both left and right make a very simple promise: to give people what they actually want. A populist movement will prioritise one area of policy – be that affordability, or migration – and simply do what the vast majority of people are asking for.

The left can build a populist project on the basis that the vast majority of people want their bills to be lower, their wages to be higher, and the gap between rich and poor to be smaller. The right can build a populist project on the basis that most people in the west want limits on migration, a clampdown on crime, and a tough line on defence.

Some on the left argue that left-wing populism isn’t comparable to right-wing populism. After all, right-wing populists generally act as a vanguard for the same elite that has benefitted from the last several decades of neoliberalism. By prioritising somewhat popular, but highly divisive policies on issues like crime and migration, they’re able to increase the salience of culture war politics and sneak pro-capital economic policies in through the back door.

This is, of course, true. But I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to separate right- and left-wing populism. In some ways, the left’s project is similar. The idea is to keep people rigidly focused on issues like inequality and the cost of living to encourage them to vote for left parties, which will then introduce progressive social policies for which there is often not a clear majority.

Both left and right populists mobilise people on the basis of existing majorities for particular policy proposals – whether that’s a wealth tax, or tighter border controls. And they try to make the issue for which they have a majority the salient political issue in an election cycle.

The main difference is that the majorities in favour of the right’s agenda are smaller than those in favour of the left’s. For example, 52% of people think immigration numbers should be reduced in the UK, while 70% of people support a mansion tax. The right therefore relies more heavily on distraction and obfuscation. They have to get people to stop talking about inequality and affordability by flooding the airwaves with culture war talking points. And they’re generally pretty successful because they have much more money behind them.

From populism to movement building

The main issue with this strategy is that the question of ‘what people want’ is malleable over time. For example, in the US today, just 29% of people think inward migration should be reduced, down from 55% in 2024; while 95% of Americans see the cost of living as a “severe national crisis”. The US populist right gave people what they wanted – and then people realised that they actually wanted something else.

This is the major limitation of populist politics. Populism is reactive. It responds to existing majorities on certain issues, but it can’t build new ones. Populists struggle actively to build support for policies people don’t already favour, which is why right-populists struggle when it comes to issues like affordability, and left-populists struggle when it comes to issues like migration. Instead of building majorities, they simply avoid talking about the issues for which they don’t have majority support.

I see populist politics as one tool in the left’s arsenal – not a panacea. Electing left candidates on the basis of a left populist message can both galvanise the movement and help to achieve real policy wins. But populist electoral politics alone will only get us so far – because populists can only respond to what people already believe, they’re not very good at changing minds. And we need to change minds on a lot of issues.

Actively changing peoples’ minds - as opposed to waiting for events to change minds on their own - is very hard. As Sarah Stein Lubrano showed in her masterful book Don’t Talk about Politics (which I reviewed here), its hard to persuade people to change their minds on political issues, as these issues are core to their identities. When they do change their minds, it’s not because they’ve heard a particularly compelling argument or seen an especially charismatic politician.

Sometimes, as in the migration example above, people change their minds because of real world events - like watching their neighbours being abducted by ICE. But the left can’t rely on events to change peoples minds for us. We have to learn how to persuade. And Lubrano’s book shows that people aren’t persuaded by abstract arguments - they change their minds because they’ve built a trusting relationship with someone of a different political persuasion and have moderated their views as that relationship has strengthened.

There is no substitute for this kind of bottom-up, relationship-focused movement building. Populist electoral projects can activate the large majorities in favour of higher wages, lower bills, and higher taxes on the rich – and, to a lesser extent, anti-imperialism. But on their own, populist politicians can’t build the movements capable of changing people’s minds – and people’s behaviour – over the long term.

This kind of deep movement-building isn’t just about winning people over to progressive social policies. It’s about creating the kinds of strong and powerful movements capable of defending all left policies – even the popular ones. Movement building is really the sine qua non of socialism. It’s a lot harder than doing left populism – but it’s the only way you can truly build class consciousness.

Hello and welcome to another edition of my podcast, The Roundup.

Each week, I read you all my Substack content from the previous week in one quick episode - so you can catch up while driving, walking the dog, or cleaning your house!

From socialists to socialism

Democratic socialists won’t threaten the status quo without a movement behind them. Plus the super profits of the fossil fuel companies, and the coming world hunger crisis.

What should the left be fighting for?

Why the left needs to climb back down the abstraction ladder.

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In solidarity,

Grace

Democratic socialists are winning primaries across the US on a platform of opposing imperialism, fighting oligarchy, and helping Americans struggling with the cost-of-living crisis. Professional politicians given millions of dollars by AIPAC and powerful corporate lobbyists are being defeated by ordinary Americans raising funds through small individual donations.

is the latest socialist to win his primary, in Michigan. Most of the Democratic establishment backed El-Sayed’s opponent, Haley Stevens, and AIPAC-linked Super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent more than $30 million trying to get her elected. El-Sayed’s victory follows that of last month in the Colorado primaries, as well as wins for , Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York.

The Guardian claims that top Democrats are “setting aside their qualms” about his platform to support El-Sayed in the hope of beating Trump in the midterms. States like Michigan will be particularly important in achieving this goal. But the Democratic establishment is not being so tolerant towards all DSA-backed candidates. is being hounded for social media posts in which she stated her support for defunding the police, which she said “upholds white supremacy”.

This is, of course, true – but “defund the police” doesn’t work as a slogan for a populist electoral platform, and Hong has since distanced herself from the comments. While most Black Americans think the police need to be “completely rebuilt” to ensure people are treated fairly, 39% believe spending on local police budgets should remain the same, while 35% say it should increase. This seems to speak to a difference between how people view the police in general, and how they view the day to day policing presence in their local area. Populist candidates need a message that speaks to both.

None of this is to say that Hong doesn’t deserve the left’s support – she absolutely does. But Bernie Sanders seems to disagree. When asked whether he supported Hong, he said he wasn’t endorsing a candidate in the race. This is poor form from Bernie, but I’m not especially interested in making judgements about the values and personalities of individual politicians – I am very interested in what their decisions can tell us about how power works within the Democratic Party and, relatedly, the American state.

The issue for the US left is that, up to now, democratic socialists have been winning as individual democratic socialists, rather than as part of a coherent socialist movement. Building movements is about shifting the balance of power; operating as a politician within the institutions of the capitalist state is about making decisions in the context of a given balance of power. Without a movement to back them, individual politicians end up having to make big compromises on certain issues so they can make progress on their legislative priorities.

This is why the Democratic establishment isn’t too worried about the progressive victories seen in the last few weeks. The election of a few socialists strengthens their appeal to progressives without threatening the balance of power within the party as a whole. The realities of governing will inevitably push progressive politicians towards compromise – as has been the case for Sanders and AOC.

All this would change if the left got its act together and figured out how to work as something approaching a coherent force within electoral politics. That would require the DSA to get its line straight on the role of electoralism in socialist politics, and coordinate with the labour movement, community organisers, and wider social movements to develop a basic set of policy proposals. I’m not especially confident this will happen any time soon – and I imagine the Democratic establishment feels the same.

As I wrote in my piece for Tribune last month, one of the lessons from Corbynism is that you can’t put the cart of electoral politics ahead of the horse of movement building. It’s exciting to see progressives win, but they won’t be able to change much unless we can shift the balance of power in which they’re operating. So be excited, but remember, no one is coming to save us.

In news completely unrelated to the success of insurgent socialist candidates across the US, eight of the biggest oil companies earned more than $90bn in profit in just three months as a result of Trump and Netanyahu’s attacks on Iran – while workers saw petrol and food prices jump sharply, and heatwaves devastated much of the US. According to analysis from The Guardian, this is roughly double what the oil majors made in the same quarter last year, and amounts to about $700,000 worth of profit every minute.

The company that made the most from the crisis was the Saudi state oil company, Aramco, which saw a 34% increase in its profits as its competitors struggled to produce and transport oil thanks to the conflict in Iran. BP saw its profits more than double from the previous quarter; Chevron’s profits were up fivefold on the same period last year; Exxon Mobil made the most profit since Russia invaded Ukraine; and Shell reported its highest quarterly profit ever.

Trump - the fossil fuel industry’s favourite President in decades - went so far as to criticise Chevron and Exxon Mobil for “making too much money”. He claimed they would be forced to return their excess profits to the public – though he’s unlikely to follow through on this promise. This criticism represents an interesting shift in Trump’s position on inflation. Up to now, he’s claimed the affordability crisis is a hoax peddled by the Democrats. But he’s now realising he can’t call “fake news” when people complain about rising bills.

This shift is a big opportunity for progressives to connect imperialism with insecurity and falling living standards at home. It also represents an opportunity to connect these issues to the climate crisis. In the same article, The Guardian points out that wildfires seen across the US and Canada have dramatically increased air pollution and resulted in an estimated 4,000 deaths within just a week. One and a half million people a year have their lives shortened by wildfire smoke. Socialists need to be clear that Americans’ bills are higher, and their lives shorter, thanks to the fossil fuel companies corrupting democracy and profiting from the chaos that results.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a branch of the UN that leads on world hunger, has issued a warning that the world is on the verge of a significant increase in food prices. Climate breakdown is pushing down yields at the same time as the wars in Iran and Ukraine push up the costs of fertilising and transporting crops. The super El Niño setting in this year is only making matters worse.

The Iran war may be “over”, according to Trump, but the effects on food prices will be lasting. Farmers have had to cut back on fertiliser due to the increasing cost of fertilisers produced using natural gas, but this won’t start to affect yields until later this year. The worst effects of the super El Niño have yet to appear, and yields will continue to suffer as it escalates. Other input costs, like diesel to power farm machinery and plastics for packaging, will also feed into higher prices over the coming months.

The FAO’s chief economist pointed out that rising commodity prices take three to six months to affect food prices on the shelves. So consumers won’t feel the full effects of the price shocks from the Iran war until the end of this year. The global South will be the worst hit by the coming food price shock. The FAO warns that tens of millions of people could be pushed into food insecurity – right as aid budgets have been cut and war continues to cause dislocation and starvation everywhere from Gaza, to Sudan, to the DRC.

We know that food price shocks are correlated with political unrest and regime change – the Arab Spring being one of the best examples of this relationship. The effects of this food price shock are likely to be just as significant, especially because the causes aren’t going away any time soon.

I found this piece really interesting, as it highlighted an aspect of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that I hadn’t considered. Scientists have warned that the ships stuck in the Strait pose an “extreme biodiversity threat” as they could introduce invasive marine species to ports across the world.

There are currently over 1,000 commercial vessels stuck in the Gulf as a result of the closure of the Strait. Their hulls are becoming “encrusted with marine life – from microbes and algae to barnacles and other invertebrates” as they remain stationary in the Gulf. When they finally leave the Gulf, these marine species will travel with them, potentially introducing non-native invasive species into waterways around the world.

The study says that ships only usually remain in harbours for a few days, which means marine life has less of an opportunity to establish itself on their hulls. But some of the ships stuck in the Strait have been there for weeks, even months, and have accumulated entire ecosystems in the process.

The scientists point out that marine life in the Gulf is particularly hardy because of the “extreme heat and salinity” of the water there. These characteristics make the organisms “particularly good invaders”. Ports with similar conditions to the Gulf, like those in India and Singapore, are acutely exposed to these risks.

The ships need to be cleaned carefully before leaving the Gulf, but this is unlikely to happen as global shipping is notorious for a lack of regulation and oversight. Most ships sail under ‘flags of convenience’, tying them to countries with loose climate and labour regulations and low taxes. But if the ships aren’t cleaned, fishing communities across the world – already suffering as a result of overfishing and climate breakdown – will be forced to pay the price.

One of the first things English teachers learn is how to help their students climb up ‘the abstraction ladder’. Instead of describing people caring for one another, we ask students to write about compassion. Instead of describing people fighting against authority, we ask people to analyse power. Instead of describing someone being treated unfairly, we ask them to explore justice.

Experienced teachers know that climbing the ladder is only half the journey. The strongest writing – and the strongest thinking – always makes the journey back down. Showing what injustice feels like, and how justice could actually be lived; how compassion is experienced in everyday life, in all its messy contradictions; what power feels like as we suffer under it.

Political narratives should do the same. The left is remarkably good at climbing the ladder. Most leftists can describe ideas like capitalism, socialism, neoliberalism, or intersectionality fluently. The left doesn’t suffer from a shortage of abstraction. It suffers from a shortage of return journeys.

It’s always easier to attack injustice than to describe a just society. It’s easier to argue about socialism than describe what an ordinary day would look like in a socialist society. It’s easier to make statements about freedom than to describe what people can actually do when they become free together.

From abstraction to reality

Recently, I asked people a simple question on social media: What should leftists be fighting for? The answers ranged from ‘sustainability’ to ‘socialism’, ‘healthcare’ to ‘housing’, ‘liberation’ to ‘abolition’. All concepts high up the abstraction ladder.

But as soon as I asked people why we should be fighting for these things, they started to climb back down the ladder. People stopped describing political concepts. They started describing lives. Or, perhaps more accurately, they started describing the rich and fulfilling lives they could build if they worked together.

One commenter began with community. I asked what they meant. Soon, she was describing neighbours, shared gardens, and lives that felt less lonely. Another answered socialism. Asked why, they started describing what it might feel like to live in a society that no longer forced people to work simply to survive. One of the most moving replies came from a homeless man. They began with policies. After a few questions they expressed something simpler: what it would mean to them to have a home.

After these conversations, I realised that people weren’t simply describing better policies or different values. They were describing things they wanted to be able to do together. The capacity to care for one another, to learn, to create, to speak without fear, to organise, to shape our shared conditions together. The ability simply to live a decent life.

I’ve started to think of these as our social powers: our shared capacities to learn, create, care, organise and govern. These capacities never belong to isolated individuals. They only become real when we develop them together through institutions, relationships and shared practices.

Seeing Social Powers

Since those discussions, I have started to see examples of the importance of social power everywhere. Teachers in Melbourne, where I live and work, are currently engaged in an industrial dispute. Many rank-and-file members have urged their union, the Australian Education Union, to push harder for concessions from management.

The Victorian Government offered what it described as one of the strongest pay deals in the country. Many teachers rejected it. Not because pay didn’t matter. Because their struggle was never just about pay. It was about the conditions that shape everyday teaching: impossible workloads, chronic understaffing, and the growing sense that teachers are no longer able to do the job they entered the profession to do.

Again and again, when union members have discussed the proposed agreement, I have heard the same question: ‘what will actually change when I walk into work tomorrow?’

That isn’t an abstract question. It’s a question about teachers’ everyday reality, and how they might work together to change it. Will they finally have the time to get to know their students? To plan properly? To teach well? To leave work without carrying it home every night? If they can’t answer ‘yes’ to each of these questions, they will continue their strike.

Another way of life

The point of political thought isn’t to escape life through abstraction. It’s to see the conditions of life with greater clarity.

Politics is lived where people learn, care, create, organise and govern together. It is the space where they begin to imagine a world where the time they spend caring for their relatives isn’t squeezed between two shifts; where they have time to learn new skills because learning belongs to everyone; where work develops our capacities instead of exhausting them.

Whenever I ask people their ‘why’, the conversation comes back down the ladder of abstraction. Teachers, students, union members, and even leftists stop talking about fairness, socialism, capitalism or justice. They stop fighting for political ideas alone and start talking about life: a secure home and community, time with the people they love, freedom from exhaustion, and the chance to learn, create and contribute. Our old political words name these ordinary possibilities. The point is to help people live them.

Socialism is not an ideal to defend. It is a name for struggles over how society’s collective powers are organised, and whether they reproduce class rule or become the basis of transformation. This is what our old abstractions need to become: new social forms, institutions and relationships through which we can work together to build a new way of life.

Beornn McCarthy is a teacher, unionist and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. He writes the Substack, exploring how ordinary life can become the starting point for socialist politics.

Each week, I read you all my Substack content from the previous week in one quick episode - so you can catch up while driving, walking the dog, or cleaning your house!

We didn’t choose AI. Capital did.

The AI boom was planned by capital. When it collapses, capital must be made to pay.

Timing Is Everything in the AI Bubble

This week’s tech sell-off is a symptom of a deeper problem: no one knows when - or how - big tech’s $1 trillion bet on AI is going to pay off.

Remember, if you’re already a paid subscriber and you want to listen to the podcast on your usual streaming app, you can listen on Patreon. Just message me for access to the Patreon channel.

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In solidarity,

Grace

Read more

That $1 trillion could have been used for anything. It could have been invested in renewables. It could have been used to develop life-saving new drugs. It could have been used to build housing, public infrastructure, or anything else human beings need to survive and thrive.

Instead, it has been channelled into constructing energy-draining, water-absorbing data centres that power LLMs built on the theft of millions of people’s creative work, which consistently produce incorrect responses and drive many users mad in the process. It’s hard to think of a worse use of society’s shared resources.

Now, you may argue that we live in free market societies, so investment takes place according to the laws of the market. All that money and investment is flowing into AI because it is simply the most profitable use of resources. And when society maximises profits, it maximises efficiency – ensuring that, on aggregate, everyone is better off over the long run.

There are a lot of problems with this story. Firstly, we do not live in free market societies. We live in capitalist societies – that is, societies dominated by capital. Capital is not distributed into lots of little businesses each producing widgets in perfect competition with one another. Capital agglomerates until it is concentrated within a few massive, monopolistic corporations, controlled by a few powerful men.

These massive corporations can afford to ignore what’s profitable in the short run pursuit of what will bring their owners immense wealth and power in the long run. Just take Amazon. It was unprofitable for years while Jeff Bezos channelled more and more money into expansion. Investors continued to funnel billions into Amazon’s coffers because they were betting that Bezos could carve out a powerful monopoly. And they were right. Corporate concentration and monopoly power trump competition and efficiency every time.

Despite all the hype about AI, LLMs are not currently profitable. OpenAI and Anthropic – the two companies whose fate is tied entirely to the performance of their LLMs – have yet to make a profit. And yet both companies are trying to list on the stock market chasing valuations of $1 trillion.

Why? Because these two companies have successfully enclosed – that is, taken and put walls around – vast areas of human knowledge. Now, they are selling this knowledge back to us in the form of strange, sycophantic chatbots that put all this knowledge back together in unpredictable – and sometimes completely useless – ways. Still, investors are betting that this innovation will revolutionise capitalist production, and that one or both of these companies will continue to hold immense power over the market.

All the other companies in the ecosystem – the ones building the infrastructure, the ones producing the chips, the ones powering the data centres – are dependent upon the performance of the LLMs at the centre of the boom. Which is why companies like Nvidia and Oracle are locked into a circular network of financing with OpenAI – they’re funding OpenAI while it loses money, because their profits are contingent upon the company’s success.

This is where the next correction to our original story comes in. Right now, we are absolutely in a bubble when it comes to AI. That doesn’t mean the technology won’t permanently change the way our economy works – but it does mean that the tech won’t be as profitable as most investors are expecting, especially over the short term. In other words, not only are our markets not free – they’re not efficient either.

Investors are betting that this tech cycle will be like the last one – the one where companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon enclosed the entire internet. Lots of those companies took a long time to make any profit, because they were investing to eke out a market-dominating position – not to maximise short-term profits. The companies involved in the AI boom are trying to do the same thing – but it’s not working.

First, there’s too much competition among US LLM providers. It’s not just ChatGPT and Claude now – Gemini and Copilot are nipping at their heels. Then, there’s competition from China. Chinese companies have already been able to create their own LLMs – they might not be as good as the originals, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re incredibly cheap.

And then there’s the productivity puzzle. For the LLMs to be profitable over the long run, they need to be rolled out by lots of businesses that won’t cancel their subscriptions as soon as a cheaper option is available – which means the productivity gains of introducing the technology have to be very clear. But not many businesses have seen significant productivity gains from the introduction of the technology. In this context, it’s not clear how all these LLMs are going to generate the profits required to produce a decent return on that $1 trillion investment.

When investors realise that some of the bets they have made aren’t going to yield much of a return, the cash will dry up. The circular webs of financing will collapse. Companies will go under. And the world will be left with hundreds of massive data centres without enough customers. Compute will become extremely cheap – just like accessing the internet did after the telecoms companies spent billions competing to lay fibre optic cables in the 1990s.

The boom will get going again after the bust – with valuations returning to more sensible levels. A few of the massive tech companies will buy up the remnants of the others, leaving the market even more concentrated. The technology will become pedestrian as it is incorporated into every area of our lives. People will get real about what AI can do, and what it can’t do.

Of course, millions of people will lose their jobs and their savings during the bust. Wealth and power will become even more concentrated, as the largest tech companies buy up their defunct competitors, before leveraging their control over the technological infrastructure that most other businesses require to function. They will use this power to further capture our democracies, lobbying politicians to wage war on their foreign competition.

Our environment will also be permanently changed. Erald Kolasi and Jesse Damiani have just written an excellent piece calculating the environmental impact of the AI boom. They estimate that, in 2026, AI will be responsible for 1.1% of total global energy demand. AI is already using more energy than the whole of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, many communities are being forced to go without water, while others experience striking ‘heat island’ effects from the astonishing amounts of heat being pumped out by these megaliths.

After years of hype, and trillions of dollars, the AI boom will leave us with a captured economy, a corrupted democracy, and a devastated environment. We’ll be told that this is just how markets work – sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down. But this narrative obscures how decisions are really made in capitalist economies.

As I showed in my book, Vulture Capitalism, capitalist economies are characterised by pervasive central planning. Monopolistic corporations work with corrupt politicians to decide who gets what, while using ‘the market’ as a veil to conceal their power. The AI boom is no different. A few powerful capitalists decided that we would spend several years devoting all our time and money towards the development and roll out of AI – and so we did.

‘The market’ didn’t decide that AI would be our future. Capital did. And when the devastating consequences of their decisions become clear, we cannot allow them to hide behind disembodied market forces. Capital took us down this route, and capital must be made to pay. The politicians aren’t going to go after their wealthy backers – that part is on us. So block new data centres, strip them for parts, and start organising your communities and your workplaces for the fight back.

As I’ve written many times before, we are in the midst of an AI bubble. No, this does not mean that AI is useless. It does mean that the big tech companies have ploughed unimaginable amounts of money into the development of a technology – and the construction of the infrastructure that powers it – without a clear idea as to how they’re going to make this money back over the short- to medium-term. In fact, the four hyperscalers (Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta) have spent $1 trillion on capital investments over the last 3 and a half years – mainly on data centres, advanced chips, and power generation.

All this spending is being financed by investors in both debt and equity markets. Creditors are going to want their money back. Equity investors are going to want to see all that capital spending translate into big profits. But at this point in the innovation cycle, it isn’t exactly clear where those profits are going to come from. Expectations about future profits seem detached from reality – and that’s why many people are claiming that we are in the midst of a bubble.

Great Expectations

Let’s take a bit of time to understand this mismatch between expectations and reality, and why it matters. We’ll stick with equity investors to keep things simple. When you buy a share in a company, you’re buying a stake in that company’s future profits. So, the price you’re willing to pay for that share today is linked to your expectations about that company’s future profits. If you think a company is about to blow up, you’ll be willing to pay a lot of money to buy shares in that company – even if it isn’t currently particularly profitable.

But while the price of a share today is a known quantity, the profit that company will generate in future is not. As Keynes identified decades ago, this gap between prices and expectations is where bubbles form.

With enough hype, investors can convince themselves that a currently unprofitable company will be the most profitable company in the world in a few years’ time. Sometimes they’re just plain wrong – as investors in Pets.com discovered during the dot-com bubble. Sometimes they’re right – just ask people who bought Amazon stocks in the early 2000s. Most of the time, they’re somewhere in between. In this context, the crucial factor that determines whether a bet pays off is time.

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“Dear Abortion Support Network team. The email you got two hours ago – it wasn’t me. My boyfriend hacked into my email account. He wrote to the clinic. He’s cancelled my appointment. I don’t know what to do. I can’t escape from him. I can’t leave Belgium. I can’t get an abortion.” - Email from Nayla, June 2026.

Nayla, 22, was 16 weeks pregnant when she contacted our helpline to access abortion care abroad. Nayla had been delayed from accessing care in Belgium by her controlling partner and was now past the legal time limit of 14 weeks. Over a month, our helpline volunteers found safe ways to communicate with Nayla, helped her access identity documents, arranged an appointment abroad, and provided support for her to leave her partner.

Twelve hours before Nayla was due to meet her driver, we received an email from her account thanking us for our support and informing us that she had changed her mind. Within two hours we received the email above.

Nayla’s story of reproductive coercion reveals how the state – through the violence of abortion restriction – colludes with perpetrators of domestic abuse to enact harm on women and pregnant people. As the political centre skews further to the right, and more communities are stripped of their rights, the scale and nature of this violence only escalates.

Patriarchy, racism and the far right: a violent alliance

It is no coincidence that the far right is mobilising against women’s reproductive rights all over the world. Patriarchy (the belief in male superiority) and misogyny (hatred of women) are both central to the politics of the far right. Far-right groups seek to bolster patriarchy while far-right leaders exploit racist, misogynist beliefs to grow their supporter base.

The funding system that has enabled the global rise of the far right is well documented. Money has been traced from wealthy and well-connected Christian evangelicals in the US to anti-abortion agitation in the UK and Europe, and to the rollback of LGBTQI+ rights on both continents.

The far right pushes a narrative that women need ‘protection’, positioning white men as protectors and global-majority men as perpetrators. In laying the blame for gender-based abuse at the door of individual Black and brown men, this narrative renders the violence committed by white men – and the state – completely invisible. And the infantilisation of women that goes hand in hand with this ‘protection’ narrative gives the authoritarian state power over our bodies and freedoms.

Having worked to end violence against women and girls for 25 years, I can attest to the harms carried out by the state in the name of ‘protecting’ women and children. From airport hymen testing of migrant women; to the criminalisation of sex workers; to attacks on trans women’s rights to public life – protection narratives are often weaponised against marginalised communities.

No freedom without bodily autonomy

Liberation begins in the body. Women and gender-expansive people cannot attain economic, social, cultural, political or spiritual freedom without reproductive freedom. Without abortion access, the state reduces us to vessels for the uncertain promise of new life.

Nayla was able to access abortion care abroad. Our donors, our helpline, our community held her. Neither the Belgian government, nor her partner, nor the far-right actors who blocked recent attempts to increase the abortion time limit in Belgium, could stop Nayla.

The far right moves with hate and fear. Now more than ever we must move with grace, care, love and bravery. They move to restrict abortion access, borders and freedoms; we must open our hearts, minds and lives to the possibilities of freedom.

I believe that the work we do – offering care, walking alongside people, and moving money with need rather than greed – is the real resistance. Whatever you feel about abortion, whether or not you’ve had one, whether you felt shame or relief, now is the time to defend abortion access, to unlearn endemic abortion stigma, and to join the fight against the far right.

When Nayla returned home, she said ‘Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I couldn’t have done this without you. My new life starts today’.

Camille Kumar is Managing Director of Abortion Support Network, a helpline and mutual aid fund for people in the UK and Europe forced to travel for abortion care. Support ASN here.

Each week, I read you all my Substack content from the previous week in one quick episode - so you can catch up while driving, walking the dog, or cleaning your house!

Phantom Blocks from Brooklyn to Belgravia

How prisons and penthouses both hollow out and haunt neighborhoods

Trump’s Forever War

The President is trapped between an affordability crisis he denies, and a conflict he cannot escape.

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Yesterday, Brent crude prices hit $100 per barrel for the first time since May. The increase came on the back of Trump’s announcement he was considering a “massive attack” on Iran, and the Houthis’ effective closure of the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Trump’s war on Iran is starting to look less like a one-off crisis and more like a permanent escalation of hostilities that could result in long-term constraints on the production and supply of oil and other petroleum products.

Tensions have been escalating for a while now. With Iran continuing to target vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump declared the ceasefire “over” in early July and unleashed a barrage of attacks on the country while calling the Iranians “scum”. For the last 13 days, Trump has attacked Iran every day – and is now threatening to strike Iranian infrastructure whenever ships passing through the Strait are targeted.

Another dimension to this round of conflict is the escalation of tensions between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, who are supported by Iran. The Saudis have been trying to bomb Yemen’s Houthis into submission for years (often using weapons manufactured in the UK) – resulting in massive civilian casualties and a humanitarian disaster that has killed hundreds of thousands.

Up to now, both the Saudis and the Houthis had largely kept to the sidelines of the Iran war. But on Monday, the Houthis emailed the world’s major shipping companies instructing them to avoid docking in Saudi ports – before attacking two Saudi tankers trying to pass through the Red Sea. In effect, this means the Houthis are blockading Saudi Arabia by cutting off access to the Bab al-Mandab waterway between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa – one of the few remaining routes available to tankers trying to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Millions of barrels of oil have been shipped via the Bab al-Mandab Strait every day since the conflict with Iran began, allowing Saudi Arabia to maintain exports and alleviating the pressure on global oil supplies. To avoid the Bab al-Mandab Strait, ships have to pass all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, which adds more than $2 million to every journey.

Oil prices were already under pressure as production capacity has been dented by stoppages and outages in facilities across the Middle East and Russia. When the conflict first broke out, US producers were able to step up production to meet increased demand – but today there isn’t much room to increase output.

And most governments have already drawn down a significant portion of their reserves. The US has released about 77% of the 172 million barrels it set aside from the Strategic Petroleium Reserve in March, leaving the SPR at its lowest level since 1983. One analyst quoted in the FT predicted prices could rise as high as $139 per barrel if tensions are not de-escalated.

To make matters worse for consumers, US oil refineries are operating at pretty much maximum capacity. The margin refineries are charging for converting crude into petrol and diesel has reached its highest level on record, which means consumers are paying more at the pump. Gas prices are also edging up on the back of the logistical chaos in the Red Sea and rising demand thanks to the heatwave. European gas prices have surged by 50% over the last month.

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