In the first round of the Brazilian presidential elections earlier this month, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva styled his campaign as the culmination of his decades-long political career — the final chapter in this elder statesman’s legacy. When the results were announced on 4 October, it appeared that this narrative had little sentimental purchase. Much of the electorate wanted a younger candidate, a new direction, an outlet for their frustration. About 56 million of them voted for Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president now serving a lengthy prison sentence for attempting a coup. He received 47 percent of valid votes to Lula’s 45 percent.
While neither of the contenders got the majority needed to avoid a runoff, the verdict seemed clear: Lula, seeking an unprecedented fourth term at the age of eighty, was on his way out, and bolsonarismo had come roaring back.
No candidate who failed to win the first round had ever prevailed in the second. Bolsonaro allies had swept to power in legislative races across the country, suggesting that Brazil had shifted to the right and out of Lula’ reach. Yet there was one key figure in Lula’s orbit who remained confident in the possibility of a turnaround: Congressman André Janones. With Lula’s blessing, he immediately set about bringing the campaign into the digital spaces it had so far struggled to penetrate. The Brazilian far right, seemingly convinced they were unbeatable, downplayed Lula’s steady rise in the polls over the last three weeks — until finally, on Sunday, he defied the odds and stormed to victory, winning an astounding 64 million votes.
The outcome was the result of two immediate factors: Lula’s singular leadership, and Janones’s intuitive understanding of today’s online ecosystem. Together, they managed to beat the Bolsonaro machine.
Janones is not a standout politician, yet his savviness as an operator and digital strategist is well known. A lawyer from Minas Gerais, he first gained national prominence with his social media commentary during Brazil’s 2018 truckers’ strike. He was elected to Congress that year and built a following with his informal, confrontational communication style — distinct from the polished language of most campaigns. He has often been hard to pin down politically. He briefly ran for president in 2022 on the ticket of a tiny party with little popular appeal before heartily endorsing Lula and becoming one of the president’s most dogged defenders.
The first round of the campaign leant heavily on traditional tactics: occasional rallies, slick campaign ads highlighting Lula’s achievements, interviews in the presidential palace. The aggregate effect, in a country where politics often seems remote from everyday life — with lawmakers seemingly powerless to confront rising costs and spiralling levels of debt — was to cast lulismo as a distant part of the establishment.
Lula could, of course, point to significant gains during his third term. He pushed through a comprehensive modernisation of the country’s tax system and increased the share paid by the rich. He reintroduced and expanded social programmes for the poorest Brazilians. Employment rose to the highest level on record while inflation fell to the lowest. Lula vigorously resisted Trump’s intimidation, standing firm against punitive tariffs and forcing the White House to drop them. He charted an autonomous foreign policy, strengthening ties with other nations of the Global South. And he safeguarded Brazil’s democratic institutions after Jair Bolsonaro’s attempt to rewind to the days of military dictatorship.
But the sense of precarity that continued to afflict many Brazilians, especially indebted and lower middle-class ones, was harnessed by the far right to drive a hardline politics of ‘security’: promising the individual protection from the twin menaces of crime and communism. This bolsonarista offer began to cut through thanks to historically low turnout, mobilisation among far-right evangelicals and the support of the country’s most reactionary elites — from the military police to agribusiness — not to mention Washington’s overt attempts to sway the election in Bolsonaro’s favour. Lula found that a straightforward attempt to run on his record would not wash in a polarised and sceptical political climate.
As young people took to the streets to protest against a possible Flávio victory, it fell to Janones to shake things up from inside the campaign. The first move was to bypass the gatekeepers. The day after the first round, Janones began transforming a WhatsApp channel he had created months earlier, named Exército do Lula (‘Lula’s Army’), into a command centre for the runoff. At that time it had roughly 50,000 followers. Within days, it had attracted millions. By October 23 it had passed 10 million — roughly a tenth of the Brazilian electorate. The scale was extraordinary even by the standards of Brazilian digital politics, where WhatsApp has long been a central platform for persuasion and mobilisation (not to mention insidious misinformation).
The political imperative, Janones recognised, was to raise the saliency of the election for the millions who had not bothered to vote in the first round. The campaign did not necessarily need to convert Bolsonaro voters; it needed to turn out eligible voters likely to support the president. Through Exército do Lula, followers received videos, audio messages, hashtags and instructions which allowed them to distribute campaign material across other social platforms, recruiting others and amplifying content. The aim was to turn a passive audience into an organised network of political messengers, carrying Lula’s platform into family chats, neighbourhood networks and private conversations that his official accounts might never reach.
All this might seem obvious for a twenty-first century campaign, but the Workers’ Party (PT) has, by its own admission, been slow to get with the times. Whereas Lula’s official messaging recapped the familiar themes of his biography and social programmes, Janones’s digital operation was more responsive and combative. It tried to make the stakes of the election personal, to answer attacks quickly, and to give supporters a direct role in the contest. The far right, with tacit assistance from US Big Tech platforms, had a robust social media presence throughout the campaign. In the final weeks it felt like Lula had finally entered the ring.
Janones thus offered something the PT’s traditional machinery increasingly struggled to provide: a mechanism for turning political loyalty into meaningful, coordinated action. The issue had arisen well before the campaign. On 1 May 2024, Lula attended a Labour Day rally at São Paulo’s Corinthians stadium. The event drew an estimated 1,635 people. For a party that emerged from the labour movement, and a president whose political identity was forged in the industrial trade unions around São Paulo, this was a humiliating spectacle. Clearly, the institutional ties that had sustained the PT for decades could no longer guarantee mass mobilisation.
The campaign’s treatment of Lula’s life story in the first round was also hagiographic when it should have been parasocial. Lula’s rise to power is not simply an inspirational tale of poverty overcome; it is a reflection of many strands of Brazilian political history — rural to urban migration, industrialisation, redemocratisation — which bound together different social layers that had little else in common. Lula is a leader in whom disparate groups can see their struggles combined. The campaign initially erred in presenting this history as a finished monument, to be admired from a distance. Janones reanimated it as a living legacy.
During the final televised debate, Bolsonaro made a mocking reference to the fact that Lula has only nine fingers, having lost one of them in a factory accident as a teenage metalworker. This snide attack allowed Lula to remind voters where he comes from: the long hours he had to work, the harsh conditions under which Brazilians like him were — and still are — forced to make a living. He did not need to appeal to anyone’s pity. He simply remarked that he knew the world of work because, unlike Flávio, he had lived it. The missing finger evoked his life before the presidency, the party and the mythologies that have sprung up around him. A cool assertion of political authority grounded in personal experience. In that moment, Lula expressed everything his campaign had previously struggled to convey.
The exchange made clear that Lula’s most effective political resource is not mere nostalgia, but a life story that still resonates with tens of millions of people across Brazil’s deep social and demographic divides. By bringing that story into the digital spaces where Brazilians increasingly encounter politics, the campaign reworked by Janones managed to reach undecided voters and activate supporters. Now, as Lula embarks on his fourth term — facing hostile domestic elites, a continent dominated by the right, and White House that tried to ensure his downfall — he will have to apply the same logic to his policy programme: renovating his classic mode of social democracy for the rapids of the 2020s.
Living in London for the past five years has taught me how to be present in my family’s life from afar. I follow our family WhatsApp group, keep up with the little details of everyone’s life and look forward to the photos and messages that make the distance feel a little less vast. But when your family lives under occupation, you learn not to take even the simplest plans for granted.
On Thursday, my sister spent the day baking a cake and preparing food with her five-year-old daughter and two-year-old son, ready to drive from Ramallah to Jerusalem the following day to celebrate our father’s 76th birthday. I went to bed in London expecting to wake up to messages saying they were on their way. But, as so often happens in Palestine, the occupation had other plans.
Instead, I woke up to messages from my sister about the shooting in Hebron, in which two Israeli soldiers were killed. Israeli forces subsequently killed two Palestinian men they identified as the attackers. Later that morning, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered Hebron to be locked down and instructed the military to prepare for a full closure of the West Bank.
‘We won’t be able to make it anymore,’ my sister wrote.
I called her immediately. ‘What are we going to do with all the food and the cake?’ she asked. She had already invited our aunties to join them at my father’s house, and the children were excited. Everything was ready, but the checkpoint she needed to pass to leave Ramallah was now closed, so she could no longer make the journey as planned.
We tried to make light of the situation. But after we hung up, I was left in despair, thinking about how we keep trying to carve out small moments of joy, only to find that even these can be taken away in a second.
Over the course of my father’s birthday, Israeli occupation forces began their siege of Hebron. So far, their raids and demolitions have resulted in the arbitrary detention of dozens of Palestinians, the eviction of hundreds of families from their homes and the displacement of thousands from the city and surrounding towns and villages.
By Sunday, Netanyahu’s threat of a mass lockdown had become reality. Israel closed all crossings out of the West Bank to Palestinians. My sister’s cancelled journey to our father’s birthday was one small example of what that closure meant: the sudden loss of the freedom to make even the simplest plans. Across the West Bank, thousands of Palestinians were facing the same uncertainty, unable to know when they would be able to travel again or resume their daily lives.
Netanyahu was able to shut down the West Bank so quickly because Israel already exercises sweeping control over Palestinian movement. In April 2026, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported 925 movement obstacles affecting an estimated 3.4 million Palestinians across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. These included checkpoints, road gates, roadblocks and earth mounds. The total number of obstructions was 43 percent higher than the average over the preceding two decades. At least 459 of these obstacles hindered access between Palestinian towns and villages and the main roads connecting them.
OCHA also documented around 2,000 access incidents across the West Bank in 2025, an average of approximately 38 a week. These included mobile checkpoint stops, vehicle and identity checks, extended delays, closures and restrictions on access to agricultural land. The figures describe the scale of the restrictions, but not what it means to organise your life around them. A road closure can mean missing a hospital appointment, arriving late for work or being unable to reach a university. Nor can the figures capture the movement that never happens as life grounds to a halt — the dinners with relatives that are pre-emptively cancelled, the postponed visits to an elderly parent, the decisions to abandon mundane plans rather than put young children at risk going from point A to point B.
The Israeli press has reported that the lockdown will end after the elections on Tuesday. But I find little reason to trust that this will mean a return to normal, as if normal were something we still had in our lives. Netanyahu has announced plans for a ‘very extensive’ military operation in the West Bank, on a scale not seen since 1967, while finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for a campaign ‘exactly like in Gaza’. Even if the election-related closure is lifted, there is little reason to believe that the wider assault on Palestinian movement and everyday life will end with it.
There is much speculation about who will form the next government and whether a change of leadership in Tel Aviv might bring a change of direction. But as I sit in London watching my family navigate life in the West Bank, it’s difficult to find much hope in any of the possible outcomes. The opposition may want Netanyahu out, but the bloc’s refusal to form an electoral alliance with the Palestinian parties of the Joint List or Ra’am will likely keep it from forming a government. Leading opposition figures have also advocated for the expansion of settlements and continued control over Palestinians. These parties may disagree with Netanyahu on who should govern Israel, but none of them offer my family much reason to believe that life will become easier.
Since our mother died a few years ago, my sister’s Friday visits to my father have been an important part of his week. She would drive from Ramallah with her children, and they would spend time together. For a while it was a familiar routine, requiring little more than deciding what to eat and when to leave.
But since October 2023, the weekly Friday visits have gradually become every month or two. A simple act that held our family together has become something we can no longer take for granted.
Sometimes, watching what happens between Ramallah and Jerusalem, I feel as though my sister lives just as far from my father as I do. And as we spent his 76th birthday separated from one another, all I could think about was my sister’s question. What do we do with all the food and the cake?
In 2017, the Labour Party’s ‘For The Many, Not The Few’ election manifesto pledged to build a National Care Service. Built on the same universal principles of the NHS, we called for social care to be freely available to all those who need it, wherever they need it, whenever they need it. Over the next two years, we developed this policy and centered it once more in the 2019 manifesto, which promised to provide ‘community-based, person-centred support, underpinned by the principles of ethical care and independent living’. Vowing to reverse the damage done by years of Tory cuts, we pledged to provide free personal care for older people, with an ambition to extend this provision to all working-age adults living independently in their own homes, and people with complex conditions like dementia.
At that time, 1.5 million elderly people had been left without the care they needed. Today, that number has exceeded 2 million. The care crisis is continuing to have a profound impact on a depleted, overworked and underpaid workforce, one in five of whom live in poverty Unsurprisingly, the same number are considering leaving or are already actively planning to leave their posts. The most common reasons? Feeling undervalued, overwhelmed and exhausted. Vast numbers of unpaid carers — predominantly women — end up filling the gap, sacrificing their careers and income to provide round-the-clock care. By 2035, 1.6 million unpaid carers will be in poverty, rising to over 2 million by 2050.
I am pleased that Andy Burnham has signalled his intention to build a National Care Service. I was less pleased to hear that it will not be set up until after the next general election, with reports suggesting we may even have to wait until the 2030s. For at least the last five parliaments, there has been a cross-party endeavour to kick the can down the road. The social care crisis has reached epidemic proportions right across the country, and it demands action now.
Crucially, we can fund care for all without sacrificing state pension security. At just over £12,500 a year, the UK state pension is still among the weakest in Europe, which is one of the many reasons why more than 2 million pensioners live in poverty today. They will be the ones who suffer the most from the proposed removal of the triple lock.
There are, of course, many wealthy and asset-rich pensioners, but this is because we live in a deeply unequal society which concentrates wealth in the hands of a few. This isn’t about old versus young. This is about the super-rich versus the rest. That’s why a National Care Service should be funded, primarily, by a range of wealth taxes. A 2% tax on households with more than £100m in wealth would affect fewer than 1,000 of the richest UK households, and raise more than £10 billion a year. Equalising capital gains tax with income tax would raise around £8 billion a year. Raising the bank surcharge to 16% could raise £24 billion over the next four years.
In his conference speech, Burnham committed to break with the ‘flawed thinking of the last 40 years’. He could start with social care itself. Following decades of internal market ideology from both New Labour and the Conservatives, almost all local authority-run care homes had been closed and outsourced to private providers. A National Care Service worthy of its name must reverse the disaster of privatisation, and ensure health and social care is run for public good, not profit.
We can embed a National Care Service into a much wider programme that redistributes wealth and power to lift people of all generations out of poverty. This week’s budget is an opportunity to do just that. Chancellor John Healey can — and should — stand up in parliament and say: ‘Today, we are bringing water, energy, rail and social care into public ownership’ (as opposed to ambiguous references to ‘public control’). ‘Today, we are bringing in rent controls. Today, we are ending cuts to welfare to ensure all those who live with disabilities and illnesses can live in dignity. Today, we are abolishing tuition fees to end the profound injustice of student debt.’ Anything less is a missed opportunity and an indication that this government has refused to learn from the failures of the last.
Every budget, and every spending commitment, is a choice. Year on year, the chancellor chooses to spend more on weapons and war. Over the past year, the UK government has spent £60.2 billion on defence. Meanwhile, politicians bury their heads in the sand over the real threat to our security: the climate crisis. If the government was really interested in building a safer world, then maybe it would face up to the truth: there’s no security on a planet on fire. Where is the agenda for environmental sustainability or, dare I say the word — peace?
At a time when millions of people are struggling with the cost of living, spending billions more on the machinery of war is the wrong political choice. Why can’t we spend that money on something else instead? Say, a National Care Service? We don’t need to trade state pension security for social care. We can redistribute money away from war, away from corporations, away from the few, and toward a society that cares for each other and cares for all.
In 2011, an Ecuadorian court found Chevron guilty of dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste water and crude oil directly into the streams and rivers of the Amazon rainforest. The court ordered Chevron to pay $19 billion in damages to the people of the Lago Agrio region, who experienced spikes in cancer rates and birth defects as the water around them turned black. Even when a 2013 ruling decreased the liability to $9.5 billion, the judgment marked an unprecedented victory for indigenous communities over corporate abuse and environmental destruction.
Fifteen years later, Chevron has yet to pay a cent. After the ruling, the oil giant marshalled its enormous resources to delegitimise the decision, evade responsibility and exact retribution against those who dared to hold the company accountable for its crimes. Steven Donziger, the American environmental and human rights lawyer who represented the Amazon communities, became Chevron’s primary target.
Over the next decade, Chevron relentlessly pursued Donziger through New York City courts. In 2014, it filed a racketeering suit alleging that the Ecuador judgment had been secured through corruption and bribes. When Donziger refused to turn his laptop and electronic devices over to Chevron in order to protect his clients, the court charged him with contempt. Though federal prosecutors declined to pursue the case, US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan appointed a team of private prosecutors with ties to Chevron to act as the ‘government’ — a first in US legal history. They proceeded to strip Donziger of his law license, place a lien on his home, freeze his bank accounts, confiscate his passport and place him under house arrest.
In total, Donziger spent over 900 days in home detention — more than four times the maximum sentence — and an additional forty-five days in prison. After years as a corporate prisoner, he finally regained his freedom in 2022.
Now once again in possession of his passport, Donziger is travelling the world to hold Chevron accountable. During a recent trip to London, he spoke to Tribune about the health of the communities in Ecuador, renewed efforts to collect on the judgment, and the state of the rule of law in the US and the UK.
Evan Robins
Where does the case against Chevron stand?
Steven Donziger
The Amazon communities have won a $9.5 billion judgment, plus interest. In total it’s probably worth $12 billion now. It was affirmed unanimously by Ecuador’s Supreme Court and by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court, but Chevron refuses to pay. As a result, the communities’ only option is to file lawsuits in other countries where Chevron has assets and ask courts to seize those assets to force them to comply with the law in Ecuador. This type of foreign enforcement proceeding is standard procedure in a commercial dispute context. But in this landmark human rights case, Chevron is spending millions on lawyers to erect all sorts of roadblocks to evade the court judgement.
However, there is no statute of limitations on foreign enforcement actions. This is a critically important fact and it terrifies Chevron, because it will face the financial risk of the Ecuador judgement forever unless it deals with it. However, Chevron had me detained for close to three years and had my passport confiscated for seven years. I simply couldn’t travel to do the work. This led the case to enter a state of abeyance. The communities are now trying to get it moving again. I’m also travelling again and went to Ecuador recently for the first time in years.
Evan Robins
In what capacity are you able to re-enter this work? Does your involvement put you at risk?
Steven Donziger
Chevron’s attacks, which were unprecedented from a legal standpoint and also unprecedented in their viciousness, resulted in serious hardship for me and my family. Chevron was able to take my law license without a hearing, so I’m not here as a lawyer. I’m here as an advocate for the communities of Ecuador searching for support so they can enlist law firms in different countries to represent them and force Chevron to pay the judgment that it owes. Is this a threat to me personally? No, I don’t believe so. No more so than living in New York and continuing to speak out about the environmental crimes and human rights atrocity that Chevron perpetrated in Ecuador. If Chevron wanted to go after me again, they could do it. I would defend myself, and I think I would be able to prevail. It’s not without risk, but I’ve been very open about what I’m doing now. And a lot of people around the world support our team – including sixty-eight Nobel Laureates, dozens of members of the US Congress, and dozens of legal associations around the world who have spoken out against Chevron’s abuses.
Evan Robins
How has the situation developed for the communities in Ecuador over the years of this legal battle?
Steven Donziger
When Chevron had me detained in 2019, the communities were really hurting. Cancer rates were high. But last March I went back to the Amazon for the first time in seven years, and it’s gone from very bad to catastrophic; levels of cancer are off the charts. Several people I knew prior to my arrest have since passed away. What’s taking place in the area where Chevron operated is really a quiet massacre where a handful of people die every week, and over the years, thousands of people have reportedly died from the pollution. It’s not like a spectacular event where there’s mass casualties for all the world to see. It’s a slow, incremental degradation of human life and the environment. Those who have been hurt, and their surviving family members, need to be compensated. The environment that continues to harm people and poison people needs to be remediated. This is a moral imperative. It’s also a legal requirement. So this is not only about saving lives. It’s also about corporate accountability and the need to uphold the rule of law.
Evan Robins
Not only has Chevron not complied with the Ecuador judgement, but now it’s leading the charge into Venezuela.
Steven Donziger
Chevron is as profitable as it’s ever been in its history. The last seven years have been incredibly lucrative. They’re in tight with Trump and they’re marauding the world for oil and profits. Not only are they deeply embedded in Venezuela, but they also are deeply embedded in Israel with gas fields off the coast of Gaza. They’re essentially complicit with the Israeli government in stealing Palestinian-owned gas. Things are good for them from a profit-loss standpoint, but they’re also causing a tremendous amount of harm around the world, and they don’t really seem to care about that part because legal enforcement of environmental laws has become so lax. They operate as if they have impunity. And you know what? There’s nothing that any government or prosecutor has done to prove otherwise. We did hold them accountable to a great extent, but we never collected on the judgment. Now there’s a president of Ecuador who’s essentially a mini version of Trump, so Chevron thinks it’s protected even in Ecuador. But I don’t think that’s entirely true.
Evan Robins
Can you say more about the current relationship between Ecuador’s government, Trump, and Chevron?
Steven Donziger
For the duration of this long legal case, Chevron’s posture vis-à-vis Ecuador’s government was to pressure it to join forces with the company to repress the rights of its own citizens to bring suit against an environmental polluter. That is, Chevron constantly tried to get Ecuador’s government to put its thumb on the scales of justice to favor the company. Ecuador, like the United States, holds itself out as a democracy with a system of separation of powers and checks and balances. But in my opinion, Chevron has no respect for separation of powers. For years the company’s entire strategy was to strong-arm Ecuador’s president to interfere with the country’s independent judiciary and snuff out the case in violation of its Constitution.
One way they tried to do this was by offering what I would call bribes, but what they might call inducements. During the Obama presidency, for example, Chevron tried to arrange a $700 million aid package in conjunction with the State Department as a way to coax Ecuador’s president to interfere with the judicial branch and kill off the case. Ecuador’s current president, Daniel Noboa, has a governing style modeled to a great degree on Trump. He’s actually trying to help Chevron evade the judgement we won to the point of reportedly offering Chevron $200 million as compensation for the ‘harm’ of letting Ecuador’s own citizens sue Chevron in his country’s courts. This appears to be a total capitulation to corporate colonialismIt’s very clear that Trump is close with Chevron, Trump is close with Naboa, and Noboa is close with Chevron. They are class allies united in their disdain for the humble among us. In the meantime, we fight on.
Evan Robins
You’ve often spoken about the power of corporations over American democracy and the rule of law. How are you seeing this develop during Trump’s second term?
Steven Donziger
What we’re seeing now has been a fifty-year plan by the corporate elites and the oligarchs to take power in the US. They don’t want to just lobby Congress, they want to control Congress. They don’t want to just lobby the president, they want to control or at least have enormous influence over the executive branch. It’s the same with the judiciary. The judiciary is particularly vulnerable because if you can control only five of the nine justices on the Supreme Court, you essentially can control policy and law for an entire population of 350 million people. That’s what has happened in recent years in the United States. Trump did not cause it; he’s just the latest vehicle being used for its implementation.
The corporate strategy to take control of government was born in the 1970s with the Lewis Powell memo, which led to the creation of the Federalist Society and the Koch brothers funding movement. Powell himself became a Supreme Court justice. The plan was to try to organise our society to align it more with corporate profits, with the focus being on the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. The plan was, and is, bold and clever.
I would argue that we don’t have a democracy right now in the United States. Our Supreme Court is no longer a court, but in my view is a political arm of the Trump movement that is manipulating the law to support a far-right extremist political agenda. As a lawyer, I am repulsed by what’s happening.
My case was one illustration of their power. I was incarcerated for three years by an oil company. I’m the only person ever prosecuted criminally by a corporation in US history. The judge charged me with criminal contempt for refusing his order that I turn over my confidential case file, an order that was unprecedented and legally baseless. The regular prosecutor rejected the case. So the judge appointed a Chevron lawyer to step into the shoes of the US government and prosecute me. As a result, I spent more than four times my maximum sentence locked up in a very irregular, and I would argue, corrupt, legal proceeding. I became what many lawyers described as a corporate political prisoner. I knew when it was happening that it was a playbook that could be applied elsewhere and I felt in many respects like an animal in a legal lab test. When my detention ended in 2022, after almost three years locked up in my house and in prison, it was clear that we were entering a period in the United States — particularly if Trump were to be elected again — where the rule of law would be under severe attack and where my rogue case would even become the norm as Trump targets his enemies, be they activists, progressives or immigrants.
The specific corporate attack playbook that was used against me is now being used against Greenpeace. Energy Transfer, the largest pipeline company in the United States, was so furious with the successful indigenous-led protests at Standing Rock in 2016 that they literally hired the same law firm that Chevron used against me and deployed it against Greenpeace, resulting in a completely unjust $345 million civil judgment in the courts of North Dakota that was handed down in 2025. The use of the civil racketeering law is being abused by corporations to suppress speech and activism and to intimidate people on the progressive left. We’re also seeing similar things throughout the West right now. In Germany, Australia, Canada, the United States, and especially here in the UK, people are being attacked for exercising the right to free speech and the right to protest.
I think these extremely oppressive measures from governments and corporations that are taking place in the United States and the UK and other countries are a response to our growing power. The corporations and their bought politicians are happy to engage in class warfare against people organising against them. They’re unabashed about it. They used to try to hide it or couch it in kind of rule of law clothing, but we’re not seeing that as much anymore. Now they’re really in naked conflict with our power, because they feel heat from us. Out of the ashes of Trump, something new is going to be built. We have the power to shape it if we get sufficiently organised. Progressive politicians, led by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are slowly gaining a foothold in the United States. There’s a real possibility right now for a greater shift. But the left in the United States is still extraordinarily weak because of the corporate-financed attacks.
Evan Robins
In the UK, barrister Rajiv Menon is facing his own unprecedented contempt of court proceedings for his closing speech in a trial defending a Palestine Action activist. This clearly echoes the outrageous contempt charge imposed on you. What advice do you have for Menon as he fights his own battle against judicial overreach?
Steven Donziger
My best advice is to lean into it and fight it every step of the way. Not just in court, but publicly. To speak out. Try to make what’s happening to you a touchstone issue for the entire society. The forces that try to drown out speech, whether it’s the British state or a corporation like Chevron in my case, want to do this outside of public view as much as possible. They want to act like it’s a normal legal proceeding and it’s just the way the law works. That’s not what is actually happening. These are politically driven cases, so they have to be met with politics.
The best advice is to go public, get organised, get as much support as you can from other lawyers, from bar associations, from labour groups, from any social sector organization that can help. It’s a lot of work, and most lawyers are not trained to do it. But it’s necessary. I’m appalled to come to this country and see the level of repression against speech. I’m appalled to see climate activists sentenced to multi-year prison terms for engaging in non-violent civil disobedience. When they start attacking the lawyers who defend the people who are being hit with these draconian and repressive laws, you’re in serious trouble. At that point you’re no longer in a democracy, you’re in an authoritarian state. That’s what I’m feeling in the UK, at least in terms of punishing advocates for disfavoured causes like Palestinian self-determination and climate justice.
In September, students in two French colonies ignited a movement that soon spread to France. Protesting poor school conditions in France’s South American and southern African outposts, they spoke of a coloniser who never put them first. In multiracial France, many young people felt the same way. But the origins of this movement — carrying radicalism from the global South to North — have been barely noticed in the French press. What kinds of politics are possible for people all over the world seeking to escape centuries of deliberate underdevelopment and dependence enforced by European powers? One region is finding out.
While students blockaded streets in French Guiana and Mayotte, at the United Nations General Assembly in New York an African leader delivered a defiant speech. Niger’s Prime Minister positioned his country alongside neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso as a regional bloc continuing the anticolonial struggle. The Alliance of Sahel States (AES), Lamine Zeine Ali Mahaman said, had embarked on ‘an irreversible process towards our countries’ sovereignty’. Tearing into former colonial master France, he championed self-reliance, ‘total control over our resources,’ and ‘responsibility for our choices and our alliances’. Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso’s charismatic leader, presented the choice starkly: ‘unite forever against imperialism, or be reduced to being slaves until we disappear.’
AES was forged in 2023 following coups in three former French colonies. All are landlocked states that lie in a contiguous semi-arid sweep across the Sahel and into the Sahara. The coups followed failed attempts by French and allied forces to stem a militant insurrection that took root in Mali following the 2011 overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. By the time French forces began leaving in 2023, al-Qaeda-linked groups had spread from Mali into its two neighbours.
Announcing a definitive break from a French imperialism that remained remarkably intact after flag independence, AES invited Russian troops to battle militants and regain territory under their control. In late August, Russian forces under the so-called Africa Corps, a successor to the Wagner Group, helped Nigerien forces suppress an army mutiny, participating directly in fighting around the military airbase in Niamey.
The United States now waits in the wings, mulling military strikes in concert with Mali against militants. Earlier this year, Washington struck a multimillion-dollar health deal with Burkina Faso and moved to repair relations with Niger, just a few years after it was asked to leave behind its sprawling $100m drone airbase near Agadez.
Has the AES gone from the frying pan of French neocolonialism only to jump into the raging infernos of Russian power, with American imperialism lurking close behind? This cauldron of imperial meddling presents a case study in the challenges of doing politics within a system set up to make you fail.
At independence, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger inherited states whose formal sovereignty obscured profound economic dependence on their former colonial power and limited control over vast stretches of their own territory.
How to assert economic and political sovereignty in landlocked, sparsely populated and semi-arid countries still in the grip of French imperialism became a persistent question for anticolonial leaders. Mali’s first leader, Modibo Keïta, pursued economic and monetary sovereignty by withdrawing Mali from the West African monetary union and creating a national currency in 1962. Meanwhile, in Niger, Djibo Bakary’s campaign to leave the French Community — following Sékou Touré’s Guinea — on the eve of independence failed after French meddling in a 1958 referendum. Later, in the 1980s, Burkina Faso underwent a radical socialist experiment under Thomas Sankara, who pursued economic self-reliance but was deposed and killed in a 1987 coup that brought his former comrade Blaise Compaoré to power. Compaoré reversed many of Sankara’s policies and rebuilt relations with France. Suspicions of French involvement in Sankara’s overthrow and assassination persist.
A fractured territorial sovereignty was also built into the very bones of these states. All three inherited highly centralised states governing enormous peripheral spaces. In Mali and Niger, this left many Tuareg communities in the Saharan north distant from political power, culminating in several punishing rounds of open rebellion. In Burkina Faso, pastoral communities, including many Fulani, would similarly find themselves at the margins of the state. It did not help that, particularly in Niger, some peripheral regions also contained prized natural resources.
These internal tensions weakened the emerging states, and helped in unravelling their attempts at meaningful sovereignty while increasing their dependence on foreign power. Mali, which left the colonial-era CFA franc in 1962, returned in 1984. By the dawn of this century, all three countries still used the colonial-era CFA franc and were governed by political classes deeply entwined with Paris. Niger had long supplied uranium to France’s nuclear industry. In Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaoré remained in power. By the time revolutions and wars broke out to their north in 2011 – in Tunisia, Egypt and most importantly Libya – Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso all sat near the foot of the UN’s Human Development Index: Mali ranked 175th of 187 countries, Burkina Faso 181st and Niger 186th. The promise of independence had frayed.
The 2011 Libyan civil war marked a turning point. After Muammar Gaddafi was ousted by a NATO-led intervention in which the USA, France and Britain played leading roles, ethnic Tuareg fighters who had served the Libyan leader trundled back across the Sahara to northern Mali with weaponry looted from Libya’s vast armouries.
This proved to be the spark that lit a tinderbox. Their manpower and materiel were a boon to Tuareg separatists fighting for the independent state of Azawad. The separatists initially fought alongside al-Qaeda-linked and other militant groups, but the alliance quickly fractured, with the Jihadis driving their erstwhile allies from major northern cities and then pushing south. The Malian government struggled to contain the rebellion and was soon overthrown by mutinying soldiers furious at its handling of the war. Their advance prompted French military intervention in 2013. As the insurgencies began to spill across Mali’s borders, Operation Serval gave way to the regional Operation Barkhane in 2014.
The instability was a factor in the rise of ethnic militias and competition between pastoralists and farming communities over land and resources, compounded by climate pressures and the retreat of the state; all of this in countries suffering from chronic underdevelopment.
The counter-insurgency approach — bomb now, ask questions later — could kill militants but did little to extinguish the insurgencies. At times, it made matters worse. As Tony Chafer and his co-authors at the Royal United Services Institute have argued, France’s intervention in the region amounted to a ‘disutility of force’ which ‘made the military situation worse and the attainment of an acceptable political outcome harder.’
Unable to contain the militant insurgencies amid rising mistrust of French intentions, the Sahel was beset by a succession of military coups and counter-coups. Assimi Goïta emerged as Mali’s anti-French ruler in 2021, after taking part in a coup the previous year that overthrew the elected president, and then removing the civilian-led transitional government that replaced him. In Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré came to power in September 2022 in the country’s second coup in eight months. Then, in Niger in July 2023, Abdourahamane Tiani, commander of the presidential guard, overthrew his employer.
Then came the Russians. Russian personnel operating under the Wagner Group began to arrive in Mali in 2021, just as the French were on their way out. Deployments to Burkina Faso and then Niger would arrive from 2024 onwards. Western governments were suspicious of Russian intentions: Russia’s war in Ukraine was already underway while the drawing down of French forces represented a diminishing Western footprint in the region. In 2022, the UK government said that Wagner was a ‘driver of conflict’ in the region and accused it of ‘capitalising on instability for its own interests.’ The American government claimed that a Russian disinformation campaign was ‘treating government takeovers as new waves of decolonisation in Africa’ and that such a discourse ‘allows for support of Wagner’s unrestrained exploitation of African resources, notably gold, diamonds, and timber.’
Russian troops came to Mali without the French colonial baggage. Their arrival also recalled the Soviet era, when Mali enjoyed strong military, educational, and trade ties with Moscow, as did Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara.
Needless to say, the Russians have since expanded their economic partnerships with the resource-rich AES countries, striking deals for Mali’s storied gold and lithium, and Niger’s abundant uranium resources. But this has not simply meant transferring French control of these resources to Moscow. AES governments appear, in some cases, to be bargaining with their new partners from a firmer position. In 2025, Mali began construction on its first-ever gold refinery, with a Russian company holding a minority stake. Niger nationalised its uranium mines, wresting them from French-majority control, before striking a deal with the Russians.
Nonetheless, critics see a clear logic of Russian power: ‘protect the juntas, protect the mines,’ as Hannah Rae Armstrong puts it. Russian efforts to shore up the governments in Niger and Mali this year against a putsch in Niamey and a siege of Bamako, respectively, suggest as much. That highlights a difficult postcolonial condition. AES rulers, who have not yet sought a popular mandate, want to control their resources but must struggle too to control their territory.
The AES was formed, says Article 5 of its Charter, to assert ‘territorial integrity and sovereignty’ over swathes of its member states that had fallen into militant hands. The Charter claims a commitment to diplomatic means, but AES governments have also made no bones about hitting hard — at considerable human cost. In 2025 alone, reports suggest Malian forces and their Russian allies killed 918 civilians, compared with 232 killed by al-Qaeda-linked and Islamic State-linked groups. In Burkina Faso, government forces and allied militias killed 523 civilians, compared with 339 killed by the two militant groups. Niger is an exception to this pattern, since there Islamic State Sahel Province is the principal source of civilian harm in the most heavily affected western regions. But state violence risks feeding the grievances through which militant groups recruit.
Indeed, this year alone, armed groups have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to strike across Mali simultaneously, capturing towns and military positions and increasingly threatening the capital itself. On April 25, JNIM (an al-Qaeda-linked group) and Tuareg rebels launched one of the largest coordinated offensives Mali has seen in years, with attacks stretching from the north to Bamako, Mopti and Sévaré. In Kati, a suicide attack killed Mali’s defence minister, Sadio Camara. JNIM has also sought to lay siege to Bamako, building on a fuel blockade begun in 2025 by attacking the roads and supply lines on which Mali’s capital depends.
Before the AES, Mali had recognised that restoring state sovereignty could mean more than recovering territory by force. It could also mean addressing some of the conditions driving conflict: accountable local government, rebuilding schools and clinics, and restoring livelihoods. It signed the Algiers Accord with northern armed groups in 2015 and, a few years later, began negotiations with al-Qaeda-linked leaders, achieving agreements over freedom of movement, disarmament and access to farmland — even when such negotiations were opposed by France.
The window for reconciliation narrowed as Goïta consolidated power following the second coup in 2021 and tilted toward military conquest. Fighting with northern rebels resumed in 2023, and Bamako formally abandoned the Algiers Accord in January 2024. Traoré, meanwhile, has made mass mobilisation central to his own war effort, recruiting tens of thousands of civilian Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland to fight alongside the army.
Russian involvement has only intensified this approach. Moscow had spent almost a decade demonstrating the limits of military reconquest in Syria, helping Bashar al-Assad recover much of the country and remain in power, only for the government it had fought to preserve to collapse with astonishing speed in December 2024. By kicking the French out, the AES may appear to have decolonised their war; alongside their Russian allies, they have so far failed to decolonise the way it is fought.
While AES leaders have attempted to reorient away from the old French imperial sphere, they are now increasingly looking towards the United States as a potential partner in countering militants and attracting investment. The turnaround is extraordinary.
As recently as April 2025 in Burkina Faso, supporters of Ibrahim Traoré took to the streets after General Michael Langley, commander of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), told a US Senate hearing that Traoré’s government was using the country’s gold resources to protect its military regime rather than benefit ordinary citizens. And in 2024, Tiani’s government in Niger terminated its military cooperation with the United States, forcing Washington to abandon its sprawling airbase near Agadez, where drones had surveilled the Sahara from high above.
But behind the scenes, Trump meant change. While the Biden administration had made a return to constitutional government a condition for restoring economic and security cooperation with AES members, the Trump administration has renewed engagement with their military governments.
In August, the Mali Security Partnership and Counterterrorism Act was introduced in Congress, following a rapprochement with Bamako that has seen senior US officials visit the country and Washington increase intelligence sharing. The transactional character of the emerging relationship was already apparent in reports last year that US officials were exploring increased counterterrorism assistance alongside access to mineral resources, as the US scrambled for rare earths amid competition with China.
Then there is the five-year bilateral health cooperation deal struck with Burkina Faso in February. Subject to congressional funding, Washington intends to provide up to $147 million to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other infectious diseases, including $12 million for health surveillance, digitised data reporting and laboratory capacity. The small print remains unclear, but similar deals struck elsewhere in Africa under Trump’s America First strategy, including with Nigeria, contain provisions for sharing health data and pathogen samples with Washington, raising questions about data sovereignty.
AES leaders have insisted that any renewed relationships would not be conducted on neocolonial terms. But the Americans have made no secret of their intentions, with a 2025 US Army War College assessment concluding: ‘Instability in the Sahel directly affects US economic, security, and political interests, particularly in maintaining trade routes and ensuring African economies can integrate into global markets.’ The assessment also warned that Russian influence could shut Washington and its allies out of the region.
As if to come full circle, the Sahel states may now find themselves seeking another foreign partner in a counter-insurgency war. If military force has repeatedly failed to resolve political problems in the region, it is a bitter irony that AES states now lean on the country that launched the War on Terror. Afghanistan and Iraq offer sobering warnings about the limits of attempting to resolve political crises through counter-terrorism.
Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger now face their disempowered position within the world system while confronting the existential threat of militant insurgencies. AES leaders have sought to navigate these constraints by bargaining with both Russia and the United States. Their leaders have presented an image of strength. But their hand weakens as insurgencies grow, increasing their dependence on foreign guns. In the end, sovereignty may depend less on which foreign power the AES can expel than on whether it can build states its own people have reason to defend.
The US mid-terms will be watched eagerly just about everywhere on the planet. With Donald Trump breaking records for unpopularity, the Democrats look set to take control of the Senate and Congress. But expectations may not be matched by action, least of all on foreign policy, where differences between the two parties are often marginal.
When the Republicans lost the mid-terms in 2006, it didn’t stop George Bush launching a disastrous ‘surge’ in Iraq. After Barack Obama suffered a similar electoral setback in 2014, he continued to pursue an aggressive strategy overseas. One of his lesser known decisions, which drew no meaningful opposition in Washington, was to impose an unelected board on Puerto Rico to control its finances.
The Puerto Rican example is significant not only because it is the meeting point between foreign and domestic policy, but also because the board Obama appointed — known as PROMESA — is still in charge, and the future of the colony remains unresolved.
The US has ruled Puerto Rico for longer than the British Raj in India. These mid-terms are the 65th round of Congressional elections since the US invaded Puerto Rico in 1898. In 1917, Puerto Ricans were given US citizenship — conveniently making them eligible for conscription just as the US was entering World War One — but those living in the colony are still unable to vote in elections for the legislature that exercises sovereignty over them. This democratic outrage was compounded when Obama responded to Puerto Rico’s debt crisis by imposing PROMESA, depriving it even of the bankruptcy protection afforded to US cities.
As ever with colonial situations, ‘debt’ is itself a misnomer. Colonial powers do not keep their possessions out of charity. Puerto Rico has served as a major US military base and test bed for all manner of nasty weapons. Its economy has been shaped for colonial purposes, first as a supplier of sugar and later as a low-tax, cheap labour producer of pharmaceuticals and electrical goods. Recent years have seen its prime Caribbean coastal land plundered for development, pricing Puerto Ricans out of their own communities.
Some aspects of Puerto Rico’s value to the US are impossible to quantify — how, for example, do you price being used to launch the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela? But the colony’s economic value has been more precisely measured in studies that show how the gap between the wealth it creates (GDP) and the income it retains (GNI) has grown since the 1960s to a point where around a third has been expatriated annually in most years since the 1980s. Just two years’ worth of this surplus value would be enough to clear Puerto Rico’s bond debt.
‘US corporations make billions on the island while half of Puerto Rican children live in poverty — and this all happens as an unelected fiscal board and not the Puerto Rican people decide the island’s future,’ says Darializa Ávila Chevalier, the Democrat candidate for New York’s 13th District, which includes Harlem and parts of The Bronx.
Ávila Chevalier is among the candidates backed by the advocacy organisation of Puerto Ricans living in the United States, Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora (BUDPR), which is working to ensure that the case for independence is not sidelined by a row between Trump and the Democrats over ‘statehood’.
In July, Kamala Harris sent Trump into apoplexy by suggesting the issue should be ‘revisited’ both in Puerto Rico and in Washington. Posting on Truth Social, he replied that this would make it ‘impossible for Republicans to ever win an Election again’ and represent “THE END OF AMERICA!”
Trump’s rant was a slap in the face for Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood governor, Jenniffer González, whose craven support for the president was shown to count for nothing. At the same time, for independence supporters, Harris’s proposal to revisit statehood is yet another case of the Democrat leadership using the issue garner Latino votes having done nothing about it when they had the chance.
The Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), which has enjoyed a resurgence in support since the debt crisis, sees ‘statehood’ simply as annexation and believes it will leave the island languishing in even worse poverty than the most deprived US states such as Mississippi and Louisiana. Despite more than a century of US colonial rule and periods of sweeping repression of pro-independence groups, Puerto Rico has remained a Spanish-speaking nation with a distinct identity that its people — across the political spectrum — hold dearly.
The limited self-government Puerto Rico has had since 1952 was accepted in a take-it-or-leave it referendum only after Luis Muñoz Marín, the colony’s first elected governor and prime advocate of a compromise, claimed that independence would mean veterans losing their war pensions and be an economic ‘tragedy’ leaving people in ‘hunger’. Even after that vote, the US Congress removed from the draft constitution an entire section that promised ‘the fairest distribution’ of economic benefits that were claimed to accrue from remaining part of the US because it sounded too much like socialism.
This devolution of some powers — which, without irony, was officially called ‘free association’ — was enough to get Washington off the hook at the United Nations, which voted in 1953 by 26 to 16 to remove Puerto Rico from its list of non-self-governing territories. However, it did not change the underlying colonial relationship or deter the US from suppressing dissent using the coercive tools of its domestic red scare and the covert tactics of the FBI’s counter intelligence programme, COINTELPRO.
By 1973, a UN transformed by the presence of newly-independent states defied US objections and initiated regular hearings on Puerto Rico again. This year, BUDPR’s Damara González told the UN’s Decolonization Committee that PROMESA’s ‘dangerous cuts to basic services’ meant that ‘every day thousands of Puerto Ricans go without water and electricity in their homes and workplaces [and that] citizens are unable to adequately bathe, prepare meals, and store medicine.’ She said: ‘If the United Nations is to live up to its charter of affirming human rights and promoting social progress, it must move to mitigate these ongoing crises by first addressing their root cause, the United States’ colonial rule over Puerto Rico.’
Washington has been successful over the decades in dividing Puerto Ricans, but support for independence is growing. The party of Muñoz Marín gained only 21 percent of the popular vote in governor elections, while Alianza — which includes PIP — saw its support rise to 31% to become the main challenger to González, who won with a 41 percent vote share.
While this issue is ultimately a matter for Puerto Ricans to decide, there will be no progress without pressure in the US itself on Washington politicians. As BUDPR president Alberto Medina says: ‘Without the ability to vote for president and no voting representatives in Congress, Puerto Ricans are wholly disenfranchised from U.S. politics. It’s Americans, not Puerto Ricans, who can pull on the levers of power and compel action from their elected leaders.’
On Wednesday, the government approved drilling in Jackdaw, a gas field in the North Sea that has been in limbo since campaigners blocked its consent in a judicial review last year. In one sense the news was unsurprising; energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh’s first ministerial trip was to an oil and gas site in Aberdeen, and other senior Labour figures had signalled an interest in rolling back climate commitments. Yet the decision also seems to conflict with Burnham’s progressive repositioning of the party. How should we understand its politics?
Ask someone from the climate movement, and they’ll tell you this is an indefensible decision that contradicts the science and the UK’s climate obligations with little to show for it. Turn to industry or some of the major unions, and they’ll stress its necessity to support jobs and domestic energy security.
Both sides come armed with stats. The oil and gas industry claims that thousands of jobs are at stake. In its press release, the government claimed the Jackdaw field could increase domestic gas production by 6 percent at its peak, while affirming that it sees no conflict between this growth and its climate commitments. It has also foregrounded the need to bring down energy bills.
The climate movement tells a different story. It points out that the ‘thousands of jobs’ figure combines prospective jobs from both Jackdaw and the Rosebank oil field, ignoring the fact that, by the government’s own estimation, just 27 jobs will be created by Jackdaw alone. Uplift, which alongside Greenpeace has led campaigns and court challenges against both Jackdaw and Rosebank, cites analysis by the North Sea Transition Authority showing that Jackdaw would reduce the UK’s annual gas import dependency by just 2 percent. At this scale, the additional production from Jackdaw would barely dent the country’s reliance on imports. Worse still, it would have no material impact on bills, as the price of gas extracted from the field would still be set on international markets.
There are similar tensions surrounding the field’s climate impact. Supporters say Jackdaw’s product will reduce our reliance on imported liquified natural gas (LNG), which they claim is a far dirtier source. Climate groups, meanwhile, point out that the gap is overstated, since these comparisons refer to how dirty the gas was to produce, rather than describing the substantially larger downstream emissions associated with actually burning the stuff. And because LNG constitutes a minority of what we import, it’s just as possible that Jackdaw’s supply simply displaces gas piped in from Norway, whose production is considerably cleaner than the UK’s.
Much of the debate has so far centred on these particularities: job numbers, tax revenues, emissions, import dependency. The effect has been to force climate advocates into splitting hairs over estimates rather than dedicating our full efforts to contesting the politics of the decision.
During his first hundred days, Burnham has repeatedly described the government’s approach to Jackdaw and Rosebank as one of ‘pragmatism’. The word has done some heavy lifting for the prime minister amid conflicting demands from activists, unions and industry. But what does it really mean in an era of deadly heatwaves and record-shattering temperatures? This week’s conspicuously timed UN Emissions Gap report states in no uncertain terms: ‘the opportunity to bridge the 1.5°C emissions gap with “no or limited” overshoot has been lost’. With every extra degree, more potentially irreversible damage is done to the world around us. In these conditions, it is impossible to find a purpose in Burnham’s pragmatism. It looks more like an attempt to evade any meaningful commitments as the climate crisis accelerates.
Fahnbulleh has now indicated that drilling at Rosebank will not be allowed to go ahead; the field would be considerably more environmentally destructive and do little more than pump oil into global markets. Jackdaw seems likely, therefore, to be presented as a reasonable tradeoff; the fact is that it comes with no coherent vision of a different economic model, grounded in a different energy system. Ed Miliband’s Great British Energy, once billed as a major public power champion, is a shadow of what was promised. The UK’s progress on climate adaptation is drastically off track. Minimal effort has been made to stop disasters like wildfires and harvest failures.
Burnham clearly wants to mimic the success of the ‘affordability’ politics that’s sweeping the United States. Tethered to the Jackdaw announcement was an ‘Energy Wealth Fund’ that, starting from a £2 billion government investment, will ostensibly use funds from oil and gas tax receipts to ‘reinvest Britain’s energy wealth in renewable and low carbon energy infrastructure, unlock investment, back the industries of the future and create skilled jobs.’ But here, too, the crucial questions are unanswered. What portion of tax revenues will go to the fund? How will it be run, and in what will it invest? Will it do so directly, or as yet another vehicle for de-risking private investment — socialising risk while privatising gain? Is this £2 billion even new money, or has it been rebadged from existing GB Energy or National Wealth Fund allocations?
Perhaps most fundamentally, there is the problem of how the government intends to fund what has been touted as a transformative investment vehicle from a revenue stream that is by definition in decline. With gas production expected to almost entirely disappear by 2050, the UK’s North Sea Basin circa 2026 is a far cry from Norway in the 1990s, when oil production was booming and the country established its Sovereign Wealth Fund. Oil and gas firms have also been able to claim outsized levels of financial relief either for investments in more oil and gas or for the cost of decommissioning expired rigs. The real meaning of the fund, then, is clear: an attempt to cover for a lack of direction, winning over the climate-minded with gestures toward green investment.
So when Burnham says ‘pragmatism’, read prevarication. If his main aim is to reduce energy bills, then the Jackdaw decision makes little sense. If it is a sop to the climate-denialist right, then it is a total failure. The Tories and Reform will now be emboldened in their project of maximally exploiting what remains of Britain’s fossil resources while jettisoning climate goals. Since the decision was announced, the shadow energy secretary Andrew Bowie has condemned Labour for refusing to issue new exploration licences in the North Sea and pushed for the approval of Rosebank. Burnham, he says, is pursuing a ‘deeply confused energy policy’. Is he wrong?
We are living through a time when all the major parties of the right are dragging the country towards an outright politics of denial, helped by a media in which, according to research by Persuasion UK, ‘negative opinions about Net Zero [are] triply overrepresented. . . . versus their actual prevalence among the British public’. Only a clear climate strategy — not a politics in which directionlessness is disguised as sober pragmatism — can push back against this destructive trend.
What might this look like? The economist Brett Christophers has written that dealing with the climate crisis requires a ‘double bet’: electrification of demand at the same time as a decarbonisation of electricity supply. I would make this a triple bet: as the ecological and human costs of extraction rise, we must also reduce demand by reorganising our economy — confronting inequality, prioritising collective needs, and resisting the rise of ecologically disastrous projects like hyperscale data centres that offer ‘growth’ like a poison apple.
Practically, you might start with an affordable energy guarantee; a rapid and state-led scheme to replace gas-fired boilers with heat pumps; and insulating homes and workplaces to drive down demand for heating. As a recent report by the think tank E3G noted, the economic benefits of these measures alone would dwarf the meagre rewards of new oil and gas licenses. The work of adaptation, meanwhile, is both urgent and popular, from improved public transit and resilient agricultural systems to more abundant and biodiverse green spaces.
Whatever politicians might say, the data shows that the appeal of climate politics hasn’t shifted for the British public in recent years, even if it is less prioritised. Mike Davis wrote in 1998 that ‘disaster amnesia is a federally subsidised luxury’: in other words, it’s possible to forget even the worst disasters when somebody else is footing the bill. This is clearly the government’s attitude towards the environmental disasters that struck Europe this summer. But as the crisis escalates, this is not a luxury they can enjoy for very long. The only pragmatic climate politics is one that meets the radicalism of the moment.
On October 1, the government quietly ended the ‘groundbreaking’ migration policy that the Home Office had announced only a year prior. The short-lived Anglo-French ‘one in, one out’ deal, put in force in August 2025 and championed by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood after she took the role a month later, ran a state-sanctioned cross-border trade in human beings. People who crossed the Channel in a small boat were deported to France, and in exchange, another individual was allowed to enter the UK from France. After deporting more than 1,400 people, the scheme was scrapped without so much as a press release or an official statement to mark its conclusion.
This disastrous policy was sold as both a ‘safe route’ for seeking asylum and a deterrent against dangerous journeys across the Channel. But as many migration and refugee charities from across the UK and France argued, the ‘safety’ logic was inherently a contradiction that relied on one person surviving a traumatic and life-threatening crossing only to be detained and deported so that another could enter. It functioned as a twisted zero-sum lottery and depended on the very dangers it purported to deter.
Under international law, claiming asylum is lawful however a person arrives. The 1951 Refugee Convention recognised that fleeing persecution forces people to breach certain immigration rules and protects refugees from being penalised for how they enter a country. Despite this, the UK government continues to punish those who arrive here to seek asylum, even though a person can only claim asylum once they’re on UK soil and there is no way for them to reach the UK except to cross the Channel.
In January 2026, over 100 people detained under the scheme issued a collective statement calling on human rights organisations to investigate their treatment and conditions. They reported being ‘subjected to extreme physical, psychological, and emotional abuse’, and that people were ‘mentally deteriorating due to constant fear, harassment, and uncertainty about their fate’. Peaceful overnight protests were held in two detention centres. Reports say officers responded with riot shields, dogs and tear gas as detainees pleaded to not be taken to France by force.
A study by Medical Justice of its clients detained under the scheme found that every single individual of the twenty they assessed showed clinical evidence of a history of torture, ill-treatment or human trafficking, as well as serious mental health conditions including PTSD, depression and anxiety. Many described experiencing severe violence and traumatic events in France before arriving in the UK, including witnessing killings by smugglers or facing death threats themselves. Those deported to France under this scheme are thrown back into EU regulation, meaning they face the threat of secondary deportation to countries they previously passed through where they may have faced severe human rights abuses.
Children were supposed to be excluded from this operation. However, JRS UK and Humans for Rights Network (HfRN) found that at least 141 age-disputed children and young people had been detained under the scheme, highlighting serious failures in safeguarding and protection. The Home Office’s own figures revealed that over a nine-month period, nearly 100 children had been wrongly detained as adults as part of the scheme. Some of them were nonetheless deported to France.
While the Labour government that came into office in 2024 cancelled the Rwanda deal of its predecessors, what it built maintained the very same logic: declare claims ‘inadmissible’, refuse to hear someone’s grounds for asylum, and instead detain and deport them to another country. Starmer proudly promised the deal with France was not about performative ‘gimmicks’. In practice, it continued the theatre of control we have come to expect from politicians who are pandering to racists and scapegoating migrants for their failures.
The government’s human trading scheme was not a standalone policy. It was soon followed by the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, which has led to criminal charges for those who at one point in their journey steered the boat to safety. In April 2026, the UK signed a three-year, £662 million deal with France for new riot-trained police units, surveillance drones and helicopters in northern France, as well as a new detention centre in Dunkirk. Under Labour, immigration raids have reached the ‘highest levels in UK history’, and the detention estate is expanding. The government reopened Campsfield IRC in December 2025 after seven years of closure and despite strong local opposition.
In September 2026, just before the ‘one in, one out’ programme closed, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood reopened the UK Resettlement Scheme and announced new community, university and employer sponsorship routes. Seeing this as a hopeful pivot would be a mistake. Such routes are small and strictly defined, meaning they are only good for the few hundred people who qualify. For the majority of refugees, they function as a tool of exclusion, criminalising and justifying border violence against those who enter outside of the route’s narrow parameters.
According to reports, Prime Minister Andy Burnham wanted the Anglo-French refugee trading operation to continue, and in the end it closed not because of the immense harm it caused, but because it didn’t go far enough to reach its desired scale. A government spokesperson stressed that ‘lessons learned’ would help ‘accelerate efforts’ to deport people seeking asylum going forward.
Small boat arrival figures are reportedly low, but at what cost? Performative cruelty only fuels a politics that normalises and demands more cruelty. It’s government ministers, not asylum seekers, who need to change course.
On October 4, Brazilians put the son of a jailed coup plotter in line to win the presidency. Flávio Bolsonaro won 47 percent of valid votes to Lula’s 45 percent, with runoffs to be held this Sunday. There are two main explanations for the surprise outcome. The first blames Trump: his tariffs, his sanctions, his support for bolsonarismo. The second blames the economy, with high levels of material hardship working against the incumbent. Both are half right, but we can only understand the reality of the situation when we put these halves together.
As in Chile, Honduras, Colombia and Peru, voting took place in Brazil under intense pressure from Washington. There were trade tariffs tied to the trial of the elder Bolsonaro, sanctions placed on his trial judge, punitive measures slapped on the financial system, and a far-right candidate openly celebrating this interference. Yet the other regressive force came from within. Brazil continues to maintain an interest-rate regime that bleeds its working classes, transferring wealth upward to investors. There is a clear connection between these two factors. The empire and the rentier both live off Brazil’s surplus. The election must be seen as a struggle over its future.
Washington has set out its hemispheric strategy in no uncertain terms. The Trump administration wants to protect US supremacy against China in what it views as a civilisational contest. It aims to do this by securing the material means of ‘energy dominance’: cheap fossil fuel for its reshored factories and its allies locked into American gas, as well as leverage over global oil flows (including those that China imports). It also sees computation — chips, data centres, frontier models — as a crucial battleground. Washington is willing to bargain with Beijing over soybeans, aircraft, and rare earths, but it will not move on chip controls.
When an entire resource network cannot be dominated, the next best thing is to seize its chokepoints. This is how the Trump administration views Latin America, as the place where chokepoints come cheapest: a hemisphere of oil, minerals, electricity and server farms, all of which can be fenced off from China. After the raid on Venezuela, the US now holds a majority stake in 65 billion barrels on hundred-year terms. It has traded tariff relief for a minerals framework in Argentina and collected a minerals deal and a nuclear memorandum in Colombia.
Brazil is the next domino it wants to topple. This giant country pumps 3.8 million barrels of oil a day, more than any of its neighbours. It sits on the second-largest rare-earth reserves on earth and its electricity is 89 percent clean, which allows it to host half the region’s data-centre capacity. Its central bank runs Pix, a free public payment system that moves more transactions than credit and debit cards together. Lula remained unwilling to subordinate Brazil to the US. Under his presidency, the country fined and suspended American social media platforms that failed to curb far-right disinformation. It used its international position to work towards possible alternatives to dollar hegemony, building on systems like Pix. It charted its own course in foreign policy, rejecting US warmongering in the Middle East and Ukraine; and it vowed to fortify its democratic institutions against a Trump-backed takeover — prosecuting Jair Bolsonaro for his attempted coup in 2022.
Trump tried to use force to get Lula to yield. In July 2025, he decreed a 50 percent tariff. But Brazil did not retaliate and did not capitulate. Bolsonaro was convicted, coffee and beef got more expensive in the US, and the tariff was gone by November. The second attempt was smarter: a 25 percent duty that exempted everything American consumers would notice and focused instead on Pix, the platforms, and patents. In May, three days after Flávio’s visit to Trump, Washington put Brazil’s two biggest criminal groupings on its terrorist lists, which places any Brazilian bank at risk of secondary sanctions if it is accused of giving them ‘material support’.
Still, the intimidation failed to pay off. Coercion works best when the target country is dependent. In the 1980s and 90s, Brazil had dollar debts, few foreign exchange reserves and an IMF programme, and it did what it was told. Today, China buys 29 percent of its exports to the US’s 11, the central bank holds more than 300 billion dollars, and the country paid off the IMF in 2005. This makes for a less pliable state.
If the US cannot use trade to get its way, it must instead target the ‘network’ layer: dollar clearing, platforms, chips. Bringing them fully under its control requires a new government in Brazil. Hence support for the Bolsonaros, who are more than willing to hand over such strategic resources. Eduardo Bolsonaro moved to the US to lobby for sanctions on Brazilian judges. Flávio asked Trump for the terrorist designations, then tried to persuade the trade representative to freeze the tariff until after the election, since punishing Brazil may have handed victory to Lula. His platform promises to loosen environmental rules, legalise mining on indigenous land, and align with Washington on foreign and trade policy.
This is the latest chapter in a much longer story of Brazilian subordination. Washington did not directly orchestrate the coup of 1964 or the impeachment of 2016: two previous instances where the country’s left was defeated. Instead, it worked to elevate a ruling class that prefers to live off American patronage than to share domestic wealth. It need not take what can be freely given.
Yet a strategy this crude was unlikely to succeed on its own. Lula’s approval rating rose when the tariffs hit; sovereignty was one of his strongest campaign issues. The country’s high interest rates, however, drained vital support from the left. The policy rate is an astonishing 13.75 percent, which after inflation is close to 8.5 percent, more than any other economy in the top forty. Banks lend to households at 62 percent a year and on revolving credit cards at 445. A record 51 percent of adults are in default, and households spend nearly three tenths of their income servicing debt.
The same rate organises the public accounts. Before interest, the government’s deficit is 0.6 percent of GDP. After interest it is almost 9.5 percent. The gap, about 1.2 trillion reais (£180 billion) a year, flows to the owners of public debt: banks, funds, pension plans, and the families at the top of the distribution ladder. The country’s deficit is essentially an interest bill that reflects this massive transfer of wealth to the rich. The rent Brazil must pay at home is the twin of the one Washington wants to extract from abroad. One is charged in dollars by card networks and oil majors, the other in reais by the owners of the public debt. Both will be served by the Bolsonaros.
Lula’s third government chose to redistribute around this domestic toll rather than break with it. Every year the minimum wage beat inflation, income tax disappeared for incomes up to 5,000 reais (£745) a month, and dividends were taxed for the first time in thirty years. But the government kept the 3 percent inflation target that Bolsonaro’s finance minister had set, and kept the central bank’s autonomy to enforce it. It left the public banks lending at private rates, and wrote a fiscal rule that leaves the interest bill outside its limits. Under that rule the main cash transfer, Bolsa Família, stayed frozen until seventeen days before the first round. This is a dynamic that I have previously described as ‘contained social-developmentalism’: real gains for the poor, but inside a fiscal cage.
This explains the paradox of October. Brazilian unemployment is at a record low, real wages are rising, and inflation is inside the target band. Yet a 445 percent charge on one’s credit card is not a formula for reelecting an incumbent. In such a highly indebted country, this rate regime gives rise to political volatility.
Flávio’s trick is to hide one kind of rent behind the other. His campaign focused on crime, promising to build Salvador-style mega-prisons, as well as cutting tax across the board. His economic team has considered limiting pensions, disability benefits, and the health and education floors to inflation, according to Folha de S.Paulo; the campaign calls these ‘informal conversations’. Yet his programme says nothing about the interest bill. The electoral demography shows why. Bolsonarismo does not need to conceal its racism and misogyny: it knows it cannot win over these constituencies. Its path to success lies in convincing indebted workers — those who want their Sundays and their credit scores back, and who naturally feel that Lula has not delivered.
Lula has begun to fight on that terrain. In the last month of the campaign, he moved the contest away from identity and the culture war issues, where bolsonarismo is strongest, and onto the economy, where it is weakest. Bolsa Família rose by 15 percent, the first increase since 2023, from 600 to 691 reais (£89 to £103) a month for 19 million families. Congress passed a government bill forgiving 12.6 billion reais (£1.9 billion) in tax debts owed by 3.6 million self-employed microentrepreneurs, who were also promised grants and cheaper credit. The state-owned Banco do Brasil cut its personal loan rate by a fifth. The Treasury was authorised to buy up to 150 billion reais (£22.3 million) worth of defaulted consumer debt from the banks at a tenth of its face value. The online betting platforms that drained 62 billion reais (£9 billion) from households in 2025 were banned. And the government forced the Senate vote on the six-day week. None of this touches the interest rate. But it shows the direction that a fourth term would have to take.
The task now is to turn these campaign measures into a lasting agenda for economic sovereignty. Pix was defended by millions because it saved them money every day. The same principle must now be applied to credit, to the budget, and to the terms on which Brazil sells its resources. Public banks can cut rates and force private ones to follow. The inflation target can be adjusted to what the country’s productivity allows. Fiscal rules can be reformed to exempt public investment and the capitalisation of Petrobras, Eletrobras and the development bank — transforming Brazil’s trade with China from a commodity account into a real developmental strategy. Data centres and rare earths can be offered to anyone, on one condition: technology transfer, public equity, and electricity sold at cost to Brazilians before it is sold to servers.
Until just a few days ago, Brazil’s constitution permitted a six-day week. A movement launched by a pharmacy clerk pushed an amendment to end it through the lower house with only 22 votes against; in the Senate, Flávio’s party kept it off the floor for months. Seven in ten Brazilians supported the reform, including a majority of Bolsonaro voters, according to one poll, while three thousand employers’ associations lobbied against it. On 14 October, with the polls tied, the Senate finally passed it by 75 votes to one. Flávio had announced his support the day before, after visiting his father in prison; his allies already speak of revising the rule in 2027. Congress promulgated the amendment on 16 October, nine days before the runoff. This is what a sovereignty that pays looks like. The rentier could not block it and the empire could not sanction it. What remains to be decided on Sunday is who gets the credit.
British readers will recognise the shape of the problem. A centre-left government treats its fiscal rule as laws of nature, and the far right reaps the rewards. While Lula has defied the empire, he has not yet confronted the rentier. This inconsistency may already have sealed his fate. Yet if he manages to win on 25 October, the task of the left is to resolve it by reclaiming the country from its creditors.
It’s just over a month since teenagers in Mayotte, a French overseas territory, launched a protest against conditions at their high school: a facility built for 900 students in which 2,300 were enrolled. The movement they started — demanding more public investment and a better deal for teachers — has now upended French politics, inspiring hundreds of thousands to take to the streets in support of a new social settlement.
As the protests have expanded, the state’s response has become increasingly violent, culminating in the chaotic scenes of last Saturday. The coming weeks will decide whether it’s the left or the far right that stands to benefit in the upcoming presidential elections, where it is likely that Marine Le Pen will face off against Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
To analyse the movement and its next steps, Tribune spoke to the French political activist Rym Khadhraoui about the character of the uprising, the rival forces trying to capitalise on it, and why it’s reached a crucial crossroads.
What is the current situation of the protests? How have they developed over the past month?
The 17th of October was a turning point. Even before the high school movement started, there was speculation that the gilets jaunes would reemerge on that day to protest the rising price of fuel. By the time it arrived, we’d already had a month of massive youth-led uprisings. The entire country was in a state of anticipation. The hope was that different sectors would join forces — students, teachers, farmers, rail workers, all those hit by the cost-of-living crisis — and transform the demands around education into something more general. In the end, about 800,000 people turned out across France and caught the state entirely off guard: the biggest national demonstration since the movement against the pension reform in 2023. In Paris, heavy teargassing and kettling early in the day injured protesters and prevented the demo from properly forming. And there were also scenes of confrontation with police, damage to public buildings and stealing from shops in several cities.
The latter became the focus of public debate and media coverage. Macronism, of course, responded in the only way it knows how: with repression. Overnight curfews are now in place in some cities. Macronist politicians talk of calling in the army, expediting trials with harsh sentences, banning social media and outlawing protests altogether. We’ve entered a new phase, in which the movement has expanded and the state’s response has escalated.
Where do we go from here? It’s clear that Macronism is weak, and that because the government has no way of answering the movement’s social demands — none at all — it will continue to lash out, generating constant images of brutality which will reverberate across the internet. It’s also clear that more rounds of protests are coming, despite rising authoritarianism and school closures over the next two weeks. Some people are talking about October 24th as a time for act two of the gilets jaunes. The big trade unions have called for a day of action on November 5th, which may be accompanied by strikes. So there’s every reason to hope that this expansionary phase is just getting started.
Why was the movement able to broaden outward from its original constituency of high-schoolers?
France is known for having strong public services, a strong idea of redistribution. Macron’s aim was to break that promise and create a fully neoliberalised country like Britain. The high-school movement was a resounding assertion that the French will not accept this: that now, after ten years, they are ready to bury Macronism once and for all. The first school that went on strike was in Mayotte, a French overseas territory. It was followed by students in Créteil in the banlieue of Paris who had very specific demands linked to conditions in their school, which, like most public schools across the country, has dramatically deteriorated in recent decades. They lit a flame that spread rapidly.
There’s a distinctive feature here that we should point out. Unlike the gilets jaunes or the pensions protests, this movement was not opposing a specific law or demanding the repeal of a particular reform. From the beginning, it was an entirely positive protest, driven by the students’ feeling that they deserve more, that the state must meet its social commitments. The teachers were at the core of their demands; there was a spontaneous solidarity between them. These kids were deeply concerned with their teachers’ working lives, with the need for things like mental health support and nurses and psychologists in schools. It was impossible to portray them as selfish teenagers.
It didn’t take long for the movement to reach even the privileged and prestigious schools in the centre of Paris that are historically very right wing. Students there rose up and made clear that they were doing so in solidarity with schools in the banlieues. Obviously Gen Z has been politicised by many issues like the genocide in Gaza, the climate crisis, state racism, feminism. But even so, this kind of pure solidarity — the act of setting up a barricade because you are concerned about the situation of others — seemed like something new. That’s what made the demos so beautiful, so joyful. And it’s what made the state’s crackdown so barbaric.
Eight thousand people — 89 percent of them children — were arrested in just over two weeks. The total number arrested over a year of gilets jaunes protests was ten thousand. That shows you the intensification of the repression under Macron. Each day when the protesters assembled, the first act of the police would often be to spray them with tear gas, before moving in with a barrage of sting-grenades and rubber bullets. At least two children have lost eyes. One has lost a hand. A fourteen year-old boy had his jaw broken and teeth knocked out. The extent of the violence revealed Macronism for what it is: a political project that first causes children to lose a decent education, and then causes them to lose limbs when they protest. The movement began to bring in much wider layers partly because of public sympathy for the students in the face of this horrifying assault.
So those are two of the factors: the positive character of the movement and the outrage at the state repression. And then there is a third element, related to the upcoming presidential elections that will be held in April. Often France’s social movements die down in the runup to elections, but this time it’s different. In 2024, the leftist coalition, the Nouveau Front Populaire, won the elections for the National Assembly. Macron famously refused to respect the result, instead appointing a right-wing government which has ruled with an iron fist, attempting to slash social spending and smother dissent. So for many young people, the idea that we would wait for elections, that we would defer politics until polling day, no longer holds. Journalists have been asking some of the high school students, ‘Why don’t you simply cast your ballot in six months?’, and their response is almost always the same: they don’t have six months to wait; they don’t have a maths teacher right now. They have concrete demands that will only be answered if they take action.
How are France’s different political forces responding to the unrest? Let’s start with the far right.
Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has been trying to perform a double-act. On the one hand, they claim to have some ‘social’ conscience, to care about public services. On the other, they emphasise ‘security’ in the sense of hard borders, law and order, and state racism. This balance is now becoming impossible to maintain. Since the legislative elections of 2024 they have shown that they are aligned with Macron’s party on every major economic principle. They’ve voted in favour of its free-market policies. They’ve shown how desperate they are to reassure the investors and the EU. They just outlined their ‘alternative budget’ and — guess what? — it involves massive cuts to public spending. Confronted by a mass movement for more public investment, RN has no credible response. Its only option is to swerve away from the ‘social’ and fully embrace ‘security’, leaning even further into the issues of identity and immigration.
Whether this will be effective depends on what happens over the coming weeks. What we’ve seen since October 17th — news footage of windows being smashed and shops being robbed — could play to the RN’s advantage if the wider public turns against the protesters and begins to support the crackdown. The RN could then weaponise a very particular discourse of ‘order’, one which has no problem with children being maimed or mass arrested, but which cares an awful lot about things like theft and property damage. The party will try to present itself as the protector of this order, against a Macronist bloc that is too weak to enforce it and against a left that actively wants to destroy it. This message already resonates with a significant portion of the population. Probably around 30 percent of people would say we should put all the protesters in jail. If Le Pen becomes the tribune of this group, and convinces others to join them, then this makes things very difficult for LFI.
But there are a couple of reasons why the RN may struggle to pull this off. First, it’s hard for it to be the ‘party of order’ when pretty much all the other parties apart from LFI are vying for this same position. Its discourse isn’t that different to what the centrists are saying. Even the Socialist Party’s candidate Raphaël Glucksmann has been calling for all necessary measures to restore order. So it doesn’t exactly come across as an ‘anti-establishment’ line.
Second, it could be harder for the RN to mobilise nationalism when France has such a proud national tradition of popular protest. There’s the side of France that wants to lock up the protesters, but there is also another side of France — one that’s constantly ready to strike, that’s deeply engaged in social movements and proud to be marching in the streets. What we’ve seen with the student movement is a reappropriation of national symbols as revolutionary. When I was blocking my high school during the last big youth movement exactly twenty years ago, we would never have sung the national anthem or waved the French flag. Now this is changing. A young Black girl interviewed in front of her school recently told reporters, ‘Our curriculum is literally full of people who revolt — Arthur Rimbaud, La Boétie, Olympe de Gouges — and then they’re surprised when we revolt!’ She’s right. And it makes it all the more ridiculous when reactionaries try to blame the protests on Muslim immigrants. What could be more French than storming a public building to bring about social change!
So it’s possible that the right’s attempts to exploit the protests could backfire, especially if the left ensures that strong social demands remain at the centre of the movement and that police violence is opposed at every turn. These are the battle lines going into the presidential campaign.
So is this the strategy of the left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon?
Mélenchon remains hugely popular with the young. The latest poll gives him 49 percent with 18 to 24 year olds. When he joined the protests he was received like a rockstar. And it’s not just him. Senior LFI politicians like Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of Saint-Denis, came out and literally stood between the police and protesters. Others joined the blockades themselves. This is a party that’s channeling the energy of highly politicised young people who have strong ideas about what the state should provide.
In this sense LFI has no real rival on the left. Glucksmann has taken a moderate position, expressing some sympathy with the protesters while condemning the disorder. But that fails to cut through when the entire terms of the debate are being set by LFI: it is shaping the field of discourse with its boldly antagonistic approach. It is the only major party brave enough to stand with the protesters against the repressive apparatuses. It is also the only viable electoral force that has a genuine answer to the protesters’ demands: a redistributive programme that will put people before financial markets — taxes on wealth, public ownership, price caps, social investment, a lower retirement age, ecological planning. Macronism’s total inability to address inequality and material hardship has had a radicalising effect on many people, to the extent that these social policies have now become mainstream. The more Mélenchon can keep the emphasis on them, the more he stands to gain.
Of course, October 17th has put him in a somewhat trickier position. The official line from the government is now that the ‘ultra left’ has been fomenting riots and disorder. The investigative outlet Mediapart has reported yesterday that several territorial intelligence and police sources say they were pressured to portray LFI as being behind the movement and the related violence, despite internal assessments reportedly finding no evidence for that claim.
But Mélenchon and the party have already been accused of this for years now, so I doubt how effective this new wave of demonisation will be. Some of the population see him as a terrifying figure who simply wants to stoke chaos; many others know better. Mélenchon has said repeatedly that he supports peaceful protest and that he wants the students to know that there is no cause for despair — that voting for him at the presidential election can help to make their demands a reality.
It’s now up to the wider left to maintain this sense of hope as we enter this critical period. There are expectations that a general strike could be called, though it’s too soon to say. This could be a way of pushing the movement to the next level, linking student activism to workplace mobilisations — again, not simply to object to this or that law, but to advocate a total overhaul of the system itself. This broad movement can keep up the pressure on LFI as we head into the election to remain a vehicle for deep systemic change.
We don’t yet know how this will play out — whether the movement will continue to grow, and whether it will propel Mélenchon to the presidency. But even in the worst case scenario that Le Pen wins the runoffs on a pledge to restore order, the events of recent weeks have revealed something hugely important: that the French people will not accept her programme. New coalitions will form. New barricades will go up. We will not submit.
On Sunday 25 October, Brazilians vote in a crucial run-off election between progressive President Lula and far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was jailed for his role in attempting a coup to overturn the 2022 election result.
The election will shape the future not only of Brazil but of wider Latin America, where far-right forces backed by Washington have made huge inroads in recent years as Trump seeks greater influence over the region and, especially, its rare earth minerals, which are essential for advanced technologies and AI.
The first-round results and subsequent opinion polls indicate an incredibly close contest.
We believe it is for the Brazilian people alone to decide their country’s future, free from outside interference.
So we are deeply alarmed that the Trump administration has made clear its support for the Bolsonaro movement and has been intervening in Brazilian politics in the run-up to the election.
This has involved economic and diplomatic pressure, including the imposition of punitive tariffs on Brazilian goods explicitly linked to political goals, Trump holding a White House meeting with Flávio Bolsonaro, and reported US funding for groups seeking to undermine Brazilian institutions.
There are also mounting concerns about the role of interference by US-based tech platforms in the election, including suppression of pro-Lula content and online political adverts funded from the US in breach of Brazilian electoral law.
All this led 31 members of the US Congress to recently express alarm at the scale of US interference and destabilisation in Brazil.
Brazilian social movements and trade unions have warned that a victory for Flávio Bolsonaro would pose a threat to the social progress achieved in recent years, a danger to the Amazon, to the rights of Brazil’s large black population and other minorities, and even to democracy itself.
We oppose all US interference in Brazil’s election and stand in solidarity with the Brazilian people, their democratic rights and the social movements working for a more equal and just society.
Initial signatories include:
Richard Burgon MP, Chair of the Brazil Solidarity Initiative
Diane Abbott MP
Lorraine Beavers MP
Órfhlaith Begley MP
Apsana Begum MP
Siân Berry MP
Ian Byrne MP
Ellie Chowns MP
Jeremy Corbyn MP
Pat Cullen MP
Carla Denyer MP
Neil Duncan-Jordan MP
Colum Eastwood MP
Cat Eccles MP
John Finucane MP
Chris Hazzard MP
Chris Hinchliff MP
Dáire Hughes MP
Imran Hussain MP
Kim Johnson MP
Ian Lavery MP
Brian Leishman MP
Clive Lewis MP
Rebecca Long-Bailey MP
Cathal Mallaghan MP
Rachael Maskell MP
Paul Maskey MP
John McDonnell MP
Grahame Morris MP
Simon Opher MP
Kate Osborne MP
Adrian Ramsay MP
Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP
Hannah Spencer MP
Jon Trickett MP
Nadia Whittome MP
Christine Blower, Member of the House of Lords
John Hendy KC, Member of the House of Lords
Prem Sikka, Member of the House of Lords
Tony Woodley, Member of the House of Lords
Andrea Egan, General Secretary, UNISON
Maryam Eslamdoust, General Secretary, TSSA
Paul Fleming, General Secretary, Equity
Steve Gillan, General Secretary, POA
Daniel Kebede, General Secretary, NEU
Gawain Little, General Secretary, GFTU
Dave Ward, General Secretary, CWU
Sarah Woolley, General Secretary, BFAWU
Matt Wrack, General Secretary, NASUWT
Steve Wright, General Secretary, FBU
Jess Barnard, Labour NEC member
Marcus Barnett, Tribune
Sue Branford, Latin America Bureau
Lee Brown, Brazil Solidarity Initiative
Ben Chacko, Editor, Morning Star
Luke Daniel, President, Caribbean Labour Solidarity
Dr Francisco Dominguez, Co-author, Right-Wing Politics in the New Latin America
Sabby Dhalu, Co-Convenor, Stand up to Racism
Lindsey German, Convenor, Stop the War Coalition
Kate Hudson, Vice-President, CND
Myriam Kane, Black Liberation Alliance
Pablo Navarrete, Founding Editor, Alborada
Matt Willgress, Editor, Labour Outlook
Tim Young, Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America.
This statement was organised by the Brazil Solidarity Initiative and can also be viewed here.
‘On the careful choice of soldiers depends the welfare of the Republic, and the very essence of the Roman Empire and its power is so inseparably connected with this charge, that it is of the highest importance not to be entrusted indiscriminately.’
‘You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.’
Sometime in the early fifth century, an aristocratic Roman thinker with no first-hand experience of war sat down to write what would become the most important military rulebook in history. The short tract, Concerning Military Matters, ripped up conventional ideas about military affairs and the art of war, casting a long shadow over the following millennium of fighting. Its lessons ranged from instructions on how to manage raw and undisciplined troops to notes on legionary musical etiquette. But many of them were timeless. In the Middle Ages the rulebook was still treated as gospel by a rogue’s gallery of despots and their generals.
Its author, Flavius Vegetius Renatus, regarded his work as a clarion call to an empire that had awesome power but was beset by an array of problems — particularly, Vegetius believed, with its military. He addressed his preface for the first book directly to Emperor Valentinian with typical coyness: ‘I do not presume to offer this work to Your Majesty from a supposition that you are not acquainted with every part of its contents.’ Yet this faith in the leader’s intellect would prove wrongheaded. Over the next century, Vegetius’ wisdom on running a successful military machine would be spurned, and the Roman colossus would fall from its unrivalled global dominance.
In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon describes the empire’s pinnacle in glowing prose: ‘In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind,’ he writes. ‘The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour.’ Yet three centuries later in 410, Rome, the imperial capital, the symbol of all that was great and good in the empire, was sacked by the ‘barbarians’ who had once been its slaves. Historians have spent the last millennium trying to work out how this happened with such speed. ‘Although the topic has been popular, and myriad reasons have been offered to explain Rome’s fall, no consensus has emerged, and historians of the twentieth century have multiplied the variety of explanations many times over,’ writes one historian. Explanations range from the insidious influence of Christianity from the first century on to a tear in the moral fabric of Roman society.
But one strain of thought stands out — the military explanation. Here Vegetius was a pioneer. In his book, he observed that ‘so many defeats’ as the Romans suffered at the time can ‘only be imputed’ to the ‘careless choice of our levies.’ He feared that the careless attention paid to stocking the fighting force with upright and well-trained warriors could prove the death of the empire he loved. He was further alarmed at the ‘inclination so prevalent among the better sort in preferring the civil posts of government to the profession of arms.’ At the Battle of Châlons centuries before, Rome’s military had already been shown up as a shadow of its former self. The enemy commander Attila had the gall to inform his troops that Rome’s warriors were nothing but a ragtag army of nonentities. It was an unthinkable charge. ‘The dust of battle overwhelms them while they fight in close formation under a screen of protective shields,’ he taunted as his soldiers laughed. The descent culminated when the imperial city was sacked for the first time in 800 years, as one of the barbarian Germanic tribes that had been tormenting the empire, the Visigoths, stormed into Rome and looted for three days.
As he looked back centuries later, Gibbon saw the same trajectory as Vegetius. ‘In the purer ages of the Commonwealth,’ he wrote, ‘the use of arms was reserved for those ranks who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain.’ Gradually, though, things changed. ‘The common soldiers, like the mercenary troops of modern Europe,’ writes Gibbon, soon became ‘drawn from the meanest, and very frequently from the most profligate, of mankind.’ The Roman military had also opened its doors to the conquered enemies — a process referred to in the field as ‘barbarisation,’ which allowed mercenaries to receive Roman largesse in exchange for fighting the elite’s increasingly avaricious wars.
The new additions created endless problems for a military that had been the envy of the world. As historian Arthur Ferrill, author of The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation, writes, ‘Despite the impact of barbarisation, Roman forces continued to fight according to traditional Roman tactics, yet those tactics, previously so superior, seemed absurd to the barbarians of the fifth century.’ It had a significant and detrimental impact on the ability of the army to do its job. ‘To fight effectively in close order, troops require intensive drill and rigorous discipline,’ says Ferrill. ‘Romans of the fifth century apparently maintained the old formations but abandoned the necessary training. As a result they combined the worst features of the Roman and barbarian styles of fighting.’ The importance of the ‘careful choice of levies’ has continued to occupy all the most renowned military thinkers. Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that one of the ways ‘in which a ruler can bring misfortune upon his army’ is by ‘employing the officers of his army without discrimination’, while Nicolo Machiavelli warned that ‘If a prince bases the defense of his state on mercenaries he will never achieve stability or security. For mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined, and disloyal; they are brave among their friends and cowards before the enemy.’ Both books were apparently favorites of American military planners before and during the War on Terror.
History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it often resonates. In the American psyche, 9/11 seemed to echo the sacking of Rome. It wasn’t a verdict on the military weakness of the country — the US still had hundreds of bases around the world and its defense budget was nearly as much as that of the rest of the world combined. But it did precipitate the War on Terror which saw the decline and so-called barbarisation of the US military, with the inclusion of domestic ‘undesirables’ on a scale comparable to the twilight of the Roman imperium. In fact, the American military’s deterioration was considerably quicker and more dangerous. And the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq could well foreshadow the diminution of American power along Roman lines. Since these debacles and the subsequent financial crisis, the concept of ‘American Decline’ is now invoked across the media and academia.
In Vegetius’ second address to the Empire he made a plea: ‘The expense of keeping up good or bad troops is the same,’ he wrote, ‘but it depends wholly on You, most August Emperor, to recover the excellent discipline of the ancients to correct the abuses of later times. This is a reformation the advantages of which will be equally felt by ourselves and our posterity.’ He could easily have been addressing US President Barack Obama in January 2009. Like the Roman Emperor, Obama was inheriting a military broken by the ‘abuses of later times’ — or, more specifically, by the Bush administration. Its troops were scarred, many mentally unstable and untreated, ravaged by two wars and the subsequent occupations for which the Pentagon was ill-prepared. Countless families across the nation were (and are) dealing with loved ones who have changed forever, while the military had reached the lowest point in its history.
‘We’re on the brink,’ said Thomas White, former Secretary of the Army, earlier in the War on Terror. ‘We are in a situation where we are grossly overdeployed, and it is unlike any other period in the 229-year history of the Army. We have never conducted a sustained combat operation with a volunteer force, with a force that we have to compete in the job market to hire every year.’ It was a task without historical precedent, and it fell to Obama to fix for posterity what had been so disastrously broken. ‘I thought by the end of Vietnam . . . we had broadly destroyed the US Army,’ White added. ‘The non-commissioned officer leadership had vanished. Indiscipline rates were way, way up. We needed a complete rebuilding of the force from bottom to top. And that’s precisely what we engaged ourselves in for the next 20 years or so.’
Obama had been forceful in denouncing the use of veterans as guinea pigs to test new drugs on. He had come out equally strongly against the discriminatory ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. He had backed the post-9/11 GI Bill, which would pay out $78 billion in education benefits to veterans who had served in the military after September 11. ‘What this new generation of veterans must know is this,’ he declared. ‘Our nation’s commitment to all who wear its uniform is a sacred trust that is as old as our republic itself. It is one that, as President, I consider a moral obligation to uphold.’ Obama announced a new twenty-first-century Veterans Health Administration which would make it easier for veterans with PTSD to receive the medical benefits they deserved, while the GI Bill would also open up educational opportunities and job training to those coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. It seemed he was aware that if the government continued to get the reintegration of its soldiers back into civilian society wrong, it would have disastrous effects for America for decades to come.
But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear. Obama had originally opposed the war in Iraq and his campaign had been built partly on his ironclad commitment to end the war. ‘As a candidate for this office, I pledged I would end this war. As President, that is what I am doing.’ But in reality, many of the Bush administration’s most destructive policies were simply kept in place. The final 50,000 non-combat US troops were brought home in 2011, but many called it the privatization of the occupation, as security contractor numbers continued to rise. At the same time, Obama ratcheted up operations in the other front in the War on Terror: within a year of his inauguration he announced a ‘surge’ in Afghanistan which would increase troop levels by 30,000, keeping up the pressure on the broken military. In 2011, just 34 percent of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan believed the wars had been worth fighting. At the same time, both veterans and active-duty personnel were less likely to approve of Obama than the rest of the population.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the longest combat operations in American history. Millions of lives were destroyed in the process and whole societies traumatised. The project ended up as a humanitarian catastrophe for the occupied populations but, contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t a failure for the ideologues who started the conflagrations. Rumsfeld’s vision of an eviscerated civilian military was, in the end, and at great human cost, realised. Trying to keep the army small when the wars demanded large numbers of troops meant the military acted more and more like a corporation; unfortunately it was a corporation without enough employees. Morten G. Ender at the Military Academy in West Point put it this way: ‘What’s new is the all volunteer force. The military now has to rely on the corporate model. If people don’t come to your business you have to compromise your standards or lower your expectations.’ In power, Obama ended up using more private security contractors than even the Bush administration had, despite promising to phase out what journalist Jeremy Scahill calls their ‘unconstitutional’ use. In truth it was impossible to do without them: the broken US military could not long stand on its own two feet. The fact that its armed forces have become US military Inc. should be extremely worrying for the American public, for the military planners whose concern is projecting power around the world, and for those who may be next on the receiving end of their bombs.
It is clear that the military’s drop in standards unleashed a significant tranche of mentally unstable, extremist, and violent individuals upon the Iraqi and Afghan populations. Many of the most sickening of the atrocities committed by US service members — from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal to the Mahmudiyah massacre — were directly related to the loosening of standards. It might be a felon who had received a ‘moral waiver’ but couldn’t shake off his criminal impulses, or a neo-Nazi granted a newfound freedom in the military. It could be a drunk soldier who picked up his weapon in the middle of a binge and went out to take pot-shots at the locals. This had profound implications for the pretext of the military interventions, which were billed as a moral crusade to bring democracy to the benighted Middle East.
For modern military occupations, destruction of the occupied society is usually de rigueur. But the evidence strongly suggests that a military rife with addicts and neofascists is even more likely to grievously harm the society it occupies. The Irregular Army also ended up as the largest anthropological experiment in history, with US service members as the guinea pigs. In 1992, as Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney had said ‘The military is not a social welfare agency . . . We aren’t there to run social experiments. We are there to fight and win wars,’ but under his administration’s watch a ‘social experiment’ is what it became.
Weird alliances were formed under these auspices. Neo-Nazis from Iowa broke bread with gang-bangers from Chicago in Baghdad, and alcoholics supped ‘hajji juice’ with the mentally ill in Fallujah. In November 2010, it was reported that Mexican drug cartels were enlisting white supremacists to smuggle illegal drugs across the border. Members of both of groups had been enlisted in the military in considerable numbers during the War on Terror. Did the relationship begin there? The military’s recruitment policy now bears much responsibility for America’s ongoing social degeneration. From the mentally scarred soldiers who are refused treatment (many of whom end up in the criminal justice system) to heavily trained gang-bangers stalking the streets of US cities, the barbarisation of the US armed forces will be a theme that returns again and again, touching on many of the ills that plague the country.
Over the coming decades, these veterans of the War on Terror, many of them with military training and easy access to weapons, will continue to stalk the streets of both the US and the Middle East. Indeed, the Trump administration now welcomes such people into government. America will pay for this in the blood of its own citizens, as will the subject populations of the countries its military occupies. A warning shot was fired in March 2011 when the FBI arrested Kevin William Harpham, a 36-year-old army veteran and member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, in Spokane, Washington, on suspicion of planting a bomb at a Martin Luther King Day celebration, which if detonated would have killed hundreds of people. How many more Harphams are out there? How many more lives will they take? And how will this affect America’s already precarious imperial power?
This is an edited extract from Matt Kennard’s book Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals, recently published by OR Books in a new and expanded edition.
It’s like a traffic accident: a fatal junction, a death. Macronism is dying at the crossroads for which it has always been destined: the intersection of capital and people. Here, capital appears in its purest form — the form of money that makes money, without mediation: finance capital. And opposite it, the fire. The FT ran an early headline: ‘France Caught Between the Bond Market and the Barricades.’ There we are: right to the bone.
Four decades of neoliberal rot are now coming to a head at this point of terminal crisis — the point where two incompatible principles of sovereignty collide: the financial markets’ claim to sovereignty, as they seek to control all public policies, shape them according to their wishes, and nip in the bud any they dislike; and the sovereignty of the people. Macronism is the party of the former against the latter: choose France, please the markets — as for the rest: riot police, eye-gouging, mutilations.
It took until 2017 for capital to get a man of capital elected. Previously, there had been lingering delays, awkward timidity, occasional backtracking. But with Macron, everything has become clear. It is no coincidence that the sovereign debt crisis erupted at the same time as the political crisis (let’s stop talking about a ‘social’ crisis): these are characteristic features of a global order headed for ruin, when all its internal processes synchronise, signalling that fundamental contradictions of the matrix have reached a critical moment. The matrix has created its own impasse — its total impasse.
How did we get here? 1) Sanctify the financial markets, applaud their complete control over the economy, and celebrate their role as watchdogs of the neoliberal order: distant, abstract, incomprehensible, beyond the reach of any protest movement — perfect. 2) Enact the Tax Law: exempting both the rich and capital from being taxed. 3) Watch as the deficit inevitably widens and the debt balloons. 4) Invoke ‘the debt’ (self-imposed) and ‘the markets’ (deliberately enshrined) to begin the rampage: cut, impoverish, privatise, commodify. 5) Turn the people protesting into enemies and subdue them with weapons of war. Until the day when — no. No more. Then, the bunker that the rich thought they had built turns against them: the final explosion of the matrix.
The last adjustment variable — the one on which the rich had staked everything, the variable of voluntary servitude — has just collapsed. The daily of the bourgeoisie, Le Monde, is ‘dismayed’ by the ‘accumulation of crises’. One can see why these people are despondent, situated at the intersection of blabocracy (the government of loudmouths) and morocracy (the government of idiots). They cannot understand a thing unless they are destroying things. Their impasse is total. Their equation has no solution; there is no way out. The people have broken free from the straitjacket and forced Prime Minister Lecornu into it. This unfortunate man is under orders to announce a fiscal recovery plan just as the entire country rises up to tell him: No, not this time.
A formidable nemesis: it’s no longer even about Parcoursup, or the de-indexing of pensions, or housing assistance; it’s about everything. No authority can reassert itself when everything is called into question; that is to say, when the primal sovereignty of the people — denied by the usurping sovereignty of capital and the markets — rises up. This gigantomachy was bound to happen eventually. Now its time has come.
But poor Lecornu hasn’t seen anything yet. Like the media morocrats, he doesn’t realise that the real financial cyclone — the one involving private debt, AI, private credit and private equity, as well as household debt — hasn’t hit yet; it’s still gathering strength. It will ravage the US financial system and thus the entire neoliberalised world system. Banks and insurance companies will go under and will have to be bailed out. Yet again. With public money. The ensuing recession will be devastating. Deficits will skyrocket. Why? Because this is a crisis of everything: ‘La Totale’.
‘La Totale’ is also a historic opening. Under the guise of youth — astonishing in every respect — popular sovereignty is surging forward. We know the bourgeois order’s only response: to terrorise. But these ‘solutions’ are only temporary. Their scope is limited. The sum total of everything that is unbearable — high schools, colleges, diesel, food, wages, firefighters, healthcare, public services, pensions — has crashed up against the sum total of all those who can no longer bear the unbearable. Behind the high school students spearheading the movement, the larger battalions are beginning to grow restless. The fatal error of Macronism: because it corrupts everything, everything can work towards its overthrow.
When everything comes into play, the balance shifts. The Nahel revolt — from which the current movement draws much of its legacy — had seen the police teeter on the brink of collapse: too many red lights flashing on the ‘big board’ in the Interior Ministry’s crisis room, too many hotspots in too many places across the country, impossible to keep track of — so in came the police brigades, the RAID, the BRI, the madness of a regime already on the ropes. Now, we wait for nothing more than for the working class rise from its strongholds and take the stage: refinery workers, transit workers, sanitation workers. Picket lines everywhere, blockades everywhere: the Total Strike — but ours. From one Total Strike to another: the Total Strike of the uprising against the Total Strike of the bourgeois crisis. The police are overwhelmed, resorting to extremes that will fuel hatred against them to levels where fear is transformed into a desire for revenge.
Whatever happens from here on out, this regime has lost. In ten years, Macronism has quite literally destroyed the country, before sinking into shame and disgust. We have long awaited the moment to present it with the bill. And here it is. Macronism is not only morally delegitimised but also symbolically defeated. No movement in France since May ’68 has produced such a wealth of imagery. TikTok has become the channel of vitality, invention and creativity: when we aren’t trembling with rage at videos of police violence, we’re crying with laughter — or simply crying because it’s so beautiful. Who would have thought: TikTok, the return of Simone Weil’s ‘pure joy’.
A tyrannical regime cannot beat it. Here, high school students sing Aznavour’s ‘Emmenez-moi’ beneath the sunlight; there, eruptions of energy right under the bullies’ noses. We don’t know where to look. A radio broadcast arrives from the blockade at none other than the École Alsacienne, the famously elite private school, where a ‘woman in fur’ is asked for her view of the students. The woman in fur says ‘I support them.’ In the background, we hear the protesters sing the final verses of The Internationale at the top of their lungs. Only times of extreme crisis produce scenes so absurd, so joyful. The symbolic disaster is total. There is no recovering from this convergence of images.
La Totale marks the culmination of a bourgeois state that has been looming on the horizon for quite some time: a state reduced to two ministries — the Ministry of the Budget and the Ministry of the Interior. Or, to put it another way: the Ministry of Friends (the markets) and the Ministry of Enemies (the people). As the first runs up against the economic impasse of neoliberalism, the second comes to hold all the power. It is nothing more than a gathering of sadistic thugs at every level; this is indeed the novelty of Macronism.
Even Pasqua, even Pandraud, even Sarkozy, even Hortefeux knew when to stop. The new rulers do not. They take pleasure in beating people, gouging out eyes, maiming, strangling young women or groping them. The levels of sexual violence in police custody are staggering. The police are nothing more than a degenerate force, made up of degenerates. We are living in an era where the police now inspect protest signs. What little bell is jingling inside an officer’s head when he decides which are allowed and which are not? Who gives such instructions? It’s true, as we are often told, that there are lawless zones in the country: they are called ‘the Ministry of the Interior’ and ‘the police stations’.
Such is the hideous spasm of powers on the wane. Macron, a sham ruler and a puppet of historical forces that overwhelm him on all sides, came to power to carry out neoliberalism — that is, to bring it to an end. He has now been overthrown, and by whom? By kids. An abject disgrace on top of a historic failure. A young girl protesting sums up the situation: ‘I don’t understand why they tell us not to revolt’, she says, ‘when our curriculum is literally full of people who revolt — Arthur Rimbaud, La Boétie, Olympe de Gouges’. Suddenly, the morocrats of the 24-hour news channels — old, white, bourgeois — find themselves ridiculed. The unfathomable hypocrisy of bourgeois culture, which cares nothing for what it reads, what it sees, what it claims to revere — which celebrates merely to embalm and neutralise — is exposed. Only young people, from the depths of their integrity, can rediscover it.
Among the avalanche of photos destined to go down in history, one will undoubtedly stand out. It shows a child, sitting on the ground against a police van, handcuffed, beneath the two thugs who arrested him. Everything in the frame is dark: the street, the police vehicle, especially the helmeted officers. But a patch of light radiates, leaping out of the image: the face of this child looking directly at the camera. It’s as beautiful as a Rembrandt.
The entire period has become melodramatic, full of stark polarities — from Rembrandt to Hugo, so to speak. But one subsumes all others. There is the struggle, which is life, and the bourgeoisie, which is death.
The Labour Party has issued an extraordinary ultimatum. It has ordered its councillors to withdraw from any power-sharing deals with the Greens unless local Green parties renounce the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion passed at their national conference last month. The edict could affect as many as 19 councils, including Sheffield and Warwick, causing administrative gridlock and disruption to local services.
At Prime Minister’s Questions this week, Andy Burnham also ruled out any coalition or co-operation agreement with the Greens at national level — putting paid to the notion of a progressive pact against Reform — on the grounds that the motion is ‘antisemitic’ and ‘wrong’.
This was a strange about-face. Burnham had previously been trying to distance himself from his predecessor on the issue of Palestine. He apologised for Labour’s handling of Gaza under Starmer (while stopping short of describing the genocide as such), and last month imposed limited sanctions on Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements.
Now, the ultimatum threatens to undo that careful positioning. Burnham is imposing a purity test that requires Greens who wish to work with his party to drop any anti-Zionist commitments. For those who ditched Labour over Gaza, this will be a stark reminder of its complicity in the genocide — giving the lie to any notion that it has meaningfully changed.
The fact is that Labour was dragged kicking and screaming into even token sanctions against Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank. The measures, imposed after years of persistent pressure, do not represent any fundamental change in policy; British diplomats reportedly reassured the Trump administration that they were merely ‘symbolic’.
The passing of the Zionism is Racism motion has since sent Labour scuttling back to its political comfort zone: running cover for Zionism and demonising its opponents. Under Burnham, the occasional rebuke to ‘illegal settlers’ or expression of concern about Palestinian casualties might be just about acceptable. But questioning the ideology that motivates the atrocities is not.
Those who support the Palestinian freedom struggle are often accused of having an ‘obsession’ or ‘fixation’, as if there were something pathological about refusing to look away from the destruction of a people. Yet we can now see that it is Labour which is returning again and again to Zionism, like a dog to its vomit. It will continue to fly the flag for this cause, even when it undermines its own attempts to win back voters and plunges its councils into crisis.
Let’s be clear on that last point: Labour is so committed to the founding ideology of a foreign state that it will put it ahead of the needs of local residents and the services on which they rely. Who are the real obsessives here?
The turn of events has also once again exposed the dangerous and cynical weaponisation of antisemitism. First Corbyn, now Polanski: any force that challenges the Westminster consensus, even if it happens to be the only British political party with a Jewish leader, will be smeared as a threat to Jews. There is no means of placating these hostile forces; were the Greens to renounce Zionism is Racism, the goalposts would be shifted once again, and they would be placed at the centre of some other concocted crisis.
Thus does history repeat itself. But what’s most astonishing this time is the unbridled arrogance of a Labour Party that has spent three years of backing Israel’s genocide to the hilt now presuming to give morality lectures to the Greens. The viciousness of its attack proves the emptiness of its contrition over Gaza.
All this may well turn out to be an overreach. Even voters who know little about Palestine or Zionism will struggle to understand why Labour is turning on its own local administrations. The impression it creates is not of a party that’s been renewed as a force for ‘hope’, but of one that remains petty, vindictive, opportunistic and self-serving.
On Sunday 4 October, thousands of people from across the country joined the unity parade celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street: a landmark in local and labour movement history, which saw communities band together to face down Oswald Moseley’s fascist forces as they tried to terrorise East London.
Today, blackshirts are on the march again, with at least 100,000 turning out for the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally last autumn. This was a sobering reminder of the need to redouble our efforts, going beyond nostalgia, brass bands and platform speakers, and building a national movement against the far right inspired by Cable Street’s example.
Here the trade unions are critical. No other organisations have the same potential to link workplaces to local communities. With 6.5 million members and massive resources at their disposal, they should be playing a more dynamic, consistent and creative role: engaging not only in a war of manoeuvre, to fight back against racist immigration policies, but also a longer war of position, to build an anti-racist consensus on this question.
Since May, Tower Hamlets Trades Council, where I serve as co-secretary, has led a season of cultural activities about the significance of the Battle of Cable Street and why it still matters. Under the heading ‘TOGETHER on Cable Street’, more than thirty events were held across the borough, organised with a wide range of local organisations: history walks, book talks, a film season, concerts, poetry and mural painting, projects with local schools. Hundreds of people have come here to take part.
The season was a success, but it was also a reminder that work still needs to be done. We cannot take for granted that everyone knows what happened on 4 October 1936, particularly the younger generations. And the unfortunate reality is that the labour movement is not as strong or as bold as it was back then.
Among some trade unionists there is a sense of resignation to the fact that a significant number of union members support Reform and other far-right forces: a trend that reflects accumulating despair after decades of economic malaise. But such views cannot be tackled by ignoring them, any more than staying at home was the way to beat Mosley’s blackshirts.
Nor can we simply hold out hope that Andy Burnham will save the day. On the contrary, the new prime minister seems reluctant to use his power to confront the far right directly. The early signs of his policy agenda (weak commitments to deal with the housing crisis, fiscal rules to block real public investment) suggest he is reluctant to make reforms at the scale needed to tackle racist scapegoating.
Finally, factionalism both within trade unions and between them risks undermining a united front against reactionary nationalism. Rather than being siloed in different sectors, we need more practical collaboration to reassert the unity of our struggle.
One union that threw its weight behind the Battle of Cable Street commemoration was Unite. For weeks leading up to the anniversary, it dedicated staff time and resources to a variety of activities aimed at raising the profile of trade unions in fighting racism, using Cable Street as an example. Unite produced a widely circulated tabloid featuring a range of relevant issues in an accessible style alongside a range of campaigning materials. And on the eve of the 4 October parade, it organised a gig pitched specifically at younger people, as well as commissioning a stained-glass window commemorating the anniversary.
This is the kind of unapologetic, diverse approach to anti-racist campaigning that trade unions are best placed to deliver. Our efforts in Tower Hamlets show the potential for the labour movement to reach beyond its usual confines and remake the national debate, applying pressure for policies that tackle inequality and unaffordability, and creating spaces of solidarity in which anti-racist consciousness can form. During our season Tower Hamlets Trades Council worked with a local who runs a community garden, and who made a striking point. ‘You can’t superimpose anti-racism’, he said. ‘You have to patiently grow it.’
After a three-decade absence of Orange feet on Portadown’s Garvaghy Road, the once historic dispute at Drumcree has reignited. On 25 September, the Parades Commission gave members of the Orange Order permission to march down the predominantly Catholic street — reviving an old display of sectarian force, and triggering a standoff that saw thousands mobilise to defend the local community.
This backwards strain of political unionism, whose supremacy was once upheld by the British state, has now been forced to recognise that its power is on the wane. Last week the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Chris Bryant, ordered cancellation of the march, reflecting Orangeism’s diminished influence in Whitehall, the six counties and Portadown itself — once considered an Orange Citadel.
But despite the euphoria that followed the decision, it’s clear that deep scars have been reopened. Speaking to Tribune at the Garvaghy Road, one woman described witnessing the beatings her parents, aunts and uncles received at the hands of the Royal Ulster Constabulary the last time the Orangemen paraded down their road in the 1990s. Politicians like the DUP’s Carla Lockhart told residents to ‘regulate their emotions’ at the planned Orange presence, ordering a community to wash away its anger at an orchestrated campaign of murder waged against them, which between 1996 and 1999 alone saw 21 people killed in a ruthless effort to silence opposition to the parade.
The most infamous of these horrors, never far from the lips of residents, was the brutal murder of the Quinn children: three Irish boys, aged eight, nine and ten, burned alive in their family home by members of the Ulster Volunteer Force.
Another victim was the solicitor Rosemary Nelson. An inquiry into her murder concluded that the abuse she received from RUC members legitimised her as a target for paramilitaries; that leaked police intelligence increased the danger to her life; and that despite her life being in danger, the RUC failed to provide her with protection. After Nelson’s murder, an Orange Hall held a celebration.
Nelson’s daughter-in-law, Councillor Catherine Nelson, told me that when her husband was a child, he would see his mother come home ‘battered and bruised’ — looking ‘frightened but determined’. Now, to now see his wife on the same road, she said, ‘made him worry about me, it triggered those memories’.
Linda O’Neill, a ‘first-generation’ Garvaghy resident who works at the community centre and is a member of the Garvaghy Road Residents Association, described how Drumcree sits within a longer history of anti-Catholic pogroms. Her parents had been driven from another part of Portadown in their youth, and she had grown up knowing of other families burned out of their homes by gangs of armed men, sometimes aided by the police.
To Linda, the Garvaghy Road was developed as a ‘ghetto’ for ‘Catholics who couldn’t get houses anywhere else’. There has always been a close connection between the Orange marches and violence, she said. Many years ago she saw the paramilitary killer Billy Wright, known as ‘King Rat’, holding a gun to her friend’s head and saying, ‘You’re only alive because I need you to send a message. The Orange Order’s coming down the road.’
Louth TD Ruairí Ó Murchú told Tribune that a sectarian march with such a violent history, staged in a community that does not want it, ‘wouldn’t be accepted anywhere else in the Western world’. The fragile political ecology in the North of Ireland has long been uniquely generous to the Orange Order — a group that bans Catholic members and prohibits its ‘brethren’ from marrying Catholics or attending Catholic weddings and funerals.
Residents take an attitude of disinterest towards the dozens of other Orange marches in Portadown, content to ignore what is not rubbed in their faces. For all the ultimata placed on Drumcree in the year to March 2026, there were 2,507 unionist marches across the six counties, 26 times the number of republican marches. Only 1.5 percent faced restrictions on their route. As one woman put it: ‘They only fixate on this one small strip of land because someone told them they couldn’t march through a nationalist area.’
Locals who spoke to Tribune were resolute in their refusal to let their pain fester into anything resembling sectarianism. There is no interest in replacing orange supremacy with its green equivalent. There is simply the reasonable demand to ‘live in peace in our own community without being intimidated’. Whatever the future holds, Garvaghy Road knows, after the outpouring of support from across the island of Ireland and indeed around the world, that it will never stand alone.
Nor should the most extreme end of loyalism be allowed to declare itself the singular voice of the wider Protestant community. The demonstrations backing the march were tragic affairs and relied on AI to artificially bolster dwindling crowds. The Belfast Telegraph reported that ‘many senior unionists and even some top Orangemen will have been quietly delighted’ at Bryant’s intervention. An open letter signed by well over a thousand Protestants stood behind the Garvaghy Road residents. In the aftermath of such an exhausting struggle, Linda stressed, ‘all Protestant people who have attended our Community Centre for years know that this door will always be open to them.’
For the DUP, the dispute is a useful distraction. The party has spiralled into a self-inflicted crisis over its support for Brexit — an event that predictably opened up new possibilities for Irish unity — and has failed to articulate any positive vision for Irish life inside of the United Kingdom. It hopes that beating the sectarian drum will also divert from the imminent sentencing of its former leader Jeffrey Donaldson, recently found guilty on eighteen counts of child sexual abuse.
Amid the crisis of unionism, its most extreme fringes have risen in prominence, with unelected figures like Jamie Bryson, an alleged spokesperson for loyalist paramilitaries, coming to the fore. He and his like offer direction — albeit reactionary and sectarian — for a rudderless ship. This is a disciplined and, as the legal battles over Drumcree suggest, well-resourced tendency that is filling the vacuum left by the DUP.
The Garvaghy Road dispute is downstream from Bryson’s strategy. He claimed this week that the Orange Order would now march ‘all of those traditional routes again’, signalling his intention to replicate the standoff elsewhere and generate a culture war over previously settled parade routes. Alongside wider attempts to target the Irish Sea border and the promotion of the Irish language, Bryson represents a project to drag the North backwards. He has plainly stated his goal on X: ‘Pull Stormont Down’.
The DUP now faces a dilemma. If it charts a different, more moderate course to Bryson, it risks opening up space on its right flank to Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice (who called for Garvaghy Road to be ‘sanitized’). This would require leadership the DUP has not demonstrated and political authority it no longer wields. The alternative is climbing into the passenger seat and letting Bryson drive unionism toward a trajectory that would rob the DUP of the authority it derives from its place on Northern Ireland’s Executive.
Trying to play by Bryson’s rules is already backfiring for the DUP. They recently made a failed attempt to pass a vote of no confidence in the Sinn Féin First Minister Michelle O’Neill over her support for the Garvaghy Road community. Bryson dismissed the move as theatrics and demanded the party withdraw entirely from the power-sharing government. The politics of the lowest common denominator rarely pays off.
As tensions simmer, Sinn Féin’s National Chairperson Declan Kearney has called on the British left to ‘rally once more in defence of the Irish peace process. To stand with us in support of equality, democracy and Irish unity.’ Kearney insisted to Tribune that the Good Friday Agreement ‘is a peace settlement, not a political settlement’, and that it cannot be taken for granted. As this historic achievement built on the principle of equality comes under increasing strain from reactionary forces, we must respond with one voice: There is No Going Back.
Artificial intelligence is about to change everything. The most pessimistic predictions foresee the end of humanity itself. The most optimistic imagine a future in which work becomes largely optional, with people free to spend more time with their families, communities and personal interests.
The outcomes will likely fall somewhere between those extremes. Yet wherever you stand on that spectrum, one thing is clear: we are on the brink of a technological transformation that will fundamentally reshape our economy, society and workplaces.
This is serious business, and it is something politicians must engage with fully. The deployment of artificial intelligence raises profound questions about power, wealth, work and democracy.
Even setting aside the most dramatic warnings about existential risk, there are significant concerns about job displacement, the spread of scams and misinformation, increased surveillance, and the environmental costs associated with the infrastructure required to support these systems.
At the same time, we should not approach AI simply as a threat. For generations, our movement has argued that the benefits of technological progress should be shared by the many rather than captured by the few. Trade unionists fought for the weekend, bank holidays, pensions and the eight-hour working day. Those victories were made possible by rising productivity combined with collective organisation. Artificial intelligence has the potential to drive productivity gains on a scale rarely seen before. The question is not whether those gains will exist, but who will benefit from them.
History offers important lessons. The Luddites are often portrayed as opponents of technology itself. In reality, they were workers resisting a model of economic change that threatened their livelihoods while concentrating wealth and power in fewer hands. Their objection was not to innovation but to injustice. Today’s debate about artificial intelligence raises many of the same questions. Workers should not be expected to carry all of the risks while a small number of corporations and billionaires enjoy the rewards.
If AI significantly increases productivity, those gains must translate into higher living standards for ordinary people. Higher wages, shorter working hours and stronger public services should be the benchmarks by which success is measured. Technological progress has little value if it leaves working people poorer, less secure and with less control over their lives. The arrival of artificial intelligence demands a new social settlement. If machines can increasingly perform tasks once undertaken by people, society must rethink not only how economic security is provided but also how purpose, dignity and fulfilment are sustained.
Policies such as a shorter working week with no loss of pay, universal basic services, stronger collective bargaining rights and new forms of social protection should be central to that conversation. The goal should not be to preserve every existing job forever, but to ensure that everyone shares in the benefits of automation.
The development and deployment of AI cannot be left solely to multinational technology companies and a handful of socially awkward billionaires. When some of the most influential figures in the technology sector struggle to answer basic questions about whether humanity’s future should take precedence over technological acceleration, it is clear that the decisions shaping our society cannot be left in their hands.
How these systems are used in workplaces, schools, public services and government should be subject to democratic oversight. Workers and their representatives must have a meaningful voice in how AI is introduced, how data is collected and how decisions affecting employment and public services are made. Transparency, accountability and democratic control must be at the heart of the AI revolution.
There is growing debate about whether there should be a pause in the expansion of the infrastructure required to embed AI more deeply into our lives. Taking time to consider the social, economic and environmental consequences of such a profound transformation is no bad thing. Yet while that debate continues, the major technology companies press ahead, embedding AI ever more deeply into everyday life with the active support of governments around the world.
Behind every AI system sits a vast physical infrastructure that is largely invisible to the public. Data centres have become an essential part of modern life, supporting everything from online banking and video streaming to public services and cloud computing. The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is now driving unprecedented demand for digital infrastructure, with a growing number of data-centre developments proposed across the United Kingdom.
In my own constituency, there are now three separate proposals for data centres within a relatively small geographical area. While these developments may bring investment and technological opportunities to the country as a whole, it is local communities that live with their consequences.
Data centres require substantial amounts of electricity, water and land. People have legitimate questions about environmental impacts, pressure on energy networks, transport infrastructure and the use of valuable development sites. That is why I have called for a moratorium on future data centres so we can get this right. These concerns should not be dismissed as anti-technology sentiment. They are practical, reasonable questions about how growth is managed and who benefits from it.
Rejecting data centres outright may be unrealistic. However, small pockets of industrial land cannot simply become the plug socket for Britain’s digital economy. Any development must deliver a clear public benefit. When people access online services, they have little idea where their data is being processed, and too often there appears to be no lasting advantage for the communities that host these facilities.
If growth is being driven from their doorstep, those communities should see tangible returns. That could include a direct financial levy on operators, programmes that create skilled employment opportunities, investment in local energy networks and robust environmental safeguards. If local people are expected to shoulder the impacts of AI infrastructure, they should also share in its rewards.
The AI revolution is not a future challenge. It is already underway. The choice facing us is not whether to embrace or oppose artificial intelligence. It is whether we allow this transformation to deepen existing inequalities or whether we shape it in the interests of working people.
As with every major technological shift in history, the technology itself is only part of the story. The real questions are who owns it, who controls it and who benefits from it. If we fail to answer those questions, the answer will be provided for us by the tech billionaires who already hold the power.
This piece forms part of a new pamphlet from the Socialist Campaign Group: The Socialst Policies We Need.
Higher education is facing its biggest crisis in living memory.
Up and down the country we see university bosses taking an axe to workers’ jobs. It has been estimated that over 30,000 jobs and 4,000 courses have been cut from higher education in the last three years alone — the majority on the Labour government’s watch. This is unprecedented.
In many places there is an assault on staff pensions, terms and conditions. Workloads are rising and pay has been eroded year after year. Experienced educators are being pushed out of the profession. And its students who pay the price with fewer lecturers, courses and support services. Our young people are being asked to take on more and more debt for an education that has been devalued.
The UK’s universities are supposed to be one of our proudest achievements, but decades of underfunding and a failed market-driven model has pushed the sector into freefall.
Yet despite the chaos unfolding across our universities, the Labour government has thus far refused to take any action to stabilise the situation. Higher education desperately needs a long-term funding plan. Right now, it is nowhere to be seen.
At the University and College Union (UCU), we see the consequences every day at branch level. The new academic year is only just beginning, and yet there is already a wave of workplace disputes taking shape across the country. Our members are not just fighting to defend their jobs, terms and conditions, they’re also fighting to defend education as a public good. These disputes are likely to multiply over the coming weeks and months.
We will back our members all the way as they stand up for what is right. We will not stand by as higher education falls into decline. That is why UCU has launched the ‘Education. It’s ours’ campaign.
The campaign starts from a simple idea: education belongs to all of us. Educators pass on their knowledge to future generations. Students gain the knowledge they need to build a successful future. Wider society benefits from a well-educated population.
So why is it that higher education is increasingly treated like a marketplace rather than a public service? The right wing in this country talk about taking back control, well it’s time to take back real control of our education system.
We are demanding immediate investment in higher education, the protection of our members jobs, terms and conditions, a new long-term funding model based on public investment, a fairer approach to international students and a greater say for staff and students in the governance of institutions.
I have been on picket lines and in workplaces across the UK in recent weeks, and it is clear the sector is in crisis, and our response as a union must match the moment. We are backing and resourcing every local dispute. We will be bringing together striking branches. We have a political and media engagement plan, and in November the leadership of the union will tour the UK to promote union membership and participation in our campaign.
This campaign is about building the power to win. We need to grow our membership and build density in every university workplace. We need to strengthen our branches and build their capacity to fight. We need to deepen connections with students, communities, and the wider trade union movement. And we need to increase our political power and influence.
We cannot go into the fight for the future of higher education without doing the hard yards, building the union and being ready to stand up in every workplace. We can and we will get to that place.
There are no shortcuts to building that strength. Every member of UCU has a part to play. And we will need the support of our allies across the trade union movement and beyond.
Education belongs to all of us. It’s ours. Let’s make sure it has a brighter future.
Support the campaign at educationitsours.org.uk
Over the last week, a fresh wave of protests against corruption within India’s Electoral Commission, which recently purged millions of people from the country’s voter lists, has erupted in Delhi. The protests are the latest phase of a youth-led mass movement sparked by the failings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP government. Building on the momentum of the summer’s ‘Cockroach’ protests against leaked exam results and diminishing prospects for young people, protestors are now looking to topple chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, just as they ousted education minister Dharmendra Pradhan in early August.
The resurgence of protest in Delhi has been met by a full-scale police crackdown and the mass arrests of activists, including of Cockroach Janta Party leader Abhijeet Dipke. Today, thousands of protestors, including representatives of India’s opposition parties, are marching to the Supreme Court to demand it take action where the Modi government won’t.
Danish Ali, a student leader and organiser in Delhi, spoke to Tribune about the movement’s fresh demands, the growing coalition behind it, and the legitimacy crisis engulfing Modi’s regime.
Evan Robins
When we spoke in August, the education minister had recently resigned and you were on tour supporting protests in Bihar. The focus seemed to be shifting out of Delhi. What’s happened since then to get to this point?
Danish Ali
The biggest achievement of the summer was not the resignation of the education minister, but that people from all across India became aware of the political crisis that we’re in. Before then, it was all so depressing: people used to think that nothing could be changed in this country, that things would always be like this. But times have changed quite a lot since then. That protest made everyone realise that if we collectively struggle and fight for something, change can happen. Now, there’s a very hopeful atmosphere in the country.
After the protest in Jantar Mantar ended, a lot of people started protesting in different parts of India. There was a twenty-five day protest in Jharkhand, and a lot of students were protesting in Bihar, Mumbai, Maharashtra, Bangalore and Kolkata. Those actions created a fertile ground for other protests to develop in Indian society. Right now, we’re seeing that so many people have become disillusioned with the current regime. They’ve realised that this government is not just insensitive, it’s very brutal and keen on curtailing every kind of people’s movement.
Frustration is mounting against this government, and people were waiting for something like this to happen. The issue now has to do with the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process, which is a voter eligibility review undertaken by the Electoral Commission. Through this process, 130 million names have been removed from the election roll, including many legitimate voters.
This is a very big issue. It’s also not limited to students, but is something that affects each and every person of this country, so there’s a lot of energy and excitement in the movement and on our campuses. The government is very much on the back foot right now.
A new wave of protests has been happening since 2 October. In response, the government has been closing metro stations in Delhi, including more than fifty-seven stations ahead of the protest on 10 October. They also stopped trains going to Delhi from different parts of the country. District police were actually making students exit trains they had boarded to get here. And in Delhi, they’re not allowing us to gather en masse. But despite the crackdown, the people of this country have shown this government that they are not going to be silenced anymore. They are going to put up a fight, and the government has to face it.
Evan Robins
What has it been like in Delhi over the past week?
Danish Ali
The police are no longer allowing us to gather in Jantar Mantar, where protests regularly take place. When we went there on 2 October, all the roads were blocked and the whole area was barricaded. A lot of police were on duty and the whole of Delhi felt like it was under curfew. All the main gates of Jawaharlal Nehru University were blocked, and when the students were trying to go out of their campus to join the protest, more than twenty students were illegally detained. But we are of the belief that if they don’t allow us to go to Jantar Mantar, we will build our own Jantar Mantar.
We were detained on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of October. After that, we held a press conference and did a lot of campaigning in different areas of Delhi, and outside of Delhi as well. Then there was a call for a protest on 10 October.
The day before that protest, our comrades were threatened with house arrest and there was intense surveillance of students and activists. I personally left my campus the night before because I expected that I would be detained if I tried to go to the protest site in the morning from the campus. Despite the crackdown, we somehow managed to gather near the AIIMS Metro station. There’s a hospital there, so they can’t officially block the station. We gathered and hid under the trees before starting the march because we knew police would detain us if they spotted us.
When the police found out that a march was happening, they barricaded the road. We broke two layers of barricading to get through. I was with comrade Neha Bora — president of the All India Students’ Association — who was dragged by the police and detained in a very brutal manner. A lot of students were dragged and beaten, and we were also teargassed. The way in which the Delhi police treated the student protestors, and particularly female students, was very shameful. I personally saw many female students being dragged by the male police officers. Their clothes were torn and their hair was pulled. The police also issued threats like, ‘We will ruin your career. We will ruin your life. You will get beaten up while in detention’ and so on. Many people were actually beaten up while they were in detention.
The police’s strategy is to just roam around the streets of Delhi, force you onto a detention bus, and then drive you to some fringe police station that is not even in Delhi, but in a nearby city. But the protestors have become so resilient. Many people, myself included, actually jumped out of the detention buses. There’s a lot of support from the common masses. If they see a police bus taking away students, they come out to help. In my case, a crowd argued with the police and made it possible for us to jump out of the windows. Then together we forced the police to release all of the students on the bus.
Evan Robins
What are the movement’s demands now?
Danish Ali
Our demands are very simple. Gyanesh Kumar, who is the chief election commissioner, has proven to be very compromised and partial to the BJP. He is responsible for the deleting the names of so many legitimate voters, most of whom are actually from marginalised backgrounds, including Muslims, gender minorities, and poor people. He was also responsible for including the names of very illegitimate voters just to ensure the victory of BJP ministers in different localities.
When this kind of corruption is going on, I think that person should take some responsibility, and he should be immediately removed from that post. And not just removed — I think he should be arrested. A lot of the time this government labels students as seditious. But when a person is actually sitting in the Election Commission and murdering the very spirit of democracy in this country, that’s real sedition. We want him to be removed, we want him to be arrested, and we want a serious inquiry into the Election Commission.
We also want all the processes going on under SIR to be stopped immediately, because we know that this has always been done in a very compromised and biased manner just to benefit the BJP government. We can’t trust that any elections will be done in a transparent or a fair manner. Finally, we want the Modi government to take some responsibility and provide some assurance that the Election Commission will do what it was designed to do from now on.
The administration cannot actually remove Kumar from his position because the position comes with special protections. So today, we’re marching on the Supreme Court with the aim that it will take some cognisance of this matter.
Evan Robins
What kind of coalition is marching today? How has the composition of the movement changed since the summer?
Danish Ali
All the opposition parties have given the call for the march today. That includes the leader of opposition, Rahul Gandhi, who is the president of the Congress party, as well as other left organisations and parties, like the Samajwadi Party. Of course, the student organisations are also involved. Essentially, all political entities other than the BJP are protesting against Kumar right now.
I think it’s very good that the opposition parties are finally taking a stand. Back during the protests against the paper leak at Jantar Mantar, they weren’t so involved. Rahul Gandhi did join the protests, but only after a while. So I think it’s good that this time they have taken the lead now, and they are taking this very seriously.
Obviously, the opposition parties have a lot to say about the Electoral Commission. For some time, we’ve been hearing these parties complain that many ministers of their parties, in all different states of India, have lost seats by a very small margin — a margin ensured only through corruption of the people sitting in the commission who were openly supporting the BJP government.
This isn’t just a problem for those parties, but for all sections of society. And even BJP voters should realise that their vote is devalued, and that when the government stays in power not by the people’s mandate, but by corruption and scams, the whole idea of democracy is under threat. Every single citizen of this country should be concerned about this fact and should start coming to the streets, coming to demand transparency and responsibility and accountability from the Electoral Commission and from the government
We’re not expecting the Modi government to act in a very positive manner because we have seen that these are fascists. They don’t believe in democracy at all. We know that whenever we go to any protest site, we will be detained, beaten up, lathi charged, and sent to jail. But we still go because we can no longer wait. We know that this is going to be a long fight, and they’re not going to go down that easily. But in the coming days and weeks, we will maximise our efforts, not just in Delhi, but all across the country.
Last week we brought a motion to Green Party Conference to declare the Green Party of England & Wales anti-Zionist. It was adopted by the party’s members with a decisive margin.
This marks a historic rupture — the first time a major political party in the Western world, with several sitting members of parliament, has opposed the Israeli settler colonial project in its entirety: not just the abuses of this or that Israeli government, but the decades-long enterprise of building an ethno-state in Palestine. A state which, since its earliest days, has subjugated and ethnically cleansed the native Arab population.
The fact that this should happen here in Britain is particularly significant, given our country’s role in creating Israel to protect its imperial interests in the Middle East. For almost eighty years, Israel has been an outpost of Western power in that region, violently suppressing its self-determination movements and ensuring the continued subordination of its people. Today, many in the West have woken up to this reality after seeing it in the killing fields of Gaza. The Greens’ new stance is a sign of this wider shift.
Some critics of the motion claim that Zionism ‘means different things to different people’ and that not every use of the term is ‘racist’. But the only way to define a political project is to look at what it does in practice. In this case, Zionism has long meant the oppression, displacement and genocide of Palestinians, who are treated as an inferior species. This is the only meaning of Zionism that matters, because it is the only one that exists in the real world.
Other critics agree that Zionism should be challenged but see our motion as a strategic error. They claim that this position will turn the Greens into a minoritarian fringe party at a time when we should be trying to build a majoritarian alternative to Labour. Some also argue that the focus on foreign policy is too remote from pressing material issues in Britain, and leaves the party vulnerable to attacks from the establishment.
While these are legitimate concerns, they misunderstand both the current political moment and the way forward for the Greens. The truth is that describing Zionism as racism is not only a principled position, but also a pragmatic one.
There’s no doubt that the political situation has changed with Burnham’s entry to Number 10. His attempt to win back voters who abandoned the party under Starmer appears to be having some success. The Greens are no longer within touching distance of overtaking Labour and monopolising the progressive vote. Our party therefore risks diminishing its relevance if we respond to Labour’s programme with a similar platform. We should not be offering ‘Burnhamism plus’. We should be presenting a radical alternative which draws clear dividing lines. Only then can we consolidate the support of the many people who have gravitated towards the Greens over the past year, and who want something fundamentally different to the establishment consensus. Our motion on Zionism does exactly that.
This might be a ‘minoritarian’ project in the short-term, in the sense that the Greens’ support base is currently only a minority of the population. But once we have energised and activated that base, then we can build out from it: creating a mass movement with opposition to racism and genocide at its core, which can speak to people up and down the country — and shift their politics to the left.
The aim is not simply to reflect back the opinions of ‘the majority’; this would be to embrace the dead-end politics of Starmerism, in which policy is decided through polling exercises and focus groups. Our ambition is to change people’s opinions by broadening the public debate: opening up the realm of political possibility and denouncing racism wherever it rears its head.
When a national party like the Greens adopts a position of this kind, it inevitably draws outrage from the media — but it also transforms the conversation by bringing new ideas into the mainstream. There are at least three immediate practical benefits.
First, by opposing Zionism outright we reject any complacency in light of Ed Miliband’s minor policy shift on Israel. We make clear that limited sanctions are not enough for a state that is intrinsically racist. Just as anti-racists in the 1980s did not merely oppose the ‘extreme’ elements of Apartheid South Africa, we cannot stop at sanctioning ‘illegal settlers’ today. Maintaining pressure on the British government is essential to save lives abroad and enforce accountability at home.
Second, as the Greens continue to face all manner of smear campaigns, we must make sure to resist capitulation. We know from the Corbyn era that attempts to appease the establishment and offer half-way compromises only make things worse, especially when it comes to bad-faith accusations of ‘antisemitism’ leveled at critics of Israel. The only option is to stand strong and refuse to apologise for our principles. By formally committing the Greens to anti-Zionism, we can help to embed this approach. Far from making the party vulnerable, ‘Zionism is Racism’ allows it to remain resolute when it is attacked.
Finally, by changing the narrative on Zionism, we can extend the gains of the Palestine movement. The mobilisation against the genocide has brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, propeled outsider candidates to parliament, thrown the two-party system into crisis and encouraged tens of thousands to join the Greens. The Labour government now wants us to think that a ceasefire is in place and that this movement can go away. But we must insist otherwise. Zionism continues to rampage across Gaza and the West Bank with Britain’s material support. By calling this project what it is, and demanding an end to its crimes, we can keep alive the spirit of opposition that has swept across our country over the past three years — and give it a permanent home in the Greens. This is not purity politics. It is a vital strategic step in building a left party that’s fit for purpose.
This piece is part of a debate on Green strategy after the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion. You can read the other entry, from a member of Greens Organise, here.